gaming for science and health
Over a three-week period, gamers playing Foldit, an online protein-folding game, helped to map out the structure of an enzyme that could be used to help fight HIV and AIDS.
quote out of context
It’s not clear how many klutzes want to notify their insurers that a doctor visit was a W22.02XA, “walked into lamppost, initial encounter” (or, for that matter, a W22.02XD, “walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter”).
(via the browser)
From 102 to 67…
In 36 hours. Out on the patio, I’m shivering.
headline of the day, III
Jury rules in favor of doctor who cut off part of Kentucky man’s penis
headline of the day, II
Korean scientists create glowing dog
Mark Menjivar, You Are What You Eat
Delicatessen Attendant | Daphne, AL | 4-Person Household | Disowned by parents for marrying a black man.
You Are What You Eat is a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.
I like that so many of them are from Texas.
(via marginal revolution)
the first synthetically engineered windpipe transplant
A 36-year-old man who had tracheal cancer has received a new lab-made windpipe seeded with his own stem cells in a procedure in Sweden they call the first successful attempt of its kind, officials said Thursday.
it’s good to be the guy behind the guy
Laurence R. Gesquiere, a research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and colleagues report in the journal Science that in five troops of wild baboons in Kenya studied over nine years, alpha males showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males.
The stress, they suggested, was probably because of the demands of fighting off challengers and guarding access to fertile females. Beta males, who fought less and had considerably less mate guarding to do, had much lower stress levels. They had fewer mating opportunities than the alphas, but they did get some mating in, more than any lower-ranking males. After all, when the alpha gets in another baboon bar fight, who’s going to take the girl home?
(via the browser)
The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
If you haven’t read Paul’s piece yet, you should:
We don’t tell many people about what we are doing. When we do some say: “Well, it must be fun trying.” Or: “Are you sure you’re doing it right?” I laugh with them; after all, how many times have I said something insensitive while trying to be funny? I don’t talk about the large doses of medicine that I inject into my wife’s buttocks that cause her to inflate like a hormonal balloon. Nor do I discuss how intimacy itself has become such an awkward, uncomfortable thing that it’s scheduled on a Google Calendar named “LadyStuffings” with events that show up in pink.
from the comments
I watched him empty the little packets onto the nuggets. He first dumped the nuggets from their little Chick-fil-a box onto his styrofoam tray. Then he emptied four little mayo packets onto them. Then he dumped both containers of fries onto the tray beside the nuggets. He ate the fries unadorned.
He appeared to be about my age or a bit younger–maybe late 40s. He watched me watching him.
START TODAY
MAKE NO DELAY
TRUTH will out!
This is Mr Curtis’s shop window in Barrack Street, Waterford, dressed for a competition. (Circa: 1930.)
Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.
The War Against Girls
I don’t really think Last’s conclusion is the logical necessity he suggests it is, but I do think the general narrative forces us to reflect on some of the weaknesses of the pro-choice ethic. It did for me, anyway.
In the mid-1970s, amniocentesis, which reveals the sex of a baby in utero, became available in developing countries. Originally meant to test for fetal abnormalities, by the 1980s it was known as the “sex test” in India and other places where parents put a premium on sons. When amnio was replaced by the cheaper and less invasive ultrasound, it meant that most couples who wanted a baby boy could know ahead of time if they were going to have one and, if they were not, do something about it. “Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 later,” reads one ad put out by an Indian clinic, a reference to the price of a sex test versus the cost of a dowry.
But oddly enough, Ms. Hvistendahl notes, it is usually a country’s rich, not its poor, who lead the way in choosing against girls. “Sex selection typically starts with the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” she writes. “Elites are the first to gain access to a new technology, whether MRI scanners, smart phones—or ultrasound machines.” The behavior of elites then filters down until it becomes part of the broader culture. Even more unexpectedly, the decision to abort baby girls is usually made by women—either by the mother or, sometimes, the mother-in-law.
Now, if you excuse me, I am going to go hide since public, rational discussion on this particular subject is almost impossible.
sex with neanderthals
When the Neanderthal genome was published last year, it offered the first conclusive evidence that humans had swapped genes with our closest hominid cousins. This was seen as another possible way in which humans had driven Neanderthals to extinction — when we couldn’t out-compete them, we simply assimilated them into our bloodlines. But the question of whether we actually gained something tangible from sexual contact with Neanderthals went unanswered.
Until now, that is.
(via @tcarmody)
headline of the day
2.5 Million British Men Too Fat To See Their Penis
Cowboys and Pit Crews
Atul Gawande delivered this year’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School:
You are the generation on the precipice of a transformation medicine has no choice but to undergo, the riders in the front car of the roller coaster clack-clack-clacking its way up to the drop. The revolution that remade how other fields handle complexity is coming to health care, and I think you sense it. I see this in the burst of students obtaining extra degrees in fields like public health, business administration, public policy, information technology, education, economics, engineering. Of some two hundred students graduating today, more than thirty-five are getting such degrees, intuiting that ordinary medical training wouldn’t prepare you for the world to come. Two years ago, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement started its Open School, offering free online courses in systems skills such as outcome measurement, quality improvement, implementation, and leadership. They hoped a few hundred medical students would enroll. Forty-five thousand did. You’ve recognized faster than any of us that the way we train, practice, and innovate has to change. Even the laboratory science must change—toward generating treatments and diagnostics that do not stand in isolation but fit in as reliable components of an integrated, economical, and effective package of care for the needs patients have.
tweet of the day
Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
kids today
A 16-year-old from the Toronto area used a supercomputer system to find a new drug combination that shows potential in treating the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis.
When I was sixteen, I fucked a grapefruit.
A Lonely Hunter
This human heart has had the fat and extra tissue removed, leaving pure angel-hair blood vessels to make up its shape.
Via this wonderful collection of curiosities. The internet is a wonderful thing, yes? Yes.
from the comments
It was 1987, in Paris, my last night out before leaving. I had been to dinner at a favorite news media hangout (dive of course) that featured belly dancers. I consumed the strange green house drink plus a shellfish paella (I know I know) that I had been avoiding on previous visits. I was quite ill the next day. No details, they make me sick to dwell on. I was stuck in the hotel room except for one quick trip. I sat outside in the sun, trying to get down tea and toast at a little cafe where the waiters had been trying to guess my nationality, slipping checks on the bistro table with an occasional bored query. Irlandaise? Angleterre? La Grece? That last day I said goodbye with the words “Etats-Unis” as I walked away, very very carefully. The taxi to the airport was a nightmare, the wait for the plane, but I made it. I boarded. Suddenly I was okay. I did not want to go home. But I had been off balance for weeks and needed my own country back. I realized then it was my anchor. I asked for tea and a Coke. I made it back.
Madden NFL 12, teachable moments
Madden NFL 12, the coming version of the eerily true-to-life N.F.L. video game played by millions of gamers, will be realistic enough not only to show players receiving concussions, but also to show any player who sustains one being sidelined for the rest of the game — no exceptions. Beyond that, in the background, the game’s announcers will explain that the player was removed because of the seriousness of head injuries.
headline of the day
Hospital names Dr. Frankenstein chief medical officer
The Longevity Project
What are the variables that affect how long we live?
In The Longevity Project the psychology professors Howard S. Friedman and Leslie Martin describe their two-decade-long odyssey to answer that question using Terman’s data. Eventually publishing about 50 scholarly papers on the subject, they discovered that many adages promising long life—get married, exercise regularly, think happy thoughts, don’t work so hard—are not shortcuts to immortality, and for certain groups of people, they can actually have the opposite effect.
It Gets Better: The Book
We started this project to talk directly to kids about no matter how much their lives may be bad right now that it does get better.
Now we’ve collected about 100 incredible stories from allies and members of the LGBT community. From the kid across the street to President Obama, these stories will provide hope to kids who may not have access to YouTube.
If you want to help get a copy of this book onto the shelf of a high school library, you can do it.
headline of the day, II
Oral sex is leading cause of increasing U.S. cancer rates, compared to tobacco use in other nations
