CHICAGO — Flu viruses must be able to pick a very specific type of lock before entering human respiratory cells, U.S. researchers said on Sunday, offering a new understanding of how flu viruses work. The discovery may help scientists better monitor changes in the H5N1 bird flu virus that could trigger a deadly pandemic in humans. And it may lead to better ways to fight it, they said. The scientists found that a flu virus must be able to attach itself to an umbrella-shaped receptor coating human respiratory cells before it can infect cells in the upper airways. ‘What the lock needs is the right key. It opens the door,’ said Ram Sasisekharan, a professor of biological engineering and health sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The H5N1 avian flu virus now almost exclusively infects birds. But it can occasionally pass to a person. Experts have feared that the bird flu virus would evolve slightly into a form that people can easily catch and pass to one another, triggering an epidemic. ‘We now know what to look for,’ said Sasisekharan, whose study appears in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Before a flu […]
When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation’s Wal-Marts. And this NAFTA Superhighway, as it is called, is just the beginning, the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union. Even as this plot unfolds in slow motion, the mainstream media are silent; politicians are in denial. Yet word is getting out. Like samizdat, info about the highway has circulated in niche media platforms old and […]
Hurricanes and tornadoes have seasons, but do earthquakes? They do in the Himalayas, and it’s during the winter. For years, seismologists had observed that far more earthquakes shook the massive Asian mountain range in the winter months than in the summer, but they couldn’t pinpoint the cause of this seasonal change. A new study of GPS and satellite data presented last month at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union has connected the increase in earthquake activity to the monsoon season that drenches the region each summer. When it rains, it shakes The Himalayas are a highly quake-prone region because of the stresses building up between the Indian and Eurasian plates as India continues to drive into Asia. Philippe Avouac of Caltech and his colleagues analyzed a catalog of 10,000 Himalayan quakes and found there were twice as many during the winter months (December to February) as during the summer. For example, for magnitude-3 quakes, there were up to 150 per month in the winter, but only 75 in the summer. (Quakes this small are often not even felt.) For magnitude-4 temblors (sometimes felt), the winter average was 16 per month, while the summer rate […]
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is imposing restrictions on the ability of states to expand eligibility for Medicaid, in an effort to prevent them from offering coverage to families of modest incomes who, the administration argues, may have access to private health insurance. The restrictions mirror those the administration placed on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in August after states tried to broaden eligibility for it as well. Until now, states had generally been free to set their own Medicaid eligibility criteria, and the Bush administration had not openly declared that it would apply the August directive to Medicaid. State officials in Louisiana, Ohio and Oklahoma said they had discovered the administration’s intent in negotiations with the federal government over the last few weeks. The federal government has leverage over states, because it pays a large share of the costs for Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and states have to comply with federal standards to get federal money. The insurance program was created for children whose families have too much income to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy private insurance. On Dec. 20, the Bush administration rejected a proposal by […]
Living standards in Britain are set to rise above those in America for the first time since the 19th century, according to a report by the respected Oxford Economics consultancy. The calculations suggest that, measured by gross domestic product per capita, Britain can now hold its head up high in the economic stakes after more than a century of playing second fiddle to the Americans. It says that GDP per head in Britain will be £23,500 this year, compared with £23,250 in America, reflecting not only the strength of the pound against the dollar but also the UK economy’s record run of growth and rising incomes going back to the early 1990s. In those days, according to Oxford Economics, Britain’s GDP per capita was 34% below that in America, 33% less than in Germany and 26% lower than in France. Now, not only have average incomes crept above those in America but they are more than 8% above France (£21,700) and Germany (£21,665). ‘The past 15 years have seen a dramatic change in the UK’s economic performance and its position in the world economy,’ said Adrian Cooper, managing director of Oxford Economics. ‘No longer are we […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
