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Comment Re:Those who ignore the past... (Score 1) 47

I read TFA and the author completely misses the issue

The author didn't miss the issue. The issue was whether an employer can get patient data from hospitals all over the country for their employees. The technology is there, that's what HL2 does; I've worked on a few similar systems - it's a hassle but it can be done (although Imaging seems to be a bigger hassle). As the author points out, the real problem is getting that HL7 feed turned on. The NFL has enough money and clout to make it happen.

You bring up the unrelated issue of whether the federal government should be collecting all of that patient data. Congress could pass a law requiring it, but they won't for the reasons you list.

Submission + - Resistance to antibiotics found in isolated Amazonian tribe (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: When scientists first made contact with an isolated village of Yanomami hunter-gatherers in the remote mountains of the Amazon jungle of Venezuela in 2009, they marveled at the chance to study the health of people who had never been exposed to Western medicine or diets. But much to their surprise, these Yanomami’s gut bacteria have already evolved a diverse array of antibiotic-resistance genes, according to a new study, even though these mountain people had never ingested antibiotics or animals raised with drugs. The find suggests that microbes have long evolved the capability to fight toxins, including antibiotics, and that preventing drug resistance may be harder than scientists thought.

Comment Re:So (Score 2, Insightful) 193

You only see the projects that were completed; there were plenty of others that were never started for various reasons. But even today there are may Megaprojects planned or in work. Granted, many of these are outside the US but not all of them.

That said, your comment is off topic. Sinking an obsolete aircraft carrier after blowing the crap out of it with a couple of atomic bombs hardly qualifies as something that was done "for the betterment of people".

Submission + - Scientists Find Radioactive Aircraft Carrier Off California Coast

HughPickens.com writes: Aaron Kinney writes in the San Jose Mercury News that scientists have captured the first clear images of the USS Independence, a radioactivity-polluted World War II aircraft carrier that rests on the ocean floor 30 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay. The Independence saw combat at Wake Island and other decisive battles against Japan in 1944 and 1945 and was later blasted with radiation in two South Pacific nuclear tests. Assigned as a target vessel for the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests, she was placed within one-half-mile of ground zero and was engulfed in a fireball and heavily damaged during the 1946 nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. The veteran ship did not sink, however (though her funnels and island were crumpled by the blast), and after taking part in another explosion on 25 July, the highly radioactive hull was later taken to Pearl Harbor and San Francisco for further tests and was finally scuttled off the coast of San Francisco, California, on 29 January 1951. "This ship is an evocative artifact of the dawn of the atomic age, when we began to learn the nature of the genie we'd uncorked from the bottle," says James Delgado. "It speaks to the 'Greatest Generation' — people's fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who served on these ships, who flew off those decks and what they did to turn the tide in the Pacific war."

Delgado says he doesn't know how many drums of radioactive material are buried within the ship — perhaps a few hundred. But he is doubtful that they pose any health or environmental risk. The barrels were filled with concrete and sealed in the ship's engine and boiler rooms, which were protected by thick walls of steel. The carrier itself was clearly "hot" when it went down and and it was packed full of fresh fission products and other radiological waste at the time it sank. The Independence was scuttled in what is now the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, a haven for wildlife, from white sharks to elephant seals and whales. Despite its history as a dumping ground Richard Charter says the radioactive waste is a relic of a dark age before the enviornmental movement took hold. "It's just one of those things that humans rather stupidly did in the past that we can't retroactively fix."

Comment Re:Doesn't look close (Score 0) 113

It's that half-second of overcorrection that doomed it.

Maybe. Or maybe it was coming in at the wrong angle. Or maybe the thrusters had no chance. Or maybe the legs wouldn't have stood up to it even if the thrusters had worked as planned. All we know *for sure* is that it crashed. I'm sure they'll keep working on until the kinks are ironed out though.

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