Accused killer: I performed surgery on myself

While on the lam for 2½ years, a Japanese man wanted for the murder of a British woman says he scissored off his lower lip, dug two moles out of his cheek with a box cutter and gave himself a nose job in an attempt to obscure his identity.

The disclosures come in a book released Wednesday and written from jail by Tatsuya Ichihashi, who will stand trial later this year in the murder and rape of his English teacher, Lindsay Ann Hawker.

Hawker, 22, was found dead in a sand-filled bathtub on the balcony of Ichihashi’s apartment in Chiba, east of Tokyo, in March 2007.

Ichihashi, arrested in 2009 after a lengthy nationwide manhunt, admits to taking Hawker’s life in the book, “Until the Arrest.” But he doesn’t describe the crime or his motives, instead detailing his life at large, during which he traveled up and down the country, in constant fear of arrest and obsessed with cosmetic surgery.

While police say Ichihashi has confessed to assaulting Hawker and that she died from her injuries, he won’t enter a plea until the trial begins. The details in the book do not take responsibility for anything beyond what Ichihashi has already told investigators. If convicted of murder, he could face the death penalty.

After escaping the police who came to his apartment to question him, he bound up his nose with a thread and needle — like a cook trussing a piece of meat — to make it narrower.

At first, Ichihashi, 32, wandered around Tokyo and then drifted north to Aomori prefecture, where he twice tried to cut off part of his lower lip to make it thinner. The first time, he couldn’t follow through because of the excruciating pain, he wrote. He finished it up a few days later in a public bathroom.

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He wore several layers of surgical masks to hide the scars, but apparently didn’t stand out in the spring when many Japanese do the same to escape pollen. …

“Having saved nearly 1 million yen ($12,100) from a string of construction jobs, he spent most of it on two plastic surgery operations, once to acquire a longer and narrower nose, and the second to raise the bridge of his nose.”

via Accused killer: I performed surgery on myself – World news – Asia-Pacific – msnbc.com.

The title and first part of the article are a bit misleading. If you read far enough you see that he had the nose job done at a clinic and this got him reported to the police. Police eventually stopped him on Nov. 10, 2009 at the ferry terminal in Osaka. When asked his name, he “gave his real name for the first time in 2½ years and was arrested.” For a while I was trying to figure out how he could do that by himself to nose …

 

Hubble telescope detects the oldest known galaxy

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what scientists believe may be the oldest galaxy ever observed.

It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang.

A Nasa team says this was a period when galaxy formation in the early Universe was going into “overdrive”.

The image, which has been published in Nature journal, was detected using Hubble’s recently installed wide field camera.

According to Professor Richard Bouwens of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands: “We’re seeing these galaxies – ‘star cities’ – that are building themselves up over cosmic time.”

The research team observed rapid growth over a relatively short period of time: Their sample data showed there was just one galaxy in existence about 500 million years after the Big Bang. But this rises to 10 galaxies some 150 million years later. The tally has doubled about 100 million years later.

“You start out with these little seeds in the very early Universe which would eventually have formed stars, then star clusters, baby galaxies then eventually these large majestic galaxies that we know today,” according to Professor Bouwens. …

via BBC News – Hubble telescope detects the oldest known galaxy.

The moss which only gathers on one stone: Tiny plant in Derbyshire Dale is one of world’s rarest

Ramblers and climbers pass by without a second glance as they focus on the stunning scenery.

But only yards from their feet, in a raging stream, one of the rarest plants on the planet is growing.

A single square yard of stony riverbed in the Peak District contains the world’s entire stock of Derbyshire feather moss.

via The moss which only gathers on one stone: Tiny plant in Derbyshire Dale is one of world’s rarest | Mail Online.

Derbyshire feather-moss is a species of aquatic moss which is only known from one site in the entire world. It is thought to have evolved in this one place in the Peak District and is therefore naturally rare.

Little is known about the environmental requirements of the moss, but the site and the area surrounding it are protected by Natural England, and the water quality is regularly monitored by the Environment Agency

via PeakDistrcit

Disabled Man Banned for Wheelchair Tank

British authorities have told a disabled man he cannot use his wheelchair on public streets because he requires a tank license to drive it.

Jim Starr, 36, has been banned from using his custom-made wheelchair by Britain’s Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency, which claims it is actually a tank.

“The whole idea of the chair was that I could go down to the beach with the kids,” said Starr. “It is a fantastic machine and can take me anywhere I want to go. It has no limits.

“It is ridiculous that I should have found a chair that could help me do all that … only for the authorities to turn around and say that if I used it on the roads, I would be doing something illegal,” he said.

A former landscape gardener, Starr has required a wheelchair since 1999 because of chronic back and joint conditions, neurological problems and arthritis.The $24,000 chair, given as a Christmas gift by a friend, is made in the United States.

Appropriately named the Tank Chair, the modified wheelchair was invented by Brad Soden, a U.S. Army veteran inspired by his time spent in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. …

via Disabled Man Banned for Wheelchair Tank.

T-Rex hunted like a lion, did not scavenge like a hyena

A new study has revealed that Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn’t a scavenger like a hyena; rather it hunted like a lion.

Scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) used an ecological model based on predator relationships in the Serengeti to find out if scavenging would have been an effective feeding strategy for the dinosaur.

“By understanding the ecological forces at work, we have been able to show that scavenging was not a viable option for T.rex as it was out-competed by smaller, more abundant predatory dinosaurs,” said Dr Chris Carbone.

“These smaller species would have discovered carcasses more quickly, making the most of ‘first-come-first-served’ opportunities.”

The study concluded that an individual T.rex would have roamed over large distances to catch its prey.

The research helps experts understand the behaviour of T.rex as a hunter.

The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

via T-Rex hunted like a lion, did not scavenge like a hyena | Discoveryon.

Training the brain to think ahead in addiction

The growing numbers of new cases of substance abuse disorders are perplexing. After all, the course of drug addiction so often ends badly. The negative consequences of drug abuse appear regularly on TV, from stories of celebrities behaving in socially inappropriate and self-destructive ways while intoxicated to dramatization of the rigors of drug withdrawal on “Intervention” and other reality shows.

Schools now educate students about the risks of addiction. While having a keen awareness of the negative long-term repercussions of substance use protects some people from developing addictions, others remain vulnerable.

One reason that education alone cannot prevent substance abuse is that people who are vulnerable to developing substance abuse disorders tend to exhibit a trait called “delay discounting”, which is the tendency to devalue rewards and punishments that occur in the future. Delay discounting may be paralleled by “reward myopia”, a tendency to opt for immediately rewarding stimuli, like drugs.

Thus, people vulnerable to addiction who know that drugs are harmful in the long run tend to devalue this information and to instead be drawn to the immediately rewarding effects of drugs.

Delay discounting is a cognitive function that involves circuits including the frontal cortex. It builds upon working memory, the brain’s “scratchpad”, i.e., a system for temporarily storing and managing information reasoning to guide behavior.

In a new article in Biological Psychiatry that studied this process, Warren Bickel and colleagues used an approach borrowed from the rehabilitation of individuals who have suffered a stroke or a traumatic brain injury. They had stimulant abusers repeatedly perform a working memory task, “exercising” their brains in a way that promoted the functional enhancement of the underlying cognitive circuits.

They found that this type of training improved working memory and also reduced their discounting of delayed rewards.

“The legal punishments and medical damages associated with the consumption of drugs of abuse may be meaningless to the addict in the moment when they have to choose whether or not to take their drug. Their mind is filled with the imagination of the pleasure to follow,” commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. “We now see evidence that this myopic view of immediate pleasures and delayed punishments is not a fixed feature of addiction. Perhaps cognitive training is one tool that clinicians may employ to end the hijacking of imagination by drugs of abuse.” …

via Training the brain to think ahead in addiction.

Scientists Determine What Makes an Orangutan an Orangutan

For the first time, scientists have mapped the genome–the genetic code–of orangutans. This new tool may be used to support efforts to maintain the genetic diversity of captive and wild orangutans. The new map of the orangutan genome may also be used to help improve our understanding of the evolution of primates, including humans. …

The name “orangutan” is derived from the Malay term, “man of the forest,” a fitting moniker for one of our closest relatives.

There are two species of orangutans, defined primarily by their island of origin–either Sumatra or Borneo. The outlook for orangutan survival is currently dire because there are estimated to be only about 7,500 orangutans in Sumatra, where they are considered critically endangered, and only about 50,000 orangutans in Borneo, where they are considered endangered.

The endangerment status of orangutans is determined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

There are no other wild populations of orangutans other than those in Sumatra and Borneo. The decline of the Sumatran and Borneo populations of orangutans is caused by varied threats, such as illegal logging, the conversion of rain forests to farmland and palm oil plantations, hunting and diseases.

Using a mix of legacy and novel technologies, the research team mapped the genomes of a total of 11 orangutans, including representatives of both the Sumatran and Bornean species.

The map of the orangutan genome may support conservation efforts by helping zoos create breeding programs designed to maintain the genetic diversity of captive populations. (The greater the genetic diversity of a species, the more resilient it is against threats to its survival.) The genome map may also help conservationists sample the genetic diversity of wild populations so they can prioritize populations of wild orangutans for conservation efforts.

Evolutionary implications

After scientists map a species’ genome, they compare it to the genetic maps of other species. As they do so, they search for key differences that involve duplications, deletions and inversions of genetic material. These differences may contribute to the unique features of particular species. They may also provide information about general evolutionary trends, such as the overall rate at which genomic evolution has occurred.

Before the orangutan’s genome was mapped, the genetic codes of three other great primates–humans, chimpanzees and rhesus macaques–were mapped.

The genomes of the gorilla and bonobo will soon be mapped, as well.

Analyses of the orangutan genome reveal that this primate has many unique features. For example, comparisons of the structural variation of the genomes of orangutans, humans, chimpanzees and rhesus macaques indicate that during the last 15 million years or so of primate evolution, the orangutan genome has generally been more stable than those of the other primates, with fewer large-scale structural changes. …

via nsf.gov – National Science Foundation (NSF) News – Scientists Determine What Makes an Orangutan an Orangutan – US National Science Foundation (NSF).

Test shows dinosaurs survived mass extinction by 700,000 years

University of Alberta researchers determined that a fossilized dinosaur bone found in New Mexico confounds the long established paradigm that the age of dinosaurs ended between 65.5 and 66 million years ago.

The U of A team, led by Larry Heaman from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, determined the femur bone of a hadrosaur as being only 64.8 million years old. That means this particular plant eater was alive about 700,000 years after the mass extinction event many paleontologists believe wiped all non-avian dinosaurs off the face of earth, forever.

Heaman and colleagues used a new direct-dating method called U-Pb (uranium-lead) dating. A laser beam unseats minute particles of the fossil, which then undergo isotopic analysis. This new technique not only allows the age of fossil bone to be determined but potentially can distinguish the type of food a dinosaur eats. Living bone contains very low levels of uranium but during fossilization (typically less than 1000 years after death) bone is enriched in elements like uranium. The uranium atoms in bone decay spontaneously to lead over time and once fossilization is complete the uranium-lead clock starts ticking. The isotopic composition of lead determined in the hadrosaur’s femur bone is therefore a measure of its absolute age.

via Test shows dinosaurs survived mass extinction by 700,000 years.

Little-known growth factor enhances memory, prevents forgetting in rats

Jules Asher – … “To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of potent memory enhancement via a naturally occurring factor that readily passes through the blood-brain barrier – and thus may hold promise for treatment development,” explained Cristina Alberini, Ph.D., of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, a grantee of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Alberini and colleagues say IGF-II could become a potential drug target for boosting memory. They report on their discovery in the Jan. 27, 2011 issue of Nature. …

The staying power of a memory depends on the synthesis of new proteins and structural changes in the connections between brain cells. These memory-strengthening changes occur within time-limited windows right after learning, when memories undergo consolidation, and also right after a memory is retrieved, a process called reconsolidation.

Hints from other studies led the researchers to suspect that IGF-II plays a role in these processes within the brain’s memory center, the hippocampus, where it is relatively highly concentrated. The little-known growth factor is part of the brain’s machinery for tissue repair and regeneration; it is important during development and declines with age….

via EurekaAlert

The Olive Oil Cure for Depression

Researchers from the universities of Navarra and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have demonstrated that the ingestion of trans-fats and saturated fats increase the risk of suffering depression, and that olive oil, on the other hand, protects against this mental illness.

They have confirmed this after studying 12,059 SUN Project volunteers over the course of six years; the volunteers had their diet, lifestyle and ailments analyzed at the beginning of the project, over its course and at the end of the project. In this way the researchers confirmed that despite the fact that at the beginning of the study none of the volunteers suffered from depression, at the end of the study 657 new cases had been detected.

Of all these cases, the participants with an elevated consumption of trans-fats (fats present in artificial form in industrially-produced pastries and fast food, and naturally present in certain whole milk products) “presented up to a 48% increase in the risk of depression when they were compared to participants who did not consume these fats,” affirmed Almudena Sánchez-Villegas, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, first author of the article.

In addition, the study demonstrated a dose-response relationship, “whereby the more trans-fats were consumed, the greater the harmful effect they produced in the volunteers,” the expert stated.

Furthermore, the team, directed by Miguel Ángel Martínez-González, Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Navarra, also analyzed the influence of polyunsaturated fats (abundant in fish and vegetable oils) and of olive oil on the occurrence of depression. “In fact, we discovered that this type of healthier fats, together with olive oil, are associated with a lower risk of suffering depression,” emphasized the researcher and director of the SUN Project.

150 million persons depressed worldwide

Thus, the results of the study corroborate the hypothesis of a greater incidence of the disease in countries of the north of Europe compared to the countries of the south, where a Mediterranean dietary pattern prevails. Nevertheless, experts have noted that the incidence of the disease has increased in recent years, so that today some 150 million persons are affected worldwide, where it is the principal cause of loss of years of life in those countries with a medium-to-high per capita income. …

via Eating poorly can make us depressed.

The photo is Shelley Duvall, the actress who played Olive Oyl, in Altman’s “Popeye“.  There are different types of depression, of course.  Situational depression, when you lose someone you love, for example, is natural. Feel it, but don’t let it make you sick, don’t overwhelm yourself with grief. Keep your perspective.  Most depression can be cured by getting what I consider the basics: a healthy diet, exercise, enough sleep, sex, and sunlight.  I haven’t felt depressed for no reason in a long time, but if I was, I’d have some olive oil on a fresh salad and watch Shelley Duvall.