Above: seen in Athens
Below: a piece by Vinchen
(via Wooster Collective)
MonthMay 2008
“Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal, an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.
‘In spite of information stemming from ancient texts, constituents of Bosweilla had not been investigated for psychoactivity,’ said Raphael Mechoulam, one of the research study’s co-authors. ‘We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behavior. Apparently, most present day worshipers assume that incense burning has only a symbolic meaning.’
(via PhysOrg)
“Terry Pratchett has sold more than 55 million books worldwide. He was the UK’s best selling author until JK Rowling came along, he’s been awarded an OBE and won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for Literature. He’s a multi-millionaire and his fans love him – and he has an awful lot of them. But he hasn’t got his health. He’s been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s Disease at the age of 60. For this week’s On The Ropes he talks to John Humphries about his life, his work and how he’s coping with a disease that – so far – has no cure.”
(via BBC Radio: On The Ropes. h/t SF Signal. Picture by Josh Kirby)
Is this for real?
The self-described computer geek from Kennedale bought the 1993 Eagle Talon from a junkyard for just $750.
“First thing I did when I got the car home was pull the engine out,” Murray said.
He then spent about $4,000 more to convert the gas-guzzler to run on electricity alone, doing all the work himself in his garage at home.
“I bought the electric motor and I was like well, I gotta figure out a way to couple it together with the original transmission,’ he said.
The car can hit 55 mph, driving right past the high prices at gas stations.
“I hear people complain about them at work all the time. I just grin,” he said.
Murray spends just $7 per month on electricity to charge the batteries — enough to go about 300 miles.
(via Cryptogon)
I’ve been thinking for a while that the key to making oil-free/oil-low cars practical is the cheap conversion of old vehicles into new renewable-energy powered cars. It’s just not practical for everyone to have to throw away all the old cars on the road. (I wasn’t surprised to read that buying a fuel efficient used car is more environmentally friendly than buying a new hybrid.) It looks like this guy might have found the beginnings of a solution.
Update: He has much more information, including an updated cost ($6,456.92) and schematics on his website.
Five years after taking the lead in “Operation Pipe Dreams,” which prosecuted people who sold marijuana pipes around the country, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan is leading a similar investigation called “Operation True Test.”
The newest project for Ms. Buchanan is looking into companies that sell “masking products” that are supposed to help drug-users pass employer drug tests.
[…]
Only a small amount of product was seized during the search Wednesday, Ms. Kinsley said.
The main items taken were documents — including bank records, business documents and order forms.
Also seized, Mr. Chong said, were 8,000 to 10,000 copies of the recently released documentary “a/k/a Tommy Chong,” a film chronicling his journey through arrest, prosecution and nine-month prison term.
“It’s a way to punish the distributor financially,” Mr. Chong said. “There’s no way to get the DVDs back until the investigation is over.” Mr. Chong said he has no ownership in the film.
He called the documentary a “focal point” of the raid. It was released about a month ago, and sales were slow, Mr. Chong said.
“It’s selling like crazy now, thanks to Mary Beth. She’s brought us a nice publicity gimmick.”
Ms. Buchanan would not comment on Mr. Chong’s allegation or discuss what alleged crimes are being investigated as part of Operation True Test.
Full Story: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
(via The Agitator)
Inhaling carbon nanotubes could be as harmful as breathing in asbestos, and its use should be regulated lest it lead to the same cancer and breathing problems that prompted a ban on the use of asbestos as insulation in buildings, according a new study posted online today by Nature Nanotechnology.
During the study, led by the Queen’s Medical Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh/MRC Center for Inflammation Research (CIR) in Scotland, scientists observed that long, thin carbon nanotubes look and behave like asbestos fibers, which have been shown to cause mesothelioma , a deadly cancer of the membrane lining the body’s internal organs (in particular the lungs) that can take 30 to 40 years to appear following exposure. Asbestos fibers are especially harmful, because they are small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs yet too long for the body’s immune system to destroy.
Michael Sheehan is on a one-man mission to put terrorist threats into perspective, which is a place they’ve rarely or ever been before. Already you can see it’s going to be a hard slog. Fighting the inflated menace of Osama bin Laden has become big business, generating hundreds of billions of dollars for government agencies and contractors in what one friend of mine in the Washington policy-making stratosphere calls “the counterterrorist-industrial complex.”
[…]
Before September 11, said Sheehan, the United States was “asleep at the switch” while Al Qaeda was barreling down the track. “If you don’t pay attention to these guys,” said Sheehan, “they will kill you in big numbers.” So bin Laden’s minions hit U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, they hit the Cole in 2000, and they hit New York and Washington in 2001—three major attacks on American targets in the space of 37 months. Since then, not one. And not for want of trying on their part.
What changed? The difference is purely and simply that intelligence agencies, law enforcement and the military have focused their attention on the threat, crushed the operational cells they could find—which were in fact the key ones plotting and executing major attacks—and put enormous pressure on all the rest.
See also: The Power of Nightmares
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