Swine flu’s ground zero? Townspeople are convinced

Local health officials and Federal Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova downplay claims that the swine flu epidemic could have started in La Gloria, noting that of 35 mucous samples taken from respiratory patients there, only Edgar’s came back positive.

Confirmation that the boy was infected with H1N1 — a strange new mix of pig, bird and human flu virus that has killed as many as 152 people in Mexico and now spread across the world — wasn’t made until last week, when signs of the outbreak elsewhere prompted a second look at his sample. ….

Townspeople blame their ills on pig waste from farms that lie upwind, five miles (8.5 kilometers) to the north. The toxins blow through other towns, only to get trapped by mountains in La Gloria, they say. They suspect their water and air has been contaminated by waste. …

When Associated Press journalists on Monday entered a Granjas Carroll farm that has been the focus of community complaints, the cars were sprayed with water. Victor Ochoa, the general director, required the visitors to shower and don white overalls, rubber boots, goggles and masks and step through disinfectant before entering any of the 18 warehouses where 15,000 pigs are kept.

Ochoa showed the journalists a black plastic lid that covered a swimming pool-size cement container of pig feces to prevent exposure to the outside air.

“All of our pigs have been adequately vaccinated and they are all taken care of according to current sanitation rules,” Ochoa said. “What happened in La Gloria was an unfortunate coincidence with a big and serious problem that is happening now with this new flu virus.”

Mexican Agriculture Department inspectors found no sign of swine flu among pigs around the farm in Veracruz, and say that no infected pigs have been found yet anywhere in Mexico.

via Swine flu’s ground zero? Townspeople are convinced.

Astronomers see oldest object in universe yet

Astronomers have spotted a burst of energy from a dying star, setting a record for the oldest and most distant object seen by Earth yet.

The 10-second blast was from when the universe was only 630 million years old.

NASA’s Swift satellite spotted the gamma-ray burst, an explosion of high-powered radiation, on April 23. Then ground telescopes watched the afterglow and calculated it had traveled about 13.1 billion light years to get here. It beat old records by 100 or 200 hundred million light years.

NASA astrophysicist Neil Gehrels said the star’s fiery death gave birth to a black hole. The star was only 1 million years old or so and was about 30 times the size of our sun.

via Yahoo

Deputy quits after wife, mom-in-law take squad car

A Polk County deputy has turned in his badge after his wife and mother-in-law took his patrol car out for a joyride. Officials said the 44-year-old deputy resigned Monday after serving 21 years with the sheriff’s office.

The arrest report said his wife and mother-in-law face charges of vehicle theft, theft of a firearm and impersonating a law-enforcement officer. His wife also faces charges of possession of a firearm of a convicted felon.

A third person riding in the back seat also was arrested.

Witnesses reporting seeing the patrol car driving erratically in Lakeland on Sunday morning. The deputy apparently didn’t know the car was taken.

via Deputy quits after wife, mom-in-law take squad car.

It would be interesting to hear what the motive was. Did his family perhaps not want him risking his life as a cop? If so, they got what they wanted.

SKorean experts claim to have cloned glowing dogs

South Korean scientists say they have engineered four beagles that glow red using cloning techniques that could help develop cures for human diseases. The four dogs, all named “Ruppy” — a combination of the words “ruby” and “puppy” — look like typical beagles by daylight.

But they glow red under ultraviolet light, and the dogs’ nails and abdomens, which have thin skins, look red even to the naked eye.

Seoul National University professor Lee Byeong-chun, head of the research team, called them the world’s first transgenic dogs carrying fluorescent genes, an achievement that goes beyond just the glowing novelty.

“What’s significant in this work is not the dogs expressing red colors but that we planted genes into them,” Lee told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

His team identified the dogs as clones of a cell donor through DNA tests and earlier this month introduced the achievement in a paper on the Web site of the journal “Genesis.”

Scientists in the U.S., Japan and in Europe previously have cloned fluorescent mice and pigs, but this would be the first time dogs with modified genes have been cloned successfully, Lee said.

He said his team took skin cells from a beagle, inserted fluorescent genes into them and put them into eggs before implanted them into the womb of a surrogate mother, a local mixed breed.

Six female beagles were born in December 2007 through a cloning with a gene that produces a red fluorescent protein that make them glow, he said. Two died, but the four others survived.

The glowing dogs show that it is possible to successfully insert genes with a specific trait, which could lead to implanting other, non-fluorescent genes that could help treat specific diseases, Lee said.

via SKorean experts claim to have cloned glowing dogs.

Who wants a glowing puppy?

Gov’t revokes rule limiting species protections

Federal agencies again will have to consult with government wildlife experts before taking actions that could have an impact on threatened or endangered species.

The Obama administration said Tuesday it was overturning a rule change made in the final weeks of the Bush presidency.

Officials at the Interior and Commerce departments said they have reimposed the consultation requirement that assured the government’s top biologists involved in species protection will have a say in federal action that could harm plants, animals and fish that are at risk of extinction.

Such consultation had been required for more than two decades until the Bush administration made it optional in rules issued last December, just weeks before the change in administrations. Environmentalists argued that the change severely reduced the protection afforded under the federal Endangered Species Act.

“By rolling back this eleventh-hour regulation, we are ensuring that threatened and endangered species continue to receive the full protection of the law” and that top science will be the foundation of the decision making, said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke added: “Our decision affirms the administration’s commitment to using sound science to promote conservation and protect the environment.”

via Gov’t revokes rule limiting species protections.

Good. Most people do not understand that life on Earth is a fairly fragile interconnected web. We need biodiversity long term to survive and thrive.

GOP Senator Specter’s Party Switch Gives Obama a 100-Day Gift

Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter turned the 111th session of Congress upside down Tuesday, announcing that he will switch parties and become a Democrat. The move was the product of weeks of intensive negotiation between Specter and Democrats in the Senate and the White House, and it favorably alters the balance of power for President Obama as he is facing tough votes in the months ahead on health care, energy and budget bills. “We are thrilled to have you,” Obama reportedly told Specter on the phone just a few minutes after he learned of the switch Tuesday morning.

In a statement, Specter said, “Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.” (Read Senator Arlen Specter’s statement.)

via GOP Senator Specter’s Party Switch Gives Obama a 100-Day Gift.

The party system is played out. We have the technology to count people’s votes on actual issues and move to a true democracy. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

Man accused of leading long chase in garbage truck

A 40-year-old man was jailed after leading deputies on a 57-mile chase, in a garbage truck. At one point, a Morrison County sheriff’s deputy tried to stop the truck by firing a shotgun into its engine. It all started when authorities got a report Tuesday about an intoxicated man trying to get into a home. The man left, driving the truck, before deputies arrived.

Authorities said the driver swerved at squad cars and accelerated in reverse. Deputies tried stopping the truck with stop sticks, but it kept going with several flat tires. The driver eventually pulled over and was caught by a police dog as he ran into the woods. The suspect was treated for dog bites, then jailed, pending charges.

via Man accused of leading long chase in garbage truck.

Built like  a tank, but not the best get away car.

Dinosaurs Lived in the Arctic

You know the scenario: 65 million years ago, a big meteor crash sets off volcanoes galore, dust and smoke fill the air, dinosaurs go belly up.

One theory holds that cold, brought on by the Sun’s concealment, is what did them in, but a team of paleontologists led by Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, argues otherwise. Some dinosaurs (warm-blooded, perhaps) were surprisingly good at withstanding near-freezing temperatures, they say.

Witness the team’s latest find, a diverse stash of dinosaur fossils laid down just a few million years before the big impact, along what’s now the Kakanaut River of northeastern Russia. Even accounting for continental drift, the dinos lived at more than 70 degrees of latitude north, well above the Arctic Circle.

And they weren’t lost wanderers, either. The fossils include dinosaur eggshells — a first at high latitudes, and evidence of a settled, breeding population.

It’s true the Arctic was much warmer back then, but it wasn’t any picnic. The size and shape of fossilized leaves found with the bones enabled Godefroit’s team to estimate a mean annual temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, with wintertime lows at freezing.

Yet there is more than one way to skin a dino. All that dust in the atmosphere must have curtailed photosynthesis everywhere, weakening the base of the food chain and inflicting starvation, and finally extinction, upon the dinosaurs.

via Dinosaurs Lived in the Arctic | LiveScience.

Police: Man cut pacemaker from dad’s chest

Authorities in northeast Iowa say a man faces charges accusing him of cutting a pacemaker out of his father’s chest.

The Delaware County sheriff’s office issued a statement Sunday saying 32-year-old Jesse Fierstine struck his 63-year-old father, Charles Fierstine, on the head with a flashlight and a piece of firewood Saturday.

The sheriff’s office said Jesse Fierstine then used a pocketknife to cut the pacemaker out of his father’s chest.

Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here

The statement said the younger Fierstine was charged with attempted murder.

via Police: Man cut pacemaker from dad’s chest – Crime & courts- msnbc.com.

Thieves hide behind flu masks

Three armed thieves wore the blue surgical masks now ubiquitous in flu-hit Mexico City to hide their faces as they robbed watches from a department store, Mexican media said Monday.

Employees and security guards at a branch of the Sanborns department store told the daily Excelsior the thieves were able to slip through the shop Sunday without attracting attention as they blended into a sea of masked shoppers.

One of the robbers threatened store assistants with a gun while another guarded the door and the third helped himself to watches from the jewelry department.

Mexico is in the grip of a new strain of flu that has killed up to 149 people and set off a major global health scare after infecting people in the United States, Canada and Europe, raising fears of a flu pandemic.

Banks in the Mexican capital have been forced to abandon normal rules over not letting in customers wearing face coverings as the government took emergency measures over the weekend and advised residents in the crowded city to wear face masks at all times outside their homes.

via Watch thieves hide behind flu masks.