Robert Mugabe is to lose vital support from one of his few remaining allies on the world stage, China. One of the Zimbabwe president's oldest diplomatic friends, China yesterday told Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office minister, that it was dropping all assistance except humanitarian aid.
Their resoluteness should not be surprising. And there is nothing novel about the regime's response. But the resounding silence of the United Nations is hard to fathom. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and his special envoy for Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, have had two months to reflect on a June warning about Burma sounded by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Not since it denounced the Rwanda genocide of 1994 has the Red Cross issued such a public condemnation of a government's behavior. Myanmar's autocratic military rulers have destroyed more villages in areas inhabited by ethnic minorities than have been razed in Darfur. Its partnership in the narcotics trade has helped spread addiction and HIV/AIDS infection to neighbors.
Devising that sort of mash-up, which handles multiple data sources to produce a customized solution, is typically the province of a professional. But the new systems are designed, their creators say, so people with modest technical skills can tailor applications to their needs — while writing little or no code.
“One reason cats are so susceptible to secondhand smoke is because of their grooming habits. Cats constantly lick themselves while grooming, therefore they lick up the cancer-causing carcinogens that accumulate on their fur,” MacAllister said. “This grooming behavior exposes the mucous membrane of their mouth to the cancer-causing carcinogens.” Malignant lymphoma is another type of cancer that cats that live with smokers have a higher risk of getting. This cancer occurs in the lymph nodes and cats are twice as likely to have this type of cancer compared to cats living in a non-smoking home. This form of cancer is fatal to three out of four cats within 12 months of developing the cancer.
In a different study (Strack & Mussweiler; pdf) asked one set of participants "Did Gandhi live to the age of 140?" The participants presumably all responded, "No." The second question was to estimate how long Gandhi lived. The average estimate was 67. The second group of participants was first asked "Did Gandhi live past the age of 9." Again, presumably everybody replied correctly. On the second question, they estimated on average that Gandhi lived to 50. There are many other examples. This is why experts will tell you that polls are next to meaningless unless you know the exact wording of the question. It's not subliminal mind control like in the movies, but manipulating people's decisions (or, at least their answers to surveys) is fairly easy.
Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and participatory analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we expect to be of assistance to peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.
Towards the end of the video, the robot conceptualizes itself, determining its own structure using sensors built into each joint. Then, it thinks of different ways that it might move - walk - from place to place.
Intuitively, even though a quantum computer in some sense involves exponentially many paths or “parallel universes,” the single universe that happened on the answer can’t shout above all the other universes: “hey, over here!” It can only gradually make the others aware of its presence.
"For several months, I thought I was just failing," says Clark. "I kept administering antibiotics, but every single Wolbachia gene I tested for was still there. I started thinking maybe the strain had grown antibiotic resistance. After months of this I finally went back and looked at the tissue again, and there was no Wolbachia there at all." Clark had cured the fly of the parasite, but a copy of the parasite's genome was still present in the fly's genome. Clark was able to see that Wolbachia genes were present on the second chromosome of the insect.
(Styckeindelning av mig)
The book even went over some guidelines for predicting how lethal a disease would be, based on its mode of transmission: typically, we've thought that diseases get less lethal over time because that increases their ability to spread, but the book says it depends on the transmission path. Malaria wants -- inasmuch as a disease can want anything -- people to be very ill indeed, so that they spend lots of time not moving, giving mosquitoes a better chance of finding the people, while colds do want people to be as mildly sick as possible so they can maximize their distribution.
A particularly neat case is cholera, which can be spread by human-human contact, or more usually by contamination of drinking water. In the latter case, the sicker the person, the better, because more bacteria will be voided by the person through diarrhea, while in the former case, milder infections spread more because there's longer-term contact with heath care personnel, meaning more chances to spread.
Watching cholera epidemics in South America, that's exactly what they observed: in countries that were poor, where there wasn't really any official health care, the disease became progressively more lethal over time, while in countries where infected people got immediate health care, the disease got less lethal over time.
Not all the experts agree that there is any connection between mold and depression—despite this new research. Critics wish the study hadn’t relied on self reports. “Having professionals do the inspection and rate homes for dampness or moldiness is much better than having people self report,” says Pat Breysse, director of the division of environmental health engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
When human heart muscle cells derived from embryonic stem cells are implanted into a rat after a heart attack, they can help rebuild the animal's heart muscle and improve function of the organ, scientists report in the September issue of Nature Biotechnology. The researchers also developed a new process that greatly improves how stem cells are turned into heart muscle cells and then survive after being implanted in the damaged rat heart. The findings suggest that stem-cell-based treatments might one day help people suffering from heart disease, the leading cause of death in most of the world.
The companies are accused of violating a patent on automatic message routing held by Polaris IP. The patent has a long history in litigation, but all the cases have been settled out of court.
Neighborhood property values predict local obesity rates better than education or incomes, according to a study from the University of Washington being published online this week by the journal Social Science and Medicine. For each additional $100,000 in the median price of homes, UW researchers found, obesity rates in a given ZIP code dropped by 2 percent.
1. R. A. Fisher - Genetik. Skapade också statistiska metoder som används idag för t ex läkemedelstest.
2. Louis Pasteur - pastörisering, vaccin och upptäckte metoder för att se kiralitet (spegelvända molekyler), vilket banande väg för att upptäcka DNA senare. Gjorde teori om att det finns mikroorganismer.
3. Leo Szilárd - Satte igång Manhattan-projektet. Gjorde den matematiska kopplingen mellan entropi och information
4. John von Neumann - skapade modeller för spelteori och en massa andra saker
Den femte skall man själv nämna på hans blogg.
So I decided to do something a little different: What five scientists have had the greatest impact on human life? Yes, Newton was great, but gravity goes on without him.
Vad händer med mediciner i avloppen?Läs mer: Svenskt kranvatten tippas som nästa heta miljötrend
– Det vänder sig i magen när jag ser folk bära hem flaskvatten från affären, säger Anders Nordström, universitetslektor i naturgeografi vid Stockholms universitet.
Birth control pills, estrogen replacement drugs, ibuprofen, bug spray, sunscreen, mouthwash and antibacterial soap: all of these products could turn up in your next glass of tap water, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Last summer, USGS scientists sampled 139 rivers and streams, finding hundreds of prescription and over-the-counter drugs and personal care products lingering in the nation’s water supply.
Farm animals also are a source of pharmaceuticals entering the environment, through their ingestion of hormones, antibiotics and veterinary medicines. (About 40 percent of U.S.-produced antibiotics are fed to livestock as growth enhancers.) Manure containing traces of such pharmaceuticals is spread on land and can then wash off into surface water and even percolate into groundwater. Along with pharmaceuticals, personal care products also are showing up in water.
The antibodies raised by the vaccine must reach the brain by traversing the organ’s protective blockade, the blood brain barrier. “Normally antibodies aren’t getting into the brain in any large quantities,” said Dr. Sigurdsson. “In this animal model—and also in Alzheimer’s disease—there’s a breakdown of the blood brain barrier. In addition, it is well established that neurons have receptors that can bind to and promote uptake of antibodies and our studies seem to indicate that sick neurons that are accumulating tau aggregates take up more antibodies than healthy neurons. The antibodies then end up at the site where they can interact with pathological tau protein in the neuron, and promote its clearance.”
But recent medical evidence has shown that even with lead levels less than 10 mcg/dl, a child can lose roughly seven IQ points.
Den socialdemokratiske riksdagsmannen Yilmaz Kerimo, själv med assyr-syriansk bakgrund, vill inte uttala sig om den aktuella händelsen. Men han låter förstå att de lokala partifunktionärerna gjorde fel. – Yttrandefriheten ska gälla så länge det framförda budskapet inte går emot partilinjen, säger Yilmaz Kerimo till Ekot.
The new “brothers” pledged to live together sharing ‘un pain, un vin, et une bourse’ – one bread, one wine, and one purse. As Tulchin notes, “The model for these household arrangements is that of two or more brothers who have inherited the family home on an equal basis from their parents and who will continue to live together, just as they did when they were children.” But at the same time, “the affrèrement was not only for brothers,” since many other people, including relatives and non-relatives, used it.
The effects of entering into an affrèrement were profound. As Tulchin explains: “All of their goods usually became the joint property of both parties, and each commonly became the other’s legal heir. They also frequently testified that they entered into the contract because of their affection for one another. As with all contracts, affrèrements had to be sworn before a notary and required witnesses, commonly the friends of the affrèrés.”
Tulchin argues that in cases where the affrèrés were single unrelated men, these contracts provide “considerable evidence that the affrèrés were using affrèrements to formalize same-sex loving relationships. . . . I suspect that some of these relationships were sexual, while others may not have been. It is impossible to prove either way and probably also somewhat irrelevant to understanding their way of thinking. They loved each other, and the community accepted that. What followed did not produce any documents.”