Science/Technology blog

How deeply do you want to look into your DNA?
Credit: U.S. Department of Energy Genome Programs

Remember Jim Watson? The guy who co-discovered what DNA looks like? Recently he got to look at the 6 billion letters that make up his DNA. And maybe soon you can get a peek at yours.

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What are we doing to our kids?So do we understand them? Obviously not!

What we understand as fact about our very own children may be completely wrong and not only confusing our teens, but making them worse. As a teen, you are bombarded by everything and everyone that conveys to you that you are not ready — ready to drink, ready to drive, ready to have sex, ready for responsibility, ready for life. Adults say that even though you feel you are ready, you are not, and that is just fact. So teens are caught in this limbo of life. You feel invincible, ready to take everything on and experience what life has to offer, and then bam! You are faced with extreme opposition from society — “you’re not ready!”, they say.

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Wanna shoot me?!Accidental experiment shows that many people would shoot an innocent person (with paintballs) if kept anonymous.

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Snipped from NewScientist.com.

Well, here is more proof that our government has higher priorities in making money than protecting its citizens. Here the FDA has too quickly approved a drug for insulin resistance and diabetes. Now they are paying the price, but instead of just taking it off the shelves and admitting fault, what do they do? Yep, they try to keep it secret and scare physicians into staying quite about its deadly side effects. A good a smear campaign for anyone that is willing to speak up about safety.

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Snipped from HeraldNews.com.

It seems that our government is still trying to figure out if they want to break our constitutional laws and civil liberties or just do away with them entirely. Looks like Bush is still trying to remove all individual privacy, and increase all governmental secrecy — well, at least when it comes to the executive branch’s secrecy. This is a continuation of the amazing, unethical lengths that Bush is willing to go to “secure” his country. Ashcroft spoke to the House panel on Thursday about his points of view on the White House’s new controversial eavesdropping policies.

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Not that I enjoy saying “I told you so,” but President Bush’s lack of ability or (more likely) desire to forge any sort of bipartisan support for his Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) is really coming back to bite folks.

Let’s have a quick refresher, shall we?

The VSE was announced back in 2004, along with a pledge for yearly increases in NASA’s budget in order to pay for the development of new spacecraft to take astronauts back to the Moon, and later on to Mars. So much for the promise — when reality reared its ugly head, the budget increases didn’t come through (NASA’s budget has dropped since 2004, after accounting for inflation), but the NASA administrator is still pursuing the Vision he’s been directed to follow.

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Snipped from msnbc.msn.com

Yes, this is for real. Having lived in Saudi Arabia for over a year, I observed first hand the heavy handed and ruthless tactics employed by the “religious police”. These are men who you wouldn’t recoginze as “police” except for their signs of piety sporting scraggly beards, traditional white robes falling slightly above the ankle and red-and-white checkered head scarves minus the black cords on their head to hold them down. Oh, and the other thing — they carry a big stick and I mean BIG stick. They patrol the streets to make sure shops are closed during prayer times by banging on the store fronts with their big stick. And they also don’t hesitate to bang on people’s heads (literally) if an unrelated man attempts to mingle with a woman, or if a woman isn’t properly covered. Well, it seems maybe they have gone too far because there is an unprecedented trial going on in Saudi Arabia in which the religious police are accused of murdering two men. And, you won’t believe what their “crimes” were.

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Snipped from Boston.com.

Any regular reader of Blog4Brains can tell you where I stand on abortion, gay marriage and many other personal issues that the our “wonderful” government wants to intrude in on. I will say that most of this Constitutional travesty is created out of religious righteousness even though our First Amendment declares that this is unAmerican. If you are interested in what I have to say about these issues you can read The Fear of Abortion — Wiping Out Freedoms and Why Gay Marriage is Politically Important. The problem with these articles is it is me talking about why it is important to address these issues, yet who am I to say anything? But, here I found a prominent lawmaker Representative Gale Candaras, a Democrat from Wilbraham, discuss why she has changed her view on this very important issue.

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Severn Cullis-Suzuki speaking atthe University of Alberta MyerHorowitz Theatre.A 12 year old ordering UN delegates to stop their ignorance

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Have you ever looked at your credit card bill and thought you needed to have your head examined? Stanford University is using complex brain imaging to study how humans make shopping decisions, and are finding that emotions play a large role in everyday purchases.

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