“Her carefully cultured cells were dead and Katherine Schaefer was annoyed, but just a few minutes later, the researcher realized she had stumbled onto a potential new cancer treatment.” (Yahoo! News)

Date with a bulldozer: “In a wooded ravine tucked away from the water parks, restaurants and mega-resorts that dominate this tourist town, a piece of history is quietly dying. After more than half a century of wowing tourists (and causing probably more than a few cases of nausea), the Wonder Spot, a mysterious cabin where people can’t stand up straight, water runs uphill and chairs balance on two legs, is no more.

Owner Bill Carney has sold the iconic attraction to the village of Lake Delton for $300,000. The village wants to build a road through the crevice where the Wonder Spot has stood since the 1950s.

Now, the Wonder Spot, one of more than a dozen sites around the nation dubbed ‘gravity vortexes’ and a throwback to postwar, family-oriented tourist attractions, has a date with a bulldozer.” (Yahoo! News)

“The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons.

…Peter Neufeld, a lawyer who is a co-director of the Innocence Project, which has exonerated dozens of prison inmates using DNA evidence, said the government was overreaching by seeking to apply DNA sampling as universally as fingerprinting.

“Whereas fingerprints merely identify the person who left them,” Mr. Neufeld said, “DNA profiles have the potential to reveal our physical diseases and mental disorders. It becomes intrusive when the government begins to mine our most intimate matters.”

…Immigration lawyers noted that most immigration violations, including those committed when people enter the country illegally, are civil, not criminal, offenses. They warned that the new law would make it difficult for immigrants to remove their DNA profiles from the federal database, even if they were never found to have committed any serious violation or crime. (New York Times )“

“Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” (Guardian.UK)

“…there isn’t much of a free market of ideas in the mental health world–it’s pretty much the mental health establishment versus the anti-psychiatry movement. Let me stress that I am not a member of the latter movement.

What I am is a long-time psych patient who has become quite skeptical about where we are with mental health in this country…. [and] an actual journalist, for what that might be worth in the blogosphere. I am also mentally-ill, having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder (more commonly called manic-depression back then) in 1989. I have been an attentive eyewitness to the psychopharmacological revolution that has swept this nation since about 1990. I have seen and experienced the good. I have seen and experienced the bad. I have lived the in-between.”

“Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” (Guardian.UK)

“A blood test for pregnant women may be able to diagnose trisomy 21, which leads to Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus, according to a preliminary study.

The new test yielded a false positive rate under 2% for trisomy 21 with a detection rate of 66%, said Ravinder Dhallan, M.D., of Ravgen Inc., here, and colleagues. Their company-sponsored, preliminary study of 60 pregnant women was published online in the Feb. 3 issue of The Lancet.” (MedPage Today)

“Jill Bolte Taylor, Phd, a neuroanatomist at Indiana University, Bloomington, had a major stroke and discusses it in her fascinating book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

As a brain expert, Dr. Bolte Taylor was able to analyze the physical and mental effects of her stroke — as it occurred, and as she recovered from the life-changing event.”

Injured Brains of Medical Minds: Views from Within Edited by Narinder Kapur: “This book provides a unique perspective on what it is like to be brain-damaged, seen through the eyes of doctors or neurosurgeons who have themselves suffered a brain injury or brain illness. Each of the personal accounts, written over the past 120 years, is accompanied by a commentary written by the author which critically examines the experiences of the sufferer, relating them to current issues in clinical neurology and cognitive neuroscience.”

Jeff Sharlet on How the Christian Right is reimagining U.S. history: “Is “fundamentalism” too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer “maximalism,” a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America—from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy—that means a culture born again in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword, literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, “maximalism” isn’t bad, an unintended tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But I think “fundamentalism”—coined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready to do “battle royal for the fundamentals,” hushed up now as too crude for today’s chevaliers—still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.

If the term “fundamentalism” endures, the classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken, writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers, attribute radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.

The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.” (Harper’s)

“Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has left the Pentagon, but not the Defense Department. On Jan. 4, Mr. Rumsfeld opened a government-provided transition office in Arlington and has seven Pentagon-paid staffers working for him, a Pentagon official said… ” (Washington Times)

Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by Johns Hopkins history professor and New Republic contributing editor David Bell: “Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?”