Pot goes the weasel

Cannabis truly helps multiple sclerosis sufferers

New Scientist, 16:37 10 September 04, by Anna Gosline

One down, tumor to go

Magnets could pull cancer drugs to tumours

New Scientist, 16:23 08 September 04, by Anna Gosline

“It’s a new way of driving drugs around the body. Drug trafficking, if you will,” says Andrew Harrison, a materials chemist at the University of Edinburgh, who is developing the technique.

“If you tether the drug to a small magnetic particle, then you can use an external magnetic field to make sure it gets to the appropriate part of the body - and stays there,” he says. ...

In theory, doctors would inject ironbound drugs in liquid solution and then immediately draw them towards tumours with a magnetic field. The particles would not only deliver concentrated doses of strong medication, but they could also easily be sequestered in a limited area of the patient’s body.

One of the team’s prime inspirations for these particles comes from bacteria. Magnetotactic bacteria, discovered in the 1970s, produce their own tiny magnetic particles packed in proteins and lipids that provide a good attachment site for organic drugs.

Unfortunately, this family of bacteria is hard to grow in culture and produces extremely small yields of particles. Scientists have identified a cluster of genes that they think controls particle production.

Eureka! We're only a couple dozens stone's throws away from creating Magneto!

As long as it doesn't hurt anyone...

it's okay, right?

Global suicide toll exceeds war and murder

New Scientist, 13:37 08 September 04, by Shaoni Bhattacharya

Suicide kills more people each year than road traffic accidents in most European countries, the World Health Organization is warning. And globally, suicide takes more lives than murder and war put together, says the agency in a call for action.

The death toll from suicide – at almost one million people per year – accounts for half of all violent deaths worldwide, says the WHO. “Estimates suggest fatalities could rise to 1.5 million by 2020,” the agency warned on Wednesday.

What, me? Believe in original sin and the devil?

Dear God, have mercy on us. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.

1001101010000101101

Nickel 'nanodots' could mean tiny hard drives

New Scientist, 14:54 07 September 04, Will Knight

Journal reference: Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (doi:10.1166/jnn.2004.107)

Nanoscopic dots of nickel that could be used to store terabytes of data in a computer chip just a few centimetres wide have been created by US researchers.

Each "nanodot" consists of a discrete ball of several hundred nickel atoms and can have one of two magnetic states. This allows them hold a single bit of information, as a "1" or a "0".

In a conventional computer hard drive, information is stored on a disk coated with a magnetic material, and bits must be far enough apart not to interfere with each other. Nanodots should allow bits to be packed closer together as the dots are discrete units that are not structurally linked. ...

The researchers used a pulsed laser to heat nickel until it turned into plasma - an amorphous form of matter with positively and negatively charged atoms. In this form, the nickel rearranged itself on two different substrates - aluminium oxide and tin titanium nitrate - as uniform dots.

The dots arranged themselves at a density that would, theoretically, allow about five terabytes of data - five thousand gigabytes - to be packed into computer drive roughly the size of postage stamp. ...

The fabrication technique could perhaps be used in other ways. It was also possible to arrange the dots in three dimensions within a substrate. The pair found the nanodots could be arranged in a uniform manner within the crystalline structure of tin titanium nitrate. In theory, this could strengthen the crystal lattice of a molecule, perhaps leading to the development of novel, super-strong materials, Narayan says.

On the fly

Self-sustaining killer robot creates a stink

New Scientist, 15:13 09 September 04, by Duncan Graham-Rowe

It may eat flies and stink to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous.

To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity. ...

Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry out remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations. ...

The robot's energy source is the sugar in the polysaccharide called chitin that makes up a fly's exoskeleton. EcoBot II digests the flies in an array of eight microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which use bacteria from sewage to break down the sugars, releasing electrons that drive an electric current (see graphic). ...

Each MFC comprises an anaerobic chamber filled with raw sewage slurry - donated by UWE's local utility, Wessex Water. The flies become food for the bacteria that thrive in the slurry.

Enzymes produced by the bacteria break down the chitin to release sugar molecules. These are then absorbed and metabolised by the bacteria. In the process, the bacteria release electrons that are harnessed to create an electric current.

My suggestion: add a holding chamber for some flies and then harvest their maggot larvae for fuel. Reprocess some of the digested flies and maggots into a food for future flies to make more maggots. Pete and repeat. Pretty unappetizing, but, if a smart person spent time on this, it could be a virtually self-sustaining symbiotic ecosystem.

I'm getting sleepy, sleeeepy, very sleeeeepy...

I never undertsand why stories like this ("Hypnosis really changes your mind", New Scientist, 13:28 10 September 04, by Anna Gosline) amaze people. Well, let me restate myself. I understand why people love such findings. There is a dull and widespread opinion these days that since the brain always changes with the psyche, and that the mind can be altered via the brain, that the mind *is* the brain. We live in an age of presumed reductionism and it's just as numbly assumed neurology presents deep problems for classical (and Christian) anthropology.

But was it ever a surprise, really, that the brain changes in conjunction with the mind? Did we ever doubt that "feeling in love" literally warped your brain? When was it such a revelation that guzzling booze wrecked your brain and, in turn, wrecked your mind? God made the human mind a brainish thing. He did not, however, make every brain a minded thing.