It’s a good idea to wait for true love — but if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world.
The To Do List may look and feel like an R-rated teen sex comedy in the modern tradition, a la American Pie or Superbad or The Girl Next Door — and, true to form, it offers gross-out gags and F-bombs aplenty.
But at the center of writer/director Maggie Carey’s brave, funny debut film, there’s an un-panicked, radically reassuring portrayal of teenage sex.
Set in the summer of 1993, The To Do List follows late-blooming valedictorian Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) as she attempts to master a full repertoire of sexual proficiencies with interchangeable male classmates. The end game to this plan: losing her virginity to chick-magnet lifeguard Rusty Waters (a delightfully ’90s-tastic Scott Porter) before starting her freshman year at Georgetown. Her more experienced best friends (Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele) counsel her along the way, while her dorky but endearing friend Cameron (Johnny Simmons) quietly pines for her.
What’s unusual about The To Do List isn’t that Brandy sets her sights on losing her virginity to a gorgeous, kinda-brain-dead older boy; pop culture boasts plenty of young women who initially just want to get the whole awkward rite of passage over with. Instead, what’s unusual about Carey’s film is that (spoiler alert) Brandy succeeds — and then moves on. She loses her virginity to a guy who doesn’t really know her and definitely doesn’t love her, and then she checks off the “Intercourse” box on her eponymous to-do list, packs up her things, and goes to college, un-traumatized and un-stricken by tragic regret.
When it comes to teenage girls losing their virginity on TV and in the movies, a few old storylines tend to get recycled. Most of them have to do with the fear of what could happen if the girl doesn’t “save it” for the right moment or the right guy. These fictional teenagers with plans to have sex for the first time often “come to their senses” at the last minute, or get effectively dissuaded by someone older and wiser who advocates waiting for the “right” guy to come along — the good guy, the One, who’s trustworthy and kind and loves her for the right reasons.
My So-Called Life‘s Angela Chase, for instance, backs out of losing her virginity to her longtime crush, the dopey but sexy Jordan Catalano, because she’s simply not ready. Rachel Berry saves herself for Finn on Glee after thinking better of her promise to let bad-boy rival glee-club singer Jesse be her first. On Friday Night Lights, a determined Julie Taylor makes a curfew-conscious appointment to have sex for the first time with her new boyfriend Matt Saracen — only to get nervous and realize that, like her mother warned her, she’s not ready. (Julie and Matt do have sex later — after it’s been firmly established over the course of a season or so that Matt is, indeed, the “right” guy.)
On How I Met Your Mother, Robin Scherbatsky realizes her younger sister Katie has plans to have sex with her obnoxious boyfriend when they visit New York together; she enlists her friends to help talk her out of it, and they succeed. American Beauty and What Women Want feature father figures persuading teenage girls away from having sex for the first time with men who don’t love them. In 2002′s Crossroads, Britney Spears’s valedictorian Lucy reneges at the last minute on a pact to lose her virginity with her high-school lab partner, and instead has sex for the first time with Ben, a sensitive musician who once rescued his sister from their abusive dad.
And what happens to the fictional teenage girl who actually goes through with it, who loses her virginity without waiting for a boy or man who loves her truly, madly, deeply, and honestly?
Read it all at the Atlantic.
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How Shingles Virus Was Made Worse by the Chickenpox Vaccine
The increase in cases of adult shingles has many medical professionals questioning the validity of chickenpox vaccinations. Both viruses are part of the same herpes virus family and both are highly contagious.
Chickenpox vaccinations are not a permanent form of vaccination. When vaccinated children become adults, they find themselves vulnerable to contracting chickenpox, a disease that is more taxing to an adult than a child.
The rise in the number of shingles cases has caused many doctors to question the validity of mandating a vaccine for the virus as part of a child’s vaccination requirement for attending school. In fact, New York Times Best Selling Author Dr. Joseph Mercola states on his website that “vaccinating children for chickenpox may very well be causing a shingles epidemic”. (1)
Is the Chickenpox Vaccination a Valid Requirement?
Before the vaccine, chickenpox was a common childhood disease that nearly every child had. It was almost a rite of passage since it was just one of the things every parent expected their child must go through. While there were always a few cases of children and even adults dying as a result of chickenpox, they were the exceptions.
Read it all at Top Secret Writers.
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Therapy programs patients’ own cells to fight cancer
It is vanishingly rare for an experimental treatment to wipe out advanced, recurrent cancer, then keep the disease from coming back.
Yet therapies driven by CARs have been doing exactly that in a small but growing number of blood-cancer patients at the University of Pennsylvania and other centers.
In simplest terms, a CAR – chimeric antigen receptor – is a synthetic genetic structure that programs the patient’s immune cells to recognize and attack cancer.
But there is nothing simple about these molecular taskmasters. CARs endow key immune cells with unnatural power, making them as lethal and tenacious – and potentially as hard to control – as the malignant cells they strike.
While the technology has not yet worked well against solid-tumor cancers, that may change with the rollout of next-generation “armored” and “muscle” CARs. Some big biopharma companies are banking on it.
“There are people in [the] industry who feel this is the future . . . for cancer,” said Renier J. Brentjens, a leukemia specialist working on CARs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “This may be revolutionary, like penicillin” was against deadly infections.
The stakes are so high that CARs are already the stuff of lawsuits.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis is suing Penn, accusing it of trying to commercialize a CAR that St. Jude has patented. Penn is countersuing, contending that its CAR therapy has crucial differences – and that St. Jude’s patent is invalid.
Neither side would discuss the litigation.
One good thing: St. Jude says it does not intend to try to make Penn stop using the CAR, since that might delay care “to the detriment of cancer patients.”
Penn’s team – cell therapy pioneer Carl June and colleagues David Porter, Michael Kalos, and Bruce Levine – was not the first to test a CAR therapy in humans, but it was the first to report jaw-dropping success.
In 2010, Penn’s version unexpectedly eradicated the cancer of the first patient to try it, a 64-year-old man with end-stage chronic lymphocytic leukemia who had exhausted conventional options. He is cancer-free almost three years later.
It has become clear that his response was not a fluke. Full remissions have been reported in at least 18 adult and pediatric blood-cancer patients at centers including Penn, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, and Baylor College of Medicine.
Not all patients get better, but enough have to keep hopes soaring. At Penn and Children’s, for example, leukemia was eradicated in seven of the first 12 patients – 58 percent.
Since then, more children, including Maddie Major of La Plata, Md., and Avrey Walker of Redmond, Ore., have gone from gravely ill to cancer-free.
“The responses are rapid, not like with regular chemotherapy,” June said. “An average of 3.5 pounds of cancer are cleared in each patient.”
Read it all HERE>
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Prehistoric Human Ancestor that Walked like a Chimp and Smiled Like a Man
Photo: Brett Eloff/Lee R. Berger/University of WitwatersrandOne sunny morning in 2008, nine-year-old Matthew Berger was chasing his dog Tau near his father’s dig site in the Malapa Nature Reserve, Johannesburg, South Africa, when he stumbled upon a fossilized bone. He ran to his dad, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, who came over and cursed widly. Matthew mistakenly thought his father was angry because he had done something wrong, but Lee was just excited. “Sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died,” Lee said. The boy had just discovered a new hominid species.
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