Republicans try to distance themselves from the word 'Republican',

Scan any right-wing blog these days and it's hard not to notice that something is missing.

Namely, the word "Republican."

As he so often does these days, Rush Limbaugh sets the trends in the right-wing noise chamber. If you've listened to Limbaugh's radio show lately, you'll notice that he has rarely mentioned the word "Republican" since November. Indeed, he goes out of his way every 30 seconds to mention that he's actually a "conservative."

How Things Work Home Page


A great place to ask that nagging question.

1531. What does it mean if a light bulb uses 60 watts? — B, Los Angeles

The watt is a unit of power, equivalent to the joule-per-second. One joule is about the amount of energy it takes to raise a 12 ounce can of soda 1 foot. A 60 watt lightbulb uses 60 joules-per-second, so the power it consumes could raise a 24-can case of soda 2.5 feet each second. Most tables are about 2.5 feet above the floor. Next time you leave a 60-watt lightbulb burning while you're not in the room, imagine how tired you'd get lifting one case of soda onto a table every second for an hour or two. That's the mechanical effort required at the generating plant to provide the 60-watts of power you're wasting. If don't need the light, turn off lightbulb!

The 100 Worst Porn Movie Titles



(e.g. Airtight Granny)

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
--george bernard shaw

All beauty is the future.

Barbie Deemed Threat to Saudi Morality

"Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful. . ."

Sheik Abdulla al-Merdas, a preacher in a Riyadh mosque, said the muttawa take their anti-Barbie campaign to the shops, confiscating dolls from sellers and imposing a fine.

. . .

"It is no problem that little girls play with dolls. But these dolls should not have the developed body of a woman, and wear revealing clothes," al-Merdas said.

"These revealing clothes will be imprinted in their minds and they will refuse to wear the clothes we are used to as Muslims," the sheik said. . .

Other items listed as violations on the site included Valentine's Day gifts, perfume bottles in the shape of women's bodies, clothing with logos that include a cross, and decorative copies of religious items — offensive because they could be damaged and thus insult Islam.

Attention span and reasoning may get higher marks than intelligence, especially in math


. . .intelligence is not enough to become a young math whiz. It also takes a good attention span and training your mind to "self regulate" or focus on the task at hand.

The measure for academic success for decades has been a person's intelligence quotient, or IQ. But new research published in the journal Child Development says that a thought process called "executive functioning," which governs the ability to reason and mentally focus, also plays a critical role in learning, especially when it comes to math skills.

"It's often thought that kids don't do well because they're dumb, and there's nothing we can do about it," says lead study author Clancy Blair, associate professor of human development and family studies at Pennsylvania State University. "But not only is executive function pivotal for academic success, it's amenable to training, and this training might make a big difference in a child?s ability."

In Blair's study, the parts of the brain's so-called executive function, which is linked to math ability in preschoolers, are "working memory" and "inhibitory control."


The Executive Function occurs in the Prefrontal Cortex.

The most typical neurologic term for functions carried out by the pre-frontal cortex area is Executive Function. Executive Function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes).

Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person's personality and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.

Distractions turn on different parts of our brains and do so more quickly than the daily grind of paying attention

. . .

Separate regions are responsible for the different ways our brain focuses on the world around us, according to the study by MIT researchers, and our brain waves even pulsate at different frequencies depending on the type of outside stimulus.

"Neural activity goes up and down in a regular periodic way, with everything vibrating together," said study co-leader and neuroscientist Earl K. Miller. "It is faster for automatic stimulus and slower for things we choose to pay attention to."

. . .

Scientists have always recognized two different ways that the brain processes information coming from the outside world. Willful focus (as occurs when you gaze at a piece of art) produces what are called "top-down" signals, while automatic focus (like when a wailing siren snaps you to attention) produces "bottom-up" signals. . .

Studying monkeys assigned to different tasks, Miller and co-author Timothy J. Buschman found that when a picture or object "popped out" at the creature, the parietal cortex jumped into action. When the monkeys were merely searching for the object, however, it was activity in the prefrontal cortex controlling the brain. This finding is the first to support this difference with concrete evidence. . .

"Anything that stands out as different from everything else—like a red apple in the middle of a green field—tends to grab your attention. . ." , activating the parietal cortex.


The prefrontal cortex is the seat of memory, language and abstract reasoning. For those with lower measured intelligence, the prefrontal cortex grew thicker with neuron-rich gray matter more quickly and reached a peak thickness at age 8. For the smartest kids, the cortex was thinner early on and didn't reach peak thickness until age 11.

The parietal cortex is the region of the brain that encodes the category or meaning of visual information.

The ability to take a piece of information through our senses, assign meaning to it and categorize it helps people make sense of the world around them and behave accordingly. Because of this, when a chair is seen by the eyes, it's deemed appropriate for sitting on.

"You're not born knowing about categories or things like chairs or tables or telephones," said lead author David Freedman, a postdoctoral research fellow in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. "Instead those develop through learning."

. . .

He and colleagues trained a group of monkeys to play a computer game in which they recognized dozens of visual patterns in one of two categories.

"Once they were trained, we monitored the activity of individual neurons while they were playing. . ."

Activity in the parietal cortex, the area around the middle of the brain right around the top of the head, was completely reorganized as a result of training. The parietal neurons mirrored the monkeys' decisions about which of the two categories each visual pattern belonged to.

Learning and experience also changed how the parietal cortex represented categories. . .
Over the course of few weeks, the monkeys were retrained to group the same visual patterns into two new categories. Parietal cortex activity was completely reorganized as a result of this retraining and encoded the visual patterns according to the newly learned categories. . .

"The activity didn't just encode what those visual patterns looked like," Freedman said. "Instead, the activity encoded what those patterns actually meant or what category those patterns belonged to."


(It occurs to me that if the parietal cortex doesn't have sufficient blood flow it won't work as efficiently and will keep yammering away until it gets an off signal.)

Chart comparing how Hillary, Obama and Lieberman voted on Iraq-related issues.

Hillary and Obama voted exactly the same on every vote but one, on whether to confirm General Casey to be Army Chief of Staff. Hillary voted against him, Obama and Lieberman voted for him.

On every other vote Hillary and Obama have the same opinion.

Lieberman, however, voted on the opposite side eleven times, and where Obama missed one vote and Hillary missed none, Holy Joe missed six.

The chart is very revealing: It demonstrates Lieberman's increasing trend of voting with the GOP on everything from detainee treatment, to military commissions, to regime change in Iran, to resolutions on Iraq, to the recently-passed timetable for withdrawal, and even procedural motions on whether or not to debate the subject at all.

Another interesting pattern: Lieberman's breaking ranks with Dems has steadily grown much more frequent over time as the war progressed — and especially after his 2006 reelection as an Independent. Since then he's voted with the GOP on war-related questions far more frequently than he did in the past.

Burgess Shale Seafloor,



Paintings of John Sibbick

Republicanism defined,


Wikipedia defines Omertà as “the categorical prohibition of cooperation with state authorities or reliance on its services, even when one has been victim of a crime.”

I have yet to see a better definition of who Republicans are and what they want. As a theory of life it disestablishes the state and society, respecting only violence and the threat of violence.

Master list of Republican sex scandals.


Two, grabbed almost at random,

John Schmitz, right-wing republican congressman, who had had his committee chairship taken away from him in the California State Senate after issuing a press release attacking Jews, feminists and gays. Forced out of office in 1982 for having an adulterous affair and fathering two children out of wedlock with one of his students. He was caught because his baby was admitted to hospital for having hair tied so tightly around his penis that it was almost severed. His daughter, Mary Kay LeTourneau, was convicted of having an adulterous affair with one of her students, and giving birth to two of his children.

Randall Terry, Right to Life activist, founder of Operation Rescue, involved in the Terri Schiavo protests. Once imprisoned for sending former President Bill Clinton an aborted fetus. His son Jamiel is gay; his daughter Tila had sex outside of marriage, became pregnant, had a miscarriage - she is no longer welcome in his home; his daughter Ebony had 2 children outside of wedlock and became Muslim. He has campaigned against infidelity and birth control, gays and unwed mothers. Terry himself was censured by his church after committing adultery.

Smokers can be deadweights around the office with lower working performance and more sick days taken than their non-smoking colleagues, two new studies suggest.

In one study, researchers monitored the career progression of more than 5,000 women entering the U.S. Navy between 1996 and 1997. Daily smokers, they found, showed poorer job performances than non-smokers.

Compared with non-smoking participants, frequent tobacco users were more likely to quit before serving their full term, were involved in more incidents of early discharge due to bad behavior and displayed a higher rate of personality disorders, researchers report in the current issue of the journal Tobacco Control. . .

(A second) study team found that, overall, non-smokers took the least amount of days off while smokers took the most sick leave, an average of 11 extra days—more than 2 full-time work weeks. After adjusting for type of job plus health and socioeconomic factors, they reported the difference in sick leave between smokers and non-smokers to be about eight days, or 1.5 work weeks.

A carnivorous wolf-like cow, Andrewsarchus is known from only a single skull recovered in the 1920s in Mongolia.

Andrewsarchus is known only from an enormous, meter-long skull and pieces of bone, but the skull's similarity to that of smaller mesonychids suggests that Andrewsarchus had the same wolf-like body on a larger scale. Extrapolating from the body proportions of similar mesonychids, Andrewsarchus was most likely about 4-6 metres (13-18 feet) long, standing nearly 2 metres (6 feet) at the shoulder, making it the largest terrestrial carnivorous mammal that has ever existed. It probably averaged about 1500 kilograms in weight with some exceptional animals over 2000 kilograms, making it over twice as heavy as most Kodiak brown bears, and rather heavier than a Percheron horse.





Andrewsarchus eating a brontothere, as big as a rhino, with a sarkastodon in the background, by John Sibbick

A life-sized model

Light apparently behaving remarkably like a liquid

Researchers directing a special type of light at metal poked with holes in irregular patterns recently discovered that all the light behaved like a liquid and fell across the metal to find its way through the escape holes.

That means the light was acting pretty weird. Picture shining a flashlight at your kitchen colander. While some of the light from the flashlight will travel through its holes, the solid part of the colander will keep much of the light from shining through.

In contrast, experiments described in the March 28 issue of the journal Nature demonstrated that terahertz radiation—a low-frequency light on the electromagnetic spectrum located between microwaves and mid-infrared regions—traveled around a thin sheet of metal, through patterned holes, and all of it came out the other side. Experts sometimes refer to this radiation as T-rays.

"You can get 100 percent transmission of light, even if holes only make up 20 percent of the area," University of Utah physicist Ajay Nahata told LiveScience. Nahata is one of the experimenters.

At Saturn's North Pole,




The hexagon spans nearly 25,000 kilometres – the width of two Earths – and appears to be a clearing in the clouds that extends at least 75 km below the planet's visible cloudtops.

(update: Don't miss the gif movie, you can watch the whole thing rotate.)

While at Saturn's South Pole,




Saturn's south pole also boasts a dramatic feature – a hurricane-like storm two-thirds as wide as the Earth. . . "It's amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of Saturn's poles," says Bob Brown, leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, US. "At the south pole, we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely different."

Here's the video.

David Stockman, the former budget director in the Reagan White House, was charged Monday with overseeing a sweeping fraud at a troubled auto parts supplier that he led before the company sought bankruptcy protection.

What's interesting here is that this is the company that bought Prince Corporation for $1.3 billion in the late 90s from Erik Prince who used the money to create Blackwater USA.

Prince's sister Betsy is married to Dick (Are We Not Men?) DeVos, the son of the founder of Amway and failed candidate for governor of Michigan.

So my question is,

was Stockman installed at Collins & Aikman Corp in order to plant this large amount of cash on exactly the one screwball who could create a thing like Blackwater? And did this so derange the company it led, out of necessity, to the fraud in this present scandal?

Improving the superior pizza.

University of Maryland food chemists said on Monday they had found ways to enhance the antioxidant content of whole-grain wheat pizza dough by baking it longer at higher temperatures and giving the dough lots of time to rise. . . .

Antioxidant levels rose by up to 60 percent with longer baking times and up to 82 percent with higher baking temperatures, depending on the type of wheat flour and the antioxidant test used, they said. The precise mechanisms involved are unclear, they said.

Baking time and temperature can be increased together without burning the pizza when done carefully, the researchers said. They used oven temperatures from 400 to 550 degrees Fahrenheit (204 to 287 degrees Celsius), and baking times from 7 to 14 minutes.

They looked at fermentation times up to two full days, and found that longer periods in some cases doubled the dough's antioxidant levels. This probably stemmed from chemical reactions caused by yeasts in the dough that had more time to release the antioxidant components, Moore said.

A common fermentation time is about 18 hours, Moore said.

While you're digesting that, this recipe for pan pizza from Cooking for Engineers is absolutely perfect. In fact, I'm making one right now.

It makes two 9-inch pizzas, but you can just make one large one. If you increase all the ingredients by 50% it seems better suited to a larger pizza pan.


And, for those who are thorough,

Billy Reisinger's Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza.

The greatest story in the history of Earth!!

A Fluke of Nature

As the sun rises over a grassy pasture, and the morning light glints from the countless clinging drops of dew, a single snail resolutely inches toward a mound of steaming nourishment. But unbeknownst to the armored gastropod, this seemingly ordinary heap of cow dung conceals a legion of tiny Dicrocoelium dendriticum eggs, each of which contains the embryo of a sinister mind-controlling parasite. As the snail gorges itself on the fibrous feast, it unwittingly sets the collection of unborn lancet flukes on a miniature adventure which will lead them through slime, zombies, and bile to ultimately find their own unique kind of utopia. . .

World's Deepest Hole, the Kola Superdeep Borehole,


Because free water should not be found at those depths, scientists theorize that the water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms which were squeezed out of the surrounding rocks due to the incredible pressure. The water was then prevented from rising to the surface because of the layer of impermeable rocks above it.

Another unexpected find was a menagerie of microscopic fossils as deep as 6.7 kilometers below the surface. Twenty-four distinct species of plankton microfossils were found, and they were discovered to have carbon and nitrogen coverings rather than the typical limestone or silica. Despite the harsh environment of heat and pressure, the microscopic remains were remarkably intact.

The Russian researchers were also surprised at how quickly the temperatures rose as the borehole deepened, which is the factor that ultimately halted the project's progress. Despite the scientists' efforts to combat the heat by refrigerating the drilling mud before pumping it down, at twelve kilometers the drill began to approach its maximum heat tolerance. At that depth researchers had estimated that they would encounter rocks at 100°C (212°F), but the actual temperature was about 180°C (356°F)– much higher than anticipated. At that level of heat and pressure, the rocks began to act more like a plastic than a solid, and the hole had a tendency to flow closed whenever the drill bit was pulled out for replacement. . .

If the hole had reached the initial goal of 15,000 meters, temperatures would have reached a projected 300°C (572°F).

When drilling stopped in 1994, the hole was over seven miles deep (12,262 meters), making it by far the deepest hole ever drilled by humankind.

He and Professor Provine figure that the first primate joke — that is, the first action to produce a laugh without physical contact — was the feigned tickle, the same kind of coo-chi-coo move parents make when they thrust their wiggling fingers at a baby. Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting.

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Professor Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.”

Humans are laughing by the age of four months and then progress from tickling to the Three Stooges to more sophisticated triggers for laughter (or, in some inexplicable cases, to Jim Carrey movies). Laughter can be used cruelly to reinforce a group’s solidarity and pride by mocking deviants and insulting outsiders, but mainly it’s a subtle social lubricant.

The study. . . suggests that human cranial capacity as an indicator of brain size grew dramatically during our evolution, and that variations in global temperature as well as progressive shifts toward global cooling account for as much as 50 percent of the variation in cranial capacity. The research utilized several measures of paleotemperatures and a sample of 109 fossilized hominid skulls (ranging) over the past 2 million years.

In addition to the impact of global cooling, "By paying close attention to the geographic origin of each of the fossilized skulls," said Gallup, "it became clear that seasonal variation in climate may also have been an important selective force behind the evolution of human cranial capacity. Specifically, we found that as the distance from the equator increased, north or south, so did brain size."

The authors suggest that a key environmental trigger to the evolution of larger brains was the need to devise ways to keep warm and manage the fluctuations in food availability that resulted from cold weather.

Mice engineered to produce a human protein in their eyes develop dramatically enhanced colour vision, a new study reveals.

The finding supports the idea that full colour vision offered an immediate advantage to our primate ancestors when it evolved about 40 million years ago, the researchers say. . .

Blush awareness

Humans, monkeys and apes have tri-chromatic vision that involves receptor proteins for short, medium and long wavelengths of light.

Scientists have hypothesised that this enhanced colour perception – which includes greater sensitivity to reddish hues – offered an evolutionary advantage by enabling our ancestors to better distinguish ripe fruit and avoid poisonous berries, and even to become more attuned to emotions. . .


There was a recent article that suggested long head hair on humans evolved through grooming behaviour, because longer hair on women gave men more stuff to do and so spend more time hanging out and paying attention.

Ergo all of civilization proceeds from the beauty parlor.

I'd suggest that improved color vision evolved at the same time, along with our general absence of body hair, because it allowed people to see fevers or injuries on the body, while fooling with the hair.

Blimps to Swim Through the Air like Fish

Blimps steered by artificial muscles may one day swim through the air like fish, suggest recent flight tests. The blimps would be much quieter than those steered by traditional blimp propellers, making them ideal for observing wildlife.

Researchers believe artificial muscles – plastics that stretch when a high electrical voltage is applied – could be a way to mimic nature's efficiency at accomplishing tasks. Using the technology, future robots may be able to "run on Mars like a cheetah, climb a mountain or a cliff like a gecko, or fly like a bird", says Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US.

On 'breed',


Quotation:
A witness who cannot be named told the court that Neal told him in 2005 that he had been targeting teenage boys in suburban toilet blocks to “breed” them—a term used to describe intentionally infecting someone with HIV. Neal also allegedly wore a penis piercing to increase the rate of transmission when he had unprotected sex, the court was told.


My question is, could this actually be, not insanity, but an influence of the virus itself, either to enhance its reproduction, or a reaction to the presence of a virus that can threaten the whole species by forcing evolution of a resistant population?

And this isn't bad, either,

Deluxe Nerd Glasses,

for your special friend.

War rhinos!

(Never happened --)

Honest to god Hot Wheels Radar Gun. Emits actual radar.

Beautiful Original Series phaser-esque styling and real-plastic look.

This would be great for sitting around with your stoned moron friends,

"Hey, Spid man, you are going zero miles an hour!"

"Hey, feel that? --Radar!"

You could also use it to clock bugs.

Clockpunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction which is similar, but different from Steampunk. As with steampunk, it portrays advanced technology based on pre-modern designs, but rather than the steam power of the Industrial Age, the technology used is based on springs, clockwork and similar. Clockpunk is based very intensively on the works of Leonardo da Vinci and as such, it is typically set during the Renaissance. The idea is fairly new and very few works have been created in this genre.

Clockpunk works include Pasquale's Angel by Paul McAuley, and Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick. There are also clockpunk elements in the Marvel 1602 comic series and its sequels, and in the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett, most notably a da Vinci space shuttle in The Last Hero.

Build a cloud chamber

Emerging Chinese Cartoon Industry

Reflecting China's changing social realities, particularly in cities, Little P wants to be China's first successful cartoon icon. Bad Girl is playing a lead role in transforming Chinese cartoons from poor-quality kids' stuff or dull propaganda to something far hipper, as the country competes with Japanese manga and Korean manhwa.

The red-haired Song Yang also works as a DJ, as a model, a TV host,a games designer and a musician. "I love to mix work and play," he said. "What I've done has been out of fun. I enjoy life just as everyone else does, going to pubs, parties and art exhibitions, but what differentiates my visits to these places is that I've always got an intention. I try everything within my reach to expand my personal experiences and accumulate resources for my cartoon creations." . . . Last year, the government banned foreign cartoons during primetime TV to protect local business; SpongeBob SquarePants was proving too popular with local children. The government offers tax breaks to cartoonists, and schools have been established in four art and film academies to train more animators. . . .

The Xinjiang native is incredibly prolific. Bad Girl has been used in an advertisement for Hugo Boss' Man fragrance, he's written cartoon versions of two famous novels, Animal Is Wild by Wang Shuo, and Jade Buddha by Hai Yan, his own graphic novel, A Penguin Sits At the Other Bank and a cartoon phone novel called Oolong Khan.

feral sheep

It's as if the average Republican were a feral child raised by a herd of sheep on a remote Hebridean island.

All about the Bornean Clouded Leopard.

Tracing Human Migration Through Dental Bacteria,


The team. . .discovered that Streptoccocus mutans, a bacterium associated with dental caries, has evolved along with its human hosts in a clear line that can be traced back to a single common ancestor who lived in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. . .

In his analysis of the bacterium, Caufield used DNA fingerprints and other biomarkers that scientists have also employed to trace human evolution back to a single common African ancestor, known as “ancestral Eve.”

“As humans migrated around the world and evolved into the different races and ethnicities we know today,” Caufield said, “this oral bacterium evolved with them in a simultaneous process called coevolution.”

“By tracing the DNA lineages of these strains,” Caufield said, “We have constructed an evolutionary family tree with its roots in Africa and its main branch extending to Asia. A second branch, extending from Asia back to Europe, traces the migration of a small group of Asians who founded at least one group of modern-day Caucasians.”

A commercial I just saw,

Tooth Tunes

"Makes you really want to brush your teeth for two minutes!"


A toothbrush that plays music, vibrating it through your teeth and into your skull.

Available in Queen, KISS, Hilary Duff and Kelly Clarkson.

Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus,


A zip file of a cookbook of 1911. Remarkably worth looking at.

A survey of wild and domestic pigs has caused archaeologists to reconsider both the origins of the first Pacific colonists and the migration routes humans travelled to reach the remote Pacific.


Scientists from Durham University and the University of Oxford, studying DNA and tooth shape in modern and ancient pigs, have revealed that, in direct contradiction to longstanding ideas, ancient human colonists may have originated in Vietnam and travelled between numerous islands before first reaching New Guinea, and later landing on Hawaii and French Polynesia.

Using mitochondrial DNA obtained from modern and ancient pigs across East Asia and the Pacific, the researchers demonstrated that a single genetic heritage is shared by modern Vietnamese wild boar, modern feral pigs on the islands of Sumatra, Java, and New Guinea, ancient Lapita pigs in Near Oceania, and modern and ancient domestic pigs on several Pacific Islands.

New DNA study helps explain unique diversity among Melanesians


"In this part of the world, the genealogy extends back more than 35,000 years, when Neanderthals still occupied Europe," he adds. "These island groups were isolated at the edge of the human species range for an incredible length of time, not quite out in the middle of the Pacific, but beyond Australia and New Guinea. During this time they developed this pattern of DNA diversity that is really quite extraordinary, and includes many genetic variants that are unknown elsewhere, that can be tied to specific islands and even specific populations there. Others suggest very ancient links to Australian Aborigines and New Guinea highlanders."

Friedlaender also says that the study gives a different perspective on the notion of the "apparent distinctions between humans from different continents, often called racial differences. In this part of the Pacific, there are big differences between groups just from one island to the next — one might have to name five or six new races on this basis, if one were so inclined. Human racial distinctions don’t amount to much."

Green Tea Short-Circuits the Cancer Process


"A unique quirk of biochemistry allows green tea's protective effects to extend to many different kinds of cells," says Dr. Gasiewicz. "In fact, one of the active green tea substances - called EGCG (epigallocatechin-3-gallate) - seems to target one protein that is common throughout our bodies. And it does so with a degree of precision that cancer drugs still aren't able to match."

This protein is called HSP90, and it is present at high levels in many cancer cells. Scientists believe that, in some circumstances, HSP90 helps to trigger the series of changes in cells that eventually lead to cancer.

However, when green tea's EGCG binds to this protein, it helps to prevent these changes from happening. "EGCG targets HSP90, binds directly to it, and keeps it from passing on signals that can start the cancer process," Dr. Gasiewicz explains. "As a result, potentially harmful genes are less likely to get turned on." This is important, because HSP90 is present in all of our cells. . .

Asian data links green tea to reduced risk for breast, prostate, bladder, colon, stomach, pancreatic and esophageal cancers. This new finding shows that EGCG may be effective against an important "common denominator" for many different cancers, at the very start of the cancer process.

EGCG Does What Cancer Drugs Can't Yet Do

Green tea's EGCG acts with a natural precision that scientists have not yet been able to duplicate in a drug. Because cancer cells tend to have higher levels of HSP90 than healthy cells, pharmaceutical researchers have tried to develop a drug that keeps HSP90 from sending the biochemical signals that can trigger cancer. But nothing seems to work as perfectly as green tea's EGCG.

Unlike black tea or oolong, regular green tea leaves are baked or steamed before they can oxidize, so their EGCG level remains high. . .

Spearmint as testosterone suppressor


The Turkish researchers thought that spearmint might be linked with reports of diminished libido in townsmen (presumably because of its effects on androgen levels). In one previous rat study, spearmint reduced testosterone levels.

For this study, 21 women with hirsutism drank two cups of herbal spearmint tea for five days at a certain time in their menstrual cycle.

All women showed a decrease in free testosterone (circulating hormone not bound to other molecules) and an increase in several different "female" hormones, including follicle-stimulating hormone and estrogen.

There was no significant decrease in total testosterone levels; it was unclear if there was any change in amount of excess hair growth.

Minesweeper, its' origin and noble pedigree.


The article recommends two variations,

Minesweeper Clone 2007

and

Crossmines

Scientists find laughter is the spark that holds society together,

A good laugh may not only lift your mood, but can make you more cooperative and altruistic towards strangers, according to a new study.

Laughter, a universal human behavior, has been shown in previous studies to act as a “social lubricant” and promote group cohesiveness. In this new study, researchers tested whether this sense of closeness would promote altruistic behavior.

Study participants watched either a funny or a serious video, and then played a game with strangers to see how laugher affected the balance between group interest and self-interest during the game-play. . .

The researchers found that laughter made strangers more likely to invest in the group fund, and so increased their sense of altruism. . .

The study also suggested that laughter increases endorphin levels, which are known to be part of the body's mood-lifting chemistry.

Laughter may have had evolutionary importance by promoting group bonding, which could have enabled our early ancestors to work together to cope with a hostile environment, van Vugt said.



Will it always follow then that engaged negativity in a movie will cause people to huddle apart from one another? I can certainly think of some famous movies that have left me a lot less interested in speaking to strangers.

Water under extreme pressure turns into ice, but some different kind of ice.

In the new experiment. . . the volume of "water shrank abruptly and discontinuously, consistent with the formation of almost every known form of ice except the ordinary kind," according to a Sandia statement Thursday.

Apparently, there are at least 11 other types of ice that most of us don't know about. They're classified by how they behave at certain temperatures and pressures.

Study: Playing Video Games Improves Eyesight

Playing "Gears of War," "Lost Planet," "Halo" and other action video games that involve firing guns can improve your eyesight, new research claims.

Sedate games like "Tetris" don't work.

A group of 10 male college students who started out as non-gamers and then received 30 hours of training on first-person action video games showed a substantial increase in their ability to see objects accurately in a cluttered space, compared to 10 non-gamers given the same test, said Daphne Bevelier of the University of Rochester. . .

First-person action games helped study subjects improve their spatial resolution, meaning their ability to clearly see small, closely packed together objects, such as letters, she said. Game-playing actually changes the way our brains process visual information.

"These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it," she said, in a prepared statement. "That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."

The finding suggests that playing first-person action video games could be a useful rehabilitation therapy for people with certain vision problems, she said, such as amblyopia (or lazy eye) and the simple effects of aging.

Another study has showed that playing certain virtual reality games that involved physical motion helped stroke victims improve their ability to walk eventually.

The Irish in America.

Cheer Up!


New Delhi, March 07: Two top nuclear scientists of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) are currently in Taliban custody. The two were working at PAEC’s facility in North West Frontier Province. Zee News investigations reveal that the two scientists were kidnapped about six months ago. To avoid international embarrassment Pakistan Government has kept this information under wraps.

According to information available with Zee News, nuclear scientists have been kidnapped by Taliban at the behest of Al-Qaeda. Further investigations reveal that Al-Qaeda may be using the expertise of the scientists to produce nuclear bombs. The two scientists are reportedly being held somewhere in Waziristan, near Afghanistan border.

In January this year Pakistan security agencies had foiled another attempt by Taliban militia to kidnap nuclear scientists. Earlier, incidents of Taliban militia stealing uranium in NWFP have already been reported. PAEC also has a uranium mining facility in NWFP.

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Captain America wills his shield to Stephen Colbert,

http://www.marvelcomics.com/news/-1.891

The universe as a string-net liquid,

Different phases of matter are characterised by the way their atoms are organised. In a liquid, for instance, atoms are randomly distributed, whereas atoms in a solid are rigidly positioned in a lattice. FQHE systems are different. "If you take a snapshot of the position of electrons in an FQHE system they appear random and you think you have a liquid," says Wen. But step back, and you see that, unlike in a liquid, the electrons dance around each other in well-defined steps.

It is as if the electrons are entangled. Today, physicists use the term to describe a property in quantum mechanics in which particles can be linked despite being separated by great distances. Wen speculated that FQHE systems represented a state of matter in which entanglement was an intrinsic property, with particles tied to each other in a complicated manner across the entire material.

This led Wen and Levin to the idea that there may be a different way of thinking about matter. What if electrons were not really elementary, but were formed at the ends of long "strings" of other, fundamental particles? They formulated a model in which such strings are free to move "like noodles in a soup" and weave together into huge "string-nets".


They've found what might be an example of this state of matter on Earth, a mineral called herbertsmithite.

Extraordinary theory that Titan is covered with lakes of liquid farts, kilometer thick glaciers of acetylene and volcanoes that burp up giant masses of polyurethane.


Sounds like a planet you could get out of the Archie McPhee catalog.