The blood-brain barrier is a safety system within the body that keeps foreign substances that are in the bloodstream out of the brain. For example, it blocks the ability of hormones and neurotransmitters from being able to cross over from the bloodstream into the brain, except through certain predesignated “doorways.”
Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks. “Wait a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?” It took me a few seconds to pick my jaw off the floor. I had certainly come into Gavin’s office prepared for eye rolls at the mention of “exo-civilizations.” But the civilizations he was asking about would have existed many millions of years ago. And, if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian hypothesis, after an old Dr. Who episode with intelligent reptiles…
To Must, cloning the elderly dog was a way to keep her daughter’s memory alive and, she says, to “protect” her grief […] Alarm bells went off in my head. Must wasn’t just cloning a pet. She was trying to preserve a lost child. It seemed awfully close to a real human cloning scenario, one in which a heartbroken parent tries to replace a son or daughter who dies early. I shot a question to Jose Cibelli, an animal cloning scientist at Michigan State University: Is it time to worry about human cloning again? Cibelli quickly e-mailed back: “YES.”
It’s time for Christians to armor up. It’s time for us all to recognize how serious the other side is to silence our message, to confine us, to restrict us, and eventually to exterminate us. We must push back hard against the darkness rather than meekly surrender. It’s past time for us to “take up the whole armor of God, that [we] may be able to stand firm in the evil day” (Ephesians 6:13). There no longer is any place in the body of Christ for the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot. It is an evil day, and we are fighting for everything that matters.
As the tensions in Syria have escalated into a US-led missile attack on Friday, several end-of-days experts weigh in on the situation, explaining who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, what are the real causes and what do Biblical sources say will happen. The rising multinational tensions in Syria burst into flames on Friday when US President Trump led a coalition with the United Kingdom and France in a missile attack against Syrian President Assad’s chemical weapons laboratories. This was in response to a chlorine attack Assad allegedly perpetrated last Saturday against the Syrian town of Dhouma, in which dozens of civilians were killed. Military forces from many nations are currently deployed in Syria with Russia maintaining air-bases in support of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
Alex Malarkey, the boy who claimed in a bestselling book that he went to heaven while comatose from a car accident, is suing his publisher Tyndale House for damages including book profits from the since-retracted story. The 2010 book The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven listed Malarkey as a coauthor with his father Steve, but Malarkey retracted the story in 2015. “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible,” he told Tyndale and book sellers at the time, which included LifeWay Christian Resources. In a lawsuit filed April 9 in DuPage County Circuit Court in Wheaton, Ill., Malarkey said his father, now deceased, fabricated and solely authored the tale based on Alex’s two-month coma, signed the book deal with Tyndale and received all of the profits due the authors, with no compensation going to Alex, who was 10 at the time of publication.
