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Scientists Restore Walking After Spinal Cord Injury
Spinal cord damage blocks the routes that the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. Until now, doctors believed that the only way for injured patients to walk again was to re-grow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. For the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganize itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement. The lead researcher said, "This pessimistic view [that severe injury to the spinal cord means permanent paralysis] has changed over my lifetime, and our findings add to a growing body of research showing that the nervous system can reorganize after injury."
Please, don't bring this shit up. It's a debate that goes in circles and never finds a solution that's to anyone's satisfaction.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Your self-image, the precise volume that you occupy in space and how it's organized, is one of the most important aspects of your consciousness. It allows you to navigate past a table in the hallway and miss it by a fraction of a centimeter. It's also very dynamic; after all - people change when they grow. Damage to that area of the brain is debilitating; not just phantom-phenomena (pains), but there are people who cannot move a leg if they don't see it. Others imagine that the person in the mirror is someone else.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Wow. It's pretty sick for you to immediately jump from the concept of loving parenting to the concept of child abuse.
If only your mother had had the foresight to abort YOU.
News flash: that isn't your body or your "kid". You don't like it, write your congressman. If a majority of the people want abortion outlawed, it will be. Until then, you're out of luck. Why don't you ask your imaginary friend Jesus to help you.
Posting under my real login because 1) my karma can take it 2) I'm not a coward.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The scientist didn't restore walking after spinal cord injury. The mice restored their own ability to walk by neural rerouting. The scientist just cut the nerves and waited to see what happened. If the scientists actually restored the ability to walk when it was otherwise unlikely to return on its own, then this would be a much bigger story. This story is just another interesting data point that the brain and nervous system are much more plastic than previously thought but we've known that for at least a decade.
Friend, the only magical thing that happens is that the fetus goes from being completely within the mother's body, with every single one of the fetus's biological processes regulated and supplied by the mother, to being outside the mother's body, breathing on it's own, an "individual", a "person" for the first time. As someone who watched his daughter being born, I can tell you it's a very important moment. Oh, it's wonderful to see that ultrasound, but is it a person? Nunh-uh.
In my view, the state of being completely within, enveloped by, the mother's body is very much a state of "belonging" to the mother. For that reason, I give the mother, the vessel, the owner of that fetus the right to decide its disposition. No one else.
So the answer to "when does a fetus become a person?" is: "When the mother says it does." As a father of a beloved child, 19 now, sleeping about 30 feet away from me, upstairs, right now, I can tell you just how insignificant the act of fatherhood is until the baby emerges from the mother's body. 20 seconds of frantic (though pleasurable) exertion, and then 9 months of bewilderment. I wouldn't have dared try to exert any dominion over that fetus. And, as someone who is pretty fond of women, especially since my mom, my wife, my sister and my daughter all happen to be women, I don't want the government, state or federal, or some self-proclaimed religious leader, to try to exert dominion over a woman's fetus, either. Do you get that? It's a woman's fetus.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Better yet don't vote for either wing of the Corporate party. I split my vote between the ultimate pro-choicers (Libertarians) and the Geens.
A vote for a candidate who will pass laws for the corporations and against you is worse than a wasted vote. As I like to smoke put and bang hookers a vote for a Democrat or Republican is a vote for my own incarceration. As someone's sig says, "oh look, my tax dollars at work coming to arrest me!"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Truck drivers regularly miss me by a fraction of a centimeter on public roads.
Very funny, but actually an extension of the same thing. The old cliche of "becoming one with the machine" as it pertains to driving is very apt. A good driver "knows" exactly what space the car occupies as it does become part of their personal space and they can parallel park instantly or do one of those "handbrake-slide-into-the-parking-space" tricks.
People who lack that perception are the ones endlessly backing into and out of a space when there's still a long way between them and the next car. Be interesting to see if there's been some test to see if these people also have a limited sense of personal space outside the car and are more prone to misjudging distances from their own bodies.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Let's hope not. See, ideally certain things should be defined as the rights of the individual involved, and not part of greater society's business. In this case, reproductive freedoms of the women.
I'd certainly like to think that a simple majority could never vote to re-enact slavery, or not allowing Jews or women to vote, or racially mixed marriages -- because, it's not simply a matter of the will of the majority. "We hold these rights to be inalienable" and all that jazz.
As much as people in the US would like to overturn Roe v Wade, one would hope that the judiciary would remember the points involved in the case. There are broader issues involved.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.