Hasta La Gadget!

In case it wasn’t glaringly clear, police accountability is a major concern these days — and the White House is convinced that technology can help solve the problem. It’s now promising up to $263 million in matched funding for law enforcement agenci…

Cyber Monday is upon us which means that you better get that credit card out, because almost every other online retailer is trying to get you to make a purchase. As if the Black Friday shopping frenzy wasn’t enough, Cyber Monday is now an yearly occurrence where retailers offer amazing discounts online. T-Mobile Cyber Monday deals are worth looking at, there are some great iPhone 6 discounts, which should entice you to pick up this smartphone on Magenta.

How would you like to pay for a 16GB iPhone 6 but receive far great onboard storage? That’s what T-Mobile’s Cyber Monday deal is all about. Instead of offering straight up cash discounts the carrier is offering a free upgrade to the 64GB model. So purchase a 16GB iPhone 6 from Magenta and for the same price receive a free upgrade to the 64GB iPhone 6 model.

If the iPhone 6 is not your cup of tea, worry not. This promotion also extends to the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. The carrier will bump up the 32GB iPhone 5c to the 64GB model and the 8GB iPhone 5c to the 32GB model.

The deal is good only for today since Cyber Monday is a one day thing. In order to take advantage of it be sure to get your order in by midnight Pacific Time tonight.

T-Mobile Cyber Monday Deals Bring iPhone 6 Discounts

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Around the holidays, we know that we’ll be eating more food than some will have in their lifetimes. This brings on all sorts of indigestion and gas issues that your friends, family, and yes, even you have to deal with. Everyone will be clamoring for the bathroom at some point, and sometimes no odor-fighter in the world is enough to keep those smells at bay.

While you can get scented toilet seats and use sprays to hide dirty deeds, why not just perfume what comes out of your hind end? Christian Poincheval is a French artist and inventor who decided the world has had enough of smelly poots, and created a capsule of natural ingredients that will make your accidental slips smell like potpourri. Not only will they bring about more pleasant farts, but they are also said to help with reducing gas and bloating.

Of course, those with pets likely wish they could feed something like this to their dog to curb the stench of death they can produce. Luckily enough, there is a powder version that will work just fine for your pooch and is perfectly safe for them to consume. There are different smells to choose from, such as rose and chocolate. It would undoubtedly start some very interesting conversations. It will cost you around $13 for a bottle with 60 capsules, which should be more than enough to save you through the holiday season.

Available for purchase on pilulepet, found on telegraph
[ Who knew a pill could make your flatulence pleasantly fragrant? copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

 Today’s Fun 3D Printable™ comes to us from Thingiverse user lilykill. The model is rendered in 3D and the head is connected to the ball body so it won’t be able to spin freely. The best thing, though? The model is life-size and can be printed to be about as big as R2-D2. Read More

The British Parliament appears poised to give the go-ahead to a set of techniques for generating infants which, if implemented, would constitute the first cases of large-scale human genetic engineering. These techniques are widely referred to – by their scientist-creators and other proponents, by journalists, by bioethicists, by members of regulatory panels, by legislators, and even by some critics of the procedures – as “mitochondrial transfer” or “mitochondrial replacement.” These scientifically inaccurate descriptions have been instrumental in easing the way to public acceptance of these manipulations.

What exactly are these techniques? An isolated nucleus from the egg of one woman is inserted into an enucleated (nucleus-lacking) egg of another woman. Done before fertilization, it is called “maternal spindle transfer” (MST). Done after, it is called “pronuclear transfer” (PNT). In fact, no transfer of mitochondria (the organelles that extract energy from fuel molecules and make it available for the cell’s functions) is involved in these “three-parent” procedures. So why are they referred to as mitochondrial “transfer” or “replacement”?

The techniques are being promoted as a way of circumventing mitochondrial mutations, which can lead to severe disease. It is understandable that an affected woman who intends to become pregnant would seek to avoid passing down this genetic predisposition to her offspring. Methods such as MST and PNT represent radical interventions in the reproductive process that, if accurately portrayed, would stir fears in prospective parents and rightly attract the attention of legislators and regulators. The laboratory scientists and doctors for whom these women are clients (not patients – their own conditions are not being treated), thus have an interest in minimizing the perceived scale of what they are proposing to do.

Since it is true that nuclear genes of an affected woman or couple will eventually find themselves in the presence of mitochondria from a second woman, from the viewpoint of the first woman the mitochondria of her egg are “replaced.” But this is only mitochondrial replacement in the sense that someone who moves into a new home may experience “refrigerator replacement,” i.e., only by employing a highly idiosyncratic (and misleading) use of the term.

Focusing only on mitochondria ignores the other significant features of the second woman’s egg such as its cytoplasmic and membrane composition and structure. Shifting attention in this fashion must raise questions about disingenuousness of the methods’ proponents. In fact, the manipulation of the second woman’s egg (i.e., the egg that will actually be implanted) constitutes a “genome transfer” or “genome replacement.” Choosing a conceptual frame based solely on who is soliciting or paying for the procedure (i.e., the woman seeking to avoid passing on a genetic predisposition for mitochondrial disease) is not motivated by scientific or medical concerns.

In biological terms, both MST and PNT are very much like cloning by nuclear transfer, the methodology that produced Dolly the sheep. Like cloning, the techniques involve replacement of an egg’s nucleus by a nucleus from another cell. When cloning, the transferred nucleus is from a differentiated cell of a fully developed animal (or potentially, a person), making the resulting organism a genetic “copy” of the nucleus donor. When undertaking MST and PNT, the transferred nucleus is from an egg or a fertilized egg, so that the resulting organism will have a novel genome. Otherwise, however, the hazards of cloning also pertain to MST and PNT, since the manipulations are the same. Clones tend to die prematurely, as happened with Dolly, or exhibit enlarged organs and metabolic abnormalities. Some human embryos constructed by MST unexpectedly had unbalanced chromosomal duplications (aneuploidy). This is the case because unlike the sorts of cellular aberrations repeatedly encountered over the course of evolution – breaks in DNA, the unfolding of protein molecules – the experimental combination of fragments of two broken cells generated by cloning or the two proposed techniques have no inbuilt mechanisms to correct the range of functional and developmental defects inevitably associated with their construction.

It is unfortunate that few science journalists have the training or inclination to assume a critical stance toward the assertions of the scientists they interview. It is therefore common to see these procedures described in the popular and scientific press as the mere replacement of the 37 mitochondrial genes (compared to the 20-25,000 of the nucleus). The scientists who promulgate the transfer/replacement imagery and those bioethicists who do the same know better. Indeed, bioethicists should be scrutinizing the scientists’ practice and language as opposed to promoting their fantasies and business models. Their collusion in these deceptions is inexcusable.

Moreover, anyone familiar with the relevant science would have been aware, over the period during which the techniques were being evaluated by the British Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), of evidence that mitochondria are not (as the impact-minimizing refrain has it) mere energy-providing organelles. The very existence of mitochondrial DNA mutations affecting hearing, vision, pancreatic function and neuromuscular activity (the justifications of the entire enterprise), would be enough to tell us this. Indeed, in the past two years the evidence for the non-passivity of the mitochondria has become inescapable. Since mitochondria are active participants in cell function and organismal development, integration among coevolved nuclear and mitochondrial systems would contraindicate arbitrary mixing and matching. (The engines of a Jaguar and a Rolls-Royce do essentially the same thing, but they are not interchangeable.) This adds an array of hazards to MST and PNT that go well beyond those they share with cloning.

A prospective child made by MST or PNT would be the result of an evolutionarily unprecedented experiment with known, or easily anticipated, hazards. Juxtapose this against the fact that the biological identity and long-term health of the three biological parents undertaking MST or PNT are not directly at risk in the procedures. It is, therefore, entirely unwarranted to make their perspective (or more specifically that of the nuclear gene donor) the one from which the procedure is judged, thereby allowing the techniques to be characterized as being of minimal impact. Rather, the perspective of the individual brought into being by the procedures should be paramount. Combining fragments of two damaged eggs to produce a human embryo is, despite the rhetoric of mitochondrial “transfer” or “replacement,” large-scale manipulation of nuclear genes. Its backdoor admittance to the repertoire of assisted reproduction techniques in the guise of being a trivial tweak bodes ill for future attempts to regulate gene transfer methods for any other purpose.

A kind of omertà among scientists and bioethicists has prevented a significant number of them from representing to the HFEA and FDA, and the press, the gravity of these alterations. But the health implications and the eugenic outcomes these procedures would enable are too great to ignore.

This post is adapted from an article by the author in the September-November issue of GeneWatch (Council for Responsible Genetics, Cambridge, Mass.).