Major biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor?? | Doug's Darkworld. The abandoned town of Pripyat, the Chernobyl reactor in the background. There has been an exciting new biological discovery inside the tomb of the Chernobyl reactor. Like out of some B-grade sci fi movie, a robot sent into the reactor discovered a thick coat of black slime growing on the walls. Since it is highly radioactive in there, scientists didn’t expect to find anything living, let alone thriving. The robot was instructed to obtain samples of the slime, which it did, and upon examination…the slime was even more amazing than was thought at first glance.
This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source. Aside from its novelty value, this discovery leads to some interesting speculation and potential research. Possibly this could also be used to create plants or mushrooms that could grow in space, serving as a food source for space travellers. Like this: Like Loading... Albert-Andre Nast, 1953 | The Practice of Medicine, Perfected: Portrait of a Doctor, France, 1953. So much has been written about the American healthcare system in recent years — in short, that it’s an insanely byzantine, profit-driven train wreck — that it’s hardly worth recounting the various and often contradictory reform proposals that have been floated to set it right. The ongoing technical debacle that is Obamacare’s HealthCare.gov’s website only highlights how complex any solutions are likely to be. In the midst of the debate, meanwhile, one striking image is often invoked — that of the quasi-mystical “country doctor” who, in some vaguely perceived, misty past, made his (almost always emphatically his, and not her) way through all sorts of weather, at all times of day and night, to patients old and young, dispensing cures and even a kind of homey wisdom learned in a lifetime of caregiving.
[MORE: See all of TIME.com's health coverage.] And if, for most of the planet and for most of human history, those days and that doctor never existed? Well . . . more’s the pity. [MORE: See W. Thomas Insel: Toward a new understanding of mental illness. Let's upgrade undergrads to first-class citizens. It’s a “tsunami”! Or a “Copernican revolution.” So say the president of Stanford and other university leaders. Not since the turn of the last millennium have so many people rung the doomsday alarm. This time it’s not the end of the world we’re worrying about, but the disintegration of undergraduate university education as we know it. To which I say – maybe. It’s clear we’re in a collective frenzy about the future of higher education, and the frenzy is likely to accelerate.
Governments seek more accountability for the billions of tax dollars we all contribute. Exactly how teaching and learning will be reshaped will, of course, be revealed over time. So, the sky is not falling. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. At Concordia, almost 15 per cent of our course enrollments this year are in online courses. Universities, I’ll wager, will settle on the full range of options: some face-to-face courses; blended courses; and fully-online academic programs. I don’t see a tsunami. Why Your Brain Craves Music. If making music isn’t the most ancient of human activities, it’s got to be pretty close. Melody and rhythm can trigger feelings from sadness to serenity to joy to awe; they can bring memories from childhood vividly back to life.
The taste of a tiny cake may have inspired Marcel Proust to pen the seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, but fire up the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and you’ll throw the entire baby-boom generation into a Woodstock-era reverie. From an evolutionary point of view, however, music doesn’t seem to make sense. Unlike sex, say, or food, it did nothing to help our distant ancestors survive and reproduce. Yet music and its effects are in powerful evidence across virtually all cultures, so it must satisfy some sort of universal need — often in ways we can’t begin to fathom.
(MORE: Your Brain on Sesame Street: Big Bird Helps Researchers See How the Brain Learns) But the nucleus accumbens is just part of the neural symphony. Bugs As Drugs. Let’s say you want to buy things with germs in them. There’s yogurt, of course, but there’s so much else. You can buy pills for your gut, creams for your face, tablets for your breath. You can buy blueberry juice with germs, and pizza with germs. And a lot of these products make big promises about the benefits their germs will bring you.
“Fungal Defense is specially formulated with ingredients that help maintain a balanced, healthy digestive environment,” for example. Did that last statement make not so much sense to you? There’s ample evidence that the 100 trillion microbes that call us home–the microbiome–exert important influences on our biology. A huge amount of research has been carried out on mice rather than humans, for example. Actual experiments on people have been a lot rarer, not surprisingly. There are many reasons for this shortfall. Making matters worse (or a more exciting challenge, if you’re of a sunny disposition) is the fact that there isn’t any one microbiome.
Gulf War Syndrome, Other Illnesses Among Veterans May Be Due To Toxic Environments. In 1991, as part of Operation Desert Storm, former U.S. Army Spc. Candy Lovett arrived in Kuwait a healthy 29-year-old eager to serve her country. Two decades later, she's accumulated a stack of medical records over five feet high -- none of which relates to injuries inflicted by bullets or shrapnel.
"It's just been one thing after another," said the veteran, who now resides in Miami and whose ailments run the gamut from lung disease and sleep apnea to, most recently, terminal breast cancer. "At one point," she said, "I was on over 50 pills. " Former Air Force Tech. Wymore and Lovett -- and countless others who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the desert region over the past three decades -- have struggled to understand this, but they share one nagging conviction: These ailments are tied to service in a war zone.
"I knew something strange was happening," said Dr. "There is concern that there could be long-term effects" of dust and burn pit exposures, said Dr. Dr. Navy Capt. North America. Jonas Bendiksen Globalization’s promises and perils do not only manifest themselves in nations around the world, but also in communities across North America. The Rockefeller Foundation, therefore, works both at home and abroad to assure that more people can reach the benefits of progress and growth while strengthening resilience to new and evolving social, economic, health, and environmental challenges. Local Action Yields Global Results Many of our model programs start domestically, but yield global impact: Our successes in combating malaria began as pilot projects in Arkansas and Mississippi and later expanded to research centers in 25 locations in Latin America, Europe, the Near East and Asia.
The vaccine to prevent yellow fever was developed in the Foundation’s New York laboratories in 1935. Some of Our Current Projects in the United States Rebuilding New Orleans more Protecting American Workers’ Economic SecurityCampaign for American Workers more more NYC Cultural Innovation Fund more more. Learnist | 50 Best Websites 2012.
The Rich Haven’t Always Hated Taxes. Mitt Romney has proclaimed, “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more.” While most Americans may not agree with his tax rate (14%), few would disagree with his sentiment. Almost no one willingly pays more taxes than required. Yet there was a time when elites willingly acknowledged that they should pay far higher rates than others. In fact, when the income tax was first regularly put into place in 1913, the well-off were the only ones required to pay it. Before that time, our government relied upon a system of tariffs for revenue. But as the nation grew in population and economic prowess, it required public works like more efficient transportation to grease the wheels of capital, public goods like schools to create more skilled workers, and public protections to help those who the market failed.
Our leaders — many of whom came from the wealthy elite — turned to the idea of an income tax. (MORE: One Nation, on Welfare: Living Your Life on the Dole) SquareSpace | 50 Best Websites 2012. Squarespace 6, the ambitious new upgrade to this major blogging platform, is all about creating beautiful, image-rich websites with a minimum of technical expertise. You choose a template, customize it by dragging elements around and then begin filling it with content. Bonus feature: every Squarespace site adjusts itself on the fly to look good and work well on a PC, tablet or phone.
Unlike WordPress and Blogger, this service isn’t free, but plans begin at a reasonable $8 a month. Next If This Then That. How Do Words, such as Yes and No, Change Our Brains and Lives? The neuroscience of language, consciousness, and communication raises many fundamental questions, the answers to which consistently defy definition. For example: when we speak, where do our words come from?
Our brain, or our mind? And what do we mean by mind? Similar dilemmas arise when we try to study the nature of consciousness. What is it, and where is it? Is it generated solely by neural activity, or is it a separate force that influences the activity of the brain? Hypotheses abound, but nobody seems to know for certain. However, we do have a few clues that illuminate the relationship between the brain, the mind, and our ability to communicate effectively to others. How much information can our conscious mind hold in working memory?
Most people will say, “But I need more time to explain!” In business, time is money, so brevity is a highly valued trait. The Power of Yes What about the power of the word “yes?” Related articles: The Surprising Big Idea at TED: Turn Off Technology. It’s a TED tradition: when the stage lights go up at the beginning of a talk, the little gadgets go away—iPhones, iPads, and Blackberries all have to be powered down, even by the tech big wigs who were in attendance, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Linked In’s Reed Hoffman, and Google’s Marissa Mayer.
Fully listen without technological distraction. Though it sounds simple, it was the most radical message being spread at TED 2012. A surprising number of this year’s wide variety of speakers seemed to be joining one another in a resounding chorus, a call really, for a renaissance in technological discernment. Technology is powerful, the thinking went, but it actually disempowers us when we use it addictively and indiscriminately. (MORE: Segways, String Theory, and Snacks: A Report from TED) The leader of the pack was definitely MIT professor and author of Alone Together, Sherry Turkle. MORE: 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life. In-Your-Face: Can Computers Catch You Telling a Lie? A popular school of thought, dramatized in the recent TV drama Lie to Me, is that a careful study of facial expressions—especially eye movements—tells investigators if a perp is dissembling.
Reality is neither as dramatic nor as decisive. Even experienced investigators average only about a 65 percent success rate, according to researchers. Could computers do a better job? Researchers at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (U.B.), claim their video-analysis software can analyze eye movement successfully to identify whether or not a subject is fibbing 82.5 percent of the time. The 40 interviews were conducted by Mark Frank, a U.B. professor of communication and a study co-author, and included a diversity in age, gender and ethnicity. Prior to the interview, each subject was given the opportunity to "steal" a check made out to a political party or cause that the volunteer strongly opposed. Afterward, subjects sat down with a retired law-enforcement interrogator.
Why China Will Have an Economic Crisis. The view in most of the world is that China is indestructible. Shrugging off the crises multiplying elsewhere, China seems to surge from strength to strength, its spectacular growth marching on no matter what headwinds may come. It appears inevitable that China will overtake a U.S. mired in debt and division to become the world’s indispensable economy. Those businessmen and policymakers looking to the future believe China’s “state capitalism” may be a superior form of economic organization in dealing with the challenges of the modern global economy. My answer to all of this is: think again. I don’t doubt for a second that China will be a major economic superpower with an increasingly influential role in the global economy. In many respects, it already is a superpower. (MORE: Are China’s Big State Companies a Big Problem for the Global Economy?) But the more time I spend in China, the more convinced I am that its current economic system is unsustainable.
What happens? (MORE: What the U.S. The Boy Who Played With Fusion. "Propulsion," the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "I just want to see the propulsion stuff. " A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten.
For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son's boundless appetite for knowledge. Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. As the guide runs off to fetch the center's director—You gotta see this kid! When I meet Taylor Wilson, he is 16 and busy—far too busy, he says, to pursue a driver's license. "Where does it come from? " President Obama plans to propose a lower corporate tax rate, but Warren Buffett says that taxes aren't a key factor driving corporate investment.
Yesterday, President Obama announced a long-awaited proposal to cut corporate taxes in America, which U.S. businesses complain are much too high by international standards. The proposed reform is intended to prevent companies from shifting operations and earnings to tax havens (paging Mitt Romney!) And instead encourage companies to bring them back into the U.S., where they could create jobs and growth. What’s being missed in all this is that the corporate tax debate and the jobs debate are two separate things. Here’s why. America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the rich world. But most American businesses don’t pay it. The President is suggesting that the corporate tax rate drop from 35% to 28%. (MORE: The Corporate Tax Rate Is Lowest in Decades; Is Business Paying Its Fair Share?) That gets at the key issue: Fundamentally, lower taxes aren’t the reason that businesses choose to invest, or not, in a certain country.
True enough.