The New York Nerd

National Geographic has a fascinating piece on Ayahuasca healing rituals with Shamen in Peru. I read it slow and soaked up every word, here it is.

A new study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine documents the successful treatment of tumors in a male patient. All of the tumors disappeared after the man was injected with billions of his own cloned immune cells, and he has remained tumor free for two years now. Here is a link to the NEJM Article, and here is a link to an article covering the story in The Guardian which you’ll find much more readable. This is huge news, sounds like if this treatment can cure cancer it can probably cure a whole lot of other stuff as well!

Those Nike Shox maybe doing you more harm than good. Humans’ natural gait is toe heel toe, not heel toe like you do in a padded shoe. It puts extra strain on your knees and it’s just not we have evolved for over the past 4 million years. NY Magazine just published a very interesting article about this, check it out.

This ought to help you quite smoking!

The New York Nerd’s man of the day is Hugo Nanofsky. His son was arrested 14 years ago in Florida for possession of a pipe. They impounded the car permanently, and this made Hugo furious. Hugo is a biochemist though, and trained his attention for 14 years on making sure noone else have to suffer this injustice. He set about inventing oranges that produce THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. It seems that Hugo has acheived this goal, and THC oranges are now very real. The seeds have been distributed. It is going to be years before the legal issues are sorted out, but the government won’t have much luck differentiating one type of orange from another in Florida. Here’s more

Apparently they are no longer using silicon in the pizza cheese, even though their original patent includes it. Here is the printed retraction from the original source, this is in pdf format.

This is so crazy, in the USA, Pizza Hut cheese is made of salt, water, starch, and Polymethylsiloxane. What is that last one you ask? Oh don’t mind that, it’s just a silicon chemical made by Dow Industrials designed for the formulation of plant food. But it surely safe for humans right? Well no regulations exist for human consumption, but the amount Pizza Hut uses is 10 times higher concentration than the maximum allowable for plants!! Here’s more

Guiness, the dark stout beer may help prevent heart attacks, according to a recent study. Lager beer did not produce the same benefits. Here’s more

The tar from two cartons of cigarettes is distilled out, if you want to continue smoking after you watch this, I’d be shocked:

We sink the boats at Disney World! That’s right, you heard me, Disney is having a huge problem with fat people bottoming out the boats on the It’s A Small World ride. We’ve hit the threshold where we start sinking boats at Disney, I’m embarrassed for this country on so many levels. Here’s more on this story