Flu: "super-antibody" discovered that could prevent pandemic

Researchers have discovered an antibody that is effective against all strains of flu. This is a potentially huge discovery in the race between flu evolution and human technology.

Can people become immune from flu?

Will we be able to prevent the next pandemic?



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Here's a link to just one article:

Flu vaccine based on 'super-antibody' could prevent all pandemic strains
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/28/flu-vaccine-super-antibody-pandemic

Warren Buffett asks for more taxes on himself

It's unbelievable that Americans keep electing politicians who would rather condemn us to unpayable medical debt, increasingly mediocre schools and expensive universities, and crumbling infrastructure than ask the wealthiest to pay additional taxes they wouldn't even notice.

Even when we actually have a regressive tax system where the middle class pay a higher percentage that the wealthiest. Warren Buffett paid 17.4% of his taxable income in Federal taxes. The average in his office of 20 was 36%.

Thanks again to him for being so level-headed.

Aside from basic fairness, he also debates the argument that capital gains taxes inhibit investment.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html

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Stop Coddling the Super-Rich
By WARREN E. BUFFETT
Published: August 14, 2011

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon yet deployed.

Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon yet deployed

How do outsiders stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Sanctions? Bombing? Support street protestors? Actually: computer worms.

We're still having to rethink the art of war in the information age.

Read more about Stuxnet on wikipedia.

The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes.

Unlike most malware, Stuxnet does little harm to computers and networks that do not meet specific configuration requirements. Symantec noted in August 2010 that 60% of the infected computers worldwide were in Iran.

The attacks seem designed to force a change in the centrifuge’s rotor speed, first raising the speed and then lowering it, likely with the intention of inducing excessive vibrations or distortions that would destroy the centrifuge. If its goal was to quickly destroy all the centrifuges in the FEP, Stuxnet failed. But if the goal was to destroy a more limited number of centrifuges and set back Iran’s progress in operating the FEP, while making detection difficult, it may have succeeded, at least temporarily.

On 23 November 2010 it was announced that uranium production at Natanz had ceased several times because of a series of major technical problems. A "serious nuclear accident" occurred at the site in the first half of 2009.

Symantec estimates that the group developing Stuxnet would have consisted of five to ten people and as many as 30, and would have taken six months to prepare.

Human intelligence vs. other animals

One measure of relative intelligence between animals.

The encephalization quotient or EQ) is a rough estimate of the possible intelligence of an organism. It can be defined as the ratio of the actual brain weight to the expected brain weight of a typical animal that size, EQ=w(brain)/Ew(brain).

Of course this measure keeps humans on top.
But interesting how much closer bottlenose dolphins are to humans than chimps...


wikipedia

Bicycle City

In the Southern U.S., instead of building another golf cart development, why not a bicycle city?



A nice sign of progress: toward appropriate technology.

Charleston City Paper

Bicycle City

Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much

Starting to quantify the benefits of friendly touches, researchers looked at NBA basketball teams.



"If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”"

The touchiest player was Kevin Garnett.



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Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much
By BENEDICT CAREY
February 23, 2010



Psychologists have long studied the grunts and winks of nonverbal communication, the vocal tones and facial expressions that carry emotion. A warm tone of voice, a hostile stare — both have the same meaning in Terre Haute or Timbuktu, and are among dozens of signals that form a universal human vocabulary.

But in recent years some researchers have begun to focus on a different, often more subtle kind of wordless communication: physical contact. Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.

“It is the first language we learn,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009), and remains, he said, “our richest means of emotional expression” throughout life.

The evidence that such messages can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. Research by Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute in Miami has found that a massage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depression and strengthen a relationship.

In a series of experiments led by Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana, volunteers tried to communicate a list of emotions by touching a blindfolded stranger. The participants were able to communicate eight distinct emotions, from gratitude to disgust to love, some with about 70 percent accuracy.

“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined.”

To see whether a rich vocabulary of supportive touch is in fact related to performance, scientists at Berkeley recently analyzed interactions in one of the most physically expressive arenas on earth: professional basketball. Michael W. Kraus led a research team that coded every bump, hug and high five in a single game played by each team in the National Basketball Association early last season.

In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.

The same was true, more or less, for players. The touchiest player was Kevin Garnett, the Celtics’ star big man, followed by star forwards Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors and Carlos Boozer of the Utah Jazz. “Within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw, Garnett has reached out and touched four guys,” Dr. Keltner said.

To correct for the possibility that the better teams touch more often simply because they are winning, the researchers rated performance based not on points or victories but on a sophisticated measure of how efficiently players and teams managed the ball — their ratio of assists to giveaways, for example. And even after the high expectations surrounding the more talented teams were taken into account, the correlation persisted. Players who made contact with teammates most consistently and longest tended to rate highest on measures of performance, and the teams with those players seemed to get the most out of their talent.

The study fell short of showing that touch caused the better performance, Dr. Kraus acknowledged. “We still have to test this in a controlled lab environment,” he said.

If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”

“We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”

The same is certainly true of partnerships, and especially the romantic kind, psychologists say. In a recent experiment, researchers led by Christopher Oveis of Harvard conducted five-minute interviews with 69 couples, prompting each pair to discuss difficult periods in their relationship.

The investigators scored the frequency and length of touching that each couple, seated side by side, engaged in. In an interview, Dr. Oveis said that the results were preliminary.

“But it looks so far like the couples who touch more are reporting more satisfaction in the relationship,” he said.

Again, it’s not clear which came first, the touching or the satisfaction. But in romantic relationships, one has been known to lead to the other. Or at least, so the anecdotal evidence suggests.

Requests to the Right Ear Are More Successful Than to the Left

This adds new depth to the idea of a "right hand man."


"Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear.... some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively."


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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/earcigarette/#ixzz0fclY4yXS

You’re in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, “Hai una sigaretta?”

If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.

“The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior,” write psychologists Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the University G. d’Annunzio in Italy in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

It’s the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out.

What’s surprising about the study is that ear choice had such a decided impact on the behavior of participants in a natural, or as the researchers put it, ecological, setting. Why would people feel more generous when their right ears are addressed?

Marzoli and Tommasi write that some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively. Talk into the right ear and you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain.

“These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized differential specialization of right and left hemispheres,” they write.

In addition to the direct cigarette-ask study, they also simply observed people interacting and also asked for cigarettes without directing their requests towards a particular ear. The Italian researchers picked the night club setting because the loud music allowed the cigarette-asker to approach people and speak directly into one ear without seeming “odd.”

getting used to commercialism

the thousands of ads we sense each day are like flies on our faces that we've gotten used to.

Biochar - sequester carbon as charcoal fertilizer

With all the talk (and money) behind carbon capture and storage, the fact remains that storing carbon as coal is the safest bet. First: Leave It In The Ground.

But second: we can generate a kind of charcoal from biomass (which does not decay back into the air like rotting biomass). It is also a particularly rich soil amendment, especially because the surface area of the charcoal retains additional water and nutrients.

Although charcoal is the secret of the rich "loma prieta" soils cultivated by Amazonian natives, it is today being called "biochar" and it's a promising, elegant potential solution.

Farmers or cooperatives process biomass in high-heat, high-pressure, low-oxygen conditions, separating it into gas, liquid, and solid. The gas (methane and carbon monoxide) and liquid (hydrocarbons) are a superior energy source because they can be burned at a higher temperature than biomass. The solid layer is biochar that can be used to sequester carbon and improve soil quality.

We should be careful not to overload soils, but the opportunity to start increasing, rather than linearly decreasing soil depth, is exciting.

Maintaining rich soils is a hallmark of successful civilizations.


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http://www.biochar-international.org/


http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_TQPDNDDT

Military robots that eat bodies

Well, it takes no creativity to imagine this going bad...


http://www.robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/EATR
The purpose of the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR)™ (patent pending) project is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling, which would otherwise preclude the ability of the robot to perform such missions. The system obtains its energy by foraging – engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.