Reuters
DETROIT, Mich.---A University of Michigan survey released today shows widespread consumer interest in buying plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). But the cost of the cars is much more influential than environmental and other non-economic factors as a predictor of purchase probabilities.
WASHINGTON, DC---Consumer spending will lag rather than lead the recovery from the current recession, according to University of Michigan economist Richard Curtin.
WASHINGTON, DC---Consumer spending will lag rather than lead the recovery from the current recession, according to University of Michigan economist Richard Curtin.
A spate of articles have been published recently concerning the effects of Green Tea on prostate cancer. The following discussion of the science, as well as the media response, is taken from my blog at Blue-Genes.net - please subscribe there, as I'm not sure whether I will continue to copy my posts here. N.B. the press release is also featured on Scienceblog here. Click here to read original post
More than a decade after Harvard researchers first revealed that life and health insurance companies were major investors in tobacco stocks -- prompting calls upon them to divest -- the insurance industry has yet to kick the habit, they say.
Maybe Deep Fritz should be called On the Fritz. The German-built, chess-playing computer lost another game to 27-year-old Russian champ Vladimir Kramnik in a match billed as the "Brains of Bahrain." The competition's third day of play ended when Kramnik, well, kicked Fritz' butt in 57 moves that showed DNA can still best silicon at some things. As reported by Reuters, Sunday's game wasn't completely one-sided. "Fritz, after early errors, fought back and startled Kramnik with some typical computer tactics. 'I never imagined (the 27th move) and the tactics that followed. Only a computer would find and play something like that,' Kramnik said later. 'I was completely shocked.' The Fritz team was more than a little embarrassed, however, when their brainchild in move 12 returned its bishop to its original square. This bizarre move was something even the lowliest human player would never consider."
Results of an animal study published in the journal Science raise the possibility that the use of the rave fave drug Ecstasy ? methylene-dioxymethamphetamine ? can damage brain cells. The same cells, in fact, that are destroyed by Parkinson?s disease.
"We don't know if human beings develop the same effects we describe in monkeys and in baboons," Dr. George Ricaurte, a Johns Hopkins neurologist, told Reuters. "The broader issue is, are there hundreds of cases of unexplained parkinsonism in MDMA users? We don't know because we haven't looked."
The Reuters article also contains the following quotation, reproduced below only marginally out of context: "[A]s you might imagine, it is not easy to get a baboon to take an oral dose of a drug."
A new reports says that up to half of all U.S. residents may be ineligible for smallpox vaccination because of the growing incidence of eczema. In a report appearing in the September issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Dr. Renata J.M. Engler from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, and colleagues note that in people with eczema, exposure to vaccinia --- a relative of smallpox used to inoculate people --- or even contact with someone who was recently vaccinated can cause a condition that can lead to scarring, blindness and even death. "A major challenge lies in the ability to protect the population from the disease while minimizing the considerable side effects from the vaccine," Reuters quotes from their report. The researchers say more studies should be conducted to help identify people who are prone to side vaccinia effects. Others who should avoid smallpox vaccination include people with immune deficiency diseases such as AIDS, and those on immune system-suppressing drugs, such as transplant patients.
Live near the ocean? Ever wonder why your air is so clean, while the poor saps inland keep dying from smog? Reuters reports salty sea spray actually scrubs out air pollution. According to an article published in the journal Science, some of the spray rises high into the atmosphere and helps create raindrops, which drag pollution back down to earth (they also make you wet when it rains.) "The idea that larger salt particles can seed clouds and enhance rainfall is not new but it was not combined with actual observation," says Daniel Rosenfeld, who conducted the experiment.
Oh, to be as well-regarded and useful as recently departed polymer chemist William Mallow. Mallow, the man credited with inventing clumping cat litter and perfecting Liquid Paper, was remembered this week by family and friends as a scientist with a knack for practicality. In addition to litter and white-out, Mallow worked on the space shuttle's heat-resistant tiles, developed a way to artificially age Scotch whiskey and improved the rubber skin used on robot dinosaurs at Walt Disney World, Reuters reports.
"He was a people's chemist," said Dr. Robert Bass, a colleague at the Southwest Research Institute. While at the institute, Mallow also helped Liquid Paper inventor Bette Nesmith Graham perfect the white goo. (Nesmith Graham, it should be noted, is the mother of former Monkees member Michael Nesmith).
Mallow's latest project was a military-grade slip-n-slide gel called the Mobility Denial System. Meant to foil attacks on government buildings and control crowds, "it can be sprayed on any surface and causes people to slip and fall and prevents vehicles from getting traction."
Mallow, a native of Akron, Ohio, died of leukemia at age 72 in a San Antonio hospital on Tuesday, Reuters says.
Computer chips have been shrinking for years. But who stops to consider that that's only been possible because the stuff on the chips, like circuits, transistors and memory have shrunk too? To keep the trend going, Germany's Infineon has joined Advanced Micro Devices and United Microelectronics Corp. to develop technology to produce the tiny structures needed inside chips. As the number of elements on a chip doubles approximately every year, "chipmakers are under pressure to develop new microelements to fit on (them)," Reuters reports. Currently, the size of the smallest element on a chip is 130nm. The three-way alliance will focus on developing a 65nm and 45nm manufacturing process.
City work crews were busy Friday cleaning up 12 tons of dead and dying squid after what looks to have been the largest mass beaching of the rubbery mollusks in a century. Scientists say the squid were likely following prey, maybe grunion, when they ventured into the shallow waters off La Jolla Cove, California, and were washed up on shore. Locals were freaked. "It was just unbelievable," Bill Halsey, 26, told Reuters. "They made these strange noises like a dolphin or a seal as they were dying." Added Clif Williams: "The thing that weirds me out about the squid is that they have humanlike eyeballs." The jumbo flying squid, aka Dosidicus gigas, usually call the eastern Pacific Ocean home, but have been turning up on beaches from Orange County to the Mexican Border. Researchers think warm water currents associated with El Nino are drawing the suckers north.
Goma, a town in eastern Congo, has been hit with a volcano spurting molten rock 100 meters in the air, just a few months after a separate volcano devastated the area. "It was something like an explosion of the sun," Dario Tedesco, a volcano consultant to the United Nations, told Reuters. "It was really spectacular, it was glowing everywhere, the sky was red, you could see the lava coming up from the fissure." In January another volcano razed much of Goma, and researchers say they're worried that hothead could blow again. According to the wire service, the winter eruption forced tens of thousands of people to flee into neighboring Rwanda -- something few rational people would do by choice. Vulcanologists say the pool of molten rock bubbling in a 1.2-km wide crater at the top of the January volcano had risen rapidly in the last two weeks, but that it is devilishly hard to judge how much risk it poses.
Incidentally, the Granular Volcano Group runs a Web site that explains the physics behind much of a volcano's activity. It's a little math-heavy, but you can watch some neato supercomputer simulations of different kinds of gas clouds and debris flows.
A single gene change that boosts the amount of a certain protein in early brain cells causes mice to develop abnormally large brains, Reuters Health reports. Normal mice have smooth, flat brains. But tinker with the gene in question and suddenly the little furballs develop brains so big they fold in on themselves, forming the wrinkles, ridges and crevices found also in the human brain. Study author Dr. Anjen Chenn of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard University in Boston said the finding might help researchers understand how humans came to develop brains so much bigger than those of other mammals. Whether or not more size means more smarts is uncertain, Chenn said. "It is quite an interesting question ... and that's something we want to look at in the future."
Vaccinating hundreds of thousands of Americans would be more effective in the case of an intentional or accidental outbreak of smallpox than a more limited "ring" plan endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some specialists believe. "Mass vaccination really leads to fewer deaths than the CDC interim plan," Lawrence Wein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told Reuters. Besides, he said, if there were a smallpox attack, "I think it highly likely that people would take to the streets to demand vaccination, or would flee." Of course, the smallpox vaccine could be fatal or severely debilitating for many people, including those with common skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis.
