The arrest in Yemen this week of a group of "Islamist militants" has provided more evidence that the Israeli government and its associated agencies are still hard at work fabricating "Islamic terrorism" for the enthrallment of the 'educated' masses back home and in the 'enlightened' West:
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said the security forces have arrested a group of alleged Islamist militants linked to Israeli intelligence.
Mr Saleh did not say what evidence had been found to show the group's links with Israel, a regional enemy of Yemen.
The arrests were connected with an attack on the US embassy in Sanaa last month which killed at least 18 people, official sources were quoted saying.
Israel's foreign ministry has rejected the accusation as "totally ridiculous".
"A terrorist cell was arrested and will be referred to the judicial authorities for its links with the Israeli intelligence services," Mr Saleh told a gathering at al-Mukalla University in Hadramawt province.
"Details of the trial will be announced later. You will hear about what goes on in the proceedings," he added.
The 17 September attack was the second to target the US embassy since April. Militants detonated car bombs before firing rockets at the heavily fortified building.
Mr Saleh did not identify the suspects, but official sources were quoted saying it was same cell - led by a militant called Abu al-Ghaith al-Yamani - whose arrest was announced a week after the attack.
An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said the Yemeni president's statement was without foundation.
"To believe that Israel would create Islamist cells in Yemen is really far-fetched. This is yet another victory for the proponents of conspiracy theories," Igal Palmor said in remarks reported by AFP.
Is it really "far fetched" to believe that Israel would fabricate Islamic terrorist attacks? After all, is it not true that Islamic terrorism is Israel's 'bread and butter', without which Israel would stand naked, for all the world to see, as the brutal occupier that it is? And is the same not true of the US and British governments?
Lest we forget the past, and the very recent past at that, below are a collection of mainstream news reports that leave us in little doubt that Israel (closely followed by the US and UK) has its fingers all over "Islamic terrorism" in the Middle East.
As you know: In the face of public outrage over -- and House rejection of -- the Bush administration's attempt at a $700 billion extortion -- a "gift" of your money to the very same people who have caused a global financial crisis -- administration hacks reacted in predictable fashion, throwing in another $100 billion worth of bribes in a shameless bid to get the bill passed.
Then the Senate approved, by a 3-1 margin, a thrown-together 450-page bill that few of them could have had time to read, much less consider.
Consider? No other options were considered at all, or even deemed worthy of consideration. And suddenly all the pressure was on the House.
The phones were ringing off the hook in the offices of "our" "Representatives", with public sentiment more or less equally divided between "NO!" and "HELL, NO!"
Background: the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing "unruly individuals," and the management of a national emergency. I am in Seattle and heard from the brother of one of the soldiers that they are engaged in exercises now. Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks.
East Farmingdale, N.Y. - William "Wild Bill" Cutolo was a feared mobster who vanished nearly a decade ago during a bloody struggle for control of the Colombo crime family. It had been widely believed that after rival gangsters killed him, his body was dumped off the side of a boat in the Atlantic Ocean.
As it turns out, Cutolo's body was buried in a wooded area of Long Island near a stretch of railroad tracks, manufacturing plants and warehouses. Authorities found his badly decomposed remains in the area Monday, reportedly acting on a tip from an informant who said three bodies may be buried there.
John McCain's campaign is imploding as the presidential candidate lapses into incoherence and petulance, and his running-mate becomes a national laughing-stock. In the face of an impending economic meltdown, the Democratic candidates, Obama and Biden, appear to be the only adults in the contest. Meanwhile, the GOP's erstwhile dependable allies, the corporate media, are displaying moments of journalistic integrity. This presents a problem for the Republican ticket for, as Stephen Colbert aptly observed, "reality has a liberal bias."
And so the polls show an expanding lead for Obama over McCain, with no clear indication that the trend might reverse.
A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
Hockey moms in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
Last Wednesday, Sheriff's deputies arrived at the home of a woman in Akron, Ohio named Addie Polk, in order to evict her. After 38 years in that house, Ms. Polk had fallen behind on paying the mortgage. It was so bad that the company that held that mortgage, Fannie Mae, had foreclosed.
In fact, it was far worse than anybody knew. Addie Polk couldn't bear it any more. So, rather than be evicted, she shot herself in the chest.
Michael Schwirtz The New York Times 2008-10-09 22:01:00
President Viktor A. Yushchenko of Ukraine signed an order Thursday to dissolve Parliament and hold snap elections, after efforts to resuscitate a long-ailing pro-West coalition collapsed and sent the country deeper into political turmoil.
Renee Maltezou and Daniel Flynn Reuters 2008-10-09 17:30:00
Athens - Tens of thousands of Greeks went on strike on Wednesday, grounding flights and bringing traffic to a halt in the capital, in a protest against the conservative government's privatisation plans and the rising cost of living.
Greece's largest union, the GSEE private sector federation, called the 24-hour stoppage after Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis unveiled plans to sell loss-making Olympic Airlines last month while public discontent mounted over the impact of the global economic slowdown.
The police chief leading operations on the day Jean Charles de Menezes' was shot has told an inquest surveillance messages were "clearly misinterpreted".
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick said she was told officers were at one time unsure whether the Brazilian was the suspect they were looking for.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2008-10-07 16:51:00
A US aircraft carrier group has arrived in South Korean waters for a visit likely to upset North Korea.
South Korean navy officials say the USS George Washington is anchored just outside the southern port of Busan for an international fleet exhibit, and will come into port on Tuesday before leaving on Friday.
But Pyongyang sees such events as military provocations.
The tale of what the Bush Administration is up to in the Caucasus is slowly filtering out, although the U.S. press has largely deep-sixed the story. The recent Georgia-Russia war was just one move in a chess game aimed at cornering the energy reserves of Central Asia, extending the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Moscow's vulnerable southern border, and ending Russia's control of the Black Sea. Georgia was just a pawn - an expendable one at that - in a high stakes game.
While the White House and some in the European Union (EU) represent the recent war as one between an increasingly powerful Russia reasserting itself in its former empire versus a small, democratic nation trying to recover two of its former provinces, that story is fraying a bit. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was recently condemned by the EU's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights for undemocratic practices, and a recent NATO analysis of the war supports the Russian charge that Tbilisi started the whole affair. The maneuvers that led to the war, however, have gone largely unreported.
The head of the French military General Jean-Louis Georgelin on Wednesday backed comments by a senior British military officer's view that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable.
A British officer "was saying that one cannot win this war militarily, that there is no military solution to the Afghan crisis and I totally share this feeling," Georglin told French television channel Public Senat.
"The strategy of NATO, as it has been redefined in Bucharest (at the start of April) does not say anything else," he said.
Georgelin's remarks just a few days after comments by British Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith.
A roadside bomb blast has killed at least 10 people near the troubled Swat Valley in northwestern Pakistan, local authorities say.
The bomb, apparently detonated via a remote control, exploded near a prison van and a school bus at Kwago Obbo in the Upper Dir district in North West Frontier Province killing three school children, four policemen and three prisoners, Press TV's Pakistan correspondent reported.
Eric S. Margolis Information Clearing House 2008-10-08 14:19:00
For those who savor historical irony, the Soviet Empire collapsed in the years 1989-1991 because of an implosion of its economy brought on by a ruinous arms race with the United States and the heavy costs of occupying Afghanistan.
Seventeen years later came the turn of the world's other great imperial power, the United States. Lethally bloated by runaway debt, and burdened by 50% of the world's military spending, the house of cards known as the US economy finally collapsed.
The doomsday news from New York and Washington has obscured most other world affairs. This is unfortunate because for the first time there is a flicker - and I mean only a flicker - of light at the end of the Afghanistan tunnel. It may only be an oncoming truck bomb.
The US-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, revealed last week he had asked Saudi Arabia to broker peace talks with the alliance of tribal and political groups resisting Western occupation collectively known as Taliban. Saudi Arabia had been one of the few nations to recognize the Taliban government and retains considerable influence in Afghanistan and remains a loyal friend of Pakistan.
Jordana Hube Canwest News Service 2008-10-08 04:46:00
An autistic man was allegedly punched and Tasered at least five times by police who were executing a search warrant in his home, according to a lawsuit -- filed by George Lochner and his family -- seeking $9 million in damages from Toronto Police.
Lochner's lawyer, Clayton Ruby said emergency task force officers used "abusive" and "unnecessary" force against the 43-year old developmentally disabled man the night they entered his bedroom looking for his brother Silvano Lochner, 50.
Editor's Note: October 7 marks the second anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading Russian journalist and outspoken government critic who exposed the brutal treatment of civilians in Chechnya by Russian forces and Moscow-supported Chechen officials. Two years on, Russia shows no political will to bring her killers to justice. To honor Politkovskaya and other women like her in the world, the human rights organization Reach All Women in War (RAW in WAR), presented the second annual Anna Politkovskaya Award to Afghan politician and social activist Malalai Joya in London Monday. An elected member of the Afghan Parliament and outspoken critic of warlords and war criminals in the government, Joya was suspended from office on grounds that she had "insulted" fellow representatives in a television interview. She delivered these remarks at the London ceremony.
My own life and hardships speak for themselves about the obstacles Afghan women face today. I've been threatened with death; I've survived a number of assassination attempts; and every effort is made by the fundamentalists to silence me. But I am happy to enjoy support of the peace-loving people of the world. I am especially grateful to Reach All Women in War (RAW in WAR) for considering me for the Anna Politkovskaya Award of 2008.
Underscoring the severity of a new class of vulnerability known as clickjacking, a blogger has created a proof-of-concept game that uses a PC's video cam and microphone to secretly spy on the player.
The demo, which is available here, appears to be a simple game that tests how quickly a user can click on a series of moving targets. Behind the scenes, it combines a generic clickjacking attack with weaknesses in Adobe's Flash technology to record the player using the PC's video camera and microphone.
Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and former Attorney General Stephen H. Sachs last week released a report titled: Review of Maryland State Police Covert Surveillance of Anti-Death Penalty and Anti-War Groups from March 2005 to May 2006. O'Malley and Sachs were joined by Maryland State Police Colonel Terrence B. Sheridan at the release.
On July 31, 2008, O'Malley appointed Attorney General Sachs to head an independent review to look into intelligence-gathering activities of the Maryland State Police. That review was conducted with the assistance of the Maryland Attorney General's Office and the full cooperation of the Maryland State Police, according to a release from the Governor's Office.
The former superintendent of the Maryland State Police has defended the covert surveillance of protest groups that took place during his tenure, describing the operation as a legitimate way to find out information.
"It is not about spying; it is not about terrorism," Col. Tim Hutchins, who served as the head of the state police from December 2003 to June 2007, told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee yesterday. "There is no requirement for a police officer to announce who they are ahead of time, whether they are making a drug buy or attending a public meeting."
County supervisors took action to expand options for law enforcement officers to track convicts in San Bernardino County.
The methods include tracking offenders with Global Positioning Satellites, home-based electronic monitoring for offenders on house arrest, and alcohol monitoring for offenders with alcoholrelated convictions, such as driving under the influence, officials said.
"technology to wipe out truth is now available. not everybody can afford it but it's available. when the cost comes down look out!" -- Bob Dylan, "World Gone Wrong"
"toleration of the unacceptable leads to the last round-up." -- Dylan, ibid.
In the whirlwind of anxiety and confusion surrounding the global economic meltdown, one thing is certain: governments will use the crisis to augment their own power.
This may occur directly, as with the Bush-Paulson bailout plan, which gives the Treasury Secretary virtually unlimited and unsupervised power to give billions of taxpayer dollars to his cronies on Wall Street, while also allowing him to override the few restrictions left on the machinations of raw greed in the financial markets. (Yes, of course, all of this will change completely after Barack Obama is elected: instead of Hank Paulson and George Bush doling out bailout pork to their Wall Street pals, a brand-new Treasury chief and Obama will be doling out bailout pork to their Wall Street pals.)
But the economic freak-out will also be employed as a distraction, with governments using it to enact measures hugger-mugger while public attention is obsessively focused elsewhere. A prime -- and chilling -- example of this can be found in a new law slouching its way through the legislative process in Britain, where it is likely to emerge in the stark light of day next year. And it is a very rough beast indeed; the measure will, as Jenni Russell puts it in the Guardian
How bad? 'I thought I was going to throw up,' Jennifer Brunner recalls.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner will be under the national spotlight next month, overseeing what's expected to be the state's largest-ever turnout for a presidential election. It will also be her first as the state's chief election official.
The stakes will be just as high as they were for her Republican predecessor, J. Kenneth Blackwell, four years ago, when the narrowly decided state election was marred by charges of questionable results and complaints that some residents, largely in minority areas, were forced to wait hours to cast their votes.
This year, denizens of the Buckeye State who mistrust touch-screen systems will be allowed to vote on a paper ballot if they prefer. The directive to allow "paper or plastic" came in the wake of Brunner's landmark 2007 "Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing" analysis, otherwise known as EVEREST, in which "critical security failures" were found in every system tested by several teams of both corporate and academic computer scientists and security experts.
Workin' in a coal mine,
Goin' down down down,
Workin' in a coal mine,
Whoops, about to slip down ...
So it turns out that Enron (remember Enron?) was just the canary, and now the entire coal mine is caving in on the miners. That would be us. Believe me, it isn't "clean coal" dust we'll all be eating.
Questions remain about how depleted uranium waste from the first Gulf War was transferred, and whether health risks were posed.
On April 26, 2008, the BBC Alabama arrived in Longview, Wash., carrying 6,700 tons of Kuwaiti sand. The sand had become contaminated with depleted uranium when U.S. military vehicles and munitions caught fire at Doha Army base in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. The depleted uranium was being repatriated. The sand was a gift of the Kuwaiti government.
So was the cost of repatriation. Neither government will discuss just how much the tab was.
French film legend-turned-activist Brigitte Bardot took a swipe at Sarah Palin on Tuesday, saying the US vice-presidential candidate was a disgrace to women.
"I hope you lose these elections because that would be a victory for the world," Bardot wrote in an open letter to Republican John McCain's running mate in the November vote.
"By denying the responsibility of man in global warming, by advocating gun rights and making statements that are disconcertingly stupid, you are a disgrace to women and you alone represent a terrible threat, a true environmental catastrophe," wrote Bardot.
The screen icon from the 1960s, who now heads an animal rights foundation, went on to assail Palin for supporting Arctic oil exploration that could jeopardise delicate animal habitats and for dismissing measures to protect polar bears.
"This shows your total lack of responsibility, your inability to protect or simply respect animal life," Bardot wrote.
The Syrian foreign ministry confirmed on Thursday that the country's security authorities have detained two U.S. citizens who entered illegally into its lands without visas, the official SANA news agency reported.
The report said that Holli Chmela, 27, and Taylor Luck, 23 were arrested Thursday after they crossed into Syria with the help of smugglers.
Jennifer Griffin, Justin Fishel Fox News 2008-10-07 16:46:00
Amid false allegations from Iranian media that a U.S. plane was forced down after accidentally entering Iranian airspace, FOX News learned Tuesday about another tense incident that occurred last month near the Strait of Hormuz.
On Sept. 6, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard threatened to shoot down U.S. helicopters flying cover aboard the USS Peliliu patrolling in the area, according to a classified military transcript of the radio exchange.
Saudi's top judiciary official has issued a religious decree saying the owners of television networks broadcasting immoral content may be killed.
Saudi cleric Saleh al-Luhaidan, chairman of the Saudi Supreme Judicial Council has been quoted by the al-Arabiya television network as saying that "the owners of these (satellite) channels propagate depravation and debauchery."
The Wahhabi cleric said that satellite channels caused the "deviance of thousands of people" as they show "seduction, obscenity and vulgarity."
Saudi Arabia, practices an austere form of Islam known as Wahhabism that originated in the 18th century in Arabia.
Sam F. Ghattas Associated Press 2008-10-08 21:59:00
A few tents and trucks dotting a green hill across the river are about all that is visible of a Syrian troop deployment on Lebanon's northern border - a buildup that has raised concerns of a possible Syrian incursion.
There was no sign Wednesday that the Syrian troops were preparing to cross the border. Syria says the deployment - first made public several weeks ago - is aimed at preventing smuggling from Lebanon.
But the United States and some anti-Syrian politicians in Beirut have warned that Syria could attempt an incursion, a concern raised especially after a Sept. 27 car bombing in Damascus killed 17 people.
Myra Butterworth The Daily Telegraph 2008-10-09 20:42:00
Homebuyers could see their mortgage costs rise despite the interest rate cut, after some banks yesterday failed to pass on the cut while others pulled some of their most competitive deals.
Rowena Mason The Daily Telegraph 2008-10-09 20:50:00
Kaupthing - among Britain's 20 largest banks - became the third financial institution to be taken over by the Icelandic government this week, after Chancellor Alistair Darling seized its UK operation on Tuesday and ruled out help through the bail-out.
Sigurdur Einarsson, the bank's chairman, said the seizure of the UK arm directly led to the collapse of the entire group. "It is very sad, unfortunate and disappointing," he said.
Meanwhile a fierce diplomatic row broke out between the UK and Iceland with Prime Minister Gordon Brown accusing Iceland of "completely unacceptable" behaviour by not recompensing UK savers in the failed Icesave bank. Mr Brown said he is freezing assets of Icelandic companies in the UK as a result.
Dave Lindorff The Smirking Chimp 2008-10-09 20:50:00
Critics of government get all worked up when Washington spends money stupidly, or does something manifestly stupid. There was a even senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, who used to hand out "Golden Fleece" awards for such things.
The Pentagon's notorious $600 payments for toilet seats that were $12 in local discount stores, or $434 paments for hammers that were $10 in the local hardware store were good examples of this.
But nobody seems to be screaming about the incredibly wasteful rescue of AIG, on which the government has spent first $85 billion and now another $37.5 billion.
NEW YORK - Stocks plunged in the final minutes of trading Thursday, sending the Dow Jones industrials down more than 675 points, or more than 7 percent, to their lowest level in five years after a major credit ratings agency said it was considering cutting its rating on General Motors Corp. The Standard & Poor's 500 index also fell more than 7 percent.
The songbird has a friend in the beaver. According to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the busy beaver's signature dams provide critical habitat for a variety of migratory songbirds, particularly in the semi-arid interior of the Western U.S.
The study, which appears in the October 2008 issue of the journal Western North American Naturalist, says that through dam building, beavers create ponds and stimulate growth of diverse streamside vegetation critical for birds, including many migratory songbirds in decline. The study found that the more dams beavers build, the more abundant and diverse local songbirds become.
"We found that increasing density of beaver dams was associated with a diverse and abundant bird community and the wetland and streamside habitat these species depend on," said Hilary Cooke, the study's lead author who is now finishing her dissertation at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "This habitat is critical to birds in semi-arid regions yet has been severely degraded or lost through much of the West. Our results suggest that management of beavers may be an important tool for restoring habitat and reversing bird declines."
Scientists have claimed a fearsome mutant fish has begun actively hunting people - after gorging itself on human corpses which have been dumped in rivers.
They reckon that a huge type of catfish, called a goonch, may have developed a taste for flesh in an Indian river where bodies are dumped after funerals, reports The Sun newspaper.
Ciudad Obregon, Mexico - Hurricane Norbert strengthened Wednesday into an extremely powerful Category 4 storm off Mexico's Pacific coast and was on track to hit the southern Baja California peninsula over the weekend.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Norbert will likely turn toward the northeast over the next two days en route to the Baja peninsula and Mexican mainland. Officials across the region were setting up shelters and preparing for possible evacuations from low-lying regions.
One of the smallest seals - the Caspian - has joined a growing list of mammal species in danger of extinction.
Scientists from the University of Leeds together with international partners have documented the disastrous decline of the seal - a species found only in the land-locked waters of the Caspian Sea - in a series of surveys which reveal a 90 per cent drop in numbers in the last 100 years.
The research findings have prompted the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to move the Caspian seal from the Vulnerable category to Endangered on its official IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, announced today in Barcelona [06 October 2008].
Dr Simon Goodman of Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sciences says: "Each female has just one pup a year, so with numbers at such a low levels, every fertile female that dies is a nail in the coffin of the species. We're hoping that the seal's change in Red List status will help raise awareness about their plight, and the many important conservation issues facing the whole Caspian ecosystem."
Commercial hunting, habitat degradation, disease, pollution and drowning in fishing nets have caused the population of the seal collapse from more than 1 million at the start of the 20th century to around 100,000 today.
Frozen arctic soil contains nearly twice the greenhouse-gas-producing organic material as was previously estimated, according to recently published research by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists.
School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences professor Chien-Lu Ping published his latest findings in Nature Geoscience. Wielding jackhammers, Ping and a team of scientists dug down more than one meter into the permafrost to take soil samples from more than 100 sites throughout Alaska. Previous research had sampled to about 40 centimeters deep.
After analyzing the samples, the research team discovered a previously undocumented layer of organic matter on top of and in the upper part of permafrost, ranging from 60 to 120 centimeters deep. This deep layer of organic matter first accumulates on the tundra surface and is buried during the churning freeze and thaw cycles that characterize the turbulent arctic landscape.
Scientists filming in one of the world's deepest ocean trenches have found groups of highly sociable snailfish swarming over their bait, nearly five miles (7700 metres) beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. This is the first time cameras have been sent to this depth.
'We got some absolutely amazing footage from 7700 metres. More fish than we or anyone in the world would ever have thought possible at these depths,' says project leader Dr Alan Jamieson of the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab, on board the Japanese research ship the Hakuho-Maru.
'It's incredible. These videos vastly exceed all our expectations from this research. We thought the deepest fishes would be motionless, solitary, fragile individuals eking out an existence in a food-sparse environment,' says Professor Monty Priede, director of Oceanlab.
What's the worst that could happen after eating a slice of pepperoni pizza? A little heartburn, for most people.
But for up to a million women in the U.S., enjoying that piece of pizza has painful consequences. They have a chronic bladder condition that causes pelvic pain. Spicy food -- as well as citrus, caffeine, tomatoes and alcohol-- can cause a flare in their symptoms and intensify the pain. It was thought that the spike in their symptoms was triggered when digesting the foods produced chemicals in the urine that irritated the bladder.
However, researchers from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine believe the symptoms -- pain and an urgent need to frequently urinate -- are actually being provoked by a surprise perpetrator. Applying their recent animal study to humans, the scientists believe the colon, irritated by the spicy food, is to blame.
Honey may reduce healing times in patients suffering mild to moderate burn wounds. A systematic review by Cochrane Researchers concluded that honey might be useful as an alternative to traditional wound dressings in treating burns.
"We're treating these results with caution, but it looks like honey can help speed up healing in some burns," says lead researcher Dr Andrew Jull, of the Clinical Trials Research Unit at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Honey has been used in wound treatment since ancient times. The mechanism of action is unclear. While honey may help the body remove dead tissue and provide a favourable environment for the growth of new, healthy tissue, current interest in medicinal honey focuses largely on its antibacterial effects.
A cream commonly used to treat burns may actually delay healing. In addition, despite the wide range of wound dressings available for burns, there is no consensus on the most effective alternative treatment, say Cochrane Researchers who carried out a systematic review of existing data.
Increased understanding of the wound healing process means that there are now a large number of different ways to treat burns. Films, gels, artificial skins and fibre dressings may all help to heal wounds, but doctors still often turn to traditional gauze dressings, as well as silver sulphadiazine (SSD) cream. Healthcare providers have used SSD cream since the 1960s to minimize the risk of burns becoming infected, although concerns have recently been raised about its toxic effects on skin cells.
The Cochrane Team who carried out the research found 26 relevant trials. Although each trial was relatively small they concluded that SSD cream increases the time taken for a wound to heal, as well as increasing the number of dressing applications required.
The circadian rhythm that quietly pulses inside us all, guiding our daily cycle from sleep to wakefulness and back to sleep again, may be doing much more than just that simple metronomic task, according to Stanford researchers.
Working with Siberian hamsters, biologist Norman Ruby has shown that having a functioning circadian system is critical to the hamsters' ability to remember what they have learned. Without it, he said, "They can't remember anything."
Though not known for their academic prowess, Siberian hamsters nonetheless normally develop what amounts to street smarts about their environment, as do all animals. But hamsters whose circadian system was disabled by a new technique Ruby and his colleagues developed consistently failed to demonstrate the same evidence of remembering their environment as hamsters with normally functioning circadian systems.
There's a lot of truth in the old proverb "experience is the best teacher," and apparently it even applies to 10-month-old infants.
Researchers have found that infants who had an opportunity to use a plastic cane to get an out-of-reach toy were better able to understand the goal of another person's use of a similar tool than were infants who had previously only watched an adult use a cane to retrieve a toy.
"Acting on the world is one way infants learn about the world, and only recently have there been studies showing that active, hands-on experience is a more effective way of learning than watching. This study indicates that there is a benefit to actual hands-on experience early in human development," said, Jessica Sommerville, a University of Washington assistant professor of psychology and lead author of a study published in the current issue of the journal Developmental Psychology.
A 30 percent increase in chronic kidney disease over the past decade has prompted the U.S. Renal Data System (USRDS) to issue for the first time a separate report documenting the magnitude of the disease, which affects an estimated 27 million Americans and accounts for more than 24 percent of Medicare costs.
"NIDDK's annual analysis and publication of data on kidney disease in the United States is essential in quantifying public health trends, guiding funding priorities, and designing targeted kidney research programs," said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. "The major focus on chronic kidney disease in this year's report acknowledges that this disorder is a growing public health issue deserving of wider public awareness and intensified scientific investigation."
Using data from multiple sources, the USRDS has created a new handbook of information that can be used by researchers, government officials, health program planners, and others to develop research goals, assess public health needs, set program priorities, and inform policymakers and the public. USRDS research depends on collaborations with other agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, especially the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Patient registries for other countries also contribute data for analyses.
Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.
The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables.
A pair of Penn State researchers has developed a statistical approach, called Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time (ALIPR), that one day could make it easier to search the Internet for photographs.
The public can participate in improving ALIPR's accuracy by visiting a designated Web site , uploading photographs, and evaluating whether the keywords that ALIPR uses to describe the photographs are appropriate.
ALIPR works by teaching computers to recognize the contents of photographs, such as buildings, people, or landscapes, rather than by searching for keywords in the surrounding text, as is done with most current image-retrieval systems. The team recently received a patent for an earlier version of the approach, called ALIP, and is in the process of obtaining another patent for the more sophisticated ALIPR. They hope that eventually ALIPR can be used in industry for automatic tagging or as part of Internet search engines.
A group of galaxies in our cosmic backyard has given astronomers clues about how stars form. A thorough survey using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has observed around 14 million stars in 69 galaxies. Some galaxies were found to be full of ancient stars, while others are like sun-making factories.
The detailed study, called the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) program, explored a region called the Local Volume, where galaxy distances range from 6.5 million light-years to 13 million light-years from Earth.
A typical galaxy contains billions of stars but looks smooth when viewed through a conventional telescope because the stars appear blurred together. In contrast, the galaxies observed in this new survey are close enough to Earth that the sharp view provided by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 can resolve the brightness and colour of some individual stars. This allows scientists to determine the history of star formation within a galaxy and tease out subtle features in a galaxy's shape.
The future is a foreign country, and nowhere is it more foreign that the designs thrown up by a surge in robotics research. The feverish imagination and creativity of European robot scientists has led to dozens of robot designs, some bizarre, some beautiful, but all are inspired.
Kenneth Chang The New York Times 2008-10-09 06:02:00
One Japanese and two American scientists have won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology for watching the dance of living cells and the proteins within them.
It seems like the inevitable comedic summit of this fall's presidential campaign: the real Sarah Palin coming on "Saturday Night Live" to meet her look-alike impersonator, Tina Fey.
