As I established last “lightning round,” there are certain thoughts I have that don’t really make an entire Take it from Snee. They’re just ideas I save up from stories I read and, when the week’s particularly slow, I just ejaculate them into one gonzo post.
So, enjoy my brain ejaculations.
I promise to avoid your hair and those pants that are dry clean only. But you’re on your own for your eyes. You don’t like this? Keep ’em shut. Continue reading Take it from Snee: A few more things
It looks like not everything is booming (eh?) in the terror business.
Tahir ul-Qadri, a London-based Muslim scholar and founder of Minhaj-ul-Quran, has issued a fatwa–or religious ruling–against suicide bombers. Over 600 pages, he determined that killing people is bad, no matter the reason, and that you may not pass Go or collect 72 virgins, but go straight to hell.
However, don’t get so glum, Mopey Mutallah. If you’re angry and disenfranchised, you can still get into heaven the old fashioned way: being a judgmental, hypocritical prick.
Researchers have long believed that amyloid plaques either cause Alzheimer’s or are a key factor, and a lot of money has gone into researching drugs that reduce the prevalence of these plaques. So it’s a great cause for celebration that bapineuzumab, a drug now being developed by Elan Corp. and now owned by Johnson & Johnson, showed an ability to reduce amyloid plaques in 28 patients. At the end of the 18-month study period, the patients had 25 percent less amyloid plaques than a control group. And the bapineuzumab patients actually had less plaques than they had at the start of testing.
But like most all good things, there’s a bit of a catch. Actually, there are two catches here. The first is that bapineuzumab can have dangerous side effects — high doses can have ill effects, as earlier tests found, and two patients in the current study had cerebral edemas caused by water on the brain. But it sounds like the side-effects are manageable, and it may be just a matter of finding the right dosage.
The bigger catch is, we still don’t know if amyloid plaques are a cause or merely a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. A large and growing number of researchers believe the true cause of Alzheimer’s is the tangles of tau proteins that also accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers.
In any case, whether bapineuzumab turns out to be a wonder drug, or a dead end, the real breakthrough here is the development of a method of assessing a patient’s number of amyloid plaques, something we could only do after death, via autopsy, until now. Now, we can only hope that we don’t need to repeat the same research multiple times over.
Ah, newlyweds. The bliss of just being married to the person you want to spend the rest of your life with … then spending the night in jail after attempting to run over an ex.
We don’t want to freak you guys out or anything, but the world might just be ending. The only other possibility is that our animal foes have dangerous new technology.
More than 300 of miles away from any water, a desert town in Australia was attacked by hundreds of fish falling from the sky. It rained fish for no apparently reason. The good news is that no one was serious injured.
Now, “scientists” will try to tell you that this happened because a tornado formed over water, sucked up the fish, and deposited them in the town, but that’s a long, long trip for a tornado. This leaves us with the very real possibility that the animals are somehow able to launch themselves into the air en masse so that they can take out our small towns.
