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Here’s a cloning project that everyone will agree should be done: a nonprofit group plans to clone the world’s oldest tree, a 55 foot tall bristlecone pine that?s 4,767 years old and clings to a wind-swept mountain in eastern California. “It has lived at least a millennium longer than any other known tree,” says Forest Service official Larry Payne. The tree, named “Methuselah,” predates Christ by almost 3,000 years.

Edmund Schulman discovered the tree and dated it with by a core sample in the 1950s. However, boring provides only an age estimate, because it?s difficult to count 4,767 tree rings in a core sample from a twisted bristlecone trunk that?s 4 ? feet across. “The only way to determine the exact age is to cut it down,” Payne says.
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Huge buildings could be built in space using radio waves to move the pieces into place. Radio-controlled construction would make it unnecessary to move heavy construction equipment into orbit. It would also eliminate the need for space-walking construction workers. Engineer Narayanan Komerath got the idea from “acoustic shaping,” in which sound waves are used to build solid objects in weightless environments.
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Australian scientists think lemon juice could be a cheap and effective form of birth control, as well as help stop the spread of AIDS. Roger Short says lab tests show that lemon juice kills off sperm and HIV. This is one of the secrets of birth control and venereal disease protection in the days before the Pill or the diaphragm.

Short believes lemons could be an alternative to costly HIV-drugs and traditional forms of contraceptives in developing countries. They can be used as a contraceptive by soaking a cotton ball in the juice and inserting it into the vagina before sex. “We can show in the lab that lemon juice is very effective in immobilizing human sperm and also very effective in killing HIV,” he says.
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A reader writes: “I am a lawyer from Chile currently living in Florida. Talking of disappeared Nazis, you spoke (with Nick Cook on Sept. 28 Dreamland) of a place in Chile that was only recently closed down. Unfortunately, I must inform you that such place, formerly known as ‘Colonia Dignidad,’ still exists.” A former SS officer used local slave labor to build an empire, where he founded a hospital that sterilizes poor against their will and steals their newborn children. He has sexually abused hundreds of minors. U.S. citizen Boris Weisfeiler was captured by Augusto Pinochet and taken to Colonia Dignidad, where he has never been seen again. To read this fascinating Insight, click here.
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