Incidence of Malaria Jumps When Amazon Forests Are Cut
“Establishing a firm link between environmental change and human disease has always been an iffy proposition. Now, however, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writing in the current (June 16, 2010) online issue of the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, presents the most enumerated case to date linking increased incidence of malaria to land-use practices in the Amazon.
The report, which combines detailed information on the incidence of malaria in 54 Brazilian health districts and high-resolution satellite imagery of the extent of logging in the Amazon forest, shows that clearing tropical forest landscapes boosts the incidence of malaria by nearly 50 percent.
“It appears that deforestation is one of the initial ecological factors that can trigger a malaria epidemic,” says Sarah Olson, the lead author of the new report and a postdoctoral fellow at the Nelson Institute, Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.”
Read more at Science Daily
Suspended animation is no longer a pipe dream
“A research scientist in a Seattle cancer laboratory has discovered the secret to reanimating organisms that had been frozen to a temperature below survivable limits.
Dr. Mark Roth was inspired by cases of individuals who survived prolonged exposure to the bitter cold with few adverse affects — like Canadian toddler Erica Nordby, who wandered from her house in the winter of and whose heart stopped beating for two hours before she was rescued, warmed, and came miraculously back to life; and Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, who fell asleep on a snowy mountainside in 2006 and was found 23 days later with a core body temperature of just 71°F. He too was successfully reanimated having suffered no appreciable ill effects.
Experimenting on yeasts and worms, Roth and his team found that if his specimens were deprived of oxygen before freezing, they’d enter a state of suspended animation from which they can be reliably revived.”
Read more at io9
Why Our Brains Are Fooled by Illusions
Head over to Discover Magazine for some nice examples of optical illusions.
A drug that could make you live 30 percent longer
“Want to live into your hundreds? If you’re young and fertile, you have to decide now whether you want to take a drug that will extend your life by a few decades.
Researchers at Stanford Medical School have discovered that blocking the activity of certain genes can extend the lives of roundworms by up to 30 percent – but only if the worms are fertile. This is further confirmation of what many scientists had already suspected, which is that the key to life extension is tied to the reproductive system. Geneticist Anne Brunet, co-author on the new study, explained:
It makes a sort of sense that the reproductive system would be involved in life span, since that is really the only ‘immortal’ part of an organism. In that context, the body is just the mortal envelope.”
Read more at io9
Make Your Own ‘Magical’ Paper Plane
Watch the video and then get frighteningly excited about making one of your own, then you can go scare your neighbours with your wacky voodoo powers.
Classic scams to avoid
“Playwright Alan Bennett had his wallet, with £1,500, stolen by pickpockets pretending to clean ice-cream from his coat. It’s a classic scam, so what others should you look out for?
He’s not the first person to fall for such a scam. The back of Alan Bennett’s raincoat was splattered with ice-cream by two women and a man, who then pretended to clean it off, while they pinched the writer’s wallet from a pocket.
Bennett, whose works include his Talking Heads monologues, The Madness Of George III and The History Boys, said the incident was “most upsetting”. The fact he had been carrying £1,500 in cash couldn’t have made it any easier.
The “distraction” scam is a favourite with thieves in London and police have repeatedly warned tourists and shoppers to be on their guard. But what other ploys should people watch out for?”
To read up on 5 classic scams visit BBC News
Whale Poop Cleans The Environment
“Sperm whale waste isn’t much to look at — a diarrhea-like substance with a few squid beaks floating around — but new research has found it removes carbon from the atmosphere, helping to offset greenhouse gases that have been tied to global warming.
Sperm whales in the Southern Ocean release 220,462 tons of carbon when they exhale carbon dioxide at the water’s surface, but their poo stimulates the drawdown of 440,925 tons of carbon, according to the research, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
These ocean giants and certain other marine mammals may therefore be among the most environmentally beneficial animals on the planet.
“If Southern Ocean sperm whales were at their historic levels, meaning their population size before whaling, we would have an extra 2 million tonnes (2,204,623 tons) of carbon being removed from our atmosphere each and every year,” lead author Trisha Lavery Told Discovery News.”
Read more at Discovery News
Experiments cast doubt on the classic marker of a genuine smile.
“For years psychologists have thought that a real smile, which reflects felt, positive emotion, is signalled by upturned lips and crinkly eyes. This genuine smile is named after the French physician Duchenne, who passed electrical currents through live subjects and took photos of their weirdly contorted faces.
Oddly enough when some people try to fake a smile they look like one of Duchenne’s subjects: in pain. It has been suggested that 80% of us are unable to conjure up a fake smile that will trick others because we don’t have voluntary control over the muscles around our eyes which signal the Duchenne smile.
Others, though, may well be much better at faking a real smile, which is a handy trick because people automatically trust, like and want to be with those who appear to be showing real emotion.
Writing in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, however, Krumhuber and Manstead (2009) question whether this 80% estimate is anywhere near the mark. In the first of a series of experiments they found that 83% of the people in their study could produce fake smiles that others mistook for the real thing in photographs.”
Read more at PsyBlog
Video: The pattern behind self-deception
“Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things — from alien abductions to dowsing rods — boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble.
Michael Shermer debunks myths, superstitions and urban legends, and explains why we believe them. Along with publishing Skeptic Magazine, he’s author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Mind of the Market.”
230,000 Facebook Users Pranked
What do creative people do when they’re bored?
If you’re David Thorne, creator of the hilarious website 27b/6, and you’ve got a long weekend in front of you, you might try to see how many people you can get to RSVP to an imaginary woman‘s birthday party.
After selecting a photo of an “attractive, approachable” young woman, Thorne set up a prank Facebook page inviting her friends to “Kate’s Party,” pretended to accidentally leave it open to public viewing instead of setting it to private, then twittered his 27,000 followers.
Thorne’s followers (slashers?) swung into high gear and began RSVPing for the event, which prompted a “response” from “Kate” — who was allegedly horrified that her apartment was to be set upon by thousands of Aussie boozehounds.
“WTF?????????? WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE? WHY ARE THERE 10000 PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN INVITED??????? THIS IS A PRIVATE PARTY AT OUR APARTMENT,” she/he/someone wrote. When it got to 60,000 attendees, the event was canceled, with 170,000 more awaiting confirmation.
Continue reading at Zug
