Hmm. Something I've never seen ... until now.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Guiness World Record for most T-Shirts worn at one time.
[youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6tlw-oPDBM]
NASA may abandon plans for moon base
NASA will probably not build an outpost on the moonMovie Camera as originally planned, the agency's acting administrator, Chris Scolese, told lawmakers on Wednesday. His comments also hinted that the agency is open to putting more emphasis on human missions to destinations like Mars or a near-Earth asteroid.
NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a permanent base there. But some space analysts and advocacy groups like the Planetary Society have urged the agency to cancel plans for a permanent moon base, carry out shorter moon missions instead, and focus on getting astronauts to Mars.
Under Scolese's predecessor, Mike Griffin, the agency held firm to its moon base plans. But the comments by Scolese, who will lead NASA until President Barack Obama nominates the next administrator, suggest a shift in the agency's direction. He spoke to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies of the House Committee on Appropriations.
Scolese was asked repeatedly whether NASA could still make it to the moon by 2020 under the proposed 2010 budget, but failed to give a clear yes or no, and his answers suggested the agency's plans were in flux.
via NASA may abandon plans for moon base - space - 29 April 2009 - New Scientist.
I'd like to see a moon landing with modern equipment. The special effects would be awesome.
Merkel in her underpants stops traffic
The 100-metre-square mocked-up image of the half-naked world leader is part of a nationwide advertising campaign for an underwear company aiming to cash in on the success of a "cash-for-clunkers" scheme for old cars.
Punters trading in their old underwear will get a €5 discount on a new pair, the advert promises, under the slogan: "The country needs new undies."
The electronic advert - on a busy road junction in the heart of former West Berlin – caused a stir on the streets and made it onto the front pages of local papers, with scores of people taking snapshots of the billboard with cameras or mobile phones.
"I think it's great. Brilliant. It's a positive signal for the economic situation in Germany," said a 54-year-old who gave his name of Meier adding he would "definitely" trade in his old pants at the first opportunity.
A 37-year-old called Bebe said: "I think it's fantastic that you can look at something funny when you're waiting for the bus."
Merkel herself was tight-lipped on the subject of her image being used in this fashion. "The chancellor's office does not want to comment on the campaign," a spokesman said.
via Merkel in her underpants stops traffic - The Local.
Gardasil Linked to Nerve Disorder
April 30, 2009 (Seattle) -- Girls and women who receive the Gardasil vaccine to prevent cervical cancer may be at increased risk of a rare but serious disorder of the nervous system in the first few weeks after getting their shots, researchers report.
Overall, the vaccine does not raise the odds of developing Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), a disorder of the peripheral nervous system, says Nizar Souayah, MD, of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark.
“But there is clear evidence from our database of an increased incidence of Guillain-Barre syndrome in the first six weeks, especially the first two weeks, after vaccination,” he tells WebMD.
Still, the risk is extremely low: 26 in 10 million in the first two weeks and 30 in 10 million in the first six weeks after vaccination. That compares to 5 in 10 million odds in the general population, Souayah says.
In response to the study, a spokesperson for Merck, which makes Gardasil, notes that the CDC says that “the data do not currently suggest an association between Gardasil and GBS.”
The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.
via Gardasil Linked to Nerve Disorder.
If a dangerous effect only shows up in 30 people of every 10 million, it is hard to imagine what kind of testing could reveal this beforehand.
NEW! UFO video Katy TX April 24 09
What I like is that people are bypassing media filters so much at this point that if a real event happened people all over the world would see it very quickly.
Comment on ATS:
Comment on ATS:
It looks interesting and the guy filming seems to trip and almost fall over when he sees it come back out of the cloud.He mentions in the video that he has been seeing a lot of UFOs lately. He does have some other interesting videos in his channel.
Infrared Camera Can Help Detect H1N1 Flu
An infrared camera that uses thermal imaging to screen people who may have a disease could help health officials put a stop to the H1N1 flu epidemic.
Wilsonville-based FLIR Systems creates cameras that use thermal imaging to detect a person's body temperature. A person with a higher body temperature could be running a fever, which is a common symptom of the H1N1 flu.
After the camera picks out a "hot person" in a crowd, the person can be tested to see if they have an infectious disease.
"This technology is very important when you have a flu outbreak like this because we're capable of scanning a very large number of people in a very short period of time," said Andy Teich, of FLIR Systems. "So people exiting an airplane, people entering a building, crossing a border -- we can look at a line of people."
FLIR officials said they have sold hundreds of the cameras to various government agencies, airports, hospitals and schools worldwide to try to limit the spread of disease.
According to FLIR, the thermal imaging devices aren't a complete solution for a disease like the flu, but they remain an effective way of identifying a person who could possibly be infected. The company said the technology may lead to lives and money being saved.
The cameras cost between $10,000 and $15,000. While they have been popular internationally, they have hardly been used at all in the United States. The company said that may change if the H1N1 flu becomes a pandemic.
via Infrared Camera Can Help Detect H1N1 Flu - Portland News Story - KPTV Portland.
Couple arrested for sex on lawn at Windsor Castle
Queen Elizabeth II was at home at Windsor Castle, the sentries who guard her were on duty, and the large park surrounding the magnificent building was full of tourists on a Sunday afternoon. So it didn't take long for people to realize that something was out of order when an inebriated couple arrived from a nearby restaurant and began having sex on a grass bank outside the castle, according to witnesses.
"One window from the guardroom opened up and when a soldier saw what was going on he told his mates — and lots of windows opened up," witness Mark Robinson told The Sun newspaper.
"The couple did not care who was looking and just kept going as if they were in their own bedroom."
Japanese tourists filmed the couple, who only stopped when police officers arrived on the scene, witnesses said.
Thames Valley Police said the man and woman were arrested and given a written warning about outraging public decency.
The queen was in the castle at the time, but her office declined Friday to comment about what had happened
via Couple arrested for sex on lawn at Windsor Castle.
Queenhibitionists?
Holy Bat Fungus, Cave Man
The U.S. Forest Service is closing thousands of caves and former mines in national forests in 33 states in an effort to control a fungus that has already killed an estimated 500,000 bats.
Bats have been dying at alarming rates from what scientists call "white-nose syndrome," so-named because it appears as a white powder on the face and wings of hibernating bats.
The problem was first spotted in New York and within two years has spread to caves in West Virginia and Virginia. There's no evidence the fungus is harmful to people.
Researchers believe the fungus is spread from bat to bat, but they have not ruled out the possibility that humans tromping from cave to cave might help to transmit it on their shoes and equipment, said Dennis Krusac, a biologist with the service's Southern region.
"We don't have the answers at this point," he said. "If we have answers in a year or sooner, we can open them back up."
Forest Service biologist Becky Ewing said an emergency order was issued last week for caves in 20 states from Minnesota to Maine. A second order covering the Forest Service's 13-state Southern region should be issued later this month.
The sites will be closed for up to a year, she said.
The orders follow a March request by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for people to voluntarily stay out of caves in 17 states.
Biologists are concerned the fungus could wipe out endangered Indiana, Virginia and Ozark big-eared and gray bats.
Bats play a key role in keeping insects such as mosquitoes under control. Between April and October, they usually eat their body weight in bugs per night. The loss of 500,000 bats means 2.4 million pounds of bugs aren't eaten in a year, Ewing said.
via Forest Service closes caves to stop bat fungus.
'Worst Case' Scenario for Flu Estimated
There will be about 1,700 U.S. cases of the new H1N1 flu, aka "swine flu," in the next four weeks under a worst-case scenario, according to a research team's new simulations.
And a second team working independently, about 200 miles away, on exactly the same question came up with a similar forecast.
As of Thursday, there were 109 lab-confirmed U.S. cases of the new influenza, according to the World Health Organization, which earlier this week raised the risk level of the influenza to one stage below pandemic because the virus is being transmitted within at least two countries in one region of the world. A full pandemic - the virus is also being transmitted within a third country in a different region - is considered imminent.
It is not clear, however, how virulent or deadly this flu strain will become. Flu viruses are unpredictable, and while some in history have proven incredibly deadly, many would-be-pandemics turned out to be quite mild. Also, medicine and public health are more sophisticated today, in terms of treatments and educational campaigns, than they were during the nation's last pandemic flu in 1968, let alone during the Spanish flu of 1918.
Still, researchers are eager to predict what might happen and Dirk Brockmann has identified the hotspots.
California, Texas and Florida will have most of the cases by late May if Brockmann's large-scale computer simulations are right. His group at Northwestern University came up with the figure of 1,700 cases by late May, and also projected more than 100 cases for the Chicago area.
"Remember - that's exponential growth, which means slow at the beginning and then very fast," Brockmann said. "If you run the worst-case scenario for four months, we're at a very different number."
Brockmann's computer clusters can be used to simulate an infectious disease that spreads among 300 million people. The approach was based on human mobility patterns - daily commuting, intermediate trips and long-distance ones - which helps determine how a disease could potentially spread, and he modeled those on data from a dollar-bill tracking project called WheresGeorge.com. You can track people's movements, to a certain extent, if you know where they spend cash.
"These networks play an important role in the spread of infectious disease," he said. "So we're looking at how people travel in the United States and Europe and trying to find a theory behind human traffic. Then we can unravel the structures within these networks and explain them."
via 'Worst Case' Scenario for Flu Estimated.
Indus Script Encodes Language, Reveals New Study Of Ancient Symbols
The Rosetta Stone allowed 19th century scholars to translate symbols left by an ancient civilization and thus decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
But the symbols found on many other ancient artifacts remain a mystery, including those of a people that inhabited the Indus valley on the present-day border between Pakistan and India. Some experts question whether the symbols represent a language at all, or are merely pictograms that bear no relation to the language spoken by their creators.
A University of Washington computer scientist has led a statistical study of the Indus script, comparing the pattern of symbols to various linguistic scripts and nonlinguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language. The results, published online April 23 by the journal Science, found the Indus script's pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it codes for an as-yet-unknown language.
"We applied techniques of computer science, specifically machine learning, to an ancient problem," said Rajesh Rao, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and lead author of the study. "At this point we can say that the Indus script seems to have statistical regularities that are in line with natural languages."
via Indus Script Encodes Language, Reveals New Study Of Ancient Symbols.
Alien Abduction, the "Two Most Trustworthy Cases"
The first case is not mysterious or even frightening (other than the abuse by the hypnotherapist) if you consider how memory and hypnosis work.
Memories: When we remember something, we actually don't recall the original event. What we do is remember the last time we remembered the event. Details drift over time and this is why we are sometimes absolutely certain and absolutely wrong about something that happened in our past. Memories are changed by new events.
Hypnosis: Hypnosis is a state of deep relaxation which includes a singular focus (usually on the hypnotist's voice) and it has a component of faith in authority. Hypnotic regression is not a useful tool at all, other than for trickery or entertainment. What happens when you take someone back to a past event under hypnosis is that you are actually leading them to create a memory. Their imagination fills in details under the authority of the hypnotist which are as real as actual memories, because this is the mechanism of actual memory.
The real reason this hypnotherapist's face is blanked out is that she violated all kinds of rules by doing what she did. She essentially creates a new traumatic event on top of whatever he originally experienced, if anything at all, and then she's there touching the patient to "comfort him" from a false traumatic event she induced. This is why you need a license to become a hypnotherapist. You can royally screw some people up if you are ill-willed or incompetent. If she had a license, which I doubt, she would probably lose it over what we've just seen.
The shard of glass in his leg? I'd need to see the complete report of the people doing the study. My guess is that the Abduction Researcher is taking a few lines of the report out of context. "It is unexplained how a bit of shower door got lodged in this guy's leg. Very mysterious."
I'm not saying alien abductions are impossible, I'm pointing out the simplest explanation. This type of jumping to wrong conclusions happens many times without the knowledge of either the therapist or the patient. Both are fooled when their pre-existing beliefs lead them down an imaginary path. Science is full of examples of wrong conclusions and self-fulfilling prophesies generated by flawed methods.
If the "shard of glass" was communicating with a mother ship, if it floated in thin air, if it moved by itself, if it disappeared, if it was magnetic, if it could pass through solid objects, or if it contained a highly advanced encoded language ... then I'd have a different conclusion.
Grey Alien Caught on Traffic Cam?
What do you think of this? Someone messing with a video editor? The car that almost hit the beast didn't react, so I think this is fake. Still interesting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)