Nice wikipedia snippet | Arcology

"An arcology is distinguished from a merely large building in that it is designed to lessen the impact of human habitation on any given ecosystem. It could be self-sustainable, employing all or most of its own available resources for a comfortable life: power; climate control; food production; air and water conservation and purification; sewage treatment; etc. An arcology is designed to make it possible to supply those items for a large population. An arcology would supply and maintain its own municipal or urban infrastructures in order to operate and connect with other urban environments apart from its own.

Arcology was proposed to reduce human impact on natural resources. Arcology designs might apply conventional building and civil engineering techniques in very large, but practical projects in order to achieve pedestrian economies of scale that have proven, post-automobile, to be difficult to achieve in other ways." -arcology wikipedia source

Offline wikipedia setup

An open source application automates the process of downloading and displaying all of Wikipedia on your desktop, a large task that takes more than a day to complete.

Dubbed Xowa, the software displays an offline copy of 4.4 million Wikipedia articles with full HTML formatting intact. You can even set up additional wikis, like Wiktionary or Wikquote, and navigate between them while offline. For example, you could "Click on 'Look up this word in Wiktionary' and instantly view the page in Wiktionary."-arstechnica source

Interesting article on setting up a local backup copy of wikipedia.

Cell fusion

When human and mouse cells (or cells of any two mammalian species or of the same species) are mixed, spontaneous cell fusion occurs at a very low rate (10-6). Cell fusion is enhanced 100 to 1000 times by the addition of ultraviolet inactivated Sendai (parainfluenza) virus or polyethylene glycol (PEG).

These agents adhere to the plasma membranes of cells and alter their properties in such a way that facilitates their fusion. Fusion of two cells produces a heterokaryon, i.e., a single hybrid cell with two nuclei, one from each of the cells entering fusion. Subsequently, the two nuclei also fuse to yield a hybrid cell with a single nucleus.-wiki article on cell fusion

An article on cell fusion.