Test Your DNA for Diseases — No Doctor Required

Test Your DNA for Diseases — No Doctor Required

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/23/drugstore-genomes-whos-pushing-the-sequencing-industry/#ixzz2AECzoJAC

Ray “Smartphone for the Blind” Features Tactile & Audio Interface

Qualcomm has partnered with Project RAY, a group devoted to improving the lives of blind and visually challenged people through technology, to create a smartphone specifically for those that can’t see. There’s a variety of apps developed for smartphones that take advantage of technology originally developed for sighted folks to help those that are blind.
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Blues!

A Berry So Shiny, It's Irresistible (And Inedible)

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Steiner measured that intensity. It's the result of how unusually reflective the berry's skin is. Most surfaces reflect just a small percentage of the light that hits them. However, this berry reflects 30 percent of the light.

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Steiner says its reflectivity is more intense than any living thing. "We find that it is more intense than, for example, the morpho butterfly, which is usually cited for being one of the most brilliantly colored animals.

True Blue Stands Out in an Earthy Crowd

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Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency. They’re exploring the physics and chemistry of blueness in nature, the evolution of blue ornaments and blue come-ons, and the sheer brazenness of being blue when most earthly life forms opt for earthy raiments of beige, ruddy or taupe.

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As a raft of surveys has shown, blue love is a global affair. Ask people their favorite color, and in most parts of the world roughly half will say blue, a figure three to four times the support accorded common second-place finishers like purple or green. Just one in six Americans is blue-eyed, but nearly one in two consider blue the prettiest eye color, which could be why some 50 percent of tinted contact lenses sold are the kind that make your brown eyes blue.

Swishing soda in your mouth can boost self-control (seriously)

A spoonful of sugar makes the willpower go up, according to a series of studies that have suggested fueling the brain with sweets can strengthen self-control. Now, new research finds that sugar's potential may be greater than expected: You don't even need to swallow to get the benefits of sweetness.

Simply swishing a glucose-laden drink in the mouth and spitting it out boosted self-control and willpower for tasks from squeezing a handgrip to completing impossible brain teasers, the new study found.

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Via Barking Up the Wrong Tree

In Africa, 15M cell phones map malaria

Phone calls and text messages from 15 million mobile phones may help track the spread of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, new research shows

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Edward Nahim: Sierra Leone’s Only Psychiatrist

Sierra Leone is trying to heal its wounds in the aftermath of one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars—but there’s only one psychiatrist around to treat the nation’s trauma.

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Get Up. Get Out. Don’t Sit.

Just as we were all settling in front of the television to watch the baseball playoffs, two new studies about the perils of sitting have spoiled our viewing pleasure.

The research, published in separate medical journals this month, adds to a growing scientific consensus that the more time someone spends sitting, especially in front of the television, the shorter and less robust his or her life may be.(..)

and the findings were sobering: Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.

By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes, the authors said.

Looking more broadly, they concluded that an adult who spends an average of six hours a day watching TV over the course of a lifetime can expect to live 4.8 years fewer than a person who does not watch TV.

Those results hold true, the authors point out, even for people who exercise regularly. 

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Can you really predict what will make you happy?

Here’s what most people think will make them happy, in order of importance:

Via The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain:

A survey of more than 2,015 people conducted by the British research company Ipsos MORI revealed that people believe the following five factors are most likely to enhance happiness (they are listed in order of importance).

1) More time with family
2) Earning double what I do now
3) Better health
4) More time with friends
5) More traveling

Are they right?

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Florida's Giant Eyeball Mystery

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Looking for a Google

Can the spirit of enterprise be taught?

WORLD-BEATING companies that began in garages—think of Amazon, Apple or Google—are revered in the West. Developing countries can boast one or two examples of their own: India’s Tata and South Korea’s Samsung began life as small trading companies; Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group, an agri-business firm, started as a seed shop. But these are exceptions. Of the millions of small enterprises in poor countries, hardly any grow big and strong. The World Bank’s new World Development Report* looks at what can be done to help start-ups in poor countries become the next Google

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The question is what can be done to improve matters. Obviously, good infrastructure and a welcoming investment climate matter. Governments have tried providing cheap loans or grants to pay the wages of an extra employee. This had no effect. Nor did giving special grants to female business owners, as happened in Ghana. But free management training did help. The trouble is that most enterprises see no point in it: asked whether lack of management expertise was a problem, only 3% of Brazilian small firms said yes.

Learning from abroad, though, makes a big difference. In 1979 Desh, a Bangladeshi garments firm, sent 130 of its staff for an eight-month course at a South Korean textile plant. At the time, Bangladesh had no textile exports and no modern industry. When the trainees got back, almost all of them set up their own firms. Today Bangladesh has 3.6m textile workers, 80% of them women, generating $13 billion of exports a year. Mr Yunus should be proud.

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Lacking Teachers and Textbooks, India’s Schools Turn to Khan Academy to Survive

CHENNAI — In a country where teachers are in short supply and decent textbooks are hard to find, Indian schools are pinning their hopes on a free online tutorial service based in the United States.

A few Indian schools are already using Khan Academy, which offers lessons on numerous subjects through online videos, to cement math and science fundamentals, cut student absenteeism, boost test scores and in some cases, to simply survive. But these one-time school initiatives could gain traction from an effort to dub 450 of the 3,400 English-language Khan Academy videos in at least three Indian languages, as well as other efforts to make them more accessible to Indian students.

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Drunk With Power

This is a great article on arguably, one of the most colorful writers in the wine world. I get his daily emails just for his writing and do occasionally succumb to buying some of his unusual wine selections...
Uvealblues

Jon Rimmerman sells $30 million worth of wine a year over e-mail. How? Well, let him tell you a little story about a young syrah he once swilled outside Walla Walla

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He realized he had the seeds of his own start-up in that wine letter. He’d already switched to e-mail, picking up several hundred new subscribers who often asked where to buy the wines. It was a no-brainer to start selling them. All he needed now, Rimmerman decided, was a clear sense of mission — a brand identity, in other words, centered on making the world a better place instead of just making a buck. Rimmerman claims that he made two lists — things he liked about the wine business, and things he did not — and decided that his company’s goal would be to transform the industry until his “don’t like” column was empty.
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Lara Logan 2012 BGA Speech on Afghanistan

This App Identifies Dollar Bills for the Blind

A new mobile app helps the visually impaired count dollar bills with the help of a smartphone camera.

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Women Entrepreneurs Drive Growth in Africa

KAMPALA, UGANDA — Far too often, in the view of Africa’s budding female entrepreneurs, their continent is characterized as the recipient of aid that enables residents just to struggle by, and as a place that mistreats and marginalizes its women.
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It was into this world, and against it, says Bethlehem Tilahun, that her shoe company SoleRebels was born.

“I kept hearing over and over the phrase ‘poverty alleviation,”’ said Ms. Tilahun, now a footwear mogul whose company grossed $2 million in sales this past year. “The media, preoccupied with a singular narrative about ‘Africa’ that missed the story of Africa — part of a larger spectrum of endless entities that have monopolized Africa’s image, our brand.”

With SoleRebels, she said proudly, “We’ve inverted the whole paradigm.”

Ms. Tilahun, 33, is one of a cresting wave of African entrepreneurs who are harnessing Africa’s businesses and brands as the continent enjoys its greatest economic success in generations. The International Monetary Fund now forecasts, admittedly in a recession-plagued world, that Africa will have the fastest-growing economy of any continent over the next five years.

Many of the new entrepreneurs of Africa are women.

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Her ‘Crime’ Was Loving Schools

Twice the Taliban threw warning letters into the home of Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old Pakistan girl who is one of the world’s most persuasive advocates for girls’ education. They told her to stop her advocacy — or else.

She refused to back down, stepped up her campaign and even started a fund to help impoverished Pakistani girls get an education. So, on Tuesday, masked gunmen approached her school bus and asked for her by name. Then they shot her in the head and neck.

“Let this be a lesson,” a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said afterward. He added that if she survives, the Taliban would again try to kill her.

Surgeons have removed a bullet from Malala, and she remains unconscious in critical condition in a hospital in Peshawar. A close family friend, Fazal Moula Zahid, told me that doctors are hopeful that there has been no brain damage and that she will ultimately return to school.

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These events coincide with the first international Day of the Girl on Thursday, and they remind us that the global struggle for gender equality is the paramount moral struggle of this century, equivalent to the campaigns against slavery in the 19th century and against totalitarianism in the 20th century.

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The Ames Illusion

“Big” me. “Little” me. Watch these two versions of me–which are really the same size–explain why I appear petite in one place on screen and large in another. The reason, in short, is that I have been trapped in a clever visual illusion, one invented 78 years ago by American opthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. In the HBO movie “Temple Grandin,” the main character (Grandin) recreates the same illusion for a class assignment. Watch the scene here. The video below deconstructs the trick that Ames and Grandin play on our eyes.

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Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into "Facts"?

False information is pervasive and difficult to eradicate, but scientists are developing new strategies such as "de-biasing," a method that focuses on facts, to help spread the truth.
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"You have to be careful when you correct misinformation that you don't inadvertently strengthen it," says Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth and one of the paper's authors. "If the issues go to the heart of people's deeply held world views, they become more entrenched in their opinions if you try to update their thinking."

Psychologists call this reaction belief perseverance: maintaining your original opinions in the face of overwhelming data that contradicts your beliefs. Everyone does it, but we are especially vulnerable when invalidated beliefs form a key part of how we narrate our lives

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Half of the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong

Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date.  But at what rate do former facts disappear? Arbesman applies the concept of half-life, the time required for half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate, to the dissolution of facts. For example, the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 is just over 29 years. Applying the concept of half-life to facts, Arbesman cites research that looked into the decay in the truth of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis. “The half-life of truth was 45 years,” reported the researchers.
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Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each by each is how the scientific process is supposed work, i.e., experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. How many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disheartening study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over ten years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
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Via Simolenonsense

Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon who claims to have visited the afterlife

Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he's long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.

But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven.

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