http://www.netzwelt.de/news/87704-higgs-teilchen-nachweis-2012-erfolgen.html
http://www.21dezember2012.org/
The disaster at Fukushima drew attention once again to the perils of nuclear energy, and raised important questions about how its technology came to be. The Thorium Dream explores the passionate Internet-based movement in the United States behind an alternative nuclear fuel, thorium, and a supposedly safer, smaller reactor design that was born at the start of the atomic age and then forgotten. Its proponents say the technology could forever end our energy and resource problems, while solving the safety, proliferation and waste issues, and they're determined to bring it to the U.S. before other countries do -- or before other forces manage to keep the idea stuck in the bin of fringe curiosities.via Boing Boing
Jon Page is a plant biochemist and adjunct professor of biology at the University of Saskatchewan. He explains that a simple genetic switch is likely responsible for the production of THCA, or tetrahydrocannabinolic acid, the precursor of the active ingredient in marijuana."The transcriptome analysis showed that the THCA synthase gene, an essential enzyme in THCA production, is turned on in marijuana, but switched off in hemp," Page says.
(...) over thousands of years of cultivation, hemp farmers selectively bred Cannabis sativa into two distinct strains -- one for fibre and seed, and one for medicine. Marijuana has been used medicinally for more than 2,700 years, and continues to be explored for its pharmaceutical potential.
"We found a considerable amount of change in how our subjects performed on the IQ tests in 2008 compared to four years earlier," explains Sue Ramsden, first author of the study. "Some subjects performed markedly better but some performed considerably worse. We found a clear correlation between this change in performance and changes in the structure of their brains and so can say with some certainty that these changes in IQ are real."
An increase in verbal IQ score correlated with an increase in the density of grey matter -- the nerve cells where the processing takes place -- in an area of the left motor cortex of the brain that is activated when articulating speech. Similarly, an increase in non-verbal IQ score correlated with an increase in the density of grey matter in the anterior cerebellum, which is associated with movements of the hand. However, an increase in verbal IQ did not necessarily go hand-in-hand with an increase in non-verbal IQ.Brain Scans Support Findings That IQ Can Rise or Fall Significantly During Adolescence @ Science Daily