Passengers on the London Tube barely escaped with their lives when a defective train with no driver broke away and sped through six stations without stopping. Circle round and hear the harrowing tale of London's ghost train of death. More »
"Traditional prison," writes Graeme Wood in this month's Atlantic, "has become more or less synonymous with failed prison." One radical solution: scale back traditional prisons in favor of sophisticated monitoring devices. And it's actually not as radical as it sounds. More »
This is one of the 36 sculptures my non-profit corporation maintains. (It's not mine, I work here)
He was recently knocked over. Yes, Humpty had a great fall. We are getting ready to re-install him, but I have a problem. The artist used some weird type of rod/nut combination I've never s
Living on a submarine would probably get pretty miserable pretty quickly. But this wacky camera concept brings the best part of submarine life—the periscope!—to all your landlocked photographic adventures. More »
This is not transhumanist or futurist art per se, but I thought I'd share it with you here in all its surrealist glory. The influence of such painters as Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch and René Magritte are unmistakeable.
Vladimir Kush's homepage.
Just in time for the release of Denny’s new Fried Cheese Melt, a study in The American Journal of Cardiology questions if cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins might pair well with fast food. A side of McStatins with that Big Mac, the study suggests, could decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Using data from previous studies, researchers in the UK compared the decreased risk of cardiovascular disease from taking statins to the increased risk caused by sucking down a cheeseburger and milkshake. From their abstract:
“The risk reduction associated with the daily consumption of most statins, with the exception of pravastatin, is more powerful than the risk increase caused by the daily extra fat intake associated with a 7-oz hamburger (Quarter Pounder®) with cheese and a small milkshake.”
The study’s authors note that the pills certainly won’t counteract all of the ill effects of unhealthy eating choices–diners would still have to contend with the calories and the sodium. Instead they compare taking the medications with other protections from risky behaviors, like wearing a helmet while motorcycling.
Reuters reports that some physicians are worried that the combination will give fast food lovers the wrong message, and may make diners think that they can avoid the negative consequences of their date with the deep fryer. But study coauthor Darrel P. Francis’ statement to CBS News makes you wonder if the currently prescription-only drugs such as Lipitor and Crestor might soon be available next to the ketchup pump:
“It’s ironic that people are free to take as many unhealthy condiments in fast food outlets as they like, but statins, which are beneficial to heart health, have to be prescribed.”
Related content:
Discoblog: Fast Food News: It Boosts Impatience, and What Trumps KFC’s Double Down?
Discoblog: Fast Food Joints Lie About Calories (Denny’s, We’re Looking at You)
Discoblog: Grand Engineering Challenge of Our Era: A Non-Lethal Hot Dog
Discoblog: How Deep Fryer Grease Can Become an Energy-Saving Coating for Your Roof
Image: flickr / Marshall Astor — Food Pornographer
Granting us a view of our dystopian future, tinkerer Randy Sarafan combined engineering ingenuity and what looks like extreme depression to make "The Most Useful Machine," an automated channel surfing aid. One step closer to being completely immobile! More »
The antibiotics-resistant superbug that emerged in South Asia appears to have claimed its first life. According to doctors who treated a man in Belgium, he went to a hospital in Pakistan after a car accident, and there he picked up the bacterial infection. While the man died back in June, his doctors announced today that he carried the superbug.
This new health scare intensified this week after researchers published a study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases characterizing “a new antibiotic resistance mechanism” in the U.K., India, and Pakistan. How bad is this “mechanism?”
It’s bad:
The problem isn’t a particular kind of bacteria. It’s a gene that encodes an enyzme called New Delhi metallo-lactamase-1 (NDM-1). Bacteria that carry it aren’t bothered by traditional antibiotics, or even the drugs known as carbapenems deployed against antibiotic-resistant microbes.
The NDM-1 gene is a special worry because it is found in plasmids — DNA structures that can easily be copied and then transferred promiscuously among different types of bacteria. These include Escherichia coli, the commonest cause of urinary tract infections, and Klebsiella pneumoniae, which causes lung and wound infections and is generated mainly in hospitals [AFP].
It’s no worse than what we had before:
Yes, NDM-1 is scary. But it’s not unprecedented.
There are numerous strains of antibiotic-resistant germs, and although they have killed many patients in hospitals and nursing homes, none have yet lived up to the “superbug” and “flesh-eating bacteria” hyperbole that greets the discovery of each new one. “They’re all bad,” said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center. “Is NDM-1 more worrisome than MRSA? It’s too early to judge” [The New York Times].
The Los Angeles Times contends that the problem is not a serious problem for the West—at least not yet. The people in the most danger are patients in hospitals, The New York Times says—especially ones with weaker immune systems.
Could it happen anywhere?
India and Pakistan have developed some excellent hospitals and surgeons that provide medical care and surgical procedures, especially elective procedures, more cheaply than they are available in the West. But the overuse of antibiotics among the larger population leads to the development of resistance, and those organisms can make their way into even the best hospitals [Los Angeles Times].
Indians, however—cognizant of the bad press that comes with having a medical scare named after one’s capital city—have fought back against the idea that their practices brought on the emergence of a superbug.
“Several superbugs are surviving in nature and they have been reported from countries like Greece, Israel, the U.S., Britain, Brazil,” and elsewhere, V. M. Katoch, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research in New Delhi told India Real Time. “It’s unfortunate that this new bug, which is an environmental thing, has been attached to a particular country” [Wall Street Journal].
Related Content:
DISCOVER: Promising Antibiotic Could Spawn the Next Superbug
80beats: Tiny Nanotech “Diving Boards” Test the Killing Power of Antibiotics
80beats: Non-Lethal Antibiotics Could Fight “Superbugs”
80beats: Red Meat Acts as Trojan Horse for Toxic Attacks By E. Coli
Image: USDA
hi , I want to know how can we perform the non destructive testing technique to establish the coefficient of friction in the cold rolling process . Is there any technique available in the world today ?
Like the iPhone version, the new Photoshop Express for iPad is a basic image editing program that can publish your photos in your own Adobe-based online gallery or through Facebook. It's nice and fast. Unfortunately, it has problems. More »
August 12 – 17, 2010
Serrada di Folgaria (TN)
Second installment of ‘Serrada Futurista’ – a celebration of Futurism in Folgaria.
BitTorrent etiquette dictates that once you've downloaded files, you also seed them to help others' downloads go quickly. If you need to move or rename your download, everything's thrown off. Reader Jake Champion explains how to seed after moving or renaming files. More »
This photograph was made in a small town in Southeast Ohio, along the Ohio river, called Cheshire. To the left you can see the Gavin Power Plant, a coal-fired plant that provides electricity to Ohio, Appalachia, and the greater Northeast. The coal that is burned at Gavin Power comes in part from mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia. In 2002, shortly after federal health experts confirmed that the blue sulphuric clouds from the plant endangered the residents of the town, the American Electric Power company bought the entire village of Cheshire for $20 million, and the residents of Cheshire agreed to relocate. Photographer Daniel Shea has been working on a long-term project to explore the social and environmental impacts of coal in Southeast Ohio and Appalachia.
About taking this photo, Shea writes: “I had driven by this house repeatedly over the course of a week. Sometimes I would stop and photograph it, but it never felt right. This is a residential street in a very small town, and people take notice of strangers. I received really dirty looks the first time I photographed it, it was noon and the sun and heat were unbearable. Eventually I made it back to the house at 5 AM. At that time you couldn’t see the stacks, so I parked outside, waiting until they were barely visible an hour later. I knew while taking it that it would be “the” picture from Plume. This is a fairly atypical landscape — I assume that the house belongs to a manager at the power plant as there isn’t a lot of money in the region; it’s mostly rural poverty.”
When we shared with you Apple's acquisition of Liquid Technologies' supermaterial, we noted that liquid metal is already in use across a variety of industries, from sports to aerospace. Or, you might find it on the wristwatch you have now. More »
The Hemmings article on a model t tank made me remember a few similar things I had seen at farm shows. Figured I would share a few.
http://www.modeltfordsnowmobile.com/
http://www.vintageprojects.com/tractors/model-a-tractor-plans.html
Captain Christian Balan shows holding a spool of Cat-5 cable, eager to play tech support. If he can get the computers running in this relatively-prosperous town of 4000 people, maybe the platoon will get some tips about local insurgent activity. More »
Just want to cheer you up a bit. Click play and watch how things are getting better….
What is the average time length of a human generation? Or let's say we have a large number of birth certificates, and each has the mother's and father's age at the time of the birth of the newborn. What would be the average age of all those parents? I'm sure this number, call it generation length
Hello. Earlier this week, when the heat index was above 110 F, I came home to a warm house. I discovered that the dual run capacitor on my Bryant AC had blown the top off, spitting oil every where. After tracking down a replacement capacitor, and cleaning up the oil, I powered up the unit again.
