Previously, a strong feeling had prevailed against using portraits on coins in the United States
{ How to make a penny | via Washington Post | As of 2009, it cost the U.S. Mint 1.62 cents to make a penny }
Queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either
Why breasts are the key to the future of regenerative medicine
To be in the company of Chris Calhoun is to encounter breasts, and encounter the damn things anytime, anywhere—including over a plate of spaghetti in a bustling Manhattan restaurant.
On this spring afternoon, the 44-year-old CEO of San Diego-based biotech company Cytori Therapeutics pulls out his laptop, launches a PowerPoint presentation, and there they are: conical and cantaloupy, As through Ds, beige and pink and taupe and tan, more breasts than you might see in a women’s locker room, never mind in the middle of a lunch table.
A passing waiter does a double take at this lively slide show, but Calhoun is oblivious. He’s talking excitedly about how these women’s bodies led him and his team of scientists to a discovery in tissue engineering, a process that could well be one of the most momentous medical advances of the 21st century: the use of stem cells—specifically stem-cell-enriched adipose (fat) tissue—to enhance, heal, and rebuild injured or damaged organs. (…)
Breast augmentation is just one development (so to speak) in the company’s more ambitious plan: to introduce stem cell medicine to the mass market—and not using the ethically fraught kind of stem cells from human embryos. Instead, based on almost a decade of trials that Cytori and its academic partners have performed on cell cultures, lab rodents, and now humans, they believe their engineered flab cells can treat more organs than you find in a French butcher shop. Chronic heart disease? In human studies released in May, the cells improved patients’ aerobic capacity and shrank the size of the infarct (tissue killed by lack of blood). Heart attack? A human clinical trial, also reported in May, found that the cells increased both the blood supply to damaged heart muscle and the volume of blood that the heart pumped. Kidney injury as a result of cancer therapy? In recent rat studies, the cells improved kidney function. Incontinence after prostatectomy? Another recent study reported that, by 12 weeks after injection, the cells had decreased the amount of urine male volunteers were leaking by 89 percent.
If Calhoun and his scientists succeed, they won’t just create more cleavage. They’ll make practical a whole new field, one that medical visionaries have dreamed of for decades: regenerative medicine.
It makes sense to apply Cytori’s technology to enhance breasts instead of, say, repair urinary sphincters as a strategic way to move the patented technology out of rats and into people as soon as possible. Hearts, kidneys, and even sphincters have to work in order for us to survive. But we can live just fine without breast tissue, and, outside of feeding offspring, breasts don’t have to do much. The fact is, the scientific and regulatory hurdles to getting Cytori’s cells into clinical use will be easier to clear for breasts than for other tissue: Breasts simply aren’t as necessary as other organs, so the bar for proving to regulators that the technology works will be lower.
It’s also a booming market. In 2009, women forked over $964 million to plastic surgeons for breast augmentation, which edges out nose jobs as the most commonly performed plastic surgery in the US.
{ Wired | Continue reading | Thanks Steve }
‘Truth is the most valuable thing we have–so let us economize it.’ –Mark Twain
In the financial markets, a lot rides on the word of a company’s top executives. If a CEO tells a lie, a lot of shareholders can get hurt.
Now, after studying thousands of corporate earnings calls, two researchers from Stanford University think they’ve come up with a way to tell when senior executives are fibbing.
It’s a question that people have been wrestling with for as long as humans have been interacting with each other.
“I think since the Garden of Eden we’ve been trying to figure this out — who’s lying and who’s not lying,” says David Larcker, a professor of accounting at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. (…)
Kumar was asked, “Can your books be trusted?” And he replied by saying, “We hire the very best auditors.” Larcker says that can be a big warning sign.
“You basically are not answering the question. You’re basically making reference to somebody else, and those are the kinds of things in psychology you look for,” he says. (…)
Zakolyukina says lying executives tend to overuse words like “we” and “our team” when they talk about their company. They avoid saying “I.” (…) Lying CEOs also tend to use a lot of words that express positive emotion — things are fabulous and fantastic and extraordinary.
related { Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market }
photo { Richard Avedon }
I’m not the guy you kill. I’m the guy you buy.
In fact, most of the life on the planet is probably composed of bacteria. They have been found making a living in Cretaceous-era sediments below the bottom of the ocean and in ice-covered Antarctic lakes, inside volcanoes, miles high in the atmosphere, teeming in the oceans — and within every other life-form on Earth.
These facts by themselves may trigger existential shock: People are partly made of pond scum. But beyond that psychic trauma, a new and astonishing vista unfolds. In a series of recent findings, researchers describe bacteria that communicate in sophisticated ways, take concerted action, influence human physiology, alter human thinking and work together to bioengineer the environment. These findings may foreshadow new medical procedures that encourage bacterial participation in human health. They clearly set out a new understanding of the way in which life has developed on Earth to date, and of the power microbes have to regulate both the global environment and the internal environment of the human beings they inhabit and influence so profoundly.
Science has determined that life arose and became complex through a process generally known as evolution, but biologists are engaged in an energetic debate about the form of that evolution. In essence, the argument centers on whether the biosphere should be characterized as a tree of life or an interactive web. In the tree construct, every living thing springs from a common ancestor, organisms evolve slowly by means of random mutations, and genes are passed on from parent to offspring (that is to say, vertically). The farther away from the common ancestor, generally speaking, the more complex the life-form, with humans at the apex of complexity.
The tree-of-life notion remains a reasonable fit for the eukaryotes, but emerging knowledge about bacteria suggests that the micro-biosphere is much more like a web, with information of all kinds, including genes, traveling in all directions simultaneously. Microbes also appear to take a much more active role in their own evolution than the so-called “higher” animals. (…)
Recent research has shown that gut microbes control or influence nutrient supply to the human host, the development of mature intestinal cells and blood vessels, the stimulation and maturation of the immune system, and blood levels of lipids such as cholesterol. They are, therefore, intimately involved in the bodily functions that tend to be out of kilter in modern society: metabolism, cardiovascular processes and defense against disease. Many researchers are coming to view such diseases as manifestations of imbalance in the ecology of the microbes inhabiting the human body. If further evidence bears this out, medicine is about to undergo a profound paradigm shift, and medical treatment could regularly involve kindness to microbes.
Still, in practice, the medical notion of friendly microbes has yet to extend much past the idea that eating yogurt is good for you. For most doctors and medical microbiologists, microbes are enemies in a permanent war. Medicine certainly has good reason to view microbes as dangerous, since the germ theory of disease and the subsequent development of antibiotics are two of medical science’s greatest accomplishments.
But there’s a problem: The paradigm isn’t working very well anymore. Not only are bacteria becoming antibiotic-resistant, but antibiotics are creating other problems. Approximately 25 percent of people treated with antibiotics for an infection develop diarrhea. Moreover, people who contract infections just by being hospitalized are at risk of developing chronic infections in the form of biofilms.
{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading | Thanks Constantine }
‘The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be.’ –Jean Eustache
It is the greatest question in computer science. A negative answer would likely give a fundamentally deeper understanding of the nature of computation. And a positive answer would transform our world: Computers would acquire mind-boggling powers such as near-perfect translation, speech recognition and object identification; the hardest questions in mathematics would melt like butter under computation’s power; and current computer security methods would be as easy to crack as a TSA-approved suitcase lock.
So when Vinay Deolalikar, a computer scientist at Hewlett Packard labs in India, sent an email on August 7 to a few top researchers claiming that P doesn’t equal NP — thereby answering this question in the negative and staking a claim on the million-dollar Millennium Prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute — it sent shock waves through the community. Usually, computer scientists groan when they find such a claim in their Inbox, expecting the typical amateurish “proof” with the same hoary errors. But Deolalikar is a recognized and published scientist, and his paper had novel ideas from promising areas of research.
Needless to say poor Tommy was not slow to voice his dismay but luckily the gentleman in black who was sitting there by himself came gallantly to the rescue and intercepted the ball
Laws that criminalize insider trading cover corporate insiders and those they tip, but not specifically Congress. (…)
This week the Wall Street Journal reported that during the past two calendar years, 72 congressional aides from both parties made trades in companies that their bosses’ help oversee. Among them are top advisers to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Their timely investments proved profitable, but the staffers deny the trades sprung from inside knowledge, the Journal reported.
Cold and clammy. Aftereffect not pleasant.
Goldman Sachs continues to defend its title in the media as the most maligned and unscrupulous company throughout this past decade’s financial downfall and ’standing ten count.’ Two of the largest and most scrutinized transactions during this period were the currency swaps designed to hide Greece’s debt and the making of the Abacus deal that blindly fleeced investors of billions. We delve into the fine print of these two particular deals to try and evaluate whether Goldman was inherently immoral and unethical or a merely surfer responding to its environment and going with the flow of the moment.
related { Hegel on Wall Street }
All these things that nobody wants any more, September’s reminding July
To be wrong is to be surprised, and I think in day-to-day life, we’re often disorientated and upset by that experience. But in literature or art it’s safe to explore that disorientation.
‘Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemon juice.’ –James Joyce
Colour does not exist. Not out in the world at any rate. All that exists in the world is a smooth continuum of light of different wavelengths. Colour is a construction of our brains. A lot is known about how the brain does this, beginning with complicated circuits in the retina itself.
Thanks to a new paper from Greg Field and colleagues we now have an even more detailed picture of how retinal circuits are wired to enable light to be categorized into different colours. This study illustrates a dramatic and fundamental principle of brain wiring – namely that cells that fire together, wire together.
Where do we go from here, time ain’t nothing but time
Strangely, history has never figured into the equation when it comes to exploring why some countries prosper and others don’t. To understand how it might relate, Diego Comin at Harvard Business School, Erick Gong at the University of California, Berkeley, and I started by compiling a list of 11 ancient technologies that were around in 1000 B.C.: Was there written language? The wheel? Agriculture and iron tools? We drew today’s boundaries on the ancient world and assigned each separate technology history to the future country that would form within that territory. Then we expanded the survey to 1500 A.D., looking for the adoption of 24 technologies, including oceangoing ships, paper, printing, firearms, artillery, the magnetic compass, and steel.
We found that there was a remarkably strong association between countries with the most advanced technology in 1500 and countries with the highest per capita income today. Europe already had steel, printed books, and oceangoing ships then, while large parts of Africa did not yet have writing or the wheel. Britain had all 24 of our sample technologies in 1500. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga had none of them. But technology also travels. North America, Australia, and New Zealand had among the world’s most backward technology in 1500; today, they are among the wealthiest regions on Earth, reflecting the principle that it’s the people who matter, not the places. As migration has transformed parts of the world that were nearly empty in the Middle Ages, technology has migrated with them.
Like the boogie to the boogie without the boogie bang
What followed was a fascinating assortment of statistics and tidbits about how design influences how people shop. (…)
It takes eight seconds to walk by a typical storefront. Once someone is two seconds past the door, they will not turn around. You have to grab them in the first four seconds while they are approaching.
Within two seconds of entering a store, 70% of people know whether they will buy something. Stores use simple window displays and a “front and center” table to clearly and quickly convey what’s hot, and most train a staff member to welcome customers immediately upon entry.
An open door generates 35% more business than a closed door. Doors that are flush to the sidewalk are more inviting than recessed doors. Outdoor planters and a lot of downlight can make a recessed entry more welcoming. How many museum and library entrances are hard to find, dark, and require opening a heavy door? (…)
People like to walk in a loop. They avoid “cul de sacs” that they can see are dead-ends, because they don’t want to get bored walking through the same merchandise twice. (…)
75% of American spending occurs after 5:30pm and on Sunday.
‘Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience.’ –Philip Roth
Ask any Ashkenazi American Jew about his family’s arrival in the United States, and you’re likely to hear a certain story. With minor variations, it goes something like this: “My great-grandfather was called Rogarshevsky, but when he arrived at Ellis Island, the immigration officer couldn’t understand his accent. So he just wrote down ‘Rogers,’ and that became my family’s name.”
Most American Jews accept such stories as fact. The truth, however, is that they’re fiction. Ellis Island, New York City’s historic immigrant-absorption center, processed up to 11,000 immigrants daily between 1892 and 1924. Yet despite this incessant flow of newcomers, the highest standards of professionalism were demanded of those who worked there. All inspectors—many of whom were themselves immigrants, or children of immigrants—were required to know at least two languages; many knew far more, and all at the native-speaker level. Add to that the hundreds of auxiliary interpreters, and together you’ve covered nearly every possible language one might hear at Ellis Island. Yiddish, Russian, and Polish, in this context, were a piece of cake.
The twins were now playing in the most approved brotherly fashion
Humans are a social species, we interact with other people – aided by language- and exchange information on daily basis. The effects of social isolation have been demonstrated and predicted to be very severe and “de-humanising” in many cases with a long list of adverse effects on cognitive abilities and emotional stability. The question often posed when considering this feature of mankind is whether it is an adaptation to the presence of others in our environment, a simple product of proximity; or it is a function developmentally wired into our genes and is ,thus, needed for proper growth and development. The latter also would imply the evolutionary advantage of cooperation and living in a group.
In a recent study, researchers tackled the question of whether we are genetically wired to be social, and they did so by finding one of the most controlled environments in human developmental studies, and chose the ideal subjects for most genetic questions. Twins in utero! (…)
The intentional nature of movements directed towards the other twin is an important observation from this study; it suggests that we are , in fact, genetically wired to be social.
And that a whole abyss separates it from the antics of the street-fair clown
{ In Botvinick and Cohen’s experiment, an individual is seated with both hands resting parallel on a table with palms facing down. A partition is placed between one of their hands and their line of vision. Then, a fake rubber hand is placed on the other side of the screen. | Davidson.edu | Continue reading }
We’ve got 600 attorneys here. We’ve got to find out who’s an expert on psychiatric commitment statutes
The taste of Kit Kat candy bars, Coca-Cola beverages and Jelly Belly candies are known to stimulate cravings and subsequently influence consumers’ spending habits, but now researchers suggest simply hearing the sound of those brands and others with repetitively structured names can induce similar outcomes.
Across several product categories, audible exposure to repetitive-sounding brand names favorably affects how consumers perceive and choose items and decide where to buy them, reveals a study recently published in the Journal of Marketing.
Researchers said their findings provide the first evidence of this discovery, which could prove beneficial for marketers, advertisers and store managers.
“Companies have spent millions of dollars choosing their brands and their brand names and they’ve been picked explicitly to have an influence on consumers,” wrote University of Alberta marketing professor Jennifer Argo. “We show that it can get you at the affective level.”
related { The Coke Machine—part nonfiction narrative, part history of the Coca-Cola Company and the many crimes it has been accused of—works hard to provide answers. | The Atlantic | full story }
image { Marco Fusinato, Mass Black Implosion, 2007 | ink on archival facsimile of score }
Lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance
Earlier this year, the euro was sold as a proxy for a variety of ailments in the eurozone. However, as we argued then and now, the euro will not only prevail, but triumph over the US dollar in the medium to long-term.
Let’s first debunk the myth that economic growth is necessary to have a strong currency – just look at Japan.To understand why the euro may continue to strengthen, consider the yen: how has Japan, with its dismal economic growth had such a strong currency? Unlike the US, which requires foreigners to finance its current account deficit, Japan has a trade surplus while financing its budget deficit domestically. (…)
It’s often been lamented that the eurozone has no central finance minister to co-ordinate a fiscal response in a crisis. (…) Rarely observed, however, is the major advantage of not having a central Treasury secretary: it is far more difficult to spend money. In the US, it’s comparatively easy to stuff a trillion dollars into the banking system; in the eurozone, the money has to come from regional, often local, governments which is a far more painful process. (…)
In an effort to impose structural reform, the ECB has held the eurozone on a comparatively short leash ever since the introduction of the euro. As a result, most European consumers, particularly German ones, are far less leveraged than their US counterparts. Tightening in the eurozone won’t, therefore, automatically derail a eurozone recovery.
In contrast, US consumers remain on life support; most of the support by way of extraordinary monetary policies is aimed at reducing the number of homeowners “under water” in their mortgages. Given that it is politically unacceptable to encourage consumers to downsize, the most realistic alternative is to push up the price level to bail out these homeowners. As free market forces would favour further de-leveraging and lower home prices, such a policy is going to require an extraordinary monetary and fiscal effort; this may not lead to sustainable growth, but will show up in assets with the greatest level of monetary sensitivity, i.e. through a weaker dollar, and higher precious metals and commodities prices.
This story is beginning to unfold before our eyes: the Fed is likely to engage in more quantitative easing, amplified by Bernanke’s unequivocal comments that the Fed will resist market pricing of inflation expectations that it deems too low. Those regions that resist this path, such as the eurozone, may experience weak economic growth on the backdrop of relatively strong currencies.
There are many potential pitfalls to the Fed’s strategy; we can, however, be reasonably certain, that the strategy poses grave risks to the US dollar. A strong euro is no accident; a temporarily strong dollar was.
