Category Archives: Popular Culture

Hope For Michael Moore

A breakthrough: converting skin cells directly to brain cells, without a transition through stem cells.

Faster, please.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Now this is really cool — living lasers made from human cells:

Optical imaging labels can report on the molecular workings of tissues and cells in the body. Fluorescent protein tags that emit visible or infrared light are now common tools for studying cell biology in test tubes. But getting such light in and out of the body is difficult because light diffuses as it passes through biological tissues. Living lasers, if they’re made into practical systems, have the potential to change that. One can imagine having a hybrid living-nonliving medical implant under the skin that would beam out a stream of information about biomarkers in the blood, for example.

Not only that, but if it works with shark cells, it would be the solution to Dr. Evil’s long-time frustration.

Praise Be To Jobs

I am completely unsurprised by this:

In a recently screened BBC documentary called ‘Secrets of the Superbrands’, UK neuroscientists found that the brains of Apple fans are stimulated by images of Apple products in the same areas as those triggered by religious imagery in a person of faith. According to the scientists, this suggests that the big tech brands have harnessed, or exploit, the brain areas that have evolved to process religion.

At least they’re not Scientologists. Well, OK, maybe some of them are.