Komen Also Stops Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Either Or
Either Or

Wow, Susan G Komen Anti-Choice Cure’s new agenda is very clear. No need to even debate the topic any more, they have outed themselves as just another partisan, evangelical organization, like the disgusting Westboro Baptist Church, like Newton Leroy Gingrich, Randall Terry and their ilk. Science be damned, there are partisan points to score!

In addition to pulling funds from Planned Parenthood for The Susan G. Komen Foundation also decided to stop funding embryonic stem cell research centers making it fully transparent the organization has evolved from non-political non-profit to a partisan advocacy organization.

That means the loss of $3.75 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, $4.5 million to the University of Kansas Medical Center, $1 million to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, $1 million to the Society for Women’s Health Research, and $600,000 to Yale University. That’s a loss of nearly $12 million dollars in research money to eradicate breast cancer this year alone.

This is a new position for the organization which had previously supported all sorts of scientific research targeted at finding a cure for breast cancer and saving women’s lives. It’s new position is that the organization will categorically no longer support any embryonic stem cell research.

(click here to continue reading Susan G. Komen Foundation Also Stops Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research | Care2 Causes.)

 

Anti-Science Newt Gingrich

Abyss of Intoxication
Abyss of Intoxication

Telling lies is apparently the Christian thing to do, witness how Newt Gingrich tells falsehood after falsehood, whipping up his supporters into a frenzy:

[Newt Gingrich] is always good at judging how far he can go with his crowds, and this one was clearly passionate about ending abortion. So he unpacked a series of mistruths about the subject that had the crowd of about 1,000 in the Aloma Church roaring, each more outlandish – and malign – than the last.

The judiciary, he said, is “totally out of control” and needs to be reined in. (The facts: even after three years of the Obama administration, Republican-appointed judges are a majority on the Supreme Court, the federal appeals courts, and the federal district courts.)

One of the reasons there are so many abortions in the United States, he said, is that the federal government funds Planned Parenthood. (In fact, as he knows full well, federal law already prohibits any of the $75 million or so the government gives to Planned Parenthood from being used for abortion. If he ever managed to cut off that money, it would mean an end to HIV screening, STD treatment and counseling, primarily for poor women – the real casualties of his thoughtless campaign.)

And finally, his most jaw-dropping whopper was on the subject of embryonic stem-cell research: One of the most promising avenues of treatment for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and spinal cord injuries. (Just a few days ago, there was a report that the cells seemed to be effective against macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness.)

Mr. Gingrich not only told the church audience that he would eliminate all funding for this research, because it can lead to the destruction of human embryos, but he went one vicious step further. (This maneuver, where he really has an angry head of steam worked up, is well known to his regular listeners.)

Research into embryonic stem cells, he said, has nothing to do with science. “This was the use of science to justify desensitizing society to killing babies,” he said. If the “secular left” could have done the same research without killing embryos, they would have rejected it, he said, because their real interest was in exploiting Parkinson’s victims to promote abortions.

It was essentially an aside, and yet a breathtaking attack on science and scientists.

(click here to continue reading Newt Gingrich Fires Up Crowd in Florida With Anti-Abortion Rhetoric – NYTimes.com.)

Yes, stem cell research is only a front, masking the true baby-killing agenda of us secular humanist Saul Alinksy acolytes …what an asshole.

Mind-altering drugs research call from Prof David Nutt

Shroom as Big As Your Head
Shroom as Big As Your Head

If only governments listened to reason…

Former government drugs adviser Prof David Nutt has said that regulations should be relaxed to enable researchers to experiment on mind-altering drugs.

Prof Nutt told BBC News that magic mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy, cannabis and mephedrone all have potential therapeutic applications.

However, he said they were not being studied because of the restrictions placed on researching illegal drugs.

He said the regulations were “overwhelming”.

His comments followed the publication of new research by his group in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that the active ingredient in magic mushrooms could be used to treat depression.

“I feel quite passionately that these drugs are profound drugs; they change the brain in a way that no other drugs do. And I find it bizarre that no-one has studied them before and they haven’t because it’s hard and illegal,” he said.

Prof Nutt was sacked by the home secretary from his government advisory role three years ago for saying that ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol.

We need to have a more scientific rational approach to drugs and vilifying drugs like psilocybin whilst at the same time actively promoting much more dangerous drugs like alcohol is totally stupid scientifically” Prof David NuttHe says his new research indicated that there were no “untoward effects” from taking magic mushrooms and that it should not be illegal to possess them.

Prof Nutt and his team scanned the brains of volunteers who had been injected with a moderate dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms.

They had expected higher activity in areas of the brain associated with visual imagery. But in fact they found that the drug switched off a network of interconnected regions of the brain which regulated an individual’s sense of being and integration with their environment.

The researchers say that this alters consciousness because individuals are less in touch with their sensations and normal way of thinking.

(click here to continue reading BBC News – Mind-altering drugs research call from Prof David Nutt.)

LSD Partners  Dylan

LSD Partners – Bob Dylan

How Exercise May Keep Alzheimer’s at Bay

Sharpening Stones and Walking On Coals
Sharpening Stones and Walking On Coals

Cautiously encouraging is better than despair, no?

Alzheimer’s disease, with its inexorable loss of memory and self, understandably alarms most of us. This is especially so since, at the moment, there are no cures for the condition and few promising drug treatments. But a cautiously encouraging new study from The Archives of Neurology suggests that for some people, a daily walk or jog could alter the risk of developing Alzheimer’s or change the course of the disease if it begins.

For the experiment, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis recruited 201 adults, ages 45 to 88, who were part of a continuing study at the university’s Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Some of the participants had a family history of Alzheimer’s, but none, as the study began, showed clinical symptoms of the disease. They performed well on tests of memory and thinking. “They were, as far as we could determine, cognitively normal,” says Denise Head, an associate professor of psychology at Washington University who led the study.

The volunteers had not had their brains scanned, however, so the Washington University scientists began their experiment by using positron emission tomography, an advanced scanning technique, to look inside the volunteers’ brains for signs of amyloid plaques, the deposits that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. People with a lot of plaque tend to have more memory loss, though the relation is complex.

(click here to continue reading How Exercise May Keep Alzheimer’s at Bay – NYTimes.com.)

Can’t hurt to walk a bit every day, why not do it?

Misery-inducing Norovirus Can Survive for Months — Perhaps Years — in Drinking Water

Feeding On Its Own Hungriness
Feeding On Its Own Hungriness

Fascinating article about the Norovirus, aka the stomach flu…

Norovirus is Norwalk Virus, named for the Ohio town which in 1968 was home to the virus’s first identified outbreak and which no doubt do not include this information in its Chamber of Commerce literature. Often called “stomach flu” or “24-hour flu”, this awful malady has no relation to influenza virus, but has gained a reputation no less sinister in recent years. It is the agent responsible for innumerable cruise-ship “gastroenteritis” outbreaks and outbreaks at camps, state fairs, nursing homes, schools, and yes, even NBA locker rooms.

Anyone who’s experienced it can tell you it’s a bit like having all of your intestines’ pain receptors activated at once, with uncontrollable nausea and/or diarrhea added as a special bonus. When I was in high school, every so often I’d experience twelve hours of intense pain along with nausea so powerful that I’d feel the urge to hurl even when nothing was left. This was followed by 12 hours of utter exhaustion. Then, I’d feel pretty much normal again and go right back to school, no doubt perpetuating the cycle since victims shed virus for several days after they recover. I’m pretty sure that it was norovirus.

…This virus is responsible for about nine out of 10 “stomach flu” cases in the U.S., and is probably responsible for about 50% of the cases of what people call “food poisoning”. It takes fewer than 10 virus particles to make you sick, and the virus can be spread by sick people handling your food or water, or shaking your hand, or by you touching surfaces they’ve touched, or even by (I know, ewwww) aerosolization of their bodily fluids when they flush the toilet after a visit to the necessary room.

(click here to continue reading Misery-inducing Norovirus Can Survive for Months — Perhaps Years — in Drinking Water | The Artful Amoeba, Scientific American Blog Network.)

 

You Should Close the Toilet Lid When You Flush

Surprised this factoid has not become common knowledge yet1- simple enough to close (both) lids of the toilet before flushing, otherwise all sorts of fecal matter float around in your bathroom. A few years ago, saw an exhibit at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum that actually demonstrated this with black lights and a model bathroom. I’ve closed the lid ever since.

Don't pee here
Don’t pee here

Cecil Adams of the Straight Dope wrote:

I read somewhere years ago that when you flush the toilet with the lid open, a plume of contaminated water droplets is ejected into the air and lands on everything in the bathroom, including (yuck) your toothbrush. Women I mention this to nod knowingly, but among men it is met with scorn, the common view being that this is another female scare story intended to “get us to put the top down.” Knowing your ability to rise above petty considerations of gender, I turn to you.

— Katie Wolf, Toledo, Ohio

Dear Katie:

Opinions on this topic do seem to break down along male-female lines. “Toilet water on your toothbrush!” my assistant Jane howled. “That’s gross! That’s disgusting!” “Yeah,” said Little Ed, “it’s got Straight Dope written all over it.”

You remembered right about toilet plume, although I think toilet “aerosol” is probably the more accurate term. No doubt you saw something about Charles Gerba, a professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in environmental microbiology. For those of you with a romanticized picture of the academic life, I should tell you this means he spends a lot of time crawling around public toilets and has had the cops called on him twice.

In 1975 Professor Gerba published a scientific article describing the little-known phenomenon of bacterial and viral aerosols due to toilet flushing. The more you learn about it, the scarier it sounds. According to Gerba, close-up photos of the germy ejecta look like “Baghdad at night during a U.S. air attack.” The article ominously depicts a “floor plan of experimental bathroom with location of gauze pads for viral fallout experiments.” A lot of virus fell on those gauze pads, Gerba found, and a lot of bacteria too. In fact, significant quantities of microbes floated around the bathroom for at least two hours after each flush.

 

(click here to continue reading The Straight Dope: Does flushing the toilet cause dirty water to be spewed around the bathroom?.)

Oui Oui Enterprises
Oui Oui Enterprises

Footnotes:
  1. like I’ve noticed that sneezing into one’s sleeve instead of one’s hand has become more common practice recently []

Republicans Against Science Leading GOP

It's not just rocket science
It’s not just rocket science

I think Paul Krugman is right, Rick Perry is just vile…

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

But never mind that, Mr. Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, “manipulating data” to create a fake threat. In his book “Fed Up,” he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”

I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

(click here to continue reading Republicans Against Science – NYTimes.com.)

and to Dr. Krugman’s larger point, willfully ignorant, anti-science idiots like Rick Perry (and Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, et al) are the standard bearers of the Republican party. That’s what is really scary – the thought of one of these anti-intellectuals winning the election keeps me up nights, worrying.

Research Points to Early Detection of Alzheimer’s

Poached Scrambled eggs in the pot
Poached Scrambled eggs in the pot

Research continues on this dread disease, so don’t draw any drastic conclusions from this one study, but interesting nonethless.

“Earlier intervention will allow us to treat patients when they have much less disability and when it could still be possible to prevent or delay such [memory] losses,” said Howard Feldman, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s vice president of global clinical research for neuroscience.

The exact causes of Alzheimer’s are still unknown, but clumps of a sticky substance called amyloid and masses of tau protein in the brain are thought to be key factors in its development. Until recently, amyloid plaques and tau tangles could be seen only in the brain upon autopsy.

But during the past decade, the identification of biomarkers—proteins and other chemicals in the brain and spinal fluid associated with amyloid and tau levels—as well as better brain-scanning technology have provided a clearer picture of Alzheimer’s in living patients and how it progresses over time.

Increasingly, the evidence suggests that amyloid, which many researchers had fingered as likely contributing to memory loss in Alzheimer’s and which has been the most popular target of experimental drugs, may be most toxic early in the disease process, before symptoms appear.

It appears to trigger a cascade that causes tau protein—which normally serves to stabilize cell structure—to break down, form tangles and kill brain cells. The tau changes, many experts now believe, are at the heart of the dementia symptoms.

In one study presented at the Paris conference, Mayo’s Dr. Jack and his colleagues examined 298 patients spanning the cognitive spectrum from normal to severe Alzheimer’s dementia over the course of a year. Using brain scans and biomarker analyses, they found little change in amyloid among patients progressing toward Alzheimer’s. But there were substantial changes in tau and brain volumes, suggesting that they change later in the course of the disease than amyloid.

(click here to continue reading Research Points to Alzheimer’s Early Toll – WSJ.com.)