Cup of mint tea is an effective painkiller

A cup of Brazilian mint tea has pain relieving qualities to match those of commercially available analgesics, a study suggests.

Hyptis crenata has been prescribed by Brazilian healers for millennia to treat ailments from headaches and stomach pain to fever and flu.

Working on mice, a Newcastle University team has proved scientifically that the ancient medicine men were right.

The study is published in the journal Acta Horticulturae.

In order to mimic the traditional treatment as closely as possible, the Newcastle team carried out a survey in Brazil to find out how the medicine is typically prepared and how much should be consumed.

The most common method was to produce a decoction. This involves boiling the dried leaves in water for 30 minutes and allowing the liquid to cool before drinking it as a tea.

via BBC News – Cup of mint tea is an effective painkiller.

Websites ‘need to pay for news’

Rupert Murdoch has said it is time for internet search engines and other websites to start to pay for any news reports they currently take for free.

Mr Murdoch, owner of media giant News Corporation, said such sites would soon have to pay for any content taken from his firm’s many news providers.

He was speaking at the World Media Summit in Beijing, where his comments were backed by some of his competitors.

Associated Press boss Tom Curley said news providers were being “exploited”.

‘Act decisively’

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,” said Mr Murdoch, whose company owns newspapers including the Sun and the Times in the UK, and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.

“If we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators – the people in this hall – who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.”

The BBC’s Chris Hogg said Mr Murdoch warned global news executives who had gathered for the summit that many news providers faced going out of business unless they started to charge websites such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook for carrying their content. …

Mr Curley said news content creators had “been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission”.

“Crowd-sourcing web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook, have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing websites of traditional news publishers,” he added.

Mr Curley said news providers had to “decisively act to take back control of our content”.

“We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves – at great human and economic cost – to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.”

Mr Curley said earlier this week that Associated Press was considering selling news stories to some websites, such as Google or Yahoo, exclusively for a certain period, such as half an hour.

via BBC NEWS | Business | Websites ‘need to pay for news’.

I guess Murdoch is not a fan of Fair Use. Listen, people avoid mainstream sites because they don’t want ads and hype. I am consistently frustrated by having to view spam ads all over a page with the text I want to read threading through a maze of crap. Murdoch just doesn’t get it. The days where a few giants had a stranglehold on news is over. They blew it by lying too damn many times and by spamming us relentlessly.  If the big news outlets go to a paid model, the will lose EVEN MORE viewers and then their advertisers will drop them. They should be embracing the current technology, encouraging crowd-sourcing, providing teasers for bloggers and other social sites, with links to the details on their sites for those who are truly interested.  It is a shame that Murdoch had decided to pick a fight with his own consumers. He will not win until he understands what people really want: free interesting verified facts relevant to our lives with limited salient pithy interpretation that holds up under scrutiny.

Gold hits record highs, why I recommend Palladium now

Gold is a new bubble waiting to burst, but not for a while. If, like me, you bought low years ago, congrats! This is not really the time to buy gold. This is the time to buy things that are currently low in cost but will go up in the future.

I posted a tip several months ago about Palladium. Palladium has many uses and the price is good right now. The value, like gold, is still climbing and at $371/oz Palladium is well below its 5 year high of $579/oz.  The US just agreed to curb greenhouse emissions. How does this relate to the price of Palladium? Here’s how:

Palladium is the active component in several catalytic formulations for environmental technologies, due to its superior performances in the conversion of some hydrocarbons (for example, methane) and halocarbons, and the thermal stability and low volatility of Pd species. The properties and reactivity of Pd-based catalysts in the conversion of methane catalytic combustion for gas turbine applications, reduction of greenhouse gas (methane, N₂O) emissions, hydrodehalogenation and oxidative destruction of halocarbons and their applications in the elimination of other pollutants from gaseous emissions are reviewed, with emphasis on the structure-activity relationships, reaction mechanism and sensitivity to poisoning. – sciencedirect

Here’s the scoop on gold:

Gold climbed to the highest price ever, capping the longest rally in 27 years, as the dollar’s slump deepened and on a report that India’s central bank may add to last month’s 200 metric-ton purchase.

Gold reached a record $1,189 an ounce and has rallied 13 percent since Nov. 2, after India said it bought bullion from the International Monetary Fund. The country, the world’s largest gold consumer, may buy more from the IMF, the Financial Chronicle reported. U.S. Dollar Index, a six-currency gauge of the greenback’s strength, fell to a 15-month low.

“There is a lot of central-bank buying, hedge-fund buying and gold is obviously getting to $1,200 an ounce before the end of the year,” David Lee, a trader at Heraeus Precious Metals Management in New York, said in a telephone interview. The metal has climbed 34 percent this year, heading for the sharpest annual increase since 1979.

Gold futures for February delivery climbed $21.20, or 1.8 percent, to $1,188.60 on the New York Mercantile Exchange’s Comex division. Up for a ninth straight session, the most-active contract’s rally is the longest since August 1982. The metal has climbed 14.1 percent this month, heading for the biggest monthly gain since September 1999.

“Funds and central banks around the world are nervous about the future of the U.S. dollar and the world economy, and that’s why they are buying gold,” Lee said by e-mail. “We’ve reached ‘irrational-exuberance’ levels on many commodities,” including gold and copper, he said.

One-Way Trade

“The gold trade is as crowded as a Tokyo subway car at rush hour,” Jon Nadler, a Kitco Inc. senior analyst in Montreal, said by e-mail. “This has been a one-way, dollar- carry-fueled street since Sept. 1, and it has seen the market become decoupled from anything resembling its fundamentals — kind of like oil became last year.”

Bullion typically moves inversely to the U.S. currency. The dollar index slid as much as 0.9 percent today after Federal Reserve officials described this year’s decline as “orderly.”

“We expect gold to continue to break through new highs” through this year, Scott Licamele, the director of emerging- markets research at Red Star Asset Management, said by e-mail. “The weak-dollar trend will continue as dollar-debasement fears persist.”

In London, gold for immediate delivery rose $17.42, or 1.5 percent, to $1,186.82 an ounce at 7:17 p.m. local time after touching a record of $1,187.38.

‘Going Ballistic’

“Gold is in uncharted territory as it continues to go ballistic,” Ralph Preston, a Heritage West Futures Inc. analyst in San Diego, said by e-mail.

“With today’s push over Monday’s high, look for residual momentum to carry prices to $1,200 an ounce before month’s end, which represents the next psychological stop on this runaway bull train,” Preston said. “I don’t see a bubble. I see a changing world order, and gold is a reflection of that change.”

The central banks of Russia and Sri Lanka have acquired gold recently, prompting analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale and Barclays Capital to forecast more such purchases. Governments are the biggest bullion holders.

“Actions from central banks are very important at the moment,” said Eugen Weinberg, an analyst at Commerzbank AG. “The purchase from India was like a seal of prices above $1,000 an ounce. Also, other central banks are buying gold.” – bloomberg

Implant-based cancer vaccine is first to eliminate tumors in mice

A cancer vaccine carried into the body on a carefully engineered, fingernail-sized implant is the first to successfully eliminate tumors in mammals, scientists report this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The new approach, pioneered by bioengineers and immunologists at Harvard University, uses plastic disks impregnated with tumor-specific antigens and implanted under the skin to reprogram the mammalian immune system to attack tumors. The new paper describes the use of such implants to eradicate melanoma tumors in mice.

“This work shows the power of applying engineering approaches to immunology,” says David J. Mooney, the Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. “By marrying engineering and immunology through this collaboration with Glenn Dranoff at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, we’ve taken a major step toward the design of effective cancer vaccines.”

Most cancer cells easily skirt the immune system, which operates by recognizing and attacking invaders from outside the body. The approach developed by Mooney’s group redirects the immune system to target tumors, and appears both more effective and less cumbersome than other cancer vaccines currently in clinical trials.

Conventional cancer vaccinations remove immune cells from the body, reprogram them to attack malignant tissues, and return them to the body. However, more than 90 percent of reinjected cells have died before having any effect in experiments.

The slender implants developed by Mooney’s group are 8.5 millimeters in diameter and made of an FDA-approved biodegradable polymer. Ninety percent air, the disks are highly permeable to immune cells and release cytokines, powerful recruiters of immune-system messengers called dendritic cells.

These cells enter an implant’s pores, where they are exposed to antigens specific to the type of tumor being targeted. The dendritic cells then report to nearby lymph nodes, where they direct the immune system’s T cells to hunt down and kill tumor cells.

“Inserted anywhere under the skin — much like the implantable contraceptives that can be placed in a woman’s arm — the implants activate an immune response that destroys tumor cells,” Mooney says.

The technique may have powerful advantages over surgery and chemotherapy, and may also be useful in combination with existing therapies. It only targets tumor cells, avoiding collateral damage elsewhere in the body. And, much as an immune response to a bacterium or virus generates long-term resistance, researchers anticipate cancer vaccines will generate permanent and body-wide resistance against cancerous cells, providing durable protection against relapse.

via Implant-based cancer vaccine is first to eliminate tumors in mice.

Cells defend themselves with protein bodyguards

When cells are confronted with an invading virus or bacteria or exposed to an irritating chemical, they protect themselves by going off their DNA recipe and inserting the wrong amino acid into new proteins to defend them against damage, scientists have discovered.

These “regulated errors” comprise a novel non-genetic mechanism by which cells can rapidly make important proteins more resistant to attack when stressed, said Tao Pan, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. A team of 18 scientists from the University of Chicago and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease led by Pan and Jonathan Yewdell published the findings Thursday in the journal Nature.

“This mechanism allows every protein to get some protection,” Pan said. “The genetic code is considered untouchable, but this is a non-genetic strategy used in cells to create a bodyguard for proteins.”

Proteins are constructed through a process called translation where cellular elements use the genetic code to guide the assembly of building blocks called amino acids into the correct sequence. First, a copy of the DNA, called messenger RNA, is made and transferred to a cellular structure called a ribosome. Transfer RNAs (tRNA), one for each of the 20 amino acids used in building proteins, read the messenger RNA code and bring the proper amino acids to the ribosome, where they are bonded together to form a complete protein.

Each tRNA can be attached to only one of 20 amino acids, a specificity that prevents errors during the construction of proteins. In artificial laboratory preparations, scientists have observed that only one out of every 10,000 amino acids is placed into a protein incorrectly, and thus protein errors were thought to be exceptionally rare.

But Jeffrey Goodenbour, University of Chicago graduate student and co-lead author along with Nir Netzer of the NIAID, decided to look at how often tRNA errors, called misacylations, occurred in live cells. After developing a novel technique for measuring these errors, published for the first time in this paper, the authors were surprised to find a much higher error rate in those cells for the amino acid methionine. As high as one out of every 100 methionines was incorrectly placed in proteins, they found.

When the cells were stressed by exposure to a virus, bacteria or a toxic chemical such as hydrogen peroxide, that error rate went even higher, as up to 10 percent of methionines placed into new proteins were different from what the gene specified.

“That was 1,000 times more than the textbook says should be there,” Pan said.

Further experiments revealed that it was always the same amino acid, methionine, placed incorrectly into new proteins. Methionine is one of only two amino acids to carry sulfur atoms on its side chains, a feature that allows it to neutralize dangerous molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROS) that form inside an infected or stressed cell. ROS can damage proteins through a chemical process called oxidation, but methionine can be oxidized (and restored through a process called reduction) without being permanently damaged.

“The idea is that methionine can protect you from having oxidation of the active site of protein, which would ultimately completely block function of the protein,” Goodenbour said. “You end up reducing the total reactive oxygen species load in the cell. It’s a very interesting mechanism.”

Cells normally put methionines near important parts of a protein to protect those segments from being damaged by reactive oxygen species. When the cell is under stress, and the amount of ROS increases, the number of methionine “errors” is ramped up tenfold, allowing new proteins to be even more resistant to attack.

“Think of a boxing match,” Pan said. “If you put methionine close to active site, the reactive oxygen species has to get past it to get to the active site residues for oxidization. You’ve put something right in front of it so a protein can take a hit. If you have a lot of methionines, to knock this protein out will take many, many hits. So this is a strategy used in cells to create a bodyguard for a protein.”

Researchers discover biological basis of ‘bacterial immune system’

Bacteria don’t have easy lives. In addition to mammalian immune systems that besiege the bugs, they have natural enemies called bacteriophages, viruses that kill half the bacteria on Earth every two days.Still, bacteria and another class of microorganisms called archaea (first discovered in extreme environments such as deep-sea volcanic vents) manage just fine, thank you, in part because they have a built-in defense system that helps protect them from many viruses and other invaders.

A team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Georgia has now discovered how this bacterial defense system works, and it could lead to new classes of targeted antibiotics, new tools to study gene function in microorganisms and more stable bacterial cultures used by food and biotechnology industries to make products such as yogurt and cheese.

The research was published today in the journal Cell.

“Understanding how bacteria defend themselves gives us important information that can be used to weaken bacteria that are harmful and strengthen bacteria that are helpful,” said Michael Terns, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “We also hope to exploit this knowledge to develop new tools to speed research on microorganisms.”

Other authors on the Cell paper include Rebecca Terns, a senior research scientist in biochemistry and molecular biology at UGA; Caryn Hale, a graduate student in the Terns lab at UGA; Lance Wells, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and Georgia Cancer Coalition Scholar at UGA and his graduate student Peng Zhao; and research associate Sara Olson, assistant professor Michael Duff and associate professor Brenton Graveley of the University of Connecticut Health Center.

The system, whose mechanism of action was uncovered in the Terns lab (Michael and Rebecca Terns are a husband-wife team), involves a “dynamic duo” made up of a bacterial RNA that recognizes and physically attaches itself to a viral target molecule, and partner proteins that cut up the target, thereby “silencing” the would-be cell killer.

The invader surveillance component of the dynamic duo (an RNA with a viral recognition sequence) comes from sites in the genomes of bacteria and archaea, known technically as “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” or more familiarly called CRISPRs. (A palindrome is a word or sentence that reads the same forward and backward.) CRISPR RNAs don’t work alone in fighting invaders, though.

Their partners in invader defense are Cas proteins that arise from a suite of genes called “CRISPR-associated” or Cas genes. Together, they form the “CRISPR-Cas system,” and the new paper describes this dynamic duo and how they protect bacteria from viruses.

“You can look at one as a police dog that tracks down and latches onto an invader, and the other as a police officer that follows along and `silences’ the offender,” said Rebecca Terns. “It functions like our own immune system, constantly watching for and neutralizing intruders. But the surveillance is done by tiny CRISPR RNAs rather than antibodies.”

What the team discovered was that a particular complex of CRISPR RNAs and a subset of the Cas proteins termed the RAMP module recognizes and destroys invader RNAs that it encounters.

“This work has uncovered intriguing parallels between the bacterial CRISPR-Cas system and the human immune system, suggesting a novel way to target disease-causing bacteria,” said Laurie Tompkins, Ph.D., who oversees genetic mechanisms grants at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences. “It may be possible to turn CRISPR-Cas into a suicide machine, killing pathogenic bacteria by an attack on their own molecules, similar to the self-destruction seen in human autoimmune diseases.”

More Hacktivism: 9/11 Pager data, where are the UFO leaks?

From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks is releasing over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

The messages are being broadcast to the global community “live”, sychronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message is from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed.

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its revelation will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the event and its tragic consequences.

An index of messages released so far is available here.

Twitter users should refer to #911txts. We will give status updates at twitter.com/wikileaks.

Observations may be posted to reddit. Please vote for important material.

via 9/11 Pager data.

Wikileaks has 14,263 Followers. About Wikileaks:

Wikileaks is a multi-jurisdictional organization to protect internal dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who face legal or other threats related to publishing. Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we are of assistance to people of all nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly – in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances – the internet, and cryptography – the risks of conveying important information can be lowered.

Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to stronger scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency can provide. Wikileaks provides a forum for the entire global community to relentlessly examine any document for its credibility, plausibility, veracity and validity. …In its landmark ruling on the Pentagon Papers, the US Supreme Court ruled that “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.” We agree.

We believe that it is not only the people of one country that keep their government honest, but also the people of other countries who are watching that government. – wikileaks

Have there been any UFO leaks? Not yet, AFAIK, but if Gary McKinnon had downloaded the images of the craft he supposedly saw when he hacked into a NASA computer, Wikileaks would have been the place to post them.

For ufologists… the idea that someone in government, abroad or here, eventually, might disclose the cover-up about UFOs that they contend is rampant, and can do so anonymously, should come as heaven-sent… – wikileaks

He said he investigated a NASA photographic expert’s claim that at the Johnson Space Center‘s Building 8, images were regularly cleaned of evidence of UFO craft, and confirmed this, comparing the raw originals with the “processed” images. He claimed to have viewed a detailed image of “something not man-made” and “cigar shaped” floating above the northern hemisphere, and assuming his viewing would be undisrupted owing to the hour, he did not think of capturing the image because he was “bedazzled”, and therefore did not think of securing it with the screen capture function in the software at the point when his connection was interrupted.^[39] McKinnon stated the image was approximately 256 megabytes in size, yet that the craft’s details were still distinct in the greatly inferior 4-bit color and low resolution he had to reduce the viewing image to appear across his mere 56k modem connection (approximate transfer rate 5.4kbps). – wiki

A person could submit documents to wikileaks here: https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Leak but, of course, a person with proof of aliens would want to do something like that from an unmonitored public computer such as in a busy library to avoid being traced.  On the disinfo side of the coin, there is no reason someone could not fake some documents and leak them to “prove” something outlandish…. then again, the point of wikileaks is that you’d have a lot of people reviewing the leaked document(s) to determine if the veracity.

‘Police targeting people for their DNA’

Police forces have been arresting people simply to add them to the controversial DNA database as a result of lax rules that have developed with almost no public scrutiny, the Government’s independent DNA watchdog warns today.

The Human Genetics Commission (HGC) also says there is little evidence that the national DNA database, the largest of its kind in the world, is of any use in solving crimes. In its two-year report examining the database, published today, it concludes that allowing police to add anyone arrested to the DNA database damages the assumption of innocence.

The report received testimony from one senior police source, a retired chief superintendent, who said it was “the norm” for officers to arrest someone to obtain their DNA profile.

“It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained,” said the source, whose identity has been kept secret. “It matters not whether the arrest leads to no action, a caution or a charge, because the DNA is kept anyway.”

The HGC calls for a debate on the rules on taking DNA samples and adding them to the database, which currently holds the data of around 5 million people. It adds that an independent body is needed to oversee the database. The commission also recommends that all police officers be added to the database to foster trust with the communities they serve.

It notes that there is “very little concrete evidence” as to how useful the database is in investigating crime, adding that the database is having a “disproportionate effect” on some groups. Young black men are “highly over-represented”, it says, with more than three-quarters of those aged 18-35 on the database.

Professor Jonathan Montgomery, the chairman of the HGC, said “function creep” of the database had been allowed to take place almost unchecked, as it evolved from a database of offenders to a database of suspects with hardly any legal foundation or scrutiny.

via ‘Police targeting people for their DNA’ – Crime, UK – The Independent.

In my view each person owns his or her unique DNA, along with all the rights to it, so police who collect and store it are committing a crime of biological property theft.

Learning while you sleep may work after all

Cosmos magazine describes an interesting study that appears in Science, but John Rudoy, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, in Chicago, USA.

… Half of the sound cues were then played to the participants once they had reached the ‘deep sleep’ stage of their nap, as determined by electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings.

When tested post-nap, it was found that participants were able to place the sound-cued objects more accurately than those not played during their nap. However, in the control experiment, in which participants were played the additional sounds without any sleep, there was no marked improvement. … – cosmos

The article goes on to say that the practical application of this is yet to be determined. I wonder if I can use this to improve my pitch recall. If I study during the day, then play a tape loop all night that plays a note and then tells me what that note is, would I be able to wake up and have absolute pitch awareness?

Seems worth a try.

 

Design fixed for 1,000mph car

The UK team aiming to smash its own land speed record by driving a car beyond 1,000mph (1,610km/h) has settled on a final design for the vehicle.

It calls for a major re-configuration of the vehicle’s two power units, with a Eurofighter jet engine now being positioned above a hybrid rocket.

The car, known as Bloodhound, will be built in Bristol’s docklands.

The team expects to start running the vehicle on the Hakskeen Pan, Northern Cape Province, South Africa, in 2011.

The dried-out lake bed had the perfect surface for the record attempt, said Bloodhound’s driver, Wing Commander Andy Green.

“It’s hard enough to support a six-tonne car on metal wheels but soft enough to allow the wheels just to sink in maybe 10mm,” he told BBC News.

The project was launched into the public domain in October 2008. Since then, intensive efforts have been under way to finalise the car’s design – one that maximises the vehicle’s performance and stability.

The original plan was to position a small (200kg) rocket above a heavier (1,000kg) EJ200 Eurofighter Typhoon engine loaned to the team by Britain’s Ministry of Defence.

However, as the design staff worked through the modelling, it became clear that additional thrust was going to be needed to overcome the aerodynamic drag. This called for a bigger (400kg) rocket.

This in turn introduced instabilities that could only be solved by flipping the positions of the two power units.

“We have switched the architecture of the rocket and the jet engine and the reason for that was we were seeing some quite high lift loads at the rear end of the car,” explained chief designer John Piper.

“The change, though, has had some beneficial side-effects, he added.

“We can now get a good chassis structure across the top which means we can now have a really good mounting for a single fin, whereas before with the rocket on top it was right in the way of where the fin would go. That meant we were going to have to have two fins, one on each side; and they were occupying the space where ideally we’d like to put in parachute cans.

via BBC News – Design fixed for 1,000mph car.