How the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition.

… Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.” Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that’s due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.

… During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: “Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.” Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. “Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?” asked Nebraska’s Omaha Bee. …

The saga began with ratification of the 18^th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States.* High-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol organizations had helped push the amendment through in 1919, playing on fears of moral decay in a country just emerging from war. The Volstead Act, spelling out the rules for enforcement, passed shortly later, and Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920.

But people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade’s end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country’s defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior.

Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and redistilling it to make it potable.

Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. government started requiring this “denaturing” process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the country’s drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge’s government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.

To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to “renature” the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly. …

Most of those sickened and dying were those “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff.”

And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes,” proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

Officially, the special denaturing program ended only once the 18^th Amendment was repealed in December 1933. … And when Prohibition ended and good grain whiskey reappeared, it was almost as if the craziness of Prohibition—and the poisonous measures taken to enforce it—had never quite happened.

… Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

via The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition. – By Deborah Blum – Slate Magazine.

Senators to NASA chief: Go somewhere specific

NASA needs to go somewhere specific, not just talk about it, skeptical U.S. senators told the space agency chief Wednesday.

President Barack Obama’s proposed budget kills the previous administration’s return-to-the-moon mission, sometimes nicknamed “Apollo on steroids.” That leaves the space agency adrift without a goal or destination, senators and outside experts said at a Senate Commerce science and space subcommittee hearing, the first since Obama unveiled his new space plan this month.

On top of that the nation’s space shuttle fleet is only months away from long-planned retirement, an issue for senators from Florida, where NASA is a major employer. And while the new NASA plan includes extra money — $6 billion over five years — for private spaceships and developing new rocket technology, NASA shouldn’t be just about spending, the senators said. It should be about John F. Kennedy-like vision.

“Resources without vision is a waste of time and money,” Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said, calling the Obama space plan a “radical change of vision and approach.” He vowed to fight the plan “with every ounce of energy I have.”

And former chief astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson said the new plan “has no clear path, no destination, no milestones and no program focus.”

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said after the hearing that critics were confusing the lack of a specific destination or timetable with the lack of a goal.

NASA has a goal, a big one, Bolden said. It’s going to Mars. But Bolden added that getting astronauts to Mars is more than a decade away and NASA needs to upgrade its technology or else it never will get there.

“We want to go to Mars,” Bolden said. “We can’t get there right now because we don’t have the technology to do it.”

That is why he said the new NASA plan invests in developing in-orbit fuel depots, inflatable spaceship parts, new types of propulsion and other technology.

via Senators to NASA chief: Go somewhere specific – Yahoo! News.

Her Facebook status changed to “single?” Ur dumped

Digital dumping is on the rise, according to a survey, with growing numbers of people preferring to use email and social networking Web sites to break up with their partners.

Over one third of 2,000 people polled (34 percent) said they had ended a relationship by email, 13 percent had changed their status on Facebook without telling their partners and six percent had released the news unilaterally on Twitter.

By contrast, only two percent had broken up via a mobile phone text.

The rest had split up the old-fashioned way by face-to-face conversation (38 percent) and by telephone (eight percent).

“Digital Dumping will soon take over when it comes to ending a relationship,” said Sean Wood, Marketing Manager for DateTheUk dating service for whom the survey was carried out.

“It’s often easier, quicker and avoids any misunderstandings.”

via Her Facebook status changed to “single?” Ur dumped – Yahoo! News.

Heart Stem Cells Move Closer to Human Treatments

Researchers are moving ahead — although sometimes ploddingly — toward the goal of using stem cell therapies to rescue people with cardiovascular disease, the leading killer of men and women in the United States.

Although much of the gains thus far have been in basic science, stem cells do seem close to actually being able to help actual humans.

“We have seen consistent but modest effects of stem cells in improving heart function and reverse remodeling of heart,” said Dr. Gordon Tomaselli, a spokesman for the American Heart Association and an associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

“I think there’s great hope,” added Dr. Darwin J. Prockop, director of the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Scott & White in Temple.

Several studies presented last November at the annual scientific sessions of the American Heart Association in Orlando serve as examples.

In one study, out of Germany, 35 patients who received bone-marrow stem cell transplantation during coronary artery bypass surgery achieved “excellent long-term safety and survival.”

Ten patients who received similar transplantations after repair of mitral valves also fared well, with improvements in the heart’s pumping capacity.

Slovenian investigators had similar success, with improvements seen in patients with advanced heart failure who received bone-marrow derived stem cells.

There were also advances in gene therapy reported, with Singaporean researchers using nanotechnology to deliver genetically modified cells to help heal heart attack damage in rabbits.

The stem cell promise hinges on the ability to produce unlimited supplies of human cardiac cells, experts say.

Kevin Eggan, chief scientific officer for the New York Stem Cell Foundation and associate professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University, noted two breakthrough treatments that would require steady production of stem cells.

One is a future “patch” made out of these cells to fix a damaged heart after a heart attack. Researchers also hope to fashion blood vessels out of stem cells for use in bypass surgery and other procedures.

“People are making very substantial progress in being able to make those various vascular cells you would need,” Eggan said. “Transplanting those is something that will come from all of this.” …

via Heart Stem Cells Move Closer to Human Treatments – Yahoo! News.

The image is from this 2008 article:

Donated hearts for lifesaving transplants are scarce, but now researchers may have hit upon a way to generate the blood-pumping organs in the lab–at least in rats. The approach, which involves transplanting cells from a newborn rat onto the framework of an adult heart, produced an organ that could beat and pump fluid. Further refinement will be necessary before the technique is ready for people, but it could also generate other organs.

Approximately 3000 patients in the United States are on the waiting list for a heart transplant, but only about 2000 donor organs become available each year. Stem cells, which can give rise to heart tissue, offer a potential solution. But to form an entire heart, the cells require a framework, or scaffolding, to grow on, and finding an adequate structure has proven difficult. Now, a team led by bioengineer Doris Taylor of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, has shown that old hearts stripped of their cells may provide a fix for the scaffolding problem.

… To apply this method to people, the heart scaffolding could come from either human cadavers or pigs, Taylor says. Adult stem cells, such as those found in bone marrow, could be taken from patients awaiting transplants and used to grow the new heart. – sciencemag

Watch this movie and win $10,000?

A Bollywood filmmaker has issued a lucrative challenge to horror movie fans: a $10,000 reward for anyone who can watch his latest supernatural thriller, alone, in a cinema until the closing credits.

Ram Gopal Varma’s “Phoonk 2,” a sequel to his 2008 film of the same name, is about an evil spirit that traumatizes a family. “Anyone who says the movie cannot scare him is going to be put in a theater by himself,” Varma told reporters in Mumbai at an event to promote the movie.

Varma said the film fan who steps up to the challenge will be wired up to a heart monitoring machine as well as a camera that ensures they keep their eyes open during the whole movie.

Readings from the machines will be shown live on a screen outside the cinema, Varma said, and if the contestant succeeds, they will win 500,000 rupees (approximately $10,850).

Varma issued a similar challenge ahead of the release of the original “Phoonk” but the promotional contest was withdrawn after allegations the selection process was rigged.

Varma said the contest winner ran out 30 minutes after the film started, but newspaper reports said a film fan in the southern Indian city of Bangalore booked an entire cinema to prove the director wrong and watched the film alone with a doctor on call and security personnel stationed outside.

via Watch this movie and win $10,000? – Yahoo! News.

I’ve already seen enough horror movies for one lifetime.  I avoid them now, but I did find this challenge interesting.

Italy convicts 3 Google execs in abuse video case

It seems that when it comes to letting the Web be the Web, it could be the United States against the world.

An Italian judge on Wednesday held three Google executives criminally responsible for an online video of an autistic teenager being bullied — a verdict that raises concerns that the Internet giant, and others like it, may be forced to police their content in Italy, and even beyond.

The reaction to the verdict in the United States was swift and nearly unanimous in its condemnation of a dangerous precedent experts said threatens the principle of a free and open Internet.

However, Milan Prosecutor Alfredo Robledo reflected a European concern with privacy when he expressed satisfaction with a decision he said protected a fundamental right, putting the interests of an individual before those of a business.

“This is the big principal affirmed by this verdict,” Robledo said. “It is fundamental, because a person’s identity is a primary good. If we give that up, anything can happen and that is not OK.”

The charges stemmed from a complaint by Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome that was named in the 2006 video posted on Google Video, a video-sharing service Google ran before acquiring YouTube later that year.

The footage showed an autistic student in Turin being pushed, pummeled with objects, including a pack of tissues, and insulted by classmates, who called him a “mongoloid.”

The prosecutor’s case emphasized that the video had been viewed 5,500 times over the two months it was online, when it climbed to the top of Google Italy’s “most entertaining” video list and had more than 80 comments, including users urging its removal.

Google argued that it was unaware of the offensive material and acted swiftly to remove it after being notified by authorities, taking the video down within two hours.

Those convicted of violating Italy’s privacy laws were Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, its senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond and retired chief financial officer George Reyes. They were given six-month suspended sentences.

via Italy convicts 3 Google execs in abuse video case – Yahoo! News.

Scientists Determine Massive Planet is Being Torn Apart by Its Own Tides, Providing Opportunity to Watch a Planetary “Death March”

Illustration of WASP-12b in orbit about its host star (Credit: ESA/C Carreau)

An international group of astrophysicists has determined that a massive planet outside our Solar System is being distorted and destroyed by its host star – a finding that helps explain the unexpectedly large size of the planet, WASP-12b.

It’s a discovery that not only explains what’s happening to WASP-12b; it also means scientists have a one-of-a-kind opportunity to observe how a planet enters this final stage of its life. “This is the first time that astronomers are witnessing the ongoing disruption and death march of a planet,” says UC Santa Cruz professor Douglas N.C. Lin,. Lin is a co-author of the new study and the founding director of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University, which was deeply involved with the research.

The findings are being published in the February 25 issue of Nature.

The research was led by Shu-lin Li of the National Astronomical Observatories of China. A graduate of KIAA, Li and a research team analyzed observational data on the planet to show how the gravity of its parent star is both inflating its size and spurring its rapid dissolution.

WASP 12-b, discovered in 2008, is one of the most enigmatic of 400-plus planets that have been found outside our Solar System over the past 15 years. It orbits a star, in the constellation Auriga, roughly similar in mass to our Sun. Like most known extra-solar planets, it is large and gaseous, resembling Jupiter and Saturn in this respect. But unlike Jupiter, Saturn or most other extra-solar planets, it orbits its parent star at extremely close range – 75 times closer than the Earth is to the Sun, or just over 1 million miles. It is also larger than astrophysical models would predict. Its mass is estimated to be almost 50% larger than Jupiter’s and its 80% larger, giving it six times Jupiter’s volume. It is also unusually hot, with a daytime temperature of more than 2500°C.

Some mechanism must be responsible for expanding this planet to such an unexpected size, say the researchers. They have focused their analysis on tidal forces, which they say are strong enough to produce the effects observed on WASP 12b.

via Scientists Determine Massive Planet is Being Torn Apart by Its Own Tides, Providing Opportunity to Watch a Planetary “Death March” | The Kavli Foundation.

NASA Desperately Looking for Soviet Moon Rover

It is very unclear why the US specialists insist on finding an old Russia spacecraft.

The work conducted on the Moon in the last century allows scientists to measure the distance to it with high degree of precision, up to a millimeter. Thanks to the equipment left on the Moon, we found out that the natural satellite moves away from Earth 38 millimeters a year.

To measure the distance between Earth and the Moon, a powerful laser beam is directed from Earth to the Moon, and then the time is calculated spent for the light to travel back and forth. Knowing the speed of light, we can calculate the distance.

The beam is directed at the so-called corner reflector. Its basic model consists of three mutually perpendicular, intersecting mirror surfaces. Any beam that gets to the mirrors is reflected back towards the source.

The reflectors installed on the Moon are more complex. Instead of mirrors they have prisms serving as reflecting panels.

Three corner reflectors were left on the Moon by American astronauts who came with the missions “Apollo-11”, “14” and “15”. Two reflectors were sent by Russia.

The first Russian reflector arrived to the Moon along with the automatic station “Luna-17” and was installed on the self-moving robot “Lunokhod-1″. The second one was installed on “Lunokhod -2″, delivered to the Moon in 1973 along with the station “Luna-21″.

All reflectors but the one installed on “Lunokhod-1″ are still functioning. In 1971, after a number of successful experiments with the reflector, the robot seemed to be missing. It was known for fact that it stopped in Mare Imbrium (Latin for “Sea of Showers” or “Sea of Rains”) because laser impulses were sent there, but no answers were received.

It did not seem like a big deal. Yet, the Americans are trying to find it for some reason, searching the Moon’s surface with a laser beam. It is hard to miss something because the area of the light spot can reach 25 square kilometers.

According to Vladislav Trushev with the Rocket Propulsion Paboratory, NASA failed to find “Lunokhod-1″ three years ago. Now, specialists from University of California, San Diego, measure the distance to the Moon with the most precise equipment, a powerful telescope with a laser, in an observatory (Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico). They discovered that the work of the existing reflectors has worsened significantly.

It is very difficult to “catch millimeters” because it requires very sensitive equipment. Out of millions of billions of photons reflected from the Moon, only a few thousands come back to Earth detectors. This number constantly decreases .

According to Tom Murphy, head of research, efficiency of the reflectors has worsened more than ten-folds. The issues began between 1979 and 1984, and the situation keeps getting worse.

The scientist believes that soon it may be impossible to take measurements.

The only sound hypothesis suggests that the reflectors are either covered by the Moon dust or scratched, because the dust is abrasive. But what did make it move in four locations at the same time? It could not be the wind.

In any case, this does not explain why the Americans keep searching for the Russian robot. They may think that the reflectors installed on it could still work.

NASA is going to send its LRO now located in the Moon’s orbit to search for “Lunokhod-1″. They plan to take high quality pictures of the spot where the Soviet equipment may be located to take a better look at it.

kp.ru

via World around us: NASA Desperately Looking for Soviet Moon Rover.

Peru poison frog reveals secret of monogamy

The first monogamous amphibian has been discovered living in the rainforest of South America.

Genetic tests have revealed that male and females of one species of Peruvian poison frog remain utterly faithful.

More surprising is the discovery that just one thing – the size of the pools of water in which they lay their tadpoles – prevents the frogs straying.

That constitutes the best evidence yet documented that monogamy can have a single cause, say scientists.

Details of the frog’s sex life is to be published in the journal The American Naturalist.  …

Many animals appear to be monogamous, with males and females forming pairs that can often last a lifetime.

But the recent explosion in genetic analyses has revealed many of these so-called monogamous relationships to be a sham.

While many animals might stay together and breed, they will often sneak off and cheat on their partners when they get a chance.

So Dr Brown and his colleagues decided to check out the mimic poison frog more closely.

They sampled the DNA of many pairs of adult frogs, and the subsequent generations of tadpoles they produced.

Of 12 frog families, 11 had males and females that remained continually faithful to one another, together producing all their offspring. In the twelfth family, a male frog mated with two females.

“Others have found evidence of social monogamy in amphibians where parents remain paired, however they didn’t look at the genetics of these couples and their offspring to confirm this,” Dr Brown told the BBC. …

via BBC – Earth News – Peru poison frog reveals secret of monogamy.

Clifftop home in Torquay loses garden in rock fall days after sale

The six-bedroom property was sold last week for the bargain price because of its precarious position overlooking Oddicombe Beach in Torquay, Devon.

But just six days later more than 5,000 tonnes of rock at the bottom of the garden collapsed into the beach below.

Local residents said they heard a ”rumbling” noise before the unstable sandstone cliffs crumbled, narrowly missing a row of beach huts.

Police and coastguards feared joggers or dog walkers were trapped underneath the rock and used thermal imaging equipment to hunt for survivors.

No-one was hurt but Ridgemont House lost a ”substantial” chunk of its land and now sits just 50ft from the edge of the 300ft cliff.

One neighbour said: ”Apparently the cliff collapse was sparked when a large boulder the size of a Transit Van fell off and the whole lot went.

”It happened in the middle of the night so no-one saw how bad it was until daylight. It was a huge cliff fall.

”Ridgemont House lost a large chunk of its land – it was only sold last week. The timing was pretty terrible.”

The house was built in the late 1930s when Torquay and the English Riviera was popular with wealthy holidaymakers from London.

It, along with its gardens, were sold for £123,000 at auction last September and bought at another auction just days ago for £154,500 – just a fraction of the £1.5million for a similar sized beach front home in other British resorts.

It is understood to have been bought as a second home by a property developer from London named Sue Diamond, who paid a deposit with the sale to be finalised in March.

The new owner was said to be too upset to speak about the damage to her new property yesterday. …

via Clifftop home in Torquay loses garden in rock fall days after sale – Telegraph.