BS-Report.com

Lesley Stahl had an interesting segment Sunday on the growing coal ash problem in the world.   The EPA and the coal industry should be working to get this Toxic waste under control.  How can they say coal is a “Clean” energy resource when it does this?    LINK

Awesome retort to Kirk Cameron and Ray “the banana guy” Comfort video….

Dangerous staph bacteria have been found in sand and water for the first time at five public beaches along the coast of Washington, and scientists think the state is not the only one with this problem.

Article on Staph bacteria

Fill ‘Er Up With Human Fat – Forbes.com

How a Beverly Hills doctor powered his SUV using his patients’ spare tires.

Liposuctioning unwanted blubber out of pampered Los Angelenos may not seem like a dream job, but it has its perks. Free fuel is one of them.

For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigator.

Pretty ingenious if you ask me.

PM’s Complete Guide to Home Heating Systems – How Your Heat System Works – Popular Mechanics

How Your Heating System Works: A Primer

Cool article on house heating/cooling systems.

Hypertension Might Hinder Thinking – US News and World Report

Looks like another reason to keep your blood pressure in check.

First 3-D Images Inside Human Arteries | LiveScience

The walls that line human coronary arteries have been imaged for the first time in 3-D, a team of researchers says. Such images will allow cardiologists to see inside patients’ arteries more clearly and check for areas of inflammation or plaque deposits that can cause a heart attack.

New honeycomb tire is ‘bulletproof’ | Military Tech – CNET News

Resilient Technologies and Wisconsin-Madison’s Polymer Engineering Center are creating a “non-pneumatic tire” (no air required) that will support the weight of add-on armor, survive an IED attack, and still make a 50 mph getaway. It’s basically a round honeycomb wrapped with a thick, black tread.

Looks pretty cool. I want a set for my jeep.

Study finds obese kids have arteries like 45-year-olds – Los Angeles Times

“It’s possible that they will have heart disease in their 20s and 30s,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who led the study presented at a New Orleans meeting of the American Heart Assn.”There’s a saying that ‘you’re as old as your arteries,’ meaning that the state of your arteries is more important than your actual age in the evolution of heart disease and stroke,” she said. “We found that the state of the arteries of these children is more typical of a 45-year-old than of someone their own age.”

Just plain scary.

Otto the octopus wrecks havoc – Telegraph

A octopus has caused havoc in his aquarium by performing juggling tricks using his fellow occupants, smashing rocks against the glass and turning off the power by shortcircuiting a lamp.

Fructose In The Brain?. In the Pipeline:

You can observe this sort of thing in lab rats – if you infuse extra glucose into their brains, they stop eating, even under conditions when they otherwise would keep going. A few years ago, an odd result was found when this experiment was tried with fructose: instead of lowering food intake, infusing fructose into the central nervous system made the animals actually eat more. That’s not what you’d expect, since in the end, fructose ends up metabolized to the same thing as glucose does (pyruvate), and used to make ATP. So why the difference in feeding signals?

A paper in PNAS (open access PDF) from a team at Johns Hopkins and Ibaraki University in Japan now has a possible explanation. Glucose metabolism is very tightly regulated, as you’d expect for the main fuel source of virtually every living cell. But fructose is a different matter. It bypasses the rate-limiting step of the glucose pathway, and is metabolized much more quickly than glucose is. It appears that this fast (and comparatively unregulated) process actually uses up ATP in the hypothalamus – you’re basically revving up the enzyme machinery early in the pathway (ketohexokinase in particular) so much that you’re burning off the local ATP supply to run it.

There are a couple of weak points in the studies that are pointed out later in the article but there is definately points that should be looked into more thoroughly. I do try to avoid fructose in my diet and the easiest thing to avoid is beverages with lots of high-fructose corn syrup(almost all pop).

Copper door handles and taps kill 95% of superbugs in hospitals | Mail Online

During the ten-week trial on a medical ward, a set of taps, a lavatory seat and a push plate on an entrance door were replaced with copper versions. They were swabbed twice a day for bugs and the results compared with a traditional tap, lavatory seat and push plate elsewhere in the ward.

The copper items had up to 95 per cent fewer bugs on their surface whenever they were tested, a U.S. conference on antibiotics heard yesterday.

Looks like the price of copper is going to go up.

A Rise in Kidney Stones Is Seen in U.S. Children – NYTimes.com

“The older doctors would say in the ’70s and ’80s, they’d see a kid with a stone once every few months,” said Dr. Caleb P. Nelson, a urology instructor at Harvard Medical School who is co-director of the new kidney stone center at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Now we see kids once a week or less.”

The Stink in Farts Controls Blood Pressure | LiveScience

A smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.

United Kingdom: UFO files reveal attempt to shoot down UFO – Nachrichten English-News – WELT ONLINE

looks like the ufo crowd gets some good stuff to read..

Edge: WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.

Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers.

This is a pretty long read but lots of interesting observations of the minds of the democrats/republicans/conservatives/liberals.

AP: Airlines could save $10 billion a year with GPS – USATODAY.com

Currently, jetliners move in single-file lines along narrow highways in the sky marked by radio beacons. Many of the routes gently zigzag from one beacon to the next, sometimes forcing cross-country flights to follow sweeping arcs and waste hundreds of gallons of fuel.

Guess this is kind of a no brainer.  Get it installed.

Asteroid Exploded in Earth’s Atmosphere | LiveScience

Asteroid Exploded in Earth’s Atmosphere

Watching television and films ‘can make you mean’ – Telegraph

Maybe this is why Valow always has his panties in a bunch.

National Science Foundation give $100,000 to study World of Warcraft. Link

I guess all that time playing WoW could have made us some serious cash.