Brains, Blindness, Chimpanzees, Particle Physics and Mad Cows

If you live in the UK, please donate your brain to science...after you're dead of course and presumably no longer using it. Your brain could really help fight debilitating brain diseases. They actually need healthy brains more than diseased brains.

Porn makes you blind but just for a few seconds.


Smoking makes you blind and it's for life. It's so sad how they find more and more how bad smoking is for you. Of course my granddad smoked until he was 90.

I read this fascinating article in the Economist that the chimpanzee gene has been completely sequenced. It turns out that the genomes "differ by only 1.2% over the course of some 3 billion pairs" I had always thought we were 98% similar, but it turns out we're actually 98.8% similar. Wow. "There are no immediately obvious genes—present in one, but not the other—that account for such characteristic human attributes as intelligence or even hairlessness. And while there is a gene connected with language, known as FOXP2, it had already been discovered." The article points out "it may be that many of the crucial differences are not in the genes themselves, but in how and when the messages those genes carry are transcribed and translated into the protein molecules that do the work in cells—and thus, ultimately, determine what an organism looks like and how it behaves." Even so, it was humbling to read and as the article rightly points out, chimpanzees used to be classified as Homo troglodytes and that's how I think of them.

I also enjoyed reading this article on how particle physics makes things magnetic which ended "So, next time you have an MRI scan, remember that part of the picture depends on something that isn't really there. Strange, eh?"

Sad to read this article about how mad cow disease might be caused by humans infecting cows, you have to pay, so I can't quote from it either, but the upshot is that human waste from the Ganges was collected by bone collectors in India and was then fed to cows in Britain. The Economist admits it's far fetched. Even so, it confirms my dislike for beef. Dunno what I'm allergic to in beef, but maybe it's humans brains....

And last and definitely least, Ipod releases a shiny new cell phone Now I need to wait for the combo cell phone/Ipod/Palm/camera. Shiny happy/music playing/camera/pda that runs out of batteries in minutes.