A tough way to wake up: Man stabbed while sleepwalking

What a wake-up call.

A 24-year-old Kansas City man suffered a stab wound to his face and shoulder Wednesday when his girlfriend allegedly tried to wake him from sleepwalking.

Police said the victim was intoxicated when he came home to his apartment. The girlfriend awoke about 1:30 a.m. and saw him urinating in the closet. She thought he was sleepwalking because he had done that in the past.

She tried to wake him up, but she said he pushed her out of his way. Scared he might hit her, she said, she grabbed a knife and held it up as he approached, cutting him. His injuries are believed to be non-life threatening.

via www.kansascity.com | 06/24/2009 | A tough way to wake up: Man stabbed while sleepwalking.

Dog in Calif. came _ somehow _ from Saudi Arabia

A “sweetheart” of a dog now in a California shelter may be really, really far from home. His microchip says the knee-high, light tan Saluki came from Saudi Arabia.

The neutered male dog brought to a Carlsbad animal shelter last week has an implanted microchip that was sold to the U.S. Military Training Mission, headquartered in Riyadh, said Lt. Dan DeSousa of San Diego County’s Animal Services Department.

The dog was found June 15 near Escondido, about 30 miles north of San Diego.

DeSousa said he believes someone in the military owns the dog and likely brought him from overseas. But they haven’t been able to track down the owner, even after speaking with veterinarians who work with the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia.

“In our hearts and minds, we know this dog belongs to someone in the military. For all they’ve done for us, it is only fair we try to get the dog reunited,” DeSousa said.

DeSousa said he doesn’t know the dog’s name but he wears a tag that reads “Pet Rejuvenizer.” Plenty of people have said they would take him but authorities hope the real owner will come forward.

“There’s a lot of unanswered questions, and dogs can’t talk, so we’re kind of restricted as to what information we can get out of him,” DeSousa said, chuckling. “We’re trying to put the word out. He is a sweetheart of a dog.”

via Dog in Calif. came _ somehow _ from Saudi Arabia — Page 1 — Times Union – Albany NY:1163:.

I’m thinking one or more humans is involved somehow…

Salt Block Unexpectedly Stretches

To stretch a supply of salt generally means using it sparingly.

But researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Pittsburgh were startled when they found they had made the solid actually physically stretch.

“It’s not supposed to do that,” said Sandia principal investigator Jack Houston. “Unlike, say, gold, which is ductile and deforms under pressure, salt is brittle. Hit it with a hammer, it shatters like glass.”

That a block of salt can stretch rather than remain inert might affect world desalination efforts, which involve choosing particular sizes of nanometer-diameter pores to strain salts from brackish water. Understanding unexpected salt deformations also may lead to better understanding of sea salt aerosols, implicated in problems as broad as cloud nucleation, smog formation, ozone destruction and asthma triggers, the researchers write in their paper published in the May Nanoletters.

The serendipitous discovery came about as researchers were examining the mechanical properties of salt in the absence of water. They found unexpectedly that the brittle substance appeared malleable enough to distort over surprisingly long distances by clinging to a special microscope’s nanometer-sized tip as it left the surface of the salt.

More intense examination showed that surface salt molecules formed a kind of bubble — a ductile meniscus — with the exploratory tip as it withdrew from penetrating the cube. In this, it resembled the behavior of the surface of water when an object is withdrawn from it. But unlike water, the salt meniscus didn’t break from its own weight as the tip was withdrawn. Instead it followed the tip along, slip-sliding away (so to speak) as it thinned and elongated from 580 nanometers (nm) to 2,191 nm in shapes that resembled nanowires.

A possible explanation for salt molecules peeling off the salt block, said Houston, is that “surface molecules don’t have buddies.” That is, because there’s no atomic lattice above them, they’re more mobile than the internal body of salt molecules forming the salt block.

Salt showing signs of surface mobility at room temperatures was “totally surprising,” said Houston, who had initially intended to study more conventionally interesting characteristics of the one-fourth-inch square, one-eighth-inch-long salt block.

- via sciencedaily

Stem cell surprise for tissue regeneration

This cross section of hind limb muscle tissue is from a mouse five days after injury. The uninjured cells are at top and stained red. The blue cells below are regenerating muscles cells. They were labeled with a blue stain and formed from muscle stem cells.

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Scientists working at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology, with colleagues, have overturned previous research that identified critical genes for making muscle stem cells. It turns out that the genes that make muscle stem cells in the embryo are surprisingly not needed in adult muscle stem cells to regenerate muscles after injury. The finding challenges the current course of research into muscular dystrophy, muscle injury, and regenerative medicine, which uses stem cells for healing tissues, and it favours using age-matched stem cells for therapy. The study is published in the June 25 advance on-line edition of Nature.
Previous studies have shown that two genes Pax3 and Pax7, are essential for making the embryonic and neonatal muscle stem cells in the mouse. Lead researcher Christoph Lepper, a predoctoral fellow in Carnegie’s Chen-Ming Fan’s lab and a Johns Hopkins student, for the first time looked at these two genes in promoting stem cells at varying stages of muscle growth in live mice after birth.

As Christoph explained: “The paired-box genes, Pax3 and Pax7 are involved in the development of the skeletal muscles. It is well established that both genes are needed to produce muscle stem cells in the embryo. A previous student, Alice Chen, studied how these genes are turned on in embryonic muscle stem cells (also published in Nature). I thought that if they are so important in the embryo, they must be important for adult muscle stem cells. Using genetic tricks, I was able to suppress both genes in the adult muscle stem cells. I was totally surprised to find that the muscle stem cells are normal without them.”

The researchers then looked at whether the same was true upon injury, after which the repair process requires muscle stem cells to make new muscles. For this, they injured the leg muscles between the knee and ankle. They were again surprised that these muscle stem cells, without the two key embryonic muscle stem cell genes, could generate muscles as well as normal muscle stem cells. They even performed a second round of injury and found that the stem cells were still active.

The scientists then wondered when these genes become unnecessary for muscle stem cells to regenerate muscles. It turned out that these embryonic genes are important to muscle stem cell creation up to the first three weeks after birth. What makes the muscle stem cells different after three weeks? The scientist believe that these two embryonic muscle stem cell genes also tell the stem cells to become quiet as the organism matures. After that time is reached, they “hand over” their jobs to a different set of genes. The researchers suggest that since the adult muscle stem cells are only activated when injury occurs (by trauma or exercise), they use a new set of genes from those used during embryonic development, which proceeds without injury. The scientists are eager to find these adult muscle stem cell genes.

“We are just beginning to learn the basics of stem cell biology, and there are many surprises,” remarked Allan Spradling, director of Carnegie’s Department of Embryology. “This work illustrates the importance of carrying out basic research using animal models before rushing into the clinic with half-baked therapies.”

US Supreme Court: Stop strip searching kids for asprin

School officials violated the rights of a 13-year-old girl by strip-searching her to look for prescription-strength ibuprofen, the U.S. Supreme Court said Thursday in an unexpected 8-1 ruling that bolsters students’ privacy rights.

The ruling moves most of the nation a step closer to California, where a 1988 state law prohibits school employees from conducting strip searches. The court appeared to leave the door open for the searches in some circumstances – but not when school officials are looking only for painkillers and have no evidence that a student is hiding them under her clothing.

The ruling, written by Justice David Souter, said authorities in a Safford, Ariz., middle school had grounds to search eighth-grader Savana Redding’s backpack for pills, based on a fellow student’s allegation that the girl was supplying them, but not to have a nurse search under her bra and underpants.

“What was missing … was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Redding was carrying pills in her underwear,” Souter wrote in what may have been his last significant opinion. He is retiring after the 2008-09 term ends Monday.

Although school officials have more leeway than police to conduct searches, Souter said the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment still requires educators to show a reasonable suspicion that a student is concealing contraband.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a vehement dissent, said courts should stop interfering with school officials and leave them free, under a centuries-old standard, to act with the same authority as a parent to search or discipline students.

Such a constitutional interpretation is needed “to keep the judiciary from essentially seizing control of public schools,” Thomas said. He said parents who object to a school’s treatment of their children can ask their school board or legislature to change the rules, “send their children to private schools or home-school them, or they can simply move.”

Souter told a lawyer during the session that he would “rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search … than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime.” Others made similar comments, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court’s only woman, told a USA Today reporter later that some of her male colleagues didn’t seem to understand the situation from a 13-year-old girl’s perspective.

“I wanted to make sure no other person would have to go through this,” Redding, now 19, said Thursday in a statement released by her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union. In an earlier court affidavit, she said the search was “the most humiliating experience I have ever had.”

The case dates to October 2003, when the assistant principal at Safford Middle School pulled Redding out of class, brought her to his office and showed her four ibuprofen pills of 400 mg each, twice the dose of an over-the-counter Advil. School rules banned the pills on campus.

Redding denied she was distributing the pills and agreed to a search of her backpack, which found nothing. The administrator then sent her to the office of the school nurse, who told her to remove her clothes and pull out her bra and underpants for a further search, which again found no pills.

Her mother then sued the district and everyone involved in the search. Thursday’s ruling upheld a decision by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that a strip search of a student for an everyday painkiller crosses constitutional boundaries.  – sfgate

Embarrassment can be deadly. Destroy someone’s self esteem as a teenager and they can end up with a lifetime of depression, which, for some, ends in suicide.

World record: 17 yr old youngest person to conquer tallest summits on 7 continents.

A seventeen year old from Malibu, California, has just become the youngest person to conquer the tallest summits on each of the seven continents.

On June 8th Johnny Strange, a 17-year-old high school senior, broke the world record for youngest person to climb the highest summit on every continent, the Seven Summit challenge, by scaling Mount Kosciuszko in Australia. The previous record was held by 18-year-old Samantha Larson of Long Beach, Calif. in 2007. Strange, scaled Mount Everest on May 20th. – now public

This is from June 9:

Three weeks ago, Malibu’s Johnny Strange delivered a message from the top of Mt. Everest, stating, “Stop Genocide.”

But he carries another message for fellow teenagers: Pursue your dreams and meet challenges head-on.

Strange, 17, after scaling the world’s tallest peak at 29,035 feet, flew from the Himalayas to Australia and on Monday (Tuesday in Australia) strolled to the top of 7,310-foot Mt. Kosciuszko to become the youngest person in the world to have climbed the highest peak on seven continents, known collectively as the Seven Summits.

Strange beat a record held by Long Beach mountaineer Samantha Larson, who achieved the Seven Summits when she was 18.

Afterward Strange typed an e-mail to family and friends that read: “Never let anyone stifle your dreams no matter the feat, for if you have the heart and the courage, impossible is nothing.”

It helps to have a wealthy attorney and fellow adventurer as a father, but this should steal nothing from Strange’s accomplishment. He climbed Antarctica’s Mt. Vinson when he was 12 to set this project in motion, and Everest is daunting for climbers of any age and experience level because of its perilously thin air and unpredictable nature (six climbers have died on Everest this season).

Strange reached the summit of Everest two days after Utah’s Johnny Collinson stood on top of the world. Collinson also is 17 and he’s trying to bag the Seven Summits within a calendar year.

Strange said he chose Kosciuszko instead of  Everest as his final Seven Summits peak because he wanted to tackle Everest “as a lone experience, not part of the Seven Summit goal.” – LATimes

Michael Jackson dies at 50

I found out within 10 minutes after the LA Times reported it.  Amazing how fast information travels.  Farrah Fawcett Majors (62) and Michael Jackson (50) in one day! RIP. Wikipedia has a daily death list here. Perhaps we should do something about this whole death problem. Well, some people are working on it:

It is not known that human physical immortality is an unachievable condition. Biological forms have inherent limitations — for example, their fragility and slow adaptability to changing environments, which may or may not be able to be overcome through medical interventions or engineering. As of 2009, natural selection has developed biological immortality in at least one species, the jellyfish Turritopsis nutricula,^[4] one consequence of which is a worldwide population explosion of the organism.^[5]

Certain scientists, futurists, and philosophers, such as Ray Kurzweil, advocate that human immortality is achievable in the first few decades of the 21st century, while other advocates believe that life extension is a more achievable goal in the short term, with immortality awaiting further research breakthroughs farther into an indefinite future. Aubrey de Grey, a researcher who has developed a series of biomedical rejuvenation strategies to reverse human aging (called SENS), believes that his proposed plan for ending aging may be implementable in two or three decades.^[6] – wikipedia

Great, because being dead sounds boring. Has a single ghost ever been scientifically proven to be the returning spirit of someone who has died? I think not. Here is some stuff about Jackson:

At 3:24 pm Pacific time today, the LA Times reported that Jackson was dead. The New York Times already has a minute-by-minute account of what happened, starting with a 12:21 pm PST call to the parademics.  – lat

On a magical night in 1983, Michael Jackson struck a pose on stage, clasping the black fedora on his head with his white sequined glove. His black jacket and silver vest glittered as white socks showed under his high-water black pants. Then he erupted into a flurry of fluid dance moves in a performance of Billie Jean that would catapult the former child singing sensation into full-blown superstardom.

Probably no celebrity has been as revered and reviled over the past 40 years as Jackson, 50, who died Thursday in Los Angeles. The troubled, reclusive star was rushed to UCLA Medical Center by paramedics responding to a call from his home at about 12:30 p.m.

Jackson had been scheduled next month to begin the first of 50 sold-out concerts at London’s O2 Arena, a testament to his enduring popularity with fans around the world, a love affair that reached a peak on that March evening 26 years ago.

The occasion was the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever television special that celebrated a milestone for the legendary label, but it was also a seminal moment for the King of Pop. A then-record 47 million people watched in awe as Jackson unveiled the moonwalk with an electrifying performance. Other Motown greats performed that night and Jackson himself had reunited with brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Randy for a walk down memory lane with the Jackson 5.

But in that moment, Jackson stood alone in the spotlight, a singular figure riding a wave of popularity rarely seen anywhere. His groundbreaking Thriller— still the biggest selling album of all time — was dominating the charts and Jackson was in the process of reshaping the musical landscape with his videos and celebrity. There were still millions of records to be sold, acclaimed videos to be filmed and record-shattering concert tours to undertaken.

It was also before years of tabloid exposes, bizarre behavior, artistic flops, financial crises, health issues and child sex abuse scandals tarnished his image. His run of triumphs in the 1980s, in addition to Thriller, included the blockbuster albums Off the Wall and Bad.

Since he first arrived on the scene in 1969 as the cherubic 11-year-old phenom leading the teen heartthrob J5 singing I Want You Back, Jackson has been at the forefront of pop culture.

He transformed pop music, becoming the first African-American singer to gain mass crossover appeal. The premiere of videos for songs likeBeat It, Billie Jean, Thriller, Bad andSmooth Criminalwere major events and he helped popularize the then-fledgling MTV. It, in turn, brought him into millions of homes daily.

Thriller won a record eight Grammy Awards in 1984. Virtually every song became a hit single and it changed the industry’s thinking about how albums were put together and marketed. It also opened the door for artists to have more creative freedom and higher royalty returns. At the same time, he inspired legions of imitators and a line of dolls and accessories.

He spent his life under the glare of paparazzi flashbulbs, but in recent years, he has more often been the subject of negative news about his eccentricities and personal life. Jackson’s seemingly charmed life started to change when a pyrotechnics accident during the filming of a Pepsi ad set his hair afire and burned his scalp. He got outpouring of sympathy after that and won a $1.5 million settlement from Pepsi, which he donated to charity.

But his health also became a public fascination, especially as he began to change his appearance through plastic surgery. He had several nose jobs, his lips thinned, and chin clef put in, among other alterations. Meanwhile, Jackson’s brown skin grew progressively lighter, rumored to be the result of skin bleaching, but later diagnosed as vitiligo. The skin disorder causes a loss of pigment.

Jackson himself fueled gossip column by leaking false stories that he slept in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, reportedly to slow the aging process, or next to the bones of Joseph Merrick, the 19th century Englishman known as “The Elephant Man” because of his congenital deformities.

He addressed many of these issues in his 1988 autobiography, Moonwalk, in which he also revealed that he had been physically abused as a child. That same year, he built his $17 million Neverland Ranch near Santa Ynez, Calif., replete with an amusement park and exotic animals.

And while none of his post-Thriller albums matched its success, 1987′s Bad, 1991′s Dangerous and 1995′s HIStory were still commercial successes. Jackson reminded the world again of his power as a artist with an exhilarating halftime performance at 1993′s Super Bowl XXVII before a U.S. TV audience of more than 135 million.

via – USAtoday

Homeless Guy Smashes Other Homeless Guy Upside Head With Skateboard During Quantum Physics Argument

Bell’s Theorem and the Death of Locality? Or the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument? We may never know what the beef was, but an argument between two homeless men about the splitting of atoms resulted in the splitting of lip:

A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today.

Jason Everett Keller, 40, allegedly accosted another homeless man, Stephan Fava, on the 200 block of Grand Avenue in South San Francisco at about 1:45 p.m. March 30.

At the time, Fava was chatting with an acquaintance, who is also homeless, about “quantum physics and the splitting of atoms,” according to prosecutors.

Keller joined in the conversation and, for reasons unknown, got upset, authorities said. He picked up his skateboard and hit Fava in the face with it, splitting his lip, prosecutors said.

Physics discussion ends in skateboard attack (SF Gate, image via Computer Science for Fun)

via Homeless Guy Smashes Other Homeless Guy Upside Head With Skateboard During Quantum Physics Argument – Boing Boing.

Drugs Won the War

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done.

Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly five times the world average. In part, that’s because the number of people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. Until the war on drugs, our incarceration rate was roughly the same as that of other countries.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad. One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)

I’ve seen lives destroyed by drugs, and many neighbors in my hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, have had their lives ripped apart by crystal meth. Yet I find people like Mr. Stamper persuasive when they argue that if our aim is to reduce the influence of harmful drugs, we can do better.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Drugs Won the War – NYTimes.com.

Seems we’d do better to strike at the root of the problem: people turning to addictions to cope with stress, depression, disconnection, etc.

Grey hair may be protecting us from cancer

GREY hair may be unwelcome, but the processes that produce it are now better understood and could be protecting us from cancer.

Cells called melanocytes produce the pigments that colour hair and their numbers are kept topped up by stem cells. Hair goes grey when the number of stem cells in hair follicles declines. Now Emi Nishimura of Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan and colleagues have found what causes this decline in mice.

When the researchers exposed mice to radiation and chemicals that harm DNA, damaged stem cells transformed permanently into melanocytes. This ultimately led to fewer melanocytes, as it meant there were fewer stem cells capable of topping up the melanocyte pool. The mice also went grey (Cell, vol 137, p 1088). Nishimura’s team proposes that the same process leads to the reduction in stem cells in the follicles of older people, especially as DNA damage accumulates as we age.

David Fisher, a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School, suggests such processes may help protect us from cancer, by discouraging the proliferation of stem cells with damaged DNA, which could pass on mutations. “One likely beneficial effect is the removal of potentially dangerous cells that may contain pre-cancerous capabilities,” he says.

via Grey hair may be protecting us from cancer – health – 21 June 2009 – New Scientist.