And the bad news keeps coming for Air America, according to this snippet from an article in The Washington Post:

Air America, the liberal talk network carried on WWRC-AM (1260), went from bad to nonexistent. After WWRC recorded a mere fraction of a rating point in the spring with syndicated shows from the likes of lefty talkers Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Stephanie Miller, Arbitron couldn’t detect a measurable listenership for the station this time around.

If you can’t make it there, you can’t make it anywhere!

The Senate had a chance today to undo the massive pork-barrel spending that makes up a huge portion (more than 6,300 pet porcine projects!) of the $286.4 billion transportation bill. Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma sponsored amendments to rescind the some of the more egregious overspending, re-directing the funds to help pay for Hurricane Katrina recovery.

But the Senate voted 82-15 to kill the amendments after transportation subcommittee ranking Democrat Patty Murray hinted that the Appropriations Committee would go after the pet projects of anyone who voted for them.

Here are a couple examples of what eighty-two senators decided were vitally necessary–items that had to be funded rather than shift the money to re-build hurricane-ravaged New Orleans:

• The $224 million “Bridge to Nowhere” that would connect Ketchikan, Alaska, to an island where there is an airport and about 50 residents, and another $229 million for a bridge near Anchorage. 37-year Senate veteran Ted Stevens of Alaska is the porker responsible for that project. He told a freshman colleague that he would resign and “be taken out of here on a stretcher” if the Senate killed funding for two Alaskan bridges. [Edit: And the downside would be…?]

  “We find ourselves in significant difficulties as a nation,” Coburn said, referring to the massive costs of hurricane relief and the mounting federal deficit. The Alaska bridges, he said, “are very low on the totem pole” of national priorities. (via The Washington Post.)

• $500,000 in HUD money to build a sculpture garden at the Seattle Art Museum (via Investor’s Business Daily.) This bit o’ pork was Senator Murray’s pet project and apparently the attempt to kill it is what cause her threats to seek vengeance.

…Coburn presented a series of measures designed to clean up the appropriations process. They include an amendment to end Senate procedures that hide pork from public scrutiny, another to prevent HUD from helping fund a $2.2 million cat-and-dog shelter in Rhode Island, the cancellation of funding by the HUD “Community Development Fund” for a $1 million sound-stage facility in Mississippi, and cutting funding for a $950,000 parking facility for a Nebraska art museum that has more than $66 million in assets. (via Investor’s Business Daily.)

So what’s Coburn’s angle in all this? He was elected to the Senate last year on a platform of slashing the size of government and ending old-school pork barrel spending. In an interview today with Hugh Hewitt, when asked if he was worried about Senator Murray’s threats to go after spending on projects for Oklahoma, Senator Coburn replied:

No. I don’t ask for any projects. I ran on a platform of saying the biggest problem we face in our country is financial and economic, and cultural in Washington, that if we don’t change that, I promised you I will not earmark a thing until the budget is in surplus.
…
So I don’t have any earmarks. So I don’t have any…you know, there’s no power over me to withhold earmarks, because I have none.

[Edit 10.21 7:55 EDT] According to a follow-up article in the WaPo:

Many residents of Alaska appear to support forfeiting the bridge money for hurricane relief. “This money, a gift from the people of Alaska, will represent more than just material aid; it will be a symbol for our beleaguered democracy,” reads a typical letter to the Anchorage Daily News.

[Senator Don Young], who made sure his state was one of the top recipients in the highway bill, was asked by an Alaska reporter what he made of the public support for redirecting the bridge money. “They can kiss my ear! That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he replied. [Emphasis mine]

Wow, are these guys tone-deaf or what?! If they had voted for the Coburn amendments, they’d have been heroes twice over: first for getting the money for their constituents, then for being “noble” in transferring the money to New Orleans. Instead they come off looking arrogant, selfish, and fiscally reckless.

[Edit 10.21 8:07 EDT] The vote was 82-15, not 86-13 as I had previously written. [Since corrected.]

[Edit 10.21 16:46 EDT] Beltway Blogroll has a roundup of yesterday’s debate on the Senate floor. (Via InstaPundit). Yes, the Blogosphere got soundly thumped on this one, but now we’re being heard, which is a victory of sorts all by itself. If not for the Porkbusters, no debate would have been held!

Read more!

From an article in The Wall-Street Journal:

D’oh! Arabized Simpsons Aren’t Getting Many Laughs

When an Arab satellite TV network, MBC, decided to introduce “The Simpsons” to the Middle East, they knew the family would have to make some fundamental lifestyle changes.

“Omar Shamshoon,” as he is called on the show, looks like the same Homer Simpson, but he has given up beer and bacon, which are both against Islam, and he no longer hangs out at “seedy bars with bums and lowlifes.” In Arabia, Homer’s beer is soda, and his hot dogs are barbequed Egyptian beef sausages. And the donut-shaped snacks he gobbles are the traditional Arab cookies called kahk.
…
The family remains, as the producers describe them, “dysfunctional.” They still live in Springfield, and “Omar” is still lazy and works at the local nuclear power plant. Bart (now called “Badr") is constantly cheeky to his parents and teachers and is always in trouble. Providing the characters’ voices are several popular Egyptian actors, including Mohamed Heneidy, considered the Robert De Niro of the Middle East.
…
“Al Shamshoon” is currently broadcast daily during an early-evening prime-time slot, starting with the show’s first season. If it is a hit, MBC envisions Arabizing the other 16 seasons.

But there’s no guarantee of success. Many Arab blogs and Internet chat sessions have become consumed with how unfunny “Al Shamshoon” is. “They’ve ruined it! Oh yes they have, *sob*. … Why? Why, why oh why?!!!!” wrote a blogger, “Noors,” from Oman.

Read more!

There’s a news drought today, so if you came here looking for nanotech breakthroughs or the latest on the space elevator, try again tomorrow. But just so you don’t go away empty-handed, check out the following links–they’re guaranteed to entertain.

First is Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s Illusion Pages site. His best images–the Rotating Snakes, Rotating Koban, and A Donguri-Pattern Curtain–use an effect called peripheral drift to trick your eyes into seeing motion where there is none.

CAUTION: Some of the pictures on his website can cause dizziness or even epileptic seizures (the latter happens when the brain can’t handle the conflicting information from your eyes). If you start feeling unwell while at the site, immediately cover one eye with your hand and then leave the page. Do not close both eyes because that can make the attack worse.

Next, the Butterscotch Threshold has recreated Escher’s Relativity in LEGO bricks. And the Escher for Real page has an animated version of Möbius Ring - Ants and models of the Penrose Triangle, Escher’s Cube, and Escher’s Waterfall.

Finally, there’s this “scary” illusion.

According to an article in Xinhua News, China’s taikonauts Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng returned home today from five days in orbit. Welcome home, boys!

Now, can someone explain why Xinhua is using an obviously faked photo with the caption Shenzhou-6 spacecraft lands safely? Trying not to make knee-jerk anti-Communist comments here, but it sure looks suspicious.

[Edit 10.17 12:10 EDT] Alright, the fake-looking image I was curious about was from a series of images simulating the flight. Which leads to the question: Why didn’t they have live footage of the craft landing? They must have known via radar where it would land and should have had helicopters and other recovery vehicles on-site well before it touched down. After all, we filmed John Young and Michael Collins’s splashdown in Gemini 10 and that was in 1966!

According to a story at ANANOVA.com The Rolling Stones (combined age of 245 and counting) are travelling with a heart machine while on tour in case one of them loses the beat. [rimshot]

Organisers have brought in a defibrillator, used to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm.

According to The Sun quoting US magazine Globe a source said: “With all four band members now veterans, their managers are not taking any chances.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

In a related and timely vein, NEWS.au.com has an article about a clinical trial for a new treatment that may repair the damage done to heart muscle by chronic heart disease.

[Melbourne-based bio-tech company Mesoblast] has discovered a rare cell in bone marrow which triggers the regrowth of heart muscle and arteries. Researchers determined how to isolate the cell and breed it outside the body.

When injected into the heart in huge quantities it reverses heart disease by sparking arterial and heart-muscle regeneration, a pre-clinical study has found.

Read the whole article.

65.5 million years ago, the Alvarez meteor hit the Earth, killing nearly half of all species on the planet. On impact, the 6-mile-wide meteor blasted so much dust and ash into the atmosphere that for at least the next 6 months (and possibly as long as 10 years), sunlight could not reach the surface. What life was left on Earth carried on its business in pitch darkness. The global fire-storm resulting from the meteor strike, followed by the months-long night and the oceans turning acidic (caused by acid rain from the huge amounts of gypsum and sulphur that were vaporized), proved too much for the dinosaurs. After ruling the planet for 150 million years, except for the birds they were totally wiped out. In fact, no animals weighing more than 55 pounds are thought to have survived the cataclysm. Humans and other mammals are descended from tiny vole-like survivors.

Scientists calculated, based on the amount of iridium (rare on Earth but common in meteors) ejected during the collision, that a crater at least 60 miles wide would form. After a worldwide search, the 105-mile-wide Chicxulub Crater was discovered beneath the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. It’s the right age and it’s certainly big enough to have been the Dinosaur Killer.

But surely that’s not the only time the Earth’s been struck?! Not hardly (well, actually, very hardly), according to the Earth Impact Database we’ve been hit repeatedly over the millenia. They’ve tallied 172 confirmed craters ranging in size from the 50-foot-wide, 1,000-year-old Haviland crater in Kansas to the 186-mile-wide, 2-billion-year-old Vredefort crater in South Africa.

The Impact Field Studies Group, teams of scientists who travel around searching for more craters and doing field studies at impact sites, has so far found 543 suspected impact sites. Check out their gallery of confirmed impact crater panoramas.

[Edit 10.16 23:31 EDT] It has been brought to my attention that this entry was not a news story. Guilty as charged, I just like writing about end-of-the-world catastrophes. However, as luck would have it, The Register-Guard published an article today on the do’s and don’ts of meteorite hunting:

The odds against finding a meteorite that just hit the Earth are astronomical.

But here is a safety tip just in case you do: put on a pair of gloves before touching it to protect yourself from cold, not heat.

‘’There is a greater danger of getting frostbite than of getting burned'’ when handling a meteorite that just landed, said Dick Pugh, a meteorite scientist visiting La Grande.

The interior of a meteorite usually is frozen. Seconds earlier, it was in space, where the temperature may be 200 degrees below zero, Pugh said. The outer layer of a meteor momentarily bursts into flame as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere, but does not warm its interior.

‘’It is only a fireball for five or six seconds,'’ said Pugh, who is from the Portland State University Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory.

It’s fascinating stuff, so make sure you read the whole article.

From an article by Reuters:

It was the first day of school, so some students were understandably nervous. But then again, they were not taking just any course, but one run by a Vatican university to teach aspiring demonologists and exorcists.

“There is no doubt that the devil is intervening more in the life of man these days,” Father Paolo Scarafoni told the students, most of them priests who want to learn how to tackle the demon if they should ever encounter him.

“Not all of you will become exorcists but it is indispensable that every priest knows how to discern between demonic possession and psychological problems,” he said.
…
[Father Gabriele] Nanni said there are four sure signs that pointed to demonic possession rather than psychological problems.

He listed them as:

“When someone speaks or understands languages they normally do not; when their physical strength is disproportionate to their body size or age; when they are suddenly knowledgeable about occult practices; when they have a physical aversion to sacred things, such as the communion host or prayers.”

It sure seems to me like they’re wasting time chasing the wrong guy. Instead of looking for Linda Blair wannabees being possessed by Satan, they should be training these students to detect the truly evil.

Yesterday, Deb Riechmann and the Associated Press published this article:

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged

WASHINGTON - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday’s vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

I’m just going to examine the first paragraph because the entire article hinges on it.

Read more!

From the International Herald Tribune:

A breakthrough for Sunnis on constitution

Iraqi political leaders have agreed to an important last-minute change in a draft constitution in exchange for a promise by some prominent Sunni Arab leaders to publicly support the document in a nationwide referendum Saturday, President Jalal Talabani said Wednesday.

The change would create a panel in the next Parliament with the power to propose broad revisions to the constitution. In effect, the change could give the Sunnis - who were largely shut out of the constitution-writing process - a chance to help redraft the document after the December elections.

The agreement was a major victory for American officials, who have spent weeks urging Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish leaders to make changes that could soften Sunni opposition to the charter and forge a broader consensus. The Americans had voiced fears that if the constitution passed over strong Sunni opposition, more would lose faith in the political process and turn toward violence.
…
“This will give a new chance to the people who were not present in the writing of the constitution,” said Alaa Makky, a senior member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Iraq’s best-known Sunni political group, which had until now been urging its members to vote against the document in the referendum Saturday.

“We think this may be the beginning of a new era, and we think it is a great success.”

Read the whole article.

Actually, it’s called resilin, a rubber-like substance that its creator, Dr Chris Elvin from CSIRO in Queensland says:

…Is, a very, very efficient rubber material that is found and occurs in most insects, but probably best exemplified by fleas, which are able to jump very, very high distances and they are able to do this repeatedly.”

The scientists first determined that resilin is what enables fleas to jump so high, then they located the gene for resilin in the sequenced genome of the fruit fly and cloned it into a bacterium.

The hope is that eventually resilin could be used as a replacement for arteries and spinal discs.

“What we’ve been able to do is recreate in the lab what nature has taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve,” Dr Elvin said.

Read the whole article at ABC News Online.

It’s a cornucopia of cloning with these articles about cows imbued with human genes and an imminent endorsement from the FDA that will allow cloned livestock to be sold in the United States:

• New Zealand to clone cows with human genes - NZ scientists intend to use human cells to genetically engineer cows to produce milk high in a protein that will boost the body’s natural defences against disease. The scientists at crown research institute AgResearch have approval from the Environmental Risk Management Authority to undertake laboratory experiments and intend to apply to take it a stage further and create transgenic cows. AgResearch will partner Netherlands-based Pharming Group to produce the milk. Read the whole article.

• Where’s the cloned beef? - The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to rule soon on whether or not meat and dairy products from cloned livestock are safe to eat, which raises an important question: Cloned beef - will it really be what’s for dinner?

Already, hundreds of cloned cows, pigs and other animals are living on farms throughout the United States, ready to start producing cloned offspring, awaiting an endorsement from the FDA.

The agency has been looking into the issue for more than three years. And now, government officials, industry leaders and consumer groups are all saying that they expect the FDA to propose to permit sales of cloned byproducts - a decision that will be subject to 60 days of public comment, and some additional review.
…
However, consumer groups say that they believe Americans will refuse to feed their families biotech food. The International Food Information Council backs this claim up with a recent survey they did throughout the United States, asking consumers whether they would buy cloned milk, meat and eggs. Sixty-three percent said they would not buy cloned byproducts - not even if the FDA approves them.

Read the whole article.

As for me, I don’t care whether the meat is cloned or not as long as it wants to be eaten.

In an update to this post, The Daily Yorimuri has an article saying that the JAXA prototype was launched from a rocket and reached an altitude of 11 miles, glided in the air at Mach 2 and landed safely using a parachute.

This was the first successful flight since the last prototype crashed after take-off.

According to The Washington Post:

A breakthrough in supersonic flight could help Japan leap ahead in the aerospace field. The country, which manufactures high-tech components for U.S.-based Boeing Co., has only a limited domestic airplane industry.

[Kenichi Saito, a spokesman for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA] said the prototype 38-foot-long, arrow-shaped craft, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., was launched on a rocket and reached a flying altitude of 11 miles before floating back to Earth by parachute.
…
Monday’s $10 million experiment marked a crucial step in Japan’s plans to develop a larger supersonic aircraft that can carry 300 passengers between Tokyo and Los Angeles in about four hours.

It also underpinned a June agreement between Japan and France to jointly research a possible successor to the Concorde over the next three years.

Read the whole article.

The more a ram smells, the more the goat loves him.” - French proverb

From telegraph.co.uk:

Is there more than a whiff of truth about Gallic charm?

It is one of the most enduring and insulting of national stereotypes: the Frenchman as a workshy character whose unpleasant body odours owe as much to his aversion to soap as to his love of garlic and onions.

The French dismiss such talk as no more than cruel caricature, dreamt up by their beer-swilling, overweight and perfidious English neighbours. Now a leading French journal has produced figures suggesting that it may be closer to the truth than anyone – except perhaps rush-hour passengers on the Paris metro – might ever have imagined.

A booklet published by the weekly Le Point magazine draws on a mixture of polling information and academic research to paint a sometimes surprising – and not always flattering – picture of Gallic daily life.

Among the statistics contained in “24 Hours in France – An Unusual Portrait of France and the French” is the fact that only one in 10 of the population regularly uses soap, while almost one in 25 admit that they never shower or bathe, and one in 33 say they never brush their teeth.

Read the whole article.

From Business Wire:

Oshkosh Truck Corporation and partners Rockwell Collins and the University of Parma, Italy, announced that their robotic truck, TerraMax, has completed the DARPA Grand Challenge. The vehicle was one of five to complete the race.

TerraMax completed the 132-mile desert course with an unofficial run time of 12 hours and 51 minutes. The team was assigned a starting time more than two hours behind the first vehicle, and was “paused” numerous times by DARPA officials to accommodate disabled or slower moving vehicles on the course. As a result, daylight ended before TerraMax could complete the course on the first day.

Even though TerraMax was capable of operating autonomously in the dark, race officials paused it in the middle of the desert – among snakes, scorpions and coyotes – until daybreak for the safety of the chase vehicle drivers.

TerraMax idled in the desert overnight, setting off for the finish line at dawn. About five miles from the course’s end, this eight-foot-wide defense truck passed through Beer Bottle Pass, with just inches to spare between its bumper and a 200-foot sheer cliff. TerraMax was the largest and widest vehicle to successfully navigate this narrow, treacherous mountain road, demonstrating the precision of the vehicle’s numerous sensing systems. The large Oshkosh truck crossed the finish line just after noon on Sunday, October 9, following more than 30 hours of continuous operation.
…
TerraMax’s autonomous systems were optimized for a more difficult environment than it faced on the racecourse selected by DARPA. “We decided in the beginning that we would design this vehicle to autonomously handle real off-road terrain, actively detect and navigate around obstacles, and maintain a high-level of confidence in vehicle safety,” said Scott Uhlir, Rockwell Collins principal program manager for advanced programs. “While our race time could have been improved significantly by altering these parameters, we finished the race believing that we are that much closer to providing a real-world solution.”

Three years ago the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development arm of the Pentagon, challenged robotics experts from across the country to develop an autonomous, driverless vehicle that could traverse a rugged, off-road desert course. After no vehicle completed last year’s 150-mile DARPA Grand Challenge, 195 teams entered the competition this year. Three levels of qualifying events narrowed the final field to 23.

DARPA Grand Challenge teams were given the race route just two hours before the start of the race at 6:30 a.m. PDT on Saturday, Oct. 8. Team TerraMax members then programmed the course coordinates into their vehicle.

Read the news release.

[Edit 10.11 9:56 EDT] Doh! I misread the release, it turns out that Team TerraMax completed the race but came in fifth. Here’s the correct tally:

• First place: Stanford Racing Team

• Second place: Red Team

• Third place: Red Team Too

• Fourth place: Gray Team

• Fifth place: Team TerraMax

OK, yes it’s old news that Britney Spears gave birth to a boy on September 14.

But did you know [cue X-Files theme] that by some weird coincidence (or fit of despair), nearly 400 songbirds in Madison, Wisconsin died that same night when they flew into guy wires holding up a television tower?

“There were birds all over the place,” said Steven Ugoretz, a DNR environmental specialist who works on tower-related issues.

Searchers found 172 birds around the base of the 1,100-foot tower. Crows, cats and other scavengers took another 200 or more, and Ugoretz estimates more birds likely died because no one searched a heavily wooded area just north of the tower.

Read the whole Associated Press article. Here’s a photo of the WMTV tower.

A 6-foot alligator lost out in a struggle for survival with a 13-foot Burmese python in the Florida Everglades last week. However, even though he was crushed and swallowed by the snake, the ‘gator got the last laugh because his mangled bulk caused the python’s stomach to burst.

According to an Associated Press article:

The gory evidence of the latest gator-python encounter — the fourth documented in the past three years — was discovered and photographed last week by a helicopter pilot and wildlife researcher.

The snake was found with the gator’s hindquarters protruding from its midsection. Mazzotti said the alligator may have clawed at the python’s stomach as the snake tried to digest it.

In previous incidents, the alligator won or the battle was an apparent draw.

“There had been some hope that alligators can control Burmese pythons,” Mazzotti said. “This indicates to me it’s going to be an even draw. Sometimes alligators are going to win and sometimes the python will win.”
…
[Joe] Wasilewski said a 10- or 20-foot python also could pose a risk to an unwary human, especially a child. He added, however, “I don’t think this is an imminent threat. This is not a `Be afraid, be very afraid’ situation.’”

Read more!

From BBC News:

Solar handbag lights up contents

The contents of a woman’s handbag have long remained a mystery - often even to the owner - but a new design offers to shine a light on the problem.

A solar-powered handbag designed by a student from Brunel University promises to make finding keys and other items at the bottom of a bag easier.

The handbag, dubbed Sun Trap, uses a solar cell attached to the outside of the bag to trap energy from sunlight.

The energy is stored in an internal battery which lights up the lining.

The lining is made from an electroluminescent material similar to that found in mobile phones and is lit up by the bag’s zip which acts as a switch.

Read the whole article

A man who immigrated from Kenya became a double winner when he scored a $1.8 million dollar lottery win on the same day he became a U.S. citizen.

From the Associated Press article:

Shortly after Moses Bittok, of West Des Moines, took the oath of citizenship on Friday, he discovered he had a $1.89 million winning ticket from the Iowa Lottery’s Hot Lotto game.

“It’s almost like you adopted a country and then they netted you $1.8 million,” Bittok said Monday as he cashed in his ticket. “It doesn’t happen anywhere — I guess only in America.”

Bittok said he took the citizenship oath at the federal building in Des Moines Friday then went shopping with his family. They stopped at a gas station to check his lottery ticket from the Sept. 21 drawing.

“For some reason, I’m calm,” he said. His wife, Leonida, screamed.

From an Agence France-Presse article:

Dust to dust to … diamonds? US firm turns cremated remains into precious gems

Everyone said she was a gem. Now, just eight ounces of cremated remains is all it takes to turn your mother into a diamond.

In fact, there’s enough carbon in those ashes to make about 20 gems. And there will still be several pounds of ashes left over to display on the mantelpiece.

So far, nobody’s ordered more than 11 diamonds, said Dean VandenBiesen, vice president of operations for LifeGem, which uses super-hot ovens to transform ashes to graphite and then presses the stone into blue and yellow diamonds that retail for anywhere from 2,700 to 20,000 dollars.

“It’s not for everyone,” VandenBiesen admitted, adding that for those who do chose to immortalize their loved ones in jewelry, the experience is extremely positive.

“We have people that approach us who have just experienced a tragedy and they say I can’t wait, I’m so excited about this,” he said. “In the field of death care, when someone says I’m really excited about this, I think we’ve achieved what we wanted to do which is change the culture of death.”

Read the whole article

From a New York Times article:

Why do-it-yourself photo printing doesn't add up

Prices of printers have dropped up to 30 percent in the last few months thanks to a savage price war. Is this then the time to buy a photo printer for your home?

After all, for about $200 you can get the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 8250 that in just 14 seconds spits out a photo that equals the quality of those coming back from the photo finisher in an hour. For the same price, Canon's iP6600D prints a borderless 4-by-6-inch photo in 46 seconds, but also prints on both sides of dual-side photo paper.

The catch is that after you make an initial investment, you are going to pay at least 28 cents a print, if you believe the manufacturers' math. It could be closer to 50 cents a print if you trust the testing of product reviewers at Consumer Reports.

In the meantime, the price of printing a 4-by-6-inch snapshot at a retailer's photo lab, like those inside a Sam's Club, is as low as 13 cents. Snapfish.com, an online mail-order service, offers prints for a dime each if you prepay. At those prices, why bother printing at home?

Read the whole article

From an October 6 Associated Press article:

Researchers Reconstruct 1918 Flu Virus

For the first time, scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed millions of people in 1918.

Why? To help them understand how to better fend off a future global epidemic from the bird flu spreading in Southeast Asia.

Researchers believe their work offers proof the 1918 flu originated in birds, and provides insights into how it attacked and multiplied in humans. On top of that, this marks the first time an infectious agent behind a historic pandemic has ever been reconstructed.

The scientists involved in the project contend there’s no real risk to public safety. The vials of this frightening germ — about 10 of them — are locked away at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said Terrence Tumpey, the CDC research scientist who constructed the virus.

However, at least one ethicist thinks there should be a broader public discussion before scientists take such bold steps.

“There isn’t much input from the public. I think there should be,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.

Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected people and then spread among them. So far, the current Asian virus has infected and killed at least 65 people but has rarely spread person-to-person.
…
The Spanish flu of 1918 was a worldwide contagion that in a few months killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million worldwide, including roughly 550,000 in the United States.

In severe cases, victims’ lungs filled with fluid and they essentially drowned in a disease process that took less than a week. It was known for being particularly dangerous to young adults, a group usually less susceptible to flu complications than older people.

Also on October 6 comes this BREITBART.com article in which a cargo plane carrying research samples of frozen influenza and herpes viruses crashed near Winnipeg in Canada. According to Federal Express, the samples were destroyed in the crash and ensuing fire along with other freight.

Time to stock up on VICKS First Defence and chicken soup.

A best-selling writer of children’s books (and a minister of religion!) was tossed out of the Penair School school in England after telling the 12-year-old students that Harry Potter was gay. (Presumably they kicked him out before he also had a chance to reveal the truth about Santa Claus.)

Read the whole article

From the Associated Press:

The first major study of an experimental vaccine to prevent cervical cancer found it was 100 percent effective, in the short term, at blocking the disease and lesions likely to turn cancerous, the drugmaker Merck & Co. said Thursday. Its shares rose nearly 6 percent.

Gardasil, a genetically engineered vaccine, blocks infection with two of the 100-plus types of human papilloma virus, HPV 16 and 18. The two sexually transmitted viruses together cause about 70 percent of cervical cancers.

Other types of HPV also can cause cervical cancer and painful genital warts. About 20 million Americans have some form of HPV.

Read the whole article.

According to an article at Engadget, Canon has announced a new ground-breaking technology called SmileShot that will only let a camera take a picture if the subject is smiling. Whoo boy, I can imagine the photo captions:

“The grieving widow, seen here smiling…”
“After barely surviving the shark attack in which he lost his leg, the diver, seen here smiling…”

Society will never be the same.