WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 59 million Americans went without health insurance coverage for at least part of 2010, many of them with conditions or diseases that needed treatment, federal health officials said on Tuesday.

They said 4 million more Americans went without insurance in the first part of 2010 than during the same time in 2008.

‘Both adults and kids lost private coverage over the past decade,’ Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news briefing.

The findings have implications for U.S. healthcare reform efforts. A bill passed in March promises to get health insurance coverage to 32 million Americans who currently lack coverage.

But Republicans who just took control of the House of Representatives last week have vowed to derail the new law by cutting off the funds for it, and some want to repeal it. Experts from both sides predict gridlock in Congress for the next two years in implementing healthcare reform’s provisions.

Even before the healthcare reform act, Congress passed provisions expanding free health coverage for children.

‘As private insurance coverage fell, the safety net protected children, but did not adequately protect adults,’ Frieden said.

Nine percent of adults lost private insurance, and public insurance […]

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The most important political and intellectual reality in America today can be seen in a 2006 CBS News poll, which found that a large segment of Americans ‘do not believe that humans evolved.’ This sentiment is usually discussed in religious terms. I suggest it should be seen as a political statement.

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If the Manning brothers were quantum physicists as well as NFL quarterbacks, one of them could win his game’s opening coin toss every time. The night before they played, the brothers would take two coins from a special quantum box to use the next day. If Peyton’s game came first, after learning the outcome of his coin toss, he would know without a doubt how his brother’s coin would land. Say Peyton’s came up heads; he could text ‘tails

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Biotech firms hit as cash dries up and research shifts eastward – Business News, Business

The global biotechnology business model is ‘breaking down’ as investors tighten purse strings and the industry’s research base shifts to emerging economies, a report suggests.

Last year, biotech companies in Europe managed to raise just $1.1bn (£678m) in venture capital – the lowest haul since 2003. The auguries are also dim: 84 per cent of the participants at a recent biopharmaceutical conference in Monaco view funding as the industry’s prime challenge.

Historically, the biotech industry has relied on external investment to develop innovative ideas that have often sprung from the world of academia. Investors dug into their pockets in the hope of cashing in by floating biotech firms or selling new therapies to established players in the pharmaceuticals sector.

But the business model is risky and many investments end up in the red. A report by the accountant PricewaterhouseCoopers cites a recent study of 1,606 biotech investments realised between 1986 and 2008. Of these, 704 resulted in a full or partial loss and 16 managed only to cover their costs.

The gross rate of return on these investments stood at nearly 26 per cent, well above the pooled average return […]

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Bird navigation, plant photosynthesis and the human sense of smell all represent ways living things appear to exploit the oddities of quantum physics, scientists are finding.

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics dealing with the strange behaviour of very tiny things like elementary particles and atoms, and is extremely different from the physics that humans experience every day.

‘Down at that level, everything is pretty darn weird,’ Seth Lloyd said before giving a lecture about quantum aspects of biology Wednesday evening in Waterloo, Ont.

‘Electrons can be in two places in once, or five places at once, or a thousand places at once. And then there are these funky quantum effects like ‘entanglement,’ where two different systems can have more information about each other than they have any right to have under classical mechanics,’ said Lloyd, a professor of quantum mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

‘When things get bigger, certainly on the scale of human beings or even at the scale of bacteria, then this kind of quantum weirdness tends to go away.’
Sensor, solar cell lessons

It has only been in the past three or four years that scientists have started figuring out how quantum mechanics is exploited by animals, […]

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