Monday, September 15th, 2014
, - Agence France-Presse (France)/Raw Story
Stephan: This is just a first report, and there will be many steps before it becomes available, but this is a major new approach in medicine, with enormous implications, as this report spells out.
Blood vial via luchschen / Shutterstock
Scientists said Sunday they had invented a device that uses a magnet to extract bacteria, fungi and toxins from blood, potentially throwing a lifeline to patients with sepsis and other infections.
The external gadget — tested so far in rats but not yet humans — could be adapted one day for stripping Ebola and other viruses from blood, they hoped.
Acting rather like a spleen, the invention uses magnetic nanobeads coated with a genetically-engineered human blood protein called MBL.
The MBL binds to pathogens and toxins, which can then be “pulled out” with a magnet, the developers wrote in the journal Nature Medicine.
The “bio-spleen” was developed to treat sepsis, or blood infection, which affects 18 million people in the world every year, with a 30-50 percent mortality rate.
The microbes that cause it are often resistant to antibiotics, and spread fast.
If the invention is shown to be safe for humans, “patients could be treated with our bio-spleen and this will physically clean up their blood, rapidly […]
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Monday, September 15th, 2014
KRISTINA FIORE, SARAH WICKLINE WALLAN, and ELBERT CHU, - MedPage Today
Stephan: This is further proof, if such is needed, of the truth that the Illness Profit System is about profit not wellness. This behavior ought to be criminal, that it is not tells us something important about ourselves.
Source reference: Lane WS, et al "High-dose insulin therapy: is it time for U-500 insulin?" Endocrine Practice 2009; 15(1): 71-79.
Retired nurse Mary Smith was having trouble controlling her type 2 diabetes on her regular insulin regimen, so her doctor decided to put her on something stronger.
Amber Taylor, MD, director of The Diabetes Center at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, wrote Smith a prescription for Humulin U-500 insulin, a much more concentrated form of the drug. It could deliver far more active ingredient at far less overall volume, which was important since Smith’s insulin doses were getting high.
But when Smith showed up at the pharmacy, she was told she’d have to shell out $900 for a vial.
“There was no way I could afford that,” Smith told MedPage Today as she recalled the pharmacy visit, which happened about a year ago. And the price has gone up since then: Now a single bottle of highly concentrated Humulin U-500 insulin that lasts a diabetes patient about one month costs $1,200 wholesale — more than five […]
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Sunday, September 14th, 2014
Silvio Marcacci , - Clean Technica
Stephan: Here is some very good news. It is becomes ever more clear day by day that the claims made against non-carbon energy -- great costs, loss of jobs, marginal impact -- are the usual corporate lies. BP can spend a fortune buying television ads, but it doesn't change the facts that are emerging.
Click through to see the graphics.
Green jobs rally image via CleanTechnica
Hey everybody – here’s a great idea: Let’s cut American greenhouse gas emissions 40% and energy demand 30% then create 2.7 million jobs while lowering the national unemployment rate 1.5%
Oh, and by the way, this will only cost 1.2% of the current United States gross domestic product. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Now it gets better – these are green jobs, and renewable energy is the key to unlocking it all.
Welcome to the brave new world that’s ‘truly within reach” according to ‘Green Growth: A U.S. Program for Controlling Climate Change and Expanding Job Opportunities,” an upcoming report from the University of Massachusetts and Center for American Progress.
A Clean Energy Economy ‘Truly Within Reach”
By now, the fossil fuel industry’s talking points are tired and stale: Expanding renewables will crush the American economy and cause blackouts without really impacting climate change.
The only problem with that narrative is that it looks more and more like fiction with every passing day. ‘The fundamental imperative of climate […]
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Sunday, September 14th, 2014
MACRINA COOPER-WHITE, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: It turns out there is a "music of the spheres" -- I have heard it twice in my life. No idea what it was, maybe this.
Click through to see the very helpful graphics.
The study was published online in the journal Science on September 11, 2014.
What does an atom sound like? Apparently it’s a “D-note.”
That’s according to scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, who have revealed in a new study that they’ve captured the sound of a single atom.
“We have opened a new door into the quantum world by talking and listening to atoms,” study co-author Per Delsing, a physics professor at the university, said in a written statement. “Our long term goal is to harness quantum physics so that we can benefit from its laws, for example in extremely fast computers.”
For their study, Delsing and his colleagues constructed an artificial atom 0.01 millimeters long and placed it on the end of a superconductingmaterial. Then they guided sound waves along the surface of the material, bounced sound off of the atom, and recorded what came back using a tiny microphone located on the other end of the material.
On the right, an artificial atom generates sound waves consisting of ripples on the surface of a solid material. The sound, known as a surface […]
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Sunday, September 14th, 2014
Rob Brown, Noemi Giszpenc and Brian Van Slyke, - Truthout
Stephan: More and more in rural areas, such as where I live, I see localism on the rise. In the absence of rational policy at the Federal and many State levels, local communities are acting. He is a lovely example.
On remote Deer Isle, Maine, the movement for a more just and democratic economy won a major victory this summer. More than 60 employees of three retail businesses – Burnt Cove Market, V&S Variety and Pharmacy, and The Galley – banded together to buy the stores and create the largest worker cooperative in Maine and the second largest in New England.
Now the workers own and run the businesses together under one banner, known as the Island Employee Cooperative (IEC). This is the first time that multiple businesses of this size and scope have been merged and converted into one worker cooperative – making this a particularly groundbreaking achievement in advancing economic democracy.
Getting There: What It Took
When the local couple that had owned the three businesses for 43 years began to think about selling their stores and retiring, the workers became concerned. The stores were one of the island’s biggest employers and a potential buyer probably would not have come from within the community or maintained the same level […]
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