The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. – Benjamin Franklin
– New cancer ‘wonder’ drugs trigger cancer spread to bones (Natural News, Feb 20, 2013):
Most cancer drugs are used to hopefully kill tumors and keep malignancies from spreading. Unfortunately, new research from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis raises serious concerns that Big Pharma’s highly touted class of cancer drugs known as IAP antagonists actually increases the risk of tumors spreading to bone.
Read moreCancer ‘Wonder’ Drugs Trigger Cancer Spread To Bones
– When Brain Damage Unlocks The Genius Within (POPSCI, Feb 19, 2013)
”This event was so much bigger than anything we’ve seen on video that it doesn’t surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.’
– Margaret Campbell-Brown, physics professor at the University of Western Ontario
– Russian meteorite 1,000 times bigger than originally thought (FOX News, Feb 19, 2013):
It turns out the meteor that landed in Russia last week was a bit bigger than the 10 tons first reported. About 1,000 times bigger.
When a hunk of rock raced out of the morning skies over Russia on Friday and exploded with nearly 500 kilotons of energy, early size estimates from the Russian Academy of Sciences that were carried by the Associated Press, Reuters and other news wires pegged it on the small size, with a weight of about 10 tons.
Oops.
Later in the evening, after studying infrasound data from stations around the world, NASA released a new estimate revising that first guess upward by a thousand-fold: The meteorite actually weighed closer to 10,000 tons, scientists said — approximately as much as 170 M1 Abrams tanks.
Read moreRussian Meteor 1,000 Times Bigger Than Originally Thought
– [Hope] Technology to produce solar cell from wood pulp is developed, “Manufacturing cost is 1/100,000? (Fukushima Diary, Feb 19, 2013):
Associate professor Nogi from Osaka university developed the technology to produce solar cell from wood pulp with his developing team.
The manufacturing cost is 1/100,000 of the one with glass substrates, 1/500 ~ 5,000 of the one with plastic.
– The Search Is on for Meteorite (Wall Street Journal , Feb 19, 2013):
The meteor that crashed to earth in Russia was about 55 feet in diameter, weighed around 10,000 tons and was made from a stony material, scientists said, making it the largest such object to hit the Earth in more than a century.
Large pieces of it have yet to be found. However, a team from Ural Federal University, which is based in Yekaterinburg, collected 53 fragments, the largest of which was 7 millimeters, according to Viktor Grokhovsky, a scientist at the university.
It is the largest reported meteor since the one that hit Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The U.S. agency’s new estimate of the meteor’s size was a marked increase from its initial one.
– Vegetarian Diet Cuts Cancer Risk – Study (Foodconsumer, Feb 17, 2013)
– Chimpanzee Memory Study Suggests Apes’ Short-Term Recall Better Than Humans’ (Huffington Post, Feb 17, 2013):
Boston — Chimpanzees may have more smarts than humans, at least regarding short-term memories, new research suggests.
A Japanese researcher presented a video showing the remarkable abilities of a chimpanzee named Ayumu, here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Thursday (Feb. 14). When the numbers 1 through 9 appeared randomly on a screen and then disappeared, the chimpanzee was able to recall the exact sequence and location of each number. Ayumu has also learnt numbers 1 through 19 and is able to touch each one in ascending order, which hasn’t been shown before, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a researcher at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute, told Livescience.
As Matsuzawa showed the video to a room of scientists and journalists, murmurs of amazement were heard. “Don’t worry, nobody can do it,” Matsuzawa said, with an almost mischievous smile. “It’s impossible for you.”
Read moreChimpanzee Memory Study Suggests Apes’ Short-Term Recall Better Than Humans’
– A sensational breakthrough: the first bionic hand that can feel IIndependent, Feb 17, 2013):
The first bionic hand that allows an amputee to feel what they are touching will be transplanted later this year in a pioneering operation that could introduce a new generation of artificial limbs with sensory perception.
The patient is an unnamed man in his 20s living in Rome who lost the lower part of his arm following an accident, said Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
The wiring of his new bionic hand will be connected to the patient’s nervous system with the hope that the man will be able to control the movements of the hand as well as receiving touch signals from the hand’s skin sensors.
Read moreSensational Breakthrough: The First Bionic Hand That Can Feel
– Scientists create ‘sixth sense’ brain implant to detect infrared light (Telegraph, Feb 17, 2013):
A brain implant which could allow humans to detect invisible infrared light has been developed by scientists in America.
Scientists have created a “sixth sense” by creating a brain implant through which infrared light can be detected.
Although the light could not be seen lab rats were able to detect it via electrodes in the part of the brain responsible for their sense of touch.
Similar devices have previously been used to make up for lost capabilities, for example giving paralysed patients the ability to move a cursor around the screen with their thoughts.
But the new study, by researchers from Duke University in North Carolina, is the first case in which such devices have been used to give an animal a completely new sense.
Dr Miguel Nicolelis said the advance, reported in the Nature Communications journal this week, was just a prelude to a major breakthrough on a “brain-to-brain interface” which will be announced in another paper next month.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Sunday, he described the mystery work as something “no one has dreamed could be done”.
The second paper is being kept secret until it is published but Dr Nicolelis’s comments raise the prospect of an implant which could allow one animal’s brain to interact directly with another.
Read moreScientists Create ‘Sixth Sense’ Brain Implant To Detect Infrared Light
– GMO fail: Monsanto foiled by feds, Supreme Court, and science (Grist, Feb 15, 2013):
It’s been a good week if you enjoy a little GMO schadenfreude. The FDA has reportedly bowed to public pressure to extend the comment period on its approval of genetically engineered salmon, and Illinois, Maryland, and Iowa are the latest states to buck GMOs by introducing labeling bills into state legislature.
Even the Supreme Court has an opportunity to take Monsanto down a peg. On Feb. 19, the court will hear arguments in a patent infringement case between an Indiana farmer and Monsanto (I covered it in detail here). If Monsanto prevails, it’ll move a few more paces towards agricultural monopoly; if it loses, the company will take a couple steps back. It’s encouraging that the Supreme Court chose to hear the case over the solicitor general’s urging to dismiss it, but Monsanto could have an inside man: As in other Monsanto-related cases, former Monsanto-lawyer-turned-Supreme-Court-Justice Clarence Thomas has no plans to recuse himself.
But GMOs took the biggest punch this week from academia: Tom Philpott highlights a USDA-funded study [PDF] by University of Wisconsin scientists who found that several types of GMO seeds (including Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready varieties) actually produce a lower yield than conventional seeds. Only one seed — a corn that produces its own pesticide to combat the corn borer — offers any significant yield benefit. In other words, planting most genetically modified seeds results in less harvest per acre than planting non-genetically modified seeds.
The researchers looked at 20 years of data from test plots in Wisconsin from 1990-2010, both on research plots and on plots in participating farmers’ fields. Philpott flags a key point from the study:
Read moreGMO Fail: Monsanto Foiled By Feds, Supreme Court, And Science
– How to turn living cells into computers (Nature, Feb 13, 2013):
Genetic system performs logic operations and stores data in DNA.
Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in living cells. These ‘genetic circuits’ could be used to track key moments in a cell’s life or, at the flick of a chemical switch, change a cell’s fate, the researchers say. Their results are described this week in Nature Biotechnology1.
Synthetic biology seeks to bring concepts from electronic engineering to cell biology, treating gene functions as components in a circuit. To that end, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge have devised a set of simple genetic modules that respond to inputs much like the Boolean logic gates used in computers.
– Largest Prime Number Known Is 17-Million Digits Long, Mathematician Says (Huffington Post, Feb 6, 2013):
The largest prime number yet has been discovered — and it’s 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.
The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers devoted to finding primes, similar to projects like SETI@Home, which downloads and analyzes radio telescope data in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The network, called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) harnesses about 360,000 processors operating at 150 trillion calculations per second. This is the third prime number discovered by Cooper.”It’s analogous to climbing Mt. Everest,” said George Woltman, the retired, Orlando, Fla.-based computer scientist who created GIMPS. “People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that’s never been known before.”
Read moreMathematician: Largest Prime Number Known Is 17-Million Digits Long
– Debunking the GMO Talking Points with Ease (Farm Wars, Feb 6, 2013):
#1 GMOs are needed to feed the world.
This is always a future based “goal” never to be obtained any time soon. GMOs have been on the market since 1996. When are they going to feed the world? The answer is never because that’s not what they are intended to do. I’ve heard an estimate of 80% of the GMOs grown in the US is used for force feeding factory farmed animals. USA today reported, “It takes about 15 pounds of feed to make 1 pound of beef, 6 pounds of feed for 1 pound of pork and 5 pounds of feed for 1 pound of chicken”. Do you think we could feed the world with those numbers?
#2 GMOs reduce the use of chemical pesticides.
This talking point is just a blatant lie. Well, sort of. Although, a variety of corn and cotton produces its own insecticide, most GMO crops are sprayed with heavy amounts of herbicide, which has more than doubled since the introduction of GMOs. Companies like Monsanto always use the words pesticide and insecticide when reporting a decrease in use, but never say herbicide when it comes to reduction. It’s a play on words. Monsanto and the other biotech companies know most people don’t know the difference.
What could possibly go wrong?
– FDA approves first GMO flu vaccine containing reprogrammed insect virus (Natural News, Feb 8, 2013):
A new vaccine for influenza has hit the market, and it is the first ever to contain genetically-modified (GM) proteins derived from insect cells. According to reports, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the vaccine, known as Flublok, which contains recombinant DNA technology and an insect virus known as baculovirus that is purported to help facilitate the more rapid production of vaccines.
According to Flublok’s package insert, the vaccine is trivalent, which means it contains GM proteins from three different flu strains. The vaccine’s manufacturer, Protein Sciences Corporation (PSC), explains that Flublok is produced by extracting cells from the fall armyworm, a type of caterpillar, and genetically altering them to produce large amounts of hemagglutinin, a flu virus protein that enables the flu virus itself to enter the body quickly.
Read moreFDA Approves First GMO Flu Vaccine Containing Reprogrammed Insect Virus
– Yet more evidence emerges that our universe is a grand simulation created by an intelligent designer (Natural News, Feb 7, 2013):
There’s a lot of buzz in the news about a new scientific study that statistically supports the idea that our known universe is actually a grand computer simulation. This is mainstream science, and the idea isn’t a whacky as you might first suppose. I’ve actually written about this several times in articles about consciousness and the nature of reality. This news, by the way, also supports the idea of a Creator who brought this universe — and everything in it — into existence by design.
A new scientific paper published in arXiv and co-authored by Silas Beane from the University of Bonn reveals strong statistical evidence that our reality is, indeed, a grand computer simulation. The title of the paper is Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation.
Here’s what it means in layman’s terms
YouTube Added: 01.02.2013
Description:
Visit http://science.nasa.gov/ for breaking science news.
A comet falling in from the distant reaches of the solar system could become a naked-eye object in early March. This is Comet Pan-STARRS’s first visit to the inner solar system, so surprises are possible as its virgin ices are exposed to intense solar heating.
FYI.
Description:
Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine (US Army ret) – Personal Fukushima Estimate of Situation — http://www.GeneralBert.com // Transcript of EoS with citations, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/5/prweb9498292.htm
– The Hidden Connection Behind Viruses, Vaccines and Cancer (GreenMedInfo, Jan 29, 2013):
By Dr Tyson Perez.
Mainstream medicine tells us that the hepatitis B virus (HBV) causes liver cancer which is why it is so necessary for US newborns to be vaccinated within hours of birth. We are told that the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is supposedly so prevalent in our population, causes cervical cancer which is why there is such a push to vaccinate girls and boys in the US as early as 9 years old. Let’s not forget about Simian Virus 40 (SV40) which is known to have contaminated polio vaccines and is associated with a wide variety of human cancers. Conventional wisdom tells us that viruses cause cancer. But is this true? Let’s investigate the story further.
Read moreThe Hidden Connection Behind Viruses, Vaccines and Cancer
– Garlic Proven 100 Times More Effective Than Antibiotics, Working In A Fraction of The Time (Waking Times, Jan 29, 2013)
A significant finding from Washington State University shows that garlic is 100 times more effective than two popular antibiotics at fighting disease causing bacteria commonly responsible for foodborne illness.
Their work was published recently in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy a follow-up to the author’s previous research in Applied and Environmental Microbiology which conclusively demonstrated that garlic concentrate was effective in inhibiting the growth of C. jejuni bacteria.
Garlic is probably nature’s most potent food. It is one of the reasons people who eat the Mediterranean diet live such long healthy lives. Garlic is also a powerful performer in the research lab.
Read moreGarlic Proven 100 Times More Effective Than Antibiotics
– BPA Substitute Could Spell Trouble: Experiments Show Bisphenol S Also Disrupts Hormone Activity (Science Daily, Jan 22, 2013):
A few years ago, manufacturers of water bottles, food containers, and baby products had a big problem. A key ingredient of the plastics they used to make their merchandise, an organic compound called bisphenol A, had been linked by scientists to diabetes, asthma and cancer and altered prostate and neurological development. The FDA and state legislatures were considering action to restrict BPA’s use, and the public was pressuring retailers to remove BPA-containing items from their shelves.
The industry responded by creating “BPA-free” products, which were made from plastic containing a compound called bisphenol S. In addition to having similar names, BPA and BPS share a similar structure and versatility: BPS is now known to be used in everything from currency to thermal receipt paper, and widespread human exposure to BPS was confirmed in a 2012 analysis of urine samples taken in the U.S., Japan, China and five other Asian countries.
– World on a string: DNA to be used for data storage (RT, Jan 24, 2013):
From cave paintings to cloud computing, man has sought out increasingly complex ways to store data. Now researchers have found that nature’s own hard drive – DNA – can be synthesized to back up a world of knowledge in the information age.
On Wednesday researchers from the UK-based European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) published findings in the journal, Nature, describing how they had stored all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a digital photo of their lab, a PDF of the 1953 study that described the structure of DNA, and a 26-second sound clip from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in manufactured DNA.
“We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from bones of woolly mammoths, which date back tens of thousands of years, and make sense of it,” says study co-author Nick Goldman of the EBI.
“It’s also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy,” he continued.
Hospital superbugs such as MRSA are some of the best know antibiotic-resistant diseases, but MPs were warned about infections such as gonorrhea and TB that affect the general population. Photograph: Getty Images
– Antibiotic-resistant diseases pose ‘apocalyptic’ threat, top expert says (Guardian, Jan 23, 2013):
Britain’s most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu or major coastal flooding.
Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue should be added to the government’s national risk register of civil emergencies.
She described what she called an “apocalyptic scenario” where people going for simple operations in 20 years’ time die of routine infections “because we have run out of antibiotics”.
Read moreTop Expert: Antibiotic-Resistant Diseases Pose ‘Apocalyptic’ Threat
– White Island could erupt at any moment (New Zealand Herald, Jan 25, 2013):
Unsettled activity at White Island, which has prompted authorities to raise alert levels, indicates the volcano could erupt at any moment.
But exactly if, when, or how that may occur remains unclear as scientists gather more data from the off-shore Bay of Plenty volcano, which has been in an eruptive cycle since last August.
Over previous months, a jagged lava dome plugging magma below has emerged in the volcano, which is New Zealand’s most active.
Flashback:
– All 40 H5N1 Exposed Ferrets DIED
– US Government Paid Dutch Researchers To Mutate Deadly H5N1 Virus And Make It Go AIRBORNE!!!
The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile governments or rogue scientists.
– Scientists Push to Resume Research On Virulent Man-Made Flu Virus (TIME, Jan 23, 2013):
Researchers who voluntarily stopped work on a potent strain of influenza they created in the lab are hoping to end the moratorium on their studies.
In January 2012, scientists agreed to halt their research on the dangerous H5N1 avian flu–or bird flu virus–that they had manipulated to become more easily transmissible from person to person. H5N1 became known as avian influenza because it thrives in fowl populations, including ducks and migrating geese, and while it caused severe illness in people, the virus was less adept at jumping between human hosts, and presumably, among other mammals as well. Since 1997, when the virus was identified in Hong Kong, about 600 people have been infected and nearly 60% have died.
But two groups of scientists, one led by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and another led by Yoshi Kawaoke at University of Wisconsin, independently managed to create strains of H5N1 in their labs that could pass between ferrets, marking the first time that a version of the avian flu could easily spread among mammals. The potential for a pandemic with H5N1, which, to date, may have a 50% mortality rate among those infected, was concerning enough to biosafety officials that the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) requested that scientific journals not publish the details of how the virulent strains of H5N1 were made. The papers, the officials feared, could serve as a how-to guide for human catastrophe if the results were used by bioterrorists.
Read moreScientists Push To Resume Research On Deadly Man-Made Flu Virus