October 4, 2006, 4:43 AM CT

Remake of Friday the 13th should be out by 2007

Jason lives! Or at least he will once all of the litigations are finished. The folks over at bloody-disgusting.com gave us this, but please be aware the information is of the hearsay variety:

B-D reader 'xerotheory7803' sent in this little update on New Line Cinema and Platinum Dunes' delayed Friday the 13th project. Xero tells B-D, "I just got back from the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Jersey and got a little bit of news to share with you. After the 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning' Panel, I was talking with Andrew Form, one of the producers who is also producing the new 'Friday The 13th', and he said that the remake, which is tied in a rights battle right now, should be in theaters by July 2007. He also exclaimed that they will fight to the bitter end to make sure it is released with an R rating, no PG-13 bullshit for Jason Voorhees." We've also heard some positive rumbling here in Los Angeles and hope to have some big news for you soon!

Wow has it been that long already? Well the original Friday the 13th was made in 1980, and yeah, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that twenty six years may in fact be long enough for a remake.

This is a classic horror movie and I am curious to see if the movie makers can do it justice. It's going to be difficult, to me the eighties had a real lock on fear and tension. But if this movie is made I will watch it.........

Posted by: Ethen      Permalink         Source

October 4, 2006, 4:40 AM CT

All Stages From Life To Death

Taken on the grounds of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I thought it was very cool how this one leaf displays all of the stages from life to death.

Via Flicker.........

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October 3, 2006, 10:22 PM CT

New Fodder For The Next Clean Air Fight

New research from scientists at Harvard University measured secondhand tobacco smoke in cars and found pollution levels that are likely hazardous to children.

"The levels were above the threshold for what's considered unhealthy for sensitive groups -- people like children and the elderly -- as determined by the Environmental Protection Agency," said lead study author Vaughan Rees, Ph.D., a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health.

During 45 driving trials, the researchers strapped a pollution monitor into a child-safety seat, and then asked a smoker-volunteer to light up at different times along the near hour-long route. The road tests were conducted under two different ventilation conditions: all car windows rolled down, then with just the driver's side window cracked about two inches.

"Common sense tells you if you smoke in a pretty confined space, such as a car, without ventilation, there's going to be a lot of secondhand smoke which is potentially dangerous," said Rees.

He added, "Before this study we had no idea what sorts of levels of secondhand smoke were generated. And we had no way of comparing that with other studies that have looked at secondhand smoke levels in other indoor environments like bars and restaurants".........

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October 3, 2006, 10:20 PM CT

Chemical Found In Curry May Help Immune System

Scientists observed that curcumin -- a chemical found in curry and turmeric -- may help the immune system clear the brain of amyloid beta, which form the plaques found in Alzheimer's disease.

Reported in the Oct. 9 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, the early laboratory findings may lead to a new approach in treating Alzheimer's disease by enhancing the natural function of the immune system using curcumin, known for its anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.

Using blood samples from six Alzheimer's disease patients and three healthy control patients, the scientists isolated cells called macrophages, which are the immune system's PacMen that travel through the brain and body, gobbling up waste products, including amyloid beta.

The team treated the macrophages with a drug derived from curcumin for 24 hours in a cell culture and then introduced amyloid beta. Treated macrophages from three out of six Alzheimer's disease patients showed improved uptake or ingestion of the waste product in comparison to the patients' macrophages not treated with curcumin. Macrophages from the healthy controls, which were already effectively clearing amyloid beta, showed no change when curcumin was added.

"Curcumin improved ingestion of amyloid beta by immune cells in 50 percent of patients with Alzheimer's disease. These initial findings demonstrate that curcumin may help boost the immune system of specific Alzheimer's disease patients," said Dr. Milan Fiala, study author and a researcher with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the VA Greater Los Angeles Health Care System. "We are hopeful that these positive results in a test tube may translate to clinical use, but more studies need to be done before curcumin can be recommended".........

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October 3, 2006, 10:11 PM CT

Nanoparticles To Aid Brain Imaging

If you want to see precisely what the 10 billion neurons in a person's brain are doing, a good way to start is to track calcium as it flows into neurons when they fire.

To that end, Alan Jasanoff at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT has developed a new nano-sized calcium-sensing contrast agent that is detectable by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, machines that can be used for detailed noninvasive brain imaging.

The work is reported in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Sept. 25-29.

In an application known as functional MRI (fMRI), MRI machines are already increasingly used to observe brain functions as people--or animals--undertake various activities like reading or learning. But Jasanoff notes that current fMRI technology has limitations.

"Using conventional fMRI to study the brain is like trying to understand how a computer works by feeling which parts of it are hot because of energy dissipation in different components," said Jasanoff, who also holds appointments as an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Biological Engineering Division.

The analogy is apt, because fMRI indirectly measures neural activity by detecting changes in blood flow to brain regions with increased energy requirements. But these hemodynamic changes occur several seconds after the neurons actually fire, too slow to study precise neural activity. Further, the spacing of tiny blood vessels limits the spatial resolution of the technique to volumes containing at least 1,000 neurons, too coarse for discrimination of highly specialized functional areas within a brain region.........

Posted by: Ethen      Permalink         Source

October 3, 2006, 10:03 PM CT

Food Sources Of Disease

As the recent U.S. outbreak of E. coli infections caused by contaminated spinach demonstrates, the safety of the food we eat cannot be taken for granted. Two studies in the Nov. 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online, further illustrate the point, one adding a new bacterial culprit to the mix and the other showing that use of antibiotics as growth promoters in livestock increases the risk of antibiotic resistance in humans.

In one study, researchers led by Katri Jalava, DVM, of the Finnish National Public Health Institute, and J. Pekka Nuorti, MD, DSc, of the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, traced an outbreak of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis infection among children in a Finnish town to carrots grown on a single farm. An epidemiologic investigation linked illness to eating raw carrots. Laboratory tests confirmed that the bacteria in infected children's stool samples were indistinguishable from the bacteria isolated from the farm.

The authors noted that this marked the first time that the bacterium had been recovered from an epidemiologically implicated source of food-borne illness. They pointed out that it is well known as a pathogen in wild mammals, and that the farm stored the carrots in a barn in open containers for months. "A combination of direct contact with wildlife feces during storage and cross-contamination during washing and peeling," they concluded, "are the most likely contributing factors." To prevent such outbreaks, "regulations addressing the production, storage and shipping conditions for fresh produce are needed".........

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October 3, 2006, 10:02 PM CT

Nanotechnology to Stop Weaponized Anthrax

Picture a spider web coated with sugar. But instead of luring in unsuspecting creatures, this spider web pulls in deadly anthrax spores, rendering them harmless.

Clemson University chemist Ya-Ping Sun and his research team have developed such a countermeasure strategy to weaponized anthrax, a biological agent used by a terrorist or terrorists that killed five Americans in 2001. The Clemson team's findings are published online in the "Journal of the American Chemical Society".

"For anthrax to be effective, it has to be made into a fine powder that can easily enter the lungs when inhaled. That is what makes it lethal," said Sun. "What we have done is come up with an agent that clings to the anthrax spores to make their inhalation into the lungs difficult".

Anthrax spores are covered with carbohydrates, or simple sugars, that are used to communicate with or attract other biological species. The Clemson team used carbon nanotubes as a platform or scaffolding for displaying sugar molecules that would attract the anthrax spores. Carbon nanotubes are hollow tubes made of carbon atoms. Typically one-hundred thousandth the thickness of a single human hair, nanotubes are formed from intensely heated carbon. When sugar coated, the carbon nanotubes bind with the anthrax spores, creating clusters that are too large to be inhaled -- stopping their infection and destruction.........

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October 3, 2006, 9:35 PM CT

Fisheries Linked To Decline In Albatross Population

Fishermen caught and killed about 1 percent of the world's waved albatrosses in a year, as per a new study by Wake Forest University biologists.

"If that happens every year, that is not sustainable," said Jill Awkerman, a Wake Forest graduate student who is the lead author of the study published online Sept. 26 in the journal Biological Conservation. "In a matter of decades, you could be talking about extinction".

Awkerman's research shows the waved albatrosses are unintentionally killed when caught in fishing nets or on fishing hooks, but are also intentionally harvested for human consumption.

She worked with David Anderson, professor of biology at Wake Forest, on the study. Since 1999, Anderson and his research team have studied survival rates of waved albatrosses on Española Island in the Galapagos Islands, located off the coast of Ecuador. Española is a small island where almost all of the waved albatrosses in the world nest and breed.

Identification bands from 23 waved albatrosses killed in 2005 were returned to the scientists by fishermen. The scientists put bands on a total of 2,550 albatrosses, so almost one out of every 100 birds is being killed unintentionally or intentionally by fishermen.

As part of the study, the scientists and his colleagues in Peru also surveyed 37 major fishing communities to investigate albatross interactions with fisheries in the main areas where they forage for food off the Peruvian coast. They sent observers out on fishing vessels to find out what happens when fishermen encounter the giant seabirds. The observers observed that some albatrosses became tangled accidentally in submerged gillnets. Eventhough some of the birds caught in nets could be released, fishermen often killed them for food instead. The fishermen also intentionally caught albatrosses on baited hooks.........

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October 3, 2006, 9:29 PM CT

Williams Syndrome, And Love Of Music

Children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, just love music and will spend hours listening to or making music. Despite averaging an IQ score of 60, many possess a great memory for songs, an uncanny sense of rhythm, and the kind of auditory acuity, than can discern differences between different vacuum cleaner brands.

A study by a multi-institutional collaboration of scientists, published in a forthcoming issue of NeuroImage, identified structural abnormalities in a certain brain area of people afflicted with Williams syndrome. This might explain their heightened interest in music and, in some cases, savant-like musical skill.

Professor Ursula Bellugi, director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies the central hub of this unique scientific alliance explains, "Understanding the connections between missing genes, the resulting changes in brain structure and function, and ultimately behavior may help us to reveal how the brain works".

The current study is just the latest chapter in a story that's been unfolding for quite some time gaining increasing momentum in recent years. It all started when Bellugi reached out across disciplines and assembled a team of experts under the umbrella of a Program Project from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development to help her trace the influence of individual genes on the development and functioning of the brain.........

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October 3, 2006, 9:25 PM CT

Can Math Professor Predict New York Yankees Victory?

The New York Yankees have better than a 3 in 4 chance of defeating the Detroit Tigers in their best of 5 series beginning tonight, said Bruce Bukiet, PhD, associate professor in the department of mathematical sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).

Bukiet's mathematical model, which was published in the journal "Operations Research," computes the probability of a team winning a game against another team with given hitters, bench, starting pitcher, relievers and home field advantage.

In the other American League (AL) match-up, Bukiet said that the Minnesota Twins have a 71 percent chance of defeating the Oakland A's. "So, it looks as if the AL Championship series will have the Yankees facing the Twins," he added.

In the National League, the teams are more evenly matched. The Los Angeles Dodgers have a 58 percent chance of defeating the New York Mets, while the San Diego Padres have a 62 percent chance of defeating the St. Louis Cardinals.

Bukiet, an avid Mets fan, said that winning the first game can change a team's fortunes markedly. If the Mets win the first game, their chances of advancing increase from 42 percent to 62 percent. If the Cardinals win in the first game, their chances of winning, according to Bukiet, improve 38 percent to 57 percent.........

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