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Because Japan, That’s Why

March 27, 2014 by

Just another day at the office in Tokyo.
Just another day at the office in Tokyo.
Long ago and far away, on November 10, 2010, the very first article I wrote about Japan was about how Domino’s Pizza was willing to pay $31,000 an hour for a pizza delivery person. If you search this blog for articles mentioning Japan you will end up with hours of reading pleasure. Or so I am told. You can just click the link if you’re lazy. Anyway, amongst the gems you will discover the joys of young girls riding giant penises down the street. That is a family activity in Japan. I tell you this in case you are looking for ways to spice up your next sushi experience. Certainly the flying knife displays at Benihana’s would become more dangerous and fun. Then again we are talking about a country that uses Kentucky Fried Chicken to sponsor Christmas, so maybe that whole “finger licking good” thing just carries over.

The world may never know.

One thing it does know is that perfectly innocent things go to Japan and come back in need of therapy. For example, there is a Disney World in Japan. When you go there you can see all the Disney princesses, just like you can at any other Disney owned park. What’s different in Japan is that after you meet the princesses you can own their underwear.

You thought I was kidding didn’t you?

Online retailer Bellemaison features the Disney Fantasy Shop, a section that sells lingerie in designs inspired by Disney’s princesses. Each pair includes a carefully crafted bra and pair of panties that are intricately lined with lace, and made more vibrant with pastel colors. In some designs, bra straps are equally decorative with hues that sometimes complement the cups.

If you read Japanese you can order online by clicking the company’s link above.

If you do please send us pics so we know what they look like on humans.

Of course now that you’re festooned in your princess panties you need to do something romantic to make the evening worthwhile. Thanks to the fact you’re in Japan now, just go with me on this, you need not buy wine, order food or even go see a movie. No, all you need to do is let your significant other drop by and have him/her lick your eyeballs.

Oh, sure, the Japanese don’t actually do that, despite the stories to the contrary, but there’s nothing preventing you from starting a trend.

After all, once they start at the eyeballs who knows where they’ll end up?

Probably by moistening your pretty princess panties.

Anyway, one thing that has been a tradition in Japan for over a thousand years (unlike eyeball licking) has been the history of the ninjas. Ninjas, in pop culture, are mostly sword wielding assassins who want to kill Batman. Mostly employed by Ra’s al Ghul. Who, oddly enough, isn’t Asian at all.

In the real world, and yes they do exist, their legacy is a touch more complicated. Yes, they killed people but they also protected them. Also, ninjas would use any means necessary to accomplish their goals. If that meant shooting you in your sleep, so be it.

But now the tradition of Ninjutsu may be passing into the setting sun. Jinichi Kawakami, the last living ninja, has decided not to train a successor.

Masters in the dark arts of espionage and silent assassination, they are rarely seen and never heard… until they strike.

Employed by samurai warlords to spy, sabotage and kill, they are relics of an ancient code that have all but died out in the modern age.

All but one. As the 21st head of the Ban clan, a dynasty of secret spies that can trace its history back some 500 years, 63-year-old engineer Jinichi Kawakami is Japan’s last ninja.

He is trained to hear a needle drop in the next room, to disappear in a cloud of smoke or to cut a victim’s throat from 20 paces with nothing more than a two-inch ‘death star’.

‘I think I’m called (the last ninja) as there is probably no other person who learned all the skills that were directly handed down from ninja masters over the last five centuries,’ he said. ‘Ninjas proper no longer exist.’

But Kawakami has decided to let the art die with him because ninjas ‘just don’t fit with modern day’, adding: ‘We can’t try out murder or poisons. Even if we can follow the instructions to make a poison, we can’t try it out.’

An engineer by trade, Kawakami started practicing the art of Ninjutsu at the age of six before he began training under the gruelling regime of Buddhist master Masazo Ishida.

To improve his concentration, he would spend hours staring into the flame of a candle until he felt he was inside it.

To hone his hearing he would practice listening to a needle being dropped onto a wooden floor in the next room.

He climbed walls, jumped from heights and learned how to mix chemicals to cause explosions and smoke.

He was also trained to withstand extreme heat and cold as well as go for days without food or water.

‘The training was all tough and painful. It wasn’t fun but I didn’t think much why I was doing it. Training was made to be part of my life,’ he said.

And at the age of 19, he inherited his master’s title along with a cache of secret scrolls and ancient tools.

But he says the art of the ninja lies in the power of surprise, never brute force or outward strength and is about exploiting weaknesses to outfox larger, more powerful opponents while distracting their attention to get the upper hand.

And, he says, the ability to hide in the most unlikely of places is a ninja’s greatest weapon.

‘If you throw a toothpick, people will look that way, giving you the chance to flee, he adds. ‘We also have a saying that it is possible to escape death by perching on your enemy’s eyelashes; it means you are so close that he cannot see you.’

Kawakami now runs the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum, in Iga, 220 miles southwest of Tokyo and recently began a research job at the state-run Mie University, where he is studying the history of ninjas.

He says he has decided not to take on an apprentice to pass on the legacy, making him the last in the line of Ban clan ninjas.

Ninjas, also known as shinobi, have been feared and revered throughout history for their talents as assassins, scouts and spies.

They are mainly noted for their use of stealth and deception but also for their amazing powers of endurance.

Ninjutsu can be translated as ‘Art of Stealth’ but also means ‘Art of Enduring’ and the ninjas themselves were noted for being able to walk long distances without stopping, jump over seven feet and dislocate their joints to escape from small spaces.

But they are not only ruthless killers as depicted in so many Hollywood movies.

In fact, ninjas considered the art of espionage far greater than that of fighting which was always a last resort – ninjas were skilled in spying and defeating foes using intelligence, while swinging a sword was deemed a lower art.

But if necessary, they had to be experts with weapons such as shuriken, a sharpened star-shaped projectile, and the fukiya blowpipe, usually filled with a poison dart.

And they were also skilled at making both poisons and medicines.

Excluding the whole killing thing those are the same skills taught to Boy & Girl Scouts the world over. Just in case you’re ever thinking of messing with a Scout.

There is no word, and God knows I looked for one, as to why he’s refusing to train a successor. I’m sure it would be an interesting reason but, no matter what it is, the decision is his and his alone.

And so, like many things the west doesn’t truly understand, another part of a colorful universe fades to black.

Unlike your pretty princess panties which will, ultimately, fade to beige.

Desperate House DJs – Back to Brooklyn from Bill McCormick on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Filed Under: Uncategorized

Bad Human!

December 5, 2019 by Bill McCormick

Not a good pet.

It’s that time of year again, when people give stuff to other people and expect other stuff in return. Why they just don’t give themselves stuff and be done with it baffles me, but here we are. Then again, Christmas was banned in many countries for over a century because it was so violent. So maybe giving people stuff instead of starting riots is a step in the right direction. Add in the fact that many people will just get drunk, and watch some of the greatest, brain bending, holiday films ever made, and you have a recipe for depression. So, obviously, the best thing you can do is give them something that will make them happy. And nothing’s happier than a ball of fur or scales wrapped in love. [Read more…] about Bad Human!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: bad ideas, birds, crocs, gators, monkeys, pets, snakes, venomous

From Here to Eternity

November 21, 2019 by Bill McCormick

It just keeps on going on.

There are numerous long lived people in the Bible. There are others enumerated in the pantheon of religions that preceded the books of the children of Abraham. Eastern religions have their own immortals. In all cases immortality is the gift of the sacred. Even the evil possessors of this gift are considered above mere mortals. But that may be changing. Last year I noted that scientists had discovered how to work with the gene that causes aging, possibly even stopping it completely. There has been a spate of other developments as well. All the way back in the good old days of 2016 I wrote about how scientists were overcoming the limitations that prevented humans uploading their minds into cybernetic beings. [Read more…] about From Here to Eternity

Filed Under: News Tagged With: cybernetic, eternal, immortal, medicine, orbiter, overlords, slaves

Happy Death Day, Grandma!

June 7, 2018 by Bill McCormick

The times are changing at the seniors’ center.

The headline might seem a touch off putting but it was the best way I could think of to get the point across. While science fiction has long considered the idea that there could be some sort of mandatory maximum age (Logans Run, Star Trek: The Next Generation and others), the idea seemed ludicrous to most. We barely lived long enough to register as a flutter against the geologic scale of time, why would we happily kill ourselves? Way back in January of 2014 I wrote an article about how science had discovered a set of genes which could impact our lifespans. It was a more innocent time. The article more whimsical than worthy of serious consideration.
[Read more…] about Happy Death Day, Grandma!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: immortality, longevity, science

A Better Tomorrow Today

April 13, 2018 by Bill McCormick

Go ahead and jump for joy.

Humans have an amazing capacity for destruction. We blow stuff up, wipe things out, eradicate entire species, and still wander blithely along as though it’s God’s will or something. A single nuclear warhead could kill a couple million people in seconds. There are thousands of those bad boys dotting the Earth. If they all went off at once there are estimates that the top layer of the planet would vaporize. So there’s your happy thought for the day.

Back in September of 2012 I wrote a story about how we could all die a little more slowly, but still pretty damn quick, if all the bees disappeared. Essentially all pollinated plants would die, the animals that subsist on them would soon follow, and then we’re done. Figure about four years. Yes, there might be dystopian pockets of survivors, but the human race, for all intents and purposes, would be done.

Eijio Miyako, a chemist at AIST in Japan, takes the whole “end of the world due to lack of bees” thing seriously. And, unlike you and I, he’s a scientist and can do something about it.

Also, because he’s from Japan, his solution involves robot bees.

Stefan Kostarelis at Techly in Australia, tells us all about it.

In an example of life imitating art, scientists have come up with a technology straight out of an episode of Black Mirror: Bee-like pollinating drones.

A team at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan engineered the devices using a combination of horsehair, $USD 100 drones and a sticky ion gel.

It’s pretty simple really – first, the drones fly into flowers much like a bee would. Inside the flower, pollen gets stuck to the drone due to the combination of the ion gel and horsehair. That same pollen is then shaken off into the next flower, and so on. It’s just your run of the mill birds and the robots bees.

Popular Mechanics reports that Eijio Miyako, a chemist at AIST actually created the sticky ion gel by accident in 2007. The gel, which Miyako considered a failure, sat unused for a decade. When Miyako picked it up again recently he was pleased to find that it was still sticky and figured it would be perfect for his new project.

Miyako is now the project leader behind the “Robo-bees”. In the video above, you can see the first time that a drone has successfully pollinated a flower, in this case Japanese lilies. Blink and you’ll miss it!

“What’s wrong with regular bees?”, you may ask.

The answer is “nothing”, except for the fact that they have reportedly been dying at an unprecedented rate. Although the death of bees was a mystery at first, we now have a better idea of why it’s happening. And as usual, it looks like we are to blame. Predictable.

In 2014, Time reported on a study from Harvard’s School of Public Health. It found that pesticides were the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which is the phenomenon in which worker bees just suddenly up and leave a colony without warning. The pesticides in question are those that contain neonicotinoids (NNIs) and they are partially or completely banned in the EU, Canada and the U.S.

Above, if you click on the article I wrote, there’s a link to Zom-Bee-Watch. When I wrote the article infected, and dangerous, bees were in very limited locales. They now cover about forty percent of the U.S. and are spreading. Those are bees that no longer pollinate. They just eat, breed, and die. Coupled with the drastic uptick in the number of bees just kicking the bucket this is a problem.

While “make a healthier planet” would be my go-to answer, robot bees can work in the interim.

So science marches on trying to make our lives better whether we want it to or not. One thing science has been assiduously working on is how to cure paralysis. Or, barring that, at least give the paralyzed a way to live normal lives. Two years ago I wrote about a scuba styled suit that a person could wear and regain total movement. It works. But issues with durability and cost have kept it from commercial production.

In the meantime, way back in 2016, a company called SuitX came up with an exoskeleton that worked, gave the person complete mobility, and allowed them to work a normal job. While flashier ideas have come and gone, SuitX is still here, working, and costs about as much as a car.

Signe Brewster at MIT’s Technology Review, tells us all about it.

Paralyzed from the waist down after a BMX accident, Steven Sanchez rolled into SuitX’s Berkeley, California, office in a wheelchair. A half-hour later he was standing and walking thanks to the Phoenix—a robotic exoskeleton now available for around $40,000.

The suit returns movement to wearers’ hips and knees with small motors attached to standard orthotics. Wearers can control the movement of each leg and walk at up to 1.1 miles per hour by pushing buttons integrated into a pair of crutches.

At 27 pounds, the Phoenix is among the lightest and cheapest medical exoskeletons. It also has unique abilities; the suit is modular and adjustable so it can adapt to, say, a relatively tall person who just needs mobility assistance for one knee.

Exo

A battery pack worn as a backpack powers the exoskeleton for up to eight hours. An app can be used to track the patient’s walking data. SuitX has mainly worked with patients with spinal cord injuries, who can use the Phoenix to walk again.

“We can’t really fix their disease. We can’t fix their injury. But what it would do is postpone the secondary injuries due to sitting,” says SuitX founder and CEO Homayoon Kazerooni. “It gives a better quality of life.”

The technology behind SuitX’s industrial and medical exoskeleton originated at the Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, which Kazerooni leads. He said his major goal is to build a version of the exoskeleton for children. Children with neurological disorders sometimes need intensive walking training or can risk losing their mobility.

The device could also have therapeutic benefits for people who have experienced a stroke or other motor injury, but more research needs to be conducted.

Since this article came out SuitX has made tremendous advances. Their goal is to make a suit that is as lightweight as possible that can still provide the support and mobility a person requires.

But not all research is being done in the areas of exoskeletons. In Australia they are developing a bionic spine which can control prosthetic limbs, mobility devices such as mechanized wheel chairs, and many other things that allow paralyzed people to become functional. It is, literally, implanted at the base of the patient’s spine and takes over motor control.

Partly based on that research scientists at the University of California came up with a cap that stimulates brain activity and allows a patient to walk unaided.

It’s days like this that make you proud to be human. Using the power of the patient’s mind, scientists have enabled a man completely paralyzed in both legs to walk again. And this astonishing feat didn’t involve the help of an exoskeleton or robotic limbs, and no brain implants were required, making this a first for rehabilitation.

The patient was a 26-year-old man who had no motor (movement) function in his lower limbs due to a spinal cord injury sustained five years ago. He also lost sensation below his injury, although he could just about feel when his bladder was full.

Describing the results in the Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation, the team’s goal was to allow him to regain voluntary control of his legs using his brain, but without the need for invasive brain surgery. To achieve this, the researchers created a brain-computer interface system using an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap to read patterns of brain activity while he thought about walking.

Next, he underwent training to learn how to acquire brain control of an avatar’s walking within a virtual reality environment. Once he achieved this, he then had to build up strength in his leg muscles that had deteriorated through a lack of use, which involved electrical stimulation combined with weight shifting maneuvers.

After his muscles were reconditioned enough to stand, it was time for the really hard work to begin. Instead of going for gold straight away, the team first got him to practice walking movements while he was suspended a few centimeters off the ground. As he thought about walking, his brain signals (read by the EEG cap) bypassed his damaged spinal cord and were pinged to electrodes that had been positioned around his knees, providing muscular stimulation. Nineteen sessions later, the man had improved so much that he was ready to put his feet to the ground.

Wearing a system that supported his weight and helped prevent falls, he was able to successfully translate what he had learned and walked unsuspended. Over time, his control improved and he was able to walk several meters.

An undeniably incredible feat, but whether or not such a system could ultimately offer benefits to the wider population will rest on future trials involving more people. Obviously everyone is different, as are their injuries, but it is hoped that this technology could benefit many people. However, it might not be suitable in some circumstances.

“It can be speculated that a very severe traumatic brain injury in tandem with a spinal cord injury could prevent this brain-computer interface system from working,” An Do, one of the study’s lead researchers, told IFLScience.

There is also, as always, room for improvement, with the technology requiring tweaking and streamlining, which Do predicts will take a significant amount of time. Do also said that the team is working towards developing a simplified version as well as a system that would involve a brain implant, which could potentially offer improved control.

The link in the article for the Journal of Neuroscience will take you to the doctors who are working on this. It’s not commercially available yet but candidates are still being accepted. Since it’s a study there is no cost involved other than travel.

But the absolute best news comes from the work of Dr. Edward D. Wirth III, chief medical director of Asterias Biotherapeutics. He has come up with a way to use stem cells to regrow euro pathways and allow a patient to regain full mobility with no artificial enhancements.

Spinalcord.com has the full story.

Scientists have begun using stem cell injections to treat those who have been paralyzed in accidents resulting in a spinal cord injury. In March 2016, Kristopher Boesen (Kris) was in a car accident that paralyzed him from the neck down. After the accident, Kris had difficulty breathing on his own due to his injuries and was told he may never be able to regain control of his limbs again.

Kris could undergo the standard surgery given to patients suffering from a spinal cord injury that would stabilize the spine, but it would most likely do little to nothing for his motor and sensory functions. Kris did not choose to do this surgery. Instead, he discovered a clinical trial being done involving treatment with stem cells which was looking to enroll patients just like him and decided to take the chance.

The Trial

The clinical trial was being led by Dr. Edward D. Wirth III, chief medical director of Asterias Biotherapeutics. It involves injections of “AST-OPC1– an agent consisting of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) that derive from embryonic stem cells. OPCs are the myelin-forming cells of the brain and spinal cord that help nerve cells to function.”

This treatment is supposed to reduce the size of the injury cavity and replace the myelin coating of the nerve cells, stimulate nerve cell growth, and produce blood vessels that will bring oxygen and healing to the injured site. In order to participate in this study, Kris was required to be able to breathe on his own. With the help and care of his respiratory team, he was breathing without a ventilator and approved for the trial.

The Study

The National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center states that “each year there are approximately 17,000 new cases of spinal cord injury in the United States.” This study is just one example of how regenerative medicine is bringing hope to those who had thought they would never be able to move their limbs again. The procedure that Kris took part in was a part of a phase 1/2a clinical trial evaluating the safety of the doses being given to the patients. The AST-OPC1 cells being injected are developed by the Asterias Biotherapeutics based in Fremont, CA. These cells come from the embryonic stem cells that are found in the brain and the spinal cord.

The clinical trial is now at the 10 million cell level, which is the amount that was found to be most effective in the pre-clinical studies. In order to be involved in the study, “enrollees must be between 18 and 69, and their condition must be stable enough to receive an injection of AST-OPC1 between the 14th and 30th days following their injury. Keck Medical Center is one of the 6 sites in the United States that is authorized to enroll subjects and administer the clinical trial dosage.”

The Results

After 2 weeks, Kris was able to achieve some minor motion in his arms and hands. It took about 3 months, but he was eventually able to write his own name with pen and paper and accomplish a good deal of other normal daily tasks. Kris went from having complete immobility to being able to function on his own again.

If you, or someone you know, is interested in, and qualified for, this study please contact The Keck Institute via the link. They have six locations in the U.S.

ALl in all not everything’s bleak. Science is making great strides in many areas, whether people believe in it or not.


Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
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Filed Under: News Tagged With: bees, exoskeleton, paralysis, walk

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