Shrew spit to cure and detect cancer

Shrew spit tames cancer cells
CBC News
May 24, 2010

Shrew spit is under investigation by Canadian scientists as a potential screening test and treatment for breast, prostate and ovarian cancers.

The northern short-tailed shrew, a mouse-like mammal with a long snout, is one of the world's few venomous mammal species. With one bite, its saliva can paralyze prey.

Biochemist Jack Stewart of Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., set out to find out how.

Stewart spent several years luring the animals with pepperoni and trapping dozens of shrews in his rural backyard before he eventually identified the chemical in shrew saliva that causes paralysis. Researchers then purified and synthesized it.

At first, Stewart thought the chemical — called soricidin — might be a potential painkiller, because it blocked nerve transmission. When he tested it on a random cell culture that happened to be ovarian cancer cells, however, he found the cells died — which was initially a source of annoyance to him.

"Then a light bulb came on," Stewart recalled. "Oh, they died," he said with a laugh. "That's a good thing in cancer."
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Interview about mood & emotion research using fMRI

Interview about mood & emotion research using fMRI: "I was able to escape a crushing lack of inertia long enough to undergo the following controversial interview on the top behavioural science blog, of Christina Summerdyk & Martin Metzmacher:
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Part 1:

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Part 2:

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Dan Fitzgerald about fMRI – Video interview
This is a Behavioural Science Video Interview with Daniel Fitzgerald about fMRI
fMRI Video Interview #1

* Introduction
* What is fMRI?
* fMRI Research
* fMRI Method
* fMRI Signal
* The Salmon
* Corrections & Thresholds
* The Black Box
* The Press

fMRI Video Interview #2

* fMRI & Behaviour
* Understanding Behaviour
* Getting Started
* Use of fMRI
* Future of fMRI
* Brain Pacemakers

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Stentor Protozoa swim the Interwebs

Stentor (protozoa)

Stentor are a group of filter feeders and diggers, a genus of ciliate protozoa, representative of the heterotrichs. The body is generally horn-shaped, hence the association with the Greek herald and the former name "trumpet animalcule", with a ring of prominent membranelles around the anterior "bell" that sweep in food and aid in swimming. Stentor are common in freshwater lakes and streams, usually attached to algae and other detritus. Some reach several millimetres in length, making them among the largest single-celled organisms. Stentor can come in different colors. As in many freshwater protozoans, the stentor has a contractile vacuole. Because the concentration of salt inside the stentor and in the surrounding freshwater is different, the stentor must store water that enters it by osmosis and then discharge it from the vacuole. Stentors can regenerate, and small fragments can grow into full organisms. Stentor can live symbiotically with a species of green algae. The stentor ingests the algae and the algae converts the stentor's waste into nutrients. Stentors react to outside disturbances by contracting into a ball of protoplasm. Stentors have cilia at their tip which they use to move and catch their food. They are classified as heterotrophs, because they cannot make their own food.
Source

Why we buy crap we don't need.

Subliminal messages are everywhere in pop culture

Posted Thu Dec. 16, 13:02:36 PST 2004
By Gavin Cook of The Campanile

In the late 1950s, an experiment was performed that would affect the world, even though it went relatively unnoticed. In Fort Lee, New Jersey, a movie theater ran the messages "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coke" every five seconds throughout the movies they showed. In six weeks, the sales of Coca-Cola went up 18 percent while popcorn sales rose an astronomical 58 percent.

Why would moviegoers accept these advertisements and not simply storm out of the theater, annoyed and resolute not to purchase any soda or popcorn?

The reason is these messages were only flashed for three-tenths of a millisecond, or one 3000th of a second, a time that does not allow the moviegoer to consciously "see" the message.

This was the birth of subliminal messages and the beginning of a new era.

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Why Debt Slaves Act Retarded

IMG SRC
Why play a losing game? Study uncovers why low-income people buy lottery tickets
Science Codex
July 24, 2008

Although state lotteries, on average, return just 53 cents for every dollar spent on a ticket, people continue to pour money into them — especially low-income people, who spend a larger percentage of their incomes on lottery tickets than do the wealthier segments of society. A new Carnegie Mellon University study sheds light on the reasons why low-income lottery players eagerly invest in a product that provides poor returns.

In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group that was made to feel subjectively more affluent. The Carnegie Mellon findings point to poverty's central role in people's decisions to buy lottery tickets.

"Some poor people see playing the lottery as their best opportunity for improving their financial situations, albeit wrongly so," said the study's lead author Emily Haisley, a doctoral student in the Department of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. "The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape."
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Vibrations return to Northern Star

IMG SRC
The Pole star comes to life again
PhysOrg.com
The Northern Star, whose vibrations were thought to be dying away, appears to have come to life again.
An international team of astronomers has observed that vibrations in the Pole star, which had been fading away to almost nothing over the last hundred years, have recovered and are now increasing. And the astronomers don't know why.

[The Pole star comes to life again]
Plot of decrease over 100 years of amplitude of 4-day light variation of Polaris and of the increase since 2000. Observations before 2000 from other work, observations after 2000 from this work.
Click here to enlarge image
The discovery will be announced during the "Cool Stars 15" conference at the University of St Andrews. Dr Alan Penny from the School of Physics and Astronomy will present results of the recovery to around 350 international delegates at the meeting that runs from July 21-25.

The astronomers were watching Polaris in the expectation that they would catch the star switching off its vibrations completely when they made the surprising observation of its revival.

Dr Penny explained, "It was only through an innovative use of two small relatively unknown telescopes in space and a telescope in Arizona that we were able to discover and follow this star's recovery so accurately."
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Man Still Evolving?

From Best Free Documentaries:

Homo Futurus

This is a documentary about a controversial theory regarding the mechanism that drove the evolution of humans from primates to modern man; challenging the presently accepted evolutionary premise. It also speculates on humanity's future evolutionary path.
More Free Documentaries:

Television Under The Swastika

Civilization - The Reich Underground

Decoding Ferran Adria