“They cre­ated the tis­sue by coat­ing a three-​​dimensional poly­mer scaf­fold with a gene deliv­ery vehi­cle that encodes a tran­scrip­tion fac­tor known as Runx2. They gen­er­ated a high con­cen­tra­tion of Runx2 at one end of the scaf­fold and decreased that amount until they ended up with no tran­scrip­tion fac­tor on the other end, result­ing in a pre­cisely con­trolled spa­tial gra­di­ent of Runx2. After that, they seeded skin fibrob­lasts uni­formly onto the scaf­fold. The skin cells on the parts of the scaf­fold con­tain­ing a high con­cen­tra­tion of Runx2 turned into bone, while the skin cells on the scaf­fold end with no Runx2 turned into soft tis­sue. The result is an arti­fi­cial bone that grad­u­ally turns into soft tis­sue, such as ten­dons or ligaments.”

“This con­ser­v­a­tive myopia dates back to Pres­i­dent Rea­gan, who gut­ted Jimmy Carter’s multibillion-​​dollar research and devel­op­ment bud­get for renew­ables, and ended the tax cred­its for wind and solar. The sad result is our coun­try is now a bit player in what will prob­a­bly be one of the biggest job-​​creating indus­tries of the cen­tury, an indus­try we launched. We had 90 per­cent of global-​​installed wind capac­ity in the 1980s. Today we have one major wind man­u­fac­turer, Gen­eral Elec­tric, with about one-​​sixth of the market.

Clean energy shouldn’t be a par­ti­san issue. But it is. And that means those who who want this coun­try to be a leader in clean energy — those who want to avoid cat­a­strophic global warm­ing and avoid the worst of peak oil — need to start becom­ing sin­gle issue voters.”

“See yon­der!” said Tom, stretch­ing his long arm into infi­nite space, “see yonder—there’s a bee!”

Can I pay in Social Cap­i­tal? How about Intel­lec­tual Capital??

“Librar­i­ans are being moved from inter­me­di­aries (medi­at­ing between patrons and infor­ma­tion), and some say they are being dis­in­ter­me­di­ated. How­ever, I think they are on their way to becom­ing apo­me­di­aries when it comes to infor­ma­tion access.

Pub­lish­ers have tra­di­tion­ally been inter­me­di­aries between authors and read­ers, but some exper­i­ments (PLoS One, Wikipedia and the like) seem to indi­cate that they are mov­ing into the realm of serv­ing as apo­me­di­aries. In the realm of blogs, apo­me­di­a­tion is the main force affect­ing much of the tal­ent run­ning blogs. Pub­lisher inter­me­di­a­tion is not what it once was.

Google is per­haps the most promi­nent apo­me­di­ary, guid­ing results to the top based on apomediation.

Apo­me­di­a­tion feels like the net effect of an infor­ma­tion econ­omy that no longer oper­ates on a scarcity model. Now, infor­ma­tion is read­ily avail­able any time. Inter­me­di­aries will still be needed, but less often than before, in fewer roles, and for shorter durations.”