This is absolutely amazing. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the key to fighting just about every deadly disease we know of is probably as simple as eating fresh, tasty foods.

William Li presents a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases: anti-angiogenesis, preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that cut off the supply lines and beat cancer at its own game.

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As always, cracked cracks me up with good old facts.

My favorite bit here:

Vitamin C has been touted as a cure-all for everything from preventing colds to curing cancer. The latter claim was popularized by Linus Pauling and eaten up by people who forgot that he got a Nobel Prize in chemistry and not medicine. The movement was dealt a bit of a setback when he died of cancer in 1994.

Read the full article on Cracked

This is freaking awesome. It’s only a matter of time before we have custom house pets, bacteria that cleans air, water and anything else we want, in fact, bacteria that creates just about any chemical element or structure that we want. The possibilities are pretty wild.

The part about watermarks in the DNA is impressive.

Craig Venter and team make a historic announcement: they’ve created the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA. He explains how they did it and why the achievement marks the beginning of a new era for science.
–TED.com

You also may be interested in Gregory Stock on TED with “To Upgrade is Human”: http://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_stock_to_upgrade_is_human.html

Disturbing images and information about the state of the oceans and predictions for the future. I hope my daughter can see the ocean as beautiful as I’ve seen it in my life.

In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse. Astonishing photos and stats make the case.

Since Lena has a bit more time to write blogs than I do, here’s her latest with photos and videos galore: http://bit.ly/ctm6KL

Dean Kamen is one of my future thinking heroes. He is one of the many reasons I think we can expect cybernetic replacements that outperform human originals in the next 10-20 years. You may know Dean Kamen as the inventor of the Segway, which makes most people think that he’s a frivolous inventor–but it’s quite different once you hear him speak about his inventions and the reasons he invents. It may surprise you to hear that the Segway was invented as a philanthropic device. See his other TED talks for more viewing interest: http://www.ted.com/speakers/dean_kamen.html

In this talk:

“Soldiers who’ve lost limbs in service face a daily struggle unimaginable to most of us. At TEDMED, Dean Kamen talks about the profound people and stories that motivated his work to give parts of their lives back with his design for a remarkable prosthetic arm.” – from TED

This is a write for ten minutes practice session: http://writeforten.com/posts/533

It’s a part of you, this thing they’ve implanted. What is it made of, some polymer clay, iron, ore, something wicked or new, who knows. They put these things inside, hoping to gain insight. imagine what they could glean from a clean specimen. Men with no connection, nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

Back in the dark, again, they’ve got this thing wired to your head. If you think straight, the lights go out. What can that be for? If there’s a reason, they wouldn’t tell you. That’s part of the experiment, the data collection, the reason.

But you do this to pay for school. It’s all you can do, that or sell parts. It’s better to gain a little implant than lose a little kidney or push your plasma on the street. At least these guys are professional. Or so they seem. How could you tell if this was legit or something sinister? It’s so easy to make things. The suits, the badges, the equipment. It looks like it would have been expensive before you could just make things. But now, these guys could be broke, selling off your data to the personality cloners, pushing our your identity to the over-net, leaking out your dreams to the pay-per-view audiences in distant places.

You wonder for a minute if this is your fifteen minutes of fame. Could it be? Could this be all there is to show? You’ve got this tube of gelatinous metal in your ribcage. Are you the first to try it? Probably. You try bending and find it’s sore. You jump, push, pull, drop and roll. There in a half turnpipe spin, you find bliss. This new ribcage of yours just splits open to reveal a tentacle mesh of neotechnic hands, reaching out for perch against the walls, rocketing you back and forth. You close your eyes. They carry you, these arms, walking for you, bounding through the hallway of the artificial medical unit. There at the end, you see a woman in white standing next to a hover-tray. It’s giving her in injection. She faints. Move along. Nothing to see here. Nothing but images as you float by, out into the streets.

There’s a place in the park where all the old men go to die. They play games with their past selves, screaming banter at bankers, bidding on winners and pranksters. Eventually, it all caves in. The pieces fall. The trees sag and drop their leaves.

I was just telling some friends that I thought the future of gaming would have more impact on the real world. My wife has been playing a lot of Farmville on Facebook recently and it got me thinking that if we could harness the power of games like that to make people desire with such gusto to sit and click through such menial tasks, we could convert any kind of work into a game. Maybe all jobs in the future will be games–and all schools and lessons will be too. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could learn to write code by playing a game?

Well, Jane McGonigal already has games that affect the real world.
Check out Evoke: http://www.urgentevoke.com/ to take a crash course in saving the world.

Synopsis of this talk on TED:

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

At TEDxUSC, David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form — in schools, workplaces, even the driver’s license bureau. By understanding our shared tribal tendencies, we can help lead each other to become better individuals.

Chills…

The LXD (the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers) electrify the TED2010 stage with an emerging global street-dance culture, revved up by the Internet. In a preview of Jon Chu’s upcoming Web series, this astonishing troupe show off their superpowers.