twoday
seaweed is heart yummy!
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—Physicians for decades have grappled with ways to block further tissue damage in patients who suffer heart attacks. They have tried everything from drugs to cell therapy—all with little luck. But promising new research indicates that a biogel made from seaweed may have the healing powers that have thus far eluded them.
The first clinical trial in humans recently began of an alginate-based biomaterial that, when injected into animals, helped their hearts repair themselves. The therapy is set to be tested over the next year in 30 patients in Germany, Belgium and Israel who have suffered severe heart attacks; if successful, the trial will be expanded to include a few hundred U.S. heart patients, and the experimental biogel could be on the market by 2011.
"This could revolutionize the treatment of patients recovering from a massive heart attack," says Jonathan Leor, director of the Neufeld Cardiac Research Institute at Tel Aviv University's Sheba Medical Center, who helped develop the potentially heart-saving therapy.
google teams up with the un
A new partnership between the UN refugee agency and Google allows users of the powerful Google Earth search tool to track refugees in global conflict regions.
Nearly 35 million people across the globe have been uprooted by violence, political conflict and catastrophe. Now the United Nations is partnering with Google in a new effort to keep track of them.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees unveiled on Tuesday a multimedia system to monitor refugees in conflict regions using Google Earth, the internet search giant's global mapping software.
the ocean will KILL you
Bracing seaside air may not be so healthy after all. The mix of sea salt, ship fumes and city smoke leads to a chemical reaction that encourages the formation of ozone smog.
Sea breeze
(iStockphoto)
A team led by James Roberts, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, has developed a new mass spectrometer capable of measuring nitryl chloride (ClNO2) – a chemical that encourages the formation of ozone.
This compound is created when nitrogen oxides – from ship exhausts and city smoke – mix with aerosol particles containing chloride, such as sea salt spray. Until recently there was no way of measuring nitryl chloride, so nobody knew how much was floating around.
our sister solar system
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.
They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.
Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought.
And he told a major meeting that astronomers were on the brink of finding many more of them.
The St Andrews researcher said this planetary system, and others like it, could host terrestrial planets like Earth. It was just a matter of time before such worlds were detected, he explained.
yahoo ms proxy war!
Now that Microsoft has made another pass at Yahoo, and Yahoo has rebuffed Redmond's advances, what's next? Here's an outline of the likely sequence of events.
Let's assume that Yahoo fails to agree on a deal with Microsoft before the three-week deadline Microsoft set in its April 5 letter, which would be April 26. At that point Microsoft, presumably, will launch a proxy battle to take over Yahoo's board.
First, Yahoo has to send out its proxy materials to shareholders, which includes information about its board nominees. (Yahoo recently extended the deadline for nominating board members to 10 days after it announces its annual meeting, and the company still hasn't scheduled that yet.) Given that Yahoo's shareholder meeting was in June of last year, that could imply that the deadline to nominate candidates for the board would fall in May.
braille cell phone
Braille phones in and of themselves aren't all that unique, but a former professor (who just so happens to be completely blind) from Tsukuba University of Technology has crafted a variant that jumps and jives. Dubbed the world's first vibrating Braille cellphone, the device is programmed to emit pulses depending on which key is pressed; more specifically, a pair of terminals attached to the handset "vibrate at a specific rate to create a message." Those currently involved with the project are now toiling to make the keypad-to-vibration converters smaller, but there's no word just yet on whether the technology will be picked up commercially.
lungless frog
The first recorded species of frog that breathes without lungs has been found in a clear, cold-water stream on the island of Borneo in Indonesia.
The frog, named Barbourula kalimantanensis, gets all its oxygen through its skin.
"Nobody knew about the lunglessness before we accidentally discovered it doing routine dissections," study lead author David Bickford, a biologist at the National University of Singapore, said in an email.
His colleague Djoko Iskandar at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia first described the frog in 1978 from one specimen. About 15 years later, fishermen found another individual.
anbar's last stand
COMBAT OUTPOST NORSEMAN, Iraq - The marines of India Battery of the 3rd Battalion, 11th Regiment jokingly referred to the first half of their deployment to Anbar Province as a "desert spa" experience.
After serving early in the war as the insurgency's engine, the largely Sunni province seemed to have been tamed after the US helped turn tribal leaders against Al Qaeda in Iraq elements there.
It was a success story that Gen. David Petraeus held up as a "model" for the country in congressional hearings last September. And on Tuesday, as General Petraeus returns to Washington, he is likely to be asked about recent turmoil in Iraq's Shiite south – not the relative calm in its western Sunni heartland.
But as the marines of the 3/11 have learned since their deployment shifted to Anbar's desolate western reaches, all is not yet tranquil in the province.
economic contraction - likely
Federal Reserve officials anticipated that the economy would shrink in the first half of the year, with some concerned about ``a prolonged and severe economic downturn.''
``Many participants thought some contraction in economic activity in the first half of 2008 now appeared likely,'' the Fed said in minutes of the March 18 Federal Open Market Committee meeting released in Washington today.
Policy makers also found little sign that housing markets have reached a bottom, the minutes showed. Traders increased bets that the Fed will lower its benchmark interest rate half a point when policy makers meet April 29-30, futures prices show.
patraeus and cocker's feet to the fire
In a reprise of their testimony last September, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker came to Capitol Hill today to tell lawmakers that security has improved in Iraq and that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has taken steps toward political reconciliation and economic stability.
But unlike in September, when that news was fresh and the administration said a corner had been turned, even some of the war's strongest supporters in Congress have grown impatient and frustrated. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Crocker are facing many lawmakers today and tomorrow who had expected more by now and who are wondering whether any real change will occur before the clock runs out on the Bush administration.
teenagers gone wild
The 16-year-old victim is literally backed into a corner as fellow teens scream at her, threaten her and ultimately beat her unconscious.
Two teenage males stand "lookout" and a video camera rolls, according to authorities in Florida, as the high school cheerleader, a guest at the house where the beating allegedly occurred, is intermittently berated and pummeled by peers.
When the 35-minute beating is done, the girl is allegedly forced into a car and dumped at another friend's house. She is told to keep her mouth shut — or else the next beating will be worse, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
ms couric meet mr blitzer
CBS, the home of the most celebrated news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its news-gathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday.
Over the last decade, CNN has held intermittent talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures. But during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who asked for anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.
Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS’s news-gathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network’s news feeds.
pope to talk about pedos
The Vatican's No. 2 official says Pope Benedict XVI recognizes the damage and pain caused by the clergy sex abuse crisis and will seek healing during his U.S. trip next week.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press that Benedict will deliver a message of "trust and hope."
The pope turns 81 during the trip. Bertone says Benedict is fit but could not meet all the invitations from U.S. cities and had to limit himself to Washington and New York.
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—Physicians for decades have grappled with ways to block further tissue damage in patients who suffer heart attacks. They have tried everything from drugs to cell therapy—all with little luck. But promising new research indicates that a biogel made from seaweed may have the healing powers that have thus far eluded them.
The first clinical trial in humans recently began of an alginate-based biomaterial that, when injected into animals, helped their hearts repair themselves. The therapy is set to be tested over the next year in 30 patients in Germany, Belgium and Israel who have suffered severe heart attacks; if successful, the trial will be expanded to include a few hundred U.S. heart patients, and the experimental biogel could be on the market by 2011.
"This could revolutionize the treatment of patients recovering from a massive heart attack," says Jonathan Leor, director of the Neufeld Cardiac Research Institute at Tel Aviv University's Sheba Medical Center, who helped develop the potentially heart-saving therapy.
google teams up with the un
A new partnership between the UN refugee agency and Google allows users of the powerful Google Earth search tool to track refugees in global conflict regions.
Nearly 35 million people across the globe have been uprooted by violence, political conflict and catastrophe. Now the United Nations is partnering with Google in a new effort to keep track of them.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees unveiled on Tuesday a multimedia system to monitor refugees in conflict regions using Google Earth, the internet search giant's global mapping software.
the ocean will KILL you
Bracing seaside air may not be so healthy after all. The mix of sea salt, ship fumes and city smoke leads to a chemical reaction that encourages the formation of ozone smog.
Sea breeze
(iStockphoto)
A team led by James Roberts, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, has developed a new mass spectrometer capable of measuring nitryl chloride (ClNO2) – a chemical that encourages the formation of ozone.
This compound is created when nitrogen oxides – from ship exhausts and city smoke – mix with aerosol particles containing chloride, such as sea salt spray. Until recently there was no way of measuring nitryl chloride, so nobody knew how much was floating around.
our sister solar system
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.
They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.
Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought.
And he told a major meeting that astronomers were on the brink of finding many more of them.
The St Andrews researcher said this planetary system, and others like it, could host terrestrial planets like Earth. It was just a matter of time before such worlds were detected, he explained.
yahoo ms proxy war!
Now that Microsoft has made another pass at Yahoo, and Yahoo has rebuffed Redmond's advances, what's next? Here's an outline of the likely sequence of events.
Let's assume that Yahoo fails to agree on a deal with Microsoft before the three-week deadline Microsoft set in its April 5 letter, which would be April 26. At that point Microsoft, presumably, will launch a proxy battle to take over Yahoo's board.
First, Yahoo has to send out its proxy materials to shareholders, which includes information about its board nominees. (Yahoo recently extended the deadline for nominating board members to 10 days after it announces its annual meeting, and the company still hasn't scheduled that yet.) Given that Yahoo's shareholder meeting was in June of last year, that could imply that the deadline to nominate candidates for the board would fall in May.
braille cell phone
Braille phones in and of themselves aren't all that unique, but a former professor (who just so happens to be completely blind) from Tsukuba University of Technology has crafted a variant that jumps and jives. Dubbed the world's first vibrating Braille cellphone, the device is programmed to emit pulses depending on which key is pressed; more specifically, a pair of terminals attached to the handset "vibrate at a specific rate to create a message." Those currently involved with the project are now toiling to make the keypad-to-vibration converters smaller, but there's no word just yet on whether the technology will be picked up commercially.
lungless frog
The first recorded species of frog that breathes without lungs has been found in a clear, cold-water stream on the island of Borneo in Indonesia.
The frog, named Barbourula kalimantanensis, gets all its oxygen through its skin.
"Nobody knew about the lunglessness before we accidentally discovered it doing routine dissections," study lead author David Bickford, a biologist at the National University of Singapore, said in an email.
His colleague Djoko Iskandar at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia first described the frog in 1978 from one specimen. About 15 years later, fishermen found another individual.
anbar's last stand
COMBAT OUTPOST NORSEMAN, Iraq - The marines of India Battery of the 3rd Battalion, 11th Regiment jokingly referred to the first half of their deployment to Anbar Province as a "desert spa" experience.
After serving early in the war as the insurgency's engine, the largely Sunni province seemed to have been tamed after the US helped turn tribal leaders against Al Qaeda in Iraq elements there.
It was a success story that Gen. David Petraeus held up as a "model" for the country in congressional hearings last September. And on Tuesday, as General Petraeus returns to Washington, he is likely to be asked about recent turmoil in Iraq's Shiite south – not the relative calm in its western Sunni heartland.
But as the marines of the 3/11 have learned since their deployment shifted to Anbar's desolate western reaches, all is not yet tranquil in the province.
economic contraction - likely
Federal Reserve officials anticipated that the economy would shrink in the first half of the year, with some concerned about ``a prolonged and severe economic downturn.''
``Many participants thought some contraction in economic activity in the first half of 2008 now appeared likely,'' the Fed said in minutes of the March 18 Federal Open Market Committee meeting released in Washington today.
Policy makers also found little sign that housing markets have reached a bottom, the minutes showed. Traders increased bets that the Fed will lower its benchmark interest rate half a point when policy makers meet April 29-30, futures prices show.
patraeus and cocker's feet to the fire
In a reprise of their testimony last September, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker came to Capitol Hill today to tell lawmakers that security has improved in Iraq and that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has taken steps toward political reconciliation and economic stability.
But unlike in September, when that news was fresh and the administration said a corner had been turned, even some of the war's strongest supporters in Congress have grown impatient and frustrated. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Crocker are facing many lawmakers today and tomorrow who had expected more by now and who are wondering whether any real change will occur before the clock runs out on the Bush administration.
teenagers gone wild
The 16-year-old victim is literally backed into a corner as fellow teens scream at her, threaten her and ultimately beat her unconscious.
Two teenage males stand "lookout" and a video camera rolls, according to authorities in Florida, as the high school cheerleader, a guest at the house where the beating allegedly occurred, is intermittently berated and pummeled by peers.
When the 35-minute beating is done, the girl is allegedly forced into a car and dumped at another friend's house. She is told to keep her mouth shut — or else the next beating will be worse, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
ms couric meet mr blitzer
CBS, the home of the most celebrated news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its news-gathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday.
Over the last decade, CNN has held intermittent talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures. But during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who asked for anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.
Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS’s news-gathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network’s news feeds.
pope to talk about pedos
The Vatican's No. 2 official says Pope Benedict XVI recognizes the damage and pain caused by the clergy sex abuse crisis and will seek healing during his U.S. trip next week.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press that Benedict will deliver a message of "trust and hope."
The pope turns 81 during the trip. Bertone says Benedict is fit but could not meet all the invitations from U.S. cities and had to limit himself to Washington and New York.
posted by william overin @ 1:35 PM
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