Creating Non Addictive Pain Killers Using Chili Peppers?

Now this is an exiting breakthrough in the understanding of pain.

"This is a major breakthrough in understanding the mechanisms of pain and how to more effectively treat it," Dr. Hargreaves said. "These data demonstrate, for the first time, that OLAMs constitute a new family of naturally occurring capsaicin-like agents, and may explain the role of these substances in many pain conditions. This hypothesis suggests that agents blocking either the production or action of these substances could lead to new therapies and pharmacological interventions for various inflammatory diseases and pain disorders such as arthritis, fibromyalgia and others, including pain associated with cancer."

OLAMs are oxidized linoleic acid metabolites which are created from cells at the source of the pain. These are similar to the capsaicin oil that is found in chili peppers. So if you block these molecules then you might be able to block the pain right at the source instead of in the brain like opioids.

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Another Biotech Winner: Pozen has Just Got Vimovo Approved

Well they just got a new drug called Vimovo approved and the stock has taken off after hours. What was interesting is the news was preceded by a drop in the stock that took it down as low as $5. I think someone was making investment decisions based on incomplete information. My thinking is that the FDA didn't rule by a certain specified time and this spooked investors into panic selling. In any case this is yet another big Biotech winner.

Vimovo is a fixed-dose combination of the anti-inflammatory drug naproxen and an immediate release version of esomeprazole, the active ingredient in AstraZeneca's acid reflux treatment Nexium.

Shares of Pozen were up more than 21 percent, or about $2.30, in after-hours trading on Friday, trading at $13.15, after earlier closing at $10.85. (Reporting by Susan Heavey; additional reporting by Ben Hirschler in London and Vidya Loganathan in Bangalore; editing by Carol Bishopric)

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Now a Criminal Probe Against Goldman?

Well, it seems that everyone is going to pile on now that Goldman didn't play along with the White House.

"Given the recent focus on the firm, we are not surprised by the report of an inquiry," said a Goldman spokesman. "We would fully cooperate with any requests for information."

A spokeswoman for the office of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney said she could "neither confirm nor deny" any Goldman investigation. In Washington, a spokeswoman said the Justice Department declined to comment.

Obama sure can go after his enemies with a real Nixonian zeal. I would be willing to bet that this "inquiry" will come to nothing months down the line long after financial reform has been passed. It must suck for Goldman to be made out to be the whipping boy by the Obamanaughts after literally 100s of years of good conduct.

I really hope it knocks off a few more points of Goldman stock it seems to be doing that after hours with the stock trading at $156. I just need to see that all the salvos that the White House can fire against Goldman has been launched before I decide to buy in though.

Also as soon as financial reform passes it is time to seriously look at going long the banks since the "legislation risk" will have certainly been lifted. I would be willing to bet too that all of these troubles that afflict Goldman will magically disappear as well. It's the Chicago way.

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Dendreon's Provenge Finally Makes the Big Time

Well, Dendreon has finally gotten their place in the sun in the form of an AP article and it has been a long time coming.

Doctors have been trying to develop such a therapy for decades, and Provenge is the first to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

"The big news here is that this is the first immunotherapy to win approval, and I suspect within five to ten years immunotherapies will be a big part of cancer therapy in general," said Dr. Phil Kantoff, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who helped run the studies of Provenge.

Experimental vaccines to treat other cancers � including the deadly skin disease melanoma and an often fatal childhood tumor called neuroblastoma � are already in late-stage development.

Well, I have held this stock since 2007 and this is quite a payoff. I read about how this thing worked way back when and I think that it has been a travesty that the FDA didn't approve this thing earlier. It just showed that the Bush-run FDA was no place for breakthrough therapies while the Obama-FDA is the opposite. I ding Obama a lot but he is more pro-science when it comes to things like this then Bush ever was.

In any case this Provenge is kind of a difficult therapy to get running because each treatment has to be tailored to the individual. But once that happens it actually extends the persons life and might lead to newer therapies down the line. It would be interesting to see how this therapy can be combined with things like DNA injections that kill cancer cells.

The idea that you are getting the persons own immune system to attack the cancer is something out of SciFi. That was part of why I invested in them even when the stock dropped into the $1 range and kept with them until now. It is good to see them finally get their due and to see another weapon in the armory in the fight against cancer.

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Obama Removes Immigration Reform From 2010 Agenda

I would feel pretty stupid if I was the Hispanic Caucus right now. Part of the reason they voted for ObamaCare was because Obama was going to push immigration reform. Now it looks like he is going to fob it off until after the Midterms if he even does it.

Immigration reform was an issue Obama promised Latino groups that he would take up in his first year in office. But several hard realities � a tanked economy, a crowded agenda, election-year politics and lack of political will � led to so much foot-dragging in Congress that, ultimately, Obama decided to set the issue aside.

Another reality is that if he thought his numbers were low now wait until he pushes some kind of comprehensive immigration reform. The fault-lines in that mess go really deep and Obama might join Bush at the lowest job approval ratings of all times.

What is worse is that the recession is deadly when it comes to immigration reform. The idea of illegals filling jobs that Americans don't want doesn't wash when there is 10% unemployment. The idea that some person who is not a citizen and broke the law to get into the country is taking a job from a citizen who might have been out of work for a year or more is bad news for them.

There is a deep well of resentment out there and the Dems are right for passing it off until the economy actually improves on Main Street. Calling some young guy who cant find a job a racist for wanting a job that an illegal immigrant is currently filling at a black market wage will not be sufficient to drain that well.

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How Human Rights Watch Morphed into an Anti-Israel Group

This is quite an interesting article on how one of the founders of Human Rights Watch had a falling out with the organization over its treatment of Israel.

On October 19 of last year, the op-ed page of The New York Times contained a bombshell: a piece by Robert Bernstein, the founder and former chairman of Human Rights Watch (HRW), attacking his own organization. HRW, Bernstein wrote, was �helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.�

I wonder if Obama is getting his background of anti-Israel-ism from groups like HRW?

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Illegal Immigrants Planning on Leaving Arizona

I guess this law might actually achieve the goal of reducing the amount of illegals coming to America.

"Nobody wants to pick us up," Julio Loyola Diaz says in Spanish as he and dozens of other men wait under the shade of palo verde trees and lean against a low brick wall outside the east Phoenix home improvement store.

Many day laborers like Diaz say they will leave Arizona because of the law, which also makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally and directs police to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants.

I wonder if these day labor positions could instead be filled full time by young African American males who are getting smacked down by this recession?

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World Cup MVPs Ring: Looks Like Something out of a Gumball Machine

I have to say that this dorky looking thing is not worth $70,000.

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CSI Is Helping Crooks Cover Their Tracks

I was wondering when this was going to happen.

Criminals watch television too, and there is evidence they are also changing their behaviour. Most of the techniques used in crime shows are, after all, at least grounded in truth. Bleach, which destroys DNA, is now more likely to be used by murderers to cover their tracks. The wearing of gloves is more common, as is the taping shut--rather than the DNA-laden licking--of envelopes. Investigators comb crime scenes ever more finely for new kinds of evidence, which is creating problems with the tracking and storage of evidence, so that even as the criminals leave fewer traces of themselves behind, a backlog of cold-case evidence is building up.

I wonder if we have any criminals going over the crime scene with a black light in order to get rid of any hairs or skin that they may have left behind?

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Advice to the Tea Party from the Cato Institute

This is good advice however I do wonder if this movement will endure past 2012 when Obama is hopefully ushered out of office?

He offers five pieces of advice for members of the Tea Party movement:

1. Republicans aren�t always your friends.

2. Some tea partiers like big government.

3. Democrats aren�t always your enemies.

4. Smaller government demands restraint abroad.

5. Leave social issues to the states.

I have to agree with #3. If the Dem is a fiscal conservative and wants to shrink the size of government and has a track record of doing it then I support them 100%.

Also #5 should be pushed quite a bit because the more the Tea Party moves away from slowing the growth of government and fiscal sobriety the faster they can be marginalized. Most everyone agrees that the government wastes money but wedge issues like immigration or abortion should be left to their own advocacy groups to tackle.

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HP Buys Out Palm at $5.70 a Share

Well, it seems that HP has just gotten into the smart phone game in a big way.

Neither RIM nor Lenovo will be putting Palm in its pocket. Rather, it's computing giant Hewlett-Packard, which is snapping up the company in an all-cash transaction valued at about $1.2 billion � $5.70 for each outstanding share of Palm stock.

That's a healthy premium over the $4.63 the stock closed at Wednesday, valuing the company considerably higher than the $781 million it was worth at the end of the Wall Street trading day.

I avoided PALM shares as the stock went into takeover speculation mode because if it failed to get a bid it was a dead duck. Now what is interesting is that we will have a three way race between tech giants in the smart phone game. We have Google with Andriod, Apple with IPhone, and HP with the Palm Pre. You add to this RIMM and the Blackberry and we have a very crowded field with tons of cash to throw around to gain or retain market share. Hopefully, this "Battle of the Smart Phones" will be to the consumers great benefit.

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How Do You Get Rats Healthier? Feed Them Grapes

I guess it might work for humans too.

After three months, the rats that received the grape-enriched diet had lower blood pressure, better heart function, and reduced indicators of inflammation in the heart and the blood than rats who received no grape powder. Rats also had lower triglycerides and improved glucose tolerance.

The effects were seen even though the grape-fed animals had no change in body weight.

So the rats didn't lose weight but they did have better heart function as well as lower blood pressure. Hmm, perhaps the grape pill might become about as important as taking any other kind of blood pressure medicine in the years to come.

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How Twitter Was Hacked

Now this is as scary thought for every "cloud" start-up out there. The attack didn't need a botnet or a cracker program or anything like that. All they did was this simple series of steps:

Just to summarize the attack:

1. HC accessed Gmail for a Twitter employee by using the password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email. In this case the secondary email was an expired Hotmail account, he simply registered it, clicked the link and reset the password. Gmail was then owned.
2. HC then read emails to guess what the original Gmail password was successfully and reset the password so the Twitter employee would not notice the account had changed.
3. HC then used the same password to access the employee�s Twitter email on Google Apps for your domain, getting access to a gold mine of sensitive company information from emails and, particularly, email attachments.
4. HC then used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other Twitter employee personal and work emails.
5. HC then used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon and iTunes, among other services. A security hole in iTunes gave HC access to full credit card information in clear text. HC now also had control of Twitter�s domain names at GoDaddy.
6. Even at this point, Twitter had absolutely no idea they had been compromised.

That last point has to be the most scary. Twitter was hacked and lost secret work papers and they didn't even know it was happening until they were tipped off. If this hacker was after some profit he could have sold this information to the highest bidder. Good think Techcrunch was able to talk him out of it.

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Arizona Governor Signs Immigration Bill into Law

Now we will see the Justice Department challenge to this new law.

The legislation, sent to the Republican governor by the GOP-led Legislature, makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. It also requires local police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants; allows lawsuits against government agencies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws; and makes it illegal to hire illegal immigrants for day labor or knowingly transport them.

That last part sounds like a bad deal for bus and cab drivers. I mean how do they know that an illegal got on their bus or not? In any case this new law sets up a pretty interesting showdown over states rights. I figure the Feds would take precedence when it comes to immigration laws. I'm sure Constitutional law scholar Obama can shed some light on these matters.

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Financial Reform Bill Could Cost Bansk Billions?

I really think Congress needs to go back and take a college level finance course before they do any further damage to the world financial system.

Dick Bove, analyst at Rochdale Securities, says the effect of moving U.S. banks out of the swaps business would be "staggering" -- so much so he has a hard time believing it could come to pass.

For example, if it precluded banks from arranging currency swaps, it would harm international trade, Bove explains. That's because companies that sell products abroad use the swaps to prevent wild swings in foreign exchange rates from impacting their profits.

Oh they can still buy the swaps but it will be from European banks. That would be at the cost of the entire $464 Trillion dollar market going overseas all at once. I guess the Congress just loves killing American business and propping up European business.

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