Let the healing begin. From the TECHNOLOGY REVIEW:
By injecting stem cells directly into the brain, scientists have successfully reversed neural birth defects in mice whose mothers were given heroin during pregnancy. Even though most of the transplanted cells did not survive, they induced the brain’s own cells to carry out extensive repairs.
Transplanted stem cells have previously shown promise in reversing brain damage caused by strokes, as well as by neurological diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s. But their use in treating birth defects is relatively new. In recent years, a handful of research teams have been developing stem-cell-based therapies for rodents with real or simulated birth defects in the brain….[Rest of article]
Every foul-smelling girl I ever talked to about her smoking habit looked at it as a weight-loss technique.
From the SCIENCE DAILY site:
ScienceDaily (Jan. 6, 2009) — Remember the cool girls, huddled together in high school restrooms, puffing their cigarettes? Well, here’s consolation for the nerds in the crowd: Those teen smokers are more likely to experience obesity as adults, according to a new study from Finland.
Girls who smoke 10 cigarettes per day or more are at greatest risk, particularly for abdominal obesity. Their waist sizes are 1.34 inches larger than nonsmokers’ waists are as young adults, according to the study in the February 2009 issue of the American Journal of Public Health….[Rest of article]
I first read about this new invention a year or so ago. Some guy has invented “spectacles” filled with water that are user-adjustable to allow the lenses to focus appropriately. From THE GUARDIAN:
It was a chance conversation on March 23 1985 (”in the afternoon, as I recall”) that first started Josh Silver on his quest to make the world’s poor see. A professor of physics at Oxford University, Silver was idly discussing optical lenses with a colleague, wondering whether they might be adjusted without the need for expensive specialist equipment, when the lightbulb of inspiration first flickered above his head.
What if it were possible, he thought, to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be “tuned” by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?
More than two decades after posing that question, Silver now feels he has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable - to offer glasses to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2020.
Some 30,000 pairs of his spectacles have already been distributed in 15 countries, but to Silver that is very small beer. Within the next year the now-retired professor and his team plan to launch a trial in India which will, they hope, distribute 1 million pairs of glasses.
The target, within a few years, is 100 million pairs annually. With the global need for basic sight-correction, by his own detailed research, estimated at more than half the world’s population, Silver sees no reason to stop at a billion….[Rest of article]
I’m currently reading a book called THE LOBOTOMIST, by Jack El-Hai. I had actually picked it up about a year ago after seeing one of the victims of this barbarbaric “medical” procedure on CNN a year ago, and hearing him speak on National Public Radio.
I put the book down unfinished last year because it was just too depressing. (I have an acquaintance who went through a comparable procedure back in the early 50s, when this procedure was all the rage).
From what I understand, no one has done these procedures since the early 70s. Actress Frances Farmer allegedly was given one in the late 40s (as shown in the 1982 Jessica Lange movie FRANCES), but I note that the Wikipedia article seems to dispute this. One of the most tragic stories of this butchery regards President Kennedy’s sister Rosemary, whose father Joseph had her lobotomized without mother Rose’s consent (Rose was out of the country at the time). She never recovered. (Ironically, Rosemary’s transgression that so mortified her father was her apparent promiscuity–behavior he obviously tolerated in his sons, they being “chips off the old block” in that whole promiscuity department…)
Anyway, I recently picked the book up again and am “enjoying” it. It’s an interesting book about a sad time in medical history.
So long, Bush Administration.
