New Artificial Blood Made In Transylvania (Yes, Really)
November 9th, 2013Via: Smithsonian:
Science, in all its grand ambition and contemporary sophistication, doesn’t quite have what it takes yet to replicate anything like blood. It not only delivers oxygen and essential nutrients, but also serves a host of other functions crucial for our survival, such as fighting infections, healing injuries and regulating hormones. So far, researchers have concentrated the bulk of their efforts on the more modest goal of creating something that can at least effectively carry out the vital role of transporting oxygen throughout the body.
This kind of “artificial blood” would be a useful substitute for critical circumstances such as medical emergencies, when the body can’t do this on its own. It could also be designed to be sterile, unlike real blood, which can be infected and infect others during a transfusion. And while donated blood requires refrigeration, a synthetic version could be made to last longer and be readily available for various life-or-death situations, even on the battlefield.
The latest bearer of hope for such a potential breakthrough comes from a research facility located in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca, of all places. (Yes, Translyvania is a real place in Romania.) Researcher Radu Silaghi-Dumitrescu, a professor at Babes-Bolyai University, has been working on a unique concoction and his work has progressed to the point where he and his team successfully transfused a blood substitute into mice—without them experiencing any ill effects, according to a report by the Romanian news outlet Descopera. He intends for the lab-engineered blood to work inside the body for several hours or even up to an entire day as the body replenishes itself.
Research Credit: cgroove69
Philippines Typhoon: At Least 10,000 Dead?
November 9th, 2013Via: Reuters:
One of the most powerful storms ever recorded killed at least 10,000 people in the central Philippines province of Leyte, a senior police official said on Sunday, with coastal towns and the regional capital devastated by huge waves.
Super typhoon Haiyan destroyed about 70 to 80 percent of the area in its path as it tore through the province on Friday, said chief superintendent Elmer Soria, a regional police director.
Most of the deaths appear to have been caused by surging sea water strewn with debris that many described as similar to a tsunami, which leveled houses and drowned hundreds of people.
The national government and disaster agency have not confirmed the latest estimate of deaths, a sharp increase from initial estimates on Saturday of at least 1,000 killed.
“We had a meeting last night with the governor and the other officials. The governor said, based on their estimate, 10,000 died,” Soria told Reuters. “The devastation is so big.”
—
Via: CNN:
A day after Super Typhoon Haiyan roared into the Philippines, officials predicted that the death toll could reach 1,200 or more.
“We estimate 1,000 people were killed in Tacloban and 200 in Samar province,” Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross, said of two coastal areas where Haiyan hit first as it began its march Friday across the archipelago.
The Red Cross said it would have more precise numbers Sunday. But experts predicted that it will take days to get the full scope of the damage wrought by a typhoon described as one of the strongest to make landfall in recorded history.
Man Spent 34 Years in Prison for Murder He Didn’t Commit
November 9th, 2013Via: USA Today:
A man who spent 34 years behind bars for a decades-old killing was freed from jail Friday after his conviction was overturned.
Kash Delano Register, 53, walked out of a downtown jail at about 4:30 p.m. and was greeted by family members and attorneys.
…
Register was convicted of killing Jack Sasson, 78, in April 1979 and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. He always maintained his innocence.
Superior Court Judge Katherine Mader threw out the conviction on Thursday, ruling that prosecutors used false testimony at trial and failed to disclose exculpatory evidence.
Two Admirals Face Probe in Navy Bribery Scheme
November 9th, 2013[???]
Via: Washington Post:
Two U.S. admirals — including the director of naval intelligence — are under investigation as part of a major bribery scandal involving a foreign defense contractor, Navy officials announced Friday night.
Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch, the service’s top intelligence officer, and Rear Adm. Bruce F. Loveless, the Navy’s director of intelligence operations, were placed on leave Friday, and their access to classified material was suspended, the Navy said in a statement.
Both admirals are being investigated for their ties to a Singapore-based defense contractor, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, whose chief executive was arrested in September on charges that he bribed other Navy officers into giving him classified or privileged information in exchange for prostitutes and cash.
Two Navy commanders and a senior Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent have already been arrested, and a captain was relieved of his ship’s command last month in connection with the case.
But the announcement that two admirals in charge of protecting the Navy’s secrets have been swept up in the investigation makes the crisis the worst to tar the Navy since the 1991 Tailhook scandal, when a convention of naval aviators sexually assaulted scores of women.
EPA Bans Most Wood-Burning Stoves
November 8th, 2013Tell me another one.
Via: Off The Grid News:
Wood-burning stoves offer warmth and enhance off-grid living options during cold weather months, but the tried-and-true heating devices now are under attack by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA has banned the production and sale of the types of stoves used by about 80 percent of those with such stoves. The regulations limit the amount of “airborne fine-particle matter” to 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The current EPA regulations allow for 15 micrograms in the same amount of air space.
Most of the wood stoves currently nestled inside cabins and homes from coast-to-coast don’t meet the new environmental standard. The EPA launched a “Burn Wise” website to help convince the public that the new regulations were needed.
Trading in an old stove for a newer stove isn’t allowed.
“Replacing an older stove with a cleaner-burning stove will not improve air quality if the older stove is reused somewhere else,” the website says. “For this reason, wood stove change out programs usually require older stoves to be destroyed and recycled as scrap metal, or rendered inoperable.”
CIA Pays AT&T $10 Million Per Year for Access to Call Data
November 8th, 2013Via: New York Times:
The C.I.A. is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist with overseas counterterrorism investigations by exploiting the company’s vast database of phone records, which includes Americans’ international calls, according to government officials.
The cooperation is conducted under a voluntary contract, not under subpoenas or court orders compelling the company to participate, according to the officials. The C.I.A. supplies phone numbers of overseas terrorism suspects, and AT&T searches its database and provides records of calls that may help identify foreign associates, the officials said. The company has a huge archive of data on phone calls, both foreign and domestic, that were handled by its network equipment, not just those of its own customers.
The $100,000 Battery That Could Help Hotels Save Bundles of Money
November 8th, 2013Via: The Atlantic:
What riles Hobbs is utilities’ approach to managing electricity supply and demand for big commercial customers like hotels. If a hotel’s energy consumption spikes—say on a hot day when guests all turn on their room air conditioners at once—the utility ratchets up the electricity rate they pay. To avoid these so-called demand charges—which can account for half of a monthly power bill—businesses can participate in programs that cut their bills if they allow their local utility take control of their air conditioners or lighting to reduce electricity use when the grid is overloaded.
Letting hotel guests who pay $300 a night sweat, however, is not an option. So Hobbs has pulled the plug on his utility by storing electricity in lithium-ion battery packs when rates are low for use when demand and prices rise. The battery and sophisticated software was built by a Silicon Valley startup called Stem and is another example of how technological innovation is upending utilities’ century-old stranglehold on power.
“We measure a business’ electricity usage and predict when there will be spikes in usage and make decisions on whether to charge or discharge batteries,” says Prakesh Patel, Stem’s vice president of capital markets and strategy, who notes that demand charges have risen 30 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area over the past three years.
That means Stem’s algorithms are constantly analyzing a customer’s power demand as well as other factors, such as weather patterns and past energy use, and then charging and discharging the batteries in tiny increments. Such fine-tuning keeps a customer’s utility bills down while minimizing wear and tear on the expensive lithium ion battery packs, which are similar to those found in electric cars.
A Recently Discovered Bacterium Thrives in NASA’s Spacecraft Clean Rooms
November 8th, 2013Via: JPL:
A rare, recently discovered microbe that survives on very little to eat has been found in two places on Earth: spacecraft clean rooms in Florida and South America.
Microbiologists often do thorough surveys of bacteria and other microbes in spacecraft clean rooms. Fewer microbes live there than in almost any other environment on Earth, but the surveys are important for knowing what might hitch a ride into space. If extraterrestrial life is ever found, it would be readily checked against the census of a few hundred types of microbes detected in spacecraft clean rooms.
The work to keep clean rooms extremely clean knocks total microbe numbers way down. It also can select for microbes that withstand stresses such as drying, chemical cleaning, ultraviolet treatments and lack of nutrients. Perversely, microbes that withstand these stressors often also show elevated resistance to spacecraft sterilization methodologies such as heating and peroxide treatment.
“We want to have a better understanding of these bugs, because the capabilities that adapt them for surviving in clean rooms might also let them survive on a spacecraft,” said microbiologist Parag Vaishampayan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., lead author of the 2013 paper about the microbe. “This particular bug survives with almost no nutrients.”
This population of berry-shaped bacteria is so different from any other known bacteria, it has been classified as not only a new species, but also a new genus, the next level of classifying the diversity of life. Its discoverers named it Tersicoccus phoenicis. Tersi is from Latin for clean, like the room. Coccus, from Greek for berry, describes the bacterium’s shape. The phoenicis part is for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, the spacecraft being prepared for launch in 2007 when the bacterium was first collected by test-swabbing the floor in the Florida clean room.
Some other microbes have been discovered in a spacecraft clean room and found nowhere else, but none previously had been found in two different clean rooms and nowhere else. Home grounds of the new one are about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) apart, in a NASA facility at Kennedy Space Center and a European Space Agency facility in Kourou, French Guiana.
Snowden Pulled Off NSA Document Heist—Using Oldest Trick in the Book?
November 8th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues at a spy base in Hawaii to access some of the classified material he leaked to the media, sources said.
A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments, said a source close to several U.S. government investigations into the damage caused by the leaks.
Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.
The revelation is the latest to indicate that inadequate security measures at the NSA played a significant role in the worst breach of classified data in the super-secret eavesdropping agency’s 61-year history.
Reuters reported last month that the NSA failed to install the most up-to-date, anti-leak software at the Hawaii site before Snowden went to work there and downloaded highly classified documents belonging to the agency and its British counterpart, Government Communication Headquarters.
Related: Social Engineering (as the term relates to computer security)
Crispr
November 7th, 2013Via: Independent:
A breakthrough in genetics – described as “jaw-dropping” by one Nobel scientist – has created intense excitement among DNA experts around the world who believe the discovery will transform their ability to edit the genomes of all living organisms, including humans.
The development has been hailed as a milestone in medical science because it promises to revolutionise the study and treatment of a range of diseases, from cancer and incurable viruses to inherited genetic disorders such as sickle-cell anaemia and Down syndrome.
For the first time, scientists are able to engineer any part of the human genome with extreme precision using a revolutionary new technique called Crispr, which has been likened to editing the individual letters on any chosen page of an encyclopedia without creating spelling mistakes. The landmark development means it is now possible to make the most accurate and detailed alterations to any specific position on the DNA of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes without introducing unintended mutations or flaws, scientists said.
The technique is so accurate that scientists believe it will soon be used in gene-therapy trials on humans to treat incurable viruses such as HIV or currently untreatable genetic disorders such as Huntington’s disease. It might also be used controversially to correct gene defects in human IVF embryos, scientists said.
