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Microsoft thinks time crystals may be viable after all  

Movement without energy? Redmond puts its money where its mouth is

Microsoft researchers have teamed up with physicists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, to show how time crystals might be possible.…

 
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A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived review popular science at its best  
Adam Rutherford's elegant account of the Human Genome Project brings a note of realism to our dreams of a medical revolution

Sixteen years ago, British researcher Ewan Birney launched an unusual sweepstake. At the time, scientists were completing the Human Genome Project, the international effort to unravel the genetic makeup of human beings. But how many individual human genes would be revealed when the project was completed, Birney wondered? So he asked the world's top geneticists to each bet a dollar on the outcome.

This might have seemed a rather tardy question, given that the project had already consumed “the best part of a decade, the invention of brand new technologies, unprecedented computing power and $3bn”, as Adam Rutherford notes. Late or not, Birney's query nevertheless produced a striking answer.

Related: Do your genes determine your entire life? | Julian Baggini

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Palmer at sunset  

Full Text:

A beautiful sunset ignites the new ice forming in Arthur Harbor at Palmer Station on Anvers Island. Palmer Station is slightly above the Antarctic Circle (66.5 degrees) at 64.77 degrees latitude, consequently the sun never sets permanently during the winter months. However, sunsets are longer due to its low angle.

Image credit: Julian Race, NSF, U.S. Antarctic Program photo library

 
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How the brain builds panoramic memory  

Full Text:

When asked to visualize your childhood home, you can probably picture not only the house you lived in, but also the buildings next door and across the street. MIT neuroscientists have now identified two brain regions that are involved in creating these panoramic memories. As we look at a scene, visual information flows from our retinas into the brain, which has regions that are responsible for processing different elements of what we see, such as faces or objects. The team suspected that areas involved in processing scenes -- the occipital place area (OPA), the retrosplenial complex (RSC), and parahippocampal place area (PPA) -- might also be involved in generating panoramic memories of a place. These brain regions help us to merge fleeting views of our surroundings into a seamless, 360-degree panorama, the researchers say.

Image credit: MIT

 
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Curiosity rover likes big buttes but it cannot lie around  

Mars' layered rocks look just like the American southwest, says Yanquiphile NASA

Mars looks just like the American southwest, says NASA after landing images of some big buttes on Mars.…

 
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Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari review chilling  

The epic, widely celebrated Sapiens gets the sequel it demanded: a breathless, compulsive inquiry into humanity's apocalyptic, tech-driven future

Yuval Noah Harari began his academic career as a researcher of medieval warfare. His early publications had titles like “Inter-frontal Cooperation in the Fourteenth Century and Edward III's 1346 Campaign” or “The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles”. Then, the story goes, having won tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he embarked on a crusade of his own. He was invited to teach a course that no one else in the faculty fancied a broad-brush introduction to the whole of human activity on the planet. That course became a widely celebrated book, Sapiens, championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Barack Obama, and translated into 40 languages. It satisfied perfectly an urgent desire for grand narrative in our fragmenting Buzz-fed world. The rest is macro-history.

Related: Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun and the consequences cannot be known

Individuals will become a just a collection of 'biochemical subsystems' monitored by global networks

Related: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari review

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The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson review - Newton, Einstein and the invisible planet  

It's a story that has been told many times, but this new take on the revolution in astronomy from Newton to Einstein is a fresh, smartly-paced read

Isaac Newton set it up for Albert Einstein: he calculated a system of heavenly motion that governed the entire measurable cosmos. He then added a challenge: a theory, he wrote “that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.”

He didn't live to find out quite how much frustration that claim would give his fellow astronomers, who identified Uranus, and then from the behaviour of Uranus inferred the existence of another planet, and finally identified Neptune. They relied on Newton's predictions, which were spot on and self-evidently right, all the way to the edge of the solar system - except for one tiny little niggling detail about the planet closest to the sun.

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Weekend Roundup: China's Slump Tests Brazil's Democracy  
What global interdependence giveth it can also take away. As long as China's economy grew rapidly, as it did over recent decades, the demand for Brazil's iron ore, oil and soybeans generated enough rising prosperity to disguise the cracks in the democratic system of Latin America's largest country.

China's slump has now exposed the malignant corruption and mismanagement that festered in the shadows of the "Brazilian miracle," sending the nation into a downward spiral of deep recession, high inflation and burdensome debt. Social unrest and massive demonstrations have regularly filled the streets, culminating in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.






Writing from Sao Paulo, Brazil's revered former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso says, "Brazil has turned a sad page in its history. I would have much preferred that Dilma Rousseff had proved the political and administrative capacity to complete her mandate. Unfortunately the crime of responsibility was compounded by the collapse in her overall ability to govern." But, for Cardoso, Brazil's troubles reflect a larger calamity. Representative democracy is in crisis across the West, he writes. "At the core of this crisis is the widening gap between people's aspirations and the capacity of political institutions to respond to the demands of society. It is one of the ironies of our age that this deficit of trust in political institutions coexists with the rise of citizens capable of making the choices that shape their lives and influence the future of their societies." The challenge for all democracies, he concludes "is to bridge the gap between demos and res publica, between people and the public interest, reweaving the threads that may reconnect the political system with the demands of society."

Writing in HuffPost Brazil, Raphael Tsavkko Garcia warns of further turmoil ahead. "Don't fool yourself; Dilma's impeachment won't alleviate Brazil's current crisis," he says. "For the next two years, [President Michel] Temer's government will be under strong (and necessary) pressure. Cuts on the social programs that Dilma started may be increased and accelerated. ... Our problems didn't start yesterday, and they won't go away anytime soon."

On the other side of the globe, China is seeking to expand its integration with the economies of Central and South Asia through reviving the Silk Road by building out new infrastructure and trade routes. Peter Cai reports on the wariness over China's plans he found during a recent visit to India. "At the heart of India's reluctance to embrace Beijing's promise of road building and connectivity," he writes, "is strategic mistrust. The country is wedged between two nuclear-armed neighbors and has fought wars against both in the last 60 years." Cai cites local experts who see China's effort to build roads and bridges "as instruments of Beijing's intention to build influence in its neighborhood." Some, he says, even suggest that a "new Great Game," not unlike when Russia and Britain jostled for power in the region in the early 20th century, is now underway.

In a WorldPost debate, China scholars Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Kate Merkel-Hess spar with Beijing-based scholar Daniel A. Bell over claims in an essay I wrote recently arguing that Chinese President Xi Jinping's current crackdown on an independent civil society must be understood in light of that country's long history as a unitary state with no autonomous realm beyond its fold. Wasserstrom and Merkel-Hess argue that President Xi is selectively reading China's history, dismissing periods of pluralism as a way to justify authoritarianism. Bell argues that Wasserstrom and Merkel-Hess display a "colonial mindset" by engaging in their own selective reading of Chinese history to suit Western notions of human rights and democracy. All agree, as Bell puts it, that "It's a mistake to say that there is only one political tradition in Chinese history and to draw implications for contemporary China based on that assumption."

In an essay in HuffPost France, Prime Minister Manuel Valls condemns what he calls the "proselyte contestation" of those in France who "seek to defy two of the fundamental principles of our country" -- the equality of men and women and secularism. Marc Steinau, Benjamin Reuter and Nicholas Miriello report that political violence is rising in Germany along with the right-wing Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former member of Iran's National Security Council, and Hesam Rahmani assess the state of the Iran nuclear deal, which continues to be attacked by opponents both in the U.S. and Iran. The fear, they write, is that "radical voices on both sides that have sought to undermine the deal will win, and escalation will once again become the name of the game between Iran and the U.S. The path to peace will diverge back onto the path to war."

As if it couldn't get worse, Willa Frej reports that child suicides are escalating in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya. Rowaida Abdelaziz, however, has a glimmer of hope from there -- a family suffering from meningitis has been evacuated for treatment just weeks after one member, an 11-year-old boy, had himself been removed due to the same illness. On the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Dean Obeidallah surveys how the lives of Muslims in the Middle East have been impacted.

Arthur Molella contends that the 1900 world's fair in Paris has shaped our present-day attitudes toward technology He recalls Henry Adam's reflections at the time. "In a chapter titled 'The Dynamo and the Virgin,' he cites Adams as "ponder[ing] the implications of the machine age, expressing deep concern over what he sees as a dangerous clash between the seductive grandeur of modern science and technology -- what he calls 'the Dynamo' -- and the essential undergirding of humanity, religion and traditional values, which he christens 'the Virgin.'"

Finally, our Singularity series this week talks to virtual reality pioneer Chris Milk, who says, "I don't think the future of VR looks like video games; I don't think it looks like cinematic VR; I think it looks like stories from our real lives."

WHO WE ARE


EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Nick Robins-Early is a World Reporter. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.


CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.


EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).


VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.


CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.


The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.


Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.


ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.


From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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NASA launches OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission  
The $1bn spacecraft aims to return around 60 g of asteroid material  
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Why I Donated My 9-11 Triage Tag To The Memorial & Museum  
Before tubes were put down my throat to help me breathe, I was put in an ambulance. An emergency responder found me barefoot and terrified just blocks from Ground Zero. I was on the corner of West and Vesey when the second tower collapsed and had run out of my favorite pair of slip-on shoes escaping the downpour of debris, abandoning them somewhere a few blocks away. The bottoms of my feet were bleeding, lacerated from sprinting across pavement strewn with broken glass. The crisis worker (was my lifeline a he or a she? In the mind-blanking terror of that morning I still don't recall) thrust a triage tag around my neck. Scrawled in black ink and shorthand, the rectangular piece of paper lists my medical conditions: "diff breathing," "inhalation," "abd pain."

My triage tag is just one of 11,000 artifacts in the official collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. A decade after the attacks I donated it, along with my press pass working as an investigative producer for WNBC-TV. And while seeing the triage tag on display and reading the accompanying description likely makes some visitors wonder whatever happened to me, I wish there were a button next to the plexiglass case that played an audio recording of how I feel 15 years later. "I'm so happy," the voice would proclaim again and again. "Some days are harder than others, but mostly I'm at peace."

I've come to learn this sense of healing is the experience of many individuals who've donated belongings to the museum, some in recognition of their own experience, others in memory of loved ones who died. In a just-completed, yet to be published study called A Theory of Psychotherapeutic Object Dynamics, researchers conclude that the act of donating objects to the 9/11 Museum has made moving forward easier for many people.

Brenda Cowan, Associate Professor of Exhibition Design, School of Graduate Studies at SUNY/Fashion Institute of Technology, led the investigation and partnered with the museum to find participants. I was part of that group, each of us interviewed separately. At the conclusion of the report, which the National September 11 Memorial & Museum shared with me, Cowan writes that every subject of her study expressed "deep themes" of "personal healing," "renewal," "transformation," and "growth."

There are several reasons why donating objects sparks this surprising uptick in happiness, even years after a donation is made. In the process of bequeathing possessions, the 9/11 Museum became viewed as a partner in keeping our personal survivor stories and the memories of our loved ones alive. Donors came to recognize the museum as a protector of belongings and recollections, a place to keep them safe, in perpetuity. One person even referred to the museum as a "therapeutic ally." Cowan calls this phenomena the result of "Releasing/Unburdening."

This has certainly been the case for Eileen Fagan who lost her older sister, Pat, on September 11. Pat worked as an insurance adjuster on the 98th floor of the south tower. Eighteen months after she was killed, Fagan learned her sister's black purse had been located, covered in dirt and dust, but miraculously, fully intact. Among the items still inside were an extra pair of eyeglasses, a few credit cards, a driver license, and the ID card she used every day to get into her job at Aon. There was also Pat's signature coral-pink creamy lipstick. The most evocative items for Fagan, though, were the small denomination dollar bills and rosary beads.

"My sister would often stop in church for mass on the way to work," she told me. "She'd always wanted to light a candle, and she'd needed a few dollars to do that. When I see that pocketbook, it's not a reminder of her death. It's a wonderful and inspiring reminder of her life."

Like Fagan's donated pocketbook, my triage tag is also a surprising reminder of good memories. It helps me recall that after I was released from the hospital, with the triage tag cut off and in my bag, I had somewhere in Manhattan to go that felt completely safe -- my father's apartment. My mother had been dead five years by then, and even though my dad was frail and desperately ill from lung cancer, a day-long wave of panic gradually transformed into a nighttime oasis of love and support -- a safe harbor that included much-needed parental doting and affection.

September 11 was the last time I saw my father sitting up, able to talk to me, or hold my hand. It was also the final Tuesday I got to be somebody's daughter. That Friday, my dad died in another New York City hospital, a few miles from where I'd nearly suffocate on soot and rubble.

In many ways my triage tag is a symbol of survival and a job performed. But it's also a reminder that my father wanted to protect me even as our world was shifting and his was ending. His love endures and that knowledge bubbles up and makes me happy every time I think about my triage tag on display at the museum. And the realization that loved ones who have passed away can still be part of our present? That makes Eileen Fagan smile, too.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Evolution Is True. So What?  
There can be no debate about the truth of evolution. Genetic mutations and adaptations to local environments result in traits that can be passed down to descendants. Intelligent design is false, and there can be no debate about this either (although there are many debates between creationists and scientists that take place, which often result in the debaters talking past each other).

What can be pondered over is the mechanism or mechanisms of evolution--and what we can do about it, but more on that later. For a while, because of my strong belief in kindness as a basic constituent of reality, I eschewed the notion of the world as an uncaring place. I even entertained the long disproven theory of Lamarkian evolution for a while, which holds that traits one organism develops in a lifetime can be passed down through DNA. While epigenetic changes can in fact play a role in the inheritance of traits, these do not change the DNA itself. This changes the phenotype but not the genotype.

My favorite biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, was a proponent of natural selection and Darwinism. Yet he left room for other possible factors that can influence evolution, including neutralism--an idea that holds that evolution guards against change in order to slow random and possibly harmful genetic change. Gould was sympathetic toward a soft version of the Bauplan, which posits some mechanism of internal change, though he did not embrace it. For Gould, natural selection remained primary.

Modern geneticist Jeremy England at MIT is trying to formulate a thermodynamic theory on the origin of life. Scientist Robert Lanza and philosopher Thomas Nagel posit that consciousness must have a role in the origin of life and thus evolution. Even more speculative is the idea of Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge scientist who holds that morphic resonance has some role to play in evolution. Morphic resonance is the theory that as certain patterns accumulate, they reinforce each other, which can create the type of life forms we see today.

While all of these ideas are interesting, we cannot ignore the fact that natural selection is the best bet to explain how life changes materially, even if the mind or other forces play a role. For physical things, randomness rules and purpose, while very important, is small. In psychology, the tendency to see what we want to see is called confirmation bias. If we're already looking for what we want to see, then we believe it. Therefore many have discarded evolution because of their distaste for its cruelty and its leveling of the living world. We want to be special, but our universe is vast and we are very small. Important, but small.

Evolution polices the material world. And this is why I believe in evolution as a material theory. A grand theory that can explain the origin of life and its role in the universe may be years in the offing because of the borders materialists erect to explain evolution. We may never have one because of this bias. Nevertheless, Darwinian evolution answers the questions we have now in the material world. It is up to us to attempt to fine tune our understanding of how it operates with non-material quiddities. While denying evolution flies in the face of science, we may recognize evolution for what it does on its side of the equation and seek to change the way we relate to each other, to "vote" on how we may change ourselves socially and culturally on the non-material side of the equation. But this would extend beyond materialism and certainly raise the hackles of pompous types like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. These thinkers seem to think they represent the lone candles battling the darkness of faith.

Modern science has gone from the non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) of Stephen Jay Gould to Jerry A. Coyne's negative dogma that science and religion are incompatible. This is not going to help us find out the truth.

Rather, we must accept material evolution for what it is and our mental and social worlds for what they are. The fact that we know more about the former than the latter does not negate the importance of mind and interaction in shaping who we are and what we can become.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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NASA's OSIRIS-REx is off to nick some rocks from asteroid Bennu  

Did space rocks bring us life? Just 7 years and we'll know!

NASA has successfully launched its first mission sending a spacecraft to an asteroid with the aim of returning samples of space rocks back to Earth.…

 
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NASA's Other Asteroid Mission: Grab A Chunk And Put It In Orbit Around The Moon  

Flying people to an asteroid is really hard, so NASA wants to bring part of it to them. But some former astronauts say the $2 billion plan was born of politics and budget cuts, and makes little sense.

 
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Elon Musk says SpaceX Falcon 9 fireball robe is 'biggest challenge yet'  

'Anomaly' wasn't rocket engine's fault, he claims

SpaceX are still investigating the explosion that caused its Falcon 9 rocket, and the Facebook satellite it was carrying, to erupt into flames last week.…

 
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A Map To Help Cancer Doctors Find Their Way  

A computer program can map cancer progression in much the same way historical explorers drew maps of the Earth without satellite imaging. Small bits of data can be pieced together to form a picture.

 
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Luigi Galvani Scientist of the Day Luigi Galvani, an Italian...  









https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Galvani#/media/File:Bologna_Statue_of_Galvani.jpg

Luigi Galvani Scientist of the Day

Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician, was born Sep. 9, 1737.

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Flash Physics: Levenson new deputy head of US telescope body, πΚ atoms at CERN, simulating 'monster pulsars'  
Today's selection of need-to-know updates from the world of physics  
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National Engineering & Construction Recruitment Exhibition, Birmingham  
Exhibition: 25 Nov 2016 - 26 Nov 2016, Birmingham, United Kingdom.  
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Indigo bunting  

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Indigo buntings often migrate by night, using the stars to navigate. The seasonality of bird migration is shifting in response to climate change. As a result, birds in the United States are arriving at their northern breeding grounds earlier in spring -- and may be departing later in fall. Scientists supported by the National Science Foundation made the migration shift discovery thanks to information aggregated from two sources: remote-sensing data from weather surveillance radar and ground-based data collected in citizen science databases.

Image credit: Kyle Horton

 
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Smartphone hacks 3-D printer by measuring 'leaked' energy, acoustic waves  

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The ubiquity of smartphones and their sophisticated gadgetry makes them an ideal tool to steal sensitive data from 3-D printers. That's according to a new University at Buffalo study that explores security vulnerabilities of 3-D printing, also called additive manufacturing, which analysts say will become a multibillion-dollar industry employed to build everything from rocket engines to heart valves. Unlike most security hacks, the researchers did not simulate a cyberattack. Instead, the researchers programmed a common smartphone's built-in sensors to measure electromagnetic energy and acoustic waves that emanate from 3-D printers. These sensors can infer the location of the print nozzle as it moves to create the three-dimensional object being printed. According to the researchers, the tests show that smartphones are quite capable of retrieving enough data to put sensitive information at risk.

Image credit: Wenyao Xu

 
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Boffins ID bug behind London's Great Plague of 1665  

Yersinia pestis fingered as slayer of 10,000 black death victims

Scientists have revealed Yersinia pestis as the bacteria that caused London's 1665 Great Plague.…

 
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Light pushes liquid uphill  
Illuminated polymer tubes could replace pumps in labs-on-a-chip  
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Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy Restores Hand Function To Paralyzed Man  
Kris Boesen, a young man paralyzed with a neck injury, has recovered hand and arm function, thanks to an embryonic stem cell research therapy originally funded by California's Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Act of 1999.

Today, three months after stem cells were injected into his spine, Boesen is "able to feed himself, use his cell phone, write his name, operate a motorized wheelchair and hug his friends and family..."

Flashback: when my own son Roman Reed was paralyzed in a college football accident, September 10th, 1994, there was literally no hope offered for his recovery -- or anyone else with a spinal cord injury, which were typically described as "devastating."

But Roman had no interest in giving up. He challenged himself and everyone around him. With his inspiration, California passed and renewed a research funding law named after him.



That was just the beginning.

Today, thanks to scientist Hans Keirstead's pioneering work on a Roman Reed Act grant, the efforts of dedicated scientists at Geron, Inc., funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM, which sprang from Palo Alto real estate developer Bob Klein's Proposition 71) and the unceasing efforts of too many people to name, a major improvement for the devastating injury has occurred.

Fremont, California is home to both Asterias Biotherapeutics, the company which provided the embryonic stem cells which were converted to the "insulating" oligodendrocyte cells which re-wrapped the damaged spinal cord nerves, and Roman Reed himself, for 21 years massively involved in the quest for cure, including the Roman Reed Foundation, and a new company, StemRemedium.

The first mention of paralysis in history was on the walls of an Egyptian tomb, which said: "Of paralyzed soldiers, deny them water, let them die, there is nothing that can be done."

But on this day, September 7, 2016, that grim outlook is no longer accurate; today, there is something that can be done.

And it all began with a small California law, Assembly Bill 750, (Dutra, D-Fremont), inspired by a young man, age 19, lying in a hospital bed, who refused to accept paralysis.

Don C. Reed is the author of "STEM CELL BATTLES: Proposition 71 and Beyond: How Ordinary People Can Fight Back Against the Crushing Burden of Chronic Disease," available now from Amazon.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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WATCH: Bacteria Invade Antibiotics And Transform Into Superbugs  

We know that bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics, but we've never seen it happen. An MIT scientist figured out how to show bacteria surviving antibiotics and invading a giant petri dish.

 
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How Do Ants Find Their Way Home?  
Tiny yellow "blindfolds" helped scientists understand more about the way Cataglyphis ants navigate.

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com  
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