big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Great moments in making it up, because memory is fiction:
A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it.
The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.
Memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information.
Slate has published an important series on the distortions and dishonesties of memory.
Truly photo-realistic drawings!
Very, very talented Paul Lung uses only a 0.5mm technical pencil to produce millions of textures.
Each drawing takes 40-60 hours.
Violent crimes – murders, rapes, and assaults – are substantially higher in countries with a relative scarcity of men. Go figure.
HA! Costumes from the 1873 Mardi Gras ‘Missing Links’ Parade. Yes, we might have become any of these. Random can easily do that.
Score’s customers are political operatives, CEOs, bankers, hedge-fund managers and celebrities, a manager reveals. “We had one guy who spent $2 million a year in the club.” !
Cocaine slows fetal growth.
Yes, babies are smaller with smaller heads.
But as these children grow, brain and body size catch up.
Many crack babies have done alright.
Prison policies not so much.
Tooling around with the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal cortical axis as a practical option.
The British Medical Journal takes on antibiotic resistance. Far too many multi-drug resistant bacteria are appearing.
“Nothing less than the future of medicine, from organ transplants to chemotherapy, is at stake, and there will be no second chances.”
Editorials: Tackling antibiotic resistance
Research: Effect of antibiotic prescribing on antimicrobial resistance
Analysis: Stoking the antibiotic pipeline
They found strong evidence that individuals prescribed an antibiotic in primary care for a respiratory or urinary infection develop a resistance. The effect is greatest in the month immediately after treatment, but may last for up to a year, and this residual effect may be a driver for high levels of resistance in the community.
Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, chief of the biology of aging division:
“We’re seeing that the health of mitochondria is central to aging.
“I think it is important for people to focus on good nutrition, but for those of advanced age who are running out of energy and not moving much, we’re trying to find a supplement mixture that can help improve their quality of life.”
Scientists do not fully understand all the processes that lead to loss of function as people age. But more and more research points to the mitochondrial free radical theory of aging, that as people age, oxidative damage piles up in individual cells such that the energy-generation system inside some cells stops working properly.
Hearing loss and the use of the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra.
Today’s surgeons may soon seem Medieval.
The nanotech wound closure replaces sutures and staples. Instead of a needle and thread, a patient’s wound would be coated in a dye, then exposed to green light for 2-3 minutes. The dye absorbs the light and catalyzes molecular bonds between the tissue’s collagen.
The laser instantly creates a seal that’s watertight, which prevents inflammation or risk of infection, and speeds up healing.
Fun brain thump at The Daily Grail
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it.
BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States.
Its 2009 revenues of $327bn are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence US policy and regulatory oversight.
In 2009, the company spent nearly $16m on lobbying the federal government, ranking it among the 20 highest.
Seven of the 10 largest corporations in the world are oil companies.
Naw. Do you really believe it?
One in eight will eliminate or scale back cable, satellite or other pay-TV this year.
NASA published satellite images of the gulf oil slick. The persistent crap from the canal-driven Mississippi is remarkable too.
When I was floating freely in space and looking back on Earth from my safe haven amongst the stars, I saw a world without division…
Name: Anousheh Ansari
Age: 42
Birthplace: Mashhad, Iran
Occupation: Entrepreneur, space traveler
Who am I? I am a human — plain and simple — no labels attached. I would be honored if everyone would think of me and preferably others as such.
By labeling ourselves or others, we create boxes, boundaries and decide who belongs on what side of the line. We divide ourselves, and by dividing ourselves, one would determine which side of the line is better.
Sometimes each side believes that their side is better and sometimes one side can be so persuasive to make the other side believe that they are on the wrong side. At the end, it doesn’t matter which side you are on because no one wins. The labels we put on ourselves and let others put on us are just that — labels. And they can be removed. Once we are free, we can just be human, pure and simple.
Among the one in seven couples now classed as infertile, the “male factor” has been found to be the most commonly identified cause. As many as one in five healthy young men between the ages of 18 and 25 produce abnormal sperm counts. Even the sperm they do produce is often of poor quality. In fact only between 5 and 15 per cent of their sperm is, on average, good enough to be classed as “normal” – and these are young, healthy men.
People using red pens to correct essays marked more errors and awarded lower grades than people using blue pens. [true]
Think of Edward O. Wilson, one of the most important biological theorists since Darwin.
Author of some two dozen books, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, expert on social insects, discoverer of new species, passionate advocate of biodiversity, he is best known for his groundbreaking work on the evolution of social behavior.
Describing ‘the decency of ants’, no writer could do this better.
When the nest must be defended, its eldest residents — with the least long-term utility remaining to them — become the most suicidally aggressive: Where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies.
Stefani Joanne Germanotta: “I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.”
“If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.”
“A year from now, I could go away, and people might say, ‘Gosh, what ever happened to that girl who never wore pants?’
“Rule the world! What’s life worth living if you don’t rule it?”
Sales of sexual misconduct liability insurance reveal that Catholic churches are not higher risk than other congregations.
High school locker rooms? At least 36 swimming coaches have been banned for life by the USA Swimming organization over the last 10 years because of sexual misconduct with teenagers
Steve Puma:
Young gamers spend approximately 10,000 hours playing online games by the time they reach age 21.
While this number may not seem significant, at first, it happens to be about the same number of hours a child will spend in school between 5th grade and high school graduation.
Game designer Jane McGonigal asks, “Exactly what skills are these gamers getting good at?”
