Eideard

Mosquito landing boxes in Tanzania

Researchers in Tanzania have chemically reproduced the stench of smelly feet in an innovative new approach to combat the spread of malaria in the country.

The scientific team at Tanzania’s Ifakara Health Institute has developed a potent serum — similar to that of human foot odor — to lure and kill mosquitoes, which can carry malaria and other diseases.

Four times more powerful in attracting mosquitoes than natural human odor, the synthetic smell is now being used in a pioneering research program aimed at killing mosquitoes outdoors using a “mosquito landing box…”

Mosquitoes are lured inside the boxes by the synthetic odor, which is dispersed by a solar-powered fan. Once inside, the insects are either trapped or poisoned and left to die.

“Substances we omit when we sweat, such as lactic acid, act as a signal to mosquitoes … The aim here was to produce a mixture that would mimic a human being.” The result, said Fredros Okumu, was a chemical blend that “smelt just like dirty socks…”

“This is a great example of an African innovator, with an African innovation, tackling an African problem,” said Dr Peter Singer, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada.

“Malaria kills about 800,000 people a year, mostly children, in Africa. At the moment existing technologies, such as bed nets and sprays, tend to repel mosquitoes inside the home.

“This technology attracts mosquitoes outside the home to kill them, and could be complimentary to what is there now,” Singer continued…

For Okumu, this is a personal as well as a scientific venture. Born in western Kenya, malaria has been apart of Okumu’s life for as long as he can remember.

“All the places I have lived have been malaria zones. When I was growing up I had malaria at least twice every year,” he said.

Most American and Europeans have little knowledge of this terrible disease. So many people die, so many children especially, it really is one of the grim reapers of African history.

Century City and downtown Los Angeles
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said…it would again delay issuing a final limit on smog pollution opposed by manufacturers and many Republican lawmakers until the Obama administration has finished reviewing it.

In December, the agency said it would issue the rule by the end of July…

“Following completion of this final step, EPA will finalize its reconsideration, but will not issue the final rule on July 29th, the date the agency had intended,” the EPA said in a release…It was the fourth time the agency delayed the smog standards, originally slated to be finalized last August…

The proposal was stronger than 2008 standards set by the Bush administration. Environmentalists blasted those for being less than what government scientists recommended.

Under the rule, factories and oil, natural gas and power generators would be forced to cut emissions of nitrogen oxides and other chemicals called volatile organic compounds. Smog forms when those chemicals react with sunlight.

The rule has been opposed by industry groups. The American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable complain that it would damage the economic recovery and that many areas would not be able to meet the new limits…

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has said the ozone rules would save as much as $100 billion in health costs, and help prevent as much as 12,000 premature deaths from heart and lung complications…

Every additional day of delay means more Americans will suffer…that is, ordinary Americans. Not those who will return to their home districts after another do-nothing session of Congress. Those politicians who should be prompting the EPA to get off their rusty dusty butts and aid the lives of American people aren’t risking their health by doing anything more than passing quickly through pollution zones.

The same holds true in spades for that herd of dinosaurs who smoke their cigars in private clubs funded by the American Petroleum Institute, the greenback claque chauffeured forth-and-back to meetings of the US Chamber of Commerce. Perish the thought anything other than filtered, conditioned air reaches their pampered respiratory systems.

Think these people are freer without a Federal Aviation Administration?

Thousands of employees have been furloughed and dozens of major projects put on hold after Congress failed to reauthorize funding for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Air traffic controllers will remain on the job, but the furloughs have hit many engineers, scientists, computer specialists, community planners and others. Nearly 4,000 employees in 35 states, Washington and Puerto Rico have been told to stop work, according to the FAA.

Efforts to continue funding hit a stumbling block over House Republican efforts to make it harder for airline and rail workers to unionize and over a move to cut subsidies for air service to rural airports.

Congress adjourned Friday without passing legislation, causing funding to end at midnight that night…

The FAA said contractors have been told to stop work on dozens of projects across the country, including a $43 million project in Las Vegas and a $31 million project in Oakland, California, to build air traffic control towers.

Without new legislation, the government will also not be able to collect about $200 million a week in airline taxes that normally go to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund. A $2.5 billion program providing grants for airport construction projects was similarly forced to shut down.

Ideological elitists are going to have to climb down from their ivory towers sooner or later and understand that people outside of Congress need work, need jobs, need dignity and the right to organize and govern their own lives. Making collective political activity illegal does nothing for liberty. Even if it may optimize profits for corporations, enforcing limits on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans will only fill a reservoir of discontent and ill will – that will eventually spill over onto the political landscape.

American voters are too easy at forgetting who screwed them from election to election. But, it’s easier to remind people nowadays. Cripes, all you need to do is crank up a press conference filled with Republican promises of jobs and match it side-by-side with the ZERO quantity of jobs/infrastructure legislation they have offered up since the last election.

Flying in the face of years of scientific belief, University of Illinois researchers have demonstrated that sugar doesn’t melt, it decomposes.

“This discovery is important to food scientists and candy lovers because it will give them yummier caramel flavors and more tantalizing textures. It even gives the pharmaceutical industry a way to improve excipients, the proverbial spoonful of sugar that helps your medicine go down,” said Shelly J. Schmidt, a University of Illinois professor of food chemistry.

In a presentation to the Institute of Food Technologists about the importance of the new discovery, Schmidt told the food scientists they could use the new findings to manipulate sugars and improve their products’ flavor and consistency.

“Certain flavor compounds give you a nice caramel flavor, whereas others give you a burnt or bitter taste. Food scientists will now be able to make more of the desirable flavors because they won’t have to heat to a ‘melting’ temperature but can instead hold sugar over a low temperature for a longer period of time,” she said…

Schmidt and graduate student Joo Won Lee didn’t intend to turn an established rule of food science on its head. But they began to suspect that something was amiss when they couldn’t get a constant melting point for sucrose in the work that they were doing.

“In the literature, the melting point for sucrose varies widely, but scientists have always blamed these differences on impurities and instrumentation differences. However, there are certain things you’d expect to see if those factors were causing the variations, and we weren’t seeing them,” Schmidt said.

The scientists determined that the melting point of sugar was heating-rate dependent…

Schmidt said a true or thermodynamic melting material, which melts at a consistent, repeatable temperature, retains its chemical identity when transitioning from the solid to the liquid state. She and Lee used high-performance liquid chromatography to see if sucrose was sucrose both before and after “melting.” It wasn’t…

To distinguish “melting” caused by decomposition from thermodynamic melting, the researchers have coined a new name–”apparent melting.” Schmidt and her colleagues have shown that glucose and fructose are also apparent melting materials.

Puts me in mind of research we could do about American politicians and “apparent honesty”, eh?

Though I admit this might encourage some pastry experiments, this autumn.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The rally, particularly huge in a nation of fewer than five million people, took place hours after Anders Behring Breivik appeared in a closed court charged with the murders.

The rose is the symbol of the Norwegian Labour party, whose youth camp members were cut down in Breivik’s gun rampage on Utoya island on Friday.

Prime minister Jens Stoltenberg told the crowd: ‘We will not let fear break us. The warmth of response from people in Norway and from the whole world makes me sure of this one thing – evil can kill a single person but never defeat a whole people…’

Earlier, a scheduled minute’s silence stretched on for five minutes in Oslo, while similar tributes were held not only across the country but in neighbouring Sweden and Denmark. Flags flew at half-mast across the capital, where a sea of bouquets is growing around the cathedral.

Mechanic Sven-Erik Fredheim, 36, said: ‘This is a tragic event to see all these young people dying due to one man’s craziness.

‘It is important to have this minute of silence so that all the victims and the parents of the families know that people are thinking about them.’

The turnout was so great the scheduled “march” had to be canceled. The whole of downtown Oslo was already filled with mourners leaving no room for a march route.

HM Revenue and Customs was due to send out millions of reminder letters to those who owed monies to be paid by July 31. But several hundred thousand people have still not received the reminders after HMRC officials failed to order enough paper on which to print the letters.

Officials apologised for the error and insisted that no one would be left out of pocket as those who did not receive reminders would be given an extra 30 days to pay without incurring interest charges…

An HMRC spokesman said: “Due to exceptionally high demand this year we are experiencing delays in sending paper self assessment tax statements to customers.

“This in no way prevents the accurate payment of tax and no one will be out of pocket as a result…”

“We very much regret any inconvenience and will send paper statements to everyone who should have one as soon as possible.”

I admit it. I love how polite Brits can be when they know the cock-up is their own fault.

Gave me the most polite apology – after bubbles stopped popping out of his nose.

A U.S. military task force has discovered that part of a $2.16 billion transportation contract was diverted through a murky network of subcontractors and into the hands of a group of Afghan power-brokers, criminals and Taliban insurgents…Roughly $600 million of the contract had been spent before authorities were alerted to the scandal…

Only part of that money, however, is believed to have been diverted to “nefarious elements,” the source added…Well, that makes me feel better.

The official said it appears some of the payments were given for truckers to be assured of safe passage through insurgent areas of Afghanistan. As has happened in other instances, trucking contractors paid off local drivers who then turned around and paid local security forces, who in turn paid insurgents in their areas…

Actually, when I worked in traffic management, we did the same thing to get our shipments through Mafia checkpoints in Newark.

The contract program, called Host Nation Trucking — which expires in September — has since been replaced by a more stringent system that requires up to 40 different contractors — an effort to reduce overall reliance on a single firm.

The new program is also meant to tighten accounting measures of second and third party vendors, an area various groups had previously been able to exploit, the source said…

Government officials are currently pursuing corrective actions against the trucking firms, including suspensions and limits on work, though all eight companies still remain on the U.S. payroll.

If you’re functioning here at home within a Republican-devised system like “mark to market” accounting, why expect the Pentagon to deploy legitimate accounting and oversight in a war zone created by the same phonies?

The U.S. EPA estimated that servers and data centers were responsible for up to 1.5 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption, or roughly 0.5 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, in 2007. With companies such as Apple and Google strongly pushing the move to cloud computing, that figure is likely to increase significantly in the coming decade. Since a lot of energy is consumed keeping the computer systems cool, colder climates are seen as more favorable sites for data centers. But a new paper from Microsoft Research proposes a different approach that would see servers, dubbed Data Furnaces, distributed to office buildings and homes where they would act as a primary heat source.

The Microsoft Research paper says that at around 40-50°C the temperature of the exhaust air from a computer server is too low to regenerate electricity efficiently. However, this temperature is perfect for heating purposes, such as home/building space heating, clothes dryers and water heaters. So the researchers argue that placing servers used for cloud computing operations directly into homes and/or office buildings would turn heat generation from a problem into an advantage.

The Data Furnaces (DFs) would be micro-datacenters on the order of 40 to 400 CPUs that would be connected to the Internet and integrated into the house/office building’s heating system in the same way as a conventional electrical furnace. By leveraging the home’s existing infrastructure and doing away with the need for dedicated real estate and construction of new facilities, DFs would significantly reduce the cost per server when compared to conventional data centers.

Additionally, such a setup would also provide lower network latency as the storage and computation systems can be located closer to areas of high population density and therefore those using them.

The DFs would be managed remotely and the researchers suggest that cloud computing service operators could provide free heat to host families in return for occasionally replacing air filters or, in extreme circumstances, turning servers off and on…

RTFA. Farfetched? Maybe not. We could certainly benefit from a proposal like this – we have the space in a detached building that still would allow heated air to be ducted into the house in cold weather. The data center owners would have the benefit of one or two resident geeks.

Cripes – I’ll be among the first to volunteer.

YouTube audio recording of Kenny’s speech – The article link has the video
 
The Vatican has recalled its ambassador to Ireland following the release of an Irish government report that the Vatican had discouraged efforts by bishops to report cases of sex abuse to the police.”

The report, released on July 13, found that clergy leaders in the rural Irish diocese of Cloyne did not act on complaints against 19 priests from 1996 to 2009. It also concluded that the Vatican had encouraged bishops to ignore child-protection guidelines that included the “mandatory reporting” of abuse to civil authorities. [Complete text of the report here]

A brief Vatican statement explaining the decision to recall its ambassador noted, “in particular, the reactions that have followed” the release of the report.

Perhaps the most striking of those reactions was an impassioned denunciation of the Vatican by Ireland’s prime minister, Enda Kenny, who spoke for 12 minutes on the floor of Ireland’s parliament last Wednesday.

As readers can hear in the video of the complete speech, or read in a transcript of the remarks published by The Irish Times, Mr. Kenny began, with barely suppressed anger:

The revelations of the Cloyne report have brought the government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports, Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children.

But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order.

Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic … as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism — the narcissism — that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.

The rape and torture of children were downplayed or “managed” to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and “reputation.”

Listen or watch. Add your personal judgement to history.

Ana Sosa, 13 – arrives in Maine by private jet for camp

Gov. Paul LePage of Maine happened to be waiting for his flight at Augusta State Airport on a recent Saturday when the weekend crush began.

A turboprop Pilatus PC-12 carrying Melissa Thomas, her daughter, her daughter’s friend and a pile of lacrosse equipment took off for their home in Connecticut, following the girls’ three-week stay at Camp All-Star in nearby Kents Hill, Me. Shortly after, a Cessna Citation Excel arrived, and a mother, a father and their 13-year-old daughter emerged carrying a pink sleeping bag and two large duffel bags, all headed to Camp Vega in Fayette.

“Love it, love it, love it,” Mr. LePage said of the private-plane traffic generated by summer camps. “I wish they’d stay a week while they’re here. This is a big business.”

They’re his kind of people.

For decades, parents in the Northeast who sent their children to summer camp faced the same arduous logistics of traveling long distances to remote towns in Maine, New Hampshire and upstate New York to pick up their children or to attend parents’ visiting day.

Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation’s wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps. One private jet broker, Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets, said his summer-camp business had jumped 30 percent over the last year…

Officials at the airport in Augusta said 51 private planes arrived between Thursday and Saturday; on a normal day, they would expect just a few. The airport was so busy that one of its two public runways was closed so all the incoming planes would have someplace to park, said Dale Kilmer, operations manager for Maine Instrument Flight, which operates the airport…

At Robert Lafleur Airport in Waterville, which is close to many of the private camps in the Belgrade Lake region of Maine, the assistant manager, Randy Marshall, brought on two extra people to help handle the traffic last weekend.

In Augusta, Mr. Kilmer usually creates a temporary lounge on parents’ weekend for the pilots and flight attendants who must wait for their clients to return from their children’s camps, so that they can depart later that afternoon. He has already received catering orders for return flights, which include fruit and sandwich trays for adults and sandwich boxes for younger siblings. One flier has already requested a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a fruit cup with a single strawberry, a juice box, a banana and a cookie or brownie…

Mr. Rome, the Blue Star Jets president, said families could rent a seven-person turboprop plane starting at $3,800 for a round trip in one day, making the price competitive with some commercial flights.

“You don’t have to be a millionaire to do it,” Mr. Rome said.

But it helps, right? No doubt Congress will find some way to ease the burden on these parents.