There’s growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul. The upshot appears to be high rates of violent crime, high narcotics use, high teenage birthrates and even high rates of heart disease.
That’s the argument of an important book by two distinguished British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinsonand Kate Pickett. They argue that gross inequality tears at the human psyche, creating anxiety, distrust and an array of mental and physical ailments — and they cite mountains of data to support their argument.
“If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police,” they assert. “You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problem.” They explore these issues in their book, “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.”
This isn’t really all that shocking of a revelation, more a confirmation in my view. But check this shit out:
There’s similar evidence from other primates. For example, macaque monkeys are also highly social animals, and scientists put them in cages and taught them how to push a lever so that they could get cocaine. Those at the bottom of the monkey hierarchy took much more cocaine than high-status monkeys.
I think what happened here is that this study was actually a foregone conclusion adopted in order to provide an excuse to give cocaine to macaques. Why not? The scientists’ own status within our society has been trampled so thoroughly and unjustly, why not stand around feeding cocaine to a bunch of monkeys all day? Sounds like more fun than XBox.
No one really knows why, but for an open wound, simply applying suction dramatically speeds healing times. (The theory is that the negative pressure draws bacteria out, and encourages circulation.) But for almost everyone, that treatment is out of reach — simply because the systems are expensive — rentals cost at least $100 a day and need to be recharged every six hours.
No more. Danielle Zurovcik, a doctoral student at MIT, has created a hand-powered suction-healing system that costs about $3. The device is composed of an airtight wound dressing, connected by a plastic tube to a cylinder with accordion-like folds. Squeezing it creates the suction, which lasts as long as there’s no air leak. What’s more, where regular dressings need to be replaced up to three times a day — a painful ordeal — the new cuff can be left on for several days.
MIT Student Develops $3 Cutting-Edge Healing Device, Field Tested in Haiti
Roughly 8 percent of your DNA isn’t really human. (How’s that for a morning wake-up call?) Instead, it’s the de-activated remnants of ancient retroviruses. All viruses hijack host cell machinery to replicate themselves, but retroviruses are a little more invasive than most. These viruses trick cells into turning viral RNA into DNA—the reverse of the normal DNA to RNA transcription process—and then snuggle that DNA right into the rest of the host’s genome. They mutate frequently and, sometimes, accidentally deactivate themselves—in which case the “dead” viral DNA just ends up hanging out in the human genome.
Resurrecting ancient viruses – Boing Boing
Science is fucking cool. Keep your jebus and your arks and unicorns, reality is pretty damned interesting.
Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women.
Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ – CNN.com
A new malaria vaccine is showing some positive results in trials conducted in Kenya and Tanzania. You’ll notice the article mentions that this is being done by scientists, as opposed to Allah or Jesus. Hopefully, once a final vaccine for malaria is discovered, it won’t be hampered by religious fanatics like the effort to eradicate polio.
An experimental malaria vaccine for babies reduced the chances of developing the mosquito-borne illness by more than half, scientists are reporting today. The results, from two trials conducted in Kenya and Tanzania, are the most promising yet in the quest to develop effective immunization against the life-threatening parasite.
The findings on GlaxoSmithKline’s RTS,S/AS01 showed a 53 percent lower risk of infection over eight months and were presented today at the annual American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene meeting in New Orleans. They build on results published last year that found that GSK’s RTS,S/AS02 vaccine (the same shot formulated with a different adjuvant, or immune-enhancing additive) slashed the risk of a first-time malaria infection by 66 percent in infants who received the full three-dose course. A safety study on that vaccine published in today’s online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine showed about the same efficacy — a 65 percent reduction in first-time infections for babies 12 months and younger.
Scientists are about to create life from non-living matter. How can anybody still believe in creationism?
“We’ve made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide,” Szostak said in a phone interview. “What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple [genetic] sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful.”
By doing “something useful” for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know.
Forgive me (or don’t – fuck you) for sounding like a sore winner here, and I’m obviously being a bit premature, but the fact is the abiogenesis of life has been a feather in the cap of the ignorant for too long. It’s nice to see that the rationalists may soon be plucking that one for themselves.
