drugpolicyreform:

MARCY DOLIN: I’m lying on my bed, smoking a joint. I smoke about eight a day, and eat a marijuana cookie before I go to sleep at night. I like the peanut-butter ones. I’ve been using marijuana for about 35 years, ever since I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It takes the pain and muscle spasms away. Without it, I would be living on morphine and other horrible drugs. I couldn’t do that to my family. That’s no life, and I would have ended it. That’s the truth. I used to take a drug called Neurontin, and I just never stopped crying. I was in a fog, totally depressed. I told my doctor that I was going back to just marijuana; he said he would have me arrested if he could. What are they going to do? I’m 71 years old. Are they going to put me in jail? I’m not hurting anybody. It’s just here in my own house.

The New York Times

ikenbot:

This Is NASA’s Cancer-Sniffing Cellphone Sensor

What if you could use your phone to test the air for toxins? What if you could monitor your health simply by blowing on it? Sounds amazing, right? Nanosensor technology developed by NASA Ames is going to make that a reality.

Jing Li, a scientist at NASA Ames, has been working for years on what will be the greatest phone accessory of all time. It’s a small chip (about the size of a postage stamp) that houses 32 nanosensor bars. Each bar is composed of a different nano-structure material. Because each sensor bar is unique it can respond to different chemicals in different ways, enabling it to not only differentiate between them, but also to monitor their relative levels, in real time.

In its current state (which is looking mighty close to production-ready), it’s housed in a small case that attaches to a smartphone. For legal reasons they wouldn’t say which smartphone it’s built to attach to, but you can probably guess. Eventually, it will be built to attach to many other popular models. The idea is to develop a low-cost version so that consumers can afford to have them for health and safety applications. But let’s back up a second.

This nanosensor technology was originally developed by NASA Ames for space applications. This is NASA, after all. The first usage was monitoring for fuel leaks around launch vehicles. They’ve been on the International Space Station since 2008, monitoring air-quality and checking for formaldehyde in the air. Future applications could include taking samples on asteroids and Mars missions. So that’s where it started, but the Department of Homeland Security is now funding this project in order to bring it back down to earth—and to consumers.

The most exciting potential use, though, is how it could diagnose and monitor people with medical conditions. For example, for diabetes patients there is a direct correlation between the level of acetone in their breath and the level of sugar in their blood. The nanosensor could be used as a completely non-invasive diagnosis and measurement method. Just breathe on your phone. No more pricking your finger a million times a day. We have a pretty serious aversion to the word revolutionary here, but this thing fits the bill.

Full article

THIS IS WHY NASA IS SO IMPORTANT.

cwnl:

Could Neutrons be Swapping Through The Multiverse?

Illustration: Energy // The idea that there are multiple universes present in further dimensions of space isn’t new, but a team of scientists think they may be able to lend it some credence by observing neutrons jumping from one universe to the next.

Physicists Hope to Catch Neutrons in the Act of Jumping from Our Universe to Another

The notion of multiple universes is one that cosmologists like to theorize about but generally don’t relish proving, mainly because doing so would be very difficult.

But a team of researchers that showed a few years ago how matter might travel between our universe and others now think they ought to be able to observe this phenomenon in action using existing technology, lending credence to the multiverse theory. All they need is a neutron bottle, some neutrons, and a year.

The experiments would require bottling neutrons in an ultracold state, a process that physicists have been performing for years to measure how quickly neutrons decay. These bottles—made of ordinary matter imbued with magnetic fields—are able to trap these super-cooled neutrons and keep them moving slowly enough that they can be observed. Physicists can measure the rate at which these trapped neutrons strike the walls of the bottle and how quickly this rate declines as the neutrons decay.

In a perfect experiment, the neutrons would always decay precisely at a rate equal to the beta decay rate, but this is never the case because neutron bottles aren’t perfect—the rate of decay is always a bit faster, presumably because some of the neutrons escape by means other than decay.

Or maybe they don’t. Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few colleagues have postulated that maybe these neutrons simply depart for another universe. They have already shown how, theoretically, large enough magnetic potentials could provide the basis for inter-universe matter swapping.

Now, in a paper available at arXiv, they’ve used decay rate data to place an upper limit on how often this might be able to happen. They found that it’s probably quite rare if it happens at all—according to their figures, the probability of a neutron making the leap to another universe is smaller than one in a million.

But that doesn’t rule it out completely, especially considering how many neutrons there are out there. Moreover, Sarrazin thinks he has a way to observe this experimentally. A change in the gravitational potential should also affect the rate of matter swapping, and the gravitational potential here on Earth changes as the planet moves around the Sun.

Run a neutron trapping experiment for a full year, and you could see if there is a modulation in the rate of neutron decay based on some kind of annual cycle. If so, that means the neutrons probably aren’t just decaying, but swapping universes as well.

discoverynews:

Magic Mushrooms Could Treat Depression

The active ingredient in the trippy fungus could help users treat depression, anxiety and stress.

keep reading

thedailywhat:

BAMF of the Day: With a finish time of eight hours and 25 minutes, 100-year-old Indian-born Brit Fauja Singh completed yesterday’s Toronto Waterfront marathon to become the oldest person ever to run a full marathon.

Singh was nearly forced to quit at the 35 kilometer mark, but pushed through the pain, and eventually bested his own personal goal. 

More remarkable still, Singh took up running only 20 years ago, and has been running some 16 kilometers every day since.

I guess it’s true what they say: You’re only as old as you run.

Watch Singh cross the finish line below:

[ctv / image: thestar / video: dpaf.]

WHY.

WHY IS A 100 YEAR OLD MAN IN BETTER SHAPE THAN ME.

vicemag:

VICE’s latest documentary, On The Front Lines With Libyan Rebels, is now playing on CNN.

ampersands:

good:

Americans continue to have no idea how much government welfare they’re actually getting: 

We see it pop up in the news all the time: The people who most hate on the idea of government assistance are sometimes the ones getting it. Just last week, there were reports that Michele Bachmann’s husband gets farm subsidies and reportedly received $137,000 in Medicaid money. A new paper from Cornell University puts this dynamic in chart form, and the results are kind of shocking.

Half of people getting federal student loans don’t think they’ve ever used a government social program. Forty percent of Medicare recipients have no idea their health insurance is funded by the state. And 25 percent of the people receiving that emblem of All That Is Bad About Big Government, welfare, don’t connect that paycheck to the “enemy.” Given the fact that one in six Americans use anti-poverty programs alone, there’s a hell of a lot of people who are deluded about how much the government helps them out.

Read more on GOOD →

Important article (see also the percentage of foreign aid people think we give vs. reality—25% of the budget instead of the real less than 1%) but I’m really reblogging for the picture.

staff:

This week we launched the 6th iteration of the Tumblr Dashboard. And as you can probably tell, it makes room for a whole bunch of new things we’re getting ready to launch.

The first are some major upgrades to Messages (currently Questions and Submissions) that are available today:

Unified Inbox. The new Inbox saves you the trouble of checking for new Messages across all of your blogs. Additionally, the Inbox icon will show an unread count for any Messages that any of your blogs receive! You can disable the Inbox on your Preferences page.

Delete All Messages. Once you’ve answered or approved all of the posts you care about, you can now delete the rest with just two clicks.

Private Answers. When someone asks a Question that you’d like to respond to but you’d rather it not appear on your blog, you can now deliver a private answer directly to the sender.

Note: These features won’t appear unless you have Questions or Submissions enabled on at least one of your blogs.

finally a private messaging feature. this is what i’m talking about.