Smoking bans are running rampant, not just in the US, but across the world.  And the world, of course, is fighting back.  A new technology is emerging which gets around smoking bans.  It’s the electronic cigarette.

It’s typically only slightly longer than your ordinary cigarette.  Only instead of being a burning paper-wrapped stick of chopped-up tobacco, it’s a flameless aluminum tube containing a battery, a nebulizer, a cartridge of liquid nicotine (plus propylene glycol for a mist of “smoke”), and an LED light for effect.

There is no smoke.  There is no burning tobacco leaf.  There doesn’t even have to be a flavor or smell.  All that it really is, is a nicotine inhaler, cleverly disguised as a cigarette.

There’s debate about whether or not there are any health impacts on using the device.  Obviously it clears up all of the hazardous poisons and carcinogens associated with smoking.  Whether or not nicotine itself is dangerous however is still up for debate.  Of course one could make similar arguments about caffiene or alcohol.  Any tool when used properly can be positive, and when abused can become detrimental.

Clearly the electronic cigarette is not intended as a device to help you quit smoking.  It keeps you right on obsessed with your next nicotine hit, and with your oral fixations.  It’s not a tool to help you get over any addictions.  It’s merely a device to allow you to enjoy a smoking-like experience in all of those mean nasty places that have passed laws to ban smoking.

According to Wikipedia (not always the utmost accurate source, but a fair good hand better than guessing):

• In the European Union some countries have stipulated a decision according to the legal status of e-cigarette products.
• In Austria the e-cigarette is seen as a medical device and the nicotine cartridges are considered a medicinal product. This means that an e-cigarette needs to be CE-marked and the nicotine cartridges must be registered as medicinal products before they can be sold.
• In the United Kingdom, electronic cigarette use is currently unrestricted, with celebrity nightclub Chinawhite allowing use of the devices indoors, where traditional cigarette smoking is prohibited.^[10]
• In The Netherlands the use of the e-cigarette is allowed but advertising the electronic cigarette is forbidden as long as no European legislation or guideline exists.^[11]
• In Finland the usage is prohibited as it is considered a medical device by the Finnish National Agency for Medicines.
• In the United States, the e-cigarette is accepted as a smoking substitute or cigarette alternative, but is not approved as a smoking cessation product. Since the e-cigarette does not contain any tobacco, it is not subject to tobacco-related regulations^[1] such as the Clean Indoor Air Act.^[12]

So whether or not the electronic cigarette is right for you, is, well, up to you.  I can’t say that I am entirely impressed with the thought of someone blowing “steam” that has been flavored/scented to mimic the nastiness of a cheap cigarette.  Second hand “smoke” doesn’t have to be a “health hazard” to offend.  So obviously I would prefer that those who use such a device in a non-smoking environment either stick to flavorless cartridges, or try something more appealing like a quality pipe tobacco smell over a cheap cigarette.  Heck, try strawberry flavor.  Or chocolate.  Now that the nicotine hit has been disambiguated from the pollution, one is really free to introduce any flavor or scent combination that one desires.  (Or at least purchase whatever cartridge options are manufactured.)

I, sadly, expect that as more and more smoking bans are put into place, more and more demand for this product will rise.  You really can’t expect people to just give up a drug addiction.  Period.  And nicotine is most definitely an addictive drug.  But now, it can be an enjoyably innofensive drug, much like caffiene.  Coffee in the morning to get you going, and an electronic smoke in the evening to bring you down.  It’s a sad world, but it’s the one we live in.  And thanks to technology, there are new options every day.

Actually, it’s an eel.

Imagine a world of electronic eyes for the blind, electronic ears for the deaf and hard of hearing, even replacement limbs and organs.  Perhaps the Twenty-First Century will be the era of cybertechnology, and we will see many human woes solved.  There are all sorts of theoretically great machine bits and bobs we could add to the human body, if only we had some decent way to power them…

Well David LaVan from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) co-authored new research with Jian Xu of Yale University on a proposed solution for just that very problem.  Their answer?  The electric eel.

Electric eels have specialized cells called electrocytes that turn a biological chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) into the electricity that they zap creatures with to earn their name.  The ATP itself is actually made from sugars and fats in the body.  It’s a completely organic way to turn what you eat into electricity.  Even the electrocyte cells themselves are basically just your ordinary every-day nerve tissue with a twist.  These electrocyte nerves work on the same principle as the nerves in your body, just at a slower cycle, which allows them to carry a much larger electrical charge than the simple weak nerve impulses that travel through your body every nanosecond.  It’s all natural, and it’s all there.  In theory we could begin developing technology to create a bio-electrical powerplant organ that could be used to power cybernetics, starting today.

The question is, will we?  Will we ever?

Making power from the fats and sugars moving through the blood stream or stored in the body is not really a new idea.  There are other approaches as well, although I have to say that this one so far impresses me the most.

But once we open that door, will we ever be able to close it?  Even limit it?

Personally, I don’t see why not.  But others disagree.  Which is one of the reasons why cybertechnology, implanting machines inside of human bodies, is not advancing very well at all.  People are afraid.  One day you’re talking about giving blind people sight again.  The next you’re trying to stop an army of Terminators.  At least, that’s how the fear mongers put it.

And so, great ideas like these, powering cyber-eyes and ears from engineered electrocyte “nerve” cells, based on the very same natural organic mechanisms that make the electric eel so shocking, go relatively no where.  They remain undeveloped.  Not because of who they can help, but because of what, if left unchecked, could be done with them.

I wonder what would have become of Alfred Bernhard Nobel and his deadly invention of dynamite (and the man who created the Nobel prize) would have come to in a day as paranoid as today.  A stable explosive?  Why that could kill people!  Never mind how many mountains it could move.

Let us hope that at some point we can get over fears and move forward into the future of the body electric.

Have you ever wondered, why can’t we cure male pattern baldness?  Why can’t we grow a culture of new skin with its shiny new hair follicles from some place that still has good hair growing, like our beard?  And then just swap the top of our head with that?

Heck, why haven’t we by now figured out what causes it and how to stop or even reverse it?  Plenty of products claim to, but if they really worked we wouldn’t have so many bald people, would we?

It just kind of makes you wonder.  Why is it with all of our neat technology and science can’t we even do something like cure baldness?  Or cure the common cold?  It’s no wonder we can’t cure cancer if this is the best we can do!

Here’s one that puzzles me.  Like the appendix, wisdom teeth are one of those things that we humans have that we just don’t need.  And, often, end up causing us trouble.

If you couldn’t guess, yesterday morning I had my widsom teeth pulled.  All four of them.

And now my face is trying to swell up like a hamster hoarding treats.

It’s no fun.

Thank goodness that it was done after putting me to sleep.  I can’t even begin to imagine what it’d be like to be conscious during that.  Though I have to say, that anethesia was some pretty trippy stuff.  I swear, seconds after the IV was put in, I was out like a light.  And then supposedly after the operation was done the dentist / surgeon was asking me questions or something like that.  I wouldn’t know.  I don’t remember a whit of it.  Luckily my hun was there.  Even on our way home (she was driving, of course) we supposedly had a conversation about what broth to make me.  I don’t remember it, at all.

And when I got home and drank the broth, I decided it was the strangest tasting beef broth I’d had.  Not bad, mind you.  But definitely beef with some seasoning I couldn’t identify.

It was part chicken stock and part organic vegetable stock.  No beef.  That’s how messed up my head was.

Since then I’ve been living the luxury of Vicodin.  (Well, Hydrocodone.)  I feel like House.  Now if I just was grumpier and needed a cane…

Actually, I’m starting to wonder why Dr. House is so grumpy all the time.  That Vicodin sure is making me happy. 

But long story short, I’m all messed up!  My pillow had bloody drool on it.  I’m in pain.  Even my lips are swelling.  And if it weren’t for Malt-O-Meal I wouldn’t have anything even remotely solid in my stomach.  (It actually works out quite nicely since it’s solid enough to seem like food, but soft enough to swallow without chewing.)

All-in-all, I’d have better days.  And you’d think that by now we humans would have developed some kind of protein-based sealing glue that could like bandage and hold the gums together so that I don’t bleed and can just like go about my life.  And then my body would absorb it or it’d break down.  Or something neat and bio-techno like that.

But no.  I bleed and I hope the clots form and hold.

Yipee.

(Sarcasm folks.)

And you’d kind of figure that at some point evolution would finally do away with those wisdom teeth all together.

But I’m not so lucky.

Hair loss and graying in my early 20s.   Wisdom teeth pulled at 31.  Why couldn’t it have gone the other way around?

Oh well.  Such is life.  At least I’ll live.  And at least I’ve got my Vicodin! 

It’s a Sunday. And what better way to celebrate a Sunday than to bring up topics that would make a priest blush? How about a good ol’ dash of technology and science in human sexuality!

Nature or nurture? Frankly, I’m not even going to try to answer that. Hell, I’m not even sure it really makes a difference. Personally, I don’t give a fig. You are who you are. Who cares why?

However, what if it really was nature?

Where could there be such proof?

Try this.

New Scientist has an interesting article by Ivanka Savic and her colleague Per Lindström (conducted the study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden) on how scans of brains show that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait from birth. That it is not something that “develops”, and thus is not something that can be “cured”.

There have been previous studies that showed things like this, but were typically based on sexually driven cues. They were designed to show responses to sexual stimuli. And in that, they didn’t really prove anything more than the sexual preferences of the participants. Where as the difference with this study is that it does not scan for anything sexual in the brain. Instead of studying sexual responses, it uses PET scans to measure blood flow to the amygdala, part of the brain that governs fear and aggression.

Yes, that’s right, it traces the effects of how our brains handle fear. This study examines brain parameters likely to have been fixed at the very point of birth. It examines something we’ve been wired for all along, not something that we could have developed into.

With heterosexual men and women (HeM and HeW respectively) on the left showing their typical fear responses in the left amygdala, we can see clearly that the results are near opposite between the hetero sexes. In straight men their blood flow triggers the sensorimotor cortex and the striatum, which are responsible for “fight or flight” active response to a situation. In straight women on the other hand, the blood flow goes into regions of the brain that manifest fear as intense anxiety, a more internalized and less reactive response.

What is fascinating is that the homosexual woman (HoW) responds identically to fear as the heterosexual man (HeM). And the homosexual man (HoM) responds identically to that of a heterosexual woman (HeW). It’s a clear-cut case of a homosexual brain responding to a non-sexual stimulus in the opposite manner of a heterosexual, or in other words in the same manner as their sexual gender preference.

Besides the study making this wonderful observation, it also gives rise to actual proof of other observations-turned-stereotypes.

Men do take situations head on.

Women worry.

Gay men worry. And thusly are more likely to be prone to acts of drama and even suicide.

Where as gay women are more likely to just brute their way through.

It really is all right there, in the scans of brains.

And so it would seem, our sexual preferences are perhaps not so much a matter of nurture, but simply who we are from birth. We were wired a certain way, and there’s just no fixing that.