90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Genetic Mutants? 5 Strange Science Facts About Moms

By Stephanie Pappas

Many people will spend Mother's Day, celebrating the love, warmth and emotional support they get from their mothers.

But did you know that many moms are also genetic mutants whose very brains altered in the process of motherhood? Yes, this makes good old mom sound a little bit like an X-man, but there's science behind it, we promise.

So this Mother's Day, we've rounded up some of the stranger scientific facts about motherhood. Read on, and then go give that sweet mutant mom a hug

1. Mom's a genetic patchwork

Pregnancy changes the body, but stretch marks get all the glory. A much cooler side-effect of gestation is that moms may carry little pieces of their children with them for years to come.

It's called microchimerism. The placenta separates the blood flow of mom and baby, but a handful of fetal cells cross this barrier and lodge in mom's body. Scientists have found that these cells can persist for years or even decades. The role of these cells, if any, remains mysterious. But a 2012 study found that DNA from a child's cells could even end up in mom's brain.

2. You changed her brain

Research in rodents has found that having offspring changes the brain. When pregnant mom-to-be rats gain new smell-related neurons — perhaps the better to recognize her babies' scent with. These changes persist throughout the mom's life, according to a 2011 study.

The human brain is not immune from pregnancy-related change, either. A yet-unpublished study presented on May 7 at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society found that pregnant women use the right side of their brain more than new moms when looking at images of adult and baby faces sporting different emotions. The effect was strongest when pregnant women were processing happy faces, the researchers reported. The changes may be part of promoting the mother-baby bond after birth, they suggested.

Previous studies have found that pregnant women and new moms get a boost in their ability to read facial emotions, and these brain changes may be related.

3. She might help your love life

The pushy mother-in-law is a time-honored stereotype, but cut mom a break. She may have done more for your love life than you think.

A close and warm relationship with mom during childhood predicts better relationships later in life, according to research presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. Maternal help in the romance department may even cross species lines: Another 2010 study, this one published in the journal Nature Communications, found that low-ranking male bonobos get more chances to mate when mom is around. Moms play matchmaker by allowing their sons into their social circles, and even chase away rival males.

Not feeling lovey-dovey? Good news: A strong bond with mom can help kids make friends, too.

4. You might have made her a little OCD

If your mom seems to worry a lot, you may not be imagining things. Having a baby makes people a bit obsessive, it turns out.

Northwestern University researchers studied new moms when their babies were 2 weeks and 6 months old, and found that 11 percent had significant symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, such as fear of germs or compulsions to check and recheck the baby monitor. In comparison, only about 2 percent to 3 percent of the general population has these symptoms, the researchers reported in 2013 in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine.

When taken to an extreme, these symptoms can be harmful, the researchers wrote. But some worries are probably normal and adaptive — taking care of a newborn is tough work, after all. The increase in obsessive symptoms may be a result of stress or postpartum hormones.

5. Her voice is powerful

You knew your mother's voice before you were even born. A 2003 study out of Queen's University in Canada published in the journal Psychological Science found that the fetal heart races faster when hearing a recorded poem read by its own mother compared to when the poem is read by a stranger's voice. The study was conducted in the third trimester, when babies were nearly ready to be born. [That's Incredible! 9 Brainy Baby Abilities]

Another study from the University of Montreal found that the newborn brain is as responsive as the fetal heart. When moms made a short "A" sound, the left hemisphere of brand-new babies' brains became active, while the right hemisphere became active when a stranger spoke, the researchers reported in 2010 in the journal Cerebral Cortex. The right hemisphere of the brain is linked to voice recognition, while the left processes language and motor skills, so mom's voice may lay the groundwork for a baby's first words.

This vocal maternal superpower continues long past the baby stage. Hearing a mother's voice eases older children's stress just as much as a real-life hug, according to a 2010 study. The sound of mom's voice lowers a child's stress hormone, cortisol, and raises his or her level of oxytocin, a hormone linked with love and bonding. So give your mom a call this Mother's Day. It'll do you both good.

IRANIAN REGIME THREATENS TO RELEASE NAMES OF WESTERN OFFICIALS WHO TOOK BRIBES TO PASS NUKE DEAL

EARLIER THIS WEEK PRESIDENT TRUMP WITHDREW FROM THE SHAM IRANIAN NUCLEAR DEAL. PRESIDENT TRUMP KNEW THE DEAL WITH THE IRANIAN MULLAHS WAS NOT WORKING.

This was despite former Secretary of State John Kerry working against the Trump administration to salvage the weak deal with the Iranian regime.

On Saturday John Kerry was spotted at a meeting with Iranian officials in Paris, France.

Of course, the Iranian regime is very upset with President Trump’s decision.

Now this…
Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari warned Western officials this week that if they do not put pressure on the Trump administration the Iranian regime will leak the names of all Western officials who were bribed to...

On Tuesday morning at 7 am, CBSNews.com reported a new poll result about Robert Mueller: "A year into the special counsel investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 elections, a slight majority of Americans thinks the investigation is politically motivated. Fifty-three percent say so, while 44 percent think the investigation is justified."

A majority of Americans think the Mueller probe is political, and not justified? CBS paid for the poll, but failed to report it on television. Guess where you could find that result on television? On Fox News on Tuesday night. Sean Hannity had it:

SEAN HANNITY: According to a brand-new CBS News poll, more Americans now think, rightly so, Robert Mueller's witch-hunt is, in fact, politically motivated. Now, this comes as the mainstream, destroy Trump media continues to do Mueller's bidding.

Now, according to NewsBusters, get this, CBS, NBC spent a combined 30 seconds on the recent beat-down last Friday of the special counsel investigation from a federal judge. And meanwhile, President Trump's poll numbers, they're rising. This despite a NewsBusters study showing that network news broadcasts in this country featured negative stories about the president 90 percent of the time. Wow.

Tucker Carlson also reported it:

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, a new poll from CBS finds that the majority of Americans, 53 percent, now view special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation as a politically motivated operation.

And you can see why they might conclude that. The Democratic Party seems to be agreeing with that interpretation and adding to it. Recent fund- raising emails from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have lied about the investigation itself. They have claimed that if the party can collect 1 million signatures, it will somehow force President Trump to give testimony to...

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Lance Izumi: Examples of Insane Leftist Bias in U.S. Schools

Girls With Guns

Black Support For Trump Reaches DANGER ZONE For Democrats

In a dangerous turn for Democrats, black support for President Trump is skyrocketing.

It turns out the era of politics driven by racial identity may be over. With Barack Obama now in America’s collective rear-view mirror – and his race-motivated politics behind us, maybe we can get back to becoming one America.

Support for President Trump in the African American community stands at 16 percent.

While these sound like dismal numbers, they’re actually historically high. Shockingly so, even, especially considering Trump only received 8 percent of the black vote in November 2016.

An equally good number for the President is the “not-sure” rating among blacks.

When African Americans were asked whether they approved, disapproved or were “not sure,” one in ten were in the latter category. That raises the possibility that Trump’s approval could rise to 26 percent among a minority population that typically votes almost exclusively for Democrats.

The latest numbers come from a YouGov/Economist poll and was reported by The Federalist.

And that 16 percent is up from just a couple months ago. The same poll reported in January that Trump’s approval was 10 percent among black Americans – they keep getting better.

Even better: The YouGov poll asks “all voters,” and not just “registered voters.” The latter category consistently bodes better for Republican candidates.

And as The Federalist notes, it’s not just one poll that shows rising support for Trump among African Americans. A Marist poll found 8 percent approval among blacks, and a Quinnipiac poll found 11 percent.

These great numbers are dangerous to Democrats who surely must see the rising popularity for President Trump among their most loyal supporters as a...

Jeff Carlson at theMarketswork on Thursday put together a piece where he places an individual by the name of Stefan Halper as a potential FBI spy into the Trump campaign. (Note that some believe that Obama may have had more than one spy on the Trump campaign).

Carlson determined that George Papadopoulos, the lower level campaign worker for the Trump campaign, appears to have been targeted by three individuals with ties to British and/or U.S. Intelligence: Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer and Stefan Halper.

Mifsud and Papadopoulos obtained positions at an organization named the Centre for International Energy and Natural Resources Law & Security. Papadopoulos was a nobody and the Centre sketchy at best. Mifsud vanishedin early November 2017, shortly after Papadopoulos was in the news and indicted. His whereabouts are still unknown.

Carlson notes:

Although the common story is that Mifsud is a Russian Agent, many ties seem to lead [him] back to UK Intelligence. Julian Assange put out a Twitter Thread noting the connection between Mifsud and UK Intelligence.”

Alexander Downer is the Australian individual who apparently overheard Papadopooulos talk about Trump and Russia in a bar which alerted the FBI to the story and their eventual spy program on Trump. This story has been refuted for months. Carlson writes –

The Papadopoulos/Downer meeting has been portrayed as a chance encounter in a bar. That does not appear to be the case….Downer has direct ties to UK Intelligence firm Hakluyt where he served on the Advisory Board from 2008-2014.

Shortly after the Papadopoulos and Downer chance encounter Peter Strzok was in London per texts released by the FBI. “Strzok texts suggest he was in London on August 3, 2016.” The corrupt FBI’s investigation into Trump officially started a few days earlier.

But, the most intriguing individual noted by Carlson is Halper. Carlson concludes his post with the following –

My guess is Papadopoulos never knew what hit him. A young man, suddenly thrust into a position beyond his experience, Papadopoulos made for an easy intelligence target.

Carter Page almost certainly discussed the just completed Moscow trip with his host, Stefan Halper, during the London symposium.

It’s now being reported that Devin Nunes has learned the identity of a “top secret intelligence source” that was part of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Investigation.

I think there’s a decent chance that source is Stefan Halper.

Halper had contact with both Papadopulos and Carter Page. Halper has connections to UK Intelligence and US Intelligence. Halper met with Carter Page just days after Page’s Moscow trip.

A second Internet sleuth ties Halper to the Obama team of crooks. Overnight, Jacob Wohl on Twitter identified Federal Records that reveal that the Obama Administration paid Stefan Halper $282,295 to apparently spy on...

The world’s most influential synthetic biologist is behind a new company that plans to rejuvenate dogs using gene therapy. If it works, he plans to try the same approach in people, and he might be one of the first volunteers.

The stealth startup Rejuvenate Bio, cofounded by George Church of Harvard Medical School, thinks dogs aren’t just man’s best friend but also the best way to bring age-defeating treatments to market.

The company, which has carried out preliminary tests on beagles, claims it will make animals “younger" by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.

Its age-reversal plans build on tantalizing clues seen in simple organisms like worms and flies. Tweaking their genes can increase their life spans by double or better. Other research has shown that giving old mice blood transfusions from young ones can restore some biomarkers to youthful levels.
Harvard biologist George Church is working on technology to reverse aging in dogs and humans.

“We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we’ll move on to humans,” Church told the podcaster Rob Reid earlier this year. The company’s other founders, CEO Daniel Oliver and science lead Noah Davidsohn, a postdoc in Church’s sprawling Boston lab, declined to be interviewed for this article.

The company’s efforts to keep its activities out of the press make it unclear how many dogs it has treated so far. In a document provided by a West Coast veterinarian, dated last June, Rejuvenate said its gene therapy had been tested on four beagles with Tufts Veterinary School in Boston. It is unclear whether wider tests are under way.

However, from public documents, a patent application filed by Harvard, interviews with investors and dog breeders, and public comments made by the founders, MIT Technology Review assembled a portrait of a life-extension startup pursuing a longevity long shot through the $72-billion-a-year US pet industry.

“Dogs are a market in and of themselves,” Church said during an event in Boston last week. “It’s not just a big organism close to humans. It’s something people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We’ll do dog trials, and that’ll be a product, and that’ll pay for scaling up in human trials.”

Noah Davidsohn (left) and Daniel Oliver (right)—seen here with the dog-show announcer David Frei—have appealed to dog owners to fund an anti-aging study in pets.
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It’s still unknown if the company’s treatments do anything for dogs. If they do work, however, it might not take long for people to clamor for similar nostrums, creating riches for inventors.

The effort draws on ongoing advances in biotechnology, including the ability to edit genes. To some scientists, this progress means that mastery over aging is inevitable, although no one can say exactly how soon it will happen. The prolongation of human lifespan is “the biggest thing that is going to happen in the 21st century,” says David Sinclair, a Harvard biologist who collaborates with the Church lab. “It’s going to make what Elon Musk is doing look fairly pedestrian.”

Dog years

Rejuvenate Bio has met with investors and won a grant from the US Special Operations Command to look into “enhancement” of military dogs while Harvard is seeking a broad patent on genetic means of aging control in species including the “cow, pig, horse, cat, dog, rat, etc.”

The team hit on the idea of treating pets because proving that it’s possible to increase longevity in humans would take too long. “You don’t want to go to the FDA and say we extend life by 20 years. They’d say, ‘Great, come back in 20 years with the data,’” Church said during the event in Boston.

Instead, Rejuvenate will first try to stop fatal heart ailments common in spaniels and Doberman pinschers, amassing evidence that the concepts can work in humans too.

Lab research already provides hints that aging can be reversed. For instance, scientists can “reprogram” any cell to take on the type of youthful state seen in an embryo. But turning back the aging program in animals is not as easy because we’re made up of trillions of specialized cells acting in concert, not just one floating in a dish. “I don’t think we are even near to being able to reverse the aging process as a whole in mammals,” says J. Pedro de Magalhães, whose team at the University of Liverpool maintains a database of longevity-connected genes.

Starting around 2015, Church’s large Harvard lab, also known for attempting to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth, decided to make a run at rejuvenating mice using gene therapy and newer tools like CRISPR.

Gene therapies work by inserting DNA instructions into a virus, which conveys them into an animal’s cells. In the Harvard lab, the technology has been used to modulate gene activity in old mice—either increasing or lowering it—in an effort to return certain molecules to levels seen in younger, healthy animals.
A flyer promoting a gene-therapy study in pet dogs says technology can make them “younger.”

The lab started working through a pipeline of more than 60 different gene therapies, which it is testing on old mice, alone and in combinations. The Harvard group now plans to publish a scientific report on a technique that extends rodents’ lives by modifying two genes to act on four major diseases of aging: heart and kidney failure, obesity, and diabetes. According to Church, the results are “pretty eye-popping.”

Any age you want

In a January presentation about his project at Harvard, Davidsohn closed by displaying a picture of a white-bearded Church as he is now and another as he was decades ago, hair still auburn. Yet the second image was labelled 2117 AD—100 years in the future.

The images reflect Church’s aspirations for true age reversal. He says he’d sign up if a treatment proved safe, or even as a guinea pig in a study. Essentially, Church has said, the objective is to “have the body and mind of a 22-year-old but the experience of a 130-year-old.”

Such ideas are finding an audience in Silicon Valley, where billionaires like Peter Thiel look upon the defeat of aging as both a personal imperative and, potentially, a huge business that would transform society. Earlier this year, for example, Davidsohn told Thiel’s Founders Fund that because scientists can already modify life spans of simpler organisms, it should be possible to do so with humans as well. He told the investors that one day “we’ll be able to control the biological clock and keep you whatever age you...