Ewan's Corner

Posts Tagged ‘research’

As usual the comments are the best part of today’s Slashdot coverage of a new study claiming that “A host of common chemicals is feminizing males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people“:

1. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and osteoporosis.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called “dough.” It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.
8. Bread is often a “gateway” food item, leading the user to “harder” items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

Wired News: It’s Alive (ish). The whole concept of these living neural network “animats” freaks me out a bit. I know it’s just a small nervous system rather than a real brain, but still – the results point to some kind of awareness – bizarre and eerie indeed. They next hope to try and make the animats learn, and network multiple animates… when do you stop – if at all? I’m all for furthering our understanding of the brain, but this casual “let’s see what happens” attitude bothers me.

Researchers have found that lab-grown neuron cultures tend to fire in bizarrely synchronized, dishwide waves, eerily echoing the neural patterns seen during Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s possible that this is a state of arrested development,” Potter said, “or that the networks are asleep because they’re missing the parts (humans) use to wake up. It’s (also) possible that the networks are in some sort of epileptic state.”

Related: The Neurally Controlled Animat: Biological Brains Acting with Simulated Bodies (PDF),
MEART, Wikipedia (sparse) Animat topic.

Wired says Happiness Is the Best Medicine. Obvious yes (and now i don’t have to worry about admitting that large breasts make me happy), but also fascinating:

“We learned that the patients with higher levels of spirituality or higher levels of religiosity may have a significantly slower progression of cognitive decline,” said Kaufman.
The new work may help to demystify the effect of spirituality or religion.

“There is some evidence that religious beliefs help people cope with the stresses and strains of life,” said Steptoe, “so this could be linked with the same processes that we have studied.”

Marmot concurred. “Our research shows that psychological processes have profound biological effects,” he said. “Spirituality can be one example of how the brain, acting through its connections with the neuroendocrine system, can have important effects.”

“Higher levels of religiosity”? A typical boring secular scientist term for “closer to God” – and don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying all scientists are boring and secular (case in point). This should be blindingly obvious to any Christian… it’s not hard to see why Christians are happier, when you see the promises we have :-)
Philippians 4:6-7