All UK Patients to be Barcoded by 2013
The Totalitarian Tiptoe to under-the-skin microchipping.
‘The barcodes, which will be read by handheld scanners, are to be issued to patients from October neaxt year under the orders of the Information Standards Board (ISB) for Health and Social Care.
By next April trusts have must plans on how they will implement the change-over. The ISB is imposing the rule to cut down on the number of avoidable errors like patients being given the wrong medication.
Studies show they can stop such administrative errors by 42 per cent, according to Franck Riout of Zebra Technologies, which makes barcoding systems for NHS trusts.’
Fuel Poverty in UK Forcing Many to Live a Life of Candlelight, Cold and Early Nights
Tuesday, 06 December 2011 10:04
‘Graham Smith, acting deputy head of the Extra Help Unit (EHU), where some of the most desperate cases of fuel hardship are referred, has had five or six cases in the past few months where older people have been convinced a neighbour must have tapped into their meter and be using their electricity because their bills have gone up so much.
“They’d stopped using their electricity altogether and were just using candles instead. They get fixated on it, sometimes it’s the early stages of dementia. I’ve had to refer a lot of people to social services,” he explains.
Many cases in recent weeks have revolved around people who are having their benefits reassessed too. “We’re seeing a lot of disability living allowance cases, where the benefits are being stopped and they are fighting it but are in limbo and have no money.’
Read more: Fuel Poverty in UK Forcing Many to Live a Life of Candlelight, Cold and Early Nights
NASA Has Just Discovered The Most Habitable Planet
NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the “habitable zone,” the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets.
The newly confirmed planet, Kepler-22b, is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets.
Previous research hinted at the existence of near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Two other small planets orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our sun recently were confirmed on the very edges of the habitable zone, with orbits more closely resembling those of Venus and Mars.
“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Kepler’s results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA’s science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.”
Kepler discovers planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that cross in front, or “transit,” the stars. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.
“Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet,” said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the team that discovered Kepler-22b. “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”
The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescopes and the Spitzer Space Telescope to review observations on planet candidates the spacecraft finds. The star field that Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be seen from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations help determine which candidates can be validated as planets.
Kepler-22b is located 600 light-years away. While the planet is larger than Earth, its orbit of 290 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our world. The planet’s host star belongs to the same class as our sun, called G-type, although it is slightly smaller and cooler.
Of the 54 habitable zone planet candidates reported in February 2011, Kepler-22b is the first to be confirmed. This milestone will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The Kepler team is hosting its inaugural science conference at Ames Dec. 5-9, announcing 1,094 new planet candidate discoveries. Since the last catalog was released in February, the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler has increased by 89 percent and now totals 2,326. Of these, 207 are approximately Earth-size, 680 are super Earth-size, 1,181 are Neptune-size, 203 are Jupiter-size and 55 are larger than Jupiter.
The findings, based on observations conducted May 2009 to September 2010, show a dramatic increase in the numbers of smaller-size planet candidates.
Kepler observed many large planets in small orbits early in its mission, which were reflected in the February data release. Having had more time to observe three transits of planets with longer orbital periods, the new data suggest that planets one to four times the size of Earth may be abundant in the galaxy.
The number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates has increased by more than 200 and 140 percent since February, respectively.
There are 48 planet candidates in their star’s habitable zone. While this is a decrease from the 54 reported in February, the Kepler team has applied a stricter definition of what constitutes a habitable zone in the new catalog, to account for the warming effect of atmospheres, which would move the zone away from the star, out to longer orbital periods.
“The tremendous growth in the number of Earth-size candidates tells us that we’re honing in on the planets Kepler was designed to detect: those that are not only Earth-size, but also are potentially habitable,” said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University in San Jose, Calif. “The more data we collect, the keener our eye for finding the smallest planets out at longer orbital periods.”
NASA’s Ames Research Center manages Kepler’s ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development.
Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA’s 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepscicon-briefing.html
Scientists Weaponize Deadly Bird Flu, Consider Releasing Results Necessary to Create Bioweapon
Tuesday, 22 November 2011 08:20
‘It sounds like something out of a bizarre science fiction comic book, but scientists have weaponized the H5N1 bird flu virus, and are actually considering releasing the research.
The experiments, which involved mutating the virus a total of 5 times, made the strain highly contagious between ferrets — the very animal model used to study human flu infection.
Of course many scientists are now warning that if such research was made public it could result in the construction of deadly bioweapons.’
Living cells say: Can you hear me now?
Image: NSF
It has long been known that cells release chemical signals in response to outside conditions, triggering reactions inside the cell.
But it turns out that such communication is a two-way street: New research shows that cells’ signaling mechanisms can tell whether their signals are being received, and then adjust the volume of their messages as needed.
Cells use these chemical signaling systems to control many basic functions. For example, signaling can control how genes are turned on and off in response to external or internal cues, how cells grow and organize their internal structures, and even how and when cells trigger their own death, a process known as apoptosis.
The new finding could lead to new ways of finely controlling cells’ output of signal molecules, which could be useful for everything from synthetic biology to slowing the spread of cancer cells.
Researchers led by MIT’s Domitilla Del Vecchio, a Keck Career Development Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering, first proposed three years ago that the signaling systems within cells might detect and respond to nearby receptors for their signals. Their new research now presents the first direct experimental evidence in support of this theory.
A paper on these results, which Del Vecchio and colleagues call “surprising” and “non-intuitive,” was published in October in the journal Science Signaling. In addition to Del Vecchio, the paper was co-authored by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Buenos Aires and Rutgers University.
Del Vecchio says the effect is similar to the way electrical or hydraulic systems interact with what is known as a load. For example, when you flush a toilet, the water pressure at a nearby faucet may drop because of the extra flow of water to refill the tank. Likewise, your lights may dim momentarily when a refrigerator motor kicks on, placing an extra burden on the household circuit.
Similarly, it turns out, when a cell is putting out signaling molecules in response to some variable stimulus, the time it takes to respond will change if there are “downstream targets” — that is, receptors within the cell that are receiving the signal. Because electrical and hydraulic systems are well understood, the comparison may help scientists figure out how to harness and apply the new knowledge about cell behavior.
These cell signaling systems are “building blocks used to transmit information from outside the cell, through the cell membrane, to the interior where processes occur to decide how the cell will react,” Del Vecchio says. This new finding, she says, gives scientists “another understanding of how real organisms parse the information coming from outside the membrane.”
This understanding might ultimately lead to new ways of controlling some disease processes. “A lot of recent papers talk about how cancer formation may be due to aberrant signaling,” Del Vecchio says. This finding may offer an example of a method that cells use to control which signals get transmitted and which ones don’t, which could help lead to new ways of deliberately manipulating these systems.
Del Vecchio says, “In principle, it gives us a way to tune the behavior of the system, which wasn’t known before. In addition, it gives us an idea of how we can build devices” to harness this mechanism.
Another possible application of such a system would be to engineer cells that can respond — perhaps by changing color — to certain disease-causing substances or toxins, thus producing very sensitive biologically based detectors.
“Signaling cascades are often portrayed as unidirectional,” says Stanislav Shvartsman, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton University who was not involved in this research. But, he adds, earlier work by Del Vecchio and colleagues “argued that this picture is far from truth, even in very simple cascades.” Now, in this new paper, he says they “provide a convincing proof of their earlier theory. The results of their beautifully designed and carefully executed experiments profoundly influence our understanding of signal transduction in cellular networks.”
David L. Chandler, MIT News Office
http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/cell-signaling-received-1117.html
Israel’s Plan to Destroy Iran’s Civilian Infrastructure
‘Israel plans not only to attack Iran’s fledgling nuclear program, but also its civilian infrastructure.
Eli Lake, writing for The Daily Beast, cites current and former U.S. intelligence officials who say Israel’s target list includes Iran’s electric grid, internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.
Officials say Israel has developed a weapon that simulates a maintenance cellphone signal commanding cell networks to “sleep” and stopping transmissions. It also has electronic jammers that can interrupt emergency frequencies for first responders and police.’
Read more: Israel’s Plan to Destroy Iran’s Civilian Infrastructure
EU Chief: The Time Has Come For a Federal Europe
‘A huge European superstate is the only solution to the economic crisis engulfing the continent, the President of the European Commission declared today.
Jose Manuel Barroso claimed the fate of the euro and European Union were intertwined and that the only answer to the growing threat of collapse was a massive Federal Europe.
As the crisis in Greece deepened Mr Barroso told the European Parliament: “We are confronted with the most serious challenge of a generation. “What we need now is a new, unifying impulse, a new federalist moment – let’s not be afraid to use the word.’
Monsanto Partners with USAID to Push GM Corn in Nepal
Sunday, 20 November 2011 08:24
‘The southeast Asian country of Nepal is once again having to fight against foreign interests that are trying to take over its agricultural system. Biotechnology giant Monsanto apparently has its sights set on bringing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) to this sliver of a country just north of India, and it is allegedly working with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a so-called humanitarian group, and officials in Nepal to make it happen.
USAID issued a statement on Sept. 13, 2011, saying that it had partnered with Nepal’s Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MoACs) and Monsanto to “promote hybrid maize (corn) seeds among 20,000 farmers of Chitwan, Nawalparasi and Kavre districts and provide training to them.” Media across Nepal quickly picked up on the story, and massive public outcry ensued.’
Read more: Monsanto Partners with USAID to Push GM Corn in Nepal
FDA Pulls Use of Breast Cancer Drug Avastin Because of Severe Side Effects
Sunday, 20 November 2011 08:55
‘The blockbuster drug Avastin should no longer be used in advanced breast cancer patients because of dangerous side effects.
The Food and Drug Administration declared Friday there is no proof that the drug extends the lives of advanced patients.
The ruling by the FDA was long expected, but it was certain to disappoint women who say they’ve run out of other options as their breast cancer spread through their bodies. Impassioned patients had lobbied furiously to preserve Avastin as a last shot.’
Read more: FDA Pulls Use of Breast Cancer Drug Avastin Because of Severe Side Effects
TSA Claims X-ray Scanners are Safe as Europe Bans Scanners for ‘Health, Safety’
Monday, 21 November 2011 09:32
‘The European Union has decided to ban all X-ray scanners from EU airports in order to protect the health and safety of EU citizens, yet the TSA still claims that the scanners are completely safe. The ban comes after the recent media outburst regarding the 1998 report that linked the X-ray scanners to cancer. The report found that the machines could be causing 100 cases of cancer per year conservatively.
It is quite clear that the TSA is clinging on to the X-ray scanners for dear life, while the EU is taking the appropriate steps in protecting the health of travelers. This is evidenced by how differently the two governing bodies responding to the X-ray scanner cancer issue.’
Read more: TSA Claims X-ray Scanners are Safe as Europe Bans Scanners for ‘Health, Safety’
Believe nothing 