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nick1899 18-Sep-2009
Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, was celebrated for performing “miracles” by President Bartlet and an African leader in “The West Wing” (see the video clip below). He was described as history’s “greatest human being” by Penn and Teller (in their program featuring Dr. Borlaug and some of his opponents, like Greenpeace). Since his death on Saturday night at the age of 95, tributes from world leaders have been flowing. link »
I wrote about Dr. Borlaug, who was crediting with saving hundreds of millions of lives, in a post last year about environmentalists’ role in exacerbating food shortages (and pressuring the Rockefeller and Ford foundations to reduce support for Dr. Borlaug’s agricultural research). In a lecture given on the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize , Dr. Borlaug told an audience in Oslo in 2000: I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot. It took some 10,000 years to expand food production to the current level of about 5 billion tons per year. By 2025, we will have to nearly double current production again. This cannot be done unless farmers across the world have access to current high-yielding crop-production methods as well as new biotechnological breakthroughs that can increase the yields, dependability, and nutritional quality of our basic food crops. link »
Dr. Borlaug wrote an introduction to “The Frankenfood Myth,” a 2004 book by Greg Conko, who has posted a tribute to Dr. Borlaug at the OpenMarket blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mr. Conko reviews Dr. Borlaug’s achievements and concludes, “Never was so much owed by so many to a single man.” link »
At Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Ronald Bailey has written about a rap song honoring Dr. Borlaug and also posted a tribute contrasting Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 predictions of mass starvation (”The battle to feed all of humanity is over”) with the progress that Dr. Borlaug helped achieve: In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million in 1970. In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million. And the yields continue to increase. Last year, India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5 percent from 1998. Since Ehrlich’s dire predictions in 1968, India’s population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. Soon after Borlaug’s success with wheat, his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread the Green Revolution through most of Asia. link »
tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/
2009/ 09/ 15/ greatest- · Original page -
nick1899 18-Sep-2009
Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children's show in PBS history - outlasted only by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. link »
The show, which started in 1983, was hosted by actor LeVar Burton. (If you don't know Burton from Reading Rainbow , he's also famous for his role as Kunta Kinte in Roots , or as the chrome-visored Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. ) link »
Each episode of Reading Rainbow had the same basic elements: There was a featured children's book that inspired an adventure with Burton. Then, at the end of every show, kids gave their own book reviews, always prefaced by Burton's trademark line: "But you don't have to take my word for it ..." link »
The show's run is ending, Grant explains, because no one - not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show's broadcast rights. link »
Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading - like phonics and spelling. link »
Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read - but that's not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do. link »
" Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read," Grant says. "You know, the love of reading - [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read." link »
Linda Simensky, vice president for children's programming at PBS, says that when Reading Rainbow was developed in the early 1980s, it was an era when the question was: "How do we get kids to read books?" link »
Since then, she explains, research has shown that teaching the mechanics of reading should be the network's priority. link »
Research has directed programming toward phonics and reading fundamentals as the front line of the literacy fight. Reading Rainbow occupied a more luxurious space - the show operated on the assumption that kids already had basic reading skills and instead focused on fostering a love of books. link »
www.npr.org/
templates/ story/ story.php?storyId=112 · Original page -
nick1899 12-Sep-2009
Bee colonies are well known for high levels of cooperation, but new research published in Molecular Ecology demonstrates a conflict for reproduction between worker bees and their Queens, leading some workers to selfishly exploit the colony for their own needs. link »
The study focused on Melipona scutellaris a Brazilian species of highly social stingless bees, found throughout the Atlantic rainforest. Colonies contain around 1,500 workers and are headed by one single-mated Queen. link »
Denise Alves, Dr Tom Wenseleers, and their co-authors carried out a genetic study of nearly 600 males from 45 colonies to discover the parentage of the worker population. Their results showed that 22.89% of Melipona scutellaris males are sons of the workers rather than the Queen, demonstrating an on-going conflict for reproduction. link »
"Surprisingly our results show that over 80% of the worker's sons had genotypes that were incompatible with them being the sons of the present queen," said Alves. "This demonstrates, for the first time, how workers continue this conflict by reproductively parasitizing the next-generation of the workforce for their own selfish benefit." Worker bees are generally unable to mate, but are capable of laying unfertilized eggs which can develop into male offspring. To assure dominance over reproduction the Queen often selectively eats any worker laid eggs. In some species other workers may eat the eggs of fellow workers in what is known as 'worker policing'. Even with these barriers there is much to gain for worker bees producing their own offspring, however the benefit is entirely for the individual and can be costly for the colony overall. The team found that workers who reproduce can live as much as three times longer, meaning that reproducing workers have a life expectancy almost matching the Queen herself. This added life expectancy is thought to be because workers who reproduce do not usually carry out risky tasks such as foraging. However as worker bees who are reproducing are not working, an increase in individual workers who reproduce puts the collective production of the colony in jeopardy, hence a queen-worker conflict over the production of males ensues. To demonstrate this conflict the team studied the genotypes of worker and queen bees from 45 colonies. If a male carried a genotype not present in either the mother queen or her mate, then it was clear the male was either the son of an invading bee or of a worker who superseded the Queen. The team found that of 576 males genotyped, 61 (10.59%) could not be assigned to the Queen and were therefore definitely worker's sons. Of these 61, 14 (22.95%) were consistent with being sons of workers of the current queen while 47 (77.05%) were derived from workers derived from a previous, superseded queen . The team estimates 77.11% of the males were the queen's sons. 4.34% were the sons of the workers derived from the current queen and 18.54% were the sons of workers derived from a previous, superseded queen. "These results are the first explicit demonstration that conflict over male parentage in insect societies is not just played out between the queen and workers," concludes Alves, "but shows that the conflict may also spill over from one generation of workers to the other." link »
www.eurekalert.org/
pub_ releases/ 2009-09/ w-nrd0907 · Original page -
nick1899 12-Sep-2009
Using advanced brain imaging techniques, the scientists discovered that a person's brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first experienced, even if specifics can't be recalled. link »
"By understanding how this works in young, healthy adults, we can potentially gain insight into situations where our memories fail more noticeably, such as when we get older," he said. "It also might shed light on the fate of vivid memories of traumatic events that we may want to forget." link »
Inside an fMRI scanner, the students were shown words and asked to perform various tasks: imagine how an artist would draw the object named by the word, think about how the object is used, or pronounce the word backward in their minds. The scanner captured images of their brain activity during these exercises. link »
A bout 20 minutes later, the students viewed the words a seco nd time and were asked to remember any details linked to them. Again, brain activity was recorded. link »
Utilizing a mathematical method called pattern analysis, the scientists associated the different tasks with distinct patterns of brain activity. When a student had a strong recollection of a word from a particular task, the pattern was very similar to the one generated during the task. When recollection was weak or nonexistent, the pattern was not as prominent but still recognizable as belonging to that particular task. link »
www.eurekalert.org/
pub_ releases/ 2009-09/ uoc--mee0 · Original page -
nick1899 11-Sep-2009
PhD student Arvind Narayanan and his advisor Vitaly Shmatikov link »
Their newest paper, "De-anonymizing social networks," is yet another attack on the idea that data can be easily anonymized by stripping out a few bits of personally identifiable information (PII). Much of their work over the last few years is built on the premise that PII extends far beyond names and addresses; in many datasets, the very structure of the data provides all sorts of clues that can be deciphered with only a few bits of information. link »
In "De-anonymizing social networks," Narayanan and Shmatikov take an anonymous graph of the social relationships established through Twitter and find that they can actually identify many Twitter accounts based on an entirely different data source—in this case, Flickr. link »
One-third of users with accounts on both services could be identified on Twitter based on their Flickr connections, even when the Twitter social graph being used was completely anonymous. The point, say the authors, is that "anonymity is not sufficient for privacy when dealing with social networks," since their scheme relies only on a social network's topology to make the identification. link »
The strongest adversary is a government-level agency interested in global surveillance. Its objective is large-scale collection of detailed information about as many individuals as possible. Another attack scenario involves abusive marketing. If an unethical company were able to de-anonymize the graph using publicly available data, it could engage in abusive marketing aimed at specific individuals. Phishing and spamming also gain from social-network de-anonymization. Using detailed information about the victim gleaned from his or her de-anonymized social-network profile, a phisher or a spammer will be able to craft a highly individualized, believable message. Yet another category of attacks involves targeted de-anonymization of specific individuals by stalkers, investigators, nosy colleagues, employers, and neighbors. link »
The fact is that we're not as anonymous as many of us would like to think. Back in 2000, a Carnegie Mellon researcher took a look at 1990 US census data and concluded that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified based on only three items: ZIP code, gender, and date of birth. link »
For most people at most times, anonymity isn't crucial; knowing that you could be unmasked isn't a major deterrent to Internet postings. Many people using social networks like Twitter, for instance, do so as a way of connecting to others and gaining followers using their real names. Narayanan himself has a Twitter account with his name on it. link »
But for those doing anything "sensitive"—watching movies that you don't want the world to know you're watching, searching for things that you don't want the world to know you're searching for, it's useful to remember just how far your data trail extends behind you on the Internet... and just how well determined researchers can follow the digital bread crumbs. link »
arstechnica.com/
tech-policy/ news/ 2009/ 03/ pulling- · Original page -
nick1899 11-Sep-2009
The Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission had a bright idea back in the mid-1990s—it decided to release "anonymized" data on state employees that showed every single hospital visit. The goal was to help researchers, and the state spent time removing all obvious identifiers such as name, address, and Social Security number. But a graduate student in computer science saw a chance to make a point about the limits of anonymization. link »
Latanya Sweeney requested a copy of the data and went to work on her "reidentification" quest. It didn't prove difficult. Law professor Paul Ohm describes Sweeney's work: At the time GIC released the data, William Weld, then Governor of Massachusetts, assured the public that GIC had protected patient privacy by deleting identifiers. In response, then-graduate student Sweeney started hunting for the Governor’s hospital records in the GIC data. She knew that Governor Weld resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city of 54,000 residents and seven ZIP codes. For twenty dollars, she purchased the complete voter rolls from the city of Cambridge, a database containing, among other things, the name, address, ZIP code, birth date, and sex of every voter. By combining this data with the GIC records, Sweeney found Governor Weld with ease. Only six people in Cambridge shared his birth date, only three of them men, and of them, only he lived in his ZIP code. In a theatrical flourish, Dr. Sweeney sent the Governor’s health records (which included diagnoses and prescriptions) to his office. link »
Boom! But it was only an early mile marker in Sweeney's career; in 2000, she showed that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified using only three bits of information : ZIP code, birthdate, and sex. link »
Such work by computer scientists over the last fifteen years has shown a serious flaw in the basic idea behind "personal information": almost all information can be "personal" when combined with enough other relevant bits of data. link »
That's the claim advanced by Ohm in his lengthy new paper on "the surprising failure of anonymization." As increasing amounts of information on all of us are collected and disseminated online, scrubbing data just isn't enough to keep our individual "databases of ruin" out of the hands of the police, political enemies, nosy neighbors, friends, and spies. link »
When AOL researchers released a massive dataset of search queries, they first "anonymized" the data by scrubbing user IDs and IP addresses. When Netflix made a huge database of movie recommendations available for study, it spent time doing the same thing. Despite scrubbing the obviously identifiable information from the data, computer scientists were able to identify individual users in both datasets. link »
Because most data privacy laws focus on restricting personally identifiable information (PII), most data privacy laws need to be rethought. And there won't be any magic bullet; the measures that are taken will increase privacy or reduce the utility of data, but there will be no way to guarantee maximal usefulness and maximal privacy at the same time. link »
There are approaches that can reduce problems. Instead of releasing these huge anonymized databases, for instance, make them interactive, or have them report most results in the aggregate. (But such techniques sharply limit the usefulness of the data.) link »
Ohm's alternative is an admittedly messier system, one that can't be covered with simple blanket laws against recording Social Security numbers or releasing people's name and addresses. Such an approach has failed, and now looks like playing "Whac-A-Mole" with personal data. "The trouble is that PII is an ever-expanding category, writes Ohm. "Ten years ago, almost nobody would have categorized movie ratings and search queries as PII, and as a result, no law or regulation did either." Expanding privacy rules each time some new reidentification technique emerges would be unworkable. link »
arstechnica.com/
tech-policy/ news/ 2009/ 09/ your-sec · Original page -
nick1899 08-Sep-2009
The material, containing a cocktail of synthetic and natural chemicals, spurs on the growth of neural stem cells which in turn repair damaged nerves. After promising studies on rats scientists in the US say the treatment could be ready for patient trials in as little as three years. link »
It is hoped the biogel will be useful in the treatment of wounded soldiers with head injuries. Modern protective clothing and equipment has led to larger numbers of combat soldiers suffering serious injuries who previously would have died. link »
''These results that we are seeing in adult lab rats are the first of its kind and show a sustained functional recovery in the animal model of TBI (traumatic brain injury). It also represents one of very few in the traumatic brain injury field that attempts structural repair of the lesion cavity using a tissue-engineering approach.'' link »
Current strategies for tackling traumatic brain injury include hypothermia - or cooling - and protecting surviving nerve cells with chemical agents. However, their success is limited. The new procedure involves injecting the biogel into the wound site to direct the response of neural stem cells. Stem cells are immature ''mother'' cells that can generate different types of tissue. Those in the brain produce nerve cells. Chemicals in the biogel help the neural stem cells to regenerate normal brain tissue at the site of damage. link »
www.telegraph.co.uk/
health/ healthnews/ 6128801/ Inj · Original page -
nick1899 07-Sep-2009
Living without a car in close proximity to fast food restaurants is associated with excess body mass index and weight gain, according to a University of Pittsburgh study link »
adults in areas with high fast food concentration who didn't have a car were as much as 12 pounds heavier than those who lived in neighborhoods that lacked such restaurants. link »
The study, part of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study, was based on a survey of 2,156 adults in 63 neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. Car owners on average weighed 8.5 pounds more than non-car owners except in areas with high fast food concentration, meaning five fast food restaurants per mile. link »
Non-car owners in high fast food concentration areas were found to weigh 2.7 pounds more than car owners who lived in the same areas, and 12 pounds more than residents of areas without fast food outlets. Those who did not own a car and lived in areas without fast food outlets weighed the least. link »
www.eurekalert.org/
pub_ releases/ 2009-09/ uops-s090 · Original page -
nick1899 07-Sep-2009
A new method for "recycling" hydrogen-containing fuel materials could open the door to economically viable hydrogen-based vehicles. link »
Hydrogen is in many ways an ideal fuel for transportation. It is abundant and can be used to run a fuel cell, which is much more efficient than internal combustion engines. Its use in a fuel cell also eliminates the formation of gaseous byproducts that are detrimental to the environment. link »
For use in transportation, a fuel ideally should be lightweight to maintain overall fuel efficiency and pack a high energy content into a small volume. Unfortunately, under normal conditions, pure hydrogen has a low energy density per unit volume, presenting technical challenges for its use in vehicles capable of travelling 300 miles or more on a single fuel tank-a benchmark target set by DOE. link »
In order to overcome some of the energy density issues associated with pure hydrogen, work within the Chemical Hydrogen Storage Center of Excellence has focused on using a class of materials known as chemical hydrides. Hydrogen can be released from these materials and potentially used to run a fuel cell. These compounds can be thought of as "chemical fuel tanks" because of their hydrogen storage capacity. link »
Ammonia borane is an attractive example of a chemical hydride because its hydrogen storage capacity approaches a whopping 20 percent by weight. The chief drawback of ammonia borane, however, has been the lack of energy-efficient methods to reintroduce hydrogen back into the spent fuel once it has been released. In other words, until recently, after hydrogen release, ammonia borane couldn't be adequately recycled. Los Alamos researchers have been working with University of Alabama colleagues on developing methods for the efficient recycling of ammonia borane. The research team made a breakthrough when it discovered that a specific form of dehydrogenated fuel, called polyborazylene, could be recycled with relative ease using modest energy input. This development is a significant step toward using ammonia borane as a possible energy carrier for transportation purposes. link »
www.eurekalert.org/
pub_ releases/ 2009-09/ danl-hsg0 · Original page -
nick1899 07-Sep-2009
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have identified two small protein fragments that could be developed into an anthrax vaccine that may cause fewer side effects than the current vaccine. link »
Anthrax, a disease caused by the bacterial species Bacillus anthracis, occurs when anthrax spores (the microbe's dormant stage) are inhaled, ingested or enter the body through an open wound. Anthrax is a common disease among grazing animals such as cows, goats, and sheep but can also result from bioterrorism. Eighty to 90 percent of people infected through inhalation will die if not treated, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 2001, five people died after inhaling anthrax spores contained in envelopes mailed to U.S. lawmakers and media personnel. Typical treatment post-exposure includes the antibiotics ciprofloxacin, doxycycline and penicillin. Anthrax results in part from toxic proteins, or toxins, that the multiplying bacteria secrete. The current anthrax vaccine employs one of these proteins, which elicits protective antibodies when injected into people. While this 40-year-old vaccine can prevent disease, it has significant drawbacks. Immunity is temporary, and five injections over the course of 18 months are needed to sustain it. One in five vaccine recipients develop redness, swelling or pain at the injection site, and a small number develop severe allergic reactions. link »
In their study, the Einstein scientists focused on the protein toxin used in the current vaccine, looking for the smallest protein sections (known as peptides) that could trigger the production of protective antibodies when injected into animals. link »
The next step in the Einstein research will be to inject the peptides into an animal model to see if the peptides can protect against anthrax infection. link »
www.eurekalert.org/
pub_ releases/ 2009-09/ aeco-esm0 · Original page -
nick1899 04-Sep-2009
www.smashingmagazine.com/
2009/ 07/ 15/ clever-png-op · Original page -
nick1899 04-Sep-2009
Killed or disabled viruses have proven safe and effective for vaccinating billions worldwide against smallpox, polio, measles, influenza and many other diseases. link »
But killed or severely "attenuated" vaccines, which are safer than "live" vaccines, have been largely unsuccessful for many non-viral diseases, including illnesses like tuberculosis and malaria. link »
A new study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Berkeley-based Aduro BioTech provides clues why killed and severely attenuated vaccines don't always work. It also suggests ways to engineer an attenuated vaccine to make it as potent as a live vaccine but as safe as a killed vaccine. link »
The study, which appears in the Sept. 4 online edition of the journal PLoS Pathogens, suggests that for killed or severely attenuated non-viral vaccines to work - and for viral vaccines to work better - it's necessary to make the microbes act as if they're alive. link »
The findings support a new hypothesis about how the innate immune system distinguishes pathogenic from non-pathogenic microbes, proposed by Portnoy, UC Berkeley colleague Russell Vance, assistant professor of molecular and cell biology, and Ralph Isberg of Tufts University in the July 23 issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe. They argue that it's not only how a pathogen looks that determines how the immune system responds, but also how it acts - where it goes in the cell, what pathways it interferes with, and how disruptive it is. link »
A vaccine against these intracellular pathogens would need to induce a so-called cellular or T cell response that is not effectively induced by current available vaccines link »
The body's immune system is a complex interplay of activation and suppression that operates to keep the body in a balanced state with no inflammation until it's needed, Portnoy said. The first line of defense against invading pathogens is the innate immune system, which deploys when the body recognizes characteristics of viruses and microbes that are common enough that they have been programmed into our genes and are with us from birth. link »
The more sophisticated system, however, is the acquired or adaptive immune system, which kicks in after the innate immune response. It recognizes unique aspects of pathogens - the proteins and sugars that they sport and generates antibodies to latch onto and target them for destruction. It also mobilizes T cells to attack the invaders or, more importantly, infected cells. link »
Listeria generates one of the strongest immune responses of any intracellular pathogen, which makes it a promising vehicle to deliver antigens that will immunize against a range of illnesses, from cancer to HIV. Portnoy has studied Listeria bacteria for 22 years to understand why it is so immunogenic, and how Listeria can be used as a vaccine without itself inflaming the immune system and causing disease. link »
Based on their and other experiments, Portnoy and Vance argue that the immune system looks at more than the microbe's coat, but also at how the microbe behaves. Listeria bacteria, for example, enter macrophage cells by luring these cells to engulf them. Once inside the phagosome, or stomach, of the macrophage, the bacteria secrete proteins that punch holes in the phagosome that allow the bacteria to spread throughout the guts of the cell, the cytosol. link »
The implication, the researchers argue, is that the innate immune system monitors behavior as well as the antigens on the surface of invaders to know how aggressively to respond. The initial response of the innate immune system determines the level of response of the acquired immune system. link »
Method for creating immunization for certain virus and typically non-immunizable pathogens (bacteria and parasites) would employ a 'Trojan-Horse' cloaking the target in a virus known to illicit strong response link »
www.eurekalert.org/
pub_ releases/ 2009-09/ uoc--hti0 · Original page
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