Was the research done independently, and if not, was it paid for by a drug company?And if the results are favourable about a particular drug, can you be sure that other less favourable results have not been censored or suppressed?
Mentions how physicians are wined and dined for some shilling action.
12. Transmission flushes are one of the biggest scams going. Manufacturers don't recommend them, and your car almost never needs one.
To test the fruit's ability to protect the skin, ten volunteers were asked to eat five tablespoons of tomato paste mixed with olive oil every day for three months.
Another ten had a daily dose of olive oil - minus the tomato paste.
Tests using ultra-violet lamps showed the tomato-eaters were a third better protected against sunburn at the end of the study than at the start, the British Society for Investigative Dermatology's annual conference heard.
Other tests suggested the tomato-based diet had boosted production of collagen, the protein that keeps skin supple.
If that were not enough, the fruit also protects our mitochondria - the elements of cells which turn the food we eat into energy.
Professor Birch-Machin, of Newcastle University, said: "Being kind to our mitochondria is likely to contribute to improved skin health, which in turn may have an anti-ageing effect."
It will stop being merely a passive supplier of juice. Instead, power companies will be able to cue us, like those amber lights in Tsapoitis' house, to make choices about when and how we consume power. And most likely, we'll have our computers and appliances carry out those decisions for us.
American society can adapt to this new world. But can the American government? Washington has gotten used to a world in which all roads led to its doorstep. America has rarely had to worry about benchmarking to the rest of the world—it was always so far ahead. But the natives have gotten good at capitalism and the gap is narrowing. Look at the rise of London. It's now the world's leading financial center—less because of things that the United States did badly than those London did well, like improving regulation and becoming friendlier to foreign capital.
Environmental factors also play a key role; it's likely that a careful diet could suppress the risk—these tests would ideally identify those who need to change their diets—but neither employers or insurers are able to track diet in the same way they can track genetics.
Re semantic web from Nova Spivack:
From To do for data what the Web did for documents.
You are turning the Web into a database, and your data becomes a part of it. Your data becomes part of the worldwide database. The semantic Web will let you move from data record to data record, just like you go from Web page to Web page.
Among the changes proposed by the bill are radical alterations to key terminology, including replacing the word "drug" with "therapeutic product" throughout the Act, thereby giving the Canadian government broad-reaching powers to regulate the sale of all herbs, vitamins, supplements and other items. With this single language change, anything that is "therapeutic" automatically falls under the Food and Drug Act. This would include bottled water, blueberries, dandelion greens and essentially all plant-derived substances.
The Act also changes the definition of the word "sell" to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved "therapeutic substances."
As a boy, he watched his father, a money manager, navigate the Depression. As a financial manager, consultant and financial historian, he personally dealt with the recession of 1958, the bear markets of the 1970s, the 1987 crash, the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s and the 2000-2002 bear market that followed the tech-stock bubble.
New research suggests that declarations of love, jokes, or words of anger are best remembered when they are heard through the left ear, while instructions, directions and non-emotional messages have more impact on the right side.
There were three scenarios involving different retail prices: one group of buyers was given a price of $5,000, another was given a price of $4,988, and the third was told $5,012. When all the buyers were asked to estimate the wholesale price, those with the $5,000 price tag in their head guessed much lower than those contemplating the more precise retail prices. That is, they moved farther away from the mental anchor. What is more, those who started with the round number as their mental anchor were much more likely to guess a wholesale price that was also in round numbers. The scientists ran this experiment again and again with different scenarios and always got the same result.Also,
... a physician might say that your chance of responding to a medication is “good” or that your chance of responding is 80 percent. The percentage is more precise, but many studies have shown that patients prefer vague generalities like “good,”...
Synsepalum dulcificum:
For about an hour after you eat it, everything sour tastes sweet... Scientists say a protein in the fruit works by binding to taste buds and altering the tongue's so-called sweet receptors to activate when sour foods are eaten. A French explorer known as the Chevalier des Marchais first encountered the effects in 1725 somewhere in West Africa, says Adam Gollner, who is writing a book about miracle fruit. The chevalier saw villagers eat the berry before consuming gruel and palm wine, so he gave it a try himself.
ZoomProspector aggregates information about various cities and communities - such as labor force sizes, unemployment rates, education levels, venture capital investments, and household incomes - and makes that info accessible through a map-based search tool.
"The design is also ideal for a multitude of off-the-grid applications, with the potential to bring power to deserts, isolated islands, ocean-bound freighters, and heavily forested landscapes. Additionally, the balloons’ eminently deployable nature makes them perfect for disaster and emergency situations, since the balloons are quick to set up and can be delivered via air. Cory and Gurfil have constructed several prototypes and have conducted research to show that a 10 ft balloon could provide around a kilowatt of energy (equivalent to 25 square meters of solar panels). Their target cost is $4,000 per balloon, compared to the $10,000 it would cost for a solar field producing the same amount of energy."
Inside the chip, the two proteins flow along tiny tubes and are exposed to a phosphate salt solution that makes them aggregate into tiny spheres 1 to 5 micrometres across.
A sudden jump in acidity and phosphate concentration then partially breaks open the spheres, allowing the proteins to latch together into chains. At this point, the flow speed increases and draws out the proteins into long silk fibres.
Creating fibres from two proteins was found to make the silk more chemically stable. The team has not tested the artificial silk's mechanical properties, but its grainy appearance suggests it does not yet rival the quality of the real thing.
... the government's decision was prompted by the death of a 17-year-old French girl last year, who jumped from a bridge in Amsterdam.But no formal link was established between her death and the use of mushrooms.
Other incidents involving the drug have included an Icelandic tourist jumping from a balcony and breaking both legs and a Danish tourist driving his car wildly through a camping ground, narrowly missing sleeping campers.
The ban on the cultivation and use of the mushrooms means most of Smart Shops will have to close.
And the same critical attitude toward bounded tribal territories is applied to European history. Ancient European tribal identities -- Celt, Scythians, Cimbri, Teoton, and Pict -- are now frequently seen as convenient names for chamelon-like political alliances that had no true ethnic identity, or as brief ethnic phenomena that were unable to persist for any length of time, or even as entirely imaginary later inventions.
The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups - each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, ...)
Well, up to 52K anyways.
The field hasn't come to an agreement on to how to account for the behavior of cuprate high-temperature superconductors. It is believed that the layered structure of the cuprates, the ability of electrons to hop from copper ion to copper ion, and the shielding provided by copper-free layers all contribute to the superconductivity. Since these new materials also have a similar-ish layered structure, are bad conductors before they transition, and exhibit antiferromagnetism, it is hoped that they can offer new insights into a general mechanism(s) of high-temperature superconductivity.
What the Buddha wants us to achieve is to have our mind awaken to itself (i.e., bodhicitta) instead of being asleep; deeply transfixed to the physical body. There exists a variety of practices because the nature of delusion is complex. Some people, therefore, require a different practice than others...
We must also be careful of not becoming a warden over the physical body as if it were a convict and needed constant monitoring.
Among Highland clans, each killing demands a revenge killing, so that a war goes on and on, unless political considerations cause it to be settled, or unless one clan is wiped out or flees. When I asked Daniel how the war that claimed his uncle's life began, he answered, "The original cause of the wars between the Handa and Ombal clans was a pig that ruined a garden." Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeper lying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig.
The mushy lamps consist of an organic compound, which is coupled with ultraviolet light and a glasslike inorganic compound that gives the substance structural protection. The combo can handle temperatures to 500 degrees Celsius, uses half the power of typical fluorescent lights, and will last longer than white LEDs due to heat resistance.
... a non-profit, volunteer-run Dialysis and Transplant Patients Association (DATPA) mediates between recipients and donors. Recipients who cannot be assigned a kidney from a deceased donor and who cannot find a related living donor may apply to the DATPA. The DATPA identifies a possible donor from a pool of people who have applied to the DATPA to be donors. Donors are medically evaluated by transplant physicians, who have no connection to the DATPA, in just the same way as are non-financially compensated donors. The government pays donors $1,200 plus limited health insurance coverage. In addition, charitable organizations also provide renumeration to impoverished donors.
Like thinking that there was no need to improve upon the Model T or thinking of the telephone as a toy.
... adding beeswax to starch from peas produces an edible material that can be spread into thin films but is water resistant too.
Short profile and a quote excerpted from interviews with the photographers.
Ixp-Note is a new form of intelligent Post-It (TM) note. More than just a blank sticky note, the Ixp-Note allows the user to enter time and date of the future event. Using low cost electronic circuit printing technology, on paper, the user selects the time and date via touching the printed scroll strip with the finger. The user then writes the event to remember on the glow strip, which will flash or sound at the chosen time.
From a 2002 article.
In October 2001 he complained of headaches and secretly collected pornography once more. But after a MRI scan revealed tumour regrowth and it was removed, the behaviour again disappeared.
3. Doeg the Edomite killed 85 priests and all the men, women, children, infants, oxen, donkeys, and sheep with a sword. 1 Samuel 22:18-29
Me thinks me have serious problem. Me thinks me addicted. But since when it acceptable to call addict monster? It affliction. It disease. It burden. But does it make me monster?
Megadoses of E, for example, can increase the risk of bleeding if you’re already on heart meds like blood thinners. An earlier 2004 analysis by Johns Hopkins researchers found consuming 400 IU or more of vitamin E a day alone (some products on the market today contain 1,000 IU per capsule) was associated with a higher risk of dying and should be avoided. (One theory says high doses may alter your natural immune function and actually become pro-oxidant.) Taking too much niacin without a doctor’s okay can lead to liver damage and other problems over time. And too much vitamin A increases the risk of liver and lung cancers, and can cause birth defects and reduce bone density.
Orienting kids to hate markets and free enterprise is a setup for some real pain.
One design uses "legs" just beneath the skin that lengthen under the influence of an electric field, bending the skin upwards. By controlling the field around each piezoceramic leg, Lagoudas’ team can deform the skin into corrugations of right wavelength and amplitude to cut down drag.
Final delivery leg not as important as production practices.
Can save captures in various formats (bmp, gif, jpeg, pcx, png, tga, tiff and pdf), and send anyscreenshot to your image editor of choice, printer, email client, open it in a Word or Powerpoint doc, or upload it to an ftp site. Can also annotate.
Just inject into spinal cord of paralyzed mouse, et voila, function restored:
The new material is different because the researchers can inject it as a liquid directly into the spinal cord. Negatively charged molecules in the liquid start clumping together when they come in contact with positively charged particles such as calcium and sodium ions in the body. The molecules self-assemble into hollow, cylindrical nanofibers, which form a scaffold that can trap cells. On the surface of the nanofibers are biological molecules that inhibit scars and encourage nerve fibers to grow.
Here's how the test worked: Ariely and his students went around and left six-packs of Coke in randomly selected dorm refrigerators all over campus. When he checked back in a few days, all of the Cokes were gone.
Different scenarios here.
But when he later placed plates of six loose dollar bills in those same refrigerators, not a single bill was missing when he checked back. Even though the value was comparable--and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways. Why is that?
On crackling joints:
When to get help: See a doctor if you experience any grinding or popping that comes with pain, locking, swelling, or limited motion. This could signal an exercise injury, a temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder (if the pain is in your jaw) or the onset of osteoarthritis, a condition that affects about 28 million women, usually beginning after middle age when cartilage starts to break down. If you’re diagnosed with arthritis, your doctor may prescribe exercise, a prescription-strength pain reliever, a cortisone injection, or physical therapy. According to experts, acupuncture may help.
The argument got out of control.
His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.
First of fourteen (~5 min.):
Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes VBS has ever dealt with. After we went back and forth with their representatives for months, they finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang. Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, “No, nobody can come.” Then they said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.” We had no idea what that was supposed to mean. They already knew we were journalists, and over there if you get caught being a journalist when you’re supposed to be a tourist you go to jail. We don’t like jail. And we’re willing to bet we’d hate jail in North Korea.
But we went for it. The first leg of the trip was a flight into northern China. At the airport the North Korean consulate took our passports and all of our money, then brought us to a restaurant. We were sitting there with our tour group, and suddenly all the other diners left and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs. We were thinking, “Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. We’re jet-lagged. Can we just go to bed?” but this guy with our group who was from the LA Times told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited then you’re not going to get your visa.” So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. That was our first hint at just what a freaky, freaky trip we were embarking on...
- A Carleton University study found that students who procrastinate eat less nutritiously, sleep less and drink more alcohol than those who finish assignments fast. (U.S. studies show that up to 70 per cent of students admit to procrastination.)- Individuals with a weak ego or sense of identity -- who react rather than assess and who avoid problem-solving and decision-making -- procrastinate more.
The social theories of Karl Marx were long ago discarded as of little value, even to revolutionaries. But he did warn that capitalism had a tendency to generate its own crises. Indeed, the spread of capitalism, and its accelerated industrialization and wealth-creation, may have fomented the food-inflation crisis — by dramatically accelerating competition for scarce resources.
Cool 360 degree road tour of Prague. More a demo of the tech. Should be more cities in the future.
Didn't know this:
... Three Mile Island was responsible for a whopping zero fatalities. In fact, there weren't even any injuries. Later tests revealed that the level of radiation people were exposed to in the five-mile radius was equivalent to the amount of radiation a person is exposed to while flying on a commercial airliner. In other words, the danger was nil.
From 20 June 2008:
Offspring - I am cancelling the reservation to Arun’s restaurant. People are losing everything to the flooding in Iowa; people are losing their homes from bank foresclosures (USA Today highlighted a family who took out a home equity loan for $100,000 - their house is now worth $60,000); the price of oil is making travel via car or air prohibitive yada yada yada and I am going to have my hard working princess daughters spend $100 each for a fancy dinner - food we consume, digest then poo? I would rather spend money supporting the local restaurants. Mama
A little thick and no WiMAX yet, but does practically everything for a handheld -- camera, GPS, ...
6. Partial ownership: Marketing executives know the power of ownership so they use all kinds of tricks to encourage partial ownership because it often leads on to full ownership. We don't usually return our furniture within the 30-day money-back guarantee period because we've grown attached to it - it's ours.
13. Wait for your brother to die. Take his widow. -Onana and Boaz (Deuteronomy or Leviticus, example in Ruth)
A new book by NYU interactive telecommunications professor, Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, is a good place to start. Although Shirky predicts the demise or extreme downscaling of a lot of familiar jobs right now — everything from design to procedural legal work — he's also got a lot of telling observations about the future of work, social relationships, and even politics, based on years of researching how people communicate online.
“In 2000, she suddenly had a little trouble finding words,” her husband said. “Although she was gifted in mathematics, she could no longer add single digit numbers. She was aware of what was happening to her. She would stamp her foot in frustration.”
By then, the circuits in Dr. Adams’s brain had reorganized. Her left frontal language areas showed atrophy. Meanwhile, areas in the back of her brain on the right side, devoted to visual and spatial processing, appeared to have thickened.
When artists suffer damage to the right posterior brain, they lose the ability to be creative, Dr. Miller said. Dr. Adams’s story is the opposite. Her case and others suggest that artists in general exhibit more right posterior brain dominance. In a healthy brain, these areas help integrate multisensory perception. Colors, sounds, touch and space are intertwined in novel ways. But these posterior regions are usually inhibited by the dominant frontal cortex, he said. When they are released, creativity emerges.
Users needn't worry about that the system voicing their inner thoughts though. Callahan says producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires "a level above thinking". Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.The video shows fairly crude, delayed first generation tech, but wow. Good for privacy and public chatter nuisance concerns.
Argentinian researchers reported (in the March 7, 2007 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry) that crushing garlic releases an enzyme, alliinase, that catalyzes the formation of allicin, which then breaks down to form a variety of heart-healthy organosulfur compounds. So crushed or chopped garlic, they reported, was potentially better for cardiac health than whole cloves.Even more surprising, they noted that allowing the crushed garlic to stand for 10 minutes before cooking appeared to further enhance formation of those compounds. So when making a dish that contains garlic, crush the cloves first, and let them rest on the cutting board for at least 10 minutes while doing other prep work.
Inflation.
Now when the Chinese present their lists, some American importers are conceding higher prices, meaning that American shoppers, for the first time in years, are starting to pick up the tab for rising costs in China. Some Chinese factories are now asking their American customers for price increases of as much as 20 percent to 30 percent.
The diseased cells contain structures called Lewy bodies, accumulations of a protein called α-synuclein that are a hallmark of Parkinson's. This is a surprise, as conventional wisdom suggests that the grafted cells, still only 11 to 16 years old, are too young to be affected in this way.
To preview sites that don't care to be previewed from the search results page.
Rough and ready writeups for the sales associate to concentrate on the more profitable target.
Two brands of sock lost nearly 100% of their silver content within four washings, while two other brands lost less than 1% over the same number of washings.
On anchoring:
So I come to a big class of students and I say today we are going to have an auction for all kinds of products. Here is some wine, and some books, and some chocolate, and some computer accessories -- have a look at all of them and get your opinions about them. And then I asked each of the students to write down the last two digits of their social security number and then we turned this into dollars. So in my case my last two digits are 79. I would write $79 next to each of those. And then we asked everybody to answer whether they would pay the price set by those two digits for each of those products.
But what we’re hearing is that this isn’t a simple javascript or Flash embed. It’s a deeper integration that requires an insertion of code into a site’s back end application files...
It’s interesting because it pulls the Wiki content directly into a site’s HTML and allows it to be indexed by search engines. That means partner sites will get the SEO benefits of the wiki, a major plus for these partners.
How serious is he?
He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn't have time to organize them all himself. So he's hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags.
While Gryzb recommends subtle personality changes, Kihn takes it a step further. He picked up tips from the masters – Donald Trump, Scarface and "the guy in my building with a tattoo on his face" – and decided to "blowtorch away my old personality and uncover the rock-hard warrior within". In his book, Kihn devises a "10-step programme to assholism" for anyone wanting to acquaint themselves with their darker side. He himself signed up to the National Rifle Association, started kickboxing, screamed at colleagues and ate garlic bagels on public transport.
The Vikings, the Tudors, the potato famine, ...
This post onward can be found at delicious.
34) Keep the yuckiness out of your pool by floating some tennis balls in the water. Supposedly, the balls will absorb body oils from people who swim in the water - but you need to replace them every few weeks to keep them fresh.
Haven't read through, but tulips in the Netherlands made some headlines in '03 with some pyramid scam, I think.
In the latest work a Manduca moth had its thorax truncated to reduce its mass and had a MEMS [micro-electromechanical systems] component added where abdominal segments would have been, during the larval stage.
Images taken by x-ray of insects with these changes and others found that tissue growth around the inserted probes was good. One DARPA goal is to show that during locomotion the heat and mechanical power generated by the thorax could be harnessed to power the MEMS.
Some unreal misfortune with the Quixote project, entitled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Otherwise, he's just too different for the studios to let do his thing.
Provided that one is already proficient with the mechanics. This experiment involved high pressure moments in golf.
... concentrate on a single “holistic cue word” describing their intended movement, such as smooth.
The red light district is in the oldest, most beautiful area of Amsterdam. In the last 20 years, it has changed from a mixed neighborhood to one almost exclusively peopled by the very well to do. They pay a fortune for those apartments and homes. The talk of cleaning up the neighborhood for the sake of the prostitutes and to lessen criminal behavior is simply a smokescreen. What they wish to do is to create a more up-scale neighborhood - it is gentrification pure and simple.
Recovered now, but interesting insights into perception.
... a specially-engineered fluid to dry clothes using hydronic technology. By heating up a non-toxic fluid in a self-contained system, the dryer produces enough heat to dry clothes significantly faster than traditional dryers, resulting in less energy consumption and reduced energy costs for consumers.
Compared to the patients who listened to audio books and the control patients, the patients who listened to music daily showed superior performance when tested three months and six months later on measures of verbal memory and focused attention.
With headings like "Work backward from your goal", "Make contingency maps", and "Document everything obsessively".
