BRKFST-300 -LUNCH-450- TFFN-250- DNNR-600= TOTAL 1600 CAL
PLUS WALK TO WGH X 2/DAY
TOP UP HNGR WTH TOAST
//////////////////Lose weight on red wine diet
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Published: 12:01AM GMT 17 Nov 2006
Video: Mice on a treadmill
A substance found in red wine could double endurance as well as cut weight and reduce the risk of diabetes, according to a new study.
High levels of the substance - called resveratrol - could help shed weight and boost tolerance for exercise because it activates a “longevity gene”, according to a study published in the journal Cell by Sirtris Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Prof Johan Auwerx at the University Louis Pasteur.
//////////////////Gum problems lead to stroke in men,
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Not sure I understand this argument. Abortion was legalized as per
indian civil law in 1972, and was not specific to any community.
It was Macaulay who was mainly responsible for the 1837 draft on
abortion in the indian penal code. it imposed prison terms and fines
for abortionists and this was struck down in the 1972 legislation.
///////////////////NUKE=ighly radioactive rubble and dust thrown up by the explosion would rain down on the surroundings, emitting lethal gamma rays. The wind could carry deadly levels of fallout several kilometres in just a few minutes - too fast for anyone to outrun it. People attempting to drive out of danger on clogged roads would fare little better, as cars offer scant protection from gamma rays.
For many people, the safest option would be to seek shelter in buildings or underground. Just staying inside could slash the immediate death toll from radiation by up to a factor of 100, or even 1000, Mettler says. However, people must be told this in advance. "Without prior education, it would be a horrible issue," he says.
//////////////////////Monkeys have a memory for grammar
00:01 08 July 2009 by Catherine Brahic
For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide
Primates can intuitively recognise some rules of grammar, according to a study of cotton-topped tamarin monkeys (Saguinus oedipus).
The findings do not mean primates can communicate using language, but they do suggest that some of the skills required to use language may be linked to very basic memory functions.
One grammatical structure that i
NS=
/////////////////Murder and suicides climb during recessions
00:01 08 July 2009 by Paul Marks
For similar stories, visit the Death Topic Guide
In the Great Depression, many a destitute worker contemplated suicide, so what effect is the current recession likely to be having on death rates?
To find out, David Stuckler at the University of Oxford and colleagues took mortality data on 26 European Union countries from 1970 to 2007. They correlated it with data on employment levels, GDP and social security expenditure.
For every 1 per cent increase in unemployment, both suicides and homicides rose by 0.8 per cent. When employment fell by 3 per cent or more in one go, suicides leapt by 4.4 per cent and homicides by 6.0 per cent.
/////////////////////Robot rescue 'rat' feels its way through rubble
12:36 02 July 2009 by Sandrine Ceurstemont
For similar stories, visit the Robots Topic Guide
Video: See the "rat" robot feel its way around
A new robot with artificial whiskers could one day be used to locate survivors of natural disasters, or people trapped in burning buildings.
Developed by a team led by Tony Prescott from the University of Sheffield and Anthony Pipe from the University of Bristol, both in the UK, SCRATCHbot mimics the way a rat senses its environment.
/////////////////////NS=Dawn of the animals: Solving Darwin's dilemma
08 July 2009 by Douglas Fox and Michael Le Page
Magazine issue 2716. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
Read full articleContinue reading page |1 |2 |3
WHEN Darwin unveiled his theory of evolution, the earliest known fossils lay in rocks belonging to what Darwin called the Silurian age. Older rocks seemed devoid of fossils. The apparently sudden appearance of sophisticated animals such as trilobites did not fit in with Darwin's idea of gradual evolution.
"If my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited... the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer," Darwin wrote in the first edition of On the Origin of Species. His conundrum is known as Darwin's dilemma.
Of course, we have since discovered innumerable fossils from far earlier periods. Rocks as old as 3.8 billion years contain signs of life, and the first recognisable bacteria appear in rocks 3.5 billion years old. Multicellular plants in the form of red and green algae appear around a billion years ago, followed by the first multicellular animals about 575 million years ago, during the Ediacaran (see "The rise of animals").
Even so, many perplexing questions remain. Why did animals evolve so late in the day? And why did the ancestors of modern animals apparently evolve in a geological blink of an eye during the early Cambrian between about 542 and 520 million years ago? A series of recent discoveries could help explain these long-standing mysteries. These findings suggest that the first animals evolved far earlier than we thought, perhaps more than 850 million years ago. The really extraordinary part, though, is that these early animals may have completely transformed the planet, paving the way for the larger and more complex animals that followed them.
Some of the biggest finds have come from an ancient seabed in China, called the Doushantuo Formation, where unusual conditions preserved some extraordinary fossils. Layers between 550 and 580 million years old, during the last part of the Ediacaran, contain tiny spheres consisting of anything from one to dozens of different cells - just like the early embryos of animals. Some have suggested they are the remains of giant bacteria, but a series of studies over the past decade have left little doubt that they really are animal embryos.
In 2007, for instance, Leiming Yin of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China reported finding embryos encased inside hard, spiky shells - unlike anything produced by bacteria. What is more, shells that are identical apart from the lack of preserved embryos on the inside can be found in rocks as old as 632 million years - the dawn of the Ediacaran - suggesting that the animal embryos themselves go back this far.
Other, more tentative findings push the dawn of animals back even further. Roger Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleague Gordon Love analysed brownish, oily sandstone cores drilled from as deep as 4 kilometres below the desert of Oman. The oil is what's left of dead organisms that drifted down to the depths of ancient oceans, where they decayed slowly due to the lack of oxygen. No visible fossils remain, but within that oil are molecular fossils - chemicals derived from the ancient organisms. In layers between 635 and 713 million years old, Summons and Love found 24-isopropylcholestane (24-IPC), a stable form of a kind of cholesterol nowadays found only in the cell membranes of certain sponges. "The biomass of sponges must have been pretty substantial," says Love, now at the University of California, Riverside. "They were ecologically prominent."
Another recent discovery places the first animals even earlier. In 850-million-year-old rocks in the MacKenzie Mountains of Canada, researchers were exploring the remains of a massive reef of stromatolites built by cyanobacteria. Among the stromatolites, they found peculiar netted patterns of grey calcium carbonate interspersed with petrified mud. Team member Elizabeth Turner, a palaeontologist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, recognised the patterns as a characteristic of a collagen mesh - something only animals build (Geology, vol 37, p 475).
As some dead sponges decay, the scaffold of collagen protein that holds their cells together is replaced by specific calcium carbonate minerals. Meanwhile, mud fills the spaces in between. These characteristic patterns occur during the last 500 million years, and have even been produced from dead sponges in the lab.
What Turner found looks very primitive. "It's even simpler than a sponge," she says. "This may represent the basal metazoan," she says, "the simplest form of animal life, in which a few different types of cells were living together in a shared, collagenous matrix."
These findings fit in well with the molecular evidence. By comparing the genomes of different living organisms, biologists can get an idea not only of what their common ancestor was like but also when it lived. Such studies suggest that the first animals were sponges, or something very like them.
///////////////////FRST ANML 850 MYA
/////////////////What can DNA tell us? Place your bets now
08 July 2009 by Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake
Magazine issue 2716. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
For similar stories, visit the Essays and Genetics Topic Guides
Read full articleContinue reading page |1 |2
From Newton to Hawking, scientists love wagers. Now Lewis Wolpert has bet Rupert Sheldrake a case of fine port that: "By 1 May 2029, given the genome of a fertilised egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities." If the outcome isn't obvious, then the Royal Society will be asked to adjudicate. Watch this space...
Competition: Challenge New Scientist to a scientific wager
Lewis Wolpert
I HAVE entered into this wager with Rupert Sheldrake because of my interest in the details of how embryos develop, and how our understanding of this process will progress. In my latest book, How We Live and Why We Die, I suggest that it will one day be possible to predict from an embryo's genome how it will develop, and I believe it is possible for this to happen in the next 20 years.
I am, in fact, being a little over-keen because 40 years is a more likely time frame for such a breakthrough. Cells and embryos are extremely complicated: for their size, embryonic cells are the most complex structures in the universe.
Animals develop from a single cell, a fertilised egg, which divides to produce cells that will form the embryo. How that egg develops into an embryo and newborn animal is controlled by genes in the chromosomes. These genes are passive: they do nothing, just provide the code for proteins. It is proteins that determine how cells behave. While the DNA in every cell contains the code for all the proteins in all the cells, it is the particular proteins produced in particular cells that determine how those cells behave.
Every cell of the embryo contains many copies of several thousand different proteins. These proteins have a plethora of functions: acting as enzymes to break down and build other molecules, providing structures for the cell, interacting with each other, and many more. The complexity of the interactions between millions of molecules is amazing.
As the proteins determine how the cells behave, it is their activity that causes the embryo to develop. Underlying this process, though, are the genes, as they control which proteins are made - including some proteins that activate specific genes. It is essential that there is this control over which cells continue to divide, and of mechanisms to pattern the embryo so that different cells develop into different structures, such as the brain or limbs.
There is a huge incentive to understand these processes and so be able to work out the development of an embryo given only its genome. This ability could pave the way for regenerative medicine by allowing scientists to program stem cells to become structures that could replace damaged parts of the body.
To win the bet, we will have to be able to predict the behaviour of almost all the cells in the embryo. In a small worm, say the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, there are 959 cells, making it the ideal model to solve this problem. It is a major challenge, but advances in cell biology, systems biology and computing will take us there.
One of the nematode worms, with just 959 cells, is the ideal model to solve this problem
Rupert Sheldrake
LEWIS WOLPERT's faith in the predictive power of the genome is misplaced. Genes enable organisms to make proteins, but do not contain programs or blueprints, or explain the development of embryos.
The problems begin with proteins. Genes code for the linear sequences of amino acids in proteins, which then fold up into complex three-dimensional forms. Wolpert's wager presupposes that the folding of proteins can be computed from first principles, given the sequence of amino acids specified by the genes. So far, this has proved impossible. As in all bottom-up calculations, there is a combinatorial explosion. For example, by random folding, the amino-acid chain of the enzyme ribonuclease, a small protein, could adopt more than 1040 different shapes, which would take billions of years to explore. In fact, it folds into its habitual form in 2 minutes.
Even if we could solve protein-folding, the next stage would be to predict the structure of cells on the basis of the interactions of millions of proteins and other molecules. This would unleash a far worse combinatorial explosion, with more possible arrangements than all the atoms in the universe.
Random molecular permutations simply cannot explain how organisms work. Instead, cells, tissues and organs develop in a modular manner, shaped by morphogenetic fields, first recognised by developmental biologists in the 1920s. Wolpert himself acknowledges the importance of such fields. Among biologists, he is best known for "positional information", by which cells "know" where they are within the field of a developing organ, such as a limb. But he believes morphogenetic fields can be reduced to standard chemistry and physics. I disagree. I believe these fields have organising abilities, or systems properties, that involve new scientific principles.
//////////////////WHO Says Tamiflu-Resistant H1N1 "an Isolated Case"
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GENEVA (Reuters) Jun 30 - The first H1N1 infection found to be resistant to the antiviral Tamiflu represents an "isolated case" with "no public health implication" at this time, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday.
The United Nations agency has declared a global pandemic is underway from the virus known as swine flu, which has so far been treatable with Roche's Tamiflu (oseltamivir).
WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said that the discovery of a patient in Denmark whose infection did not respond to the drug, revealed by the Swiss drug company and Danish officials on Monday, did not amplify the severity of the virus.
"This is an isolated case. At this time, there is no public health implication. But we must remain alert as the virus can change at any time and we must not be complacent," he told Reuters. Officials say the patient is now well and no further contagion with the resistant virus was detected.
//////////////"Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself."
—Cicero
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