A team at Roche's biotechnology unit Genentech in California compared all the genetic changes in a single patient's lung tumor with healthy tissue from the patient, a 51-year-old man who had smoked an average of 25 cigarettes per day for 15 years before the tumor was removed.

What they found were as many as 50,000 genetic mutations.

"Fifty thousand is a huge number. No one has ever reported such a high number," said Zemin Zhang of Genentech, whose findings appear in the journal Nature.

"This is likely associated with the smoking history of the patient. It is very alarming," Zhang said in a telephone interview.

Smoking is the biggest single cause of lung cancer, and studies suggest mutations occur with each cigarette smoked.

Zhang said the ratio between the number of cigarettes the person smoked before his tumor was removed and the number of mutations in the tumor suggest that for every three cigarettes he smoked, one genetic mutation occurred.

Newburgh police say it took four officers and four jolts from a Taser to subdue a man found running naked through city traffic, high on the hallucinogen PCP.

They began getting reports about a man running around in nothing but sneakers at about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Officers first spotted vehicles swerving, and then the man. When they told him to hit the ground, he came at them, yelling and refusing to stop. When one of the officers unholstered a Taser, the man kept coming, shouted "Give it to me'' and was hit with the first jolt. Police say he fell, jumped back up and starting trying to yank out the Taser darts.

He was shocked again, struggled with officers trying to handcuff him and was shocked twice more.

The man, whose name was not released, was taken to a local hospital for treatment.

[Thanks Jesse1!]

Sting Teams Up with Montel Williams and George Soros in New Drug Policy Alliance Video Calling for End to Drug War

Sting, the internationally renowned singer/songwriter, has teamed up with actor/producer/medical marijuana advocate Montel Williams and businesssman/philanthropist George Soros in a powerful video supporting the Drug Policy Alliance's call for an end to the failed war on drugs.

In the two-minute video, Sting poignantly states that he believes in the right to "sovereignty over one's mind and body" and that "the war
on drugs represents an extraordinary violation of human rights." He goes on to say that "it's time to step out of our comfort zone and
begin to tell the truth about drugs and our failed drug policies."

Montel Williams expresses his view that, "whether you use drugs or not you deserve to be treated with kindness and dignity."

George Soros, meanwhile, explains that he supports the Drug Policy Alliance because the organization promotes harm reduction and fosters debate on drug policy.

The video also includes a scientist, an activist, a former drug war prisoner, and a parent -- each of whom articulates the need to dramatically reduce the role of criminalization in drug policy.

The Drug Policy Alliance is the nation's leading organization working to end the war on drugs and to promote new drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. DPA is headquartered in New York City, with offices in California, Washington, DC, New Mexico, and New Jersey.

Originally published in 2008 'The Entheogenic Evolution: Psychedelics, Consciousness and Awakening the Human Spirit' by Martin W. Ball, PhD, is a work of exploratory non-fiction. Ball examines and intertextualizes a range of topics -- social, scientific, religious and philosophical -- that maps out the entheogenic plateau. The construction of the work is underpinned by the knowledge and experiences he has garnered from psychedelic drugs.

Entheogen -- meaning 'generating God within' -- was first coined as a term by Gordon Wasson et al in the late Seventies but as a reading of the psychedelic experience it has a much longer history. Presently, it appears, the entheogenic reading has become the dominant paradigm for the counterculture and, as one might expect, the production of texts leaning toward this discourse have greatly increased. This offering from Martin Ball is one such text; an entheogenic treatise.

New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at Karolinska Institute have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.

High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual or bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing.

"We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia," says associate professor Fredrik Ullen from Karolinska Institutet's Department of Women's and Children's Health, co-author of the study that appears in the journal PLoS ONE.

Just which brain mechanisms are responsible for this correlation is still something of a mystery, but Dr Ullen conjectures that the function of systems in the brain that use dopamine is significant; for example, studies have shown that dopamine receptor genes are linked to ability for divergent thought. Dr Ullen's study measured the creativity of healthy individuals using divergent psychological tests, in which the task was to find many different solutions to a problem.

"The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people," says Dr Ullen. "Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity."
The thalamus serves as a kind of relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.

"Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus," says Dr Ullen, and explains that this could a possible mechanism behind the ability of healthy highly creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the mentally ill.

"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," says Dr Ullen about his new findings.

DOCTORS believe they may have found the cause of the powerful spiritual experiences reported by people "brought back from the dead".

A study of the brainwaves of dying patients showed a surge of electrical activity in the moments before their lives ended.

The researchers suggest this surge may be the cause of near-death experiences, the mysterious medical phenomena in which patients who have been revived when close to death report sensations such as walking towards a bright light or a feeling that they are floating above their body.

Many people experience the sensation as a religious vision and treat it as confirmation of an afterlife. However, the scientists behind the new research believe that is wrong.

"We think the near-death experiences could be caused by a surge of electrical energy released as the brain runs out of oxygen," said Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University medical centre in Washington.

"As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the brain cells fire one last electrical impulse. It starts in one part of the brain and spreads in a cascade and this may give people vivid mental sensations."