theweaselking | Jul. 28th, 2005

Jul. 28th, 2005

Also,
Creeeeeeepiest emo-kid cami top EVER.

Also,

Also,

Finally, a kitten.

IRA orders its members to disarm.

Swedish researchers have created new functioning brain cells from stem cells drawn from the brains of living adults

Neurosurgeons withdrew the stem cells from the brains of adults during routine surgery for hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, a researcher at the Stockholm Karolinska Institute told the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet.

As long as an agent was present to induce cell division, the extracted stem cells created new and working brain cells.

"So far we have managed to produce several millions of new cells from the original stem cells. About 25 percent of them are (active) neurons," Ulf Westerlund, who presented his doctoral thesis on the subject last week, told the paper.

When the researchers added glutamate, a salt that functions as a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, the new cells communicated in a network, according to Westerlund.

"This means we had working synapse connections that are needed for nerve cells to work," he said.

Danger, lots of spiders and flies and beetles and slugs. Some AWESOME pictures, though.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls for the government to "blacklist" people who disagree with the invasion of Iraq, since disagreeing with the government is terrorism and makes you only one step removed from being a suicide bomber.

At the same time, Bill O'Reilly equates dissent with treason and demands the arrest of everyone who doesn't agree with him.

In Chicago, if you're a whistleblower cooperating with a federal corruption investigation, your identity has been "accidentally" leaked to your boss, your co-workers, and all the people being investigated.

This month's Robert O'Brien Idiot Of The Month winner: Dr Judith Reisman, who claims that pornographic images cause permanent brain damage through the release of toxic chemicals.

Thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably, subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process. This is true of so-called "soft-core" and "hard-core" pornography. And once new neurochemical pathways are established they are difficult or impossible to delete.

The writer of the award asks why sex doesn't cause this same brain damage - my answer is "because sex is only supposed to happen in the dark with your eyes closed".

The Guardian points out:

They foresee two possible outcomes: if they can demonstrate that porn physically "damages" the brain, that might open the floodgates for "big tobacco"-style lawsuits against porn publishers and distributors; second, and more insidiously, if porn can be shown to "subvert cognition" and affect the parts of the brain involved in reasoning and speech, then "these toxic media should be legally outlawed, as is all other toxic waste, and eliminated from our societal structure".

One more quote from our award winner:

The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were largely the creation of "the German homosexual movement." Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to repeat those crimes. "Idealistic 'gay youth' groups are being formed and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those who formed the original 'Hitler youth.'"