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"Biogeochemists located where the most carbon dioxide emissions occur in the U.S. using a new mapping system. With this program-available to anyone on the Web-researchers were able to extract information about carbon dioxide emissions by transforming data on local air pollution and combining it with geographic information systems (GIS) data to layer the emissions onto infrastructures at the Earth's surface."
"Publishers like Hearst Newspapers, The New York Times and Time Inc.are drawing up plans for possible Internet fees....
“People reading news for free on the Web, that’s got to change,” Mr. Murdoch said last week at a cable industry conference in Washington.
The Associated Press said on Monday that it intended to police the use of news articles linked on countless Web sites, where many consumers read them free, to make sure the sites shared advertising revenue with those who created the material."
".....appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicate that nearly every adult has little blobs of brown fat that can burn huge numbers of calories when activated by the cold, like sitting in a chilly room that is between 61 and 66 degrees.
Thinner people appeared to have more brown fat than heavier people, younger people more than older people; people with higher metabolic rates had more than those whose metabolisms were more sluggish, and women had more than men.....
“The thing about this brown fat is that it takes a very small amount to burn a lot of energy,” said Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, head of the section on obesity and hormone action at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.
The fat really is brown, researchers say, because it is filled with mitochondria, cells’ tiny energy factories. Mitochondria contain iron, giving the tissue a reddish brown color.
The hope is that scientists may find safe ways to turn peoples’ brown fat on"
"In a study published in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers observed that adolescent and young adult vegetarians may experience the health benefits associated with increased fruit and vegetable intake and young adults my experience the added benefit of decreased risk for overweight and obesity.To which I would suggest that the people (i.e. the vegetarians) studied, may be high volatility people in the sense they go to extremes. As such, they are more apt to become vegetarians but also more likely to have eating problems later on if they give up the vegetarianism.
However, current vegetarians may be at increased risk for binge eating, while former vegetarians may be at increased risk for extreme unhealthful weight control behaviors."
"..why are potholes and road maintenance even an issue? Governments have been telling us for centuries that they must own the roads, that no one else can do it, and that road-building and maintenance is one of the reasons we must have government.
Yet, governments are terrible at this. Daily now, we are inundated with reports of how bridges are falling down, roads are in disrepair, and the infrastructure in general is a nightmare. And this caught government by surprise? The life span of roads and bridges isn't a big mystery. If roads are the government's specialty, why are they so lousy at it, and why did they not even notice that their bridges are in lousy shape? It's not as if this problem couldn't be anticipated.
So now, everywhere across America, at local, state and federal levels, Americans are being told that taxes must be increased to pay for road and bridge repair. But why? There are already taxes in place for this. The tax revenues for this are generally based on vehicle registration fee revenues, gas taxes, and income taxes. All of these taxes increase either with the number of cars on the road, or with miles driven, or with population growth, or with economic growth. In other words, tax revenues have increased many times over, yet we're now being told 'oops we forgot about the roads, so give us more money."
"About 1 percent of the heart muscle cells are replaced every year at age 25, and that rate gradually falls to less than half a percent per year by age 75, concluded a team of researchers led by Dr. Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The upshot is that about half of the heart’s muscle cells are exchanged in the course of a normal lifetime, the Swedish group calculates. Its results are to be published Friday in the journal Science.
“I think this will be one of the most important papers in cardiovascular medicine in years,” said Dr. Charles Murry, a heart researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. “It helps settle a longstanding controversy about whether the human heart has any ability to regenerate itself.”"
