Chronic Arguing With Your Spouse May Raise Your Heart Disease Risk
Science Daily — Individuals whose close relationships have negative aspects, such as conflict and adverse exchanges, appear to have an increased risk of heart disease than those with more positive close relationships, according to a new report.
"An extensive body of research shows that social relations are associated with better health and reduced risks of cardiovascular disease," the authors write as background information in the article. "However, contradictory findings on the health benefits of structural support and the limited protective effect of marital status against cardiovascular disease among women have stimulated further scientific inquiry into the quality of social relationships."
Roberto De Vogli, Ph.D., M.P.H., and colleagues at University College London studied 9,011 British civil servants who completed a questionnaire about negative aspects of their close relationships either between 1989 and 1990 or between 1985 and 1988. Although the questionnaire assessed up to four close relationships, the researchers focused specifically on the primary close relationship. In addition, participants answered questions about how much emotional and practical support they received from that person on a regular basis. They were then followed for an average of 12.2 years to see if they experienced fatal or non-fatal coronary events, including heart attacks or chest pain.
Of the 8,499 individuals who did not have coronary heart disease at the beginning of the study and who provided sufficient information for the analysis, 589 reported a coronary heart disease event. After adjusting for other factors that influence heart disease risk--such as sociodemographic characteristics and health habits--those who experienced a high level of negativity in their close relationships were 1.34 times more likely to experience a coronary heart disease event than those with a low level of negative close relationships.
For breakfast I'll have the cold, dry toast with a side of harangue.
Dust in the wind—Cosmic Division
According to AP—astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to answer the cosmic question of where we come from.
Planets and much on them, including humans, come from dust -- mostly from dying stars. But where did the dust that helped form those early stars come from?
A NASA telescope may have spotted one of the answers. It's in the wind bursting out of super-massive black holes.
The Spitzer Space Telescope identified large quantities of freshly made space dust in a quasar about 8 billion light years from here.
Astronomers used the telescope to break down the wavelengths of light in the quasar to figure out what was in the space dust. They found signs of glass, sand, crystal, marble, rubies and sapphires, said Ciska Markwick-Kemper of the University of Manchester in England. She is the lead author of a study that will be published later this month in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Dust is important in the cooling process to make stars, which are predominantly gas. The leftover dust tends to clump together to make planets, comets and asteroids, said astronomer Sarah Gallagher, a study co-author at the University of California Los Angeles.
"In the end, everything comes from space dust," Markwick-Kemper said. "It's putting all the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out where we came from."
Astronomers figure that the planets that formed in the past several billion years -- and those away from quasars -- came from dust that was belched from dying stars. That's what happened with Earth.
That still leaves a question about where the dust from the first couple billion years of the universe came from, which helped form early generations of star systems.
"It's formed in the wind," of the black holes, Markwick-Kemper said. Gas molecules collide in the searing heat of the quasar, which is thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, and form clusters.
"These clusters grow bigger and bigger until you can call them dust grains," she said.
Scientists who weren't part of the study hailed the work.
Cornell University astronomer Dan Weedman, the former director of NASA's astrophysics division, said the study was an important step in answering a fundamental mystery of the early universe.So that stuff under the bed, is that a universe or a black hole?
So, what should we call you, meatgans?
Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets
Science Daily — A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency, Cornell researchers suggest.
Even though a moderate-fat plant-based diet with a little meat and dairy (red footprint) uses more land than the all-vegetarian diet (far left footprint), it feeds more people (is more efficient) because it uses more pasture land, which is widely available. This deduction stems from the findings of their new study, which concludes that if everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally. With today's high-meat, high-dairy diet, the state is able to support directly only 22 percent of its population, say the researchers.
The study, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, is the first to examine the land requirements of complete diets. The researchers compared 42 diets with the same number of calories and a core of grains, fruits, vegetables and dairy products (using only foods that can be produced in New York state), but with varying amounts of meat (from none to 13.4 ounces daily) and fat (from 20 to 45 percent of calories) to determine each diet's "agricultural land footprint."
They found a fivefold difference between the two extremes.
"A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food," said Christian Peters, M.S. '02, Ph.D. '07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. "A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres."
"Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use," said Peters.
The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay. A large pool of such land is available in New York state because for sustainable use, most farmland requires a crop rotation with such perennial crops as pasture and hay.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of meat and eggs a day in 2005.
"In order to reach the efficiency in land use of moderate-fat, vegetarian diets, our study suggests that New Yorkers would need to limit their annual meat and egg intake to about 2 cooked ounces a day," Peters said.
The research was supported in part by the National Research Initiative of the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service.
Lacto, ovo, nono...goddam it, that little frog was right. It's not easy being green, let alone coming up with a name for yourself.
Who cares?
Apathy halts Nobel winner's talk
Professor Sir Martin Evans was knighted in 2003
A day after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, a talk on stem cell research by Sir Martin Evans has been cancelled because of a "lack of interest".
The event, due to be held at Cardiff's Techniquest, was organised before he was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday.
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council had arranged the event six weeks ago.
It will now be re-scheduled for sometime in the new year.
The public discussion on Wednesday was to feature Sir Martin and Dr Nick Allen, both from Cardiff University.
A similar discussion went ahead at Tehniquest in October 2006 involving the same people.
Sir Martin, a professor of mammalian genetics, is considered by many the chief architect of stem cell research.
He was knighted in 2003 and received the Lasker award - the American equivalent of the Nobel Prize for medicine - in 2001.
He is also a fellow of the Royal Society and fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
The 66-year-old scientist helped show how the cells that form all the tissues in a mouse's body - embryonic stem cells - can be removed and grown separately in the lab.
He also helped create a method to alter genes in mice.
Dr Christine Hauskeller from the University of Exeter was also expected to talk about the ethical and societal issues that stem cell science raises.
Clearly the talk wasn't promoted correctly. He should have found a way to work in the words beer, babes and hot.
But how did they get the olive down that little tube?
Doctors save man with vodka drip
Australian doctors have kept an Italian tourist alive by feeding him vodka through a drip for three days, medical staff in Queensland say.
The 24-year-old man, who had swallowed a poison in an apparent suicide attempt, was treated while in a coma.
Doctors set up the drip after running out of medicinal alcohol, used as an antidote to the poison.
Medical staff said the patient had made a full recovery, and the hangover had worn off by the time he woke up.
He had been taken to hospital in the northern Queensland town of Mackay after swallowing ethylene glycol - a poison contained in anti-freeze.
"The patient was drip-fed about three standard drinks an hour for three days in the intensive care unit," Dr Todd Fraser said in a statement.
"Fortunately for him he was in a medically induced coma for a good portion of that. By the time he woke up I think his hangover would have well and truly gone."
He spent 20 days in hospital before being discharged.
“Look pal, the party’s over. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimple
Polish police end nun rebellion
Polish police have evicted a group of defrocked Roman Catholic nuns from a convent they were occupying in defiance of the Vatican. The nuns have been defending their charismatic mother superior.
Bailiffs used ladders to scale the walls of the convent in the eastern town of Kazimierz Dolny, and opened the gates to let in some 150 policemen.
The police found some 65 nuns, a baby and a Franciscan monk in the building.
The nuns resisted attempts to replace their mother superior, who claims to have seen visions of the Holy Spirit.
Last year, the Vatican expelled 10 of the nuns from their order - the Congregation of the Sisters of Bethany.
However the sisters remained and were later joined by a number of novices.
A Church spokesman has likened the group to a sect, and said the nuns had been subjected to mental manipulation.
A Polish court earlier this year approved a request from the Bethany order to evict them.
On Wednesday police in riot gear found the nuns and their mother superior inside the convent playing guitar and singing religious songs, a police spokesman said.
Police also found one woman with a baby, whom they later took to hospital.
The women were seen being escorted from the convent.
Franciscan monk Roman Komaryczko, the nuns' alleged spiritual leader, was led away in handcuffs.
Visions are one thing, but tying up prime real estate is really unacceptable.
Human’s aren’t all bad, once you get used to the smell
Moose use humans to elude predators
Accordin to a story on MSNBC, in a strange new twist of nature and adaptability, moose now apparently can take advantage of human development and use it as a shield against predators.
When it's time for pregnant moose to give birth in Yellowstone Park, they move closer these days to roads, and therefore people, to protect their newborns from bears, scientists say.
Wildlife Conservation Society researchers figured this out by tracking moose and brown bears in Yellowstone Park for 10 years, from 1995 to 2004. Brown bears can prey heavily on moose calves.
Over that decade, scientists found the number of bears increased rapidly, apparently due to conservation efforts. At the same time, pregnant moose apparently moved a whopping 400 feet (125 meters) closer, on average, to paved roads each year to give birth.
"The closest moose we had give birth was 50 yards from a road," Wildlife Conservation Society biologist Joel Berger told LiveScience. Normally moose stay at least 1,000 yards (1 kilometer) away from roads to give birth.
Brown bears typically shy away from human traffic, avoiding areas within about 1,600 feet (500 meters) of roads in Yellowstone and elsewhere.
"We as humans have unwittingly provided all kinds of de facto protection for these moose without trying to," Berger said. He detailed his team's findings online Oct. 9 in the journal Biology Letters.
Similar examples of prey species using humans as cover from carnivores have occurred in Kenya, where vervet monkeys stay close to ranger stations to avoid leopards, and in Nepal, where axis deer have evaded tigers by lingering near a tourist center.
"These animals have learned to use us to their benefit," Berger said. "I'm not saying that people shouldn't visit parks, but we have to recognize there are subtle and important effects of the infrastructure we put in place that we are only starting to be aware
of.
“The only problem with the humans is that they all think they’re comedians. They keep asking me where that little squirrel is and what about Boris and Natasha. Like I never head that one before.”
Yeah, I know your kid almost died, but what about me?
Cop who fell on the job sues family of baby who almost drowned
An officer who went to help when a baby fell in a pool says she slipped in a puddle.
CASSELBERRY - In January, 1-year-old Joey Cosmillo wandered into the backyard and fell into the family pool. When his mother hauled him out, he wasn't breathing. Rescuers were able to bring him back to life, but he suffered severe brain damage and cannot walk, talk or even swallow.
Now, his family faces another burden: One of the rescuers, Casselberry police Sgt. Andrea Eichhorn, is suing, alleging the family left a puddle of water on the floor that afternoon, causing her to slip and fall.
The boy's grandparents, named in the suit, are mystified and angry.
"The loss we've suffered, and she's seeking money?" said Richard Cosmillo, 69, the boy's grandfather. "Of course there's going to be water in the house. He was sopping wet when we brought him in."
Eichhorn last week sued Richard Cosmillo; his wife, Maggie Cosmillo; and the boy's mother, Angela Cosmillo, accusing them of negligence. They were careless, according to the suit, and allowed the home they shared to become unsafe.
As a consequence, Eichhorn broke her knee, something that kept her off the job for two months, according to police Chief John Pavlis.
Joey now lives in a nursing home five miles away, where he gets 24-hour care. He breathes through one tube. He's fed through another.
"He doesn't have any abilities -- any," his grandmother said. "He can't sit. He can't swallow. He can't eat. We're not even sure he can see."
She and Richard Cosmillo are the boy's legal guardians. For the first two months after the accident, she remained at his bedside, never once going home.
She has now gone back to work at a furniture store, and her husband keeps watch on the boy. He visits every day.
"This thing," Maggie Cosmillo said, "has destroyed our lives forever."
The baby's mother was the only one home Jan. 9, when the boy slipped out of the house and wound up in the pool, according to a police report.
She plunged in and dragged him out, carrying him inside, down a hallway and into a bedroom. She also called 911.
Eichhorn arrived a few minutes later. As she stepped into the room where rescuers were working on the boy, she slipped and went down on one knee, then stood back up, according to Richard Cosmillo.
Later that day, she went to an emergency care center and eventually to an orthopedist, according to her attorney, David Heil.
While she was on medical leave, Pavlis said, the city's insurer paid her medical bills and provided disability checks.
Eichhorn, a 12-year department veteran, would not discuss the suit. Her attorney said those benefits, paid by the city's workers' compensation carrier, were not enough. The suit seeks an unspecified amount of money.
Eichhorn, he said, is a victim. Her knee aches, and she will likely develop arthritis.
If the Cosmillos had made their pool baby-proof, police would not have been called to the scene, there would have been no water on the floor, and Eichhorn would not have hurt herself, he said.
"It's a situation where the Cosmillos have caused these problems, brought them on themselves, then tried to play the victim," he said.
The department's personnel file on Eichhorn, who earns $48,000 a year, is filled with letters of praise. She has worked as a prostitution decoy and a hostage negotiator, and once wrestled a box of razor blades away from a person threatening suicide.
It seems she took that work as a decoy hooker to heart.
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