NASAdude

A research team led by Professor Hyung-sik Choi at division of Mechanical and Information Engineering in Korea Maritime University developed an advanced kinetic measurement system for footwear that converts kinetic energy to electric energy.

In future, the system might enable you to charge your mobile phone or MP3 player while walking thanks to shoe-embedded generators.

Users would just have to plug the adapter into their shoes and walk to power their phone, as the walking generators and actuators embedded in shoes create 0.1~0.2 megawatt of electricity [units? It should be something like milliwatt-hrs for total energy, or maybe milliwatts continuous] for every four to five footsteps, but the researchers work to enhance the efficiency of the shoe-power-harvesting systems to 1 megawatt for the same number of footsteps within years.

That means almost all small-sized digital products can be charged with a six-hour walk.

In addition, the shoe generator can be used for other purpose like tracking bearer's whereabouts as the shoe's location is traceable within 100 meters of their position.

From Textually and Korea Times.

Posted by NASAdude at 04:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As said on Slashdot, Scotty would be proud.

Glass breakthrough
By Belle Dumé, Science Writer at PhysicsWeb.  Source

Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a "flame-spray" technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties. The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and could, say the team, be extended to other oxides (A Rosenflanz et al. 2004 Nature 430 761).

Glass is formed when a molten material is cooled so quickly that its constituent atoms do not have time to align themselves into an ordered lattice. However, it is difficult to make glasses from most materials because they need to be cooled -- or quenched -- at rates of up to 10 million degrees per second.

Silica is widely used in glass-making because the quenching rates are much lower, but researchers would like to make glass from alumina as well because of its superior mechanical and optical properties. Alumina can form glass if it is alloyed with calcium or rare-earth oxides, but the required quenching rate can be as high as 1000 degrees per second, which makes it difficult to produce bulk quantities.

Rosenflanz and colleagues started by mixing around 80 mole % of powdered alumina with various rare-earth oxide powders -- including lanthanum, gadolinium and yttrium oxides. Next, they fed the powders into a high-temperature hydrogen-oxygen flame to produce molten particles that were then quenched in water. The resulting glass beads, which were less than 140 microns across, were then heat-treated -- or sintered -- at around 1000°C. This produced bulk glass samples in which nanocrystalline alumina-rich phases were dispersed throughout a glassy matrix. The new method avoids the need to apply pressures of 1 gigapascal or more, as is required in existing techniques.

The 3M scientists characterised the glasses using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and thermal analysis, and tested the strength of the materials with hardness and fracture toughness tests. They found that their samples were much harder than conventional silica-based glasses and were almost as hard as pure polycrystalline alumina.

Moreover, over 95% of the glasses were transparent (see figure) and had attractive optical properties. For example, fully crystallized alumina-rare earth oxide ceramics showed high refractive indices if the grains were kept below a certain size.

Posted by NASAdude at 04:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Meth Cooks May Be Caught Pink-Handed; By ROXANA HEGEMAN, AP Writer; Source

WICHITA, Kan. - It may fall a shade shy of catching thieves red-handed, but for farmers fed up with methamphetamine cooks filching their fertilizer, staining them pink will do just fine.

Assuming you can discourage thieves you cannot easily catch, a new product called GloTell — which is added to tanks of anhydrous ammonia — will not only besmirch the hands of those who touch the fertilizer, but leaves its mark on anyone who snorts or shoots the end product.

GloTell is already proving to be a handy deterrent, but there were details to be worked out between its birth as a farmer's brainstorm and finished product.

The additive had to withstand the cold, corrosive nature of anhydrous ammonia. It had to be safe for the environment, safe for crops and even safe around children.

And in the two years it took to develop GloTell, researchers at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale found it did much more than just stain thieves pink.

The visible stain, even if washed off, was still detectable by ultraviolet light 24 to 72 hours later. As an added benefit, the additive helped farmers detect any tank leaks, said Truitt Clements, spokesman for Illinois-based GloTell Distributors LLC.

Best of all, the treated anhydrous ammonia rendered any meth it was used to make extremely difficult to dry and turned it an unbleachable pink, he said.

"Most people that are drug users, they like a clean-looking drug if they are going to ... put it in their body," Clements said. "We know the end-product is not pretty at all."

Snort it, and it turns the nose fluorescent pink. Inject it, and the telltale pink shows up at the injection site, he said.

During product testing, GloTell was added to anhydrous ammonia tanks at farms that had been having problems with meth thefts in Illinois, Kentucky and Indiana, Clements said. Within a week, the thefts stopped.

On Tuesday, GloTell was unveiled at the Illinois State Fair.

Next month, Virginia-based Royster-Clark Inc. will begin selling it at nearly 250 of its outlets around the nation under an exclusive distribution agreement with GloTell, said Lori Ann Peters, a spokeswoman for Royster-Clark.

"The meth problem is not a problem that affects only families of people addicted, it plagues entire communities," Peters said.

The meth problem is especially bad in rural states like Kansas, which ranks among the top five meth-producing states in the nation, said Kyle Smith, spokesman for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

"Meth is our Number One problem — and has been for several years now," he said.

In 2003, there were 649 meth labs were seized in Kansas, compared to four labs seized in 1994, according to KBI statistics.

Anhydrous ammonia is especially dangerous to use in meth production — it can burn lungs, cause explosions and chemical burns, he said. Meth makers will likely turn to other meth production methods if GloTell use becomes widespread.

"Even if it pushes them to use a different methodology, that is good. ... It has to be demonstrated to me first. I hope it works, but we have to see," Smith said.

Clements said the additive will likely add about $9 per ton to the cost of anhydrous ammonia, which now costs about $240 a ton.

To deal with the problem of meth thefts, some states have passed laws requiring locks on anhydrous ammonia tanks — with limited success.

Iowa State University has also been working on an additive that would make anhydrous ammonia unusable for meth production. That product may debut next year, said Harriet Wegmeyer, spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute, an industry trade group.

"All farmers want to do is go out and produce their crops and raise their families and do the best job they can," Clements said. "A lot of times they are fighting druggies and putting up fences and locks. They just want to go back to the production of agriculture."

Posted by NASAdude at 02:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By David Adam, science correspondent, The Guardian

They call it the God particle: a mysterious sub-atomic fragment that permeates the entire universe and explains how everything is the way it is. Nobody has ever seen the God particle; some say it doesn't exist but, in the ultimate leap of faith, physicists across the world are preparing to build one of the most ambitious and expensive science experiments the world has ever seen to try to find it.

At a summit meeting in Beijing yesterday, 12 experts from countries including Britain, Japan, America and Germany announced they have agreed on a blueprint for the new experiment - a gigantic atom smashing machine called the international linear collider. Now they must convince their respective governments to meet the anticipated £3bn price tag.

Buried underground away from vibrations on the surface, the collider would accelerate particles from opposite ends of a 20-mile tunnel at near-light speeds and smash them into each other head-on. One stream of particles would be electrons; the other would be positrons, their antimatter partner.

The scientists hope the resulting cataclysmic explosion of heat, light and radiation will recreate the conditions found in first few billionths of a second after the big bang. And when that happens, they hope the God particle, otherwise known as the Higgs boson, will show itself.

The collider will not be built in Britain (Germany, America and Japan are favourites) but scientists here are determined to play a leading role in the project. British physicists have already been involved in planning a number of its key components and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), which pays for research in this field, is waiting to see if the government agrees a plan for Britain to invest some £300m in the experiment over the next decade. A decision is expected in the autumn.

Ian Halliday, chief executive of PPARC said: "This is an extremely significant milestone. We now have a clear and defined route for the future that will enable the world's particle physics community to concentrate resources and unite efforts behind the design."

Scientists have learned the hard way in recent years that such megaprojects are beyond the reach of individual countries. The US attempted to build its own linear collider in Texas in the early 1990s but the project collapsed amid spiralling costs, leaving them with a £1bn bill and only a hole in the ground to show for it.

Dark energy

If it gets built, the new machine could open the door to a shadowy new domain of physics. "The international linear collider will take our science into completely new areas," said Brian Foster at Oxford University. "It will hopefully reveal new and exciting physics, addressing the 21st century agenda of compelling questions about dark matter and dark energy, the existence of extra dimensions and the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time."

Key to these discoveries is the Higgs boson particle, which scientists have been searching for since the British physicist Peter Higgs proposed it in the 1960s. The physicists want to find it because such a particle would plug a hole in a theory that is both their greatest triumph and their biggest headache.

Just as chemists group the different elements according to their similarities in the periodic table, so physicists use something called the standard model to explain how various subatomic particles interact to make the universe tick. "Go back40 years and we were finding particles but we had no idea how they fitted to gether. We were discovering pieces of a jigsaw but we didn't have the picture on the front of the box," said George Kalmus at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory in Oxfordshire. "We now have a pretty good picture on the front of the box and that picture is called the standard model."

But the standard model is now starting to show its age, and as physicists devise bigger and better experiments to test its theoretical predictions, they are coming across more and more anomalies.

Chief among these is the discovery that even the tiniest, most fleeting particles have some mass - the standard model assumes that they don't. The Higgs particle offers physicists a way out: they think the Higgs somehow interacts with all other forms of matter to give them their mass, or in other words, to make them weigh anything. The idea is so appealing that they have already spent billions of pounds on a succession of more powerful accelerators to hunt it down.

"We keep on looking for the Higgs boson and we keep on not finding it, but we now have an indication of where it is," said Professor Kalmus. He says existing accelerator machines, built in the shape of rings, just cannot get the particles travelling fast enough or to collide with enough force to reach the energy levels where the Higgs particle is believed to exist.

Another accelerator, the large hadron collider, is already under construction at the Cern laboratory under the Swiss Alps and is due to be switched on in 2007. It could have the potential to find the Higgs particle, but will tell physicists little about its interactions.

Prof Kalmus says studying it in more detail is crucial. "The world is running out of easily developed energy sources. If we can learn more about how energy and mass are related in this strange way then who knows what effect that might have."

Posted by NASAdude at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You've heard of "Pope on a rope".  How about Pope on a pager?  Now you can get a daily text message on your cell phone from the Pope.  All joking aside, it's an interesting idea.  No, the service isn't free; you'll be charged $0.30 per message ($110/yr).  The site doesn't indicate where the money goes from the Pope's message. The funds raised by the similar Muslim service in the UK goes to charity.

Cell Phone Users Are Finding God, By Elizabeth Biddlecombe, Source

Once merely a useful tool for keeping in touch on the go, the mobile phone is fast finding a new niche as an instrument of spiritual enlightenment.

From Muslims who use their phones to point them toward Mecca, to Roman Catholics who collect text messages from the Vatican, religious observers across the globe are turning to their cell phones for aid and inspiration in practicing their faith.

In response, service providers and religious institutions are rolling out a host of services to attract the growing ranks of spiritually oriented phone users.

For followers of Islam, companies such as LG Electronics and Dubai-based Ilkone Mobile Telecommunications make phones that aid Muslims in their daily practice by indicating the direction of Mecca, providing the call to prayer or even incorporating the Quran within the phone. Even those with a regular phone can augment it with a religious ring tone or download a lunar calendar.

The text message, a dominant method of communication in many parts of the world, has also become a valuable religious tool. Indian operator BPMobile lets customers send prayers by SMS to a Bombay temple where they are offered to the Hindu god Ganesh.

In a similar vein, subscribers in the United States and several European countries can receive a daily text message from the pope.

The Pope's Thought of the Day is so popular that the Vatican is testing a more advanced multimedia messaging, or MMS, service that provides text, audio, images and video of the pope's weekly service from St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.

Multimedia spiritual guidance can also be had in the United States by people who subscribe to a daily service called The Seven Spiritual Laws, which features the holistic teachings of Deepak Chopra. Currently available from two U.S. mobile operators, the service provides daily aphorisms as well as diet tips and an inspiring image.

"It's amazing that people can find solace in something so short. People just need a little nudge so that they can have a reflective experience," observes Chopra.

Chopra is not the only spiritual leader to see the value of the mobile phone as a tool for enlightenment.

"I think it is excellent," enthuses Rabbi Emanuel Carlebach of the House of Israel Congregation in Ste Agathe, Quebec. Carlebach himself downloads "Psalms in his Palm" and excerpts from scripture through PilotYid.com, a Judaism-oriented service for users of Palm OS devices that seeks to cover costs with voluntary donations.

"There is a principle that the Torah teaches us: We are supposed to utilize everything in the world to serve God," he says.

Carlebach also sees no ethical conflict in the fact that many of these religious services are for profit.

"One is entitled to make an honest living," he says, characterizing the payment as a means of thanking the provider for the convenient service.

But even the for-profit services are treated carefully. Andy Nulman, president of Airborne Entertainment, the company behind Chopra's service, says the price it charges subscribers, $3.25 a month, is about midrange for a mobile-entertainment subscription service.

Neither Acotel, the company that handles the technical side of the Pope's Thought of the Day service, nor the Vatican makes a profit from the daily messages. However, subscribers do pay a fee to read the messages. Acotel is not allowed to promote the service -- you'll find no mention of it on the company's website -- but works with local Christian organizations to promote it.

A British service has taken a third route. MS Wireless Marketing sends the money raised from daily Islamic text messages to humanitarian charities in the United Kingdom. Saadi Hussain, managing director, says it has raised 17,000 pounds ($31,000) in 17 months.

"The mobile phone is a perfect solution," Hussain says, "because it allows you to do micropayments. Over the year people are spending 70 pounds ($128), but they don’t realize it because they are spending 25 pence (46 cents) a day." Not only do his customers receive holy verses and prayer times on a daily basis but they are fulfilling their Muslim duty for charitable donation, Hussain says.

However, there are times when spiritual leaders work to keep religion and mobile technology separate. The Catholic Church in the Philippines, for example, has forbidden confession and absolution via text messaging.

In other instances, people are incorporating cell phones into spiritual practices as they see fit, often in surprising ways.

In China, people burn paper effigies of material goods, including mobile phones, to ensure their dead relatives are fairing well in their parallel lives. While last year one might have burned a basic phone, this year's offering will be a camera phone with color screen.

On a recent field trip around Asia, Genevieve Bell, senior researcher at Intel, saw people getting their mobile phones blessed by a Buddhist monk.

"Because they are wearing them on their bodies, they didn't want them to be bad for them," she says.

Posted by NASAdude at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems most of these are honest errors, but how did this one get through QC?

Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.

The software giant has seen its products banned in some of the biggest markets on earth--and it's all because of eight wrongly colored pixels, a dodgy choice of music and a bad English-to-Spanish dictionary.

Speaking at the International Geographical Union congress in Glasgow on Wednesday, Microsoft's top man in its geopolitical strategy team, Tom Edwards, revealed how one of the biggest companies in the world managed to offend one of the biggest countries in the world with a software slip-up.

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. "It cost millions," Edwards said.

Another social blunder from Microsoft saw chanting of the Koran used as a soundtrack for a computer game and led to great offence to the Saudi Arabia government. The company later issued a new version of the game without the chanting, while keeping the previous editions in circulation because U.S. staff thought the slip wouldn't be spotted, but the Saudi government banned the game and demanded an apology. Microsoft then withdrew the game.

The software giant managed to further offend the Saudis by creating another game in which Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques. That game was also withdrawn.

Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.

Microsoft has also seen its unfortunate style of diplomacy have an effect in Korea, Kurdistan, Uruguay and to China--where a cartographical dispute saw Chinese employees hauled in front of the government.

Edwards said that staff members are now sent on geography courses to try to avoid such mishaps. "Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world," he said.

Source

Posted by NASAdude at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A cream that blocks allergic substances from entering the nose seems to reduce symptoms in patients with hay fever, new research shows. The cream, known as Alergol, is applied inside the lower nose where it traps these substances.

Dr. Alexandre Grigorov, at Humboldt University in Berlin, and colleagues conducted a study involving 91 patients, who were randomly assigned to apply Alergol or an inactive "placebo" cream to the lower nose region four times daily for four days. Before and after each treatment, the subjects were exposed to extracts of pollen, house dust and animal dander.

The findings appear in the Archives of Otolaryngology--Head and Neck Surgery.

Treatment with Alergol greatly reduced the drop in airflow that occurred with exposure to the allergic substances. In addition, use of this cream produced a marked drop in symptoms. By comparison, the placebo cream had much more modest effects.

"This objective assessment clearly demonstrated that Alergol pollen blocker cream is a safe and effective alternative to the drugs normally prescribed for (hay fever)," Grigorov's team concludes.

SOURCE: Archives of Otolaryngology--Head and Neck Surgery, August 2004.

Posted by NASAdude at 01:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This topic sounds intriguing. If you and your luggage are searched, what is the need of identification? I've heard that certain people might get "special" security checks if they are profiled as high risk. That means that those not identified as high risk would get a lesser and quicker (hopefully) security check. Is that the only reason for identification? Wouldn't we be better off if everyone was checked thoroughly and do away with identification? Are felons (or any other group within society) not allowed to use mass-travel? That's the only other possible reason that I can think of for requiring identification.

Flight ID Fight Revived, By Ryan Singel, Source

Backed by a phalanx of civil liberties groups, civil liberties iconoclast John Gilmore on Monday relaunched his legal campaign against the federal government's requirement that airlines ask passengers for photo identification in order to board a plane.

Gilmore, who began his fight against the identification requirement in the summer of 2002, filed suit Monday in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, asking the court to force the government to reveal the requirement and to declare it an unconstitutional burden on the right to travel.

The suit is a continuation of Gilmore's original challenge (Gilmore v. Ashcroft), which he filed without backing from civil liberties groups in U.S. District Court in July 2002.

Although a traveling tips page on the Transportation Security Administration website advises travelers to "keep available your airline boarding pass and government-issued photo ID for each adult traveler until you exit the security checkpoint," government lawyers refused to tell the judge in the original case whether or not the requirement existed.

Government lawyers argued the government does not require passengers to show identification to fly and that "the challenged requests for identification are of central importance to achieving the government's objective of preventing air piracy."

But the government acknowledged that if the requirement did exist, it would be in a secret security directive that had to be challenged in an appeals court, an argument heeded by the judge when she finally dismissed the original lawsuit on jurisdictional grounds 14 months after hearing arguments in the case.

Gilmore, who made millions as the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, has not flown or taken an intercity bus or train domestically since July 4, 2002, when he was not allowed to fly on Southwest Airlines without showing identification, despite having gone through the screening process.

Gilmore says he does not have a state-issued identification or driver's license and that the identification rule, unlike searches for weapons in carry-on bags, does not make the country safer.

"I'm not willing to show my passport to travel in my own country," Gilmore said in an interview. "I am not willing to have my rights taken away by bureaucrats who issue secret laws in the dead of night."

The identification requirement dates back to the Clinton administration, which put the measure in place just after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. Terrorism was initially suspected as the cause of the disaster, though it was later determined that a faulty fuel tank was to blame.

Civil liberties advocates say that they are now backing Gilmore's challenge both because the stakes are high and because the political mood in the country has shifted since 2002.

"The climate has changed," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

CDT, a moderate advocacy group known for working closely with members of Congress, is signing on to an amicus brief supporting Gilmore's case due to the group's concerns over government transparency, according to Schwartz.

"If you are requiring people to do something, you can't not show them the rule," Schwartz said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was co-founded by Gilmore, filed a brief supporting his argument that the requirement itself is unconstitutional, according to EFF attorney Lee Tien.

"When you are justifying a massive program of identity checking, you have the burden of showing why this is a good thing," Tien said. "The identity requirement is security theater. If a court accepts such a requirement without any factual support, it opens the door for these same kinds of programs to spread like toadstools."

Other groups supporting Gilmore include the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which recently won a ruling from the Supreme Court allowing Guantanamo Bay detainees to contest their detention in U.S. courts.

Chris Hoofnagle, EPIC's associate director, thinks the courts may be most sympathetic to Gilmore's challenge to government secrecy.

"The executive branch has created a category of regulations that is extrajudicial, and courts don't like things that are unreviewable," Hoofnagle said. "There shouldn't be such a thing as secret regulations in a democratic society."

Gilmore says he has spent somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 on his lawsuits.

He has also hired privacy activist and publicist Bill Scannell to launch internet publicity campaigns backing this lawsuit and another lawsuit challenging an airline passenger screening system.

"People make money and they choose what they want to spend it on," Gilmore said. "Some people spend it on their kids, making sure they get a good education. I choose to spend it on building the kind of society I want to live in."

The government will have 60 days to respond to the complaint.

Posted by NASAdude at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Net porn good for you: official, By Lester Haines, Source

A government-funded study into porn consumption Down Under has concluded that a little of what you fancy might do you good - and may even make users "more relaxed about their sexuality" and lead to healthier marriages, news.com.au reports.

The survey - nicely entitled "Understanding Pornography in Australia" and carried out by a team led by Dr Alan McKee - quizzed 1000 porn users and concluded that "pornography is actually good for you in many ways", as McKee put it.

McKee's findings have added fuel to the punch-up over Labor proposals to force ISPs to filter porn in order to protect kiddies from online smut. The author of the draft legislation - Australia Institute executive director Clive Hamilton - hit back at McKee's findings with: "No man who regularly uses pornography can have a healthy sexual relationship with a woman," adding: "The question is - how much are we willing to pay to protect our children from damaging pornographic images?"

McKee, however, asserted: "The more we try and turn porn into something that's seen to be bad and has to be kept away from families, the more problems we might be causing for ourselves."

The doc drew the line, though, at suggesting that pornography was good for children: "I think you come there to an issue we can't answer - should children who are 16-years-old be allowed to be sexual?" he evaded.

ISPs and politicians have weighed into the debate with the former calling the legislation "unworkable" and the latter calling for investment in greater parental awareness and increased funding for Australian Broadcasting Authority agency Netalert - the watchdog which deals with Net porn - rather than draconian censorship rules.

Posted by NASAdude at 03:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Source;  By Richard Black,  BBC science correspondent
Usually monkeys work hard only when they know a reward is coming, but the animals given this treatment did their best all the time.

Monkeys are rather like people in their approach to work - at least, those who live in a laboratory and learn to press levers for rewards of food and water.

They concentrate on their task only when the moment of delivery approaches. Dr Barry Richmond
US National Institute of Mental Health Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health near Washington DC, led by Dr Barry Richmond, have now developed a genetic treatment which changes their work ethic markedly.

"Normal monkeys and people procrastinate - tend not to work very well when they have a lot of time to get the job done, and work better when the reward is nearer in time," Dr Richmond says.

"The monkeys under the influence of the treatment don't procrastinate."

The treatment consists of anti-sense DNA - the mirror image of a piece of one of our genes - and basically prevents that gene from working.

After about 10 weeks it had worn off, and the monkeys were back to their usual unmotivated selves.

Dr Richmond believes treatments based on this concept could one day benefit people with conditions like depression, where motivation has largely disappeared from their lives.

But for the rest of us, the day when such treatments fall into the hands of our bosses may be one we would prefer to put off.

Posted by NASAdude at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two articles came out today that were a little off-beat, and seemed to be thematic.  The first indicates that the Quran doesn't necessarily promise 72 virgins to Muslim martyrs in parasise.  The second introduces the idea of cuddle parties, where people get to cuddle with each other but sex and kissing is not permitted.

Follows is an excerpt. Read the full article posted on the CDT site, written for the NY Times, taken from the Charolette Observer.  (Could it be more complicated?)

It has long been a staple of Islam that Muslim martyrs will go to paradise and marry 72 black-eyed virgins. But a growing body of rigorous scholarship on the Quran points to a less sensual paradise -- and, more important, may offer a step away from fundamentalism and toward a reawakening of the Islamic world. Some Islamic theologians protest that the point was companionship, never heavenly sex. 

Some Islamic theologians protest that the point was companionship, never heavenly sex. Others have interpreted the pleasures quite explicitly. Al-Suyuti wrote that sex in paradise is pretty much continual and so glorious that "were you to experience it in this world you would faint."

But now the same tools that historians, linguists and archaeologists have applied to the Bible for about 150 years are beginning to be applied to the Quran. The results are explosive.

The Quran is beautifully written, but often obscure. One reason is that the Arabic language was born as a written language with the Quran, and there's growing evidence that many of the words were Syriac or Aramaic.

For example, the Quran says martyrs going to heaven will get "hur," and the word was taken by early commentators to mean "virgins," hence those 72 consorts. But in Aramaic, hur meant "white" and was commonly used to mean "white grapes."

The following article can be read in full here.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- It's not about sex and all about the touchy-feely experience of snuggling up to perfect strangers wearing pajamas.

The grab fests are called cuddle parties, and since they started in New York in February, hundreds of people have paid $30 each to touch and embrace others in intimate gatherings.

...

But the rules are clear. The PJs stay on the whole time.

In case things get too steamy, a small chime is kept on hand. Before the cuddling begins, the chime is struck several times so everyone gets the message.

...

Curiosity is a big driver for people who attend cuddle parties, and it is a better way to meet people than going to a bar, getting drunk and spending the night with someone just because of the need for some affection, she said.

A cuddle party is really about communication and not therapy, say the organizers.

Before any touching begins, participants gather in a circle to hear the rules and voice any questions or concerns. The first rule is that the event is not clothing optional, pajamas must stay on and sex is not permitted.

Participants team up into pairs, and to ensure the boundaries of what is permissible are clear, they practice saying "no" to the question, "May I kiss you?"

An introduction to cuddling ensues, first by hugging three people. People then get in a circle on their hands and knees, rub shoulders and moo like cows. After a bit of swaying, everyone falls to their side, which puts them into an easy cuddling position.

...

A repeat customer who called herself a born-again Christian said it was good to cuddle up to another person, albeit a perfect stranger, after a hectic week.

"I felt good. I had a particularly stressful week," said the woman, who did not wish to be named.

Friends had warned her that the parties would be nothing more than thinly disguised preludes to sex, but she dismissed those worries as alarmist and unfounded, saying, "It's not about sex."

Like others, the chance to meet someone was a consideration in attending a cuddle party.

"People in a way are looking for a connection," Fernando said. "It's weird, but not unusual."

A man named Dwayne H., who described himself as introverted, said he thought the parties would help him relax before strangers and help him express his feelings.

...

Posted by NASAdude at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Jacqueline Ali, Source

New analysis by UK astronomers suggests our own planetary system may have formed in a very different way to those spotted orbiting other stars.

The findings suggest that one formation mechanism may not fit all planetary systems, as other astronomers have previously suggested.

The study appears in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the past 10 years, over 100 extrasolar systems (planetary systems orbiting stars other than the Sun) have been discovered from the wobble in their host stars, caused by the motion of the planets themselves.

But none of them seem to resemble our Solar System very much. In fact, these exoplanets have several important attributes that are entirely at odds with the Solar System as we know it.

Lead researcher Dr Martin Beer of the University of Leicester's theoretical astrophysics group, pointed out that much of the modelling done on the formation of planetary systems is based on our own one.

"But existing data suggests that the planets in the Solar System are truly different from other planets," he told BBC News Online.

If this is the case, Beer and his colleagues argue in their research paper, it is unreasonable to base our understanding of all planetary systems on the one around the Sun.

They go on to speculate that if the Solar System is unique, then the search for Earth-like planets around other stars may be in vain.

Odd one out

When compared to all known planetary systems, say the authors, our own is something of an anomaly.

This appears to suggest that there might be two entirely separate mechanisms of planetary formation at work, or - at the very least - that there are two extremes of a single formation process.

Planetary size is one puzzle; most exoplanets are gargantuan, gaseous masses like Jupiter.

Dr Martin Beer Smaller planets similar to the Earth's relatively humble proportions - and rocky composition - are noticeably absent, although the researchers admit that this may be because smaller planets are more difficult to spot.

Also, the large exoplanets are significantly closer to their stars than those in our own system are to the Sun.

They follow highly eccentric, or elliptical, orbits, which are more elongated than the largely circular orbits of the planets in the Solar System.

Current thinking

Planets are thought to form from the aggregation of dust particles between stars into a rocky core. This core either forms a solid planet, or develops a gaseous layer to become a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn.

Most theories of the formation of planetary systems are variations on this. But they do not account for the super hot and gaseous exoplanets that astronomers have been seeing around other stars.

Most planets outside the Solar System are "gas giants" like Jupiter However there is an alternative, more dynamic scenario.

Some researchers have proposed that giant planets can form directly through sudden gravitational collapse of the gaseous discs around stars.

At present, it is impossible to determine which of the theories is correct.

Much more observational work is needed before solid judgements about whether the Solar System is truly different can be made.

The current observational techniques rely on the gravitational pull that the planets exert on their parent stars. Since large, "hot Jupiters" as they are called, exert strong pulls on their stars, these planetary systems may simply be the ones that readily draw the attention of astronomers.

"It's like a fisherman deciding that all fish are larger than 5cm because that is the size of the holes in his net," Dr Beer commented.

"It will be another five years or so before we will be able to see systems like our own," he added. "At that point we will know whether the Solar System is truly different, or in fact very average."

"Nevertheless, the existing data leaves open the possibility that [our own planetary system] is quite unique compared to [others]. If this turns out to be true, then our current understanding of planet formation is unduly coloured by our intimate knowledge of the Solar System."

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A Chinese court has sentenced three Christians to up to three years in jail for leaking state secrets.
By Louisa Lim; BBC correspondent in Beijing

Xu Yonghai, Liu Fenggang and Zhang Shengqi were found guilty of passing on information to a US-based magazine.

The Beijing government is becoming increasingly alarmed at the rise of Christianity in China, a communist and officially atheist nation.

Christianity is growing in China, to the concern of the authorities

Religious organisations and human rights groups have been closely following this latest court case.

The three convicted men were members of an illegal house church, which met secretly to sing and pray.

Attending such a gathering is seen an act of defiance of state control in China.

The men were found guilty of leaking state secrets, after they passed information about a court case to US-based Christian organisations.

One of the men, Liu Fenggang, was also found guilty of passing on information about the government's destruction of unofficial churches in the eastern city of Hangzhou.

Activists say local governments are trying to extend their control over house churches, sometimes labelling them illegal cults in a bid to force their members to worship in the official churches.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in religious belief in China.

International church groups estimate there could be as many as 35 million Protestants in the country.

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Source

Two kittens have been born using a new cloning method that may be safer and more efficient than traditional methods, a U.S. company said Thursday.

Genetic Savings & Clone promises to clone anyone’s pet — for $50,000 or so — and started with chief executive officer Lou Hawthorne’s own pet cat.

Click thumbnails for full-size image:

The two kittens, Tabouli and Baba Ganoush, were born to separate surrogate mothers in June, the company said.

Its report was not submitted for the traditional scientific review process and has not been scrutinized by cloning experts. But the company says it's less interested in the scientific questions and medical promise of cloning and more interested in its business model — helping people make copies of their beloved pets.

"These two remarkable kittens should finally put to rest the issue of resemblance between clones and their genetic donors," Hawthorne said in a statement. "When performed by a skilled team using sufficiently advanced technology, clones resemble their donors to an uncanny degree — just as we predicted. It’s a happy day for our clients."

Some experts have argued that cloning pets is a gamble, because non-genetic factors such as conditions in the mother’s womb can affect coat color and temperament.

That was the case back in 2001 when Genetic Savings & Clone produced the first cloned cat, named "cc" (which stands for "carbon copy"). Research published in the journal Nature cited DNA evidence that the kitten was indeed a clone, but her coloring and disposition were different from those of her genetic mother.

This time around, the company used a new method called chromatin transfer, which had been perfected by cloning expert James Robl and colleagues at Hematech, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Hematech is using the method to clone cattle that produce human antibodies in their milk.

The traditional nuclear transfer method of cloning involves taking the nucleus from a cell of the animal to be cloned, putting it into an egg cell that has had its own nucleus removed, and then triggering this egg into growing as if it had been fertilized.

It is not efficient. Most eggs die, and many animals are born deformed.

Chromatin transfer tries to produce a cloned embryo that more closely resembles a normal embryo.

It involves dissolving the outside of the nucleus of the cell to be cloned and removing certain regulatory proteins from the chromosomes, which carry the genes, and the proteins around the chromosomes.

This entire cell with its permeable nucleus is fused to an egg cell to create the clone.

Genetic Savings & Clone said it has tried the method to duplicate Tahini, a 1-year-old female Bengal cat belonging to Hawthorne. Bengals are specially bred crosses of Asian leopard cats and domestic cats.

The company has contracted to produce five more clones for clients by the end of the year.

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2004-08-05 15:08:32 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By Paul Simao; Source

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Motorists who swerve to avoid deer, cattle and other large animals are almost as likely to end up in the emergency room as those who hit them, U.S. health officials said on Thursday.

An estimated 10,080 people are treated for non-fatal injuries each year from crashes that occur after a driver swerves or slows down to avoid large animals, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The bulk of these injuries are a result of a car going off the road or hitting a tree, pole or guardrail, according to the CDC, which compiled 2001-2002 data from 66 emergency rooms across the nation.

In comparison, about 12,245 Americans are treated for non-fatal injuries after collisions with large animals.

Ann Dellinger, a CDC epidemiologist and one of the study's authors, said drivers who come across animals on the roads should consider a number of factors, including road and weather conditions, before deciding whether to take evasive action.

"There are so many things that are going to impact each crash that it's difficult to say how they would fall out if everybody did one thing," Dellinger said.

Animal-related car crashes could be cut if drivers stayed alert and did not speed or drink and drive, according to the CDC. The Atlanta-based agency also said greater use of fences and underpasses could reduce the incidence of such accidents.

An estimated 247,000 car accidents involving animals, usually deer, are reported each year in the United States. About 200 people die as a result of these crashes.

Drivers, especially those in Wisconsin and other rural states with large deer populations, are advised to be aware of the times when deer are more likely to be crossing roads.

Crashes involving large animals are more likely to occur in October and November, the height of the fall deer-hunting, mating and migration season, and during early morning and at dusk.

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By Lucy Sherriff, Published Wednesday 4th August 2004 12:57 GMT, Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/04/matter_anti_matter/

Miniscule differences in the way antimatter and matter behave may help to explain why the universe is dominated by matter, according to a group of scientists working on the BABAR experiment.

The big bang should have produced equal quantities of matter and antimatter. The fact that our universe is so dominated by matter must be down to some subtle difference in the two substances. The research teams on the BABAR experiment have discovered tiny differences in the decay patterns of B and anti-B mesons, a phenomenon known as a CP violation.

This is one of three conditions outlined by Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov to explain the observed imbalance in the relative quantities of matter and antimatter, and is not easy to find. The differences in the decay patterns that point to a CP violation are tiny: in this case less than 300 parts in 200m pairs of B and anti-B mesons.

The BABAR experiment involves the Stanford Linear Accelerator's PEP II accelerator, which collides electrons and positrons. This collision produces exotic heavy particle and anti-particle pairs known as B and anti-B mesons. In turn, these decay into other subatomic particles, like kaons and pions.

SLAC's Marcello Giorgi, who is also spokesman for the BABAR experiment, said that if there were no difference between matter and antimatter, both the B meson and the anti-B meson would exhibit exactly the same decay patterns. "However, our new measurement shows an example of a large difference in decay rates instead."

Giorgi explained that the team has examined the decays of more than 200m pairs of B and anti-B mesons and found 910 examples of the B meson decaying into a kaon and a pion, but only 696 examples of the same final state for the anti-B. This is what is known as a direct charge conjugation parity, or CP violation: you can read upon that here.

"The new measurement is very much a result of the outstanding performance of SLAC's PEP-II accelerator and the efficiency of the BABAR detector," Giorgi said. "The accelerator is now operating at three times its design performance and BABAR is able to record about 98 per cent of collisions."

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The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRH) has approved a US$415,000 contract to trial the tracking technology with Alanco Technologies.

The pilot project will run at the Ross Correctional Facility in Chillicothe, Ohio. If all goes well, the technology could be rolled out to all of the state's inmates in 33 separate facilities. Inmates will wear "wristwatch-sized" transmitters that can detect if prisoners have been trying to remove them and send an alert to prison computers.

Staff will also wear the technology on their belts so they can be tracked for security purposes. Warders can activate an alarm themselves but the alert will also be sent if the transmitter is forcibly removed or the warder is knocked down.

Alanco claims system can pinpoint the location of staff and prisoners in real-time and track them within the confines of a prison.

The Ross project is not the first such rollout of tracking chips in US prisons. Facilities in Michigan, California and Illinois already employ the technology and Robert R. Kauffman, Alanco CEO, said he expects three new states to sign up to use RFID technology.

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Six weeks of dietary supplementation with vitamin E adds no benefit to the standard treatment of mild-to-moderate asthma in adults, according to researchers in the UK.

"Increased dietary vitamin E intake is associated with a reduced incidence of asthma, Dr. Andrew Fogarty and colleagues from Nottingham City Hospital note in the August issue of Thorax. In addition, combinations of antioxidant supplements that contain vitamin E have been effective in reducing bronchoconstriction induced by ozone.

This prompted the team to examine the effect of 500 mg/day natural vitamin E versus placebo (sugar pill) on asthma symptoms in 72 adults with mild to moderate asthma. The subjects continued to receive at least one dose of inhaled corticosteroid per day.

The main outcome measures were changes respiratory capacity, symptom scores, bronchodilator use, and serum immunoglobulin E levels.

No significant differences were observed between the vitamin E and placebo groups after 6 weeks.

"Since we have previously found a similar outcome for vitamin C and magnesium supplements in asthma, our trials indicate that these single nutrients are not effective," Fogarty and colleagues comment.

"Future studies of antioxidants should therefore perhaps consider using combinations of antioxidants, whether in a synthetic preparation or in the form of whole food such as fruits."

Thorax, August 2004

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