Gun Nuts, Car Crashes, and Radiation--Fun For Everyone!

Personal stories of women who have had abortions.  Healthy sweaty women.  And why some women will vote Republican is beyond me.  The next generation of intelligent women.

The negatives of Governor Chris Christie.

A meeting of Mothers Against Gun Violence brings out a group of gun nuts.

What letting loose a virus into the internets can do... think space station..

A shower design that reuses water and saves money.  Do you think we'll ever see it produced in the US?

The Earth is old... older than 6,000 years.  Life on Earth is really old.  Apparently older than we ever imagined.  And here is a panorama of Mars.  (scroll down and ignore the annoying whirling gif.)

Russian car crashes from dash cams.

Fukushima residents may never go home, say Japanese officials  I thought that was a given.  They have lost that area of Japan forever.

Monday mopings...

Um... shouldn't we be worried a bit about this? Vial of easily weaponized virus goes missing in Texas

Overfishing our oceans.

Monsanto's death patents.

Five reasons why not to eat anything from China.

But Chevron is so trustworthy!

Conservapedia Disproves E=mc²

We could have told you this: Researchers link ‘unfounded’ wars to increased risk of PTSD. War for war's sake will destroy armies. Wars for no just cause destroys soldiers.

 Might as well make yourselves useful: Cleaning up the oceans with drones.

Puzzled cats are puzzled.

North Korea prepares for war ... with somebody.  Anybody?

This is why Congress is broken, the Republicans want to stay ignorant about anything Obama offers.  They will refuse to do anything he suggests.  The teabaggery party has won.

How to deal with angry bees.  Killer bees or not.

Bees instinctually target the eyes, nose, ears and face. If you lack a helmet and veil, the bees will sting your repeatedly in the head and upper trunk, and at some point this will cause your eyes to swell shut and then you are in big trouble. If you are blind, escaping these insects is difficult or impossible, and the likelihood of you running into other objects or falling down in addition to being attacked--goes up. This is how people sometimes die in these confrontations. They get stung repeatedly in the face, the flesh swells around their eyes, they are still being stung repeatedly which hurts like hell and is scary, and they run into a wall or tree, or fall over items in their path and hurt themselves, or knock themselves out, meanwhile more bees appear, just to sting the person, while they are down and unable to get back up.

Saving Britain's heritage...by losing Shakespeare's house.

How does an anti-virus program work?

A chart that helps define the different conservative branches.

Creating a superbug one antibacterial soap at a time.

A testament to love.

What?

What privacy?

What reproductive control? New Mexico Bill Would Imprison Rape Victims Who Receive Abortions and Washington police failures on rape detailed in groundbreaking report but wait!.... uh... Catholic Hospital Argues Fetuses Are Not People In Malpractice Suit

What gun safety by knowledgeable gun owners?

What super viruses?

What deficit?

What part of the Grey Lady will be left?

What Sandy Hook conspiracy?

What American Dream?

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

Sorta like this kitty:

 

Making the rounds on Facebook: Charlie Chaplin's final speech in the 'The Great Dictator':

 

 Banks actually just a bit concerned about Occupy Wall Street protesters. As they should be. Also, the squidding of Goldman Sachs.

 I KNEW my fascination with bees had something to do with brains.

 Cool new idea to sterilize hospital rooms.

 Monsanto's genetic food being rushed to market: Under Industry Pressure, USDA Works to Speed Approval of Monsanto's Genetically Engineered Crops.  And childhood obesity be damned, food giants fight proposed nutrition guidelines.

 Looks like Beijing is copying the pea-soup fogs of Jack the Ripper's era: Beijing air goes from 'hazardous' to off the charts, literally

 The Republicans' radical embrace of nullification.

 The trial of Bradley Manning.

 Keeping an eye on the radiation levels in Japan.

 Incoming water wars.

 How doctors choose to die when they know the options available.

 All this might not matter. The melting of the permafrost in the Arctic is releasing huge quantities of methane:

Bee happy...

Scientists may finally understand what is causing the Colony Collapse Disorder:

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

What the overuse and misuse of antibiotics

Has led us to:

New drug-resistant superbugs found in 3 states

The U.S. cases occurred this year in people from California, Massachusetts and Illinois, said Brandi Limbago, a lab chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three types of bacteria were involved, and three different mechanisms let the gene become part of them.

[snip]

She did not know how the three patients were treated, but all survived.
Doctors have tried treating some of these cases with combinations of antibiotics, hoping that will be more effective than individual ones are. Some have resorted to using polymyxins — antibiotics used in the 1950s and '60s that were unpopular because they can harm the kidneys.

The two Canadian cases were treated with a combination of antibiotics, said Dr. Johann Pitout of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. One case was in Alberta, the other in British Columbia.

Both patients had medical emergencies while traveling in India. They developed urinary infections that were discovered to have the resistance gene once they returned home to Canada, Pitout said.

The CDC advises any hospitals that find such cases to put the patient in medical isolation, check the patient's close contacts for possible infection, and look for more infections in the hospital.

Any case "should raise an alarm," Limbago said.

Tell the FDA to Save Antibiotics

Tell the FDA: Protect Human and Animal Health by Saving Antibiotics

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering a rule that could weaken already-lenient controls on the use of antibiotics in food animal production.

The new rule affects the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD), a program allowing veterinarians to prescribe antibiotics mixed into animal feed in new ways. Currently, the VFD ensures that for those new antibiotic uses a diagnosis is made before animals are given antibiotics in their feed.

Many industrial farms routinely feed antibiotics to poultry or livestock to compensate for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, while promoting growth. Proposed changes to the VFD could weaken oversight that prevents unnecessary drug use - increasing the rate of antibiotic resistance in humans.

Up to 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are fed to healthy food animals. Weakening the VFD could breed dangerous new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans thus making these important drugs we depend on useless.

Send your comment now. Tell the FDA to protect human and animal health by rejecting this rule and saving antibiotics.

At least we'll die happy...

CDC Officials Announce Free Ice Cream For Everyone, Delicious Tasty Ice Cream, And Also There Is An Ebola Outbreak

Blog sprinkles

Instant anti-depressant from NTodd.

JJ at Unrepentant Old Hippie has a fascinating argument going on her post about the nun in an Arizona hospital being automatically excommunicated for helping to save a woman's life... because the woman had a life threatening pregnancy.

Headline to gape at: Texas schools to teach kids that ’separation of church and state’ not in Constitution or how about this one? Deepwater Horizon survivors allege they were kept in seclusion after rig explosion, coerced into signing legal waivers

How to kill Social Security by ignorance explained by Gaius Publius of AmericaBlog.

Being skeptical about skeptics about global warming.

British bees are leaving their hives as well.

Steve Bates' laptop has been attacked by an 'interesting' virus. Can anyone identify it?

Karl Rove projects his own style of governmental 'control' on to the Obama administration.

And the oil meter still rolls on...

Bees ... or no bees

At all...



It's worse than we thought:

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

Voices of the common folk

Are heard in Obama's Oval Office. Rather a nice change from the last regime, isn't it?

Bees

Or no bees at all:

MERCED, Calif. – The mysterious 4-year-old crisis of disappearing honeybees is deepening. A quick federal survey indicates a heavy bee die-off this winter, while a new study shows honeybees' pollen and hives laden with pesticides.

Two federal agencies along with regulators in California and Canada are scrambling to figure out what is behind this relatively recent threat, ordering new research on pesticides used in fields and orchards. Federal courts are even weighing in this month, ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overlooked a requirement when allowing a pesticide on the market.

[snip]

Bees have been declining over decades from various causes. But in 2006 a new concern, "colony collapse disorder," was blamed for large, inexplicable die-offs. The disorder, which causes adult bees to abandon their hives and fly off to die, is likely a combination of many causes, including parasites, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition and pesticides, experts say.

"It's just gotten so much worse in the past four years," said Jeff Pettis, research leader of the Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. "We're just not keeping bees alive that long."

This year bees seem to be in bigger trouble than normal after a bad winter, according to an informal survey of commercial bee brokers cited in an internal USDA document. One-third of those surveyed had trouble finding enough hives to pollinate California's blossoming nut trees, which grow the bulk of the world's almonds. A more formal survey will be done in April.

"There were a lot of beekeepers scrambling to fill their orders and that implies that mortality was high," said Penn State University bee researcher Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who worked on the USDA snapshot survey.

Beekeeper Zac Browning shipped his hives from Idaho to California to pollinate the blossoming almond groves. He got a shock when he checked on them, finding hundreds of the hives empty, abandoned by the worker bees.
The losses were extreme, three times higher than the previous year.

We're all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee......

Weird lights over Norway

Halo cloud over Russia

Meteor over Utah:



Update 12/10: New giant virus discovered!!

Update: Mahakal in comments links to the report:

Russia confirms failed missile launch

And this:



Ssshh... we really know space aliens are involved!

Plan B

Using science to save the bees and the world

Oh no! Science is evil! It is dispassionate and logical and wants to sacrifice your children!! Or not?

Scientists say that mass bee deaths may be caused by viruses that disrupt gene expression.

The team analysed which genes were turned on and which were turned off in healthy bees and those from hives with colony collapse disorder (CCD).

Since 2006, CCD has caused the catastrophic loss of US bee hives and is implicated in bee deaths elsewhere.

Writing in PNAS journal, the team say they used "whole genome microarrays" to compare cells from bees' guts.

Lead scientist May Berenbaum from the University of Illinois told BBC News that the research was made possible by publication of the bee genome in 2006.

[snip]

"So maybe what's happening is basically the ribosome wears out. So we looked to see if the CCD bees have more of these viruses than healthy bees. And they do.

The viruses in question include "deformed wing virus" and "Israeli acute paralysis virus".

The scientists believe that if a number of similar picorna-like viruses attack simultaneously, they may be able to overwhelm the ribosome.

"We talk about a smoking gun. We have the bullet hole!" said May Berenbaum.

"We now need to look for how multiple viruses might interact on the ribosome."

The honey bee is the US's key agricultural pollinator. As such it is worth $14bn to the country's economy.

CCD was first identified in 2006. In the winter of 2007-8 more than a third of US bees were lost.

Similar losses have been reported in Europe, giving rise to fears that CCD is a global problem.

Cyber terrorism

Is just in its infancy:

WASHINGTON – The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange.

An early analysis of the malicious software used in the attack found its targets also included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained attacks.

The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attack. It was not immediately clear who might be responsible or what their motives were.

The attack was remarkably successful. Some of the affected government Web sites — such as the Treasury Department, Federal Trade Commission and Secret Service — were still reporting problems days after it started during the July 4 holiday.

But it's growing up fast.

Time for the plastic sheeting and duct tape

Or at least the face mask and bubble wrap suit...

International scientists say they have found the first evidence of resistance to the world's most effective drug for treating malaria.

The hard hat and bunny slippers?

Atlanta, GA (AHN) - Scientists have identified a lethal new virus in Africa similar to the dreaded Ebola virus. The so-called "Lujo" virus, which causes excessive bleeding like Ebola, infected five people in Zambia and South Africa last fall.

Although scientists are not yet sure how the first person became infected, they do know the bug usually comes from a family of viruses found in rodents, according to Dr. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist involved in the discovery.

Well... we won't have to worry about these because we're all going to drown, dehydrate, starve, or burn up anyway:

Climate change is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300m people, according to the first comprehensive study of the human impact of global warming.

It projects that increasingly severe heatwaves, floods, storms and forest fires will be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths a year by 2030, making it the greatest humanitarian challenge the world faces.

Economic losses due to climate change today amount to more than $125bn a year — more than all the present world aid. The report comes from former UN secretary general Kofi Annan's thinktank, the Global Humanitarian Forum. By 2030, the report says, climate change could cost $600bn a year.

Civil unrest may also increase because of weather-related events, the report says: "Four billion people are vulnerable now and 500m are now at extreme risk. Weather-related disasters ... bring hunger, disease, poverty and lost livelihoods. They pose a threat to social and political stability".

All this fades into the background with this horrible horrible news:

FAIRFAX, Va. - Officials in northern Virginia are blaming Krispy Kreme doughnuts for clogging the sewers.

Fairfax County says the company has damaged its sewer system by dumping yeast and grease from a plant in Lorton.

County officials filed a lawsuit this month after the company refused to pay a US$1.9 million bill for repairs to the system.

Krispy Kreme says the charges are unfounded.

April Fool's Day Worm

(CNN) -- A computer-science detective story is playing out on the Internet as security experts try to hunt down a worm called Conficker C and prevent it from damaging millions of computers on April Fool's Day.

The anti-worm researchers have banded together in a group they call the Conficker Cabal. Members are searching for the malicious software program's author and for ways to do damage control if he or she can't be stopped.

They're motivated in part by a $250,000 bounty from Microsoft and also by what seems to be a sort of Dick Tracy ethic.

"We love catching bad guys," said Alvin Estevez, CEO of Enigma Software Group, which is one of many companies trying to crack Conficker. "We're like former hackers who like to catch other hackers. To us, we get almost a feather in our cap to be able to knock out that worm. We slap each other five when we're killing those infections."

The malicious program already is thought to have infected between 5 million and 10 million computers.

Those infections haven't spawned many symptoms, but on April 1 a master computer is scheduled to gain control of these zombie machines, said Don DeBolt, director of threat research for CA, a New York-based IT and software company.

What happens on April Fool's Day is anyone's guess.

Getting viruses from friends

And washing your hands won't help:

...Facebook has seen five different security threats in the past week. According to Trend Micro, four new hoax applications are attempting to trick members into divulging their usernames and passwords. And a new variant of the Koobface worm is running wild on the site, installing malware on the computers of victims who click on a link to a fake YouTube video.

The Koobface worm is dangerous. It can be dropped by other malware and downloaded unknowingly by a user when visiting malicious Web sites, Trend Micro reports. When attackers execute the malware, it searches for cookies created by online social networks. The latest variant is targeting Facebook, but earlier variants have also plagued MySpace.

Koobface's Wicked Agenda

Once Koobface finds the social-networking cookies, it makes a DNS query to check IP addresses that correspond to remote domains. Trend Micro explains that those servers can send and receive information about the affected machine. Once connected, the malicious user can remotely perform commands on the victim's machine.

"Once cookies related to the monitored social-networking Web sites are located, it connects to these Web sites using the user log-in session stored in the cookies. It then navigates through pages to search for the user's friends. If a friend has been located, it sends an HTTP POST request to the server," Trend Micro reports.

Ultimately, the worm's agenda is to transform the victim's computer into a zombie and form botnets for malicious purposes. Koobface attempts to do this by composing a message and sending it to the user's friends. The message contains a link to a Web site where a copy of the worm can be downloaded by unsuspecting friends. And the cycle repeats itself.

Ways to protect yourself?

Argast called the Koobface worm a mix of something old and something new. The new is using social networks as a method to spread malware. The old is using fake codec Trojans linked to a saucy video to induce the user to install the malware.

Argast said people can protect themselves by running up-to-date antivirus software, restricting which Facebook applications they install, thinking twice before clicking on links from friends and never, never installing a codec from some random Web site in the hopes of catching some celebrity in a compromised situation.

Basically wear protection at all times....