For more than 60 years, Robert Martensen’s lung cells replicated without a hitch, regulated by specialized enzymes called kinases. Much like thermostats that adjust the temperature in a room to make sure it’s not too hot or too cold, kinases make sure that the right number of new cells are created as old ones die. But sometime in his early sixties, something changed inside Martensen. One or more of the genes coding for his kinases mutated, causing his lung cells to begin replicating out of control.

At first the clusters of rogue cells were so small that Martensen had no idea they existed. Nor was anyone looking for them inside the lean, ruddy-faced physician, who exercised most days and was an energetic presence as the chief historian at the National Institutes of Health. Then came a day in February 2011 when Martensen noticed a telltale node in his neck while taking a shower. “I felt no pain,” he recalls, “but I knew what it was. I told myself in the shower that this was cancer—and that from that moment on, my life would be different.”

Martensen initially thought it was lymphoma, cancer of the lymph glands, which has a higher survival rate than many other cancers. But after a biopsy, he was stunned to discover he had late-stage lung cancer, a disease that kills 85 percent of patients within a year. Most survive just a few months. […]

He heard about a new drug being tested at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Developed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, the drug had dramatically reduced lung cancer tumors and prolonged life in the couple hundred patients who had so far used it, with few side effects. But there was a catch. The new med, called Xalkori, worked for only 3 to 5 percent of all lung cancer patients.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

photo { Patrick Romero }

The romantic view of romance in Western culture says a very small fraction of people would make a great partner for you, customarily one.

Some clues suggest that in fact quite a large fraction of people would make a suitable spouse for a given person. Arranged marriages apparently go pretty well rather than terribly. […]

It seems we overstate the rarity of good matches. Why would we do that? One motive would be to look like you have high standards, which suggests that you are good enough yourself to support such standards. But does this really make sense? In practice, most of the ways a person could be especially unusual such that it is hard for them to find a suitable mate are not in the direction of greatness. Most of them are just in various arbitrary directions of weirdness.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

Research shows that friends influence how girls and women view and judge their own body weight, shape and size. What Wasylkiw and Williamson’s work sheds light on, is how much of a young woman’s body concerns are shaped by her perceptions of peers’ concerns with their own body versus her peers’ actual body concerns. […]

They found that the more women felt under pressure to be thin, the more likely they were to have body image concerns, irrespective of their actual weight and shape. Interestingly, body talk between friends that focussed on exercise was related to lower body dissatisfaction.

{ Springer | Continue reading }

Rats use a sense that humans don’t: whisking. They move their facial whiskers back and forth about eight times a second to locate objects in their environment. Could humans acquire this sense? And if they can, what could understanding the process of adapting to new sensory input tell us about how humans normally sense? At the Weizmann Institute, researchers explored these questions by attaching plastic “whiskers” to the fingers of blindfolded volunteers and asking them to carry out a location task. The findings, which recently appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, have yielded new insight into the process of sensing, and they may point to new avenues in developing aids for the blind.

{ Weizmann Institute of Science | Continue reading }

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position x and momentum p, can be known simultaneously. The more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. The original heuristic argument that such a limit should exist was given by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, after whom it is sometimes named, as the Heisenberg principle. […]

Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused with a somewhat similar effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Jason Lazarus }

Since I had spent many years in self-destruct mode, I wanted to use my need for sexual connection to help others. Finally, I had my answer: working as a sex surrogate. […]

A sex surrogate is a therapist who helps people overcome their bedroom dysfunctions. Yes, it involves sleeping with strangers, but unlike prostitution, these men weren’t in search of a good time. They were in pain and filled with shame. They had tried everything. Usually, a sex surrogate is a last resort. And over time, they taught me more about intimacy and vulnerability than I could have imagined. […]

So I taught Bruce how to move his hips in a thrusting motion.

{ Salon | Continue reading }

photo { Jonathan Waiter }

Assume that you can’t redistribute happiness or wealth within the marriage. If your spouse is unhappy you will be unhappy and if your spouse is happy you are likely to be happy; happy wife, happy life.

If you can’t redistribute happiness the play to make is to maximize total happiness. Maximizing total happiness means accepting apparent reductions in happiness when those result in even larger increases in happiness for your spouse. If you maximize the total, however, there will be more to go around and the reductions will usually be temporary.

{ Marginal Revolution | Continue reading }

photo { Sergiy Barchuk }

The gap between professional race drivers and self-driven cars isn’t all that big, as a race at the Thunderhill Raceway in California proved yesterday. Although the human driver achieved victory against the self-driven Audi TTS in a head-to-head, he only managed to shave off a few seconds from the computer’s time.

{ Silicon Angle | Continue reading }

photo { Roger Minick }

A growing number of professionals are using social media to build a personal, public identity—a brand of their own—based on their work. Think of an accountant who writes a widely read blog about auditing, or a sales associate who has attracted a big following online by tweeting out his store’s latest deals.

Co-branded employees may exist largely below the radar now, but that’s changing fast, and employers need to start preparing for the ever-greater challenges they pose for managers, co-workers and companies. Their activities can either complement a company’s own brand image or clash with it. Companies that fail to make room for co-branded employees—or worse yet, embrace them without thinking through the implications—risk alienating or losing their best employees, or confusing or even burning their corporate brand.

Part of this change is generational. Younger employees show up on the job with an existing social-media presence, which they aren’t about to abandon—especially since they see their personal brands lasting longer than any single job or career.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Anuschka Blommers & Niels Schumm }

The Philadelphia 76ers unveil the world’s largest T-shirt cannon.

Scientists Use Cadaver Hands to Study the Dangers of Pumpkin Carving.

Can We Link Hurricane Sandy to Climate Change?

The research labs lost ALL their mice (1000s) and most of their research samples.

Between now and 2045, TRS [the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System] will pay $376.5 billion to retired teachers. It has just $36.3 billion on hand.

Your personality is revealed in the way you speak, according to new research. Introverts tend to use more concrete words and are more precise, in contrast to extraverts, whose words are more abstract and vague.

Exercise is smart for your heart – and makes you smarter.

Researchers found that subtle changes in a food’s flavor and texture can increase the expectation of how filling it will be and suppress hunger, regardless of the number of calories.

Primates, rodents may show signs of sadness, study suggests.

After conducting experiments on the bacteria, invisible to the naked eye, the team found that the current was in fact generated by the bacteria themselves, essentially acting as power cables.

Technology is finally coming up with solutions that could eliminate animal experimentation.

People may seem very different from lemurs, monkeys and apes, but all primates share a few key physical and behavioral characteristics.

When a person moves their head while undergoing fMRI, it looks like the neural activity observed in autism. According to a piece in Nature today, a major line of research about autism might be seriously flawed.

A study called Tanner Stage 4 Breast Development in Adults: Forensic Implications looks at the very different things different experts saw when they all peered at the same female nipples.

Why does shock therapy beat back depression? New experiments show how such a blunt treatment can have such positive effects.

Efficiency Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power.

New Fusion Engine Could Cut Travel Time To Mars Down To Six Weeks.

A new algorithm predicts which Twitter topics will trend hours in advance.

The Psychology Of Tetris.

Why are rainbows curved?

Should Museums Exhibit Bad Art?

How many kids are found as a result of missing-child posters?

What Is the Use of Elephant Hair?

Ask A Banker: What Do Investment Bankers Actually Do?

A majority of actors don’t really set out to memorize dialogue at all.

The Story Behind The FedEx Logo.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Cannibalism But Were Afraid to Ask.

Google Earth Finds More Strange Patterns in the Chinese Desert.

Jeremy Hunt to open world’s first placebo hospital.

Album Cover Locations In NYC.

Monday night, NYC.

Snow Drawings.

Cindy Sherman reveals that, like most people, she’s had trouble finding anything good in New York’s second-hand shops.

U.S. cellphone carriers took a major step on Wednesday toward curbing the rising number of smartphone thefts with the introduction of databases that will block stolen phones from being used on domestic networks.

The initiative got its start earlier this year when the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and police chiefs from major cities asked the cellular carriers for assistance in battling the surging number of smartphone thefts. In New York, more than 40 percent of all robberies involve cellphones and in Washington, D.C., cellphone thefts accounted for 38 percent of all robberies in 2011.

With the introduction of the database, carriers will be able to block stolen handsets from being used on their networks. Until now, such blocking had targeted the SIM card, so unauthorized calls could not be made on stolen phones, but putting in a new SIM card meant the phone could still be used. That meant a stolen phone could be sold on the second-hand market.

The new database blocks the IMEI number, a unique identification number in the cellphone.

{ Network World | Continue reading }

photo { Garry Winogrand }

Since Apollo 17’s flight in 1972, no humans have been back to the moon, or gone anywhere beyond low Earth orbit. No one has traveled faster than the crew of Apollo 10. (Since the last flight of the supersonic Concorde in 2003, civilian travel has become slower.) Blithe optimism about technology’s powers has evaporated, too, as big problems that people had imagined technology would solve, such as hunger, poverty, malaria, climate change, cancer, and the diseases of old age, have come to seem intractably hard.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Humans specifically seek out the eyes of others, rather than just the middle of their faces, according to a new study proposed by an 11-year-old boy that uses characters from video game Dungeons and Dragons.

Cognitive scientist Alan Kingstone, director of the brain and research lab at the University of British Columbia in Canada, first became interested in testing whether people look at each others eyes, or simply the centre of their heads, two years ago. However, some had suggested an answer to the question would be impossible to find because our eyes happen to always be roughly in the centre of our heads.

Taking the problem home to his family, Alan’s then 11-year-old son, Julian Levy – named lead author of the subsequent paper, titled “Monsters are people too”, published in British Royal Society journal Biology Letters – had “a clever idea that only a kid’s brain could have,” Kingstone said.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

photo { Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait in Mirrors, 1932 }

Contemplating death doesn’t necessarily lead to morose despondency, fear, aggression or other negative behaviors, as previous research has suggested. […]

The awareness of mortality can motivate people to enhance their physical health and prioritize growth-oriented goals; live up to positive standards and beliefs; build supportive relationships and encourage the development of peaceful, charitable communities; and foster open-minded and growth-oriented behaviors.

{ Improbable Research | Continue reading }

photo { Sasha Kurmaz }

The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace.

{ Atlantic | Continue reading }

For nearly a decade, scientists have told city and state officials that New York faces certain peril: rising sea levels, more frequent flooding and extreme weather patterns. The alarm bells grew louder after Tropical Storm Irene last year, when the city shut down its subway system and water rushed into the Rockaways and Lower Manhattan.

On Tuesday, as New Yorkers woke up to submerged neighborhoods and water-soaked electrical equipment, officials took their first tentative steps toward considering major infrastructure changes that could protect the city’s fragile shores and eight million residents from repeated disastrous damage. […]

“The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations. We are only a few feet above sea level,” Mr. Cuomo said during a radio interview. “As soon as you breach the sides of Manhattan, you now have a whole infrastructure under the city that fills — the subway system, the foundations for buildings,” and the World Trade Center site. […]

After rising roughly an inch per decade in the last century, coastal waters in New York are expected to climb as fast as six inches per decade, or two feet by midcentury, according to a city-appointed scientific panel. That much more water means the city’s flood risk zones could expand in size. […]

What scientists, who have devoted years of research to the subject, now fear most is that, as soon as the cleanup from this storm is over, the public will move on.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { What Will Happen to the NYC Subway Rats? }

{ A smart road design that features glow in the dark tarmac and illuminated weather indicators will be installed in the Netherlands from mid-2013 }

New research shows a simple reason why even the most intelligent, complex brains can be taken by a swindler’s story – one that upon a second look offers clues it was false.

When the brain fires up the network of neurons that allows us to empathize, it suppresses the network used for analysis, a pivotal study led by a Case Western Reserve University researcher shows. […]

When the analytic network is engaged, our ability to appreciate the human cost of our action is repressed.

At rest, our brains cycle between the social and analytical networks. But when presented with a task, healthy adults engage the appropriate neural pathway, the researchers found.

The study shows for the first time that we have a built-in neural constraint on our ability to be both empathetic and analytic at the same time.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Jonathan Waiter }

This study offers the first combined quantitative assessment of suicide terrorists and rampage, workplace, and school shooters who attempt suicide, to investigate where there are statistically significant differences and where they appear almost identical. Suicide terrorists have usually been assumed to be fundamentally different from rampage, workplace, and school shooters.

Many scholars have claimed that suicide terrorists are motivated purely by ideology, not personal problems, and that they are not even suicidal. This study’s focus was on attacks and attackers in the United States from 1990 to 2010 and concluded that the differences between these offenders were largely superficial. Prior to their attacks, they struggled with many of the same personal problems, including social marginalization, family problems, work or school problems, and precipitating crisis events.

{ Homicide Studies/SAGE | Continue reading }