Just a quick thought, prompted by my response to "TV as Teacher". We can blame the corporate media for pumping our kids full of distorted values and promoting gross stupidity, but the thing is, they're doing the same to the kids' parents - to you and to me. How are some people able to resist this toxic waste yet others welcome it either consciously or blindly? What is our mental vaccine that repels this ubiquitous barrage on our senses?

There are times when online discussions get heated, times when people seem to have differing ideas of what certain concept actually mean. Sometimes Wikipedia helps in gaining at least the first foothold on a new subject, but sometimes you really want to find an expert. Academic Earth has thousands of videos and hundreds of complete courses from America's leading universities. Sadly, you can't get an online degree with them, but you can talk as if you already have one!


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Most people think that science is done behind closed doors with expensive equipment, fiddling around with complicated technology by scientists wearing cheap lab coats. The rest of us merely stand on the outside waiting for some interesting discoveries to be made. Well, although the caricature is partly true there are many experiments where the amount of data is so huge that the research teams have enlisted the help of citizen scientists.

Researchers have demonstrated the safety of a potential vaccine against mesothelioma, a rare cancer associated primarily with asbestos exposure. The vaccine, which infuses uses a patient's own dendritic cells (DC) with antigen from the patient's tumor, was able to induce a T-cell response against mesothelioma tumors.

"[This] is the first human study on DC-based immunotherapy in patients with mesothelioma," wrote Joachim G Aerts M.D., Ph.D., a pulmonary physician at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands.

The findings have been published online ahead of print publication in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

The Symphony of Science is a project inspired by the work of Carl Sagan and has become well-known for producing short videos setting to music the wise words of scientists.