5/20/2011 PERMALINK
Spinal implant allows paralyzed man to stand and take steps. An implant designed by UCLA neurobiologist V. Reggie Edgerton can activate a patient's spinal nerves just enough to make them responsive to sensory signals coming from the legs. Test on 25-year-old Rob Summers, who was paralyzed below the chest in a car accident in 2006, the implant has allowed him to stand for several minutes on his own, and with help take repeated steps on a treadmill and voluntarily move his hips, knees, ankles, and toes. Researchers say the advance is a breakthrough in the treatment of spinal cord injury, though they caution that it has only so far been tested in a single patient.

5/19/2011 PERMALINK
Learn more about corporate media's effect on politics in 2 minutes than a media/polisci double major would teach you. Watch this link to come to a complete understanding of the role of the mainstream corporate media in politics in the United States of America. Afterward, consider swearing off the old bankrupt corporate media for good. The memes conveyed there are typically designed to be maliciously manipulative and destructive to your future well being. Use the web to make up you mind. You don't need no stinking corporate media. They are yesterday.

5/18/2011 PERMALINK
Telomere measuring blood test estimates your remaining life span. A new blood test from a Spanish company called Life Length will soon be released in the United Kingdom that is designed to measure the remaining length of your telomeres. Telomeres are DNA sections that serve as end caps on your chromosomes. They effectively preventing replication errors of critical the gene segments that cause the loss of cell function associated with aging.
"Knowing whether our telomeres are a normal length or not for a given chronological age will give us an indication of our health status and of our physiological 'age' even before diseases appear," said Maria Blasco, the test's inventor and head of telomeres research at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid.

5/17/2011 PERMALINK
Stem cell study could pave the way to regeneration of your age-damaged muscles. A team at Monash University led by developmental biologist Professor Christophe Marcelle has found the mechanism that causes stem cells in the embryo to differentiate into specialised cells that form the skeletal muscles of animal bodies. The scientists investigated the effect of a known signalling pathway called NOTCH on muscle differentiation. They found that differentiation of stem cells to muscle was initiated when NOTCH signalling proteins touched some of the cells. These proteins were carried by passing cells migrating from a different tissue–the neural crest–the progenitor tissue of sensory nerve cells. Muscle formation in the target stem cells occurred only when the NOTCH pathway was triggered briefly by the migrating neural crest cells.

5/17/2011 PERMALINK
Genetic neuron mods that let tiny laser implants communicate directly with your neurons. In a talk at TED, Ed Boyden, who leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT's Media Lab, shows how, by inserting genes for light-sensitive proteins into brain cells, he can selectively activate or de-activate specific neurons with fiber-optic implants. With this unprecedented level of control, he's managed to cure mice of analogs of PTSD and certain forms of blindness. On the horizon says Boyden, neural prosthetics and implanted brain co-processors to enhance your capabilities.

5/16/2011 PERMALINK
Possible setback for reprogrammed stem cells.- Technology Review A promising type of stem cell may not be as well-suited for tissue replacement transplants as scientists had hoped. According to new research, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells derived from adult tissue but with the potential to proliferate indefinitely and to turn into any type of tissue, can trigger an immune reaction when the undifferentiated cells are transplanted into tissue-matched mice. It is still possible that human iPS cells may not trigger the same adverse reaction.

5/12/2011 PERMALINK
Two recent events elevate America's politicos and regulators to world class 'banana republic' corruption levels. Some months ago all 50 state attorney generals jointly announced that they were shocked, shocked to find that the Federal government's regulators were doing nothing to punish all the mortgage processing crooks that helped the nation's largest banks perpetrate the biggest fraud in human history.

This massive fraud was targeted directly at the largest asset of most American families, their equity in their home. So far, $6.5 trillion in household net worth has been stolen or destroyed as a result of the housing crash that directly resulted from this massive conspiracy of fraud.

This is far more damage done to America than Osama Bin Laden could have accomplished had he lived a thousand more years, rather than being executed without trial for his crimes.

But the 50 state AG's promised to make things right, even if the banksters have Federal regulators and Congressmen too much in their pocket for them to do anything about this massive fraud. Those who had destroyed so much of the wealth of so many fine American families would finally be brought to account for the many blatant violations of law that are being uncovered daily by the state AG's. A $20 billion penalty would be accessed from the banksters that orchestrated this massive fleecing of America's families and those most culpable would be jailed, promised the 50 AG's.

But soon it all began to go the way of Federal law enforcement.

The 50 attorney generals, the men most directly responsible for enforcing the laws of our land, decided to reduce the penalty to a pittance, not $20 billion as first claimed, but chump change for the banksters a mere $5 billion dollars. And rather than jail the guilty, they promised as part of a proposed settlement to guarantee the banksters that no one will be prosecuted individually for their role in the biggest fraud scheme in all of human history.

Why the complete turnaround? What did the 50 attorney generals get in return for backing off?

You guessed it, campaign contributions, cushy jobs for their kin folks and all the other favors from the banksters that Federal politicos and regulators have long enjoyed are now being showered on state attorney generals. Even before the bankers could even get their Washington lobbyists on the road to the state capitals to offer, the attorney generals were contacting them asking for favors similar to those showered on the Feds.

And simultaneous with this massive sell out of the American public by those entrusted to enforce our laws, the blatantness of the payoffs at the Federal level hit a whole new level of obscenity this week.

A little background here.

When cable companies like Comcast buy content channels like NBC, consumers can only lose. Because then Comcast has less incentive to roll out the higher speed internet service that many other advanced nations already have, but very few in America enjoy. Service that would obsolete cable channels, by letting any American watch any movie, sports event or TV show in full HD at any time they desire. They could chose to watch commercial free by paying a small fee or watch for free by accepting commercials.

However, letting the old cable and content companies control the roll out of the faster internet service capable of this, is exactly like putting the buggy and stage coach builders in charge of developing America's roads back at the start of the last century. If we'd done that, we would all still be traveling on roads too narrow and muddy for any vehicle other than a horse drawn buggy. Our modern highway system never would have gotten built. The auto industry never would have developed. Most of us would still be tilling the soil with even the few privileged enough to live in a town enjoying the aroma of streets covered in horse droppings.

You may remember that there was one very vocal FCC Commissioner in favor of purchase of NBC by Comcast. A Commissioner who demanded there be no conditions on the deal what-so-ever. A Commissioner who claimed letting a cable company buy a content company would "bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms." Even though anyone with a grain of common sense can see that exactly the opposite is true.

Well, a mere four months later that same FCC Commissioner, Republican Meredith Atwell Baker, has been rewarded by the newly formed Comcast/NBCUniversal with a cushy job in their Washington lobbyist office, paying the kind of salary most Americans can only dream about. This regulator, just the latest of many, many Federal politicos and regulators to sacrifice the public interest for personal gain, is now Comcast's new senior vice president of government affairs.

And with these two events, the United States of America achieves that for which our crooked politicos and regulators have long strived. Our nation has now officially ascended to the highest level on the corruption scale. The United States of America has achieved full recognition that our corruption level has reached 'banana republic' status.

Civilizations advance most rapidly by fostering the rapid creation and spread of new utility. 'Utility' being any product, service or idea of real value to individuals. The fundamental flaw in Representative Democracy is that it strongly tends to favor those that control existing utility, over those seeking to create new and improved utility. This turns free markets into destructive controlled markets and true capitalism into destructive crony capitalism, two extremely powerful destroyers of healthy civilizations.

5/10/2011 PERMALINK
The housing crash is actually accelerating. Home listing site Zillow.com reports that average home prices are down 8% from a year ago, 3% over the quarter, and prices are continuing to fall at the rate of about 1% every month. This has pushed the percentage of homeowners in negative-equity positions (home worth less than the mortgage) to a record 28%. A new milestone has been reached. Cumulative homeowner's equity has now declined from $12.8 trillion in 2006 to $6.3 trillion in 2011. Americans have now lost more than half of what is the single largest asset for most families, their home equity. Massive home ownership subsidies created by Congress in the form of Fannie, Freddie and the FHA. Plus a decade of below market interest rates enforced by the Federal Reserve Bank. Combined to produce a bubble so massive that its popping has now produced 57 straight months of declining home values, destroying the security of millions of American families, with no end yet in sight. In the totally corrupt Crony Capitalism system that America was made over into over the last decade. The extremely wealthy Wall Street bankers, the ones who profited most from the mortgage scam, had their massive losses covered by Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank. The middle class has been chosen to take the bullet for this massive debacle, entirely created by Congress, the Fed and Wall Street's Crony Capitalist banksters. While the massive amount of new debt Congress and the Fed have taken on to pay for the bailout of their bankster benefactors will be grinding down the American middle class for generations to come. And not one prominent bankster has been punished for creating all those trillions in fraudulent mortgages that the Fed and Congress have now assumed liability for.

5/08/2011 PERMALINK
China is rapidly moving into the humods era, gathering the data necessary to alter and control the evolution of our species. The world's largest genome-mapping facility at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, China has more capacity for high quality DNA-sequencing than all the facilities in the USA combined. They are actively seeking the human genetic mods, such as the genes that code for higher IQs, that will allow humans to become humods. Taking the momentous step up the evolutionary ladder from homo sapiens to homo novo, beings able to actively alter and control our own evolution.

5/04/2011 PERMALINK
Modding your immune system to destroy cancer cells. In a new study, Dr. Marcus O. Butler, of Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has found a kinder, gentler way of treating melanoma, and perhaps other cancers. Butler and his colleagues harvested immune cells from nine patients. Theses sells were then modded in their lab to program in the ability to remember cancer cells and multiplied in number. Butlers team then infused the enhanced cells back into the patients from whom they been taken, priming their immune systems to far more efficiently seek out and destroy cancer cells throughout the body.