On:

Most writers we know who blow a lot of grass can’t write an intelligible sentence, but anthropologist J. Francis Thackeray says Shakespeare may have smoked marijuana, since several 17th-century clay pipes found at the site of his home had been used to smoke grass.

He says Shakespeare’s line “weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain” might mean he was “aware of the deleterious effects of drugs.” In Sonnet No. 76, Shakespeare writes of “invention in a noted weed,” meaning he might have smoked for inspiration. The same sonnet refers to “compounds strange,” and in Sonnet 27, Shakespeare wrote about “a journey in my head.” Sonnet No. 118 says, “to make our appetite more keen, with eager compounds we our palate urge.” Marijuana users have a huge appetite after smoking it.read more

On:

Chronic back pain wears people out, and it may also actually cause their brains to shrink. Dr. A. Vania Apkarian found that the brains of people with chronic pain may experience changes in their gray matter, the part of the brain associated with thinking, and says this means “the urgency to cure chronic pain becomes more important.”

When Apkarian compared the gray matter of 10 people with chronic back pain to the brains of 20 people who were pain-free, he found that the people with back pain had less gray matter. In another study, he found that people with chronic pain have “a very specific” type of decline in their ability to make emotional decisions.
read more

On:

Scientists believe they can create both eggs and sperm from either male or female stem cells. It’s worked with mice and Japanese scientists think it will work for humans too. This would mean that, for the first time, a male couple could have biological children.

However, the most obvious use would be to help infertile heterosexual couples to produce children using in-vitro fertilization. Even couples where the woman can’t produce viable eggs and the man can’t produce sperm would be able to have children.
read more

On:

A season of increasingly bizarre and violent weather has continued with devastating tornadoes in the United States on May 4-5, with the storm system rebuilding on May 6. These storms have devastated communities in Kansas, Missouri, Georgia and Tennessee, and have taken 38 lives.

This is not the first episode of unusual and extremely violent weather to strike in recent months. There have been so many incidents in the past six months, that it begins to appear that we are entering a period of violent and changing climate.The combination of reduced oceanic circulation, high levels of solar activity, and more and more heat being retained in the lower atmosphere, is causing this change.
read more