The Adjustment BeEuro

Don’t you hate spelling “bureau”?  There’s no “o” in it anywhere.

Etymologically, bureau seems to mean ‘red’. Its ultimate source is probably Greek purrhós ‘red’, a derivative of pur ‘fire’ … which is related to English fire. This was borrowed into Latin as burrus, which developed into Old French bure ‘dark brown’. This seems to have formed the basis of a derivative burel, later bureau, meaning ‘dark brown cloth’. This cloth was used for covering the writing surface of desks, and so eventually bureau came to mean ‘writing desk’ itself. Offices being the natural habitat of writing desks, bureau was later applied to them too. The derivative bureaucracy is 19th-century, of French origin.

via wordorigins

I had to tell you this. It was part of my plan.

Darpa’s Cheetah-Bot Designed to Chase Human Prey

Perhaps you thought the four-legged BigDog robot wasn’t eerily lifelike enough. That’ll change soon. BigDog’s makers are working on a new quadruped that moves faster than any human and is agile enough to “chase and evade.”

Boston Dynamics, maker of the Army’s BigDog robotic mule, announced today that Darpa has awarded it a contract to build a much faster and more fearsome animal-like robot, Cheetah.

As the name implies, Cheetah is designed to be a four-legged robot with a flexible spine and articulated head (and potentially a tail) that runs faster than the fastest human. In addition to raw speed, Cheetah’s makers promise that it will have the agility to make tight turns so that it can “zigzag to chase and evade” and be able to stop on a dime.

Cheetah builds off work on the company’s previous four legged animal bot, BigDog. It was built as a kind of unmanned pack mule, designed to carry equipment for troops on the battlefield. The robotic donkey could carry 300 lbs. over 13 miles on flat ground, take a swift kick and keep on moving. It’s creepy, lifelike movement can be seen on a number of videos online, climbing over hills and snow and hiking alongside soldiers, using GPS coordinates as its waypoints.

via Darpa’s Cheetah-Bot Designed to Chase Human Prey | Danger Room | Wired.com.

I have one word for you if you are being chased by this bad boy…  bolas.  Even if it comes equipped with line cutters to get itself free, three trained humans with bolas (which are very cheap to make, by the way) could take it down.  Of course, you have to have know the thing is hunting you to be prepared. Not sure what it is supposed to do when it catches you. Does it eat you? Explode? Leap upon you?

Adjust your compass now: the north pole is migrating to Russia

It sounds unlikely but it’s true: the magnetic north pole is moving faster than at any time in human history, threatening everything from the safety of modern transport systems to the traditional navigation routes of migrating animals.

Scientists say that magnetic north, which for two centuries has been in the icy wilderness of Canada, is currently relocating towards Russia at a rate of about 40 miles a year. The speed of its movement has increased by a third in the past decade, prompting speculation that the field could be about to “flip”, causing compasses to invert and point south rather than north, something that happens between three and seven times every million years.

Already the phenomenon is causing problems in the field of aviation. Tampa International airport in Florida has just spent a month renaming its three runways, which in common with those at most US airports are identified using numbers that correspond to the direction, in degrees, that they face on a compass. “Everything had to be changed; it was a huge project,” Brenda Geoghagan, a spokeswoman for the airport, said.

The current rate of magnetic north’s movement away from Canada’s Ellesmere Island is throwing out compasses by roughly one degree every five years, prompting the US Federal Aviation Administration to re-evaluate runway names across the country every five years. Similar changes were recently made to runways at Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach.

Geologists believe that magnetic north pole (which is different from the true North Pole, the axis on which the Earth spins) moves around due to changes in the planet’s molten core, which contains liquid iron. They first located it in 1831, and have been attrying to follow its progress ever since.

Records indicate that the pole’s location barely moved in the early decades, but in about 1904, it began tracking north-east at a rate of about nine miles a year. That speed increased significantly from about 1989, possibly because of a “plume” of magnetism deep below ground. The pole is now believed to be heading towards Siberia at about 37 miles each year. …

via Adjust your compass now: the north pole is migrating to Russia – Science, News – The Independent.

Inside A Google Auto-Driving Car

YouTube – Inside A Google Auto-Driving Car.

New Views of Discovery’s Launch from Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Boosters

I posted some other shuttle launch videos recently, but these views are wild. Some new angles.

YouTube – New Views of Discovery’s Launch from Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Boosters.

Lost satellite deals blow to climate research

For the second time in two years, a rocket glitch sent a NASA global warming satellite to the bottom of the sea Friday, a $424 million debacle that couldn’t have come at a worse time for the space agency and its efforts to understand climate change.

Years of belt-tightening have left NASA’s Earth-watching system in sorry shape, according to many scientists. And any money for new environmental satellites will have to survive budget-cutting, global warming politics — and now, doubts on Capitol Hill about the space agency’s competence.

The Taurus XL rocket carrying NASA’s Glory satellite lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and plummeted to the southern Pacific several minutes later. The same thing happened to another climate-monitoring probe in 2009 with the same type of rocket, and engineers thought they had fixed the problem.

“It’s more than embarrassing,” said Syracuse University public policy professor Henry Lambright. “Something was missed in the first investigation and the work that went on afterward.”

Lambright warned that the back-to-back fiascos could have political repercussions, giving Republicans and climate-change skeptics more ammunition to question whether “this is a good way to spend taxpayers’ money for rockets to fail and for a purpose they find suspect.” …

Why it failed

Glory failed when the rocket’s clamshell-shaped protective covering that was supposed to shield it during launch never opened to let the satellite fire into orbit. A similar fiasco happened in 2009 when the Orbiting Carbon Observatory fell back to Earth after the rocket nose cone also failed to separate. …

via Lost satellite deals blow to climate research – Technology & science – Space – msnbc.com.

Rockefeller Scientists discover new compound that rids cells of Alzheimer protein debris

Cody Mooneyhan – New research in the FASEB Journal suggests that a compound called SMER28 reduces beta-amyloid by stimulating autophagy, which effectively slows the buildup of toxic beta-amyloid

If you can’t stop the beta-amyloid protein plaques from forming in Alzheimer’s disease patients, then maybe you can help the body rid itself of them instead. At least that’s what scientists from New York were hoping for when they found a drug candidate to do just that. Their work appears in a research report online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), and shows that a new compound, called “SMER28″ stimulated autophagy in rat and mice cells. Autophagy is a process cells use to “clean out” the debris from their interior, including unwanted materials such as the protein aggregates that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. In mice and rat cells, SMER28 effectively slowed down the accumulation of beta-amyloid.

“Our work demonstrates that small molecules can be developed as therapies, by activating a cellular function called autophagy, to prevent Alzheimer’s disease,” said Paul Greengard, Ph.D.,Nobel laureate and director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University in New York, NY. “By increasing our understanding of autophagy, it might be possible to stimulate it pharmacologically or naturally to improve the quality of life for aging people.”

Using mouse and rat cells, scientists tested various compounds for their ability to reduce the buildup of beta-amyloid by exposing cultured cells to compounds known to activate autophagy. The effects of these compounds were then compared by removing growth factors from the culture medium. Researchers then focused on the most effective compound, which was SMER28, to characterize the cellular components involved in this phenomenon. For that purpose, the effect of SMER28 on beta-amyloid formation was compared using normal cells or cells where the expression of genes known to be involved in autophagy was reduced or abolished. Results showed involvement of three important autophagic players, and one was essential for the effect of SMER28. This research represents a radically different approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease, namely boosting a cellular mechanism to enhance the clearance of beta-amyloid, as well as other protein aggregates; and it opens a new therapeutic avenue for the treatment of this and other degenerative diseases.

“Autophagy has been called the cell’s equivalent of urban renewal. In that sense, SMER28 functions as a cellular forklift to clear out unwanted debris,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. “The Rockefeller group shows that strategies to remove the blight in cells that causes Alzheimer’s disease are not only worth pursuing, but so far, appear to be very promising.”

via Rockefeller Scientists discover new compound that rids cells of Alzheimer protein debris.

Multiple sclerosis blocked in mouse model

Scientists have blocked harmful immune cells from entering the brain in mice with a condition similar to multiple sclerosis (MS).

According to researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, this is important because MS is believed to be caused by misdirected immune cells that enter the brain and damage myelin, an insulating material on the branches of neurons that conduct nerve impulses.

New insights into how the brain regulates immune cell entry made the accomplishment possible. Washington University scientists had borrowed an anti-cancer drug in development by the company ChemoCentryx simply to test their theories.

“The results were so dramatic that we ended up producing early evidence that this compound might be helpful as a drug for MS,” says Robyn Klein, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and immunology, of medicine and of neurobiology. “The harmful immune cells were unable to gain access to the brain tissue, and the mice that received the highest dosage were protected from disease.”

ChemoCentryx is now testing the drug in Phase I safety trials. The study is published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine. …

via Multiple sclerosis blocked in mouse model | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis.

California superstorm would be costliest ever US disaster

Merrill Balassone – A hurricane-like superstorm expected to hit California once every 200 years would cause devastation to the state’s businesses unheard of even in the Great Recession, a USC economist warns.

Researchers estimate the total property damage and business interruption costs of the massive rainstorm would be nearly $1 trillion.

USC research professor Adam Rose calculated that the lost production of goods and services alone would be $627 billion of the total over five years. Rose, a professor with the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, also is the coordinator for economics at the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at USC.

That number would make the severe storm scenario “the costliest disaster in the history of the United States̶, Rose said, more than six times greater than the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and Hurricane Katrina, which each caused $100 billion in business interruption.

The storm simulation U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists termed “ARkStorm – or “atmospheric river storm” – is patterned after the U.S. West Coast storms that devastated California in 1861-62.

The storms lasted for 45 days, forming lakes in the Mojave Desert and the Los Angeles Basin. California was left bankrupt after the storms wiped out nearly a third of the state’s taxable land, according to the USGS.

But those storms were no freak event, said USGS scientists, who called the ARkStorm model “plausible, perhaps inevitable.”

The ARkStorm areas include Orange County, Los Angeles County, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay area. The megastorm likely would require the evacuation of 1.5 million people.

According to the USGS, the ARkStorm would:

• create hurricane-force winds of up to 125 miles per hour in some areas and flood thousands of square miles of urban and agricultural land to depths of 10 to 20 feet.
• set off hundreds of landslides that would damage roads, highways and homes.
• disrupt lifelines such as power, water and sewers that would take weeks or months to repair.

Rose estimated the ARkStorm would cause the state’s unemployment rate to jump six percentage points in the first year, a further blow to the California economy that currently has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation at 12.4 percent.

Rose called the severe storm scenario “much more imaginable” after Los Angeles was hit with 9.42 inches of rain in December. It was the wettest December in downtown Los Angeles in more than a century.

Climate scientists said global warming is a major factor behind the increasingly destructive power of hurricanes and other storms.

The sea level is rising as oceans warm and glaciers melt, which can create higher storm surges and more disastrous flooding in coastal areas.

“Climate change affects how the whole ecosystem works,” said Mark Bernstein, managing director of The USC Energy Institute.

“Storms form based on how warm the oceans are and how the jet stream changes,” Bernstein said. “The consequence is [the rain] will come in shorter and more intense bursts.”

Businesses and local governments can minimize the long-term impacts of such a disaster, Rose said, by creating emergency plans, increasing inventories of critical materials, backing up information systems, and diversifying supply chains and routes.

via USC California superstorm would be costliest US disaster.

A group of more than 100 scientists and experts say in a new report that California faces the risk of a massive “superstorm” that could flood a quarter of the state’s homes and cause $300 billion to $400 billion in damage. Researchers point out that the potential scale of destruction in this storm scenario is four or five times the amount of damage that could be wrought by a major earthquake.

It sounds like the plot of an apocalyptic action movie, but scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey warned federal and state emergency officials that California’s geological history shows such “superstorms” have happened in the past, and should be added to the long list of natural disasters to worry about in the Golden State.

via Yahoo

Christchurch quake: 10,000 homes ‘cannot be rebuilt’

New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key has said 10,000 homes in Christchurch are lost forever and cannot be rebuilt after the 22 February earthquake.

He also announced a national memorial day of 18 March, with events planned for Christchurch’s Hagley Park.

On Sunday the treasury department said that quake recovery would cost the country NZ$15bn ($11bn; £9.2bn).

The death toll, at 166 so far, is expected to rise to around 200 as rescue work continues.

Rescue workers were relieved to find no dead in the rubble of the collapsed tower of Christchurch Cathedral; they had earlier pulled about 90 bodies from the Canterbury TV building.

Victims are being identified using fingerprints, DNA, dental records and other personal items such as jewellery.

The painstaking process could take months to complete, officials say, adding to the misery of relatives waiting for news. …

via BBC News – Christchurch quake: 10,000 homes ‘cannot be rebuilt’.