Just because they're a scientist doesn't mean that they're not bat-shit crazy.

One of the things I love most about people who deny that global climate is getting warmer or that there's no way the Twin Towers could have fallen due to jetliners smashing into them is the "trump card" of pulling out a scientist that agrees with them. All you need is one, right? And, suddenly, POOF! You're theory is valid. Except it's not. There's a thing called consensus. Besides, many scientists are nuts and believe all sorts of crazy shit.

Did a UFO deliberately crash into a meteor to save Earth 100 years ago? That's what one Russian scientist is claiming.

Dr. Yuri Labvin, president of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation, insists that an alien spacecraft sacrificed itself to prevent a gigantic meteor from slamming into the planet above Siberia on June 30, 1908.

The result was was the Tunguska event, a massive blast estimated at 15 megatons that downed 80 million trees over nearly 100 square miles. Eyewitnesses reported a bright light and a huge shock wave, but the area was so sparsely populated no one was killed.

Most scientists think the blast was caused by a meteorite exploding several miles above the surface. But Labvin thinks quartz slabs with strange markings found at the site are remnants of an alien control panel, which fell to the ground after the UFO slammed into the giant rock.

"We don't have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals," Labvin told the Macedonian International News Agency. "We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space."
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The final stand at the Texas schoolboard meeting.

By way of Andrew Sullivan's magnificent blog I was brought aware of a Newsweek article from his good friend, and one of my favorite debaters, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens makes some great points. The evangelical community is a huge liability for the GOP. Do you really want a party linked to crackpot wackos that think, the basic equivalent of, the Earth being flat? I can't think of a better way to disengage the enlightened and thoughtful of your party than to interject the most drastically ignorant fringe that one could imagine.

Mention the name "Texas" and the word "schoolbook" to many people of a certain age (such as my own) and the resulting free association will come up with the word "depository" and the image of Lee Harvey Oswald crouching on its sixth floor. In Dallas for the Christian Book Expo recently, I had a view of Dealey Plaza and its most famous building from my hotel room, so the suggestion was never far from my mind.

But last week Texas and schoolbooks meant something else altogether when the state Board of Education, in a muddled decision, rejected a state science curriculum that required teachers to discuss the "strengths and weaknesses" of the theory of evolution. Instead, the board allowed "all sides" of scientific theories to be taught. The vote was watched as something more than a local or bookish curiosity. Just as the Christian Book Expo is one of the largest events on the nation's publishing calendar, so the Lone Star State commands such a big share of the American textbook market that many publishers adapt to the standards that it sets, and sell the resulting books to non-Texans as well.

In many ways, this battle can be seen as the last stand of the Protestant evangelicals with whom I was mingling and debating. It's been a rather dismal time for them lately. In the last election they barely had a candidate after Mike Huckabee dropped out and, some would say, not much of one before that. Many Republicans now see them as more of a liability than an asset. As a proportion of the population they are shrinking, and in ethical terms they find themselves more and more in the wilderness of what some of them morosely called, in conversation with me, a "post-Christian society." Perhaps more than any one thing, the resounding courtroom defeat that they suffered in December 2005 in the conservative district of Dover, Pa., where the "intelligent design" plaintiffs were all but accused of fraud by a Republican judge, has placed them on the defensive. Thus, even if the Texas board had defiantly voted to declare evolution to be questionable and debatable, its decision could still have spelled the end of a movement rather than the revival of one.

Yet I find myself somewhat drawn in by the quixotic idea that we should "teach the argument." I am not a scientist, and all that I knew as an undergraduate about the evolution debate came from the study of two critical confrontations. The first was between Thomas Huxley (Darwin's understudy, ancestor of Aldous and coiner of the term "agnostic") and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (third son of the great Christian emancipator William) at the Oxford University Museum in 1860. The second was the "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925, which pitted the giant of Protestant fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, against Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken. Every educated person should know the arguments that were made in these transatlantic venues.

So by all means let's "be honest with the kids," as Dr. Don McLeroy, the chairman of the Texas education board, wants us to be. The problem is that he is urging that the argument be taught, not in a history or in a civics class, but in a biology class. And one of his supporters on the board, Ken Mercer, has said that evolution is disproved by the absence of any transitional forms between dogs and cats. If any state in the American union gave equal time in science class to such claims, it would certainly make itself unique in the world (perhaps no shame in that). But it would also set a precedent for the sharing of the astronomy period with the teaching of astrology, or indeed of equal time as between chemistry and alchemy. Less boring perhaps, but also much less scientific and less educational.

The Texas anti-Darwin stalwarts also might want to beware of what they wish for. The last times that evangelical Protestantism won cultural/ political victories—by banning the sale of alcohol, prohibiting the teaching of evolution and restricting immigration from Catholic countries—the triumphs all turned out to be Pyrrhic. There are some successes that are simply not survivable. If by any combination of luck and coincidence any religious coalition ever did succeed in criminalizing abortion, say, or mandating school prayer, it would swiftly become the victim of a backlash that would make it rue the day. This will apply with redoubled force to any initiative that asks the United States to trade its hard-won scientific preeminence against its private and unofficial pieties. This country is so constituted that no one group, and certainly no one confessional group, is able to dictate its own standards to the others. There are days when I almost wish the fundamentalists could get their own way, just so that they would find out what would happen to them.
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Washington state approves doctor assisted suicide.

Finally. I really don't understand why its such a big deal that people cannot choose to end their lives. Especially for those that are suffering. "No! You can't end your life! You must sit and suffer the pain until the very end. It's only inhumane thing to do..."

Terminally ill patients with less than six months to live will soon be able to ask their doctors to prescribe them lethal medication in Washington state.

But even though the "Death with Dignity" law takes effect Thursday, people who might seek the life-ending prescriptions could find their doctors conflicted or not willing to write them.

Many doctors are hesitant to talk publicly about where they stand on the issue, said Dr. Tom Preston, a retired cardiologist and board member of Compassion & Choices, the group that campaigned for and supports the law.

"There are a lot of doctors, who in principle, would approve or don't mind this, but for a lot of social or professional reasons, they don't want to be involved," he said.

But Preston said discussions about end-of-life issues between doctor and patient will increase because of the new law, and he thinks that as time goes on more and more doctors who don't have a religious or philosophical opposition will be open to participating.

"It will be a cultural shift," he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that it was up to states to regulate medical practice, including assisted suicide, and Washington's Initiative 1000 was passed by nearly 60 percent of state voters in November.

It became the second state, behind Oregon, to have a voter-approved measure allowing assisted suicide.

[...]

Under the Oregon and Washington laws, physicians and pharmacists are not required to write or fill lethal prescriptions if they are opposed to the law. Some Washington hospitals are opting out of participation, which precludes their doctors from participating on hospital property.

Dr. Stu Farber, director of the palliative care consult service at the University of Washington Medical Center, voted against the measure and doesn't plan to prescribe lethal medication to his patients for now.

"I am not here to tell people how they should either live their life or the end of their life," Farber said. "There's possibly a story out there, in the future, that's so compelling that maybe I would write a prescription."

Farber said he would refer patients to Compassion & Choices of Washington, the state's largest aid-in-dying advocacy group, after talking about how they came to their decision.

The advocacy group is compiling a directory of physicians who aren't opting out of the law, as well as pharmacies willing to fill the prescriptions, said executive director Robb Miller.

"Physicians don't understand yet exactly how the law works," Miller said. "Whenever there's lack of understanding, there tends to be some reluctance."

Dr. Robert Thompson, an internist and cardiologist at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle who voted for the measure, said that in his 32 years of practice he has treated patients who would have benefited from this law.

"I believe for the sake of compassion, and for a person's own individual rights, that this should be an option for them," he said.

[...]

Under the Washington law, any patient requesting fatal medication must be at least 18 years old, declared competent and a state resident. The patient would have to make two oral requests, 15 days apart, and submit a written request witnessed by two people, one of which must not be a relative, heir, attending doctor, or connected with a health facility where the requester lives.

[...]

Two doctors must certify that the patient has a terminal condition and six months or less to live.

Some doctors who opposed the measure have argued that a six-month terminal diagnosis is never a sure thing.

"There is no question in my mind that, if this is too easy of a task, people will die prematurely," said Dr. Linda Wrede-Seaman, a family physician and palliative care specialist in Yakima.

[...]

That decision was made easier by the law's clear option that physicians could opt out if they wanted to, said Dr. Larry Robinson, vice dean for clinical affairs at the UW School of Medicine.

"We're not forcing anyone to do anything," he said.
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Robotic arms controlled by human brain.

This is so fucking cool.

A wheelchair-mounted robotic arm controlled by thought alone has been created by scientists at the University of South Florida.

The device could give people with amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or full body paralysis the ability to perform simple day to day functions that would otherwise be impossible.

"We aren't reading people's thoughts," said Redwan Alqasemi, a scientist at the University of South Florida who, along with Rajiv Dubey and Emanuel Donchin of USF, helped develop the software and hardware. "This is the first time a person with severe disabilities like ALS can perform daily activities for themselves."

Over time, patients with ALS slowly lose control over their muscle movement, losing the ability to move their arms, legs and eventually all muscles except those around the eye. Patients with ALS have fully functional brains, but have no way to express their thoughts.

EEG scans offer one way for patients with ALS to communicate with the outside world. By fitting patients with a head cap equipped with electrodes and filled with an electrically conductive gel, scientists can monitor particular kinds of electrical impulses coursing through the brain.

In this case, the scientists monitor a particular brain wave called P300, so-called because it lasts about one-third of a second. Reading P300 waves is basically like reading a person's thoughts, but only in the most coarse kind of way.

For the wheelchair-mounted robotic arm, the person in the wheelchair looks at directional arrows flashing across a small screen. When the arrow points in the direction that they want to go, their brain lights up on the EEG, and the wheelchair or robotic arm moves accordingly.

This doesn't happen at the speed of thought, however. Turning the wheelchair or moving the robotic arm takes about seven seconds as the arrows cycle across the screen. The wheel chair or arm continues in that direction until it receives a new command.

The wheelchair or arm could move faster, but it might not move as accurately, said Alaqsemi. The next step for the USF scientists is to refine the model's hardware and software, to increase speed and reliability while cutting down on weight.

"Every pound you take off the robotic arm is another pound of payload that can be lifted," said Alqasemi.

Right now the robotic arm can lift about four pounds, about the weight of a gallon of milk. In the next version Alqasemi hopes to double the payload.

Lifting a door handle or moving a gallon of milk may seem like simple tasks, but according to Jonathan Wolpaw, who builds brain computer interfaces at the Wadsworth Center in New York, using thought-controlled devices is harder than simply just thinking.

"Our normal muscle movements require practiced skill and control," said Walpaw. "Controlling brain activity is also a skill that requires practice."

Reading P300 brain waves is a good system, argues Walpaw, because it doesn't take a lot of practice to train the brain. With only one WMRA built so far and no current plans to commercialize the design, not many people will get the chance for their brain to learn the new skill. But when commercial models appear in several years, even slow brain computer interfaces could make the impossible, possible.

"It would allow patients with severe disabilities the ability to control their own environment and have some form of independent mobility," said William Heetderks, Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. "It would be very valuable to these individuals."
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Omega 3-rich diet may help you live longer.

This is a rather long article, even though I've slimmed it down considerably. Still, it's very informative and incredibly interesting.

At the end of a residential cul-de-sac in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a driveway winds up a hill to the headquarters of Ocean Nutrition, a complex of buildings of mid-century vintage overlooking the tall-masted schooners and gray-hulled Canadian Navy destroyers in Halifax Harbour.

Down the road, semi-trailers loaded with drums of oily yellow liquid pull up outside a newly built factory. Inside cavernous galvanized-steel hangars, the oil is blended with deionized water in 6,500-gallon tanks. The resulting slurry of micro-encapsulated oil is then pumped through a five-story spray-drier to remove the moisture.

The final product is a fine-grained beige substance that looks like flour but is, in fact, a triumph of technology: smelly fish oil, transformed by industry into a tasteless, odorless powder. It will be used to spike everything from infant formula in China to the Wonder Bread and Tropicana orange juice on our supermarket shelves.

After seven years and $50 million of research, the company's 45 technicians and 14 Ph.D.s have found a high-tech way of getting a crucial set of nutrients back into our bodies — compounds that, thanks to the industrialization of agriculture over the past half century, have been thoroughly stripped from our food supply without, until recently, it being realized by anyone.

Now, an ever-growing body of research is showing that the epidemic of diseases associated with the Western diet — cancer, heart disease, depression, and much more — might be curtailed simply by restoring something we never should have removed from our diets in the first place: omega-3 fatty acids.

[...]

Omega-3 molecules are a by-product of the happy meeting of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide in the chloroplasts of terrestrial plants and marine algae. Not long ago, these fatty acids were an inescapable component of our diet. Back in the early 1900s — long before the arrival of bovine growth hormone and patented transgenic seeds — American family farms were perfect factories for producing omega-3s.

Bucolic, sun-drenched pastures supported a complex array of grasses, and cattle used their sensitive tongues to pick and choose the ripest patches of clover, millet, and sweet grass; their rumens then turned the cellulose that humans can't digest into foods that we can: milk, butter, cheese, and, eventually, beef, all of them rich in omega-3s. Cattle used to spend four to five carefree years grazing on grass, but now they are fattened on grain in feedlots and reach slaughter weight in about a year, all the while pumped full of antibiotics to fight off the diseases caused by the close quarters of factory farms.

Likewise, a few generations ago, chickens roamed those same farms, foraging on grasses, purslane, and grubs, providing humans with drumsticks, breasts, and eggs that were rich in grass-derived omega-3s. Today, most American chickens are now a single hybrid breed — the Cornish — and are raised in cages, treated with antibiotics, and stuffed full of corn.

Our animal fats were once derived from leafy greens, and now our livestock are fattened with corn, soybeans, and other seed oils. (Even the majority of the salmon, catfish, and shrimp in our supermarkets are raised on farms and fattened with soy-enriched pellets.) So not only have good fats been stricken from our diets, but these cheap, widely available seed oils are the source of another, far less healthy family of fatty acids called omega-6s, which compete with omega-3s for space in our cell membranes. Omega-6s are essentially more rigid fatty acids that give our cells structure, while omega-3s are more fluid and help our bodies fight inflammation. Our ancestors ate a ratio of dietary omega-6s to omega-3s of approximately 1:1. The Western diet (the modern American and European eating pattern characterized by high intakes of red meat, sugar, and refined carbohydrates) has a ratio of about 20:1.

"The shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all," writes Michael Pollan in his prescriptive manifesto In Defense of Food. "From leaves to seeds: It's almost, if not quite, A Theory of Everything."

[...]

Okinawans, of Japan, once had the longest life expectancy in the world. But with postwar American administration, which didn't end until 1972, residents of the Japanese prefecture switched to a Western diet rich in meat and seed-based vegetable oils (think Spam, McDonald's hamburgers, and margarine). As a result, they experienced a precipitous rise in cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. Western eating habits proved hard to shake, and 47 percent of Okinawan men are still considered obese, twice the rate of the rest of Japan.

According to a 2003 study published in the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, urban Indians who have adopted seed-oil-rich diets succumb to heart disease and chronic illnesses at a much higher rate than village dwellers who eat a "poor man's diet" that is high in mustard oil, which is relatively high in omega-3s. It is believed that, in the 1960s, Israelis enthusiastically adopted an ostensibly heart-healthy diet rich in polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils; now heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are ubiquitous, and rates of cancer are higher than in the United States.

In 1970, intrigued by reports that Eskimos rarely die from heart disease, two Danish scientists flew to Greenland and charmed blood samples from 130 volunteers. Hans Olaf Bang and Jørn Dyerberg discovered that the Inuit people still got most of their calories from fish, seal, and whale meat. Despite their high cholesterol intake, the Inuit had a death rate from coronary disease that was one-tenth that of the Danes, enthusiastic pork eaters who have been known to butter even their cheese. And diabetes was almost non-existent among the Inuit.

[...]

Among the Japanese, who each eat an average of 145 pounds of fish a year, rates of depression and homicide are strikingly low. Meanwhile, men who live in landlocked nations such as Austria and Hungary, where fish consumption is respectively 25 pounds and nine pounds per capita, top the global charts in suicide and depression. Despite the fact that the Japanese smoke like fiends, struggle with high blood pressure, and eat a hundred more cholesterol-rich eggs a year per person than Americans do, they boast enviably low rates of cardiovascular disease, as well as the longest life span on the planet, an average of 81 years... three years longer than that of Americans.

And while it's true that the Japanese consume soy in the form of tofu, miso, and soy sauce, the way it is prepared — precipitated or fermented — is far healthier than the raw, mineral-blocking phytate estrogen and omega-6-rich versions consumed by Americans.

Dr. Hibbeln is convinced that the key to the average Japanese citizen's longevity is omega-3 fatty acids; levels in Japanese bloodstreams average 60 percent of all polyunsaturates. After half a century of favoring seed-based vegetable oils, the level of omega-3s in American bloodstreams has fallen to 20 percent of polyunsaturates. "We have changed the composition of people's bodies and brains," says Dr. Hibbeln. "A very interesting question, to which we don't yet know the answer, is to what degree has the dietary change altered overall behavior in our society?"

Lately, the answers have been coming in thick and fast. In one study of 231 inmates medicated with fish oil in a British prison, assaults dropped by a third. Comparing homicide rates in five countries, Dr. Hibbeln found that the rising consumption of omega-6 fatty acids correlated with a hundredfold increase in death by homicide, even though access to firearms went down in all the countries surveyed except the United States. A paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that even a modest increase in the consumption of omega-3-rich fish reduced the risk of coronary death by 36 percent. A 2007 study by the National Institutes of Health found a positive correlation between mothers' consumption of omega-3s during pregnancy and the fine motor skills and verbal IQs of their children.

[...]

"Men in their forties and fifties can nearly reverse their risk of dying from sudden cardiac death by eating fish at least three times a week," says Dr. Hibbeln. "And if they want to live longer and happier lives, there's substantial data that they should increase their body composition of omega-3s." Your family doctor can test your ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, or you can do it yourself. (Your Future Health sells test kits on its Web site, yourfuturehealth.com.)

How could a simple change in dietary fat have such a huge impact on so many aspects of our health? The answer lies in the nature of two specific forms of omega-3s, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which are especially rich in seafood.

Not all omega-3 fatty acids, it turns out, are created equal.

[...]

While it's true that terrestrial plants are good sources of omega-3s, the fatty acid most present in land-based species is alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). Essential for good health, ALA can be found in fruits, vegetables, and some seeds, among them lettuce, leeks, purslane, kale, broccoli, blueberries, hemp, chia, and flaxseed. ALA is especially rich in plants that grow in intense light, and the fatty acid is thought to help the plants recover from sun damage. Though the human body is capable of turning ALA into DHA and EPA through a series of enzymatic reactions, it is not particularly good at it: Less than 1 percent of the ALA we get from vegetable sources ultimately becomes DHA and EPA. The ocean is the world's richest source of DHA and EPA, particularly from plankton-eating oily fish such as sardines, mackerel, and herring.

Recently discovered archaeological evidence suggests that around 2 million years ago, early hominids, the ancestors of modern humans, left the forests to live on the wooded edges of huge brackish lakes and estuaries in what is now Africa's Rift Valley. Prehistoric middens found in Kenya and Zaire are filled with shells and headless catfish skeletons, evidence that these proto-humans were taking full advantage of the easily gathered protein — and, incidentally, omega-3 fatty acids — at one of the world's first all-you-can-eat seafood buffets. Around the same time, hominid brains began to grow, swelling more than twofold from 650 grams in Homo habilis, the first tool-using hominid, to 1,490 grams in the early ancestors of Homo sapiens. "Anthropologists usually point to things such as the rise of language and tool making to explain the massive expansion of early hominid brains," says Cunnane. "But this is a catch-22. Something had to start the process of brain expansion, and I think it was early humans eating clams, frogs, bird eggs, and fish from shoreline environments."

[...]

Cunnane shows me a photo of an image carved into buff-colored sandstone. "This was found in a cave in France. It must have been one of the Sistine Chapels of the drawing world at the time." It is a highly naturalistic rendition of a salmon, down to gill flaps and hooked mandible. Evidence of early fish eating, jaw-dropping in its technical sophistication, the image is 22,000 years old. An interesting footnote to Cunnane's theory is that our seafood-eating Cro-Magnon ancestors, including the master sculptor responsible for this bas-relief, might well have been smarter than we are. Fossil evidence shows that the Cro-Magnons, though their bodies were smaller than those of Neanderthals, had brains about 200 grams heavier than modern humans'. Humanity's relatively recent creep away from seafood-rich shorelines, Cunnane believes, explains everything from the 20 percent of American women who are iron deficient to the dangling goiters of people living in mountainous regions. (If iodine hadn't been added to table salt 80 years ago, cretinism, a deficiency typified by severely stunted mental growth, would be endemic in most developed countries.)

Until the American Revolution, 98 percent of the population lived along rivers and oceans. Leaving the coasts might be a slow-motion public-health disaster. Deficiencies of DHA and the brain-selective minerals abundant on shorelines, speculates Cunnane, affect the performance of the modern human brain and, uncorrected, might eventually cause brains to shrink.

[...]

Colin Barrow, PhD, Ocean Nutrition's vice president of research and development, has any number of ways of getting omega-3s into his diet. He could, he points out, spread specially formulated Becel margarine onto DHA- and EPA-spiked Wonder Bread and wash it down with omega-3 supplemented Danone liquid yogurt. Instead, he prefers to take his omega-3s neat: He stirs a tablespoon of pure powdered fish oil into his morning juice.

A tall, soft-spoken New Zealander with a ginger beard and a long-toothed smile, Barrow has used the expertise gained from a PhD in chemistry and marine natural products to develop the process that allowed Ocean Nutrition to reintroduce omega-3s into packaged foods.

"The process is called microencapsulation," says Barrow, "and it was originally used for delivering ink in the cartridges of ink-jet printers." If you increased the size of a grain of Ocean Nutrition's microencapsulated powder to that of a basketball, it would be filled with Ping-Pong-ball-size agglomerations of oil encased in gelatin. Each particle is like a microscopic fish-oil capsule, allowing the powder to be added to food without changing the food's taste. Without a protective coating to prevent oxidation, the omega-3 in a glass of orange juice would stink like a sardine tin left out in the sun. Ocean Nutrition has taken any hint of fishiness out of fish oil — an essential move in the notoriously seafood-averse North American market.

The source of Ocean Nutrition's meticulously deodorized oil is, ultimately, a fish. Namely, Engraulis ringens, the Peruvian anchoveta, a small schooling species that lives in the relatively unpolluted waters off the west coast of South America. The process starts when fishing boats encircle the vast schools with purse-seine nets and bring the catch back to barges. Under the close supervision of rabbis, who are there to ensure that no squid, shellfish, or other nonkosher species remain in the nets, billions of fish are sucked through a pipe to onshore processing plants. There, the anchoveta are heated to 85 degrees Celsius, ground with an auger, and pulverized with a hydraulic screw to extract the oil. The oil is then distilled and filtered through clay to eliminate all traces of mercury, dioxins, and other persistent organic pollutants, those nasty toxins that can cause developmental and long-term neurological problems in consumers of tuna and farmed salmon. Transported by container ship through the Panama Canal, the oil arrives in Nova Scotia, where it is further concentrated and refined. Some of the oil ends up on the shelves of Walmart, Walgreens, and other major retailers that package it in their house-brand capsules. The rest, in powdered form, goes to the likes of PepsiCo and Unilever, who mix it into packaged foods. Ocean Nutrition now supplies 60 percent of the North American fish-oil market.

For anybody concerned about the future of the oceans, Ocean Nutrition's sourcing policies are good news. With big predatory species such as tuna, sharks, and swordfish already fished to 10 percent of their former abundance, and marine ecologists predicting the collapse of most major fisheries by the year 2048, conservationists have expressed concern about what kind of impact the widespread use of omega-3 supplements could have on the world's remaining fish stocks. Fortunately, the Peruvian anchoveta fishery — one of the world's largest — is in no imminent danger of collapse.

"These fish have been harvested in a highly regulated way, in very pristine waters, for more than 50 years," says Ian Lucas, Ocean Nutrition's executive vice president of marketing, "and the biomass is actually expanding." Fish oil is an industrial by-product of the fish-meal industry, which supplies feed for livestock and farmed shrimp and salmon. "It's going to take a long, long time before the fish-oil industry actually causes more fishing to happen," says Lucas. But according to Daniel Pauly, PhD, a leading authority on the decline of the world's fisheries at the Fisheries Centre at Vancouver's University of British Columbia, stocks of Peruvian anchoveta can fluctuate wildly; there was a temporary collapse in the 1970s and again in the 1980s. To forestall future problems, Pauly believes the fishery needs to be even more strictly monitored and regulated than it is today.

As word spreads of omega-3's benefits, so does fish-oil consumption. Lucas says that the share of omega-3 fatty acids in the supplement market has been growing by 30 percent a year for the past five years. Though alternative sources of fish oils exist, some are clearly more ecologically questionable than Peruvian anchoveta. A Virginia-based company called Omega Protein nets a schooling fish called menhaden off the mid-Atlantic coast; its -menhaden-based fish oil may now be added to 29 different categories of food. The fishery has been criticized because menhaden is a keystone species in the food chain of the East Coast; the fish feed by filtering algae from the water, and, in their absence, microscopic plankton have proliferated, creating the harmful algae blooms and dead zones that plague places such as Chesapeake Bay.

Barrow escorts me into a lab and shows me a 10-liter glass fermentation tank bristling with hoses and filled with a cloudy, swirling, foam-topped liquid. In its search for alternative sources of omega-3s, Ocean Nutrition has gathered a DHA-rich alga from an undisclosed location in Canada. In the United States, a company called Martek has already patented its own DHA-producing alga called Crypthecodinium cohnii, which is grown in massive multistory tanks in South Carolina; much of the infant formula in North America is now supplemented with Martek's patented Life's DHA.

"The product is good," says Barrow, "but it's really expensive, and they can't get their microorganisms to produce EPA. Our organism is a really good producer; we can get it to express about 8 percent EPA." This may be the future of omega-3s: an essential nutrient grown in tanks, sparing the world's fish stocks from overharvesting.

[...]

And now, full disclosure: As part of the research for a book I was writing about the sustainability of seafood in our world's oceans, I have radically increased my intake of omega-3s over the past two years. I've been taking three fish-oil capsules a day (a combined total of 1,800 milligrams of DHA and EPA), and having at least four fish meals a week. Early on, I saw a marked change in my alertness and capacity for sustained attention. But it wasn't until I started diminishing the amount of omega-6s in my diet that I started to lose weight. In the past year, I've shed five pounds and reversed the first swellings of a nascent potbelly.

The goal is not to "nix the six" completely, as the writer of one diet book puts it; after all, omega-6s are essential to good health. But getting an adequate supply is hardly a challenge; they are omnipresent in our food, and we would all be better off if our diets were closer to the 1:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

[...]

Omega-3s aren't a quick fix like Advil, or even, for that matter, Prozac, which takes several weeks to change brain chemistry. Omega-3s take at least three months to harness themselves into heart cells, for example. I can't be certain about improvements in my cardiovascular health, but since I started loading up on DHA and EPA, I feel as if I've upgraded my brain. My energy is high, and I feel strangely unflappable, like I've gained some kind of unbeatable equilibrium. My body feels different too, as though my fat and muscle have been redistributed to more useful places. Navigating among the omega-6-fattened hordes, I feel lean and swift, like a tuna darting among sea cows.

So, by all means, keep swallowing those omega-3 capsules. But here's an even better idea: Seek out grass-fed beef, free-range chickens and their eggs, the best olive oil, canola oil, and butter you can find, and lots of fish and shellfish, preferably small wild-caught species from clean waters. In other words, if you are looking for a guiding principle, keep it simple and eat like your ancestors ate.
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Chemicals in food packaging and shampoos may cause infertility.

I've held the belief for quite some time that the high spikes in cancer rates and other diseases is probably going to wind up being attributed to all of the bizarre preservatives and other synthetic chemicals put into foods and various products. Seems that one could add infertility to that list as well.

Food packaging, shampoo, clothes, and other household products contain chemicals that may make it harder for some women to get pregnant, suggests the first study on the subject.

It's still too early to recommend that women who want to conceive try to avoid these products, said lead researcher Chunyuan Fei, a Ph.D. student in epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. But her results are concerning enough to warrant further work.

"This is quite a new topic and lots of things are unknown," Fei said. "Because these chemicals are widespread, I think it's important to conduct more study."

The chemicals Fei and colleagues looked at belong to a group called perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs, which appear in a variety of common products, from upholstery to pesticides. In particular, the researchers focused on perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoate, which are respectively called PFOS and PFOA.

Studies have linked PFOS and PFOA to toxic effects in the livers, immune systems, and reproductive systems of animals. In people, Fei and colleagues previously found that women with many children had lower blood levels of PFOS and PFOA than did women with fewer children.

In turn, the scientists wondered if these chemicals might affect fertility. Eight percent of women in the United States have visited their doctors for infertility-related reasons, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To investigate, the team collected blood and surveyed more than 1,200 newly pregnant women who are taking part in the Danish National Birth Cohort, a long-term health study. All of the women had become pregnant on purpose.

About 30 percent of women tried for more than six months before conceiving, results showed. Half of those tried for more than a year.

There was an equally big range in chemical levels in the women's blood — with more than 40 times more PFOA in some women than others and more than 16 times more PFOS from the lowest to highest concentrations.

For analysis, the researchers divided the women into groups of high and low chemical levels. Their calculations showed that women with the most PFOS in their blood were up to 134 percent more likely to have needed six months or more to get pregnant. Women with the most PFOA were up to 154 percent more likely to have trouble conceiving.

The findings are important, said epidemiologist David Savitz, because PFOS and PFOA are virtually impossible to avoid. We all have at least low levels of them in our bodies. Yet, they haven't been studied extensively.

"That leaves them in the 'Who knows what we'll find' category," said Savitz, director of the Disease Prevention and Public Health Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

But he's not ready to jump to conclusions until further research comes along to support or refute it.

"It's well done but it still kind of sits there more or less in isolation," he said, adding that many companies are in the process of phasing out PFOS and PFOA anyway. "I would certainly urge suspending judgment or making any sort of behavioral response other than staying tuned."
- Source

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New species of frogfish approved, has "human-like" features?

Well, it certainly is clumsy, that's for sure. And it does somewhat resemble a human face. Still, pretty cool looking, and it's "psychedelica" name is certainly warranted.

Most fish have eyes on the sides of their heads, but a scientist now has confirmed a new and elusive species of carnivorous frogfish with eyes that face forward, like ours. The creature also has a fleshy chin and cheeks, adding to its strange appearance.

The bizarre new species, Histiophryne psychedelica, made a brief splash a year ago when sport divers about 30 feet offshore of Ambon Island, Indonesia, photographed a shallow-water fish not seen before in 20 years of diving there.
- Source

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

^ Frogfish video

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Deep sea fish are crazy looking.

I love deep sea fish. Sure, some look hella creepy, like the anglerfish (which gave me nightmares as a kid), but some are little more harmless looking. However, just because they don't have massive spikey teeth and such doesn't mean they're any less weird.

A bizarre deep-water fish called the barreleye has a transparent head and tubular eyes. Since the fish's discovery in 1939, biologists have known the eyes were very good at collecting light. But their shape seemed to leave the fish with tunnel vision.

Now scientists say the eyes rotate, allowing the barreleye to see directly forward or look upward through its transparent head .

The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) is adapted for life in a pitch-black environment of the deep sea , where sunlight does not reach. They use their ultra-sensitive tubular eyes to search for the faint silhouettes of prey overhead.

Scientists had thought the eyes were fixed in an upward gaze, however. This would make it impossible for the fish to see what was directly in front of them, and very difficult for them to capture prey with their small, pointed mouths.

Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute use videos from the institute's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study barreleyes off Central California. At depths of 2,000 to 2,600 feet (600 to 800 meters), the ROV cameras typically showed these fish hanging motionless in the water, their eyes glowing a vivid green in the ROV's bright lights. The video also revealed a previously undescribed feature of these fish — its eyes are surrounded by a transparent, fluid-filled shield that covers the top of the fish's head.

Most existing descriptions and illustrations of this fish do not show its fluid-filled shield, probably because this fragile structure was destroyed when the fish were brought up from the deep in nets.

Robison and Reisenbichler were fortunate to bring a net-caught barreleye to the surface alive. Over several hours in an aquarium on the ship, they were able to confirm that the fish rotated its tubular eyes as it turned its body from a horizontal to a vertical position.

Barreleyes are thought to eat small fishes and jellyfish. The green pigments in their eyes may filter out sunlight coming directly from the sea surface, helping the barreleye spot the bioluminescent glow of jellies or other animals directly overhead. When it spots prey (such as a drifting jelly), a barreleye rotates its eyes forward and swims upward, in feeding mode.

The findings were detailed recently in the journal Copeia.
- Source

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Boy with the cat eyes.

This is just weird.

A Chinese boy who has eyes that glow in the dark has stunned doctors with his ability to see and read in complete darkness.

Doctors have studied Nong Youhui’s eyesight ever since his father took him to a hospital in Dahua, which is located in southern China.

Tests conducted in complete darkness concluded Nong can read perfectly without any light and can see as clearly as most people do during the daytime.

Experts believe the boy was born with a rare condition called leukordermia, which has left his eyes with less protective pigment and made them more sensitive to light.
- Source

nothing after the jump

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Why scientists don't care to debate "Intelligent Design."

In a bit of intellectual smacktalk, Nicholas Gotelli, a Biology professor at University of Vermont, delivered a scathing rebuttal to a request for him to debate at the Discovery Institute. The DI is a conservative think tank (and I use the term "think" very liberally here) that is ardently seeking to institute creationism into the science curriculum of public schools. Gotelli explains why he, and many others in the scientific community, have no interest in such a public fiasco.

Dear Professor Gotelli,

I saw your op-ed in the Burlington Free Press and appreciated your support of free speech at UVM. In light of that, I wonder if you would be open to finding a way to provide a campus forum for a debate about evolutionary science and intelligent design. The Discovery Institute, where I work, has a local sponsor in Burlington who is enthusiastic to find a way to make this happen. But we need a partner on campus. If not the biology department, then perhaps you can suggest an alternative.

Ben Stein may not be the best person to single-handedly represent the ID side. As you're aware, he's known mainly as an entertainer. A more appropriate alternative or addition might be our senior fellows David Berlinski or Stephen Meyer, respectively a mathematician and a philosopher of science. I'll copy links to their bios below. Wherever one comes down in the Darwin debate, I think we can all agree that it is healthy for students to be exposed to different views--in precisely the spirit of inviting controversial speakers to campus, as you write in your op-ed.

I'm hoping that you would be willing to give a critique of ID at such an event, and participate in the debate in whatever role you feel comfortable with.

A good scientific backdrop to the discussion might be Dr. Meyer's book that comes out in June from HarperCollins, "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design."

On the other hand, Dr. Belinski may be a good choice since he is a critic of both ID and Darwinian theory.

Would it be possible for us to talk more about this by phone sometime soon?

With best wishes,
David Klinghoffer
Discovery Institute




Dear Dr. Klinghoffer:

Thank you for this interesting and courteous invitation to set up a debate about evolution and creationism (which includes its more recent relabeling as "intelligent design") with a speaker from the Discovery Institute. Your invitation is quite surprising, given the sneering coverage of my recent newspaper editorial that you yourself posted on the Discovery Institute's website:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/02/

However, this kind of two-faced dishonesty is what the scientific community has come to expect from the creationists.

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren't members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.

"Conspiracy" is the predictable response by Ben Stein and the frustrated creationists. But conspiracy theories are a joke, because science places a high premium on intellectual honesty and on new empirical studies that overturn previously established principles. Creationism doesn't live up to these standards, so its proponents are relegated to the sidelines, publishing in books, blogs, websites, and obscure journals that don't maintain scientific standards.

Finally, isn't it sort of pathetic that your large, well-funded institute must scrape around, panhandling for a seminar invitation at a little university in northern New England? Practicing scientists receive frequent invitations to speak in science departments around the world, often on controversial and novel topics. If creationists actually published some legitimate science, they would receive such invitations as well.

So, I hope you understand why I am declining your offer. I will wait patiently to read about the work of creationists in the pages of Nature and Science. But until it appears there, it isn't science and doesn't merit an invitation.

In closing, I do want to thank you sincerely for this invitation and for your posting on the Discovery Institute Website. As an evolutionary biologist, I can't tell you what a badge of honor this is. My colleagues will be envious.

Sincerely yours,

Nick Gotelli

P.S. I hope you will forgive me if I do not respond to any further e-mails from you or from the Discovery Institute. This has been entertaining, but it interferes with my research and teaching.
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"Success! And now the child doesn't want to swear!"

Remember that scene in South Park: Bigger Longer, and Uncut where Cartman has the V-Chip device that shocks him whenever he cusses? A new type of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder treatment might seem eerily similar, but it's actually rather different. It doesn't deliver a shock to prevent these behaviors, instead it delivers a steady stream of impulses to the brain, targeting at quelling abnormal brain signals.

Personally, I wonder about something like this. We don't actually know that much about the brain, and I can't help but wonder what types of complications and side effects may occur. Still, the FDA has approved it, so you know it's safe, right? Oh... wait. Never mind.

Patients suffering from obsessive, distressing thoughts have a new treatment option: a pacemaker-like device that relieves anxiety with electrical jolts to the brain.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved Medtronic's Reclaim Deep Brain Stimulator device as the first implant to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes uncontrollable worries, such as fear of germs or dirt.

Patients suffering from the disorder try to relieve their anxiety with obsessive behavior, such as washing their hands or checking locks repeatedly.

"These are obtrusive thoughts that take control of people's lives to the point that they lose their jobs, can't have relationships and in many cases, can't even leave their homes," said Dr. Hooman Azmi of Hackensack University Medical Center.

While about 2.2 million Americans have the disorder, the new device would only be available to a small group of patients who don't respond to other treatments, such as antidepressant drugs and therapy.

The FDA approved the device under a program reserved for conditions that effect fewer than 4,000 people each year.

The FDA's director for devices stressed that Reclaim provides some relief, but patients likely will have to continue taking medications as well.

"Reclaim is not a cure," Dr. Daniel Schultz said in a statement. "Individual results will vary and patients implanted with the device are likely to continue to have some mild to moderate impairment."

Shaped like a pacemaker, the Reclaim device is implanted under the skin of the chest and then connected to four electrodes in the brain. The electrodes deliver steady pulses of electricity that block abnormal brain signals.

Similar devices have been used since the 1990s to treat movement disorders like Parkinson's disease and tremors. But where prior devices target areas of the brain that deal with movement, Medtronic said its product delivers electrical signals to areas that control mood and anxiety.

"What deep brain stimulation does is modulate those circuits that we believe are hyperactive in patients with obsessive compulsive disorder," said Paul Stypulkowski, the company's senior director of research.

Medtronic Inc., the world's largest medical device maker, also is studying the use of the technology in patients with severe depression.

In 2005, rival Cyberonics became the first company to win FDA approval for a device to treat depression. However, the company's Vagus Nerve Stimulator has been plagued by questions of effectiveness.

Members of Congress and consumer watchdog groups campaigned against the Cyberonics device, citing research that some patients who have received it had worsening depression. A number of insurers, including the government's Medicare program, have refused to pay for the device in depression patients.

Medtronic representatives point out that their technology differs from that used by Houston-based Cyberonics, which delivers an electrical signal to nerves in the neck. Medtronic's devices stimulate the brain directly.
- Source

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Better soldiering through chemistry.

Some soldiers can hack it, some can't. This is often referred to as "battle sense." These soldiers are able to respond to high-stress combat situations, think clearly, and act appropriately. As to why this was, no one was specifically sure. Turns out, it's a neuro-chemical thing.

Soldiers who perform best under extreme stress have higher levels of chemicals that dampen the fear response, a finding that could lead to new drugs or training strategies to help others cope better, a U.S. researcher said.

"There are certain individuals who just don't get as stressed. Their stress hormones are actually lower," Deane Aikins of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, told reporters Sunday at the American American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Aikins and colleagues at Yale study stress hormone levels of soldiers undergoing survival training, which includes mock prisoner of war experiences.

Blood samples taken from soldiers in the training programs showed those who fared best under extreme stress had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and higher levels of neuropeptide y, a chemical that dampens the body's stress response.

"All of the recovery hormone systems, all of the systems that turn it down, really kick in for these resilient individuals," Aikins said.

"The question is how do you get folks who aren't as cool in stress trained up?"

Aikins and colleagues now are studying whether giving other soldiers a dose of this stress-dampening neuropeptide might help people fare better in combat situations.

He said mental training exercises such as meditation also might help improve the performance of soldiers under stress.
- Source

So, the plan is to give soldiers experimental drugs that will help them in battle? Y'know, last time we did that, it didn't turn out so well.

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Don't be a doucher.

While the evidence may not be concrete, researchers have found that douching may increase the risk of contracting STDs. Seems that trying to make one's snatch smell like a meadow after a fresh spring rain may have a significant downside. However, I have to wonder what the correlation here really is. Logic would dictate that if a girl is regularly douching, then she's probably also fucking on a higher frequency than her non-douched peers. Apparently the real issue has to do with douche washing away beneficial micro-organisms that help keep STIs from taking hold.

Results of a study provide "convincing evidence," researchers say, that douching increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases.

Among a group of sexually active adolescent girls, those who said they always practiced vaginal douching were nearly two times more likely to have a sexually transmitted disease (STD) than girls who said they never douched, the researchers found.

"Douching is a harmful activity because it disrupts the healthy vaginal microorganisms and enables STIs to take hold," Dr. Sten H. Vermund of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, told Reuters Health.

"Overwhelming evidence from biomedical research suggests that douching is harmful for women's health," Vermund added.

He and his colleagues studied the douching habits over 3 years of 368 sexually active girls who were nearly 17 years old on average.

During follow-up assessments, 88 of the girls never reported douching. Compared with this group, as well as the girls who intermittently reported douching, the 50 girls who reported always douching had a shorter time to acquiring a sexually transmitted infection.

When the investigators allowed for other factors associated with STDs, including race and age, as well as HIV status and baseline sexual history, the risk for STD was nearly twofold greater for girls who always douched compared with those who never douched.

In the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the investigators note that this study is the first to follow girls over time, and to ensure that douching practices preceded incident STDs. Previous studies that suggested douching as a risk factor for STDs could not determine if douching was practiced in response to the STD symptoms.

Vermund concludes, based on this study and others, that "adolescents and women should be discouraged from douching unless guided to do so by a doctor."
- Source

So, moral of the story: if you're gonna be skanky, let your natural skank shine forth instead of covering it up with douche.

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An encyclopedic collection of ignorance.

There is more than just one wiki out there. The format of Wikipedia has been used for many things. World of Warcraft, Fallout, D&D, and many other things. It's a useful template to use for any information-based web-compilation. There is even a conservative Wikipedia called, Conservapedia.

Now, I'm not against conservatism, but I am gainst the idea of a "conservative" wikipedia. Primarily because such a thing is not fact-based, but pure propaganda. A circle-jerk for idiots that like to think that hating fags makes them conservatise, when in all reality it just makes them bigots. These are the types of folks that George Will and Buckley Jr. despised and would maintain were merely fringe elements. Well, Palin showed that those "fringe elements" are running the fucking show nowadays.

Looking at Conservapedia, I saw this in their "News" section:

The Conservapedia evolution article has sprinted past the 500,000 view mark! This is bad news for the dogmatic evolutionists who are aware that in 2006, the prestigious science journal Science reported concerning the United States: "The percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year."[9] Watch the internet continue to grind down evolutionism!
- Source

Asides from nearly having my eyes roll into the back of my head, I think I almost had a seizure. "Watch the internet continue to grind down evolutionism!" That can be better put: "watch the internet continue to increase ignorance!"

Bless Oghma, I think I need to stop reading shit like this or else I'll surely be dead before I turn 30.

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Y'know it's hard out there for a dentist...

It truly is. The future of dentistry is in decline. Why? Because people just aren't loosing their teeth like they used to.

As long as there are hockey players, there will be niche markets for false teeth. But the real news about the future of dentures is that there isn't much of one. Toothlessness has declined 60 percent in the United States since 1960. Baby boomers will be the first generation in human history typically to go to their graves with most of their teeth.

The introduction of cavity-preventing fluoride into drinking water and toothpaste is viewed as one of the 10 greatest public health accomplishments of the 20th century, right up there with vaccinations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And it's not just your flossing and brushing (like you should) that is creating this pandemic for dental professionals, it's also regrowing teeth. The whole idea of dentures will become a bygone thought. Lose a tooth? Fuck it! Grow some more and shove 'em in there. All thanks to the miracles of stem cells. (which will probably all cause our brains to implode or stricken us with horrendous mutations later on in life)

So what's the future of dentures?

"Hopefully, they will become a relic," says Mary MacDougall, director of the Institute of Oral Health Research at the University of Alabama. "Like Washington's false teeth."

Regenerating a whole tooth is no less complicated than rebuilding a whole heart, says Songtao Shi, of the University of Southern California, who heads a team working on creating such a tooth.

Not only do you have to create smart tissue (nerves), strong tissue (ligaments) and soft tissue (pulp), you've got to build enamel -- by far the hardest structural element in the body. And you have to have openings for blood vessels and nerves. And you have to make the whole thing stick together. And you have to anchor it in bone. And then you have to make the entire arrangement last a lifetime in the juicy stew of bacteria that is your mouth.- Source

Okay, maybe it isn't so easy to do. But we'll get there one day.



"Welcome! To the world of tomorrow!"

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Robocop realer than you think.

Remember that scene in Robocop 2 where they showed the test footage of all the Robocop prototypes that didn't make it? Well, remember how they kept going crazy and attacking the scientists or killing themselves? Turns out similar incidents are no longer just a piece of fiction.

P.W. Singer, author of Wired For War, was on NPR's Fresh Air today, and he detailed just such an account. During one test, a machine equipped with an automatic machine gun turned on and, while being shown to the VIPs, automated and began aiming at the gun at the VIPs. Fortunately, it wasn't loaded. However, in South Africa, a similar such machine was being shown. These onlookers were not so lucky. The machine automated and began opening fire, killing nine people.

Other interesting tidbits Mr Singer brings up is a scientist who said that he doesn't see any legal or ethical problems with using machines in war, unless the machine repeatedly keeps killing the wrong people. In which case it is a recall issue, and still not a legal or ethical issue.

Overall, the whole piece was incredibly intriguing and should appeal to a wide range of interests. You can listen to the stream by going here and clicking the "Listen Now" link at the top left of the article. I believe the player requires Adobe Flash.

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No heart? No problem!

D'Zhana Simmons says she felt like a "fake person" for 118 days when she had no heart beating in her chest.

"But I know that I really was here," the 14-year-old said, "and I did live without a heart."

As she was being released Wednesday from a Miami hospital, the shy teen seemed in awe of what she's endured. Since July, she's had two heart transplants and survived with artificial heart pumps — but no heart — for four months between the transplants.

Last spring D'Zhana and her parents learned she had an enlarged heart that was too weak to sufficiently pump blood. They traveled from their home in Clinton, S.C. to Holtz Children's Hospital in Miami for a heart transplant.

But her new heart didn't work properly and could have ruptured so surgeons removed it two days later.

And they did something unusual, especially for a young patient: They replaced the heart with a pair of artificial pumping devices that kept blood flowing through her body until she could have a second transplant.

Dr. Peter Wearden, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh who works with the kind of pumps used in this case, said what the Miami medical team managed to do "is a big deal."

"For (more than) 100 days, there was no heart in this girl's body? That is pretty amazing," Wearden said.

Damn right that's a big deal! That's awesome! I can't wait until people can be preserved as detached heads in jars.


"Welcome! To the world of tomorrow!"

However, it's not quite as easy and simple to live without a heart as one might have hoped.

Although artificial hearts have been approved for adults, none has been federally approved for use in children. In general, there are fewer options for pediatric patients. That's because it's rarer for them to have these life-threatening conditions, so companies don't invest as much into technology that could help them, said Dr. Marco Ricci, director of pediatric cardiac surgery at the University of Miami.

He said this case demonstrates that doctors now have one more option.

"In the past, this situation could have been lethal," Ricci said.

And it nearly was. During the almost four months between her two transplants, D'Zhana wasn't able to breathe on her own half the time. She also had kidney and liver failure and gastrointestinal bleeding.

Taking a short stroll — when she felt up for it — required the help of four people, at least one of whom would steer the photocopier-sized machine that was the external part of the pumping devices.
- Source

Eentually the technology will get smaller. I can only hope that one day, when someone asks, "have you no heart?" I can safely reply, "actually, no. I don't."

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Copernicus found.

It's crazy to think that Copernicus, one of the godfathers of astrology, has been in an unknown grave for all these years. Copernicus is the first known to have challenged the Catholic Church's notion that the sun revolves around the Earth, as was supported by biblical interpretations. This revolutionary theory laid the groundwork for many future astrologists. His findings were later published, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, as he lay upon his death bed. Story has it that as the first printing was laid upon his bed, Copernicus woke from a coma, read the manuscript, and then passed. Copernicus was later buried somewhere within the Cathedral of Frauenburg.

Archeologists over the years have searched to find Copernicus' final resting place, and now it is thoroughly believed that they have found the body of Copernicus.

Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer's books.

Polish archaeologist Jerzy Gassowski told a news conference that forensic facial reconstruction of the skull that his team found in 2005 buried in a Roman Catholic Cathedral in Frombork, Poland, bears striking resemblance to existing portraits of Copernicus.

The reconstruction shows a broken nose and other features that resemble a self-portrait of Copernicus, and the skull bears a cut mark above the left eye that corresponds with a scar shown in the painting.

Moreover, the skull belonged to a man aged around 70 — Copernicus's age when he died in 1543.

In addition, Swedish genetics expert Marie Allen found that DNA from a tooth and femur bone matched that taken from two hairs retrieved from a book that the 16th-century Polish astronomer owned, which is kept at a library of Sweden's Uppsala University where Allen works.
- Source

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Real life Furbies!?!?

A primate species that looks like a living, breathing version of the Furby electronic toy has been found alive in the forested highlands of an Indonesian island for the first time in more than 70 years, scientists announced Tuesday.

Three specimens of the pygmy tarsier, a nocturnal creature about the size of a small mouse, were trapped and tracked this summer on Mount Rorekatimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in Central Sulawesi, Texas A&M University reported.

Texas A&M anthropologist Sharon Gursky-Doyen, leader of the expedition, said the tarsiers were found on mountainsides above 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) in elevation, amid damp, dangerous terrain. "I actually broke my fibula walking around there," she told msnbc.com.

Pygmy tarsiers rank among the rarest of the many tarsier species in Asia and the Pacific — and in fact some primatologists had written them off as extinct.

There are plenty of questions to be answered: For example, unlike nearly all other primate species, pygmy tarsiers have claws instead of nails on their fingers. Other clawed primates, such as marmosets and tamarins, are thought to have adapted to grip onto trees or dig out insects for food. Why did pygmy tarsiers follow a similar evolutionary path?

Unlike other tarsier species — including the species that live farther down the mountainside — the pygmy tarsiers don't seem to call to each other or mark their territory with a musky scent. "How are pygmy tarsiers communicating with one another if they're not doing it through vocalizations or scent marking?" Gursky-Doyen asked.

One clue came when the scientists saw a tarsier open its mouth in the wild. "It looked like it might be vocalizing, but I couldn't hear anything," Gursky-Doyen said. She speculated that the creature might have been calling in frequencies that couldn't be heard by humans, but were well-suited to cut through the cacophony of forest rainfall.

Gursky-Doyen said she hoped the latest find would put added pressure on government officials to protect habitat within the national park.

"At present, the national park is over 2,000 square kilometers [in area], but there are 60 villages of people living within that park," she explained. She said some of those settlements are closing in on the mountain habitat frequented by the reclusive tarsiers and other, yet-to-be-discovered species.

"As the villages get closer and closer, there's going to be more disruption," she said.

Gursky-Doyen’s research was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Conservation International Primate Action Fund, Primate Conservation Inc. and Texas A&M.
- Source

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Irate Christians want to stop PBS funding.

A new PBS documentary entitled "The Bible's Buried Secrets" examines some of the more recent findings that both support and dispute the accuracy of the Bible.

"The Bible's Buried Secrets," premiering tonight on PBS, presents archaeological findings that will annoy believers as well as skeptics - which suggests the TV documentary just might be on the right track.

At least that's the view of William Dever, a world-renowned archaeologist who worked on the show and calls it "the first honest film that's been made" about the first books of the Bible. For Jews, those books make up the Torah and other early scriptures, while Christians would call them the early part of the Old Testament.

The two-hour show has already stirred up a backlash among some believers. For example, the program airs archaeologists' assertions that:

* The Bible's first books have been traced back to multiple authors writing over a span of centuries.

* There's no evidence for the actual existence of patriarchs such as the biblical Abraham.

* Some ancient adherents of Yahweh also worshiped his "wife," a fertility goddess named Asherah.

* The Exodus appears to have involved just a small segment of the Jewish population rather than all Jews.

* The Land of Canaan was not taken over by conquest - rather, the Israelites actually might have been Canaanites who migrated into the highlands and created a new identity for themselves. "Joshua really didn't fight the Battle of Jericho," Dever said.

[...]

Disbelievers may be discomfited as well: "The Bible's Buried Secrets" includes a segment highlighting the work of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary's Ron Tappy, who is part of a team studying an inscription at Israel's Tel Zayit archaeological site. The inscription hints that a well-organized state was functioning in the 10th century B.C., with Jerusalem as its seat.

Yet another inscription at Tel Dan, from the ninth century B.C., appears to refer to the "House of David" - although that interpretation is disputed. Such evidence suggests that King David and King Solomon were historical figures who matched up with the biblical accounts.

The funny thing is, it's only the bible literalists that have freaked out and are now submitting an online petition to remove all federal funding for PBS.

[T]he American Family Association [has started] up an online petition urging Congress to cut off federal funding for PBS.
- Source

According to the AFA's website,

Take Action

Sign the petition urging Congress to stop using tax dollars to fund PBS. Let PBS operate like every other non-commercial network, raising its own money from its viewers instead of using tax money.

Petition Text

TO MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

In light of PBS's decision to air "The Bible's Buried Secrets," I ask that you vote to stop funding PBS with tax dollars.

PBS is knowingly choosing to insult and attack Christianity by airing a program that declares the Bible "isn't true and a bunch of stories that never happened."

PBS should raise its own money. I should not be forced to help pay for its programs.
- Source

Keep in mind that PBS does pay for over 50% of its operating costs itself through contributions. And, yeah, fuck Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and all the other educational programing on PBS.

Keep in mind this is the AFA that believes Jews control the world's media, that profane content on TV is directly because of Jews who push for an anti-family agenda, whose members have openly and physically attacked lesbians and gays, who CBS's Senior Vice President, Gene Mater, said, "we look upon [AFA founder] Wildmon's efforts as the greatest frontal assault on intellectual freedom this country has ever faced." - Source

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