OUR LOCAL GALAXY

Galactic Superbubbles around the Solar Neighborhood & our Local ChimneyThe first detailed map of space within about 1,000 light years of Earth places the solar system in the middle of a large hole that pierces the plane of the galaxy, perhaps left by an exploding star one or two million years ago.
The new map, produced by University of California, Berkeley, and French astronomers, alters the reigning view of the solar neighborhood. In that picture, the sun lies in the middle of a hot bubble - a region of million-degree hydrogen gas with 100-1,000 times fewer hydrogen atoms than the average gas density in the Milky Way - and is surrounded by a solid wall of colder, denser gas.
Instead, said astronomer Barry Welsh of UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, the region around the sun is an irregular cavity of low-density gas that has tunnels branching off through the surrounding dense gas wall. Welsh and his French colleagues suspect that the interconnecting cavities and tunnels, analogous to the holes in a sponge, were created by supernovas or very strong stellar winds that swept out large regions and, when they encountered one another, merged into passageways.



///////////////////ZL=Can Sharks Predict the Weather?
Posted: 25 Mar 2008 03:24 PM CDT
A student at Aberdeen University in the U.K. is engaged in a groundbreaking study to see if we might be able to monitor the behavior of sharks in order to predict the weather. When Hurricane Gabrielle arrived in Florida in 2001, shark researchers noticed that young black tipped sharks (who presumably had been tagged) moved to deeper depths as the storm approached.


//////////////HRT 'might ward off Alzheimer's'Hormone replacement therapy may protect post-menopausal women against Alzheimer's disease, research suggests.



//////////////////GOLODGHARMO KOL


/////////////////NIGHT SHIFT=Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps, police officers, security guards, truck drivers, office cleaning crews, hotel desk clerks, nurses, pilots and many others keep patients alive, streets safe and packages moving. But at a price.
These workers -- and people with more conventionally sleep-deprived lifestyles -- are known to be at higher risk for accidents, sleep disorders and psychological stress due to daytime demands, such as family and other obligations, that interfere with sleeping. Now scientific evidence suggests their disrupted circadian rhythms may also cause a kind of biological revolt, raising their likelihood of obesity, cancer, reproductive health problems, mental illness and gastrointestinal disorders.


////////////////////language brain=This study therefore provides some evidence that the organization of the arcuate fasciculus was strongly modified in the human lineage, and that this was one of the brain specializations that led to the emergence of language.
In the macaque, the brain regions analogous to Wernicke's area are involved in higher order processing of visual information. It seems, then, that when humans diverged from other primates during the course of evolution, another specialization necessary for language was the addition of new cortical fields such as Wernicke's area.


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