Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

A recent post on Ars Technica explains how researchers are converting adult stem cells from patients with certain diseases into embryonic stem cells. This will hopefully make studying the cellular basis of diseases like Parkinson’s easier by providing a virtually unlimited supply of tissue, which was previously difficult to come by. This technique [...]

Cedar Point is offering admission tickets for $25 online (normally $43) if you buy 4 or more. If you’ve never been to Cedar Point, all I can say is that you’re missing out on the best rides in the world. Period. They have three out of the top ten steel roller coasters [...]

WordPress 2.6 came out yesterday (ahead of schedule). It’s got a few nice new features to it, but not nearly as many changes as was found in 2.5. It was certainly more of a fit-and-finish release, but it looks like (as usual) they did their homework and fixed some good stuff. One [...]

Nine Inch Nails has pre-released their new album, ‘The Slip‘, online (via Chicagoist). I’m not really a NIN fan, but there’s something a little different about this one. They’ve released it completely for free under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC-SA) in many different formats (including lossless). Apparently, Mr. Reznor feels that Radiohead, [...]

I received word today that my Stafford loan lender for school (Northstar’s Total Higher Education Loans, T.H.E.) is temporarily suspending new loans for next year. As I went to look at the benefits available through another popular med student lender, MEDLOANS (a Sallie Mae subsidiary), I quickly read about how Sallie Mae is likewise [...]

Is Microsoft Windows “collapsing”? Some are saying it is, and I kind of believe it, although the process is likely to be a very drawn-out death. Experts are warning that the new version of Windows, due out at the end of 2009, needs some major changes in order to keep it competitive. [...]

Will the Large Hadron Collider bring about a cosmic Doomsday event, be used to shoot pidgeons, or just create the Higgs Boson and discover the meaning of life? Only the next few months will tell…
Note to dyslexics: Don’t transpose the “d” and “r” in that second word, or you’ll get an entirely different [...]

Lots of upgrades for me over the past 24 hours. The most relevant one is that WordPress 2.5 was officially released today, so my blog is now running on 2.5. What does this mean? Well not a whole lot for you readers unfortunately, given that the big changes occurred on the back-end [...]

I should be a plastic surgeon because I just gave my website a wicked face lift. This is a design I’ve been working on for quite a while now. I started it last spring/summer when I was thinking about making a blog. By the time I actually got the site up and [...]

Researchers at HMS have discovered an important mechanism by which cancer cells can grow so quickly (via /.). They’re hoping to use this information clinically to significantly reduce the growth rate of cancer cells, making them much easier to manage. Cool.