ok, i really shouldnt be up right now, but i also really wanted to post this since im pretty sure i would otherwise forget.. i was just scratching just under my neck, you know, the skin between the collar bone and the shoulder.. and i have no idea how.. i heard a *kghhttt* and ouchies.. i looked at my finger and i had ripped a layer of skin clean off.. i thought it mightve been a scab or something (but i didnt have one there) but i went to check and... well, it wasnt.. (of course, now it will be in a couple days) dang, so how did i manage to do that? just rip the top layer of skin like that?? it doesnt really hurt, but how can my skin rip off so easily? ugh, what am i some sort of low budget cyborg? (please picture the terminator movie for that one.. yeh, exactly) anyways. just wanted to share that.. oh, and something i posted as my status, but ill give that its own post.. 'ow 'boutit?
Gambling vs. Risk Taking (John MacArthur) http://www.gty.org/Blog/B110627 ... You've probably heard this argument before from advocates of gambling: "If gambling is sin, then so is investing in the stock market, buying a house, and even starting your own company. They all involve the same element—risk taking." That argument may appear convincing on the surface, but can it survive closer scrutiny? Today we'll let John MacArthur answer that question...
John MacArthur - I do not Allow a Woman to Teach... (1Timothy 2:12-15)
Examples of women "teachers" today: Joyce Meyer, Juanita Bynum, Paula White, Marilyn Hickey, Monica Dennington, Beth Moore, Lisa Bevere, Mary Manin Morrissey, Gloria Copeland
1 Timothy 2:12-15 (New American Standard Bible) 12But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.
13For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve.
14And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression.
15But women will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.
What is the Heart of the Gospel? (2 Cor.5:21)-John MacArthur & Kirk Cameron Pastor John MacArthur (Grace to You) explains what is the heart of the Gospel (Justification by Faith Alone/Sola Fide) to Actor Kirk Cameron (The Way of the Master) from 2 Corinthians 5:21: "God made Him (Jesus) who had no sin to be sin (offering) for us, so that in Him (Jesus) we might become the righteousness of God." (The Great Exchange: My sin for Christ's perfect righteousness).
For indepth explanation of 2 Corinthians 5:21 by John MacArthur, go to video "The Gospel of Eternal Hope: 15 Words of Hope"
obamacare on the prowl.. a few facts, courtesy of a group of doctors:
The Whole Truth A response to the Democrat ad showing Paul Ryan throwing grandma off a cliff: ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGnE83A1Z4U ) Get the whole truth on how Obamacare will impact the health and welfare of your loved ones at www.AmericanDoctors4Truth.org.
and i really need to database-ize at least the tags for the blog.. sometimes i miss a tag after i submit the post, and then.. ugh, theres no good, quick way to fix it right now.. if i do database-ize the tags.. that means i can.. wait for it.. wait for it.. make it so that if you are a user, you can keep track of your favorite blog posts, and mark them as read, etc! kewl eh?
joelie said this one at prayer meeting that he heard yesterday:
no Bible, no breakfast
ie, if you havent read your Bible that morning, you dont have your breakfast. simple, easy to remember, easy to apply. i think im going to give this one a try. (ive also been trying to have breakfast, at least to regulate my circadian rhythm and see if i can get this fixed already.. which reminds me, why am i still up?
ok a quick one while i take a short break (whoda thunk id be learning how to write legal documents one day?)
so, ever thought where the word "pal" comes from? well, it comes from the romani language.. you know, the language of the romani people, also known by the more common term "gypsies".. and did you ever wonder where the gypsies come from? well, if you thought "well, duh, romania.." (or "maybe rome?") then you guessed much as i had guessed, and much as me, were quite wrong in your guess. the romani language is an indo-european (indo-iranian -> indo-aryan) language. and the romani people come most likely from india, and more precisely central india, probably starting their migration at around 1000AD. the romani language apparently is quite similar to domari (with speakers mainly in iran, egypt and india) and both are quite similar to hindi..
interesting huh? feel smarter? now you know where esmeralda is originally from!
ok, lest i forget to post on this.. we went rock climbing the saturday before last (10 days ago) to celebrate my godson's bday.. (note to self, he calls me "papa'" haha) and so i went with luz and natalien.. now, i dont know if i already mentioned this, but at the beginning of the month i went on a 5 day full fast (where all you consume is water, no juice, no food.. and if any muslims are reading this, its a continuous fast.. no eating at midnight each day or any of the sort).. so i had lost about 8lbs during those 5 days, and gained them right back the next week. (yeah, im kind of surprised at that too). the point in so saying, is that despite my 10 finger pushups + 10 diamond pushups every other time i shower of exercise ive been giving myself, all my muscles were still in healing (at least thats my excuse) so i really didnt have much strength, plus the fact that my get really sweaty really easily, and i sort of didnt think to ask for a pack of chalk to ease my climbing experience (i thought you had to pay for it -- me cheap). ah, let me give you a bit of a fuller story. i was also feeling sick that day, oh yeah, i forgot about that.. bad headache. so we arrived about an hour late, and then waited around for an hour before we got our "belay test".. you know, to test to see if its safe to let you go belay another human life.. so luz and i were trying our best to remember, as we tried observing the kids who were already there doing their stuff to see if seeing them reminded us of how to do it.. etc.. and then we totally tried to fake our way through the test (so we didnt have to pay the extra cost of a "refresher course".. --we're cheap) but we also totally failed!! haha.. oh man, i was pretty glad we did too, since that way the guy could tell us all the right ways of doing all the things we had forgotten, and then how he told us that the method we had learned a year or so ago at the other place was slightly different as the lifelines were attached to the ground, where they werent at this place. yeah. we didnt even notice that! so, he saved our lives, and that was good.
back to the story, so i tried a couple of really strained attemps at a 5.6 level wall (thats like one level over the kiddie level) but my sweatiness was making it really tough.. and you really have to have good grip. so i think in this struggle (though i did make it to the top) i consumed too much of my energy, and my healing muscles did have much to give. luz was doing pretty well though (natalie wasnt climbing that day, and my lovely wife is afraid of heights, so it was luz and i and my wife looking on.) i think she got up a 5.8 if i remember correctly. and then of course, my 7-year old godson came over to see if he could climb a wall with me belaying him.. so, he almost ran up a 5.6 wall.. ugh, i felt terrible.. haha, by this time i had already tried a 5.8, 5.9, and i think even a 5.7 (probably in that order too) and had failed miserably at all of them. ugh, so yeah, i guess you could say i was climbing at a 7-year old level.. *head hangs in shame* oh well.. it was still fun, and i am definitely itching to go again, a little more prepared this time, with more beefy arms, and more dry hands. (yes, more in number). after that we went to their place and watched thor.. oh boy, dumb fun, and actually it was exactly what i expected it to be. meh. i enjoyed the time we spent with them, as always.
and also before i forget, note to self again, natalie called me the other day to tell me that she was doing a Bible lesson with the kids, and she was doing it on respect and had them drawing on a whiteboard, so she told the littlest one to draw his dad. and so my godson started drawing me! *heart melts* and he started drawing my beard, and then my hair, and he said "he cut it recently, but im going to draw him with long hair..." and then.. hear this.. he said "oh yeah, and im going to draw his slippers too! because he always wears slippers!" hahaha.. awesome.. i told natalie now i have to get him some slippers.. the hunt is on!
whoa, just remembered i never did my birthday blog post.. ok, ill make time for that this week (he said)
ohhh maaaan! i just improved my blog posting script quite significantly (made the preview window MUCH less annoying, and does not make a million http requests, and does not flash and do weird things when i type.. ) something ive been wanting to do for a while but always thought it was probably not possible.. but hey, it WAS!! so now posting is much much less annoying.. so expect better quality posts! *cough*
Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?
No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 53-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire.
Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.
The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.
But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”
whoa
An evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague, Flegr has pursued this theory for decades in relative obscurity. Because he struggles with English and is not much of a conversationalist even in his native tongue, he rarely travels to scientific conferences. That “may be one of the reasons my theory is not better known,” he says. And, he believes, his views may invite deep-seated opposition. “There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Reviewers [of my scientific papers] may have been offended.” Another more obvious reason for resistance, of course, is that Flegr’s notions sound an awful lot like fringe science, right up there with UFO sightings and claims of dolphins telepathically communicating with humans.
But after years of being ignored or discounted, Flegr is starting to gain respectability. Psychedelic as his claims may sound, many researchers, including such big names in neuroscience as Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, think he could well be onto something. Flegr’s “studies are well conducted, and I can see no reason to doubt them,” Sapolsky tells me. Indeed, recent findings from Sapolsky’s lab and British groups suggest that the parasite is capable of extraordinary shenanigans. T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat’s strong innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1 predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and sexual arousal. “Overall,” says Sapolsky, “this is wild, bizarre neurobiology.” Another academic heavyweight who takes Flegr seriously is the schizophrenia expert E. Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, in Maryland. “I admire Jaroslav for doing [this research],” he says. “It’s obviously not politically correct, in the sense that not many labs are doing it. He’s done it mostly on his own, with very little support. I think it bears looking at. I find it completely credible.”
What’s more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings. “My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of,” says Sapolsky.
Familiar to most of us, of course, is the rabies virus. On the verge of killing a dog, bat, or other warm-blooded host, it stirs the animal into a rage while simultaneously migrating from the nervous system to the creature’s saliva, ensuring that when the host bites, the virus will live on in a new carrier. But aside from rabies, stories of parasites commandeering the behavior of large-brained mammals are rare. The far more common victims of parasitic mind control—at least the ones we know about—are fish, crustaceans, and legions of insects, according to Janice Moore, a behavioral biologist at Colorado State University. “Flies, ants, caterpillars, wasps, you name it—there are truckloads of them behaving weirdly as a result of parasites,” she says.
Consider Polysphincta gutfreundi, a parasitic wasp that grabs hold of an orb spider and attaches a tiny egg to its belly. A wormlike larva emerges from the egg, and then releases chemicals that prompt the spider to abandon weaving its familiar spiral web and instead spin its silk thread into a special pattern that will hold the cocoon in which the larva matures. The “possessed” spider even crochets a specific geometric design in the net, camouflaging the cocoon from the wasp’s predators.
Flegr himself traces his life’s work to another master of mind control. Almost 30 years ago, as he was reading a book by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Flegr was captivated by a passage describing how a flatworm turns an ant into its slave by invading the ant’s nervous system. A drop in temperature normally causes ants to head underground, but the infected insect instead climbs to the top of a blade of grass and clamps down on it, becoming easy prey for a grazing sheep. “Its mandibles actually become locked in that position, so there’s nothing the ant can do except hang there in the air,” says Flegr. The sheep grazes on the grass and eats the ant; the worm gains entrance into the ungulate’s gut, which is exactly where it needs to be in order to complete—as the Lion King song goes—the circle of life. “It was the first I learned about this kind of manipulation, so it made a big impression on me,” Flegr says.
dawkings wrote that?? and you two STILL believe in evolution?? you have GOT to be kidding me!!! *smacks head* ugh, it is true what the Bible says, "the fool says in his heart, 'there is no God'" (ps 14:1) how can you study soo much and still miss such a HONKER of a display of God's glorious work in creation?? 3 different species all part of the intricate process that keeps one alive. just.. ugh.. this is why i dont believe in atheists.. what a load of baloney.
After he read the book, Flegr began to make a connection that, he readily admits, others might find crazy: his behavior, he noticed, shared similarities with that of the reckless ant. For example, he says, he thought nothing of crossing the street in the middle of dense traffic, “and if cars honked at me, I didn’t jump out of the way.” He also made no effort to hide his scorn for the Communists who ruled Czechoslovakia for most of his early adulthood. “It was very risky to openly speak your mind at that time,” he says. “I was lucky I wasn’t imprisoned.” And during a research stint in eastern Turkey, when the strife-torn region frequently erupted in gunfire, he recalls being “very calm.” In contrast, he says, “my colleagues were terrified. I wondered what was wrong with myself.”
His bewilderment continued until 1990, when he joined the biology faculty of Charles University. As it happened, the 650-year-old institution had long been a world leader in documenting the health effects of T. gondii, as well as developing methods for detecting the parasite. In fact, just as Flegr was arriving, his colleagues were searching for infected individuals on whom to test their improved diagnostic kits, which is how he came to be asked one day to roll up his sleeve and donate blood. He discovered that he had the parasite—and just possibly, he thought, the key to his baffling self-destructive streak.
He delved into T. gondii’s life cycle. After an infected cat defecates, Flegr learned, the parasite is typically picked up from the soil by scavenging or grazing animals—notably rodents, pigs, and cattle—all of which then harbor it in their brain and other body tissues. Humans, on the other hand, are exposed not only by coming into contact with litter boxes, but also, he found, by drinking water contaminated with cat feces, eating unwashed vegetables, or, especially in Europe, by consuming raw or undercooked meat. Hence the French, according to Flegr, with their love of steak prepared saignant—literally, “bleeding”—can have infection rates as high as 55 percent. (Americans will be happy to hear that the parasite resides in far fewer of them, though a still substantial portion: 10 to 20 percent.) Once inside an animal or human host, the parasite then needs to get back into the cat, the only place where it can sexually reproduce—and this is when, Flegr believed, behavioral manipulation might come into play.
The parasite T. gondii, seen here, may be changing connections between our neurones, altering how we act and feel. (Dennis Kunkel Microscropy, Inc./Visuals Unlimited/Corbis Images)
Researchers had already observed a few peculiarities about rodents with T. gondii that bolstered Flegr’s theory. The infected rodents were much more active in running wheels than uninfected rodents were, suggesting that they would be more-attractive targets for cats, which are drawn to fast-moving objects. They also were less wary of predators in exposed spaces. Little, however, was known about how the latent infection might influence humans, because we and other large mammals were widely presumed to be accidental hosts, or, as scientists are fond of putting it, a “dead end” for the parasite. But even if we were never part of the parasite’s life cycle, Flegr reasoned, mammals from mouse to man share the vast majority of their genes, so we might, in a case of mistaken identity, still be vulnerable to manipulations by the parasite.
In the Soviet-stunted economy, animal studies were way beyond Flegr’s research budget. But fortunately for him, 30 to 40 percent of Czechs had the latent form of the disease, so plenty of students were available “to serve as very cheap experimental animals.” He began by giving them and their parasite-free peers standardized personality tests—an inexpensive, if somewhat crude, method of measuring differences between the groups. In addition, he used a computer-based test to assess the reaction times of participants, who were instructed to press a button as soon as a white square popped up anywhere against the dark background of the monitor.
The subjects who tested positive for the parasite had significantly delayed reaction times. Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.
The findings were so bizarre that Flegr initially assumed his data must be flawed. So he tested other groups—civilian and military populations. Again, the same results. Then, in search of more corroborating evidence, he brought subjects in for further observation and a battery of tests, in which they were rated by someone ignorant of their infection status. To assess whether participants valued the opinions of others, the rater judged how well dressed they appeared to be. As a measure of gregariousness, participants were asked about the number of friends they’d interacted with over the past two weeks. To test whether they were prone to being suspicious, they were asked, among other things, to drink an unidentified liquid.
The results meshed well with the questionnaire findings. Compared with uninfected people of the same sex, infected men were more likely to wear rumpled old clothes; infected women tended to be more meticulously attired, many showing up for the study in expensive, designer-brand clothing. Infected men tended to have fewer friends, while infected women tended to have more. And when it came to downing the mystery fluid, reports Flegr, “the infected males were much more hesitant than uninfected men. They wanted to know why they had to do it. Would it harm them?” In contrast, the infected women were the most trusting of all subjects. “They just did what they were told,” he says.
this is just such an interesting article, i think im going to post the whole thing
Why men and women reacted so differently to the parasite still mystified him. After consulting the psychological literature, he started to suspect that heightened anxiety might be the common denominator underlying their responses. When under emotional strain, he read, women seek solace through social bonding and nurturing. In the lingo of psychologists, they’re inclined to “tend and befriend.” Anxious men, on the other hand, typically respond by withdrawing and becoming hostile or antisocial. Perhaps he was looking at flip sides of the same coin.
Closer inspection of Flegr’s reaction-time results revealed that infected subjects became less attentive and slowed down a minute or so into the test. This suggested to him that Toxoplasma might have an adverse impact on driving, where constant vigilance and fast reflexes are critical. He launched two major epidemiological studies in the Czech Republic, one of men and women in the general population and another of mostly male drivers in the military. Those who tested positive for the parasite, both studies showed, were about two and a half times as likely to be in a traffic accident as their uninfected peers.
When I met Flegr for the first time, last September, at his office on the third floor of Charles University’s Biological Sciences building, I was expecting something of a wild man. But once you get past the riotous red hair, his style is understated. Thin and slight of build, he’s soft-spoken, precise with his facts, and—true to his Toxo status—clad in old sneakers, faded bell-bottom jeans, and a loose-fitting button-up shirt. As our conversation proceeds, I discover that his latest findings have become—to quote Alice in Wonderland—“curiouser and curiouser,” which may explain why his forehead has the deep ruts of a chronic worrier, or someone perpetually perplexed.
He’s published some data, he tells me, that suggest infected males might have elevated testosterone levels. Possibly for that reason, women shown photos of these men rate them as more masculine than pictures of uninfected men. “I want to investigate this more closely to see if it’s true,” he says. “Also, it could be women find infected men more attractive. That’s something else we hope to test.”
Meanwhile, two Turkish studies have replicated his studies linking Toxoplasma to traffic accidents. With up to one-third of the world infected with the parasite, Flegr now calculates that T. gondii is a likely factor in several hundred thousand road deaths each year. In addition, reanalysis of his personality-questionnaire data revealed that, just like him, many other people who have the latent infection feel intrepid in dangerous situations. “Maybe,” he says, “that’s another reason they get into traffic accidents. They don’t have a normal fear response.”
It’s almost impossible to hear about Flegr’s research without wondering whether you’re infected—especially if, like me, you’re a cat owner, favor very rare meat, and identify even a little bit with your Toxo sex stereotype. So before coming to Prague, I’d gotten tested for the parasite, but I didn’t yet know the results. It seemed a good time to see what his intuition would tell me. “Can you guess from observing someone whether they have the parasite—myself, for example?,” I ask.
“No,” he says, “the parasite’s effects on personality are very subtle.” If, as a woman, you were introverted before being infected, he says, the parasite won’t turn you into a raving extrovert. It might just make you a little less introverted. “I’m very typical of Toxoplasma males,” he continues. “But I don’t know whether my personality traits have anything to do with the infection. It’s impossible to say for any one individual. You usually need about 50 people who are infected and 50 who are not, in order to see a statistically significant difference. The vast majority of people will have no idea they’re infected.”
Still, he concedes, the parasite could be very bad news for a small percentage of people—and not just those who might be at greater risk for car accidents. Many schizophrenia patients show shrinkage in parts of their cerebral cortex, and Flegr thinks the protozoan may be to blame for that. He hands me a recently published paper on the topic that he co-authored with colleagues at Charles University, including a psychiatrist named Jiri Horacek. Twelve of 44 schizophrenia patients who underwent MRI scans, the team found, had reduced gray matter in the brain—and the decrease occurred almost exclusively in those who tested positive for T. gondii. After reading the abstract, I must look stunned, because Flegr smiles and says, “Jiri had the same response. I don’t think he believed it could be true.” When I later speak with Horacek, he admits to having been skeptical about Flegr’s theory at the outset. When they merged the MRI results with the infection data, however, he went from being a doubter to being a believer. “I was amazed at how pronounced the effect was,” he says. “To me that suggests the parasite may trigger schizophrenia in genetically susceptible people.”
One might be tempted to dismiss the bulk of Flegr’s work as hokum—the fanciful imaginings of a lone, eccentric scholar—were it not for the pioneering research of Joanne Webster, a parasitologist at Imperial College London. Just as Flegr was embarking on his human trials, Webster, then a freshly minted Ph.D., was launching studies of Toxo-infected rodents, reasoning, just as Flegr did, that as hosts of the parasite, they would be likely targets for behavioral manipulation.
She quickly confirmed, as previous researchers had shown, that infected rats were more active and less cautious in areas where predators lurk. But then, in a simple, elegant experiment, she and her colleagues demonstrated that the parasite did something much more remarkable. They treated one corner of each rat’s enclosure with the animal’s own odor, a second with water, a third with cat urine, and the last corner with the urine of a rabbit, a creature that does not prey on rodents. “We thought the parasite might reduce the rats’ aversion to cat odor,” she told me. “Not only did it do that, but it actually increased their attraction. They spent more time in the cat-treated areas.” She and other scientists repeated the experiment with the urine of dogs and minks, which also prey on rodents. The effect was so specific to cat urine, she says, that “we call it ‘fatal feline attraction.’”
She began tagging the parasite with fluorescent markers and tracking its progress in the rats’ bodies. Given the surgically precise way the microbe alters behavior, Webster anticipated that it would end up in localized regions of the brain. But the results defied expectations. “We were quite surprised to find the cysts—the parasite’s dormant form—all over the brain in what otherwise appeared to be a happy, healthy rat,” she says. Nonetheless, the cysts were most abundant in a part of the brain that deals with pleasure (in human terms, we’re talking sex, drugs, and rock and roll) and in another area that’s involved in fear and anxiety (post-traumatic stress disorder affects this region of the brain). Perhaps, she thought, T. gondii uses a scattershot approach, disseminating cysts far and wide, enabling a few of them to zero in on the right targets.
To gain more clarity on the matter, she sought the aid of the parasitologist Glenn McConkey, whose team at the University of Leeds was probing the protozoan’s genome for signs of what it might be doing. The approach brought to light a striking talent of the parasite: it has two genes that allow it to crank up production of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the host brain. “We never cease to be amazed by the sophistication of these parasites,” Webster says.
*cough*
Their findings, reported last summer, created immediate buzz. Dopamine is a critical signaling molecule involved in fear, pleasure, and attention. Furthermore, the neurotransmitter is known to be jacked up in people with schizophrenia—another one of those strange observations about the disease, like its tendency to erode gray matter, that have long puzzled medical researchers. Antipsychotic medicine designed to quell schizophrenic delusions apparently blocks the action of dopamine, which had suggested to Webster that what it might really be doing is thwarting the parasite. Scientists had already shown that adding the medicine to a petri dish where T. gondii is happily dividing will stunt the organism’s growth. So Webster decided to feed the antipsychotic drug to newly infected rats to see how they reacted. Lo and behold, they didn’t develop fatal feline attraction. Suddenly, attributing behavioral changes to the microbe seemed much more plausible.
As the scientific community digested the British team’s dopamine discoveries, Robert Sapolsky’s lab at Stanford announced still more attention-grabbing news. The neuroscientist and his colleagues found that T. gondii disconnects fear circuits in the brain, which might help to explain why infected rats lose their aversion to cat odor. Just as startling, reports Sapolsky, the parasite simultaneously is “able to hijack some of the circuitry related to sexual arousal” in the male rat—probably, he theorizes, by boosting dopamine levels in the reward-processing part of the brain. So when the animal catches a whiff of cat scent, the fear center fails to fully light up, as it would in a normal rat, and instead the area governing sexual pleasure begins to glow. “In other words,” he says, “Toxo makes cat odor smell sexy to male rats.”
The neurobiologist Ajai Vyas, after working with Sapolsky on this study as a postdoctoral student, decided to inspect infected rats’ testicles for signs of cysts. Sure enough, he found them there—as well as in the animals’ semen. And when the rat copulates, Vyas discovered, the protozoan moves into the female’s womb, typically infecting 60 percent of her pups, before traveling on up to her own brain—creating still more vehicles for ferrying the parasite back into the belly of a cat.
Could T. gondii be a sexually transmitted disease in humans too? “That’s what we hope to find out,” says Vyas, who now works at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. The researchers also discovered that infected male rats suddenly become much more attractive to females. “It’s a very strong effect,” says Vyas. “Seventy-five percent of the females would rather spend time with the infected male.”
After I return from Prague, Flegr informs me that he’s just had a paper accepted for publication that, he claims, “proves fatal feline attraction in humans.” By that he means that infected men like the smell of cat pee—or at least they rank its scent much more favorably than uninfected men do. Displaying the characteristic sex differences that define many Toxo traits, infected women have the reverse response, ranking the scent even more offensive than do women free of the parasite. The sniff test was done blind and also included urine collected from a dog, horse, hyena, and tiger. Infection did not affect how subjects rated these other samples.
“Is it possible cat urine may be an aphrodisiac for infected men?,” I ask. “Yes. It’s possible. Why not?” says Flegr. I think he’s smiling at the other end of the phone line, but I’m not sure, which leaves me wondering whether I’ve stumbled onto a topic ripe for a Saturday Night Live skit, or a matter worthy of medical concern. When I ask Sapolsky about Flegr’s most recent research, he says the effects Flegr is reporting “are incredibly cool. However, I’m not too worried, in that the effects on humans are not gigantic. If you want to reduce serious car accidents, and you had to choose between curing people of Toxo infections versus getting people not to drive drunk or while texting, go for the latter in terms of impact.”
In fact, Sapolsky thinks that Toxo’s inventiveness might even offer us some benefits. If we can figure out how the parasite makes animals less fearful, he says, it might give us insights into how to devise treatments for people plagued by social-anxiety disorder, phobias, PTSD, and the like. “But frankly,” he adds, “this mostly falls into the ‘Get a load of this, can you believe what nature has come up with?’ category.”
*cough* oh it must be the cold im getting over.. *cough*
oh boy, this is a really long article. i dont know if ill end up posting the whole thing.. we'll see
Webster is more circumspect, if not downright troubled. “I don’t want to cause any panic,” she tells me. “In the vast majority of people, there will be no ill effects, and those who are affected will mostly demonstrate subtle shifts of behavior. But in a small number of cases, [Toxo infection] may be linked to schizophrenia and other disturbances associated with altered dopamine levels—for example, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and mood disorders. The rat may live two or three years, while humans can be infected for many decades, which is why we may be seeing these severe side effects in people. We should be cautious of dismissing such a prevalent parasite.”
ok be honest, how many of you have been wondering at some point during the reading of this thing "hmm, do i have this virus??"
The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey agrees—though he came to this viewpoint from a completely different angle than either Webster or Flegr. His opinion stems from decades of research into the root causes of schizophrenia. “Textbooks today still make silly statements that schizophrenia has always been around, it’s about the same incidence all over the world, and it’s existed since time immemorial,” he says. “The epidemiology literature contradicts that completely.” In fact, he says, schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared.
Since the 1950s, he notes, about 70 epidemiology studies have explored a link between schizophrenia and T. gondii. When he and his colleague Robert Yolken, a neurovirologist at Johns Hopkins University, surveyed a subset of these papers that met rigorous scientific standards, their conclusion complemented the Prague group’s discovery that schizophrenic patients with Toxo are missing gray matter in their brains. Torrey and Yolken found that the mental illness is two to three times as common in people who have the parasite as in controls from the same region.
Human-genome studies, both scientists believe, are also in keeping with that finding—and might explain why schizophrenia runs in families. The most replicated result from that line of investigation, they say, suggests that the genes most commonly associated with schizophrenia relate to the immune system and how it reacts to infectious agents. So in many cases where the disease appears to be hereditary, they theorize, what may in fact be passed down is an aberrant or deficient immune response to invaders like T. gondii.
Epstein-Barr virus, mumps, rubella, and other infectious agents, they point out, have also been linked to schizophrenia—and there are probably more as yet unidentified triggers, including many that have nothing to do with pathogens. But for now, they say, Toxo remains the strongest environmental factor implicated in the disorder. “If I had to guess,” says Torrey, “I’d say 75 percent of cases of schizophrenia are associated with infectious agents, and Toxo would be involved in a significant subset of those.”
Just as worrisome, says Torrey, the parasite may also increase the risk of suicide. In a 2011 study of 20 European countries, the national suicide rate among women increased in direct proportion to the prevalence of the latent Toxo infection in each nation’s female population. According to Teodor Postolache, a psychiatrist and the director of the Mood and Anxiety Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, a flurry of other studies, several conducted by his own team, offers further support of T. gondii’s link to higher rates of suicidal behavior. These include investigations of general populations as well as groups made up of patients with bipolar disorder, severe depression, and schizophrenia, and in places as diverse as Turkey, Germany, and the Baltimore/Washington area. Exactly how the parasite may push vulnerable people over the edge is yet to be determined. Postolache theorizes that what disrupts mood and the ability to control violent impulses may not be the organism per se, but rather neurochemical changes associated with the body’s immune response to it. “As far-fetched as these ideas may sound,” says Postolache, “the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention was willing to put money behind this research.”
Given all the nasty science swirling around this parasite, is it time for cat lovers to switch their allegiance to other animals?
Even Flegr would advise against that. Indoor cats pose no threat, he says, because they don’t carry the parasite. As for outdoor cats, they shed the parasite for only three weeks of their life, typically when they’re young and have just begun hunting. During that brief period, Flegr simply recommends taking care to keep kitchen counters and tables wiped clean. (He practices what he preaches: he and his wife have two school-age children, and two outdoor cats that have free roam of their home.) Much more important for preventing exposure, he says, is to scrub vegetables thoroughly and avoid drinking water that has not been properly purified, especially in the developing world, where infection rates can reach 95 percent in some places. Also, he advises eating meat on the well-done side—or, if that’s not to your taste, freezing it before cooking, to kill the cysts.
As concerns about the latent infection mount, however, experts have begun thinking about more-aggressive steps to counter the parasite’s spread. Inoculating cats or livestock against T. gondii might be one way to interrupt its life cycle, offers Johns Hopkins’ Robert Yolken. Moving beyond prevention to treatment is a taller order. Once the parasite becomes deeply ensconced in brain cells, routing it out of the body is virtually impossible: the thick-walled cysts are impregnable to antibiotics. Because T. gondii and the malaria protozoan are related, however, Yolken and other researchers are looking among antimalarial agents for more-effective drugs to attack the cysts. But for now, medicine has no therapy to offer people who want to rid themselves of the latent infection; and until solid proof exists that Toxo is as dangerous as some scientists now fear, pharmaceutical companies don’t have much incentive to develop anti-Toxo drugs.
Yolken hopes that will change. “To explain where we are in Toxo research today,” he says, “the analogy I always give is the ulcer bacteria. We first needed to find ways of treating the organism and showing that the disease went away when you did that. We will have to show that when we very effectively treat Toxoplasma, some portion of psychiatric illness goes away.”
But T. gondii is just one of an untold number of infectious agents that prey on us. And if the rest of the animal kingdom is anything to go by, says Colorado State University’s Janice Moore, plenty of them may be capable of tinkering with our minds. For example, she and Chris Reiber, a biomedical anthropologist at Binghamton University, in New York, strongly suspected that the flu virus might boost our desire to socialize. Why? Because it spreads through close physical contact, often before symptoms emerge—meaning that it must find a new host quickly. To explore this hunch, Moore and Reiber tracked 36 subjects who received a flu vaccine, reasoning that it contains many of the same chemical components as the live virus and would thus cause the subjects’ immune systems to react as if they’d encountered the real pathogen.
The difference in the subjects’ behavior before and after vaccination was pronounced: the flu shot had the effect of nearly doubling the number of people with whom the participants came in close contact during the brief window when the live virus was maximally contagious. “People who had very limited or simple social lives were suddenly deciding that they needed to go out to bars or parties, or invite a bunch of people over,” says Reiber. “This happened with lots of our subjects. It wasn’t just one or two outliers.”
haha wow, so interesting
Reiber has her eye trained on other human pathogens that she thinks may well be playing similar games, if only science could prove it. For example, she says, many people at the end stages of AIDS and syphilis express an intense craving for sex. So, too, do individuals at the beginning of a herpes outbreak. These may just be anecdotal accounts, she concedes, but based on her own findings, she wouldn’t be surprised if these urges come from the pathogen making known its will to survive.
“We’ve found all kinds of excuses for why we do the things we do,” observes Moore. “‘My genes made me do it.’ ‘My parents are to blame.’ I’m afraid we may have reached the point where parasites may have to be added to the laundry list of excuses.”
She has a point. In fact, I’ve been wondering whether T. gondii might in some small way be contributing to my extreme extroversion—why I can’t resist striking up conversations everywhere I go, even when I’m short of time or with strangers I’ll never see again. Then it occurs to me that cysts in my brain might be behind my seesaw moods or even my splurges on expensive clothes. Maybe, I think with mounting conviction, the real me would have displayed better self-control, had I not been forced to swim upstream against the will of an insidious parasite. With my feline pal Pixie on my lap (for the record, she’s an outdoor cat), I call to get the results of my Toxo test. Negative. I don’t have the latent infection.
I call to tell Flegr the good news. Even though I’m relieved, I know my voice sounds flat. “It’s strange to admit,” I say, “but I think I’m a little disappointed.” He laughs. “People who have cats often feel that way, because they think the parasite explains why they behave this way or that,” he says. “But,” I protest, “you thought the same way.” Then it hits me. I may have dodged T. gondii, but given our knack for fooling ourselves—plus all those parasites out there that may also be playing tricks on our minds—can anyone really know who’s running the show?
wow, holey, what a well written article. so interesting. i guess i did end up posting the whole thing. perhaps my longest post?
someday, auroras, someday.. (thanks to luz for the link)
Aurora Borealis - Northern Lights Yellowknife, NWT Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) time lapse movies from Prelude Territorial Park 30 Km outside of Yellowknife filmed September 2011. Used Canon 5 D Mark II, 24 mm F1.4 lens to record the individual images.
all acts of mercy of God toward sinful man are a result of Christ's death upon that cross. if the sun goes up for the non-believer, it is a result of the cross. if the non-believer can rejoice, it is a result of the cross. Glory be to God who is patient and merciful with ALL.. his common grace is not common at all!
Founded in northern states in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, modernizers, ex-Whigs and ex-Free Soilers, the Republican Party quickly became the principal opposition to the dominant Democratic Party...
[...]
The first public meeting where the name "Republican" was suggested for a new anti-slavery party was held on March 20, 1854 in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin.
from wikipedia article on the republican party.. sooo, the republican party was founded as an anti-slavery party.. haha.. ohh boy are the lefties gonna have a hard time with that one. and if you think about it, being anti-socialism falls perfectly in line with that original mandate, where they dont want the people to be slaves of the government. (as you might already know, i think there is a place for socialist notions, but this only where the central government is weak.. as is the case in switzerland, for example)
1.
Military. the key group of officers and enlisted personnel necessary to establish and train a new military unit.
2.
a group of trained or otherwise qualified personnel capable of forming, training, or leading an expanded organization, as a religious or political faction, or a skilled work force: They hoped to form a cadre of veteran party members.
3.
(especially in Communist countries) a cell of trained and devoted workers.
4.
a member of a cadre; a person qualified to serve in a cadre.
another post i think might be of blessing to you for me to repost here:
but given just how much of the Bible has been proven true to the point where coincidence must be ruled out, and this by secular sources, i say that it is inescapable even from a secular standpoint, that we are dealing with something different here when it comes to the Bible. honestly, a 1 in 10^157 chance that 48 prophecies be fulfilled in a single man in history, ALL being fulfilled to the letter, thats a bit hard to toss aside. i know youve encountered at least some old testament stuff about the messiah. i think its mindblowing that God preserved the jews as a nation through just soo much persecution, you are quite well aware im sure that there is no more hated group of people in history than the jews, and how many nations have tried to eradicate them completely, and yet, here they still are! to be honest, the existence of the jews to me is quite a loudly speaking testament of the existence of the God of Israel. but specifically, i think its also amazing in that the jews to this day STILL use the same Scriptures (the tanach) which still contain the same prophecies, which say the same exact things.. things like that the glory of the second temple would surpass that of the first, that the Messiah Himself would enter the second temple, and that God Himself would enter the second temple (micah 5).. as you know, the second temple was destroyed in 70AD by the romans.. the second temple no longer exists, as of 40 years after Jesus' death. if they were to rebuild it, that would make it the 3rd temple, so that prophecy is impossible to fulfill now. that means the Messiah must NECESSARILY have come before the year 70AD. also, if you know a bit about the history of the temple, you will know that the second temple did not in any way compare to the first.. the second was sort of haphazardly rebuilt, one hand lifting stones, and the other holding a sword (according to nehemiah) it wasnt as big, it wasnt as luxurious, etc etc.. but what micah tells us is that its glory was greater because, well, the Messiah, God Himself, would walk into it. that can no longer happen.
whats my point? well that in having jews who reject the Messiahship of Christ, we have a non-favorably-biased group of people who can attest to the existence of such prophecies. no serious jewish person denies that Jesus existed, or did the historical things the Jesus of the NT did. they deny His divinity of course, but not His historicity. that means we know those prophecies existed, and that the historical events occurred. this is quite significant because the historicity shows us the fulfillment of those prophecies which can NO LONGER be fulfilled.. by anyone! to me, this is unequivocal, undeniable evidence that the Bible is the Word of the Living God, the God of the Israelites, who promised to reach out to the gentiles with a new pact in the (OT) book of jeremiah. blows my mind.
on tyndale and why we have and english Bible to read (in a previous post i posted on wycliffe too.. God used many men to bring the Bible to our hands in a language we can read and understand.. all the glory to Him!)
im in too much pain and discomfort, so i couldnt sleep. i just posted a response to something on my wall on facebook that i would like to share with you, may it be of blessing:
a couple of things though, you cannot be a christian and deny the inerrancy and divine inspiration of the Bible. and therefore a christian must affirm that the full counsel of God is the truth. so a person who says that something isnt a sin when the Bible clearly states it to be so is not a christian.
also, the Bible has more than 360 prophecies (detailing something like 475 identifying characteristics) about the messiah that were fulfilled by Jesus alone, 190 of which that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else. prophecies that were given from 400-3000 years before His birth. some even as specific as giving the very date of the crucifixion! you might be tempted to say these were "prophecies" given after the fact, but jews to this day use the same books we call our "old testament", and we have manuscripts of the books containing these prophecies that are dated to at least a century before the birth of Christ.
this just goes to show that these are indeed preexisting prophecies that were indeed fulfilled to the letter. so now we face a bit of a problem, because we must either say that the ancient israelites had some serious advanced time-telling capabilities or the Bible is in fact of divine origin and can be 100% relied upon as a source for truth.
some students at westmont college led by their professor calculated the odds of a single person fulfilling just 48 of those prophecies as being 1 in 10^157, in other words, 1 / 1 with 157 zeroes after it! according to mathematician emile borel, anything over 1 in 10^50 is considered a mathematical impossibility. again, we are talking about only 48 of these prophecies.
and these are just the messianic prophecies.. theres also hundreds of historical prophecies that were fulfilled as well.
the Bible, as you can see is unquestionably the inerrant Word of God, declaring the good news of the Messiah, the Son of God who came down to die for sinners who did nothing but willingly sin against their holy, perfect Creator. Jesus gave His life for sinners, for people who offended Him in every possible way. He did not die for good people, He did not die for perfect people. He died for people like me: hopeless, sinful, dead, God-hating sinners who do not deserve His mercy and grace. and He rose on the third day to show us He had defeated death and sin and to show us that there is victory over sin in Him, and in Him alone, as there is salvation in no other name, and no amount of effort or "good deeds" we can ever do will ever be enough. this is the God of the Bible, this is the God who created me and wove me together in my mother's womb. glory be to Him, and to Him alone!
ugghhh! ok, i finally found out how to get my gmixer tray icon back, since for some reason sometimes it "goes away", and i dont know how to get it back.. well, you have a few ways to do this:
type "gmixer -d" in a terminal window
edit "/usr/share/applications/gmixer.desktop" using your superuser, and add the " -d" to the line that says "Exec=gmixer" so that every time that you run gmixer from gnome it does that automatically
its funny how something as simple as a new (working) mouse can just cheer you right up.. yes, my ps/2 ball (scroll) mouse that ive had for years now decided that the middle mouse button would not longer work.. now, for a windows/mac user, that might not be such a big deal, but for someone like me who uses the middle button for so many things (quick paste a url in firefox, or quick paste of anything to anywhere) it is. and the frustration had mounted to such an extent that i got myself a new mouse on ebay.. yes, new. as in, not used. this ones usb, and also uses a ball (instead of those annoying red lasers that play skippideedoodah on you when its not on a perfectly smooth, non reflective surface) and it has of course, a working scroll wheel and middle click button.. ahhh, life is good.. lets get that 5% productivity back! (and the invaluable lack of frustration of course!)
very interesting, test your knowledge on abortion with this neutral language quiz. do it without looking anything up and tell me how you fared. i got 9/10 (not bad for a non-US citizen, eh? -- it was the 14th amendment question i got wrong..)
ah and for your own edification, in the same thread i posted this for someone who asked the diff between "murder" and "killing":
the 6th commandment is "thou shallt not murder" (lo tirtzach, in hebrew) as opposed to "thou shallt not kill" (lo taharog) where the hebrew word "ratzach" is never used in the context of killing an animal, or in war, or as self defense (where the word "horeg" is used instead). that means that the commandment does not forbid taking the life of an animal (in order to eat it for example) or of a human if they are going to kill you themselves. any taking of innocent human life is called murder, and causes what is called "bloodguilt".
well there ya have it, kids. and how did i run into this gem? some atheist guy on my facebook friends list said that "some pro-lifers condone bombing abortion clinics" so i retorted: "and some atheists believe in God".. he said "thats not true".. so i looked it up, haha, and i was right! hahah.
Japanese researchers have invented a speech-jamming gadget that painlessly forces people into silence.
Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University, developed a portable "SpeechJammer" gun that can silence people more than 30 meters away.
The device works by recording its target's speech then firing their words back at them with a 0.2-second delay, which affects the brain's cognitive processes and causes speakers to stutter before silencing them completely.
Describing the device in a research paper published Feb. 28 at arXiv.org, Kurihara and Tsukada wrote, "In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stopping speaking."
They found that the device works better on people who were reading aloud than engaged in "spontaneous speech" and it cannot stop people making meaningless sounds, such as "ahhh," that are uttered over a long time period.
Kurihara and Tsukada suggested the speech-jamming gun could be used to hush noisy speakers in public libraries or to silence people in group discussions who interrupt other people's speeches.
"There are still many cases in which the negative aspects of speech become a barrier to the peaceful resolution of conflicts," the authors said.
"hi, japan? yeah, id like to order two of your speech jamming guns please. one for each hand.. yeah thanks"
as i close tabs to try to keep my "freedom" (see below post) heres one for joelie (please note, this trailer has foul language and is rated for MATURE audiences):
God Bless America Trailer Loveless, jobless and possibly terminally ill, Frank has had enough of the downward spiral of America. With nothing left to lose, Frank takes his gun and decides to off the stupidest, cruelest and most repellent members of society with an unusual accomplice: 16-year-old Roxy, who shares his sense of rage and disenfranchisement. From stand-up comedian and director Bobcat Goldthwait comes a scathing and hilarious attack on all that is sacred in the United States of America.
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