GAUTAM NAIK, - Wall Street Journal
Stephan: This is excellent news. I have been covering this trend for about eight years now, and am heartened by its growing success. This trend will eliminate the rejection issues transplant patients now face, and will allow people who are profoundly disfigured, or who would otherwise die, to survive. It will also eliminate the grey world of body parts suppliers.
MADRID — Reaching into a stainless steel tray, Francisco Fernandez-Aviles lifted up a gray, rubbery mass the size of a fat fist.
It was a human cadaver heart that had been bathed in industrial detergents until its original cells had been washed away and all that was left was what scientists call the scaffold.
Next, said Dr. Aviles, ‘We need to make the heart come alive.’
Inside a warren of rooms buried in the basement of Gregorio Marañón hospital here, Dr. Aviles and his team are at the sharpest edge of the bioengineering revolution that has turned the science-fiction dream of building replacement parts for the human body into a reality.
Since a laboratory in North Carolina made a bladder in 1996, scientists have built increasingly more complex organs. There have been five windpipe replacements so far. A London researcher, Alex Seifalian, has transplanted lab-grown tear ducts and an artery into patients. He has made an artificial nose he expects to transplant later this year in a man who lost his nose to skin cancer.
‘The work has been extraordinarily pioneering,’ said Sir Roy Calne, an 82-year-old British surgeon who figured out in the 1950s how to use drugs to prevent the body from rejecting […]
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ERIC W. DOLAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is some wonderful good news; it offers an alternative to the chemical and poison driven agriculture model that dominates our world now. It also offers an answer to the vast youth unemployment problem we have in our inner cities, as well as eliminating a great deal of pollution arising from trucking food across the country. It is not an entire solution to the poison model, of course, but it could go a long way towards ameliorating the toxic web in which we are now trapped.
The article has one major flaw: it's assessment of costs, does not include any of what I have mentioned above and, therefore should be disregarded as a criticism.
Click through and look at the video, and listen to these young people talk about what they are doing.
An formerly abandoned warehouse in Chicago is now home to the nation’s largest hydroponic vertical farm.
FarmedHere LLC opened the 90,000-square-foot farm in Bedford Park on Friday. The facility utilizes aquaponics, a sustainable system that combines raising fish with growing soil-free plants.
‘The tilapia fertilize our plants. Their primary job is eat, produce waste. The plants are able to soak it up. The plants clean the water for the fish and it comes back to the tanks,
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IGOR VOLSKY, - Think Progress
Stephan: Who would have thought we must fear an Iranian invasion? There is a level of craziness in the Theocratic Right that simply beggars the mind. Here is an example of it that I came across today. You can't parody this stuff, because it is beyond parody.
Click through to see the actual video of this conversation.
During a roundtable discussion on Friday, Fox News’ Lou Dobbs agreed with a network contributor who argued that Americans need to access military-style assault weapons to protect themselves from an Iranian invasion.
‘What scares the hell out of me we have a president, as we were discussing during break, that wants to take away our guns, but yet he wants to attack Iran and Syria. So if they come and attack us here, we don’t have the right to bear arms under this Obama administration,
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JOERG DREWEKE, - Guttmacher Institute
Stephan: The true damage being done by the Theocratic Right's drive to limit access to contraception is revealed by this report. As it shows, at every level letting women control their own bodies is good policy.
Empowering Women to Time and Space Childbearing Is Linked to a Wide Range of Positive Outcomes-But Not All Women Benefit Equally
The ability to delay and space childbearing is crucial to women’s societal and economic advancement, according to a new Guttmacher Institute review of the scientific literature. The review, which examined the body of evidence on the impact of contraceptive use, underscores that women’s ability to obtain and effectively use contraceptives has a positive impact on their education and workforce participation, as well as on subsequent outcomes related to income, family stability, mental health and happiness, and the well-being of their children.
‘The scientific evidence strongly confirms what has long been obvious to women,’ says Adam Sonfield, lead author of the literature review. ‘Contraceptive use, and the ensuing ability to decide whether and when to have children, is linked to a host of benefits for themselves, the quality of their relationships, and the well-being of their children. But the evidence also suggests that the most disadvantaged women in our society do not fully share in these benefits, which is why unintended pregnancy prevention efforts need to be grounded in broader antipoverty and social justice efforts.’
The body of literature reviewed by Guttmacher experts […]
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LAURENT BELSIE, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: Here, for the first time, environmentalists and carbon energy corporations have reached an agreement. I don't support Fracking in any form. I think the long-term unintended and unknown consequences of this practice will haunt us for generations. I would far prefer to see the money spent on noncarbon energy technologies. But, if Fracking cannot be stopped, at least this may show a way to mitigate its impact.
Energy companies and environmentalists have reached rare common ground over the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking
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