Links for Saturday, 2/4/2012 February 4, 2012
Salon – Porn is coming for your daughter:
That’s right, pornographers are “targeting” your little girls with the help of young porn hunks like Deen and luring them into watching Internet smut! YouPorn must be advertising on Justin Bieber message boards now, I guess? At one point, Vega grills Deen about his teenage fans: “Are you encouraging them in any way to watch your films or read your blog?” It’s not like teenage girls would ever happen across this X-rated material because they want to watch porn — there must be some cute “boy next door” tricking them into it. It isn’t that parents have no good reason to be concerned about their kids — male or female — using porn as sex-ed. It’s not even that the segment is a total rip-off of Amanda Hess’ piece about Deen and his female teenage fans in GOOD magazine (and it is). My real criticism is that even while reporting on teenage girls who admittedly like porn and seek it out, “Nightline” manages to make it sound like they’re being taken advantage of by porn the predator.
The Blogess – This candle-stick needs an intervention:
me: I think your candlestick holder is clinical depressed.
her: What?
me: I think I need to have an intervention. With your candle-holder.
her: …
me: I have anti-psychotics in the car.
Santorum proceeded to lecture the mother and suggest she should be grateful to the drug companies for saving her son’s life. “He’s alive today because drug companies provide care,” Santorum said. “And if they didn’t think they could make money providing that drug, that drug wouldn’t be here.” He also claimed it would “freeze innovation” if pharmaceutical companies were required to offer their drugs at a reasonable price.
AntiWar.com - Justice Dept, FBI Say Interest in Online Privacy an ‘Indicator’ of Terrorism:
In particular, the flyer cautions businesses to be on the lookout for “content of extreme/radical nature” as well as people who visit an Internet cafe even though there is evidence they have Internet access at home. It also urges people to watch for anyone using “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address,” or who seems “overly concerned about privacy.”
Strenuous exercise actually tears your muscle fibers; that’s why an intense workout can leave you sore for days. (Don’t worry—it’s normal and it generally heals fine.) The researchers wanted to study how massage affects this muscle damage, so they made 11 healthy young men cycle to the point of exhaustion.
Then, finally, relief! Sort of. One leg on each man was randomly chosen for a 10-minute massage. Unfortunately more pain was then in store for these volunteers. A tissue sample was taken from the quadriceps muscle (often known simply as “quad”) of each leg 10 minutes and 2.5 hours after the massage.
Researchers looked at the level of different mRNA, or messenger RNA, transcripts in these tissue samples. mRNA carries the information for building proteins in the cell, so the level of a particular mRNA molecule can tell you how much of its corresponding protein is being made.
Compared to unmassaged muscle cells, the tissue from massaged legs had different levels of two key proteins: less NFkB and more PGC-1alpha. Lowering NFkB levels reduces inflammation and increasing PGC-1alpha levels leads to the creation of more mitochondria that generate energy for cell growth, so both these massage-induced changes are good news for healing muscle cells.