Map Room Archive: Shows 76 - 90
From
Sundown Lounge No. 90
Huge Amounts of Water at Mars' South Pole
Mars is unlikely to sport beachfront property anytime soon, but the planet has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out.
With a radar technique, astronomers have penetrated for the first time about 2.5 miles (nearly four kilometers) beneath the south pole’s frozen surface. The data showed that nearly pure water ice lies beneath.
Discovered in the early 1970s, layered deposits of ice and dust cap the North and South Poles of Mars. Until now, the deposits have been difficult to study closely with existing telescopes and satellites. The current advance comes from a probe of the deposits using an instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter.
“This is the first time that a ground-penetrating system has ever been used on Mars,” said the new radar study’s lead author, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “All the other instruments used to study the surface of Mars in the past really have only been sensitive to what occurs at the very surface...”
Rapid Victories Against Extreme Poverty
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Around one billion people live in extreme poverty, suffering from economic deprivation so severe that they must struggle daily for survival. Extreme poverty is sometimes defined as living on under $1 a day, but more accurately it is the lack of reliable access to basic needs, including adequate food, basic health services, safe drinking water and connectivity with the wider world (via roads, power and telecommunications).
Recent orthodoxy holds that extreme poverty results from corruption, mismanagement and weak institutions. A corollary is that institutional improvements take considerable time, so the escape from extreme poverty is likely to take decades. Without denying the benefit of stronger institutions, I suggest that excessive focus on institutional reforms has gotten the policy sequencing more wrong than right. Often, more direct aid can dramatically reduce extreme poverty in just a few years.
Consider the case of agricultural output. Impoverished farmers in Africa grow around one ton of cereal grains per hectare, roughly a third of the average yield in other developing countries. Their low yields reflect a lack of fertilizers, high-yield seeds and small-scale water management. The farmers are too poor to buy such inputs, and they lack the collateral to borrow. Thus, they plant with what is available, get insufficient yields and remain too poor to buy better inputs or diversify production.
Yet if poor farmers are subsidized for a few years to obtain improved inputs and thereby raise yields and diversify output, and if they reinvest the resulting boost to income on the farm and in the community, two things can happen. First, farm productivity can increase persistently, even after subsidies are removed. Second, the households can accumulate wealth, which can be used as collateral or to self-finance purchases of improved technologies. Temporary assistance can put the farmers on the path of long-term growth. It's not a hunch. Asia's Green Revolution worked that way.
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The Millennium Villages Project, a public-private partnership, is already applying that package of measures fruitfully in 10 African countries. Such interventions can be expanded quickly to the national level. Immunization campaigns, mass distribution of bed nets, countrywide deworming, vitamin supplementation, voucher-based provision of seeds and fertilizers, treadle pumps for irrigation, elimination of user fees for schools and clinics, and mass training of community health workers are all being introduced successfully across Africa...
New Irises and Corneas From Stem Cells
Stem cell researchers in England used stem cells to create irises in people born with aniridia, a rare genetic disease that prevents iris formation. Being born without an iris leads to decreased vision, cataracts, and -- in some cases -- even glaucoma. The stem cells were taken from cadavers.
Researchers from Japan grew new corneas from stem cells. They haven't transplanted them into humans yet, but a Center City doctor has.
Brandon Ayers from the Willis Eye Institute created and transplanted a "keratoprosthesis" from donated corneal tissue and the results -- assuming they're not hype -- were pretty amazing.
"We take people who haven't seen in probably 30 years and within a week after surgery are now seeing between 20/50 and 20/20 or perfect vision," said Dr. Brandon Ayers, with Wills Eye Institute.
Ayers uses a donated human cornea and tiny pieces of plastic to build an artificial cornea in the operating room. It's called a keratoprosthesis. A hole is punched in the middle of the human donor cornea, and then it is placed on the front of the artificial cornea that looks like a tiny mushroom.
"Then we take the back plate -- that gets gently placed on there," Ayers said.
After that's threaded in place, a tiny titanium lock ring holds it all together. That is what is sewn in the patient's eye after his or her diseased cornea is removed.
From blind or nearly there to 20/20 vision? That's a pretty good upgrade.
The Boston Keratoprosthesis developed by the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary. (Photo courtesy of Michael W. Belin, MD)
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From Geeknotes:
Issue #5 of Phot'Art International, devoted to the Netherlands, has just been published. Distributed in over 50 countries, Phot'Art International is now a world-wide reference in terms of photography of author. Phot'Art International, published in French and English, is available only by subscription.
4th Anniversary of the Iraq Debacle - More Fallout:
A few days ago, I got this letter from a group with a simple request - TELL CONGRESS TO VOTE FOR FULLY FUNDED WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ NOW. Here's their letter...
From
Sundown Lounge No. 89
First Commercially Available Brain To Computer Interface
The evolution of the Computer Human interface may seem to be rooted in the infernal keyboard and its recent travelling companion, the mouse, but much work is being done in the areas of virtual worlds, voice recognition, handwriting recognition and gesture recognition to give us a new paradigm of computing.
It now appears we are on the edge of another brave new virtual world – the direct interface between the brain and the computer is here. One of the Holy Grail’s of research, there are many such projects going on around the world at present. Now the German g.tec (Guger Technologies) group has taken the technology out of the lab and into the real world with a complete BCI kit, and amazingly, there’s also a kit for a pocket PC - a super-low-weight biosignal recording system “g.MOBIlab” is used to measure the EEG and the data processing, analysis and pattern recognition are performed on a commercially available Pocket PC or in this case, your windows PC.
The first BCI system will enable the composition and sending of messages, and control of a computer game. There’s also an invasive (implanted) option still being trialled in the laboratory – this is significantly more effective abnd the system can already accept and process input from both the embedded array and the cap array. Though the first work in the area is focussed on enabling paralysed humans to communicate far more freely, the potential to enhance one’s communications quite freely is clearly not that far away. There’s also the potential unlocked by putting such a device into the hands of thousands of eager and capable amateurs who will no doubt broaden the understanding of the human mind with their pursuits. The BCI system is nominated for the 2007 European ICT Grand Prize.
In several research projects patients have used the device to successfully produce control signals to select letters and words or to control specific functions of a wheelchair or prosthetic device.
The activity of the brain is recorded with a EEG (Electroencephalogram) electrodes mounted onto the surface of the head.g.tec has developed a sophisticated biosignal amplifier which allows the acquisition of the signals with very high accuracy. The amplifier is plugged into a USB port of the notebook for signal acquisition. The big advantage of the ECoG recordings is the better signal quality. Even a single electrode overlaying a specific brain region can generate a reliable control signal for a BCI system. On the surface of the head the EEG measures the activity of millions of neuron to extract the control signal.
via Gizmag
World’s First SciFi Interior Design Firm
Have you evenr wanted to remodel your house and giveit more of a space-age look? Well now you can - with the help of what may be the world’s first SciFi interior design firm called 24th Century Design.
As kids, we all created forts. If you were really stylin’, yours was probably made of cardboard and included your mom’s best (or worst) bedsheets. Tony Alleyne, however, is no kid and his detailed living space takes “forts” to a whole new level.
North of London, on a private block in Hinckley, Leicestershire, UK, lies the most tricked out ‘Star Trek’-themed studio apartment in the world. Ring the doorbell, and you’ll be greeted by Patrick Stewart saying “Welcome to the 24th century.”
The touch of this one button will get Trekkies salivating, but we haven’t even touched the surface of the launching pad. With the looks of Picard and the skills of Data, Alleyne has taken his sci-fi passion to the next level—he lives inside it.
How does one go about transforming their entire living space into space-worthy? It takes some serious motivation. After his wife left in 1994, Alleyne needed a project to keep his hands and mind busy.
In late 1997, Alleyne set out to create his ultimate bachelor pad. Since the local Home Depot doesn’t have a sci-fi section, Alleyne had to handcraft everything himself. However, most of the materials used in the construction can be found at almost any home improvement store.
Nearly three years ago, Alleyne began work on the “Star Trek: Voyager” re-fit of the apartment. “I decided that I would apply a harder luxury interior,” he says. “I have always considered that of all the Starfleet ships, Voyager is, in terms of interior, the luxury liner of the galaxy.” Alleyne then added shades of grey and incorporated aluminum inlays as featured in and around the Voyager ship. “I also added some pretty cool LCARS [Library Computer Access and Retrieval System] and some new lighting effects.”
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Naturally, Alleyne’s apartment has garnered attention—and even prompted him to start his own design business, 24th Century Design. However, it’s also brought in a ton of requests from people seeking a similar setup. While many installers might see an opportunity, Alleyne found that many of these potential clients were hoping for a freebie.
“I receive many requests for various science fiction applications including ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Dr. Who’ and ‘Star Wars’,” says Alleyne. “The strange thing is most of the inquiries come from people who, for reasons I have yet to understand, expect me to work free of charge. I wouldn’t dream of writing to a motor mechanic saying, ‘Can you tell me how to fix my car via email because I don’t want to pay you to do it’.”
While Alleyne’s “Star Trek” project didn’t drive him mad, it did drive him into bankruptcy. He emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year and now says he’d like to move on to a bigger place to play with. There he could add more voice activation into the mix.
Energy 2.0: Smells Like Green Spirit
By Mark Anderson
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- If a green energy revolution is brewing, it will be the students and twenty-somethings who fire the engines of innovation, rather than today's dominant companies. That was the consensus, anyway, of the roughly 550 researchers, students, entrepreneurs, CEOs and financiers gathered here last week.
Energy 2.0: The MIT Energy Conference, which took place Friday and Saturday, pushed what keynote speaker Daniel Yergin called "a great bubbling." Presentations ranged from algae-powered solar cells to corn-powered homes.
"High prices have revolutionized the energy scene and launched an era of innovation that could come to rival the internet boom," Yergin wrote in a December Newsweek article.
"Energy is unquestionably the challenge of this era," said Susan Hockfield, MIT's president Susan Hockfield. "And there is absolutely no question in my mind that the most productive source of new ideas and approaches is today's young people." She speculated that no matter how the energy problems of tomorrow are solved, some of the key people to unravel them were probably attending the conference.
"The name of this conference is Energy 2.0 -- what I would say is we never had Energy 1.0," said General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt. "GE is in (both) the health-care and the energy business. The last 25 years of health care has (gone through) maybe nine or 10 iterations of technology, but we still sell some of the same parts in the energy sector that we sold 25 years ago."
Kick-starting a sector of the economy that has remained mostly stagnant for more than a generation will be a challenge, said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industry Association.
"Quick show of hands: How many people here in the audience have a solar system on their roof?" Resch asked. "OK, a dozen maybe. Now how many people want to have a solar system on their roof?"
Ninety percent of the audience raised their hands. "Pretty much everybody," he said. "What you can very quickly see is people want to have solar. There is an incredible untapped demand here."
The straw poll typifies the massive market forces now building, he said -- and it will only get stronger as oil and gas prices rise and alternative sources like solar drop in price.
Promoting Solar Nation, a new activist website, Resch said German subsidization of solar energy has made Germany the world's largest solar market, seven times bigger than the United States. "Yet the amount of sunlight that falls on Germany is equivalent to Anchorage, Alaska," he said. "It proves that if it works in Germany, it'll work great in the United States."
Electricity only constitutes a third of the U.S. energy budget. Plug-in hybrid cars took the spotlight in an afternoon session, offering what many panelists argued is perhaps the most realistic near-term path through the thicket of oil and climate crises to come.
And the biggest challenge of turning a 30- to 40-mpg hybrid car into a 100-plus-mpg plug-in hybrid is making a lighter, cheaper battery that can recharge quickly and pack more stored energy per pound.
Said Hockfield, "I never would have imagined two-and-a-half years ago that the thing I'd be talking about with greatest excitement is storage. Batteries are where it's at. Then ... four new battery technologies came out of MIT," she said.
"It is quite possible that 10 years from now, we'll look into this and say, 'Well, that wasn't such a big deal after all,'" said Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute of the battery tech challenges a plug-in hybrid creates. "But that doesn't mean it (will have been) easy."
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From Geeknotes:
4th Anniversary of the Iraq Debacle - Marches in DC and Hollywood:
From
Sundown Lounge No. 88
MIT Posts Entire Curriculum Online for Free
The entire catalogue of information from 1,800 courses at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be available free online by the end of the year. Once uploaded, it will represent one of the internet’s most important resources.
By providing free access to course material such as lecture notes, assignment details, podcasts and videocasts, MIT’s Open CourseWare program will transform the e-learning landscape.
MIT initiated the programme in 2001 and material from 1,550 MIT courses is already available. Anne Margulies, executive director of Open CourseWare, said that in January alone, the site had had 1.5 million visits, and the figure rose to two million if visits to language translated sites were included. Overseas visitors– from China and India in particular – dominate usage traffic, with 60% of visits originating outside the US.
Margulies said that MIT had seen little potential for making money from putting materials online and had decided to give them away. She said that about half of the Open CourseWare users were teaching themselves with the materials, 35% were students at other institutions, and 15% were teachers.
“MIT is eager for the material to be re-used, as long as it is for noncommercial purposes, and whoever re-uses it gives proper citation to the original MIT author as well as to MIT,” Margulies said.
An international consortium of open courseware providers has been formed (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/). It has 120 members, half of whom are already providing open courseware.
Learn about this and other efforts at the upcoming Future of Education event on March 27th.
Clinical Trials Go Offshore
As with so many other business endeavors, clinical trials are often outsourced to developing countries with cheap workers and few regulations.
The upside? Cheaper drug development.
The downside? Situations like this:
Russian prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into vaccine trials by British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC that were allegedly conducted on children without parents' permission.
Prosecutors said the deputy director of the hospital had been paid $50,000 to participate in the trials and that such tests on minors were illegal in Russia. They also said parents had been told the vaccines were humanitarian aid.
GlaxoSmithKline officials could not be immediately reached for comment, but Michael Crow, the head of GSK's Russian operations, told Dow Jones Newswires that the allegations were unsubstantiated and untrue...
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Why the Media Passes Off Bunk as News
Drew Curtis: In early February, the lead story on CNN.com – "the most trusted name in news" – was about tattooed fish. Emblazoned on the website was a large picture of a fish with some kind of design on its belly. I don't have fish but if I ever wanted any, I'd probably get that fish. It looked pretty cool. But here's the problem...
Surely there were more important things happening in the world. I think there is a war going on somewhere. Is Social Security fixed yet?
Part of the blame lies with the 24-hour news cycle. Sometimes there just isn't anything substantial going on. But the mass media, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Journalists have developed proven techniques to fill it.
Consider the recent announcement – almost certainly bogus – by movie director James Cameron that he discovered boxes that once contained the bones of Jesus, his alleged wife, Mary, and their alleged boy, Elroy, or whatever his name was. This news item is a combination of two common "not-news" stories slammed together.
1. Headline Contradicted by Actual Article. Headlines of most of the articles about this subject stated that Mr. Cameron had found a box with Jesus' bones in it. However, the actual articles tell us that there were no bones inside after all, and we don't have samples of Jesus' DNA. Headline Contradicted by Actual Article is either an editorial oversight or an intentional misleading of the public to draw attention to an otherwise lame article. In this case, however, the article wasn't just lame, it was inflammatory because of its close relation to our next type of bogus media article.
2. Ad Masquerading as Actual Article. Several hundred publications ran this article, so it's not likely that anyone was paid off for placement. But this isn't a news article – it's a commercial. Most articles tell us that the "startling" claim about Jesus will be examined in-depth in a documentary Cameron produced. And they helpfully remind us what channel it's on and what time to watch. That's an ad in my book. Figuratively and literally. (Sharp readers will see what I just did there.) There are several other techniques media use to stir reader interest. They're transparent and simplistic, but they work.
So whose fault is all this, the media's or the public's? Both. Real news is simply not a ratings leader. Evening network news shows aren't shown during prime time because they can't hack it. This is also why prime-time news shows consist almost entirely of celebrity interviews and pedophile arrests. Note which type of "news" gets the better time slot.
My forthcoming book offers some solutions. Here's one: Split 24-hour news channels in two – one carries all the "Fark," the other carries all the real news. Revenues funnel into the same bank account; everyone wins.
Until that happens, news consumers will have to adjust to a world in which journalistic principles are being thrown out the window in a frantic quest for ratings. And mass media outlets need to make a call: Either report serious news or give up all pretenses.
Via Christian Science Monitor
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From Geeknotes:
For a preview of ConstantPoetry's video archive of
ChicagoPoetry.com's Whole Lotta Love poetry event,
go to:
ConstantPoetry
and then check back every day for a different
poetry video, including an archive of the Woman
Made Gallery "Sham to Shame" event.
Daize will be bringing down the house at
the HARD ROCK HOTEL "Viva Las Vegas" venue
headlining a two night performance
April 13 and 14, 2007. Show starts at 9 pm.
GO DAIZE...VEGAS BABY!!!!
From
Sundown Lounge No. 87
International Polar Year
By Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
A huge international research effort to study the frigid frontiers at the poles of our planet begins this week.
More than 60 countries, including the United States, will participate in the International Polar Year, which aims to explore the effects of climate change on the Arctic and Antarctica, such as the melting of sea ice and glaciers.
The project also will determine how climate changes affect indigenous populations, plants, and animals and the rest of the globe.
“Our planet is changing more quickly than at any time in recorded history, and the frigid waters of the North and the frozen continent of the South are helping us realize and understand that change,” said Arden Bement Jr., director of the National Science Foundation at the U.S. kick-off celebration held in Washington, D.C., today.
Speakers at the event, streamed live on the Web, explained the reason for pooling the resources and research of so many countries.
“The kind of problems we’re dealing with are problems that can’t be solved by a single university or a single nation,” Bement said. “It takes a global approach.”
Many speakers emphasized how little is known about these remote regions of our planet and how their study will yield a more complete picture of the Earth that it is important to obtain.
Not all studies will focus on climate change. Research will range from the molecular level to astronomical observations.
Some research efforts have already begun: a recent 10-week expedition discovered several potential new species in an area of the Weddell Sea of Antarctica formerly covered by ice shelves.
The International Polar Year, actually the fourth such collaboration, launches in Paris on March 1, though several countries held their own kick-off celebrations today.
The IPY will last two years so researchers can have two annual observing cycles in each pole.
Emergency Care Guinea Pigs
By Kristen Philipkoski, with Randy Dotinga and Scott Carney
You're unconscious, suffering from cardiac arrest on the floor of a shopping mall. The paramedics rush to the scene and promptly begin to… enroll you in a randomized trial to determine if a new type of CPR-based treatment is better than the traditional one.
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The only way you can get out of this involuntary research project is to wear a wristband saying you've opted out. And the only way you'd have a wristband was if you happened to know about the project in the first place.
Otherwise, you may get randomized to the new, untested way of doing things -- and it could kill you. (Or you might get randomized to the old, tested way of doing things -- and it could kill you too, since it doesn't appear to work very well.)
If you live in one of about a dozen regions around the U.S. and Canada, this scenario could happen to you. It's all thanks to a waiver of "informed consent" regulations, which require people to give an OK before research is done on them.
The upcoming cardiac arrest research project appears to be the first of its kind to be launched since a study drew intense criticism -- and a federal rethink in the U.S. -- by forcing unknowing trauma patients to get transfusions of fake blood. (Here's a Wired News story about that.)
I'm writing a story about the new project for Wired News. I'll be blogging this week about what I've heard from various bioethicists and medical experts.
Scientists Invent Real-Life 'Tricorder'
From UPI, Published: Feb. 27, 2007 at 3:26 PM
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Feb. 27 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have created a handheld sensing system they liken to Star Trek's "tricorder," used to analyze the chemical compounds of alien worlds.
But Purdue University researchers say their system could have more reality-based applications, such as testing foods for dangerous bacterial contaminants and urine for biomarkers that might provide an early disease warning.
The instrument is a miniature mass spectrometer combined with a technique called desorption electrospray ionization, or DESI. The device and technique were developed by a team of researchers led by Purdue Professor R. Graham Cooks.
"Conventional mass spectrometers analyze samples that are specially prepared and placed in a vacuum chamber," Cooks said. "The key DESI innovation is performing the ionization step in the air or directly on surfaces outside of the mass spectrometer's vacuum chamber.
"We like to compare it to the tricorder because it is truly a handheld instrument that yields information about the precise chemical composition of samples in a matter of minutes without harming the samples."
The research team has used the device to identify cocaine on a $50 bill in less than 1 second.
© Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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From Geeknotes:
Online Novels I'm currently Reading...
Last Minute Items from Chicago: Urban Twang (from show 77)
Urban Twang
This Friday, March 2
10:00 pm Set Time
Goose Island Wrigleyville
3535 N. Clark, Chicago
(Performing in the back room)
Friday we will be at Goose Island Wrigleyville, the home
of some of the best micro-brewed beers in America.
Because we load in at 8 p.m. and will be spending two
hours there before going on stage, we cannot guarantee
being sober enough to put on a good show.
To listen to Urban Twang please visit: http://urbantwang.com/songs
To see Urban Twang on the YouTube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_2BZ4QVM7Ck
To hear Urban Twang on a podcast (Thank you Chicago
Acoustic Underground):
http://www.chicagoacoustic.net/podcasts/120206_urbantwang.mp3
The Urban Twang Website: http://www.urbantwang.com
March Poetry Madness
**Thur March 1: The Lip Reading Series at the
Spot, 4437 N. Broadway,
presents Mary Hawley and
Mike Puican with open mic, 8 PM, $5.
**Thur March 1 Central Jr. High School at 9400 S.
Sawyer, presents a reading
by poets David Gecic,
Carol Anderson, and Cathleen Schandelmeier,
part
of their literary week celebration, 6:30 PM, free.
**Fri March 2: DvA Gallery, 2568 N. Lincoln Ave,
presents publishers
reading from their own work,
featuring Dave Gecic, Wayne Allen Jones,
C. J.
Laity and Steven Schroeder, 8 PM sharp, free.
**Mon March 5: Waiting 4 The Bus at Jaks Tap, 901
W. Jackson,
presents Michael Brownstein with an
open mic, 7:30-10 PM.
**Tue March 6: The Cafe, 5115 N. Lincoln Ave,
presents featured poet
Eric Labrat, with open mic,
8 PM, free.
**Wed March 7: Guild Complex presents it's Prose
Series at California Clipper,
1002 N. California,
8:30 PM, free.
**Sun March 11: Woman Made Gallery, 685 N.
Milwaukee Ave, presents
an "International Reading"
featuring work in English and translated into
Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Serbian, Chinese,
Lithuanian and Spanish,
read by Ray Bianchi, Chris
Glomski, Francesco Levato, Radmila Lunic,
Jennifer
Scapettone, Steven Schroeder, Huichun (Amy) Liang,
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas and Jackie White, 2 - 4 PM,
free and open to the public.
**Thur March 15: The Poetry Foundation presents
Poetry Off the Shelf
featuring Martin Espada, at
The Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St, 6 PM,
admission is free but call 312-787-7070 for
reservations.
**Thur March 15: University of Arkansas Press
author Carole Simmons Oles
will be reading and
discussing her new book of poetry, Waking Stone:
Inventions On The Life Of Harriet Hosmer, with
guest Heather Bergstrom,
at Beck's Book Store,
Northeastern Illinois University,
5500 N. St.
Louis, 773-588-2770, 7 PM, free.
**Fri March 16: Mercury Cafe, 1505 W. Chicago Ave,
presents featured
St. Pat's Day poets Lynn
Fitzgerald, Dan Cleary and Cathleen Schandelmeier,
7 to 9 PM, with open mic, free.
**Mon March 19: Waiting 4 The Bus at Jaks Tap, 901
W. Jackson,
presents Laurel Graham with an open
mic, 7:30-10 PM.
**Wed March 21: Guild Complex presents Palabra
Pura, with featured poets
Ray Gonzalez and Yolanda
Nieves, at California Clipper, 1002 N. California,
8:30 PM, free.
**Wed March 21: The Poetry Center of Chicago
presents Pulitzer Prize winner
Claudia Emerson at
the SAIC Ballroom, 112 S Michigan Ave, 6:30 PM,
$10.
**Sun March 25: Myopic Books, 1564 N. Milwaukee
Ave, 2nd Fl, presents
a reading by Betsy Andrews,
7 PM, free.
**Thur April 5: Lip Series at The Spot, 4435 N.
Broadway, features Ian Belknap
and Sharon Green
with open mic, 8 PM, $5.
**Wed April 11: The Poetry Center of Chicago
presents "Teachers Speak"
featuring Dan Ferri,
Billy Lombardo, and Taylor Mali at the SAIC
Ballroom,
112 S Michigan Ave, 6:30 PM, $10.
=======================================
Please help keep Chicago's non-commercial,
independant poetry calendar operating:
http://chicagopoetry.com
From
Sundown Lounge No. 86
Scientists Generate Electricity in Novel Way
By Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
Researchers say they have successfully generated electricity from heat by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles, a finding that could yield cheap refrigerators, not to mention new, more efficient energy sources in general.
Currently, about 90 percent of the world’s electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels, which creates heat, often in the form of steam. The steam spins a turbine that drives a generator to produce electricity. But this method is indirect, and in the process, plenty of heat is wasted and its energy goes uncaptured.
“Generating 1 watt of power requires about 3 watts of heat input and involves dumping into the environment the equivalent of about 2 watts of power in the form of heat,” said lead author Arun Majumdar of the University of California at Berkeley.
“If even a fraction of the lost heat can be converted into electricity in a cost-effective manner,” Majumdar said, “the impact it would have on energy can be enormous, amounting to massive savings of fuel and reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.”
But the temperature at which that heat is released is too low to be used by traditional heat engines, so researchers have been developing thermoelectric converters to change the heat to electricity more directly.
The converters operate based on a phenomenon called the Seebeck effect: When the junctions of two metals are kept at different temperatures, they respond differently to the temperature difference, and a voltage is generated...
Human Compassion Surprisingly Limited
By Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer
SAN FRANCISCO—While a person's accidental death reported on the evening news can bring viewers to tears, mass killings reported as statistics fail to tickle human emotions, a new study finds.
The Internet and other modern communications bring atrocities such as killings in Darfur, Sudan into homes and office cubicles. But knowledge of these events fails to motivate most to take action, said Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon researcher.
People typically react very strongly to one death but their emotions fade as the number of victims increase, Slovic reported here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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"We go all out to save a single identified victim, be it a person or an animal, but as the numbers increase, we level off," Slovic said. "We don't feel any different to say 88 people dying than we do to 87. This is a disturbing model, because it means that lives are not equal, and that as problems become bigger we become insensitive to the prospect of additional deaths."
Human insensitivity to large-scale human suffering has been observed in the past century with genocides in Armenia, the Ukraine, Nazi Germany and Rwanda, among others.
"We have to understand what it is in our makeup—psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally—that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century," Slovic said. "If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."
Slovic previously studied this phenomenon by presenting photographs to a group of subjects. In the first photograph eight children needed $300,000 to receive medical attention in order to save their lives. In the next photograph, one child needed $300,000 for medical bills.
Most subjects were willing to donate to the one and not the group of children...
New Cells from Old Brains
By Nikhil Swaminathan
Scientists have found that the adult human brain can create new cells, opening the door to new therapies to possibly halt and even reverse paralysis and damage from degenerative nerve disease.
It was long believed that once the brain stopped developing, so did its ability to produce new neurons. But scientists began debating the matter in the early 1960s when claims of fresh neurons in an adult brain surfaced. Since then, evidence for so-called neurogenesis has snowballed, culminating in the 1998 discovery that cells were replicating in the horseshoe-shaped hippocampus region of the cerebrum of five cancer patients.
Scientists had found new neurons, or nerve cells, in the olfactory bulbs (structures located on either side of the forebrain involved in processing odors) of other mammals, leading them to suspect that humans might have them there, too. Researchers, however, could not locate the pathway, found in the other animals, between the cerebrum in the center of the human brain (where neural stem cells are created) and the forebrain, where they morph into neurons.
This week, scientists from New Zealand and Sweden report they not only located this elusive passageway—called the rostral migratory stream (or RMS)—in the human brain, but also found cells in the process of differentiating into neurons along this structure.
"We suspect [the cells] may be following this tube because the tube is filled with liquid that contains some kind of growth factor or some type of attractant," says Peter Eriksson, a neuroscientist at Sahlgrenska Academy at Göteborg University in Sweden and co-author of the study appearing in this week's issue of Science. "From animal studies, it's very obvious that if you have an insult [to] the brain, there are a number of molecular signals that tells the stem cells to start dividing and to start migrating and perhaps also to start repopulating areas of injury..."
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From Geeknotes:
BOLLYWOOD & INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL / FESTIVAL DE BOLLYWOOD & CINEMA INDIANO
March 6-11, 2007 at 7:30 PM / De 6 a 11 de marco de 2007, as 19h30
Cinemateca, Largo Senador Raul Cardoso, 207, Vila Clementino, Sao Paulo, Brasil
Organized by Rattapallax, Academia Internacional de Cinema (AIC) and Indian Trade Promotion Organization (ITPO) in Sao Paulo
BAD JAMIE CD Release Shows in Boston & NYC
*This Friday and Saturday* marks the release of the new CD by BAD JAMIE, and
shows in both Boston and NYC have been scheduled to celebrate!
*BOS*
*Friday, Feb 23 @ Bill's Bar*
5.5 Lansdowne St., Boston
Doors 9pm / Show 10pm
$5 to enter / 21+
w/ *The Black Tie Affair*
and the lighting effects and stylizing of Vizzie from *Psylab*
*NYC*
*Saturday, Feb 24 @ Lit Lounge*
93 2nd Ave., NYC
Doors 9pm / Show 10:30pm
$6 to enter / 21+
*CD's will be available at both shows for $6!* Brand spanking new t-shirts
will also be available.
We'll be playing cuts from the CD as well as songs never-before-heard! We
are very excited for both nights and we hope to see you there!
Love Always,
BAD JAMIE
community
EPK
web
From
Sundown Lounge No. 85
Cosmic Rays Blamed for Global Warming
Man-made climate change may be happening at a far slower rate than has been claimed, according to controversial new research. Scientists say that cosmic rays from outer space play a far greater role in changing the Earth's climate than global warming experts previously thought. In a book, to be published this week, they claim that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet.
Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.
Mr Svensmark last week published the first experimental evidence from five years' research on the influence that cosmic rays have on cloud production in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. This week he will also publish a fuller account of his work in a book entitled The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change.
A team of more than 60 scientists from around the world are preparing to conduct a large-scale experiment using a particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, to replicate the effect of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.
They hope this will prove whether this deep space radiation is responsible for changing cloud cover. If so, it could force climate scientists to re-evaluate their ideas about how global warming occurs...
Turning Algae into Fuel
Jim Sears spent years in his Boulder garage pondering the details of a system for turning algae, sunlight and power-plant exhaust into fuel on a massive scale. The company he founded to make his vision a reality, Solix Biofuels, launched with fanfare in December.
In that same garage two weeks ago, Jim Sears met with Boulder biodiesel entrepreneur Mark Fischer and Colorado School of Mines Ph.D. candidate Jonathan Meuser, an algae specialist. On Friday, Sears and colleagues launched an organization called Solar Democracy. About 30 attended the event at the Spice of Life Events Center.
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President George W. Bush asked for 35 billion gallons of biofuels a year by 2017 in his State of the Union address. Corn ethanol can produce just 15 billion gallons, so algae is getting serious attention, said Katherine Andrews, a biologist working on algal fuels at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. But problems abound, she said.
The greatest of the challenges is one spanning science and politics. Researchers have yet to identify which of the 100,000 known species of algae produce what kinds of potential fuels, Meuser said.
Solar Democracy`s idea is to encourage widespread "bioprospecting" by, for example, sending out collection kits and inexpensive diagnostic tools.
Schoolchildren or curious adults could zap information on promising algae over the Internet and have it reviewed by scientists. Hot prospects could be sent to a full-fledged lab for analysis, Sears said, and Solar Democracy would build up a comprehensive, publicly accessible repository of information on photosynthetic organisms...
Mystery Ailment Strikes Honeybees, By Genaro C. Armas
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) -- A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination. Researchers are scrambling to find the cause of the ailment, called Colony Collapse Disorder.
The country's bee population had already been shocked in recent years by a tiny, parasitic bug called the varroa mite, which has destroyed more than half of some beekeepers' hives and devastated most wild honeybee populations.
Along with being producers of honey, commercial bee colonies are important to agriculture as pollinators, along with some birds, bats and other insects. A recent report by the National Research Council noted that in order to bear fruit, three-quarters of all flowering plants—including most food crops and some that provide fiber, drugs and fuel—rely on pollinators for fertilization.
Scientists at Penn State, the University of Montana and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are among the quickly growing group of researchers and industry officials trying to solve the mystery...
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From Geeknotes:
POETRY AND THE LAW: OPENING ARGUMENTS
The College of Law- 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, -Room A
On February 15-16 the University of Illinois College of Law, the MFA Creative Program, and
author Richard Powers will host the first conference in the United States to explore and
celebrate the relationship of law and poetry.
Conference participants include James Elkins, Editor of The Legal Studies Forum, the poets Evie Shockley, Frank Pommersheim, Rachel Contreni Flynn, Tim Nolan, and Carl Reisman. The program is free and open to the public.
Contact person: Carl Reisman
creisman61 'at' yahoo.com
Puddin'Head Press Release party and open mic for BrotherKeeper by Larry Janowski
Please join us for a fun, star-studded afternoon of poetry to celebrate the release of
"BrotherKeeper" by Larry Janowski which has just been let out of its cage!
Come view this wonder of the poetry world at:
Corosh
1072 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago,
Saturday, February 17th
from 1 to 5 PM
There will be special performances by guest poets Carol Anderson, author of Ordinary,
Nina Corwin, author of Conversations With Friendly Demons And Tainted Saints
and Chris Green, author of Conceptual Animals
The main event will be hosted by Al DeGenova,
Editor of Afterhours Magazine
And then we'll have a mega-open-mike hosted by Charlie Newman,
host of The Café and The DVA Gallery.
For more information, please visit our website
www.puddinheadpress.com
Or call us at 708-656-4900.
PS: Corosh is a great restaurant and bar
so you can eat, drink, hear poetry all in one afternoon.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 84
Google's Plan to Control the Internet,
by Robert Cringely
I spoke recently with an old friend who is a bandwidth broker. He buys and sells bandwidth on fiber-optic networks around the world. And he told me something that I found not completely surprising, but I certainly hadn't known: Google controls more network fiber than any other organization.
This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber, just that they control it through agreements with network operators. I find two very interesting aspects to this story: 1) that Google has acquired -- or even needs to acquire -- so much bandwidth, and; 2) that they don't own it, since probably the cheapest way to pick up that volume of fiber would be to simply buy out any number of backbone providers like Level 3 Communications.
Google loves secrecy. That they've been acquiring fiber assets hasn't been a secret, but the sheer volume of these acquisitions HAS been. Why? One thought is that it kept down the price since people didn't really know it was Google snatching up this stuff (they've done it under a number of different corporate names). But if price was the issue, then why hasn't Google just bought the companies that own the fiber? It made no sense until I scratched my head and thought a bit further, at which point it became obvious that Google wants to -- in its own way -- control the Internet. In fact, they probably control it already and we just haven't noticed. The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television...
Drugs that can be 'Smoked,'
Alexza Pharmaceuticals is developing drugs that can be “smoked,” and, like nicotine in cigarettes, pass through the lungs and into the bloodstream almost instantly.
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All self-respecting painkillers these days offer “fast-acting relief,” a promise we accept to mean anywhere from 15 minutes to more than an hour. For Alexza Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is developing drugs for migraine, pain, panic and agitation, “fast” has to mean “within seconds.” The Palo Alto, California-based company is developing drugs that can be “smoked,” and, like nicotine in cigarettes, pass through the lungs and into the bloodstream almost instantly.
Alexza is hoping to provide similar results but in such a way that patients can carry the delivery device — an inhaler that looks like a miniature hip flask — in a pocketbook or the glove compartment of a car.
The device contains a battery-powered package that heats a thin coating of drug to create a vapor that can be sucked into the lungs.
Introducing the X-Hawk Flying Car
Still think that flying cars are something that is only possible in an episode of the Jetsons? Not so, if Rafi Yoeli of Israel is to be believed. In fact, he claims that his X-Hawk flying vehicle will be ready by 2010! Great video!
Urban Aeronautics, Yoeli's own company, says that the X-Hawk will initially be implemented "as a workhorse vehicle that could be used by firefighters, rescue teams, and the military to aid in the recovery of people stranded in hard to reach places." You see, the X-Hawk flying car has the same level of maneuverability as a helicopter, except the "ducted fan design" has no exposed blades. Taking off and landing is done vertically, whereas horizontal movement can approach speeds as high as 155mph. The exact range of these vehicles has not yet been determined, but they say that it can remain in the air for about two hours.
To see the video clip click here. Courtesy of MobileMag.com
An unmanned "Mule version" is expected to hit the air in 2009, whereas larger renditions -- including one designed to house 10 passengers -- are being planned for the near future. Flying won't come cheap, of course, with the estimated price sitting between $1.5 and $3.5 million, "and Yoeli admits those estimates might be low." (I guess I'll have to wait for the Yaris or Fit edition)
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From Geeknotes:
THE 15TH ANNUAL PAN AFRICAN FILM & ARTS FESTIVAL
February 8-19, 2007
With an attendance of over 200,000 people, PAFF is the largest Black History Month event in the United States. In a fun, family friendly environment, audiences enjoy cinema, art, music, spokenword, panels, workshops and parties. All ages, genders, ethnic groups and lifestyles are welcomed.
Centered around the largest and most prestigious Black film festival in North America, each year PAFF screens over 150 films from the U.S., Africa, the Caribbean, South America, the South Pacific, Europe and Canada, made by or about people of African descent. PAFF also includes a section of international films from the developing world.
Press Release African Film Selections.pdf
(From Rattapallax:)
Leading Brazilian & Latin-American Filmmakers & Writers at the AIC
Some of the best Brazilian and Latin-American filmmakers, poets, and writers will be holding workshops and lectures at the Academia Internacional de Cinema in February 2007. The directors of "Bus 174", "City of Men", "The Holy Girl" and "Madame Sata" are scheduled to appear at the AIC.
Democrats Who Served vs Chickenhawks Who Didn't...
Democrats:
----------------
John Murtha: 37 years in the Marines.
Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts.
Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star,Vietnam. Paraplegic from war injuries. Served in Congress.
Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars,and Soldier's Medal.
Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
Chuck Robb: Vietnam
Howell Heflin: Silver Star
George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received #311.
Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and AirMedal with 18 Clusters.
Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.
Republicans
------------------
George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard duty; got assigned to Alabama so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty.
Dick Cheney: did not serve. Five deferments.
Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
Tom DeLay: did not serve.
Roy Blunt: did not serve.
Bill Frist: did not serve.
Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
Rick Santorum: did not serve.
Trent Lott: did not serve.
John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
Jeb Bush: did not serve.
Karl Rove: did not serve.
Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." This is the man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
Vin Weber: did not serve.
Richard Perle: did not serve.
Douglas Feith: did not serve.
Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
Richard Shelby: did not serve.
Jon Kyl: did not serve.
Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
Christopher Cox: did not serve.
Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor.
Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non- combat role making movies.
B-1 Bob Dornan: Intentionally enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.
Phil Gramm: did not serve.
John McCain: Vietnam POW, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
John M. McHugh: did not serve.
JC Watts: did not serve.
Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although he continued in the NFL for 8 years as quarterback.
Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.
Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
George Pataki: did not serve.
Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
John Engler: did not serve.
Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.
Pundits (and others)
-------------------------
Sean Hannity: did not serve.
Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a pilonidal cyst.)
Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
Michael Savage (Wiener): did not serve.
George Will: did not serve.
Chris Matthews: did not serve.
Paul Gigot: did not serve.
Bill Bennett: did not serve.
Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
John Wayne: did not serve.
Bill Kristol: did not serve.
Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
Clarence Thomas: did not serve.
Ralph Reed: did not serve.
Michael Medved: did not serve.
Charlie Daniels: did not serve.
Ted Nugent: did not serve.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 83
The Smart Fuel Cell
A fuel cell that efficiently regulates its own power output based on the amount of hydrogen it is fed has been developed by US researchers. The simple control mechanism could extend the range of devices that can practically be powered using fuel cells.
Fuel cells generate electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and waste water. They are a cleaner alternative to petrol and diesel but currently remain experimental.
Although the system sounds simple enough, controlling a fuel cell's power output by feeding in more or less hydrogen has not been practical until now, says Jay Benziger, the chemical engineer at Princeton University in New Jersey, US, who developed the new fuel cell.
Engineers have tended to feed a steady supply of hydrogen and oxygen into their cells, in part to ensure that the gases will force waste water out of the system. But this causes some of the hydrogen to flow through the cell unused, meaning it must then be captured and recycled.
It also means the power output cannot be throttled back by simply lowering the input of gases, unlike a simple petrol engine. If it is necessary to lower the power output, conventional systems simply shunt current to attached resistors, which is less efficient...
The hyperbike - designed for stability, comfort, and exercise. Uses both your hands and feet for power, has no seat, and can go up to 50 miles per hour. The wheels are eight feet tall! This is a prototype. Inventer D.C. DeForest, Jr. is looking for investors. The video interview is here
Open Access to Science Under Attack
By David Biello
Advocates of open access to scientific research may find themselves under fire from high-profile public relations flaks and high-powered lobbying groups.
The battle over public access to scientific literature stretches back to the late 1990s when Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus began plans for PubMed Central--a repository for all research resulting from National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding--and, a few years later, launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). These easily accessible journals and repositories have struck fear into the hearts of traditional publishers, who have enlisted the "pit bull" of public relations to fight back, reports news@nature.
The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers hired Eric Dezenhall, head of Dezenhall Resources, a PR firm that specializes in "high stakes communications and marketplace defense," to address some of its members this past summer and potentially craft a media strategy.
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Dezenhall declined to comment for this article, citing "our longstanding policy due to strict confidentiality agreements neither to identify our clients nor comment on the work we do for them," in an email response to a request for an interview. But "nobody disagrees on the goals of high-stakes communications--sell a controversial product, win an election, defuse conflict and so forth," Dezenhall notes in the "manifesto" on the firm's website. "The life-or-death public relations struggles facing businesses today are not about information they are about power." In this case, the struggle is over access to scientific information...
(click for larger version)
Military Shows Off New Ray Gun, By Elliott Minor
MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. (AP) — The military calls its new weapon an “active denial system,'' but that's an understatement. It's a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire. Apart from causing that terrifying sensation, the technology is supposed to be harmless — a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons. Military officials say it could save the lives of innocent civilians and service members in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said.
During the first media demonstration of the weapon Wednesday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios that U.S. troops might encounter in war zones. The device's two-man crew located their targets through powerful lenses and fired beams from more than 500 yards away. That is nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets. Anyone hit by the beam immediately jumped out of its path because of the sudden blast of heat throughout the body. While the 130-degree heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make the participants think their clothes were about to ignite.
The system uses electromagnetic millimeter waves, which can penetrate only 1/64th of an inch of skin, just enough to cause discomfort. By comparison, microwaves used in the common kitchen appliance penetrate several inches of flesh. The millimeter waves cannot go through walls, but they can penetrate most clothing, officials said. They refused to comment on whether the waves can go through glass...
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From Geeknotes:
Chicagopoetry.com has cool poetry news. Click here for the short schedule...
In New York Harbor there stands a dilapidated military fortification, built to defend America against the British in the War of 1812 ... and it just happens to have the identical blueprint as Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. In the same spirit that placed the Statue of Liberty onto Fort Wood, there's a group who's pushing a petition to transform the fort into the New Globe.
(From Rattapallax:)
EDWARD HIRSCH, a celebrated and award-winning poet and critic, will be teaching at the creative writing workshop from July 9-16, 2007. Creative Writing Brazil is an unique literary workshop in Sao Paulo, organized by Rattapallax magazine and Academia Interncional de Cinema.
Also:
Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil more or less continuously from 1951 to 1966 and then intermittently to 1971. The country functioned beautifully as a necessary escape from the deprived and anxious world of her early childhood. Creative Writing Brazil will have a discussion about her life and work in Brazil, and introduce you to renowned Bishop scholars and translators of her work. You'll also visit her house in Ouro Preto - Casa Mariana - and other noted Bishop landmarks in Brazil.
If you're in Rome, you can visit the Spazio Arte Contemporanea Capsvla, and catch the installation “Berlin ‘06” by Giuliano Pastori. It opened January 25 and runs to February 15, it was born from a trip Pastori took to the IV edition of Biennial of Berlin.
AUSTIN, Texas – Witty best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, a Texas liberal who died after a long battle with breast cancer, left legions of admirers, even among the politicians she regularly skewered.
Ivins died in her home in hospice care. She was 62. Ivins revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time.
Here's her last column, reprinted from Truthdig. Posted lest it disappear...
From Open Mic Stage:
Maria Danes' latest release is 'Music United For Animals' a collection of songs written to speak up for animals in distress and each song supports the end of cruelty.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 82
Why Aliens Haven't Found Us Yet
It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe - and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit. Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven't had enough time to look.
Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen, proposed that a single civilisation might build eight intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life. Once on their way each probe would send out eight more mini-probes, which would head for the nearest stars and look for habitable planets.
Mr Bjork confined the probes to search only solar systems in what is called the "galactic habitable zone" of the Milky Way, where solar systems are close enough to the centre to have the right elements necessary to form rocky, life-sustaining planets, but are far enough out to avoid being struck by asteroids, seared by stars or frazzled by bursts of radiation.
He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today.
Like humans, alien civilisations could shorten the time to find extra-terrestrials by picking up television and radio broadcasts that might leak from colonised planets. "Even then, unless they can develop an exotic form of transport that gets them across the galaxy in two weeks it's still going to take millions of years to find us," said Mr Bjork. "There are so many stars in the galaxy that probably life could exist elsewhere, but will we ever get in contact with them? Not in our lifetime," he added.
[Fermi's paradox only holds if the speed of light is an unsurmountable barrier. I'm not convinced - Ed.]
Robot-Built Homes
The first prototype — a watertight shell of a two-storey house built in 24 hours without a single builder on site — will be erected in California before April.
A rival design, being pioneered in the East Midlands, with £1.2m of government funding, will include sunken baths, fireplaces and cornices. There are even plans for robots to supplant painters and decorators by spraying colourful frescoes at an affordable price.
By building almost an entire house from just two materials — concrete and gypsum — the robots will eliminate the need for dozens of traditional components, including floorboards, wooden window frames and possibly even wallpaper. It may eventually be possible to use specially treated gypsum instead of glass window panes.
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Engineers on both projects say the robots will not only cut costs and avoid human delays but liberate the normal family homes from the conventional designs of pitched roofs, right-angled walls and rectangular windows.
“The architectural options will explode,” predicted Dr Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who will soon unleash his $1.5m (£940,000) robot. “We will be able to build curves and domes as easily as straight walls.
“Your shoes, clothes and car are already made automatically, but your house is built by hand and it doesn’t make sense.”
At Loughborough University’s School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, the technology is being backed by a £1.2m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
It involves computer-controlled robotic nozzles which pipe quick-drying liquid gypsum and concrete to form walls, floors and roofs.
Inspired by the inkjet printer, the technology goes far beyond the techniques already used for prefabricated homes. “This will remove all the limitations of traditional building,” said Hugh Whitehead of the architecture firm Foster & Partners, which designed the “Gherkin” skyscraper in London and is producing designs for the Loughborough team. “Anything you can dream you can build.”
Invisible 'Radio' Tattoos
Somark Innovations announced biocompatible RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) ink, which can be used to tattoo cattle and laboratory rats and can be read through animal hair.
It might even be used on humans eventually.
This is a passive RFID technology that contains no metals; the tattoos themselves can be colored or invisible.
The Somark ID System creates a "biocompatible ink tatoo with chipless RFID functionality."
The RFID ink tatoo does not require line of sight to be read, as is the case with other RFID devices (making them better than a barcode for some applications).
RFID ink tattoos also solve the annoying problem of ear tag retention. Conventional RFID ear tags sell for about $2.25; about 60-90 percent of them eventually fall off. Also, Somark claims that the biocompatible RFID ink system will improve readability rates as well.
Somark Innovations co-founder Mark Pydynowski noted that the RFID ink is fully biocompatible and was safe for use in humans. He noted that RFID ink tattoos could be used to track and rescue soldiers. "It could help identify friends or foes, prevent friendly fire, and help save soldiers' lives," Pydynowski said.
Readers should note that VeriChip tags for patients are FDA approved and VeriChip tags have been proposed for immigrants.
This technology reminds me of Jack Vance's spray-on conductive wire; it also makes you think about the other possibilities that having an ink that can be used to create a functioning circuit. You don't need to tattoo it; you could print it onto flexible surfaces, like the sleeve watch from the 1981 novel Dream Park.
Maybe now they can get that Dattoos skin circuit idea off the ground. Story Invisible RFID Ink Safe For Cattle And People via VCTB.
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with permission from Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction.)
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From Geeknotes:
(From LA Weekly's "A Considerable Town":)
Tia Chucha's Lament
By DANIEL HERNANDEZ
Wednesday, January 17, 2007 - 6:00 pm
In a perfect world, there would be a Tia Chucha’s Cafe Cultural on every other street corner in L.A. You’d walk in, get a coffee and a couple tamales, browse through the deep selection of novels, histories and children’s books, and maybe catch a young person working on an art project, learning son jarocho or reading their poetry. You’d get the feeling that most people who walk into Tia Chucha’s say they get when they’re there: that it’s genuinely welcoming, a place where people come to express themselves, share and be nourished. You wouldn’t want to leave.
For now, there’s only one Tia Chucha’s. It’s in Sylmar — but not for very long. The café is facing an eviction in February after five years of operating at an undistinguished strip mall on Glenoaks Boulevard. The owners want to bring in a laundry. Author Luis J. Rodriguez, who opened the café in 2001 with his wife, Trini, said Tia Chucha’s will most likely relocate to a temporary space before possibly finding a permanent home in Pacoima. In the meantime, supporters are planning a silent auction and other fund-raisers to ensure that the presence of Tia Chucha’s in the San Fernando Valley remains uninterrupted.
Essential Political Documentaries:
"The Secret Government - Constitution in Crisis" by Bill Moyers
It aired on PBS in 1987 and is as good as anything on the tape (must see). Moyers is a very respected TV journalist who also worked for Lyndon B. Johnson and has a very professional approach. He interviews many different people involved with the CIA and other government agencies. His documentary gives quite an overview of what has actually happened in the last 50 years regarding the CIA and the cold war (including Iran, Guatamala, Cuba, Viet Nam and Chile). He features such people as Ralph McGeehee and Phil Retinger (both former CIA agents), Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque (Ret. U.S.N.), Theodore Bissell (active in the CIA at the time), Sen. Frank Church and many others.
"The Power Of Nightmares"
subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC series of documentary films, written and produced by Adam Curtis.
This documentary argues that during the 20th Century politicians lost the power to inspire the masses, and that the optimistic visions and ideologies they had offered were perceived to have failed. The film asserts that politicians consequently sought a new role that would restore their power and authority. Curtis, who also narrates the series, declares in the film's introduction that “Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares”. To illustrate this Curtis compares the rise of the American neoconservatives and radical Islamists, believing that both are closely connected; that some popular beliefs about these groups are inaccurate; and that both movements have benefited from exaggerating the scale of the terrorist threat. (Summary from Wikipedia)
From Venue Verite:
Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of unusual, short, free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters’ hometown. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four soliloquies.
Each poem is an epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. They speak about the sorts of things one might expect. Some recite their histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while few tell how they really died. Speaking without reason to lie or fear of the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that’s shorn of all facades. The interplay of various villagers — e.g. a bright and successful man crediting his parents for all he’s accomplished, and an old woman weeping because he is secretly her illegitimate child — forms a gripping, if not pretty, whole. (Summary from Wikipedia)
Public domain works available at Librivox:
1 - "The Hill" read by Lokon
3 - "Ollie McGee" read by Kristin Hughes
15 - "Mrs. Benjamin Pantier" read by Gesine
22 - "'Indignation' Jones" read by Gesine
40 - "Theodore the Poet" read by Phil Bordelon
68 - "A.D. Blood" read by Victoria Grace
200 - "Anne Rutledge" read by Linda Leu
From
Sundown Lounge No. 81
Top 10 Detox Foods
As 2007 swings into gear, there's no better time to give your body a healthy, fresh start than now! Plus if you're thinking about lowering your weight - and your RealAge - "eating clean" is a great first step.
Add these 10 foods to your grocery cart and you'll get three terrific benefits:
1. Lots of super-healthy liquids to flush out the body while pouring in nutrients.
2. Fiber to keep your GI tract fit.
3. Foods that energize cleansing enzymes in the liver, your body's built-in detox center.
Here's the top three:
1. Green leafy vegetables. Eat them raw, throw them into a broth, add them to juices. Their chlorophyll helps swab out environmental toxins (heavy metals, pesticides) and is an all-round liver protector.
2. Lemons. You need to keep the fluids flowing to wash out the body and fresh lemonade is ideal. Its vitamin C - considered the detox vitamin - helps convert toxins into a water - soluble form that?s easily flushed away.
3. Watercress. Put a handful into salads, soups, and sandwiches. The peppery little green leaves have a diuretic effect that helps move things through your system. And cress is rich in minerals too...
Burqini: Muslim Women's Version of the Bikini
It's not itsy-bitsy or teenie- weenie but the Burqini may prove to be just as popular as its polka-dotted predecessor.
The modest bathing costume is designed for water-going Muslim women who, because of religious values, cannot show more than their face, hands and feet in public.
A cross between a burqa and a bikini, the polyester suit is made up of pants and a long- sleeved thigh or knee-length A-line top with head covering. It is water-repellent, UV-resistant and comes with Arab designs.
Its Australian designer, Aheda Zanetti, has been swamped with thousands of inquiries about the product from Europe, Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East. Zanetti said she started producing the Burqini as Muslim women were missing out on sports because of their dress code...
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Genetically Modified Hens
Lay Eggs Loaded with Drugs
Genetically modified hens can produce drugs in the whites of their eggs, scientists reported today.
The technology "signifies an important advance in the use of farm animals for pharmaceutical production," the scientists said in a statement.
Traditional methods for producing therapeutic proteins such as antibodies used to treat cancer and arthritis are expensive. Farm animals could produce them faster and cheaper, the thinking goes.
Researchers led by Helen Sang of the Roslin BioCentre in Edinburgh, Scotland created transgenic hens by inserting the genes for desired pharmaceutical proteins into the hen’s gene for ovalbumin, a protein that makes up 54 percent of egg whites.
All the egg whites from these hens contained miR24, an antibody with potential for treating malignant melanoma. The whites also packed human interferon b-1a, an antiviral drug.
"With the demand for therapeutic protein drugs increasing, the efficient generation of transgenic hens that produce functional protein drugs at high levels in egg whites marks an important step in the development of this technology," according to a statement released by the Proceedings of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, which published the research in its online edition.
Deadly Frog Fungus Spreads to Japan
TOKYO (AP) — At least five frogs have died in Japan's first confirmed cases of a fungal infection linked to sharp reductions in amphibian numbers in other parts of the world, an expert said Friday. The discovery prompted animal and research groups in Japan to jointly declare “a state of emergency,'' urging frog owners to contact veterinarians immediately for any abnormalities.
Yumi Une, assistant professor of Azabu University in Kanagawa, just west of Tokyo, said that at least five frogs tested positive for the chytrid fungus recently.
It is the first time that the fungus has been confirmed in frogs in Japan, according to Une. In Asia, only Australia had confirmed cases of the fungus infection.
The emergency declaration, posted on the Web site of World Wide Fund for Nature Japan Friday and dated Saturday, urged owners of frogs and other amphibious animals to be more vigil and authorities to strengthen quarantine.
The chytrid fungus kills the frogs by growing on their skin, making it hard for them to use their pores and regulate water intake. The frogs die of dehydration in the water.
Frogs and many other amphibians are acutely sensitive to changes in environmental temperature and humidity as they can not maintain a steady internal temperature to the same extent as birds and mammals.
It is believed to be a major cause of the dramatic reduction of the number of amphibians in many parts of the world.
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From Geeknotes:
A few poetry resources online...
esnips Poetry Community, media sharing and bookmarking site; 1GB free -
http://www.esnips.com/community/poetry
The Verse Marauder
The Verse Marauder is a poetry only webzine with small, monthly editions.
To submit, send no more than 3 poems, in the body of the email [no attachments] to:
editor'at'theversemarauder'dot'com
Put the word SUBMISSION in the subject line to distinguish it from canned ham.
Only the merit of the work counts in evaluating your work; the author's publishing
resume or standing in the poetry world is irrelevant.
Nuvein Urban Legends Of The World Contest;
deadline 3/31, 1,500 wds max, $100 top prize
Entertain us with fantastic lore
that fascinates the mind.
Tell us tall tales from your neighborhood
to intrigue the imagination.
From
Sundown Lounge No. 80
Black Diamonds Come from Outer Space
If you’re looking for a space-age way to propose marriage, a black-diamond ring might be the way to go.
Long baffled by their origin, scientists now have evidence that these charcoal-colored gems formed in outer space.
Stephen Haggerty and Jozsef Garai, both of Florida International University, analyzed the hydrogen in black diamond samples using infrared-detection instruments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and found that the quantity indicated that the mineral formed in a supernova explosion.
Also called carbonado diamonds, meaning “burned” or “carbonized” in Portuguese, black diamonds defy mineral-making rules and are neverfound in the world’s mining fields where the clear and classic variety typically resides.
Since 1900, about 600 tons of conventional diamonds have been traded. Black diamonds reside in certain geologic formations in Brazil and the Central African Republic.
Haggerty has suggested, in the past, that black diamonds might have rained down on Earth inside meteorites billions of years ago. Their relative distribution on Earth could be explained by the timing of the formation of the continents, he said.
The new research was published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
NASA Outlines Recent Changes in Earth's Freshwater Distribution
Recent space observations of freshwater storage by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) are providing a new picture of how Earth's most precious natural resource is distributed globally and how it is changing.
Researchers are using GRACE's almost five-year data record to estimate seasonal water storage variations in more than 50 river basins that cover most of Earth's land area. The variations reflect changes in water stored in rivers, lakes, reservoirs; in floodplains as snow and ice; and underground in soils and aquifers.
"Grace is providing a first-ever look at the distribution of freshwater storage on the continents," said Jay Famiglietti, professor of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine. "With longer time series, we can distinguish long-term trends from natural seasonal variations and track how water availability responds to natural climate variations and climate change."
Several African basins, such as the Congo, Zambezi and Nile, show significant drying over the past five years. In the United States, the Mississippi and Colorado River basins show water storage increases during that time. Such information is vital for managing water resources in vulnerable parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, since increasing populations and standards of living place demands on water resources that are often unsustainable. The data can be used to make more informed regional water management decisions.
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GRACE's abilities to detect water are particularly vital for the emerging field of groundwater remote sensing. "Remote sensing of groundwater has been a Holy Grail for hydrologists because it is stored beneath the surface and is not detected by most sensors," said Famiglietti. "Outside of the United States and a few other developed nations, it is not well monitored. It's been speculated that many of Earth's key aquifers are being depleted due to over-exploitation, but a lack of data has hampered efforts to quantify how aquifer levels are changing and take the steps necessary to avoid depleting them. With additional data, such as measurements of surface water and soil moisture, we can use GRACE to solve this problem..."
Forget the iPhone - Where's The New Apple Software?
From Monkey Bites
Poof We was robbed! Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is a pretty spectacular device and I’m glad it was announced now so I can start saving for the next six months, but this is a software blog and frankly we’re a bit miffed — we got nothing from Apple.
Phone Schmone. Where’s the Leopard previews? Release dates? Amazing additional features Jobs promised at the WWDC? Can a million rumors about retiring the Aqua interface really be wrong? We just don’t know. And our fingernails can't take it much longer.
What about ILife ‘07? ITunes? IWork? Rumor has it that some Steveo’s presentation used some Keynote features that aren’t available to us mortals using the ‘06 version. It seems reasonable to assume that an iWork ‘07 must therefore exist, but nary a peep from the big man.
Then of course there was my dream of an Aperture update shot to hell. Something about a spreadsheet app as well. Okay, let’s be honest I don’t care about a spreadsheet app, but still, the disappointment is palpable over here at Monkey Bites.
We take some measure of consolation in remembering this quote (brought to our attention again by Steven Johnson) from Palm CEO Ed Colligan. When asked about the iPhone, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector. We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
In the immortal words of Ace Venture: RRREHEHEALLY!
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From Geeknotes:
Hello everybody!
I'm doing two live storytelling shows (Jan. 11th and 18th) at the M-Bar?
with Missi Pyle, Ann Randolph and MC Lance Anderson.
10pm-11pm
$10 drink minimum. No price for admission.
Missi, Anne and Lance are all great talents.
Please come and support us as we workshop some new material.
Tim Coyne
thehollywoodpodcast.com
myspace.com/hollywoodpodcast
Urban Twang, one of the bands featured in the All-Chicago show, has new songs and upcoming gigs...
From
Sundown Lounge No. 79
Inside Seagate's R&D Labs
By Rob Beschizza|
PITTSBURGH -- As Gordon Moore is to transistors, Seagate CTO Mark Kryder is to "areal density" -- a measure of how tightly data can be packed onto the surface of a disk. In a conference room overlooking the Allegheny River, he describes the coming storm in magnetic technology.
"When I joined Seagate, the idea of conquering 100 Gb per square inch seemed unimaginable," Kryder said. "Even 20 seemed unlikely."
In the eight years since then, however, Kryder and his colleagues at Seagate Research have stuffed 421 Gb per square inch onto test platters, and they're only getting warmed up. On a crisp December day -- one that also saw the death of Seagate founder Al Shugart -- Wired News yanked them out of the lab to get an exclusive tour of their Pittsburgh research headquarters, and a look at what you'll be buying in 2012.
White-coated scientists lurk in dust-free rooms, protected from environmental contaminants by massive glass panes and a complex air-recycling system. Amid dozens of labs at the 300,000 square-foot facility, machines of Gilliam-esque oddness and complexity whirr, surrounded by piles of technology it will take years for even a few of us to use.
The world's brightest young electrical engineers handle grains of magnetic matter so tiny they are measured by the nanometer, clumped into the smallest possible configurations that can hold a single bit of data.
Operating at the very edge of understood physics, the magnetic material can be shrunk only so small, thanks to the so-called superparamagnetic limit -- a barrier Seagate has spent millions of dollars fighting....
UFO Archive To Be Launched By French Space Agency
With the responsibility for training their astronauts turned over to Europe and cat launchings no longer in vogue, what's a French space agency to do? Become the official Internet source for UFO sightings, naturally.
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See, according to Jacques Arnould of France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales space agency, CNES will publish their archive of some 1,600 UFO sightings and other foo fightin' phenomena before mid-February. The on-line archives will consist of about 6,000 reports (many relating to the same incident) filed by pilots and the public alike over the last 30 years.
Given the success of films about visitations from outer-space beings like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of The Third Kind and Independence Day, the CNES archive is likely to prove a hit.
Now you will have about two months to hone your conspiracy theories and brush up on your high-school French. What, you didn't expect these to be published in English did you?
Flexible Plastic Sheets of Power
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated a prototype that could offer a new way to power gadgets. The prototype, which consists of plastic and flexible electronics, can wirelessly supply power to any device that touches its surface.
These sheets of flexible electronics can wirelessly transmit power to gadgets. The sheet in hand has copper coils for power transmission; the black and brown squares are switches for turning the current on and off; the next set of copper coils senses the position of a gadget; and the black and white grid is an array of organic transistors that detect the position of the gadget and direct current flow.
The power sheet, says Takao Someya, professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo, relies on the well-known physical principle of electromagnetic induction, used to charge electric toothbrushes and some RFID tags. However, he says, his system is designed in a way that overcomes the limitations of common induction schemes. Traditional induction systems can only spread small amounts of power over a relatively large area, and fairly large amounts of power can only be supplied to precise locations (such as a toothbrush mount). Someya's power sheets, in contrast, can be large, and they can still supply a large amount of power to gadgets placed near them.
This new capability, he says, is enabled by a novel design and by advances in the fabrication of flexible electronics. The power system actually consists of two types of sheets: one sheet senses the position of an object, and the other sheet supplies power to the object's point of contact, but not to the rest of the sheet. "In this way, the system selectively feeds power as high as 30 watts to electronic objects placed upon it," Someya says.
The position-sensing sheet relies on two types of flexible electronics. Using a technique similar to silk screening, the researchers printed an array of copper coils 10 millimeters in diameter. In addition, they used a modified inkjet printer to print an array of organic transistors. Both devices are thin and flexible enough to bend with a sheet of plastic...
Gadgets would need to be equipped with a coil and special power-harvesting circuitry to use the power pad. As the gadget gets closer to the pad, the electrical resistance of the pad's coils decreases. The array of transistors detects the exact position of the change in resistance and effectively directs the subsequent power flow, which is provided by devices on the second sheet of plastic...
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From Geeknotes:
I'm still not doing the whole shownotes thing, but on the podpage I have links to the various artists featured in this week's show. The 'Polar Radio' link is there as well...
From
Sundown Lounge No. 78
New Tattoo Ink May Change The Longevity of Tattoos
Just as the number of Americans sporting tattoos has soared in the past decade, so has membership in another group: people who want their bodywork removed. Only then do they come to know the truth — that laser tattoo removal is painful, expensive and may not do the job completely.
Soon there may be a solution to tattoo regret — removable tattoo ink. A company founded by doctors says it will begin selling such ink early next year. The ink is applied just as with any tattoo, and will remain in place as long as desired. But if the owner later decides that the artwork has to go, it can be removed fully and safely with a single laser treatment.
The founders of the company making the removable ink, New York-based Freedom-2 LLC, say their goal is to help those who have come to regret permanently decorating their bodies. But backers say the technology will not only simplify tattoo removal, it will create an expanded market for body art — since consumers can be now assured that the tattoo will come off easily and without exorbitant cost.
"I think it will open a floodgate for people who want tattoos," says Dr. Bruce Saal, a Los Gatos, Calif., dermatologist who specializes in laser tattoo removal and has invested in the company. "People will say, 'I want to do something a little wild. Now that I know it's not a lifelong commitment, I'll do it.' "
The company will sell only black ink initially but will eventually add other colors. It is also developing a "time-limited tattoo," which will consist of ink in biodegradable polymer beads that dissolve and fade over time...
Parasite Makes Women More Attractive
A comon parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says.
About 40 per cent of the world's population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, including about eight million Australians.
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Human infection generally occurs when people eat raw or undercooked meat that has cysts containing the parasite, or accidentally ingest some of the parasite's eggs excreted by an infected cat.
The parasite is known to be dangerous to pregnant women as it can cause disability or abortion of the unborn child, and can also kill people whose immune systems are weakened.
Until recently it was thought to be an insignificant disease in healthy people, Sydney University of Technology infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter said, but new research has revealed its mind-altering properties.
"Interestingly, the effect of infection is different between men and women,'' Dr Boulter writes in the latest issue of Australasian Science magazine.
"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.
"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.
"In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens''...
Happiness: Good for Creativity, Bad for Single-Minded Focus
by JR Minkel
Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing.
University of Toronto psychologists induced a happy, sad or neutral state in each of 24 participants by playing them specially chosen musical selections. To instill happiness, for example, they played a jazzy version of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. After each musical interlude, the researchers gave subjects two tests to assess their creativity and concentration.
In one test, participants in a happy mood were better able to come up with a word that unified three other seemingly disparate words, such as "mower," "atomic" and "foreign." Solving the puzzle required participants to think creatively, moving beyond the normal word associations--"lawn," "bomb" and "currency"--to come up with the more remote answer: "power."
Interestingly, induced happiness made the subjects worse at the second task, which required them to ignore distractions and focus on a single piece of information. Participants had to identify a letter flashed on a computer screen flanked by either the same letter, as in the string "N N N N N," or a different letter, as in "H H N H H." When the surrounding letters didn't match, the happy participants were slower to recognize the target letter in the middle, indicating that the ringers distracted them.
The results suggest that an upbeat mood makes people more receptive to information of all kinds, says psychologist Adam Anderson, co-author of the study published online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. "With positive mood, you actually get more access to things you would normally ignore," he says. "Instead of looking through a porthole, you have a landscape or panoramic view of the world..."
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From Geeknotes:
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