WASHINGTON — The nation’s governors descended on the capital this weekend to consider how to spend their share of the $787 billion economic stimulus and to lay the groundwork for more federal largess to come. Nearly all the governors have been demanding help from Washington for months, and 46 states are facing budget shortfalls. Some have already been forced to lay off workers. So they need the money, but at least four Republican governors say they will turn at least some of it away. Leading the critics was South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. ‘The stimulus is a huge mistake,’ Sanford told ABC News, ‘a political promise that’s been made but not paid for.’ Sanford said he would reject unemployment insurance because of what he said were federal strings attached to it, and also said he would not take $42 million in funding for green buildings. Like Sanford, Republican Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi said he would reject the federal unemployment extension money, which requires that states extend the benefits to workers laid off from part-time jobs. ‘We will not be accepting unemployment insurance money because it requires us to have a significant tax increase […]
A ‘danger receptor’ that may kick-start an immune reaction to cancer in the body has been found by UK researchers. It picks up signs of cell death caused by injury or tumours and mobilises the body’s defences, Nature reports. The finding may explain why some tumour-killing drugs partly work by setting off an immune response. Better understanding of the receptor could help develop cancer treatments that harness the immune system, the London Research Institute team said. Cell death is a normal process in the body which keeps growth and repair ticking over and keeps tissue healthy. But sometimes there is an abnormal type of cell death called necrosis. It has been thought for many years that the body somehow senses this abnormal cell death and sets off an immune reaction. From an evolutionary point of view this would make sense as injury puts the body at risk of infection and an immune response would be a sensible precaution. However, until now no receptor capable of detecting this abnormal cell death had been found. The researchers discovered that the DNGR-1 receptor on a type of immune cell called a dendritic cell mobilises […]
SACRAMENTO, CA — Federal water managers said Friday that they plan to cut off water, at least temporarily, to thousands of California farms as a result of the deepening drought gripping the state. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials said parched reservoirs and patchy rainfall this year were forcing them to completely stop surface water deliveries for at least a two-week period beginning March 1. Authorities said they haven’t had to take such a drastic move for more than 15 years. The situation could improve slightly if more rain falls over the next few weeks, and officials will know by mid-March if they can release more irrigation supplies to growers. Farmers in the nation’s No. 1 agriculture state predicted it would cause consumers to pay more for their fruits and vegetables, which would have to be grown using expensive well water. ‘Water is our life – it’s our jobs and it’s our food,’ said Ryan Jacobsen, executive director of the farm bureau in Fresno County. ‘Without a reliable water supply, Fresno County’s No. 1 employer – agriculture – is at great risk.’ The drought would cause an estimated $1.15 billion dollar loss in agriculture-related wages and […]
It may be the worst-kept secret in medicine: pharmaceutical money buys journal influence. What the public has so long suspected has now been demonstrated in a recently published peer-reviewed study. (1) Researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the University of Florida found that ‘in major medical journals, more pharmaceutical advertising is associated with publishing fewer articles about dietary supplements.’ Furthermore, they found that more pharmaceutical company advertising resulted in the journal having more articles with ‘negative conclusions about dietary supplement safety.’ This new study, the first of its kind, specifically looked at pharmaceutical advertising as compared with journal text about dietary supplements. The authors reviewed a year’s worth of issues from each of eleven of the largest medical journals: the Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine, Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Pediatrics and Pediatric Research, and American Family Physician. The results were statistically significant. . . and embarrassing. Medical journals carrying the most pharmaceutical ads ‘published significantly fewer major articles about dietary supplements per issue than journals with the fewest pharmads (P < 0.01). [...]
Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands. The stark warning - which includes discussion of a ‘Terminator’-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters - is part of a hefty report funded by and prepared for the U.S. Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research. The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers. ‘There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,’ Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. ‘Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when … programs could be written and understood by a single person.’ The reality, Dr. Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
