The most common form of dementia may be closely related to another common disease of old-age – type II diabetes, say scientists.
Treating Alzheimer’s with the hormone insulin, or with drugs to boost its effect, may help patients, they claim.
The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports insulin could protect against damage to brain cells key to memory.
Supplies intended for NATO forces in Afghanistan were suspended Tuesday after Taliban militants blew up a highway bridge in the Khyber Pass region, a lawless northwestern tribal area straddling the border with Afghanistan.
Hidayatullah Khan, a government official in the region, was quoted by Reuters as saying that the 30-yard-long iron bridge was located 15 miles northwest of Peshawar, the capital of the restive North-West Frontier Province.
Pakistani officials said they were assessing the damage and teams had been sent to repair the bridge. But it was not immediately clear how soon the trucks carrying crucial supplies for NATO forces would be able to travel through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan.
The Taliban is getting better at this shutting down supply lines thing. The official word is that this is no big deal because other routes can handle the load. But if this becomes a habit there are going to be problems.
Edit: America’s supply problems are not going to be helped by this either.
An earthquake that killed at least 80,000 people in Sichuan last year may have been triggered by an enormous dam just miles from the epicentre
The 511ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicentre, of the Sichuan earthquake.
Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have affected the pressure on the fault line underneath, possibly unleashing a chain of ruptures that led to the quake.
The ruble slumped to its weakest level against the dollar in 11 years as investors speculated Russia will be forced to give up its currency defense after draining reserves.
One should note that Russia has not drained its reserves yet. The market is just beginning to anticipate that they will be drained. Then what?
Every week it gets worse and worse and worse. Today it was Japan….
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN DATA THIS BAD FOR ANY MAJOR ECONOMY – EVEN IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION. December industrial production came in down 9.6%, worse than the METI forecast. It is now down almost 21% year over year. METI forecasts a further 4.7% decline in February. The inventory to production ratio soared again. Maybe METI will be correct.
If it is, Japan industrial production will have fallen 28% (non annualized) in four months. It will have fallen by a third in about a year. Nothing in the history of major nations compares. A 28% decline in four months would be more than half of the entire decline in U.S. industrial production over the 3 years and nine months of the U.S. Great Depression.
As far as the chaos goes, this will have to do….
Relativity minor so far, but this kind of thing is going to grow as economic problems get worse. It is going to test the EU’s ability to hold together.
As far as these particular strikes are concerned, they are going to get a lot worse in the week ahead. A story to watch.
Large swaths of Britain came to a standstill in the grip of the worst snowstorms for 18 years.
Despite five days of severe weather warnings, transport bosses still appeared to have been completely caught out as up to a foot of snow fell across the country, bringing rail, air and road networks to a halt.
From later on in the article…..
But David Frost, the director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said the collapse of the transport network was unacceptable.
He said: “People of my generation saw much worse winters than this in the 1960s and 1970s, yet things kept going. Why can’t we cope now?
You should keep this mind when ever someone tries to tell you that we should drive vehicles more like the ones they drive in Europe. A fuel efficient vehicle is one that is light. And a light vehicle is one that can’t get traction in the snow. It is a simple matter of physics.
This week’s poem of the week is a simple little pop song with no particular poetic merit. But it is one of the most disturbing simple little pop songs ever produced.
A 40 Year Wish List from the Wall Street Journal is this week’s rant of the week.
Letters to Malcolm and the trouble with Narnia: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their 1949 crisis by Eric Seddon is an exploration of why Tolkien objected so strongly to C.S Lewis’s Narnia series and why their friendship cooled so markedly.
It must be admitted that this essay suffers to a degree from the author’s strong Catholic bias. There is no denying that J.R Tolkien was a committed orthodox Catholic. But interpreting J.R Tolkien’s likes and dislikes and what bothered him solely through the prism of Catholic doctrine is to get a limited view of the man.
In particular, some of us would argue that Mr. Seddon gives too short a shrift to J.R. Tolkien’s strongly held aesthetic views (and in particular, his strong aversion to allegory). Mr. Seddon argues that because J.R Tolkien did not object to all of C.S Lewis books equally, then therefore his aesthetic principles could not have been a large part of what he found so offensive in the Narnia series. We do not find this particular argument convincing.
Using the same method of arguing as Mr. Seddon, we could easily argue that theological objections could not have been what bothered J.R. Tolkien because many of C.S. Lewis’s earlier works did not conform to Catholic doctrine.
Nonetheless, Mr. Seddon’s central argument that J.R Tolkien so strongly objected to the Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe because of way C.S. Lewis’s his type of Christ is not without merit. Only, we would add that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was also the penultimate type of what Tolkien objected to aesthetically.
To be sure, the two types of objections were never particularly distinct in Tolkien’s mind. But to fail to understand how the two things intertwined is to not understand why Tolkien should object so strongly to Narnia and not as strongly to other books that transgressed various Catholic doctrines.
Tens of thousands of people living near Japan’s volatile Mount Asama have been told to brace themselves for a major volcanic eruption within 48 hours.
From later in the article…..
According to scientists at an observation station operated by Tokyo University, there was a sharp increase in volcanic earthquakes in the region in January, with their epicentres directly below the peak of the mountain. That volcanic activity accelerated on Sunday morning and was accompanied by crustal change, apparently caused by increased magma movement beneath the peak.
Experts are predicting an eruption is possible in a matter of hours and an initial blast could hurl volcanic rocks up to 2.5 miles.
If this thing blows, next winter will probably be even colder thzn this one already is.