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[tahitianstarseed]

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[bettybytes-blog]

It doesn't matter what age you are, if you whine you annoy those around you.  These researchers actually got paid to find out what we already know (surprise, surprise). 

[zavajj-blog-blog]

Can the Miracle Berry Prevent World Hunger?

From the first page of the article;

Chicago chef Homaro Cantu thinks it might be. Cantu, executive chef at Moto restaurant in the Windy City and his new venue iNG, told the TED audience on Tuesday that miracle berries could help feed people in famine-stricken regions by turning what would normally be inedible ingredients — such as wild and bitter grasses — into palatable food. Kentucky bluegrass, for example, tastes like tarragon, Cantu says.

“It works 100 percent of the time, and there are no complications with pharmaceutical products,” Cantu told Wired.com after his talk. “We haven’t seen any side effects. That’s just huge.”

And from the second page;

Finally, they decided to devise healthy substitutions for unhealthy foods, such as BBQ sauce made from crab apples and hay, and hamburgers. In the case of the latter, they eliminated the cow and focused on what cows eat — corn, beets and barley. The resultwas a mixture that looked, cooked and tasted like a hamburger patty.

Read more...

[zavajj-blog-blog]

A Russian team searching for signs of life beneath a 14-million-year-old frozen Antarctic lake has had to halt drilling just a few meters from water, potentially damaging 20 years of work in the process.

The team — headed up by the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg — had to call off work just 29 meters [95-foot] short of the end goal because the Antarctic winter is fast closing in. News that they plan to fill the 3,749-meter [12,300-foot] borehole with kerosene to prevent it from freezing will further trouble groups who fear continued research will contaminate the lake.

[zavajj-blog-blog]

CIA: We Totally Called Egypt’s #Jan25 Movement

  Usually, when mass uprising scrambles the politics of a U.S. ally, politicians blame the nation’s spy apparatus for missing the warning signs. Only when it comes to Egypt, the CIA isn’t having it, vowing that it’s had its watchful eye on potential destabilization for decades. They just might not have known what exactly it would take to loosen Hosni Mubarak’s hold on the country.

“The ingredients of upheaval were there for a long time,” says Paul Pillar, who was the intelligence community’s top Mideast analyst from 2000 to 2005, “but it was impossible to predict in advance what particular catalyzing events would set stuff off.”

Publicly available information, like rapidly expanding opposition Facebook pages, hinted that popular anger in Egypt was bubbling over. The CIA declined to tell Danger Room what specifically it told the Obama administration about the Egyptian protests before last week. But Stephanie O’Sullivan, a longtime CIA official nominated to be intel chief James Clapper’s deputy, told a Senate panel yesterday that the agency secret warned Obama last year that anger at Mubarak’s regime was growing.

Echoing Pillar, Sullivan told senators, “We didn’t know what the triggering mechanism would be for that. And that [warning] happened at the end of the last year.” Back then, the agency concluded Mubarak was in an “untenable” situation.

Real talk: the spy service is supposed to provide big warnings when some huge geopolitical development is brewing. But it’s unfair to expect analysts to provide specific dates for when, say, Mubarak faces a breaking point. It also passes the buck away from the Obama administration, which is struggling to figure out exactly what its response to the upheaval is. If the CIA told Obama last year that Mubarak was going to have to fight to stay in power, the obvious follow-up question is what he did with that information.

At the same time, the CIA is really, really close to its Egyptian counterparts. It relied on Egypt’s spymaster, now Mubarak’s vice president, to carry out a torture program against terrorist suspects. But Pillar denies that closeness led the CIA to rely on rosy pictures of a stable country provided by Egypt’s spies.

“They take with grain of salt what [Egyptian spies] have to say,” Pillar says. “Anybody in the State Department or intelligence community following a country like Egypt is highly conscious of that as an occupational hazard. That doesn’t mean necessarily that they have great sources inside an opposition movement, but they’re aware of this as a potential shortcoming.”

Pillar remembers being the agency’s senior Egypt analyst in the 1980s. His predecessor was Bruce Reidel, now a respected think-tanker and occasional Obama adviser. It was the early days of the U.S.-Egypt partnership, around the time Islamic militants assassinated dictator Anwar Sadat, which brought Mubarak to power. Back then, the CIA wondered how long Mubarak would last.

“If we were to have made predictions back then about timing” the end of the regime, Pillar says, he would have guessed Mubarak “probably not would have lasted anywhere this long. And of course, they’ve had bread riots, that have been disturbing every now and then.”

But the agency tends not to pinpoint “timing prognostications” about a regime’s downfall far in advance. Consider the bureaucratic imperative there: if politicians demand analysts forecast when foreign governments are going to fall, then the CIA’s response will be to issue lots of imprecise reports predicting the potential collapse of this or that despot. One thing the CIA never wants? Blame. And that’s something unprepared politicians always find it convenient to dish out.

[zavajj-blog-blog]

Mice Kept on Unnatural Schedule Go Haywire

Artificially separated from a natural cycle of light and dark, the bodies and brains of mice go haywire in ways that may mimic the human effects of circadian disruption.

The mice are not an analogue for humans who work a night shift or regularly travel across multiple time zones, but they could provide a model for deeper investigations of what happens when circadian rhythms are bumped.

After all, it’s only been a century since mechanized timekeeping and artificial lighting made it possible to override a biological system calibrated for the last several billion years, with circadian systems found in even the most primitive algae.

“Modern society has resulted in a round-the-clock lifestyle, in which natural connections between rest-activity cycles and environmental light-dark cycles have been degraded or even broken,” wrote researchers led by neuroscientist Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University in a Dec. 11 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study. “However, the ramifications of chronic disruption of the circadian clock for mental and physical health are not understood.”

  Yet if the effects are not understood in exact detail, a growing body of evidence points to problems. Circadian “clock genes,” centrally controlled in mammals by a brain region that gets signals straight from the retina, have central regulatory roles in gene networks. Hormone-balance signals are tied to circadian cycles, and night-shift work has been correlated with increases in diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Such correlations can flag a problem but don’t say much about how it works, sending researchers to work on animals. To create chronic circadian disturbance, McEwen’s team turned lab lights on and off to create 20-hour days for mice, while a control group was kept on a regular 24 hour schedule. Within six weeks, the disrupted group started to gain weight, despite eating the same diet as controls. They grew obese, and had altered levels of insulin and leptin, two key metabolic hormones.

Effects extended to their brains. In the prelimbic prefrontal cortex, a region important to emotional control and cognitive flexibility, neurons shrank and were arranged in less complex ways. The mice had trouble learning to navigate mazes, and were spooked by new environments.

The researchers hope their model of disruption will be used by other scientists to conduct further investigations of circadian disruption.

The findings demonstrate “the central role circadian rhythms play in both mental and physical health,” they wrote. “How these findings translate to humans is an important area of research, because such effects could put chronically disrupted individuals at risk for developing metabolic and cardiovascular problems.”