Monthly Archive for February, 2008

Texas’ Peyote Hunters Struggle to Find a Vanishing, Holy Crop

Published
by
billycuts
on February 21, 2008
in Entheogens/Psychedelics, Environmental/Nature, Ethnobotany/Botany, Mind/Body/Spirit and Religion
. 1 Comment

Mauro Morales picks his way through mesquite trees and prickly pear cacti. The 65-year-old cautiously steps around a thicket of tasajillo, or rattail cactus, just down the road from his small ranch near Rio Grande City. Tasajillo thorns stick you like a fish hook, he says. Then there’s the cola seca—the rattlesnake—another job hazard.

“We’re far enough from a hospital that you probably wouldn’t make it if you got bit,” he says in a quiet voice, as though a snake might take his words as an invitation to strike.

Morales has been wandering through the chaparral for half an hour, staring at the ground. He combs over small rocks with a stick. Finally, he spots a greenish knob, sprouting out of the ground under the tasajillo thicket.

“There’s some medicine, right there,” he says. It’s a lone peyote button, about an inch in diameter, way too small to harvest. It’ll be another five years before this peyote is mature. As he navigates the hostile flora, he points to three more small peyote plants, all of them too young to cut.

“I used to collect as much in a week as I now do in a month,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the medicine.”

Dallas Observer via Dose Nation

Read the full post "Texas’ Peyote Hunters Struggle to Find a Vanishing, Holy Crop" (5556 words, estimated 22:13 mins reading time)

Next plague likeliest to emerge from poor tropical countries

Published
by
billycuts
on February 21, 2008
in Biology, Environmental/Nature and Health/Bio-Tech
. 0 Comments

Scores of infectious diseases have emerged to threaten humans in the past decades as viruses leap the species barrier from wild animals and bacteria mutate into antibiotic-resistant strains, scientists reported on Wednesday.

Presenting the first-ever map of “hotspots” of new infectious diseases, they predict that the next pandemic is likeliest to come out of poor tropical countries, where burgeoning human populations come into contact with wildlife.

A three-year investigation led by four major institutions tracked 335 incidents since 1940 when a new infectious disease emerged.

The category includes HIV/AIDS, which has slain or infected more than 65 million people around the world, and outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H5N1 bird flu, which have cost tens of billions of dollars to contain.

Yahoo via Posthuman Blues

Read the full post "Next plague likeliest to emerge from poor tropical countries" (641 words, estimated 2:34 mins reading time)

Behavior: An Absence of Free Will, a Tendency to Cheat

Published
by
billycuts
on February 21, 2008
in Consciousness/Psych/Brain
. 0 Comments

If there is no such thing as free will, do you really have to put that money into the office coffee kitty when no one is looking?

A study suggests that when people are encouraged to believe their behavior is predetermined — by genes or by environment — they may be more likely to cheat. The report, in the January issue of Psychological Science, describes two studies by Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan W. Schooler of the University of British Columbia.

NY Times via Technoccult

Read the full post "Behavior: An Absence of Free Will, a Tendency to Cheat" (270 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

‘Pancakes Soaked, Start Bucking’ by Gregory Jacobsen

Published
by
billycuts
on February 21, 2008
in Art
. 0 Comments

pancakes_soaked.jpg

More at Gregory Jacobsen’s site

Horizon: Britain’s Most Dangerous Drug

Published
by
billycuts
on February 20, 2008
in Cannabis, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Entheogens/Psychedelics, Health/Bio-Tech, Mind/Body/Spirit, Movies and Other Drugs
. 0 Comments

New Bone Created In Minimally Invasive Procedure

Published
by
billycuts
on February 19, 2008
in Biology, Futurism/Transhumanism and Health/Bio-Tech
. 0 Comments

A new technique that combines bone marrow removal and injection of a hormone helps promote rapid formation of new bone at targeted locations in the body, it was reported by Yale School of Medicine recently in Tissue Engineering.

“This could radically change the way patients are currently treated for weakened or fractured hips, vertebrae and acute traumatic long bone fractures,” said senior author Agnès Vignery, associate professor of orthopedics.

She said currently available treatment requires surgery and artificial materials and often results in imperfect outcomes. “The ideal approach would be to create new bone where it is needed and at a faster rate,” Vignery said.

Science Daily

Read the full post "New Bone Created In Minimally Invasive Procedure" (282 words, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

Pet dog to be cloned by Korean biotech

Published
by
billycuts
on February 19, 2008
in Biology, Genetics and Health/Bio-Tech
. 0 Comments

A South Korean biotech company has announced it will, for the first time ever, commercially clone a pet dog, according to reports coming out of the country.

RNL Bio said last week that it received an order from Californian Bernann McKunney, to clone her deceased pet pitbull, Booger, to the tune of $150,000. Booger died in 2005, but not before McKinney had tissue from his ear preserved.

The Korean company told the BBC that the cloning will take place at Seoul National University (SNU), where the first dog, Afghan hound Snuppy, was successfully cloned as a proof of concept in 2005. The SNU team that will recreate Booger is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, who was a colleague of Hwang Woo-suk, the disgraced Korean stem cell scientist who admitted fabricating data on human embryonic stem cell lines in 2006. Hwang’s dog cloning work, however, was determined to be legitimate, and the SNU team went on, after Hwang’s departure from the university, to successfully clone wolves.

The Scientist

Read the full post "Pet dog to be cloned by Korean biotech" (256 words, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)

Human culture subject to natural selection, Stanford study shows

Published
by
billycuts
on February 19, 2008
in Anthropology, Genetics, Memetics and Society/Social Systems
. 1 Comment

The process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes, a new study finds.

Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. Speeded or slowed rates of evolution typically indicate the action of natural selection in analyses of the human genome.

This study of cultural evolution, which compares the rates of change for structural and decorative Polynesian canoe-design traits, is scheduled to appear Tuesday, Feb. 19, in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Biological evolution of inherited traits is the essential organizing principle of biology, but does evolution play a corresponding role in human culture”” said Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California-Los Angeles and author of Guns, Germs and Steel. “This paper makes a decisive advance in this controversial field.”

EurekAlert

Read the full post "Human culture subject to natural selection, Stanford study shows" (621 words, estimated 2:29 mins reading time)

Fidel Castro Resigns as Cuba’s President

Published
by
billycuts
on February 19, 2008
in Latin America and Political
. 0 Comments

19castro3953x.jpg

Fidel Castro stepped down Tuesday morning as the president of Cuba after a long illness. The announcement was made in a letter to the nation written by Mr. Castro and published early Tuesday morning on the Web site of Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party.

The resignation ends one of the longest tenures as one of the most all-powerful communist heads of state in the world.

In late July 2006, Mr. Castro, who is 81, handed over power temporarily to his brother, Raúl Castro, 76, and a few younger cabinet ministers, after an acute infection in his colon forced him to undergo emergency surgery. Despite numerous operations, he has never fully recovered but has remained active in running government affairs from behind the scenes.

Now, just days before the national assembly is to meet to select a new head of state, Mr. Castro resigned permanently, and signaled his willingness to let a younger generation assume power. He said his failing health made it impossible to return as president.

“I will not aspire to neither will I accept — I repeat I will not aspire to neither will I accept — the position of President of the Council of State and Commander in chief,” he wrote in the lette

He added: “It would betray my conscience to occupy a responsibility that requires mobility and the total commitment that I am not in the physical condition to offer.”

NY Times

Read the full post "Fidel Castro Resigns as Cuba’s President" (1211 words and 1 image, estimated 4:51 mins reading time)

Dean Kamen’s ‘Luke Arm’ Prosthesis Readies for Clinical Trials

Published
by
billycuts
on February 18, 2008
in Biology, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Futurism/Transhumanism and Robots/A.I.
. 0 Comments

deka01.jpg

Dean Kamen’s “Luke arm”—a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars—came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project. If DARPA gives the project the green light—and some greenbacks—the state-of-the-art bionic arm will go into clinical trials. If all goes well, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives its approval, returning veterans could be wearing the new artificial limb by next year.

The Luke arm grew out of DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was created in 2005 to fund the development of two arms. The first initiative, the four-year, US $30.4 million Revolutionizing Prosthetics contract, to be completed in 2009, led by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., seeks a fully functioning, neurally controlled prosthetic arm using technology that is still experimental. The latter, awarded to Deka Research and Development Corp., Kamen’s New Hampshire–based medical products company (perhaps best known for the Segway), is a two-year $18.1 million 2007 effort to give amputees an advanced prosthesis that could be available immediately “for people who want to literally strap it on and go.” Kamen’s team designed the Deka arm to be controlled with noninvasive measures, using an interface a bit like a joystick.

IEEE

Read the full post "Dean Kamen’s ‘Luke Arm’ Prosthesis Readies for Clinical Trials" (2 words, estimated 0 secs reading time)

Breaking the Drug Taboo: Group of Traumatized Veterans Get Ecstasy Treatment

Published
by
billycuts
on February 18, 2008
in Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Entheogens/Psychedelics, Health/Bio-Tech, Military and Mind/Body/Spirit
. 0 Comments

An experimental study that treats PTSD veterans with the drug MDMA could make life after war a lot more livable.

“We need to be positioning ourselves now to provide the assistance that our veterans need,” said House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs chairman Bob Filner (D-CA) during a hearing, called “Stopping Suicides: Examining the Mental Health Challenges Facing the Department of Veterans Affairs,” held in December 2007. “Not only for those brave men and women who are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for our veterans from previous conflicts. We cannot afford to put this issue off.”

Filner’s choice of words is instructive, as are his sentiments: With upwards of 25 million veterans in the United States, not counting those overseas in the morally murky theater of Iraq and Afghanistan who may return home sometime after the 2008 presidential election, that’s a lot of assistance and funding needed to head off what he called a “rate of veteran suicide [that] has reached epidemic proportions,” to the point that it has doubled the suicide rate of civilians. Safeguards already put into place have failed, for a variety of reasons, and given the severity of the mental and physical problems carried by returning soldiers, some daring out-of-the-box thinking is not only desperately needed, but required.

Enter the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and its currently funded trials using 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine—otherwise known as MDMA, or ecstasy—to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the U.S. Army had carried out lethal dose studies of MDMA back in the 1950s, work which was not classified until the close of the 1960s, it was only centered on animals and was mixed in with a variety of other compounds. At the closure of that research, MDMA languished in clinical obscurity until its rise as a club drug in the ‘80s and ‘90s brought it the kind of attention that dooms better drugs to Schedule I classifications—that is, illegality—and lesser drugs to approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But MAPS founder and president Rick Doblin became aware of MDMA in 1982, and since then has been convinced of its therapeutic uses. Accordingly, his organization has coordinated and/or funded recent studies into MDMA treatment of PTSD and has its eyes set on a higher goal.

“We’re looking to make MDMA into a prescription medication in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere,” he explained by phone.

Entheology

Read the full post "Breaking the Drug Taboo: Group of Traumatized Veterans Get Ecstasy Treatment" (1679 words, estimated 6:43 mins reading time)

Fiber-based nanotechnology in clothing could harvest energy from physical movement

Published
by
billycuts
on February 18, 2008
in Energy/Fuel
. 0 Comments

Nanotechnology researchers are developing the perfect complement to the power tie: a “power shirt” able to generate electricity to power small electronic devices for soldiers in the field, hikers and others whose physical motion could be harnessed and converted to electrical energy.

The February 14 issue of the journal Nature details how pairs of textile fibers covered with zinc oxide nanowires can generate electrical current using the piezoelectric effect. Combining current flow from many fiber pairs woven into a shirt or jacket could allow the wearer’s body movement to power a range of portable electronic devices. The fibers could also be woven into curtains, tents or other structures to capture energy from wind motion, sound vibration or other mechanical energy.

“The fiber-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from physical movement,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If we can combine many of these fibers in double or triple layers in clothing, we could provide a flexible, foldable and wearable power source that, for example, would allow people to generate their own electrical current while walking.”

EurakAlert

Read the full post "Fiber-based nanotechnology in clothing could harvest energy from physical movement" (923 words, estimated 3:42 mins reading time)

Wireless Monitoring Of People And Things: Future Of Social Networking?

Published
by
billycuts
on February 14, 2008
in Big Brother, Computers and Society/Social Systems
. 0 Comments

080212173134.jpg

If you need information, the Internet offers a wealth of resources. But if you’re hunting down a person or a thing, a computer’s not much help. That may soon change. Electronic tags promise to create what some call the “Internet of things,” in which objects and people are connected through a virtual network.

To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington’s computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.

The RFID Ecosystem project aims to create a world that many technology experts predict is just on the horizon, said project leader Magda Balazinska, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.

“Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people’s privacy at the same time,” Balazinska said. “We want to get a handle on the issues that would crop up if these systems become a reality.”

Science Daily

Read the full post "Wireless Monitoring Of People And Things: Future Of Social Networking?" (1234 words and 1 image, estimated 4:56 mins reading time)

Geneticist sentenced in art case

Published
by
billycuts
on February 14, 2008
in Art, Biology, Genetics and Law
. 0 Comments

A geneticist was sentenced to one year of unsupervised release (no jail time) and a $500 fine for supplying bacteria to an artist, according to the Buffalo News, bringing to an end a well-publicized case that began more than three years ago.

Robert Ferrell, based at the University of Pittsburgh, pled guilty in October to a misdemeanor, after he supplied Steven Kurtz with bacteria for use in biotechnology art projects.

The men were originally charged with mail and wire fraud in connection with Ferrell’s purchase of samples of two common bacteria, Serratia marcescens and Bacillus atrophaeus, for Kurtz.

Ferrell and Kurtz were indicted in June, 2004.

The Scientist

Read the full post "Geneticist sentenced in art case" (254 words, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)

Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse

Published
by
billycuts
on February 14, 2008
in Biology, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Genetics and Health/Bio-Tech
. 0 Comments

Scientists have created the world’s first schizophrenic mice in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the illness.

It is believed to be the first time an animal has been genetically engineered to have a mental illness. Until now they have been bred only for research into physical conditions such as heart disease. It will allow researchers to study the disease and develop treatments using a limitless supply of laboratory animals.

Times Online via TechnoOccult

Read the full post "Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse" (238 words, estimated 57 secs reading time)