"Nicotine, that addictive drug in cigarettes, protects from Parkinson’s disease, found a study in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology."
First coffee, now cigarettes. Parkinson’s has no place amongst the wicked.
My dream bike is something like this. Minimal and geometric. I just with shaft drives that were so prevalent 100 years ago would make a comeback.
Hiroshi Sugimoto for Hermès. If I were a rich kid on Instagram, I would buy all of these.
"For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”, all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn’t a fluke; it was the country we are becoming."
Paul Krugman
AND WE WON!
Also, so proud of America and all the states that legalized gay marriage and marijuana!
"That is the best part of beauty, which a picture cannot express…"
Sir Francis Bacon
Mice Genetically Engineered to be Super-Sensitive to the Smell of TNT, Will Be Used to Clear Landmines
A Belgian organization called APOPO already uses giant African pouched rats as a cheaper way to sniff out landmines. The rats are not genetically modified, but their sense of smell is sharp enough to detect TNT.
…While the furry minesweepers are effective (with two handlers, they can cover a field in one hour that would take two full days for metal detectors), they need nine months of training to become reliable, a process that costs around 6,000 euros per rat.
The genetically engineered mice, however, are so sensitive to TNT that encountering the molecule is likely to change their behavior involuntarily, so they would need little to no training.
[Molecular Neurobiologist} Charlotte D’Hulst… used genetic modification to ensure that the mice have 10,000 to 1,000,000 odor-sensing neurons with a TNT-detecting receptor compared with only 4,000 in a normal animal, “possibly amplifying the detection limit for this odor 500-fold,” she says.
Each odor-sensing neuron in a mouse’s nose is spotted with one kind of odor receptor. Usually, each specific receptor is found in one out of every thousand odor-sensing neurons, but about half the scent-detecting neurons in D’Hulst’s mice have the TNT-detecting receptor.
(via Genetically Modified Mice Could Be Tiny Landmine-Sniffing Heroes | MIT Technology Review)
We’ve been doing this to animals for as long as we’ve been around, the technology is different but the game remains the same. I’m interested in seeing where this ends up and mice become an avenue for potential technological fixes for other problems.
John Updike on Mo Yan
In his 2005 review for The New Yorker of Mo’s novel “Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” John Updike was struck by the unique mix of “brutal incident, magic realism, nature description, and far-flung metaphor” in Mo’s work, and by the wry, freewheeling forthrightness of the prose. “The Chinese novel, perhaps,” he writes, “had no Victorian heyday to teach it decorum,” giving Mo the freedom to craft “indulgent and hyperactive metaphors”…
Joshua Rothman looks back at John Updike’s 2005 review of Mo Yan’s novel: http://nyr.kr/PpXwJ6
CONGRATS to Mo Yan!!!
Dear Democrats:
This may be the last nail in the coffin of your over-confidence.
Get out the vote.
