facility:johns hopkins university

Bernie Sanders cites Israel’s nation-state law in slamming Trump for inspiring authoritarianism

’There’s no question that other authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn inspiration from the fact that the president of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy is shattering democratic norms,’ said Sanders

JTA
Oct 10, 2018

▻https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-bernie-sanders-cites-israel-s-nation-state-law-in-slamming-trump-1

In a major foreign policy speech identifying an emerging authoritarian strain around the world, Bernie Sanders included the passage of Israel’s nation-state law as an example of President Donald Trump’s inspiring anti-democratic moves.
“It should be clear by now that Donald Trump and the right-wing movement that supports him is not a phenomenon unique to the United States,” Sanders said Tuesday in a speech to the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “All around the world, in Europe, in Russia, in the Middle East, in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere we are seeing movements led by demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to gain and hold on to power.”
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Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, said Trump by himself was not responsible for the rise of authoritarianism but was spurring it forward.
“While this authoritarian trend certainly did not begin with Donald Trump, there’s no question that other authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn inspiration from the fact that the president of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy is shattering democratic norms,” said Sanders.
He cited as examples the rise in popularity of a far right-wing politician in Brazil, increased repression in Saudi Arabia, and policies of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
>> There’s a reason the opposition didn’t attend the nation-state protest | Opinion
“It’s also hard to imagine that Israel’s Netanyahu government would have taken a number of steps— including passing the recent ‘Nation State law,’ which essentially codifies the second-class status of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, aggressively undermining the longstanding goal of a two-state solution, and ignoring the economic catastrophe in Gaza — if Netanyahu wasn’t confident that Trump would support him,” Sanders said.

Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Closer to Medicinal Use (It’s Not Just Your Imagination) - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/science/magic-mushrooms-psilocybin-scheduleiv.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/02/science/03xp-mushroom/03xp-mushroom-facebookJumbo.jpg

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have recommended that psilocybin, the active compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms, be reclassified for medical use, potentially paving the way for the psychedelic drug to one day treat depression and anxiety and help people stop smoking.

The suggestion to reclassify psilocybin from a Schedule I drug, with no known medical benefit, to a Schedule IV drug, which is akin to prescription sleeping pills, was part of a review to assess the safety and abuse of medically administered psilocybin.

Before the Food and Drug Administration can be petitioned to reclassify the drug, though, it has to clear extensive study and trials, which can take more than five years, the researchers wrote.

The analysis was published in the October print issue of Neuropharmacology, a medical journal focused on neuroscience.

For decades, though, researchers have shunned the study of psychedelics. “In the 1960s, they were on the cutting edge of neuroscience research and understanding how the brain worked,” Dr. Johnson said. “But then it got out of the lab.”

Research stopped, in part, because the use of mind-altering drugs like LSD and mushrooms became a hallmark of hippie counterculture.

The researchers who conducted the new study included Roland R. Griffiths, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who is one of the most prominent researchers on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs. The researchers reviewed data going back to the 1940s.

Dr. Johnson said that the F.D.A. had approved a number of trials of psilocybin. If its use is approved for patients, he said, “I see this as a new era in medicine.”

He added, “The data suggests that psychedelics are powerful behavioral agents.” In legal studies, he said, participants are given a capsule with synthetic psilocybin. (They are not given mushrooms to eat, which is how the drug is most often ingested.)

He warned, though, that psilocybin is not a panacea for everyone. In their analysis, the researchers called for strict controls on its use. There are areas of risk, too, for patients with psychotic disorders and anyone who takes high doses of the drug.

#Psychédéliques #Psylocybine #Champignons #Usage_médical #Pharmacie

#F.D.A. Did Not Intervene to Curb Risky #Fentanyl Prescriptions - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/health/fda-fentanyl-opioid-epidemic-overdose-cancer.html

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A fast-acting class of fentanyl drugs approved only for #cancer patients with high opioid tolerance has been prescribed frequently to patients with back pain and #migraines, putting them at high risk of accidental overdose and death, according to documents collected by the Food and Drug Administration.

[...]

About 5,000 pages of documents, obtained by researchers at Johns Hopkins University through the Freedom of Information Act and provided to The New York Times, show that the F.D.A. had data showing that so-called off-label prescribing was widespread. But officials did little to intervene.

#complicité #santé #opioides #opiacés

Why Did a Billionaire Give $75 Million to a Philosophy Department? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-a-billionaire-give-75-million-to-a-philosophy-department

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Philosophy matters. The new challenges of the genomics revolution, the rise of AI, the growth in inequality, societal fragmentation, and our capacity for devastating war all invite philosophical perspective.Painting by Otto Scholderer / WikicommonsLast week, for the first time in recent memory, a news story in this troubling period had me, a bachelor of arts in philosophy, sitting up straight in stunned delight. Johns Hopkins University was gifted $75 million to expand its philosophy department to near-twice its size—more professors (13 to 22 over a decade) and postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, as well more undergraduate courses. It’s apparently the largest donation any philosophy department has ever received, and for Johns Hopkins, it’s the largest gift the university has ever (...)

Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and… — ProPublica
▻https://www.propublica.org/article/nothing-protects-black-women-from-dying-in-pregnancy-and-childbirth

https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171207-shalon-lead-OG.jpg?1512749833

A black woman is 22% more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman, 71% more likely to perish from cervical cancer, but 300% more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes.

Doctors raked in cash to push fentanyl as N.J. death rate exploded | NJ.com @fil
▻http://www.nj.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2017/06/doctors_raked_in_cash_to_push_powerful_fentanyl_as_nj_death_rate_soared.html

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The most powerful opioid ever mass-marketed was designed to ease cancer patients into death.

It’s ideal for that: the drug is fast acting, powerful enough to tame pain that other opioids can’t and comes in a variety of easy delivery methods — from patches to lollipops.

But a dose the size of a grain of sand can kill you.

Meet fentanyl. It’s heroin on steroids. It’s killing people in droves. And, in New Jersey, you can get it after having your tonsils removed.

In fact, doctors who treat children’s colds and adult’s sore knees are prescribing it with alarming frequency, far more than oncologists easing end-of-life cancer pain.

The surge is stoked by companies that shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to doctors, wining and dining them in hopes of convincing them that their particular brand of fentanyl is the solution to all their patients’ pain problems.

Evidently, it’s working.

An NJ Advance Media analysis has found that eight medical specialties in New Jersey have filed more Medicare claims for fentanyl than those by oncologists. Family practitioners, for example, filed at least five times as many claims for fentanyl from 2013 to 2015 than did cancer doctors.

“There are some powerful drivers of opioid prescriptions that have little to do with the presence of pain in the population,” said Dr. Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins University.

The investigation also reveals:

From 2013 to 2015, doctors in New Jersey were paid at least $1.67 million by pharmaceutical companies marketing various forms of fentanyl. In the same time period, fentanyl deaths in New Jersey increased from 42 in 2013 to 417 in 2015.
Since late 2011, enough fentanyl has been dispensed to allow every person who has died of cancer in New Jersey to fill a prescription for the drug eight times.
Doctors are being disciplined for improperly prescribing fentanyl, in several cases losing their licenses after their patients die while taking the drug.

Zcash, a Harder-to-Trace Virtual Currency, Generates Price Frenzy - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/business/dealbook/zcash-a-harder-to-trace-virtual-currency-generates-price-frenzy.html

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Speculators are snapping up a new virtual currency known as Zcash that was designed by university academics and built to be all but untraceable. (...)

The company behind Zcash, led by a developer named Zooko Wilcox, has the support of privacy activists and computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has already secured $3 million in backing from a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are involved in the virtual currency industry.

#monnaie #anonymat #bitcoin via @Snowden

To Measure the Power of Lightning, Get a Shovel - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/to-measure-the-power-of-lightning-get-a-shovel

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It was a rainy, early summer day in the Hamptons, a few years before the First World War. Robert W. Wood, a physicist (and later a science fiction writer) engaged in optics research at Johns Hopkins University, was out on his lawn spending time with his family when he had a close encounter with a lightning bolt. The ground ignited, producing a smoky column about seven feet high. Rather than being repelled by the situation, he later described it in a letter to Nature as a “fortunate accident”—he had “hit upon a way of extending our knowledge of these curious autographs of thunderbolts.” The autographs in question were fulgurites (fulgur is an old Latin word for lightning). Although they were at one point thought to be hardened gunk released from plant roots, we now know that these roughly (...)

Ingenious: Nathaniel Comfort - Issue 37: Currents
▻http://nautil.us/issue/37/currents/ingenious-nathaniel-comfort

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Nathaniel Comfort has spent 10 years of his life studying music, 10 years studying science, and the last 20 years studying history. “What I try to do, really, is integrate all of those things,” he tells me. “I try to write about science musically if I can.” He did just that in his 2001 biography of the geneticist and Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock, which tackled the science and gender politics of the iconic researcher head on (“This book dismantles the McClintock myth in seven steps …”). He’s since published and edited books on intelligent design and genomic medicine, and is working on a project on the origins of life. Today a professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Comfort has devoted himself to what he sees as the science (...)

Dans quelles arènes vont désormais se battre Riyad et Téhéran ?
▻http://www.lorientlejour.com/article/963046/dans-quelles-arenes-vont-desormais-se-battre-riyad-et-teheran-.html

L’ennemi intérieur chiite se substitue aux subventions

« Nimr Baqer el-Nimr est un grand agitateur, un tribun. On peut l’accuser de violences verbales, mais, a priori, pas de violences réelles », estime le diplomate. [...] « Ils pouvaient très bien le garder en prison. En l’exécutant, les Saoudiens ont ravivé le feu dans la région-est du royaume, majoritairement chiite, alors que la situation s’était apaisée il y a quelques mois ».

Study: TSA full-body scanners failed to detect guns, explosives | TheHill
▻http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/215577-study-discarded-tsa-scanners-missed-weapons

The Transportation Security Administration’s full-body scanners failed to detect a number of potential weapons, including knives, guns and explosives, according to a study released this week.

The controversial scanners, which captured explicit images of passenger’s bodies, provided “weak protection against adaptive adversaries,” researchers from the University of California, San Diego; the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University concluded.

“It is possible to conceal knives, guns, and explosives from detection by exploiting properties of the device’s backscatter X-ray technology,” the authors of the study wrote.