Oil Spill, Beiruit blogs, Condi speak, CYP1A2, Ethanol, titania, starshade, FOXP2

bloggingbeirutbloggingbeirut
MASSIVE OIL SPILL spreading over 40% of the Lebanese coast, south of Beirut (Damour, Jiyyeh, Rmeileh, Saida, Sour).
considered to be the greatest environmental disaster in the history of the mediterranean.
will cost over 50 million euros to clean up (if clean-up starts today).
the oil began leaking into the sea when israeli military aircraft targeted CIVILIAN oil tanks in the jiyyeh area south of beirut.
hilarity ensues when one realizes that israel has polluted its own waters and coastline, in this flagrant act of environmental irresponsibility.
[bloggingbeirut has now shipped out to Cyprus]

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haaretz
an army that pulverized the invading forces of three Arab nations in the span of six days, is now facing an embarrassing role reversal: a war of the "many against the few" in which Israel is on the floorboards.
Who would have believed that a guerrilla organization with a few hundred regular fighters, something like a brigade and a half, could paralyze half a country, firing off hundreds of missiles every day?
haaretz headsup from billmon

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Beiruit blogs
livejournal leaving soon?
raedyassin
remarkze
beirutupdate
anaminbeirut
laureghorayeb Mother of mazenkerblog?

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informationclearinghouse
informationclearinghouse

why receive Condi?
A little learning...
Condi said a ceasefire would be a "false promise" - this is strangled syntax for a "Doctor"
- a ceasefire is a ceasefire, it isnt a promise you ficked up butch.
'Promises' may come afterwards during negotiations.
Anyway the multinational/Nato/UN force seems doubtful;:

They only had one small condition — for the force to be made up of soldiers from another country,” Mr. Barnea wrote. “The Germans recommended France; the French recommended Egypt, and so on. It is doubtful whether there is a single country in the West currently volunteering to lay down its soldiers on Hezbollah’s fence.”

but little Johnny Howard reckons he could supply Aus troops, way to make Aus a target JH!

ps "return to the Status Quo" is an absurd, meaningless illiterate use of Latin.
What Condi presumably meant was "Status Quo Ante" ie the status before...
cant some University give Condi an honorary Un-Doctorate?

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scoop Sydney protest pics

Israeli precision
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Weird Science

bioedonline
Slow Coffee drinkers at risk:

a gene CYP1A2 codes for an enzyme that helps to break down caffeine..one version CYP1A2*1F, metabolizes caffeine more slowly ...
People who carry one or two copies of the 'slow' gene are slow metabolizers..
Ahmed El-Sohemy U Toronto.. examined 2,000 people in Costa Rica who had survived, a heart attack..
..Slow metabolizers who drank two to three 250-ml cups of coffee each day were 36% more likely to have suffered a heart attack than single-cup drinkers. And those who drank four or more cups were 64% more likely to have been struck. The risk was greatest in those below the age of 60.
By contrast, one to three cups seemed to protect those individuals whose genes made them fast metabolizers. "The results are clear and quite striking,"

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bioedonline Ethanol not green?
..Burton Vaughan at Washington State U

..producing ethanol-rich fuels tends to reduce biodiversity and increase soil erosion because of the way that sugar cane is grown.
.In Brazil, ethanol from sugar cane ..40% of the fuel in vehicles.
USA..Senate passed an energy bill that requires gasoline suppliers to add 8 billion gallons of ethanol a year to their fuel by 2012, current 3 bg
..sugar-cane fields are burned..the fires can spread to nearby native vegetation
..The energy needed to generate and transport plant fertilizer leads to significant carbon dioxide emissions, and cleaning the sugar cane also consumes vast quantities of water ..3,900 litres of water being used per ton of sugarcane
David Pimentel Cornell U..has famously claimed that ethanol production consumes more energy than it can release in a car. Vaughan supports this view. But it has been contradicted by studies from Argonne Nat Lab and the US Dep of Agriculture.
Vaughan et al claim that their analysis is more thorough because it accounts for the energy consumed in making fertilizer and farming practice.

..

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bioedonline Sunscreen in the brain?

titania nanopartices 30 nanometres across, which they added to cultures of mouse microglia. ..Veronesi .. found that titania nanoparticles 30 nanometres are swallowed by microglia and that they trigger the release of reactive oxygen species ROS not as a burst but in a prolonged manner, over an hour or more. That could subject the brain to oxidative stress..
..preliminary results: titania nanoparticles can trigger cell death in neurons.

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bbc
45m daisy-shaped, plastic shield in tandem with a powerful telescope, trailing 15,000km ..
centauri bbc aics
Webster Cash, an astronomer at the U Colorado.. plan to use a mobile flower-shaped 'starshade' to spot Earth-sized planets within a few light years of the Solar System. The shade, a 30-50-metre sheet of black plastic-bag-like material, would block out light from the target star, allowing a space telescope to look directly for planets.
..astronomers have detected 194 extrasolar planets ..
A distant 'Earth' would probably be about one ten-billionth the brightness of its mother star. ..this year NASA 'deferred indefinitely' its Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission.

..Cash thinks he can do the job on the cheap using his contraption with the already-planned successor to the Hubble: the James Web Space Telescope (JWST)... positioning the shade 50,000 km from the JWST ..
The starshade has a unique petalled shape [diffraction perpendicular]
..able to see Earth-like planets within 32 light years.. 1,000 stars. Furthermore, it may be possible to see whether the brightness of the planet changes as it rotates...
..task of aligning and moving the shade may be too great for the scheme to be practical: ..
..10,000 exo-planets within 10pc (30 light years)
colorado [pdf]
..

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21Jul2006 ..Germany..to reconstruct the genome of Neanderthals
..suddenly seems possible.. work on ancient DNA by Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Inst Leipzig.. and a new method of DNA sequencing ..Connecticut company, 454 Life Sciences.
..in Neanderthal bones ..fragments 100 ..DNA units.. just the length that works best with the 454 machine..decode vast amounts of DNA at low cost...already recovered considerable amounts of DNA sequence..from every chromosome ..as judged by matching the Neanderthal DNA to the human genome ..
..will require decoding 20 times as much DNA, because so much of the DNA in the Neanderthal bones belongs to bacteria.
..Dr. Paabo..has paid particular attention to a gene known as FOXP2, which from its mutated forms in people seems to be involved in several advanced aspects of language.
[Zebra finches down regulate FOXP2, a repressor, while 'practicing' his song]
[clone them?] ..Dr. Green said. "We would not want to recreate a situation of two competing advanced hominid species."

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Oil Spill Beiruit blogs Condi speak CYP1A2 Ethanol titania starshade FOXP2