via Justin Pickard

From ScienceDaily, the study looked at the risk factors given by two large DTC companies, deCODEme (Iceland) and 23andMe (USA):

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests give inaccurate predictions of disease risks and many European geneticists believe that some of them should be banned, the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics heard May 31. In the first of two studies to be presented, Rachel Kalf, from the department of epidemiology at Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, will say that her research is the first to look at the real predictive ability of such tests, the results of which are available directly to an individual without having to go through a healthcare professional.

See Also:

• Your Personal Genetics Analysis

Needless to say, the ability to photograph barcode-less items in the real world and get instant information on them could be huge, a sort of away-from-a-home-computer Google. What remains to be seen is if Sony can bring it to the masses in a palatable format and, of course, what Google will counteroffer if SmartAR takes off.

Video and words from core77.com.

From CrunchGear:

Designed and manufactured by Polymer Vision, the screen can be rolled and unrolled 25,000 times. The question, obviously, is why would you need a rollable display? Well, as ereaders become ubiquitous the need for them to be almost indestructible. I could see a day when kids get their own ereaders for the nursery a la the Diamond Age. Interestingly, Polymer Vision isn’t the company of note when you think of e-ink displays so either they will license this technology or they could start taking more and more market shares from leaders like Eink.

Some gorgeous video via io9.com, eight minutes of time-lapse sequence taken inside and outside of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

Six Flags New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
It has been abandoned ever since.
This film was made in October 2010 by Teddy Smith

via Interdome

Inside Job is an award winning documentary about the origins and actors in the ongoing Global Financial Crisis. If I had paid attention to the Oscars this year I might have heard of it sooner, it won the award for Best Documentary Feature. Instead, it was by lurking on #spanishrevolution that I found out about this, and you’ll note this video has Spanish subtitles. But the film is in English; narrated by Matt Damon, even.

This is the story of financial deregulation and the eventual resultant crisis. Begun by Reagan, but it’s important to note, allowed to become ‘too big to fail’ under the Clinton administration. And in no way reformed by the Obama administration.

How the new Global Elite‘s ranks have become swollen with the wealthy executives of Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros and so on. This film, unsurprisingly, reveals these people to be morally bankrupt, completely divorced from reality. Having no care for society, while the western governments, purely for ideological reasons, abandoned their duty to watch over the interests of their citizens.

Preserving the status quo has come at the expense of employment.. especially for the world’s youth. This is why ‘First World’ infrastructure is in such poor repair. The same ideology adopted by politicians instructing them to pay for only bare minimum maintenance; a culture of short-term gain, ignorant of long-term consequence.

This is how one of the systems of the world was broken and a better future stolen. Observe these people and the faults in, and the corruption of, governance that allowed this to occur, that we might never have (another) a repeat of it. Dare to dream that one day soon they might all be called to account for it too.

…is the title Tim Maly gave to this photo of the recent Space Shuttle launch, taken by Trey Ratcliff:

• Bionic hand for ‘elective amputation’ patient
  

  “The operation will change my life. I live 10 years with this hand and it cannot be (made) better. The only way is to cut this down and I get a new arm,” Milo told BBC News prior to his surgery at Vienna’s General Hospital.

  Milo took the decision after using a hybrid hand fitted parallel to his dysfunctional hand with which he could experience controlling a prosthesis.

  Such bionic hands, manufactured by the German prosthetics company Otto Bock, can pinch and grasp in response to signals from the brain that are picked up by two sensors placed over the skin above nerves in the forearm.

• Vuzix Announces New See-Through Augmented Reality Enabled Video Eyewear
  

  The STAR 1200 is a see-through AR-enabled binocular Video Eyewear that is expected to be used in a wide variety of industrial, commercial, defense and some consumer applications. Building from Vuzix’ award winning technology in AR-enabled video eyewear, the new display will allow users to view the real world scene while also viewing relevant computer generated information, graphics and alerts. The AR glasses will provide connectivity to VGA, component and composite video sources. The STAR 1200 comes with 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) motion tracking sensors and a built in camera for tracking and recognizing the real world. This allows 3D computer generated content to be locked in place when overlaid within the user’s real worldview.

• Swiss Scientists Design a Turbine to Fit in Human Arteries
  

  “The heart produces around 1 or 1.5 watts of hydraulic power, and we want to take maybe one milliwatt,” Pfenniger explains. “A pacemaker only needs around 10 microwatts.” At the Microtechnologies in Medicine and Biology conference in Lucerne, Switzerland, earlier this month, Pfenniger presented results from a trial in which a tube is designed to mimic the internal thoracic artery, a millimeters-wide vessel that doctors sometimes cannibalize for surgery because it is redundant. The most efficient of the three off-the-shelf turbines he tested produced around 800 microwatts, which could run devices much more power hungry than today’s pacemakers

• Sovereign Bleak installing magnets (in his fingertips) [VIDEO]

I’ve gotten a lot of mail this weekend about the supposed new “Canadian cure for cancer” and while I hate to rain on parades, I thought I’d do a bit of fact checking before getting too excited.  There were a few things that made me scratch my head when reading the initial article. (Starting with the fact it’s a four-year-old piece on a notorious Content Mill site that is just now circulating.)  So, I went to a friend of mine, who has worked extensively in the field of nuclear medicine and this is what she had to say:

If you read the article it talks about how University of Alberta scientists have used a drug called dichloroacetic acid (DCA), and according to the article, Big Pharma aren’t interested because the drug is off-patent and they can’t make money off of it. So bang, the Canadians cured cancer and no one cares.

…Except that’s not really true.

University of Alberta scientists are currently working on small-scale clinical trials of DCA; according to their most recent update, they’ve trial-ed this on five patients–five–which is not a large enough sample for us to go ahead and say that cancer has been ‘cured.’

Furthermore, they don’t go into great detail, but what they do say isn’t that they cured any of those patients. “In some patients there was also evidence for clinical benefit, with the tumors either regressing in size or not growing further during the 18 month study.” No idea how many “some” of the five patients are, but clearly at least one of the five had further tumor growth during the 18 months. There’s also a note mentioned about how it took 3 months for the drug to reach therapeutic levels; three months in a glioblastoma patient is pretty damn long (a GBM is a fast-growing brain tumor that untreated will kill you in two to four months, on average; with treatment it tends to kill you in fourteen months, and it has a ridiculously low five year survival rate. The wikipedia page gives a decent overview.)

Anyway. Point being, this ‘magic bullet’ has been trial-ed on five people at this point, and they’re still very much in the clinical trials stage. This means we’re likely years off from the point where we have to start worrying who’s going to make money off of DCA as a cancer treatment, because we’re years off from knowing whether or not it’s actually, well, a cure. (Or, like most things in cancer treatment, just a promising treatment that helps some people and has some unpleasant side effects.)

If you’re worried about whether or not they’ll be able to get adequate funding (which, in all things scientific these days, is a well-founded concern), visit the U of A team’s home page, read what they’re doing, and make a donation if you think it’s something worth exploring further. But please, for the love of god, let’s not continue to propagate mistruths and obfuscations published by a website whose advertising slogan is ‘publish easily, attract readers, earn rewards.’ There’s a reason publishing is hard, and it’s not because Big Pharma makes it so–it’s because we publish scientific results in peer reviewed journals, and they’re held to fairly rigorous standards there.

I’m under no illusion that we will see a FDA approved, Big Pharma approved cure for cancer until pharmaceutical companies can figure out a way to charge more for it than the billions they rake in from cancer treatment each year.  But it’s way too early to imply that this avenue of research is the suppressed holy grail of cancer research.   Trust me – I’ve lost my father, my sister and all of my aunts and uncles to cancer and I’ve had my own scare – when a cure is developed, no matter how off the grid it may be, I’ll be thrilled beyond words.  But an out of date, poorly researched Hubpages article misrepresenting the work of a group of hard-working scientists is no reason to uncork the champaign and thaw out the Duke…

…not just yet at least.

Flying his jet-propelled wing attached to his back, and steering only by moving his body, Rossy launched from a helicopter at 2,440 metres above the the Grand Canyon, according to his Geneva press office.

Skimming the rockscape at speeds of up to 300km per hour, Jetman sustained flight for more than eight minutes, 60 metres above the rim of Grand Canyon West before deploying his parachute and landing smoothly on the canyon floor.

[More at: swissinfo.ch]

From WIRED UK:

Japanese company Neurowear is creating a range of fashion itemsthat are operated using brainwaves, including a pair of moveable cat ears.

The cat ear product, called “necomimi” is a novelty hair band that is worn in the normal way but features sensors that pick up on brain signals and convert them into visible actions — in this case by wiggling the cat ears.

The ears twitch through a range of different positions, which correspond to different brain activity. So when you concentrate, the ears point upwards and when you relax the ears flop down and forwards. The result is a kick-ass pair of ears that will make everyone at the furry convention / fancy dress party jealous.

Keep reading..

Always interesting to see how the mainstream re-packages the fringe as the cutting edge.

From the Guardian, where it appears Flannery is updating the Gaia hypothesis:

Tim Flannery argues that humankind is evolving into a ‘super-organism’ where interdependence has profound consequences for the individual.

Look for an expansion of this in his Long Now seminar.

Presented with the sole comment that this is another example of proto-Shriekyware.

via BoingBoing.

Just stumbled upon the trailer for Adam Curtis’ new documentary – All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and it looks, shall we say, extremely relevant to our interests.    For those unfamiliar with his work, Adam Curtis is a documentary filmmaker best known for his brilliant series of looks at modern history:  The Century of Self, the Power of Nightmares, and The Trap – Whatever Happened To Our Dreams of Freedom?   I can’t recommend those films enough for someone who wants to spend a few evenings coming to grips with what the hell happened in the 20th and early 21st centuries.   Propaganda, Psychology, Marketing, Nightmare Politics, Religious Extremism, and Game Theory – Curtis weaves them all together in a clear and concise manner into an extremely lucid and convincing secret history of modernity.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is due sometime this year from the BBC.