Politics

The airlines have decided to detain and search old ladies in wheel chairs when they set off the alarm, also little children. Now the latest group of people who are potentital terrorists in the eye of the law are people with cancer. New radiation detectors in NYC subways are triggered by people receiving chemotherapy, who are then detained and strip searched by police. The person in the article, for those without access, had received 20 milliCuries of iodine-131. Once again, good job. The story appears in this weeks Journal of the American Medical Association: http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v288n21/ffull/jlt1204-3.html

Since no one has bothered posting news in weeks, here's some highlights from current news: Pi was calculated to 1.2411 trillion digits This week's Nature has published the complete mouse genome IBM, Intel, and HP plan to build a nationwide wireless ISP Some researchers came up with the idea the valleys on Mars came from melting meteors, that all just happened to hit Mars and not Earth, the Earth's moon, Mars' moons, etc. Canada actually did something right and wouldn't let a commercial corporation take out a patent on the mouse that is genetically programmed to really prone to cancer. It's patented in the US and EU. NASA has put up Landsat images…

I know those theoretical physicists are an odd bunch, but here is an interesting one... mirror matter - a kind of matter that is pretty much the same as our own, but not. heh. see what you think: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2463143.stm

A study published in the British Journal of Cancer concludes that a woman's risk of breast cancer increases by 7% for every 10 grams of alcohol consumed daily. Interestingly, smoking had no effect on raising the risk of developing the disease. The study included 150,000 women around the world, and is the largest study ever done on women's smoking and drinking behavior. Source: newscientist Journal reference: British Journal of Cancer (vol 87, p 1234)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2399773.stm This is pretty unbelievable. I'll be interested to see what an independant international body have to say, should any go out there to verify SPANA's tests.

NewScientist is reporting new research being presented today at the American Society of Anesthesiologists which found the redheads typically require 20 percent more anesthesia before sensations of pain are not present, this is possibly related to the presense of the chemical melanocortin in the brain.

NewScientist is reporting on modified stem cells that produce a cancer-killing chemical that can find and destroy brain tumors. The standard procedure for dealing with brain tumors is surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. The mice injected with the special stem cells lived significantly longer than mice left untreated. One third even developed long term immunity to brain tumors. "Three months after the first tumours were implanted in the surviving mice, the team injected fresh cancerous cells into their brains. All mice remained healthy 120 days later, indicating they had long-term immunity to glioma. Five controls injected simultaneously with the cancerous ce…

The Houston Chronicle is carrying an article that claims possible signs of life may have been found on venus. A team from the university of Texas noticed a "mysterious patch swirling around, which may be communities of bacteria." "The team's theory is that microbes could be living in clouds 30 miles up in the Venusian atmosphere, where conditions are relatively balmy -- water droplets are present, the temperature is 158 degrees Fahrenheit and the atmosphere is similar to what it is on Earth. " You can find the research in the summer 2002 issue of the journal Astrobiology

NewScientist has an article about biological alternatives to pacemakers. "Genetically-engineered heart cells may be able to replace the electronic pacemakers that hundreds of thousands of cardiac patients have transplanted each year, suggests a new study in guinea-pigs." Full article available here. Journal reference: Nature (vol 419, p132)

A newly published paper in The Astrophysical Journal talks about the possibility of using a high-powered laser to scan for black holes by detecting the concentric rings of light that would be reflected. The authors of the paper say this technique is similar to detection of MACHOS (massive compact halo objects; possible repositories of dark matter) and could provide the first direct observations of black holes close to our solar system. ABSTRACT Shine a flashlight on a black hole, and one is greeted with the return of a series of concentric rings of light. For a point source of light, and for perfect alignment of the lens, source, and observer, the rings are of inf…

CNN is reporting that a Russian TV station will create a reality show that will follow contestants through cosmonaut training, and whoever wins gets to spend a week on the International Space Station. On a personal note, I think this disgraceful. Any uneducated slob like a reality show contestant (or Lance Bass for that matter) shouldn't get to go to the space station, it's not a tourist attraction for the people the media focuses on. I'm all for a hotel in space and people going to the ISS, but this is absurd.

yeah. after seeing a log of the chat, I decided to write my own news article about it. With 1000 milliseconds left in the 4th quarter, an FSU kicker with a shoe with an arc length angle on the order of 90 degrees struck the surface of a projectile with a x,y and y,z curvature angle on the order of 90 degrees to create a vector with a bearing with a negative x deviatation, which failed to remain within the deviation limits of the target, causing an uproar on the order of 150 decibels and an extreme increase in entropy in the student section of the national champion miami hurricanes. However, this model is not accurate to predict the outcome versus USF, where :delt…

"Pioneering research involving the detection of cosmic neutrinos and X-ray radiation has won three scientists the Nobel Prize in Physics." Article available from NewScientist

From article at CNN: "Astronomers have fashioned an Earth-sized virtual radio telescope that can distinguish celestial features 3,000 times smaller than the those observed by the Hubble Space Telescope."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid_2266000/2266608.stm okay, first of all, my apologies for this being a link to a children's news website, but the info is the same. It appears like the Ozone layer is beginning the process of repair since CFCs were banned a few years ago. to me this says that the Environment is pretty good at repairing itself once adverse effects have been removed. could a similar thing happen with global warming, and all the pollution we pump into the plant daily?

we have...... Another door! I know it's not really science, but it's interesting anyway. shame they didn't find anything else in the pyramids though :/

CNN has an article that claims italian scientists have found evidence of water on three planetary systems. Looks like they used radio telescopes to search for water's maser emissions.

According to the latest research published in Applied Physical Letters, MTSU scientists used a setup that cost about $500 to set up a system that brteaks the speed of light (group velocity, not individual particles). Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 81, No. 11, pp. 2127–2129, 9 September 2002 http://ojps.aip.org/journals/doc/APPLAB-ft/vol_81/iss_11/2127_1.html

A new object has been located in near-Earth orbit, and it's possibly Earth's 3rd known natural satellite (yes we have two - Luna and Cruithne). More info here. (ta faf)

Physicists at the University of Wisconsin have created a way to manipulate individual silicon atoms in a lattice to express binary digits. 1 silicon atom is surrounded in a cell of 20 atoms the keep the target one from interacting with others. It is the presence or absense of this central atom that is read/written by a scanning tunneling microscope as a bit. This is compared to other means of storage: 20 atoms for a bit in this system, and 32 atoms (64 for 2bp+backbone). The replication rate for DNA at room temperature is 600bp/s, but silicon could theoretically be read at 10^7 bits/s. Density compared to conventional disks is also talked about. The highest density ever …

MSNBC has an article on the catastrophic possibilities of a super-volcano eruption. Could we possibly be worrying too much about biological terrorism, nuclear terrorism, and the threat of astroids hitting our civilization, and not enough about nature's hot coca-cola?

In this article, neuroscientists have found lumbar spinothalamic cells with neurokinin-1 receptors that relay ejaculation signals to the brain. First paragraph of the article

Suprisingly, researches have found that ice in the antarctic sea has risen since 1979. Hmm, what about this global warming mess?

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/older_earth_020828.html Earth Deemed Older, Calling Moon Formation Theory into Question. A pair of new studies has helped pin down how long it took Earth to form, breaking down the final barrier of disagreement over the precise timing but creating a problem for the leading theory of the Moon's formation. Earth reached mature size 30 million years after the Sun's birth, the two independent results show. This is in line with the leading theoretical model and most other indicators. However, this is about 70 million years quicker than what was expected by Moon formation theorists. These researchers' computer models have t…

According to this story on CNN, the liftoff for the Atlas 5 is scheduled for this evening. The rocket is designed to carry more than 4 tons into orbit, making it one of the most powerful ever built.