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U.S. Punishment of the Poor

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:42:40 GMT

clipped by: chestnut501
clipper's remarks: By a Social Worker who knows

A weary social worker writes:

Our local social services department actually hired fraud investigators at the same time that it was laying off child protective workers demonstrating conclusively where our values lie and how genuinely mean spirited we are as a people.

As the resources have become more limited, the level of scrutiny and inhumanity has risen accordingly.

For nearly 30 years we have done our best to dismantle the safety net for the poor and struggling among us.

I want so badly for us as a nation to stop punishing people for being poor, or elderly or a child of poor people.

As I contemplate how to pry a few dollars from these systems designed to humiliate and degrade my clients, already struggling with being social outcasts, chronic illness, drug addiction and mental illness I sigh audibly. I read of billion dollar bailouts and disappearing pallettes of cash as I ponder how to help a family with $400.00 so they will not be homeless in three days. I am so very tired.

Science Behind Mysterious 'Fifth Taste' Revealed

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:38:33 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: In the late 19th century, French chef and veal-stock inventor Auguste Escoffier suggested that a fifth taste was responsible for his mouth-watering brew. Though Escoffier's dishes were popular, his theories were dismissed until 1908, when Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda showed that an amino acid called glutamate underlies the taste of a hearty variety of seaweed soup.

In honor of Ikeda, the taste was dubbed umami, the Japanese word for delicious. It took another 80 years for umami to be recognized by science as comparable to the other four tastes.

In the meantime, monosodium glutamate became wildly popular as a flavor enhancer. But MSG can cause headaches and dizziness, and has been tenuously linked to long-term neurological disorders. Between the public dissatisfaction with MSG and growing demand for artificial meats and dairy products, an umami alternative is welcome.

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

It's appetizing news for anyone who's ever wanted the savory taste of meats and cheeses without actually having to eat them: chemists have identified molecular mechanisms underlying the sensation of umami, also known as the fifth taste.

The much-loved but historically unappreciated taste is produced by two interacting sets of molecules, each of which is needed to trigger cellular receptors on a tongue's surface.

"This opens the door to designing better, more potent and more selective umami enhancers," said Xiaodong Li, a chemist at San Diego-based food-additive company Senomyx. Li co-authored the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Four other basic tastes — bitter, sweet, salty and sour — were identified 2,400 years ago by the Greek philosopher Democritus, and became central to the western gastronomic canon.

Tags: gastronomy, tastes

See The Result of a Nuclear Blast Centered at an Address of Your Choice

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:32:01 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: This Google Maps Mashup, can be a fun game for the holidays...

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

Nuclear weapons are often measured in kilotons, but that doesn't really tell the story of a weapon's destructive power.

Now, a new Google Maps mashup called Ground Zero lets you see the radius of thermal damage caused by a nuclear weapons blast centered at the address of your choice.

In the screenshot at the right, we can see that an American-made B61 bomb hitting Wired HQ would knock out most of San Francisco.

The visualization tool comes courtesy of Carlos Labs, an Australian coding firm. It appears that they used the same (or similar) data as the Federation of American Scientists.

most buildings within the inner circle will be "completely destroyed." The next circle will be fire-filled, and the outer regions would experience major damage from the blast shockwave

If you want to understand what these colored circles mean, head over to the Department of Energy's Historical Test Films page and take a look at some of the footage of the American military's nuclear weapons tests

Tags: google maps, neclear weapons, visualization

Chem Major Arrested For Having... A Chemistry Lab

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 17:42:03 GMT

clipped by: BartendingBear
clipper's remarks: I wonder what they'd say about Edison.

Clip Source: io9.com

A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab - and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism.

Lewis Casey, an 18-year-old in Saskatchewan, had built a small chemistry lab in his family's garage near the university where he studies. Then two weeks ago, police arrived at his home with a search warrant and based on a quick survey of his lab determined that it was a meth lab. They pulled Casey out of the shower to interrogate him, and then arrested him.

A few days later, police admitted that Casey's chemistry lab wasn't a meth lab - but they kept him in jail, claiming that he had some of the materials necessary to produce explosives. Friends and neighbors wrote dozens of letters to the court, testifying that Casey was innocent and merely a student who is really enthusiastic about chemistry.

This is a stark example of how scientific curiosity is still regarded with suspicion

"We have no words left"

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:53:30 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: <<<In Europe and the Middle East, the gap between leaders and led could not be greater when it comes to Israel. Official complicity and support for Israel contrast with popular outrage at war crimes carried out against occupied people and refugees with impunity.

With governments and international institutions failing to do their jobs, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee - representing hundreds of organisations - has renewed its call on international civil society to intensify its support for the sanctions campaign modelled on the successful anti-apartheid movement.

Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term effort to make sure we do not wake up to "another Gaza" ever again.>>>

• Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

"I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those chilling words were spoken on al-Jazeera on Saturday by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defence official in the Sderot area adjacent to the Gaza Strip. For days Israeli planes have bombed Gaza. Almost 300 Palestinians have been killed and a thousand injured, the majority civilians, including women and children. Israel claims most of the dead were Hamas "terrorists". In fact, the targets were police stations in dense residential areas, and the dead included many police officers and other civilians. Under international law, police officers are civilians, and targeting them is no less a war crime than aiming at other civilians.

Palestinians are at a loss to describe this new catastrophe. Is it our 9/11, or is it a taste of the "bigger shoah" Matan Vilnai, the deputy defence minister, threatened in February, after the last round of mass killings?

Tags: gaza, israel, one state solution, internationalism

The Chaos Inside a Cancer Cell

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 18:09:23 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: One of the rearrangements disrupts a gene called RAD51C which is involved in mending serious chromosome breaks, those in which both strands in the DNA are disrupted. The impairment of double strand break repair could be a major cause of all the other rearrangements, the researchers suggest.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

A striking feature of many cancer cells is that the DNA in their chromosomes is all jumbled up. Chunks of DNA containing one or more genes have been ripped out of their chromosome and reinserted in a different place. Other lengths of DNA have been transferred to a different chromosome altogether.

These rearrangements may degrade the cell's regulatory systems, especially when a rearrangement cuts a gene in half, or separates it from the regions of DNA that control its activity.

Researchers led by Oliver A. Hampton and Aleksandar Milosavljevic at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston have now compared the genome of a type of breast cancer cell with that of normal cells. They find 157 rearrangements, they report in the current issue of Genome Research.

The graphic summarizes their results.

The lines in blue, in the third ring, show internal rearrangements

The red lines, in the bull's eye, designate switches of DNA from one chromosome to another

Tags: genetics, dna, cancer