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3/31/2010 PERMALINK  
Will the FDA kill someone you love by killing adult stem cell therapy development. Within the next five years, it's quite possible that physicians will come into routine possession of a remarkable set of tools - a brand new way of dealing with the frailty and disabilities of aging. The tool kit is autologous stem cells derived from the patients themselves, amplified in culture, and infused back into the patient according to a precise protocol. It would be such a leap from today's medical diagnostics and treatments; it could only be called revolutionary. (It is a crime against humanity the way the FDA constantly prevents American doctors from using the most effective new cures. It kills thousands of people every month. For some diseases now American doctors use technologies that seem barely above those used by witch doctors, when compared to the miracle cures available in countries with more enlightened medical regulation. Your dog can get the miracle cure here, but thanks to the FDA desire to protect their regulatory powers, your child is doomed to death. Gay people didn't take it when FDA regulators perpetrated a holocaust on them. They followed the murderous regulators around, picketed their homes and finally forced the FDA gestapo to back off and stop killing them with their excessive delays of new AIDs drugs. Things won't change until all sick Americans rise up and demand change like the gays did. -- Editor)
3/30/2010 PERMALINK
Coping strategies for periods of systemic change. The more wealth, power and prestige someone has riding on the current system, the less likely it is that they will quickly perceive and adapt to a systemic shift. Continuing to invest in, rally around and follow the old system's institutional leaders during a systemic shift is the most self-destructive possible path.
3/30/2010 PERMALINK
The effect on markets of the world's governments going into 'national security panic mode.' All the financial pundits are wildly underestimating the profound impact on markets the world governments going into full "national security panic mode" is having. Once in 'national security panic mode,' our politicos will change accounting laws to allow big banks to hide enormous levels of bad debts from their depositors and investors. Give big banks, insurance companies, car makers, etc. huge bailout injections of capital. Take on ANY amount of bad assets and assume ANY amount of market risk, which they see as necessary to propping up the financial system. They will inject however much liquidity it takes to keep the stock market buoyant. Indeed, they would probably even be willing to secretly acquire trillions in common stocks. If they reckoned that was the only way to stave off a large decline in the stock market at this dangerous 'national security' threatening moment in history. When the rules of the game you are playing have been profoundly shifted from the economic realm into the political realm. Trying to use the old rules to assess markets is profoundly foolish, but that is exactly what financial pundits are doing. While we need to beware of this, it should not surprise us. Since this tendency is a well documented programming flaw in the human mind. All humans tend to have serious blind spots towards perception of large game-changing shifts. Typically only perceiving them well after having been trampled into the ground by them. As Douglas Adams once observed. When your tribe's woolly mammoth hunts are giving you lots of food, material for sewing incredibly warm and comfortable clothing and for building great water proof shelters. And even providing ivory and bones that can be easily shaped into great tools for killing even more woolly mammoths. Human minds have a powerful tendency to just go with the flow and never contemplate what will happen to the bloated population of their tribe when the mammoth-fueled good-times runs out next hunting season with the death of the last woolly mammoth. The few who can purge the old game's rules from their heads and get tuned into the new game's rules a little ahead of the pack are going to be the ones that survive and prosper in the post fiat money world. The Keynesian theory that fiat monies, credit expansion, suppression of interest rates and other types of government interventions and controls can build a lasting prosperity is a fatally flawed theory. And humanity has just begun to pay the terrible price that will be exacted from us for allowing the world's nation states to remodel our economies using these flawed theories. So as you read those pundits who are trying to interpret the new game using the old game's rules, beware of letting this retard further your mind's already limited capacity to perceive and adjust to a systemic shift.
3/29/2010 PERMALINK
The market in used human body parts -- everybody gets rich but the donor. The process whereby used human body parts are transferred from the original owner to the final owner consists of two exchanges. And, while the law prohibits a free market in one of these, the law allows a restricted market in the other. There are three parties involved: the original owner of the part (hereinafter, specifically not referred to as the 'donor'), the medical industry, and the final owner (the recipient, hereinafter, specifically not referred to as the 'donee'). (I've certainly never understood why the surgeon can make $50,000 for three hours work, and the hospital can make $50,000 for a few hours use of an operating room, a a few days in a hospital bed, and both those are just fine. But somehow it is a great evil if the donor makes a dime for donating an organ. I guess surgeons and hospitals can buy politicos by the score, while individual donors could only actually use the money. -- Editor.)
3/25/2010 PERMALINK
Uncharted terrortory, a new poll shows 79% of Americans fear our zombie economy might collapse. Not during the darkest hours of 9/11, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, Korea or even World War II have Americans been this skittish about our economy. A new poll finds that 79 percent of voters think it’s possible the economy could collapse, including large majorities of Democrats (72 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and independents (80 percent). You'd have to go all the way back to the depression era just prior to World War II, October 30, 1938, to find a time when the American herd was this skittish about anything. That was the day that the broadcast of Orson Wells' radio drama "War of the Worlds" sent Americans fleeing their homes in panic all across the land. It wasn't an economic collapse they feared back then. It was the gathering clouds of a new world war.
Never before has there been this much skittishness about an economic collapse of our nation, but why are Americans so freaked? Aren't our politicos, central bankers, pundits and talking heads all constantly reassuring us that all is sound?
I think it is Hollywood that is to blame. For giving so many Americans such a keen understanding of exactly what a zombie is. Thanks to Hollywood, Americans now know that temporarily reanimating a corpse doesn't really make it a living thing again. So, just because all the world's politicos and central bankers went into full panic 'national security' mode and began printing trillions of paper dollars to spend on overt and covert operations to paint a little rouge on the pale dead corpses of the world's financial markets. Doesn't mean that those markets are actually alive again. Not at all, they could just be lumbering along muttering: "Feed me, not brains, your children's futures."
Bloomberg has been suing under the Freedom of Information Act to find out the true magnitude and nature of their 'national security' financial shenanigans, but our politicos and central bankers are hell bent on keep as much of what they have done a deep dark secret as they possibly can.
Americans aren't buying their zombie markets. They are frightened by them. And this is why even more of Americas are feeling skittish today than was the case back in 1938, when so many of them ran out into the streets in panic over a radio drama about a Martian invasion.
Shhhh! Careful, the slightest little sound could trigger a stampede. Whatever you do, don't anyone step on a twig.
3/22/2010 PERMALINK
Why science can answer your moral questions much better than any religion. Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life. Sam Harris' best-selling books argue that religion is ruinous and, worse, stupid -- and that questioning religious faith is necessary to save our civilization. (Even if the cosmos has a creator, thousands of men have written screeds claimed to be the true word of that creator. No two agree, which one to believe? There is no way to know. If a creator does exist, there is only one way you can be certain you are looking directly into that creator's mind. And that is by making a rigorous study of the creator's creation, the cosmos all around you. This is what science is all about. Creator or no creator, either way, science is the best path ahead for individual humans and our species as a whole. -- Editor)
3/18/2010 PERMALINK
It's not your genes that make you unique, so much as it is the DNA sequences that surround your genes. The key to human individuality may lie not in our genes, but in the sequences that surround and control them, according to new research by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Yale University. The interaction of those sequences with a class of key proteins, called transcription factors, can vary significantly between two people and are likely to affect our appearance, our development and even our predisposition to certain diseases, the study found. The discovery suggests that researchers focusing exclusively on genes to learn what makes people different from one another have been looking in the wrong place. 'We are rapidly entering a time when nearly anyone can have his or her genome sequenced,' said Michael Snyder, PhD, professor and chair of genetics at Stanford. 'However, the bulk of the differences among individuals are not found in the genes themselves, but in regions we know relatively little about. Now we see that these differences profoundly impact protein binding and gene expression.'
3/18/2010 PERMALINK
Intel Researcher Eric Dishman talks about how to make medicine personal at TED. The US health care system is stuck in the 'mainframe' era, circa 1959, tethered to big, unwieldy centralized systems: hospitals, doctors, nursing homes. As our aging population booms, it's imperative that we create personal, networked, home-based health care for all. Indeed, it is the only way to prevent the rising cost of healthcare from bankrupting our society. (The biggest inhibiting factor to the 'personalization' of the medical industry is the FDA's murderous regulatory system. Think about how innovation happens in computers. Someone designs something new and cool that only the rich can afford. Then lots of other companies pile in with constantly cheaper versions, until very soon the same device can be obtained for $20 at Walmart. However, by requiring many years of costly regulatory approvals for each new iteration of a medical technology the FDA completely stifles rapid innovation in medicine. Millions now die prematurely annually around the world as a direct result of the FDA's deadly and destructive system of regulation. - Editor)
3/17/2010 PERMALINK
European police investigating 30 offers to sell organs for transplant on Spanish web sites. 'Man aged 29, in perfect health, is selling one of his kidneys for EUR 150 000.' This message, published on the free website habitamos.com and condemned by the Spanish consumer association Facua, was reported by various European media. Those charged with looking into this case by the Spanish Health Ministry and police conducting the investigation identified around 30 similar proposals on 13 websites. Wait now let me get this. A surgeon can charge $50,000 for 4 hours work doing a transplant. The hospital can charge $50,000 for 4 hours in an operating room and 4 days rent on a room you share with a roommate, spaces that kill over 60,000 a year because they aren't kept clean enough. However, if someone wants $50,000 for their risk and pain for donating a kidney to someone in need of it. Then they are evil, vile, greedy, criminal and must be jailed???? The old order's worldview is just insane.
3/17/2010 PERMALINK
Researchers identify key mechanism that guides cells to form heart tissue Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) have identified a key cellular mechanism that guides embryonic heart tissue formation—a process which, if disrupted, can lead to a number of common congenital heart defects. Heart tissue forms in two distinct phases known as the First Heart Field, which includes the left ventricle and portions of both atrial chambers, and the Second Heart Field (SHF), which consists of the right ventricle and outflow tract. In humans, the process occurs within the fourth week of development. Using animal models, Keck School of Medicine researchers found that retinoic acid (RA), a derivative of vitamin A, regulates the SHF tissue formation and the septation, or division, of the outflow tract into the ascending aorta and the pulmonary artery.
3/17/2010 PERMALINK
Augmented reality contact lens puts a reality augmenting net connection onto the surface of your eye. Professor Babak Amir Parviz and his students from the University of Washington have developed an augmented contact lens that embeds AR technology straight into your eye. An antenna at the periphery collects incoming RF energy from a separate portable transmitter. Power-conversion circuitry provides DC power to other parts of the system and sends instructions to the display control circuit. The display, at the center, might consist of LEDs, which would turn on and off, or LCD-like elements, whose transparency would be modulated by the control circuit. An energy-storage module, perhaps a large capacitor, is connected to a solar cell, which could provide a boost to the lens. A biosensor samples the surface of the cornea, performs an analysis, and provides data to the telecommunication module to transmit to an external computer.
3/17/2010 PERMALINK
Fixing a cellular defect could block many forms of cancer. mTOR, which stands for the 'mammalian target of rapamycin.' controls several important processes in mammalian cells, including cell survival and proliferation. One of the most significant of these processes is the production of proteins within a cell, the control of which is known as translational control. mTOR integrates information about the cell's nutritional and energy needs, and prompts the cell to manufacture key proteins for cell growth. Cancer cells exploit this signal for their own growth. Now researchers at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine have found that when the cells in the body lose the ability to control mTOR activity, mTOR is considered 'hyperactivated.' This hyperactivation causes protein synthesis rates to climb. Cells begin to proliferate without limits and simultaneously become immortal, which leads to tumor formation. According to the study team, this discovery has broad clinical implications in the fight against cancer and could affect treatment of lymphoma and many other forms of the disease, including prostate cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, brain cancer and multiple myeloma.
3/16/2010 PERMALINK
New Boolean bot can find genes in milliseconds that would take researchers years of tedious work to find. Stanford University computer scientist Debashis Sahoo, PhD, seemed to be offering some kind of trick when he asked researchers at the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine to pick any two genes already known to be involved in stem cell development. Finding such genes can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Sahoo was promising the skeptical stem cell scientists that, in a fraction of a second and for practically zero cost, he could find new genes involved in the same developmental pathway as the two genes provided. Sahoo realized that these asymmetric relationships could be found by applying Boolean logic, in which the researchers established a series of if/then rules and then searched data for candidates that satisfied all the rules. For example, scientists might know that gene A is very active at the beginning of cell development, and gene C is active much later. By screening large public databases, Sahoo can find the genes that are almost never active when A is active, and almost always active when C is active, in many other types of cells. Researchers can then test to determine whether these genes become active between the early and late stages of development.
3/16/2010 PERMALINK
Losing a single gene lets mice and could let humans regenerate lost limbs and other tissue. The absence of just a single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to have been lost through evolution in all mammals, the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue. Unlike typical mammals, which heal wounds by forming a scar, these mice begin by forming a blastema, a structure associated with rapid cell growth and de-differentiation as seen in amphibians. According to the Wistar researchers, the loss of p21 causes the cells of these mice to behave more like embryonic stem cells than adult mammalian cells, and their findings provide solid evidence to link tissue regeneration to the control of cell division. "Much like a newt that has lost a limb, these mice will replace missing or damaged tissue with healthy tissue that lacks any sign of scarring," said the project's lead scientist Ellen Heber-Katz, Ph.D., a professor in Wistar's Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis program. "While we are just beginning to understand the repercussions of these findings, perhaps, one day we’ll be able to accelerate healing in humans by temporarily inactivating the p21 gene."
3/15/2010 PERMALINK
Breakthrough in understanding of how your body repairs itself big step toward keeping your body forever young. New research led by scientists at the University of Essex has given an insight into how the body finds damage in the DNA code to repair it. From rays of sunlight to harmful tobacco smoke, our bodies are bombarded every single day by a range of environmental toxins which damage our DNA. Your body work hard to find this damage and repair it, but how the damage is found in the first place is one the great unanswered questions. Now new research led by scientists at the University of Essex has given an insight into how your body finds damage to your DNA code to allow it to be repair. As lead researcher Dr Neil Kad, from the Department of Biological Sciences, explained, understanding the processes of how the body repairs itself can lead to a greater understanding of cancer and the ageing process, a first step towards improving your body's ability to repair such damage.
The researchers tagged two bacterial repair proteins, called UvrA and UvrB, with quantum dots - semi-conductor nanocrystals that light up in different colours - to make it possible to see how they moved. They also stretched the usually clumped DNA into multiple 'tightropes' to see the process more clearly. They found that the UvrA proteins randomly jumped from one DNA molecule to the next, holding on to one spot for about seven seconds before hopping to another site. But the real breakthrough came when it was discovered that the search for damage became quicker and more efficient when UvrA formed a complex with UvrB molecules (UvrAB). This new, quicker search cut the total time to check the genome from three hours down to just 13 minutes.
3/11/2010 PERMALINK
Researchers gain new insight into how brains 'replay' to learn, create a cognitive map of reality, and plan actions. By studying brain activity in rats, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Minnesota Medical School found that replays occurring in the hippocampus were not necessarily recent or frequent paths through the maze, as would be expected if the event was being added to memory. Rather, the replays often were paths that the rats had rarely taken or, in some cases, had never taken, as if the rats were trying to build maps to help them make better navigation decisions. 'The point of the cognitive map is flexibility. It gives animals the ability to plan novel paths within their environment,' said University of Minnesota Medical School researcher A. David Redish, Ph.D. 'This replay process may be an animal's way of learning how the world is interconnected, so it can plan new routes or paths.'
3/09/2010 PERMALINK
Colorado Doctors Skirt FDA Jurisdiction to Provide Stem Cell Therapies. The FDA has yet to approve stem cell therapies for general use in medicine, but that hasn’t stopped doctors in Colorado from providing them anyway. Chris Centeno and John Schultz have boldly formed Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Broomfield, Colorado. RSI provides its patients with the Regenexx procedure, an adult stem cell transplant that uses your own cells (autologous) to treat joint injuries and bone damage. Ethical doctors have no choice but to start ignoring the FDA. Because FDA's Luddite rules are completely incompatible with the emerging personalized genetic medicine future of there profession. Where each and every treatment is unique and under the arcane FDA rules would each take so long to approve that curable patients would be long dead before the cure could be applied.
3/09/2010 PERMALINK
Reovirus, commonly found in humans, seems to kill many types of cancer cells, while causing few negative symptoms. The respiratory, enteric, orphan virus (commonly known as reovirus) is a non-attenuated, environmental virus that has shown oncolytic potential against many types of cancer, specifically lymphoid, ovarian, breast, pancreatic and high grade glioma cancer, and according to a new study prostate cancer. 'The reovirus is a very common, ubiquitous virus that most people are exposed to. As far as we know, it doesn't cause any significant illness in humans, even though when someone is exposed to it, it manifests, at most, as a mild respiratory infection or mild diarrhea,' said researcher Don Morris, M.D., Ph.D., medical oncologist in the Department of Oncology at the Tom Baker Cancer Center in Alberta, Canada.
3/09/2010 PERMALINK
If life in your nation becomes untenable, how do you find the best alternative? One of the best tools available for evaluating nation states is the Heritage Foundation's Annual Index of Economic Freedom. The Foundation assigns a 1 to 10 score for each of ten criteria (Business Freedom, Trade Freedom, Fiscal Freedom, Government Spending, Monetary Freedom, Investment Freedom, Financial Freedom, Property rights, Freedom from Corruption, and Labor Freedom). Then the ten scores are totaled to obtain an overall rating for each of the world's nations. Other resources are the International Living Quality of Life, Doing Business Rankings and American University's Country Ranking Guide.
3/08/2010 PERMALINK
Fasten your seat belts folks. Because the years just ahead are going to be one very wild ride. Unfolding in parallel are two polar-opposite civilization make or break events. Nano and bio, have joined the worldwide digital network as the three most powerful sciences ever to come out of a laboratory. There is simply no way to exaggerate the miraculous impact these technologies will have on our civilization. Consider the effect of a reasonably priced system that mods photosynthesis to make hydrogen and oxygen instead of sugar, able to power an American-sized McMansion 24/7, plus produce all the fuel for all your vehicles. Or an implantable system that can monitor and mod your biochemistry to always keep you in perfect health. Or scores of other bio/nano inventions. But there is also a complete economic/political train wreck unfolding. Caused by the abject failure of the fiat money/credit expansion economic theory that has driven the design of the world's economic system for most of the last century. Only hard work and savings can produce real wealth, not below zero interest rates and speculating on asset bubbles. Currently, our civilization is like a tiny boat bobbing around dead in the water as two giant tsunamis roar towards us. One is aligned exactly at our stern and seems likely to power our progress at speeds never before dreamt of. But the other is barreling from directly off our starboard side. Making it certain to roll and rip our tiny little boat to smithereens when it fully arrives. (No the economic problems aren't over, as the politicos are assuring you, they are just getting started.) Oh, and as if things weren't complicated enough already. Buried withing the 'good' wave are undertows that super-empower individuals to the point that one knowledgeable person might be able to take on all of civilization and win. Or bring about the extinction of our species, if he or she is crazy enough to have that as their goal. It bears repeating. Fasten your seat belts folks. Because the years just ahead are going to be one very wild ride. Yes, we are already going up the side of the 'bad' wave. It has arrived first. But that can be used to sweep away the old order's nation states and other failed institutions, which will only serve to sap human intellectual vitality from here on out. Allowing us to create the tools necessary to ride the 'good' wave unfettered. There is some debate about this, but I think that the only way to wind up in an 'Athens without the slaves' scenario, rather than a new dark ages or human extinction, is to develop a net-meme dissemination and instant feedback system that can effectively keep humanity on the tip top of the wave. Necessary, because when your boat is surfing atop a tsunami, any mistake not instantly corrected can precipitate an extinction level failure.
3/08/2010 PERMALINK
Golden nano-assassins identify, target and kill cancer cells, while leaving normal cells alone. Researchers have synthesized nanoparticles – shaped something like a dumbbell – made of gold sandwiched between two pieces of iron oxide. They then attached antibodies, which target a molecule found only in colorectal cancer cells, to the particles. Once bound, the nanoparticles are engulfed by the cancer cells. To kill the cells, the Cornell University researchers use a near-infrared laser, which is a wavelength that doesn't harm normal tissue at the levels used, but the radiation is absorbed by the gold in the nanoparticles. This causes the cancer cells to heat up and die. 'This is a so-called 'smart' therapy,' said. 'To be a smart therapy, it should be targeted, and it should have some ability to be activated only when it's there and then kills just the cancer cells.'
3/08/2010 PERMALINK
New approach to immune cell analysis facilitates creation of an autodoc implant that can accurately monitor and maintain your health. Investigators have developed a new mathematical approach to analyze molecular data derived from complex mixtures of immune cells. This approach, when combined with well-established techniques, readily identifies changes in small samples of human whole blood, and has the potential to distinguish between health and disease states. Until now, scientists had to separate out the cell types from a mixture prior to analysis to verify that actual changes in gene expression had occurred. But cell separation is time-consuming and costly, and requires large samples of blood. To overcome such obstacles, the study team developed a computational approach called cell specific significance analysis of microarrays (csSAM). "What csSAM does is marry the concepts of cell separation with the ease of analyzing large families of genes on a microarray," explains Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University. "Using a mathematical approach, we can virtually separate out the different cell types found in blood, determine the gene expression patterns of these cell types, and identify which changes in gene expression are due to actual disease and which are simply due to variations in the cell proportions.
3/02/2010 PERMALINK
Can deleting the gene for one enzyme create healthier humans? It seems to have done so for mice. "It was a surprising and unexpected finding," said Richard Lehner of the University of Alberta. "With this gene deleted, not only was there a decline in very low-density lipoproteins in the whole mouse, it also affected metabolism in fat tissue. Insulin-secreting cells became smaller, suggesting that they didn't have to work as hard to secrete insulin, and the mice became more insulin sensitive." The animals ate more, but they also expended more energy and showed no change in body weight. Very low-density lipoproteins (VLDLs) are a form of 'bad' cholesterol, Lehner explained. TGH normally frees up triglycerides from their storage place in the liver, releasing them for assembly into VLDLs. Therefore, one might expect that loss of TGH would have ill effects on the liver, as triglycerides would build up there. Indeed, he says, similar experiments with other enzymes have shown such an effect. "We didn't observe that here," Lehner said. Instead of being stored in liver, triglycerides were burned and the liver also compensated by synthesizing less fat.
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