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Submission + - Stem Cell Treatment to Regrow Torn Meniscus 'Very, Very Close' (healthline.com)

LesterMoore writes: In a new study, researchers put 3D model meniscus in sheep's knees. (Their joints are a lot like humans'.) The model attracted stem cells to it and supplied growth factors and eventually biodegraded. New working menisci grew and the sheep regained full mobility. Orthopedists say similar treatments for humans are "very, very close," according to one article.

Comment Re: What Native American is supposed to mean (Score 0) 307

Those "First Nations" killed off previous nations, so that's more revisionist bullshit.

It's really all lazy white people who don't feel like saying, "Apache", "Cherokee", "Iriquois", "Abanake", etc. - maybe because their ancestors' guilt is more apparrent with the specificity.

Any drive to collectivize those nations (not tribes) is an attempt to negate their value. Sure, they shared a common enemy but that's about it.

Comment Re: We need communism (Score 1) 38

So Google is using its massive wealth to at least make a few small dents in the central planning quagmire that has granted all sorts of telecomm monopolies and seriously screwed up the progress of technology; everywhere Google exerts some competitive pressure the incumbents react and/or people get Google Fiber connections directly, improving their conditions, but ...

what we need more of is central planning, and less capitalistic drive to outcompete the extant market players. Sheesh - some people just can't handle cause and effect.

Comment QNX is great... (Score 1) 233

And if it were still a standalone company, I'd find no surprises here. But I'm not sure I'd want to go after *anything* that's under the umbrella of Blackberry right now. In Ford's shoes, I'd've probably just gone with some embedded Linux and called it a day. Unless, of course, they were able to get Blackberry to give them one of those, "You go under, we get the source code" clauses.

Submission + - Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics

HughPickens.com writes: Maria Konnikova writes in The New Yorker that mondegreens are funny but they also give us insight into the underlying nature of linguistic processing, how our minds make meaning out of sound, and how in fractions of seconds, we translate a boundless blur of sound into sense. One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there’s a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can’t see the musicians’ faces. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. Another common cause of mondegreens is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Steven Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you’re not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error.

Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. “There’s a bathroom on the right” standing in for “there’s a bad moon on the rise” is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.

Finally along with knowledge, we’re governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we’re familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf’s law. One of the reasons that “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” substituted for Jimi Hendrix’s “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It’s much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.

Submission + - New Apps Mark the Digital Return of the Rhythm Method

HughPickens.com writes: Count natural family planning among the ways young people are hearkening back to the practices of their grandparents as Olga Khazan reports at The Atlantic that new apps are letting women know if they can have sex with their partners without a condom or a contraceptive pill using calendar-based contraception. The underlying motive is not so much trendiness as it is a dissatisfaction with the Pill, which is still the most common form of birth control for women. In a recent CDC study of 12,000 American women, 63 percent of women who stopped using the Pill did so due to its side effects (PDF). And while as of 2010, only about 22 percent of women used “periodic abstinence," an umbrella term that includes counting days, measuring temperature, and tracking cervical mucus to predict fertility, their ranks may grow as new apps and other technologies make it easier to manage the historically error-prone task of measuring, recording, and analyzing one’s cycle in order to stay baby-free.

CycleBeads, for example, is an iPhone app that allows women to track fertility based on the Standard Days Method, a system developed by Georgetown University's Institute for Reproductive Health in which specific days of each woman’s cycle are considered infertile. While the method is not as effective for women who have cycles outside of the 26-32 day range, Leslie Heyer says that its success rate is about 95 percent for “perfect use” and 88 percent for “typical use,” which would mean it beats condoms and falls just short of the Pill. “At first [my husband and I] were worried,” says Kate, a woman who began using CycleBeads nearly three years ago after experiencing weight gain and moodiness on the Pill, “but then we got used to it and have grown to trust it. I honestly can't imagine ever going back on the Pill.”

Comment Re:Only in America... (Score 1) 71

The plaintiffs - or rather their counsel - should have done their homework better and ensured that the plaintiffs had standing, though.. and I think the judge made that very clear in their highly public statements.

no kidding - I expect Apple to prevail, even if it shouldn't, merely based on this very rough approximation of the attorneys' degree of diligence in the case.

Comment Oh, look, another lefty enamored with himself. (Score 2) 209

Yes, people really are stupid. Give them something to be angry about, and they'll vote against their own interests.

It's rather presumptive of you, and every other Democrat, to pretend to know people's interests better than they do. It's part of the unmistakable arrogance that comes from the left, and was perfectly displayed by Gruber. You and your fellow leftists are cut from the same cloth as every other human, but you whip each other up with flattery on how kind, intelligent and compassionate you are for simply being on the left. Whether ruin or prosperity follows your policy actions isn't terribly important. You had the best intentions, you see, and the books can always be cooked after the fact to hide any negative news that doesn't fit the narrative.

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