More Money, More Problems

Who says that money can’t buy happiness? Well, a couple of psychologists, apparently. But frankly, this would be a more meaningful conclusion if it didn’t suggest that therapy was the only true route to happiness, which is kind of like The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce releasing a study that demonstrates that gambling is the key to happiness.

Consider the source, is all I’m saying.

But realistically, it seems like the researchers involved in this study do have a point. Money, at least money for its own sake, is fairly unlikely to produce true contentment. It is, rather, simply a convenient currency for which real happiness, found most frequently in the in the form of hookers and blow, can be exchanged. Everybody knows that!

 

The Positive Power of Negative Thinking

Up yours, everyone who ever told me “You know, it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile.” Turns out, my shitty mood is what has made me a smarter, better person.

Australian psychologist Joe Forgas  has published a paper in Australian Science Magazine detailing the upside of feeling down. While grumpy people might be less creative and more of a general pain in the ass to be around, they are also less gullible, more attentive and assess their problems more carefully. Which is probably because they have more problems, because no one likes them, because they are so goddamned pissy all the time.

 

In Which Germany Missed a Memo

Researchers in Germany have developed a drug that, when taken through the nose during a late night cram session, seems to improve retention and memory formation in college students who get a good night’s sleep after taking the drug. In other words, the Germans have invented cocaine, but made it significantly lamer. Good job, Germany.

I guess… nobody told Germany about cocaine? That seems sort of unfair. I mean, they did pretty well fuck up the first half of the twentieth century and all, but seriously, that shit was years ago.

I just hope no one was planning on winning a Nobel Prize in medicine for this, because they already gave those out today, and the team of American researchers who discovered DNA telemorase landed it. It’s  safe bet that, after giving the requisite speech about how this validates the entire field of study they’re engaged in, the winners almost certainly proceeded to revel in wads of money and the adulation of their peers. And you can bet they went out and threw down some of that fat Nobel cash on a bunch of blow like right thinking Americans, who could not be less interested in lame ass German nasal spray for brain function.

 

In Which We All Get A Little Closer To Creepy, Creepy Immortality

Dr. Henry Markram of Switzerland’s Brain Science Institute has suggested that we could see the first fully functioning computer model of a human brain in as little as 10 years. “I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial,” said Markram.

If Markram is right, we could be just a decade away from an unparalleled tool for understanding the most opaque inner workings of the human brain and diagnosing and treating neurological disorders. Not to mention the means to keep our greatest mad scientists alive and terrorizing the planet with killer robots for centuries to come.

For those of you playing along at home – Ray Kurzweil just got a boner.

 

The Cause Of, And Solution To, All Lifes Problems

Thanks to science for proving this week that what I and the bunch of drunks I associate with have always thought is both actual and factual – sweet mother alcohol is actually good for you.

It’s good for your mind – teetotalers may be more prone to depression than folks who are inclined to knock back a few, news which should come as a surprise to no one anywhere.

Perhaps counterintuitively, booze is also good for your body, and not just in a sissy ‘a glass of red wine a day’ kind of a way. People who consume alcoholic drinks are more likely to exercise than their abstaining counterparts, with heavy drinkers getting the most strenuous workouts.

Of course, there’s no arguing that alcohol does have some detrimental effects. For instance, alcohol consumption makes it harder for hamsters to get up in the morning, according to a recent study. Then again, what’s so pressing about the lives of hamsters that they need to get up at the crack of dawn, anyway?

 

Waiting For My Man

The first rehabilitation camp for Internet Addiction has opened it’s doors in the United States, and situated in Fall City, Washington, it’s just miles from my own home.

For the low, low price of just $14,500, internet junkies can enroll in a six week treatment regimen at Heavensfield Retreat Center that features lessons in conversation techniques, social skills and dating.

If these techniques sound familiar, it’s because  they’re borrowed from the boot camp style Internet addiction treatment centers that have been springing up throughout China, where Internet addiction is seen as a growing problem among Chinese adolescents. Happily, though, the staff of Heavensfield has decided to replace the “brutal beatings” portion of the treatment itinerary with animal therapy. And while feeding goats might not be as stimulating as raiding Karazhan, it’s certainly preferable to being repeatedly shocked for trying to check your blog traffic or getting beaten to death by Chinese guidance counselors after a sex-ed class.

Still, it seems a lot to ask people to spend nearly fifteen large treating a mental illness that is at least poorly understood, if it even exists, which according to the pyschiatric guidebook  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it doesn’t.

 

The Real World: Alaska

It’s time for a new round of America’s favorite game, Republicans Go Nuts On Twitter! Those of you playing along at home know that it’s just eight short days until Sarah Palin is freed from the shackles of governing and released onto a dismally unprepared populace. And according to her Twitter feed (thanks Wonkette), the Sarah Barracuda is about to take the gloves off and stop being so “politically correct.” That’s right, folks, everything we feared is true – Sarah Palin has been holding back so far. She’s not as crazy as we thought.

She is much, much crazier.

And it would appear that she’s about to stop being polite… and start getting real.

 

Every Breath You Take

During my misspent youth, it was something of a running joke between my hooligan friends and I that, should any of us be unfortunate enough to be saddled with the burdens of fatherhood, that the resulting child’s life would be best turned over to social experimentation in their early years.

So ill-prepared would we be for the perils of child rearing, we knew, the only responsible choice to make would be to devote the developmental stages of our offspring to the rigors of science. In this way, our hypothetical children could make some small contribution to the world, one no doubt greater than the dissipated life of crime, substance abuse, grift and general no-goodery for which any young minds turned over to our incapable hands for parenting would doubtless be bound.

As often as we heckled one another about the strange fates of our descendants, no one really believed it. And even though we demonstrated time after time that we were, in point of fact, terrible, terrible human beings, none of us really considered that, in the regrettable event that any of us ended up breeding, we would make guinea pigs of our babies.

We didn’t know anybody, in short, like MIT researcher Deb Roy. This is a guy who sticks to his motherfucking guns. The director of MIT’s Cognitive Machines group, Roy’s research has focused on language interaction in a variety of  physical and social contexts, as well as language acquisition in children. It’s this second line of thinking that led Roy to record his child’s entire life for the past three years.

The research, known as the Human Speechome Project, saw Roy install 11 cameras and 14 microphones in his home, represents the pinnacle of embarrassing home video technology, capturing every waking moment of  his son’s young life. After three years, Roy is done recording via the legion of hidden cameras throughout his home and he and his team have moved on to the work of analyzing the resulting quarter million hours of audio and video, working with advanced software  to find the points where the babbling of infants turns into genuine human language.

 

Winner and Losers Ahoy!

This week’s big winner is University of Colorado professor Chris Greene, whose theories that a Rydberg molecule could be formed were finally proven correct this week. The extremely weak molecular bond, in which a Rydberg atom, with just one electron in its outermost orbit, bonds for a matter of microseconds with a normal atom, forming a Rydberg molecule. The trick to forming the bond is getting conditions cold enough for the Rydberg atom to interact with it’s standard partner – University of Stuttgart researchers who successfully formed the molecule only did so at a temperature of negative 273 degrees Celsius.

Greene is joined on the podium by cow farmers everywhere, for whom the decoding of the cow genome earlier this week means that mucking about with the fundamental makeup of the animals they make their living on just got that much easier. An unlocked genome means that farmers can produce new strains and breeds of cow which will be optimized to produce more and better quality milk and meat. Future generations of gene tinkered bovines could even go to the slaughterhouse with smiles on their eager to be murdered faces. And wouldn’t that be nice?

Speaking of people with smiles on their faces, anti-depressant manufacturers are looking pretty giddy lately, and it’s not because they’ve been dipping into their own stash. Rather, the recent news that a ban on teenage anti-depressant use has not affected suicide rates among teens in the United Kingdom calls into question the perceived link between depression medication and teenagers taking their own lives. That’s right – teenagers killing themselves is actually good news for pharmaceutical companies. Try and act surprised.

Medication isn’t the only treatment for depression, though. For some people suffering from depression, a couple of hours in front of the TV can relieve the feelings of loneliness and isolation, imbuing viewers with a sense of belonging that may be missing in their lives.

‘Clean coal’ supporters also won big this week as Energy Secretary Steven Chu threw the backing of the United States behind the industry, which depends on technologies like carbon capture and gasification to provide energy from coal that doesn’t wreak havoc on the environment. The good news – these technologies may even exist and be effective. The bad news – well, they also may not, but we’re going to use them anyhow.

Cause for optimism remains, though. For evidence that things aren’t always as bad as we think, look no further than the Great Barrier Reef, one of the most astonishing natural wonders of the planet. After spending years teetering on the broink of devastation, the reef has either started one of the most amazing comebacks on record or dodged a bullet, depending on who you ask. Either way, chalk one up in the win column.

That’s not to say optimism is always warranted, as thinkers of happy thoughts are also inaugurating our losers section this week. The reason? Well, it turns out that people possessed of the rosiest outlook for the environmental future of the planet are also those who have the least notion of what’s going on. Of course, the study was performed using 15 year old subjects, so take it for what it’s worth, but remember – these are the people who will be making decisions that impact all life on earth in the coming decades, and if this study has proven one thing, it’s that not knowing how things work makes them happy.

On the other hand, unrestrained pessimists don’t look to be faring any better. News that people who think they will lose their memory as they age tend to experience far worse memory loss than individuals who don’t buy into senior moment stereotypes has Grumpy Gusses the world over settling angrily into the losers column this week. Doesn’t that just figure?

In other unsurprising news, ugly kids are among this weeks losers. A University of Miami study released this week linked physical attractiveness and good grooming in high school with not only higher grades, but also long term financial success. While this may be less than newsworthy, it does support the notion that every film strip you ever watched in elementary school was exactly right about everything, and if that doesn’t terrify you, you’re a stronger person than me.

Among this weeks other losers are Vietnam veterans, because they certainly haven’t had to put up with enough crap already. A study due out in the May issue of The British Journal of Urology International found that prostate cancer patients who had been exposed to Agent Orange  had a 50 percent higher risk of the cancer recurring than others, and that their instances of recurrence were significantly more aggressive than those of other patients.

And closing out our losers is NASA. The agency is staring down a deadline to make a decision on whether to rehab or retire the current space shuttle fleet, but doesn’t have a top executive in place to make the call. Every day that the decision gets put off is a bad one for NASA, whose astronauts are already faced with the bleak prospect of hitching rides to space alongside Russian cosmonauts. With Ruso-American relations remaining icy, that’s a bad fix at best. But keeping the current shuttle fleet in operation while the next generation of ships gets ready to go up, up and away may simply be too dangerous for the agency to face.

 

We Have A Pill For That!

Brand new and exciting medicine for any and every ailment, from cancer to kleptomania! If you’ve got it, chances are we’ve got medicine for it

First up is Provenge, the prostate cancer vaccine that made good this week, prolonging the lives of patients in a clinical trial and making it that much closer to FDA approval. A potentially less toxic cancer treatment radiation and conventional chemo, Provenge isn’t a traditional vaccine either – instead of preventing cancer, it works to activate the body’s immune system, sending white blood cells to pile on malignant prostate cancer cells and send them packing.

This week also saw big news in anaesthetics, from ones designed to save lives to those merely helpful in saving face. Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston may have turned saxitoxin, the powerful paralytic at play in shellfish poisoning, into a promising next generation painkiller. By packaging the poison in specially engineered fat cells, scientists can turn it into a slow release anaesthetic effective for days at a time that could benefit patients recovering from surgery as well as individuals suffering from chronic pain. Early tests in rats show that the designed fat cells, known as liposomes, trickle saxitoxin into the bloodstream at a safe rate, numbing tissue without damaging surrounding cells.

But chronic pain sufferers aren’t the only ones with reason to rejoice about recent advancements in anasthesia. Men with hair triggers (and presumably their partners) can get excited about PSD502, a topical anaesthetic spray shown in trials to help men suffering from premature ejaculation last as much as 6 times longer in the sack. Just, y’ know – don’t get too excited.

Now stop getting excited and start getting spooked about the prospect of your memories being edited by pharmaceuticals. Scientists at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn have been working with PKMzeta, a substance that may be among the holy grails of neuroscience –  the molecule responsible for the creation of memories in the brain. After isolating and studying the molecule, researchers injected ZIP, which interferes with PKMzeta, into the brains of rats, who promptly forgot how to avoid shocks as they had been trained for months to do. Substances like ZIP could, theoretically, be used in treating trauma, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease in humans. Of course, they could also be put to about a billion and one thoroughly malevolent purposes.

Speaking of chemical treatments for addiction, an existing one, naltrexone, looks to be branching out. Used for years in the treatment of alcoholism, it appears that naltrexone may also be effective in treating other compulsive behaviors, including kleptomania. In a study at the University of Minnesota, researchers have found that naltrexone, an opioid antagonist, dulls the giddy rush that accompanies petty theft and that is so hard to give up for many kleptomania sufferers, effectively neutering the urge to steal because it feels good.

But with all of these staggering medical advances, the plague of fir tree lung remains treatable only by surgery. So far.

 

Gepetto is Rolling Over In His Grave

Osaka University brings us CB2, the most unnerving looking android in recent memory. CB2 is designed to mimic the behavior, facial expressions and speech patterns of a human child of 1-2 years, while simultaneously haunting the dreams of all who gaze upon it’s eerie countenance. CB2 houses a camera that will monitor it’s environment and try to match up appropriate expressions and, eventually, simple sentences. Just pity the poor kid who has to be watched by this thing for the next two years as the frightening bastard tries to learn to be a real boy.

 

Always watching.

 

And for more terrible nightmares, be sure to check out an earlier iteration of the same technology on display below.

 

Destroying the Global Economy for Fun and Profit

So, if you’re still wondering what the mindset of all the stockbrokers, Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers who got us into the current economic kerfuffle looked like in the boom years, here’s Mad Money’s Jim Cramer, a former hedge fund manager himself, explaining it in surprisingly frank and really quite illuminating terms to TheStreet.com’s Aaron Task.

I was intially going to sarcastically paraphrase this, but really, the line 

“What’s important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful…”

is just beyond fucking parody.

Particularly enlightening is Cramer’s take on spreading rumors of a stock you’ve shorted being down.

“…you can’t foment, you can’t create yourself the impression that a stock is down. But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn’t understand it. That’s the only sense in which I would say that it’s illegal.”

You mean, it’s only illegal in the sense that it is an unlawful act that violates federal laws specifically meant to prevent people from doing the exact thing you just described and admitted to? That’s the only sense in which it’s illegal, you goddamn jackal?

Remind me again why more of these bastards haven’t been skinned alive and salted on live television for our amusment? Seriously, it’s a ratings bonanza waiting to happen, and I think there’s only a limited sense in which it’s illegal.

Thanks to HuffPo for this really interesting look into the brain of Wall Street.