Placebos and Loliondo

    A panacea, a cure-all, a salvation for those with any mysterious sickness - this is a goal that has been strived for by humans for countless centuries. Western medicine can be effective, but what if I told you the closest thing to a cure-all in the world is faith?
    Don't get me wrong, it's not like some higher power is intervening and curing people. But the belief itself can trigger something in people's brains. The brain has a secret store of drugs (including such specific chemicals as opioids, which serve as painkillers), which can be unlocked by people genuinely thinking they are being cured. It normally acts to supplement an actual medicinal cure, but it can be a formidable force on its own. This is why faith healing, in some cases, works.
    One prime example of this is a Christian faith healer at Loliondo in Tanzania who has throngs of people devoted to him, all waiting to receive a single cup of a drink he makes from the roots of a specific tree. The drink (or, rather, the powerful brain manipulation caused by the drink) is purpotedly capable of curing cancer, AIDS and HIV, glaucoma, infertility, etc. I'm not sure how or indeed if it does this, especially infertility,  but it has certainly gained a reputation. The throngs of people are thousands strong and form a caravan which stretches back for 7 miles across countryside.
     Placebo healing is weaker but more versatile than traditional medicine, and it can do some things that the foremost scientific discoveries have still been unable to. That being said, the principle behind it has been discovered and (except for the patients) the medical world should not treat it as a miracle.

Racial Relationships and Children

     Often, the voice of a child can be more honest and revealing than many voices of experienced adults. A recent study conducted by CNN revealed the opinions of children on friendships between race. Often, the case was that kids have very biased opinions on who to become friends with. This is mostly because of their parents' ideals of their kid's friends. In general, black kids had more civilized opinions on diversity, thinking that people should all be together. Over 70% of white children, on the other hand, are of the opinion that relations between children of different skin color are mostly negative and that they would get in trouble for their attempts to make friends. These opinions are not the kids' own, strictly speaking - they want to have friends of many different groups - their parents' opinions are the only thing that is holding them back. Why are white parents so subtly but absolutely biased? It's likely because they are the majority, they have less experiences with people that look different from them, and they have simply not let go of the belief that there is something fundamentally different about the way black people and other minorities perceive the world. Almost all they internally rely on to tell themselves everyone is equal is hearsay. Black parents, on the other hand, have grown up in a world of mostly whites, so they have experience enough to see them as "just people". rather than "white people".

     I think that while this is a clear step up from the violent racism of the 1960s and before the Emancipation Proclamation, it is still depressing - while the racial bias is small, it is still there, and it still has enough leverage over people's better judgment that it can break up childhood friendships and other fundamental interactions. I want to keep promoting civil rights until racism and other completely unjustified prejudice is ground into the dust.

HIV

     Human Immunodeficiency Virus is a seemingly incurable disease that is almost always terminal. However, a man called Timothy Brown and known as the Berlin Patient may change this. He has been cured of HIV through a process involving bone marrow transplantation between patients. Bone marrow produces lymphocytes, white blood cells that are crucial to the immune system. In Timothy's case, the marrow was of an HIV-immune individual, so Timothy's immune system became immune as well. Aside from slight neurological damage caused by trauma during the treatment, this seems to be a relatively reliable cure (yes, cure).
     Which is, of course, great for the world.

Biomimetics

    The science of biomimetics or biomimicry is one that incorporates knowledge of the natural world, chemistry, engineering ingenuity, nanotechnology, and other diverse fields. Simply put, it is the study of tools naturally evolved into creatures bodies because they were near-optimal at their job, and their replication for use by human beings. These naturally produced materials often have interesting or profound properties, and mystified people until biomimeticists looked at their internal structure under a microscope. For instance, the toes of the gecko have extreme adhesive properties - a gecko can hang upside-down from a smooth surface like glass from a single one of their toes. This works underwater and in space, and the gecko has simply to peel its toes back to take its foot off completely clean. But how does it work?
     Unseen, at extremely small scales in the range of nanometers, small electromagnetic interactions called Van der Waals forces operate between objects that are extremely close together. A gecko's toe has strange hairy-looking rows of pads on its surface. These are actually groups of extremely fine branching appendages,  which under a powerful microscope look like a forest of fibres. This results in the normally faint Van der Waals forces between the toe and the surface becoming exponentiated, which allows the gecko to easily cling on to any surface.
     This is the experimental part of biomimetics, finding out how things work. The next part is applying it, which in this case people have been doing. A team of material scientists have replicated to some degree the gecko toe surface and are building a wall-scaling robot which, if developed correctly, could help with space-station, satellite, or ship repairs.
     Wall-climbing robots, the elasticity and strength of spider silk, the disease-inhibiting properties of shark skin; all of these and more can and will be used through biomimetics.

Amputation in Sports

     Adam Bender is an inspiration to many; a sports prodigy in soccer and baseball and flag football, with  a great heart and a bright future. He also has only one leg.
     He was born with a cancerous tumor in his right leg. At a very young age, he had the leg amputated after numerous treatments failed to control it. His mother was originally depressed, but eventually it became clear to her that his spirit was not broken. He loves sports of all types, and is extremely good at scoring goals in soccer. Once, a coach discouraged him from joining the baseball team, advising him to join a league for kids with disabilities. However, he knew he was too good for that, and proved to be capable on the regular team as well.
     I think his story is one that anyone who is depressed because of a physical disability can learn from- instead of focusing on things you can't do, how about finding and pursuing something you can do.

Mind Reading

     Thoughts, plans, ambitions, opinions- we all take for granted that they are secret, alone to us when we want them to be. However, Functional MRI scans, as they're called, have been developed, which recognise the patterns of neurons firing in the brain, to recognise what object the subject is thinking of (for objects that have been tested), if you have been to a place or not, if you are familiar with something, etc. There is now a debate over the constitutionality of these machines- if your thoughts can be read, do you truly have the right to remain silent? Also, what about companies and marketers trying to use natural human psychology to extract more money out of their customers? Should they be allowed to use optimal advertisements to attract people?
    As for the genuine nature of the device, I believe the scientists and internationally acclaimed news service- their procedures for how the device operates seem sound and logical, and while I would like to think there is something special about consciousness that makes this intangible, brains and people and personalities are simply sophisticated and innovative computers.

D.J. Williams

    Many football players seem to have troubled childhoods. One among them is D.J. Williams, a star player originally from Texas, recently graduated into the NFL. He is wildly successful as a footballer, but he was not always so confident about his life and his future. His father, now residing resplendently in a maximum-security prison cell, is bipolar. He abused alcohol, cocaine, and his wife for many years, physically and verbally and in front of the kids. He was arrested for verbal abuse and served 90 days in jail, after which he started abuse again. One day he and D.J. were out fishing, and he presented the child with a gun, instructing him to shoot anyone who disturbs them. That experience almost drove him to suicide. He told his mother, who decided it was time to take the kids and leave. The next day, his father shot a man in frustration and was arrested for a longer period.
    D.J. is not sure where his future will take him. He decided to go to Little Rock, Arkansas and join the football team. He graduated and will join the NFL, for what team he is not sure.
    Wow, Texas. That's all I have to say.