..living in your spinal fluid? This is crazy.
“They may be involved in the development of the disease or may result from the disease process in brains of schizophrenic patients,” the researchers said in an abstract of the study published on Friday.
There’s so much we don’t know. Amazing.
Army troops in Afghanistan and other malarial countries are routinely prescribed Lariam, which is also known as mefloquine.
At least one of the four Fort Bragg soldiers suspected of killing his wife this summer, Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves, had almost certainly been given Lariam, according to an Army medical source familiar with Nieves’ duty in Afghanistan. …
Lariam has been blamed for psychotic episodes and suicidal behavior for more than a decade. The official product information sheet for Lariam, written by drug manufacturer Hoffmann-La Roche and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, states that Lariam has been associated with aggression, paranoia and suicidal thoughts.
This article from the BBC made me realize how rarely I actually see women breastfeeding in public. Is our society so schizophrenic that we influence women to be ashamed or embarrassed to breastfeed in public? Breastfeeding has been shown to have enormous benefit for both mother and child. I found this statistic troubling:
They don’t call it ‘mother’s milk’ for nothing!
Related:
..or to not eat mammals. Three outdoorsman have died recently from a mad-cow like disease which was most likely caused by injesting infected deer and wild game like elk and caribou. Mad-cow and other similar diseases are actually caused not by viruses or bacteria but by self-replicating proteins called prions. The prions then are absorbed from the infected tissues and are transported by the lymph system to the brain where they cause the spongey holes characterisitic of these diseases.
Microsoft has just released Service Pack 3 with lots of new big fixes and security updates.
I swear, do people really the environment remains unaffected by human beings?
BBC: Alaska glaciers raise global warming fears
An Israeli scientist has developed a featherless chicken. This thing looks just wrong. He says he’s ‘just helping evolution’. Everyday, I’m more and more glad I gave up eating meat. What’s next boneless chickens, headless chickens, vat-grown chickens, hairless cows, walking steaks? Something about this is seriously fucked up.
From The Economist, The future of mind control:
IN AN attempt to treat depression, neuroscientists once carried out a simple experiment. Using electrodes, they stimulated the brains of women in ways that caused pleasurable feelings. The subjects came to no harm?indeed their symptoms appeared to evaporate, at least temporarily?but they quickly fell in love with their experimenters. …
Yet neuroscientists have been left largely to their own devices, restrained only by standard codes of medical ethics and experimentation. This relative lack of regulation and oversight has produced a curious result. When it comes to the brain, society now regards the distinction between treatment and enhancement as essentially meaningless. Taking a drug such as Prozac when you are not clinically depressed used to be called cosmetic, or non-essential, and was therefore considered an improper use of medical technology. Now it is regarded as just about as cosmetic, and as non-essential, as birth control or orthodontics. American legislators are weighing the so-called parity issue?the argument that mental treatments deserve the same coverage in health-insurance plans as any other sort of drug. Where drugs to change personality traits were once seen as medicinal fripperies, or enhancements, they are now seen as entitlements.
This german website details how to foil annoying audio copy-protection schemes using black markers and post-it notes. w00t!
There was a good article about some of the methods ‘terrorists’ have used to evade law enforcement. Even though you often hear stories which would give the impression that the intelligence community is omniscient, common sense should tell you that it should not be that hard to conduct business outside the view of the Roving Eye, even if you are a highly-sought individual. It turns out that the eyes and ears in the NSA/Echelon/CIA have a few obvious vulnerabilities. First, as bureaucratic institutions they move slowly and make mistakes having to rely on many imperfect highly indoctorinated individuals. Even arranged as they are with a clear top-down, linear command structure this inefficiency is a problem. Secondly, it is easier to hide something than to find something. According to this article in the NY Times and other articles I have seen the terrorists have shown suprising ingenuity in concealing their communications. They have moved away from communications which are easily penetrated by governmental powers. For example, cell phone and satellite phone networks have built-in backdoors for the NSA and global law enforcement. Other things like radio are heavily monitored. Although, these groups would be shielded from greater detection if they utilized multiple strategies such as encrypting radio transmissions and band-jumping to keep the signal hard to pinpoint, though the presence of signal hopping can be detected. Terrorist organizations have successfully been using more decentralized methods of concealing their information. They have used newsgroups and forums to post coded messages. Websites have many advantages. They are decentralized global communications and can preserve communication almost permanently. This is really a good solution as you are essentially hiding information out in the open. Unlike email which is can be easily traced and intercepted, encrypted instant messaging, chat, and websites have many advantages. Out of the way, innocuous-looking websites can serve as internet dead drops. Coded information can be concealed within the body of a site, or within a newsgroup and can be left for months or years. Presumably, if you were a member of such an organization you might receive word from a contact about where to find information and instructions posted. If it is encrypted all the better. Once compromised this could add to the process keeping law enforcement delayed. The point is, that if you are determined to stay ahead of the game it is not that difficult. Most often surveillance powers are overestimated. They still rely on imperfect human beings. Certainly, anyone who would go to work as a government goon has already demonstrated a lack of judgement. If only we could send all terrorists and their twins in our government to another planet where they could duke it out. Warfare and violence are idiotic and insane. In the 20th century an estimated 120 million people died as the result of war. It needs to end.