Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing

This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you cant breathe anymore… The invention, developed by a team at Boston Childrens Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure.

Incredible. It could save lives. It could have saved the ending of Sherlock Holmes 2.

“‘Les Riches’ in France Vow to Leave if 75% Tax Rate Is Passed”

“French people have an uncomfortable relationship with money,” Mr. Grandil said. “Here, someone who is a self-made man, creating jobs and ending up as a millionaire, is viewed with suspicion. This is big cultural difference between France and the United States.”

“Organic Food Purists Worry About Big Companies’ Influence:”

As corporate membership on the board has increased, so, too, has the number of nonorganic materials approved for organic foods on what is called the National List. At first, the list was largely made up of things like baking soda, which is nonorganic but essential to making things like organic bread. Today, more than 250 nonorganic substances are on the list, up from 77 in 2002.

John McWhorter:

Today, we have our own fads. We’re more likely to hear about using nouns as verbs – structure a lesson, impact a discussion – or making new verbs from nouns, such as liaise. Yet the verbs copy, view, worship and silence were born from nouns to no complaint. The fashion simply hadn’t yet arisen to condemn them. Or, for that matter, no fuss was made at the time when William Shakespeare and William Makepeace Thackeray, both celebrated as masters of the tongue, used they in the singular form.

The transition to “they” can’t happen fast enough. Good enough for Chaucer, good enough for me.

Shamus Khan in the New York Times:

Talents are costly to develop, and we refuse to socialize these costs. To be an outstanding student requires not just smarts and dedication but a well-supported school, a safe, comfortable home and leisure time to cultivate the self. These are not widely available. When some students struggle, they can later tell the story of their triumph over adversity, often without mentioning the helping hand of a tutor. Other students simply fail without such expensive aids.

Experiences count:

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff TVs and cars to experiences trips and special evenings out. Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

A great story of secrecy and serendipity in how Apple maintained their Intel version of OS X :

“How long would it take you to get this running on a Sony Vaio?” JK replies, “Not long” and Bertrand says, “Two weeks? Three?” JK said more like two hours. Three hours, tops.

…By 7:30 that evening, the Vaio is running the Mac OS… The next morning, Steve Jobs is on a plane to Japan to meet with the President of Sony.

This was in 2001. It took 4 more years for Apple to make the shift. {via DF}

Jennifer Steinhauer for the Times:

Crisis looms, because crisis is all Washington can do these days.

Google’s collection of street images is astounding:

Google says it has now collected more than 20 petabytes of Street View imagery, and that 75 percent of all people in world can now see their house in a high definition graphic on Google Maps.

It’s still amazing, even today, to see your home or your destination on Google Maps; imagine looking back on these images in 100 years or so.

The future is almost here:

No Google engineer taught the car that a bunch of kids on a field trip would march out in front of it at an intersection. It stopped and waited for them on its own. And no-one told it that, right after that, another car would run the four-way stop sign right in front of it. It handled that, too, avoiding a collision all on its own.

At first, those interactions seemed boringly normal to me until I remembered… no-one was driving! The car had done that all itself while the man in the drivers seat sat passively watching.

David Jaffee in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose.

When we tell students to study for the exam or, more to the point, to study so that they can do well on the exam, we powerfully reinforce that way of thinking. While faculty consistently complain about instrumentalism, our behavior and the entire system encourages and facilitates it.

This may be one of the best things you’ll ever see. Watch to the end. [via DF]

Whatever you do this week, listen to the newest This American Life episode on fundraising and the power of lobbying. It’s the personal side of what they teach us about American Politics in grad school, and it’s fascinating.

Dan Ariely giving one of the funniest TED talks I remember:

Subsidies are expensive:

Studies by international organisations show that the total abolition of U.S. subsidies would increase the world cotton price by 14 percent. According to the charity Oxfam, this would translate into additional revenue that could feed one million more children per year, or pay the school fees of two million children in West Africa.