Pondering Pleasure

Michael Washburn:

People are poor analysts when it comes to pleasure. We think we eat truffles because they're delicious. We think we swoon in front of a Vermeer because it's masterly and beautiful. This assumption of a simple correlation between quality and sensation misunderstands the promiscuity of pleasure.

"What matters most," writes Paul Bloom in his engaging, evocative How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, "is not the world as it [actually physiologically impacts] our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is." Bottled water supplies the purest example of Bloom's argument. Partisans tout the superiority of Perrier, or whatever their favorite brand of sparkling water happens to be. But as experiment after experiment demonstrates, give someone seltzer water but tell them it's Perrier, and they'll wax ecstatic about the mineral springs of southern France.

Those Amazing Stem Cells

Scientists achieve huge milestone by coaxing stem cells from simple blood samples.

Say What?

A Christian scholar insists that the gospels don't say that Jesus was crucified:

Samuelsson bases his claim on studying 900 years' worth of ancient texts in the original languages - Hebrew, Latin and Greek, which is the language of the New Testament.

He spent three years reading for 12 hours a day, he says, and he noticed that the critical word normally translated as "crucify" doesn't necessarily mean that.

"He was handed over to be 'stauroun,'" Samuelsson says of Jesus, lapsing into Biblical Greek to make his point.

At the time the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were writing their Gospels, that word simply meant "suspended," the theologian argues.

"This word is used in a much wider sense than 'crucifixion,'" he says. "It refers to hanging, to suspending vines in a vineyard," or to any type of suspension.

"He was required to carry his 'stauros' to Calvary, and they 'stauroun' him. That is all. He carried some kind of torture or execution device to Calvary and he was suspended and he died," Samuelsson says.

Not everyone is convinced by his research. Garry Wills, the author of "What Jesus Meant," "What Paul Meant," and "What the Gospels Meant," dismisses it as "silliness."

"The verb is stauresthai from stauros, cross," Wills said.

Samuelsson wants to be very clear about what he is saying and what he is not saying.

Most importantly, he says, he is not claiming Jesus was not crucified - only that the Gospels do not say he was.

"I am a pastor, a conservative evangelical pastor, a Christian," he is at pains to point out. "I do believe that Jesus died the way we thought he died. He died on the cross."

But, he insists, it is tradition that tells Christians that, not the first four books of the New Testament.

Evolution Works Faster than We Originally Supposed

CNN.com:

Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley said their comparison of the genomes of ethnic Tibetan and Han Chinese could help scientists understand how the body deals with decreased oxygen and diseases associated with oxygen deprivation in the womb, according to a news release on the university's website.

The evolutionary biologists say the results of their study, which compares the genomes of 50 Tibetans and 40 Han Chinese, shows that Tibetans rapidly developed a unique ability to survive in altitudes above 13,000 feet, where oxygen levels are about 40 percent lower than at sea level.

The study said that Tibetans evolved to adapt to high altitudes after splitting off from the Han about 2,750 years ago.

The Dawn of Customized Medicine

ITProPortal:

IBM has partnered with medical device manufacturer Roche to develop a low-cost tool capable of analysing the human genome.

Business Week reports that the device will allow doctors to analyse a patient's genetic makeup within a matter of seconds.

IBM warned, however, that the technology is unlikely to be available for another decade.
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[T]he breakthrough technology was based on IBM's DNA Transistor, which uses 'nanopores' to read individual strands of human DNA by identifying each DNA base with an electric field.

Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/7/2/ibm-develop-low-cost-gene-reader/#ixzz0sdACI0AG