In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins...

In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in?"
 
  -- Washington Post article on human/animal hybrids, 11/20/04

The front page of the Washington Post several years ago had the below, incredibly revealing story on human/animal hybrids. The respected British newspaper The Guardian in 2008 posted a key story on the first human/animal hybrid embryos. Yet another revealing article on these bizarre hybrids appeared in the nature magazine National Geographic. Scientists are experimenting with creating hybrids between humans and animals called "chimeras" without clear ethical guidelines. And remember that military and intelligence services are generally at least 10 years in advance of any research being done in public. 
READ MORE

How Corporations Like Monsanto Have Hijacked Higher Education

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/mostafa fawzy

Academic research is often dictated by corporations that endow professorships, give money to universities, and put their executives on education boards.

May 11, 2012

Here’s what happens when corporations begin to control education.

"When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer's markets, the first one told me that 'no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,’” said a PhD student at a large land-grant university who did not wish to be identified. “My academic adviser told me my best bet was to write a grant for Monsanto or the Department of Homeland Security to fund my research on why farmer's markets were stocked with 'black market vegetables' that 'are a bioterrorism threat waiting to happen.' It was communicated to me on more than one occasion throughout my education that I should just study something Monsanto would fund rather than ideas to which I was deeply committed. I ended up studying what I wanted, but received no financial support, and paid for my education out of pocket."

Unfortunately, she's not alone. Conducting research requires funding, and today's research follows the golden rule: The one with the gold makes the rules.   READ MORE

Could A Club Drug Offer 'Almost Immediate' Relief From Depression?

Club Drug "Special K"

January 30, 2012, NPR blog

Traditional antidepressants like Prozac work on a group of chemical messengers in the brain called the serotonin system. 

Researchers once thought that a lack of serotonin was the cause of depression, and that these drugs worked simply by boosting serotonin levels. 

Recent research suggests a more complicated explanation. Serotonin drugs work by stimulating the birth of new neurons, which eventually form new connections in the brain. 

Ketamine, in contrast, activates a different chemical system in the brain – the glutamate system. 

Researcher Ron Duman at Yale thinks ketamine rapidly increases the communication among existing neurons by creating new connections. 

This is a quicker process than waiting for new neurons to form and accomplishes the same goal of enhancing brain circuit activity. Ketamine has been used for decades as an anesthetic. It also has become a wildly popular but illegal club drug known as "Special K." 

Mental health researchers got interested in ketamine because of reports that it could make depression vanish almost instantly.  

Carlos Zarate ... does ketamine research at the NIH. Zarate says patients typically say, "'I feel that something's lifted or feel that I've never been depressed in my life. I feel I can work. I feel I can contribute to society.' And it was a different experience from feeling high. This was feeling that something has been removed."

Note: For many inspiring potential treatment breakthroughs in health issues, click here.

Invisibility’s Next Frontier: Scientists Cloak 3-D Objects

• By Katie Drummond
• Email Author
• January 25, 2012 | 
• 7:00 pm | 
• Categories: Science! 

After five years of steady progress, scientists are now edging closer and closer to mastering real-world invisibility.

Sure, researchers have already made marked strides toward making objects unseeable. But much of the work was more like mimicry: Meta-materials that bent light around an object to conceal it, but only worked in two dimensions. Or a device that played tricks on the eye, by harnessing the mirage effect to make objects behind it “disappear.”

Now, a team of researchers have taken an incredible leap forward. They’ve successfully made a 3-D object disappear.

A group of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have figured out how to “cloak a three-dimensional object standing in free space.” That means the object is invisible, from any angle of observation.

“This object’s invisibility is independent of where the observer is,” Professor Andrea Alu, the study’s co-author, tells Danger Room. “So you’d walk right around it, and never see it.”
 READ MORE

Watch: ‘Invisibility Cloak’ Uses Mirages to Make Objects Vanish