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Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."
Science

Submission + - High Tech Recovery Attempt Of Lost Da Vinci (nytimes.com)

Submitted by sertsa
sertsa writes: If you believe . . that Leonardo da Vinciâ(TM)s greatest painting is hidden inside a wall in Florenceâ(TM)s city hall, then there are two essential techniques for finding it. As usual, Leonardo anticipated both of them.

Submission + - All your secrets are belong to us (again) (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
sertsa
sertsa writes: "Earlier this year a group of researchers at the University of Washington came up with a scheme to use peer-to-peer networks to store and ultimately forget the keys for encrypted messages causing them to "Vanish". Now a group from researchers from the University of Michigan has come up with a way to break this approach.

In our experiments with Unvanish, we have shown that it is possible to make Vanish messages reappear long after they should have disappeared nearly 100 percent of the time . . ."
Graphics

Submission + - Digital Karnak Uses Tech to Explore Archaeology (ucla.edu)

Submitted by sertsa
sertsa writes: FTO

. . . Accompanied by ETC's (UCLA's Experiential Technologies Center) most ambitious web interface to date, Digital Karnak shows the site at any point in time between 1951 B.C. and 31 B.C., allowing users to fast-forward from a single temple occupying a two-acre site to a sprawling complex covering 69 acres with eight temples, 10 small chapels, 10 monumental gateways, 15 obelisks, 100 sphinxes and even a ceremonial lake.
Businesses

Submission + - Geek Squad Caught (michaeltbarrett.com)

Submitted by sertsa
sertsa writes: A woman goes into Best Buy to return a defective camera. Best Buy blames her for breaking it until her son-in-law discovers pictures left on the camera by a member of the Geek Squad. Time for an apology?
The Matrix

Submission + - Cosmic Hologram? (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by sertsa
sertsa writes: I kept thinking someone else would submit this article from the New Scientist last week, but they didn't. So, here it is.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time . . . "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

Comment Disney & Jobs (Score 5, Interesting) 399

by sertsa (#26469837) Attached to: So Who's Running Apple Now?

This whole thing reminds me of how Walt Disney's passing affected his company.

Basically Disney lost direction, stopped making new animated movies, and hoped that revenues from merchandise and attendance at Disneyland kept the bills paid.

All of this changed of course with Michael Eisner's taking the reins. How did he do it? Aside from his business savvy (something that shouldn't be minimized) he looked back at the way Walt ran the show and continually asked himself what would Walt do.

It didn't last forever, but as everyone mac fan knows the cult of personality around Steve has a basis in the fact that Steve has vision and ruthlessly pursues that vision until it is achieved.

Apple is going to either need someone with a vision and business acuity equal to Jobs, or someone who is able to channel Jobs like Eisner did Disney. ;-)

I'm not seeing that in any of the people listed in the article.

BTW - isn't Steve on Disney's board?

Comment Re:Distance learning. (Score 2, Funny) 317

by sertsa (#26440207) Attached to: MIT Moves Away From Massive Lecture Halls

Being a professor myself I would point out that in my freshman level classes rarely is the front of the class full.

In my 10 years of teaching I've noticed as the students get older they tend to sit closer. I don't know if it's their sight, hearing, or interest-level, but I like to think it's the last possibility. ;-)

Not surprisingly as a group the older students tend to do better than their younger "peers."

Hmmmmmmm....
Biotech

Old Materials Resurface For "Prebiotic Soup" 263

Posted by kdawson from the do-not-clean-out-the-fridge dept.
AliasMarlowe writes "Stanley Miller performed the famous experiments in the 1950s showing that amino acids and other building blocks for biomolecules could be produced by passing lightning through a mix of simple hydrocarbons, water vapor, and ammonia (thought at the time to approximate the Earth's early atmosphere). Other experiments approximated the environment around volcanic eruptions, but those results were not published. Following his death last year, a former student discovered the materials from those experiments, in labelled vials. Analysis of this material indicates that the conditions around volcanic eruptions (still thought to be representative of such events in the early Earth) resulted in a higher yield of amino acids than the simple lightning experiments, and resulted in a greater variety of amino acids." Pharyngula has a discussion of the Science paper, including a graph of the amino acids produced.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Zombie Attack at Hierakonpolis

Submitted by sertsa
sertsa writes: In an article just published by the Archaeological Institute of America Archaeologists are hypothesizing that the formation of ancient Egypt is linked to recurrent Predynastic zombie attacks due to outbreaks of Solanum virus.

From the very beginning of Predynastic research, Sir W.M. Flinders Petrie reported several headless, but seemingly intact, burials during his famous excavations at Naqada in 1895. Further excavations at Gerzeh and other sites revealed more of these curious burials, but no satisfactory explanation could be proposed at the time. More recently, excavations in the non-elite cemetery at Hierakonpolis (HK43), undertaken from 1996 to 2004, have uncovered more of these strange headless burials in addition to 21 individuals whose cervical vertebrae bear cut marks indicative of complete decapitation. The individuals include men and women ranging in age from 16 to 65. The number and the standard position of the cut marks (usually on the second-fourth cervical vertebrae; always from the front) indicate an effort far greater than that needed simply to cause the death of a normal (uninfected) person. The standard position also indicates these are not injuries sustained during normal warfare.

I've got my pub scoped out!

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