n2doc
n2doc's JournalThe Best Birth Control In The World Is For Men
Posted by Jon Clinkenbeard. March 26, 2012, 11:25 AM CDT
If I were going to describe the perfect contraceptive, it would go something like this: no babies, no latex, no daily pill to remember, no hormones to interfere with mood or sex drive, no negative health effects whatsoever, and 100 percent effectiveness. The funny thing is, something like that currently exists.
The procedure called RISUG in India (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance) takes about 15 minutes with a doctor, is effective after about three days, and lasts for 10 or more years. A doctor applies some local anesthetic, makes a small pinhole in the base of the scrotum, reaches in with a pair of very thin forceps, and pulls out the small white vas deferens tube. Then, the doctor injects the polymer gel (called Vasalgel here in the US), pushes the vas deferens back inside, repeats the process for the other vas deferens, puts a Band-Aid over the small hole, and the man is on his way. If this all sounds incredibly simple and inexpensive, that’s because it is. The chemicals themselves cost less than the syringe used to administer them. But the science of what happens next is the really fascinating part.
The two common chemicals — styrene maleic anhydride and dimethyl sulfoxide — form a polymer that thickens over the next 72 hours, much like a pliable epoxy, but the purpose of these chemicals isn’t to harden and block the vas deferens. Instead, the polymer lines the wall of the vas deferens and allows sperm to flow freely down the middle (this prevents any pressure buildup), and because of the polymer’s pattern of negative/positive polarization, the sperm are torn apart through the polyelectrolytic effect. On a molecular level, it’s what supervillains envision will happen when they stick the good guy between two huge magnets and flip the switch.
more
http://techcitement.com/culture/the-best-birth-control-in-the-world-is-for-men/
Your Guide to the Idiotic Racist Backlash Against Trayvon Martin
BY Max Read
For a minute there, it looked like Trayvon Martin might avoid the kind of horseshit thunderstorm that tends to accompany the shooting deaths of unarmed African-Americans. It seemed like everyone agreed that the police had fucked up. Fox News had only one segment on the killing in the weeks following. Not even white racists wanted to defend Martin's killer, George Zimmerman: when I wrote about the case last week, the worst response I got was from one particularly dedicated nutcase, who set up a Twitter account to harass me for not properly specifying that Zimmerman is Hispanic.
But the horseshit is raining down now, helped along by a desperate Sanford Police Department doing everything it can to make Martin look like he deserved to die, and by the champion point-missers of the internet right wing, who hardly need convincing that a 17-year-old black kid was up to no good.
You can see it in the incompetent and widely-circulated "investigations" into Martin's social media presence and in the sudden rise in concern among your Facebook friends over black-on-white crime. You can see it in the faux-naïve concern trolling of the National Review and Business Insider, or on the Drudge Report, where for the second day in a row notorious race hustler Matt Drudge is pimping headlines about "new details" and "multiple suspensions," accompanied by a photo of Martin, baby-faced, mugging for the camera, sparkling grill in his mouth. And you can see it outside the bodega on your way to the subway, on the front page of today's New York Post, which reads "TRAYVON HOODWINK: Tragedy hijacked by race hustlers."
The "race hustlers" in question are Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, favorite targets of the Post, which alights with glee on a Daily Caller interview with "former NAACP leader" C.L. Bryant in which the Rev. Bryant accuses Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson of "inflaming racial passions." Bryant, former "self-professed 'Democratic Radical,'" was once the head of the Garland, Texas chapter of the NAACP. His latest project is a documentary called Runaway Slave, "a movie about the race to free the Black community from the slavery of tyranny and progressive policies." If his charges sound familiar, it's because they're the same concerns brought to bear every time black people in this country make demands. The Post, knowing it can't smear Martin, yet, settles for Bryant's incoherent appeals to racial harmony.
more
http://gawker.com/5896490/your-guide-to-the-idiotic-racist-backlash-against-trayvon-martin
Baby Rabbits Band Together
by Sean Treacy on 23 March 2012, 3:06 PM
A pile of sleepy rabbit pups isn't just cute—it's good for rabbitkind. Newborn rabbits compete for their mother's milk, and successful pups grow stronger and are more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation. But sibling rivals will put aside their differences to protect each other from the cold, according to a study published this month in PLoS ONE. Using infrared cameras (right) and rooms that slowly cool from 23°C to 11°C, researchers found that when the temperature drops, less-than-5-day-old furless rabbit pups huddle to share heat. Such cooperation, like investors making a joint business venture, comes at a small private cost, as generating heat uses body fat that in turn uses up oxygen, and using too much oxygen can stunt a rabbit's growth. But by sharing heat, rabbits mutually ensure that their siblings don't have to use up too much energy to survive the cold, helping them all live on to contribute to future bunny generations.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/scienceshot-baby-rabbits-band-to.html
'Frothy Gunk' From Deepwater Horizon Spill Harming Corals
by Sid Perkins on 26 March 2012, 3:00 PM
The massive oil spill that inundated the Gulf of Mexico in the spring and summer of 2010 severely damaged deep-sea corals more than 11 kilometers from the well site, a sea-floor survey conducted within weeks of the spill reveals. Although 10 more distant sites examined during the survey did not show any ill effects, future studies will be needed to confirm that they did not suffer long-term detriment from any exposure to oil, scientists say.
Starting with an explosion onboard the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig on 20 April and continuing for 85 days, the worst oil spill in U.S. history released an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil -- about 20 times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989. Between 3 and 4 months after the well was capped, researchers used the deep submersible vehicle Alvin and the remotely-operated vehicle Jason II to revisit several sites along the continental shelf known to host corals, says Charles Fisher, a team member and deep-sea biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park.
The researchers also used previously collected sonar data to identify a possibly rocky patch of sea floor where corals could thrive about 11 kilometers southwest of the well site. At that 1370-meter-deep site, which hadn't been visited before but had been right in the path of a submerged 100-meter-thick oil plume from the spill, the researchers found a variety of corals—most of them belonging to a type of colonial coral commonly known as sea fans—on a 10-meter-by-12-meter outcrop of rock. Nearby, boulders poking up through the sediment hosted isolated colonies of coral. Many of the corals were partially or completely covered with a brown, fluffy substance that Fisher variously calls "frothy gunk," "goop," and "snot."
Samples of the material contained mucus secreted by the corals—a sign the colonies had recently been under stress—as well as fragments of dead coral polyps, saturated and unsaturated fatty acids commonly found in biological tissues such as cell membranes, and a mélange of petroleum residues. Although the chemicals related to petroleum—including long-chain hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and a group of compounds known as hopanoids—could have originated from other oil wells or natural sea floor seeps in the area, measurements of the ratios of specific hopanoids identify the Deepwater Horizon spill as the source of the oil, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's like a fingerprint," says Helen White, a geochemist at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and a co-author of the new research.
more
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/frothy-gunk-from-deepwater-horiz.html
One Drug to Shrink All Tumors
by Sarah C. P. Williams on 26 March 2012, 3:05 PM
A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a "do not eat" signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells.
A decade ago, biologist Irving Weissman of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, discovered that leukemia cells produce higher levels of a protein called CD47 than do healthy cells. CD47, he and other scientists found, is also displayed on healthy blood cells; it's a marker that blocks the immune system from destroying them as they circulate. Cancers take advantage of this flag to trick the immune system into ignoring them. In the past few years, Weissman's lab showed that blocking CD47 with an antibody cured some cases of lymphomas and leukemias in mice by stimulating the immune system to recognize the cancer cells as invaders. Now, he and colleagues have shown that the CD47-blocking antibody may have a far wider impact than just blood cancers.
"What we've shown is that CD47 isn't just important on leukemias and lymphomas," says Weissman. "It's on every single human primary tumor that we tested." Moreover, Weissman's lab found that cancer cells always had higher levels of CD47 than did healthy cells. How much CD47 a tumor made could predict the survival odds of a patient.
To determine whether blocking CD47 was beneficial, the scientists exposed tumor cells to macrophages, a type of immune cell, and anti-CD47 molecules in petri dishes. Without the drug, the macrophages ignored the cancerous cells. But when the CD47 was present, the macrophages engulfed and destroyed cancer cells from all tumor types.
more
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/one-drug-to-shrink-all-tumors.html?ref=hp
It would be incredible if this holds up in humans!
ATREX rockets launched
Lighting the Sky
ATREX, the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment successfully launched five suborbital sounding rockets in the early morning hours of March 27, 2012, from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia as part of a study of the upper level jet stream. The first rocket launched at 4:58 a.m. EDT and each subsequent rocket launched 80 seconds apart.
Each of the rockets released a chemical tracer that created milky, white clouds at the edge of space. The launches and clouds were reported to be seen from as far south as Wilmington, N.C., west to Charlestown, W. Va., and north to Buffalo, N.Y.
The mission will gather information that will assist researchers to better understand the process responsible for the high-altitude jet stream located 60 to 65 miles above the surface of the Earth.
Image Credit: NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/missions/atrex.html
Cameron's Historic Dive Cut Short by Oil Leak
Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published 5:00 a.m. ET, March 26, 2012
In what he called a "heckuva ride," James Cameron came "screaming back up" from Earth's deepest point in about 70 minutes Monday, breaking the Pacific Ocean surface on Monday at noon, local time (10 p.m. ET Sunday).
...
"I didn't feel like I got to a place where I could take interesting geology samples or found anything interesting biologically."
This may be, in part, because a hydraulic fluid leak convinced Cameron to end the mission after about three hours. Previous projections had him surveying and sampling Challenger Deep and its life-forms for as long as six hours.
"I saw a lot of hydraulic oil come up in front of the port. The port got coated with it," he explained.
more
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120326-james-cameron-mariana-trench-fluid-leak-fish-science-sub/
TSA gets critic booted from Congressional panel
By Timothy B. Lee |
Bruce Schneier, the security expert who coined the term "security theater" to describe the Transportation Security Agency's airport screening procedures, was uninvited from speaking on a Monday Congressional panel at the insistence of the TSA.
In a blog post, Schneier reports that he had been officially scheduled to appear at a hearing sponsored by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, but received word on Friday that he had been removed from the witness list.
"The excuse was that I am involved in a lawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program," Schneier wrote. "But it's pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress."
This is not the first time the TSA has engaged in brinksmanship to avoid having to appear on a panel alongside its critics. The TSA abruptly canceled a planned appearance before the same committee last year. The agency objected to sitting alongside a representative of EPIC, a privacy group that also had a pending lawsuit against the TSA.
more
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/gunshy-tsa-gets-critic-booted-from-congressional-panel.ars?clicked=related_right
Particle-wave duality demonstrated with largest molecules yet
By Matthew Francis |
One of the deepest mysteries in quantum physics is the wave-particle duality: every quantum object has properties of both a wave and a particle. Nowhere is this effect more beautifully demonstrated than in the double-slit experiment: streams of particles (photons, electrons, whatever) are directed at a barrier with two narrow openings. While each particle shows up at the detector individually, the population as a whole creates an interference pattern as though they are waves. Neither a pure wave nor a pure particle description has proven successful in explaining these experiments.
Now researchers have successfully performed a quantum interference experiment with much larger and more massive molecules than ever before. Thomas Juffmann et al. fired molecules composed of over 100 atoms at a barrier with openings designed to minimize molecular interactions, and observed the build-up of an interference pattern. The experiment approaches the regime where macroscopic and quantum physics overlap, offering a possible way to study the transition that has frustrated many scientists for decades.
The interference of waves is determined in part by the wavelength. According to quantum physics, the wavelength of a massive particle is inversely proportional to its momentum: the mass multiplied by the particle's speed. In other words, the heavier the object, the shorter its wavelength at a given speed.
A kicked football (for example) has a very tiny wavelength compared to the size of the ball because it has a relatively large mass and a speed measured in meters per second (rather than nanometers or such). In contrast, an electron has a relatively large wavelength (though still microscopic) because it has a small mass. Longer wavelengths make it easier to generate interference so, while it isn't going to be possible to make two footballs interfere with each other (in the quantum sense!), it's comparatively straightforward to produce electron interference.
more
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/quantum-interference-with-big-molecules-approaches-the-macroscopic.ars?clicked=related_right
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