Stapes
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"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die".
-Raoul Duke
RIP
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Ecstasy trials for combat stress
David Adam, science correspondent
Thursday February 17, 2005
The Guardian
American soldiers traumatised by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares.
The US food and drug administration has given the go-ahead for the soldiers to be included in an experiment to see if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Scientists behind the trial in South Carolina think the feelings of emotional closeness reported by those taking the drug could help the soldiers talk about their experiences to therapists. Several victims of rape and sexual abuse with post-traumatic stress disorder, for whom existing treatments are ineffective, have been given MDMA since the research began last year.
Michael Mithoefer, the psychiatrist leading the trial, said: "It's looking very promising. It's too early to draw any conclusions but in these treatment-resistant people so far the results are encouraging.
"People are able to connect more deeply on an emotional level with the fact they are safe now."
He is about to advertise for war veterans who fought in the last five years to join the study.
According to the US national centre for post-traumatic stress disorder, up to 30% of combat veterans suffer from the condition at some point in their lives.
Known as shell shock during the first world war and combat fatigue in the second, the condition is characterised by intrusive memories, panic attacks and the avoidance of situations which might force sufferers to relive their wartime experiences.
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Dr Mithoefer said the MDMA helped people discuss traumatic situations without triggering anxiety.
"It appears to act as a catalyst to help people move through whatever's been blocking their success in therapy."
The existing drug-assisted therapy sessions last up to eight hours, during music is played. The patients swallow a capsule containing a placebo or 125mg of MDMA - about the same or a little more than a typical ecstasy tablet.
Psychologists assess the patients before and after the trial to judge whether the drug has helped.
The study has provoked controversy, because significant doubts remain about the long-term risks of ecstasy.
Animal studies suggest that it lowers levels of the brain chemical serotonin, and some politicians and anti-drug campaigners have argued that research into possible medical benefits of illegal drugs presents a falsely reassuring message.
The South Carolina study marks a resurgence of interest in the use of controlled psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs. Several studies in the US are planned or are under way to investigate whether MDMA, LSD and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can treat conditions ranging from obsessive compulsive disorder to anxiety in terminal cancer patients.
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Life on Mars part 2
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Here's a sight on Rogue Taxidermists making art out of road kill. I posted it a while back butr here it is again for those who missed it.
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I'm @ work friday night brah.
desole.
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Gabber, most likely Neophyte's set from Masters Of Hardcore 2000-03-03...
I concure. Nothing is more annoying than gabber to the uncultered ear.
Dayglow Abortions would prolly work too.
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Something about me stinks
something about me smells
I don't want that to be, how you remember me
Something about me stinks
If I was not so strange
if I can only change
I wouldn't be so far, from standing where you are
If I was not so strange
Everywhere I look is south
everywhere I look is south
If I could clear my vision now, I could hear you nice and loud Everywhere I look is south
Something about me's weak
if I could only tweak
myself from the inside out, I could turn my life around
if I was not so weak
Doesn't have to be the only way to common ground
Absence was an option only waiting to be found
But the further that I float along, the sooner I could sink
And in the end what really matters that if you feel that you could think of me the same
If I was not so strange
if I can only change
myself from the inside out, I could turn my life around
If I was not so strange
Something about me's weak
if I could only tweak
myself from run-around, I could be a (frown?)
if I was not so weak
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What song you want your condom to play?
The singing protectiveBy JACQUI THORNTON
Health Editor
A SCIENTIST has come up with a musical condom that gets louder as the sex gets more vigorous.
The singing protective is designed to be a laugh for couples who want to make their own sweet music, says Ukrainian inventor Dr Grigoriy Chausovskiy.
Different lovemaking positions determine what tune is played by the condom, which also works like a normal contraceptive.
The rubber has tiny sensors connected to a mini electronic device that produces the sounds.
“But there is no danger of being electrocuted,” said Dr Chausovskiy, who has teamed up with a manufacturer to export the condoms to Britain.
They will cost about 20 per cent more than normal condoms. “But people will pay for the extra stimulation,” he said."
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How about the old free will vs. fate debate.
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[color:"purple"] Optimus Prime, gay or nay.
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I had always thought Deja Vu was a malfunction between short term and long term memory.
Here's an alternitive view.
Deja vu? Scientists have the answer14 February 2005
HAMBURG - Most of us have experienced deja vu at least once in our lives - that uncomfortable feeling that you have been here in this place, in this situation before.
Usually the sensation lasts for just a moment and is quickly followed by the realization that you have not in fact experienced the current situation in the past, and simply cannot know the place you are in.
Nevertheless, there is the feeling that something was there in our memory, either in part or whole.
The sensation of deja vu, meaning "already seen", was given its name in the 19th century, but for much longer the mental phenomenon has both fascinated and
frightened those who experience it.
Science has had little to offer by way of explanation, adding to the mystery.
There have been attempts at clearing up the phenomenon, which some people see as evidence for metempsychosis - the belief that after death the soul passes to another body, whether human or animal.
One point of departure for researchers has been that a deja vu experience is linked to an experience in a dream that has been half or totally forgotten.
The French writers on the topic Marc Tadie and his brother Jean- Yves, one a director of a university department of neurosurgery, the other a professor of literature, point to this in their book "Le Sens de la Memoire".
It is characteristic of the experience that one is certain for a moment that one has lived through this experience before but can simply not remember at what point in time.
The description of dreams in works of literature can also point to a way of understanding deja vu experiences.
"In a dream the consciousness can move freely in a space without limits, in which past and future blend," the two Tadies say about descriptions of this kind.
In a contribution last year to the German magazine "Gehirn & Geist" (Brain and Spirit, published by Heidelberg) reference is made to research into memory processes conducted by John D.E. Gabrieli and his team at Stanford University in California.
Their studies indicate that the brain structures of the Hippocampus and the parahippocampal Cortex play differing roles in this process.
While the Hippocampus enables the subject to remember events consciously, the parahipppocampal Cortex can distinguish between accustomed and unaccustomed impulses, and do this without even referring to a concrete experience.
Josef Spatt of the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute in Vienna has based his hypothesis on this idea, suggesting that deja vu occurs when the Parahippocampus, without the Hippocampus being involved, emits a signal of being accustomed to, or comfortable with, a sensation.
At this moment, a current experience is regarded as well-known, even though it cannot be uniquely placed in time.
Like Spatt, Uwe Wolfradt, who researches self-alienation and memory phenomena at the the Institute of Psychology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, says there are probably many regions of the brain involved in sensations of deja vu.
"The intensive feelings of self-alienation and unreality, along with the changed feeling about time, appear to indicate a complex series of events in the consciousness," he says.
While the person experiencing deja vu begins to doubt his grasp on reality for a moment, neuro-scientists believe this "little mistake" perpetrated by our consciousness allows them an unaccustomed window onto the processes of the consciousness.
"Perhaps continuing research into deja vu will explain not only how memory errors occur, but also how the brain is able to establish a continuous image of reality at all," Wolfradt says.
DPA
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If you limit the people who get the "immortality nanates" to 1 child and sterilize them afterwards I doubt it would get too out of hand.
It might also give people an excuse to stop breeding so much.
"I'm sorry sir but you've sired more than one child, unfortunatly you don't qualify for the immotality treatment. You will have to live forever through your genes instead."
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international team of Mayo Clinic-led researchers is first to devise a system that consistently converts the measles virus into a therapeutic killer that hunts down and destroys cancer cells -- and cancer cells only. Their research findings appear as an advanced electronic article of Nature Biotechnology. The researchers harnessed the viral trait for attacking and commandeering cells, and then redirected the virus to attack diseased, rather than healthy cells. The work was done on laboratory animals implanted with two kinds of human cancer cells -- ovarian cancer and lymphoma -- and is probably still years away from use as a human therapy. But the concept has at last been proved in mice with human cancer tumors -- and that's an essential step toward using this approach to expand and improve human treatments for a variety of cancers.
The "Obedient Virus"
"When I saw the data, I was completely stunned. It's the sort of thing that, having worked on targeting viruses for about 15 years, I just couldn't believe that we'd finally got what we'd been hunting all that time," says Stephen Russell, M.D., Ph.D., lead researcher and director of Mayo Clinic's Molecular Medicine Program.
"It's very clean, very clear targeting. Our results show that we've efficiently ablated (destroyed) the ability of the measles virus to interact with its two natural receptors. And they also show that we can take our pick as to what new receptor we target and send the virus after it."
How They Did It
Using bioengineering techniques, the team reprogrammed the measles virus to seek a cancer cell to bind to instead of its natural binding partner. Then they invented a "molecular tag" that they attached to structures on the outside of the cancer-seeking measles virus. This tag is the key innovation of their work and central to the success of the team's investigation. It enables researchers to grow retargeted measles virus on special "universal substrate cells" -- while at the same time conserving the viral component for targeting and destroying tumors. Mass production of a retargeted virus was not possible before this specific innovation of the molecular tag -- and research in this area was at an impasse. Not any more.
"The virus goes where it's meant to go, and it destroys the tumors in a targeted way," says Dr. Russell.
Background Biology
Natural viruses are cellular parasites. To reproduce more viruses, they need to bind to a partner on their target cell, fuse membranes to enter the target cell and then take over the cellular machinery. When they succeed in doing this, an infection occurs. Viruses are so good at taking over cells that researchers have long dreamed of exploiting the specific attraction viruses have to certain cells and using it as a homing device to seek and enter cancer cells.
The measles virus became the focus of this vision several years ago when the surprising finding was made that the measles strain used internationally for vaccinations has natural anticancer activity.
"But we had a concern that the measles virus may be a little too promiscuous in its ability to infect both cancer cells and non-cancer cells, so we wanted to develop a method whereby we could retarget the virus to infect cancer cells only," says Dr. Russell. "And we succeeded."
Collaboration and Support
In addition to Dr. Russell, the Mayo Clinic research team includes Takafumi Nakamura, Ph.D.; Kah-Whye Peng, Ph.D.; Mary Harvey, Suzanne Greiner and Charles James. From the University of Ottawa, Ian A.J. Lorimer, Ph.D, contributed his expertise. The work was funded by The Mayo Clinic Foundation, the Harold W. Siebens Foundation, and the National Cancer Institute.
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Some other ideas...
Gun Control
Pre-marital Sex
Separation of Church and State
National Healthcare System
Women's Rights/Feminism
Education Reform
Violence in the Media
Environmental Preservation
Regulation of Business
Communism
Capitalism
Socialism
Democracy
Legal Drinking Age
Legal Voting Age
Casual Fridays and Workplace Morale
Nuclear Power
Vegetarianism
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They could debate on wether this is a hoax or not
It's kinda spanish related.
NEW Vapo-booze
in Soundboard
Posted
LINK