Monday, July 28, 2008

Wasted money, but not time

Busy week, what with the astronaut cover letter and pumping out data like Conservatives pump out dough. Big pumping, that's what we call it. Somehow, we have gone from running a $2.8 billion surplus over April and May last year to running a $517 million deficit over the same time this year. $3.3 billion seems like a lot of money to me, and so does the $1.1 billion we didn't collect from corporate revenues. Particularly with all this stuff about Liechtenstein in the press.

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Again, like you needed a reason not to eat it, boys - soy foods such as tofu may decimate your sperm count. A scary-but-true fact you might not have known: in every species tested so far, halving normal caloric intake leads to drastic prolongation of lifespan (kind of counter-intuitive, right?). Scientists may have packed part of this into pill form by activating gene expression using what is hoped to be the first generation of anti-aging drugs, resveratrol. Neurosurgery may prove to be an effective last-chance measure against highly resistant chronic depression, although it will be a long time before we know what relapse rates are like. Lastly, an interesting finding from London - a mutation in an obesity-linked gene is associated with increased appetite. This may sound like a no-brainer, but it's the first mutation we've seen that does this. Of course, our catalog of mutants is still pretty limited...


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