Blood from stem cells

I can't sleep, so I figured I would post something. A link to a wired story about creating type O negative blood from embryonic stem cells. I saw this story on http://www.onegoodmove.org and thought it quite awesome. Can you imagine the benefits of this if it continues to pan out? No more concept of not enough blood to assist in saving peoples lives. No more having to scrape blood from donors (especially the 7% of people who have type O negative blood which can be transfered to anyone). This is just one of many benefits of stem cells and one of the reasons that I can't stand that we don't do more research into it.

Now as the story will say (and im sure many people who are against embryo acquired stem cells) its possible for this blood technique to use adult stem cells. However usually one of the caveats of this type of cell is they tend to go cancerous, however since blood does not have DNA (lack of nucleus and all) its not a worry in this case. That being said embryonic stem cells still hold the best potential of coming up with cures and treatments for a variety of diseases. We just need to get those peoples head out of their ass to realize that we can save lives and the majority of stem cells that scientists want to play with, are from embryos that otherwise would be destroyed anyways.

I saw this the other day and wanted to post it for others to see as I think its fucking cool. On another cool concept is something I also saw the other day relating to technology. A guy by the name of Johnny Lee (do check out his site, he has some insane cool videos) has me impressed. He basically figured that there is a camera built into the Wii remotes that sense infrared and has come out with several projects that has some seriously cool applications. One is creating a very cheap whiteboard application that is much cheaper than one of the $3000 projessional whiteboards. For basically like $50 and a computer with the software on it (which most meetings and what not use laptops hooked to projectors anyways) you get a lot of the functionality for very cheap. He also has another application that lets him use the Wii remote for head tracking, possibly allowing for games and other applications a more 3d approach, again for next to no cost compared to comparable VR type stuff. His most impressive one I think regarding the Wii remote is a variable display system he designed.




Check it out, its some interesting stuff. Tomorrow I'm going to write something about a museum that someone on the Iron Chariots forums posted on.