big on love, tolerance, freedom and the human potential
The International Monetary Fund predicts global growth of 5.2% for this year and next year.
The US will stumble to 2%. China’s growth forecast is 11.2%. China, Russia and India will account for more than half of the world’s growth.
Using the Rule of Seventy [wiki], at this rate of growth the global economy will double in about 13 years.
Of 1,804 hospital fatalities in Britain, 576 were the result of mistakes:
More than 31% of deaths were avoidable because staff did not act, help was late, equipment failed, did not have the depth of knowledge and skills, or did not recognize the patient’s worsening condition.
But Oscar the cat is never wrong!
Oscar, a hospice cat at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island, has an uncanny knack for predicting when patients are about to die.
Every day, Oscar makes his rounds among the patients, entering each room and giving each patient a sniff. When he senses that someone is near the end of his or life, he will hop onto their bed and curl up beside them. Within hours, without fail, the patient will die.
He’s considered so accurate that nursing home staff will immediately call family members once Oscar has chosen someone, since it usually means they have less than four hours to live.
Liam has the kind of physical attributes that bodybuilders and other athletes dream about:
Liam can run like the wind, has the agility of a cat…
He’s 19 months old.
Liam Hoekstra was hanging upside down by his feet when he performed an inverted sit-up, his shirt falling away to expose rippled abdominal muscles. Two days after he was born, Liam could stand up and support his weight if someone held his hands to provide balance. He has given his mother a black eye and once punched a hole in the plaster wall during a tantrum.
Liam’s condition is a medical rarity, allowing twice the normal amount of muscle induced by a genetic mutation that reduces his production of myostatin. [story]
He’s not some kind of freak and mustn’t be viewed or treated differently than other children. His mother and his doctor agree, “He’s a normal kid. It’s going to be fun to watch him grow.”
Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy was first documented in beef cattle and mice in the late 1990s. If the myostatin protein is knocked out, muscles grow and rejuvenate much more quickly.
From a 2004 post, “Belgian Blues are unlike any cows you’ve ever seen. They have a genetic mutation that means they do not have effective myostatin, a substance that curbs muscle growth. A result is that Belgian Blues are all bulging muscles without a spot of fat…” A related post, Schwarzendogger, reports of an international DNA sampling program to study muscle-bound Whippet puppies in order to purge this often painful condition from the breed.
Gene therapy and marker-assisted selection [mas] goes to the heart of an issue that will turn our species upside down in the coming decades.
Nicholas Kristof explores the consequences of genetic alteration and whether it is really possible to “design” better humans in this editorial in the New York Times. [no sub required]
Future Pundit opines, “Future genetic engineers looking to enhance human function will search through animal genetic variations and choose ones that provide desired enhancements… …to serve as a grab bag of pre-tested genetic variations that can allow humans to endow themselves with a large variety of special abilities that humans now lack.”
What is marker-assisted selection (MAS)?
MAS is a biotechnology tool that could greatly accelerate conventional breeding of crops, livestock, farmed fish and trees. Scientists are using MAS to genetically improve certain characteristics or traits (productivity, disease resistance, quality etc.) that are important for farmers. MAS makes it possible to select traits with greater accuracy and to develop a new variety quicker than in the past.
What is the difference between marker-assisted selection (MAS) and genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?
MAS and genetic modification are different biotechnologies. MAS allows desirable genes to be “marked” or tagged so they can be selected within the breeding population, while GMOs are the result of the transfer of a desirable gene or genes from one species to another.
New plant varieties or improved animal breeds resulting from MAS do not require a specific legislative framework. The complicated approval process required for GMOs does not apply for MAS – its costs of release are therefore lower.
In addition, the technology is not controversial so there is no problem with public acceptance.
[link to FAO]
China will grow nearly twenty-five percent of its 2010 energy consumption using non-grain sources of sweet sorghum, rape and sugarcane. [Agricultural Biofuel Plan, China Daily, July 4, 2007]
The ID industry is all wet about drips and drops becoming RFID tags.
CrossID uses tiny nanometric particles of chemicals with varying degrees of magnetism—that resonate when bombarded with electromagnetic waves from a reader. Each chemical emits its own distinct radio frequency, or “note,” that is picked up by the reader, and all the notes emitted by a specific mix of different chemicals are then interpreted as a binary number. Since the system uses up to 70 different chemicals, each chemical is assigned its own position in a 70-digit binary number.
Printed on paper, packaging or cash for less than a penny, readers up to ten feet away can be used by banks and stores, or to protect secrets by preventing documents leaving the building.
Partners of cancer patients experience as much if not more anxiety, distress, and depression than patients themselves – with less social support and more loneliness. [story]
Eliminate vehicle greenhouse gas.
Trap exhaust in a box.
Reuters reports, “The world’s richest corporations and finest minds spend billions trying to solve the problem of carbon emissions, but three fishing buddies in North Wales believe they have cracked it.”
Dubbed “Greenbox”, the technology developed by organic chemist Derek Palmer and engineers Ian Houston and John Jones could, they say, be used for cars, buses, lorries and eventually buildings and heavy industry, including power plants.
“We’ve managed to develop a way to successfully capture a majority of the emissions from the dirtiest motor we could find.”
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy.
If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.
But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. - E.B. White
Dr. Robert W. Lash is an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.
For a drug to be effective it should work better than a placebo, but in most drug studies the placebo itself often has a measurable success rate—often around 20 percent. Thus, even if an alternative therapy is no more effective than a placebo, you’re still left with a one in five chance of feeling better at the end of the day. For some people, even this 20 percent chance of feeling better is worth it.
While most patients believe otherwise, medicine is too often governed by statistics.
I’ve posted another alternative: A Better Doctor
He’s a doctor. He took a foreign job to help people. He lived for two years in filth with only salty water to drink, sharing a cell measuring 1.9m (6ft) by 1.7m (5.5ft) by 3m (9.8ft) with up to eight people at a time. He was beaten up by guards, and had four teeth knocked out when investigators attacked him with clubs.
“I could not lie down to sleep for two years – I could only sit. You cannot imagine it. In the summer it got so hot, people were passing out.”
But that was nothing compared to the electric shocks given to the nurses, he says.
“They tortured and treated them like animals – in fact, you would not treat animals like that.”
Karl Rove, so-called Deputy Chief of Staff, will blacklist any Republican who votes against the president.
Blacklisting would stop White House political or financial support while running for re-election. [link]
Growing from 27 to more than 200, ethanol plants will use 14 percent of Iowa’s water supply by 2012.
An industry spokesman responds saying that’s “a drop in the bucket”.
For $25, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources grants a 10-year license for ethanol plants to pump as much water as they need from the ground.
Because it’s unknown how much groundwater exists, taxpayers will spend $500,000 to find out.
The top-ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee will not support regulations on how ethanol facilities use water – or pay their own way – until he sees proof that aquifers are in trouble. Retorts the Democrat, “First we really have to understand the big picture.”
More than half of the water used by ethanol plants evaporates during production. [story]
The Government Accountability Office says USDA paid $1.1 billion in subsidies to 172,801 dead people between 1999 through 2005.
Forty percent of that money went to people who had been dead for at least three years. Nineteen percent went to individuals who had been dead for at least seven years. [story]
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