Lean & Mean — codeine abuse is coming back, reportedly. Calling it “liquid crack”, however, is a simile based on basic drug ignorance. They couldn’t be more different. Houston Press

Utah polygamist found guilty: A Mormon, not surprisingly, he has five wives and 29 children. Convicted of failure to pay child support as well. This is the first big bigamy trial on more than half a century. One of his wives was a 13 year-old in 1986 when he allegedly had sex with her. He subsequently married her, and now faces a felony rape charge as well. CNN

Student minces no words with new sign language — “A college student’s thesis

examining sign languages from around the

world could provide autistic children or

stroke-impaired adults with a new method

to communicate.

The gestures are simple, mime-like and

require a minimal number of separate

movements. Those components, the thesis

adviser said, make signing easier for people

who might have finite motor skills or limited

memory.” CNN

A comprehensive listing of US secession movements — “Discover the fault-lines where political self-determination and the increasingly Corporate nation-state clash.” disinformation

Radical Ideology Points the Bushites Toward Avoidable Trouble —

“What is worrying is the combination of three factors that could

produce a perfect political storm.

First, the Bushies came into office with the attitude that

everything Bill Clinton did was wrong and needs to be

reversed.

Second, they bore Republican theological positions on tax cuts,

the environment and missile defense, positions that were

hatched in conservative think tanks and chanted with religious

devotion but were never tempered by the real world as it has

evolved in the last eight years. Yet early signs are that the

Bushies will say or do anything to get their radical tax cuts

made, their oil wells drilled and their missile shield built – no

matter what is going on in the world.

Finally, they control the Senate, the House, the White House and

the Supreme Court, so there are no brakes.” International Herald Tribune

Lego: No Tech Meets New Tech: “Although its trademark plastic building blocks are decidedly old school, Lego is

repositioning itself as a player in today’s technology toy market.

Founded in Denmark before World War II, Lego is emphasizing key product lines based on interactive

software, robotics and even Harry Potter, at this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.” Wired And: LUGNET™: ‘home to thousands of LEGO® fans of all

ages. We are a community which never sleeps — and has been called “the friendliest place on

the Internet.” ‘ A Webbies finalist.

Cytokine-Associated Emotional and Cognitive Disturbances in Humans. One element of the immune response is the secretion of infection-fighting circulating substances by lymphocytes (a class of white blood cells) activated by the presence of the infection. Many of us who look at the interface between behavioral disturbances and bodily physiology have suspected that these cytokines have direct — and deleterious — CNS effects and may account for some of the behavioral disturbance accompanying various physical illnesses. Here’s empirical evidence. Archives of General Psychiatry

“The drive by HMOs to “medicalize” psychotherapy – insisting that practitioners look for a

medical disorder such as clinical depression and then dispense a prescribed treatment – will ultimately suffocate psychotherapy through

ignorance of how it works.

That’s the contention of Bruce Wampold, professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a new,

controversial book, The Great Psychotherapy Debate.

Methadone increases infectivity and stimulates viral replication of HIV, according to new research. Bad news for patients who contracted HIV through IV drug abuse which they are now attempting to stabilize through methadone maintenance. BioMedNet And: Study: Heroin Moving to Suburbs, Rural Areas. ” A New

Jersey study suggests that heroin, a

longtime scourge of America’s

inner cities, is becoming a suburban

and rural problem.” CNN

The Accidental Curist — “Doctors who were trying to grow new blood vessels with gene therapy found a welcome side effect:

The therapy repaired what they thought was permanent nerve damage.” Not clear if the improvement was due to revascularization or direct nerve growth; further studies are planned. Wired

Breaking the Hickory Stick: The proposed Teacher Liability Protection Act,

supported by President Bush, will likely increase corporal punishment of schoolchildren in

states where paddling is still legal. New York Times

This Time, It’s Personal. Democrats (finally) begin opposing Bush’s judicial nominees. The American Prospect

“Suddenly some of the most unlikely people are losing sleep over what windmills might be doing to birds.” TomPaine.com

New disorder, cyberchondria, sweeps the internet, says the New Zealand Herald article. But it’s really just run-of-the-mill hypochondria (or, to be more precise, somatization) fueled by the ease of obtaining information on the ‘net.

Living dead. “Ants and infertile humans are not alive, but parasitic DNA is.

That’s the view of a Polish researcher who has proposed a

new, universal definition of life.

He claims it will lay to

rest arguments about

what is and isn’t

alive, and might offer

insights into when life

on Earth got started.

And if we ever find

something that looks

like life on another

planet, his definition

could help us settle

whether it’s alive or

not.” New Scientist

Study: Oscar Winners Live Longer , nearly four years longer on average than their colleagues who were never nominated or those nominated who did not win. Katherine Hepburn, four-time Academy Award winner, should live forever! I knew the Oscars were good for something… Washington Post

Find A Grave “… of thousands

of famous people from

around the world.”

Childhood’s end? Early puberty is more common in children who have immigrated from the third world, researchers suggest. Could pesticide residues be to blame? New Scientist

The Abolition of Man? ‘…(T)he reader who trudges through Kass must eventually wonder whether the

ethicist is confusing the map with the territory. Conservatives have long been known, in William F.

Buckley’s famous phrase, for standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” But when did they start insisting

that history which does not go their way isn’t actually history at all?

On closer examination, what worries these writers isn’t that human nature might change in the future. It’s

that human nature might not be what they think it is right now.’ Reason

Content Sites of the World, Unite! The Salons and Slates of the world ought to band together for their survival. “Right now there appears to be a race among Web publishers to

garner the most revenue in the short term by making the

experience of visiting its site intolerable, like the intrusive ads

spearheaded by CNET or the Slate format in which text ads

sneak into spaces readers expect to find unpaid-for material.

The ads will get so overpowering it’s no surprise that Salon

thinks it might take in some money by eliminating them for its

best customers.” The Standard

Puckered Out: People don’t whistle like they used to before the advent of mass entertainment. It’s a ‘loner art”, and loners today are highly suspicious. Washington Post

The wrd of Gd — the world’s first text-message church service. New Scientist

Researchers at Yale and NYU pinpoint the part of the brain that allows emotional significance to heighten perception. EurekAlert!

Monkeys Who Think… and the neuroscientist who loves them. Portrait of Marc Hauser (Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think). “To its advocates, the rise of cognitive ethology reflects a regaining of

consciousness after a dark half century of behaviorist orthodoxy, which

held that all behavior, animal or human, was the result not of mental events

but of conditioned responses to external stimuli. Cognitive ethologists trace

their assumptions back to Charles Darwin, who insisted that animals and

humans exhibit no less evolutionary continuity in their minds than in their

kidneys, hearts, and toes. The field’s critics, however, suspect that talk of

animal thinking and intention may owe less to Darwin than to the

embarrassing and dubiously anecdotal mentalism of his protégé Georges

Romanes, a popular lecturer who saw logisticating dogs and conniving

felines under every Victorian armchair.” Lingua Franca

Big Split Over Gene Theory: “If you eat a genetically modified strain of cauliflower, you won’t inherit its gene for frost resistance. That’s the position taken by researchers who are refuting an earlier claim published by the Human Genome Project international consortium that genes from other species could indeed “jump” into the human gene family tree. The dissenting view will appear in the May 25 issue of Science.” Wired

Short guide to a happy marriage: “The secret of a long and faithful marriage is to marry

a short man, according to research.

Tall men are more likely to divorce and remarry,

usually replacing their first wife with a woman who is

at least two years younger and better educated,

according to a study by American and German

scientists.” The Telegraph

The secret of life – it could be an uncrackable code

Robert Matthews laments that Claude Shannon’s passing was not noted more widely. The mathematician’s work, especially the classic 1948 paper “The Mathematical Theory of Communication”, was a foundation of information theory. What attention his death has received has generally focused on the technological implications of his work — “unsung father of the internet” kind of stuff. But Matthews suggests that

scientists involved with the Human

Genome Project would benefit from the

application of Shannon’s theorem. The argument may overreach. The Telegraph

Aboriginal rock paintings oldest depictions of mystics says researcher. But critics say that seeing shamans everywhere is a fad that will pass. The Age

‘Mere presence’ of a black face can lead people to mistake objects for weapons more often,

study says