Popular intoxicants: what lessons can be learned from the last 40 years of alcohol and cannabis regulation? In this paper we discuss the relative physical, psychological and social harms of the two most frequently used intoxicant drugs in the UK, namely cannabis and alcohol. Over the past 40 years, the use of both drugs has risen significantly with differential consequences. It is argued that increased policing of cannabis use under the current drug classification system will lead to increased criminalization of young people, but is unlikely to significantly reduce the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis.
In comparison, increases in alcohol drinking are related to significant increases in liver cirrhosis hospital admissions and mortality, at a time when mortality rates from other major causes are on the decline. A recent expert-led comparison of the health and social harms to the user and to others caused by the most commonly used drugs in the UK showed alcohol to be more than twice as harmful as cannabis to users, and five times as harmful as cannabis to others. UCSF Study Finds Pot Smoke Less Harmful Than Tobacco. CBS SF Bay (con't) Affordable Care Act Updates: CBSSanFrancisco.com/ACA Health News & Information: CBSSanFrancisco.com/Health SAN FRANCISCO (CBS/AP) – Smoking a joint once a week or a bit more apparently doesn’t harm the lungs, suggests a 20-year study that bolsters evidence that marijuana doesn’t do the kind of damage tobacco does.
The results, from one of the largest and longest studies on the health effects of marijuana, are hazier for heavy users—those who smoke two or more joints daily for several years. The data suggest that using marijuana that often might cause a decline in lung function, but there weren’t enough heavy users among the 5,000 young adults in the study to draw firm conclusions. Still, the authors recommended “caution and moderation when marijuana use is considered.” Marijuana is an illegal drug under federal law although some states, like California, allow its use for medical purposes.
Study co-author Dr. Mars Rover Curiosity Update: Self Portrait & New Images Released, First Destination Announced (PHOTOS) NASA on Friday released the latest images to be sent back by the Mars Rover Curiosity, including a high-resolution self-portrait taken by the rover's Navigation camera. According to NASA, the portrait, available below, is composed of a mosaic of 20 images taken on Aug. 8, just several days after the rover landed on Mars. Curiosity's deck, some of the science lab's instruments and two of the rover's six wheels are visible in the 120-degree image.
The rim of Gale Crater, in which the rover landed in the early morning of Aug. 6, can be seen in the background of the picture. "What's really exciting about this is that we see the rover — a self-portrait, with the rim of Gale Crater in the background," John Grotzinger, the Curiosity chief scientist, said, according to Space.com. Space.com also reports that the specs on the deck of the rover are small bits of gravel "kicked up" by the rocket-powered sky-crane that lowered Curiosity to the Marian surface.
LOOK: Curiosity Self-Portrait. Richard Muller: 'Humans Are Almost Entirely The Cause' Of Climate Change. New Particle at World's Largest Atom Smasher is Likely Higgs Boson. Physicists are more than 99 percent sure that they've found a new elementary particle that is likely the long-sought Higgs boson. Evidence for the new particle was reported today (July 4) by scientists from the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Researchers reported they'd seen a particle weighing roughly 125 times the mass of the proton, with a level of certainty that all but seals the deal it's the Higgs boson. "This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found," Joe Incandela, spokesperson for LHC's CMS experiment, said in a statement.
The Higgs, nicknamed the "God particle" (to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name), is thought to hold the key to one of the mysteries of the universe: Why do things have mass? View gallery This track is an example of simulated data modelled for the ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Colli … Mars has snowflakes, but they are tiny, study finds. Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition Researchers analyzed observations made by two Mars-orbiting spacecraft to calculate the size of snowflakes on the Red Planet, which are composed of carbon dioxide rather than water.
"These are very fine particles, not big flakes," study co-author Kerri Cahoy, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said in a statement. Clouds of Martian snow Clouds of snowhang above Mars during the planet's winter, covering its poles and reaching about halfway to the equator. For example, the team looked at temperature and pressure profiles taken by MRO to determine where and when conditions would allow carbon dioxide snow particles to form. Occasionally, the laser beam returned faster than anticipated, after ricocheting off cloud particles in the Martian atmosphere.
Learning from the size of snow. Black Holes May Roam Universe Freely, Without Galaxies, Study Suggests. By Ron Cowen (View original article) Even gravitational monsters can get the heave-ho. Two mysterious bright spots in a disheveled, distant galaxy suggest that astronomers have found the best evidence yet for a supermassive black hole being shoved out of its home. If confirmed, the finding would verify Einstein's theory of general relativity in a region of intense gravity not previously tested. The results would also suggest that some giant black holes roam the universe as invisible free floaters, flung from the galaxies in which they coalesced. Blecha, along with observational astronomer Francesca Civano of Harvard-Smithsonian and their colleagues took detailed x-ray observations of the distant galaxy CID-42, nearly 4 billion light-years from Earth.
Observations with NASA's Chandra x-ray Observatory revealed that only one of the compact visible-light sources—a blob that lies about 8000 light-years from the galaxy's estimated center—emits x-rays. Also on HuffPost: Cancer News, Video and Gossip - Gawker. Skin from heart attack patients transformed into beating heart cells | Science. Skin cells from patients with advanced heart failure were turned into beating heart cells in a dish that were young and healthy. Video: Lior Gepstein Link to video: Beating heart muscle cells created from skin cells Scientists have turned skin tissue from heart attack patients into fresh, beating heart cells in a first step towards a new therapy for the condition.
The procedure may eventually help scores of people who survive heart attacks but are severely debilitated by damage to the organ. By creating new heart cells from a patient's own tissues, doctors avoid the risk of the cells being rejected by the immune system once they are transplanted. Though the cells were not considered safe enough to put back into patients, they appeared healthy in the laboratory and beat in time with other cells when implanted into rats. The scientists then grew these "induced pluripotent stem cells" into fresh heart muscle, and removed the virus and extra genes used in the procedure. Is Scopolamine the world's scariest drug? The drug, called scopolamine, also known as ‘The Devil’s Breath,' is derived from a particular type of tree common in Colombia called the Borrachero tree.
The word "borrachero," which roughly translates to "get-you-drunk," grows wild in Bogota,Colombia. This tree which naturally produces scopolamine is so famous in the countryside that mothers warn their children not to fall asleep below its cunningly beautiful yellow and white flowers. "We probably should put some sort of fence up," jokes biologist Gustavo Morales at Bogota's botanical gardens to Reuters, eyeing children playing with borrachero seeds everywhere. The pollen alone is said to conjure up strange dreams. Read more... And when extracted and made into a colorless, odorless and tasteless powder, scopolamine does more than induce strange dreams. Quickly dissolved in liquids, criminals slip the powder into drinks or sprinkle it on food. Screenshot/Youtube andreasnilsson1976 Far from being a joke,the late Dr. Screenshot via YouTube. Arctic melt releasing ancient methane. 20 May 2012Last updated at 12:54 ET By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News Many of the sites were bubbling methane that has been stored for millennia Scientists have identified thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for many millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere.
The methane has been trapped by ice, but is able to escape as the ice melts. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this ancient gas could have a significant impact on climate change. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2 and levels are rising after a few years of stability. There are many sources of the gas around the world, some natural and some man-made, such as landfill waste disposal sites and farm animals. Tracking methane to these various sources is not easy. Using aerial and ground-based surveys, the team identified about 150,000 methane seeps in Alaska and Greenland in lakes along the margins of ice cover.
Is drinking soda really that bad for you? Sugar sweetened beverage consumption has increased significantly Men consume on average 178 calories per day from sugar sweetened beveragesSoda often displaces more healthful items in the diet Editor's note: Dr. Melina Jampolis, CNN's diet and fitness expert, is a physician nutrition specialist and the author of "The Calendar Diet: A Month by Month Guide to Losing Weight While Living Your Life.
" (CNN) -- Q: I've heard so much about the dangers of drinking soda. Is it really all that bad for you? Or is it just empty calories? You may have heard about a new study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Nutrition that found an increased risk of stroke in people who consumed more than one soda per day. These findings are not surprising in light of the growing body of evidence linking intake of sugar sweetened beverages -- of which soda makes up the largest percentage -- and diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity and high cholesterol. Sugar Makes You Dumb, Scientists Warn. Too much sugar affects your brain, a study has found. Photo: Rob Homer Eating too much sugar can eat away at your brain power, according to US scientists who published a study showing how a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup sapped lab rats' memories.
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) fed two groups of rats a solution containing high-fructose corn syrup - a common ingredient in processed foods - as drinking water for six weeks. One group of rats was supplemented with brain-boosting omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), while the other group was not. Before the sugar drinks began, the rats were enrolled in a five-day training session in a complicated maze. After six weeks on the sweet solution, the rats were then placed back in the maze to see how they fared. Advertisement "Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. The study appeared in the Journal of Physiology. Huge "Structure" of Satellites Found Orbiting Milky Way.
A huge "structure" of satellite galaxies and star clusters has been found wheeling around the Milky Way, according to a new study. The discovery surprised scientists, in part because the structure might spell trouble for theories of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible substance that's thought to make up about 23 percent of the mass in the universe. The finding is only the latest to question dark matter's existence—last week, for instance, astronomers announced that they'd failed to detect dark matter in the sun's neighborhood, even though the substance should be there, according to accepted theory. In the new study, led by Marcel Pawlowski of the University of Bonn in Germany, astronomers reconstructed the locations of the Milky Way's known satellites using sources ranging from 20th-century photographic plates to recent images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
(Related: "Dark-Matter Galaxy Detected: Hidden Dwarf Lurks Nearby? ") Cosmology in "Shambles"? Dark Matter Still Viable. 10 More Common Faults in Human Thought. Humans This list is a follow up to Top 10 Common Faults in Human Thought. Thanks for everyone’s comments and feedback; you have inspired this second list! It is amazing that with all these biases, people are able to actually have a rational thought every now and then. There is no end to the mistakes we make when we process information, so here are 10 more common errors to be aware of. The confirmation bias is the tendency to look for or interpret information in a way that confirms beliefs. The Availability heuristic is gauging what is more likely based on vivid memories. Illusion of Control is the tendency for individuals to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly have no influence on. Interesting Fact: when playing craps in a casino, people will throw the dice hard when they need a high number and soft when they need a low number.
The Planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete tasks. Bonus Attribute Substitution. UPDATE: Tornadoes, Extreme Weather And Climate Change, Revisited. By Joe Romm on March 4, 2012 at 12:25 pm "UPDATE: Tornadoes, Extreme Weather And Climate Change, Revisited" “Likely …. the most prolific five-day period of tornado activity on record for so early in the year“ NBC: “It’s as if a huge chunk of the country has suffered a deep, deep scar.”
National Weather Service Warnings for Past Week The unexpectedly fierce and fast tornado outbreak so early in the season has folks asking again about a possible link to climate change. Climatologist Dr. Kevin Trenberth emailed me that, because of climate change, “there is every expectation that the [tornado] season will move up in time. The former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research stands by his 2011 statement, “It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.”
Insured losses due to thunderstorms and tornadoes in the U.S. in 2011 dollars. Beyond that, as Dr. How the Space Miners Will Bring Trillions of Dollars to Earth.