Halts or puts to sleep?
Cannabis compound 'halts cancer'
A compound found in cannabis may stop breast cancer spreading throughout the body, US scientists believe.
The California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute team are hopeful that cannabidiol or CBD could be a non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy.
Unlike cannabis, CBD does not have any psychoactive properties so its use would not violate laws, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics reports.
The authors stressed that they were not suggesting patients smoke marijuana.
They added that it would be highly unlikely that effective concentrations of CBD could be reached by smoking cannabis.
This compound offers the hope of a non-toxic therapy that could achieve the same results without any of the painful side effects
Lead researcher Dr Sean McAllister
CBD works by blocking the activity of a gene called Id-1 which is believed to be responsible for the aggressive spread of cancer cells away from the original tumour site - a process called metastasis.
No Dude, it’s goood for you.
Well it she does it, it would explain a lot.
Vegan Heather Mills' latest bizarre outburst: 'Why don't we drink rats' milk?'
According to This is London.co.uk, it was another typical day in the world of Heather Mills.
Kicking off with her storming out of a radio interview with London's LBC station, media-shy Heather then turned up at Speaker's Corner, in a gas-guzzling black 4x4 Mercedes, to lecture the assembled crowds on ways of saving the planet.
As part of her extraordinary tirade at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, Heather exhorted people to try drinking rat's milk instead of cow milk to help reduce global warming.
The former model said eating meat and dairy was destroying the earth and insisted the milk of rats, cats and dogs would be more eco-friendly.
"Why don't we drink rat's milk or cat's milk or dog's milk?" she asked.
Ms Mills, 39, was launching a pro-vegan campaign for animals charity Viva!
Macca, Macca, Macca…what were you thinking?
Yeah, here’s the thing. If you keep them busy, they think they’re accomplishing something. You know, feel good about themselves.
Attention San Francisco shoppers: Plastic grocery store bags are going, going, gone.
Starting Tuesday, large grocery stores in the city can no longer use the traditional plastic bags that are a staple of the supermarket checkout line, as a city ordinance passed earlier this year to ban the bags takes effect.
"People are used to getting free bags and thinking there is no real consequence to them, but there is a cost," said Jack Macy, commercial recycling coordinator for the city's Department of the Environment, which is implementing the new policy.
The 180 million plastic bags city officials estimate are handed out in the city each year end up as litter on city streets, clog storm drains, harm wildlife, and contaminate and jam machines used in recycling, Macy said.
And then there is the giant patch of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean that scientists are monitoring, estimated to weigh 3 million tons and cover an area twice the size of Texas. The patch is about 1,000 miles west of San Francisco, but plastic dumped in the ocean here can end up there.
Stores can still use plastic bags so long as they are a special type that are compostable. Bags must now be made of at least 40 percent high-grade recycled paper, and many stores are using bags made from 100 percent recycled paper, Macy said.
Few, if any, stores offer compostable bags to customers, though. Those bags are biodegradable, and Macy cautions people not to throw them out with the regular garbage but instead to put them in the green city waste bins. When they are available, the city will require the compostable bags to be clearly marked.
Headline of the day
Hubby says nothing to wife about his $600,000 lottery win
Did they have PETA back then?
Ancient Maya elite binged on big game, loved furs
GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Ancient Maya rulers devastated big game in Central America and Mexico by bingeing on deer meat and flaunting jaguar fur in an early example of poor resource management, new research shows.
The Maya built soaring pyramids and elaborate palaces in Central America and southern Mexico before mysteriously abandoning their cities around 900 A.D.
A population explosion in the elite class just as the Mayan culture began to decline increased the demand for big game meat, especially white-tailed deer seen as a status symbol for nobles, said Kitty Emery, a curator at Florida Museum of Natural History.
"The elite class was growing disproportionately and they had to prove their power by acquiring more high status food," Emery said.
"They are making more demands on the environment and just like in the modern world there are limited resources," said Emery, whose study appeared in the October 31 issue of the Journal for Nature Conservation.
The collapse of the Maya, who dominated the region for some 2,000 years as accomplished scientists and urban builders, is one of the great mysteries of archeology.
Scholars have blamed the demise on everything from disease to over-farming, incessant warfare or climate change that led to prolonged drought.
Massive deforestation caused by the Maya building great cities and ceremonial complexes as well as a two-century drought shrank the habitat for animals like deer, jaguars and wild boars, said Emery.
Their extravagance nearly wiped out many large game species before the arrival of Spanish colonists around 1500 A.D., said Emery, who examined close to 80,000 samples of animal bones discarded in ancient garbage dumps around excavated ruins in Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and Belize.
"The people probably said, 'I don't care how many jaguar booties you are wearing, I don't have any corn on my table, I'm not bringing you any more deer,"' says Emery. "That's the point where people just walk away from the cities."
Jaguar booties? We think we saw them play at CBGB one time.
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