Got Body Parts? Get Cash

Somehow a stimulus check just doesn’t seem stimulating enough to jumpstart my flatlining bank account. I’m thinking I need to make a little extra dough on the side before I can start feeding any to our flagging economy, but I don’t have any skills. I’ve thought about growing vegetables, building furniture, or washing windows to pad my pockets, but I don’t have a garden, I’m useless with a hammer, and … well, I don’t want to work that hard. So instead I’m looking to make the most (money) using what I’ve got at my fingertips. After doing a little research, here are the resources I discovered, some of which I never even knew were valuable:

Hairy Business
Real hair is in huge demand for use as hair extensions, hairpieces, and wigs. So, if (like me) you can’t grow weeds, but you can grow a mean head of hair, then check out the world’s largest independent hair sale site, Hairtrader. Now, you can’t just sell any old head of hair: hair must be naturally beautiful—that means it’s never been bleached, permed, tinted, highlighted, chemically straightened, or otherwise subjected to the demands of modern life. That rules out me and most of the western world too. To date, the record sale was $2,500 for 25” of light brown hair. (Photo source: Shevy wigs)

Pissing Away Poverty
If your urine is drug and alcohol-free, you might be able to strike (liquid) gold.

Thanks to the scads of people addicted to drugs and alcohol, there’s a market for good, clean urine to help people ace their drug test. Granted, you could go to jail for selling your pee, but as someone wise and famous once said (probably someone who never attempted to sell their urine), without risk, there is no reward. Urea Sample sells synthetic urine kits to folks looking to beat drug tests for up to $139.95. If you cut out the middle man and go straight to the source, you can make around $200, according to arrest reports.

If risk is your thing and potential jail time isn’t too daunting, you could also consider selling your corneas, worth roughly $7000. Or if your pee isn’t pure, you can always just take it to the next level and opt to sell a kidney.

It’s Written All Over Your Face (and Neck, Biceps, and Back)
The advertising industry is desperate to find clever new ways to reach people. They’ve already placed ads at eye level on the back of the bathroom stall door, in school buses, on your favorite TV show, your laptop, iPod, and in video games. Now they’re eager to score new real estate—you! In 2006, Web-hosting company Globat purchased ad space on the back of a Lancaster, Pennsylvania man’s neck for an undisclosed sum of money. Robert Reames, III, age twenty-seven, had a globat.com ad tattooed on the back of his neck so he could buy a new car. I’ve often said, “I have eyes on the back of my head,” so I’m thinking I should offer the back of my head to Lenscrafters …

Got Milk?
I’ve heard many a lactating mother cry that throwing away expressed breast milk feels like throwing away liquid gold—and they’re right. While there are plenty of banks where you can sell/donate breast milk (once you’ve been screened of course), there’s also a thriving black market of men—or couples—with a breast milk fetish. (Maybe I’m just lactose intolerant, but eew!) Still, I guess if guys can make money selling sperm, why can’t we put the old mammaries to work? Another way to go is to answer this classified ad: “Got Milk? Earn $2000 per photo shoot modeling for BeautifulPregnant.com, the only pregnancy/lactation site that has a touch of class.”

It’s a Bloody Jungle Out There
It’s actually illegal to sell human organs or tissues, but that doesn’t mean they’re entirely worthless. Many companies will “compensate” you for your time, and more specifically for your plasma—the water and protein-packed portion of your blood—which is easily replaced by the body. To find a donation site in your area, visit Blood Banker. Not only do they have a listing of blood banks that pay cash for your plasma, but they also list additional information about how often you can donate. Note: a donor burns about 650 calories by donating one pint of blood!

Womb for Rent
Why get $2500 or more for donating a little old egg (okay, it’s not so old, you need to be thirty-five or under) when you can get more than $25,000 for delivering a fully hatched chick? If you need more than a little extra cash, surrogate pregnancy may be the way to go. On top of the carrying fee, you get all your medical bills, travel expenses, and maternity clothes for free. (And then you can keep that really cute pair of “fat pants” for a future non-pregnant time when you’re feeling extra bloated.) For all those older couples wanting to have children, infertile couples, or two-dad families out there, you won’t be just putting your uterus on the market for some fast cash, you’ll be giving the gift of family. (photo source: sharynmorrow on flickr (CC)

Let’s Get Clinical
No need to wait until you’re dead to donate your body to science. You can do so now, while you’re still alive and kicking, to the tune of several hundred dollars a day, depending on the study. Healthy as a horse? Great! You’re needed. You’re also needed if you smoke, have diabetes, are post-menopausal, have high blood pressure, suffer from insomnia, or have a history of depression. And if you hate drugs, but love shopping, there are clinical trials just for you. Even though drug studies are the most lucrative, research participants are also constantly needed for consumer product testing and mystery shopping sprees, where you can get paid to go to the movies, eat out, buy products, and even drink beer at pubs!

Cry Me a River
If all else fails and you’re left with nothing of your own to sell, you can always look to Hollywood for a little assistance. If you’re especially enterprising, you can follow starlets around paparazzi-style, wait for the inevitable heartbreak, then capture their tears in a vial, and sell them on eBay like one enterprising young man did recently with Paris Hilton’s tears. It’s more of a long-term commitment, but you’d be getting in on the ground floor of something unique.

Original here

What Dictionaries and Optical Illusions Say About Our Brains

Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi does not bother with how the brain accomplishes a task, but rather why it performs the function in the first place.

By Nikhil Swaminathan

THEORETICAL NEUROBIOLOGIST: In his work, Mark Changizi attempts to determine why our brain works the way it does.
COURTESY OF RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY

Although many neuroscientists are trying to figure out how the brain works, Mark Changizi is bent on determining why it works that way. In the past, the assistant professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has demonstrated that the shapes of letters in 100 writing systems reflect common ones seen in nature: Take the letter "A"—it looks like a mountain, he says. And "Y" might remind one of a tree with branches. He also showed that across different languages most characters take three strokes to write out. That's because, he says, three is the highest quantity a person's brain can perceive without resorting to counting. But Changizi's theories aren't limited to writing. He also believes that primates developed the ability to see in color so that they could figure out if peers were sending emotional cues. He hatched that theory by comparing the light wavelengths given off by the facial skin of someone blushing to that of a person not flushed. The prolific Changizi recently published two papers: one that sets out to explain how our lexical systems evolved and another that suggests how the brain's visual system is adapted to anticipate the future a fraction of a second before we actually see it. (See related slideshow here.) Changizi spoke to ScientificAmerican.com about his newest research; what his forthcoming book, The Vision R(evolution): How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision, has to do with superheroes; and what kind of scientist he is.

What's the goal of your research?
My goal is to understand the principles underlying the design of the brain or visual system or cultural artifact, like language or writing systems. I'm not as interested in the mechanisms per se. People like me make the point that you can't even study those mechanisms without having an idea what those mechanisms are trying to compute. So you have to have some opinion about what the design or function of those mechanisms are for to even do that. So, I am focusing on the function from a teleological [purposive] point of view. Of course it's unpacked with natural selection or cultural evolution.

Are you characterizing the functions of certain systems, so that other researchers can work on how a system performs its tasks?
It's certainly a consequence of my work that someone else will be in a better position to pose mechanisms when they know the big constraint of: "What is it that my mechanisms need to be computing?" But, that's not why I do it. I'm excited about the selection pressures undergoing why we see in color: What is color for? What is it optimized for? Only 1 percent of me is interested in the fact that it's implemented in the particular way it's implemented in some part of the brain. ... [My work] often makes some predictions about specific aspects of the mechanisms, but once that information is there, there could be infinitely many mechanisms that could carry out that function.

One of your more recent papers deals with the Oxford English Dictionary as an economically organized collection of the words in the English language? What is it about its organization that makes it so optimal?
If you gave definitions of all the words on the basis of some small set of atomic words, then you would have two levels of words: the bottom level, [a] small set of atomic words (between 10 and 50) and the other, roughly 100,000. That would be a very costly dictionary in terms of the size that's required. The signature of an optimally organized lexicon is: you instead take that small set of words and you use them to find a slightly larger set of slightly more complicated words, which are in turn used to build a slightly larger set of still more complicated words and so on. When you do that seven times, or so, that will then allow you to utilize the minimum amount of definition space to find the target words that you are really interested in defining in the first place.

What type of words serve as the bottom rung, or atomic words, in the lexicon?
The ones that come out from WordNet [a lexical database of the English language developed at Princeton that ranks words from the most basic to the most complex] are words like: abstraction, act, entity, event, group, phenomenon, possession, etcetera.

How does this manner of organization reflect a mechanism in our brain?
My interpretation of this result is that culture has over time evolved the meanings of the words in our lexicon so as to minimize the total size of definitions. And the reason that was selected for was because that way we could all fit more words in the head and have a richer vocabulary.

Does that imply an underlying drive toward efficiency or conciseness?
Sometimes when you speak about evolution, you mistakenly say that evolution is striving for developing a wing. But, it's blind cultural evolution. Over time, meanings of words are going to change. The structure of the lexicon is passed on, generation to generation, there'll be selection pressure changing it in certain ways. Sometimes it will change in ways that are hurtful, making it harder for people to remember. Those will tend to change back over time. So, it's blind cultural selection with no directionality per se.

If the dictionary study involves cultural evolution as its driver, then the new work on the visual system involves natural selection–based evolution. Why is it that we need to "perceive the present," as you put it, or see into the future?
Animals who move or are in a world that moves around them—as long as there are things moving somehow relative to you—will be selected to have perceptions that are true. We have about a tenth of a second delay between the time light hits the retina and the time of resultant perception, which is considerable given that you move 10 centimeters [four inches] in that amount of time even if you're only walking one meter [3.3 feet] per second. That means that if you didn't compensate for this neural delay, anything you perceive to be within 10 centimeters of passing…. [It] would have just passed you by the time you perceive it. You'd always be seeing the world as it was a tenth of a second earlier and seeing what the world looks like 10 centimeters behind where you in fact are--if you hadn't run into whatever it is you're looking for.

So, in the new work, you detail various optical illusions. (See related slideshow here.) Do these illusions result from all the errors in our visual system that need to be compensated for?
In this work, it's ones dealing only with forward motion, which is, I think, one of the main kinds of motion that we're good at dealing with. Even when you're standing still or rotating, for example, that's going to be a different kind of optic flow. Potentially, we're able to correct for those, too. But, all of these illusions turn out to be explainable from forward motion correlates. We're doing compensation all over the place. We play video games where there are made-up rules of optical flow that our visual systems can figure out on the fly.

In the new work, you were able to sort optical illusions into categories based on four visual features that were being misperceived. What particular features are those?
There are four different domains of misperception: The first is illusions of size. The second is illusions of speed. The third is luminance, or contrast. The last is illusions of perceived distance. Now, there are different ways of affecting those kinds of misperceptions—the key features that are causing those illusions. For example, size differences within your visual field could cause misperceptions or illusions of speed.

So, does this work fit in with your forthcoming book, The Vision R(evolution)?
The book is about four stories about four of the big areas of vision: The first is motion, which is this perceiving the present stuff; binocular vision, which concerns the evolution of forward-facing eyes; color and luminance, which is like the skin work; and object recognition—this is a little bit more of a stretch—but it connects to the evolution of writing and reading. The four areas all have an evolutionary side to them. Furthermore, they all have a superhero angle to them. You can describe the perceiving the present stuff as future-seeing. People have proposed superheroes that see the future and, in a weak sense, we do, too. For the evolution of forward-facing eyes, I am arguing that it is for a kind of x-ray vision. It actually allows us to see through stuff—like when you hold up a finger vertically and you see through it instead of beyond it. For animals that are large and living in forested environments, there should be selection pressure for forward-facing eyes, because you can actually see more of your environment. For color vision, the cones that we have in our eyes—that [other] mammals don't—are evolved to see the oxygenation modulations in the blood, because we want to sense the emotions in others. We really have external-sensing equipment that…[is]…empathic in nature—mind reading and emotion-reading, like the annoying character in Star Trek, the empath. A bit of a stretch of the theme is spirit-reading, our ability to read the thoughts of the dead. Object recognition (reading and writing) has allowed us to read the thoughts of the dead. So, it's four different stories connected by these kinds of themes.

Interesting. So, putting all this together, what do you consider your field? Is it cognitive science?
I would call it theoretical neurobiology in vision. But, it doesn't get at the fact that I am more evolutionary-directed, rather than computational modeling-directed—so I think evolutionary, theoretical neurobiologist would be slightly more representative.

Original here

Mutation Spells Bad News for Breast Cancer Patients

Breast cancer patients with a mutation in both copies of the NQO1 gene have a 20% lower survival rate 5 years after treatment than do patients without the mutation, according to a new study of more than 2000 Finnish women. Those with the mutation were also four times less likely to respond to a common type of chemotherapy.

NQO1 encodes an enzyme that protects cells from oxidative stress, damage to the cell and its DNA caused by reactive byproducts of metabolism. The NQO1 enzyme also helps to stabilize p53, sometimes called the "guardian angel" protein for its crucial role in preventing tumors. Because NQO1 protects a cell's DNA and its anticancer proteins, mutations that compromise the NQO1 enzyme are pernicious. One mutation, called NQO1*2, increases the risk of cancer or cancer relapse, especially for leukemia.

A group of researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland thought NQO1 could also be a promising predictor of survival for women with breast cancer. The team followed the cases of 1005 women who visited the Helsinki University Hospital for breast cancer treatment between 1997 and 2004. They tested the women for the NQO1*2 mutation and compared their survival rates over an average of nearly 6 years of follow-up visits. Only 65% of women who carried two faulty copies of the gene were alive 5 years after treatment, compared with 85% and 87% survival for women with one and two good copies, the team reports today in Nature Genetics. The mutation also increased the chance that the cancer would spread. What's more, the mutation seemed to make the breast tumors resistant to a common form of chemotherapy, epirubicin. Women with two copies of the NQO1*2 mutation had only a 17% survival rate 5 years after the therapy, compared with a 75% survival rate for women with at least one good copy of the gene. For radiation or hormone therapy, the NQO1*2 mutation seemed to make no difference.

To confirm their results, the researchers studied a second group of 1162 women treated at two other Finnish hospitals. Again, they found reduced survival: Over 10 years, 46% of women with two copies of NQO1*2 survived, compared with 75% of women with at least one normal NQO1 gene. As in the previous group, the effect was most pronounced among patients who received chemotherapy rather than radiation--but most women in the second group had received an older kind of chemotherapy, so the researchers couldn't confirm the effect of the NQO1*2 mutation on the now-common epirubicin therapy.

Nevertheless, "the results are pretty dramatic," says Carl Blomqvist, a cancer clinician and an author of the study. "The immediate thing to be done," he adds, is to launch a new clinical trial designed not just to detect the association between NQO1* and prognosis, but to really test the predictive power of NQO1*2 on cancer prognosis in women randomly assigned to epirubicin and other therapies. If the connection holds, it could give doctors another piece of information to help them choose the right treatment for a patient.

"It's an important finding," says David Ross, a toxicologist at the University of Colorado, Denver. He, too, emphasizes the need for a new clinical trial to confirm the connection between NQO1*2 and prognosis, and he adds that the cause of the effect remains unclear. "There still need to be some t's crossed and i's dotted," he says.

Original here