A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineered with a human gene.
Ventria's rice produces two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessen the severity and duration of diarrhea attacks, a top killer of children in developing countries.
See? People think "cruelty locks in the flavor" is just a joke, and yet, here we find the beneficial component of tears: the suffering of others is medicine, god dammit!
But farmers, environmentalists and others fear that such medicinal crops will mix with conventional crops, making them unsafe to eat. [...] "The issue is the growing of pharmaceutical products in food crops grown outdoors," said Hope Shand of the environmental nonprofit ETC Group in Carrboro, N.C. "The chance this will contaminate traditionally grown crops is great. This is a very risky business."
The company, meanwhile, has applied to the Food and Drug Administration to approve the protein powder as a "medical food" rather than a drug. That means Ventria wouldn't have to conduct long and costly human tests. Instead, it submitted data from scientific experts attesting to the company's powder is "generally regarded as safe."
You're all aware that microchips are made from the bone marrow of third world babies, right?
Scientists based at the Satou hospital in Japan found that kissing worked by relaxing the body and reducing the production of histamine -- a chemical that the body produces in response to pollen, causing the sneezing, runny noses and streaming eyes that characterise hay fever attacks.
The researchers asked a total of 24 couples, where both partners suffered from hay fever, to spend 30 minutes kissing. Blood samples were taken before and after to compare levels of histamine, and results showed that after the kissing session levels of the chemical were significantly reduced. This was not found to be the case, however, when the experiment was repeated with cuddling but no kissing, with no change in histamine levels found.
"They both said that their animals were emotional service dogs," said Gil Ohana, the manager, explaining why he let them in. "One of them actually carried a doctor's letter."
The increasing appearance of pets whose owners say they are needed for emotional support in restaurants -- as well as on airplanes, in offices and even in health spas -- goes back, according to those who train such animals, to a 2003 ruling by the Department of Transportation. It clarified policies regarding disabled passengers on airplanes, stating for the first time that animals used to aid people with emotional ailments like depression or anxiety should be given the same access and privileges as animals helping people with physical disabilities like blindness or deafness.
The following year appellate courts in New York State for the first time accepted tenants' arguments in two cases that emotional support was a viable reason to keep a pet despite a building's no-pets policy. Word of the cases and of the Transportation Department's ruling spread, aided by television and the Internet. Now airlines are grappling with how to accommodate 200-pound dogs in the passenger cabin and even emotional-support goats.
If one of you massochists out there wanted to download a copy of xlockmore and see if there are any interesting changes in any of the savers that exist in both, that'd be nice. (This would also be one of those tasks that I will never, ever get around to.)
The devices produce electricity when a temperature difference exists between two ends of a circuit made from two types of metal. The company has packed 5,074 thermocouples (electricity-producing circuits) into the generator, and the device provides a relatively high voltage from a smaller temperature difference: At a difference of 5 degrees Celsius, the generator produces 3.1 volts at 36 microamps, yielding 110 microwatts of electrical power.
Thermoelectric generators are particularly useful for powering wearable devices because people aren't always in the light and don't always move, but as long as they're alive they generate body heat. The temperature difference between the skin and the surrounding air is about 15 degrees Kelvin, said Stark. Even within the body there is a useable temperature difference between the core and the surface, he said.
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources. "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
President Gore on SNL (wow, SNL is still on the air?)