"The miroir des simples âmes" Marguerite la Porete
The first of June 1310, in Paris, the heart of medieval culture, to the mill the Saint-Antoine, after the burning of 54 Templars sentenced for heresy, Margherite la Porète was burnt alive as heretic together with his book "The miroir des simples âmes" (the mirror of simple souls), of which the Church ordered the destruction.
"Le miroir des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demeurent en vouloir et desir d'amour" today represents one of the vertices of religious thought speculative, a manifesto of the nobility of the soul.
Sometimes how humans trade goods are as important as what is traded. Even when it comes to trading dead humans.
Human cadavers are a legitimate market? Sure. Commerce in human cadavers was created centuries ago and is done now by medical schools because of the need to train future doctors in anatomy, requiring the dissection of a cadaver. Finding an adequate supply of cadavers is an ongoing challenge, one which has been answered by both academically-housed programs and by independent, for- and non-profit ventures that are not affiliated with higher education or research institutions.
And we have all seen "Frankenstein" - sometimes small business owners get involved.
Sheng Ding, PhD, has shown a new method for transforming adult skin cells into neurons that are capable of transmitting brain signals - one of the first documented experiments for transforming an adult human's skin cells into functioning brain cells.
Ding, of the Gladstone Institutes, said his work builds on the cell-reprogramming work of another Gladstone scientist, Senior Investigator Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD. Yamanaka's 2006 discovery of a way to turn adult skin cells into cells that act like embryonic stem cells has advanced the fields of cell biology and stem-cell research.
Most scientists and science journalists argue vehemently for basic research - and even more taxpayer money should be devoted to it, they say. Politicians usually disagree and feel like taxpayer-funded research should have a goal or at least a defined result in its framework.
It's not often that paleontology makes the news. This week, however, it did - in a big way. And let me tell you, it wasn't the edgy paper on a new assemblage of South American bivalves ("Barremian Bivalves from the Huitrín Formation, West-Central Argentina: Taxonomy and Paleoecology of a Restricted Marine Association") that was all over the rolling news channels.
No; it's the news that
Archaeopteryx may be knocked off its pedestal as the earliest bird in the fossil record, based on a new phylogeny by
Xu et al. Archaeopteryx is now deemed to be just another deinonychosaur; probably closer to velociraptor than to birds.
COLUMBUS, OHIO -- After a full day in and out of airplanes and airports, there’s really nothing like stepping out of the terminal and taking your first breath of unfiltered, unconditioned, unpressurized air. Sure, the curbside may be cluttered with exhaust fumes, and filled with the noise of honking taxi drivers, but it’s still undeniably fresh.
Too bad that last Sunday, I took that breath in the state with the worst air pollution record in the country.
Cancer is one of the scourges of modern society. An increasing number of people are fighting it, and a lot of research is being done in order to understand it better, hopefully leading to treatments or cures.
At present, the dominant theory is that cancer arises from a handful gene mutations. But recently, Peter Duesberg and his colleagues at UC Berkeley have launched the idea that cancer instead arises from chromosome disruptions, and that this, in fact, constitutes a form of speciation. So, according to this view, cancers are newly evolved species, as they have new chromosomal karyotypes. On top of this, cancers are autonomous and don’t need other cells for survival.
As a 20-year-long (ok well, 19) member of the CDF collaboration, I am very proud of this wonderful experiments' accomplishments in all areas of high-energy physics, from exotic searches to Higgs searches, from top quark measurements to b-physics measurements, and what not. CDF is a landmark in experimental physics, and the longest-lasting physics experiment ever. But it is not foulproof - nobody is in this wild world of statistical flukes and impossible-to-unearth systematic effects.
