Chopped Egg And Avocado Sandwich
My grandmother, who came from Poland but was raised in Mexico, used to make chopped egg salad and chopped seasoned avocados as table starters for special occasions. Then one day she decided to mix up the two, altered the spices a bit, and created a family hit. I have adapted her recipe by adding the Dijon and dill, and scooping a ton of it into a sandwich. The cheese is a caprice that I couldn't help adding, and I love how it tastes, but feel free to try it without it.
Chopped Egg And Avocado Sandwich
Enlarge Patricia Jinich for NPR
Chopped Egg And Avocado Sandwich
Patricia Jinich for NPR
Makes 3 to 4 hearty sandwiches
3 large hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
3 tablespoons chopped white onion
2 tablespoons chopped parsley leaves
1 teaspoon chopped fresh dill, or 1/4 teaspoon dry dill
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons mayonnaise
1 large ripe Hass avocado (about 3/4 pound), halved, seeded, meat scooped out and diced
1/4 teaspoon kosher or sea salt, more or less to taste
Black pepper, ground, to taste
6 to 8 slices brioche or challah, or any bread of your choice, lightly toasted
4 slices Muenster, Mexican manchego or chihuahua or Monterey Jack cheese (optional)
In a bowl, mix the eggs, onion, parsley, dill, Dijon and mayonnaise together. Toss in the avocado, sprinkle with salt and pepper and gently mix well.
Lightly toast the bread slices. Scoop a generous amount of the chopped egg and avocado on a slice of bread, add a slice of cheese and top with another slice of bread.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
Poor Appalachia
credits to: NPR
A team of scientists says the environmental damage from mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia is so widespread, the mining technique should be stopped.
The scientific review of research on the effects of the practice, which dumps coarse rock down the mountainsides into nearby valleys, states that harmful chemicals such as sulfate and selenium are pervasive in streams below.
Photo Gallery: Removing Mountains
In the summer of 2007, photographer Daniel Shea set out to cover the coal industry of Appalachia. These are his photos, from NPR's Picture Show blog.
Mountaintop removal is a pretty efficient and cheap way to mine coal. But when the rock or "overburden" above coal seams is blasted away and pushed over the side of the mountain, says Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, "you expose material that, when it rains and water percolates through that, it dissolves a lot of chemicals, and those are very persistent in the streams below valley fill sites."
Cleanup Laws May Not Be Working
Federal and state laws require mining companies to clean up and restore mined areas. But Palmer and 11 other scientists who published their review in the journal Science say that's not working. "Even after a site has been reclaimed and attempts have been made to re-vegetate it," says Palmer, a biologist, "the streams that remain below that, that weren't filled, have high levels of all sorts of nasty things."
Deformed fish larvae from West Virginia
Enlarge Courtesy A.D. Lemley
Deformed fish larvae from mountaintop mining-impacted streams in Lincoln County, W.Va. The fish on top has two eyes on one side of its head. The lower fish has a deformed spine.
Deformed fish larvae from West Virginia
Courtesy A.D. Lemley
Deformed fish larvae from mountaintop mining-impacted streams in Lincoln County, W.Va. The fish on top has two eyes on one side of its head. The lower fish has a deformed spine.
Things, she says, like selenium, which in high amounts can harm fish and other aquatic life; and sulfates, which alter the water chemistry. Palmer and her colleagues say many animals in these valley streams — from algae to fish and birds — could be seriously harmed.
So, they say, mountaintop mining should be stopped.
EPA Already Delaying Permits
In fact, the EPA has been holding up almost 80 permits for new mines to give them extra environmental scrutiny. And at a Senate hearing last year, EPA water expert John Randy Pomponio said the agency doesn't really know how bad the stream damage is.
"These little streams are like capillaries in your blood system," Pomponio said. "They're what travel through the landscape and capture the pollutants, clean those pollutants. And we frankly don't know where the tipping point is in losing one stream, five streams, or 18 streams in a particular watershed."
Pomponio told the Senate that mines in some valleys are so large now, their footprint covers as much as one-third of the watershed (a watershed is the whole area from which water flows into a valley). He also said the EPA has not done a good job of assessing the cumulative effect of all this mining.
While the EPA reviews the science, the mining industry in West Virginia is growing unhappy with the go-slow approach. Randy Huffman is secretary of the state's Department of Environmental Protection. Of the EPA, he says, "They just shut everything down, basically, and it kind of turned industry on its head."
Mountaintop removal coal mining approaches a home.
Courtesy of Vivian Stockman
Mountaintop removal coal mining approaches a home on the Mud River in Lincoln County, W.Va. The mine site is part of the Hobet 21 mine.
Watch Video Of Mountaintop Mining On The Sierra Club's Web Site
An Unfair Look At Pollutants?
Huffman says new requests for mining permits in West Virginia are getting closer inspection from his department, and some should go ahead while regulators are looking for solutions.
As for the pollutants the scientists listed, he says they've created a worst-case scenario.
"If you wanted to look at 30 years of coal mining in Appalachia and pick out the worst of everything that's ever happened and put it on two pages you can do that," says Huffman, "and it looks like that's what's been done."
Environmental and citizens groups in Appalachia have been suing for years to stop mountaintop mining, with mixed success. But Huffman says even if mountaintop mining were outlawed, that wouldn't keep other sources of mine waste out of valleys and streams. "We have valley fills associated with every type of mining, including underground mining," he says.
But according to the scientists who have studied the region's streams, mountaintop mining is responsible for the most of the damage.
A team of scientists says the environmental damage from mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia is so widespread, the mining technique should be stopped.
The scientific review of research on the effects of the practice, which dumps coarse rock down the mountainsides into nearby valleys, states that harmful chemicals such as sulfate and selenium are pervasive in streams below.
Photo Gallery: Removing Mountains
In the summer of 2007, photographer Daniel Shea set out to cover the coal industry of Appalachia. These are his photos, from NPR's Picture Show blog.
Mountaintop removal is a pretty efficient and cheap way to mine coal. But when the rock or "overburden" above coal seams is blasted away and pushed over the side of the mountain, says Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, "you expose material that, when it rains and water percolates through that, it dissolves a lot of chemicals, and those are very persistent in the streams below valley fill sites."
Cleanup Laws May Not Be Working
Federal and state laws require mining companies to clean up and restore mined areas. But Palmer and 11 other scientists who published their review in the journal Science say that's not working. "Even after a site has been reclaimed and attempts have been made to re-vegetate it," says Palmer, a biologist, "the streams that remain below that, that weren't filled, have high levels of all sorts of nasty things."
Deformed fish larvae from West Virginia
Enlarge Courtesy A.D. Lemley
Deformed fish larvae from mountaintop mining-impacted streams in Lincoln County, W.Va. The fish on top has two eyes on one side of its head. The lower fish has a deformed spine.
Deformed fish larvae from West Virginia
Courtesy A.D. Lemley
Deformed fish larvae from mountaintop mining-impacted streams in Lincoln County, W.Va. The fish on top has two eyes on one side of its head. The lower fish has a deformed spine.
Things, she says, like selenium, which in high amounts can harm fish and other aquatic life; and sulfates, which alter the water chemistry. Palmer and her colleagues say many animals in these valley streams — from algae to fish and birds — could be seriously harmed.
So, they say, mountaintop mining should be stopped.
EPA Already Delaying Permits
In fact, the EPA has been holding up almost 80 permits for new mines to give them extra environmental scrutiny. And at a Senate hearing last year, EPA water expert John Randy Pomponio said the agency doesn't really know how bad the stream damage is.
"These little streams are like capillaries in your blood system," Pomponio said. "They're what travel through the landscape and capture the pollutants, clean those pollutants. And we frankly don't know where the tipping point is in losing one stream, five streams, or 18 streams in a particular watershed."
Pomponio told the Senate that mines in some valleys are so large now, their footprint covers as much as one-third of the watershed (a watershed is the whole area from which water flows into a valley). He also said the EPA has not done a good job of assessing the cumulative effect of all this mining.
While the EPA reviews the science, the mining industry in West Virginia is growing unhappy with the go-slow approach. Randy Huffman is secretary of the state's Department of Environmental Protection. Of the EPA, he says, "They just shut everything down, basically, and it kind of turned industry on its head."
Mountaintop removal coal mining approaches a home.
Courtesy of Vivian Stockman
Mountaintop removal coal mining approaches a home on the Mud River in Lincoln County, W.Va. The mine site is part of the Hobet 21 mine.
Watch Video Of Mountaintop Mining On The Sierra Club's Web Site
An Unfair Look At Pollutants?
Huffman says new requests for mining permits in West Virginia are getting closer inspection from his department, and some should go ahead while regulators are looking for solutions.
As for the pollutants the scientists listed, he says they've created a worst-case scenario.
"If you wanted to look at 30 years of coal mining in Appalachia and pick out the worst of everything that's ever happened and put it on two pages you can do that," says Huffman, "and it looks like that's what's been done."
Environmental and citizens groups in Appalachia have been suing for years to stop mountaintop mining, with mixed success. But Huffman says even if mountaintop mining were outlawed, that wouldn't keep other sources of mine waste out of valleys and streams. "We have valley fills associated with every type of mining, including underground mining," he says.
But according to the scientists who have studied the region's streams, mountaintop mining is responsible for the most of the damage.
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
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