21 AUG 2013 by ideonexus

 Drugs is a Human Construct

The human body is an assembly of chemicals, as is all food & all medicine. So what we label as a drug is a social construct. Lifting weights changes your bio-physiology in a way that creates performance-enhancing effects on your body. Drinking coffee changes your metabolism in a way that creates performance-enhancing effects on your body. Eating breakfast changes your biochemstry in a way that creates performance-enhancing effects on your body. Practicing in your sport of choice creat...
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Everyone and every substance is chemicals and molecules. How we classify them is purely a social construct.

30 MAY 2012 by RadioGuy

 Humans share 98.5% of our genes with chimpanzees

The genome is not a blueprint for constructing a body; it is a recipe for baking a body. As the hox story illustrates, DNA promoters express themselves in the fourth dimension; their timing is all. A chimp has a different head from a human being not because it has a different blueprint for the head, but because it grows the jaws for longer and the cranium for less long than a human being. The difference is all timing. The startling new truth that has emerged from the human genome - that...
Folksonomies: genetics
Folksonomies: genetics
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Even the difference between human and mouse blueprints are minor. Our variation comes from the schedules that manage the expression of genes, and these are controlled by the chemicals and enzymes in our environments.

31 JUL 2011 by ideonexus

 Music Lessons Teach Children Emotional Nuance

10 years of music lessons There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby’s cry. The scientists tracked changes in the timing, pitch, and timbre of the baby’s cry, all t...
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Children who begin music lessons before the age of seven have a greater ability to detect emotional nuance than children who do not.