Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Bamboo Bike
Credits for this article: NPR
The Bamboo Bike Studio is run by three men in their late 20s who know a lot about bamboo and a lot about bicycles. On a cool autumn morning, two of them are out on a bamboo harvest — in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J.
Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray carry a small Japanese pull saw and a caliper to find bamboo stems that are 1 1/2 inches thick. When they find stems that are just right, they tap the bamboo to make sure it's not too soft: "If the bamboo's too watery, it's not as dense and it's not as strong," Aguinaldo explains.
Aguinaldo makes his living as a bicycle messenger. Sean Murray is a former schoolteacher whose voice mail greeting makes note of the fact that he is now living the dream of making bikes with his friends.
Murray says he finds bamboo patches by reading online gardening forums. He says a lot of people start growing bamboo as a decorative plant — but then it gets out of hand.
"There's a kind of urgency brought on by the protests of their neighbors," Murray says.
The two bamboo bike makers cut the green bamboo stems in 3-foot and 5-foot lengths and fill the trunk of their small sedan before heading back to their bike studio in Brooklyn.
Close up of bike joint
Enlarge Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
The bike's joints — which are wrapped in a carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy — look like they're held together with black electrical tape.
Close up of bike joint
Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
The bike's joints — which are wrapped in a carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy — look like they're held together with black electrical tape.
'My Bike Is My Favorite Object Now'
Back at the bike studio, the bamboo's outer skin is treated with a torch, and the stems are baked in a homemade oven. The brown stems are then fastened into frames by connecting them with a sawdust and resin mixture. The joints are wrapped with a thin, ribbon-like carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy. After the epoxy dries, the bike's joints look like they've been wrapped with black electrical tape.
On a recent weekend, Sari Harris — a self-described "tinkerer" — spent close to $1,000 to make her own bamboo bike. For that fee, she got the bamboo frame and all of the components she needed to make a multi-gear or single-speed bike — and a bamboo bike expert to guide her through the assembly process.
Harris is an information architect who was overdue for a bike upgrade — she'd had her old bike for more than 20 years. Harris designs interfaces for mobile phone apps — but she admits she's a little less savvy with bike maintenance ("I can change a tire and that's it," she says.) Learning the mechanics and components of her bike really appealed to Harris, and she says she now plans to do her own tuneups.
Engineer Marty Odlin was supervising Harris' work. Odlin estimates that there are now close to 80 bamboo bikes on the road that were built in his Brooklyn studio.
"Everyone who leaves the studio says, 'Wow, my bike is my favorite object now.' " Odlin says. "They have such a connection to this thing that came together under their own hands. They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with."
Building a bike
Enlarge Jesse Huffman
Marty Odlin says people form a special bond with a bike they've built by hand. "They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with," he says.
Building a bike
Jesse Huffman
Marty Odlin says people form a special bond with a bike they've built by hand. "They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with," he says.
'Something With More Enduring Value'
The Bamboo Bike Studio has drawn amateur bike builders from as far away as California and England. Alexis Mills, a bicycle messenger in Ottawa, and his 61-year-old mother, a doctor, came and made bikes.
Back in Canada, Mills quickly found that people who ride around on bamboo bikes get a lot of questions about their wheels.
"The ride itself is really smooth," Mills says. "It eats up a lot of the vibrations of the road. I wondered if it might be too flexible or too mushy, but it's not. It's really nice to ride."
Interest in bamboo bikes is growing. A company in Colorado says it will start shipping bamboo bikes in the spring that cost as much as $1,300. But Marty Odlin says the bamboo bike makers here in Brooklyn believe in doing things a different way.
"There is a concern that bamboo bikes become this fad," he explains. "And we could sell a whole bunch of them for a whole lot of money to a whole bunch of people very quickly and then nothing after that, right? It becomes a fad and dies out. We feel like we're building something with more enduring value than that."
The bikes themselves really last; Odlin and his two partners have all ridden thousands of miles on New York City streets on their bamboo frames. And whether it's a fad or not, the bamboo bike-making classes are filled until April.
The Bamboo Bike Studio is run by three men in their late 20s who know a lot about bamboo and a lot about bicycles. On a cool autumn morning, two of them are out on a bamboo harvest — in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J.
Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray carry a small Japanese pull saw and a caliper to find bamboo stems that are 1 1/2 inches thick. When they find stems that are just right, they tap the bamboo to make sure it's not too soft: "If the bamboo's too watery, it's not as dense and it's not as strong," Aguinaldo explains.
Aguinaldo makes his living as a bicycle messenger. Sean Murray is a former schoolteacher whose voice mail greeting makes note of the fact that he is now living the dream of making bikes with his friends.
Murray says he finds bamboo patches by reading online gardening forums. He says a lot of people start growing bamboo as a decorative plant — but then it gets out of hand.
"There's a kind of urgency brought on by the protests of their neighbors," Murray says.
The two bamboo bike makers cut the green bamboo stems in 3-foot and 5-foot lengths and fill the trunk of their small sedan before heading back to their bike studio in Brooklyn.
Close up of bike joint
Enlarge Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
The bike's joints — which are wrapped in a carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy — look like they're held together with black electrical tape.
Close up of bike joint
Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
The bike's joints — which are wrapped in a carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy — look like they're held together with black electrical tape.
'My Bike Is My Favorite Object Now'
Back at the bike studio, the bamboo's outer skin is treated with a torch, and the stems are baked in a homemade oven. The brown stems are then fastened into frames by connecting them with a sawdust and resin mixture. The joints are wrapped with a thin, ribbon-like carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy. After the epoxy dries, the bike's joints look like they've been wrapped with black electrical tape.
On a recent weekend, Sari Harris — a self-described "tinkerer" — spent close to $1,000 to make her own bamboo bike. For that fee, she got the bamboo frame and all of the components she needed to make a multi-gear or single-speed bike — and a bamboo bike expert to guide her through the assembly process.
Harris is an information architect who was overdue for a bike upgrade — she'd had her old bike for more than 20 years. Harris designs interfaces for mobile phone apps — but she admits she's a little less savvy with bike maintenance ("I can change a tire and that's it," she says.) Learning the mechanics and components of her bike really appealed to Harris, and she says she now plans to do her own tuneups.
Engineer Marty Odlin was supervising Harris' work. Odlin estimates that there are now close to 80 bamboo bikes on the road that were built in his Brooklyn studio.
"Everyone who leaves the studio says, 'Wow, my bike is my favorite object now.' " Odlin says. "They have such a connection to this thing that came together under their own hands. They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with."
Building a bike
Enlarge Jesse Huffman
Marty Odlin says people form a special bond with a bike they've built by hand. "They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with," he says.
Building a bike
Jesse Huffman
Marty Odlin says people form a special bond with a bike they've built by hand. "They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with," he says.
'Something With More Enduring Value'
The Bamboo Bike Studio has drawn amateur bike builders from as far away as California and England. Alexis Mills, a bicycle messenger in Ottawa, and his 61-year-old mother, a doctor, came and made bikes.
Back in Canada, Mills quickly found that people who ride around on bamboo bikes get a lot of questions about their wheels.
"The ride itself is really smooth," Mills says. "It eats up a lot of the vibrations of the road. I wondered if it might be too flexible or too mushy, but it's not. It's really nice to ride."
Interest in bamboo bikes is growing. A company in Colorado says it will start shipping bamboo bikes in the spring that cost as much as $1,300. But Marty Odlin says the bamboo bike makers here in Brooklyn believe in doing things a different way.
"There is a concern that bamboo bikes become this fad," he explains. "And we could sell a whole bunch of them for a whole lot of money to a whole bunch of people very quickly and then nothing after that, right? It becomes a fad and dies out. We feel like we're building something with more enduring value than that."
The bikes themselves really last; Odlin and his two partners have all ridden thousands of miles on New York City streets on their bamboo frames. And whether it's a fad or not, the bamboo bike-making classes are filled until April.
Monday, November 23, 2009
The Price of Information
Credits to BoingBoing
Microsoft is ready to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to remove its news content from Google, according to the Financial Times. Microsoft has also approached other "big online publishers" with similar deals.
"One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan 'puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them",' wrote the FT's Matthew Garrahan. "... Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content."
This he calls a "ray of light to the newspaper industry."
Now, every site in Google is currently there by choice. As it could conceivably change its mind and shank Balldock and Murmer with fair use, let's assume that they're planning on exclusivity. End-user license agreements, paywalls, spider-blocking, that sort of thing. Maybe even encryption and plugins and other delights. Sayonara, RSS!
In any case, participating publishers have to become invisible to search engines who don't pay up. Think of all the gambles encoded in that decision: that the U.S. ad market won't rebound enough to go it alone. That subsidized foreign competitors like the BBC aren't a domestic threat. That people will change their surfing habits to find them. And so on.
But there's one gamble which does make some twisted sense: that Microsoft is an irrational consumer. It's easy to believe that it may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google. In this case, Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either: he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.
Microsoft is ready to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to remove its news content from Google, according to the Financial Times. Microsoft has also approached other "big online publishers" with similar deals.
"One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan 'puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them",' wrote the FT's Matthew Garrahan. "... Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content."
This he calls a "ray of light to the newspaper industry."
Now, every site in Google is currently there by choice. As it could conceivably change its mind and shank Balldock and Murmer with fair use, let's assume that they're planning on exclusivity. End-user license agreements, paywalls, spider-blocking, that sort of thing. Maybe even encryption and plugins and other delights. Sayonara, RSS!
In any case, participating publishers have to become invisible to search engines who don't pay up. Think of all the gambles encoded in that decision: that the U.S. ad market won't rebound enough to go it alone. That subsidized foreign competitors like the BBC aren't a domestic threat. That people will change their surfing habits to find them. And so on.
But there's one gamble which does make some twisted sense: that Microsoft is an irrational consumer. It's easy to believe that it may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google. In this case, Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either: he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Where did all the giant beavers go?
Credits to NPR
One of the great mysteries about North America is what killed off woolly mammoths and other exotic animals that roamed the land after the last ice age. Ideas have ranged from a comet impact and climate change to human hunters. A study published Friday in Science Magazine provides new clues about this — cleverly deduced from samples of a fungus that grew on the animals' dung.
After the end of the last ice age, North America was covered with large mammals even more diverse than we see in Africa today. Jacqueline Gill, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is fascinated by how North America came to have such diverse wildlife, and why those animals are all gone today. She says the continent was home to mammoths, mastodons, beavers the size of black bears, giant ground sloths, camels and horses, and predators like the American lion, the short-faced bear and the dire wolf.
"By about 11,000 years ago, we lose about half of the animals in North America larger than the size of a German shepherd, and that's a pretty big ecological event," Gill says.
There aren't enough bones left to determine in detail when exactly they all became extinct, but Gill and her colleagues hit upon a nifty method to track the abundance of grazing animals. The scientists study a certain species of fungus, spores of which end up in lake sediments that date back some 15,000 years.
"The spores from this fungus are preserved in the lake, and the fungus only grows on animal dung," Gill says.
When there were many large animals, there was lots of dung. When the animals went away, so did the dung and the fungus that lived on those droppings. So, by studying the amount of this fungus in various layers of lake sediment, Gill and her group have pieced together a timetable that helps resolve how and when these animals died out.
One of the long-held ideas had been that a climate shift caused a change in vegetation, and the new plant matter was no good for these grazing animals, so they starved.
Gill and company have disproved that, however, by putting a date on the animals' decline: It occurred more than 14,000 years ago.
"This happens before some of the widespread vegetation change that we see in the areas that we studied, which suggest to us that habitat loss is actually not a cause of the decline, but possibly a consequence," Gill says.
That is, the vegetation might have changed after the browsing animals disappeared and stopped munching on it.
The new dates also help eliminate other ideas that have been argued over the years. John Alroy at the University of California, Santa Barbara says it's clear that the extinctions couldn't have been caused by a cold snap called the Younger Dryas.
"These data show that the extinction happened well before that time, and there's also been a recent paper arguing that the extinction might have been caused by the impact of a comet, and that impact appears to have happened much, much later than the decline, at least [at] this location," Alroy says.
So what does that leave? Well, human beings were moving into North America at that time, so Alroy says this is more evidence that hunters played a key role in driving these large animals to extinction.
"Now, really the question is: Exactly what did humans do to cause this large extinction?" Alroy says.
Gill is interested in that question, too, because, she notes, human beings are now forcing another mass extinction as we reshape habitat around the world.
One of the great mysteries about North America is what killed off woolly mammoths and other exotic animals that roamed the land after the last ice age. Ideas have ranged from a comet impact and climate change to human hunters. A study published Friday in Science Magazine provides new clues about this — cleverly deduced from samples of a fungus that grew on the animals' dung.
After the end of the last ice age, North America was covered with large mammals even more diverse than we see in Africa today. Jacqueline Gill, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is fascinated by how North America came to have such diverse wildlife, and why those animals are all gone today. She says the continent was home to mammoths, mastodons, beavers the size of black bears, giant ground sloths, camels and horses, and predators like the American lion, the short-faced bear and the dire wolf.
"By about 11,000 years ago, we lose about half of the animals in North America larger than the size of a German shepherd, and that's a pretty big ecological event," Gill says.
There aren't enough bones left to determine in detail when exactly they all became extinct, but Gill and her colleagues hit upon a nifty method to track the abundance of grazing animals. The scientists study a certain species of fungus, spores of which end up in lake sediments that date back some 15,000 years.
"The spores from this fungus are preserved in the lake, and the fungus only grows on animal dung," Gill says.
When there were many large animals, there was lots of dung. When the animals went away, so did the dung and the fungus that lived on those droppings. So, by studying the amount of this fungus in various layers of lake sediment, Gill and her group have pieced together a timetable that helps resolve how and when these animals died out.
One of the long-held ideas had been that a climate shift caused a change in vegetation, and the new plant matter was no good for these grazing animals, so they starved.
Gill and company have disproved that, however, by putting a date on the animals' decline: It occurred more than 14,000 years ago.
"This happens before some of the widespread vegetation change that we see in the areas that we studied, which suggest to us that habitat loss is actually not a cause of the decline, but possibly a consequence," Gill says.
That is, the vegetation might have changed after the browsing animals disappeared and stopped munching on it.
The new dates also help eliminate other ideas that have been argued over the years. John Alroy at the University of California, Santa Barbara says it's clear that the extinctions couldn't have been caused by a cold snap called the Younger Dryas.
"These data show that the extinction happened well before that time, and there's also been a recent paper arguing that the extinction might have been caused by the impact of a comet, and that impact appears to have happened much, much later than the decline, at least [at] this location," Alroy says.
So what does that leave? Well, human beings were moving into North America at that time, so Alroy says this is more evidence that hunters played a key role in driving these large animals to extinction.
"Now, really the question is: Exactly what did humans do to cause this large extinction?" Alroy says.
Gill is interested in that question, too, because, she notes, human beings are now forcing another mass extinction as we reshape habitat around the world.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
People just LOVE fishing, don't they?
credits to NPR
Aid organizations concerned about overfishing on tropical reefs often try to encourage fishermen out of their boats by offering them better-paying jobs on shore. But this strategy actually may make matters worse.
Fish Or Coconuts
Take, for example, the story of Kiribati, an island nation in the central Pacific. Kiribati (pronounced KIR-a-bahs) has a simple economy. People either catch fish, or they pick coconuts from their trees and produce coconut oil. Sheila Walsh, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, says most people do a bit of each.
The Kiribati government was concerned about overfishing. So it came up with a plan: It would subsidize the coconut oil industry.
"The thought was that by paying people more to do coconut agriculture, they would do less fishing," says Walsh. "And this would fulfill two goals: One, they would reduce overfishing; and two, people would be better off. They would have higher incomes."
It hit us like a bumper sticker saying -- a bad day fishing is better than a good day working. And that's sort of the story here.
- Sheila Walsh
Walsh wanted to know whether this plan was working, and the government invited her to study the issue. So, as part of her graduate work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, she flew to Kiribati to interview fishermen.
Coconut Subsidies Cause More Fishing
"And it turned out that, actually, the result of paying people more to do coconut agriculture was to increase fishing," she says. In fact, fishing increased by a startling 33 percent. The reef fish population dropped by an estimated 17 percent, putting the whole ecosystem at risk.
"It was a bit of a surprise, and we were wondering: What's going on here?"
The answer was simplicity itself. Walsh's study concludes that people earned more money making coconut oil, which meant they could work less to support themselves. And they spent their new leisure time fishing.
"It hit us like a bumper sticker saying — a bad day fishing is better than a good day working. And that's sort of the story here," Walsh says.
Fishing For Pleasure
It turns out she had stumbled into a universal truth about fishing. Fishermen aren't just in it for the money. Anthropologist Richard Pollnac of the University of Rhode Island says, just think of those snazzy sport-fishing excursions.
"People pay big money to go sports-fishing," he notes. There aren't very many occupations that people will actually pay money to do in their leisure time, he says.
So fishing as an occupation provides psychic benefits, as well as money. Pollnac argues that not just individuals but whole cultures get hooked on the thrill of being out on the water, and the gamble of coming back with either a boatload or empty-handed.
"This type of an occupation selects for a certain type of personality, and that kind of personality will not be happy in many other occupations other than fishing," Pollnac says. As a result, attempts to get fishermen to do something else — even something that pays better — often end in failure.
"There have been projects where they had vessel buyback programs, and almost 50 percent of the fishermen used that money to buy another boat to do another type of fishing, and in some cases get right back into fishing," Pollnac says.
The track record for international projects is poorly studied, which makes Walsh's research notable. Pollnac says he can't point to any great successes.
"A great deal of the international development money, I would argue, is wasted."
This problem is not lost on Craig Leisher at the Nature Conservancy. His organization does spend money to help fishermen seek other livelihoods. But does it keep them out of their boats?
"Well, no," he says. "It doesn't work to get them off the water. Rarely."
New Jobs Should Be On Water
He says the Nature Conservancy creates non-fishing jobs, but only as a tactic to help during a transition. For example, fishermen may need a temporary source of income when a new no-fishing zone is established. Fishermen lose their fishing income for a while — until fish populations in the no-fishing zone grow large enough to provide a new source of fish in the surrounding waters.
"What we have found with our research is that a lot of alternative income activities are not successful in the long term, so we look for activities that can benefit communities in the near term, just two or three years," Leisher says.
Which brings us back to the island nation of Kiribati. Walsh says she's trying to help the government figure out how to fix the problem of overfishing, which they'd accidentally made worse. Maybe, she says, the government can create new jobs out on the water by hiring the fishermen to patrol newly created nature preserves.
Aid organizations concerned about overfishing on tropical reefs often try to encourage fishermen out of their boats by offering them better-paying jobs on shore. But this strategy actually may make matters worse.
Fish Or Coconuts
Take, for example, the story of Kiribati, an island nation in the central Pacific. Kiribati (pronounced KIR-a-bahs) has a simple economy. People either catch fish, or they pick coconuts from their trees and produce coconut oil. Sheila Walsh, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, says most people do a bit of each.
The Kiribati government was concerned about overfishing. So it came up with a plan: It would subsidize the coconut oil industry.
"The thought was that by paying people more to do coconut agriculture, they would do less fishing," says Walsh. "And this would fulfill two goals: One, they would reduce overfishing; and two, people would be better off. They would have higher incomes."
It hit us like a bumper sticker saying -- a bad day fishing is better than a good day working. And that's sort of the story here.
- Sheila Walsh
Walsh wanted to know whether this plan was working, and the government invited her to study the issue. So, as part of her graduate work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, she flew to Kiribati to interview fishermen.
Coconut Subsidies Cause More Fishing
"And it turned out that, actually, the result of paying people more to do coconut agriculture was to increase fishing," she says. In fact, fishing increased by a startling 33 percent. The reef fish population dropped by an estimated 17 percent, putting the whole ecosystem at risk.
"It was a bit of a surprise, and we were wondering: What's going on here?"
The answer was simplicity itself. Walsh's study concludes that people earned more money making coconut oil, which meant they could work less to support themselves. And they spent their new leisure time fishing.
"It hit us like a bumper sticker saying — a bad day fishing is better than a good day working. And that's sort of the story here," Walsh says.
Fishing For Pleasure
It turns out she had stumbled into a universal truth about fishing. Fishermen aren't just in it for the money. Anthropologist Richard Pollnac of the University of Rhode Island says, just think of those snazzy sport-fishing excursions.
"People pay big money to go sports-fishing," he notes. There aren't very many occupations that people will actually pay money to do in their leisure time, he says.
So fishing as an occupation provides psychic benefits, as well as money. Pollnac argues that not just individuals but whole cultures get hooked on the thrill of being out on the water, and the gamble of coming back with either a boatload or empty-handed.
"This type of an occupation selects for a certain type of personality, and that kind of personality will not be happy in many other occupations other than fishing," Pollnac says. As a result, attempts to get fishermen to do something else — even something that pays better — often end in failure.
"There have been projects where they had vessel buyback programs, and almost 50 percent of the fishermen used that money to buy another boat to do another type of fishing, and in some cases get right back into fishing," Pollnac says.
The track record for international projects is poorly studied, which makes Walsh's research notable. Pollnac says he can't point to any great successes.
"A great deal of the international development money, I would argue, is wasted."
This problem is not lost on Craig Leisher at the Nature Conservancy. His organization does spend money to help fishermen seek other livelihoods. But does it keep them out of their boats?
"Well, no," he says. "It doesn't work to get them off the water. Rarely."
New Jobs Should Be On Water
He says the Nature Conservancy creates non-fishing jobs, but only as a tactic to help during a transition. For example, fishermen may need a temporary source of income when a new no-fishing zone is established. Fishermen lose their fishing income for a while — until fish populations in the no-fishing zone grow large enough to provide a new source of fish in the surrounding waters.
"What we have found with our research is that a lot of alternative income activities are not successful in the long term, so we look for activities that can benefit communities in the near term, just two or three years," Leisher says.
Which brings us back to the island nation of Kiribati. Walsh says she's trying to help the government figure out how to fix the problem of overfishing, which they'd accidentally made worse. Maybe, she says, the government can create new jobs out on the water by hiring the fishermen to patrol newly created nature preserves.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
In all my life, I've never heard of the Tsingy
check out the full article at National Geographic
"There's a crazy landform in Madagascar called a tsingy, which, euphemistically translated from Malagasy, means "where one cannot walk barefoot." It's basically a treacherous forest of limestone spires that could impale anything, and cut straight through ropes and harnesses. It's one of the few places on Earth that, because of its remote location and dangerous landscape, has remained relatively unexplored. And it took National Geographic photographer Stephen Alvarez five days to reach it to shoot the story "Stone Forest" in November's magazine."
Friday, November 13, 2009
Fantastic Mr. FOXP2
credit to NYTimes
Of the 20,000 genes in the human genome, few are more fascinating than FOXP2, a gene that underlies the faculty of human speech.
All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human version’s product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak and chimps cannot.
FOXP2 came to light in a large London family, half of whose members have severe problems in articulating and understanding speech. All turned out to have a mutation that disrupted this vital gene.
This year, one inquiry bore fruit, although of a somewhat ambiguous nature, when biologists in Leipzig, Germany, genetically engineered a mouse with the human version of FOXP2 substituted for its own. The upgraded mice squeaked somewhat differently from plain mice and were born with subtle alterations in brain structure. But mice and people are rather distant cousins — their last common ancestor lived some 70 million years ago — and the human version of FOXP2 evidently was not able to exert a transformative effect on the mouse.
A scientific team led by Dr. Daniel H. Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now completed a parallel experiment, which is to put the chimp version of FOXP2 into human neurons and see what happens. These were neurons living in laboratory glassware, not a human brain, so they gave a snapshot of FOXP2 only at the cellular level. But they confirmed suspicions that FOXP2 was a maestro of the genome.
The gene does not do a single thing but rather controls the activity of at least 116 other genes, Dr. Geschwind’s team says in the Thursday issue of Nature.
Like the conductor of an orchestra, the gene quiets the activity of some and summons a crescendo from others. Surprisingly, the chimp version of the gene had a more forceful effect in the human nerve cells than did the human version.
“The human FOXP2 seems to be acting on a more refined set of genes,” Dr. Geschwind said in an interview from London.
Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.
And some of the genes in FOXP2’s network have already been implicated in diseases that include disorders of speech, confirming its importance in these faculties.
But the FOXP2 network is certainly not the only set of genes involved in language. For one thing, FOXP2 is equally active on both sides of the human brain, whereas the language faculty is asymmetric, Dr. Geschwind said.
By studying the other genes in the FOXP2 network, Dr. Geschwind said, he hoped “to use FOXP2 as a lever to get a view of the molecular machinery in a biological language circuit.”
In a commentary on the new finding, Martin Dominguez and Dr. Pasko Rakic of Yale describe it as an important discovery that “provides a starting point for future studies of the molecular basis of language and human evolution.”
Of the 20,000 genes in the human genome, few are more fascinating than FOXP2, a gene that underlies the faculty of human speech.
All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human version’s product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak and chimps cannot.
FOXP2 came to light in a large London family, half of whose members have severe problems in articulating and understanding speech. All turned out to have a mutation that disrupted this vital gene.
This year, one inquiry bore fruit, although of a somewhat ambiguous nature, when biologists in Leipzig, Germany, genetically engineered a mouse with the human version of FOXP2 substituted for its own. The upgraded mice squeaked somewhat differently from plain mice and were born with subtle alterations in brain structure. But mice and people are rather distant cousins — their last common ancestor lived some 70 million years ago — and the human version of FOXP2 evidently was not able to exert a transformative effect on the mouse.
A scientific team led by Dr. Daniel H. Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now completed a parallel experiment, which is to put the chimp version of FOXP2 into human neurons and see what happens. These were neurons living in laboratory glassware, not a human brain, so they gave a snapshot of FOXP2 only at the cellular level. But they confirmed suspicions that FOXP2 was a maestro of the genome.
The gene does not do a single thing but rather controls the activity of at least 116 other genes, Dr. Geschwind’s team says in the Thursday issue of Nature.
Like the conductor of an orchestra, the gene quiets the activity of some and summons a crescendo from others. Surprisingly, the chimp version of the gene had a more forceful effect in the human nerve cells than did the human version.
“The human FOXP2 seems to be acting on a more refined set of genes,” Dr. Geschwind said in an interview from London.
Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.
And some of the genes in FOXP2’s network have already been implicated in diseases that include disorders of speech, confirming its importance in these faculties.
But the FOXP2 network is certainly not the only set of genes involved in language. For one thing, FOXP2 is equally active on both sides of the human brain, whereas the language faculty is asymmetric, Dr. Geschwind said.
By studying the other genes in the FOXP2 network, Dr. Geschwind said, he hoped “to use FOXP2 as a lever to get a view of the molecular machinery in a biological language circuit.”
In a commentary on the new finding, Martin Dominguez and Dr. Pasko Rakic of Yale describe it as an important discovery that “provides a starting point for future studies of the molecular basis of language and human evolution.”
"The Gut Response to What We Eat"
credits and full article can be found at NPR
A high-fat, high-sugar diet can quickly and dramatically change the population of microbes living in the digestive tract, according to a new study of human gut bugs transplanted into mice.
Trillions of microbes live inside the human gut, and one of their functions is to process parts of foods that we can't digest on our own. Recent studies have suggested that certain populations of microbes may be associated with obesity.
"The energetic and nutrient value of food may not be an absolute term, but one that is modified in part by the microbes that live in our gut — who's there in this community, how they operate, and how they operate in relationship to what we are eating," says Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo.
He and other scientists are eager to start doing experiments to see what happens if the gut populations are modified by changes in diet, antibiotics, or dietary supplements. To make such experiments possible, Gordon has been working with colleagues to take gut microbes from human feces and transplant them into the intestinal tracts of previously germ-free mice.
A high-fat, high-sugar diet can quickly and dramatically change the population of microbes living in the digestive tract, according to a new study of human gut bugs transplanted into mice.
Trillions of microbes live inside the human gut, and one of their functions is to process parts of foods that we can't digest on our own. Recent studies have suggested that certain populations of microbes may be associated with obesity.
"The energetic and nutrient value of food may not be an absolute term, but one that is modified in part by the microbes that live in our gut — who's there in this community, how they operate, and how they operate in relationship to what we are eating," says Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo.
He and other scientists are eager to start doing experiments to see what happens if the gut populations are modified by changes in diet, antibiotics, or dietary supplements. To make such experiments possible, Gordon has been working with colleagues to take gut microbes from human feces and transplant them into the intestinal tracts of previously germ-free mice.
Is this the end of Guantanamo?
Credits to Associated Press
WASHINGTON – Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, and five other suspects will be sent to military commissions, an Obama administration official said Friday.
The official said Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision Friday morning. The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Without confirming details of the decision, President Barack Obama said it was a legal and national security matter. "I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice," Obama said at a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.
Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in Obama's plan to close the terror suspect detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the detention center by Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.
It is also a major legal and political test of Obama's overall approach to terrorism. If the case suffers legal setbacks, the administration will face second-guessing from those who never wanted it in a civilian courtroom. And if lawmakers get upset about terrorists being brought to their home regions, they may fight back against other parts of Obama's agenda.
"This is definitely a seismic shift in how we're approaching the war on al-Qaida," said Glenn Sulmasy, a law professor at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy who has written a book on national security justice. "It's certainly surprising that the five masterminds, if you will, of the attacks on the United States will be tried in traditional, open federal courts."
The New York case may force the court system to confront a host of difficult legal issues surrounding counterterrorism programs begun after the 2001 attacks, including the harsh interrogation techniques once used on some of the suspects while in CIA custody. The most severe method — waterboarding, or simulated drowning — was used on Mohammed 183 times in 2003, before the practice was banned.
Holder will also announce that five other detainees, including a major suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will face justice before a military commission, the official said.
The five suspects are headed to New York together because they are accused of conspiring in the 2001 attacks. The five headed to military commissions face a variety of charges but many of them include attacks specifically against the U.S. military.
It was not immediately clear where commission-bound detainees like al-Nashiri might be sent, but a brig in South Carolina has been high on the list of sites under consideration.
The actual transfer of the detainees from Guantanamo to New York isn't expected to happen for many more weeks because formal charges have not been filed against most of them.
The attorney general has decided the case of the five Sept. 11 suspects should be handled by prosecutors working in the Southern District of New York, which has held a number of major terrorism trials in recent decades at a courthouse in lower Manhattan, just blocks from where the World Trade Center towers tumbled on Sept. 11, 2001.
Holder had been considering other possible trial locations, including Virginia, Washington, D.C., and a different courthouse in New York City. Those districts could end up conducting trials of other Guantanamo detainees sent to federal court later on.
The attorney general's decision in these cases comes just before a Monday deadline for the government to decide how to proceed against 10 detainees facing military commissions.
In the military system, the five Sept. 11 suspects had faced the death penalty, but the official would not say if the Justice Department would also seek capital punishment against the men once they are in the federal system.
The administration has already sent one Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to New York to face trial, but chose not to seek death in that case.
At the last major trial of al-Qaida suspects held at that courthouse in 2001, prosecutors did seek death for some of the defendants.
Mohammed already has an outstanding terror indictment against him in New York, for an unsuccessful plot called "Bojinka" to simultaneously take down multiple airliners over the Pacific Ocean in the 1990s.
Some members of Congress have fought any effort to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial in the United States, saying it would be too dangerous for nearby civilians. The Obama administration has defended the planned trials, saying many terrorists have been safely tried, convicted, and imprisoned in the United States, including the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef.
Mohammed and the four others — Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali — are accused of orchestrating the attacks that killed 2,973 people on Sept. 11.
Mohammed admitted to interrogators that he was the mastermind of the attacks — he allegedly proposed the concept to Osama bin Laden as early as 1996, obtained funding for the attacks from bin Laden, oversaw the operation and trained the hijackers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The charges against the others are:
_Bin Attash, a Yemeni, allegedly ran an al-Qaida training camp in Logar, Afghanistan, where two of the 19 hijackers were trained. Bin Attash is believed to have been bin Laden's bodyguard. Authorities say bin Laden selected him as a hijacker, but he was prevented from participating when he was briefly detained in Yemen in early 2001.
_Binalshibh, a Yemeni, allegedly helped find flight schools for the hijackers, helped them enter the United States and assisted with financing the operation. He allegedly was selected to be a hijacker and made a "martyr video" in preparation for the operation, but was unable to get a U.S. visa. He also is believed to be a lead operative for a foiled plot to crash aircraft into London's Heathrow Airport.
_Ali allegedly helped nine of the hijackers travel to the United States and sent them $120,000 for expenses and flight training. He is believed to have served as a key lieutenant to Mohammed in Pakistan. He was born in Pakistan and raised in Kuwait.
_Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, a Saudi, allegedly helped the hijackers with money, western clothing, traveler's checks and credit cards. Al-Hawsawi testified in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, saying he had seen Moussaoui at an al-Qaida guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in early 2001, but was never introduced to him or conducted operations with him.
The official said the four others headed to military commissions are:
_Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was 15 when captured after allegedly killing an American soldier during a 2002 battle in Afghanistan.
_Ahmed Mohammed al Darbi, who allegedly met with Osama bin Laden, trained at an al-Qaida terrorist camp, and plotted to blow up a ship in the Strait of Hormuz or off Yemen.
_Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi, accused of acting as al-Qaida's accountant, paymaster and supply chief during the 1990s when the terror network was centered in Sudan and Afghanistan.
_Noor Uthman Muhammed, charged with being a weapons instructor and deputy commander at an al-Qaida training camp.
WASHINGTON – Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, and five other suspects will be sent to military commissions, an Obama administration official said Friday.
The official said Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision Friday morning. The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Without confirming details of the decision, President Barack Obama said it was a legal and national security matter. "I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice," Obama said at a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.
Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in Obama's plan to close the terror suspect detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the detention center by Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.
It is also a major legal and political test of Obama's overall approach to terrorism. If the case suffers legal setbacks, the administration will face second-guessing from those who never wanted it in a civilian courtroom. And if lawmakers get upset about terrorists being brought to their home regions, they may fight back against other parts of Obama's agenda.
"This is definitely a seismic shift in how we're approaching the war on al-Qaida," said Glenn Sulmasy, a law professor at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy who has written a book on national security justice. "It's certainly surprising that the five masterminds, if you will, of the attacks on the United States will be tried in traditional, open federal courts."
The New York case may force the court system to confront a host of difficult legal issues surrounding counterterrorism programs begun after the 2001 attacks, including the harsh interrogation techniques once used on some of the suspects while in CIA custody. The most severe method — waterboarding, or simulated drowning — was used on Mohammed 183 times in 2003, before the practice was banned.
Holder will also announce that five other detainees, including a major suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will face justice before a military commission, the official said.
The five suspects are headed to New York together because they are accused of conspiring in the 2001 attacks. The five headed to military commissions face a variety of charges but many of them include attacks specifically against the U.S. military.
It was not immediately clear where commission-bound detainees like al-Nashiri might be sent, but a brig in South Carolina has been high on the list of sites under consideration.
The actual transfer of the detainees from Guantanamo to New York isn't expected to happen for many more weeks because formal charges have not been filed against most of them.
The attorney general has decided the case of the five Sept. 11 suspects should be handled by prosecutors working in the Southern District of New York, which has held a number of major terrorism trials in recent decades at a courthouse in lower Manhattan, just blocks from where the World Trade Center towers tumbled on Sept. 11, 2001.
Holder had been considering other possible trial locations, including Virginia, Washington, D.C., and a different courthouse in New York City. Those districts could end up conducting trials of other Guantanamo detainees sent to federal court later on.
The attorney general's decision in these cases comes just before a Monday deadline for the government to decide how to proceed against 10 detainees facing military commissions.
In the military system, the five Sept. 11 suspects had faced the death penalty, but the official would not say if the Justice Department would also seek capital punishment against the men once they are in the federal system.
The administration has already sent one Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to New York to face trial, but chose not to seek death in that case.
At the last major trial of al-Qaida suspects held at that courthouse in 2001, prosecutors did seek death for some of the defendants.
Mohammed already has an outstanding terror indictment against him in New York, for an unsuccessful plot called "Bojinka" to simultaneously take down multiple airliners over the Pacific Ocean in the 1990s.
Some members of Congress have fought any effort to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial in the United States, saying it would be too dangerous for nearby civilians. The Obama administration has defended the planned trials, saying many terrorists have been safely tried, convicted, and imprisoned in the United States, including the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef.
Mohammed and the four others — Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali — are accused of orchestrating the attacks that killed 2,973 people on Sept. 11.
Mohammed admitted to interrogators that he was the mastermind of the attacks — he allegedly proposed the concept to Osama bin Laden as early as 1996, obtained funding for the attacks from bin Laden, oversaw the operation and trained the hijackers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The charges against the others are:
_Bin Attash, a Yemeni, allegedly ran an al-Qaida training camp in Logar, Afghanistan, where two of the 19 hijackers were trained. Bin Attash is believed to have been bin Laden's bodyguard. Authorities say bin Laden selected him as a hijacker, but he was prevented from participating when he was briefly detained in Yemen in early 2001.
_Binalshibh, a Yemeni, allegedly helped find flight schools for the hijackers, helped them enter the United States and assisted with financing the operation. He allegedly was selected to be a hijacker and made a "martyr video" in preparation for the operation, but was unable to get a U.S. visa. He also is believed to be a lead operative for a foiled plot to crash aircraft into London's Heathrow Airport.
_Ali allegedly helped nine of the hijackers travel to the United States and sent them $120,000 for expenses and flight training. He is believed to have served as a key lieutenant to Mohammed in Pakistan. He was born in Pakistan and raised in Kuwait.
_Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, a Saudi, allegedly helped the hijackers with money, western clothing, traveler's checks and credit cards. Al-Hawsawi testified in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, saying he had seen Moussaoui at an al-Qaida guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in early 2001, but was never introduced to him or conducted operations with him.
The official said the four others headed to military commissions are:
_Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was 15 when captured after allegedly killing an American soldier during a 2002 battle in Afghanistan.
_Ahmed Mohammed al Darbi, who allegedly met with Osama bin Laden, trained at an al-Qaida terrorist camp, and plotted to blow up a ship in the Strait of Hormuz or off Yemen.
_Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi, accused of acting as al-Qaida's accountant, paymaster and supply chief during the 1990s when the terror network was centered in Sudan and Afghanistan.
_Noor Uthman Muhammed, charged with being a weapons instructor and deputy commander at an al-Qaida training camp.
Is this the year I partake in black friday??
credits to CNN
Target is hoping to lure this year's Black Friday shoppers with $3 toasters and coffeemakers, deep deals on high-definition televisions, and discounts of 50% on clothes and toys, according to a Web site that says it has received a leaked copy of the retailer's circular.
Brad Olson, founder of Gottadeal.com, a Web site that markets itself as one of many "official" Black Friday deal sites, said Wednesday that he received a copy of the discount retailer's ad.
For competitive reasons, most merchants typically keep a tight lid on their promotions for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, until a week before.
Olson, who's been tracking annual Black Friday deals from Wal-Mart, Target, Sears and other chain stores for the past six years, said Target's deals look "pretty aggressive" this year.
That's not particularly surprising given that the past 10 months have been a sales nightmare for most merchants.
Given that trend, sellers need to start the holiday shopping season -- their most important sales period of a year -- with a bang.
The November-December gift-buying period can account for 50% or more of sellers' annual profits and sales.
Olson said Target's Black Friday "doorbuster" deals, or the extra juicy sales given for a limited time to early shoppers, look very attractive.
These include a Westinghouse 32-inch LCD HDTV for $246. "The $246 HDTV is the lowest price that we've ever seen for that model," said Olsen.
Also in the ad: $3 Chefmate appliances such as toasters, coffeemakers and sandwich makers; a 40-inch Apex 1080p LCD HDTV for $449 with a $10 gift card; a TomTom GPS for $97; a Garmin GPS for $179; an RCA dual-screen portable DVD player for $88; a $39 Polaroid V 130 Camcorder; 50% off on select toys; and children's clothing for between $5 to $7.
The ad said the merchant is also offering a free gift card worth $10 if you spend $100 or more at its stores from 5 a.m. to noon on Black Friday.
According to Target's circular, some of the sales are valid only on Black Friday while others are good through Saturday.
Target spokeswoman Sarah Boehle said the company "is unable to confirm the accuracy of any [Black Friday] two-day ads or pricing information that is posted online."
"Each year we chronicle lots of excitement about our ads when we hear that they were prematurely leaked,' said Boehle. "We really appreciate all the interest. We encourage consumers to look for our official [Black Friday] ad."
Target is expected to release its weekly circular the week of Nov. 22.
Target is hoping to lure this year's Black Friday shoppers with $3 toasters and coffeemakers, deep deals on high-definition televisions, and discounts of 50% on clothes and toys, according to a Web site that says it has received a leaked copy of the retailer's circular.
Brad Olson, founder of Gottadeal.com, a Web site that markets itself as one of many "official" Black Friday deal sites, said Wednesday that he received a copy of the discount retailer's ad.
For competitive reasons, most merchants typically keep a tight lid on their promotions for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, until a week before.
Olson, who's been tracking annual Black Friday deals from Wal-Mart, Target, Sears and other chain stores for the past six years, said Target's deals look "pretty aggressive" this year.
That's not particularly surprising given that the past 10 months have been a sales nightmare for most merchants.
Given that trend, sellers need to start the holiday shopping season -- their most important sales period of a year -- with a bang.
The November-December gift-buying period can account for 50% or more of sellers' annual profits and sales.
Olson said Target's Black Friday "doorbuster" deals, or the extra juicy sales given for a limited time to early shoppers, look very attractive.
These include a Westinghouse 32-inch LCD HDTV for $246. "The $246 HDTV is the lowest price that we've ever seen for that model," said Olsen.
Also in the ad: $3 Chefmate appliances such as toasters, coffeemakers and sandwich makers; a 40-inch Apex 1080p LCD HDTV for $449 with a $10 gift card; a TomTom GPS for $97; a Garmin GPS for $179; an RCA dual-screen portable DVD player for $88; a $39 Polaroid V 130 Camcorder; 50% off on select toys; and children's clothing for between $5 to $7.
The ad said the merchant is also offering a free gift card worth $10 if you spend $100 or more at its stores from 5 a.m. to noon on Black Friday.
According to Target's circular, some of the sales are valid only on Black Friday while others are good through Saturday.
Target spokeswoman Sarah Boehle said the company "is unable to confirm the accuracy of any [Black Friday] two-day ads or pricing information that is posted online."
"Each year we chronicle lots of excitement about our ads when we hear that they were prematurely leaked,' said Boehle. "We really appreciate all the interest. We encourage consumers to look for our official [Black Friday] ad."
Target is expected to release its weekly circular the week of Nov. 22.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
:(
credits to yahoo
Former Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has been diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia, he announced Tuesday.
Receiving the diagnosis last December, Abdul-Jabbar, 62, says he is currently undergoing treatment for the form of blood cancer, abbreviated CML, which involves checking his blood levels on a regular basis.
While the 7-foot-2 NBA star will not disclose his prognosis, he confirms he is managing his disease, which "doesn't impact my life too significantly."
See who else has bravely fought cancer.
As a result of his diagnosis, Abdul-Jabbar has made it a mission to educate others about the importance of early detection, partnering with pharmaceutical company Novartis to travel the country and educate others about CML and other cancers.
"I think it's possible for someone in my position to help save lives," he told CNN.
Check out the day's top celeb news photos.
The National Cancer Institute describes CML as a "slowly progressing disease in which too many white blood cells are made in the bone marrow."
Former Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has been diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia, he announced Tuesday.
Receiving the diagnosis last December, Abdul-Jabbar, 62, says he is currently undergoing treatment for the form of blood cancer, abbreviated CML, which involves checking his blood levels on a regular basis.
While the 7-foot-2 NBA star will not disclose his prognosis, he confirms he is managing his disease, which "doesn't impact my life too significantly."
See who else has bravely fought cancer.
As a result of his diagnosis, Abdul-Jabbar has made it a mission to educate others about the importance of early detection, partnering with pharmaceutical company Novartis to travel the country and educate others about CML and other cancers.
"I think it's possible for someone in my position to help save lives," he told CNN.
Check out the day's top celeb news photos.
The National Cancer Institute describes CML as a "slowly progressing disease in which too many white blood cells are made in the bone marrow."
Monday, November 9, 2009
Learned about this in school...but jeez.
Credits to NPR
Trigeminal neuralgia is a rare condition that causes pain so intense it used to be known as the suicide disease. And people who get it usually have vivid memories of their first severe episode.
Sandra McGee was in the shower when she felt something like an electric shock on the right side of her face.
"I just jumped up, you know, fell against the wall and started screaming because I was being electrocuted," she says.
The pain started about an inch above her upper lip, McGee says, and traveled up to her right eye. The episode lasted about 45 seconds
McGee, 51, lives in the Los Angeles area and works as a cake decorator at Costco. She says that before she had trigeminal neuralgia, she was a pretty happy person.
That changed as the flashes of pain became more frequent and she realized they could be triggered by almost anything: a gentle touch, a drop of water on her cheek, even a smile.
"I couldn't be happy. I couldn't be sad," she says, because those emotions required facial expressions that might cause excruciating pain.
Trigeminal neuralgia is rare, affecting about one out of every 15,000 people.
But when it does strike, it can be devastating, says Dr. Neil Martin, the chair of neurosurgery at UCLA.
"In years past when we didn't have effective treatments, it was severe enough that some patients would commit suicide to escape the pain," Martin says.
The pain comes from the trigeminal nerve, which carries sensory information from the face and scalp to the brain.
There's a place near the brainstem where the trigeminal nerve can get pinched by a blood vessel. Martin says as the blood vessel expands with each pulse, it exerts pressure on the nerve, gradually wearing away the outer sheath that insulates nerve fibers.
Eventually, the nerve fibers begin to short circuit. "So a normal sensation like touching the face becomes distorted into a tremendous flash of pain," Martin says.
In the 1960s, surgeons at UCLA developed an operation to fix the problem. But many patients still don't get the surgery because doctors attribute their pain to some other cause, like dental problems.
McGee was pretty sure she had trigeminal neuralgia. She had looked it up on the Internet and seen several doctors. But she still agreed to have a root canal redone to see if that would help.
McGee also tried taking powerful painkillers.
"I took them like every eight hours. And then it got to be like every six hours, then four hours, then three hours," she says. "I was taking way too much."
So a few months ago, McGee decided it was time to try something else. She called her insurance company and asked for help finding an answer.
The company sent her to see Dr. Martin at UCLA.
Martin recalls that when he first met McGee in early August she was having up to 100 episodes a day of "sharp, shooting, stabbing electric-shock-like pain. She was in absolute agony. It was completely disabling."
Martin told McGee that surgery was her best hope for permanent relief.
The surgery still carries risks, Martin says. But it's become steadily safer and more effective over the years.
One major reason is new technologies that create detailed, three-dimensional images of a patient's brain. Those images make it easy for surgeons to plan an operation.
Martin studied a lot of those images before doing surgery on McGee.
A video of that surgery shows him creating a hole in her skull behind the ear, and gently teasing apart layers of tissue as he works his way toward the brain stem.
Within a few minutes he's exposed the problem. A pulsing red blood vessel is wedged beneath the nerve and has actually worn a visible groove in the white fiber sheath.
Martin tugs on the blood vessel and it springs free.
At that point in the surgery, Martin says, he was pretty sure he had solved the problem. But he wouldn't really know until his patient regained consciousness.
McGee remembers that the first thing she did when she woke up was touch the right side of her face. Then she smiled and made other faces. She tried all the things that had triggered pain, "just to see if it was gone," she says, "and it was gone."
Nearly three months since the surgery, McGee says there's not even a hint of the pain that dominated her life for three years.
She expects to start decorating cakes again next week.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
The Secret Topography of Antarctica
Credit to NPR
A NASA DC-8 plane equipped with lasers, ice-penetrating radar, and a gravity meter is revealing a dynamic and complex world beneath the massive ice sheet that covers Antarctica.
The plane is flying over Antarctica for six weeks as part of a mission to use airplanes to replace a dying NASA satellite that's been monitoring polar ice.
But the stopgap measure is providing a major scientific bonus: The DC-8 flies just 1,500 feet above the ice and carries instruments that let scientists see right through the ice.
"It's going to change the way that we look at Antarctica," says Thomas Wagner, a NASA Cryosphere Program scientist.
The Antarctic ice sheet covers an area larger than Europe. In places, it's miles thick. If the sheet ever melts, sea level will rise by dozens of feet.
Beneath The Ice
Scientists have known for years that there are volcanoes, mountains, rivers and lakes beneath the ice. But they haven't known many details about these things.
The NASA flights offer a way to learn a great deal more, says William Krabill, a member of the NASA team flying on the DC-8. For example, the plane carries a special radar that lets scientists study the topography of the land beneath the ice sheet, he says. Another instrument detects tiny changes in gravity fields and can reveal liquid water beneath the ice.
The flights are letting scientists burrow down through the layers of ice to see rivers and lakes and the valleys carved by moving glaciers, Krabill says, like "peeling an onion."
And scientists have already found some really surprising stuff happening inside the ice itself:
Antarctica is almost completely covered by ice sheets, which are more than a mile thick on average, and nearly 3 miles thick in places. New data from the plane flyovers is helping scientists learn about the landscape buried below the sheets of ice.
Antarctica is almost completely covered by ice sheets, which are more than a mile thick on average, and nearly 3 miles thick in places. New data from the plane flyovers is helping scientists learn about the landscape buried below the sheets of ice.
"There are these lakes that form and they literally seem to pop and deflate," Wagner says. "We just learned about this literally in the last couple of years, and we're finding new ones all the time."
If the water in those lakes gets under the ice, it could act as a lubricant and speed up a glacier's movement toward the ocean. That could speed up sea-level rise, scientists say.
For the same reason, scientists are curious about something going on at the place where glacial ice is carving a channel through dirt and rock, Wagner says.
"One of the most important unknowns right now is what is the shape of the bed under the ice," he says. "You need to know that in a very, very precise way to make models that accurately reproduce ice flow."
Seeing Through Ice With Radar
Much of that information is coming from special radars on the DC-8 that produce images in vivid colors on a computer monitor as the plane flies over a targeted area. The images provide a rough sketch of the bed beneath the ice, says Chris Allen from the University of Kansas, who is in charge of the radars.
The radar data will be refined in the coming months, and then combined with information from the lasers and the gravity meter to create a more complete picture of an Antarctica that's been hidden for millions of years.
"We are looking at structures like you see along the coast of Norway, these kinds of deep fiords," says Michael Studinger of Columbia University, who runs the gravity meter.
Right now, these Antarctic fiords are filled with ice, Studinger says. But global warming could eventually change that.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Those Bastards...
It's called lock-in, folks: The tactic that works by ensuring that once you sign on with a product or a company, you have virtually no way to escape. You're stuck for life. Apple does this with the iPod by locking iTunes to its music player. Online e-mail providers do this regularly by making it impossible to get your email out of their system and onto another.
But perhaps the most notorious example of electronics lock-in is the good-old cell phone contract early termination fee. Every carrier has one: If you want to get out of your contract early, you'll pay at least a hundred bucks for the privilege. The carriers justify it by saying you get a better deal on your cell phone when you make the initial purchase, but for many, hanging on to a crummy phone for two years just isn't worth it, and many people find that after the first year has passed, they want out of the deal (usually so they can get an iPhone).
And that termination fee is always painful.
Well, if you sign up for new service with Verizon beginning November 15 or later, that early termination fee is about to start hurting much worse. According to Boy Genius Report, Verizon is preparing to double its ETF to a whopping $350 if you cancel your service before your contract is up. For users with a simple calling plan, that amount of money can be close to the fees for a year's worth of service.
Oh, there's a little bone thrown in there for you: For every month of your contract fulfilled, the company knocks $10 off the ETF. Great deal? Hardly: Cancel your 24-month contract in the 23rd month and you're still on the hook for a $120 termination fee. Ouch.
It's unclear if the new fee will apply to all devices or just mysterious "advanced" ones (see the link for further speculation), but either way this is a bad omen for all cell phone users, as all the carriers tend to raise prices and fees in lockstep with each other whenever they think they can get away with it. (See also: Text messaging fees.) And they usually do.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Brings me back to 2nd year..
Credit to Associated Press
PARIS – Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100.
The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing structuralism — concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system.
During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including "Tristes Tropiques" (1955), "The Savage Mind" (1963) and "The Raw and the Cooked" (1964).
Jean-Mathieu Pasqualini, chief of staff at the Academie Francaise, said an homage to Levi-Strauss was planned for Thursday, with members of the society — of which Levi-Strauss was a member — standing during a speech to honor his memory.
France reacted emotionally to his death, with government officials, politicians and ordinary citizens populating blogs with heartfelt tributes.
Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner praised his emphasis on a dialogue between cultures and said that France had lost a "visionary."
Born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, Levi-Strauss was the son of French parents of Jewish origin. He studied in Paris and went on to teach in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and conduct much of the research that led to his breakthrough books in the South American giant.
Levi-Strauss also won worldwide acclaim and was awarded honorary doctorates at universities, including Harvard, Yale and Oxford, as well as universities in Sweden, Mexico and Canada.
He was down to earth.
A skilled handyman who believed in the virtues of manual labor and outdoor life, he was also an ardent music-lover who once said he would have liked to have been a composer had he not become an ethnologist.
He is survived by his sons Roman and Laurent.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
If you are feeling really Cuban...
Credits to NPR
Black beans and white rice cook together in this mainstay of the Cuban table. Dried beans give you more control over texture, but canned black beans work well, too. You can prepare the black bean mixture in advance — excluding the rice — and freeze until needed. This recipe is adapted from Goya, the food manufacturer.
Makes 8 servings
3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
1/2 medium green bell pepper, stemmed, seeded and finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups vegetable or chicken broth
1 to 1 1/2 cups water
2 cans (15.5 ounces each) black beans, undrained, or 4 cups prepared dried black beans with 1/2 to 3/4 cups water reserved from soaking them
2 cups uncooked converted white rice
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 to 2 tablespoons wine or cider vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 to 2 tablespoons butter (optional)
Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and bell pepper; cook, partially covered, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes or until they begin to soften. Stir in garlic and continue cooking 2 minutes more. Add broth and 1 cup of the water, then stir in beans, rice, bay leaf oregano and cumin.
Reduce heat to medium low and cook, covered except when stirring occasionally, for about 15 minutes or until all liquid has been absorbed and rice is tender. Add remaining 1/2 cup of water, if needed during cooking.
Before serving, discard bay leaf. Stir in wine or cider vinegar, and salt and pepper, plus butter, if desired. Serve immediately.
and...
Maricel Presilla serves fufu, a traditional Afro-Cuban dish of cooked mashed plantains, yams or the nutty root vegetable malanga, at Zafra, her restaurant in Hoboken, N.J. (Her second restaurant there, Cucharamama, features South American fare.) "In both Cuba and the Cuban exile community, fufu is made with plantains and served as an earthy dry puree enriched with pork cracklings and garlic," she told me. Shaped into balls, following an old Cuban recipe, she presents it in a broth-like tomato sofrito flavored with sesame. Both the fufu balls and sofrito can be cooked a day in advance. Pair this side dish with pan-fried Cuban-style pork chops, steak or grilled chicken.
I FEEL LIKE CHICKEN TONIGHT!
This budget-friendly recipe could not be simpler - just throw the chicken in the oven, season with lemon, garlic and parsley and you're pretty much done!
- 12 chicken drumsticks (see note)
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 60g butter, melted
- 1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley leaves, finely chopped
- 1 lemon, rind finely grated, juiced
- 3 garlic cloves, crushed
- Preheat oven to 200°C. Place drumsticks into a lightly greased shallow roasting dish.
- Combine oil and 1 tablespoon of butter. Drizzle over drumsticks. Season with salt and pepper. Toss until well coated.
- Roast drumsticks for 35 to 40 minutes or until golden and cooked through. Remove from oven.
- Combine remaining butter, parsley, lemon rind, 1/4 cup lemon juice and garlic in a bowl. Spoon over chicken. Cover. Stand for 10 minutes. Serve.
It's always the Meth
Agassi admits to snorting drugs in 1997!
"Then I come to the central lie of the letter," Agassi writes. "I say that recently I drank accidentally from one of Slim's spiked sodas, unwittingly ingesting his drugs. I ask for understanding and leniency and hastily sign it: Sincerely.
"I feel ashamed, of course. I promise myself that this lie is the end of it."
oy.
All we need is a little Sherry...
Chuletas de Puerco Criollas!
Thanks to NPR
Pork chops marinate in citrus and garlic, then bask over heat in a shallow pool of olive oil and sherry in this classic preparation from Memories of a Cuban Kitchen by Mary Urrutia Randelman and Joan Schwartz (John Wiley & Sons). The original recipe calls for eight thin pork chops and more than 20 minutes' cooking time, but thicker cuts and a shorter cooking time result in juicier chops. Serve with rice, moros y cristianos and/or fufu (recipe below).
Makes 4 servings
4 thick center-cut pork chops, each about 3/4- to 1-inch thick
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
4 cloves garlic
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 cup sour (Seville) orange juice or 1/4 cup sweet orange juice mixed with 1/8 cup each fresh lime and lemon juice
2 large onions, thinly sliced
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup dry sherry
Season the chops with salt and pepper. With a mortar and pestle, crush the garlic, oregano and cumin together into a paste. Rub the chops with the garlic paste, place in a nonreactive bowl, pour the orange juice over, and cover with the sliced onions. Cover and refrigerate 2 to 3 hours.
Remove the chops from the marinade, pat dry with paper towels, and reserve the marinade. In a large skillet, heat the oil over medium heat until fragrant, then brown the chops on both sides. Reduce heat and add the sherry and reserved marinade, including the onions. Cover and cook until the chops are tender, 12 to 15 minutes. The chops should reach an internal temperature of 155 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Cove
Thanks to boingboing for this one. That's what you get, dolphin killers!!
The Cove, the provocative film that documented the hidden dolphin slaughters in Taiji, Japan, made its Japan debut at the Tokyo International Film Festival this week, and director Louie Psihoyos was there to bear witness to its unveiling. I talked to him just two hours after he got off the airplane from Narita on Thursday morning. Here's what he had to say about his experience in watching the film with the actual dolphin killers in the audience:
All the bad guys there, front row center. The mayor, the International Whaling Committee delegate, fishermen dressed up in suits...I couldn't have dreamed of a better screening. They had all come to Tokyo with their lawyers to see if there would be any kind of litigation against the film. The screening sold out within a few hours, so I offered to give them tickets. At one point, the mayor stormed out, and the IWC delegate held his head in his hands.I thought I might get arrested when I got off the airplane in Tokyo — there are arrest warrants out for me in Taiji for things like trespassing, conspiracy to disrupt commerce, and photographing undercover police. I was invited by the TIFF, though, so that's probably what kept me safe.
Stories about dolphin hunting have been taboo in Japan for the past 30 years. The only reason this film was able to show there this week was because the Liberal Democratic Party was voted out. The government is a major sponsor of the film festival, and about two weeks after the regime change, the festival's director contacted me and said, "Given the 'environment' theme of this year's film festival, it would be hypocritical not to show The Cove." Still, the festival did seem to bury it — we had a 10:30AM screening and not a single promotional poster in sight.
All the Japanese who approached me about the film had very positive things to say about it. It was mostly young people, 18-35 year olds. They said, how can I help you get this film out in Japan? I think many were in shock. I told them that this was just the Disney version of what really happens at the cove.
During the Q&A session, I pointed out that this is not just an animal rights film, but that these dolphins have about 5000 times more mercury than allowed by Japanese law. Unfortunately, it's not enough to argue that these are the only animals in human history that have saved humans. The only way we can save them is by reminding people that human beings have made their environment so toxic that we can't eat them anymore. The question of intelligence of other animals as judged by our own intelligence is such a specie-centric thing. We're about to go through our sixth major extinction now, so how smart does that make us really?
I think the most important thing that could happen is that the film would show in Taiji. I've sent them a formal letter to see if they'd like to do an ocean-themed film festival at a national park that would include The Cove. I also told the Taiji mayor and councilmen that all profits generated from the film in Japan would go directly to the dolphin hunters if they stopped their dolphin hunting. I would gladly support them if they switch to crab hunting or whale watching.
I was only in Japan for two days — the whole thing was so surreal. At Sundance earlier this year, people thought that this movie would never screen in Japan. Now there are two major distributors in Japan negotiating for the rights. And flying back over the Pacific today, I knew there are now several thousand dolphins swimming free because of this movie.Thursday, October 22, 2009
One Big Thumbs Up to San Fran!
Thank you to NPR again!
Tossing food scraps in your garbage can is a crime — at least in San Francisco.
A brand-new city law requires residents to discard food waste in a separate bin.
It's the first program of its kind in the nation, and so far, it's a mandate San Franciscans seem to relish. In fact, many residents and landlords began implementing the law before it took effect, using their city-provided food recycling bins to separate waste.
Cutting Down On (Stinky) Refuse
After enforcing a food waste rule, the garbage room in the basement of the Cathedral Hill Plaza apartments in San Francisco is no longer a malodorous sty.
"It doesn't smell so bad," says Linda Corso, the apartment manager. "Our trash room doesn't stink like it used to."
That's because none of the wet garbage, the food waste, goes down there anymore, Corso says. Instead, food scraps go into sealed compost bins that get picked up by the city. Corso says the program has significantly trimmed the building's garbage costs.
"We used to have two bins picked up every day," she says. "Now we're down to one bin every day. So we've cut that in half."
Garbage officials in the city have been stunned and heartened by the tons and tons of food waste that is already streaming in.
After picking up curbside food scraps, garbage trucks head to the south of the city to the Organics Annex, the heart of the citywide food waste operation.
Jared Blumenfeld, the city's environmental officer, says the Organic Annex is already processing about half of the city's food waste, which is more than 500 tons per day.
"You can see a lot of lettuce, tomatoes, old apples, rotten cabbages," Blumenfeld says. "You get a kind of vivid picture here of what's being thrown away."
Composting your food scraps is probably the single most effective thing you can do as a citizen in the United States today.
San Francisco turns all of that food refuse into compost, which is then sold to Bay Area farms and vineyards. The program is the latest effort in one of the most aggressive recycling campaigns in the nation. San Francisco currently keeps 72 percent of its garbage stream out of the landfill by recycling cans, bottles, construction material and cooking oil. Blumenfeld says that even though the program officially launches Wednesday, he's not surprised by how many people are already fully participating.
'Not Rocket Science'
"We hear a lot about climate change, and what we can do and should do, and what's happening in Congress," Blumenfeld says. "But people want to know what they can, practically, do every single day, and composting your food scraps is probably the single most effective thing you can do as a citizen in the United States today."
Blumenfeld says composting is simpler than it may seem.
"This is not rocket science," he says. "This is putting some food scraps into a different pile and then turning it into compost. If we can't do that, then I really worry about our ability to do some of those more complex things."
The city can fine people for noncompliance, but officials say they are unlikely to use that power except in extreme cases. San Francisco's ultimate and fairly lofty goal — according to Blumenfeld — is to get to zero waste, meaning no garbage at all going into landfills, by the year 2020.
"If you are working on a problem you can solve in your own liftetime, you aren't thinking big enough."
Thank you to NPR for this article.
We tend to think Earth can provide us with an endless bounty of food. But farming practices in most parts of the world can't work forever. Soil is constantly washing away, and what's left is gradually losing the nutrients it needs to sustain our crops.
In the prairies of Kansas lives Wes Jackson, a man who has spent his long and rich career trying to invent a new kind of agriculture — one that will last indefinitely.
Jackson seems like a good-ol'-boy farmer from the Plains. His hands are broad and strong, a plaid shirt covers his beefy belly, and he sounds every bit like the native son of Kansas that he is.
'An Intellectual Hootenanny'
On this autumn day, the 73-year-old is surrounded by several hundred neighbors, students and fellow travelers, all here for his annual Prairie Festival. Some came from thousands of miles to gather in Jackson's barn to share ideas about the future of the planet in general, and agriculture in particular.
"We have music, the barn dance. It's sort of an intellectual hootenanny!" he says.
Jackson is part scientist, part philosopher, part farmer. More than 30 years ago, he gave up his brief career as a professor to set up this 600-acre farm on the gently rolling uplands of Kansas. He calls it the Land Institute; it includes not only the barn and other out-buildings, but an office in a suburban-style ranch house, a lab building made partly of old telephone poles, and a comfortable, rustic home.
The 10,000-Year-Old Problem
In 1976, when the institute was founded, Jackson says a lot of time was "devoted to a search for sustainable alternatives in agriculture, energy, shelter, waste management."
This grand plan turned out to be too much to bite off all at once. So Jackson quickly tore down his bulky windmills and the old solar panels, and focused on the topic closest to his heart: trying to solve "the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture."
The problem, Jackson explains, is that agriculture in most places is based on practices that use up limited resources. The major grains, like wheat and corn, are planted afresh each year. When the fields are later plowed, they lose soil. The soil that remains in these fields loses nitrogen and carbon.
This worries Jackson because vast quantities of soil are washed out of the fields and down the rivers, and the soil that's left is gradually losing its nutrients.
Trying to figure out how to solve this problem, Jackson realized the answer was right in front of him. It was the patch of native prairie on his own farm — full of grasses from ankle to shoulder height, peppered with white and purple flowers, and surrounded by shrubs and cottonwood trees.
"Here is a steep, sloping bank with a lot of species diversity, featuring perennials," Jackson says. "This is what I call nature's wisdom."
Perennials are plants that put down strong roots 10 feet or more into the ground and hold the soil in place. Perennials live year-round, unlike annual crops that get planted every year. In Kansas, perennials survive the harsh winters and the blazing hot summers.
Native Vegetation Improving Soil
In contrast to fields that get plowed every year, native prairie vegetation actually improves the soil year after year. The amazing variety of plant life in this prairie also makes it resilient against disease.
"So I thought, why can't we solve this 10,000-year-old problem?" Jackson says. "The solution is to build an agriculture based on the way nature's ecosystems work."
This turned out to be both a major plant breeding challenge, and a social one. It's not easy to get farmers and the public at large to rethink what farms should ideally be — not just areas sacrificed to food production, but actually part of nature.
Jackson's been spreading this word through his annual prairie festival for the past 31 years.
Reinventing Crops
To make progress on the biological problem, Jackson recruited a handful of young and ambitious Ph.D. plant breeders. Their mission: nothing less than to reinvent the world's most important crops.
At the annual Prairie Festival, Land Institute scientist Lee DeHaan shows off a new strain of wheat that was created from crossing wheat with a perennial grass.
At the annual Prairie Festival, Land Institute scientist Lee DeHaan shows off a new strain of wheat that was created from crossing wheat with a perennial grass.
Jackson decided to figure out a way to breed grain crops so they can be planted once, actually replenish the soil, and be harvested year after year. One of the scientists Jackson brought to the Land Institute to work on this is a Minnesota farm boy turned plant breeder, Lee DeHaan.
"At the time I started here, they said, 'Let's put the youngest guy on wheat, because maybe he can see it through,' " DeHaan says. "We're not expecting it to be something that's real easy to do or something that we'll see the results of really soon."
The Perennial Wheat Project
DeHaan joined the institute in 2001, and his job is to crossbreed regular wheat with other grasses that survive year-round.
"We decided to really go at this aggressively and make a huge population of plants that are very diverse. So that first year, we made about 1,500 new plants."
It's taken DeHaan years and years, but as we look around the greenhouse today, we see the result of his work: hundreds of plants, sitting on waist-high benches, that are a cross between wheat and grasses that grow year-round.
DeHaan will soon plant them in the fields. He hopes that maybe — just maybe — up will sprout a wheat plant that produces lots of grain and actually tastes something like wheat, and has the hardiness of a native prairie grass.
Waiting For The Big Breakthrough
"It's like scratching off lottery tickets," DeHaan says. "Maybe there's something amazing in there. We'll see. That's why we love to be plant breeders. Maybe this is the year when you make the big breakthrough. That's kind of the fun of it."
DeHaan has taken a native wheat relative that's already a perennial, and hybridized it to produce grains that are more like the wheat we actually grind into flour. They call this new kind of wheat Kernza.
Other scientists at the Land Institute are working on perennial sunflowers and perennial sorghum. Sorghum is another important staple crop around the world, though it's grown mostly for cattle food here in the United States.
It all takes lots of time, but Wes Jackson is a patient man.
The Land Institute is hybridizing sunflowers with closely related prairie species, hoping to come up with sunflower crops that don't have to be replanted every year.
The Land Institute is hybridizing sunflowers with closely related prairie species, hoping to come up with sunflower crops that don't have to be replanted every year.
"We don't feel so bad about talking about 50 years any more. Because we're not going to solve the climate problem in 50 years," says Jackson. "We're not going to solve the problem of too many people in 50 years."
The World Living Beyond Its Means
Climate change and increased populations around the world are problems that are all tied together, Jackson says. They all point to a world that's living beyond its means. Jackson's goal is to create a whole new system that will let us live sustainably.
"You start with a resilient food system," he says. "And we don't have one."
Maybe someday we will. As the silver-haired Kansan is fond of saying: If you're working on a problem you can solve in your own lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
She-Wolf...is that you?
1/2 wolf, 1/2 scholar!...
How did Shakira manage to take a summer history class at UCLA in 2007 and not make headlines until after the course was over?
How did Shakira manage to take a summer history class at UCLA in 2007 and not make headlines until after the course was over?
The Colombian-bred international pop star revealed her successful game plan in a recent interview with the UK's The Guardian.
"I used to wear a cap and a big backpack," Shakira explained. "I looked like a boy. I didn't get recognized."
When onlookers got suspicious and inquired whether or not she was the "Hips Don't Lie" singer, she told them that her name was Isabel, which is actually one of her middle names.
Her simple plan worked. Professor Robert Cleve, who taught the Introduction to Western Civilization: Ancient Civilizations from Prehistory to Circa A.D. 843 class, had no idea "Isabel" was actually a pop star.
"She told me she was visiting from Colombia and that she was just doing this for her own enlightenment and enjoyment," Cleve told the Associated Press in 2007. "She looked like just an ordinary student. She wasn't flamboyant...she didn't act like a big celebrity or anything."
The singer, whose song "She Wolf" is No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, sat near the front of the class and regularly stayed afterwards to ask questions, Cleve added. "I was really impressed with how intelligent she was," he said.
Shakira decided to take the class after wrapping the tour for her album, "Oral Fixation."
When most celebs need a break from the business, they typically take a real vacation. They travel to a remote destination, relax, and clear their minds.
But Shakira said challenging her mind instead was the ideal getaway after the tour.
"It was such a long tour, I needed a break from me," Shakira told The Guardian. "The universe is so broad, I cannot be at the center of it. So I decided to go to the university and study history for a summer course, just to kind of switch gears, taste the student life."
Shakira has been known to spend her spare time studying, and learning about the countries she visits, her manager Fifi Kurzman told The Associated Press.
While Shakira did not attend the last few classes, she told The Guardian that she enjoyed the experience. "I would go to the university over and over again if I could," Shakira said.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Days up and down they come
Like rain on a conga drum
Forget most, remember some
But don't turn none away
Everything is not enough
Nothin' is too much to bear
Where you been is good and gone
All you keep is the gettin' there
To live is to fly
Low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes
Like rain on a conga drum
Forget most, remember some
But don't turn none away
Everything is not enough
Nothin' is too much to bear
Where you been is good and gone
All you keep is the gettin' there
To live is to fly
Low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes
Friday, October 16, 2009
A Littler Wayne
I guess Lil'Wayne's been productive this year.....REproductive! ohhhh.
Another lil one -- a boy -- is on the way for Lil Wayne!
Eonline reports that the "Lollipop" rapper confirmed that will be a dad for the fourth time. This time, the mother is singer Nivea, 27 (ex-wife to The Dream, Christina Milian's new husband).
Another lil one -- a boy -- is on the way for Lil Wayne!
Eonline reports that the "Lollipop" rapper confirmed that will be a dad for the fourth time. This time, the mother is singer Nivea, 27 (ex-wife to The Dream, Christina Milian's new husband).
It's the third son in about a year for Lil Wayne -- a.k.a. Dwayne Carter Jr., 27.
Last October, his first son, Dwayne Carter III, was born to a woman (her identity was never disclosed); last month, actress Lauren London gave birth to a second son, Lennox Samuel Ari.
The multi-platinum hip-hop artist also has a 9-year old daughter, Reginae, from ex-wife Antonia Carter (they divorced in 2006).
Thursday, October 15, 2009
I like my Potato Brave
Spanish cuisine is known for loads of garlic and almonds, lemons and garlic, sherry and wine. But Spaniards do drink beer and occasionally cook with it. I mentioned to a Spanish friend that I'd made patatas bravas (literally "brave potatoes"), and he told me his wife added beer along with the vinegar. He said she used a dark Spanish beer I'd never heard of. In the past I've used a dark ale, but a recent recommendation on America's Test Kitchen led me to try O'Doul's amber. It was perfect.
Makes 6 servings
1 1/2 pounds waxy potatoes such as red bliss, cut into 3/4-inch cubes
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon hot smoked Spanish paprika
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 red or green bell pepper, seeded and sliced
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1/4 cup dark beer
2 teaspoons red or white wine vinegar
Salt to taste
Boil potatoes until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain and quarter.Thoroughly mix together red pepper, cumin and Spanish paprika, and sprinkle over potatoes.
Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium high heat. Add potatoes and bell pepper, and brown the potatoes. Add garlic and cook 1 minute longer. Add beer and cook until almost dry. Stir in vinegar, taking care to coat all potatoes. Add salt to taste and serveWednesday, October 14, 2009
I saw this guy on Top Chef Masters, and I approved!
and now..i'm hungry :0
BAM! That’s the sound of a great regional American cuisine being reduced to a cliché. But don’t blame Emeril; the same thing happened in the 80’s, when Paul Prudhomme unleashed a national epidemic of blackened catfish, from which chain restaurants across the country are still recovering. For some reason, the food of Louisiana seems destined to be eternally misunderstood.
This fall, two cookbooks, My New Orleans by John Besh and Real Cajun by Donald Link and Paula Disbrowe, should go a long way toward restoring the rich culinary traditions of Creole and Cajun cooking to their proper place in the American pantheon. Both books were written Post-Katrina, and are imbued with a reverence for local foodways that the authors fear might fade away. There are similarities between the cooking styles of Besh and Link, but one important difference: Besh covers both Creole (fancier, more restaurant-style food) and Cajun (more rustic) cooking, while Link focuses exclusively on Cajun food.
John Besh started out cooking in New Orleans, and then went to Europe to train in kitchens there. When he returned, he opened the elegant restaurant August in New Orleans, followed by Luke, Besh Steak and La Provence. He grows some of his own food, raises his own pigs and chickens, and primarily buys from local suppliers whom he knows. His book is a mostly successful attempt to capture what he calls “the food of here.”
My New Orleans is a gorgeous book. Color photographs of the food are interspersed with black and white historical pictures, and Besh describes in loving detail many of the local dining rituals. His prose is heartfelt, and throughout the book he scatters many gems, like the story about Tabasco, the famous Louisiana pepper sauce. His red beans and rice recipe is perfect, simple, a dish I could eat every week. The fried artichoke recipe calls to mind the famous preparation of the Jewish quarter in Rome, the classic version of trout amandine he includes is exemplary and the grilled corn on the cob with crab butter is genius.
A New Fish in Town!
Did you know that some of the best hardwood can be found underwater? When people built hydrodams and created lakes in valleys to get quick, cheap power, they flooded the trees and essentially forgot about them. A small underwater logging industry has ensued, but no company has taken it as far as Triton Logging of Vancouver, BC. Instead of sending human divers underwater, Triton built a giant yellow submarine called the Sawfish — a 5,500-pound unmanned logging device capable of finding, chopping, and floating trees weighing up to 200 pounds to the surface from deep underwater. When pictures of the Sawfish circulated the blogosphere in 2006, three years after its initial deployment, the sub was harvesting softwood on the west coast of Canada. It has since increased its fleet to four, doubled each machine's lifting power, and expanded its mission to underwater hardwood forests in tropical reservoirs in Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa.
Guided by sonar, video cameras, and GPS, the Sawfish dives down under the surface and finds forests to harvest.
Guided by sonar, video cameras, and GPS, the Sawfish dives down under the surface and finds forests to harvest.
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