“My husband and I stared at our daughter for that first year. She was worth every cent. Better than a new car, or a kitchen reno.” 

Reproduction: You’re doing it wrong.

Seriously though, I couldn’t put my finger on a logical reason for why this felt wrong to me until I came to this sentence. I’m all for embracing new science and using it to better our lives, but maybe we shouldn’t commodify our children?

Now, it’s no secret that I am a compendium of random facts and a voracious learner, but there are a few things that I never ever wanted to know.

This right here, this is at the top of that list:

Rosacea is a common skin condition, afflicting 16 million Americans with red, inflamed skin, usually in the middle of the face. At last, scientists think they know the cause, but it isn’t pretty—the feces of tiny, spider-like mites that live in your pores, reports New Scientist. The mites are called Demodex, and scientists have known about them a long time. We all have them living in our pores, usually 20 to 30 per square inch of facial skin. They love to hang out around your eyebrows and eyelashes and eat your facial oil.

Gross, yes, but even grosser for people with rosacea: They can have up to 10 times the number of mites in their skin. Because Demodex mites don’t have anuses, they don’t poop, and their feces just builds up in their bodies until they die, usually inside our pores. For people with rosacea, when all those critters die, it releases a lot of fecal bacteria all at once, causing an immune reaction and inflammation.

I will never be able to unlearn this.

Well now, this is just a disaster flick waiting to happen:

The largest solar energy plant in the world could bring a surprising array of dangers to the Mojave Desert when constructed is completed, reports the LA Times. First off, it’s huge: 170,000 large mirrors will be installed at the Ivanpah plant, heating water in three 45-story towers to 1,000 degrees. Critics say no one can specify the dangers because no solar plant has been bulit on this scale—but it might vaporize birds, blind drivers miles away, flip small airplanes, or even attract Air Force heat-seeking missiles.

With a new airport for Las Vegas proposed just six miles away, heat plume interference from the solar plant could be a deadly threat. “If you hit a plume dead center, you have one wing in and one wing out of it. It would flip an airplane in a heartbeat,” says the operator of the nearby Blythe airport, who adds that his complaints have been ignored. “It was a joke.” Even if Ivanpah is safe, there are applications pending for 100 other solar plants in the Mojave. “It’s an experiment on a grand scale,” says one scientist.

In an era where our gadgets exceed the science fiction of just 20 years ago, it’s amazing how many everyday annoyances have never gotten fixed. Nobody has invented tangle-proof wires, or smooth-pouring ketchup, or good-smelling bus passengers. You can’t get too mad at science for not solving these problems. It’s not like they haven’t tried. It’s just way more complicated than it sounds to fix things like …

Really, science. I expected better from you by now. Tsk. 

Heads up folks, the pharmaceutical companies are lying to us:

A former employee of a “major” pharmaceutical company has written an essay in the British Medical Journal warning that the industry’s scientific-sounding studies are sometimes rigged. “We occasionally resorted to ‘playing’ with the data that had originally failed to show the expected result,” he writes in the subscription-only essay. “This was done by altering the statistical method until any statistical significance was found.” 

 As Nature explains, the writer is referring to studies that get done after FDA approval, “research” that is subject to far less scrutiny. The companies pay doctors to enroll patients in studies, then massage the results until they’re tailor-made for a commercial. The studies are “not designed to determine the overall risk:benefit balance of the drug in the general population,” writes the anonymous whistle-blower. “They were designed to support and disseminate a marketing message.”

Does that seem like a relatively fine distinction to anyone else?

A stunning breakthrough in biotechnology was announced this week that brings humanity closer to an Orwellian prospect: parents being able to choose the characteristics of an unborn child.

For the first time, scientists have mapped the DNA of a fetus. They did so by using specimens from a pregnant woman and the father. The procedure may make it easier someday to prenatally change genes seen as causing diseases or, more startling, pick a child’s attributes such as eye color or even intelligence.

What do you think about this? Are we approaching a point where certain scientific advancements will likely do more harm than good?

I’m loathe to get in the way of human advancement, but - given all the cosmetic homogenization going on already - it’s all too easy to imagine a world where everyone looks just about the same because we select for the “ideal” genes during gestation…

(image source)

Israeli scientists […] have created a new form of marijuana that gives you health benefits without getting you stoned, AFP reports. “It has the same scent, shape and taste as the original plant—it’s all the same—but the numbing sensation that users are accustomed to has disappeared,” says Tzahi Klein, who heads development at the firm that created the new cannabis. 

The concept behind Israel’s new pot is simple: neutralize the effect of THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol—which gets you high—and increase the power of CBD, or cannabidiol, which can relieve psychiatric problems and help diabetics. You won’t get the munchies, either. But will medical users like the new, no-high grass? Klein recalls that “many of our patients who tried the new plant come back to us and say: ‘You tricked me,’” thinking it was a placebo. 

Who decided that the world was in need of pot that doesn’t get you high?  

Eat your heart out, Grey’s Anatomy.  Memorial Hermann Hospital is live-tweeting brain surgery, complete with photos and video.  (Don’t click that unless you want to see someone’s head being cut open.)

Doctors and administrators at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas are showing themselves to be a bunch of techo-savvy badasses. They’re setting a new standard for broadcasting sensitive surgeries via social media – and that takes guts.

Not really different from a live feed on television, you say? Wrong. Online is much more intense and interactive, with missteps documented and traveling around the world faster than you can click “delete.”

On February 21 of this year, they live-tweeted a double bypass heart surgery on a 57-year-old man from beginning to end. And today, neurosurgeon Dr. Dong Kim showed a brain tumor what’s what in yet another live Twittercast from their @houstonhospital handle. They had a hashtag to help folks follow along, #MHbrain, and they even Storified the whole thing so you can review the action if you missed it.

Awesome. (Not that I could ever see myself consenting to such a thing)

A new study found that by the time they’re nine months old, babies’ brains become much better at recognizing faces and emotions of people who are in the racial groups with which they interact the most. Of course, that’s typically their own race, and so it begins, a lifetime of subconsciously seeing the world as an us versus them kind of place.

…

does this mean we’re inherently terrible racists who prefer to only pay attention to our own kind? Not exactly. However, that racist phenomenon in adults where someone says, “All [insert racial group here] people look alike,” probably does have real roots in this skill that we hone so early. (Still not excusable in grownups.) But really these findings don’t have much to do with race as we come to understand it as adults. As Scott explains,

These results suggest that biases in face recognition and perception begin in preverbal infants, well before concepts about race are formed. It is important for us to understand the nature of these biases in order to reduce or eliminate them.

Ehhh … there’s a pretty huge gap between recognizing differences and using them as the basis of discrimination. I think it’s great to understand where the tendency to build the “Us vs. Them” mindset begins, but I’d wager that working on the tendency to generalize and discriminate based on those recognized differences might be more helpful.

And, while further research would need to be done to bear this out, it seems highly likely that the more diverse an environment a baby is raised in, the less pronounced this effect would become. The baby would essentially be forced to be a generalist, rather than a specialist, when it came to the way people looked. That would probably leave their brain a lot more flexible later in life when it came to thinking about racial divisions put in place by society, and who they perceived as different or an “outsider.”

There’s the answer. Let’s all trade babies!

That at least some of us will be having sexual intercourse with robots in the future should be obvious by now. Somebody out there will make love to just about any consumer good that enters the home (and if that’s not the first rule of product design, it should be).

But will our robot-human relations be relegated to the bedroom, or will love enter the equation, too? Is our society headed in a direction that will support this transition? Looking at current trends, I’d say that the answer is a resounding yes.

For most, contemplating the prospect of robot sex is immediately distasteful. The mind conjures up alchemists’ combinations of rubber and silicone and, I don’t know, hair follicles. It is hard to dismiss that slack-jawed, shark-eyed stare of love dolls, their pale arms covered by gummy, petroleum-product skin.

But those aren’t the siren love robots of the future. Realistic skin, the ability to make eye contact, faux breathing (to avoid that “walking human corpse” feel), convincing conversational skills, dexterous manipulation of objects, and the ability to not walk through sliding glass doors—we can assume that these things will be attainable within the next few decades.

I’m going to have to put aside my usual pragmatism here for moment so that I can say “eeeeeewwwww”. 

Black children seen in the emergency department for abdominal pain are less likely to receive pain medication than white children, according to a new study.

The research, which also found that black and Hispanic children were more likely to experience an ER stay longer than six hours compared to white children — even when the same tests were ordered — raises questions on how race may affect hospital care when it comes to the youngest patients.

…

Past research has shown that race can affect the way that adults express their pain. A 2002 study published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations found that black patients were less likely to disclose the fact that they were in pain than their white counterparts. When they did discuss their pain they were less likely to describe its intensity.

And doctors might also be less skilled in recognizing the pain of certain races. Specifically, doctors were almost twice as likely to underestimate the pain of black patients compared to other ethnicities in a 2007 study from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine.

Wow.

(Source: newser.com)