Here's a map of Central America and the Caribbean from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, Univ. of Texas...
Here'a a community area map of the greater Los Angeles megacity...
From the CIA, a 1.3 MB map of Iraq, and a 1.6 MB NIMA map of Baghdad, from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, Univ. of Texas...
Here's an 1805 allegorical map of "The Paths of Life" that outlines the different potential courses that a person's life can take...
The "Map of BCS Conferences" shows the names and locations of the college football teams that make up the different conferences, plus the Independent schools...
A new high-resolution map of American per-capita CO2 emissions. It shows the amount of carbon dioxide produced in 100 square kilometer regions of the United States divided by the number of residents in that area. I'm using a much smaller version,
but you can download the full eight megabyte ultra-high-resolution file here.
In honor of the Berlin...I mean, the Beijing Olympics. here's a pdf download Tiananmen Massacre map that points out the street locations and hospitals where the students died in and around the Square...
From Barry Cooper, narcotics interdiction expert, a Narcotics Interdiction Map showing the locations citizens are likely to encounter drug interdiction officers. Some officers are rated on their willingness to violate the 4th amendment...
From OurAmazingPlanet, here's a map of Earth's Atmosphere, which extends 200 miles out from the planet...
On July 13 Chicago poet Dred Sista Ren passed away. (Info from her MySpace page)
Dred Sista Ren/LaTressa R. Hodges-Lumpkin considers herself a "WEstorian because their history is fiction, give it back." And a Poetical Commentator "things that are overstood never need to be explained." She is a sought after published poet, political organizer and lecturer. Sista Ren is a founding member of the Vanguard Black Underground with nearly twenty years in the game. She hails from Fitzgerald's, Spices, Dejoie's, the Bop Shop, the Literary Guild Complex, Rituals, A Touch of the Past and most importantly Literary Explosions (Lit-X) Anotha Level. She has performed and/or hosted at universities, venues and festivals around the country and Canada.
Gertrude Rubin, Beloved Poet, 1921 - 2010
Beloved Chicago poet, writer, civil rights activist and author of The Passover Poems, Gertrude Rubin passed away on Saturday, July 24, 2010, at the age of 89. Rubin was one of the first contributors to ChicagoPoetry.com, submitting eleven poems for publication in the year 2000 that are archived here. Rubin was a member of the Poets Club of Chicago and the Poets and Patrons group. Gert was also the aunt of David Rubin, original founder and host of the Cafe Aloha poetry series.
Funeral Services will be held on Wednesday, July 28, at 2 PM, at The Piser Chapel, 9200 N. Skokie Blvd. (at Church St.) in Skokie (847-679-4740) and at Interment Memorial Park Cemetery, Skokie. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions made to Beth Emet Synagogue, 1224 W. Dempster St., Evanston, IL 60202 would be appreciated.
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Brother Love sent in a band plugger, asking for fan help getting him to open for KISS!
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Wisconsin School Cuts Crime By Changing Menu
Whether we like it or not the food that we eat doesn’t just affect our waistlines, it effects the way that we feel. If you’re mindful of the way you feel after munching on a Hershey bar and a coke then you’re less likely to eat junk food because the highs and the lows become too hard to bear. But in a move that may seem slightly more controversial, one school principal in Appleton, Wis., changed the school menu to cut crime at the school. According to a recent story on WELL Said, LuAnn Coenen, the principal at a high school, reduced fighting, weapons-carrying, and general lack of focus and discipline in the school by changing the menu.
Christina Pirello wrote on her blog WELL Said about the Wisconsin school that took an innovative approach to fixing crime and discontent. According to the story, vending machines were the first to go, replaced by water coolers and processed burgers and fries became fruits and vegetables.
“With the departure of junk food, she also saw the departure of vandalism, litter and the need for police patrolling her hallways. The students were calm, socially engaged and focused on their schoolwork. Problems were minimal. And all Ms. Coenen did was change the menu.”
But this isn’t a coincidence according to a story in Ode Magazine. The brain is an active machine. It uses a whopping 20 percent of our energy. In order to generate that energy, we need a broad range of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and unsaturated fatty acids that we get from nutritious meals. These nutrients aren’t provided in the host of processed junk food that many of us call food.
Stephen Schoenthaler, professor of criminal justice at California State University proved that much when he conducted a study on students at 803 low-income neighborhood schools in New York City. With a supervised change in the students’ diets, passing final exam grades went from 11 percent below the national average to 5 percent above it.
High Doses Of Controversial Chemical BPA Discovered In Paper Receipts
As lawmakers and health experts wrestle over whether a controversial chemical, bisphenol-A, should be banned from food and beverage containers, a new analysis by an environmental group suggests Americans are being exposed to BPA through another, surprising route: paper receipts.
The Environmental Working Group found BPA on 40 percent of the receipts it collected from supermarkets, automated teller machines, gas stations and chain stores. In some cases, the total amount of BPA on the receipt was 1,000 times the amount found in the epoxy lining of a can of food, another controversial use of the chemical.
Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst with the environmental group, says BPA’s prevalence on receipts could help explain why the chemical can be detected in the urine of an estimated 93 percent of Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We’ve come across potentially major sources of BPA right here in our daily lives,” Lunder said. “When you’re carrying around a receipt in your wallet for months while you intend to return something, you could be shedding BPA into your home, into your environment. If you throw a receipt into a bag of food, and it’s lying there against an apple, or you shove a receipt into your bag next to a baby pacifier, you could be getting all kinds of exposure and not realize it.”
What remains unknown is how much of the chemical that may rub off onto the hands is absorbed through the skin or whether people then ingest BPA by handling food or touching their mouths.
Among those surveyed, receipts from Safeway supermarkets contained the highest concentration of BPA. A receipt taken from a store in the District contained 41 milligrams of the chemical. If the equivalent amount of BPA was ingested by a 155-pound adult, that would exceed EPA’s decades-old safe exposure limit for BPA by 12 times.
Brian Dowling, a Safeway spokesman, said the company is researching the issue and consulting with its suppliers of receipt paper.
Japan’s Future Threatened by Strict Immigration Rules
For Japan, maintaining economic relevance in the next decades hinges on its ability — and its willingness — to grow by seeking outside help. Japan has long had deep misgivings about immigration and has tightly controlled the ability of foreigners to live and work here.
But with the country’s population expected to fall from 127 million to below 100 million by 2055, Prime Minister Naoto Kan last month took a step toward loosening Japan’s grip on immigration, outlining a goal to double the number of highly skilled foreign workers within a decade.
In Japan, just 1.7 percent of the population (or roughly 2.2 million people) is foreign or foreign-born. Foreigners represent small slices of almost every sector of the economy, but they also represent the one slice of the population with a chance to grow. Japan is on pace to have three workers for every two retirees by 2060.
But the economic partnership program that brought Paulino and hundreds of other nurses and caretakers to Japan has a flaw. Indonesian and Filipino workers who come to care for a vast and growing elderly population cannot stay for good without passing a certification test. And that test’s reliance on high-level Japanese — whose characters these nurses cram to memorize — has turned the test into a de facto language exam.
Ninety percent of Japanese nurses pass the test. This year, three of 254 immigrants passed it. The year before, none of 82 passed.
For immigrant advocates, a pass-or-go-home test with a success rate of less than 1 percent creates a wide target for criticism — especially at a time when Japan’s demographics are increasing the need for skilled foreign labor.
For many officials in the government and the medical industry, however, difficulties with the program point to a larger dilemma confronting a country whose complex language and resistance to foreigners make it particularly tough to penetrate.
Kan’s goal to double the number of skilled foreign workers seems reasonable enough, given that Japan currently has 278,000 college-educated foreign workers — the United States has more than 8 million, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — but it meets some resistance.
An Asahi Shimbun newspaper poll in June asked Japanese about accepting immigrants to “maintain economic vitality.” Twenty-six percent favored the idea. Sixty-five percent opposed it. And the likelihood of substantive changes in immigration policy took a major hit, experts said, when Kan’s ruling Democratic Party of Japan saw setbacks in parliamentary elections this month.
Political analysts now paint a grim picture of a country at legislative impasse. Foreigners such as Paulino find it difficult to get here, difficult to thrive and difficult to stay, and at least for now, Kan’s government will have a difficult time changing any of that.
‘A lack of urgency’
“There’s a lack of urgency or lack of sense of crisis for the declining population in Japan,” said Satoru Tominaga, director of Garuda, an advocacy group for Indonesian nurse and caretaker candidates. “We need radical policy change to build up the number” of such workers. “However, Japan lacks a strong government; if anything, it’s in chaos.”
When Japan struck economic partnership agreements with Indonesia and the Philippines, attracting nurses and caretakers wasn’t the primary objective. Japan sought duty-free access for its automakers to the Southeast Asian market. Accepting skilled labor was just part of the deal.
But by 2025, Japan will need to almost double its number of nurses and care workers, currently at 1.2 million. And because of the test, substandard language skills, not substandard caretaking skills, are keeping the obvious solution from meeting the gaping need.
The 998 Filipino and Indonesian nurses and caretakers who’ve come to Japan since 2008 all have, at minimum, college educations or several years of professional experience. Nurses can stay for three years, with three chances to pass the test. Other caregivers can stay for four years, with one chance to pass. Those who arrive in Japan take a six-month language cram class and then begin work as trainees.
They are allotted a brief period every workday — 45 minutes, in Paulino’s case — for language study. Many also study for hours at night.
“The language skills, that is a huge hurdle for them,” said Kiichi Inagaki, an official at the Japan International Corporation for Welfare Services, which oversees the program. “However, if you go around the hospital, you understand how language is important. Nurses are dealing with medical technicalities. They are talking to doctors about what is important. In order to secure a safe medical system, they need a very high standard of Japanese.”
Advocates for foreign nurses and caregivers do not play down the importance of speaking and understanding Japanese. But they emphasize that the Japanese characters for medical terminology are among the hardest to learn; perhaps some jargon-heavy portion of the certification test, they say, could be given in English or workers’ native language.
A new culture
When Paulino boarded a flight from Manila to Tokyo in May 2009, she had a sense of trepidation and adventure — not that she could express it in Japanese. She saw her mission as a way to make better money and “explore herself,” she said. Her first chance for exploration came onboard, when a meal of rice, which she doesn’t like, came with chopsticks, which she didn’t know how to use.
“All the way to Japan, we were joking about that,” said Fritzie Perez, a fellow Filipino nurse who sat in the same row. “We were saying, ‘Joyce, how are you going to eat?’ ”
Now eight months into her stint at the Tamagawa Subaru nursing home, Paulino feels comfortable speaking and joking with the elderly people she cares for.
“She did have problems initially, especially in the Japanese language, but there’s been so much improvement,” said Keisuke Isozaki, head of caretaking at the home. “She’s not capable of writing things down for the record, but otherwise she’s as capable as any Japanese staffer.”
Paulino said she is nervous about her test, scheduled for January 2013. This month, 33 nurses and caretakers returned to their home countries, discouraged with their chances.
Her friend, Perez, described the language study and the caretaking as “serving two masters at the same time.”
“When I get home, that’s when I study,” Paulino said. “But every time I read my book, I start to fall asleep. It’s bothering me. Because [the test] is only one chance. And I don’t know if I can get it.”
Risk of Earthquakes in the U.S. Midwest May be More Widespread Than First Thought
The risk of earthquakes in the U.S. Midwest may be more widespread than geologists have believed, but a “big one” may be less likely at Missouri’s New Madrid fault, researchers said.
They found that rivers that swept away sediments at the end of the last ice age could have triggered a series of large earthquakes that began in 1811 in the New Madrid seismic zone.
This suggests that these fault segments are unlikely to fail again soon, but the same process could trigger earthquakes on nearby fault segments, they reported in the journal Nature.
When glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age between 16,000 and 10,000 years ago, monstrous rivers formed and washed away 40 feet of sediment.
Eric Calais of Purdue University in Indiana and colleagues developed a computer model that shows this could have caused the crust underneath to slowly lift and cause the magnitude 7 and greater quakes that shook the Missouri-Arkansas border region in 1811 and 1812, causing the Mississippi River to run backwards and ringing church bells as far away as Boston.
“Models indicate that fault segments that have already ruptured are unlikely to fail again soon, but stress changes from sediment unloading and previous earthquakes may eventually be sufficient to bring to failure other nearby segments that have not yet ruptured,” Calais and colleagues wrote.
Areas such as Charleston, South Carolina, hit by a highly damaging quake in 1886, may be susceptible to more activity cased by the processes described by Calais, geophysicist Mark Zoback of Stanford University in California wrote in a commentary.
Scientists have a good understanding of earthquakes at major faults where one of the Earth’s tectonic plates touches another one — such as in California, Indonesia and Haiti.
Less well understood are intraplate faults — faults in the middle of a plate — like the New Madrid fault.
“Much still needs to be done to reduce earthquake hazards for those living along active plate boundaries. To recognize that, one needs only to look at the devastating consequences of the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Sumatra (230,000 dead in 14 countries), or the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year (approximately 200,000 dead and 2 million left homeless),” Zoback added.
But the uncertainty can be even worse in intraplate regions. “In the past decade alone, tens of thousands of people have died in each of the earthquakes that hit Bhuj, India (2001), and Bam, Iran (2003), as well as in the magnitude 7.9 Wenchuan event that occurred in China in 2008,” Zoback wrote.
He said the New Madrid seismic zone is the best studied of such locations.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 222
Geeknotes:
Don't Wait Animate
Stars Go Dim
Kindred Souls
CRAM VOLUME 9
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Don't Wait Animate - Festival news & Free DJ mix
Ola,
We hope Summer has been treating you well so far. After much strife we finally moved into our new DWA base in New Cross complete with an underground studio space just in time for us to begin recording our as yet untitled album. Suffice to say we’re super psyched and we’ll keep you posted as and when demos are ready.
Stars Go Dim
Hello everybody! We miss you all. Looking forward to seeing your smiling faces here soon at some upcoming shows. You and your friends can still download ALL our music FREE at www.starsgodim.com/free. All we ask is that you share it with as many people as possible. Deal? We are very excited to be performing in some new areas soon like Michigan, Nebraska, and Ohio. California! Watch for us in later September. Florida! Watch for us in November. Dates being posted soon. If you love Stars Go Dim (do you?) please consider joining our Street Team and helping us get the word out in a massive way. Join the team HERE! We are working hard on new music right now. We are very excited about the new songs. There is no release date set as of yet. We still have lots of work to do. You all don't understand how much we appreciate you all. We read every email and every Facebook post. You have a special place in our hearts. Thanks for all your love and support.
Peace and love,
Michael, Chris, Joey, and Lester
Kindred Souls - Live at The Saint in Asbury Park - Friday, July 23 at 8pm
Singer Songwriter Showcase @ The Underground in NYC - Tuesday, July 27 at 8 pm
Congratulations go out to the forty poets selected for inclusion in the new publication, CRAM VOLUME 9: POETRY IN THE FIRST, which will soon be given away free to the public, starting on the evening of Friday, July 30, when advance copies of Cram 9 will be given away, FREE, to people attending The Printers' Ball at Columbia College, 1104 S. Wabash Ave. Look for Cram representatives Donna Pecore and Donna Kiser at the Ball to get an advance copy. The Cram 9 distribution will then continue at the official release party and reading on Saturday, August 14, 7 PM, at Cafe Ballou, 939 N. Western Ave, where Cram 9 poets will be invited to read their work and where there will also be an open mic hosted by yours truly.
As you know, Poetry Cram Magazine is a unique way for talented poets to get their work into the hands of the people as quickly as possible. We know that copies of Cram won't sit in a dusty box waiting to be purchased because we GIVE them away! Over 2,400 copies of Cram have been given away free so far at such distinguished Chicago area venues as, The Harold Washington Library, The Printers Row Book Fair, The Woodland Pattern Bookstore, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and The AWP Conference. Because copies of Cram are distributed for free to those who are interested in poetry, Cram has become one of the most widely read poetry publications coming out of Chicago today. Recently we announced an open call for Cram Volume 9 that sought poetry about "YOU" and we received more submissions than ever. Forty poets were chosen for inclusion, more poets than Cram has ever published in a singe issue.
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Earth’s Upper Atmosphere Suffers Record Breaking Collapse
The Earth’s upper atmosphere has had a record breaking collapse, one that has scientists both puzzled and worried, NASA announced Thursday.
The collapse occurred during a period of low solar activity known as a “solar minimum.” During a solar minimum, sunspots and solar flare activity heavily diminish. Since the date range of a solar minimum expands over a 12-month period, it can take up to 6 months to identify one.
This collapse occurred during the 2008-2009 solar minimum. While these minimums are known to cool and contract the thermosphere, this collapse was 3-times greater than low solar activity could explain…
“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” said John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “It’s a Space Age record. Something is going on that we do not understand.”
Earth’s thermosphere ranges in altitude from 55 miles to 370 miles above ground, so it is heavily affected by solar activity. This layer is responsible for intercepting extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) before it hits the Earth’s surface.
When solar activity is high–known as a solar maximum–solar EUV warms the thermosphere causing it to expand–a lot! It’s like sticking a marshmallow peep in the microwave. When it is low, the opposite happens. While the 2008-2009 solar minimum was an extreme low for solar activity, the collapse was bigger than the sun’s activity alone could explain.
It’s worth noting that during a solar maximum, power outages, satellite function and communication disruption, and GPS malfunctions are all very common. For solar maximums and minimums are the two extremes of the sun’s 11-year cycle.
Emmert suggests high carbon dioxide (CO2) levels might play a role. As you know, CO2 acts as a coolant, shedding heat through infrared radiation. He speculates that the CO2 could magnify the cooling period during a solar minimum.
But if it is CO2, wouldn’t solar maximums also be affected?
“But the numbers don’t quite add up,” notes Emmert. “Even when we take CO2 into account using our best understanding of how it operates as a coolant, we cannot fully explain the thermosphere’s collapse.”
Beyond the Gulf Oil Spill: Five Ongoing Ecological Disasters With No End In Sight
by Jennifer Hattam, Istanbul, Turkey
Living some 6,000 miles away from the Gulf of Mexico, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that the oil spill often seems like an abstraction to me. A big, big abstraction, but still. Pictures of oil-covered pelicans and other heart-tugging images occasionally appear in the Turkish press, but generally, people here -- like people anywhere -- are more concerned about domestic issues, of which we have plenty. And I know that when I was living in the United States, the Turkish mining disasters that so compel me now would have seemed equally remote.
That's why an article on "The World's Ongoing Ecological Disasters" -- some of which make the BP spill pale in comparison -- offered an especially striking reminder that there are ecosystems and people suffering outside the eye of the nightly news.
A Five-Decade Oil Spill in Nigeria
In his piece this week for Foreign Policy, author Joshua E. Keating highlights five global environmental catastrophes that appear to be even harder to solve that the BP spill. "The Deepwater Horizon incident may have been the worst oil spill in U.S. history, but it pales in comparison to the ongoing catastrophe that has afflicted Nigeria's Niger River Delta over the last five decades," he writes, noting that the African country suffers the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year. "Oil companies operating in the region blame thieves and sabotage for the majority of the spills, though local activists say aging equipment and lax safety are the cause of many of them," Keating writes, adding that the problem will likely worsen as oil companies seek black gold in places where it's harder to extract.
Rescuers outside a Chinese coal mine where 28 miners were killed in an underground fire July 18. Photo via Xinhua/Liu Xiao.
Coal Fires Keep Blazing in China
In Inner Mongolia, more than 60 underground coal fires have been burning since the 1960s, potentially causing up to 3 percent of the world's carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. Coal is just as bad for people in China as it is for the environment; as many as 13 coal miners are killed each day while working under extremely dangerous conditions. Chinese workers face the world's highest risk of mine accidents, followed by Russia and Turkey.
This satellite image of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic clearly shows how much deforestation has occurred on the Haitian side of the border (left). Photo via NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Deforestation Adds to Haiti's Woes
The devastating earthquake in Haiti only compounded the problems of this Caribbean island, where tree-cutting carried out since 1492 has left the ground almost completely treeless. According to Foreign Policy, "98 percent of its forests are gone -- one of the worst cases of deforestation in human history," largely due to cutting trees for charcoal fuel. The ensuing erosion has devastated the agriculture sector in Haiti and made the island more prone to deadly landslides in the event of a natural disaster.
An ocean of plastic pollutes our seas. Photo via 100ambiente
A Garbage Dump Swirls in the Pacific Ocean
The massive "soup of plastic and debris one-and-a-half times the size of the United States" that is floating in the Pacific Ocean is only the most widely publicized example of a major global problem, Keating writes: "According to the U.N. Environment Program the world's oceans contain 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile. These plastics are responsible for the deaths more than a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals every year."
The drying up the Aral Sea has stranded ships on the sand. Photo via The Aral Sea Disaster
A Sea Dies in Central Asia
Damming and canalization in Central Asia by the Soviet Union, which sought to build a cotton industry in Uzbekistan's desert, have shrank the Aral Sea dramatically and made it so salty that all the fish species that once lived in it are extinct. Dilapidated boats moored in a sea of sand are a famously poignant image of environmental destruction, but the shrinking of the sea has less visible impacts as well: "When the wind sweeps across the now-dry sea bed, it spreads up to 75 million tons of toxic dust and salt across Central Asia every year."
Efforts to return water to the area, however, have allowed the Northern Aral to grow by 20 percent and fish and birds are starting to return. It's a small glimmer of hope in a world of too-little-known problems.
New Energy Technologies to unveil see-through glass SolarWindow
New Energy Technologies has announced that researchers have made major scientific and technical breakthroughs, which allows the company to unveil a working prototype of the world’s first glass window capable of generating electricity, in the upcoming weeks.
Until now, solar panels have remained opaque, with the prospect of creating a see-through glass window capable of generating electricity limited by the use of metals and various expensive processes which block visibility and prevent light from passing through glass surfaces.
The technology has been made possible by making use of the world’s smallest working organic solar cells, developed by Dr. Xiaomei Jiang at the University of South Florida. Unlike conventional solar systems, New Energy’s solar cells generate electricity from both natural and artificial light sources, outperforming today’s commercial solar and thin-film technologies by as much as 10-fold.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 221
Geeknotes:
Billy Nankouma Konate at Hooked On Drums in Chicago
Alien Encounters - An Atlanta SF Celebration of Authors of Color
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Billy Nankouma Konate Adult Djembe Workshop, Chicago, this Saturday, 7-17-10!
Special One-Time-Only African Drumming Class for Adults!
Intensive Djembe & Dundun Drum Workshop with
Billy Nankouma Konate
Acclaimed Djembefola and son of Master Drummer Famoudou Konate
This Saturday, July 17, 2010, 10 am to 2:30 pm (4 hours of instruction)
Price: $100—cash or money order—pay on day of the workshop
Adults 18 years or older ONLY
Location: The Hooked On Drums Studio, Room 211 at Kennicott Park, 4434 S. Lake Park Ave., Kenwood neighborhood, South Side, Chicago, IL
CALL 773-251-8067 TO REGISTER!
You must register in advance by calling no later than Friday, July 16. Leave your name and your phone number for call-back confirmation.
Minimum 6 students, maximum 21.
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From the Black Science Fiction Society:
Alien Encounters - An Atlanta SF Celebration of Authors of Color
Alien Encounters is scheduled for Thursday, September 2, 2010 through Sunday, September 5, 2010
The Auburn Ave Research Library on African American Culture and history will present an event to explore speculative fiction in novels, comics, graphic art by African American artists and writers -- including book signings and readings.
TH, SEPT 2 (6:30p-9p): [Hammond’s House] Wine & Words - Reception to meet the authors in which Michelle will hold a conversation with a panel of authors, open to audience discourse as well.
F, SEPT 3 (6:30p-9p): [Auburn Ave Library] Milton’s Anthology and the authors are featured.
SA, SEPT 4 (2p-6p): [Auburn Ave Library] Teen event with Dawud and other YA authors
SU, SEPT 5 (2p-6p): [Auburn Ave Library] Movie screening and discussion facilitated by Dr. Jonathan Gayles
Promotion for Alien Encounters includes posting on Auburn Libr site, Written Magazine promo, and a web site created specifically for Alien Encounters so attendees can register.
Separate from Alien Encounters, Michelle is also launching an event that the Alien Encounter authors are invited to. It’s a June 26 kick off 30 books/90 days. More details later so mark your calendars.
Michelle is the founder of Written Magazine, a publication that supports authors, and I encourage you all to join her online group at http://www.writtenmag.com/.
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From Venue Verite: Sahar Adish: The Power of an Afghan Girl's Education
Since 1980, the International Rescue Committee has helped nearly 7,000 Afghans start new lives in the U.S. A shining example of the resettled Afghan story-and the power of a girl's education-is Sahar Adish. Sahar is now a 19 year-old pre-med student at the University of Virginia and recently received a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for a film she helped to make telling her family's heroic story of escape from the Taliban. On November 7, 2007 Sahar inspired a crowd of over 750 guests at the IRC's Freedom Award dinner, which officially kicked off a year-long celebration of the IRC's 75th anniversary.
Researchers Discover Gene Pattern That Predicts Who Will Live the Longest
Researchers have found a pattern of genes that predicts with more accuracy than ever before who might live to be 100 or older — even if they have other genes linked with disease.
Their findings, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, offer the tantalizing possibility of predicting who might hope for a longer life. They also cast doubt on the accuracy of tests being marketed now that offer to predict a person’s risk of chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Several teams of researchers have identified gene patterns linked with extreme old age. But the researchers led by Paola Sebastiani and Dr. Thomas Perls at Boston University say theirs provides the best accuracy yet.
They studied more than 1,000 people who lived to be 100 or more and matched them to 1,200 other people to identify the genetic patterns more common in the 100-year-olds using an approach called a genome-wide association study.
To their surprise, the longest-lived people had many of the same genes linked with diseases as everyone else. Their old-age genes appeared to cancel out the effects of the disease genes.
“A lot of people might ask, ‘well who would want to live to 100 because they think they have every age-related disease under the sun and are on death’s doorstep, and certainly have Alzheimer’s’, but this isn’t true,” Perls told reporters in a telephone briefing.
“We have noted in previous work that 90 percent of centenarians are disability-free at the average age of 93. We had long hypothesized that to get to 100 you have to have a relative lack of disease-associated variants. But in this case, we’re finding that not to be the case.”
NO FREE PASSES
They identified 19 patterns among about 150 genes and said these patterns predicted with 77 percent accuracy who would be in the extreme old-age group.
“Some signatures correlate with the longest survival, other signatures correlate with the most delayed age of onset of age-related diseases such as dementia or cardiovascular disease or hypertension,” Sebastiani said.
The researchers stressed that having these genes is unlikely to give a person a free pass to smoke, drink and overeat.
Sebastiani said Seventh Day Adventists have an average life expectancy of 88, eight years more than their average U.S. contemporaries.
“They get there by virtue of the fact that they have a religion that asks them to be vegetarian, they regularly exercise, they don’t drink alcohol, they tend to manage their stress well through religion and time with family and they don’t smoke,” she said. “It really does speak to the incredible importance of lifestyle factors.”
The Boston researchers said they do not plan to market a test for the long-life genes and are working to design a free website where people who have had their DNA sequenced can check and see if they have any of them.
“The methodology that we developed can be applied to other complex genetic traits, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, cardiovascular disease and diabetes,” Sebastiani said.
Currently about 1 in 6,000 people live to be 100 and 1 in 7 million makes it to 110. The researchers said beliefs that certain populations in places such as Russia or Azerbaijan are more likely to have centenarians have been shown to be untrue.
Perls said he does not see the findings leading to youth elixirs, but hopes they may be used to help delay the start of age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Black Inventor Reveals Two Amazing Energy Saving Inventions On CNN
Lonnie Johnson, an inventor who has worked for NASA and created the Supersoker has started working in Atlanta to find alternative sources of energy and has created a lithium based battery that will work in cars as well as a new engine.
The Secret to Running and Swimming Faster – The Position of Your Belly Button
Sports commentators have long avoided trying to explain why blacks dominate on the running track and whites often finish first in the swimming pool. But scientists in America claim they have come up with a very simple explanation to defy the guardians of political correctness.
They say it’s all down to belly-buttons.
In a study suggesting that navel gazing may not be such a waste of time after all, top US university professors claim it’s not important whether an athlete has an ‘innie’ or an ‘outie’ but where his or her navel is in relation to the rest of the body.
They say the belly-button determines the centre of gravity.
According to the report published yesterday in the International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics, black people’s navels are higher than whites.
That gives them a speed advantage on the track, said the study, but holds them back in the pool.
Given two runners or swimmers of the same height, one black and one white, ‘what matters is not total height but the position of the belly- button, or centre of gravity,’ claims Duke University professor Andre Bejan, the lead author of the study.
‘It so happens that in the architecture of the human body of West African-origin runners, the centre of gravity is significantly higher than in runners of European origin,’ which puts them at an advantage in sprints on the track, he added.
Blacks generally have longer legs than white athletes, which means their belly-buttons are three centimeters higher than whites’, said Professor Bejan.
That means the black athletes have a ‘hidden height’ that is 3 per cent greater than whites’, which gives them a significant running speed advantage.
‘Locomotion is essentially a continual process of falling forward, and mass that falls from a higher altitude, falls faster, the professor explained.
In the pool, meanwhile, whites have the advantage because they have longer torsos, making their belly-buttons lower in the general scheme of body architecture.
‘Swimming is the art of surfing the wave created by the swimmer,’ said Professor Bejan.
‘The swimmer who makes the bigger wave is the faster swimmer, and a longer torso makes a bigger wave.
‘Europeans have a 3 per cent longer torso than West Africans, which gives them a 1.5 per cent speed advantage in the pool,’ he added.
Asians have the same long torsos as Europeans, giving them the same potential to be record-breakers in the pool.
But they often lose out to whites because whites are taller, he explained.
Many scientists have avoided studying why blacks make better sprinters and whites better swimmers because of what the study calls the ‘obvious’ race angle.
But Professor Bejan said the study he conducted with Edward Jones, a professor at Howard University in Washington, and Duke graduate Jordan Charles, focused on the athletes’ geographic origins and biology, not race, which the authors of the study call a ‘social construct.’
Professor Bejan is white, originally from Romania, and Professor Jones is black, from South Carolina.
They charted and analysed nearly 100 years of records in men’s and women’s sprinting and 100-meters freestyle swimming for the study.
Scientists Prove Which Came First — The Chicken or the Egg
One of the most puzzling and famous life questions has stumped people for generations. It’s the question of which came first: the chicken or the egg? In order for there to be an egg, a chicken would have had to lay it. In order for there to be a chicken, it would have had to hatch from an egg. It seems as though either answer could be the correct answer; until now.
Dr. Colin Freeman from Sheffield University along with colleagues from Warwick University have figured it all out. Their research project originally aimed to figure out how animals make eggshells because it’s an extraordinarily strong yet lightweight material that no human has been able to replicate, and the researchers hoped to learn how to develop a manmade equivalent by learning about the way animals make eggshells.
Chickens were chosen as their test subjects simply because the protein was easy to study. The study began when Freeman and his colleagues used the UK Science Research Council’s super-computer called HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resource), which is based in Edinburgh. The “ingredients” used to make eggshells were programmed into HECToR, and that was it. The computer was left to produce results on its own, and it took weeks for HECToR to figure out how chickens make eggshells.
When HECToR finally arrived at a conclusion, the researchers were stunned when they realized that they had solved the age old question. After years and years of debate, it was finally determined that the chicken came before the egg.
“It had long been suspected that the egg came first, but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,” said Freeman.
What they found was a protein, called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17), that exists only in a chicken’s ovaries and is vital to eggshell formation in chickens. The protein acts as an ongoing builder that pieces microscopic parts of the shell together by converting calcium carbonate into calcite crystals. The shell would not exist without this protein, which only exists in chickens, so the end result is that the chicken came first.
The protein was discovered before this research project, but HECToR made it easier for the researchers to observe the process “in microscopic detail,” thus understand the proteins significance in the eggshell-making procedure.
So what does this mean for those who always thought the egg came first? Freeman and his colleagues referred to some theories that suggest that chickens’ “ancestors evolved to create hard eggs around the time of the dinosaurs.”
In addition to answering the question that has burdened the human race for ages, the results of this study could be advantageous in the medical field since human bones and teeth are made in a similar way as eggshells. This could lead to a better understanding of how to rebuild human bones. Also, the study could help figure out how crystal structures can be made and destroyed (since the eggshells are made up of microscopic crystals). Learning how this can be done could lead to the elimination of limescale crystals on pipes and kettles.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 220
Geeknotes:
Catgut Does The Story Times
Download Stars Go Dim For Free
Rusty Wright Band
Garageband Goes Bye Bye
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Catgut Does The Story Times
Hello everyone. Catgut is providing the music for The Story Times, a weekly satirical children's storybook cartoon parody on Dave TV's website. It appears every Thursday, to cover the week's current affairs.
email: catgut'at'littlecatgut'dot'com
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Download Stars Go Dim For Free
Download ALL of Stars Go Dim's music for FREE! All we ask is that you share it with as many people as possible. Deal? Give our album to your friends, family, co-workers, Facebook friends, strangers...everybody! Burn CDs and hand them out, email your friends the download link, Tweet the link, and post on all your social websites. This is our way of saying thank you for your amazing support.
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Rusty Wright Band
Big things are happening for us in the Rusty Wright Band. We will be leaving for a 12 day tour of beautiful Italy! July 13 through the 25th. Less than a week away!
We are so excited about going that we want to continue our video blogging like we started last year on the Bluzapalooza tour of S. Korea and Japan. We've learned a lot in the last year and have set up a place on the band website for you to follow along as we travel from one end of Italy to the other.
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Garageband Goes Bye Bye
After ten years of helping people discover independent music, Garageband.com will be retired on July 15th, 2010.
The landscape of how music is discovered and delivered has changed drastically over the last decade. We are proud to have been a part of that change -- first with Garageband.com and then with iLike.com, and today with MySpace. As part of the effort to deliver the best user experience, we're focusing our resources on MySpace and iLike, and retiring Garageband.
Garageband had fallen below the radar in recent years as a hot site for new bands to expose and showcase their work. Even so, I found a lot of great music there; it will be missed.
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From Venue Verite:
"Soul on a Wave," a Surfing Documentary
2007 promotional trailer for "Soul on a Wave," a Surfing Documentary that I think is still in pre-production, based on the life stories, challenges, and triumphs of "Black Surfing Association" members, and members of the International "Caribbean Surf Network." Posted by one of the producers, Portia Scott-Hicks. Fascinating...
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RoseStreet Labs Triple-Layered Solar Panel Catches Full Solar Spectrum
Solar panels are a great technology, yanking free energy out of the air in non-polluting way. But unfortunately, they generally only catch about 15% of the suns rays, making them painfully inefficient. Now a new kind of panel aims to bump that up.
Panels from RoseStreet Labs use three separate layers of photovoltaic cells in each panel, cranking the efficiency to more than double that of typical panels, to 35%. With each layer capturing a different part of the sun’s spectrum, the panel as a whole can deliver much more free juice to whatever its hooked up to.
One gets the feeling that, once this tech is finally perfected, solar energy will be the main source of electricity in many places. If only they could hurry the process up.
How to Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi Networks
Starbucks is offering free Wi-Fi to all customers, at every location, starting today. Whether you’re clicking connect on Starbucks’ Wi-Fi or some other unsecured, public Wi-Fi network, here’s how to stay safe and secure while surfing a public hotspot.
Just because most wireless routers have a firewall to protect you from the internet doesn’t mean you’re protected from others connected to the same network. Lots of wireless hotspots these days are completely unencrypted, usually so they’re easier to connect to (baristas don’t need to be giving out the internet password to everyone that walks in). However, this leaves you unprotected against malicious users in the same coffee shop, so there are a few settings you should always make sure to tweak when you’re connected to a public network…
We’re going to show you which settings are the most important ones, as well as how to automatically change your settings to the appropriate level of security every time you connect to a public network.
The Settings
1. Turn Off Sharing
When you’re at home, you may share files, printers, or even allow remote login from other computers on your network. When you’re on a public network, you’ll want to turn these things off, as anyone can access them—they don’t even need to be a hacker, and depending on your setup, some of that stuff probably isn’t even password protected. Here’s how to turn off sharing:
In Windows: Open your Control Panel, then browse to Network and Internet -> Network and Sharing Center, then click Choose Homegroup and Sharing Options -> Change Advanced Sharing Settings. Once here, you should definitely turn off file and printer sharing, and you may as well turn off network discovery and Public folder sharing. Some of this is done automatically by Windows if you specify the network as public (more on this later).
In Mac OS X: Go to System Preferences -> Sharing and make sure all the boxes are unchecked.
You’ll also want to turn off network discovery, which will be in the same place. This will prevent others from even seeing your machine on the network, meaning you’re less likely to be targeted. On Windows (as I mentioned), it’s just another check box under advanced sharing settings. On OS X, it will be called “stealth mode” and be under your firewall’s advanced settings.
2. Enable Your Firewall
Most OSes come with at least a basic firewall nowadays, and it’s a simple step to keeping unwanted local users from poking at your computer. You may already be using a firewall, but just in case, go into your security settings (in Windows under Control Panel -> System and Security -> Windows Firewall; and on Mac under System Preferences -> Security -> Firewall) and make sure your firewall is turned on. You can also edit which applications are allowed access by clicking on “allow a program or feature” in Windows and “advanced” in OS X. Your firewall is not an end-all, be-all protector, but it’s always a good idea to make sure it’s turned on.
3. Use SSL Whenever Possible
Regular web site connections over HTTP exchange lots of plain text over the wireless network you’re connected to, and someone with the right skills and bad intent can sniff out that traffic. It’s not that big of a deal when the text is some search terms you entered at Lifehacker, but it is a big deal when it’s the password to your email account. Using HTTPS (for visiting web sites) or enabling SSL (when using applications that access the internet, such as a mail client) encrypts the data passed back and forth between your computer and that web server and keep it away from prying eyes.Some sites will do it automatically, but keep an eye on the address bar and make sure the “s” in “https” is always there when you’re exchanging sensitive information. If it disappears, you should log out immediately. Note that if the sensitive browsing can wait, you might as well just do it at home—no reason in risking more than you have to. Other sites will default to HTTP connections, but support HTTPS if you manually type it in. Gmail, for example, will allow you to log in using HTTPS, and you can specify in your Gmail Settings whether you want it to use HTTPS automatically in the future. (Go to Settings, find the Browser connection setting, and set to Always use https.)
If you access your email from a desktop client such as Outlook or Mail.app, You’ll want to make sure that your accounts are SSL encrypted in their settings. If not, people could not only theoretically read your emails, but also get your usernames, passwords, or anything else they wanted. You’ll need to make sure your domain supports it, and sometimes the setup might require different settings or ports—it’s not just a matter of checking the “use SSL” box—so check your email account’s help page for more details. If it doesn’t support SSL, make sure you quit the application when you’re on an insecure public network.
4. Consider Using a Virtual Private Network
Unfortunately, not all sites offer SSL encryption. Other search engines and email providers may still be vulnerable to people watching your activity, so if you use one of these sites frequently (or really just want the extra protection), you may want to try using a VPN, or virtual private network. These services let you route all your activity through a separate secure, private network, thus giving you the security of a private network even though you’re on a public one. We’ve detailed how to set up a VPN with Hamachi, though there are a number of great services—check out our Hive Five for best VPN tools for more ideas. If all that’s a bit too complicated, you can always go with previously mentioned Hotspot Shield, which is a fairly popular app that will run in the background and set up the VPN automatically.
5. Turn It Off When You’re Not Using It
If you want to guarantee your security and you’re not actively using the internet, simply turn off your Wi-Fi. This is extremely easy in both Mac and Windows. On a Mac, just click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar and select the turn off AirPort option. On Windows, you can just right-click on the wireless icon in the taskbar to turn it off. Again, this isn’t all that useful if you need the internet, but when you’re not actively using it, it’s not a bad idea to just turn it off for the time being. The longer you stay connected, the longer people have to notice you’re there and start snooping around.
How to Automate Your Public Wi-Fi Security Settings
You don’t want to have to manually adjust all of these settings every single time you go back and forth between the coffee shop and your secure home network. Luckily, there are a few ways to automate the process so you automatically get extra protection when connected to a public Wi-Fi network.
When you first connect to any given network on Windows, you’ll be asked whether you’re connecting to a network at your home, work, or if it’s public. Each of these choices will flip the switch on a preset list of settings. The public setting, naturally, will give you the most security. You can customize what each of the presets entails by opening your Control Panel and navigating to Network and Sharing Center -> Advanced Sharing Settings. From there, you can turn network discovery, file sharing, public folder sharing, media streaming, and other options on or off for the different profiles.
On OS X, you don’t have a lot of options for automating your network preferences, but previously mentioned Airport Location will do everything you could possibly want and more. With it, you can turn on your firewall, turn off SMTP mail, connect to a VPN, and a whole lot more, all depending on the network you’ve connected to. Heck, you can even change your desktop background for each given network, as well as run Applescripts for those functions that just aren’t built in to the app.
In Your Browser
The previously mentioned HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension automatically chooses the secure HTTPS option for a bunch of popular web sites, including the New York Times, Twitter, Facebook, Google Search, and others, ensuring secure HTTPS connections to any supported web site, every time you visit. You can even add your own to their XML config file. Note that as a Firefox extension, this works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Consider a Safety-First Approach
If you’re a real road warrior, you may find yourself adding so many profiles that automating your safe settings at every step along the way may seem like a lot of work. While most chains like Starbucks or McDonald’s should have the same names for each of their Wi-Fi networks (and thus your profiles will carry over), an better approach may be to make your more secure settings the default for your system, and create just one profile for your home network. Thus, by default, file sharing would be turned off, your firewall would be at its most secure state, and so on—then, when you return home to your protected network, you can have Airport Location or NetSetMan turn your less secure settings on.
America’s First Electric Highway
Washington state is about to turn a section of Interstate-5 — all the way from Canada to Oregon — into the nation’s first electric highway. Thanks to a $1.32 million federal grant, they’ll be able to install 10 Level-3 electric charging stations along the route. Each station is capable of charging at 400 volts and 30 amps or more and at these stations a typical EV would be 80% charged in just about 30 minutes. Plug in, grab a cup of coffee, chat with fellow travelers, and be on your way.
The state is planning on building the electric transportation mecca in the fall of this year, after a bidding process this summer by electric charging station manufacturers takes place. The state is hoping to be able to install stations every 80 miles, as most new electric vehicles — like the Leaf and the Volt — have a charging range of 100 miles.
Level-3 charging stations generally don’t charge a battery completely and cold and inclement weather are also an issue. Electric vehicle battery ranges change as the temperature varies around them and with Washington’s notoriously cold and rainy seasons, it could prove to be a problem. For now, however, we’re applauding the state on their forward thinking and are green with envy of the soon to be even greener I-5 corridor.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 219
Geeknotes:
Authonomy Writing Fiction workshop
ONYXCON 2
YouWriteOn Book of the Year on TV Book Club
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Authonomy Writing Fiction workshop
Authonomy has been connecting writers through cyberspace since 2008. Now,
for one day only, authonomy will become 3D with the first authonomy Writing
Fiction workshop.
We are hosting a day-long Writing Fiction workshop for all authonomists who
want to learn new writing techniques and hone their skills under the
guidance of experienced authors, creative writing tutors, editors, and
publishing experts including:
* Roma Tearne, best selling author of BRIXTON BEACH, BONE CHINA, MOSQUITO
and THE SWIMMER. Fellow of Creative Writing at Brookes University, Oxford.
* Harry Mann, literary agent with Lucas Alexander Whitley, whose clients
include Sophie Kinsella, Nigel Slater, Alison Weir and Andy McNab
* Scott Pack, formerly Buying Manager for Waterstone's and now The Friday
Project Publisher, publishing Stewart Copeland, Richard Dawkins, Caroline
Smailes, Charlie Brooker, and Father Christmas, amongst others.
* Annabel Wright, Senior Editor at HarperCollins for six years. Her recent
books include Daniel Clay's BROKEN and WILLIAMS PROGRESS by Matt Rudd.
The workshop is being held at HarperCollins HQ in London, on Saturday 17th
July 2010. As well as offering expert tuition on your manuscript, you will
learn more about the publishing process and gain exclusive access inside
one of the UK's biggest publishing houses. This event is also an excellent
opportunity to meet fellow authonomists, editors and the authonomy team,
over a glass of something at the end of the day.
Tickets are strictly limited so click the following link to find out more
about this event and book your place now.
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ONYXCON 2
ONYXCON - the 1st convention of its kind in the Southeast, celebrating African Diasporan influence and impact on the Popular Arts WILL RETURN THIS SUMMER! AUGUST 13th & 14th, 2010!
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YouWriteOn Book of the Year on TV Book Club
YouWriteOn 2009 Book of the Year Award Winner The Legacy achieves one of eight places on Channel Four TV Book Club Summer Reads - the show which has helped previously featured authors become bestsellers
A book developed on Arts Council established YouWriteOn.com has been selected as one of the 8 novels for this summer’s TV Book Club Summer Reads, the seasonal spin off of the hugely popular TV Book Club established by Richard and Judy which has helped catapult authors into the publishing stratosphere. Unusually, The Legacy, by first time author Katherine Webb, came to leading publisher Orion’s notice not through a literary agent – the author didn’t have one at the time - but through the peer-review website in which budding writers rate fellow writers opening chapters, garnering huge support from other aspiring writers and as a result of the support achieving an editor critique and book deal from leading publisher Orion who participate on YouWriteOn.
The editor, Sara O’Keefe thought the book was 'hauntingly beautiful' and took the author on, and Orion put The Legacy forward to feature on the TV show, which has seen previously featured novels such as Cecilia Aherne's literary hit, PS, I Love You become a film in 2007 starring Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler, and Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee released as a motion picture in America last year.
The Legacy is released on the 24th June and will feature on the TV Book Club on the 12th July on Channel Four. To view the book and cover click on the following Amazon link, The Legacy can be preordered for £5.99. Click here to view on Amazon
Waterstone’s fiction buyer Janine Cook described the Summer Reads selection as “a good list of literary and mass market titles”. The Legacy is in good company on the Richard & Judy established show, the other eight authors selected include former music teacher Clare Morrall, who was shortlisted for a Booker Prize with her debut novel Astonishing Squashes of Colour.
The Legacy’s success follows in the footsteps of others writers who have developed on YouWriteOn.com, established in 2006. Previous YouWriteOn.com members have achieved book deals with Penguin, Harper Collins, Hodder and Random House after developing their novels on the site.
YouWriteOn’s 2007 winner Caligula by Douglas Jackson achieved a six figure book deal with Random House who now participate on the site reviewing the highest rated novels each month, and The Third Pig Detective Agency by Bob Burke won an award in the Bisto Book Awards this year, whose previous winners have included Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer. YouWriteOn Book Award Winner The Afrika Reich by Guy Saville is published next year by Stephen King publisher Hodder & Stoughton. Book Award Winner Bufflehead Sisters by Patricia J DeLois, initially published by YouWriteOn, has now been published by Penguin. YouWriteOn's own new enhanced Arts Council funded publishing system, with free paperback publishing, will be introduced soon.
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First Cell Phone Radiation Law Passed in San Francisco
We know what happens when a radioactive spider bites you. You become spiderman. But what happens when you get too much cell phone radiation? Nothing good, that’s for sure. And so the people of San Francisco will soon have a new cellphone radiation law to help.
The law requires retailers to post notices on how much radiation is emitted by the cellphones they sell. This is the first law of it’s kind in the United States. The cellphone industry claims that this law could hurt sales and make consumers believe that some phones are safer than others. No one can agree on just how harmful cell radiation is.
Europe Will Be Powered By Solar Panels in the Sahara Desert Within 5 Years
If just one percent of the Saharan Desert were covered in concentrating solar panels it would create enough energy to power the entire world. That’s a powerful number, and the European Union has decided to jump on their proximity to the Sahara in order to reap some benefits from the untapped solar energy beaming down on Northern Africa. Just yesterday, European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger announced that Europe will start importing solar energy from the Sahara within the next five years. The news comes after the Desertec Initiative was announced last year, which sets a long-term plan of about 40 years.
The EU has a mission to take at least 20% of their entire energy from renewable resources by 2020. Last year they announced that they would lay a series of highly-efficient cables across the Mediterranean, build a series of solar power plants in the Sahara, and import renewable energy from across the sea. The initiative is being financed by a group of European companies and is supported by the EU government. The plan is to cover 6,500 square miles of the desert in photovoltaic systems and wind parks.
Previously it was thought that the system would take 10-15 years to start to show results. However, the EU has announced that they will complete the first part of the system within the next five years and will start importing a small amount of power as a test run before the entire initiative is finished. “I think some models starting in the next 5 years will bring some hundreds of megawatts to the European market,” Oettinger told Reuters. That energy will skyrocket into the thousands of megawatts as the project proceeds towards its completion date in 2050. It is estimated that the initiative will cost $400 billion Euros. If the EU decides to scale it up — the initiative will power a large part of Europe but not all of it — they’d only need to cover .3% of the desert with solar panels to power the entire continent.
Scientists Create ‘Plastic Antibodies’ to Fight Antigens
In a breakthrough study, researchers at UC Irvine have developed the first “plastic antibodies” and successfully introduced them into the blood of mice to halt the spread of deadly bee venom.
Researchers from the University of California at Irvine who worked on the project along with scientists from Stanford University and Japan’s University of Shizuoka, created nanoparticle-size plastic polymers to encase melittin, a toxic peptide in bee venom that causes cells to rupture. Large quantities of melittin can lead to organ failure and death.
They injected one group of mice with a lethal dose of melittin, and then injected them with the plastic antibodies.
The nanoparticles succeeded in “capturing” the antigens before they could disperse, thus reducing deaths among the mice, which also fared well in the weeks following the jab, according to UCI professor Kenneth Shea. Mice in a control group injected with the toxin but not the antibodies did not survive. “Never before have synthetic antibodies been shown to effectively function in the bloodstream of living animals,” Shea said. “This technique could be utilized to make plastic nanoparticles designed to fight more lethal toxins and pathogens.”
Antibodies are the proteins produced by the immune system to neutralize foreign threats like infections, allergens, viruses and bacteria. In the case of allergies our immune systems can be unequipped to deal with certain antigens.
To counter these shortcomings, the experts took plastic nanoparticles that had shown the ability to mimic antibodies. They used molecular imprinting to stamp the shape of the antigen melittin, the primary toxin in bee venom, onto the antibody. By imprinting tiny antigen-shaped craters into the individual particles, the plastic antibodies were then finely tuned to attach themselves to those antigens in the blood.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 218
Geeknotes:
BP State of Emergency Anthology
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STATE OF EMERGENCY: CHICAGO POETS RESPOND TO GULF CRISIS
On April 20, 2010, British Petroleum, TransOcean and Haliburton were jointly attempting to tap into a seven mile deep oil well from a rig floating in the Gulf of Mexico. After a series of negligent actions that caused their fail safe devices to fail, they discovered that they had actually tapped into a high pressure volcano or sorts, that sent mud, oil, gas and toxic compounds blasting up into their rig, literally blowing it to pieces, killing eleven people. The rig sank and the blood of the earth started gushing out of the sea bed at a rate of a million or more gallons a day. For nearly two months now it has gushed, and BP has time and time again lied to us about the scope of this disaster. They have also dumped over a million gallons of toxic chemicals into the water to keep the oil "dispersed". The oil and other poisons are still gushing and the goop has washed ashore in Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, and the toxic stew is expected to reach the east coast within months. Due to the greed of these big corporations, America is currently facing a catastrophe of biblical proportions.
On this page, a new poem or two will be added each day, addressing the Gulf of Mexico crisis. To submit a poem for possible publication on this page please email it to Publisher@ChicagoPoetry.com
I am now accepting submissions from all over the world. Become an honorary Chicago poet!
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"Song of the Apple, by Hachiro Sato" - Hanafubuki (Yoko Shibata)
"I bring close my lips
And the blue sky quietly looks on.
Though the apple says nothing,
I know well how she feels.
She is lovely—lovely little apple..."
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Coming Soon, One-Shot Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer
Radiotherapy for breast cancer patients could soon be a single dose 30-minute affair, instead of the tedious present-day regimen lasting over six weeks.
In a major breakthrough, a team of British doctors headed by University College London’s Dr Jayant S Vaidya — an Indian from Goa — has succesfully created and tested a new technique that will blast the remnants of a tumour inside the breast in just one shot, lasting half an hour. The team used radiation on areas just around the tumour rather than the whole breast, as is done presently.
A 10-year trial of this Targeted Intraoperative Radiotherapy (TIR), conducted in nine countries involving over 2,200 women, confirmed that radiation targeting a specific area of the breast was as effective as whole-breast radiation in reducing breast cancer recurrence in women.
The results of this trial was published in the latest edition of the medical journal ‘The Lancet’.
So, while a patient is still under anaesthesia following the removal of the tumour, a series of gentle X-rays are administered to destroy any remaining tumour cells at the cancer site. The technique is highly convenient, requiring just one session of radiation, making it less time consuming and less costly than whole-breast treatment.
“TARGIT trial can change two fundamental principles in the treatment of breast cancer: whole breast radiotherapy can be replaced by a targeted one-time shot and a much smaller dose of radiation may be adequate,” Dr Vaidya told TOI from UK. Several hospitals in India, including Breach Candy in Mumbai and AIIMS in Delhi, have expressed interest in his work, he added.
“Breast cancer usually recurs around the area where the tumour was detected the first time. So it’s logical to give concentrated dose of radiation to the tissues at highest risk of cancer coming back rather than the whole breast,” he added.
Dr Vaidya said that since 2000, the team started delivering TIR to patients. A special machine called Intrabeam administered radiation from inside the breast to the exact site of the cancer, instead of the present-day external beam radiotherapy.
“Our decade-long TARGIT trial has now confirmed that old and new methods are as good as each other,” Dr Vaidya said.
The therapy, however, has a few limitations at present. It can be done on patients over the age of 45 and the tumour should not be bigger than 3cm. “Our trials till now tried this technique on women above age of 45. So we don’t know how effective it will be in stopping recurrence of cancer on younger women. Trials to find this are going to start soon,” he said.
Dr Vaidya launched the TARGIT trial on March 24, 2000. In this randomized trial, women aged 45 years or older with breast cancer undergoing breast-conserving surgery were enrolled from 28 centres in nine countries. Patients were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to receive TIR or whole-breast external beam radiotherapy.
The study said, “At four years, there were six local recurrences in the intraoperative radiotherapy group and five in the external beam radiotherapy group. Recurrence in the conserved breast at four years was 1.2% in the targeted intraoperative radiotherapy and 0.95% in the external beam radiotherapy group. Radiotherapy toxicity was lower in the TIR group.”
Prof Michael Baum, professor emeritus of surgery at University College London who carried out the first procedure using intraoperative radiotherapy in 1998 said, “Many women specially in the developing world who live hundreds of miles from a radiotherapy unit will be spared six weeks of treatment going back and forth to the radiotherapy centre.”
* Targeted Intraoperative Radiotherapy (TIR) has a comparable recurrence rate of around 1% with presently used external beam radiation
* Radiotherapy toxicity were four times lower, with an incidence rate of 0.5% compared with 2% from EBR
* The new technique involves an intense blast of radiation to the tumour site extending to a radius of 2 cm lasting 30 minutes
* It takes place after the surgeon has taken out the tumour and before the wound is closed
* TIR completely avoided irradiation of the heart, lung and oesophagus causing no damage to these structures
* It is currently only available to women taking part in clinical trials
High Heels can Ruin a Woman’s Health
More women are wearing higher heels, and for longer, and experts are increasingly concerned about the long-term damage they are doing to their feet. Recent research suggests that up to a third of women suffer permanent problems as a result of their prolonged wearing of ‘killer heels’, ranging from hammer toes and bunions to irreversible damage to leg tendons.
Many of the problems – which can occur simultaneously – are caused by the increased pressure high heels put on the ball of the foot; the higher the heel, the greater the pressure. The knee and back can also be affected.
High heels in the form of stilettos first became popular in the Thirties, but while heels used to be largely ’special occasion’ wear, thanks to the success of shows such as Sex And The City they have become de rigueur for every day.
One in ten women wears them at least three days a week, and a recent survey found a third had hurt themselves falling while wearing high heels.
There are other consequences, as consultant podiatric surgeon Mike O’Neill, spokesman for the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists, explains: ‘High heels make you raise your heel and as soon as you do that your center of gravity is pushed forward.
‘What happens then is you bend your lower back to compensate for this and that changes the position of your spine, putting pressure on nerves in the back.’
This can cause sciatica, a painful condition where nerves become trapped, triggering pain and numbness as far down as the feet. Another common problem, says O’Neill, is that the Achilles tendon – which runs up the back of the leg from the heel – becomes permanently damaged.
‘This tendon is designed to be flexible, so the foot can lie flat or point. But many women who wear high heels too often suffer a shortening of the tendon because once the heel is pointed upwards, it tightens up. Stretching it again can be very painful.
‘When you try to put your foot into flat shoes you get a lot of pain in the back of the heel. I’ve seen 70-year-olds still hobbling around in high heels because they can’t put their feet flat any more, it’s just too painful.’
Most women can avoid this by sticking to heels no higher than 1.5in, he adds. But 3in or more can shorten the Achilles tendon – and you don’t have to be wearing them every day, just more than once or twice a week.
Other common complaints include bunions, bony growths at the base of the big toe caused by tight, ill-fitting shoes, and socalled ‘pump bumps’, where straps and the rigid backs of pump-style shoes cause a bony enlargement on the heel.
Many women also develop hammertoes, where tight-fitting shoes force them to crumple up their toes, shortening the muscles inside and leaving them permanently bent.
The risks to today’s teenagers are thought to be particularly great as they begin wearing high heels at an early age, before their bodies are fully developed. They run the risk of hip trouble in adulthood and problems with back pain from the stress placed on their spines as youngsters.
To minimise the risks of high heels, choose a slightly thicker heel as this will spread the load more evenly. Wear soft insoles to reduce the impact on your knees – and make sure your shoes are a snug fit so the foot doesn’t slide forward, putting even more pressure on the toes.
Finally, ‘wear high heels around the house for a few hours before you go out’, says O’Neill. ‘That gives feet a chance to get used to them before you try something more strenuous like dancing.’
But it’s not all bad news. Italian research suggests women who wear up to a 2in heel may enjoy a better sex life.
That’s because holding the foot at a 15-degree angle – as with a 2in heel – increases electrical activity in the pelvic muscles that play a vital role in sexual performance and satisfaction.
Scientists Produce Liver from Stem Cells
Scientists have grown a liver in a laboratory, offering fresh hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with diseased and damaged organs. It raises the prospect of those in need of transplants one day being offered livers that are ‘made to order’.
The first pieces of lab-grown livers could be used in hospitals within just five years, the researchers said.
Patches of artificial tissue could be used to repair livers damaged by injury, disease, alcohol abuse and paracetamol overdose.
Other possibilities include sections of artificial livers to keep those needing transplants alive – in much the same way as a dialysis machine is used to treat kidney failure.
At least one million of Britons live with liver disease and it claims more than 16,000 lives a year – more than diabetes and traffic accidents combined. Up to 600 transplants are carried out a year.
The latest experiments, which were carried out on animal livers, are still in the early stages but could one day lead to an alternative supply of organs.
The process began with a donor liver being ‘washed’ in detergent, stripping it of its cells, leaving only a collagen and blood vessel ‘scaffold’ in which the new liver cells could grow.
The U.S. scientists then injected it with up to 200 million healthy liver cells, in four shots, each ten minutes apart.
The cells spread across the scaffold, and, provided with an artificial blood supply, the liver survived in a petri dish for up to ten days, the journal Nature Medicine reports.
Tests showed that, just like a real liver, it was capable of breaking up toxins.
The researchers, from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, also transplanted the liver into a rat, for several hours.
Lead researcher Dr Korkut Uygun said: ‘As far as we know, a transplantable liver graft has never been constructed in a laboratory setting before.
‘Even though this is very exciting and promising, it is a proof-of-concept study only. Much more work will be required to make long-term functional liver grafts that can actually be transplanted into humans.
‘We haven’t been able to go beyond several hours in rats, but it’s a great start.’
Hurdles to overcome include creating a liver with all the types of cells needed for full function, including specialised cells that destroy bacteria and other invaders.
Girls Reaching Puberty Before Age 10 – A Year Earlier Than 20 Years Ago
The latest generation of girls are reaching puberty before the age of 10, a new study suggests, raising fears they may also begin sexual activity earlier. Scientists have found that the average age that breast development begins is now nine years and 10 months – almost a year earlier than a previous study in 1991.
They have yet to discover the reason behind the phenomenon but believe it could be linked to unhealthy lifestyles or exposure to chemicals in food.
The study was carried out in Denmark in 2006, the latest year for which figures were available, but experts believe the trend applies to Britain.
Data from America also points to the earlier onset of puberty.
Scientists are worried that young girls are ill-equipped to cope with sexual development when they are still at primary school – and that exposure to hormones earlier could increase their risk from breast cancer.
“We were very surprised that there had been such a change in a period of just 15 years,” Anders Juul, head of the Department of Growth and Reproduction at the University hospital in Copenhagen, told the Sunday Times.
“If girls mature early, they run into teenage problems at an early age and they’re more prone to diseases later on.
“We should be worried about this regardless of what we think the underlying reasons might be.
“It’s a clear sign that something is affecting our children, whether it’s junk food, environmental chemicals or lack of physical activity.”
Hitting puberty early can mean longer exposure to oestrogen, which is a factor in breast cancer. There is also a greater risk of heart disease.
A number of artificially produced chemicals have been blamed for interfering with sexual development, notably bisphenol A, a plastic found in the lining of tin cans and babies’ feeding bottles.
Mr Juul’s research team is now testing blood and urine samples from girls in the study to see if a direct link can be drawn between early sexual maturation and bisphenol A.
Another factor in puberty could be diet. Children are eating more than previous generations and growing bigger — and in many cases becoming obese.
There has been a steady lowering in the onset of puberty. In the 19th century, it was at about 15 for girls and 17 for boys.
The international standard for normal puberty in white girls was set in the 1960s at 12 for the age when periods begin and at about 14 for boys when their voices break and their growth surges.
A more recent consensus in Britain has proved less conclusive.
“Although we don’t have clear data here, there is evidence the same thing [as in Denmark] is happening for reasons that we don’t understand,” said Richard Sharpe, head of the Medical Research Council’s human reproductive sciences unit in Edinburgh.
“We don’t know if this is the result of better nutrition or environmental factors, but it does create social problems for girls who are already living in a sexualised society.”
From
Sundown Lounge No. 217
Geeknotes:
Hooked on Drums
Tara Betts Book Signing at Mixed Roots Festival
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Hooked on Drums
In 2006, we “spun off” the youth classes and performances from the Chicago Djembe Project as Hooked On Drums, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to bringing the life-changing power of the djembe drum tradition to urban youth in the Chicago area--and HOD has been our primary focus since then.
However, the financial crash in 2008-9 has dealt us a serious blow. Foundations and other funders have cut back, and funding we thought we could count on for our Summer camp has been canceled. Although it’s scheduled to begin in a few short weeks, we may not have the money to meet our camp budget. Student fees, which we heavily discount based on need, don’t begin to cover the total budget.
So we’re asking for your contributions to help us keep this vital and valuable program going. Please help us make up the shortfall in our Summer Camp budget, so that we can continue giving our kids the kind of positive, challenging experiences they’ve come to crave.
Tara Betts book signing at Mixed Roots Festival
Tara Betts, author of ARC AND HUE, appeared on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam” and “Spoken” with Jessica Care Moore.
Her writing was adapted for the stage in Steppenwolf Theater’s “Words On Fire”. She is a Rutgers University instructor and a Cave Canem fellow. She has toured the U.S., London, and Cuba.
Synopsis of the reading
ARC AND HUE marks the journeys and transitions of a black-identified interracial young woman from the Midwest. Inspired by hip-hop and formalist poets, ARC AND HUE explores family, womanhood, resistance, and history. A. Van Jordan said, “it’s the knowledge–yes, even more than the music—that makes these poems sing.”
Recent appearances
National Black Writers Conference, Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn, NY
College of William & Mary
Split This Rock Festival, Washington, DC
Brecht Forum, New York City
University of New Haven, New Haven, CT
Nuyorican Poets Café, New York City
Decatur Library/Poetry Atlanta, Decatur, GA
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From Venue Verite:
"Slouching Towards Oakland"
"Poetry of San Francisco"
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Air Pollution Ups the Risk of Sudden Heart Attack
The dirtier the air, the more likely people are to suffer sudden heart attacks, researchers have found. Particulate matter – tiny specks of soot, dust, and other pollutants in the air that can be breathed deep into the lungs – has been ‘consistently’ linked to increases in deaths from heart disease and clogged arteries.
But studies looking at whether air pollution specifically ups the risk of heart attack or cardiac arrest have had mixed results.
Now scientists from Monash University in Melbourne have found a direct link between the increase of airborne particles and the likelihood of heart attack.
It comes as the UK faces fines of £300million after receiving a stern warning about London’s air quality from the European Commission.
The Commission delivered its ‘final’ warning to the Government in response to dangerously high levels of airborne particles, known as PM10s. These tiny particles measure 10 microns (one millionth of a metre) or less.
‘Air pollution is bad for our health,’ said EU environment commissioner Janez Potocnik.
‘It reduces human life expectancy by more than eight months on average and by more than two years in the most polluted cities and regions.’
The Australian authors, led by Dr Martine Dennekamp noted that airborne particles could also trigger heart attack or even sudden death in people with no apparent symptoms of heart disease.
The team looked at more than eight thousands cases of sudden heart attack among people 35 and older that occurred in Melbourne between 2003 and 2006.
After a rise in concentration of the tiniest airborne particles (particles less than 2.5 microns across), the likelihood of heart attack rose and stayed higher than average for two days.
For every 4.26 micrograms per cubic metre increase in PM2.5 concentrations, the risk of cardiac arrest was four per cent higher than average for the next 48 hours.
None of several other pollutants the researchers measured, including larger airborne particles, affected risk. The effect was strongest for people 65 to 74 years old.
However, the study does not prove that pollution causes more cardiac arrests, as the researchers did not find out whether participants in the study also smoked or had other risk factors for heart disease.
Around 146,000 people have a heart attack in the UK each year. It occurs mostly in the over-50s and becomes more common with increasing age.
Wave of Labor Unrest in China Signals End of Cheap Labor
China has been hit with a recent wave of labor unrest, including strikes and partial shutdowns of factories, underscoring what experts call one of the most dramatic effects of three decades of startling growth: A seemingly endless supply of cheap labor is drying up, and workers are no longer willing to endure sweatshop-like conditions.
China’s export-driven growth has long been linked to its abundance of workers — mostly migrants from the impoverished countryside who jumped at the chance to escape a hardscrabble rural life to toil long hours in factories for meager wages.
If they were unhappy, they rarely expressed it through action, and if they did, they were quickly fired and replaced from among the hundreds of others waiting outside the factory gates.
Now all of that has started to change.
Shifting demographics, including years of effective population control through the government’s “one child” policy, have left China short of younger workers, particularly in the crucial 15-25 age group that many factories rely on most. These young workers don’t have to travel far from home like their parents did to find work. They are more aware of their rights. And having grown up in a more prosperous China, they are demanding a fairer share.
“The first generation of migrant workers made a lot of money compared with their poor life before,” said Cai He, dean of sociology at Sun Yat-sen University. “But right now the majority of migrant workers are in their 20s. They were born in the 1980s. Most of them have no farming experience” and “are more sensitive to the disparity between the wealth of the city and their own poverty.”
Cai added: “The younger people received a better education. They surf the Internet, use mobile phones and watch TV. Their awareness of their rights is much stronger than the older migrant workers.”
These young workers are asserting those rights in the form of work stoppages, slowdowns and demands for higher wages and shorter hours. The unrest was highlighted by a strike that began May 17 at Honda’s transmission factory in the city of Foshan, where hundreds of workers walked off the job. The Japanese carmaker had to shut its four assembly plants in China.
Around the same time, the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn electronics plant in Shenzhen, which assembles Apple iPhones and iPads, was struck by 10 suicides among its workers and three suicide attempts, which labor activists blamed on the stress of long overtime hours.
Bus and taxi drivers also have staged strikes this year, affecting tens of thousands of passengers.
The recent cases — particularly the Honda strike — are also noteworthy for receiving extensive coverage in the Chinese media. While labor unrest has become increasingly common across China in the past two years, experts said, most incidents typically go unreported.
“We’re having major problems with labor unrest right now,” said Sunil Balani, a Hong Kong-based businessman who exports garments to Europe from Chinese factories. “Some of our factories are running 30, maybe 40 percent empty at times.”
Although the Honda and Foxconn plants are in southern China, Balani said that most of the five plants he subcontracts are in the north and that “they’re still facing the same problem,” indicating widespread unrest .
In mid-2008, China introduced a labor law that allows workers with grievances to file complaints and opens a new mechanism for mediation. Publication of the law probably made workers more aware of their rights, experts said.
Since the law went into effect, the number of known complaints has doubled to about 700,000, and they “are going up even faster now,” said Mary Gallagher of the University of Michigan, an expert on Chinese labor. Businessmen and academics predict that the wave of unrest would probably increase, mainly because of China’s shifting population trends.
“This is the thin end of a very long wedge,” said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of GaveKal-Dragonomics, a research firm. He said the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in China is set to fall by one-third over the next dozen years, from 225 million today to 150 million in 2022.
Kroeber noted that as the number of young workers declines, the number of factories needing laborers has increased rapidly. “This is the beginning of a long process in which bargaining power is going to shift from the company to the workers,” he said.
The labor unrest poses an acute challenge to China’s ruling Communist Party and a dilemma for the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. That group, China’s only officially sanctioned union, is supposed to represent workers but in practice has worked more as a partner with the government to enforce labor discipline and keep production high.
Zhang Jianguo, a top official with the federation, said the reason for the current unrest is the huge income disparity in China. He said the portion of the country’s gross domestic product that has gone to wages has declined by almost 20 percent in the past two decades.
But some say China’s official union is itself part of the problem. “The labor union should promote fairness in society instead of promoting economic development,” said Lin Yanling, a professor at the China Institute of Industrial Relations. “But in China, the labor union doesn’t do that.”
New Peanut Created That Could Free Millions of People from Fear of Deadly Allergic Reaction
The nuts are one of the most common causes of food allergy, with a estimated quarter of a million people in Britain suffering from peanut allergy. Contact with even a tiny amount of peanut can provoke a reaction.
These can be extremely dangerous and even prove fatal, although milder reactions can also cause stomach upsets, vomiting or rash.
Sufferers face a lifetime having to cut out foods and avoid others which could have come in contact with peanuts.
The nuts contain a number of different proteins which are thought to trigger an allergic reaction.
These are not eradicated by cooking. In fact, roasting peanuts can increase the chances of a suffering a severe reaction.
Scientists have already identified the three proteins within the nut which they believe cause the majority of problems.
For the latest work researchers searched 900 different varieties of peanut, looking for naturally occurring mutations which left them with lower than expected levels of the dangerous proteins.
Using conventional crossbreeding techniques, the team then managed to create a peanut with significantly reduced levels of the allergy-causing proteins.
This “low risk” peanut could be mass farmed to bring hope to millions, they believe.
“For those who suffer badly it can be like living in fear of a poisonous snake bite,” said Soheila Maleki, from the American Department of Agriculture’s Food Allergy Research Group in New Orleans, who led the research.
“They have to avoid foods and you hear stories of children being bullied in the playground, with classmates running after them with a peanut butter sandwich.
“At the moment we are continuing to screen different varieties to see if we can create the peanut with the least risk of triggering an allergic reaction.
“Then we would hope that this could be farmed.”
The nuts contain too many triggers to ever breed a fully “allergy free” peanut, she said.
“However, a low risk peanut could cut the number of people who develop a peanut allergy in the first place, and reduce the severity of the reactions in those who do.”
The research team also believes that the new, safer peanut could also be used to help desensitise sufferers.
The findings were presented at the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology conference in London.
In a separate study also presented at the conference researchers found that eating fish of living on or near a farm could protect unborn babies and infants from allergies in later life.
The team, from Gothenburg and Munich universities, found that the immune system was shaped by the early years, and a farm environment or eating fish could help develop a tolerance to proteins that cause allergies including wheezing, hay fever and eczema.
A spokesman for Asthma UK said: “Despite the fact that food allergies trigger asthma symptoms in one in five people with the condition, anaphylactic reactions due to peanut allergy are far more common and life-threatening than asthma attacks due to this type of allergy.
However, we welcome any new approach that can help reduce the number of hospital admissions for asthma triggered by allergic reactions to foods and look forward to hearing more about this avenue of research.”
From
Sundown Lounge No. 216
Geeknotes:
Band Plugger
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Safest Car Ever Built Destroyed by the U.S. Government
The U.S. government built a fleet of cars that were safer than anything on the road thirty-five years ago. The government shredded them in secret twenty-five years ago. Two escaped the crusher. This is their story.
As Congress and the auto industry wrestle with another round of tougher safety standards, nothing on the menu comes close to setting up the federal government’s own vehicle design business. Yet that’s exactly what Congress did in 1966.
With the furor from Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed still fresh, the original act creating the Department of Transportation also ordered it to build its own experimental vehicles for testing new safety devices, and swap notes with 13 other countries. The young faces at the new agency farmed out the first set to three companies, including General Motors.
The result: Three swamp-monster sedans of more than 5000 pounds apiece that did double-duty as safe transportation and appetite suppressants. The October 1972 issue of Popular Mechanics laid out the details: Roof-mounted periscopes; bumpers wide enough to haul Dom Deluise; and in the GM model, a rear-seat “credenza,” so back-seat passengers would be protected in crashes by smacking into a vinyl-covered bosom.
Unsatisfied with the vault-on-wheels solution, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration changed course. It held a bake-off in 1975 for what a safe car in 1985 might look like. Ford and Volkswagen offered ideas, but NHTSA awarded what would become a $30 million contract to two independent engineering firms, Calspan and Minicars.
While Calspan modified French-built Simcas donated by Chrysler, Minicars designed a new model from scratch, aiming to build a four-passenger small car that could protect all its occupants in a 50-mph crash from either the front or side while burning as little fuel as possible. The result looked like an AMC Pacer worked over by the set designers of Battlestar Galactica.
For a piece of American-built iron from the depths of the Carter administration, the 14 Minicar Research Safety Vehicles had a massive amount of technology. The fender and front fascia were plastic composites that could take a 10-mph smack unscathed. Under the plastic body of the most advanced version were run-flat tires, anti-lock brakes with crash-sensing radar and dual-stage airbags. The front seats were attached to the roof with a see-through plastic shield, so they wouldn’t collapse in a rear-end collision.
Power came via four-cylinder engines pilfered from 1977 Honda Accords, mounted in a mid-rear layout driving the back wheels through a 5-speed automated manual transmission. Test drives scored about 32 miles to the gallon, but test crashes suggested passengers might walk away from most crashes up to 50 mph with minimal injuries. NHTSA officials claimed thousands of lives a year could be saved if Minicar tech became standard.
And of course it had gullwing doors. Don Friedman, who managed the project for Minicars, said the idea was simply to look as stylish as the concept being cast around the same time by John DeLorean.
By 1979, NHTSA decided to convince U.S. automakers that safety could be sold as effectively as CB radios and Corinthian leathers, putting the Minicar RSV up at auto shows and county fairs to make the point. Ben Kelley, then working as the research director for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, decided to make a public service announcement for the effort, and convinced Lorne Greene to donate a day in his best white suit.
The safest automobile ever created,” Commander Adama intoned. “There’s one slight catch: You can’t buy it.” Viewers were told to call NHTSA to voice their approval.
About 10,000 did.
The Minicar was far from showroom ready. Gullwing doors of the 1970s were as reliable as Billy Carter the week before St. Patrick’s Day. And for all its safety kit, the Minicar lacked one standard: front seat belts.
Airbags weren’t new technology, but Detroit automakers were resisting using them in all but the largest or most luxurious models. NHTSA and the RSV teams wanted to show how well their advanced bags could work in small cars, especially if the riders weren’t belted. Friedman noted that only 13% of Americans were using seat belts in 1980, and that wasn’t expected to change much before 1985.
Armed with data from 59 RSVs from Minicars and Calspan/Chrysler, NHTSA chief Joan Claybrook was ready to press on in 1980 with a new generation of safety vehicles, setting a target of a 2000-lb. car that could seat four and pass a battery of 40-mph crash tests.
All that ended in January 1981, when the “Morning in America” team from the Reagan administration halted the RSV work and promptly fracked the Lorne Greene promos. Two years later, Kelley would tell Congress that by safety standards all new U.S. vehicles were “obsolete the moment they roll off the assembly line.” Thanks to Americans’ general dislike of buckling up, the government’s experts were forecasting 70,000 auto deaths a year by 1990.
The few remaining safety cars moldered away in the Department of Transportation’s basement until 1990, when safety advocates such as Clarence Ditlow and the then-Republican controlled agency began a long-running feud over whether tougher fuel economy rules would lead to more deaths from smaller vehicles. After exploring whether the Smithsonian wanted any of the RSV cars (they did), NHTSA revealed under a Freedom of Information Act query that it had quietly sent all remaining cars to be destroyed. On July 1, 1991, the RSV showcar was crashed into a barrier at 50 mph with no dummies inside, and its airbags shut off.
Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who’d overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books.
“Junking those cars was a terrible idea,” said Kelley, who now teaches at Tufts medical school. “What is the benefit of keeping anything that’s historically important? The future wants to know more about the past, and when you destroy the past, you destroy the future’s access to knowing about it.”
“I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,” said Friedman.
What the government didn’t know was that it had lost count.
When the Reagan crew shuttered the RSV program in 1981, Minicars still had two cars in its shop; one mostly built, the other without an engine. Over the years, the cars were stored and ignored until a California man named Frank Richardson bought them in 1996 from an asset sale he used to set up his own crash-test business.
Last year, Richardson and Friedman revealed to NHTSA that the Minicars still existed, and the agency paid for a refurbish. The one intact Minicar needs a water pump, but otherwise runs.
“If somebody wanted to buy them, the price would be very high,” Richardson said.
Like other American inventions such as the VCR, the lithium-ion battery and David Hasselhoff, many of the RSV’s technologies only prospered overseas. Anti-lock brakes and air bags were standard on European cars first; Japanese automakers put the first crash-sensing brake system on the market in 2003, nearly 25 years after the RSV sported it. Yet those five-star ratings from NHTSA that have become standard for front crash safety in U.S. cars come from tests at 35 mph, still 15 mph shy of the RSV bar.
Last year, traffic deaths fell to their lowest level since 1961 at 33,963, after remaining stuck at roughly 40,000 for decades, in part because a modern car has more in common with the RSVs than ever before. With smaller cars, tougher fuel rules and bigger worries about oil on the horizon, that 1985 target date for the program may have been set about 30 years too early.
“I don’t think that RSV had much influence in its time,” says Friedman. “It is a precursor of the performance we’re going to see in the future.”
Transforming the Wind’s Vibrations into Electricity
As a renewable energy resource, wind has lots going for it – but one major downside is the cost to set up the wind turbines themselves, not to mention the problematic visual impact and the noise pollution it generates (often likened to a small jet engine, especially for those living close by). However, undergraduate students from Cornell University’s Vibro-Wind Research Group are working on a space-saving prototype that will harness wind power more cheaply and efficiently – by transforming the wind’s vibrations into electricity.
Working with a $100,000 grant from the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future, a group of engineering and architecture students designed a ‘vibro-wind’ panel fitted with foam oscillators which convert and store the mechanical energy of wind vibrations into electric energy. It’s done with the help of a piezoelectric transducer, which is a ceramic of polymer device that releases electrons when stress is applied.
A quick explanation of piezoelectricity from Wikipedia:
Piezoelectricity is the ability of some materials (notably crystals, certain ceramics, and biological matter such as bone, DNA and various proteins) to generate an electric field or electric potential in response to applied mechanical stress. The effect is closely related to a change of polarization density within the material’s volume. If the material is not short-circuited, the applied stress induces a voltage across the material. However, if the circuit is closed the energy will be quickly released. So in order to run an electric load (such as a light bulb) on a piezoelectric device, the applied mechanical stress must oscillate back and forth. For example, if you had such a device in your shoes you could charge your cell phone while walking but not while standing.
Compared to your regular wind turbine, the piezoelectric vibro-wind panel requires a lot less space and money to install.
“The thing with turbines and windmills is that you need wide open space, and you need it to be away from the city, because people don’t like the way they look,” explains chemical engineering major Rona Banai, chief student engineer of the Vibro-Wind group. Alternatively, the group is now also looking into the possibility of using an electromagnetic coil instead of a transducer.
Vibration energy harvesting has been around for a while, with recent related concepts that include the harvesting of crowd energy, along with inventions that could transform the mechanical energy from human motion to power gadgets. With ideas like this vibro-wind panel, it would be wonderful to someday see wind energy harvesting integrated into many aspects of everyday life (à la Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind), with vibro-wind panels on your roof, much like solar panels, or portable apparatuses that could power your electronics or vehicle as you move.
Are Cell Phones to Blame for the Disappearance of Honey Bees?
The growing use of mobile telephones is behind the disappearance of honey bees and the collapse of their hives, scientists have claimed. Their disappearance has caused alarm throughout Europe and North America where campaigners have blamed agricultural pesticides, climate change and the advent of genetically modified crops for what is now known as ‘colony collapse disorder.’ Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years and shrinking numbers has led to a rise in thefts of hives.
Now researchers from Chandigarh’s Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline: They have established that radiation from mobile telephones is a key factor in the phenomenon and say that it probably interfering with the bee’s navigation senses.
They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behaviour and productivity of bees in two hives – one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed.
After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phon, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.
The queen bee in the “mobile” hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive.
They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen. Because of this the amount of nectar produced in the hive also shrank.
Ved Prakash Sharma and Neelima Kumar, the authors of the report in the journal Current Science, wrote: “Increase in the usage of electronic gadgets has led to electropollution of the environment. Honeybee behaviour and biology has been affected by electrosmog since these insects have magnetite in their bodies which helps them in navigation.
“There are reports of sudden disappearance of bee populations from honeybee colonies. The reason is still not clear. We have compared the performance of honeybees in cellphone radiation exposed and unexposed colonies.
“A significant decline in colony strength and in the egg laying rate of the queen was observed. The behaviour of exposed foragers was negatively influenced by the exposure, there was neither honey nor pollen in the colony at the end of the experiment.”
Tim Lovett, of the British Beekeepers Association, said that hives have been successful in London where there was high mobile phone use.
“Previous work in this area has indicated this [mobile phone use] is not a real factor,” he said. “If new data comes along we will look at it.”
He said: “At the moment we think is more likely to be a combination of factors including disease, pesticides and habitat loss.”
The UK Government has set aside £10 million for research into the decline of pollinators like bees, but the BBKA claim much more money is needed for research into the problem, including studies on pesticides, disease and new technology like mobile phones.
According to the University of Durham, England’s bees are vanishing faster than anywhere else in Europe, with more than half of hives dying out over the last 20 years.
The most recent statistics from last winter show that the decline in honey bees in Britain is slowing, with just one in six hives lost.
This is still above the natural rate of ten per cent losses, but a vast improvement on previous years.
There has been an increase in the number of thefts of hives across the world and in Germany beekeepers have started fitting GPS tracking devices to their hives.
It has been confirmed. The unimaginable has happened. After 23 years of co-hosting and bartending the Monday night poetry open mic, Sergio Mayora is no longer at Weeds.
Cabini Green may be getting razed and the nightclubs may be moving in, but for the last two decades the inside of Weeds Tavern at 1555 N. Dayton, near North and Halsted, has remained like a time capsule. My first experience at Weeds was when I stumbled into the dive, perhaps in 1989, to use the bathroom. I was freaked out by Gregorio Gomez, dressed up like the Pope, performing his poem "The City" on stage, so I stuck around for a few beers to hear Sergio Mayora, the bartender, recite the two poems he wrote in his life: "My People" and "Shivering Through". Some twenty years later, I walked into the bar again for the hundredth time, and Gregorio was still there reciting his parody of The Lord's Prayer, amongst the bras hanging from the ceiling and the tequila being splashed into shot glasses; by then, everyone knew Sergio's two poems by heart. But over the last few years the seedy decor began to vanish and it seemed the "yuppie beer garden" was no longer a joke.
Now I've learned that Sergio Mayora, who once ran for Mayor of Chicago, has had some type of falling out with his relative who owns the bar and that he has "moved on." Sergio "moving on" from Weeds is like Marc Smith moving on from the Slam. It's unthinkable. The question now stands, is Weeds still Weeds without Sergio Mayora? You can find out on Monday, May 31, when Gregorio will host the 11th Off The Wall Poetry Contest, or any Monday night for that matter, as the open mic continues--without Sergio Mayora.
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In ebook news, my novel "Banjo Strings" finally jumped through the last vetting hoop at Smashwords and made it into their Premium Catalog, which makes my 'Epub' formatted book eligible for an ISBN no. Cool.
It will be several weeks before my book is formally listed in "Books in Print," but who cares!
I have a longer blog post coming about this in my new forum topic "eBook Odyssey" at Author Nation...
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African Liberation Day (May 25) is celebrated by many African communities around the world. It is a permanent mass institution in the worldwide Pan African Movement. The day is observed in countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Spain, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
From "The Wind of Change: The End of Colonialism in Africa"
This program seeks to understand nationalism in black Africa through the experiences of the Gold Coast, French Guinea, and the Belgian Congo, the first colonies of Britain, France, and Belgium to win independence after World War II. The devastating effects of Cold War sparring by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in these regions are assessed, with a special focus on the tragedy in the former Belgian Congo. Commentary by François Lumumba; François Nkrumah; UN dignitary Sir Brian Urquhart; former ministers from the Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Touré governments; historians Mahmood Mamdani and Jean Fremigacci; and authors William Blum and Keith Kyle is featured. (57 minutes)
This film apparently only aired in Aug. 2003 on Oregon Public Broadcasting and a couple other stations. It's a Films Media Group product, but good luck getting a copy; this title is currently not available.
Patrice Lumumba, A history lesson posted by infamousnowman
Patrice Lumumba was the first Prime Minister of the Congo,
but was overthrown and murdered less than a year into office.
Actor/environmental activist Kevin Costner has been waiting since Exxon Valdez to put his oil-separating technology to use. 15 years ago, Costner funded a science group, Ocean Therapy Solutions, headed by his brother, to develop a technology that can separate oil from water, WDSU in New Orleans reported.
"I'm just very happy that the light of day has come to this, and I'm very sad about why it is, but this is why it was developed, and like anything that we all face as a group, we face it together," Costner told the local news media.
Costner and his partners, including John Houghtaling, CEO of OTS, demonstrated how their technology works: Diesel fuel and water enter the machine together and are then jettisoned separately, with water and diesel each on one side. The machine cleans the water up to 97 percent.
There are five machines with different separating abilities, from five gallons a minute to 200 gallons a minute, WDSU reported.
According to the New York Times, BP officials and Ocean Therapy Solutions are working out where in the Gulf of Mexico is best to test the machines and hope to have them deployed within the week.
Bacteria Found in Garden Soil That Can Make You Smarter and Happier
Mycobacterium vaccae bacteria are already known to decrease anxiety, but it might have even more dramatic properties. Recent studies on mice suggest the bacteria, commonly found in the soils of people’s gardens, also increases intelligence and the ability to learn.
Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks, both of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, sought to build on previous experiments in which dead strains of the bacteria were injected into mice, spurring the neurons of the mice to greatly increase serotonin production. The more immediate effect of all this extra serotonin, of course, was decreased anxiety levels, leading the earlier researchers to conclude M. vaccae has antidepressant qualities.
But Matthews was interested in a more indirect effect:
“Since serotonin plays a role in learning we wondered if live M. vaccae could improve learning in mice.”
To assess this, Matthews and Jenks had two groups of mice; the experimental group was fed live specimens of the bacteria, while the control group was not. They were then tested in a maze to see how well the two groups could navigate the challenge.
The difference was striking:
“We found that mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice.”
The mice were retested twice after the bacteria was removed from their diet. When they were tested almost immediately afterward, they weren’t quite as proficient, but still got through the maze much faster than their control counterparts. Tested a final time three weeks later, the mice were still a little faster, but not to a statistically significant extent. This suggests the effect of the bacteria on learning is temporary, although humans with their greater cognitive capacity might be able to derive more lasting benefits from exposure to M. vaccae.
Certainly, Matthews thinks it’s an idea that’s worth following up on:
“This research suggests that M. vaccae may play a role in anxiety and learning in mammals. It is interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks.”
A Chain Reaction of Space Junk Could Destroy Communications on Earth
There is so much junk whizzing around Earth that any collision in space could now cause a knock-on effect that would destroy vital satellites, according to a Pentagon report.
A crash between a satellite and a hunk of space junk could send thousands of pieces of debris spinning out, which could destroy other satellites.
Television signals, weather forecasts, global-positioning navigation and international phone connections are just some of the services at risk.
The uncontrolled chain reaction could make some orbits unusable for both commercial or military satellites, according to the U.S Space Posture Review sent to Congress in March.
The report, which has not been publicly released, said space is ‘increasingly congested and contested.”
Since the first object, Sputnik One, was launched into space 53 years ago, mankind have created a swarm of perhaps tens of millions of items of debris.
The rubbish circling the planet comes from old rockets, abandoned satellites and missile shrapnel.
‘This is almost the tipping point,’ Indian rocket scientists Bharath Gopalaswamy told Bloomberg.
‘No satellite can be reliably shielded against this kind of destructive force.’
The warning follows the first major crash last year between a U.S. communications satellite and a defunct Russian military probe over Siberia.
The collision at speeds of at least 15,000mph created a cloud of 1,500 pieces of space junk that the International Space Station then had to manoeuvre to avoid.
A Chinese missile test in 2007 left 150,000 pieces of junk in the atmosphere.
These two events encouraged the U.S to support the United Nations when it issued guidelines that urge companies and countries to stop cluttering Earth’s orbit.
Mazlan Othman, the director of the UN’s Outer Space Affairs office, said: ‘Space needs policies and laws to protect the public interest.
‘We should have all the instruments to make sure that lifestyles are not disrupted because of misconduct in space.’
From
Sundown Lounge No. 214
Geeknotes:
Not this week - Working the eBook!
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Nano-Spiders: DNA Robots that Could One Day Be Walking Through Your Body
Scientists have created microscopic robots out of DNA molecules that can walk, turn and even create tiny products of their own on a nano-scale assembly line. The ground-breaking devices outlined in the journal Nature, could one day lead to armies of surgeon robots that could clean human arteries or build computer components.
In one of the projects a team from New York’s Columbia University created a spider bot just four nanometres across. This is about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
The nano-spider moves along a track comprising stitched-together strands of DNA that is essentially a pre-programmed course.
The track exploits DNA’s double-helix molecule – a structure of four chemicals that are paired in rungs.
By ‘unzipping’ the DNA you end up with a track that can be used rather like the teeth in a clockwork mechanism. A cog can move around the teeth, provided it meshes with them.
By using strands that correspond to sequences in the track, the robot can be made to walk, turn left or right as it is biochemically attracted to the next matching stretch.
The spider’s ‘body’ is a common protein called streptavidin. Attached to it are three ‘legs’ of single-strand enzymatic DNA, which binds to, and then cuts, a particular sequence of DNA. The fourth leg is a strand that anchors the spider to the starting point.
Study leader Milan Stojanovic said: ‘After the robot is released from its start site by a trigger strand, it follows the track by binding to and then cutting the DNA strands.’
Once the strand is cut, the leg starts reaching for the next matching stretch of DNA in the track. In this way, the spider is guided down the path set by the researchers.
Eventually, the robot encounters a patch of DNA to which it can bind but cannot cut. At that point, it is immobilised.
To watch the spider in motion, the researchers used atomic force microscopy which showed the molecular robots following four different paths.
Molecular robots have drawn huge interest because of the allure of programming them to sense their environment and react to it.
For instance, they could note disease markers on a cell surface, decide that the cell is cancerous and needs to be destroyed and then deliver a compound to kill it.
Other DNA walkers have been developed in the past, but they have never ventured more than a few steps, said Hao Yan, a professor at Arizona State University.
Professor Yan said: ‘This one can walk about to about 100 nanometers. That’s roughly 50 steps.’
The next step is how to make the spider walk faster and how to make it more programmable, so that it can follow many commands on the track and make more decisions.
In a separate study reported in Nature, Nadrian Seeman and colleagues from New York University said they had built a prototype molecular factory.
They used a number of DNA robots to assemble gold particles in different ways in response to chemical commands.
DNA walkers moved past three kinds of DNA machines that handed them a cargo of gold nano-particles, which are clutched with three ‘hands’.
‘This is the first time that systems of nano-machines, rather than individual devices have been used to perform operations, constituting a crucial advance in the evolution of DNA technology,’ said Lloyd Smith, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in a commentary also published by Nature.
Nearly £6billion is being invested in research and development of nano products worldwide, according to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, which tracks environmental and health concerns arising from the new technology.
Spacecraft To Test Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity
In what is billed to be the largest scientific instrument ever built, scientists plan to use three spacecraft flying three million miles apart to fire laser beams at each other across the emptiness of space in a bid to finally prove whether a theory proposed by Albert Einstein is correct.
Physicists hope the ambitious mission will allow them to prove the existence of gravitational waves — a phenomenon predicted in Einstein’s famous theory of general relativity and the last piece of his theory still to be proved correct, reports the Telegraph…
The three spacecraft will be put into orbits at a distance of 5 million kilometres from one another, connected only by a laser beam that will measure their positions accurate to 40 millionths of a millionth of a metre.
The mission, a collaboration between Nasa and the European Space Agency, will use three spacecraft flying in formation while orbiting the sun, with each housing floating cubes of gold platinum.
Laser beams fired between the spacecraft will then be used to measure minute changes in the distance between each of the cubes, caused by the weak waves of gravity that ripple out from catastrophic events in deep space.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted that when large objects such as black holes collide, ripples in space and time flow outwards. These ripples are called gravitational waves. A panel of international experts have now set out a detailed plan for the mission and how it can be used to reveal new insights about the universe around us.
Professor Jim Hough, an expert on gravitational waves at Glasgow University and a member of the committee that drew up the plans, said: “Gravitational waves are the last piece of Einstein’s theory of general relativity that has still to be proved correct.”
“They are produced when massive objects like black holes or collapsed stars accelerate through space, perhaps because they being pulled towards another object with greater gravitational pull like a massive black hole. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to detect them yet because they are very weak. However, the new tests we are working on have great potential to allow detection,” the Telegraph quoted Hough as saying.
Ground based attempts to detect gravitational waves on Earth have so far been unsuccessful and can only look for gravitational waves with relatively high frequencies.
Scientists have already been able to prove a number of predictions made by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, including that light is bent by gravity, gravity travels at a constant speed, that time can be warped by gravity and that space and time can bend. Einstein’s other theories including his most famous formula E=mc2 have also withstood scientific testing.
Girl Grows Two New Kidneys After Old Ones Fail
A girl left seriously ill when both her kidneys failed astounded medical experts by growing two new ones. Angel Burton from Louth, Lincolnshire, suffered from painful kidney infections from birth to the point where she required surgery at the age of five.
But surgeons were amazed to discover the little girl had four kidneys, with two new fully formed organs sitting on top of her old ones. And the new ones had taken over the role of the others, meaning she was effectively ‘cured’ of kidney failure.
Now, three years on, Angel, now eight, is fighting fit and her family are still thankful for the miracle that changed her life. She has an rare condition known as ‘duplex kidney’ - common to just a handful of people in Britain.
A duplex kidney is fused to the other at the centre and may share or have an independent ureter draining urine to the bladder. In Angel’s case both her kidneys are ‘duplex’ and fused to the other. Each has a separate ureter, meaning that she has four kidneys and four ureters.
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From
Sundown Lounge No. 213
Geeknotes:
Band Pluggers
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Ross White
Sadson Music
810-496-3051
The Rusty Wright Band to embark on 1st European tour
Sadson Music confirmed the first 7 show dates for the Rusty Wright Band.
This will be the 1st European tour for the group and will be in conjunction with their new release on Sadson Music.
"We're very excited for this opportunity to perform for our european fans. We hope to build the RWB fanbase and make Europe an annual stop". - Rusty Wright, band leader.
Additional dates are being negotiated.
International Booking is being coordinated by Break Live Music.
For further info contact:
Ross White
Sadson Music
810-496-3051
sadsonmusic@gmail.com
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Tesla-Inspired Bladeless Wind Turbine Could Generate Power Comparable to Coal Power Plants
A bladeless wind turbine whose only rotating component is a turbine/driveshaft could generate power at a cost comparable to coal-fired power plants, according to its developers at Solar Aero. The New Hampshire-based company recently announced its patent on the Fuller wind turbine, which is an improvement on a patent issued to Nikola Tesla in 1913.
The bladeless wind turbine is completely enclosed in a relatively small compact unit. Instead of using wind-powered blades to rotate a shaft and generator, the Tesla-inspired design consists of an array of closely spaced, parallel, thin metal disks separated by spacers. When air flows in the spaces between the disks, the spacers are arranged in such a way as to provide inward momentum to the air, causing the disks to move. The disks are connected to a shaft by spokes, so that the rotating disks cause the shaft to rotate as well. As explained in the patent held by Howard Fuller, the turbine design “provides maximum efficiency in converting wind energy to mechanical power.”
“The turbine of the present invention has the advantage that it is efficient over a wider range of fluid flow rates, as compared with turbines of the prior art, due to the airfoil-shaped spacers,” the patent explains. “This feature makes the present turbine especially useful for generating power from wind, which is inherently random and variable.”
What this efficiency translates to, according to a recent article at EcoGeek, are final costs of about $1.50/watt rated output, which is roughly 2/3 the cost of comparable bladed units. Further, “total operating costs over the lifetime of the unit” are estimated at about $0.12/kWh, which is comparable to current retail electrical rates. The number of disks determines the amount of power that can be produced, and a unit the size of the one pictured should be capable of generating 10kW of power, according to the company.
One major advantage of not having blades is reduced maintenance costs. For instance, the turbines can be mounted on towers or poles, while generator equipment can be located at the tower base, eliminating the need for climbing the tower for routine maintenance. Also, the turbines only need to be mounted high enough to clear nearby obstacles to wind flow. Since there are no external blades that require ground clearance, the tower can likely be shorter than those used for turbines with blades.
Further, the screen-enclosed turbine prevents injuries to birds and bats, avoids the visual pollution of spinning blades, and proper construction can make the turbine nearly transparent to radar microwave emissions, such as those from nearby defense facilities. Due to its reduced maintenance costs and limited infrastructure requirements, the turbine could even be located on urban rooftops.
Besides wind, the turbine’s design also makes it adaptable for geothermal applications, in which a heated fluid is used to drive the turbine. Since the turbine works even with relatively cool fluid, the invention could be particularly useful for situations where the geothermal source does not provide enough heat to produce the “superheated” steam needed to drive a conventional steam engine.
A UV Water Pitcher Kills 99.999% of Germs in Drinking Water
The Restore Clean Water System from HoMedics claims that its built-in ultraviolet lights will kill 99.9999% of bacteria, 99.99% of viruses and 99.95% of microbial cysts in your drinking water. Wait, what’s in my water?
Chalk this up to one of those ignorance is bliss situations, maybe, but I don’t really care that this pitcher improves on Brita’s technique by adding a second step of UV purification to the initial filtration process. What I care about is preserving the illusion that the water I’m drinking is uncontaminated and that upon viewing it under a microscope I would only see its awesome purity in greater magnification.
But if you’re a pitcher’s-half-empty type, and you can’t bear the thought of drinking another glass with all that stuff floating around in there, you can find out more over at HoMedics.
Using DNA to Replace Silicon Microchips
Silicon chips are on the way out, at least if Duke University engineer Chris Dwyer has his way. The professor of electrical and computer engineering says a single grad student using the unique properties of DNA to coax circuits into assembling themselves could produce more logic circuits in a single day than the entire global silicon chip industry could produce in a month.
Indeed, DNA is perfectly suited to such pre-programming and self-assembly. Dwyer's recent research has shown that by creating and mixing customized snippets of DNA and other molecules, he can create billions of identical, waffle-like structures that can be turned into logic circuits using light rather than electricity as a signaling medium.
The process works by adding light-sensitive molecules called chromophores to the structures. These chromophores absorb light, exciting the electrons within. That energy is passed to a different nearby chromophore, which uses the energy to emit light of a different wavelength. The difference in wavelength is easily differentiated from the original light; in computing terms, it's the difference between a one or a zero. Presto: a logic gate.
Rather than running computers and electrical circuits on electricity, light-sensitive DNA switches could be used to move signals through a device at much higher speeds. Furthermore, the waffle structures are cheap and can be made quickly in virtually limitless quantities, driving down the cost of computing power. Once you figure out how you wish to code the DNA snippets, you can synthesize them easily and repeatedly; from there you can create everything from a single logic gate to larger, more complex circuits.
A shift from silicon-based semiconductor chips would be a sea-change for sure, but semiconductors are reaching a technological ceiling and if the economics of DNA-based chips are really as attractive as they seem, change might be inevitable. DNA is already smart enough to be the foundation of life on Earth: why not the foundation of computing as well?
It’s no question that animals – particularly birds – are being severely impacted by the Deepwater oil leak. The oil has already reached shorelines, and marine birds are getting coated. Last week, David asked how a bird covered in oil gets cleaned. Turns out, it’s a painstaking and time consuming process that can seriously stress out birds. But what if we could just stick birds in a washing machine that cleans them in only seven minutes? A major oil company took the liberty of creating just such a machine.
The machine takes just seven minutes, versus as long as two hours of human handling, which reduces the amount of time a bird is under stress in increases how quickly it recovers for release into the wild. From shorebirds to pelicans to sea turtles, the list goes on of animals who are in need of a bath after running into oil slicks. Might we see machines like this put in use during the long, long clean up process we’ll have during and after the Deepwater leak?
From
Sundown Lounge No. 212
Geeknotes:
Big Poetry Cram On WBEZ
Thisisnotanexit
Inner Circle Black & White Summer Causal
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From Chicagopoetry.com
Big Poetry Cram On WBEZ - Now you can listen to the recent record breaking poetry cram on WBEZ.
Don't forget the next Poetry Cram is
THE MOTHER OF ALL POETRY CRAMS
Saturday, May 8, 7 to 9 PM
Cafe Ballou, 939 N. Western Ave
Free and open to the public
Is The Poetry Foundation A Threat To Chicago Poetry?
by CJ Laity
The following are my thoughts and my thoughts do not necessarily reflect the thoughts of anyone who reads for me in my shows, anyone who I report about at this website, anyone who I will mention in this article, anyone who I publish, or anyone else beside myself, period. So if you have something to say, say it to me, and leave my friends out of it.
Now, please allow me to rant a little bit about The Poetry Foundation, an organization that is literally pumping millions of dollars into a campaign designed to change the landscape of the Chicago Poetry Scene.
This city's poetry scene has a long history that began in the mid-eighties and came to fruition in the early nineties with the creation of the Poetry Slam, the rise of the Guild Complex, the publication of the Letter eX Poetry Newsmagazine (that would eventually be reincarnated into ChicagoPoetry.com), and the invention of a poetry open mic community. I was there, in the field, doing grunt work to help establish the poetry scene. Even if you are not a so-called performance poet but are part of what has been called the "page" scene, you owe a lot to those who created the current landscape. You may find it hard to believe, but before the mid-eighties there were no public poetry readings in Chicago, there were no poetry open mics, there was no poetry scene to speak of. Very few people cared about poetry in Chicago. If there was a poetry reading it happened within the walls of a university. The only organization that attempted public readings was The Poetry Center, but the Art Institute sponsored that as well. A group of us set the stage for the thriving poetry scene that we have today. If you like, I can dig up a Chicago Tribune article from 1991 that documents it all. We helped make poetry important and poetry was truly advanced through our work. And we did that work without millions of dollars at our disposal. We did it out of shear love for poetry. Since then, poetry has had and still has a home in Chicago: in our hearts. Now, all of a sudden, The Poetry Foundation has stepped in and they are very subtly trying to claim Chicago poetry as their own...
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Thisisnotanexit Communique May 2010
THISISNOTANEXIT launches its monthly residency at new Stoke Newington venue THE DROP (underneath the Three Crowns) on Friday May 28th. It's taken us quite some time to find a venue that offers us everything we wanted but we're glad to now call The Drop home on the last Friday of every month.
There will be a policy of no guest DJs. Music will be supplied by Thisisnotanexit Label Head Simon A. Carr and Thisisnotanexit's own Spectral Empire.
The night will commence at 10pm. Expect music you wouldn't hear in a club for the first hour or so as we play the wilder reaches of our record collections.
Detachments will be the house band and will be performing live at 11.30pm. Support bands will be booked for future events.
In an age where the pursuit of the 4/4 beat has returned we'll be rallying against this by playing a broad spectrum of music taking cues from minimal wave, analog synth music, freaky disco, post punk, proto-house and EBM - the main motive being a movement of the head, the heart and the feet all the way into the early hours.
There will be visuals and projections as part of the experience and there will be exclusive Thisisnotanexit gifts - the first 50x people that arrive will receive a limited edition SPECTRAL EMPIRE MIX CD (Cat. No. TINAE 034).
The Drop has a capacity of 100 so we advise getting down early to ensure you get in. If you want to pre-book tickets don't hesitate to get in touch.
Thisisnotanexit Summer Sampler
Command V - Lost On Me (featuring remixes from Max Pask, Night Plane, Optimo and Jacques Renault)
Detachments debut album
If you're on Facebook and you're not a fan of Thisisnotanexit then go and become one:
Cellphone Payments – An Alternative to Paying with Cash
You have won a bet, but the loser does not have enough cash on him to settle it. If he has a credit card, and most people usually do, there is finally a solution. A number of big and small companies — including eBay’s PayPal unit, Intuit, VeriFone and Square — are creating innovative ways for individuals to avoid cash and checks and settle all debts, public and private, using their cellphones.
Several of the companies have developed small credit card scanners that plug into a cellphone and for a small fee enable any individual or small business to turn a phone into a credit card processing terminal. PayPal’s cellphone app calls for only a simple bump of two cellphones to transfer money. Apple has submitted a patent application for a cellphone payment system.
Brian Kusler, 40, a software engineer, is already helping dollar bills join Susan B. Anthony coins as collector’s items. After he polished off grilled lamb and zinfandel at a San Francisco restaurant recently, his dining companion paid the bill and asked him for his share. Instead of hunting down an A.T.M., the two bumped their iPhones together, and Mr. Kusler wirelessly transferred his part of the bill, about $100.
“I don’t carry a lot of cash; I don’t think anyone does these days,” Mr. Kusler said. “We go out, and I oftentimes have to remember to pay my friends back when we get home, and I want to be able to just do it right there.”
There is evidence that paper money is being used less often, according to the Federal Reserve. Though cash payments are difficult to track, the number of noncash transactions in the United States grew from fewer than 250 a person in 1995 to more than 300 in 2006. Data on the stock of small-denomination bills and destroyed bills indicates that the use of cash peaked in the mid-1990s and has been declining since, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found.
“When debit cards were introduced in the early ’90s, that was the beginning of the slow and gradual decline of paper checks and cash,” said Red Gillen, a senior analyst at Celent, a research and consulting firm on technology and financial services, based in Boston.
Still, cash has remained essential in certain instances, like paying back a colleague for lunch, buying fruit at a farmers’ market or buying a beer at a cash-only bar. These new mobile payment technologies could finally change that.
“The problem with cash is that it is tangible, it’s inconvenient, you have to carry around a bunch of bills and you have to continually go to the A.T.M.,” said Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder who is now the co-founder and chief executive of Square, which makes a dime-size device that anyone can plug into the earplug jack of an iPhone or iPad to instantly accept credit card payments. “If we can make cards more convenient and faster, it can replace a lot of the experiences around cash.”
Light wallets are not a problem for Joe Mangrum, a sidewalk sand painter in New York, who has been using Square to take donations from passers-by and sell copies of his book. Sales have increased sharply since he started accepting credit cards on his iPhone, he said. “I’ve made the sale as opposed to twiddling my thumbs because they don’t have the cash.”
The new services could have the biggest impact on the smallest businesses, like farm stands or house cleaners, that accept only cash and checks because they do not have stores to house credit card terminals and do not want to enter into complicated, long-term relationships with credit card companies.
Rachel Ancliffe, a clothing designer in Portland, Ore., sells her dresses and blouses at sample sales and from her home, and uses Intuit GoPayment to process credit card payments.
“You can’t accept checks because then you’re just kissing your product goodbye” because of fraud and bounced checks, Ms. Ancliffe said. “I sell 10 times more because I take credit cards.”
Fraud protection offered by the credit card companies is the same as when the card is used at a cash register. Some of the new companies say security against fraud might even be improved because they provide e-mail receipts, and those from Square include photos and a map of where the transactions were made.
The death of cash has been predicted since the 1970s, when electronic transactions like direct deposit of checks were introduced. But most digital payment experiments, like one in 2006 by Visa, have focused on swiping cellphones, as is popular in countries like Japan, instead of credit cards. Mobile payments have not taken off in the United States because Americans are just as happy to reach into their pockets for a plastic card as for a cellphone.
Instead of replacing credit cards, technologies like Square and GoPayment rely on them. Credit card companies stay in the middle, extracting a fee with each swipe or bump.
GoPayment costs $12.95 a month on top of a per-transaction fee of 30 cents plus 1.7 percent to 3.7 percent of the payment, depending on the credit card companies’ rates. Square is free and users pay 15 cents plus 2.75 percent to 3.5 percent of each transaction. It will be available for iPhones and iPod Touches in May and for other phones and laptops later.
Exchanging money with friends using PayPal’s iPhone app is free if payers use a bank or PayPal account, and costs 30 cents plus 2.9 percent of the transaction for credit cards.
Though people will use cash less, it is not nearly extinct, said Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president for financial institutions policy at the American Bankers Association. “Historically, we have seen more failed innovations in payments than we’ve seen successful ones, because you have to convince people that it’s secure, more efficient and reliable,” Mr. Abernathy said.
But a cashless society could become a reality as the younger generation, accustomed to buying music on iTunes and virtual gifts on Facebook, grows up.
“Older people still tend to like to use cash or checks,” Mr. Abernathy said. “Younger people don’t want to touch a piece of paper. They want to do it all electronically.”
A Step Closer to Personalized Genetic Medicine
A scientist has brought the holy grail of personalized medicine a step closer after having all his DNA screened for diseases and susceptibility to treatments. Professor Stephen Quake, at Stanford University, spent $50,000 having his genetic make up mapped and then analysed for different diseases and sensitivity to medication.
The results, which revealed risks of heart disease, diabetes and prostate cancer, could pave the way to similar tests for the general public within the next decade, especially as the cost of genetic mapping is expected to plummet.
Professor Quake, said: “We’re at the dawn of a new age of genomics. Information like this will enable doctors to deliver personalised health care like never before.”
Several of the study authors warned that major ethical challenges lay ahead and questioned the wisdom of placing no limits on uncovering such sensitive information.
Professor Henry Greely, from Stanford Law School in California, said patients, doctors and geneticists are about to be hit by a “tsunami” of genetic data.
“The experience with Steve Quake’s genome shows we need to start thinking – hard and soon – about how we can deal with that information,” he added.
When the first human genome was mapped in 2003 it cost an estimated £1 billion to decipher. Since then prices have dropped and within 10 years it could cost as little as £650.
But hopes that it could prove a “cure-all” for the world’s ills have also been dashed. Apart from a few rare inherited diseases, scientists have discovered that conditions are much more complicated than first thought.
Many individual genes say little about the real risk of illness, and they found diet and the environment had a significant influence on the development of disease.
But the new study, published in The Lancet medical journal, claims to have accurately evaluated the risks of a number of diseases.
Prof Quake, who is 40, was screened for 55 conditions, ranging from obesity and type-2 diabetes to schizophrenia and gum disease.
In some cases the normal risk of developing a certain condition for a man of his age was scaled down, and in other cases up.
The worst news related to obesity, type-2 diabetes and coronary artery disease. Professor Quake was found to have a more than 50 per cent chance of developing any of these conditions, each of which could affect the development of the other.
He also had rare variants in three genes associated with sudden cardiac death.
Several genetic variants were associated with a good response to cholesterol-reducing statins, while one suggested he might need a higher than normal dose of these drugs.
Another mutation indicated that he could be resistant to the clot-busting drug clopidogrel. Other variations pointed to a need for reduced doses of the blood-thinning drug warfarin.
Prof Quake said of the findings: “It’s certainly been interesting. I was curious to see what would show up.
“There are many ethical, educational and policy questions that need to be addressed going forward.”
Pokeberries Could Be the Key to Spreading Affordable Solar Power Around the World
The weeds that children smash to stain their cheeks purple-red and that Civil War soldiers used to write letters home – could be the key to spreading solar power across the globe, according to researchers at Wake Forest University’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.
Nanotech Center scientists have used the red dye made from pokeberries to coat their efficient and inexpensive fiber-based solar cells. The dye acts as an absorber, helping the cell’s tiny fibers trap more sunlight to convert into power.
Pokeberries proliferate even during drought and in rocky, infertile soil. That means residents of rural Africa, for instance, could raise the plants for pennies. Then they could make the dye absorber for the extremely efficient fiber cells and provide energy where power lines don’t run, said David Carroll, Ph.D., the center’s director.
“They’re weeds,” Carroll said. “They grow on every continent but Antarctica.”
Wake Forest University holds the first patent for fiber-based photovoltaic, or solar, cells, granted by the European Patent Office in November. A spinoff company called FiberCell Inc. has received the license to develop manufacturing methods for the new solar cell.
The fiber cells can produce as much as twice the power that current flat-cell technology can produce. That’s because they are composed of millions of tiny, plastic “cans” that trap light until most of it is absorbed. Since the fibers create much more surface area, the fiber solar cells can collect light at any angle – from the time the sun rises until it sets.
To make the cells, the plastic fibers are stamped onto plastic sheets, with the same technology used to attach the tops of soft-drink cans. The absorber – either a polymer or a less-expensive dye – is sprayed on. The plastic makes the cells lightweight and flexible, so a manufacturer could roll them up and ship them cheaply to developing countries – to power a medical clinic, for instance.
Once the primary manufacturer ships the cells, workers at local plants would spray them with the dye and prepare them for installation. Carroll estimates it would cost about $5 million to set up a finishing plant – about $15 million less than it could cost to set up a similar plant for flat cells.
“We could provide the substrate,” he said. “If Africa grows the pokeberries, they could take it home.
“It’s a low-cost solar cell that can be made to work with local, low-cost agricultural crops like pokeberries and with a means of production that emerging economies can afford.”
Listening to Prayer Shuts Off Brain Activity Responsible for Scepticism
Areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active when we fall under the spell of a charismatic figure. That’s the finding of a study which looked at people’s response to prayers spoken by someone purportedly possessing divine healing powers.
To identify the brain processes underlying the influence of charismatic individuals, Uffe Schjødt of Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues turned to Pentecostal Christians, who believe that some people have divinely inspired powers of healing, wisdom and prophecy.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Schjødt and his colleagues scanned the brains of 20 Pentecostalists and 20 non-believers while playing them recorded prayers. The volunteers were told that six of the prayers were read by a non-Christian, six by an ordinary Christian and six by a healer. In fact, all were read by ordinary Christians.
Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer. Activity diminished to a lesser extent when the speaker was supposedly a normal Christian.
Schjødt says that this explains why certain individuals can gain influence over others, and concludes that their ability to do so depends heavily on preconceived notions of their authority and trustworthiness.
It’s not clear whether the results extend beyond religious leaders, but Schjødt speculates that brain regions may be deactivated in a similar way in response to doctors, parents and politicians.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 211
Geeknotes:
Smog Veil Plugger
Você Me Dá Video Premiere
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Complaints Choir documentary film screens twice in May at Hot Docs Film Fest in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Here's the schedule:
May 5: 9:30 PM (Cumberland 2)
May 7: 4:15 PM (Innis Town Hall)
I will attend all screenings and participate in the post-screening Q&A, hope to see you there!
Fazer Magazine recently published a review of the film, writing that the film is a "...liberating act of filmmaking which has given us all the ability to see Singapore's Complaints Choir where we would otherwise have been denied." (Myles LaCavera)
News regarding the Complaints Choir documentary is updated daily at film's Facebook fan page. Check it out:
12 February - 9 May at Hämeenlinna Art Museum, Finland: »I am a socialist-anarchist-individual-collectivist-individualist-communist-cooperative-aristocrat-democrat.« - A show curated by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen
14. April - 19 September at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland: Swedish and Finnish Contemporary Art (I Love My Job-installation) (More info of the project: www.workhorror.org)
May 5 Trøndelag centre for contemporary art; Trondheim, Norway (retrospective works)
1-23 June at IG Bildende Kunst, Vienna: The Exhibition: Screen Realities, The Work: In The Middle of A Movie
18-20 June at atelierfrankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany: " isn't everything after all a part of our inner life", positionen bildende Künstlerinenn aus helsinki und aus Frankfurt Main (Off Art Talent Show by JOKAklubi http://jokaklubi.blogspot.com/, Recycling You-solo performance by Tellervo Kalleinen)
This has been a public disservice announcement from Smog Veil. Had this been an actual emergency, we would have abandoned our offices located at:
1658 N Milwaukee Ave #284/Chicago, IL 60647/USA
and disconnected our phones: 773.706.0450 and fax: 312.276.8519
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Você Me Dá - Video Premiere
Hi!
We are pleased to announce the broadcast of Você Me Dá's music video.
It will happen next friday, everywhere online (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo...).
You can join the event's guest list on Facebook : Você Me Dá - Video Premiere - Facebook's guest list.
MIT Grad Student Danielle Zurovcik (above) designed this hand-powered suction device to speed up wound healing. It costs $3 and it works.
Nobody knows precisely why it works, but doctors have known for decades that the healing process for open wounds can be greatly speeded up by applying negative pressure — that is, suction — under a bandage sealed tightly over the affected area. The speculation is that it helps by drawing bacteria and fluid away from the wound, keeping it cleaner….
Earlier this semester, Zurovcik, who had been making plans for field tests of the patent-pending device at a rural clinic in Rwanda this fall, was asked by the nonprofit healthcare organization Partners in Health to take part in earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. She traveled there with a supply of 50 of the current version of the plastic, molded pumps, which cost about $3 each. (The only portable versions on the market today cost $100 a day just to rent, and must have their batteries recharged after about six hours.)
The device, a cylinder with accordion-like folds, is squeezed to create the suction, and then left in place, connected to the underside of the wound dressing by a thin plastic tube. At that point, it requires no further attention: “It holds its pressure for as long as there’s not an air leak,” Zurovcik explains. For that reason, a suitable dressing that can hold the seal is a crucial element of the system.
Drinking Too Much Pop Linked to Premature Aging
A liking for fizzy drinks could make you old before your time, scientists have warned. Research shows that phosphate, which gives many soft drinks their tangy taste, can accelerate ageing.
The mineral, which is also added to processed meats, cakes and breads, was found to make the skin and muscles wither and could also damage the heart and kidneys.
Although the experiments were carried out in mice, the researchers – from the respected Harvard University – believe the results show the potential consequences of high doses of the mineral.
Gerald Weissmann, of the research journal FASEB, where the results were published, said: ‘Soda is the caffeine delivery vehicle of choice for millions of people worldwide, but comes with phosphorous as a passenger.
‘This research suggests that our phosphorous balance influences the ageing process, so don’t tip it.’
The study is not the first to raise concerns about the safety of the carbonated colas and juices enjoyed by billions every day.
Brittle bones, pancreatic cancer, muscle weakness and paralysis have been linked to soft drinks, with just two cans a week thought to be enough to raise the risk.
In the latest study, Dr M. Shawkat Razzaque, of Harvard’s dentistry school, looked at the effects of phosphate on three sets of mice.
The first group was genetically engineered to have a gene called klotho, leading to them having higher than normal levels of phosphate.
They lived between eight and 15 weeks, suffering a range of health problems linked to premature ageing.
The second group lacked klotho, with the result that their phosphate levels were closer to normal. They lived for 20 weeks.
The third was bred to be like the second group, except they were fed a high-phosphate diet. All of these mice died by 15 weeks, like those in the first group.
This, the scientists suggest, shows that the phosphate diet had toxic effects.
They warned that the mineral could age the skin and muscles and might trigger or exacerbate kidney and heart problems.
They said: ‘Humans need a healthy diet and keeping the balance of phosphate in the diet may be important for a healthy life and longevity. Avoid phosphate toxicity and enjoy a healthy life.’
Earlier this year, a U.S. study found that two or more soft drinks a week could almost double the chances of pancreatic cancer.
Last night, drinks manufacturers questioned the latest research, pointing out that the study did not look specifically at soft drinks.
Richard Laming, of the British Soft Drinks Association, said: ‘Only 3 per cent of phosphorous in the overall diet comes from soft drinks.
‘People can continue to enjoy soft drinks in moderation as part of a balanced diet
‘Corn Smut’ – Revolting Fungus That Could Make You Younger and Healthier
This looks like an alien parasite, or maybe an evil brain, but it’s actually a fungus that attacks corn. U.S. farmers call it “corn smut” and have spent millions to eradicate it. But it’s actually better for you than corn.
A new study, released in the journal Food Chemistry reveal that corn smut, also called “the devil’s corn,” actually contains valuable nutrients that aren’t found in the corn that it feeds off. In Mexico, the fungus is called huitlacoche, and it’s already considered a delicacy. But U.S. farmers, and the U.S. government, have spent millions of dollars to eradicate the blight and develop “smut-resistant strains” of corn.
Turns out that corn smut, despite its loathsome appearance and pornographic name, is chock full of essential nutrients, including lysine, an amino acid that can strengthen bones and make your skin look younger. And beta-glucens, a soluble fiber that helps you cut your cholesterol. So it’s actually better for you, and could turn out to be more valuable on the market, than the corn it “ruins.” Weird fungi like this could be the food staples of the future, so I guess we’d better start getting used to the way they look.
