Thursday, January 31, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Paul gets second in Louisianna Caucus...
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/01/paul-alleges-bo.html
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period to convince country to go to war.
"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."
Here's the whole story.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22794451/?GT1=10755
Friday, January 18, 2008
The Doctor will see your credit now..
The folks who invented the credit score for lenders are hard at work developing a similar tool for hospitals and other health care providers.
The project, dubbed “MedFICO” in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patient’s ability to pay their medical bills. But privacy advocates are worried that the notorious errors that have caused frequent criticism of the credit system will also cause trouble with any attempt to create a health-related risk score. They also fear that a low score might impact the quality of the health care that patients receive.
Fair Issac Corp., developer of the FICO credit score, is one of several investors in Healthcare Analytics, the Massachusetts start-up that is developing the hospital risk tool. Another investor is Tenet Healthcare Corp, one of the nation's largest hospital operators. Stephen Farber, who resigned as chief financial officer of Tenet in 2004, is the CEO of Healthcare Analytics.
Several published reports have described Healthcare Analytics product as a MedFICO score, computed in a way that would be familiar to those who've used credit scores. The firm is gathering payment history information from large hospitals around the country, according to a magazine called Inside ARM, aimed at “accounts receivable management” professionals. It will then analyze that data to predict how likely patients will be to pay future medical bills. As with credit reports and scores, patients who've failed to pay past bills will be deemed less likely to pay future bills.
The idea sounds ominous to Pam Dixon, who runs the World Privacy Forum, which studies medical privacy issues.
"This is a bad idea and I don't think this benefits the consumer at all," Dixon said. "And what about victims of medical ID theft? Are we going to deny treatment to these people because they have a terrible MedFICO score?"
Firm says product's not ready yet
"MedFICO does not exist," he said, adding that the name “will very likely not be used when we bring our tools to market.”
He refused to confirm other published details about the company's work, saying it was too early given the “premature nature of our product development cycle.” Farber, the Healthcare Analytics CEO, is not granting interviews to discuss the product, said Hurley. Farber did speak to a Chicago Tribune reporter earlier this year.
Hurley did say, however, that hospitals will not use the Healthcare Analytics product before patients receive medical treatment, and it will have no impact on medical decisions.
He also pointed to federal law that makes it illegal for hospitals to refuse treatment to patients in their emergency rooms, regardless of a person’s ability to pay.
The Healthcare Analytics tool will be used after patients receive care and after a bill is generated to help hospitals make better financial planning decisions, Hurley said. It will also help health care providers sort through patient records and potentially make it easier to write off some unpaid bills as charity cases, rather than delinquent accounts, which would offer the hospital some accounting benefits, he said.
The firm “is particularly focused on finding ways to help hospitals systematically allocate charitable resources, to make sure that patients who need financial assistance the most receive it on a consistent basis across the industry,” he said.
Impact could reach beyond the ER
"If you had a poor score, you could be denied a hospital stay, for example," she said.
Linda Foley, who runs the Identity Theft Resource Center, also said any kind of medical risk scoring would run into a thicket of federal laws designed to protect consumers. It's not clear if such a score would be covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act and other credit-related laws that grant consumers the right to see their own credit reports and scores. The information may also be covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which restricts the use of patients' private information.
"The problem we see is: Who is regulating this?" she said. “How do we know it will never be used before treatment?”
She also pointed to the problem of Medical ID theft, which now hits 250,000 people each year, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Identity theft victims frequently find it difficult to clean their credit reports of errors; she feared medical ID theft victims might face the same fate.
Foley also said that a health care score, even if it was initially designed only for use in post-treatment billing issues, could end up being used in unforeseen ways.
"That’s happened with credit scores. Now they are being used for all kinds of things like setting auto insurance rates. What else could a MedFICO be used for?" she said. Perhaps an employer might access the scores and use them to predict which workers might be expensive to insure, she speculated.
Since the invention of the credit score in the 1980s, risk scoring has become a valuable tool in many industries. Auto insurers have created their own scoring system, for example. Many Web sites buy software that assesses the risk that any individual credit card purchase may be fraudulent.
A crowded field
Scoring risk in the health care industry could be a valuable business, given the rising rate of unpaid bills. American hospitals face $40 billion in unpaid bills every year and 47 million Americans did not have health insurance last year. Others face rising out-of-pocket costs.
That means hospitals need more tools for collecting debts from private individuals, Hurley said.
“Hospitals have historically worked primarily with insurance companies and government programs like Medicare to arrange for payment,” he said. “It is a recent trend that individual patients, including insured patients, have assumed significant individual responsibility for paying for care.”
Fair Issac did not immediately return a request to be interviewed. A spokesman for Tenet directed all questions to Healthcare Analytics.
While published reports said the new patient scoring system could be in place by this spring or summer, Hurley denied that, saying the firm didn't even have plans to test the system for another six months and it wouldn’t be sold commercially until the end of the year.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Glow in the dark cats.
Wow today must be World Wide Cloning Day.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/22257875#22257875 < here’s the video link for it.
South Korean scientists say they have cloned cats whose genes have been altered so that they glow in the dark - taking advantage of a technological twist that could someday be used to make more dramatic genetic changes in all sorts of creatures.
A research team at
"The ability to manipulate the fluorescent protein and use this to clone cats opens new horizons for artificially creating animals with human illnesses linked to genetic causes," the Ministry of Science and Technology said in Wednesday's report.
The procedure for cloning a cat has been around for six years, and Kong himself first performed that particular feat back in 2004. What's noteworthy about the newly reported twist - other than that glow-in-the-dark kitties are really cool - is that scientists fiddled with the donor cat's genetic code, then passed those changes on to the clones.
Here's what the researchers say they did: They took skin cells from Turkish Angora female cats and used a virus to insert the genetic instructions for making red fluorescent protein. Then they put the gene-altered nuclei into eggs for cloning. The cloned embryos were implanted back into the donor cats, which effectively became the surrogate mothers for their own clones.
Four kittens were born by Caesarian section, but one of them died during the procedure, according to the Korea Times. The fact that the kittens' skin cells glowed under ultraviolet light served as evidence that they were really gene-altered clones.
Assuming that the results are confirmed, Kong's cats would join mice and pigs in the glow-in-the-dark clone menagerie. The implication is that if you can pass along the easy-to-recognize coding for fluorescent markers through cloning, you could eventually pass along more complex genetic coding.
Theoretically, you could add in the coding for an endangered species, producing cloned hybrids to boost the gene pool for Sumatran tigers, Iberian lynxes and the like. You might even stick in the coding to give other creatures human diseases, so that they can be studied without raising the level of ethical concern that comes with human experimentation. (I realize that there's a different set of ethical concerns about such transgenic experiments, however.)
Most provocatively, animal clones might be genetically altered to produce human body parts. Does that sound like a way-out science-fiction plot? Well, it's already happening, and sparking an unsettling debate.
This week's report doesn't mean that glow-in-the-dark pets will be waiting under the Christmas tree anytime soon. There are a few caveats surrounding these cats:
- This research came to light through press releases rather than peer-reviewed articles, and many of the details still have to be published and replicated. It doesn't help that
- Even if the results are confirmed, they represent just one more small step in the long march of genetic progress. Those cool fluorescent proteins merely serve as a guide for more substantive genetic modifications.
- Even if glow-in-the-dark cats become routine in the laboratory, that doesn't mean they'll hit it off as house pets. Glow-in-the-dark fish have been offered commercially for several years - but they're still illegal in
To my mind, the best place to look for a cute little ball of glowing fur is your local pet adoption center - plus an outlet that sells glow-in-the-dark cat collars. What do you think? As always, feel free to weigh in with your comments below.
Neon Green Pig
More cloning stuff..
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Green pig gives birth to glowing piglets
The Associated Press
updated 2:58 p.m. CT, Wed., Jan. 9, 2008
The glowing piglets’ birth proves transgenic pigs are fertile and able to pass on their engineered traits to their offspring, according to Liu Zhonghua, a professor overseeing the breeding program at Northeast Agricultural University.
“Continued development of this technology can be applied to ... the production of special pigs for the production of human organs for transplant,” Liu said in a news release posted Tuesday on the university’s Web site.
Calls to the university seeking comment Wednesday were not answered.
The piglets’ mother was one of three pigs born with the trait in December 2006 after pig embryos were injected with fluorescent green protein. Two of the 11 piglets glow fluorescent green from their snout, trotters, and tongue under ultraviolet light, the university said.
Robin Lovell-Badge, a genetics expert at
Lovell-Badge had not seen the research from
He said the presence of the green protein would allow genetically modified cells to be tracked if they were transplanted into a human. The fact that the pig’s offspring also appeared to have the green genes would indicate that the genetic modification had successfully penetrated every cell, Lovell-Badge added.
But he said much more research and further trials — both in animals and in humans — would be necessary before the benefits of the technology could be seen.
Other genetically modified pigs have been created before, including by
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22563650/
© 2008 MSNBC.com
UFO in Stephenville!
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Dozens in
Large silent object with bright lights was flying low and fast
By Angela K. Brown
The Associated Press
updated 7:51 p.m. CT, Mon., Jan. 14, 2008
STEPHENVILLE,
Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.
"People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times," said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts."
While federal officials insist there's a logical explanation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane. People in several towns who reported seeing it over several weeks have offered similar descriptions of the object.
Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.
"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Sorrells said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."
Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.
Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in
Lewis said the object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.
"I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner," Lewis said. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you."
Officials at the region's two Air Force bases — Dyess in Abilene and Sheppard in Wichita Falls — also said none of their aircraft were in the area last week. The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.
One man has offered a reward for a photograph or videotape of the mysterious object.
About 200 UFO sightings are reported each month, mostly in
Fourteen percent of Americans polled last year by The Associated Press and Ipsos say they have seen a UFO.
Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan said that he first saw red glowing lights and then white flashing lights moving fast, but that even with binoculars could not see the object to which the lights were attached.
"I didn't see a flying saucer and I don't know what it was, but it wasn't an airplane, and I've never seen anything like it," Gaitan said. "I think it must be some kind of military craft — at least I hope it was."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22656172/?gt1=10755
© 2008 MSNBC.com
Clone cows are ok to eat!
This came from MSNBC today. They had a picture of some cloned cows on the page, seems we have a cloning factory right outside of
I wonder if, now that they’re cloning, if they can “Pre-flavor” the meat. Like Vanilla chicken, or Hickory Smoked beef. They can just work those flavors into their genetic code.
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FDA says clones are safe for food
Report finds no evidence of risks; decision removes last regulatory barrier
By Rick Weiss
The
updated 7:02 a.m. CT, Tues., Jan. 15, 2008
A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last
The 968-page "final risk assessment," not yet released but obtained by The Washington Post, finds no evidence to support opponents' concerns that food from clones may harbor hidden risks.
But, recognizing that a majority of consumers are wary of food from clones -- and that cloning could undermine the wholesome image of American milk and meat -- the agency report includes hundreds of pages of raw data so that others can see how it came to its conclusions.
The report also acknowledges that human health concerns are not the only issues raised by the emergence of cloned farm animals.
"Moral, religious and ethical concerns . . . have been raised," the agency notes in a document accompanying the report. But the risk assessment is "strictly a science-based evaluation," it reports, because the agency is not authorized by law to consider those issues.
In practice, it will be years before foods from clones make their way to store shelves in appreciable quantities, in part because the clones themselves are too valuable to slaughter or milk. Instead, the pricey animals -- replicas of some of the finest farm animals ever born -- will be used primarily as breeding stock to create what proponents say will be a new generation of superior farm animals.
When food from those animals hits the market, the public may yet have its say. FDA officials have said they do not expect to require food from clones to be labeled as such, but they may allow foods from ordinary animals to be labeled as not from clones.
Opponents express dismay
Opponents of the approval, including some concerned about the welfare of the clones themselves, expressed dismay upon learning about the FDA's intentions.
Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a
"One of the amazing things about this," Mendelson said, "is that at a time when we have a readily acknowledged crisis in our food safety system, the FDA is spending its resources and energy and political capital on releasing a safety assessment for something that no one but a handful of companies wants."
Others countered that public opinion and politics should play no bigger role in the decision on clones than it should in the approval of a drug or a contraceptive.
"In fact, cloned animals have been studied much more than naturally produced animals," said Cindy Tian, who has analyzed milk and meat from clones at the University of Connecticut. "We have more data on them than for any other animal that we eat."
Release of the analysis was slowed for years by several forces, including the dairy industry, concerned about the potential impact on exports of
In the past month, as an announcement neared, members of Congress, led by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), sought to delay approval through legislation.
Trade-related agencies including the Foreign Agricultural Service and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which for years have struggled to get countries to accept
A final blitz of meetings with FDA officials last week brought grudging acquiescence, insiders said. And it is possible, sources said, that even after the risk analysis is released, there will be calls for farmers to voluntarily refrain from selling products from clones until the trade issues can be resolved.
Challenges to assessing risk
To create its final risk assessment, the FDA gathered data on nearly all of the more than 600
Those animals were made by scientists scattered among various universities and companies using different methods that in many cases were difficult to compare.
Moreover, many of those animals were not just clones but also had genes added to them for projects unrelated to food production.
In those cases, it was difficult for FDA reviewers to decide whether any problems were caused by those animals being clones or by their particular genetic alterations. (The FDA has said it will not approve gene-altered animals as food without additional tests for safety.)
Finally, there was the overarching problem of deciding which measures would best predict whether the food was safe. Most puzzling was whether to take into account the subtle alterations in gene activity, called epigenetic changes, that are common in clones as a result of having just one parent.
In the end, facing the reality that epigenetics have never been a factor in assessing the wholesomeness of food, agency scientists decided to use the same simple but effective standard used by farmers since the dawn of agriculture: If a farm animal appears in all respects to be healthy, then presume that food from that animal is safe to eat.
Scientists inside and outside the agency studied thousands of pages of veterinary reports describing weight, size, organ function, blood characteristics and other measures of clones and offspring. For cattle -- the animals for which the most data exist -- full health assessments were conducted for each of five different stages of the animals' life: fetal, newborn, juvenile, sexually mature, and old.
Newborn cattle often unhealthy
They concluded that newborn cattle are often unhealthy, probably because of epigenetic changes. They are usually extremely overweight and have respiratory, gastrointestinal and immune system problems. (Cloned pigs and goats are mostly healthy from the start.)
But those problems typically disappear within the first weeks or months of life as the animals somehow compensate. And since sick clones would not pass muster with food inspectors any more than sick conventional animals would, they pose no concern, the report says.
Studies of cloned farm animal behavior, including mating behavior, also showed them to be the same as ordinary animals. (One exception: On one farm, clones showed a peculiar preference not for the surrogate mother that gave birth to them but to the animal from which they were cloned.)
Scientists also looked at nutrient levels in meat and milk from a few dozen cattle and pig clones and hundreds of their progeny, and compared them with values from conventional animals. They measured vitamins A, C, B1, B2, B6 and B12 as well as niacin, pantothenic acid, calcium, iron, phosphorous, zinc, 12 kinds of fatty acids, cholesterol, fat, protein, amino acids and carbohydrates including lactose.
For almost every measure, the values were virtually the same. The few that differed were still within the range considered normal.
Separately, the agency looked at studies in which milk and meat from clones were fed to animals for up to 3 1/2 months. There was no evidence of health effects, allergic reactions or behavioral changes.
In the end, the agency concluded that it did not have enough information to rule on the safety of food from cloned sheep. It also decided that edible products from newborn cattle clones, which often are metabolically unstable, "may pose some very limited human food consumption risk."
But it found no safety hazards for meat from healthy cattle clones more than a few weeks old, milk from cloned cows, or meat from cloned pigs or goats of any age.
"Food from cattle, swine, and goat clones is as safe to eat as that from their more conventionally-bred counterparts," the FDA risk assessment concludes.
Looking ahead, the report says FDA is collaborating with veterinary and scientific organizations, notably the International Embryo Transfer Society, to create a database on the health of new clones, which will help the agency track the field as the industry grows.
Working with the FDA, the International Embryo Transfer Society is also creating the first manual of animal care standards for clones, to be made available to farmers and the public later this year.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22663416/
© 2008 MSNBC.com
Monday, January 14, 2008
I love texas!
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Ron Paul Votes Not Counted In New Hampshire District
Ron Paul Votes Not Counted In New Hampshire District
Vote fraud confirmed, Clinton reversed mammoth pre-polling deficit to beat Obama, Diebold machines aid Giuliani, Romney Prison Planet | January 9, 2008
Paul Joseph Watson
Major allegations of vote fraud in
According to a voter in Sutton, New Hampshire , three of her family members voted for Ron Paul, yet when she checked the voting map on the Politico website, the total votes for Ron Paul were zero.
With 100% of precincts now reporting, the map still says zero votes for Ron Paul as you can see below.
CLICK FOR ENLARGEMENT
It's not as if Sutton had a handful of voters like some other districts - a total of 386 people voted yet we are led to believe that not one voted for Ron Paul? Judging by the
(Article Continues Below)
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Anyone else in Sutton who voted for Ron Paul needs to go public immediately with the charge of vote fraud and make it known that they were cheated out of their right to vote.
Diebold voting machines also did Congressman Paul no favors last night - compared to hand counted ballots Giuliani gained just short of 0.5% from electronic voting whereas Paul lost over 2%, which was the difference between finishing 4th and 5th, as this graph documents .
Mitt Romney profited the most from the Diebold swing, he received 7% more votes compared to hand counted ballots.
In the Democratic race the Diebold voting machines clearly swung the primary in Hillary Clinton's favor at the expense of Barack Obama, who had a commanding lead over the New York Senator going into the contest.
Zogby polling numbers had Obama leading
"If I was Barack Obama, I'd certainly not have conceded this election this quickly," writes The Brad Blog . "I'm not quite sure what he was thinking. And as far as offering an indication of whether he understands how these systems work, and the necessity of making sure that votes are counted, and counted accurately, it does not offer a great deal of confidence at this hour."
"While I have no evidence at this time --- let me repeat, no evidence at this time --- of chicanery, what we do know is that chicanery, with this particular voting system, is not particularly difficult. Particularly when one private company --- and a less-than-respectable one at that, as I detailed in the previous post --- runs the entire process."
As we reported yesterday , the contract for programming all of New Hampshire's Diebold voting machines, which combined counted 81 per cent of the vote yesterday, is owned by LHS Associates, whose owner John Silvestro has gone to great lengths to deflect accusations that the machines can easily be rigged.
After purchasing a Diebold 1.94w machine, the same system used in
Get ready to be filtered!
From the new york times
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/att-and-other-isps-may-be-getting-ready-to-filter/index.html
AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter
For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.
But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.
Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.
“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.
“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”
Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.
Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company’s fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly doesn’t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.
“The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” he said. “The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”
I asked the panelists how they would respond to objections from their customers over network level filtering – for example, the kind of angry outcry Comcast saw last year, when it was accused of clamping down on BitTorrent traffic on its network.
“Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.
After the session, he told me that ISPs like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. “We’ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
My eye ball popped out of socket...now what?
explainer
My Eyeball Just Fell Out of Its Socket
What should I do?
Villanova basketball star Allan Ray had his eyeball literally poked out of its socket by an opposing player in a recent game. Ray has been treating the injury with eye drops, and he planned to meet with doctors to find out if he can play in the first round of the NCAA tournament. What should you do if your eyeball comes out of your head?
Get it put back in, and soon. The longer you remain in this rare condition—known as "globe luxation"—the more strain you'll put on the blood vessels and nerves that connect your eye to the rest of your head. Your luxated globes will also be susceptible to corneal abrasions or inflammation, and the feeling of your eyelids clamped down behind them won't be pleasant.
You should be able to get your eye back in place without serious, long-term damage. (If the ocular muscles tear or if the optic nerve is severed, your outlook won't be as clear.) The treatment for globe luxation is pretty simple: Doctors apply some topical painkillers, hold back your lashes, and poke your eyeball into its socket by pressing on the white part with gloved fingers. (In some cases, they'll use a simple tool like a bent paperclip to shoehorn it back into place.) You might get antibiotics, lubricating drops, or steroids to follow up for a few days while your vision returns to normal. If your doctors can't pop your eye back in—because you've got too much swelling in the socket, for example—they'll give you an eye shield and consider a more invasive procedure.
Not all popped eyeballs come from head trauma. A few people can luxate their globes on purpose, and certain others get "spontaneous globe luxation" when their eyelids are pushed in the right way. Someone with shallow eye sockets or floppy eyelid syndrome, for example, might pop his eyeballs during a regular eye exam. You can also trigger luxation while putting in your contact lenses, or with a particularly violent sneeze. You might even pop your eyeballs by trying to exhale while keeping your nose and mouth closed (i.e., performing the Valsalva maneuver).
If your eyeballs fall out of their sockets repeatedly, you might be a candidate for a lateral tarsorrhaphy—in which doctors sew up your eyelids part of the way to keep them from opening too wide. You could also learn the following technique for popping your eye back in yourself: First direct your gaze downward. Now pinch and pull your upper eyelid with the thumb and index finger of one hand. Lay a finger from your other hand on the top part of your luxated eyeball, taking care to press only on the insensitive white part. While you continue to hold your eyelid up, push your eyeball gently down and back at the same time until it's part of the way in. Then try to look upwards; if everything goes right your eyeball will rotate under the upper lid and back into its socket.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Daniel Engber is an associate editor at Slate. He can be reached at danengber@yahoo.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2137959/
How does a fly land upside down on a ceiling?
This is fantastic..i accidentally ran into it while reading an article about odd questions that need answers.
“Dear Cecil:
This has been bothering me for years. How close to the ceiling does the housefly get before turning around to stand on it? Also, am I crazy to sit and ponder this? --Georgia R.,
Dear Georgia:
Maybe, but at least you're not shooting up a post office. Besides, you're in good company. Many great minds of science have ruminated on this vital issue. They were less concerned with how close, though, than with how period, since landing upside down is no mean feat.
The leading theory for years was that the flies did a half barrel roll sideways a la the Blue Angels just before landing. This idea was shot down in 1958 when Natural History magazine published photos showing that in fact flies do a sort of backward somersault.
On approaching the ceiling, and while still flying right side up, flies extend their forelegs over their heads till they can grab a landing spot with the suction cups in their feet. Their momentum then enables them to swing their hind legs up, like a gymnast on a trapeze. Result: inverted fly, home and dry. So the answer to your query is, they get real close. Hope that'll do.”
Monday, January 7, 2008
Friday, January 4, 2008
They're getting worried....
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Ron Paul Banners in the skys
Ron Paul Air Squadron
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The Genesis Communications Network is hoping to follow in the footsteps of the Ron Paul Blimp by attracting sponsors for flights over key demographic battlegrounds as the Republican primaries take shape over the next few months.
The first flight sets off today and will be cruising over
Approximately $465 is needed to keep each plane in the sky for an hour which can also be moved to other key markets at a cost of $200 per night.
Each billboard costs $3,695 to make an the organizers are hoping to raise around $120,000 in total which would buy 300 flight hours.
Please visit http://www.ronpaulaircorps.com and pledge your support for this exciting new activist adventure!
www.infowars.com
