The Silverware thief sent this link to a New York Times article on a strange disease that occurred in a large scale slaughter house. The heart of the article is this….

On Nov. 28, Dr. DeVries’s boss, Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the state epidemiologist, toured the plant. She and the owner, Kelly Wadding, paid special attention to the head table. Dr. Lynfield became transfixed by one procedure in particular, called “blowing brains.”

As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process.

Read the whole article if you want to find out how this process caused some factory workers to come down with serious medical problems.

Here is question to confound the theologians of our modern civil religion.

It is an article of faith in our civil religion that democracy should be imposed in any and all situations. No other form of government is valid. Therefore, should we not be pushing hard for democracy in Rwanda?

Read this excellent essay and consider the question.

Derek has an interesting post up discussing the failure of the drug torcetrapib in clinical trials. I found these two paragraphs particularly interesting….

And that’s about where knowledge of this field stops among the general population, and I can understand why, because it gets pretty ferocious after that point. As with everything else in living systems, the closer you look, the more you see. There are, for starters, several subforms of HDL, the main alpha fraction and at least three others. And there are at least four types of alpha. At least sixteen lipoproteins, enzymes, and other proteins are distributed in various ratios among all of them. We know enough to say that these different HDL particles vary in size, shape, cholesterol content, origin, distribution, and function, but we don’t know anywhere near as much as we need to about the details. There’s some evidence that instead of raising HDL across the board, what you want to do is raise alpha-1 while lowering alpha-2 and alpha-3, but we don’t really know how to do that.

How does HDL, or its beneficial fraction(s) help against atherosclerosis? We’re not completely sure about that, either. One of the main mechanisms is probably reverse cholesterol transport (RCT), the process of actually removing cholesterol from the arterial plaques and sending it to the liver for disposal. It’s a compelling story, currently thought to consist of eight separate steps involving four organ systems and at least six different enzymes. The benefits (or risks) of picking one of those versus the others for intervention are unknown. For most of those steps, we don’t have anything that can selectively affect them yet anyway, so it’s going to take a while to unravel things. Torcetrapib and the other CETP inhibitors represent a very large (and very risky) bet on what is approximately step four.

A while ago, we did an article on super maneuverable jet fighters. This clip does a better job of showing how they work then the ones we previously linked to. Notice how the individual exhaust ports on the jet engine move.

This is a bit of history I never knew before…..

A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there’s already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest. The malady, which attacks the leaves, is in the same category as Dutch Elm disease. It appeared first in Suriname, then plowed through the Car- ibbean, finally reaching Honduras in the 1920s. (The country was then the world’s largest banana producer; today it ranks third, behind Ecuador and Costa Rica.)

Growers adopted a frenzied strategy of shifting crops to unused land, maintaining the supply of bananas to the public but at great financial and environmental expense—the tactic destroyed millions of acres of rainforest. By 1960, the major importers were nearly bankrupt, and the future of the fruit was in jeopardy. (Some of the shortages during that time entered the fabric of popular culture; the 1923 musical hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas” is said to have been written after songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn were denied in an attempt to purchase their favorite fruit by a syntactically colorful, out-of-stock neighborhood grocer.) U.S. banana executives were hesitant to recognize the crisis facing the Gros Michel, according to John Soluri, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of Banana Cultures, an upcoming book on the fruit. “Many of them waited until the last minute.”

Once a little-known species, the Cavendish was eventually accepted as Big Mike’s replacement after billions of dollars in infrastructure changes were made to accommodate different growing and ripening needs. Its advantage was its resistance to Panama disease. But in 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia. It has yet to hit Africa or Latin America, but most experts agree that it is coming. “Given today’s modes of travel, there’s almost no doubt that it will hit the major Cavendish crops,” says Randy Ploetz, the University of Florida plant pathologist who identified the first Sumatran samples of the fungus.

Also, see this. (h/t Marginal Revolution for both links)

The question is, is this real or fake? I don’t hear much about this type of explosive being used. And if it was this easy to make and this effective I would think it would be more common. I have also read a lot from people saying the threat from binary explosives is way overstated.

On the other hand, the Government seems to be honestly worried (not always the best argument I know). More importantly, Derek did a couple of posts (here and here) a while back that seemed to indicate that there was stuff out there we should be worried about. I imagine that someone with Phd in chemistry would know.

Vindication for all those paranoid types that thought that putting fluoride in drinking water was a bad idea. From Reuters….

“Some recent studies suggest that over-consumption of fluoride can raise the risks of disorders affecting teeth, bones, the brain and the thyroid gland,” reports Scientific American editors (January 2008). “Scientific attitudes toward fluoridation may be starting to shift,” writes author Dan Fagin.

Sooner or later this is going to affect you personally (from News Target)…..

Nearly five percent of patients in U.S. hospitals may have acquired a particular antibiotic resistant staph infection, according to a nationwide survey conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

Researchers surveyed a total of 1,200 hospitals and other health care facilities from all 50 states, and found 8,000 patients infected or colonized with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) — or 46 out of every 1,000. This suggests that up to 1.2 million hospital patients across the country may be infected every year.

Colonized patients are those who were found to be carrying the bacteria in or on their bodies, but who had not showed any symptoms of disease.

“This rate is between eight and 11 times greater than previous MRSA estimates,” APIC wrote.

The majority of the infections had originated within the medical facility; 67 percent arose in patients being treated for general medical conditions (such as diabetes or pulmonary or cardiovascular problems) and not in intensive care patients.

Judah Folkman died on Monday. If you are like me and you have never heard of the man before you can read his his New York Times obituary here. But what I found to be really interesting is this interview at Academy of Achievement. The first part of the interview is nothing special. Just the typical biographical stuff. But once you get to this point it gets pretty interesting. Here is how the real meat of the interview starts….

The obstacles mainly were in the very beginning, in the late ’60s, when we proposed the idea that tumors need to recruit their own private blood supply. That was met with almost universal hostility and ridicule and disbelief by other scientists. Because the dogma at that time was that tumors did not need to stimulate new blood vessels, they just grew on old ones. And that even if they could, after we showed it, the next disbelief was it didn’t make any difference; it was a side effect like pus in a wound. So if you said you were studying wound healing and you found pus, they said you were studying a side effect, it’s not important. And then after we showed it was important, which took us about five years (and we said there would be specific signals, molecules that would stimulate this, everyone said — pathologists, surgeons, basic scientists — said, “No, that’s non-specific inflammation. You’re studying dirt.” They used to say, “You’re studying dirt. There will be no such molecules.” And then when we actually proved that there was — that was now 1983 (starting in the late ’60s), we had the first molecule. They said, “Well, but you’ll never prove that that’s what tumors use.” So it was each step.

H/T In the Pipeline

From Science Daily……

Researchers at Texas A&M University have discovered that lower cholesterol levels can actually reduce muscle gain with exercising. Lead investigator Steven Riechman, assistant professor of health and kinesiology, and Simon Sheather, head of the Department of Statistics, along with colleagues from The Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, have recently had their findings published in the Journal of Gerontology.

H/T Vanderleun