Downturn Accelerates As It Circles The Globe, Riots in China

The world economy is deteriorating more quickly than leading economists predicted only weeks ago, with Britain yesterday becoming the latest nation to surprise analysts with the depth of its economic pain.

Britain posted its worst quarterly contraction since 1980 on the heels of sharper than expected slowdowns reported from Germany to China to South Korea. The grim data, analysts said, underscores how the burst of the biggest credit bubble in history is seeping into the real economies around the world, silencing construction cranes, bankrupting businesses and throwing millions of people out of work. … -washingtonpost

Today millions will leave the cities to return to their rural family homes for the new year celebrations. But this year Beijing hopes the newly jobless revellers will stay there – to prevent a fresh wave of unrest in the citiesThey surged into the grimy streets around the factory: first scores, then hundreds, then more than a thousand, as word spread and tension loaded the stale, grey air. The boldest overturned a police van and smashed up motorcycles, then tore through the building destroying computers and equipment. The mood was exhilarated, angry and frightened. hey surged into the grimy streets around the factory: first scores, then hundreds, the

“It happened so quickly … There were maybe 500 involved and another 1,000 watching them. People were yelling: ‘It’s good to smash’,” said a witness.

But the riot late last year at the Kai Da factory in Dongguan, amid the grim industrial sprawl of the Pearl River Delta, was not an isolated incident. It was one of tens of thousands of protests, many erupting from the same mixture of economic grievances, resentment of police and swirling rumour.

The numbers have been climbing steadily for years. But as the Chinese New Year dawns and the global economic crisis deepens, the government fears that mass unrest could challenge its control of the country, threatening a communist regime that has embraced capitalism with spectacular results. …

via China fears riots will spread as boom goes sour | World news | The Observer.

Everyone is struggling to some degree due ultimately to overpopulation. It is in the world’s best interests right now to mobilize our massive numbers of people to find new solutions to our limited resources. Otherwise, we are headed for even bigger problems which some leaders will think can be solved most quickly by World War III.

Ghost Of Abe Lincoln Stalks The White House

Such obviously high journalistic standards in this reporting Still a fun read.

President Obama has a spooky spirit living in his new digs: The ghost of Abraham Lincoln.

According to paranormal researcher Richard Crowe, the White House is a hotspot of ghostly activity, and the ghoul most seen stalking the place is Honest Abe, a fact confirmed by a stripper.

Crowe explains, “Abe Lincoln is the most popularly reported ghost in the White House. A famous stripper named Blaze Starr spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom in the ’60s and said she saw a lifesize statue of Abraham Lincoln in the corner when she was in bed, but in the morning the statue wasn’t there.”

Not only did the stripper see Lincoln’s spirit, apparently she claims that Abe’s naughty ghost “likes to watch.”

Though the White House is an eerie place, Crowe thinks Sasha and Malia Obama will love their new haunted house because they’ll be able to have “impromptu ghost hunts all the time.”

via Ghost Of Abe Lincoln Stalks The White House.

More British men seeking breast reduction

Doctors say a record number of British men last year sought breast-reduction surgery for “man boobs” or “moobs,” as some call them.

Breast-reduction surgery for men rose from 22 operations in 2003 to 224 operations last year, said the Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons in Britain.

More men concerned with their physique also are turning to anabolic steroids, with an estimated 179,000 men ages 16-59 having used them in Britain, The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday.

via More British men seeking breast reduction – UPI.com.

Gynecomastia can arise from a number of different disorders including chronic kidney disease, liver disease and certain adrenal tumors. Basically, any condition that plays havoc with hormone levels has the potential to grow you a pair. – altpenis

Bad behavior on flights prosecutable under Patriot Act

She spanked each of them on the thigh with three swats. It was a small incident, but one that in the heightened anxiety after the Sept. 11 attacks eventually would have enormous ramifications for Freeman and her children.

A flight attendant confronted Freeman, who responded by hurling a few profanities and throwing what remained of a can of tomato juice on the floor.

The incident aboard the Frontier flight ultimately led to Freeman’s arrest and conviction for a federal felony defined as an act of terrorism under the Patriot Act, the controversial federal law enacted after the 2001 attacks.

Freeman is one of at least 200 flight passengers who have been convicted under the amended law. In most of the cases, there was no evidence the passengers had attempted to hijack an airplane or physically attack flight crew members. Many have simply involved raised voices, foul language, and drunken behavior.

Some security specialists say the use of the law by airlines has run amok, criminalizing incidents that did not start out as threats to public safety, much less acts of terrorism.

“We have gone completely berserk on this issue,” said Charles Slepian, a New York security consultant.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd defended the prosecutions, saying they helped improve airline security.

For decades, airline personnel and law-enforcement officials have had wide latitude in prosecuting unruly passengers, and largely maintained order under Federal Aviation Administration rules. The Sept. 11 attacks changed everything. Within two months, Congress passed the Patriot Act, a sweeping attempt to improve the nation’s defenses against international terrorism.

Included were two key provisions on airline security. The first defined disruptive behavior as a terrorist act, reflecting the seismic shift in airline security. The second broadened the existing criminal law so that any attempt or conspiracy to interfere with a flight crew became a felony – a change that allowed flight personnel to act against suspicious passengers even if they hadn’t begun an actual assault.

The Justice Department does not keep data on how many prosecutions or convictions have occurred, Boyd said. But according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University program, the federal government has obtained 208 felony convictions for disrupting a flight since 2003, when data first became available.

The single case of actual terrorism cited by Boyd was that of Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, who is serving three life sentences. Reid was subdued by passengers and flight attendants on a 2001 flight from Paris to Miami after he was seen trying to ignite explosives in his shoe. …

via Bad behavior on flights prosecutable under Patriot Act – The Boston Globe.

The evidence from the FBI and British intelligence I’ve read is that Reid was communicating with Zacarias Moussaoui, planning terrorist attacks on Americans. From the video I saw, I think he would have just blow his foot off rather than taking down the plane. The 100 others publicized in the 2001 atmosphere of fear never materialized. As for the 207 “terrorist attacks” on US jets which were actually just people being idiots, let’s stop the absurd paranoia.

Simulated evolution gets complex, snowflake example of self-organization

The article below my snowflake example of self-organization describes a computer model for evolution. It is from five years ago, but it is still interesting.

“How can something as complicated and beautiful as ourselves happen by chance?”

The fairly new science of self-organizing systems has the answer: Small local rules–for example, charges which cause atoms to attract or repel–lead spontaneously to large scale order and complexity, including reproduction and evolution.

This is very hard for most people to grasp or even to believe. How can order be created from chaos without a designer? One example of self-organization in the real world is crystal growth.

“Snow flakes are a very well known example, where subtle differences in crystal growth conditions result in different geometries.” – wiki

Who builds each snowflake? Isn’t something as orderly and complicated as a snow flake evidence that some intelligent being designed each one?

There is no intelligent designer of snowflakes. No one sketches out each pattern. Snow crystals grow by themselves without blueprints, with no plan.

Snowflakes are groups of 2 to 200 snow crystals. They occur when dust particles  give water vapor in clouds at cold temperatures a surface on which to form ice.

How?

As they bounce around, molecules will stick to a rough surface more often than a smooth surface. This is because a rough surface offers more sites where a new molecule can bond. The blue circle on the top of is more likely to bond than the one at the bottom.

If you look even closer (image left), you will see that water molecules are attracted to each other because Oxygen (red in the model picture) has an overall negative charge, and Hydrogen an overall  positive charge.

If you zoom out (image right), you can see that ordinary ice forms a crystal structure based on these attractions of water molecules.

Snowflake shape depends on the temperature and on how the flakes spin as they fall.

“Snowflake formation is a dynamic process. A snowflake may encounter many different environmental conditions, sometimes melting it, sometimes causing growth, always changing its structure.” – about

To sum it up: Small local rules (not a snowflake designer in the sky!), lead to the complexity and order from chaos we are able to observe in snowflakes.

The DNA in our bodies is similar to a snowflake because it self-organizes based on the properties of attractions of the Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Phosphorus atoms involved. DNA is more complicated than snow because new rules  apply as the crystals of our DNA form complicated 3 dimensional structures.

Now you can read the article with an understanding of how it can apply to the real world:

It has taken more than five decades, but the electronic computer is now powerful enough to simulate evolution. Researchers from Michigan State University have used software to prove Charles Darwin’s postulation that small, seemingly inconsequential changes over thousands of generations can result in the evolution of complex functions.

They also uncovered a twist on conventional evolutionary thinking — it seems that some mutations that are harmful in the short run may boost long-term potential.

A better understanding of evolution promises to improve software and provide new ways to address engineering challenges.

The researchers’ simulation involves bits of software that self-replicate, but not perfectly. When the digital organisms make copies of themselves they sometimes make random errors, just as DNA is subject to mutations when it replicates. Many of the mutations are neutral or harmful. “But occasionally a variant comes along that replicates faster or even performs some logic operation,” said Richard Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University.

The organisms compete to get the energy — in the form of computer time — required to replicate. The organisms perform any of nine logic operations, and if they perform them efficiently enough, they gain computer time. “Digital organisms that solve a problem get an extra boost in their reproductive rates,” said Lenski.

The researchers studied 50 different populations, or genomes, of 3,600 individuals. Each individual began with 50 lines of code and no ability to perform logic operations. Those that evolved the ability to perform logic operations were rewarded, and the rewards were larger for operations that were more complex.

After 15,873 generations, 23 of the genomes yielded descendants capable of carrying out the most complex logic operation: taking two inputs and determining if they are equivalent. The lines of code that made up these individuals ranged from 49 to 356 instructions long. The ultimately dominant type of individual contained 83 instructions and the ability to perform all nine logic functions that allowed it to gain more computer time.

In principle, 16 mutations coupled with three instructions that were present in the original digital ancestor could have combined to produce an organism that was able to perform the complex equivalence operation.

What actually happened was more complicated. The equivalence operation appeared anywhere from 51 to 721 steps along the evolutionary tree, and the organisms used anywhere from 17 to 43 instructions to carry it out.

The most efficient of the evolved equivalence functions was just 17 lines of code — two fewer than the most efficient code the researchers had come up with beforehand. Evolving even as few as 17 lines involved a lot of incremental changes.

Because the population evolved in software, the researchers were able to trace the exact genealogy from an ancestor that was able only to replicate to progeny able to perform multiple logic functions requiring the coordinated execution of many instructions.

In order to follow the exact genealogy, the researchers developed a pair of software tools. The first tool continuously purged genotypes that lacked living descendants. This reduced the number of genotypes the researchers had to study more carefully from many millions to just a few hundred.

The second tool mapped out which of the lines of code that made up a particular organism were needed to perform any particular function. The tool shows the effect on all of the organism’s performance capabilities by eliminating — one at a time — each instruction, said Lenski.

The simulation proved that digital organisms could, over many generations, acquire the many separate steps ultimately needed to perform a complex logic operation.

In one case, 27 of the 35 instructions that an organism used to perform the logic operation were derived through mutations, and all but one of them had appeared in the line of descent before the complex function was performed.

The results broadly supported the hypothesis that biologists since Darwin have held, said Lenski. “Complex features arise by building on simpler features. The functions use bits and pieces of older functions, then tweak them here and there to get the new function,” he said.

When digital organisms were rewarded for solving simple puzzles with more CPU time — and thus an increased ability to send their genes forward to future generations — they eventually evolved a way to solve even the most complex problem they were challenged with, said Lenski.

The researchers’ results also show that this is the only way organisms can evolve, said Lenski. “Calculations imply [that] the probability of the digital organisms getting that complex all at once is astronomically small,” he said.

The birds-eye view on evolution also showed a twist, said Lenski. “Biologists usually assumed that the evolution of new mutations is an uphill climb — one in which the winners are descended from the most fit organisms in earlier generations, rather like a mountaineer that is always moving up — or at least sideways,” he said.

The researchers found that among the ancestors of the eventual winner, some had mutations that were harmful in the short run. Taking two steps back sometimes provided a better route. “Some of these harmful mutations worked well in combination with other mutations that came later,” said Lenski. So while most deleterious mutations were eliminated, some were passed on, turning a short-term handicap into a long-term advantage as the subsequent evolution unfolded, he said. – trnmag

Blow Torch Bandit Sought

[Van Buren, Arkansas] Police are searching for a suspect who used a blowtorch to break into a change machine at a Van Buren car wash.

On Monday, an employee of Hog Wash car wash, 706 Fayetteville Road, called police to report the theft from the change machine on the east side of the car wash, according to a police report. Car wash owner Gerald Vaughan told police the change machine is valued at $3,000 and there was about $300 in coins and bills in it.

The damage to the wooden column where the change machine was located was estimated at $500. Authorities got video surveillance of the crime from Advantage Security — a business across the street from the car wash. It showed footage of a dark colored, extended-cab pickup parked beside the change machine.

The video shows the suspect backing into the slot next to the coin changer. The person then exited the pickup and got something out of the back of the vehicle. The person lit a torch and started cutting on the coin changer, according to the report.

Another car pulled into the car wash during the theft, and the suspect stopped cutting and got into the pickup.

When the other customer left the car wash, the suspect got out of the vehicle again and finished the job.

via Times Record, Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Pope Reinstates Four Excommunicated Bishops

Pope Benedict XVI, reaching out to the far-right of the Roman Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

Richard Williamson, one of the bishops, during a TV interview.

The decision provided fresh fuel for critics who charge that Benedict’s four-year-old papacy has increasingly moved in line with traditionalists who are hostile to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that sought to create a more modern and open church.

A theologian who has grappled with the church’s diminished status in a secular world, Benedict has sought to foster a more ardent, if smaller, church over one with looser faith.

But while the revocation may heal one internal rift, it may also open a broader wound, alienating the church’s more liberal adherents and jeoparding 50 years of Vatican efforts to ease tensions with Jewish groups.

Among the men reinstated Saturday was Richard Williamson, a British-born cleric who in an interview last week said he did not believe that six million Jews died in the Nazi gas chambers. He has also given interviews saying that the United States government staged the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretext to invade Afghanistan.

… In a November interview broadcast on Swedish television last week and widely available on the Internet, the bishop said that he believed that “the historical evidence” was strongly against the conclusion that millions of Jews had been “deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.”

… In a statement, the Anti-Defamation League said that lifting Bishop Williamson’s excommunication “undermines the strong relationship between Catholics and Jews that flourished under Pope John Paul II and which Pope Benedict XVI said he would continue when he came into his papacy.”

via Pope Reinstates Four Excommunicated Bishops – NYTimes.com.

New Stem Cell Breakthrough

A recent report may give hope for doctors and patients who wish to utilize stem cell research. As Teri Okita reports, embryonic stem cells may treat people safely and help lead to new cures.

Treatments with stem cells are still years away, they say, but this is a first step into a new world. And also, you do not have to destroy embryos, just reprogram some adult cells:

In a compelling scientific feat, independent teams of researchers in Japan and the U.S. have created human embryonic stem cells without destroying any human embryos. Scientists said they “reprogrammed” mature human cells and returned them to a primordial, embryonic-like state in a laboratory dish.

The hope is to someday convert those cells into fresh heart, nerve or other tissue and transplant it into a patient to treat diabetes, Parkinson’s disease or other ailments. – wsj

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Eating Less Meat? Try Carnosine

After some research tonight, I’m off to the store to add one more thing to my daily super shake.

Typical vegetarian diets are thought to be lacking in carnosine, but whether this has a detrimental effect on vegetarians is controversial. Carnosine was found to inhibit diabetic nephropathy by protecting the podocytes and mesangial cells.^[14] Because of its antioxidant, antiglycator and metal chelator properties, carnosine supplements have been proposed as a general anti-aging therapy. ^[15] – wiki

Carnosine is a multifunctional dipeptide made up of a chemical combination of the amino acids beta-alanine and L-histidine. It is found both in food and in the human body. Long-lived cells such as nerve cells (neurons) and muscle cells (myocytes) contain high levels of carnosine. Muscle levels of carnosine correlate with the maximum life spans of animals.

Carnosine levels decline with age. Muscle levels decline 63% from age 10 to age 70, which may account for the normal age-related decline in muscle mass and function. 1 Since carnosine acts as a pH buffer, it can keep on protecting muscle cell membranes from oxidation under the acidic conditions of muscular exertion. Carnosine enables the heart muscle to contract more efficiently through enhancement of calcium response in heart myocytes.

Aging causes irreversible damage to the body’s proteins. The underlying mechanism behind this damage is glycation. A simple definition of glycation is the cross-linking of proteins and sugars to form non-functioning structures in the body. The process of glycation can be superficially seen as unsightly wrinkled skin. Glycation is also an underlying cause of age-related catastrophes including the neurologic, vascular, and eye disorders. Carnosine is a unique dipeptide that interferes with the glycation process. When compared to the anti-glycating drug aminoguanidine, carnosine has been shown to inhibit glycation earlier in the process and also provides additive health benefits. – drsuk

The Seven Reasons Our Bodies Age, and What to do about it

Many things go wrong with aging bodies, but only a few of them are primary changes in the structure of the body itself — that is, aging damage. Other changes (such as increases in inflammation and oxidative stress) are the secondary consequences of this primary change: either the direct results of those damaged components’ inability to carry out their normal role in metabolism, or the body’s adaptive or maladaptive attempts to compensate for those changes. Thus, by removing, repairing, replacing, or rendering harmless the damage of aging, we restore the normal functioning of the body’s cells and essential biomolecules, and the secondary changes are given the chance to return to their normal, youthful baseline.

Scientists have spent decades looking for such changes in aging bodies, this research has led to the surprisingly optimistic conclusion that there are no more than seven major classes of such cellular and molecular damage (see Table 1).

Aging Damage	Discovery	SENS Solution
Cell loss, tissue atrophy	1955	Stem cells and tissue engineering (“RepleniSENS”)
Nuclear [epi]mutations (only cancer matters)	1959, 1982	Removal of telomere-lengthening Machinery (“OncoSENS”)
Mutant mitochondria	1972	Allotopic expression of 13 proteins (“MitoSENS”)
Death-resistant cells	1965	Targeted ablation (“ApoptoSENS”)
Tissue stiffening	1958, 1981	AGE-breaking molecules (“GlycoSENS”); tissue engineering
Extracellular aggregates	1907	Immunotherapeutic clearance (“AmyloSENS”)
Intracellular aggregates	1959	Novel lysosomal hydrolases (“LysoSENS”)

The specific metabolic processes that are ultimately responsible for all of this damage are still poorly understood. But as we discussed on the main SENS Platform page, this ignorance doesn’t matter for “engineering” purposes. All that matters is our ability to periodically fix the damage, at the right time: after it has formed, but before it builds up to levels high enough to interfere with our youthful functionality.

The even better news is that we know how to fix all of this damage today. For each major aging lesion, a SENS solution for its removal or repair either already exists in prototype form, or is clearly foreseeable from existing scientific developments…

Thanks to the generous support of our donors and volunteers, the Methuselah Foundation is now funding scientific research in the areas that are currently the greatest bottlenecks to the achievement of this first wave of rejuvenation therapies, including projects in LysoSENS, MitoSENS, and OncoSENS. We have also just reached an agreement to launch a project in ApoptoSENS, and are working out a collaboration in GlycoSENS.  With preliminary results from these projects proving exciting, and with greater funding coming onstream every day, the Methuselah Foundation is pushing forward to take on additional research projects. To support this critical SENS research, join the ranks of generous Methuselah Foundation donors and help us make this new rejuvenation science a reality. – MFOUNDATION

A lot of money has been raised by this group. I’ve joined the Methuselah Foundation Newsletter. I’m curious to keep up with the best things we can do for our health and long life as of right now.

Other anti-aging information:

• wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aging

• antiaging-magazine.com/pastissues

• lef.org/anti-aging/research