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If you look up “bo” on the internet, nothing that makes sense comes up. But we were looking at a bo, or rather looking for it.

We were walking along the bank of the Niger river, searching for the tracks of a hippopotamus that was ravaging the corn on Karim’s farm.

All of a sudden, a lizard about the size of a small crocodile hurtled out of the undergrowth and raced up a nearby baobab tree.

“It’s a bo,” everybody cried, racing to the foot of the enormous tree.

Now I had never seen a bo before, so I was interested out of pure curiosity.

The handful of villagers with us had other ideas, though. “The bo is delicious,” explained Karim. “It has the taste and texture of fish, and the inside of it is all white.

“You don’t see them very often. There are not that many about.”

Moustafa, Karim’s head man, was talking excitedly into his mobile phone. “He’s calling the kids from the village,” explained our host.

“He wants them to climb the tree and get the poor creature down.”

Senator Joe Lieberman and other bill sponsors have refuted the charges that the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act gives the president an Internet “kill switch.” Instead, the bill puts limits on the powers the president already has to cause “the closing of any facility or stations for wire communication” in a time of war, as described in the Communications Act of 1934, they said in a breakdown of the bill published on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee website.

The committee unanimously approved an amended version of the legislation by voice vote Thursday, a committee spokeswoman said. The bill next moves to the Senate floor for a vote, which has not yet been scheduled.

The bill, introduced earlier this month, would establish a White House Office for Cyberspace Policy and a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications, which would work with private US companies to create cybersecurity requirements for the electrical grid, telecommunications networks and other critical infrastructure.

The bill also would allow the US president to take emergency actions to protect critical parts of the Internet, including ordering owners of critical infrastructure to implement emergency response plans, during a cyber-emergency. The president would need congressional approval to extend a national cyber-emergency beyond 120 days under an amendment to the legislation approved by the committee.

The legislation would give the US Department of Homeland Security authority that it does not now have to respond to cyber-attacks, Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, said earlier this month.

Simple solution: employ the same kind of mind-control, social engineering nonsense that keeps the masses in line back home: endless television advertising, control of media, polls, worship of celebrities and sports figures, financial desperation, and “democracy”.

In a story published Wednesday (June 23) in British tabloid The Sun,, the newspaper reported that Gaga has reached out to Gunther von Hagens, a controversial anatomist who invented a technique for preserving cadavers called plastination and is responsible for the popular traveling exhibition “Body Worlds.”

The Sun quoted “a friend” of Gaga as saying “she is fascinated by Gunther’s work and life … [Gaga] sees a kindred spirit and is hoping to meet him in New York. They have spoken over e-mail and it’s gone well. She is keen to have some Body Worlds element in one of her shows.”

The source went on to say that Gaga is aiming to incorporate von Hagens’ work into her tour by the time it gets to Las Vegas, which doesn’t happen until March of 2011.

Now Darpa, usually the agency behind the Pentagon’s most out-there ideas, is putting their money into an old standby: solar power. They’re investing $3.8 million into the creation of high-powered, lightweight solar cells that can “stand up to battle conditions and environmental extremes.”

The program, called Low-Cost Lightweight Portable Photovoltaics (PoP), is being spearheaded by Dr. Robert Birkmire, director of the University of Delaware’s Institute of Energy Conversion (IEC). The Institution has a long history of working on Darpa-funded projects, including a 7-year consortium, launched in 1995, that successfully created much of the tech now going into PoP.

“Obviously, this is an agency that sets out some incredibly ambitious goals,” Birkmire told Danger Room. “But if you’d asked me in 1995, if we’d be able to complete that project? I’d have had no idea.”

And, Birkmire is quick to point out, the cells Darpa’s after will require some lofty innovation. Thin-film, flexible solar cells are a major priority for the military, because they can be applied onto almost everything — from tents to uniforms — and would minimize the number of generators and portable battery packs needed by troops in battle. In 2005, the Army tested tents lined with silicon-based solar cells that were able to generate adequate power for fans, lap tops and lights.

Five years later, Birkmire and co. have taken that technology up a notch. They’re testing cutting edge, copper-indium-deselinide-based cells, made on a lightweight plastic substrate. And Darpa wants the PoP program to yield solar cells that are more than just light and flexible — they should also be able to withstand dirt, rough handling and punctures, and be manufactured inexpensively.

Right now, Birkmire said, the cells are in their infancy, and operate at 7-11 percent efficiency. Darpa wants to see that doubled — at least.

“They want to take performance to another level, and I’m not sure that we’ll get there,” he said of the program, which will also include four industry partners. “Add to that the challenge of encapsulating these models to make them resilient for battle, and keeping them lightweight in spite of that, and it’s a big challenge.”

But because the cells are so inexpensive (less than $1/watt), and so versatile, Birkmire anticipates widespread civilian application.

The developer of the salmon has been trying to get approval for a decade. But the company now seems to have submitted most or all of the data the F.D.A. needs to analyze whether the salmon are safe to eat, nutritionally equivalent to other salmon and safe for the environment, according to government and biotechnology industry officials. A public meeting to discuss the salmon may be held as early as this fall.

Some consumer and environmental groups are likely to raise objections to approval. Even within the F.D.A., there has been a debate about whether the salmon should be labeled as genetically engineered (genetically engineered crops are not labeled).

The salmon’s approval would help open a path for companies and academic scientists developing other genetically engineered animals, like cattle resistant to mad cow disease or pigs that could supply healthier bacon. Next in line behind the salmon for possible approval would probably be the “enviropig,” developed at a Canadian university, which has less phosphorus pollution in its manure.

The salmon was developed by a company called AquaBounty Technologies and would be raised in fish farms. It is an Atlantic salmon that contains a growth hormone gene from a Chinook salmon as well as a genetic on-switch from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon.

Normally, salmon do not make growth hormone in cold weather. But the pout’s on-switch keeps production of the hormone going year round. The result is salmon that can grow to market size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years, though the company says the modified salmon will not end up any bigger than a conventional fish.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.