Thursday, August 21, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Scientists say they’ve found an efficient way to make red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells, a possible step toward making transfusion supplies in the laboratory.
The promise of a virtually limitless supply is tantalizing because of blood donor shortages and disappointments in creating blood substitutes.
Red blood cells are a key component of blood because they carry oxygen throughout the body.
Experts called the new work an advance, but cautioned that major questions had yet to be answered.
Palm vein scans are about to make their American debut. Used in Japanese automated teller machines for more than five years, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) recently announced that by next year all students who want to attend business school will be required to take a palm vein scan to verify their identity.
“It’s easy to steal a fingerprint,” said Hiroko Naito, a member of Fujitsu’s PalmSecure Team that developed the technology. “Palm vein information physically resides inside the patient, making it harder to steal.”
Friday, August 15, 2008
TBILISI, Georgia (CNN) — A grim Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said Friday that he signed a cease-fire agreement that requires the immediate withdrawal of all Russian forces from Georgian soil.
The agreement includes a provision for independent monitors and an eventual reconstruction plan for Georgia’s economy, said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who brought the documents to Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital.
The two met for almost five hours, the Georgian president said.
Later Friday, the office of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who brokered the agreement, said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had confirmed Russia’s cooperation.
“His country will sign a cease-fire accord with Georgia and scrupulously respect all agreements, including a troop withdrawal,” Sarkozy’s office said.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) — Like a chronic disease spreading through the body, “dead zones” with too little oxygen for life are expanding in the world’s oceans.
“We have to realize that hypoxia is not a local problem,” said Robert J. Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “It is a global problem, and it has severe consequences for ecosystems.”“It’s getting to be a problem of such a magnitude that it is starting to affect the resources that we pull out of the sea to feed ourselves,” he added.
Diaz and co-author Rutger Rosenberg report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science that there are now more than 400 dead zones around the world, double what the United Nations reported just two years ago.
“If we screw up the energy flow within our systems, we could end up with no crabs, no shrimp, no fish. That is where these dead zones are heading unless we stop their growth,” Diaz said.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
MOSCOW — With the fragile truce in Georgia on the brink of collapse Wednesday, President Bush announced that the United States would begin a humanitarian aid mission there and sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to settle the crisis.
Nerves frayed all day after a Russian tank battalion occupied the Georgian city of Gori, a move Georgia condemned as flagrant defiance of a Western-brokered agreement struck only hours earlier. Gori is only 40 miles from Tbilisi, the capital, and rumors circulated all day of an attack on Tbilisi.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia announced Tuesday that he agreed to a European peace proposal and had ordered a halt to his country’s military operation in Georgia, although he did not say that troops were pulling out and he insisted that Russian forces were still authorized to fire on enemies in South Ossetia.
The president said Russia had achieved its military goals in five days of , during which Russian troops advanced into Georgian territory despite strong denunciations from President Bush and other Western leaders.
But fighting appeared to continue in Georgia on Tuesday — with reports of sporadic bombing and some Russian troops digging in around Georgian cities — and it was uncertain whether Mr. Medvedev’s statement would lead to an end to hostilities.
NEW YORK, NY.- Talk about a surprising discovery. In 2006, a treasure trove of all kinds of art work—some of which has subsequently been identified as stolen—was uncovered in a New York City apartment. In an effort to track down the rightful owners, the FBI and the Public Administrator of New York County have posted pictures of the most important pieces here on the FBI website.
More than 300 works of art—paintings, sketches, sculptures, and other pieces by such artists as Pablo Picasso, John Singleton Copley, Alberto Giacometti, Giorgio Morandi, and Eugene Boudin—were discovered after the death of the apartment’s occupant, William M.V. Kingsland.
Kingsland was well known in New York City’s art circles as an engaging and intelligent connoisseur of art, books, architecture, and genealogy. But when he died, he left no will…and no apparent heirs to claim the floor-to-ceiling stacks of paintings and art works crammed into his one-bedroom apartment.
Turns out Kingsland was a pretty secretive guy—despite having many acquaintances, very few people had ever been inside his residence. In conversations with friends, he was often evasive about his early years and his family. And, as reported by the media not long after his death, William Kingsland wasn’t even his given name—he was born Melvyn Kohn and spent his early years in the Bronx before legally changing his name to Kingsland. He thought it had a more literary sound to it and would help him gain acceptance among Manhattan’s upper crust.
Monday, August 11, 2008
INVISIBILITY devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.
The breakthrough could lead to systems for rendering anything from people to large objects, such as tanks and ships, invisible to the eye – although this is still years off.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light’s direction of travel. The world’s two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week.
It follows earlier work at Imperial College London that achieved similar results with microwaves. Like light, these are a form of electromagnetic radiation but their longer wave-length makes them far easier to manipulate. Achieving the same effect with visible light is a big advance.
AUSTRALIAN scientists are hoping to cure leukaemia, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis after their breakthrough discovery of how to stop killer blood cells growing.
The team has unlocked the secrets behind the protein which controls the way the blood cancer cells spread when it is damaged - and have found a way to stop its deadly process.
Work is now starting to design a drug to prevent the damaged proteins operating, effectively stopping the cancer as well as asthma and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.