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To get desired groundspeeds and lighting conditions for the test images, researchers programmed the cameras to shoot while the spacecraft was flying about 1,547 miles or more above Mars’ surface, about nine times the range planned for the orbiter’s primary science mission. Even so, the highest resolution of about 8 feet per pixel – an object 8 feet in diameter would appear as a dot — is comparable to some of the best resolution previously achieved from Mars orbit. |
True to its nature, when the internet encounters a new would-be information shepherd, it simply builds a better cat.
THE UNIVERSITY of Toronto has worked out a way to help those trapped behind the blocking and filtering systems set up by restrictive governments.
The system is designed to disable the Great Firewall of China and prevent countries running repressive control over the net ever succeeding.
The software known as Psiphon overcomes one of the main problems of using anti-filter programs. If a user is found by authorities, they can discover everything that a user has been up too.
However Psiphon does not leave footprints on computers. It gives monitored computer users a way to send an encrypted request for information to a computer located in a secure country. When the computer finds the information it sends it back encrypted.
It enters users’ machines through computer port 443, which is designed to transport secure data for banking. If China wanted to close this avenue down, it would also have to shut off a lot of its foreign electronic banking operations.
The downside is that the user has to know someone in the safe country to help them set up a proxy and give them a username and password.
The program will be released at the international congress of the free-speech group PEN in May.
A few weeks ago, I was asked by someone privately about my “position” regarding Intelligent Design. It just so happens that at Outside The Beltway Steve Verdon helped to set up my answer with a post titled “Why Irreducible Complexity Isn�t Really A Big Deal”.
There are graphics;
In other words, I was writing that removing A, B, B’, C, or C’ renders the pathway non-functional. In short, I did not “miss the point”. However, I think it is fair to say that Joe has missed the point as he has left the main conclusion completely intact; that the evolution of IC systems is not impossible.
My position on the Intelligent Design vs Evolution debate?
I’ve concluded that it’s one of those realms of scientific debate where holding the wrong view is probably harnless. The rise and fall of species has marched along quite nicely on its own for a few millenia without our consensus. It will, in all probability, continue to do so.
However, the notion of arguing for and against either side reminds me of my fondness for singing along with Italian opera. Though I do it with some authority, I don’t actually know the words, much less what they mean … and neither does anyone else.
Though, if you ask them for their opinion, most will be convinced I’ve got it wrong.
The attention to animal cloning has been focused primarily on wealthy clients attempting to recreate a treasured pet, while overlooking the practical application most likely to attract horse, cattle and to a lesser extent, dog industry attention. From “Oozing With Type;
A project to clone elite showhorses reported its first success with a cloned foal of Pieraz, an Arab endurance champion.
Clones are banned from thoroughbred racing, but a French scientist has stored tissue from champion showhorse geldings (castrated horses) for the creation of breeding stock. Pieraz 2 is the second horse clone and the first produced for the creation of a breeding animal from a sterile one.
The first cloned horse, Prometea was announced in August, 2003, by Professor Cesare Galli, of the Laboratory of Reproductive Technologies in Cremona, Italy, who also works with a French company, Cryozootech.
”This new approach opens the possibility of preserving the genetic heritage of many exceptional horses whose genes are presently lost because of the castration,” said Dr. Galli. ”Prometea was just a scientific experiment and, scientifically, there’s not much new about the new clone.
”But from an industry viewpoint, the new horse is the real thing.”
Pieraz, an Arab horse, was the world champion of endurance races in 1994 and 1996 and is now retired in the United States in the stables of its owner, trainer and rider, Valerie Kanavy.
Endurance horse racing involves races of 50 miles or more across open country, with horses making regular ”pit stops” for food, water and veterinary inspection.
Pieraz’s foal — formally known as Pieraz-Cryozootech- Stallion — was born on Feb 25. It weighed 92 lb. and is in good health, like Prometea.
”Repeatability of the technique is now proven,” said Dr. Galli.
The cells of Pieraz used for the cloning work were provided by Cryozootech, a company founded in 2001 by Dr. Eric Palmer, a horse IVF pioneer. Dr. Palmer had been approached in 2002 by Ms. Kanavy, who was impressed by the idea that, in spite of having been castrated, her champion could transmit his qualities to future generations.
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In this era in which nanny-state politics endeavors to stifle their natural inclinations from the moment they take their first helmeted steps, we should pause a moment and say a prayer of thanks for the gift of the “risk takers”.
They are those children – boys, usually – who jump their bicycles from garage roofs, who taunt large dogs, who ride their motorcycles far too fast, who grow up to risk all and sometimes, to give all and in so doing contribute the tools and the techniques that save lives through innovative materials and technologies.
They become the race car drivers, the astronauts, the stunt pilots and their kind. By pushing the envelope for the envelope’s own sake, the risk takers discover the knowledge that trickles down to protect and improve our everyday lives.
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So Canadian scientists have found that giving kids Viagra is an effective treatment for puliminary hypertension. But giving Viagra to teenage males? Erf. All I’m saying is, don’t be surprised when sword fights (link: NSFW) start breaking out in high school parking lots.
A study that will resonate with more than one blogger.
Last night on CTV News, an item on DEET and other mosquito repellents included a recommendation by the reporter of a mixture of cis- and trans- p- menthane-3,8-diols for those didn’t like to put “chemicals” on their skin.
Did you know the 70’s era Pioneer 10 probe is speeding up and straying from the expected trajectory by 400,000 kilometres? Me, either
Via Kathy Kinsley.
Via Outside The Beltway, a NYT article on a study into the existance of evil.
In an effort to standardize what makes a crime particularly heinous, a group at New York University has been developing what it calls a depravity scale, which rates the horror of an act by the sum of its grim details. And a prominent personality expert at Columbia University has published a 22-level hierarchy of evil behavior, derived from detailed biographies of more than 500 violent criminals. He is now working on a book urging the profession not to shrink from thinking in terms of evil when appraising certain offenders, even if the E-word cannot be used as part of an official examination or diagnosis. “We are talking about people who commit breathtaking acts, who do so repeatedly, who know what they’re doing, and are doing it in peacetime” under no threat to themselves, said Dr. Michael Stone, the Columbia psychiatrist, who has examined several hundred killers at Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center in New Hampton, N.Y., and others at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, where he consults and teaches. “We know from experience who these people are, and how they behave,” and it is time, he said, to give their behavior “the proper appellation.”
Next up: Scientists review 16 different criteria by which to establish whether or not fish swim.
The caution against linking correlation with causation has been around for a long time. Unfortunately, it isn’t invoked as often as it should be.
For decades we’ve been encouraged by health officials and professionals to exercise regularly, to maintain cardiovascular health. Now, a study released at the University of Michigan involving rats indicates that there may be more involved than just working up the motivation to get off the couch.
Rats that were “born to run” not only outpaced their less-talented cousins but also were naturally less prone to heart disease, a finding that may help explain why exercise prevents heart death, researchers said on Thursday. The study may be bad news for people who hate to exercise, suggesting that not only laziness but also their genes may put them at higher risk of heart disease. “The reality of having a genetic determinant of our existence is that there are some people who are born with less ability to take up oxygen and transfer energy than others,” said Steven Britton of the University of Michigan. Britton and colleagues bred rats for 11 generations to be good or poor runners. Their high-capacity runners can exercise on a little rodent treadmill for 42 minutes on average before becoming exhausted, while the low-capacity runners average only 14 minutes. Colleagues in Norway examined the rats for heart health factors. “We found that rats with low aerobic capacity scored higher on risk factors linked to cardiovascular disease — including high blood pressure and vascular dysfunction,” said Ulrik Wisloff, a professor of exercise physiology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. “Rats with low aerobic capacity also had higher levels of blood fat disorders (such as high cholesterol), insulin resistance (a pre-diabetic condition) and more abdominal fat than high-capacity rats,” added Sonia Najjar, of the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. “Compared to high-capacity rats, the low-capacity rats had lower levels of oxidative enzymes and proteins used by mitochondria to generate energy in skeletal muscle,” Najjar said in a statement. Studies have shown that a poor ability to exercise aerobically — the kind that makes for heavy breathing — is a very strong predictor of heart disease, the researchers noted.
Another bit of “conventional wisdom” about health and wellness that may be due for reconsideration – especially in a day and age when governments are busy trying to effect behavior modification through legislation, under the guise of “reducing health care costs”.
Yesterday I had a brief meeting with the veterinary opthalmologist we’ve been working with in our ongoing research into retinal dysplasia in Miniature Schnauzers.
During our conversation, he mentioned his frustration with a decision by the Canine Eye Registry Foundation. CERF tracks the incidence of eye defects in breeds of dogs. Board certified veterinary opthalmologists use formal diagnostic forms that are designed to be read by computers and fed into the CERF database, which forms the basis for breed clubs and geneticists to track the prevalence of genetic eye disease.
Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
The researcher has been working on a specific type of retinal defect – retinopathy – in a handful of breeds. With several peer-reviewed published papers in the library, CERF concluded that the defect should be added to the form, so that data collection can begin.
However, for reasons unexplained, CERF decided to place retinopathy into the grouping of retinal dysplasias.
That’s problematic. Retinopathy is clinically and genetically distinct from retinal dysplasia. Placing it under an inappropriate category not only limits the ability to track this unique defect, it also corrupts the data on retinal dysplasia. It makes as much sense as lumping in statistics on schizophrenia with data on brain tumours.
Last night I was doing some surfing, and stumbled upon a discussion from Dean’s World from last month, titled HIV Skepticism, about the “sloppiness” of the research linking HIV to AIDS. It’s interesting reading, and even if you disagree with the premise (advanced in the book Inventing The AIDS Virus by Dr. Peter H. Duesberg), there are compelling arguments that conventional wisdom about “AIDS” may be as much politics and scientific group think, as it is scientific fact.
Dean Esmay has been interested in this for a few years;
Either Peter Duesberg was a monstrous liar or, by the mid-1990s at least, no one had ever demonstrated with any scientific rigor that HIV caused AIDS–and people had only come to believe it by a combination of well-meaning panic to stop a horrible disease, bureaucratic bumbling, pettypoliticking, and greed. No there was no conspiracy, but there was certainly a massive interlocking of government SNAFUs, scientists with huge conflicts of interest, a breakdown of the peer review process, and people in charge of that process who now had vested personal interests in maintaining the status quo.
Or: Duesberg was full of it. There really didn’t seem much alternative explanation. The man was too careful, too meticulous, and provided too much documentation. He had to be taken seriously, if only to prove him wrong.
Or so I thought.
Instead, there seemed a virtual press blackout on the book. Most of the reviews in the mainstream press were short, snotty, and condescending. It was clear that they weren’t interested in arguing with Duesberg, and when they didn’t sniff at him like rancid garbage they ridiculed him, and mocked anyone who wanted to take him seriously.
I began to feel like I was either wildly paranoid or this was a dizzyingly frightening look at just how the confluence of billions of dollars of government money, journalistic laziness and incompetence, and petty politicking had polluted medical science, science reporting, and public health policy.
In December, Dean contacted the author of a more recent book on Duesberg’s work – Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg, one George L. Gabor Miklos, PhD.
Quoting the review in Nature Biotechnology, itself, worth reading in its entirety;
Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS should be compulsory reading for those concerned with`what the U.S. (and other Western) governments are buying when they spend public money on cancer and`AIDS research. It should also be compulsory for pharmaceutical and biotech executives, since most of`their potential targets for solid tumors are irrelevant entities that continue to clog drug development`pipelines.
Finally, it should be read by anyone who is interested in the way scientific theories develop and are`shaped by historical circumstances.
Miklos had this to say, in personal correspondance with Dean;
Bottom line; Duesberg is correct on both counts…on the basis of DATA…not hysteria. Your readers can be as angry as they like, but they should save their anger until after they have evaluated`clinical DATA…and then they should direct their anger at their own medical profession.
The scientific data do not support the hypothesis that the HIV virus causes AIDS.
If you have Kaposi sarcoma and you have antibodies to the HIV virus, the CDC says you`have AIDS…by definition!
If you are diagnosed with Kaposi sarcoma and you don’t have antibodies to HIV, then you don’t have AIDS…you have Kaposi sarcoma!….go figure!
Tell me Dean, if you are diagnosed with blue ears and you have antibodies to the HIV virus, the CDC would say that you have AIDS….if you don’t have antibodies to the HIV virus you would have blue ear disease….what a joke. Your own CDC essentially defines any disease where you have antibodies to HIV in your system as AIDS. If you have malaria and and you have antibodies to the HIV virus, the CDC would you have AIDS…by definition! So AIDS equals malaria…this is clinically stupid.
You ought to ask your readers.”What is AIDS?”…DEFINE IT!
Does it all seem too far out in left field to merit a look? Is it possible that the entire scientific community is basing its assumptions – and research – on AIDS on sloppy research, unsupported by the data?
Before answering that, go back to the top of my post, and re-read the portion about how the world’s most authoritative body on canine eye disease is collecting data on retinopathy.
(HIV Skepticism at Deans World)
Via Wretchard this animated satellite’s eye view of the tsunami wavefront.
Today is the grand opening of the Canadian Light Source Synchrotron.
Where on Earth is Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,” Gerhard Herzberg asked his Jewish wife Luise after receiving a letter from John Spinks of the University of Saskatchewan.
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From small events great things come and it can be argued that the Canadian Light Source (CLS) — the largest scientific laboratory built in Canada in a generation and the jewel in the country’s innovation crown — grew out of the serendipitous meeting of these two men, cast together through a mutual love of scientific exploration and, in today’s climate, almost unimaginable hard times.
According to Gerhard Herzberg: An Illustrious Life in Science, written by Boris Stoicheff, the U of S was one of a handful of universities around the world willing and able to capitalize on Adolf Hitler’s decision to pass the Law for the Restoration of the Career Civil Service.
This law, which required public servants considered to be non-Aryans to leave their jobs, convinced a number of the world’s top physicists to look for opportunities abroad — including Albert Einstein, who resigned his position with the Prussian Academy of Science and took a position with Princeton University in the U.S.
Herzberg had been on the faculty at the University of Gottingen, which was renowned for its physics.
He found many students and faculty at the university accepted Hitler’s decrees and was shocked when the faculty of agriculture condemned James Franck, a Nobel Laureate who had won the first and second Iron Crosses in the First World War for bravery.
Franck went on to work on the Manhattan Project.
Although Herzberg was a German, and could prove it, his decision to remain with his wife meant he was considered a second-class citizen and was denied the right to teach German students.
In 1933, in the midst of the upheaval brought on by the Nazis, Herzberg received the letter from Spinks, a scientist in Saskatoon, asking for permission to work in the German scientist’s already world famous laboratory.
Within two years of the two scientists working together and becoming friends, Spinks was able to repay the Herzberg’s hospitality.
Great article by the Star Phoenix. It will open to public tours on the 30th.
(Previous post here.)
Um…. wrong.
That dog who gooses you may just save your life.
Researchers at the Hospital were inspired to train dogs for the cause as they believe that cancer cells release molecules into the urine that have a characteristic smell of the disease, it said.
One of the first cases to reach the medical literature reported a woman who had gone to the doctor after her dog started sniffing suspiciously around a skin sore. It turned out to be a malignant tumour, it said.
Trainers worked on the dogs for seven months and trained them to detect the unique odour signature of cancer, compared to those of infections, inflammation or blood, it said.
The trainers also coached the dogs to discriminate between the urine of cancer patients and those with other bladder conditions, it said.
After the training was over, the dogs were asked to choose between laboratory dishes of seven types of urine and lie down in front of the one from a cancer patient, it said.
When the trained dogs were put to the test, they were correct over 40 per cent of the time, says Willis.
“All your password are belong to us.”
| It was a pretty good guess that the Hubble Space Telescope would enrich our knowledge of the universe. But who predicted that it would bring us this much beauty?
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Translucent concrete |
Hat tip Jim Jeffers
