Brain-building Protein Identified

Article

“A protein that’s key to determining the developing brain’s size and shape could be used to manipulate stem cells to rebuild the organ in adults.”

“Underscoring the protein’s impact, over-expressing it in rats gave them enlarged brains with grooves and furrows similar to those in evolved mammalian brains.”

Posted by fly at 06:59 AM

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Autism linked to mirror neuron dysfunction

Article

“According to the new study, currently in press at the journal Cognitive Brain Research, electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings of 10 individuals with autism show a dysfunctional mirror neuron system: Their mirror neurons respond only to what they do and not to the doings of others.”

Posted by fly at 06:56 AM

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We'll all be beautiful

This is a joke page, right?

Beginning last November, the city of San Francisco began a program whereupon clinically obese men between the ages of 18 and 55 could undergo a procedure whereupon approximately 1/2 an inch is removed from each vas and the ends are sealed – commonly referred to as a vasectomy – completely free of charge. The overwhelming turnout led the State of California to follow suit, and now California is the first state in the Union to offer state-funded vasectomies to men who have been diagnosed as obese.

Well this makes sense. Eugenics won’t be pushed to make us smarter. Or stronger. But we will have eugenics to make us beautiful.

This has got to be the plot of a Philip K. Dick novel or something.

UPDATE This IS a joke page. And joke journal in fact. There’s got to be some potential in that, I think.

Posted by Thrasymachus at 07:18 AM

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Neets News

The Neets phenomenon (see my post below) seems to be catching on.

Today’s London Daily Mirror has a follow-up to the Sunday Times article here.

More surprisingly, the same phenomenon is causing concern in Japan, of all places – see this article.

But I guess that both the nature and the scale of the problem are different from in Britain.

Addendum

This Guardian article from last year is mainly about Japanese Neets. Not much in common with the British phenomenon.

Posted by David B at 02:30 AM

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Colon Cancer is a Socially Constructed Disease

We’ve all been witness to the canard that “Race is Socially Constructed” on countless occasions. In fact, some professional organizations go so far as to have official policies on this issue:

“The concept of race is a social and cultural construction. . . . Race simply cannot be tested or proven scientifically,” according to a policy statement by the American Anthropological Association.

[ . . . . . ]

Despite this, many Americans still believe in three great racial groups, a system developed in Europe and North America in the 18th century.

Yeah, who are you going to believe, the American Anthropological Association or your own lying eyes?

“We don’t even come close to having enough genetic diversity for races, or subspecies — not close,” said Robert Sussman, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis and editor of a newsletter of the anthropological association that has taken on race and racism as its yearlong theme.

“It’s hard to get across,” said Sussman. “The best audience to try to get to is probably high school and young college students. But even they are steeped in American folklore, and the folklore is that races really exist.”

Wasn’t it always so . . . the idealism, and naivete, of youth can so easily be swayed in service to outlandish schemes and philosophies.

One reason race is a myth, the great majority of anthropologists agree, is that there has not been enough time for much difference to build up between human beings.

By most measures, modern humans arose in Africa less than 200,000 years ago, a short time by evolutionary time scales. And the migration out of Africa by the ancestors of today’s Europeans, Asians, and North and South Americans took place less than 100,000 years ago.

Environmental pressure produced different physical appearances, including slightly different physiques, and Africa has the most human genetic diversity of any continent.

Well, if that’s really so then we should be embarking on a whole new series of investigations, first to purge the damn racists from the medical establishment for issuing reports that encourage members of mythical groups to seek early cancer tests:

African Americans should be screened for colorectal cancer beginning at age 45 — five years earlier than other people, according to new guidelines issued by the American College of Gastroenterology.

The advice is in response to previous findings that African Americans have earlier onset of the disease and higher incidence and mortality rates than whites.

[ . . . . . ]

African Americans tend to be diagnosed with colorectal cancer at a younger age than whites. The study cited a 2001 study that found that 10.6 percent of African Americans with colorectal cancer were diagnosed before age 50, compared with 5.5 percent of whites.

Post-diagnosis survival rates are also lower for African Americans. From 1992 to 1999 African Americans with colorectal cancer had a 53 percent five-year survival rate, compared with a 63 percent survival rate in whites, according to the report.

After we finish the purge of heretics we need to put in place a whole new research regime to determine what racist environmental variable(s) lead to differential colon cancer rates that statistically target members who belong to a mythical group. While we’re at it, these researchers may want to investigate how a claim that contradicts the position that racial differences are only skin deep found its way into press reports:

Until relatively recently, groups of people lived far apart. That isolation encouraged certain genetic traits, not just external traits such as a particular skin color, but also internal traits, like cellular function. Now, genetic medicine is revealing just how much these internal traits can vary from group to group.

Of course, the more parsimonious explanation would be that the American Anthropological Association is purposely blinding itself in furtherance of allegiance to ideology and that their Sisyphean struggle to convince the public is all for naught.

Related: Can H-BD Aware Doctors Save Lives?

Posted by TangoMan at 01:01 PM

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The evolutionary revolutionary

A profile of Robert Trivers in The Boston Globe.

A refresher: Trivers is the father of ideas like reciprocal altruism & parent-offspring conflict. He has been one of the foremost extenders of the logic of William D. Hamilton’s early work on kinship and biosocial theory.

Posted by razib at 04:21 PM

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Whipping Therapy Cures Depression

You may think that this is a parody piece from the Onion, but if you did you’d be wrong. Pravda reports on a sensational report made an international conference devoted to new methods of treatment and rehabilitation in narcology. The report was called “Methods of Painful Impact to Treat Addictive Behavior.”

Siberian scientists believe that addiction to alcohol and narcotics, as well as depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosomatic diseases occur when an individual loses his or her interest in life. The absence of the will to live is caused with decreasing production of endorphins – the substance, which is known as the hormone of happiness. If a depressed individual receives a physical punishment, whipping that is, it will stir up endorphin receptors, activate the “production of happiness” and eventually remove depressive feelings.

Russian scientists recommend the following course of the whipping therapy: 30 sessions of 60 whips on the buttocks in every procedure. A group of drug addicts volunteered to test the new method of treatment: the results can be described as good and excellent.

Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sergei Speransky, is a very well known figure in Novosibirsk. The doctor became one of the authors of the shocking whipping therapy. The professor used the self-flagellation method to cure his own depression; he also recovered from two heart attacks with the help of physical tortures too.

“The whipping therapy becomes much more efficient when a patients receives the punishment from a person of the opposite sex. The effect is astounding: the patient starts seeing only bright colors in the surrounding world, the heartache disappears, although it will take a certain time for the buttocks to heal, of course,” Sergei Speransky told the Izvestia newspaper.

The whipping therapy has not become a new discovery in the history of medicine. Tibetan monks widely used it for medical purposes too. Soviet specialists used a special method of torturing therapy at mental hospitals. They made injections of brimstone and peach oil mixture to inspire mentally unbalanced patience with a will to live. A patient would suffer from horrible pain in the body after such an injection, but he or she would change their attitude to life for the better afterwards.

“People might probably think of me as a masochist,” Dr. Speransky said. “But I can assure you that I am not a classic masochist at all,” he added.

The revolutionary method may take the Russian healthcare to a whole new level. The method is cheap and highly efficient, as its authors assure. Why not using something more efficient, a rack, for example?

I could end this off with a whole bunch of witty quips but I’d much prefer to read what you can come up with. Make your own jokes in comments.

Posted by TangoMan at 08:07 PM

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I call hypocrite

via Sepia Mutiny

Ted Rall’s latest cartoon imagines a Zoroastrian United States without separation of church and state.

What Mr. Rall leaves out of his cartoon is that the ancestral homeland of the Zoroastrians is currently under the rule of a regime repelled by the notion of separating church and state. The ancestral homeland of the Zoroastrians was invaded and the Zoroastrians subject to a campaign of ethnic cleansing by their conquerors such that the true heirs of one of the great civilizations of the ancient world may die out by the end of the twenty-first century.

Mr. Rall, of course, casts his lot with that genocide’s perpatrators and beneficiaries.

Apparently murderous hatred of Westerners, especially Americans, gives you carte blanche for murderous hatred of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and, yes, Zoroastrians.

Stupid white man indeed.

See also this.

Posted by jeet at 09:37 PM

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