Category Archives: Post Human

Charmaine Yoest framed abortion restrictions as necessary to protect womens health, although the medical evidence for such claims was often dubious. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

Donald Trump has appointed the former president of a leading anti-abortion group to the top communications role at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS).

Charmaine Yoest, who for several years was head of Americans United for Life (AUL), will be HHS assistant secretary for public affairs. AUL played an instrumental role in the recent wave of anti-abortion laws by feeding model legislation to state lawmakers.

Under Yoest, the group pushed model bills that outlawed abortion after 20 weeks, required abortion providers to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals, and mandated counseling and waiting periods for women seeking abortions. AUL is also opposed to the use of the morning-after pill and IUDs.

Between 2010 and 2016, states have enacted 288 restrictions on abortion. The AUL directly credits its own work for several dozen of those laws. Its model legislation may have inspired countless more. Abortion rights advocates have managed to block many such measures in court.

As AUL president, Yoest played a key role in framing abortion restrictions as necessary to protect womens health, although the medical evidence for such claims was often dubious. AULs ultimate goal is to end abortion.

Since leaving AUL, in 2016, Yoest has been a senior fellow at American Values, an anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage nonprofit. In her new role, she will set communications strategy for the entire health department.

The agency is headed by another staunch opponent of reproductive rights, former Georgia congressman Tom Price, who as chair of the House budget committee oversaw passage of a measure that defunded Planned Parenthood.

Price has also voiced hostility toward the requirement, put in place by the Obama administration, that health insurance plans cover contraception with no co-pay, once challenging a reporter to bring me one woman who struggled to afford contraception on her own.

View original post here:
Trump picks former anti-abortion leader for health and human services post - The Guardian

Tiny human brains have been grown in a dish, an accomplishment which could lead to breakthroughtreatments for conditions like Alzheimers and schizophrenia.

The brain cells have formed similar circuits to those of a 2-month-old fetus and give scientists an opportunity to examine how the brain and any diseases develop.

Researchers at Stanford University first grew two forebrain circuits, before going on to the next step of growing a mini-organ over nine months.

Scientists will now be able to watch how the brain develops, with the hope that the entire movie of a brains growth can be monitored in the lab, rather than just snapshots.

The process could be the first step toward being able to grow an entire human body in the lab, with researchers hoping that the thrilling science will be able to provide insights into brain conditions like Alzheimers disease and schizophrenia.

As part of the experiment, scientists have already been able to generate abnormal circuits typical of Timothy syndrome, which is linked to autism, before correcting it with drugs.

The research, reported in the journal Nature, also stated that by watching the brains develop in real time, the triggers for epilepsy can be pinpointed.

Lead scientist Dr. Sergiu Pasca, from Stanford University, said, Weve never been able to recapitulate these human brain developmental events in a dish before.

The process happens in the second half of pregnancy, so viewing it live is challenging.

Read the original here:
Scientists grow a working human brain in a lab - New York Post

Ive said it before and I will say it again: film as a medium is a mirror to the human condition. Film shows us ourselves in ways we could never see on our own, it draws us out of our self-centered mindsets and reveals aspects of self and society that otherwise we might not notice. Thats because filmas opposed to the other dominant storytelling medium, literatureis built first of images to which words are added, and images affect us differently than words, they suggest rather than lead, they leave more room for interpretation and personal translation, and thus they have the power to ring truer with an audience than does dialogue.

At the same time, film is an utter fabrication, even the most realistic (narrative) films about actual events take significant dramatic liberties in order to emphasize certain themes. After all, like I said, film is a reflection of life, not life itself, and reflections, as anyone whos ever been to a funhouse or a mall dressing room knows, can be manipulated.

But in the intersection where film meets life there are hidden truths, there are reflections that allow us to make sense of ourselves, our society, and our collective hopes and fears.

This is the ideological jumping off point for the latest erudite video essay from Luiza Liz for her Art Regard YouTube channel, in which she examines how the sensitive and the subversive medium of film superimposes icons of global trauma, obscenities of moral failure, and aesthetic splendors. And her vehicle for this examination? Katsuhiro Otomos 1982 anime classic Akira, which she looks at specifically for how it demonstrates the post-humanist dilemma. Sound heady? Hell yes it does, and Luiza delivers the goods with aplomb.

Akira is one of those films thats been dissected, sewn up and dissected again over and over by film critics, but Ive never seen an analysis quite like this, and Im willing to bet you havent either, which is why were proud to present it to you.

Continued here:
'Akira' and the Post-Human Dilemma - Film School Rejects

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. (WXYZ) - Auburn Hills police are responding to a disturbing Facebook post in which a woman reacts to rumors of human trafficking at Great Lakes Crossing.

That video has some on edge.

You can't believe everything you see or read on social media, so says a local police chief who says a video posted on Facebook is making a bad situation worse.

It contains shocking allegation bound to put parents on edge: a sex trafficking ring targeting women and children at Great Lakes Crossing.

So says the unassuming mother in a video she posted on Facebook.

I think she repeated things that she believed to be true at the time,says Auburn Hills Police Chief Doreen Olko.

But the disturbing claims arent true. Neither is the public's belief that Auburn Hills police are engaged in a cover up to protect the mall.

I've also found it insulting on behalf of our whole police department that someone would suggests that we are hushing it up, says Olko.

Police sent investigators to the woman's home. She repeated the encounter she had with a man who held the door open for her and her 6-month-old son.

He looks me up and down and starts talking about how incredible my body is, she says in the video. And all I could think was is this guy like trying or going to try to traffic me and (my son)?

The trafficking fears have been spurred by rumors on social media. They've been so disruptive the Auburn Hills police chief took to her blog to denounce them.

"I'm a person who cares about facts and about truth, so that's why we respond to this and react to it," Olko says.

The chief says the video is an example of how important it is to use social media responsibly.

"It's harmful and reckless to post things like that," she says.

Because of the woman's earnest belief that the human trafficking rumors were based in fact, she is not being charged with a crime.

The Auburn Hills police chief says if parents are truly concerned about human trafficking they should keep an eye on their children's email and social media accounts - that's where the real danger lurks.

Go here to read the rest:
Facebook post stokes human trafficking fears at Great Lakes ... - WXYZ

A bold new study claims mastodon fossils found in San Diego in 1992 show humans existed in North America 115,000 years sooner than previously thought. Here's why. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

Some 130,000 years ago, scientists say, a mysterious group of ancient people visited the coastline of what is now Southern California. More than 100,000 years before they were supposed to havearrived in the Americas, these unknown people used five heavy stones to break the bones of a mastodon. They cracked open femurs to suck out the marrow and, using the rocks as hammers, scored deep notches in the bone. When finished, they abandoned the materials in the soft, fine soil; one tusk planted upright in the ground like a single flag in the archaeological record. Then the people vanished.

This is the bold claim put forward by paleontologist Thomas Demrand his colleagues in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The researchers say that the scratched-up mastodon fossils and large, chipped stones uncovered during excavation for a San Diego highway more than 20 years ago areevidence of an unknown hominin species, perhaps Homo erectus, Neanderthals, maybe even Homo sapiens.

If Demr's analysis is accurate, it would set back the arrival date for hominins in the Americas and suggest that modern humans might not have been the first species to arrive. But the paper has raised skepticism among many researchers who study American prehistory. Several said this is a classic case of an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence which they argue the Nature paper doesnt provide.

You cant push human activity in the New World back 100,000 years based on evidence as inherently ambiguous as broken bones and nondescript stones, said David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University. They need to do a better job showing nature could not be responsible for those bones and stones.

For decades, discussion of early settlement of the Americas has focused on the tail end of the Ice Age. Most archaeologists agree that humans crossed a land bridge from Asia into Alaska sometime after 25,000 years ago, then either walked between ice sheets or took boats down the Pacific coastline to reach the wide open plains of Pleistocene America roughly 15,000 years before present. Though scientists debated the exact timing of this journey, their estimates differed by hundreds or a few thousand years, not tens of thousands.

[Ancient tools and bone found in Florida could help rewrite the story of the first Americans]

It is a bold claim, Demr acknowledged, an order of magnitude older age than has been suggested. But he asked his colleagues not to dismiss the research out of hand based only on a number.

This evidence begs for some explanation, he said, and this is the explanation weve come up with.

The rocks and mastodon remains were identified in 1992 by paleontologist Richard Cerutti, a colleague of Demr's at the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Cerutti was asked to monitor work on a new freeway south of San Diego in case any important fossils were uncovered.

When Cerutti spotted a broken tusk stuck in the soil overturned by an excavator, he called for a halt in activity and summoned Demr to the site.

Youll want to see this, Demr recalled Cerutti saying.

The scientists set up a geographic grid system and began carefully excavating several more stones and bones, plotting each new object on their grid to preserve its location. It took several months to uncover every artifact.

As the site unfolded over that five month period it became more and more exciting and more puzzling at the same time, Demr recalled.

The biggest find was a partial skeleton from a single American mastodon. Peculiarly, the largest bones were scarred and broken, but more fragile ribs and vertebrae were still intact. Some of the bones seemed to have been arranged deliberately alongside one another. Many bore the spiral fractures that are a signature of ancient people hammering on fresh bone either to extract marrow for food or break the bone into tools.

The bones were clustered in groups around a few large, heavy stones known as cobbles. Thesize and makeup of these rocks didnt match the fine-grained surrounding soil. They bore marks you'd expect to see on a hammer and anvil. Scattered around the site were flakes that seem to have been chipped off the cobbles, as though someone had struck therocks against another solid object. When held up to their source stones, the flakes fit back into them like pieces of a puzzle.

It was unusual to say the least and suggested this was a not a typical paleontological site and we should consider the possibility that we had association of extinct megafauna with humans, or at least early human activity, Demr said of the findings.

[How did the first Americans get here? A story of boats, bones and ice]

But it was difficult to figure out how old the site was. Any soft tissue in the fossilized bones had long decayed, so scientists couldnt use radiocarbon dating to determine their age. They attempted to date fossils using the uranium-thorium method, which measures radioactive decay of uranium.But the technique was not very reliable at the time, so the Cerutti mastodon remained an enigma.

More than a decade later, a mutual friend put Demr in touch with archaeologist Steve Holen. Holen believes that human history in the Americas dates back much farther than the end of the Ice Age, something he acknowledges is a minority position in his field.For several years, he has been examining museum collections and new fossil sites in search of ancient bones that look like they were touched by people.

The breakson the mastodon fossilslooked as though they were human-caused, he said. But to make sure, Holen tried to recreate them using a stone hammer the same size as the one found at the Cerutti site andthe skeleton of an elephant that had been recently buried.

The bone was extremely fresh and smelled very bad, Holen said of that experiment. I almost wished I wasn't doingthis. It took all of Holen's effort and the help of a younger, stronger colleague to break the bones. When they succeeded,they recognized thesame breakage patternsas the ones found on the fossils. There's no evidence that anyone hunted or butchered the mastodon for meat,but it definitely seemed to him like some human or human cousin had cracked the bones.

Once you do the experiment then you really can understand this much better, Holen said.

Next the team reached out to geochronologist James Paces, who retried the now much-improved uranium-thorium dating technique on the bones. He concluded that they are 130,000 years old, give or take 9,400. This date corresponds with the accepted age of the layer of rock in which the bones and cobbles were found.

But it far exceeds any established date for settlement of the Americas. The oldest biological remains from anyhumans on the continent is a coprolite (fossilized poop) from 14,300 years ago. Studies based on genetic analysis of modern Native Americans suggest that humans didn't make it over the land bridge that once linked northeast Asia to Alaska until 25,000 years ago.

If the stones and bones reallyare evidence of people, then who were they? How did they get to this part of the world so long ago? And why haven't we found other evidence of their presence? Did they die out not long after they arrived?

Because there are no hominin remains at the site, and rock hammer technology was used by many hominin species, the scientists caution that discussion of the identity of these people ispurely speculative. In a supplement to their Nature paper, they say the Cerutti people may have been Neanderthals, Denisovans (a species known only from a few fragments found in a cave in northern Siberia), or members of the species Homo erectus. It seems unlikelythat they were Homo sapiens anatomically modern humans didn't migrate out of Africa until after 100,000 years ago, according to most estimates.

As for how they got here, Demr said they may have been able to cross the land bridge before the last ice age, when the planet warmed and sea levels rose. Other species migrated to the Americas in this period, Demr said, and the hominins may have followed them over.

Otherwise, the first Americans could have used boats to cross the Bering Strait, and then scoot down the Pacific coast archaeological finds on the Mediterranean island of Crete suggest that hominins were able to cross the sea via boat more than 100,000 years ago.

[Surprising infant grave may solve the mystery of North American migration]

To some who study American prehistory, this interpretation of the Cerutti site beggars belief. Meltzer called the claim grandiose.Donald Grayson, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Washington, noted that history is rife with examples of scientists misinterpreting strange markings on stone as evidence of human activity. He pointed to the Calico Hills site in the Mojave Desert, which the archaeologist Louis Leakey believed contained 200,000-year-old stone tools. Subsequent studies have largely discredited Leakey's claim the apparent tools were most likelygeofacts, natural stone formations that only look like they were crafted by humans.

It is one thing to show that broken bones and modified rocks could have been produced by people, which Holen and his colleagues have done, Grayson said. It is quite another to show that people, and people alone, could have produced those modifications. This, Holen [has] most certainly not done, making this a very easy claim to dismiss.

Mike Waters, thedirectorof theCenter for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M,also criticized the claim. To convince him that people were in the Americas so much earlier before the first physical evidence of their remains, he would expect to see unequivocal stone artifacts, he said. He doesn't think the cobbles found at the Cerutti mastodon site meet that standard.

Rick Potts, the director of the Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History, was more measured in his appraisal. Though he thought the team's analysis of the bones and stones was thorough, he pointed out a few oddities about the site. For one, it's unusual that people would usehammer stones to process bones but not any sharp-edged tools, even though that technology had been around for more than a million years. For another, as he pointed out, the mastodon's molars were also crushed, and there's no reason he can think of that humans would crackthe huge teeth. If those teeth were broken by natural forces, then perhaps the rest of the bones were too.

It's not a solid case, Potts said, but my goodness it's a compelling one.

Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at NMNH who specializes in studying tooth and tool marks on ancient bones, agreed.

Its funny becausewhen I first started reading the paper I didnt see the extra zero and I thought, 'oh, 13,000 years, this sounds good,'" Pobiner said. And then I saw the extra zeroand I thought, 'Holy cow!'

Pobiner acknowledged that the Cerutti site contains less archaeological evidence than scientists would like before making a claim of this magnitude. But as someone who has spent her whole career looking at scratch marks and breakage patterns on bones, the evidence looks to her like it could be human modification.

Demr said that he and his colleagues considered possible alternate explanations, but none seemed to fit. Trampling by another large animal would not produce those breakage patterns, they concluded. And environmental forces, like a powerful flood, would have broken the smaller, more fragile bones as well as the big one. Holen added that the rock layer in which the artifacts were found is largely intact it does not seem to have been subject to disturbances like earthquakes or upheavals that would make the site more difficult to interpret.

Erella Hovers, an archaeologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who reviewed the paper and wrote an analysis of it for Nature, said she thought the researchers did a thorough job of ruling out natural causes of the particular breakage patterns. She added that the evidence looks much like archaeological sites she has studied in Africa and the Middle East; if the same site was found in that part of the world, she said, people would have fewer questions about it.

The Cerutti site researchersexpect to face scrutiny from his colleagues about the paper. That is partly why they have made 3-D images of the mastodon fossils available online.

I think the models are important in terms of supporting the paper because they allow anyone to look at this evidence in much the same way the co-authors did, co-author Adam Rountrey, collection manager at the University of MichiganMuseum of Paleontology, said in a statement.Its fine to be skeptical, but look at the evidence and judge for yourself. Thats what were trying to encourage by making these models available.

The scientists also hope that their paper will prompt their colleagues to take a closer look at this period in American history. Perhaps they will find more evidence of hominin presence, bolstering the Cerutti researchers' claim. Or perhaps the mastodon site is a fluke or a mistake and they will find nothing at all.

The thing to remember is it's a beginning to a new line of inquiry. It doesn't solve anything, said Hovers. It asks new questions.

Read more:

Did a teen discover a lost Maya city? Not exactly.

The key to these ancient riddles may lie in a father's love for his dead son

Girls 12,000-year-old skeleton found in cave may solve mystery of Native American origins

DNA links Kennewick Man to Native Americans

Original post:
Archaeology shocker: Study claims humans reached the Americas 130000 years ago - Washington Post

President Trump had a light-hearted call with NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station on April 24, including congratulating astronaut Peggy Whitson on her record-breaking time in space, joking about drinking urine and moving up the schedule for exploration of Mars. (Reuters)

What we are reporting here isn't fake news. But it doesn't feel exactly like real news, either. It's in that foggy realm of Trump news in which everything is slightly ambiguous and wobbly and internally inconsistent and almost certainly improvisational and not actually grounded in what you could call government policy. What happened was: Trump called the International Space Station and talked to astronauts and, in passing, mentioned that he's going to send Americans to Mars, and soon, like really lickety-split.

Trump was marking the historic achievement of astronaut Peggy Whitson, the commander of the International Space Station, who set a record for most days in space by an American astronaut. (Also on the call from the Oval Office were Ivanka Trump, who spoke about the administration's efforts to encourage women and girls to get involved in STEM fields, and astronaut Kate Rubins.)

During the call, the president asked Whitson and fellow American astronaut Jack Fischer a question:

TRUMP: Tell me: Mars, what do you see a timing for actually sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule and when would you see that happening?

WHITSON: Well, I think as your bill directed, it'll be approximately in the 2030s. As I mentioned, we actually are building hardware to test the new heavy launch vehicle, and this vehicle will take us further than we've ever been away from this planet.

So, unfortunately space flight takes a lot of time and money so getting there will require some international cooperation to get the it to be a planet-wide approach in order to make it successful just because it is a very expensive endeavor. But it is so worthwhile doing.

TRUMP: Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term, so we'll have to speed that up a little bit, okay?

WHITSON: We'll do our best.

It's hard to know if Trump was entirely serious (it's possible he was just joshin') or if he even has been briefed on the current NASA human spaceflight program. He may not know where Mars is. (Who does, really? You know it moves around a lot.)

[Trump, with NASA, has a new spaceship. Where does he want to go?]

When Whitson said your bill she was clearly referring to the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, passed by Congress and signed by Trump this year. The act essentially keeps NASA on the same course it's been for years when it comes to human spaceflight aiming at a mission to Mars with a 2033 launch. The first mission would be an orbital mission only; a later mission would attempt a landing.

NASA, understanding that Trump wants to do something big in the first term, has pondered adding astronauts to a test flight of the new Space Launch System rocket. There is very little chance that NASA is sending humans to Mars by 2024. That happens to be the year that Elon Musk who has met with Trump has said he thinks SpaceX can launch a Mars mission, though that's an extremely ambitious timeline, and Musk has a history of over-promising when it comes to schedules. For NASA to pull off such a thing, and to do it with proper safety margins and reliable hardware, would require a massive infusion of money into the space agency. This would be a crash program. Even then, it would be almost impossible to make the 2024 deadline much less by the end of Trump's first term.

So we're going to mark this down as noise rather than signal when it comes to Trump's space policy. But who knows? We live in interesting times. We advise that you keep your seat belt securely fastened and your tray table and seat back in their full upright position.

Further reading:

Trump may echo JFK's moonshot speech

Trump's budget calls for seismic disruption in funding for science and medical research

Continue reading here:
Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto by his second term 'at worst' - Washington Post

How do we distinguish between fact and falsehood? This is perhaps, one of the most debated questions of the past year. Google and Facebook are both in the spotlight for disseminating so-called "fake news", despite the artificial intelligence (AI) systems that these companies developed and deploy on their platforms. If AI is currently struggling to discern facts from fiction, could it be that human intelligence is still a necessary component for the continued successful integration of AI?

In a much simpler time, Google was a search engine that indexed websites. Today, the search giant is evolving towards giving users summarised answers to their billions of questions. Type in a word and you'll get the definition. Type in a name and you'll get a short biography. Type in a question and roughly one in five times, Google will generate a specific answer. This evolution of Google Search into something one could call Google "Q&A" goes hand in hand with the rapid evolution away from typed search towards AI-powered voice assistants.

In response to straightforward questions, Google usually cites reliable facts and sources pulled from its "knowledge graph". However, the more abstract or off-the-wall the questions are, the more likely the answers will be formulated from potentially unreliable sources. Multiple examples have recently gone viral, each demonstrating the shortcomings of Google's search methods and the ability of the AI utilized to generate factual information.

Ask Google if Obama is planning a coup, and you'll get the answer that he might be. Ask Google if women are evil and Google delivers the answer that all women have a "degree of prostitute in them". Ask Google if all republicans are fascists, and Google produces an answer that includes the suggestion they're all Nazis.

Google Home:
"Yes, republicans = nazis" pic.twitter.com/7HVQjyjbEq

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 5, 2017

https://twitter.com/ruskin147?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Most of these answers are derisory and inherently damage Google's brand. More dangerous, however, is the potential to warp users' perception of the world by providing incorrect and unfortunately inflammatory information. By giving patently false narratives top billing on Google lends these stories unwarranted credibility. Google's utilization of AI is helping to usher in what has been called the "post-truth" era.

Google is certainly cognizant of the problem. In a recent blog post, the VP of News explains their efforts to improve responses to questions through implementing a "fact check" tag, and several other initiatives focused on authenticating the sources from which its AI draws its answers. Similarly, Facebook - now the world's top referral source for web traffic - has rolled out its "disputed news" tag as a flagging system for fake news in the US.

The question is, how inherent is the problem to the system? Simply put, both platforms are powered by AI which is only as as accurate as the information on which it is trained. Weighing the veracity of different perspectives requires the kind of critical thinking that humans posses. Beyond tagging and user feedback, perhaps what Google and Facebook really require is valuable human expertise to steer and sanity check their AI - a technology still very much in the infancy stage of its development.

At Sparrho, we made the very conscious decision early on to combine AI with expert human curation. As a science discovery platform with over 60 million papers and patents, it's vital and highly essential that we deliver the most accurate and relevant results or simply facts to user queries. Through blending our AI with the insight of our users and expert scientists, we're able to identify non-linear links between research papers, ensuring that the most relevant items rise to the top.

Rather than thinking of AI as a replacement for human intelligence, information providers such as Facebook and Google ought to consider how one can enhance the another. Only by blending AI's ability to quickly process vast quantities of data with the ability of humans to understand nuance and context can we ensure facts remain facts in this post-truth era.

Interested in finding out the science behind truth and lies? Check out Sparrho's #ScienceofEveryday pinboard on #FakeNews here: https://www.sparrho.com/landing/fake-news/2/

Want to dive into the research around Artificial Intelligence? Then this pinboard of the latest AI and deep learning research is just the ticket: https://www.sparrho.com/pinboard/latest-applications-of-deep-learning/138260/ ------

Read more:
Why Artificial Intelligence Still Needs A Human Touch - Huffington Post UK

REGINA Authorities in the United States say two Canadian citizens and one person from Nigeria have been apprehended as part of an investigation into human smuggling.

The United States Border Patrol says agents picked up the three people last Friday between the North Portal and Northgate crossings, the legal entry points into Saskatchewan from North Dakota.

It was not immediately clear whether the people are still in custody or if charges have been laid.

The investigation has already led to the arrest and charges against a Saskatchewan woman.

Michelle Omoruyi, 43, is charged with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling. She is to appear in court May 15 in Estevan, Sask.

Omoruyi's lawyer, Aaron Fox, declined to comment Thursday.

An investigation into organized human smuggling in southeastern Saskatchewan began last December after Canadian border officers referred a returning male Canadian resident for further examination.

The Canadian Border Services Agency said there was evidence to suggest smugglers were bringing foreign nationals into Canada from the United States.

An RCMP cruiser is shown next to the U.S.-Canada border in Hemmingford, Que. on Mar. 5, 2017. (Photo: Graham Hughes/CP)

Last Friday, American border authorities identified a suspect in the investigation as he entered the U.S. They notified their Canadian counterparts, who in turn alerted the RCMP "that a smuggling attempt may be imminent.''

RCMP said a woman was then stopped on the Canadian side of the border between the North Portal and Northgate crossings, the legal entry points into Saskatchewan from North Dakota.

Police say nine people from West Africa were in her vehicle, but authorities would not confirm their ages, gender or nationalities . They were processed by the Canada Border Services Agency and have been released into Canada. All nine have made refugee claims.

Getachew Woldyesus, with the Regina Open Door Society, a non-profit organization that provides settlement and integration services to refugees and immigrants in Regina, says the refugees claimants have not yet reached out to the agency.

Woldyesus says the Regina Open Door Society would help find temporary housing and income support if asked.

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Canadians, Nigerian Arrested For Human Smuggling At Canada-U.S. Border - Huffington Post Canada

National Post

Husband of Regina woman accused of human smuggling arrested along with another Canadian National Post Last Friday evening, as Mounties arrested a Saskatchewan woman as part of a human smuggling investigation, U.S. border patrol agents moved in on the woman's husband, a Nigerian citizen and another Canadian on the North Dakota side of the border. So far ... Canadians, Nigerian Arrested For Human Smuggling At Canada-U.S. BorderHuffington Post Canada Human smuggling charges laid against Regina womanRegina Leader-Post Canadian couple arrested as part of human smuggling investigationCBC.ca South China Morning Post -Cape Breton Post -BBC News -Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada all 80 news articles »

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Husband of Regina woman accused of human smuggling arrested along with another Canadian - National Post

(iStock)

You leave your car in a vast, crowded parking lot, and when you return, you have no idea where it is. The ensuing search is frustrating, time-consuming and a little embarrassing.

That experience occurs more frequently as we get older, because the functions of the part of the brain that encodes spatial and episodic memories the hippocampus decline with age.

But now neuroscientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that in mice an infusion of plasma taken from human umbilical cords improves the hippocampus's functioning, resulting in significant gains in memory and cognition needed for tasks such as finding a car in a full parking lot. They also isolated the protein, known as TIMP2, that they say is responsible for the improvements.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, could one day hold implications for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease and other conditions that erode memory and cognition.

[Giving young blood to older animals raises tantalizing prospects for people]

That TIMP2 protein might have some translational promise, some therapeutic promise, in humans, said Joe Castellano, a postdoctoral researcher who identified the protein among scores of others in the blood.

TIMP2 appears to improve the transmission of information across gaps known as synapses between cells in the hippocampus, Castellano said. The quantity of the substance in the blood declines as people age.

There seems to be something in young human blood that is not in old human blood that can reactivate and rejuvenate these old brains and make mice smarter again, said Tony Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at Stanford who led the research team.

The researchers, however, voiced caution because most therapeutic approaches to disease that work in mice or other lab animals do not succeed in humans. And before it could be tried in humans, any substance would face years of safety testing.

But because the current study was conducted with human cord plasma, it is a big step forward, they said. Its not some random molecule that we found somewhere, Wyss-Coray said. Its actually produced in humans.

[Staying fit at 102]

That raises the possibility of using TIMP2 to slow the aging of other tissue in the body, he said. Scientists don't actually know whether different organs age at the same rate and are not sure where the protein is produced. Where does TIMP2 come from? Which organs produce it? Wyss-Coray said. And if its multiple organs, does it change with aging at the same speed, and can we interfere with that?

The researchers had previously shown that they could improve learning and memory in older mice by injecting them with plasma taken from young mice.

In this study, the team injected the plasma the liquid that remains when blood cells are removed into older mice whose immune systems were weakened so that their natural defenses would not attack the proteins.

They could not send the rodents scurrying after tiny vehicles in a miniature parking lot. Instead, they tested them in a maze to determine how long it took the mice to find their way to a dark and confined space they consider secure, Castellano said. The older mice treated with human cord plasma regained about half their speed at finding the correct location, according to Wyss-Coray.

A second test that required the mice to recognize contextual cues to perform a task confirmed the gains, Castellano said.

Excerpt from:
A protein from human umbilical cords revitalizes memory at least in mice - Washington Post