Six Diseases You Don’t Want

I’ve had friends and family with diseases like cancer, lupus, bipolar, and diabetes, but I’ve never known anyone with a disease I could laugh at. They say laughter is the best medicine; that’s good news for the sufferers of these diseases.

1) Maple Syrup Urine Disease (MSUD)
To answer your question, yes, your pee does smell like maple syrup. Other symptoms include lethargy, coma, avoiding food, and mental retardation. If left untreated, this disease can kill you and would make for an embarrassing obituary.

This disease is a metabolism disorder that makes the body incapable of breaking down particular proteins. Studies conducted since 1979 (Georgia) show that MSUD affects approximately 1 in every 120,000 live births and occurs in all ethnic groups worldwide. It’s genetic, so if your pee that smells like it could be poured over waffles, get to the hospital—stat!

2) Exploding Head Syndrome
I’m sure many of you get the same mental image I do when reading the name of this disease. It’s actually not that funny of a disease, but I couldn’t resist that name. Well, it’s kinda funny … the sufferer of Exploding Head Syndrome experiences a sudden loud noise in his head, either right before falling asleep or in the middle of sleep. It’s like an explosion (or cymbal crash) in your brain, but there’s no pain involved and no one else hears it (that’s got to be a lonely feeling).

A report by a British physician in 1988 might be the first description of exploding head syndrome. The good news is that doctors emphasize its benign nature—yeah, it’s traumatizing and can feel like a stroke, but it won’t really hurt you. Don’t get too stressed out—anxiety might trigger it, as can extreme fatigue. Also, women get it more than men.

3) Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder
This oddly named disease occurs due to a genetic mutation that prevents “exciting” signals in the nervous system from being regulated. It was first discovered in 1878 in a French-Canadian lumberjack population in the Moosehead Lake area of Maine.

A person with this disorder will startle easily and have an exaggerated response to the stimulus; for example, the person might “jump,” cry out, flail his limbs, twitch, or convulse. Another bonus to this disorder is that the patient has an automatic reflex to obey any order as soon as it’s delivered. If you told a sufferer to hit his brother, he would do so without hesitation. Additionally, he will verbally repeat the command over and over again while wailing on his brother … must hit brother, must hit brother, must hit brother …

One theory about the cause of this disorder is that it was a result of inbreeding. So, like, stop doing your sister. Jeez.

4) Fatal Familial Insomnia (Die Because I Can’t Sleep Disease)
The main symptom of this disease is the inability to sleep, though we’re not talking about a few sleepless nights. This is a complete inability to sleep that results in death. Other symptoms are loss of coordination, high blood pressure, excessive sweating, and coma. The disease does not show symptoms until patients are middle-aged. The best part is that your mind never deteriorates, so you’re perfectly aware of the fact that you’re dying until that coma kicks in. Good times!

FFI is one of a handful of prion-mediated diseases; prions are proteinaceous infectious particles lacking nucleic acid. Prions break all the rules regarding biological life forms and set up camp in the brain, causing holes to form, which speeds up dementia and death. Another prion-mediated disease is Mad Cow. But don’t worry, FFI has occurred in only twenty-eight families worldwide.

5) Koro Syndrome (Shrinking Penis Syndrome)
Koro is just your garden-variety genital retraction syndrome, i.e. the pathological fear that your genitals are shrinking into the body. Literally, it means that a guy fears his unit will be sucked into his body, resulting in death. There are no documented cases of actual penis shrinkage, though some sufferers hurt themselves frantically trying to stretch the penis. Treatment is informing patients that penile retraction is impossible.

GRS is similar to a panic attack, with sexual elaborations. In a culture with high sexual anxiety, a man could panic at the normal shrinkage due to cold or anxiety. Just don’t live anywhere but in the Western Hemisphere; it mostly occurs in Asia and Africa. Also, avoid witchcraft, sexual relations with prostitutes, masturbation, and food poisoning—I know it’s hard, but use some self control.

6) ABCD Disease (Easy As 1-2-3)
ABCD Syndrome is the acronym for albinism, black lock, cell migration disorder of the neurocytes of the gut, and sensorineural deafness. In other words, a person with this disease is a deaf albino with a lock of black hair who suffers from intestinal abnormalities—that’s quite the combination. Does it make anyone else think of Marilyn Manson?

ABCD Disease is extremely rare; there are only about 200,000 cases in the U.S. Just try not to be born to a parent who has a homozygous nonsense mutation in exon 3 (R201X) of the EDNRB gene … oh, and gargle with salt water.

They say that people have a higher likelihood of beating a serious disease if they laugh, so go ahead and get it out—you never know when you might be stricken with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. (Yes, it’s real, look it up!)

[via divinecaroline]

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Plastic from plants

A new biodegradable plastic has been developed from an unlikely source - wheat.

The wheat starch plastic has similar properties to conventional plastic, but it will break down in the compost heap in 40 to 50 days.

As well as being made from a low cost, renewable resource, another advantage of the plastic is that it won't contaminate any food it holds.

Watch the video on how this company CSIRO is doing it here.

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Is Mathematics Discovered or Invented?

For centuries people have debated whether – like scientific truths – mathematics is discoverable, or if it is simply invented by the minds of our great mathematicians. But two questions are raised, one for each side of the coin. For those who believe these mathematical truths are purely discoverable, where, exactly, are you looking? And for those on the other side of the court, why cannot a mathematician simply announce to the world that he has invented 2 + 2 to equal 5.

This question pops to the surface of the math world every so often, like a whale surfacing for air. Most mathematicians will simply set aside this quandary for those from the philosophical realm, and get on with proving theorems.

However, the mathematical whale has surfaced this year, thanks to the European Mathematical Society Newsletter’s June edition, where the question will once again be raised.

If you’re looking for a side to join, then maybe the Platonic theory is your cup of tea. The Classical Greek philosopher Plato was of the view that math was discoverable, and that it is what underlies the very structure of our universe. He believed that by following the intransient inbuilt logic of math, a person would discover the truths independent of human observation and free of the transient nature of physical reality.

“The abstract realm in which a mathematician works is by dint of prolonged intimacy more concrete to him than the chair he happens to sit on,” says Ulf Persson of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, a self-described Platonist.

And while Barry Mazur, a mathematician at Harvard University, doesn’t count himself as a Platonist, he does note that the Platonic view of mathematical discovery fits well with the experience of doing mathematics. The sensation of working on a theorem, he says, can be like being “a hunter and gatherer of mathematical concepts.”

Mazur provides the opposing view as well, asking just where these mathematical hunting grounds are. For if math is out there waiting to be discovered, what once was a purely abstract notion then has to develop an existence unconceived of by humans. Subsequently, Mazur describes the Platonic view as “a full-fledged theistic position.”

Brian Davies, a mathematician at King's College London, writes in his article entitled “Let Platonism Die” that Platonism “has more in common with mystical religions than with modern science.” And modern science, he believes, provides evidence to show that the Platonic view is just plain wrong.

So the question remains; if a mathematical theory goes undiscovered, does it truly exist? Maybe this will be the next “does a tree falling in the forest make any sound if no one is there to hear it?”

[via dailygalaxy]

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Why Things Cost $19.95

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most enduring bits of cinematic comedy is the auction scene in the espionage thriller North by Northwest. Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a businessman who has been mistaken for a CIA agent by the ruthless Phillip Vandamm. At a critical juncture, Thornhill is cornered by his enemies inside a Chicago auction house, and the only way he can escape is by drawing attention to himself. When the bidding on an antique reaches $2,250, Thornhill yells out, “Fifteen hundred!” When the auctioneer gently chides him, he loudly changes his bid: “Twelve hundred!” When the bidding on a Louis XIV chaise longue reaches $1,200, Thornhill blurts outs, “Thirteen dollars!” The genteel crowd is outraged, but Thornhill gets precisely what he wants: the auctioneer summons the police, who “escort” him past Vandamm’s henchmen to safety.

Clever thinking and good comedy. It is funny for a lot of reasons, and one is that Thornhill violates every psychological “rule” for how we negotiate price and value with one another. So much of life involves “auctions,” whether it is buying a used car or making health care choices or even choosing a mate. But, unlike Roger Thornhill, most of us are motivated by the desire for a fair deal, and we employ some sophisticated cognitive tools to weigh offers, fashion responses, and so forth—all the to-and-fro in getting to an agreement.

But how does life’s dickering play out in the brain? And is it a trustworthy tool for getting what we want? Psychologists have been studying cognitive bartering for some time, and several basics are well established. For example, an opening “bid” of any sort is usually perceived as a mental anchor, a starting point for the psychological jockeying to follow. If we perceive an opening bid as fundamentally inaccurate or unfair, we reject it by countering with something in another ballpark altogether. But what about less dramatic counter offers? What makes us settle on a response?

University of Florida marketing professors Chris Janiszewski and Dan Uy suspected that something fundamental might be going on, that some characteristic of the opening bid itself might influence the way the brain thinks about value and shapes bidding behavior. In particular, they wanted to see if the degree of precision of the opening bid might be important to how the brain acts at an auction. Or, to put it in more familiar terms: Are we really fooled when storekeepers price something at $19.95 instead of a round 20 bucks?

Janiszewski and Uy ran a series of tests to explore this idea. The experiments used hypothetical scenarios, in which participants were required to make a variety of “educated guesses.” For example, they had subjects think about a scenario in which they were buying a high-definition plasma TV and asked them to guesstimate the wholesale cost. The participants were told the retail price, plus the fact that the retailer had a reputation for pricing TVs competitively.

There were three scenarios involving different retail prices: one group of buyers was given a price of $5,000, another was given a price of $4,988, and the third was told $5,012. When all the buyers were asked to estimate the wholesale price, those with the $5,000 price tag in their head guessed much lower than those contemplating the more precise retail prices. That is, they moved farther away from the mental anchor. What is more, those who started with the round number as their mental anchor were much more likely to guess a wholesale price that was also in round numbers. The scientists ran this experiment again and again with different scenarios and always got the same result.

Why would this happen? As Janiszewski and Uy explain in the February issue of Psychological Science, people appear to create mental measuring sticks that run in increments away from any opening bid, and the size of the increments depends on the opening bid. That is, if we see a $20 toaster, we might wonder whether it is worth $19 or $18 or $21; we are thinking in round numbers. But if the starting point is $19.95, the mental measuring stick would look different. We might still think it is wrongly priced, but in our minds we are thinking about nickels and dimes instead of dollars, so a fair comeback might be $19.75 or $19.50.

The psychologists decided to check these lab findings in the real world. They looked at five years of real estate sales in Alachua County, Florida, comparing list prices and actual sale prices of homes. They found that sellers who listed their homes more precisely—say $494,500 as opposed to $500,000—consistently got closer to their asking price. Put another way, buyers were less likely to negotiate the price down as far when they encountered a precise asking price. Furthermore, houses listed in round numbers lost more value if they sat on the market for a couple of months. So, bottom line: one way to deal with a buyer’s market may be to pick an exact list price to begin with.

This isn’t all about money, however. Medical information, Janiszew­ski and Uy note, can also be offered in either precise or general terms: a physician might say that your chance of responding to a medication is “good” or that your chance of responding is 80 percent. The percentage is more precise, but many studies have shown that patients prefer vague generalities like “good,” so doctors tend to use them. But remember that life is an auction. In his mind, the patient is dickering with the doctor, so why not negotiate “good” up to “excellent”? When treatment choices are on the line, the auction house can indeed be a perilous place.

[via sciam]

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Cool Ice Carvings

[via funnytogo]

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Imagining the Tenth Dimension

This may be hard for some to follow, but then again it may not.




[via tenthdimension]

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Professional Panhandler: Girl Pretends to be Homeless to Pocket Cash

One word: Kamra Karma. This girl is in for a rude awaking.

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Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago, study says

Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests.

The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday.

The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.

"This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history," said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence.

"Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA."

Wells is director of the Genographic Project, launched in 2005 to study anthropology using genetics. The report was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Studies using mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through mothers, have traced modern humans to a single "mitochondrial Eve," who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

The migrations of humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the world appear to have begun about 60,000 years ago, but little has been known about humans between Eve and that dispersal.

The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa, who appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.

The researchers led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and Tel Aviv University concluded that humans separated into small populations before the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.

Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago, and researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups that developed independently.

Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, asked, "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction?"

Today, more than 6.6 billion people inhabit the globe, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

[via cnn]

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8 Fictional Cities You Wouldn't Want to Live in

Creators of fiction are always coming up with new and exciting places for their characters to dwell in, but not all of them can be utopias. In fact, some are cities and towns that would make you wish you were back in your boring old suburb again. Let's take a look, shall we?

8. Bedrock (The Flintstones)

You know how annoyed you get at your appliances when they don't work right? Now imagine that those appliances could talk and were always making witty remarks to you. Oh and also they are dinosaurs that could tear your flesh from your bones. This sounds like two things: the plot of Jurassic Park 11 (it's inevitable) and a place that I would never take a lease out on. How can you sleep when you know your record player could get a hankering for a midnight snack and fly over to your babies crib with a thirst for infant blood? If mauling by a carnivorous can opener fits into you definition of a "gay old time," then by all means, move into this modern stone age suburb. You're in store for yabba dabba death.

7. New York City (Marvel Comics)

Living in the same town as Spider-Man seems like it would kick ass. You'd get to see superheroes around every corner since about 99% of the thousands of Marvel characters all live in the city. Checking out Avengers Tower and the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building would be awesome. But then things won't seem quite so cool when Doctor Octopus knocks some rubble onto your head from fifty feet above. Or the Juggernaut leaves a giant hole in your house during a jog. And with the amount of comics that Marvel has to put out in a month, you can bet that traffic would be awful. A battle between Dr. Doom and Iron Man is bound to cause delays. Now imagine that going down four times a week.

6. Duckburg (Ducktales)

Duckburg wouldn't be a terrible place to live, until you realize what a terrorist and criminal target it is. When you have a resident like Scrooge McDuck who hoards millions of dollars in unmarked currency in a giant swimming pool, it's just an invitation for repeated attacks on the town and an influx of criminals. Not to mention the occasional crazy witch after his lucky penny and caveman brought back through time to cause a ruckus. And although Scrooge acts like a Republican, he sure doesn't employ Reaganomics and the idea of a "trickle down" economy to boost the local market. He keeps it all locked away for his own perverse enjoyment as he swims through it, never truly repaying his town for the chaos he brings upon them.

5. Zion (The Matrix)

I know this goes against the message of the movies and all, but if this turns out to be the Matrix and any freedom fighters are listening, please, leave me plugged in. After witnessing the dirty existence of the small, rag-clad community that dares to stand up to the robots, I'd really rather live a computer simulated existence that has things like restaurants and entertainment in it. The highlight of a Zionist's existence is apparently a rave, which really isn't much is a payoff for living in constant fear of weird sperm looking robots drilling into your home at any time. Sure, if you stay in the Matrix there's a chance that an Agent might decide to overtake your body and wipe you out of existence, but what's the likelihood of that happening? Don't touch that plug Morpheus.

4. The Ewok Village (Star Wars)

Any society that is eager to worship C-3P0 as a god is a troubled one at best. And despite how adorable they may be, let's not forget how Luke and the gang first ended up in their little village: they were going to eat them! If you stumble into this Endorian metropolis without a Jedi to sufficiently scare them, you're dinner. This is in addition to a constant fear of falling to your death from their tree-top homes and subjection to conversations that consist only of "yub-yub."

3. Liberty City (Grand Theft Auto 3)

Anyone who played Grand Theft Auto 3 might already feel as though Liberty City is a second home, but no matter how fun the game is, you have to realize how terrifying it would be to live in. Life might not be so fun-filled in LC when you don't have the health cheat to fall back on and it's someone else running you over with an ambulance and then throwing Molotov cocktails on top of you. Plus, with mottos like "The worst place in America" and "Where dreams go to die" there's not much that can be said to defend a place. Unless you're into killing hookers. Then look no farther.

2. The Floating Village (Waterworld)

The fact that dirt and orange trees were worth more than gold and silver on this place is enough to never want to live there, but you also have to take into account that if you get sick of this place there's really nowhere to run off to. It's just endless water all around. Imagine being stuck on a little village in the middle of the ocean with your neighbors for forever. Not a fate I would want to befall me. And the worst part? You'd be stuck in a really terrible movie.

1. Smurf Village (The Smurfs)



Sure, living in mushroom houses with a bunch of peace loving communist Smurfs sounds like a good existence. That is until you've been there for five minutes and begin to notice that every other word is replaced by "smurf." Verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs; they have no rules when it comes to smurf. They can use it for anything at anytime, leaving you at first simply confused and later driving you to madness. You'll want to smurf every smurfing smurf that smurfs your way. Also there's only one girl in the entire place.

[via omglist]

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Live Grenade Removed From Soldiers Leg

Operations don't come any tricker than this. A surgeon in Colombia has removed a live grenade from a soldier's leg. It had been lodged there for four hours and could have exploded at any time.

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PETA Announces $1 Million Prize for Fake Meat

PETA wants vat meat researchers to pick up the pace, and they’re pledging $1 million to the first research team that can come up with competitively priced fake meat by 2012. It appears this schedule might be too ambitious for researchers to meet, but in any case it’s only going to spur greater interest in the field. Amazingly, there was heated debate at PETA about offering the prize — I’m glad common sense prevailed. The moment vat meat comes online at affordable prices, animal agriculture’s future will be bleak.

[via nytimes]

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How Shoes Are Ruining the Human Foot

It took four million years of evolution to perfect the human foot. But we're recking it with every step we take.

Walking is easy. It’s so easy that no one ever has to teach you how to do it. It’s so easy, in fact, that we often pair it with other easy activities—talking, chewing gum—and suggest that if you can’t do both simultaneously, you’re some sort of insensate clod. So you probably think you’ve got this walking thing pretty much nailed. As you stroll around the city, worrying about the economy, or the environment, or your next month’s rent, you might assume that the one thing you don’t need to worry about is the way in which you’re strolling around the city.

Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: You walk wrong.

Look, it’s not your fault. It’s your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don’t just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet—your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet—are getting trounced in a war that’s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, when commenting on his findings, lamented that the American Podiatric Medical Association does not “actively encourage outdoor barefoot walking for healthy individuals. This flies in the face of the increasing scientific evidence, including our study, that most of the commercially available footwear is not good for the feet.”

Okay, so shoes can be less than comfortable. If you’ve ever suffered through a wedding in four-inch heels or patent-leather dress shoes, you’ve probably figured this out. But does that really mean we don’t walk correctly? (Yes.) I mean, don’t we instinctively know how to walk? (Yes, sort of.) Isn’t walking totally natural? Yes—but shoes aren’t.

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

Perhaps this sounds to you like scientific gobbledygook or the ravings of some radical back-to-nature nuts. In that case, you should listen to Galahad Clark. Clark is 32 years old, lives in London, and is about as unlikely an advocate for getting rid of your shoes as you could find. For one, he’s a scion of the Clark family, as in the English shoe company C&J Clark, a.k.a. Clarks, founded in 1825. Two, he currently runs his own shoe company. So it’s a bit surprising when he says, “Shoes are the problem. No matter what type of shoe. Shoes are bad for you.”

This is especially grim news for New Yorkers, who (a) tend to walk a lot, and (b) tend to wear shoes while doing so.

I know what you’re thinking: If shoes are so bad for me, what’s my alternative?

Simple. Walk barefoot.

Okay, now I know what you’re thinking: What’s my other alternative?

Galahad Clark never intended to get into the shoe business, let alone the anti-shoe business. And he likely never would have, if it weren’t for the Wu-Tang Clan. Clark went to the University of North Carolina, where he studied Chinese and anthropology. He started listening to the Wu-Tang, the Staten Island rap collective with a fetish for martial-arts films and, oddly, Wallabee shoes. As it happens, Clark’s father had invented the Wallabee shoe. “I figured this was my chance to go hang out with them,” Clark says. “One thing led to another, and we developed a line of shoes together. That’s what sucked me back into the industry.”

After college, Clark returned to England, where he started working with Terra Plana, a company devoted to ecologically responsible shoes, and started United Nude, a high-design shoe brand, with the architect Rem D. Koolhaas. Then, in 2000, Clark was approached by Tim Brennan, a young industrial-design student at the Royal College of Art. Brennan was an avid tennis player who suffered from chronic knee and ankle injuries. His father taught the Alexander Technique, a discipline that studies the links between kinetics and behavior; basically, the connection between how we move and how we act. Brennan’s father encouraged Tim to try playing tennis barefoot. Tim was skeptical at first, but tried it, and found that his injuries disappeared. So he set out to design a shoe that was barely a shoe at all: no padding, no arch support, no heel. His prototype consisted of a thin fabric upper with a microthin latex-rubber sole. It wasn’t exactly a new idea. It was a modern update of the 600-year-old moccasin.

Brennan brought his shoe to Clark...Story Continues here...

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Surgeons give hope to blind with successful 'bionic eye' operations

Surgeons have carried out the first operations in Britain using a pioneering “bionic eye” that could in future help to restore blind people’s sight.

Two successful operations to implant the device into the eyes of two blind patients have been conducted at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.

The device — the first of its kind — incorporates a video camera and transmitter mounted on a pair of glasses. This is linked to an artificial retina, which transmits moving images along the optic nerve to the brain and enables the patient to discriminate rudimentary images of motion, light and dark.

The operations were conducted as part of an international clinical trial of the technology, known as the Argus II retinal implant, which has already proved successful in restoring rudimentary vision to patients who have become blind because of common conditions such as age-related macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa.

American researchers are hoping to develop a camera the size of a pea that could be implanted within the eyeball, replacing natural tissue with artificial technology.

Surgeons hope that the implant could be available to NHS patients within three to five years.

The Argus II uses a video camera to capture images. These are converted into electrical signals, which are transmitted wirelessly to the implant behind the retina. The electrodes in the implant unscramble the signal to create a crude black-and-white picture that is relayed along the optic nerve to the brain. The brain can then perceive patterns of light and dark spots corresponding to the electrodes stimulated.

Mark Humayun, Professor of Ophthalmology and Biomedical Engineering at the Doheny Eye Institute in Los Angeles, California, which developed the technology, said: “The camera is very, very small, and very low power, so it can go inside your eye and couple your eye movement to where the camera is. With the kind of missing information the brain can fill in, this field is really blossoming. In the next four to five years I hope, and we all hope, that we see technology that’s much more advanced.”

Linda Moorfoot is one of a few American patients to be fitted with the current version of the implant. She had been totally blind for more than a decade with the inherited condition retinitis pigmentosa. With the aid of the camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses, she can now see a rough image of the world made up of light and dark blocks. She told Sky News: “When I go to the grandkids’ hockey game or soccer game I can see which direction the game is moving in. I can shoot baskets with my grandson, and I can see my granddaughter dancing across the stage. It’s wonderful.”

Ms Moorfoot’s implant has just 16 electrodes but the US surgeons have helped to fit a more advanced device, with 60 electrodes, to the two British patients to give clearer images. In California, scientists are developing an implant with 1,000 electrodes, which should allow facial recognition.

The identities of the British patients have been concealed while doctors monitor their progress.

Lyndon da Cruz, the consultant retinal surgeon who carried out the operations with his team, said: “Moorfields is proud to have been one of only three sites in Europe chosen to be part of evolving this exciting technology. The devices were implanted successfully in both patients and they are recovering well from the operations.

“It is very special to be part of a programme developing a totally new type of treatment for patients who would otherwise have no chance of visual improvement.”

John Marshall, of St Thomas’ Hospital in London, and the British Retinitis Pigmentosa Society, gave warning that it was still “very early days” for the technology.

He said: “It is very, very good news that devices have been developed. It is very good news that in experimental trials some individuals have had these inserted. However, the general public should not run away with the idea that this is going to be routine surgery for blind people in the immediate future because there is an enormous amount to learn.”

[via timesonline]

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Excuse Me, Do You Know Who I Am?

Damn it! Why didn't I ever think of this!

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Golden Eagle Throws Goat off Cliff

Wow, this is crazy! The commentary for this video is in Spanish, but it doesn't matter. Just watch the video...

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This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours

A German company has introduced a disposable DVD that can be viewed for 48 hours, then thrown away. The DVDs will sell for just €3.99 ($6.44 /£3.20).

So, it's about the same price as a new video rental in Europe - and it used to be about the same price as in the US, before the Mighty Dollar shrank into the Pygmy Dollar. But there are no late fees and no need to pop the disk in the post or return to the store. This opens up DVD distribution possibilities for new premium-priced movie releases - in petrol stations, convenience stores, coffee shops and the like, as well as online retailers - as there is no longer the need to book the DVDs back in. That's the idea. Will it work?

DVD-D Germany Ltd's 'Einmal' (German for 'once') - discs incorporate a self-destruct chemical coating to render them unreadable after a pre-set time. The process begins as soon as the discs are removed from vacuum-sealed packaging. After 48 hours (or longer, depending on the price) the DVD gives a 'No disc' error when put into a DVD player or PC. There appears to be no DRM (digital rights management), so you could copy the disks, if you're quick enough.

Self-destruct DVDs are not a new idea. In 2003 Flexplay, an Atlanta, Georgia technology company, introduced disposable DVDs using its own self-destruct technology, dubbed ED-D. This was met with fierce criticism from environmental groups, who slammed the notion of throwaway DVDs.

But Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Flexplay's content partner at the time, had a recycling program in place when it launched the initial test. Polycarbonate, Flexplay argues, is a fully recyclable plastic and the proprietary chemical and technology used in the limited play DVD conforms to US Environmental Protection Agency standards.

Flexplay stills offers disposable DVDs in the US - new releases include Beowulf - but its products seem pretty low-profile. We could find no evidence of time-limited DVDs for sale today on Amazon.com, for example. Point us in the right direction, if you can see them.

DVD-D Germany Ltd has high hopes for its home country market. Disposable DVDs have already been successfully introduced in France, Italy and Scandinavia, it says. Others believe the concept is dead in the water, as on-demand online rentals will kill movie DVDs, of whatever hue, soon enough.

[via theregister.co.uk]

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Killer Biscuits Wanted for Attempted Murder

Wow, this takes the blonde joke stigma to a whole new level!

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Unusual ebay feedback

POSITIVE: Item shipped quickly, have been having erotic dreams about seller. Thanks!

POSITIVE: Thanks for great Rainbow Brite lunchbox. Should shrunken head be inside?

NEUTRAL: Excellent communication, but should've poked holes in box before shipping the kitten. Refunded.

NEGATIVE: Despite indication in listing, I could not fit item into any of my body cavities.

NEGATIVE: Honda R-Type sticker did not add horsepower as advertised.

NEUTRAL: Item shipped promptly and in good condition, but I should not have to bid on birthday presents from my parents.

POSITIVE: I don't really remember what I ordered. But I've been sitting in the box it came in all day, and it's great!

NEGATIVE: Product didn't work, possibly broken. I woke up this morning and was disappointed to find I still believe in Jesus Christ our Savior. :(

POSITIVE: Excellent Buyer. A++++++. Thrilled by the quartz movement of the "Rolex". HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

NEGATIVE: Should have been clearer that seller only accepts payment in Bhats via Eastern Union Moneygram.

POSITIVE: Plain brown packaging seemed to fool my wife. Thanks!

NEGATIVE: The dog won't hunt.

NEGATIVE: Very nice monkey mascot costume, but it's a size 34, not a 63 as advertised.

NEGATIVE: Lederhosen not as pink as the picture led me to believe.

POSITIVE: A+++++. Items are exactly as described. Best case of kalashnikovs I've ever bought. Allah Akbar!

NEGATIVE: This is clearly the ninth, NOT THE SIXTH, repackaging of Mad Super Special #24.

POSITIVE: One of the scents mixed in with the packing peanuts remind me of a passionate weekend in Rio... was that you?

POSITIVE: The way you wrote my zip-code makes me weak in the knees. Such smooth strokes. A+!

NEGATIVE: Though you did nothing wrong, I am giving you this negative feedback to teach you that the universe is arbitrary and unfair.

NEGATIVE: Buying this Space 1999 Lunchbox did not fill the void in my empty life for as long as I'd hoped.

[via capnwacky]

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Florida woman survives gunshot between the eyes

Emergency room doctors apologized to the 42-year-old woman who had come in for treatment for staring at her in disbelief. It wasn’t every day — in fact, it was never — that they saw somebody with a large-caliber gunshot wound between the eyes who not only was alive, but wasn’t even unconscious or seriously injured.

Call it Marie’s Miracle. As reported for TODAY by NBC’s Martin Savidge, it happened late last Saturday night, when Marie, who does not want to reveal her last name for fear of retaliation, her boyfriend and her 22-year-old daughter were driving through Tampa on their way home to Riverview, Fla., after a night out.

“We had a nice night out to the movies, got something to eat, were just rolling down the road,” she said.

As they were driving on 50th Street in Tampa, a white Nissan Sentra with two people inside and a gray Nissan Altima carrying four people pulled up alongside the truck in which the trio were driving. When they stopped at a traffic light, the occupants of the two cars started yelling at them, shouting obscenities and gesturing with their hands. Then a man got out of the Sentra and another left the Altima and started yelling at Marie’s boyfriend, who had rolled down his window to find out what the problem was.

The light turned green, the men got back into their cars, and all three vehicles continued on their way. There are three lanes of traffic in each direction on the street, and the two cars got on either side of the truck.

“They were shifting lanes, and trying to box us in and trying to run into the side of the truck,” Marie said. They also continued yelling obscenities, and one man in the Sentra looked at Marie and told her he was going to kill her.

At the next light, the driver of the Sentra attempted to pay off on his promise. Horrified, Marie saw him stand up on the seat and rise through the car’s open sunroof.

“I seen him rise out of the sunroof like in the movies, and he pulled his gun up and turned it and I heard it fire,” she said.

The two cars sped away, and police are still attempting to track down the assailants.

Police investigators would theorize that the man fired three shots from a gun that they believe was a .44-caliber handgun. One of the bullets struck Marie directly between the eyes.

It should have killed her. Instead, the bullet shattered into three pieces against her skull. The fragments ran under her skin, exited through her cheek on one side of her head and near her ear on the other.

At first, she didn’t know she’d been hit. Then she realized blood was pouring from her head.

“I thought I was gonna, was gonna die, but I stayed conscious,” she said.

Her boyfriend pulled into a convenience store parking lot while her daughter called 911. An EMS crew quickly arrived to transport her to Tampa General Hospital, where Dr. Brad Peckler was one of the first to see her.

“I saw her being wheeled in, and was a little surprised that she was just sitting up and talking,” Peckler said.

When she was examined, doctors determined that all she needed was some stitches. When they were done sewing her up, they sent her on her way. She walked out of the hospital.

Said her boyfriend, “I was able to walk her out of the ER and tell her she should buy a lottery ticket.”

[via msnbc.msn]

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Water Balloon Exploding at 2,000 Frames per Second

This is pretty sweet. The water from the balloon actually holds it shape for x amount of time after the plastic skin from the balloon is gone.

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Cure for acne found, say scientists

Scientists believe they have found a breakthrough treatment for acne.

They claim that the drug, SMT D002, can reduce the flow of sebum - an oily substance produced by the skin and believed to be a significant cause - by 90 per cent.

At present, the drug is in pill form and is used to treat a condition other than acne but a pharmaceutical company plans to turn it into a cream for easier use.

Researchers believe it could become as effective a treatment as retinoic acid - a form of vitamin A - which is currently used to treat moderate to severe cases.

However, Roaccutane, the most widely used formulation of retinoic acid, has been linked to suicides among acne sufferers.

SMT D002 produced no significant side-effects when volunteers took it in pill form. Around three in every 10 patients taking retinoic acid do not respond to the drug, leaving many sufferers without an effective treatment.

Richard Pye, of Summit Corporation, based in Oxford, said the company was turning the drug into a cream because it was likely to work more quickly.

For commercial reasons Summit would not reveal the name of the existing drug form that they are developing their new acne treatment.

Richard Storer, the company's chief scientist, said: "It is a major drug, but we cannot reveal its name or the condition it currently treats."

[via telegraph.co.uk]

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World Population to Hit 6,666,666,666 in May

To many people, this means nothing. But of course 666 refers to the Beast in the Bible. Heaven knows what ten sixes means.

I don’t know who first noticed this looming numerical curiosity, but it was mentioned today on the Drudge report. To see the projection, go to the U.S. Census Bureau’s World POPClock Projection page. There you’ll find these projections among others:

05/01/08 6,664,737,085
06/01/08 6,671,275,141

So sometime in between May 1 and June 1, the gaggle-of-sixes milestone will be passed. (I say gaggle rather than googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. I could also have used a gazillion or a jillion or a bazillion, all of which are just figures of speech meaning “a lot.” Clearly, the number of people on Earth is a lot more than umpteen.)

The Census Bureau of course never knows exactly how many people are on the planet, or even in the United States for that matter. It’s all estimates. Just fun.

The last big “six scare” was 06/06/06 (June 6, 2006). We survived that, so I imagine we’ll get through this one.

(For the record, 07/07/07 came and went last year without any documented cases of extreme luck directly attributed to the date, and coming up later this year: 08/08/08.)

[via livescience]

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Yet another reason Comcast is Evil

Ask Comcast Tech guy to move his van, mysteriously loose signal...

Consumerist Reader Daniel lives in San Francisco, where parking is notoriously impossible. He came home one morning to find a Comcast van blocking his drive way, and politely asked the driver to move. Ten minutes later he lost his internet and TV signal. Mysterious coincidence, or malevolent tech? Check out the details below, via his email to consumerist...

So up until this moment, I had no issues with Comcast (other than occasionally having to switch out my cablecards). This morning around 8am, I was returning home from the gym and there was a Comcast truck blocking my garage. I was very polite (no horn or anything) and asked him to please move his truck so I can get into my garage. He said something about it being a 1 lane-1 way street and he couldn't park anywhere else. I told him that he can't park in front of my garage, so he moved.

About 10 minutes later I mysteriously lose both my internet and TV signals. I call Comcast who tells me they show no trouble on their end so it must be my equipment. They can have a tech out tomorrow. Unfortunately, I do not have another day off until next Monday. She suggested I go purchase a new Cable Modem and get replacement cable cards. I do just that. I own the cable modem, so I purchase a new one for $80.00 and stop by Comcast in Potrero Hill to get a new cable card.

I get home and install them, call Comcast to fix the issue and of course, they don't work either.

I call Executive Customer Service and explain the situation - some Comcast guy was mad that I asked him to move, so he cut my cable line. I'm not off until next Monday (6 days from now), I explained. She said, "I'll call you back in 15 minutes". It's now 4 hours later, she has not returned my call, so I call her back, she's gone for the day.

I call Comcast Service Center again, now they're telling me I cannot have a tech until Friday.

I am totally shocked at how poorly this company treats it's long time customers! I've been with them for almost 12 years and I'm subscribed to their highest level of cable programming and the new Blast internet service so I spend around $180.00 a month. Now I understand what all of the bad publicity is about.

If it's not fixed by 5:00pm, I'm canceling Comcast and switching to Dish Network and AT&T DSL.

The irony of the situation is, Comcast just called and asked me to sign up for their digital voice service. YEAH RIGHT!

Daniel
San Francisco, CA

[via consumerist]

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Look, no scars: organs removed via the mouth

THE minister charged with overhauling the NHS is testing a new form of scar-free surgery in which diseased organs are pulled out through the patient’s throat.

Professor Lord Darzi, chair of surgery at Imperial College London, has conducted preliminary experiments with the technique in which robotically controlled instruments are lowered into the patient’s stomach.

A hole is made in the lining of the stomach, then the organ - usually an appendix or gall bladder - is cut out and pulled up through the throat before the hole is stitched, leaving the patient with no external scars and a reduced risk of infection because the wounds are not exposed to the air.

The technique, called natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery, has been successfully used on patients in America, France and India. Darzi, who became a health minister last year, is one of the first surgeons in Britain to use the technique in experiments on pigs, before the first human tests.

While admitting it was still “early days”, Darzi believes the probe could eventually be used to remove cancers.

The main after-effects include a sore throat and an unpleasant taste in the mouth from having a diseased organ pulled through it.

Other orifices could be used but Darzi said he believed the mouth was the most promising. He said some aspects of the procedure needed perfecting.

“If we are going to enter through the stomach we need to develop the appropriate tools to make sure we can close the hole properly,” he said.

Darzi’s team are developing a new surgical robot called the iSnake, which they hope will assist in the new procedure and in keyhole surgery.

Other research projects on the new procedure are under way at hospitals around Britain. The first operations on patients in Britain are expected in three to four years.

[via timesonline]

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Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them

You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.

In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.

The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?

"Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.

Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. Later studies supported Libet's theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice -- but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes' study has.

In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes' team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine.

Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand -- a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis of other brain functions.

Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will. For instance, the experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions.

"Real-life decisions -- am I going to buy this house or that one, take this job or that -- aren't decisions that we can implement very well in our brain scanners," said Haynes.

Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision.

"We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point," said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. "But I don't think it's plausible."

That implausibility doesn't disturb Haynes.

"It's not like you're a machine. Your brain activity is the physiological substance in which your personality and wishes and desires operate," he said.

The unease people feel at the potential unreality of free will, said National Institutes of Health neuroscientist Mark Hallett, originates in a misconception of self as separate from the brain.

"That's the same notion as the mind being separate from the body -- and I don't think anyone really believes that," said Hallett. "A different way of thinking about it is that your consciousness is only aware of some of the things your brain is doing."

Hallett doubts that free will exists as a separate, independent force.

"If it is, we haven't put our finger on it," he said. "But we're happy to keep looking."

[via wired]

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eyePhone - Tourist information wherever you are

Would you like instant access to information on the buildings and scenery you see on your travels? A novel mobile phone programme, able to provide information on what you see when you see it, was a regional winner in the European Satellite Navigation Competition, sponsored by ESA's Technology Transfer Programme.



This novel use of satellite technology, created by Ernst Pechtl and Hans Geiger, combines three of today's modern technologies: satellite navigation localisation services, advanced object recognition and relevant internet retrieved information.

Ernst Pechtl, and Hans Geiger are co-owners of the company SuperWise Technologies AG, which has developed the Apollo image-recognition system that lies behind the eye-Phone.

How does it work? If you see something interesting while out walking for instance, you take a photograph with your mobile phone, select the item of interest with the cursor and in real time preprocessed information on the object selected is sent to your mobile phone.

"It could be a building, a mountain, a tree, plant or a special event such as a local festival,” explain Pechtl. “The amount of information you receive depends on you, if you want to know more you just click the 'more button' and you trigger a more detailed search responding to your profile of interest. Applications include tourism, education, remote healthcare, security, science, etc."

Regional winner in European Satellite Navigation Competition

The eye-Phone won the regional prize for Bavaria, Germany in the 2007 European Satellite Navigation Competition. This competition, also known as the Galileo Masters, is sponsored by ESA Technology Transfer Programme (TTP) to encourage the innovative use of satellite navigation systems to develop new products and services.

eye-Phone on cellular phone

"The eye-Phone is a good illustration of the potential of satellite navigation systems when their positioning information is combined with other communication and information technology. With the improved accuracy of the European Galileo system in comparison to existing systems, the prospects will be amazing," says Frank M. Salzgeber, head of ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme Office. "Galileo can create new businesses in Europe and strengthen Europe’s competitiveness in space spin-offs."

The system has been developed using Apollo technology, an innovative artificial intelligence system. "It's a unique piece of software that can carry out object recognition within images, a very tricky task. It is self-learning and after a short and very simple training session it can identify any object in the world," says Pechtl.

Apollo technology can identify objects in a digital image regardless of the angle from which it is taken, the lighting conditions or quality of the image. To support object recognition, it uses navigation positioning information.

It uses also an ‘angle-sensor’, a new function now being introduced in digital cameras that identifies the angle from which an image is taken and the direction in which the camera is pointing. Once the object in the picture is recognised the system can then interface to any database on the internet to select user-specific information on the object selected.

"The key to the eye-Phone system is the object recognition done by the Apollo software. Nothing in the world is able to do what our software does," says Pechtl.


Concept proved – prototype on the way

SuperWise Technologies plans to team up with mobile phone operators who would provide the eye-Phone functionality as an additional function for subscription. It will be partly located on the phone and partly in a central processing system of a cooperating image archives.

“The Apollo software is basically ready, and there is already one camera available with what we need: GPS, angle-sensor and on-board processing power. All we have to do is to integrate our system with the camera, i.e. load our software on the camera chip, to have a prototype ready and working."

A prototype should be ready during the mid of 2008, then Pechtl expects that it will take another 12 to 18 months to work out deals with mobile phone operators, find partners and negotiate agreements with database information providers, before the eye-Phone functionality can be offered to mobile phone users.

If all goes according to plan, mobile phones could soon provide a mobile tourist guide.


[via esa]

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Total Recall

How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain if that chip would double the capacity of your short-term memory? Or guarantee that you would never again forget a face or a name?

There’s good reason to consider such offers. Although our memories are sometimes spectacular — we are very good at recognizing photos, for example — our memory capacities are often disappointing. Faulty memories have been known to lead to erroneous eyewitness testimony (and false imprisonment), to marital friction (in the form of overlooked anniversaries) and even death (sky divers have been known to forget to pull their ripcords — accounting, by one estimate, for approximately 6 percent of sky-diving fatalities). The dubious dynamics of memory leave us vulnerable to the predations of spin doctors (because a phrase like “death tax” automatically brings to mind a different set of associations than “estate tax”), the pitfalls of stereotyping (in which easily accessible memories wash out less common counterexamples) and what the psychologist Timothy Wilson calls “mental contamination.” To the extent that we frequently can’t separate relevant information from irrelevant information, memory is often the culprit.

All this becomes even more poignant when you compare our memories to those of the average laptop. Whereas it takes the average human child weeks or even months or years to memorize something as simple as a multiplication table, any modern computer can memorize any table in an instant — and never forget it. Why can’t we do the same?

Much of the difference lies in the basic organization of memory. Computers organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations, with each bit stored in a specific place according to some sort of master map, but we have no idea where anything in our brains is stored. We retrieve information not by knowing where it is but by using cues or clues that hint at what we are looking for.

In the best-case situation, this process works well: the particular memory we need just “pops” into our minds, automatically and effortlessly. The catch, however, is that our memories can easily get confused, especially when a given set of cues points to more than one memory. What we remember at any given moment depends heavily on the accidents of which bits of mental flotsam and jetsam happen to be active at that instant. Our mood, our environment, even our posture can all influence our delicate memories. To take but one example, studies suggest that if you learn a word while you happen to be slouching, you’ll be better able to remember that word at a later time if you are slouching than if you happen to be standing upright.

And it’s not just humans. Cue-driven memory with all its idiosyncrasies has been found in just about every creature ever studied, from snails to flies, spiders, rats and monkeys. As a product of evolution, it is what engineers might call a kluge, a system that is clumsy and inelegant but a lot better than nothing.

If we dared, could we use the resources of modern science to improve human memory? Quite possibly, yes. A team of Toronto researchers, for example, has shown how a technique known as deep-brain stimulation can make small but measurable improvements by using electrical stimulation to drive the cue-driven circuits we already have.

But techniques like that can only take us so far. They can make memories more accessible but not necessarily more reliable, and the improvements are most likely to be only incremental. Making our memories both more accessible and more reliable would require something else, perhaps a system modeled on Google, which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability of computers.

However difficult the practicalities, there’s no reason in principle why a future generation of neural prostheticists couldn’t pick up where nature left off, incorporating Google-like master maps into neural implants. This in turn would allow us to search our own memories — not just those on the Web — with something like the efficiency and reliability of a computer search engine.

Would this turn us into computers? Not at all. A neural implant equipped with a master memory map wouldn’t impair our capacity to think, or to feel, to love or to laugh; it wouldn’t change the nature of what we chose to remember; and it wouldn’t necessarily even expand the sheer size of our memory banks. But then again our problem has never been how much information we could store in our memories; it’s always been in getting that information back out — which is precisely where taking a clue from computer memory could help.

Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, is the author of “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.”

[via nytimes]

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Scientists Flesh Out Plans to Grow (and Sell) Test Tube Meat

I think I am going to be sick....

In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.

According to a new economic analysis (.pdf) presented at this week's In Vitro Meat Symposium in Ås, Norway, meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors would cost between $5,200-$5,500 a ton (3,300 to 3,500 euros), which the analysis claims is cost competitive with European beef prices.

With a rising global middle class projected by the UN to double meat consumption (.pdf) by 2050, and livestock already responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, the symposium is drawing a variety of scientists, environmentalists and food industry experts.

"We're looking to see if there are other technologies which can produce food for all the people on the planet," said Anthony Bennett of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. "Not only today but over the next 10, 20, 30 years."

Rapidly evolving technology and increasing concern about the environmental impact of meat production are signs that vat-grown meat is moving from scientific curiosity to consumer option. In vitro meat production is a specialized form of tissue engineering, a biomedical practice in which scientists try to grow animal tissues like bone, skin, kidneys and hearts. Proponents say it will ultimately be a more efficient way to make animal meat, which would reduce the carbon footprint of meat products.

"To produce the meat we eat now, 75 to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue," Jason Matheny, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and co-founder of New Harvest, a nonprofit that promotes research on in vitro meat, told Wired.com. "With cultured meat, there's no body to support; you're only building the meat that eventually gets eaten."

Researchers can currently grow small amounts of meat in the lab, and have even been able to get heart cells to beat in Petri dishes. Growing muscle cells on an industrial scale is the next step, scientists say.

"That's the goal and it seems pretty clear from this conference that it's achievable," said Matheny on Thursday by telephone from the symposium.

Scientists are working on a variety of cell culture procedures. The cutting edge of in vitro meat engineering is the attempt to get cells to grow as if they were inside a living animal. Meat like steak is a complex combination of muscle, fat and other connective tissue. Reproducing the complexity of muscle is proving difficult.

"An actual whole muscle organ is not technically impossible," said Bob Dennis, a biomedical engineer at both North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina, who attended the conference. "But of all the tissue engineering applications it is by far the most difficult one."

While scientists are struggling to recreate filet mignon, they anticipate less trouble growing hamburger.

"The general consensus is that minced meat or ground meat products -- sausage, chicken nuggets, hamburgers -- those are within technical reach," Matheny said. "We have the technology to make those things at scale with existing technology."

At scale, in this case, would be thousands of tons per year, Dennis said.

But once the meat is made, consumer acceptance is far from assured. What cultured meat will taste like is up in the air. Some scientists think it could be used to create novel foods that won't be quite meat, but won't quite be anything else either.

"I was once at a conference of food designers and they really liked the idea that they were not bound to a certain product that we know," said Stig Omholt, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and chairman of the In Vitro Meat Consortium. "We could make novel products."

But most of the trends in food run counter to high-tech meat production. Heirloom tomatoes, organic produce and free-range-raised meat that pack the aisles of Whole Foods harken to previous, lower-tech eras.

None of the experts were sure if there is a large market of early adopters who want to eat test tube meat for environmental, health or ethical reasons.

For all the talk of high-tech meat production, attendees of the first In-Vitro Meat Symposium didn't put their stomachs where their mouths were. Instead of sampling early versions of in vitro meat, they stuck to local fare.

"We had some excellent Norwegian salmon, which was very tasty," Bennett said.

[via wired]

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