Today in the News (14 May 09)

Vaccines:
How about aq vaccine that actually HELPS brain activity? Will it be possible to make a vaccine for Alzhimer's? I wonder what sort of objections someone would raise about that? And exactly how would they justify those objections after seeing how Alzhimer's robs a person of their basic humanity?

As I do more and more research on vaccines, I am finding that a lot of mechanisms of viruses and cancer seem to be affected by vaccine vectors. So now we are looking at melanoma. Again, this is very cool, just because it ultimately increases our understanding of these horrible affligions.

Autism:
In finding more and more GENETIC links to autism, there even seems to be a co-developmental relationship with a gastro-intestinal disorder. This is incredibly important for two reasons. First, it again shows that autism is more and more likely to be a genetic disorder, and have nothing to do with vaccines. Secondly, this could help in even earlier detection and diagnosis of autism in individuals.

Lest we forget that Autism is not a new disease, there are many adults living with autism as well. One of the things that would be interesting is to look back at many diagnosis of insanity, retardation, anti-social behaviour, etc. and see if any of these folks are actually autistic.

Evolution:
I mentioned the research that had basically nailed down the "origin point" of the human species. The other aspect of this is learning about how us humans spread out and what sort of patterns there are in human population structures. Again, it's not only cool, but hopefully will give a lot of insight into our species.

In the same vein as yesterday's post where people don't even uderstand evolution, in general people are just plain dumb about all science. Sadly, this puts the United States at a disadvantage in many areas, not letting us be as flexible or dominant as we were in the past. I find it funny that the ones who claim to be most patriotic, and to be "real Americans" are pretty much the very same people responsible for dragging our science backwards.