Eideard

Medicines experts are calling for a review of the 50-year-old guidelines on prescribing antibiotics to children, warning that the rise in overweight and obese youngsters may mean that some get a less than adequate dose. While they stress that there is no evidence that children are suffering as a result of under-treatment, they say there should be better guidance than the rule of thumb that has applied for half a century.

Since the 1960s, doctors have worked on the principle that a big child is equal to half an adult, a small child is equal to half a big child and a baby is equal to half a small child, say a group of doctors and scientists in the British Medical Journal.

The problem lies with the prescription of oral penicillin, such as amoxicillin which is widely used against bacterial infections in children. They make up 4.5m of the total 6m annual antibiotic prescriptions for children…

If children get less than the dose they need, there is a possibility that their infection will not clear up easily. It also raises the risk of antibiotic resistance developing. If the bug is not successfully eliminated by the antibiotic, it may mutate into a new form that is resistant to the drug – and be passed on to other children.

Dr Paul Long, senior lecturer in pharmacognosy at King’s College London, who is one of the authors, said: ‘We were surprised at the lack of evidence to support the current oral penicillins dosing recommendations for children, as it is such a commonly used drug. Children’s average size and weight are slowly but significantly changing, so what may have been adequate doses of penicillin 50 years ago are potentially not enough today.

“It is important to point out that this study does not provide any clinical evidence that children are receiving sub-optimal penicillin doses that lead to harm, and we want to reassure parents of that. But what we are saying is that we should ensure that children with severe infections who need these antibiotics the most are still receiving an effective dose …

I’ve had this discussion with local physicians over the last couple of years. Mostly, it evokes mild – and short-lived – curiosity.

As practicing GP’s they haven’t the time for detailed and scientific studies. They’ll wait for the evidence and recommendations from peer-reviewed journals, medical associations. Still, it sounds as if it’s time for some serious research on the topic. Since we’re stuck into growing obesity as thoroughly as declining education.

Sterling

Dingoes have been filmed performing a series of feats described by scientists as evidence of “unbelievable intelligence”.

In experiments performed by researchers in Melbourne, one dingo was filmed moving a table to use as a step-ladder to reach food. Another opened a gate latch with his nose to reach a female partner.

Dingoes, which are native to Australia, are regarded as smarter than domestic dogs and have been described as “the most intelligent animal in Australia apart from man”…

“If indeed these examples can be considered cases of tool-use, they may represent the first documented evidence of such behaviour in a canid, particularly as this behaviour occurred spontaneously,” says the paper, authored by Bradley Smith, Robert Appleby and Carla Litchfield.

“After several unsuccessful attempts at jumping for the envelope, Sterling ‘solved’ the task by first moving and then jumping up onto a trestle table.

Importantly, Sterling was never purposely trained or encouraged to exhibit this (or similar) behaviour.”

In the gate-opening exercise, a dog named Teddy pushed up a latch with his nose after being separated from his partner, named Ayjay. “Sanctuary staff maintain that Teddy only opens the gate when Ayjay is removed from the same enclosure as Teddy,” the paper says.

A behavioural ecologist, Darryl Jones, Griffith University, said the feats were a “remarkable” example of tool use and involved “manipulating a completely external object to the animal to do something that requires foresight”.

Which justifies an Oz version of one one of my favorite local bumper stickers: “My dog is smarter than your 6th-grader”

Water discharged into lakes and rivers from municipal sewage treatment plants may contain significant concentrations of the genes that make bacteria antibiotic-resistant. That’s the conclusion of a new study on a sewage treatment plant on Lake Superior in the Duluth, Minn., harbor…

Timothy M. LaPara and colleagues explain that antibiotic-resistant bacteria — a major problem in medicine today — are abundant in the sewage that enters municipal wastewater treatment plants. Treatment is intended to kill the bacteria, and it removes many of the bacterial genes that cause antibiotic resistance. However, genes or bacteria may be released in effluent from the plant. In an effort to determine the importance of municipal sewage treatment plants as sources of antibiotic resistance genes, the scientists studied releases of those genes at the Duluth facility.

Although the Duluth facility uses some of the most advanced technology for cleaning wastewater — so-called tertiary treatment — the study identified it as an important source of antibiotic resistance genes. Sampling of water at 13 locations detected three genes, for instance, that make bacteria resistant to the tetracycline group of antibiotics, which are used to treat conditions ranging from acne to sexually transmitted diseases to anthrax and bubonic plague.

LaPara’s team says their research demonstrates that even the most high-tech sewage treatment plants may be significant sources of antibiotic resistance genes in waterways.

Crap! What will we do as an alternative? Do we add more chemicals to the process – possibly increasing dangerous materials in the effluent? Our population everywhere in the West adds pharmaceuticals that slide through sewage like grease through a goose. How much of that is involved in the processes which lead to these genes surviving, mutating?

The sludge being treated becomes more dangerous every year – as it is.

Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan — far short of what I’d like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.

So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker…

Do you really need that explained to you? Are you as delusional as the Republican Party?

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn’t based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

And policy makers should take that damage into account. We need more politicians like the courageous governor who supported environmental controls on a coal-fired power plant, despite warnings that the plant might be closed, because “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people.”

Actually, that was Mitt Romney, back in 2003 — the same politician who now demands that we use more coal.

How big are these damages? A new study by researchers at Yale and Middlebury College brings together data from a variety of sources to put a dollar value on the environmental damage various industries inflict. The estimates are far from comprehensive, since they only consider air pollution…

For it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that’s worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn — which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation, which the Mitt Romney-that-was used to stand up to.

As the study’s authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down. What it means, instead, is that “the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high.” That is, environmental regulations aren’t strict enough.

Republicans ignore studies like that, the overwhelming body of industrial environment studies, BTW. Why start letting facts get in the way of profits for their largest contributors? Mining, power production industries are among the largest contributors to congressional Republicans. Simple-minded politicians who live the country-club life.

Their families, their kids are OK, Jack. The rest of us can go scramble for clean air and clean water whether we can afford it or not. There hasn’t been a Republican in office that I can recall fighting against pollution since that era before Ronald Reagan. Someone like that certainly wouldn’t be supported by today’s RNC or the KoolAid Party.

Search giant Google has teamed up with the Bletchley Park Trust to kick start a fundraising effort to rebuild the records center known as Block C. A Google-supported garden party was held within the grounds of the famous WW2 decoding center last week to start off the restoration fund, which aims to transform the now derelict building into a visitor and learning center.

It’s not the first time Google has joined forces with the Trust to preserve a piece of history. Last year, Google contributed $100,000 towards an effort to save a collection of scientific material and papers relating to the wartime codebreaking work of Enigma genius Alan Turing, which had been put up for auction. In spite of public donations to the tune of $37,432 also being raised, things looked decidedly hopeless until the National Heritage Memorial Fund stepped in and secured the winning bid. The papers are now safely housed in a special display at Bletchley Park.

Now Google is helping to transform a dilapidated building last used in 1984 into a new visitor and learning center for Bletchley Park and the UK’s National Museum of Computing, which is housed in H block on the site and is home to Colossus – the world’s first electronic programmable computer…

It’s estimated that the efforts of the Park’s 10,000 plus personnel shortened the war by at least two years and saved more than 20 million lives.

Bravo!

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.

Legislators seeking to rein in government spending have put the troubled James Webb Space Telescope up for cancellation, saying the successor to NASA’s Hubble observatory is haunted by poor management and out-of-control costs…

Developed as the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency. With a 21.3-foot-diameter primary mirror, the telescope is designed to peer back in time almost to the Big Bang, giving astronomers a glimpse of infant galaxies as the universe cooled after its formation.

The proposal to terminate JWST came from the House Appropriations Committee’s panel overseeing NASA. The committee released their 2012 spending bill Wednesday, calling for more than $1.6 billion in cuts to NASA’s budget from this year’s levels…

“The bill also terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management,” lawmakers said in a press release…

The independent review team concluded JWST was making steady technical progress despite the budget issues. About three-fourths of the telescope’s hardware is already in production, according to Northrop Grumman Corp., JWST’s prime contractor…

Scientists are also finishing work on JWST’s four research instruments designed to peer deep into the cosmos and unravel how the infant universe formed and evolved.

Given that a significant portion of the House of Representatives believes that those little twinkling lights out there in space are reflections from angel’s halos – I don’t hold out much hope for anything to do with NASA or space research. Republicans and Blue Dog cowards will gnaw away at space programs as part of their jihad against science.

Tie that with the clusterfrack of voodoo economics that is the spine for Kool Aid Party ideology – and the solution for an oft mismanaged bureacracy and sloppy cost estimates ends up being termination of spending altogether on non-military aeronautics.

Natalia Avseenko, 36, was persuaded to strip naked as marine experts believe belugas do not like to be touched by artificial materials such as diving suits.

The skilled Russian diver took the plunge as the water temperature hit a freezing minus 1.5C…

Belugas have a small hump on their heads used for echo-location and it was thought that there would be more chance of striking up a rapport with them without clothes as a barrier.

The average human could die if left in sub-zero temperature sea water for just five minutes.

But Natalia is a yoga expert and used meditation techniques to hold her breath and stay under water for an incredible 10 minutes and 40 seconds.

The article mentions that Natalia stripped naked. It also mentions that she remains under subfreezing water for over ten minutes. So.. of course.. the part we remember is that she is naked.

An innovative program to encourage sustainable farming in rural China has helped restore eroded forestland while producing economic gains for many farmers, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers.

“The Sloping Land Conversion Program, which began in 2000 after massive flooding caused in part by land clearing, focuses on China’s largest source of soil erosion and flood risk — farms on steep slopes,” said study co-author Gretchen Daily, a professor of biology at Stanford.

The program aims to return more than 37 million acres of cropland on steep slopes back to forest or grassland. The government pays villagers in varying amounts of cash and rice to give up farming and find new sources of employment.

“It’s a tremendously innovative program designed to address two critical problems — securing the environment and providing economic opportunities for people in rural, desperately poor areas,” said Daily…

China’s land conversion program has its roots in the late 1960s, when farmers in the mountainous western provinces began clearing vast stretches of land to make way for more crops. The increased agricultural production helped feed a growing nation but also set the scene for disaster. When record monsoon rains pelted the region in 1998, soil from the agricultural fields washed down the mountain slopes, killing thousands of people in the villages below.

The unprecedented damage caused by the floods prompted China to reconsider the wisdom of replacing forests with farms — especially in steeply sloping terrain. In 2000, the government launched a campaign to reforest the countryside and established several large-scale programs to help farmers in the western provinces find new work in surrounding cities…

Ecologically speaking, China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program has been a clear win since it was implemented a decade ago, said Daily, noting that the program has helped to decrease soil erosion by as much as 68 percent in some areas…

On average, families that participated in the program reported doing better financially than those who did not, but some farm workers had trouble finding new work, according to the study. Households that profited most did so by sending a husband-and-wife team into the city to earn money as unskilled laborers. The wages they earned in the city combined with the government subsidy easily topped what they had earned as farmers…

Finding your way politically and socially through qualitative social and economic changes is difficult enough under the best of circumstances. Fortunately, the world at the beginning of the 21st Century seems to be a bit more willing to lend a hand than that era defined by Cold War polemics.

RTFA for lots of details.

Crikey, I’m gonna be exhausted tonight – better get some sleep!

Unbelievable as it may sound, not all young men want more sex.

According to a survey of Australian men, 12 percent between the ages of 16 and 24 said they wanted less sex — the highest proportion of any age group.

“Although it’s a minority, it’s still interesting that it’s more of them (than any other age group), which is not that sort of myth, boys not getting enough sex and dying to get it,” Juliet Richters…told Reuters.

Richters and a team of researchers from around Australia surveyed some 4,300 heterosexual men and 4,400 women between the ages of 16 and 64.

She said another survey five years ago showed similar results.

Only 31 percent of men in that age group said they wanted more sex, the lowest of any other age group as well.

“It may well be that they are being overwhelmed by girls of much the same age who are madly in love and very keen,” she said…

Half of men aged 55 to 64 wanted more sex, while only 27 percent of women in the same age group felt the same.

“The evolutionary explanation is women are only keen on sex when they can conceive. A social explanation is a whole lot of stuff, including time, pressure, tiredness,” Richter said.

“I mean, sex is a leisure activity after all.”

I forwarded this to one of the blog editors I work with – down in Oz. He hasn’t stopped laughing, yet.