kkleiner writes "Led by Dr. Mats Brännström, a team of surgeons at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden are giving Sara Ottosson, now 25 years old, hope that she may one day fulfill her dream of giving birth to a baby. The uterus will come from a very special donor: Eva Ottosson, Sara's mother. Sara's operation will mark only the second time transplantation of a uterus has been attempted in humans, and the first time between a mother and daughter."

The Narrative Fallacy writes "All 50 states in the US require the 50,000 people convicted of sexual offenses to sign a register so that their whereabouts can be tracked and monitored. The Telegraph reports that now users of the iPhone Offender Locator application can search for sex offenders living nearby a friend or colleague whose address is stored in their Apple iPhone address book, or they can type in a street address to generate a list of convicted sex offenders in the local area. 'Offender Locator gives everyone the ability to find out if registered sex offenders live in their area,' says the application developer, ThinAir Wireless, on its iTunes page. 'Knowledge equals safety. They know where you and your family are...now it's time to turn the tables so that you know where they live and can make better decisions about where to allow your kids to play.' Offender Locator uses the iPhone's built-in GPS to pinpoint the user's location, and then provide a map listing sex offenders in the local area. Tapping on one of the 'pins' dropped on to the map brings up a photograph of the offender, as well as their address, date of birth and list of convictions."

myrdos2 writes "A host of common chemicals is feminizing males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. Many have been identified as 'endocrine disruptors' or gender-benders because they interfere with hormones. Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia, and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls as boys, which may offer a clue to the mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys. It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminized genitals. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone. And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per milliliter of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years."

I get a lot of mail from obviously unbalanced people. Enough in fact, that I've often wondered if there was a institution that allowed their patients to only read Slashdot. We've even had a few visits from some questionable individuals. A man who tried to bribe me with a car if I let him "reverse engineer" Rob Malda's Life comes to mind. He insisted on Rob being present for the process and couldn't explain to me what it entailed, so I suggested he leave. The personal visits are rare, however, compared to the amount of mail I get. Here are a few of my favorites; let's hope these people have started to take their medication. Read below and don't be worried if you don't understand all of it.

twitter wrote to mention that the TSA (Transport Security Administration) has released a new set of proposed rules that is raising quite a stir among groups ranging from the ACLU to the American Society of Travel Agents. Under the new rules airlines would be required to submit a passenger manifest (including full name, sex, date of birth, and redress number) for all flights departing, arriving, or flying over the United States at least 72 hours prior to departure. Boarding passes will only be issued to those passengers that have been cleared. "Hasbrouck submitted that requiring clearance in order to travel violates the US First Amendment right of assembly, the central claim in John Gilmore's case against the US government over the requirement to show photo ID for domestic travel. [...] ACLU's Barry Steinhardt quoted press reports of 500,000 to 750,000 people on the watch list (of which the no-fly list is a subset). 'If there are that many terrorists in the US, we'd all be dead.' TSA representative Kip Hawley noted that the list has been carefully investigated and halved over the last year. 'Half of grossly bloated is still bloated,' Steinhardt replied."

gbulmash writes "In its eagerness to clear sex offenders off its site and publish their identities, MySpace identified an innocent woman as a sex offender. She shares a name and birth month with a sex offender who lives in a neighboring state and that was apparently enough to get MySpace to wrongly brand her and completely ignore her protests."

Yesterday we linked The Times of India's report that India's Ministry of Human Resource Development has rejected implementation of the One Laptop per Child initiative in that country. Readers speculated both on why India rejected the program, and whether it's a good or bad move to have done so. As usual, there are some insightful comments with wildly divergent conclusions; read on for the Backslash summary of the discussion to see a handful of the most interesting ones.

Last Thursday you got to Ask Questions of the Green Party's US Presidential nominee, David Cobb He answered 12 of the most highly rated comments. A thanks goes to Mr.Cobb for taking the time to explain some of his positions to us. Read on to see what he has to say.

scubacuda writes "On Monday, Maine Today reports that officials plan to put info about the states 1,200 registered sex offenders on the Internet to allow residents to easily determine if a convicted offender lives in their neighborhood. Some jurisdictions - including Portland, South Portland, Saco and Kennebec County - already post sex-offender information on the Internet. But the new site will cover *all* sex offenders registered in Maine, and will include their names, ages and birth dates, where they live, where they work or attend school, and which offense they were convicted of. Photographs will soon be posted, as well."

ahertz writes: "If only it were this easy for geeks! CNN is reporting that officials at the China Giant Panda Breeding Center in Woolong, China are showing... err... panda pr0n to increase the sex drive of captive pandas. The program is apparently quite effective, as birth rates have risen dramatically."

From the beginning, the Net has always seemed to have a heart - a locus, a center of activity. At first the academics and defense researchers who'd created and patched together its architecture were its pulse. Then hackers in suburban bedrooms all over the country became the epicenter, followed by the free music and intellectual property guerrillas; the open source, online rights activists and advocates; the Wired magazine gurus and visionaries, and the Web creators, programmers and designers. After that, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the dot.com capitalists took over. This culture is becoming increasingly diverse, commercial and subterranean. Where's the heart of the Net now? A.I. or AOL?

stinkydog asks: "I though some of the IANALs and privacy experts on Slashdot might have some good input on the following privacy policy for a Parks and Recreation department in a large city. Does it make sense? Would you sign off on it?" Read it below and share your thoughts on this, as always.

Contributed by readers FooBard and Scrymarch, the pair of reviews below ought to either bring back memories or spark some curiosity. Stranger In a Strange Land may not be everyone's favorite book -- even among Heinlein fans -- but it certainly strikes a chord. If you haven't read it, these reviews should give you a good idea of whether you'd like to.

Berkeley scholar Joseph Lockard (a doctoral candidate in English Literature) claims the idea of the virtual community is a Ponzi scheme, promoted by benighted utopians and elitists who equate access to the Net and the Web with social and democratic enlightenment. This myth has been virtually unchallenged for years, he says, and in a provocative and interesting essay called Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism, and the Myth of Virtual Community, Lockard claims that it's nothing more than a bunch of hooey. Does anybody out there think virtual communities are real?

Despite the soothing caveats about ethical standards, staving off discrimination and privacy issues, the completion of the so-called human map offers benefits and nightmares in almost equal proportions. Once unleashed, powerful technologies are tough to contain or control. There was lots of megahype chatter about curing cancer, heart disease and aging, but this is now officially Frankenstein time, the era of the "perfect baby" and human quality control. Unfortunately for the world, it's hard to imagine a more poorly equipped society to deal with the Human Genome Project than the U.S.

We've got another science fiction review today, this time of Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine. The book is about a post-apocalyptic future with the re-birth of technology - click below to learn more if you want this book in your stocking this year.

Andrew Hunt has come through with his first review for Slashdot, of David Zindell's The Broken God. Set in the distant future, the book chronicles vast, divinely created supercomputers, a humanity spread throughout the stars, and the notion of humanity achieving divine nature. Excellent science fiction.

Tal Cohen has taken a close look at Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach -- 20th Anniversary Edition. He's returned to the book to try and explain what the book is really about-using a new foreword. Definitely a book worth checking out - click below to read more.

Online, everybody is a critic, each opinion as good as any other. But geeks love pop culture as much or more as they love technology so you can't-- at least I can't -- let l998 go by without pausing to reflect on the really significant events of the year -- the best movies and TV shows. Here's my shot. Please take yours.

Collaborative Filtering Software is one of the biggest Web inventions to move off-line. But do we think enough about the things we make? Orwell would have jumped right off the nearest bridge. This "Big Brother" technology is coming soon to a supermarket and discount chain near you.