I've been waiting what seems like my whole life for this gadget. I am SO excited. +1,000,000 points to whoever creates the first Moleskine-like cover for it!

Do you remember these 'softish' cough drops from the 80's?

The 4-Hour Body is currently ranked #7 on Amazon for hardcovers, & #3 for the Kindle version.

Tim Ferris gives some advice for targeting the fitness & self help readership:

“Don’t target the lowest-common denominator.  Do NOT try to write for everyone.  Pen your book for your closest two friends who need it, then find the 2-5 blogs those two people would read.  It’s really as simple as that.  We’re at the dawn of the creators’ age, when you don’t have to dumb down your material to have a bestseller; you don’t have to kow-tow to big media that wants to dilute your message so that it offends no one and interests no one.  The publisher — you — can decide the fate of your ideas.  That’s should be exciting to every writer and would-be writer out there.  The timing couldn’t be better.”

Yep, it definitely excites me for sure!! Also, after seeing the issues that several friends have had with traditional publishing, going at it yourself seems to be the way to go.
Have you thought about writing a book?

Install the Chrome for a Cause extension to participate. Each tab you open will raise money for charity.

Clearly, Google has NO idea what they have gotten themselves into. ;) I am the undisputed world champion of the 'how many tabs can I open before my computer dies' Olympics. Now instead of having to explain to people why I have 127 tabs open, I can simply explain that I'm just doing my part in raising money for Doctors Without Borders. ;)

Every country in the world approaches health care differently, but the end goal is the same: Keep citizens as healthy as possible at the lowest cost. Some countries spend a lot on health care, but see don’t see great benefits for those expenditures among their citizens. Others, at least by the metrics below, are finding ways to reach both goals. This infographic is a look at 12 countries around the world that examines how far the money they spend on health care goes toward affecting the health of their citizens.

Good is awesome. ;)

In case you are panicking: you are more likely to die of Japanese Encephalitis or Dengue than the H1N1 flu.

Though I do have to say that I am very disappointed by the government's failure to get the vaccine out before the pandemic.

This flu is not your garden variety seasonal flu, guys...  Here's some info from the CDC:   "The pandemic H1N1 influenza virus continues to disproportionately attack the young, the CDC warned.  Children and adults under age 25 have accounted for 53% of hospitalizations for laboratory-confirmed H1N1 and 23.6% of related deaths since Sept. 1, the agency reported at a press briefing.

Seniors, on the other hand, have accounted for just 7% of H1N1-confirmed hospitalizations and 11.6% of deaths from the virus based on data from 27 and 28 states, respectively.

“This is really, really different than what we see with seasonal flu,” said Anne Schuchat, MD, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who led the briefing."  (Source.)

Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumors of any kind—and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why.
The findings, presented in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells "claustrophobic," stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.
"We think we've found the reason these mole rats don't get cancer, and it's a bit of a surprise," say Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov, professors of biology at the University of Rochester and lead investigators on the discovery. "It's very early to speculate about the implications, but if the effect of p16 can be simulated in humans we might have a way to halt cancer before it starts."

Click for the full-sized version

Make sure you take a look at the full sized version. It's amazing!

The bone matrix as it developed over time. (Me: Look, it's a condyle!!)

Excerpts from the article:
Now researchers have grown bone grafts in the exact shape of a desired bone, an advance that could help provide doctors with just what they need for face, skull and other skeletal reconstructions.

Although missing bone can be replaced by titanium, "there is no better substitute for lost tissue than living tissue," bioengineer Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic at Columbia University explains. "Although titanium is better than nothing—you need something to help bear loads—real bones also have bone marrow inside that has many important metabolic functions."

Patients also could rely on donated bones, but these run the risk of contamination and tissue rejection. Or surgeons can harvest bone from elsewhere in a patient's body and carve it to fit where they need to, "but this is very hard on patients," Vunjak-Novakovic says. "The damage at the site of harvest is major, and it takes long to regenerate this tissue, and patients often report doing so hurts much more and longer than the implant itself."

Instead, bioengineer Warren Grayson, along with Vunjak-Novakovic and their colleagues, grew their own grafts. They started with the temporomandibular joint, found at the point where the jaw meets the skull in front of the ear. "It was the greatest challenge we could think of, the most complex piece in the skull in terms of shape, based on surgeons we asked," she says. "If we can grow this piece, we think we can grow anything."

The temporomandibular joint, or TMJ, is also of growing clinical relevance, Vunjak-Novakovic adds. As many as roughly one out of four people experience symptoms of disorders involving the TMJ, such as pain in the chewing muscles and jaw stiffness as well as painful clicking, popping or grating in the joint.

Other research teams had tried developing replacements for this joint, but could only develop simple or imprecise shapes or grow the bone tissue inside mice, a concept that works well for research purposes but not for human applications, because cells and molecules from the mouse's body could contaminate the implant, and only very small bones could be grown.

"This is the first anatomically shaped piece of fully viable human bone," Vunjak-Novakovic says.

Wow!! The implications of this are just amazing. I can hardly even wrap my head around the big picture here... but one thing I do know is that it gives me hope.
It gives me hope that the thousands of patients who have had to settle for less than ideal joint replacements or reconstructions can someday have a better option. Nothing is better than viable, healthy bone.
After I had my jaw joints removed and implanted with titanium joint replacements in 2006, people told me not to worry, that someday science would advance to the point where I wouldn't have to replace my joints every 10 years. I nodded and smiled politely, but in the back of my mind I felt that we were still really far away from meaningful advancement in this arena.
And now this! Fantastic!

This is a good video that explains participatory medicine. Like I have been saying for a long time, healthcare is no longer a one way street. No longer do we put our medical care solely in the hands of medical professionals. As patients we have more responsibility than ever before. Part of this responsibility is learning about our health, learning how to decipher the difference between good and inadequate medical care - and then pursuing that good care. As the video says, patients are now engaged, enabled, educated, empowered, electronic, and equipped experts!

A demonstration in Washington against Obama's healthcare reform plan. Photograph: Rex Features

America's healthcare industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to block the introduction of public medical insurance and stall other reforms promised by Barack Obama. The campaign against the president has been waged in part through substantial donations to key politicians.

The industry and interest groups have spent $380m in recent months influencing healthcare legislation through lobbying, advertising and in direct political contributions to members of Congress. The largest contribution, totalling close to $1.5m, has gone to the chairman of the senate committee drafting the new law, Max Baucus. The committee this week twice voted against including public insurance in the legislation, with Baucus opposing it both times.

Baucus took $1.5m from the health sector for his political fund in the past year. Other members of the committee have received hundreds of thousands of dollars. They include Senator Pat Roberts, who last week tried to stall the bill by arguing that lobbyists needed three days to read it.

Baucus holds dinners for health industry executives at which they pay thousands of dollars each to be at the table, and an annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in his home state of Montana that lobbyists pay handsomely to attend.  John Jonas, who formerly worked on the congressional staff, acknowledges that political contributions are intended to buy influence and says it works.

"It would be very naive to say they're not influenced. The contributors certainly hope they're influencing and the recipients probably ultimately are influenced," he said. "I think it's a morally suspect practice, and then you have to look at its application to see if it's morally bankrupt ... I think what's bad about the system is it's got more and more lax over time."

The health industry permeates the process in other ways. At Baucus's side, drafting much of the wording of the reform, was Liz Fowler, a senate committee counsel whose last position was vice-president of the country's largest health insurer, Wellpoint, which stands to be a principal beneficiary of the new law.  Health companies and their lobby firms also recruit heavily among congressional staffers as a means of maintaining influence.

Robert Reich, the labour secretary in the Clinton administration, says the Obama White House, mindful of how the health industry killed off Clinton's attempts at reform, has grown so fearful of industry money that it has quietly reached agreement to pull back from price caps and public health insurance.

"The White House made a Faustian bargain with big pharma and big insurance, essentially scuttling both of these profit-squeezing mechanisms in return for these industries' agreement not to oppose healthcare legislation with platoons of lobbyists and millions of dollars of TV ads."

Amazing. And people wonder why Baucus and his colleagues haven't been able to pass healthcare reform?

Project 10 to the 100 is a Google project that calls for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible.

Over 150,000 ideas were submitted from 170 countries. They have been narrowed down to 16 finalists. Vote for your favorite!

An incredibly unique, interesting way to visualize the current health care debate.

Carrie Budoff Brown and Patrick O'Connor at Politico provide the broader perspective, suggesting that although the public option was thought to be dead as recently as a few weeks ago, recent events suggest "it may have new life"--and the test will come today. "[S]upporters [of the public option] are working hard this week to bring it back, against the odds, with a series of high-profile votes in the Senate Finance Committee." While they don't expect to prevail on any of the committee votes today, they believe the public option still has a chance to pass the full Senate. "'The Senate floor is more favorable to the public option than the Finance Committee, and [negotiations with the House are] more favorable than the Senate floor,' said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who will offer two versions of the public plan when the Finance Committee reconvenes Tuesday." Schumer added, "'The more focus there is on the public option, the better it does.'" Still, the authors say, "there are signs everywhere that it remains an uphill fight." 

I've been watching the public option debate live on CSPAN this morning. There has been discussion on the current state of large insurance companies, Medicare, competition, and right now, Senator Conrad is talking about healthcare models around the world (he cited T.R. Reid's book, The Healing of America). He favors not-for-profit, universal coverage that is not entirely government run.

If you support the public option, please speak up and contact your legislators.

Forty-five percent of the Martin's income last year went to medical bills and health insurance premiums. Yet the family still doesn't get the healthcare they need, and they face even bigger bills next year as Martha faces a hysterectomy.

What will happen to Martha Martin and her family under the current version of the healthcare reform bill? The Martin's, who make about $45,000 a year, would still be required to pay about $5400 a year for health insurance premiums, or 12 percent of their income.