March 2008
Regrowing fingers in adult humans using… well… a simple biologically derived powder
Three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane.
What happened next, Andrews reports, propelled him into the future of medicine. Spievack’s brother, Alan, a medical research scientist, sent him a special powder and told him to sprinkle it on the wound.
“I powdered it on until it was covered,” Spievack recalled.
To his astonishment, every bit of his fingertip grew back.
“Your finger grew back,” Andrews asked Spievack, “flesh, blood, vessels and nail?”
“Four weeks,” he answered.
Andrews spoke to Dr. Steven Badylak of the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine and asked if that powder was the reason behind Spievack’s new finger tip.
“Yes, it is,” Badylak explained. “We took this and turned it into a powdered form.”
That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/22/sunday/main3960219.shtml
Adam Smith Institute on The Causes of Poverty
61. “It is important for us to understand the causes of poverty.”
No. There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state, that which happens when you don’t do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes cold in the universe; it is the absence of energy. Similarly poverty is the absence of wealth. For most of humanity’s existence on this planet, poverty has been the norm, the natural condition. People hunted to survive or lived by subsistence farming, and they were poor. In some parts of the world this is still the case.
The unusual condition is wealth. This is what changes things. We should ask what are the causes of wealth and try to recreate and reproduce them. When you ask the wrong question, “What causes poverty,” you end up with wrong answers. People fall into the trap of thinking that the wealth of some causes the poverty in others, as if there were a fixed amount of wealth in the world and that rich people had seized too large a share of it.
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/globalization/common-error-no.-61-200803151059/
extinct pre-human species had 30% more cranial volume
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/21-the-extinct-human-species-that-was-smarter-than-us
hm. and died out. damn.
140 lumens per watt - double the efficiency of LEDs
http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13568_22-192842.html
short video, basically it’s a pocket of gas and some kind of heating device that might be microwave-like RF device. Not coming to flashlights any time soon, but for street lighting, stadiums etc?
The Seven Minute Hexayurt
Wow…. does this graph about federal reserve assets mean what I think it means?
Fixing the root causes of war?
Frans de Waal stands in a watchtower at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center north of Atlanta, talking about war. As three hulking male chimpanzees and a dozen females loll below him, the renowned primatologist rejects the idea that war stems from “some sort of blind aggressive drive.” Observations of lethal fighting among chimpanzees, our close genetic relatives, have persuaded many people that war has deep biological roots. But de Waal says that primates, and especially humans, are “very calculating” and will abandon aggressive strategies that no longer serve their interests. “War is evitable,” de Waal says, “if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits.”
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/apr/13-science-says-war-is-over-now
Separated at birth? Hunter S. Thompson and the Dalai Lama
Now doesn’t that explain a lot? Same person, two bodies, and all the tantric mayhem wound up with Thompson.
Just watch it….
Cap’n pugwash… thanks for the memories, Mark!
a rare good piece on Worldchanging
about platform analysis and how transformations track through digital media.