Two million people headed for the crematorium by 2025, will have to have their pacemakers removed first. The University of Michigan wants to put those devices into the chests of people in poor and developing countries.
In Spain’s “pit of the bones” lies proof that euthanasia may not be a natural, human, act: the deformed skull of a child who was cared for many years.
Doctors today encourage moms to terminate their pregnancies once the disease that afflicted “Cranium 14″ is detected.
They pieced together a 530,000-year-old fossil cranium and discovered it belonged to a child who lived to between five and 12 years old despite being born with a rare birth defect known as craniosynostosis, in which the skull segments close too early, producing facial deformities and interfering with brain development.
via Early humans ‘did not kill deformed offspring’ – Telegraph.
A bit more about the site where the skull was found:
Cranium 14 was discovered in the famous archeological site of Atapuerca. Scattered throughout several caves in the area are the bones and tools of the earliest humans found in Europe. Sima de los Huesos (the pit of the bones) contains the most interesting findings. This site is located at the bottom of a 13-metre (50-foot) deep chimney which has to be accessed by scrambling through caves. It contains thousands of bone fragments belonging to 28 people of both sexes.
Why stop there? Photo: CC/Jessica Bender
A bioethicist and professional button-pusher takes a stand for bestiality, and another replies:
In response, bioethics writer Wesley J. Smith argued: “The great philosophical question of the 21st Century is going to be whether we will knock humans off the pedestal of moral exceptionalism and instead define ourselves as just another animal in the forest… Nothing would more graphically demonstrate our unexceptionalism than countenancing human/animal sex.” ~ Oppposing Views, Mar 15
Photo:CC/Craig Cloutier
Note: Per Noble Lie’s comment, below, I’ve added “Western” to the first paragraph, for clarification. Thanks, Noble! — mb
The pressures to conform are off-the-hook, or so they appear. One sociopathic, Western plastic surgeon (below) called his adopted daughter’s Asian features “problematic.” I am seeking additional details about this unnamed speaker, who appears to have body dysmorphic disorder by proxy
The speaker was a proud father. To illustrate his comments about a piece of art that celebrated the wonders of modern medicine (and which he had just donated to a local hospital), he told a story about his adopted Asian daughter. He described her as a beautiful, happy child in whom he took much delight. Her life, he told the audience, had been improved dramatically by the miracle of modern medicine. When she joined her new Caucasian family, her eyes, like those of many people of Asian descent, lacked a fold in the upper eyelid, and that lack was problematic—in his view—because it made her eyes small and sleepy and caused them to shut completely when she smiled. A plastic surgeon himself, he knew she did not need to endure this hardship, so he arranged for her to have surgery to reshape her eyes. The procedure, he explained, was minimally invasive and maximally effective. His beautiful daughter now has big round eyes that stay open and shine even when she smiles.
via The Hastings Center – Eyes Wide Open: Surgery to Westernize the Eyes of an Asian Child.
Your Neanderthal, here. Photo: Erich Ferdinand
21st Century brutes will crave escargot, eschew dairy
With the whole world gone mad (again) for everything cryptid (the Boston Phoenix attributes this to our pressing need for Great Depression 2.0 distractions), New Scientist has cooked up a list of DNA-sequenced species to be raised from the dead.
Neanderthals, naturally, top the list of humanoid species.
Harvard archaeologists, meanwhile, believe they know what might have killed-off the Neanderthal in the first place: lactose intolerance. The Harvard folks also suggested the Neanderthal enjoyed many different kinds of food, including escargot.
To revive a long-dead species scientists would have to recover enough DNA from a well-preserved specimen and find a suitable surrogate species similar to that of the extinct animal in which to grow the new baby from an embryo.
“It’s hard to say that something will never ever be possible,”said Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who is sequencing the Neanderthal genome.
“But it would require technologies so far removed from what we currently have that I cannot imagine how it would be done.”
via Extinct Animals Could Be Brought Back To Life – ROGUEGOVERNMENT.COM.
Amped up on Adderall. Photo: CC/Unity Gain
Shrinks on the take from the pharmaceutical industry and the Rockefeller Foundation are pushing Adderall and Ritalin as productivity boosters for humans.
This can’t come to any good. Even the authors of this Nature piece (described in a Yahoo article, link and excerpt, below) concede the likelihood of a rich-poor divide over who gets the “brain-boosting” drugs.
My take: The poor will get their pills. Corporations can employ fewer, more productive workers, especially if they are on speed.
The seven authors, from the United States and Britain, include ethics experts and the editor-in-chief of Nature as well as scientists. They developed their case at a seminar funded by Nature and Rockefeller University in New York. Two authors said they consult for pharmaceutical companies; Farah said she had no such financial ties.
Some health experts agreed that the issue deserves attention. But the commentary didn’t impress Leigh Turner of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics.
“It’s a nice puff piece for selling medications for people who don’t have an illness of any kind,” Turner said.
The commentary cites a 2001 survey of about 11,000 American college students that found 4 percent had used prescription stimulants illegally in the prior year. But at some colleges, the figure was as high as 25 percent.
via Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people – Yahoo! News.
Computer scientists revive eugenics tool to spot brain damage
(SS scientists studied Tibetans' facial characteristics on an early expedition.)
University of Missouri computer scientists are sure to anger “neuro-diversity” advocates with this one: Hypothesizing that autistic kids have unique physical features, they will create a roadmap with head size and facial feature measurements for diagnosticians.
The research is being funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.
“Instead of looking at brain structures slice-by-slice in an MRI (magnetic resonance image), we developed tools to create 3-D representations of the structures in order to visualize and make comparisons,” said Kevin Karsch, a research assistant in Ye Duan’s computer graphics lab, in a recent announcement. “Using the 3-D representations, we are comparing the brain structures of autistic children to those of non-autistic children; no one has ever done that.”
Note: FXSmom last year blogged about using facial characteristics to diagnose genetic disorders.
MU Researchers Study Facial Structures, Brain Abnormalities to Reveal Formula for Earlier Detection of Autism | MU News Bureau
The U.S. Department of Defense awarded Duan, in collaboration with researchers at the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, a $110,000 grant to create a facial imaging system that will make identical measurements of the faces of children with ASD. Additionally, the NARSAD Foundation, the world’s leading charity dedicated to mental health research, awarded Duan the prestigious Young Investigator Award and $60,000 to fund 3-D imaging of various segments of the brain in children with ASD. The projects also are supported by a $100,000 contribution from other MU sources and $30,000 in Research Scholar Funds.We are developing a quantitative method that will accurately measure these differences and allow for earlier, more precise detection of specific types of the disorder,” said Ye Duan, assistant computer science professor in the MU College of Engineering. “Once we have created a formula, we can pre-screen children by performing a quick, non-invasive scan of each child’s face and brain to check for abnormalities. Early detection is crucial in treating children and preparing families.”
Terry Schiavo might have heard everything, after all.
Terry Schiavo. Photo: Getty Images
A new brain wave study finds that many people in persistent vegetative states, while unable to express themselves, are reacting internally to what they hear. The U.S. government does not keep track of the number plugs pulled on these patients, who might have been partially conscious, and aware of their fates. — mb
IEEE Spectrum: Brain-wave Test Challenges Vegetative-State Diagnosis
Of the 38 participants considered persistently vegetative, 22 percent responded to semantic errors with an N400wave effect. The group found similar results when testing the ability to discriminate between tones of different pitches. The data suggest that these patients are capable of a higher level of processing than previously thought. Although they cannot interact with their environment, many people with severe brain injuries may still be responding to it internally.
Scientists say they’ve cultivated a brain in the laboratory, which they’ve connected wirelessly to a robot.
The rat neurons, according to New Scientist, process sensor data from the robot’s sensors, and direct the machine to avoid obstacles. — mb
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