need more sleep, and hibernation does not count

ok, real fast (yeah right) lets see what's doing in the world that I find interesting.


Apparently Bush has an excellent plan to reduce mercury pollution, however it won't be feasible until 2020 at a minimum and more likely 2030. So... its important to reduce mercury, but not on a time-scale that will save lives. I love our government, it makes so much sense.

In further news regarding our government and the environment, a bit of congressionally requested climate research is behind schedule (gasp) and missing major portions that would make it useful.

Greenspan warns that the US deficit is out of control and a danger to future economic health.... gee.... whoda-thunk?

Good news for children fighting malaria, a combination of two drugs seems to be 99% of treated children. That's good news, but as someone pointed out to me recently, 99% effectiveness is good for hair spray but not for life saving medicine or machinery.... 99.999999999% is closer to what you need. Why? well if only 100 people a year got sick from malaria, then curing 99 of then would be excellent. That last person, well we would do what we could. But if 1 out of every hundred people are unaffected by the treatment, and 100 million people (exaggeration, I think) get sick, than 1 million people will be without cure. Thus, we need far better than 99% effectiveness. HOWEVER, considering that up until now we did not even have that, I am VERY happy at this news.

Amazing expedition breaks its own record for deepest human exploration into the earth. The team has a sense of humor and absolutely no fear.Very impressive work, i wonder what they will find if they continue.

I want one of these. Don't need it, and these days I can barely afford what i need, but I want one all the same.

Honda has started reatailing natural gas powered civic in the US. You have to buy a refueling appliance with it, but even so, its cheaper than gasoline by a long shot. Plus it runs cleaner. Pretty interesting. I don't think it will take off but its a nice new option.

An interesting correlation, daycare for infants seems to correlate with lower leukaemia levels.

A claim by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory says that growth in US biomass could put us on the road toe energy independence and away from mideast oil. I will believe it when someone else does the same work and can say they found the same result.

If you live to the beat of your internal clock, your healthy, if you can't seem to get it all in gear to the same beat... well.... This study says that the internal clock that times everything from heart beats to cellular processes is one possible root cause of obesity.

Lastly it would seem there is a Hibernation Trick that some scientists think might help humans with long space flight. I don't know about that. Problem is that while rodents, some anyway, have built in abilities to hibernate, there is only one primate known to hibernate and it lives in a warm climate (madagascar). This means that while puffing nasty smelling stuff into the face of a mouse might make it hibernate, puffing nasty smelling stuff into the face of a human is far more likely to make him punch you.

A quick comment on something that came into my mind. The eureka moment. While the concept is famous (greta mind is thinking about something else, and suddenly the answer to a different problem pops into his head causing him to shout 'EUREKA' and run naked through the streets of his home town) the truth is that it rarely happens, and even when it does, it is more often in the form of someone who is brilliant and well trained recognizing something unusual happening and investigating it with all the hard work and scientific expertise at their disposal. While it looks like a eureka moment (such as the discovery of teflon, it was found by a researcher looking for freon substitutes during WWII, and when he saw the white flaky stuff he recognized it for what it was and brought it to the attention of someone better trained in that field (polymers). Had he not known what a polymer was, or been less well trained as a scientific observer, he would have simply thrown it away as a failed freon replacement experiment) is actually the application of training and knowledge to an even that was unexpected. So all in all, scientific breakthroughs reward the prepared mind, not the lucky or the merely brilliant. This massively truncated diatribe on the eureka moment and scientific preparedness has been brought to you by my complete lack of sleep. When I am more awake I will track down where I got all this claptrap from.