Stomach Bug Crystallizes A Threat From Antibiotics

Stuart Bradfor

From New York Times:

Earlier this year, Harold and Freda Mitchell of Como, Miss., both came down with a serious stomach bug. At first, doctors did not know what was wrong, but the gastrointestinal symptoms became so severe that Mrs. Mitchell, 66, was hospitalized for two weeks. Her husband, a manufacturing supervisor, missed 20 days of work.

A local doctor who had worked in a Veterans Affairs hospital recognized the signs of Clostridium difficile, a contagious and potentially deadly bacterium. Although the illness is difficult to track, health officials estimate that in the United States the bacteria cause 350,000 infections each year in hospitals alone, with tens of thousands more occurring in nursing homes. While the majority of cases are found in health care settings, 20 percent or more may occur in the community. The illness kills an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people annually.

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Driller Thriller: Antarctica's Tumultuous Past Revealed

From The New Scientist:

THE midnight sun hangs low in the sky on this November evening. A plain of flat ice sweeps in all directions and mountains rise in the distance. Perched on the sea ice is a massive, teepee-shaped tent. A mechanised rumble emanates from within.

Inside the tent, men in hard hats tend a rotating shaft of steel. This drill turns day and night through 8 metres of sea ice covering the surface of McMurdo Sound, off the coast of Antarctica, and through 400 metres of water beneath it and into the seabed.

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Hemp Could Be Key To Zero-carbon Houses

The Renewable House is a timber frame house with hemp-lime walls. (Credit: Image from the National Non-Food Crops Centre)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2009) — Hemp, a plant from the cannabis family, could be used to build carbon-neutral homes of the future to help combat climate change and boost the rural economy, say researchers at the University of Bath.

A consortium, led by the BRE Centre for Innovative Construction Materials based at the University, has embarked on a unique housing project to develop the use of hemp-lime construction materials in the UK.

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Got Nature? Why You Need to Get Out

A little time spent in a green space can improve psychological and physical health, researchers are finding. Credit: stock.xchng

From Live Science:

NEW YORK — In our increasingly urbanized world, it turns out that a little green can go a long way toward improving our health, not just that of the planet.

That could mean something as simple as a walk in the park or just a tree viewed through a window. It's not necessarily the exercise that is the key. It's the refreshing contact with nature and its uncomplicated demands on us.

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Next-Gen Atom Smashers: Smaller, Cheaper and Super Powerful

From Wired News:

Size matters in particle physics: The bigger the machine, the more violently physicists can smash atoms together and break open the deepest mysteries of the subatomic world. But a revolutionary new technology could eventually render some gargantuan particle accelerators passé.

Using simulations, a team of German and Russian physicists have pioneered a new technique for particle acceleration, called proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration (PWFA). The technique may one day allow machines a fraction of the size of today's accelerators to create the highest-energy particles ever.

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World's Highest-Energy Laser To Create Mini-Stars (Pictures)

To produce the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion, the facility will aim all of its 192 laser beams simultaneously on a hydrogen target. This all happens inside this 10-metre-diameter chamber, which weighs 130 tonnes. The sphere is made up of 18 aluminium sections that are each 10 centimetres thick.The square openings are for the lasers, and the round openings are used to accommodate nearly 100 pieces of diagnostic equipment. (Image: Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Department of Energy)

From New Scientist:

In early April, the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, was given the green light to begin a series of experiments. Researchers hope they will culminate in the first ever self-sustained, stable fusion reaction that will release many times more energy than the energy used to trigger the reaction. The stadium-sized facility will train 192 laser beams on tiny targets, producing pressures and temperatures that could illuminate the interiors of giant planets and pave the way to the first fusion reactors.

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Climate Change 'Own Goal': Laws To Combat Acid Rain Are DRIVING Arctic Warming, Claims Nasa

From The Daily Mail:

It is widely recognised that humans are their own worst enemies when it comes to global warming.

But the latest research from Nasa suggests laws created to preserve the environment are causing much of the damage.

Legislation to improve air quality and cut acid rain has accounted for a shocking half of Arctic warming over the past three decades, the space agency reports.

Climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York found that declines in solid 'aerosol' particles brought in under laws to improve air quality likely triggered 45 per cent of temperature rises.

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Dance Your Way To Successful Aging

New research shows that older people can dance their way towards improved health and happiness. (Credit: iStockphoto/Georgy Markov)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2009) — Older people can dance their way towards improved health and happiness, according to a report from the Changing Ageing Partnership (CAP).

The research, by Dr Jonathan Skinner from Queen’s University Belfast, reveals the social, mental and physical benefits of social dancing for older people. It suggests that dancing staves of illness, and even counteracts decline in ageing.

Recommendations include the expansion of social dance provision for older people in order to aid successful ageing and help older people enjoy longer and healthier lives.

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The Search For The Solar System's Lost Planet

Artist's conception of the hypothetical impact of Theia and young Earth. Credit: NASA/GSFC

From Live Science:

The solar system might once have had another planet named Theia, which may have helped create our own planet's moon.

Now two spacecrafts are heading out to search for leftovers from this rumored sibling, which would have been destroyed when the solar system was still young.

"It's a hypothetical world. We've never actually seen it, but some researchers believe it existed 4.5 billion years ago — and that it collided with Earth to form the moon," said Mike Kaiser, a NASA scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

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One Speck Of Blood Or Tissue May Be Enough To Diagnose Cancer

From Times Online:

A drop of blood or speck of tissue no bigger than a full stop could soon be all that is required to diagnose cancers and assess their response to treatment, research suggests.

New technology that allows cancer proteins to be analysed in tiny samples could spell the end of surgical biopsies, which involve removing lumps of tissue, often under general anaesthetic.

Researchers at Stanford University, California, have developed a machine that separates cancer-associated proteins by means of their electric charge, which varies according to modifications on the protein’s surface.

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Finding Pages From Browser History

From Technology Review:

A new tool aims to make a Web browser's history more useful.

Web browsers remember the sites that they have visited in the past, but few people seem to use this information. Jing Jin, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a new browser-history tool, which she and her colleagues developed after studying how people use their browser history. They demonstrated the prototype in a presentation this week at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2009) Conference, in Boston.

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Brown Fat: A Fat That Helps You Lose Weight?

From Time Magazine:

For most people, fat is a burden. It doesn't really matter whether it appears as cellulite on our thighs or cholesterol in our veins — we just don't want it.

But it turns out that our bodies also make a unique form of fat tissue that behaves remarkably unlike any other: rather than storing excess energy, this fat actually burns through it.

It's called brown fat (as opposed to the more familiar white fat that hangs over belt buckles and swings from the backs of arms), and a series of papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine confirm for the first time that healthy adults have stores of this adipose tissue, which researchers hope to study further as a potential new weight-loss treatment.

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Google CEO Sees Future For News In Advertising

From The Globe And Mail:

SAN DIEGO — Google's CEO Eric Schmidt recommends that news organizations continue to rely on advertising but seek new ways to reach readers.

Without providing specific recipes, Mr. Schmidt's speech Tuesday lays out a few possibilities.

One is a site for medicine similar to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which lets users collectively contribute and edit entries.

He says there's still room for subscription and pay-by-the-piece journalism but he emphasizes advertising, the source of 98 per cent of Google Inc.'s revenue.

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Oldest Stone Blades Uncovered

Cutting-edge technology. A stone core (lower left) and three of the recently found blades. Credit: Cara Roure Johnson and Sally McBrearty/University of Connecticut

Science Now:

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS--Paleoanthropologists working in Africa have discovered stone blades more than a half-million years old. That pushes the date of the earliest known blades back a remarkable 150,000 years and raises a question: What human ancestor made them?

Not long ago, researchers thought that blades were so hard to make that they had to be the handiwork of modern humans, who had evolved the mental wherewithal to systematically strike a cobble in the right way to produce blades and not just crude stone flakes. First, they were thought to be a hallmark of the late Stone Age, which began 40,000 years ago. Later, blades were thought to have emerged in the Middle Stone Age, which began about 200,000 years ago when modern humans arose in Africa and invented a new industry of more sophisticated stone tools. But this view has been challenged in recent years as researchers discovered blades that dated to 380,000 years in the Middle East and to almost 300,000 years ago in Europe, where Neandertals may have made them (ScienceNOW, 1 December 2008).

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Sleep: Spring Cleaning For The Brain?

On the left, the brain of the well-rested blue fly has low levels of a synaptic protein called BRP in this 3D view from a confocal mircoscope. On the right, the brain of the sleep-deprived fly glows orange in areas of BRP concentration. (Bruchpilot or BRP is a protein involved in communication between neurons.)In the tired fly, the protein is present at high concentartions in three major areas of the fly's brain that are associated with learning. Sleep reduces the levels of this protein, an indication that synapses get smaller and/or weaker. This process of "downscaling" may be important so the brain is reset to normal levels of synaptic activity and can begin learning again the next day. (Credit: Courtesy of UW Health Public Affairs)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2009) — If you've ever been sleep-deprived, you know the feeling that your brain is full of wool.

Now, a study published in the April 3 edition of the journal Science has molecular and structural evidence of that woolly feeling — proteins that build up in the brains of sleep-deprived fruit flies and drop to lower levels in the brains of the well-rested. The proteins are located in the synapses, those specialized parts of neurons that allow brain cells to communicate with other neurons.

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Great Golfers' Brains Have More Gray Matter

From Live Science:

As Tiger Woods goes for his fifth green jacket in this weekend's Masters Tournament, mortal golfers wonder what's inside his head that keeps him winning. Well, chances are his brain actually has more gray matter than the average weekend duffer.

Researchers at the University of Zurich have found that expert golfers have a higher volume of the gray-colored, closely packed neuron cell bodies that are known to be involved with muscle control. The good news is that, like Tiger, golfers who start young and commit to years of practice can also grow their brains while their handicaps shrink.

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Space Station May Stay in Orbit 5 More Years

Photo: The International Space Station as seen by the departing space shuttle Discovery. NASA

From FOX News:

The U.S. and major foreign partners on the International Space Station have agreed in principle to keep it operating through 2020, at least five years beyond the current deadline, according to government and industry officials.

There had been looming questions about the future of the space station — which took nearly two decades and more than $100 billion to design and build — because until now, the major partners hadn't committed to keeping it going past 2015.

An extension could give new momentum to the scientific research conducted there, which initially was delayed by false starts and problems finishing assembly of the station.

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Space: The Final Frontier for Cell Phones?

From Time Magazine:

(LAS VEGAS) — The vast, thinly populated expanses of the country that still lack cell phone coverage could be getting an interesting option next year: ordinary-looking cell phones that connect to a satellite when there's no cell tower around.

In June, a rocket is scheduled to lift the largest commercial satellite yet into space. In orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth, the satellite will unfurl an umbrella of gold mesh 60 feet across and aim it at the U.S. That gigantic antenna will let the satellite pick up signals from phones that are not much larger than regular cell phones.

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A Hybrid Nano-Energy Harvester

Photo: Nano hybrid: A dye-sensitized solar cell (top) and a nanogenerator (bottom) sit on the same substrate in the new device. Credit: Xudong Wang

From Technology Review:

The device harnesses both sunlight and mechanical energy.

Nanoscale generators can turn ambient mechanical energy--vibrations, fluid flow, and even biological movement--into a power source. Now researchers have combined a nanogenerator with a solar cell to create an integrated mechanical- and solar-energy-harvesting device. This hybrid generator is the first of its kind and might be used, for instance, to power airplane sensors by capturing sunlight as well as engine vibrations.

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Wind Turbine Imports Increase; Can U.S. Factories Catch Up?

From McClatchy News:

WASHINGTON — Manufacturing of wind turbine parts in the United States grew last year as the market for wind energy boomed, but trade figures show that imports continued at a high rate after years of big growth.

Wind turbine imports from Europe and Asia rose from $60 million in 2004 to $2.5 billion in 2008, according to Customs data reviewed by McClatchy. Imports of other equipment usually, but not always, used for wind power production also increased in the same period. The value of AC generators and towers, for instance, jumped from $84 million to $1.6 billion.

The numbers suggest that there's potential for U.S. manufacturers to seize some opportunities, and some of the largest turbine makers say they're looking for U.S. suppliers.

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