Hong Kong: Urban Future

Holy Water confiscated

PARIS (AP) — Even holy water from the Roman Catholic shrine at Lourdes can't get by airport security screening passengers for suspicious liquids.
A passenger on a new Vatican-backed charter airline had to hand over a container of water collected at Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral to security officials at the airport in southern France on Monday before boarding a return flight to Rome, officials for Mistral Air said. They identified the passenger as Italian television personality Paola Saluzzi.
Airport officials barred other pilgrims on the Mistral Air flight from taking holy water from the shrine back to Rome, the Italian news agency Apcom reported. The pilgrims protested that they had waited in long lines to fill up their bottles with holy water from the grotto.
Airport officials refused to comment on the incident, saying only that international regulations banning passengers from carrying containers with more than 3 ounces of liquid aboard are applied across the board.
"All passengers are obliged to respect the rules and not go over the quantities (of liquid) permitted" on flights, said Franck Hourcade, an official at the Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrenees International Airport.
Security measures limiting liquids allowed in carryon baggage came in response to claims by British police that there was a plot in 2006 to bring down U.S.-bound flights out of London's Heathrow airport using liquid explosives.
Francesco Pizzo, Mistral Air's president, said the company must adhere to the international regulations.
"There are international rules that state that liquids cannot be carried on board. These have to be respected," he said.
Pizzo said that Mistral Air had provided small bottles shaped like a Madonna and full of holy water on every seat for when the pilgrims came back on board. The flight carried 145 passengers, he said.
Monday's round-trip flight to Lourdes was the company's inaugural trip. Mistral Air, a small airline owned by the private Italian post office and an outfit that organizes pilgrimages for the Diocese of Rome, is to carry pilgrims to such Catholic shrines throughout the world.
Officials expect an estimated 150,000 passengers a year will travel with the airline to destinations including Fatima, Portugal; Santiago de Compostela, Spain; the Holy Land; Czestochowa, Poland; and Sinai, Egypt.
The flights, scheduled to start regular service next year, are tailored to the pilgrims' needs, with inscriptions such as "I search for Your face, Lord," decorating the seats, and religious videos shown on board.

Metabolic activity through half-a-billion years

Une équipe internationale de chercheurs a montré que des micro-organismes provenant du permafrost arctique et antarctique avaient conservé une activité métabolique On a du mal à imaginer qu’un organisme puisse maintenir une activité métabolique pendant un demi-million d’années. C’est pourtant ce que viennent de mettre en évidence le généticien danois Eske Willerslev, professeur à l’université de Copenhague, et une équipe internationale, en étudiant des bactéries vieilles de 400 000 à 600 000 ans appartenant à l’espèce Arthrobacter. Dans un article mis en ligne, lundi 27 août, sur le site des « Comptes rendus de l’Académie américaine des sciences » (PNAS), les chercheurs affirment que ces micro-organismes sont capables de survivre pendant des dizaines de milliers d’années en réparant leur ADN, le support de l’information génétique. C’est une découverte, car si l’on savait que les bactéries pouvaient subsister sur de très longues périodes et dans des conditions difficiles, on pensait que c’était en s’enfermant dans des spores et en cessant toute activité métabolique. Dans le passé, des journaux scientifiques ont publié à plusieurs reprises des
articles sur de très vieilles bactéries. Ainsi, en octobre 2000, des chercheurs américains annonçaient, dans la revue Nature, l’isolation d’une bactérie vieille de 250 millions d’années provenant d’une mine de sel de Carlsbad (Nouveau-Mexique),
dont ils avaient réussi à faire croître une colonie. Mais, le plus souvent, les expériences réalisées après coup par d’autres équipes n’ont pas confirmé ces annonces. Dans le cas présent, les travaux publiés semblent sérieux et « suggèrent fortement qu’il y a encore chez ces organismes vieux de 500 000 ans une activité métabolique cellulaire. Ce n’est pas de la fiction, car les indices sont troublants », explique Ludovic Orlando, paléogénéticien et maître de conférences à l’Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon.
Pour Patrick Forterre, spécialiste des bactéries extrémophiles et professeur à l’université Paris-Sud, « l’étude est assez convaincante ». « Si elle se révèle fondée, il est clair que les bactéries nous sont supérieures, poursuit-il. Car nous serions en face d’une vie réveillée au ralenti. » L’équipe d’Eske Willerslev n’en est pas à son coup d’essai. Elle avait déjà démontré, en 2003 et 2004, que l’ADN de bactéries provenant d’un milieu glacé ne survivait pas au-delà de 500 000 ans. Aujourd’hui, elle fait un pas de plus. Les échantillons étudiés proviennent
de carottes de glace forées dans le permafrost arctique et antarctique – un sol perpétuellement gelé et très ancien. Ils ont été prélevés dans de strictes conditions d’étanchéité dans le nord-est de la Sibérie, le nord-ouest du Canada et l’Antarctique. Des précautions importantes ont été prises pour éviter tout risque de contamination. Puis une étude génétique a été réalisée sur des bactéries d’âges différents.

NYT: Out-of-body Sensation can be induced!

Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.
When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies. The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.
Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart. The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.
The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices. The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.
The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion. In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own. When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out. The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person’s brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake. The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with similar manipulations.
In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, asked people to don virtual reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed 6 feet away. The subjects thus saw an illusory image of themselves standing in the distance. Then Dr. Blanke stroked each person’s back for one minute with a stick while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the illusory image of the person’s body. When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, the illusion did not occur.
In another variation, Dr. Blanke projected a “rubber body” — a cheap mannequin bought on eBay and dressed in the same clothes as the subject — into the virtual reality goggles. With synchronous strokes of the stick, people’s sense of self drifted into the mannequin.
A separate set of experiments were carried out by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, “a bored medical student at University College London”, he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where your body was placed?” To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them. Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.
Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were located. Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their pulses raced. They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.
People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said. The next set of experiments will involve decoupling not just touch and vision but other aspects of sensory embodiment, including the felt sense of the body position in space and balance, they said.

Want to go to Cuba!

Modified People

When a fantasy about who you really are becomes a reality....

Growing Body Organs

Custom-Made Organs To Go

Never wait for a donor again—grow your own body parts instead

The Prescription: Tissue engineer Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University Medical Center and his team made headlines in April when they announced the first custom-built human bladders to be successfully transplanted into people. A month later, they reported that they had used the same tissue-engineering technique to restore sexual function to rabbits with damaged penises, opening the door for radical new treatments for men with sexual dysfunction. Their next big challenge is to grow one of the most intricate organs in the human body: the kidney. Atala’s work on the bladder took off in 1999, when he harvested the cells of the first of seven patients suffering from bladder disease. He and his colleagues grew the cells in culture, implanted them in a biodegradable, bladder-shaped structure, and then grafted their creation onto the patient’s unhealthy organ. This spring, they wrote in a top medical journal that all the bladder recipients are healthy, marking a major milestone in tissue engineering.
When?: 2016. The group has already produced a section of kidney tissue that excretes a urine-like substance. The next big step is to grow the millions of nephrons, or urine-recycling ducts, necessary for a functional kidney.

Would you believe it?

and now we can buy a drink that can be taken anywhere, if you don't believe me, then go see a gallery of photos on http://www.pocketshot.com. It can be probably even brought through a detector at the airport - since there is no metal, and it does conform to a 3 oz limit...

What's inside

If you ever wondered what's inside some of the stuff you use or about to use, please check out this pages:

Red Bull - Meat Sugar, Caffeine, and Bile!
Snausages - dogs will eat anything
L'Oreal Self-Tanning Lotion
Squirt-on Cheese

Nelson Mandela: a Communist?

How many of you know for what exactly was Nelson Mandela sentenced? Was he or any of his friends a member of a underground South Africa Communist Party? Was it a justified verdict?

Read this article (a review of a book) to find out a little bit more about the process

30 yrs since Elvis has left the building

Rick Dunham, alias « Elvis Himselvis », one of almost 85 000 impersonators of «The King», QUINCY HERALD-WHIG, JENNIFER COOMBES/AP PHOTO

TV: Inside our Bodies

We are a nation obsessed with our innards. Every week, hits like House and CSI invite us into a stranger's body, where we squirm and gag, all while peeking through our fingers to see more.
Now, Inside the Living Body (airing in September on the National Geographic Channel) suctions out all that superfluous plot nonsense for what can be best described as organ porn.

The two-hour documentary delivers one hi-def shot after another of, say, (A) a cold beer flowing down a man's gullet, (B) the neural network of the brain, (C) a boy's larynx stretching open during puberty, and (D) a teenager's muscle and bone growth spurt.

Of course, there's a lot of technology behind all that gore. The production crew, known for its 2005 series In the Womb, recruited more than 200 doctors, surgeons, and MRI techs as advisers and even as cinematographers to shoot some of the visceral video.

One team, for instance, used an HD endoscope to capture the first-ever footage of an egg erupting from an ovary. "It's an amazing difference in detail," fertility surgeon Steven Palter says. "It's like the audience has a magnifying glass." The producers also zoomed in on a new rendering plug-in called VoluMedic for LightWave 3D, the f/x software used in 300, Pan's Labyrinth, and X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

The application was used to overlay 3-D models of muscles, rib cages, and tendons taken from actual MRI scans onto the actors' torsos, necks, and limbs. Turns out, beauty is more than just skin deep.

Paper-thin battery

Raesearchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT have developed a new material that eliminates the need for a multilayer battery. They grew carbon nanotubes on a silicon substrate and impregnated the gaps between the tubes with cellulose—that's right, plain old paper. The cellulose also covered the ends of the nanotubes, but once it had dried, the paper material could be peeled off of the silicon substrate, leaving one end of the carbon nanotubes exposed to form an electrode.
By putting two sheets of paper together with the cellulose side facing inwards (and a drop of electrolyte on the paper), a supercapacitor is formed. These supercapacitors retain the flexibility of normal paper, but they have a rating that is comparable to that of standard commercial hardware—a 100g sheet could replace a 1300mAh battery. Because the medium is flexible, the researchers say you could shape batteries of all sizes for very specific use.
It doesn't stop there, however. By putting a drop of electrolyte on a single sheet and then putting a metal foil consisting of lithium and aluminum on each side, a lithium ion battery is formed. This paper device had a respectable 110mAh/g capacity, and the researchers indicate that small prototypes could already power small mechanical devices like fans. These batteries and supercapacitors are quite stable and have been shown to operate over a wide range of temperatures, with the research showing that they can operate between -78–150°C.

Xaxa

Паука спросили, в чем смысл жизни.
Наплел такой хуйни...

Just read...

A very entertaining and somewhat disturbing second novel from Michael Frayn, the author of hilarious Noises Off! (some of friends' lack of understanging notwithstanding) - I still laugh my ass off EVERY time I see the play.
The book itself is divided into very small and brisk chapters with very succinct titles - though written in 1968, way before chat rooms and porn sites, it is a warning against increaing isolation that permeates our society, not that the family cell, but the individuals themselves.

Xa xa

Новости: вчера черная кошка перебежала дорогу бабке с пустыми ведрами -
обе скончались на месте.

Hong Kong Airport

– Deuxième aéroport mondial pour le fret et quatorzième pour le nombre de passagers, l’aéroport international de Hongkong a enregistré, en 2006, 43,85 millions de passagers (+ 57%en dix ans) et géré 3,6 millions de tonnes de fret (+ 100%), selon le Comité international des aéroports.
– Il accueille 85 compagnies aériennes, qui desservent 156 destinations.
– Il fonctionne 24 heures sur 24. En 2006, il a enregistré 280 508 mouvements aériens.
– Environ 60000 personnes travaillent dans ou pour l’aéroport, dont près de 20 000 pour la plus grosse compagnie aérienne locale, Cathay Pacific.
– Nombre de contrôleurs aériens : 232.
– Nombre moyen de vols réguliers hebdomadaires : 5 600.

Love at first sight

Bush: Just say Yes!

One of the oldest prosthetes

Le Musée du Caire, présente une prothèse du gros orteil formée de bois et de cuir, attachée au pied d’une momie égyptienne vieille de 1000 à 600 ans av. J.-C. L’existence de ce type de chirurgie avait été signalée sur une momie égyptienne de 1550 à 1300 av. J.-C. dans un article de la revue Lancet en 2000. Signée par des médecins allemands, l’étude montrait que les chirurgiens égyptiens avaient amputé le gros orteil puis réalisé une prothèse pour le pied d’une femme âgée de 50 à 55 ans.
Une telle opération est nécessaire car le gros orteil supporte environ 40 %du poids de la marche, et son absence entraîne un déséquilibre en station verticale et une claudication lors de la course. En Asie, le plus ancien Veda de l’Inde antique (1500-800 av. J.-C.) signale l’existence d’une jambe artificielle en bois.
Les prothèses dentaires étaient également un fait courant dans l’Antiquité. Les Egyptiens savaient fabriquer des bridges, qui seront perfectionnés plus tard par les Etrusques, les Phéniciens et les Grecs.

North Korea Tableau Vivant

One hundred thousand dancers present an allegory of the reunification of the two Koreas.....

A Revolutionary condom

UK's Futura sees big impact from enlarging condoms
Thu Aug 9, 2007 12:21 PM BST
By Kerstin Neuber

LONDON, Aug 9 (Reuters) - British condom maker Futura Medical Plc (FUM.L: Quote, Profile , Research) said on Thursday that results of a study showed its new condom helped men have firmer and bigger erections, as well as a longer-lasting sexual experience.
Shares in the company, which specialises in sexual healthcare and pain relief, rose 14.5 percent to 59.25 pence on hopes the condom, which will be marketed by Durex condom-maker SSL International (SSL.L: Quote, Profile , Research), could go on sale next year.
Futura said the study of 108 healthy couples showed its CSD500 condom helped men to get a firmer erection compared with a standard condom, increased penis size and made the sexual experience last longer, delivering statistically significant results.
The condom has a small amount of gel in its peak that dilates the arteries and increases blood flow to the penis.
Chief Executive James Barder said the study results underpinned hopes the contraceptive will start generating revenues in 2008.
"We expect to get regulatory EU approval later this year and then it is a question of launching the product soon after, so the revenues are really going to hit us in 2008," he told Reuters.
Market research has shown so far that interest in the condom is enormous, Barder said.
"Up to 80 percent of existing condom users would be interested in trying the product and, more importantly, 49 percent of non-condom users would be interested in using it as it will help them maintain an erection," he said.
Barder said global consumption of condoms was around 14 billion per year, of which half are branded condoms that are actually sold, with the rest being condoms distributed to promote safer sex and in developing countries

Georgia

So, Russia flew over Georgian air space and dropped a bomb that did not even explode. Tragic, ironic, senseless.
Take a closer look at the picture. Why do they keep people off the site with a sign in English - is even the police tape supplied to Georgia by the US? Shame.... Perversely, Georgia can never become a 51st US state unless it changes its name to something else....

Интересно, что даже полицейская лента поставляется в Грузию из Америки.

Brain controls each leg separately

August 7, 2007 (Baltimore, MD) - In a study published in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland found that there are separate adaptable networks controlling each leg and there are also separate networks controlling leg movements, e.g., forward or backward walking. These findings are contrary to the currently accepted theory that leg movements and adaptations are directed by a single control circuit in the brain. The ability to train the right and left legs independently opens the door to new therapeutic approaches for correcting walking abilities in patients with brain injury (e.g., stroke) and neurological disorders (e.g., cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis).
Using a split-belt treadmill to separately control the legs, Kennedy Krieger researchers Dr. Amy Bastian and Julia Choi studied forty healthy adults and tracked each person’s ability to learn various walking exercises. Utilizing specialized computer software and infrared tracking devices placed on key joints, researchers found subjects could store different walking patterns for forward versus backward walking simultaneously, with no interference between the two, revealing that separate brain systems control the two directions of walking. Surprisingly, people could also walk easily with one leg moving forward and the other backward, a pattern referred to as “hybrid walking.” Adaptation of hybrid walking, in which varying speeds were applied to legs walking in opposite directions, was found to interfere with subsequent “normal” forward and backward walking. The combined results demonstrate there are distinct brain modules responsible for right/forward, right/backward, left/forward and left/backward walking. Most significantly, these modules can be individually trained, which would be critical for rehabilitation focused on correcting walking asymmetries produced by brain damage.

“The notion that we can leverage the brain’s adaptive capacity and effectively ‘dial in’ the patterns of movement that we want patients to learn is incredibly exciting,” said Dr. Amy Bastian, senior study author and Director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. “These findings significantly enhance our understanding of motor skills, effective therapeutic approaches and the true adaptive nature of the brain.”
The walking adaptations studied here represent a form of short term learning from practicing on this unusual treadmill. Investigators set different speeds for each belt of the treadmill causing subjects to walk in an abnormal limping pattern. However, within 15 minutes subjects adapted and learned to walk smoothly with a normal pattern and rhythm, as verified by computer models. This indicates that the phenomenon of brain plasticity can occur in short intervals. When subjects returned to normal conditions (same speed for the two legs), this adaptation caused an after-effect that resulted in a limp that lasted for five-to-ten minutes as they “unlearned” the correction. Regardless of how hard subjects tried, they were unable to stop this after-effect, because walking patterns are controlled by automatic brain systems that recalibrate themselves according to current conditions.

Joan Brossa: Eclipse (1988)

New Yorker Cartoon

Brighton Beach...

Brighton Beach

Хаха

Людмила Путина справедливо оскорблена тем, что в прессе муссируются слухи о наличии (и даже не одного) преемника Владимира Владимировича. Никакого повода для возникновения подобных предрассудков она не давала.


Интеллигентный человек - это тот, кто умеет играть на аккордеоне, но не
делает этого.

Иногда и черный юмор - признак светлого ума.