ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A Republican legal campaign questioning the legitimacy of many newly registered voters hit a wall this week when courts rejected several cases filed by GOP state parties and officials. As Democrats registered record numbers of new voters over the recent months, Republicans asked courts to enforce a law intended to prevent fraud, but that voting rights advocates feared could erroneously purge thousands of legitimate voters from the rolls. But over the last week, several judges ruled against or threw out Republican-filed challenges in battleground states. Republicans hit back on Friday, when the White House asked the Department of Justice to investigate 200,000 Ohio voters with questionable registrations. The battles are over a section of the Help American Vote Act, passed in 2002 by Congress to prevent another Florida-style recount. HAVA requires states to match information supplied on voter registration forms with department of motor vehicles and Social Security records. Individuals who provide information that does not match those documents may face confusion at the polls or be required to vote on a provisional ballot. But critics of the provision say inaccurate state databases lead to erroneous disqualifications. A study by […]
It’s a sunny Thursday morning and two accomplished scientists are seated on either side of a non-descript table in a University of Georgia conference room talking about bread mold. Bread mold? Nobody uses that term around here, though. In the lab, it’s Neurospora crassa. (Because of its long striations, the growing mold looks like a nerve system, so Neurospora literally means ‘nerve spore.’) Jonathan Arnold, a geneticist and Heinz-Bernd Schuttler, a computational physicist, are not explaining something as plebian as bread mold, though. They’re talking about biological clocks, those internal tickers that, among other things, tell all living things when to rest and when to awaken. For years, researchers thought that the function of these clocks was relatively straightforward. Now, a new NSF-supported research thrust by the two scientists and their colleagues is showing that the number of genes in Neurospora under the control of the biological clock is dramatically higher than anyone ever suspected. ‘We’re just now beginning to see why the clock is so far-reaching in effects on the organism,’ says Arnold, whose excitement when discussing his latest work is palpable. The clock’s off-on abilities don’t just intrigue geneticists, either. Oscillating organism Schuttler, […]
CHICAGO, – Making vegetable juice a daily habit could be a small step that can lead to big changes in meeting daily vegetable recommendations, according to a new study being presented by researchers from the University of California-Davis this week at the American Dietetic Association annual conference1. With seven out of 10 adults falling short of the daily recommended vegetable intake as put forth by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, researchers studied whether drinking vegetable juice could be a simple behavior change to help boost the intake of this critical food group2. And it was. The study looked at three groups of healthy men and women. All three groups received dietary counseling on ways to get more vegetables, but only two of the groups were instructed to consume at least one serving of vegetable juice, in the form of V8® 100% vegetable juice each day. Of those two groups, one drank one 8-ounce glass of vegetable juice every day and the other drank two 8-ounce glasses of vegetable juice every day as part of a balanced eating plan. The study found that those who received dietary counseling and consumed vegetable juice were far more likely to meet […]
Those who worship a higher power often do so in different ways. Whether they are active in their religious community, or prefer to simply pray or meditate, new research out of Temple University suggests that a person’s religiousness – also called religiosity – can offer insight into their risk for depression. Lead researcher Joanna Maselko, Sc.D., characterized the religiosity of 918 study participants in terms of three domains of religiosity: religious service attendance, which refers to being involved with a church; religious well-being, which refers to the quality of a person’s relationship with a higher power; and existential well-being, which refers to a person’s sense of meaning and their purpose in life. In a study published on-line this month in Psychological Medicine, Maselko and fellow researchers compared each domain of religiosity to their risk of depression, and were surprised to find that the group with higher levels of religious well-being were 1.5 times more likely to have had depression than those with lower levels of religious well-being. Maselko theorizes this is because people with depression tend to use religion as a coping mechanism. As a result, they’re more closely relating to God and praying more. Researchers […]
LONDON — A UN report launched here on Thursday says few of the world’s coastal cities will be spared by climate change. In the 20th century, sea levels rose by an estimated 17 centimeters, and global mean projections for sea level rise between 1990 and 2080 range from 22 centimeters to 34 centimeters. The low elevation coastal zone — the continuous area along coastlines that is less than 10 meters above sea level — represents 2 percent of the world’s land area but contains 10 percent of its total population and 13 percent of its urban population, says the report ‘State of the World’s Cities 2008/9: Harmonious Cities’ launched by the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-HABITAT) after analyzing urban inequalities in 28 developing countries. But at a time when over 50 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, the report sets out to determine which cities are in danger and which communities might well be drowned out. There are 3,351 cities in the low elevation coastal zones around the world. Of these cities, 64 percent are in developing regions; Asia alone accounts […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
