Making Science More Better For You on 12/13/07

It’s so much easier to find them when they glow in the dark. Right now they’re probably over by the glow in the dark kim chee

South Koreans clone cats that glow in the dark: officials
Dec 12 04:00 PM US/Eastern

Japanese Scientists Create Mice With No Fear Of Cats

South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday.

In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.

A team of scientists led by Kong Il-keun, a cloning expert at Gyeongsang National University, produced three cats possessing altered fluorescence protein (RFP) genes, the Ministry of Science and Technology said.

"It marked the first time in the world that cats with RFP genes have been cloned," the ministry said in a statement.

"The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as humans," it added.

The cats were born in January and February. One was stillborn while two others grew to become adult Turkish Angoras, weighing 3.0 kilogrammes (6.6 pounds) and 3.5 kilogrammes.

"This technology can be applied to clone animals suffering from the same diseases as humans," the leading scientist, Kong, told AFP.

"It will also help develop stemcell treatments," he said, noting that cats have some 250 kinds of genetic diseases that affect humans, too.

The technology can also help clone endangered animals like tigers, leopards and wildcats, Kong said.

South Korea's bio-engineering industry suffered a setback after a much-touted achievement by cloning expert Hwang Woo-Suk turned out to have been faked.

The government banned Hwang from research using human eggs after his claims that he created the first human stem cells through cloning were ruled last year to be bogus.

Hwang is standing trial on charges of fraud and embezzlement.

Mice with no fear of cats? This is how the unraveling begins.

What? Do you mean as a career path?
Study: Young adults now find porn more acceptable
Availability online may be a factor

By Kathleen Fackelmann
USA TODAY

College students, including young women, are far more accepting of pornography than their parents, a shift that might be related to easy access to porn on the Internet, a study reports today.

Most young women in the study said they personally did not use porn, but nearly half said viewing X-rated material was an acceptable way to express sexuality. Only 37% of the fathers and 20% of the mothers surveyed agreed.

The attitude of the young women and men in the study might be influenced by pornographic images that have proliferated on the Internet in the past 10 years, says Jeffrey Arnett, the editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research, which will publish the study in January.

In the 1980s, young adults had to go to a store and ask for the porn magazines, which often were kept behind the counter.

But Arnett says kids today are the first generation in which X-rated images can be pulled up with wireless technology from a hand-held device.

"We're in an age of pocket porn," says study author Jason Carroll.

Carroll, a social sciences researcher at Brigham Young University, and his colleagues studied 813 college students from six schools across the USA. The students went online and answered questions about their views on pornography.

The researchers found that young men were much more likely to use pornography: 86% reported that they viewed such material in the past year. The study also found that one in five young men said they viewed pornographic material every day or nearly every day.

But only 31% of young women reported any viewing of pornography. Only 3.2% said they saw such material weekly or daily.

The gender differences in use and acceptance raise a lot of questions, Arnett says. For example, will the college students change their attitudes toward porn as they get older and form stable relationships? Young women who say they are tolerant of viewing Internet porn might not be so accepting of a spouse who's visiting an X-rated site every day, he says.

The study also linked regular porn use with risky behaviors, Carroll says. Regular porn users were more likely to go on drinking binges and more likely to have sex with multiple partners.

Additional studies must be done to determine whether frequent porn use leads to greater acceptance of such behavior, which can put students at risk for a host of health problems, such as alcoholism and sexually transmitted diseases, he says.

Children and teenagers are regularly bombarded with X-rated and suggestive images that imply that casual hook-ups are the norm, says Sabrina Weill, editor in chief of MomLogic, a website that helps mothers deal with a variety of parenting problems.

"It's really important for mothers to have a frank conversation with their kids," she says, because children who can talk openly to their parents are more likely to go on to make wise decisions in college.

We can’t tell if she really believes that or is just paid to believe that.

Regular porn users were more likely to go on drinking binges and more likely to have sex with multiple partners. And your point is?


I’m going to keep doing this until it’s not my fault anymore

Women Persist In Plastic Surgery Treatments That Are Not Working, Research Says

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2007) — Women are more likely to persist with using creams, supplements and plastic surgery to look younger if they feel these are not yet working, new research says.

A study of 297 women aged from 27 to 65 years found that they were more motivated to persist with special diets, vitamins, creams, Botox or plastic surgery if they believed these had so far failed to make them look significantly younger.

The researchers, Professor Brett Martin and Dr Rana Sobh, found that women who used these means to look younger were trying to avoid a 'feared self' -- an image of themselves they had of appearing wrinkled and old.

They have found that when women want to avoid this feared self, they kept trying if they perceive themselves to be failing, but as soon as they began to succeed their anxiety lessened and they stopped trying.

Professor Martin, of the University of Bath, UK, and Dr Sobh, of Qatar University, found that of those women who felt that the treatments they were taking were not working, 73 per cent wanted to continue using them. Among those women who felt the treatments were working, only 45 per cent wanted to continue.

"This study is more evidence for the belief that when someone is thinking negatively about themselves, and they try and fail to improve their situation, they will be motivated to try again," said Dr Sobh, of Qatar University's College of Business.

"How women imagine themselves in the future has a strong effect on how motivated they are to keep using a product or service such as creams or other treatments for ageing.

"When people dwell on a negative future, they are motivated by fear, yet as they move away from this feared state -- say a wrinkled skin -- they become less motivated to carry on using a product or service."

Professor Martin, who has carried out a study on men and women using gyms, said: "This doesn't just apply to women -- men have a similar psychology about using a gym to get fit and look good."

Professor Martin said that as people became happier with their bodies, so they entered a more positive frame of mind. In this state, they became more strongly motivated by success and not by failure, as before, something the researchers believe marketers should bear in mind when selling their products.

Of the 297 women in the study, in the previous year:

* 37 % had used a special diet
* 61 % had used vitamins
* 48 % had taken a sauna
* 96 % had used moisturising cream
* 75 % had used anti-ageing skin care products such as lotions or gels
* 70 % had used a mini-facial such as an exfoliant or peeling cream
* 48 % had used in-salon treatments such as facials or light therapy
* 3 % had used treatments by doctors such as lasers, Botox, chemical peeling
* 0.25 % (1 person) had had a face-lift.

That mixer must be in here somewhere
Man Drinks Liter of Vodka at Airport Line

BERLIN (AP) - A man nearly died from alcohol poisoning after quaffing a liter (two pints) of vodka at an airport security check instead of handing it over to comply with new carry-on rules, police said Wednesday.

The incident occurred at the Nuremberg airport on Tuesday, where the 64-year-old man was switching planes on his way home to Dresden from a holiday in Egypt.

New airport rules prohibit passengers from carrying larger quantities of liquid onto planes, and he was told at a security check he would have to either throw out the bottle of vodka or pay a fee to have his carry-on bag checked as cargo.

Instead, he chugged the bottle down—and was quickly unable to stand or otherwise function, police said.

A doctor called to the scene determined he had possibly life- threatening alcohol poisoning, and he was sent to a Nuremberg clinic for treatment.

The man, whose name was not released, is expected to be able to complete his journey home in a few days.



Trust us, everything we told you is wrong

What if bad fat isn’t so bad?
No one's ever proved that saturated fat clogs arteries, causes heart disease

Suppose you were forced to live on a diet of red meat and whole milk. A diet that, all told, was at least 60 percent fat — about half of it saturated. If your first thoughts are of statins and stents, you may want to consider the curious case of the Masai, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania.

In the 1960s, a Vanderbilt University scientist named George Mann, M.D., found that Masai men consumed this very diet (supplemented with blood from the cattle they herded). Yet these nomads, who were also very lean, had some of the lowest levels of cholesterol ever measured and were virtually free of heart disease.

Scientists, confused by the finding, argued that the tribe must have certain genetic protections against developing high cholesterol. But when British researchers monitored a group of Masai men who moved to Nairobi and began consuming a more modern diet, they discovered that the men's cholesterol subsequently skyrocketed.


Similar observations were made of the Samburu — another Kenyan tribe — as well as the Fulani of Nigeria. While the findings from these cultures seem to contradict the fact that eating saturated fat leads to heart disease, it may surprise you to know that this "fact" isn't a fact at all. It is, more accurately, a hypothesis from the 1950s that's never been proved.

The first scientific indictment of saturated fat came in 1953. That's the year a physiologist named Ancel Keys, Ph.D., published a highly influential paper titled "Atherosclerosis, a Problem in Newer Public Health." Keys wrote that while the total death rate in the United States was declining, the number of deaths due to heart disease was steadily climbing. And to explain why, he presented a comparison of fat intake and heart disease mortality in six countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Italy, and Japan.

The Americans ate the most fat and had the greatest number of deaths from heart disease; the Japanese ate the least fat and had the fewest deaths from heart disease. The other countries fell neatly in between. The higher the fat intake, according to national diet surveys, the higher the rate of heart disease. And vice versa. Keys called this correlation a "remarkable relationship" and began to publicly hypothesize that consumption of fat causes heart disease. This became known as the diet-heart hypothesis.

At the time, plenty of scientists were skeptical of Keys's assertions. One such critic was Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. In a 1957 paper, Yerushalmy pointed out that while data from the six countries Keys examined seemed to support the diet-heart hypothesis, statistics were actually available for 22 countries. And when all 22 were analyzed, the apparent link between fat consumption and heart disease disappeared. For example, the death rate from heart disease in Finland was 24 times that of Mexico, even though fat-consumption rates in the two nations were similar.

The other salient criticism of Keys's study was that he had observed only a correlation between two phenomena, not a clear causative link. So this left open the possibility that something else — unmeasured or unimagined — was leading to heart disease. After all, Americans did eat more fat than the Japanese, but perhaps they also consumed more sugar and white bread, and watched more television.

Despite the apparent flaws in Keys's argument, the diet-heart hypothesis was compelling, and it was soon heavily promoted by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the media. It offered the worried public a highly educated guess as to why the country was in the midst of a heart-disease epidemic. "People should know the facts," Keys said in a 1961 interview with Time magazine, for which he appeared on the cover. "Then if they want to eat themselves to death, let them."

The seven-countries study, published in 1970, is considered Ancel Keys's landmark achievement. It seemed to lend further credence to the diet-heart hypothesis. In this study, Keys reported that in the seven countries he selected — the United States, Japan, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, and the Netherlands — animal-fat intake was a strong predictor of heart attacks over a 5-year period. Just as important, he noted an association between total cholesterol and heart-disease mortality. This prompted him to conclude that the saturated fats in animal foods — and not other types of fat — raise cholesterol and ultimately lead to heart disease.

Naturally, proponents of the diet-heart hypothesis hailed the study as proof that eating saturated fat leads to heart attacks. But the data was far from rock solid. That's because in three countries (Finland, Greece, and Yugoslavia), the correlation wasn't seen.


And you wonder why nobody knows nothin’ and nobody learns nothin’?

Conn. Teacher Calls Police Over Impromptu Karaoke
Teacher Barricades Herself Inside Classroom After Hearing 'Welcome To The Jungle'
ROXBURY, Conn. (AP) —

A school custodian's impromptu after-hours karaoke performance prompted a police response when a teacher thought she was being threatened over the loudspeaker.
State police say a teacher at Booth Free School barricaded herself inside a classroom Wednesday when she mistook someone singing a Guns N' Roses song over the public address system for a threat.

She was working after hours and thought no one else was in the building. Then she heard someone say over the loudspeaker that she was going to die.

Six troopers and three police dogs showed up and found three teenagers, one of them a custodian at the school, who had been playing with the public address system.

Police say one of them sang "Welcome to the Jungle" into the microphone. The song contains the lyrics "You're in the jungle baby; you're gonna die."

The teenagers were cuffed on the ground for about 15 minutes while police investigated. They were released after being questioned and state police Sgt. Brian Ness said they did not realize the teacher was in the school and will not face charges.

"These things happen," Van Ness said. "Luckily it was humorous. You kind of have a gut feeling. As soon as we got there, we spoke to the three kids. They understood."

Ah yes, the kind of person who introduces herself as an “educator.”

Please note: the earlier report that the dolphins who washed ashore were the punter and the place kicker are simply not true
Rescue Effort Under Way After 5th Dolphin Death
Red Tide May Be Cause

Rescuers rushed to the Mosquito Lagoon where authorities said two dolphins were trapped. Experts said they're investigating whether the dolphins are being affected by a worsening red tide bloom.

Earlier in the day, owners of a New Smyrna Beach condominium spotted the carcass of a dolphin and contacted authorities for help. A baby dolphin was later found nearby with its umbilical cord still attached. Experts said the adult may have expelled the baby at death. They join four others that died just one day earlier along the beach. It's unclear whether the baby will be counted as the six death because it hadn't yet been born.

Several other dead fish were also found along the shoreline with other smaller creatures. A county marine stranding unit was called to the beach to collect the remains.

The dolphins that died Wednesday were found by a ranger at the northern end of Canaveral National Seashore. They were removed by the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, based in Orlando.

Biologist Megan Stolen said the institute will test the dolphins to confirm whether toxins from red tide killed them.

Stolen said red tide is common on the Gulf Coast, where large blooms have killed hundreds of dolphins. The algae blooms usually do not make it to the East Coast.

Experts said a small population of red tide got caught up in the Gulf Stream last month and spun around the Keys and up the Atlantic coast.