Eideard

“Why is my attention drawn to this woman?”

The ability to see Earth’s magnetic field, thought to be restricted to sea turtles and swallows and other long-distance animal navigators, may also reside in human eyes.

Tests of cryptochrome 2, a key protein component of geomagnetic perception, found that its human version restored geomagnetic orientation in cryptochrome-deficient fruit flies.

Flies are a long, long way from people, but that the protein worked at all is impressive. There’s also a whole lot of it in our eyes.

“Could humans have this cryptochrome heavily expressed in the retina as a light-sensitive magnetoreceptor?” said University of Massachusetts neuroscientist Steven Reppert, lead author of…a study. “We don’t know if the molecule will do this in the human retina, but this suggests the possibility.”

Reppert, whose laboratory specializes in the biological mechanisms underlying long-distance butterfly migration, showed three years ago that cryptochrome allowed fruit flies to geomagnetically orient themselves using light…

Many gaps still remain in cryptochrome theory, but it’s generally thought that the cryptochrome system may be active across the animal kingdom, from fish to reptiles to birds. Humans, however, were thought to be an exception. Our own cryptochrome is considered a piece of circadian machinery, part of our molecular clock rather than any optical compass.

The new study, however, suggests that cryptochrome may be more than a clock…Whether any of this is linked to high levels of cryptochrome in human eyes — and, if so, whether that quantum compass system still works for us — is completely speculative, but it’s speculation that Reppert welcomes…

Reppert himself is now concentrating on how brains read their cryptochrome compass. “At the most fundamental level, we’re interested in how cryptochrome information is transferred to the nervous system,” he said. “Nobody knows how that occurs.”

Yet. Seems like a worthwhile study. Of course, just about any and all basic research is worthwhile. If it’s basic enough – you can’t really foretell where the results will lead.

Council bosses have admitted scoring an “own goal” after a fence was built through the middle of football goalposts in a park in York.

The new fencing was installed at a cost of £6,000 on playing fields in Heworth…

Dave Meigh, City of York Council’s head of parks and open spaces, said: “We recognise that the failure to relocate the goalposts is a real own goal.”

It has left local people who use the park to play football confused. Local residents said it was “unreal” and a “waste of money”.

Jane Hannon wrote on the BBC Look North Facebook page: “Typical example of too many chiefs and not enough Indians, one doesn’t know what the other is doing. What a waste of time and money.”

OTOH, this demonstrates there is plenty of local talent in the UK ready and qualified to take over leadership of the FA and FIFA at a moment’s notice.

Thanks, honorarynewfie

Even as China prepares to open bullet train service between Beijing and Shanghai by July 1, its steadily expanding high-speed rail network is being pilloried on a scale rare among Chinese citizens and the news media. Complaints include the system’s high costs and fares, the quality of construction and an allegation of self-dealing by a rail minister who was fired this year on grounds of corruption.

Often overlooked amid all the controversy are the very real economic benefits that the world’s most advanced fast-rail system is bringing to China, and the competitive challenges it poses for the United States and Europe.

Just as building the interstate highway system in the United States a half-century ago made modern commerce more feasible on a national scale, China’s ambitious rail rollout is helping to integrate the economy of this sprawling, populous nation. In China’s case, it is doing so on a much faster construction timetable and at significantly higher travel speeds than anything envisioned by the United States in the 1950s…

Zhen Qinan, a founder of the stock exchange in the coastal city of Shenzhen and the recently retired chief executive of ZK Energy, a wind turbine producer in Changsha, said that high-speed trains were making it more convenient to base businesses here in Hunan Province — a populous region that has long provided labor to the factories of the east, but whose mountain ranges have tended to isolate it from the economic mainstream…

Throughout China, real estate prices and investments have risen sharply in the more than 200 inland cities that have already been connected by high-speed lines in the past three years. Businesses are flocking to these cities, now just a few hours by bullet train from China’s busiest and most international metropolises.

Meanwhile, a shift in passenger traffic to the new high-speed rail routes has freed up congested older rail lines for freight. That has allowed coal mines and shippers to switch to cheaper rail transport from costly trucks for heavy cargos.

Because of this shift, plus the further construction of freight rail lines, the tonnage hauled by China’s rail system increased in 2010 by an amount equaling the entire freight carried last year by the combined rail systems of Britain, France, Germany and Poland, according to the World Bank.

The bullet train bonanza, and the competitive challenge it poses for the West, is only likely to increase with the opening of the 1,320-kilometer Beijing-to-Shanghai line, which will create a business corridor between China’s two most dynamic cities. The Ministry of Railways plans 90 bullet trains a day in each direction…

Read the rest of this entry »

A bipartisan team of Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Ron Paul, R-Texas, will introduce federal legislation that would permit states to legalize, regulate, tax and control marijuana without federal interference.

The legislation will be unveiled Thursday by Frank, an outspoken liberal Democrat, and the libertarian Paul, who is running for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

The bill would limit the U.S. government role in marijuana enforcement to interdiction of cross-border or inter-state smuggling. Citizens would be able to legally grow, use or sell cannabis in states which have legalized the forbidden weed.

The legislation is the first bill to be introduced in Congress that would end federal marijuana prohibition…

The legislation follows a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, released early this month, that pronounced the War on Drugs a failure and advocated legal regulation of marijuana.

Certainly overdue.

A breath of fresh air in Congress. Maybe a little smoke, too.

It was the British economist John Maynard Keynes who famously wrote that ideas, “both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” Right now, I’m worried about the damage that might be done by one particularly wrong-headed idea: the notion that, in stark contrast to Keynes’s teaching, government spending destroys jobs.

No, that’s not a typo. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans regularly rail against “job-killing government spending.” Think about that for a minute. The claim is that employment actually declines when federal spending rises. Using the same illogic, employment should soar if we made massive cuts in public spending—as some are advocating right now…

It is easy, but irrelevant, to understand how someone might object to any particular item in the federal budget—whether it is the war in Afghanistan, ethanol subsidies, Social Security benefits, or building bridges to nowhere. But even building bridges to nowhere would create jobs, not destroy them, as the congressman from nowhere knows. To be sure, that is not a valid argument for building them…

For example, the large fiscal stimulus enacted in 2009 was not “paid for.” Yet it has been claimed that it created essentially no jobs. Really? With spending under the Recovery Act exceeding $600 billion (and tax cuts exceeding $200 billion), that would be quite a trick…In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the stimulus’s effect on employment in 2010 was at least 1.3 million net new jobs, and perhaps as many as 3.3 million…

Read the rest of this entry »

Ramallah, West Bank A Palestinian art academy on Monday put on display a $7 million Pablo Picasso masterpiece, the first of its kind in the West Bank.

Picasso’s 1943 “Buste de Femme” is on loan from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland…

The art director of the Palestinian academy, Khalid Horani, said… the painting’s journey was “a story full of details and difficulties.”…

“Nothing is normal over here,” Horani said. “We planned to have an art work here, but found ourselves going through all the political complications.”

Horani said the painting was flown from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv and was then escorted to Ramallah by an Israeli security company before going on display. He said the uprisings in the Arab world also postponed the artwork’s delivery.

The painting is the most valuable and prestigious Western artwork ever shown in the West Bank. It is the centerpiece of the “Picasso In Palestine” exhibit in Ramallah aimed at introducing Western art to the Palestinians.

So what did I see when I studied on this? An opportunity for Scott Adams, of course:

Scraping and digging, prospecting

An entrepreneurial Queens man makes his living off New York City streets, but in a manner far different from that which city residents have witnessed before.

Raffi Stepanian, 43, earns his cash scouring the sidewalks in Midtown’s Diamond District for hidden treasure – chips of rubies, diamonds, platinum and gold that somehow fell off their owners’ jewelry and became lodged in the cracks between cement slabs or hopelessly stuck in a piece of gum some passerby flippantly spit out onto the street, according to a report.

In less than a week, Stepanian told The New York Post he amassed enough gold for two sales worth nearly $850 on 47th Street.

“The percentage of gold out here on the street is greater than the amount of gold you would find in a mine,” the Whitestone man told the Post. “It comes close to a mother lode because in the street, you’re picking up gold left by the industry.”

The valuable gem chips are already cut and processed, which makes them even more marketable than the unrefined ore one would find in a mine. And the precious stones are out on the street for anyone willing to get down on his or her knees and look for them, Stepanian says.

“It’s the same principle as collecting cans on the street and redeeming them for nickles…It’s redemption of usable gold.”

I never cease to be amazed at the prospects for earning a living seemingly always available to anal retentives and the endlessly compulsive.

A couple once celebrated for their business savvy in the tech world are suspected of fleeing to India after allegedly defrauding the city of New York of at least $400 million, prosecutors said.

Reddy and Padma Allen were indicted in absentia Monday in a federal court in New York in what prosecutors described as a “massive and elaborate scheme” to steal taxpayer dollars, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

Also on Monday, Carl Bell, a chief engineer for Science Applications International Corp., considered one of the primary contractors accused in the scandal, pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and accepting millions of dollars in bribes.

The three are the latest in a string of people indicated for their alleged role in the scheme. Eight other people have been indicted.

“The corruption on the CityTime project was epic in duration, magnitude and scope,” Bharara said.

The CityTime project is a New York City initiative meant to modernize a public payroll system for its municipal employees. It has been plagued by cost overruns and delays since it began in 1998.

Originally budgeted at $63 million, the still incomplete project has run up a bill of more than $600 million, according to the federal indictment.

Most of that excess is tainted with kickbacks and fraud, Bharara said.

Prosecutors say the couple ran a technology company, TechnoDyne, that systemically overbilled and intentionally caused delays in an effort to elicit additional funding. The pair also created shell companies, drawing additional subcontractor dollars and depositing the funds into bank accounts in India.

Prosecutors say the couple — who are American citizens — are currently in their native India.

Think they’ll respond to a polite invitation to return to New York City to discuss the charges?

What began as a fun night on the town ended in death Sunday after a 24-year-old Clinton Township man pushed through a hatch on a party bus and hit his head on an overpass, Michigan State Police said.

The incident is being investigated as “an extremely tragic accident,” Sgt. Sheila Shields said.

“People don’t realize how dangerous a moving vehicle is,” she said. “People have to think.”

According to a preliminary investigation, Salvatore Talluto was among a group of about 25 people on the party bus returning from an outing in downtown Detroit.

Scott Wanagat, Talluto’s brother-in-law, said the group was having a bachelor party and hired the motor coach to make plans easier.

Police said the bus was heading east on Interstate 94 near Van Dyke on Detroit’s east side about 2 a.m. when Talluto left his seat and put his head through an emergency exit hatch. Soon after, he struck an overpass, Shields said.

The bus was traveling about 55 mph at the time; the force of the impact knocked Talluto back into the bus, Shields said. It was unclear if Talluto had been drinking alcohol or if the bus driver would face charges. Police were called and the man was transported to St. John Hospital in Detroit. He was declared brain dead that evening, Wanagat said.

Ayup.