Category: health
Videos of presentations from the 2011 Open Science Summit can be viewed at Fora TV.
Wonderfully juicy topics include open source drug discovery, big data bioinformatics, ‘clinical trials 2.0′, open science education, open access science journalism, personal genomics, radical longevity, transparency in science, incentive and intellectual property: FORA.TV
After reading this lovely review by David Jay Brown of Honor Thy Daughter, I’m definitely adding this to my reading list.
A breakthrough. No Stem Cells Required.
Fully mature liver cells from laboratory mice have been transformed directly into functional neurons by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The switch was accomplished with the introduction of just three genes and did not require the cells to first enter a pluripotent state. It is the first time that cells have been shown to leapfrog from one fundamentally different tissue type to another.
Read article at medicalxpress.com
This was the technology portrayed in the 6th season episode of House entitled Black Hole.
The potential of it is staggering.
From description:
The left clip is a segment of the movie that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this movie from brain activity measured using fMRI. The reconstruction was obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video. (In brief, the algorithm processes each of the 18 million clips through the brain model, and identifies the clips that would have produced brain activity as similar to the measured brain activity as possible. The clips used to fit the model, those used to test the model and those used to reconstruct the stimulus were entirely separate.) Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately.
For a related video see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMA23JJ1M1o
For more information about this work, please check our lab web site:http://gallantlab.org
Navigable, interactive human anatomy atlas by Google. It will be wonderful when the detail is all filled in down to a cellular level, but you can already zoom in pretty close. click the following link and hold down the minus (zoom out) button on the upper left.
>>> Google Body
Through actual text from commercials for the anti-depressant drug known as Abilify, High Times, in association with York Productions, asks the question, “If pot did this to you, would you smoke it?”
Dear friends,
I urge you to sign this petition. Once more, this is an attack against the cultural and spiritual heritage of non-western people, a continuation of conquest and colonization of the word by people with a very limited worldview.
Best regards,
Luis Eduardo
The United Nations International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) has published on their website their annual report about the world situation on drugs in 2010. In this report, the INCB has included the preoccupying recommendation towards governments to outlaw traditional plants such as Ayahuasca (a decoction made with botanicals like Banisteriopsis Caapi and Psychotria Viridis) andTabernanthe Iboga among others, neglecting their important role as traditional medicine, as a sacrament and as therapeutic tool. These are the primary uses of these plants found in societies all over the world.
The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research & Service (ICEERS) is organizing a letter-writing campaign to counter this demonic injustice. Please read more about this issue and add your signature here, and take a moment to browse the beautiful website of ICEERS.org.
Could the mainstream media actually take a turn for the sane and humanitarian? THAT would be tremendous. This segment actually takes an honest look at what has been going on relentlessly in this country for many decades. THIS is the kind of persecution we blindly tolerate everyday as a “culture.” This is the kind of video I want to send to every person I can.
Also recently:
A Louisiana man got caught, for the fourth time, possessing or trying to sell small amounts of pot and has been sentenced to life in prison.
Oklahoma is passing a law that makes hashish (the pollen-attracting resin) a crime punishable by life-sentence and recently, also in Oklahoma, a 25-year-old mother of four, Patricia Spottedcrow, received 10-year sentence in prison for selling $31 of marijuana to an informant.
