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Medicine

Exposure to Wide Variety of Microbes May Reduce Allergies 120

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the introducing-whole-foods-gammaproteobacteria-shake dept.
sciencehabit writes "A new study reveals that people who grow up in more rural environments are less likely to develop allergies. The reason may be that environments rich with species harbor more friendly microbes, which colonize our bodies and protect against inflammatory disorders." From the article: "To test whether or not biodiversity does indeed create a shield against such conditions, the team investigated the microbial diversity of 118 teenagers. The study participants, who had lived in the same houses their whole lives, were chosen at random from a 100-by-150-kilometer block in eastern Finland. Some kids lived on rural, isolated farms, while others lived in larger towns. ... surveyed all of the types of plants growing around the adolescents' homes. The participants were part of a separate long-term allergy study, so the researchers took advantage of that data to investigate the connection between biodiversity and allergies. ... Whether there is just something special about Finland's native plants or whether this finding can be applied around the world is still an open question, Hanski says. 'Many research groups worldwide could easily attain these data from their study populations, and then we'd know how general these results might be.'"

Comment: [XBox360] Rocksmith (Score 1) 308

by Bigbutt (#39915409) Attached to: How Much Of Your Day Is Dedicated Video Games?

I play my guitar on Rocksmith probably an hour to two hours each day and play up to 6 hours on the weekend.

Rocksmith lets me plug my Strat into the console and recognizes my playing against the songs scrolling on the screen. I actually bought an Xbox just so I could get this game.

I also added in the time I spend playing Risk, Ticket to Ride, Dead Space, RealRacingHD, Plants Vs Zombies, and Doom on my iPad :)

[John]

Biotech

Biochemist Creates CO2-Eating Light That Runs On Algae 121

Posted by samzenpus
from the but-will-it-clean-my-desk? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Biochemist Pierre Calleja has a solution to reducing carbon emissions that doesn't require us to cut back on our use of carbon-producing devices. Calleja has developed a lighting system that requires no electricity for power. Instead it draws CO2 from the atmosphere and uses it to produce light as well as oxygen as a byproduct. The key ingredient to this eco-friendly light? Algae. Certain types of algae can feed off of organic carbon as well as sunlight, and in the process produce carbohydrate energy for themselves as well as oxygen as a waste product. Cajella's lamps consist of algae-filled water along with a light and battery system. During the day the algae produce energy from sunlight that is then stored in the batteries. Then at night the energy is used to power the light. However, as the algae can also produce energy from carbon, sunlight isn't required for the process to work. That means such lights can be placed where there is no natural light and the air will effectively be cleaned on a daily basis."

Comment: Which Business Data (Score 1) 185

by Bigbutt (#39858699) Attached to: At my place of employ, we track business data ...

Business Data? Like data that customers pay for us to maintain, internal data like asset tracking (of one sort or another), internal data like project documents, internal data like software written by devs?

Too many options, or just one too broad an option.

Sure, we have an asset (hardware) tracking database but it pretty much blows so I have a database I wrote that provides system tracking with automatic updates of system information. It was a spreadsheet when I got here but I pretty much don't like using spreadsheets as a database so converted it to mysql.

So "in-house; with software I wrote" is a good option too, for a small piece of the business.

[John]

Comment: Re:On the subject of comparison... (Score 1) 611

by Bigbutt (#39784853) Attached to: C/C++ Back On Top of the Programming Heap?

That's a pretty interesting site. I don't have a problem admitting to programming and liking to use PHP and find it interesting that clicking on the "I would use this for a web project" comes up with PHP in the list (along with Javascript; which isn't what I was looking for) with a couple that I wouldn't have considered (Scala?). One of the reasons I do like it is it's very similar to C which I've done in the past. If you look at my perl code, it looks very C like :)

[John]

Comment: Re:Nobody likes PHP (Score 1) 611

by Bigbutt (#39784643) Attached to: C/C++ Back On Top of the Programming Heap?

The problem seems like everyone wants to knock PHP but not provide an alternative that's somewhat easy to use. I'm a self taught programmer starting with Color Computer BASIC back in the early 80's. I've programmed in several different types of BASIC and then C. I tried C++ but didn't like it, although I liked the ideas. I've also done lots of scripting and Perl. Now I'm doing pretty well with PHP scripting having done a bunch of personal type coding over the past 4 years or so. I did poke at python 15 years ago but was working a lot with perl and they seemed to be two camps; perl or python. And since perl was on all our systems, that's about as far as I got.

I found this: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonVsPhp

But the comparisons really don't give me a good reason to go to python, heck some of them are even reasons not to move such as it's a general scripting language (like perl) vs a web specific one and I need to use modules to write web code (same as perl).

So, is there another language I should be looking at? If I'm going to go with a general purpose type scripting language, why not perl which I'm already pretty familiar with?

[John]

Comment: Client Software (Score 1) 66

by Bigbutt (#39735249) Attached to: HP To Certify Ubuntu 12.04 LTS For Its Proliant Servers

That's fine. How about they provide a working OpenView agent for Ubuntu. Until then, we're not using it.

While not HP, we have the same issue with NetBackup. Until there's a working agent, we're using Red Hat.

Or any other software that may not have a working Debian based agent.

(That's not to say there may not be a more current version that what we currently have installed that does support Ubuntu/Debian but our current install doesn't support it.)

[John]

I enjoy the time that we spend together.