Everything You Need To Know About Ricin, The Poison Mailed To President ObamaRicin is one of the most poisonous substances on Earth, its scarily easy to make, and somebody is mailing it to the President and at least one U.S. senator. What it is, how it works, and more, inside.By Dan Nosowitz
via Everything You Need To Know About Ricin, The Poison Mailed To President Obama | Popular Science.
We – me, certainly – think of myself as relatively immune to surprise, by evil or good. People say that it’s in the New York City Charter, right next to the rule about not being nice to tourists, lest we lose our municipal reputation for poor manners and indifference. But the right words still can, and should, have the power to move us – and founding documents often contain evidence of the best and worst of society. The United States Constitution, for example, was structured around giving slave-holding states a disproportionate amount of power (because of the Three-Fifths Compromise, and the undemocratic Senate, in which representation is distinctly undemocratic. Within the slave states, of course, individual slave-owners were free to treat their slaves as they wished, extracting as much economic value as was possible. And so among slave owners the economic incentive was a “race to the bottom.” ((We had thought that the phrase originated with Adam Smith, but further research suggests that first use may have been by Justice Louis Brandeis in Ligget Co. v. Lee (288 U.S. 517, 558–559) (1933). )) Yet, other parts of the body of the Constitution and Bill of rights bespeak noble and compassionate aims. And the absence of even a single use of the words “slave” or “slavery” are testimony that at least some of the Framers were opposed to, ashamed of, slavery.
And so with the United Nations: we can all bring to mind easily events in which the United Nations’ conduct – and even more often, cowardly inaction and silence doesn’t mean its existence hasn’t affirmatively led to good outcomes, and by creating channels for communication and temp0rizing – the latter being essential if the casus belli is in some part a politician with a bruised ego.
It is in this context that we present to you the Preamble of the founding Charter of the United Nations. It’s notable for many reasons but we think it worth pointing out that you can read this entire block of text from top to bottom, including the headings, or, you can read all the body copy as one statement, and read all of the headings, without reference to the text beneath each heading, as a separate complementary statement. Here it is:
PREAMBLE
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
- to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
- to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
- to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
- to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
- to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and
- to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
- to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
- to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS
Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.
You can read the Preamble – and the nineteen chapters of the Charter – here on the site of the United Nations. And, if you think that world peace, social justice and economic fairness are worth discussing ((No sarcasm intended; thanere are people who believe, for instance, that we should let markets sort things for us, that collective efforts to improve things will only make things worse; those aren’t unreasonable positions, even if we don’t share them. The latter proposition is merely an application of Murphy’s Law to global matters. )), consider the proposition that a global language would be an affirmative step. We think it’s worth considering, even if it’s a limited language, and we don’t think the discussion begins or ends with Esperanto, and in fact even a limited vocabulary in a signed language, spoken by even a small number – say 2% – of each country’s population.
Brett Zamir, the brilliant creator of, among other things, at least 11 Firefox extensions – is owed our thanks for inspiring this post, is an advocate of the universal-language premise and an advocate of Gestuno, also known as International Sign. Brett, with permission “from the World Federation of the Deaf, [has] put online an early book on Gestuno,”
And if you’ve now got an appetite for founding documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a must-read.
Charles Komanoff is widely known for his work as an energy-policy analyst, transport economist and environmental activist in New York City. He “re-founded” NYC’s bike-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives in the 1980s, co-founded the pedestrian-rights group Right Of Way in the 1990s, and wrote or edited the landmark reports Subsidies for Traffic, The Bicycle Blueprint, and Killed By Automobile. Earlier, Komanoff gained prominence for deconstructing the disastrous economics of nuclear power in the United States as author-researcher and expert witness for states and municipalities across the U.S. He wrote his visionary oil-saving report, Ending The Oil Age, after witnessing at close range the traumatic events of 9/11. Komanoff’s current work includes modeling and advocacy for traffic pricing and free transit in New York City in partnership with renowned civic activist Ted Kheel. He also directs the Carbon Tax Center, a clearinghouse for information, research and advocacy on behalf of revenue-neutral carbon taxes to address the climate crisis. A math-and-economics graduate of Harvard, Komanoff lives with his wife and two sons in lower Manhattan.11 Hanover Square21st FloorNYC 10005kea@igc.org
via Charles Komanoff.
Vizicities, now in development, may be the richest and most layered geographic information tool ever, which might make it the ideal urban planning, risk management and disaster response management tool ever. Based explicitly on the data layers in the game SimCity, it’s being developed by Pete Smart and Rob Hawkes.
Here’s a screenshot from SimCity:
SimCity Screenshot
And here are screenshots of Vizicities, still in early days:
[imagebrowser id=107]
Dr. Irwin Redlener on President Obama’s State of the Union Address:
“The president made a strong case for universal early education in America, along with raising the minimum wage. But his commitment to eliminate extreme poverty and save children from preventable deaths was focused on children of the world. All of this is, of course, laudable. But we hoped to hear a commitment to eliminate child poverty in America, where more than 16 million children are facing grim challenges right now that undermine their futures – and the future economy of the nation. Poor kids are not a voting block and they don’t have the capacity to influence public policy. The sooner the president engages the full power of his office in the battle to eliminate child poverty, the better the prospects of every child reaching his or her potential.”
Statement by Irwin Redlener, MD on President Obama’s State of the Union Address
Via Dr. Irwin Redlener’s blog. Dr. Redlener is the co-founder and president of The Children’s Health Fund.
Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, said global action is needed to fight antibiotic, or antimicrobial, resistance and fill a drug "discovery void" by researching and developing new medicines to treat emerging, mutating infections.
Only a handful of new antibiotics have been developed and brought to market in the past few decades, and it is a race against time to find more, as bacterial infections increasingly evolve into "superbugs" resistant to existing drugs.
"Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat. If we don’t act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can’t be treated by antibiotics," Davies told reporters as she published a report on infectious disease.
"And routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection."
One of the best known superbugs, MRSA, is alone estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States – far more than HIV and AIDS – and a similar number in Europe.
via Antibiotic Resistance Poses 'Catastrophic Threat' To Medicine, Says Britain's Top Health Official.
Commuter on Ringstrasse, Vienna, 2005. Image courtesy Wikipedia
Bicycle Commuting, lowers CO2 emissions, and is healthy for the commuter. Gwyn Topham, transport correspondent for The Guardian, reports on London’s ambitious plans to encourage bicycle use.
An unbroken network of cycle routes with some Dutch-style segregated lanes has been pledged as part of a £913m 10-year plan to make London safer for cyclists – including an east-west superhighway dubbed “Crossrail for the bike”.
We assume that this facility – or at least that part pictured – was intended as a short-term refuge. Via The National Archives Image Library (UK).
We’ve excerpted just a slice of a single view of Bombsight.org’s interactive map of the London Blitz. Our screen grab doesn’t do it justice – no scrolling, zooming, no selection of time slices. Check it out.
This is a project of the United Kingdom’s National Archives Image Library; we can imagine this map as a point of departure for other datasets, such us as overhead images of the damage and recovery. Compare this to one of the first iterations of the very first data map, Dr. John Snow’s mapping of cholera in London.
httpv://youtu.be/3Zaqi5DwCYE
Via Kottke.org, a Russian dashboard cam captures a plane crash. Apparently, according to Kottke, dashboard video is very popular in Russia. See Kottke’s earlier post Russians are dashboard-cam crazy.
I would disagree with Kottke. The Russians are not crazy. Apparently their legal and insurance systems are in such a state of failure that vehicle owners must be prepared to capture their own evidence in order to prove their claims. Thus a driver with a dashboard camera can provide proof of the facts of a case.
Maybe that’s a good outcome – better evidence, more accurate outcomes – but a sad way to come to it. On the other hand, as we have seen here in the United States, after members of the LA Police were filmed beating Rodney King, citizens with video have prompted the police to change their behavior.
Food waste is not just a problem for restaurants — airports also have to deal with piles of this kind of garbage.
At one of the nation’s busiest airports, Charlotte Douglas International in North Carolina, each passenger generates half a pound of garbage on average per visit. But instead of just sending all that trash to the landfill, Charlotte has taken a different approach. It’s the first airport to put worms to work dealing with trash.
Yes, worms.
Before the worms get a whack at the airport waste, there’s some human work required. Twenty-five tons of trash a day tumbles onto a conveyor belt under the supervision of Charlotte Airport housekeeping manager Bob Lucas.
“You see it coming down off the cascade up there,” Lucas says. “What that does is, it gives it like a waterfall effect. So it spreads it out on the belt a little bit more.”
A dozen employees pluck out recyclables and sort through aluminum, plastic and more, so passengers don’t have to do the sorting in the terminal.
In the four months since this operation got under way, trash going from the Charlotte airport to the landfill is down an impressive 70 percent. Recyclables are crushed, baled and sold for cash. There are shirts sorted and laundered and donated, and plastic cups collected. (The shirts come from people who toss clothing when they suddenly discover their suitcases are too heavy.)
The organic stuff — waste from airport restaurants, food scraps off planes, and the half-eaten Cinnabon that a traveler has tossed out — mixes in a big tank for a few days to start the composting process. Then it’s time for the stars of this show to take over.
“There’s the workers,” Lucas says, digging his fingers into the top layer of a 50-foot-long composting bin, “1.9 million of them.”
They are common backyard red wigglers, about 3 inches long, a quarter-inch around — and hungry. Lucas says they eat half their weight a day.
Organic waste ends up in a series of 50-foot beds where the worms do their work. Castings (aka worm poop) fall through a screen at the bottom of the bed and will be used as fertilizer on airport grounds. Enlarge image
Organic waste ends up in a series of 50-foot beds where the worms do their work. Castings (aka worm poop) fall through a screen at the bottom of the bed and will be used as fertilizer on airport grounds.
Julie Rose
“I have not heard of another airport that does that,” says Katherine Preston, environmental affairs director for Airports Council International-North America.
And that’s with good reason. First of all, recycling and worm composting take space many airports don’t have.
Plus, worms are finicky and — as Lucas recently learned — prone to crawling out en masse at times. That resulted in a panicked call to the guy who sold him the worms.
“First thing I told him: ‘They’re trying to leave.’ And he said, ‘Get a light and stick it under the bed.’ And they just turn around and go back in and they’re happy,” Lucas says.
Light on. Crisis averted. If Lucas can keep the worms happy, they’ll soon be producing enough worm poop to fertilize all of the airport’s flower beds and shrubs, Lucas says.
Worm poop. Go ahead and giggle. Charlotte officials sure did as they debated the $1.2 million it cost to launch the program. But they’re not laughing now: The airport expects to be making money off its trash in five years.
via One Airport’s Trash Is 2 Million Worms’ Treasure : The Salt : NPR.
Global efforts to combat malaria are under threat from new strains of drug-resistant malaria, which are cropping up in Southeast Asia.
Over the last decade, the number of malaria deaths around the world has dropped sharply, from just over 1 million in 2000 to roughly 600,000 last year.
Much of that progress is due to the widespread use of drugs containing artemisinin. The new malaria drugs quickly kill the parasite.
But in Southeast Asia doctors are starting to see cracks in artemisinin’s armor. The drugs are working more slowly, and sometimes they’re failing to wipe out the malaria parasite entirely.
This 5-year-old boy was carried to a Thai malaria clinic by his mother from deep inside Myanmar. If the mother had waited even a day longer, doctors say, the child probably would have died.
Shots – Health News
Stakes Rise In Malaria Battle As Cracks Appear In Drug’s Armor
A second promo image for the malaria animation post.
Shots – Health News
Herbs And Empires: A Brief, Animated History Of Malaria Drugs
The World Health Organization reported Monday that artemisinin resistance has now been detected in four countries: Cambodia, Myanmar (also known as Burma), Thailand and Vietnam.
Although the resistance is still limited to Southeast Asia, WHO officials worry that it could spill out of the region.
Two hot spots for artemisinin resistance are in Thailand’s thickly forested border regions. One is along Thailand’s eastern border with Cambodia, and the other is on the country’s western boundary with Myanmar.
If artemisinin-based treatments become ineffective in Africa — where malaria remains the leading killer of children under the age of 5 — it could be disastrous. Doctors say they have few other powerful drugs to use against the disease.
Global funding for the fight against malaria rose to $1.71 billion in 2010, or nearly twentyfold since 2000. But it has plateaued in the past few years, the WHO said. Many malaria interventions, like distribution of bed nets and insecticide spraying have also leveled off during this time, the report found.
via A View From The Ground: Thailand Confronts Drug-Resistant Malaria : Shots – Health News : NPR.
When it comes to predicting whether someone will have Alzheimer’s disease, newfangled diagnostic tests for the illness aren’t as good as old-fashioned quizzes of thinking and memory.
That’s the word from a study that compared different methods for identifying Alzheimer’s. The results was just published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Scientists have been looking for a scan or lab test, such as changes in particular proteins in the blood, to simplify and speed up the detection of Alzheimer’s. The goal is to be able to identify people at risk of the illness long before symptoms such as impaired thinking surface. But that goal is far from being realized.
In this study, researchers compared how well biological and cognitive tests did at identifying whether people who already had mild cognitive impairment would go on to develop Alzheimer’s. They found that two tests measuring verbal memory were the best at predicting whether someone would develop Alzheimer’s in the next two years.
In those tests, people were read a story or a list of words, and then asked to recall the information 30 minutes later. In people who are progressing to Alzheimer’s, "there’s forgetting," neuroscientist Terry Goldberg, a co-author of the study, told Shots. "There’s an increased rate of forgetting."
One biological marker, a brain scan that measured changes in the thickness of the middle temporal lobe, also predicted people who went on to have Alzheimer’s. Other biological markers, such as tests for telltale proteins in blood and cerebrospinal fluid, also revealed changes, but not as well. Those tests have been used in research laboratories, but aren’t being used to test for Alzheimer’s in clinical practice.
"It’s not that the biomarkers didn’t work," says Goldberg, a professor at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine in Manhasset, N.Y. "But when you compared them head to head, you find that the cognitive markers are the most robust."
That means that the thinking tests can also be used for guides in designing therapies. In fact, Goldberg says, they may ultimately be more useful that the biological tests. "What you want to change is how people do in everyday life," he says.
The trick is to diagnose mild cognitive impairment, a stage between normal forgetfulness and serious cognitive problems. It sometimes leads to Alzheimer’s, but can be caused by other diseases, too. People with MCI can be more forgetful, have trouble multitasking, and take longer to remember or decide. This study looked at 116 people with MCI who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in two years, 204 people with MCI who didn’t get Alzheimer’s and 197 healthy people as controls.
The study used information from the Alzheimer’s Disease NeuroImaging Initiative, which is looking for ways to identify risk factors for Alzheimer’s, and techniques for early diagnosis.
The goal would then be to create treatments that could profoundly slow or even halt the disease’s process. No such treatments exist now. Earlier this year, the National Institute on Aging redefined Alzheimer’s, broadening the definition and including the fact that biomarkers can be used for early detection. But since there is no treatment that slows or halts the disease, those biomarker tests don’t help patients or families manage the disease.
via Memory Quizzes Still Best For Alzheimer's Diagnosis : Shots – Health News : NPR.
In the gymnasium of a South London technical school, site of this year’s World Memory Championships, Norwegian Ola Kaere Risa checks his stopwatch.
Risa is Norway’s only contestant this year.
"I hope to defend the glory of my country," he says, laughing.
The 21st World Memory Championships are under way in London this weekend. About 75 competitors from some two dozen countries are vying to see who can memorize the most numbers, faces, playing cards or random words in a set amount of time.
Related NPR Stories
A brain made from colored gears appears inside a gray human head.
Shots – Health Blog
Middle-Aged Brains Are Already Past Their Prime
PET scans of the brains of a person with normal memory ability and someone diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
Shots – Health Blog
Memory Quizzes Still Best For Alzheimer’s Diagnosis
Research shows that under certain circumstances, we can train ourselves to forget details about particular memories.
Shots – Health Blog
Can We Learn To Forget Our Memories?
Walking shoes
Fitness & Nutrition
Stand Up, Walk Around, Even Just For ’20 Minutes’
Dong Xun, 10, is a competitor from China. His best event? Abstract images.
"I want to remember 250 this time," he says.
Yudi Lesmana’s best trick? The competitor from Indonesia says he can memorize about 25 decks of cards an hour.
These mental athletes are boosting their brain power while most of us are outsourcing ours into the nearest memory chip.
Nelson Dellis, the U.S. memory champion, says that in practice, he can memorize a deck of cards in about 32 seconds.
Dellis is ranked 24th in the world. His grandmother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease prompted him to work on his own terrible memory, he says.
Now, he helps companies and individuals do the same.
"Because people realize that they’re not using their brains as much," says Dellis. "They notice that they don’t remember numbers or addresses because they’re always typing them into their smartphones, you know?"
At the opening ceremony of the championships, the chief statistician of the event — Phil Chambers — receives a wild round of applause, perhaps one of the few places on the planet where this happens.
"You are warriors of the mind," competition co-founder Tony Buzan tells the crowd. Buzan — an expert on the brain and the thinking process, and inventor of mind mapping — says many of the strongest competitor nations have long traditions of memory work.
"China — 10,000 years ago, they started to develop systems that helped children remember. In Japan: the same. The Indian, the Arabic nations: extraordinary memory systems," he says.
Across the hall, officials — their title is "arbiter" — shuffle decks of cards and double-check columns of words and numbers.
Co-founder and chess grandmaster Raymond Keene says few here are human calculators or prodigies born with photographic memories.
"Everybody has their own way of creating the ability to memorize the facts they want to memorize," he says. "So they aren’t machines — most of them, some of them are dyslexic, and they fought against that to get where they are."
Just ordinary people, he says, who have trained their brains to do extraordinary things.
Share
23Comment
Beginning next year, young women in France between the ages of 15 and 18 will have access to birth control free of charge, and without parental notification. The French government says the new measure is intended to reduce pregnancies in this age group that result from a mixture of ignorance, taboo and lack of access to contraception.
One place where information is available on birth control, abortion and sexual abuse is a family planning clinic in a gritty neighborhood in the east of Paris.
On a recent day, a counselor talks with a handful of teenage girls in a sitting room. Clinic director Isabelle Louis says the young women who come to the clinic aren’t necessarily poor; she says many hail from well-off families and live on the other side of Paris.
“It’s not very easy for young women to go to see her family doctor and ask for contraception,” Louis says. “A lot of them are afraid the doctor would tell the parents she came.”
Starting in January, a law will protect these girls’ anonymity at their family doctor’s office, and the state will pick up the cost of the consultation and contraception. Under current rules, teenagers wanting absolute anonymity with a doctor have to pay for the visit in cash without submitting a claim to get the money back. And birth control is only partially reimbursed by the French state. Only clinics like this one are free.
via In France, Free Birth Control For Girls At Age 15 : NPR.