A typical first reaction is to associate marijuana consumption with its psychoactive effects. However, THC only becomes psychoactive when heated, like when traditionally smoked or cooked. When used raw, cannabis isn’t psychoactive. The marijuana’s abilities as a painkiller are generally perceived to be the result of its psychoactivity – so much so that the intensity of a plant’s psychoactive effects is often used as a gauge of its medical potency. Contrary to intuition, this isn’t true! The medical properties of marijuana are actually destroyed when heated or aged, as it becomes psychoactive. Heating converts 600mg of non-psychoactive THC acid into 10mg of psychoactive THC. Here’s where the exchange for medical effects occurs. While the 10mg retain some medicinal effects, there is only a fraction of the THC left. In simplified terms, in the raw plant, THC acid isn’t psychoactive, but acts as a very powerful medicine, up to 400 times more powerful than when smoked.

Healthful communication

Scientific American, in 2004, published an article called “The Brain’s Own Marijuana”, in which they asserted that the brain releases chemicals that are structurally and functionally similar to cannabinoids – the reactive property in marijuana. THC is the cannabinoid that people are most familiar with, but this is only one of 80. In normal synaptic nerve function, the signals are uni-directional, and the receiver forwards the signal, but never notifies the sender that the message has been received. Cannabinoids maintain communication with the original transmitter so that it is aware that the message has been received and is being worked on. For example, if a neuron sends a pain signal, normally it would just keep sending the message until the message becomes false. The cannabinoids turn every cell into a manager with increased oversight.

a puppy the size of a business card named Beyonce is hoping to gain the title of world’s smallest dog in the Guinness World Records.

When she was one day old, Beyonce was so small, she could fit in a spoon. At two weeks, she’s almost as big as an iPhone, The Grace Foundation of Northern California says. Vets thought Beyonce would be stillborn because of her size. She was the last of the five to be born, and wasn’t breathing at the time. The tiny puppy didn’t have a heartbeat, either.

A doctor performed chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth until Beyonce’s heart started, KCRA reported.

Now, despite her size, the foundation says she’s a normal puppy! :=)

The U.S. economy has finally started to see some steady, robust job growth adding more than 220,000 jobs each of the past three months. This is surely good news for the country, but we all know that America is anything but a monolithic place. The unemployment rate for individual states varies widely. The most recent estimate by the Labor Department has Nevada with an unemployment rate of nearly 13%, while only 3.2% of North Dakotans are out of work. So it’s safe to assume that these recent job gains, and the jobs we add going forward, will not be distributed evenly.

First, Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank (Japanese site) customers will register their biometric information at a branch, according to Gizmag’s Darren Quick. Then they’ll be able to go to one of the new ATMs and get cash simply by scanning a hand, typing in their birthdate and a four-digit PIN.

In this commercial for an Indian product called Clean and Dry Intimate Wash, a (very light-skinned) couple sits down for what would have been a peaceful cup of morning coffee—if the woman’s disgusting brown vagina hadn’t ruined everything! The dude can’t even bring himself look at her. He can’t look at his coffee either, because it only reminds him of his wife’s dripping, coffee-brown hole! Fortunately, the quick-thinking woman takes a shower, scrubbing her swarthy snatch with Clean and Dry Intimate Wash (“Freshness + Fairness”). And poof! Her vadge comes out blinding white like a downy baby lamb (and NOT THE GROSS BLACK KIND) and her husband—whose penis, I can only assume, is literally a light saber—is all, “Hey, lady! Cancel them divorce papers and LET’S BONE.”

It makes perfect sense. We just want our vaginas to reflect more light—is that so wrong? I mean, WHAT IF MY CAR BREAKS DOWN AT NIGHT AND I DON’T HAVE A REFLECTIVE ENOUGH VAGINA? Basically the idea is to get as far away as possible from any color that vaginas actually come in. Because that’s what’s at the heart of this type of thinking—the perfect vagina would be something that’s not a vagina at all.

Sometimes, an iPad just doesn’t have the hardware features for serious productivity work. When that’s the case, you need a case that turns your tablet into a notebook. Well stick your iPad here…

The NoteBook Case for iPad does this with Apple style. It essentially transforms your tablet into a device that looks like a MacBook Pro, complete with a brushed aluminum finish and black chiclet keyboard. It also adds a USB and mini-USB port, as well as a lithium-polymer battery for extra juice to your touchscreen tablet.

The keyboard, which doesn’t appear to feature the backlighting that an actual MacBook Pro does, connects to the iPad via Bluetooth.

We rarely come across iDevice cases that mimic Apple’s design aesthetic so closely. We’ve seen a MacBook Air-like keyboard case that your iPad slots into at an angle. And the ClamCase is another option that gives your iPad the notebook treatment, providing your Apple tablet with a more ultrabook-like look via an entirely black, matte frame and soft-touch surfaces.

So, could the manufacturer of the NoteBook Case for iPad be hit with a cease-and-desist letter from Apple legal, since the case is such a copy-cat of Apple style? No, it looks like it should be in the clear since the manufacturer wisely didn’t include Apple’s logo on the case, instead leaving a hole for the iPad’s own logo to peep through.

And there are plenty of actual notebooks — ultrabooks like the Acer Aspire S3 — that mimic the look and feel of products, such as the MacBook Air. They haven’t been the target of legal action yet. Apple has gone after Samsung for infringing on design patents for the iPhone and iPad, but aesthetic appropriation is a different matter entirely.

The NoteBook Case for iPad is only available in Japan right now, for about $75 (5,980 yen). It’s designed for the iPad 2, but we’ve found most iPad 2 cases tend to still fit the third-generation iPad since its 0.6 mm thicker frame is only negligibly larger.

A new study offers good news for women who unwind with a cocktail at the end of the day: light to moderate drinking is associated with lower stroke risk. The new report by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital involved 26 years of data on 83,578 women who were part of the long-running Nurses’ Health Study — a federally funded study of how such factors as diet, alcohol consumption and other lifestyle factors may influence women’s long-term health.

Over the follow-up period, there were 2,171 reported stroke events: 1,206 were ischemic strokes, which occur when a blood vessel supplying blood to the brain is blocked by a clot, and 363 were hemorrhagic strokes, when a blood vessel in the brain weakens and bursts. The rest were of an unknown type.

On average, about 35% of women reported very low levels of alcohol consumption — less than 4.9 grams, or less than half a glass of wine, a day. About 37% drank moderately — 5 to 14.9 grams daily, or a half to one and a half glasses of wine, one serving of a mixed drink, or one beer. Approximately 11% reported drinking more than the equivalent of one mixed drink per day and 30% reported abstaining from alcohol completely.

The researchers found that women who consumed low to moderate amounts of alcohol had a lower risk of stroke than women who never drank. Why would drinking lower stroke risk? “Alcohol has components that prevent blood clots and promote HDL (good) cholesterol,” says lead researcher Dr. Monik Jimenez. Fewer blood clots could account for fewer strokes. (And the boost in good cholesterol helps explain why moderate drinking may also lower the risk of heart disease.)

But keep in mind that heavy drinking can have adverse stroke effects. While the population of women in the study who drank heavily was too small to say much about their stroke risk, previous research has shown that overconsumption isn’t healthy. “Higher intake can lead to high blood pressure and atrial fibrillation which are both risk factors for stoke,” says Jimenez. “Our findings really stress moderation for women who do drink.”

But that’s not an invitation for women who don’t drink to start boozing now. Although the researchers found an association between stroke risk and alcohol, they did not find a cause-and-effect relationship. Also, the risk of stroke in women who abstained from alcohol was still relatively low. “We do not advocate alcohol consumption from those who abstain from drinking,” says Jimenez. “There are a lot of risks associated with drinking and there are other healthy lifestyle modifications women can make instead.”

Based on their findings, the researchers support the American Heart Association’s (AHA) message that men and women who consume alcohol should do so in moderation.

Now I’ll DRINK to that!

Among the app’s most-mentioned “enemies” so far are some familiar targets: politicians, teenybopper Justin Bieber, the Internet Explorer browser, pop group Nickelback, social game FarmVille and, yes, Crocs — those odd-looking plastic clogs that fashionistas love to hate.

Users of the app appear to largely be left-of-center politically. Near the top of the enemies’ list are GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Fox News, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. President Barack Obama is the sole Democrat on the list.

Terry is an artist, technologist and director of the emerging media and communications program at the University of Texas at Dallas. EnemyGraph was developed in one of his classes. He credits grad student Bradley Griffith and undergraduate Harrison Massey with actually building the app.

The EnemyGraph app, or plug-in, is easily installed through Facebook. The idea behind it, Terry said, was to offset what he sees as Facebook’s enforced artificial culture of niceness, which encourages affinities but leaves less room for disagreement.

Say, for example, that you like Kanye West on Facebook but one of your friends lists the hip-hop star as an “enemy.” EnemyGraph will send you a “dissonance report,” pointing out the difference and offering it up for conversation.

“When I saw the first friends list at the beginning of the social media era the first thing I thought was, “where’s the enemies list?” No one ever made one, so we did,” Terry said in his post. He calls EnemyGraph “a kind of social media blasphemy” and predicts Facebook will try to shut down his subversive project.

GIVE ME A BREAK!! ~~ Now we have another way to promote bullies! SMH!!

The resulting “mini-liver” is the size of a small coin; the same technique will be further developed to create a full-size liver. The world’s first artificial liver has been grown from stem cells by British scientists.

The mini-liver is useful as it is; within two years it can be used to test new drugs, reducing the number of animal experiments as well as providing results based on a human (rather than animal) liver.

Researchers Dr. Colin McGucklin, Professor of Regenerative Medicine at Newcastle University, and Dr. Nico Forraz, Senior Research Associate and Clinical Sciences Business Manager at Newcastle University, say that pieces of artificial liver could be used to repair livers injured by injury, disease, alcohol abuse or other causes in the next five years. These artificial livers could also be used outside the body in a manner analogous to the dialysis process used to keep alive patients whose kidneys have failed.

In fifteen years’ time, entire livers could be grown in the lab and then be transplanted into human beings.

The stem cells used by Drs. McGucklin and Forraz in this research are gathered from umbilical cords (“cord blood”), seen by some as a more ethical alternative to stem cells created from human embryos.

The cells are then placed in a Bioreactor, a device developed by NASA to simulate the weightless environment of space. The cells are situated in a growth medium that is constantly rotated, putting the cells in an endless state of free-fall. Ordinary cell growth in a nutrient medium in a dish does not provide a culture environment that supports three-dimensional tissue assembly. Epithelial cells without a three-dimensional assembly environment lack the proper clues for growing into the variety of cells that make up a particular tissue. Epithelial cells are the basic cells that differentiate tissue into specific organ functions. In a rotating Bioreactor, scientists can fool cells into behaving as though they are in a body.

The need for an additional source of livers for transplantation is acute. In the United States, more than 17,000 people are currently on liver transplantation lists, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS).