Outlook ³°°°™

Quick Fact:

In 1898, the Dutch botanist Martinus Beijerinck realized that something smaller than a bacteria seemed to be able to cause disease. He named this particle a virus, from the Latin word that means poison. This, it turns out, is a very apt description for a virus because of the way it goes about infecting its host - from within.

Viruses are so simple and primitive in their structure that outside a host they are lifeless and can't reproduce. Inside a host cell however, it's a different story. Viruses change their host cell's DNA, combining it with their own (or in the case of retroviruses like HIV, their RNA) to turn the cell into a virus factory, pumping out hundreds and thousands of copies of itself to go off and infect more cells in the host's body.

This replication will continue until the cell literally self-destructs.

HyperNet 2?:

The old faithful

HyperNet. What would the galaxy do without it. Believe it or not. There was a time when information was able to be carried long distances at a reasonable speed if at all. HyperNet is from the original network of mainframe computers of the last century. Very fast for their time, our ancestors pioneered the beginnings of a new revolution in networks. Thus came about the Internet. Afterward, processing power was not enough for the people of the twentieth century. Therefore Internet 2 was created. Computational power was increased exponentially. Due to the rise in processing power. The people were able to over come many information bottlenecks. This gave the people the direction to move into for the future and thus we are here with the HyperNet. The government knows where every single soul alive is, advanced tracing, and tracking is accomplished due to the vast network of system cooperating with one another. HyperNet 2 is the much waited version which promises faster than light speed information transfer.

Genetic

Engineering:

It's how it will

affect

government in the future

Genetic engineering is only in its beginning stages as we approach the millenium, but already it is stirring up controversy and raising issues concerning the affect it might have on our society. It all started when James Watson told Fracis Crick how four nucleic acids could pair to form a self-copying code of a DNA molecule. Now it is only a matter of years before the entire human genome is decoded; all 100,000 genes encoded by 3 billion pairs in our DNA.

Before the 20th century, medicine was mainly amputation, morphine and other useless treatments such as bloodletting. No medicines, antibiotics, vaccines...nothing. The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 circled the globe and wiped out more than 20 million people. More than years of war could not do what took months. The 20th century was the century of physics, with flight and splitting the atom. But we are on the verge of a medical revolution. With cloning and genetic engineering, it is entirely possible for maybe even my generation to make a newer better self, to determine the fate of our children, from sex and eye color to… Continued...