Category: interesting

1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the famous Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning from a toe injury he received after kicking his safe in anger when he could not remember its combination code.

1953: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

1978: Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was assassinated by poisoning in London by an unknown assailant who jabbed him in the calf with a specially modified umbrella that fired a metal pellet with a small cavity full of ricin poison.

1981: A 19-year-old man named Jeff Bailey died of a heart attack after scoring 16,660 on the arcade game Berzerk. This was the first known instance of a video game-related death.

Other unusual ways to die at this Wiki

The phrase “easy on the eyes” may hit closer to the mark than we suspected. Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.”

“Critically, the less time it took participants to classify a pattern, the more attractive they judged it.”

“This accounts for cultural differences in beauty – and historical differences in beauty as well – because beauty basically depends on what you’ve been exposed to and what is therefore easy on your mind.”

Full article at the Science blog

Dogs like sports celebrities too. They watch other dogs ‘play fight’ then hang out with the winners.

Dogs seem to enjoy watching other dogs compete against each other and gravitate towards the winners at the end of the game. The UK researchers, who publish their research in the journal Animal Behaviour, believe their discovery is the first demonstration of any animal eavesdropping play.

In this case, dogs appear to gain information about another dog or human’s social status and ability just by watching that individual compete.

Pooches excitedly rush toward victors when games finish, not unlike enthusiastic human sports fans at a stadium. abc.net.au

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Recent research reveals an animals’ perspective. The aim is to allow owners and vets to make objective decisions on how to care for them, free of subjective human assumptions.

It could also help vets find more appropriate ways to treat animals and relieve suffering. For instance, some medical therapies can interfere with how an animal interacts with others, says John Bradshaw of the University of Bristol, UK. Treat a dog with antibiotics, and you risk killing the bacteria that live in its anal sac and produce the individual scent by which it is recognizable to other dogs. “We don’t think of dogs losing their identities as a result of medical treatment,” he says. Our failure to see life from a dog’s perspective means that vets will too freely prescribe antibiotics without considering the consequences for the animal.

Your dog falls ill, so you take him to the vet. After a quick consultation you take him home, and soon he appears to be better. But he is not. You and the vet have failed to realise that he is still in severe pain, and the drugs the vet has prescribed will turn him into a social outcast, a dog that may be shunned or even attacked by others.

Such mistakes can happen, say animal behaviour specialists, because our understanding of animal welfare is inadequate, and at times misguided. The human tendency to anthropomorphise means we miss out on animals’ real feelings and needs…

Researchers gathered at a conference held at the Royal Society in London to hear the latest evidence on how animals interpret the world. One thing is clear: they do not see it the same way we do, and only by accepting that can we learn to care for them better.

Article at New Scientist

Taking the fear out of selling
The next time you walk into a chamber mixer and get that woozy feeling in the pit of your stomach consider these techniques and fresh perspectives on selling: Listen. Share. Take a deep breath.

Twenty conditions account for 80% of healthcare expenditure and 70% of personal healthcare expenditure is on those with chronic disabilities. Yet our health services were designed for episodic interventions not chronic conditions. [link]

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From the Science blog:
Day after day examples pile up of a government gone wild with incompetence and fraud — from drug safety, to voting machines, to using political hacks to set up democracy in Iraq.

Well, if you want to destroy government, first you have to make people lose confidence in it.

It’s working.

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Nearly a third of hospital emergency visits are alcohol-related, and after midnight this figure can be more than two thirds.

Why not an “Alcohol Health Worker”?
Why are doctors not trained to notice the signals and to intervene?

In England, about £217 million is currently spent per year on specialist alcohol treatment, compared with the £20 billion estimated cost of alcohol misuse.

Nanofactories — molecular-scale machines that could eventually move atoms around to make products — could help solve world poverty but also wreak economic and social chaos.

Desktop nanofactories could pump out anything from a new car to a novel nanoweapon, says a technology commentator.

Mike Treder from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology warns that society needs to start preparing for this brave new world.

Addressing a conference of scientists in Australia, he said that in less than 15 years nanoscale factories could be making consumer products from cups and chairs to cars and house bricks.

“It’s the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced as a species.”

via Australia ABC News in Science

Who owns the right of way?

It’s too long a story to answer, but here’s an attempt to summarize some of what I’ve learned working with the Bilger Monorail.

The air value over our roads is a trillion dollar frontier.

I propose the monorail.

Today several monorail proposals have been upgraded to sleek modern designs for urban passenger systems and rural freight. Monorail engineering is quite simple if based on the world’s oldest operating monorail in Wuppertal, Germany, or developed from monorail’s industrial history such as carrying salt mine hoppers.

A “true monorail” is cargo or a cabin suspended under a single rail. The passenger cabins or shipping containers or large cargo swing freely beneath the track — perhaps the least expensive of all land transportation. A suspended cabin is the most comfortable and stable of all transportation because forces are always downward rather than side to side.

The infrastructure is simple — a hefty post, a hefty I-beam and an ordinary steel rail. These commodities are manufactured everywhere and inexpensively with no upcoming material shortages. The drive engineering may not be as futuristic as ‘maglev’ or ‘incremental microwave’ but steel-on-steel is truly efficient. The sling designs that carry the weight are not as costly as elevating the entire roadbed such as most so-called monorails or transit systems on high concrete beams and propped up railroads.

The monorail system is flexible. For example, it can remove chains of ocean containers directly from above a ship to convey across landbridges with much lower impact on the environment. Futuristic passenger cabins, like popular bullet designs, can speed to about 170mph between cities before faster speeds introduce costly aerodynamic challenges. Slower speed lightweight neighborhood networks can weave over the streets of our congested areas — in some cases moving people, cars and freight! Most corridor for a monorail is unused airspace over our existing system of roadbed.

The true monorail may be the only practical method of enhancing our incredible investment in millions of miles of roadbed. A single-track suspended monorail was selected for the Chicago Loop Project when Jane Byrne was Mayor. And Manila chose the monorail as a practical urban and rural system. Too many times, monorail proposals fail to reach completion.

Although the true monorail is an elegant technology, it shouldn’t be technology that propels a new venture in transportation. Approaching transportation options by selecting technology seems to attract the wrong type of development team and skews social support. Development teams must first try to secure the transport conduit and build better community relations in order to focus on both industry and public issues.

In your region, who owns the right of way? Without a firm grasp of this issue, there can be no leverage, no security, no decision to move forward.

Transportation should be developed on behalf of its community. Securing the rights of way and locating terminals is an extremely challenging development horizon before new transit can be fabricated and installed. But today, asserting and managing transportation rights has been diluted, abandoned or left vulnerable to exploitation. There are no advanced university degrees in ‘roadway air management’.

Developing new transportation systems is a burden. Even under the best circumstances, the path to a stable investment to improve local transportation is more than most people will endure. And in today’s fashionable adherence to only the free market, we are too often also free to do too little.

In this forum edited by Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters, experts discuss the politics of food, and how it may be poisoning our bodies and our planet.

It turns out that Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin was right in 1825 when he wrote in his magnum opus, The Physiology of Taste, that “the destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.”

A concept “Remember Ring” GETS HOT 24 hours before your wedding anniversary or wife’s birthday, starting with 120 degrees Fahrenheit, for ten seconds. Every hour thereafer for the rest of the day, the ring gets hot again, each time a little hotter. Miniature electronics keep track of the date and control the heater.

Men’s Ring Turns Up Heat (So Wives Don’t Have To) with pic.

I came across this new study and thought, “Ah ha! So that’s how I screw myself!”

Experts have speculated that one’s prior success or sense of power can lead to disastrous mistakes, but until now there’s been little research that establishes such a link.

A sense of power leads to risk-seeking behavior.

Story & research here.

“We’ve entered a totally new region of space,” says Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist and the former director of JPL.

Our entire solar system—planets and all—sits inside a gargantuan bubble of gas about four times wider than the orbit of Neptune.

The sun is responsible.

It blows the bubble by means of the solar wind. Astronomers call the bubble itself “the heliosphere” and its outer membrane “the heliosheath.”

The heliosheath is 3 to 4 billion miles in thickness, and Voyager 1 will be inside it for another 10 years or so. Story at PhysOrg

WorldChanging points out,

When we manufacture goods, we embed energy in them: that is, their existence means we have already spent a certain amount of energy, no matter what we then do with them.

In a similar way, when we grow crops we are in a sense embedding water within them.

If a kilo of wheat takes a thousand liters of water to grow from sowing to harvest, we can, seen from a certain light, think of that kilo of wheat as containing 1,000 liters of water.

When we consider how much water is embedded in the food we transport around the planet, it turns out that there is a massive trade in virtual water.

The wetter regions of the world every year ship vast amounts of embedded water to the drier parts of the planet. This has gigantic ecological and geopolitical consequences, and as climate change intensifies, could be a trend which produces great friction.

“So the dog who insisted I let him out at 4 AM this morning helped accelerate my aging.”, says FuturePundit in this important post warning us how lack of sleep increases inflammation, reduces immunity and accelerates aging.

Reporting in the Sept. 6 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Archives of Internal Medicine, the research team finds that even modest sleep loss triggers cellular and genetic processes involved in the immune system’s inflammatory response to disease and injury.

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New research help us understand inflammation:

Bacteria and parasites often use special toxins to perforate the membranes of target cells. These pore-forming toxins are a key weapon in the attack arsenal of some common and virulent bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus, well-known for its role in hospital-acquired infections, Streptococcus pneumonie, responsible for middle ear infections and pneumonia, and Helicobacter pylori, implicated in ulcers. Pore-forming toxins compose about a quarter of all known protein toxins that increase the infectivity and severity of bacterial diseases.

Once the toxin perforates the host membrane, ions begin to leak out of the cell.

Sensing a drop in its potassium concentration, the cell reacts by forming a multi-protein complex known as an inflammasome. Scientists know that inflammasomes act like a sort of roving security force inside the cell, detecting a variety of danger signals such as bacterial RNA or bits of bacterial flagellin.

The inflammasomes join together and activate a protein, caspase-1, that in turn triggers an inflammatory response.

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From New Scientist:
Snooze your way to high test scores

If you are trying to commit something to memory, take a nap – even a short daytime snooze could help you learn.

The UTRC “lower-temperature geothermal power plant” can be thought of as a reverse cooling system.

The new turbine is essentially a refrigerator compressor running backwards

The modular, 200-kilowatt power plant from UTRC can convert temperatures as low as 165°F into electricity. [low enough for solar too] The technology is similar to steam engines, except that steam or hot water vaporizes a hydrofluorocarbon refrigerant that drives the turbine. And the refrigerant has a lower boiling point than water.

via WorldChanging

Why are beggars despised? —for they are despised, universally.

Plazoid, a blog in Humboldt County, says, “I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living.

“In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.

“Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.”

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A couple stats that set northern California’s Humboldt County apart:

• 30 overdose deaths per 100,000 population, while the state average has been about 9.2

• a suicide death rate of 20.8 per 100,000 people, more than twice the state average of 9.3

New options for spinach safety?

A new method for ridding harvested fruits and vegetables of insect pests and microorganisms, without the use of ozone-depleting chemicals like methyl bromide, has been developed by researchers at UC Davis.

The technique, called metabolic stress disinfection and disinfestation, effectively suffocates insects found in harvested produce. Forces produced by alternating vacuum and pressurized carbon dioxide applications cause irreversible changes in cell chemistry and damage to essential respiratory structures. Ethanol gas also is applied briefly to accelerate killing of fungi and bacteria and to damage insect eggs.

Researchers hope that the new technique will replace the use of post-harvest pesticides and allow for the complete phase-out of methyl bromide.

The process would be applied to pallets of fruits and vegetables to prevent damage during storage and shipping, and to avoid transporting dangerous contaminants. All major fruits, including table grapes, citrus, apples, pears, bananas and kiwifruits, as well as vegetables and ornamental flowers, retain their quality when treated with this technology…

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I worked with Russel Hines, Emeritus Research Director at the USDA, to promote modified atmosphere food safety systems in the industrial sector using molecular sieve technology.

The Monsanto sieves would remove oxygen and inject nitrogen into truck and ocean shipping containers starving pests and pathogens and somewhat slowing further growth and ripening.

My $250million proposal to install the system across Russia’s rail system — which may still be losing as much as 30% of its food production to pests and poor refrigeration — was stymied when the restructuring of the Commonwealth of Independent States in the 1990’s took the focus away from institutional government-backed investments.

The University of California, Davis, will play a key role in a new worldwide effort to create a so-called “knockout” mutant mouse for each of the approximately 20,000 genes in the mouse genome. These mice can be used to study the function of specific genes and to create models of human disease, ranging from growth and development to cancer, obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

The group plans to create lines of embryonic mouse stem cells in which 5,000 individual genes will be systematically turned off, or “knocked out.” Those embryonic stem cells will then be used to breed live mice that lack those genes.

A Mouse for Every Gene

University of California, Davis, have found that milk produced by transplanted genes in goats carry the gene for an antibacterial enzyme found in human breast milk.

Lysozyme is a protein found in the tears, saliva and milk of all mammals. It is found at high levels in human breast milk, however goat’s milk contains only 0.06 percent as much lysozyme as does human milk. Lysozyme inhibits the growth of bacteria by destroying the bacterial cell wall, causing the contents of the cell to leak out.

Because lysozyme limits the growth of bacteria that cause intestinal infections and diarrhea, and encourages the growth of beneficial intestinal bacteria, lysozyme is considered to be one of the main components of human milk that contribute to the health and well-being of breast-fed infants.

For more than a decade, UC Davis researchers have been looking for ways to enrich the milk of cows and goats with some of the beneficial compounds like lysozyme that are found in human breast milk. About eight years ago, they used gene-transfer technology to develop a line of transgenic dairy goats that carry the gene for human lysozyme and, consequently, produce human lysozyme in their milk.

Washington Post

The disclosure last month that American long-grain rice has become widely contaminated with traces of an experimental, gene-altered rice has, according to this story, provoked an economic crisis for farmers and reignited a long-smoldering debate over the adequacy of U.S. oversight of biotech food.

Already, Japan has banned U.S. long-grain imports, noting, as have other countries, that the genetically altered variety never passed regulatory muster. Stores in Germany, Switzerland and France have pulled American rice off their shelves. And at least one ship last week remained quarantined in Rotterdam, awaiting word of whether its contents would be diverted or destroyed.

Greg Yielding, executive director of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, was quoted as saying, “Until this happened, it looked like rice farmers were finally going to make a profit this year.”

Instead, U.S. rice prices have slumped about 10 percent…

Oil Executive Says World Has Tapped Just 18 Percent of Oil Supplies

The CEO of Aramco, said the world has the potential of 4.5 trillion barrels in reserves — enough to power the globe at current levels of consumption for another 140 years.

The E.coli outbreak is the 20th time in a decade that leafy greens from Monterey County have been contaminated with E. coli, and government officials already had warned growers and processors in the Salinas Valley to improve their conditions.

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Update from PhysOrg
Many creeks and streams near the region’s spinach fields are known to contain 12,000 or more E. coli organisms per 100 milliliters of water — 30 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard. California officials are currently studying ways to bring the Salinas River watershed into compliance with the EPA’s rules.

Another PhysOrg clip:
Sensor to Detect E.coli
As the Food and Drug Administration takes days to track down the source of the E. coli outbreak, Dr. Raj Mutharasan is optimizing a sensor that can enable growers to do the job themselves in a few minutes.

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The nine bags of baby spinach now linked by DNA testing to the national E. coli outbreak all held conventional rather than organic produce and all were sold under the Dole label, state health officials said late September. LATimes

People who want to work together can do amazing things. Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence, in Driven, spoke of the Drive to Acquire, the Drive to Defend, the Drive to Bond and the Drive to Learn.

Note: In Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, the authors combine the latest thinking from the biological and social sciences to lay out a new theory on human nature.

The idea: We are all influenced and guided by four drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, and defending. In this excerpt, Lawrence and Nohria examine how an organization built around the four-drive theory might look.

JP Rangaswami on Four Pillars says, “I do so like their model, so much more than that of Maslow fifty years earlier. People want to bond. People want to learn. People want to defend that which they hold as precious. And people want to acquire, yes, but not at the cost of the other drivers.”

“Sure, any form of collective action has its perils and its misuses. But hey, any form of anything has its perils and its misuses. So let’s celebrate the different ways people work together in different contexts.

We’re animals – we have animal brains. All animal brains have the circuitry in place for producing operant conditioning. It’s a fundamental psychological process, and just the sort that can create behaviours what operate automatically, or in spite of our consciously telling ourselves we should do otherwise.

Story at MindHacks

via Preoccupations

At The Economist

Emerging countries are looming larger in the world economy by a wide range of measures.

Their share of world exports has jumped to 43%, from 20% in 1970.

They consume over half of the world’s energy and have accounted for four-fifths of the growth in oil demand in the past five years.

They also hold 70% of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves.

Of course there is more than one respectable way of doing the sums. So although measured at purchasing-power parity (which takes account of lower prices in poorer countries) the emerging economies now make up over half of world GDP, at market exchange rates their share is still less than 30%. But even at market exchange rates, they accounted for well over half of the increase in global output last year.

The first “just war” theories argued that Christians should only engage in warfare for defensive purposes.

So Pope Benedict was indeed [waving] a double edged sword as the denunciation [in his speech] applies as equally to Rome as it does to Mecca. Pope Benedict would have known this.

Thus the real message of the pope’s lecture has been entirely missed.