Garlic: Effective against Vampires … and Cancer?

A small pilot study in Analytical Biochemistry — and reported on recently by Science Daily — suggests a possible link between the amount of garlic that a person consumes and a lowered potential risk for cancer.

The researchers (led by Dr. Earl Harrison), Professor of Human Nutrition at Ohio State University) were exploring how some substances found in foods or contaminated water are converted into carcinogens. By testing the presence of in urine of two separate compounds (one related to cancer risk, the other to garlic consumption), they discovered that the more they found the marker for garlic consumption in their subjects, the less there was of the marker for the risk of cancer. Vitamin C had a similar effect.

Ultimately, the scientists hope to find that a nutritional intervention could be a way to stop the process that encourages the development of these carcinogens.

Why This Internet Thing Is Never Gonna Last

It was first published in Newsweek via BoingBoing in 1995, but it’s all over the interweb today: “The Internet? Bah!” — author Clifford Stoll’s funny, grumpy essay on “this most trendy and oversold community.”

Here are some excerpts:

• “We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. … Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.”

• “How about electronic publishing? … Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”

• “Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping — just point and click for great deals. … Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn't — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.”

• “What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another.”

Social media are all about forging connections. In fact, for many of us, it’s human contact that keeps drawing us back to the internet today. Yet back in 1995, few of us recognized the potential of social media and social networking.