Most of your essentials are already distributed by vending machines: condoms, electronics, luscious 1-calorie Tab... But now, you can finally get what you really need: medical marijuana, from Anytime Vending Machines.
Thrillist - Anytime Vending MachinesAVMs are 24/7 machines housed in standalone rooms, abutting two dispensaries and protected by round-the-clock security guards -- like ATMs for people combating psychological withdrawal with a physical one. After cinching up your doctor's consultation, hit an AVM location to get your prescription approved, fingerprint taken, and a prepaid credit card loaded with your profile: dosage (3.5 or 7 grams, up to 1oz a week) and strain preference (choice of five, including OG Cush and Granddaddy Purple, the mildly hallucinogenic forebear to Prince). Then day or night, all you do is hit a machine and walk away with enough vacuum-sealed, plastic-encapsulated cheeba to adequately treat your illness, and guarantee your car never smells like new leather again.
HOUSTON - Maria didn't mean to poison her children. Quite the opposite. Worried about her daughters' lack of appetite, the young Houston mother was merely following her grandmother's advice when she gave the two girls and a niece a dose of "greta" — a Mexican folk medicine used to treat children's stomach ailments. ADVERTISEMENT
What Maria, who asked that her last name not be used, did not know then, but now will never forget, is that the bright orange powder is nearly 90 percent lead.
Fortunately, doctors detected the dangerously high levels of the toxic metal in the little girls' blood during a routine checkup a week later.
Researchers develop eye-implantable camera - Engadget
Topic: Health and Wellness
10:57 am EST, Jan 23, 2008
Most of the bionic eye systems we've seen involve clunky glasses-cam headgear, but the implantable camera now being developed at UCLA does it straight Terminator-style and keeps your face unencumbered. The camera, which researcher Michelle Hauer and her team recently filed a patent for, is small enough to be implanted directly on the eye's lens, and feeds image data to a chip at the back of the eye, where it can either be fed into the optic nerve to aid the blind, or just into a portable hard drive to aid the creepy. Hauer says power will come from on an onboard battery, but we're more interested in the mention of "optical control signals" in the patent application -- and by "interested" we mean "terrified of a zombie android army."
Nice, nasty, charming, chatty, vulpine, vulgar...when we get down to it, just how many personality traits are there? It's a question psychologists and philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries.
In recent years, researchers have tended to agree that personality is pretty much summed up by the Big Five factors of Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness. Now Janek Musek at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia has waded into the debate with the suggestion that there exists an overriding personality characteristic - he calls it the 'Big One' - with which all other personality traits are correlated.
Musek tested hundreds of participants using numerous personality measures, including the Big Five Inventory, the Big Five Observer and the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS).
Using a statistical technique called factor analysis, Musek found that a single factor explained much of the variance in people's scores on the Big Five Dimensions of personality. This means that someone who scores highly on one of the five factors (in the case of neuroticism, scores are reversed so that a 'high score' reflects emotional stability) is also more likely to score high on the others. In other words, there seems to be some key trait that captures the essence of all these dimensions.
ATLANTA (AP) -- It sounds like a freakish ailment from a horror movie: Sores erupt on your skin, mysterious threads pop out of them, and you feel like tiny bugs are crawling all over you. Some experts believe it's a psychiatric phenomenon, yet hundreds of people say it's a true physical condition. It's called Morgellons, and now the government is about to begin its first medical study of it.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is paying California-based health care giant Kaiser Permanente $338,000 to test and interview patients suffering from Morgellons' bizarre symptoms. The one-year effort will attempt to define the condition and better determine how common it is.
Fibromyalgia is a real disease. Or so says Pfizer in a new television advertising campaign for Lyrica, the first medicine approved to treat the pain condition, whose very existence is questioned by some doctors. Skip to next paragraph Jamie Rector for The New York Times
Lynne Matallana, who says she has fibromyalgia, said the drugs would aid acceptance. Related Times Health Guide: Fibromyalgia
For patient advocacy groups and doctors who specialize in fibromyalgia, the Lyrica approval is a milestone. They say they hope Lyrica and two other drugs that may be approved this year will legitimize fibromyalgia, just as Prozac brought depression into the mainstream.
But other doctors — including the one who wrote the 1990 paper that defined fibromyalgia but who has since changed his mind — say that the disease does not exist and that Lyrica and the other drugs will be taken by millions of people who do not need them.
Well, the drug is a painkiller, there's lots of things that can be used for. It doesn't matter whether or not theres a specific condition called fibromyalgia, the market exists and all the people have pain symptoms.
transparent frog whose organs can be seen through its skins is seen at a laboratory of Hiroshima University's Institute for Amphibian Biology in Hiroshima, western Japan, in this photograph released by the institute September 25, 2007. Japanese scientists have bred transparent frogs whose internal organs can be seen through their skins, giving researchers of diseases such as cancer insight into organ growth and development. Picture taken March 27, 2006. [Reuters]
