How to save a life: Compression-only CPR found effective

Always check for a pulse first. Chest compressions can fracture ribs. If you are certain there is no pulse,  push 100 times per minute with enough force to compress the chest 1.5 to 2 inches. This requires 100 to 125 pounds of force.

Look at a ruler to be sure you know what 2 inches is (most people are wrong about this).  Also, try pushing on your bathroom scale to be sure you know what it feels like to press with 125 lbs of force.

Chest compressions alone are as effective in rescuing victims of heart attacks as conventional cardiopulmonary resuscitation that combines compressions with forced breathing, researchers said Wednesday

Studies in Washington and Sweden confirm the growing idea that the breathing component of CPR is necessary only for children and those who have suffered drowning or who have respiratory problems. Recent guidelines based on these and earlier studies may overcome some of the fears of bystanders who are reluctant to initiate CPR because of the danger of infectious diseases.

“These studies reinforce the message that the American Heart Assn. has been promoting since 2008,” said Dr. Michael Sayre, a professor of emergency medicine at Ohio State University in Columbus and a spokesman for the heart association. “When you encounter a person who has collapsed suddenly, the best thing to do is to call 911 and then push hard and fast on their chest. It’s simple, and something anyone can do even if they don’t have any training.”

… Studies in animals have shown that halting chest compressions to blow air into the patient’s mouth reduces blood flow by a startlingly large amount. And the breathing drill, in any case, may not be necessary: For most patients who suffer a heart attack, the blood will contain some oxygen for at least several minutes.

“What we have learned is that continuous blood flow, even if it is not fully [oxygen-] saturated, is probably much better in terms of helping restore spontaneous circulation,” Pepe said. …

Stem Cell ‘Homing’ Fixes Joints in Rabbit Experiments

Researchers are reporting they have successfully persuaded damaged joints to regrow cartilage and bone using a novel “cell homing” approach.

The experiments, conducted in rabbits, are a proof of concept of a method that may one day replace artificial joint transplants in humans, according to Jeremy Mao of Columbia University and colleagues.

The method uses a carefully constructed “bioscaffold,” impregnated with a natural substance called a growth factor. the growth factor in the scaffold causes precursor cells to migrate to the site and become cartilage and bone cells, Mao and colleagues wrote online in The Lancet.

In contrast with previous attempts to regrow tissue in joints, the researchers reported that they did not transplant any cells.

Animals treated with the method fully recovered weight-bearing and locomotion within a month, and the regenerated tissue was similar to naturally occurring cartilage and bone, the researchers said.

via Stem Cell ‘Homing’ Fixes Joints in Rabbit Experiments – ABC News.

Doomsday shelters making a comeback

Jason Hodge, father of four children from Barstow, Calif., says he’s “not paranoid” but he is concerned, and that’s why he bought space in what might be labeled a doomsday shelter.

Hodge bought into the first of a proposed nationwide group of 20 fortified, underground shelters — the Vivos shelter network — that are intended to protect those inside for up to a year from catastrophes such as a nuclear attack, killer asteroids or tsunamis, according to the project’s developers.

“It’s an investment in life,” says Hodge, a Teamsters union representative. “I want to make sure I have a place I can take me and my family if that worst-case scenario were to happen.”

via Doomsday shelters making a comeback – USATODAY.com.

Vivos condios my darling. Survival of the super rich.

Michael Bay working on a secret ‘Confidential Alien Project’ film

How much does Michael Bay love aliens? This much—even while he’s been blowing up Chicago, which we’ve learned about through a flood of Transformers 3 set photos and videos, the director has been negotiating to unleash even MORE aliens on Hollywood.

Bay, along with his Platinum Dunes partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, just picked up a script from screenwriter Bobby Glickert that’s about alien abductions. But that’s really all we know, because the title—currently “Confidential Alien Project”—is giving up as few secrets as Area 51.

This would be Bay’s fourth alien-related movie, because in addition to the three pictures in the Transformers franchise, he’s also producing the aliens-in-high-school thriller I Am Number Four.

Are you looking forward to Bay invading theaters with more aliens? Or do you wish he’d move on to some other sci-fi plot?

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

via Michael Bay working on a secret ‘Confidential Alien Project’ film | Blastr.

Deepak Chopra’s God 2.0, quantum flapdoodle?

Michael Shermer has this interesting post about Deepak Chopra’s  quantum God.

In most surveys, nine out of ten Americans respond in the affirmative to the question “Do you believe in God?” The other 10 percent provide a variety of answers, including a favorite among skeptics and atheists: “Which god do you mean?” And then they offer a litany of classical and non-Western deities: Aphrodite, Amon Ra, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithras, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, and Zeus. “We’re all atheists of these gods,” the stock reply concludes, “but some of us go one god further.”

I have debated many theologians who make the traditional arguments for God’s existence: the cosmological argument (prime mover, first cause), the teleological argument (the order and design of the universe), the ontological argument (if it is logically possible for God to exist, then God exists), the anthropic argument (the fine-tuned characteristics of nature, making human life possible), the moral argument (awareness of right and wrong), and others. These are all reasons to believe in God only if you already believe. If you do not already believe, these arguments ring hollow, having been refuted over the ages by philosophers from David Hume to Daniel Dennett.

This past spring, however, I participated in a debate with a theologian of a different stripe, the New Age spiritualist Deepak Chopra. His arguments for the existence of a deity take a radically new tack. During our exchange, which was taped by ABC’s Nightline and viewed by millions, Chopra set out a series of scientific-sounding arguments for the existence of a divine quantum force capable of nonlocal “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein famously described quantum entanglement. Call this new theology God 2.0.

Chopra provided a preview of these arguments in his 2006 book Life After Death. Consider this passage:

The mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom. Until an observer appears, electrons have no physical identity in the world; there is only the amorphous cloud. In the same way, imagine that there is a cloud of possibilities open to the brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images I could choose from). When the mind gives a signal, one of these possibilities coalesces from the cloud and becomes a thought in the brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron. …

Chopra believes that the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) can be linked to certain mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness). This supposition is based on the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.

Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Penrose and Hameroff conjecture that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons. This, in turn, triggers the neurons to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave-function collapse can only come about when an atom is “observed” (that is, affected in any way by something else), “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms to molecules to neurons . . . and so on.

Shermer discredits this idea as does Murray Gell-Mann:

Chopra’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different types of mathematics. …

via Deepak Chopra’s God 2.0 | Big Questions Online.

It seems our desire to be immortal leads many to speculate that the brain is not responsible, by itself, for our experience of consciousness.

Model describes universe with no big bang, no beginning, and no end

By suggesting that mass, time, and length can be converted into one another as the universe evolves, Wun-Yi Shu has proposed a new class of cosmological models that may fit observations of the universe better than the current big bang model. What this means specifically is that the new models might explain the increasing acceleration of the universe without relying on a cosmological constant such as dark energy, as well as solve or eliminate other cosmological dilemmas such as the flatness problem and the horizon problem.

Shu, an associate professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, explains in a study posted at arXiv.org that the new models emerge from a new perspective of some of the most basic entities: time, space, mass, and length. In his proposal, time and space can be converted into one another, with a varying speed of light as the conversion factor. Mass and length are also interchangeable, with the conversion factor depending on both a varying gravitational “constant” and a varying speed of light (G/c2). Basically, as the universe expands, time is converted into space, and mass is converted into length. As the universe contracts, the opposite occurs.

“We view the speed of light as simply a conversion factor between time and space in spacetime,” Shu writes. “It is simply one of the properties of the spacetime geometry. Since the universe is expanding, we speculate that the conversion factor somehow varies in accordance with the evolution of the universe, hence the speed of light varies with cosmic time.”

As Shu writes in his paper, the newly proposed models have four distinguishing features:

via Model describes universe with no big bang, no beginning, and no end.

Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?

The recent decoding of a cryptic cup, the excavation of ancient Jerusalem tunnels, and other archaeological detective work may help solve one of the great biblical mysteries: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The new clues hint that the scrolls, which include some of the oldest known biblical documents, may have been the textual treasures of several groups, hidden away during wartime—and may even be “the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple,” which held the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves near an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes—thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.—wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls.

But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem.

“Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews,” said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, which airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. (The National Geographic Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.) …

Dead Sea Scrolls Written by Ritual Bathers?

In 1953, a French archaeologist and Catholic priest named Roland de Vaux led an international team to study the mostly Hebrew scrolls, which a Bedouin shepherd had discovered in 1947.

De Vaux concluded that the scrolls’ authors had lived in Qumran, because the 11 scroll caves are close to the site.

Ancient Jewish historians had noted the presence of Essenes in the Dead Sea region, and de Vaux argued Qumran was one of their communities after his team uncovered numerous remains of pools that he believed to be Jewish ritual baths.

His theory appeared to be supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, some of which contained guidelines for communal living that matched ancient descriptions of Essene customs.

“The scrolls describe communal dining and ritual bathing instructions consistent with Qumran’s archaeology,” explained Cargill, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). …

via Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?.

Before the CIA, there was the Pond

It was a night in early November during the infancy of the Cold War when the anti-communist dissidents were hustled through a garden and across a gully to a vehicle on a dark, deserted road in Budapest. They hid in four large crates for their perilous journey.

Four roadblocks stood between them and freedom.

What Zoltan Pfeiffer, a top political figure opposed to Soviet occupation, his wife and 5-year-old daughter did not know as they were whisked out of Hungary in 1947 was that their driver, James McCargar, was a covert agent for one of America’s most secretive espionage agencies, known simply as the Pond.

Created during World War II as a purely U.S. operation free of the perceived taint of European allies, the Pond existed for 13 years and was shrouded in secrecy for more than 50 years. It used sources that ranged from Nazi officials to Stalinists and, at one point, a French serial killer.

It operated under the cover of multinational corporations, including American Express, Chase National Bank and Philips, the Dutch-based electronic giant. One of its top agents was a female American journalist.

Now the world can finally get a deeper look at the long-hidden roots of American espionage as tens of thousands of once-secret documents found in locked safes and filing cabinets in a barn near Culpeper, Va., in 2001 have finally become public after a long security review by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The papers, which the Pond’s leader tried to keep secret long after the organization was dissolved, were placed in the National Archives in College Park, Md., in 2008 but only opened to the public in April. Those records plus documents obtained by The Associated Press in the past two years from the FBI, CIA and other agencies under the Freedom of Information Act portray a sophisticated organization obsessed with secrecy that operated a network of 40 chief agents and more than 600 sources in 32 countries. The AP has also interviewed former officials, family members, historians and archivists.

The Pond, designed to be relatively small and operate out of the limelight, appeared to score some definite successes, but rivals questioned its sources and ultimately, it became discredited because its pugnacious leader was too cozy with Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other radical anti-communists. …

via AP IMPACT: Before the CIA, there was the Pond – Yahoo! News.

New high-resolution photo of famous ‘Face on Mars’ proves it is just a rocky hill

It was the startling photograph that spawned a thousand conspiracy theories.

A photograph taken by the American Viking 1 Orbiter in July 1976 appeared to show a hill in the shape of a human face on the dusty surface of Mars.

But a new photograph released today, which was taken with Nasa’s high-definition HiRISE camera, finally shows the Face on Mars for what it really is: just a large, rocky hill in the middle of the Martian desert.

This is the closest ever image of the famous outcrop which should, once and for all, scotch the conspiracy theorists who believe that the ‘face’ is conclusive evidence of intelligent life on Mars.

Within days of its discovery in 1976, space enthusiasts were speculating that the structure was man-made and had been built by Martians in the distant past.

Today’s image was taken by HiRISE from on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which can pick out incredible detail from 300 kilometres above the planet’s surface.

The rocky formation is known as a mesa, a large rocky outcrop with a flat top and steep, cliff-like sides.

The Face’ mesa is in the Cydonia region and is a couple of miles long and a few hundred feet high.

Conspiracy theorists insist that the ‘face’ is an artifact from an ancient Martian civililsation and the centre of a Nasa cover-up.

Nasa even added to the theory by referring to the picture’s human likeness in the caption it added to the photo when it first released it to the general public.

The outcrop looked a little like a face, complete with eyes, nose and mouth, because of the angle of the sun and its cratered surface, and Nasa happily pointed this fact out. …

2nd image: A black and white version of the new HiRISE photo, The face is almost impossible to spot in this high-res image

via New high-resolution photo of famous ‘Face on Mars’ proves it is just a rocky hill | Mail Online.

Weird mountain.

HMS Investigator, Ship Lost For More Than 150 Years, Recovered In Canada

Canadian archeologists have found a ship abandoned more than 150 years ago in the quest for the fabled Northwest Passage and which was lost in the search for the doomed expedition of Sir John Franklin, the head of the team said Wednesday.

Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada’s head of underwater archaeology, said the HMS Investigator, abandoned in the ice in 1853, was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay along the northern coast of Banks Island in Canada’s western Arctic.

“The ship is standing upright in very good condition. It’s standing in about 11 meters (36 feet) of water,” he said. “This is definitely of the utmost importance. This is the ship that sailed the last leg of the Northwest Passage.”

The Investigator was one of many American and British ships sent out to search for the HMS Erebus and the Terror, vessels commanded by Franklin in his ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage in 1845.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice said the British government has been notified that one of their naval shipwrecks has been discovered, as well as the bodies of three sailors.

via HMS Investigator, Ship Lost For More Than 150 Years, Recovered In Canada.