Scientists use Stem Cells to Grow Miniature Liver

Scientists have managed to produce a small-scale version of a human liver in the laboratory using stem cells.

The success increases hope that new transplant livers could be manufactured, although experts say that this is still many years away.

The team from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center presented its findings at at conference in Boston.

UK experts said it was an "exciting development" but it is not yet certain a fully-functioning liver is possible.The demand for transplant livers far exceeds the number of available organs, and in recent years, research has focused on ways to use cell technology to support failing organs in the body, or even one day replace them.

Their building block is the stem cell, a "master cell" which can, in certain conditions, can divide to produce different types of body tissue.

However, constructing a three-dimensional organ from stem cells is a difficult task. Click here to read the rest of the article from the BBC...

Afrojack Ft. Eva Simons - Take Over Control (Extended Mix)

Dialogue on Climate Stifled by Political Two-Step.

I hereby propose a new television show. It will be a hit in the current election season: Dancing with the Stories... A Two-Step Flow of (mis)Information.

When it comes to accepting scientific information as fact, even facing decades of peer-reviewed and publicly available data, top political leaders can still sway the "debate" toward head-in-the-sand willful-ignorance. Case in point: Dick Cheney and other top Republicans who deny the existence of human-caused climate change.

By stating that there is not enough solid data (total rubbish), these "leaders" are influencing a two-step flow of (mis)information to the detriment of all. Why would certain politicians find it beneficial to perpetuate such views? How does the role of corporate money come influence what politicians view as pertinent or relevant issues?

Save the Whales, Save the Poop

Gross, but interesting.

From Discovery News

Chances are, you've heard a multitude of arguments against the killing of whales.

It's cruel. It has decimated whale populations. Whale meat is full of pollutants. Continued whaling will prompt preventive measures by 23rd century time travelers.

To which, we may now add another.

The ocean needs whale poop.

It wasn't long ago that researchers first confirmed that whales contributed to ocean ecology even after death, their carcasses landing on the seabed and forming the basis for unique communities known as "whale falls". Now, two whale scientists have found that, as well as seeding the seabed, whales also stimulate biological production at the ocean's surface, thanks to their nutrient-rich feces.

Continue reading...

A free press in China? Not yet.

The invisible hand of state-controlled censorship looms large in China's growing flirtation with Western concepts of intellectual expression and freedom.

A group of retired Communist Party officials, along with members of the tightly controlled state media, issued several public demands recently. The core of these call for China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, to dismantle censorship procedures “in favor of a system of legal responsibility” for items that are freely published.

Would you risk personal safety and professional status to stand up for a free press? Has censorship every affected your intellectual life? If so, how?

Google has self-driving cars!!

Google! You wiley minx you! Been sitting on something pretty spectacular, huh? A car that drives itself???!? Jeez! C'mon, you know that's exactly the kind of thing I want to own...I thought we were friends man...

Anyway, check it out...super cool! They even have an Audi TT edition. I call dibbs!





By MG Siegler

It all makes sense now.
At our TechCrunch Disrupt event a couple weeks ago in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage to give an impressive speech across a wide range of topics. But the most interesting thing he had to say what about automobiles. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers,” he said. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense.”
Well guess what? Surprise, surprise: Google has been working on a secret project to enable cars to do just that.
As they’ve revealed on their blog today, Google has developed a technology for cars to drive themselves. And they haven’t done it on a computer, or in some controlled lab, they’ve been out on California roads testing this out. “Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research,” Google engineer Sebastian Thrun (the brainchild of the project who also heads the Stanford AI lab and co-invented Street View as well) writes.
Further, The New York Times, which has a bit more, says a total of seven cars have driven 1,000 miles without any human intervention (the 140,000 mile number includes occasional human control, apparently). These cars are a modified version of the Toyota Prius — and there is one Audi TT, as well.
So how does this work? The automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors, and a laser range finder to locate everything around them (these are mounted on the roof). And, of course, they use Google’s own maps. But the key?

This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

Google says it gathered the best engineers from the DARPA Challenges (an autonomous vehicle race that the government puts on) to work on this project. They also note that these cars never drive around unmanned in the interest of safety. A driver is always on hand to take over in case something goes wrong, and an engineer is always on hand in the car to monitor the software. Google also says they’ve notified local police about the project.
So has it worked? Apparently, yes. There has been one accident so far, but it was when someone else rear-ended one of these Google cars.
Google notes that 1.2 million people are killed every year in road accidents — they think they can cut this number in half with the tech. It will also cut energy consumption and save people a lot of time.
I want this yesterday. This is all kinds of awesome.
But don’t get too excited just yet. “Even the most optimistic predictions put the deployment of the technology more than eight years away,” according to NYT.

A Vanishing Journalistic Divide

The stallion of free-range journalism has broken free and is rounding up its herd. The Wild West of Ye Olde Interweb has not been reigned in by any metaphorical barbed-wire fence, yet. It just keeps moving forward.

New York Times reporter David Carr writes that, "more and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle."

The question is, is print dead or is print-ONLY dead?

Avatar 3-D Imaging to Improve Athletes' Form?

From ‘Avatar’ Playbook, Athletes Use 3-D Imaging

The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ and ALAN SCHWARZ

In the endless quest for athletic advantage, a handful of major league baseball teams are engaged in an elaborate, largely clandestine race to master an advanced imaging technology that some baseball officials think could influence the way athletes of all ages train, perform and recover from injuries.

Read more...

The Republican re-branding of Cap-and-Trade

A small segment of society refuses their opinions to be clouded by facts. Recent Yale polling shows that about 6 in 100 Americans seriously doubt the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence that 'global warming' or 'climate change' is caused by human activity. Media often portray it as a "debate" about climate science, where one side is fighting to get legislative action and the other side is against it because the evidence is "inconclusive." As if it were a 50/50 fight. Is this balance bias responsible journalism?

In communications we often refer to this process as related to "framing." As in, the same information can be perceived as different depending on the angle to which it is referenced. Several right-wing politicians have shown great skill in pushing to cast doubt on the empirical results of decades of scientific research. This NYT article shows just this type of twisting of fact to fit political fiction. Is this effective politicking or the fleecing of an entitled, uninterested and apathetic citizenry? Probably both. And who will pay the price for delay and malaise regarding perhaps the most pressing (yet diffuse and distanced) environmental crisis the modern world has witnessed?

Goo.gl URL shortener can also spit out QR codes, if you ask it nicely

If you're not already aware of it, QR codes are the next big thing to be hitting...well...everything! If you have a smartphone, most likely, you'll be able to download an app to scan these little codes, which is really cool it you ask me. For the iPhone, download the app "i-nigma" to scan this code and see what happens.

BTW...if you want to make your own QR code for an email, ad, or business card, just add the prefix qr.cx to any URL. For example:

http://google.com would be http://qr.cx/http://google.com.

By Vlad Savov

Once again, Google fails at being ordinary. Although the claim with its Goo.gl URL shortener is that it's more about quality than features, the search giant couldn't help itself and has inserted a QR code easter egg into the mix. Should you be so daring as to append a .qr at the end of your contracted hyperlink -- such as turning http://goo.gl/JCKW into http://goo.gl/JCKW.qr (both point to this post) -- you'll be treated with a QR code, built especially for you by the company's imaging smurfs. So, in case you still don't have Android 2.2 and its awesome Chrome to Phone functionality, here's an alternative method for transitioning the webpage you're reading onto your phone. Heavens forbid we'd ever have to actually type anything out ourselves.

Facebook starts rolling out high resolution photo sharing to users

All I have to say is that it is about time they did this.










By Laura June

Facebook is already a popular way to share photo with your 'friends,' but the quality leaves a little something to be desired, to say the least. Well, that's all about to change, as the company has announced that it'll be rolling out high resolution photo uploading to all of its users over the coming weeks. Users will be able to upload and store photos that are eight times larger than what the service now allows (720 pixels). At the same time, the photo viewer will be upgraded to have a lightbox feel -- black background -- for better viewing. Great news, no doubt, for those of us who just couldn't stand another low res shot of someone's baby doing something silly.

US apologizes for infecting Guatemalans with STDs in the 1940s

Another atrocity in the history of U.S. medical research has come to light.  In the late 1940s, the U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Disease Inoculation Study purposely infected more than 1,600 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea and chancres.  The study, which came to light recently when a  Wellesley College researcher found unpublished notes from the project, has drawn an official apology from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

By the CNN Wire Staff

October 1, 2010

 

The United States apologized Friday for a 1946-1948 research study that purposely infected people in Guatemala with sexually transmitted diseases.
A statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the action "reprehensible."

"We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices," the joint statement said. "The conduct exhibited during the study does not represent the values of the United States, or our commitment to human dignity and great respect for the people of Guatemala."

Clinton called Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom on Thursday night to inform him, said Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela.

"They were obviously concerned about this information. They were saddened by it," Valenzuela said in a telephone news conference Friday.

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