Cognitive Labs

University of Washington professor Paul Ngheim has found that moderate consumption of caffeine reduced the impact of ultraviolet rays on exposed skin.

In the lab, caffeine seems to cause UV damaged cells to literally hit a figurative self-destruct button, like the climax of a typical mad scientist film, while letting normal, undamaged cells move along and go about their business unharmed.

There is even the possibility of adding caffeine to sunblock, so one could purchase a grande, SPF 50 lotion. More...

"ATR is essential to damaged cells that are growing rapidly, Nghiem said, and caffeine specifically targets damaged cells that can become cancerous. Caffeine more than doubles the number of damaged cells that will die normally after a given dose of UV," he remarked.

"This is a biological mechanism that explains what we have been seeing for many years from the oral intake of caffeine," he added.

The findings were published online Feb. 26 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

But, Nghiem added, people shouldn't increase the amount of coffee or tea they drink to prevent skin cancer. "You are talking a lot of cups for a lot of years for a relatively small effect," he said. "But if you like it, it's another reason to drink it."

Nghiem has also been experimenting with applying caffeine directly to the skin. "It suppresses skin cancer development by as much as 72 percent in mice, and human studies are moving ahead slowly," he said.

It's possible that topical caffeine preparations might one day be used to help prevent skin cancer, Nghiem said. "Caffeine is both a sunscreen and it deletes damaged cells," he said. "It may well make sense to put it into a sunscreen preparation."

Dr. Robin Ashinoff, a dermatologist and clinical associate professor of dermatology at New York University's Langone Medical Center, cautioned that these findings need to be verified before they can have any clinical application.

"This study tells me that caffeine may be a useful ingredient topically to remove ultraviolet-genetically damaged cells from reproducing," Ashinoff said. "This may help prevent the development of skin cancer."

This new treatment could be enjoyed even by members of the new Star Trek movie, where the good news is that they've gone back to the 1960's "jammie" style of uniform (now in production)



Paramount photo

Labels: caffeine, doppio, seattle, sun, worshippers

article with this pic is here, portugese

The SF Chronicle, a venerable newspaper since the U.S. Civil War, may shut down. It has been owned by Hearst since 2001, after it was decided to sell the SF Examiner, the original Hearst paper in SF. Hearst Corporation is also considering shuttering the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Another paper in the family is the Albany (NY) Times-Union. It is also possible that the parent is looking to find a new home for the newspaper operation while it retains the popular website, sfgate.com. There are much different costs and economies of scale in operating newspapers vs. operating websites...which reach far greater numbers of people, with equal or greater attentive time, for much less expenditure. And that's where the rub is with the business.

Labels: chronicle, hearst, kane, portugese

Natto is an odorous, squishy byproduct of soy - formally an enzyme called nattokinase. According to Wired Science, this may be the latest preventative nutritional item that can help maintain cognitive fitness by interfering in the buildup of protein tangles.

Thus, it joins other suggestions including anti-oxidant berries, omega-3 fatty acids from fish and flax, teas, and cruciferous vegetables, plus exercise. Researchers at National Taiwan University led the scientific investigation.

Labels: chef, gan, gao, gladstone, iron, rowe, wired

Why do animals hibernate? It might be an adaptation.

Mammals that regularly hunker down, hibernate, or otherwise hide from the world are better at weathering environmental change than are less hermitic species, according to a new study. The finding offers a window into which animals might thrive as the climate changes and habitats vanish.

"Just imagine yourself in a war zone," said lead researcher Lee Hsiang Liow, a paleobiologist at the University of Oslo. "Having some food storage and a place to avoid harsh environmental conditions would help you survive that period while there was bombing outside in your habitat."

Read more at Discovery.

Labels: hibernate, liow, oslo, proceedings

The blog gene expression tackles the issue of whether these simians are appropriate as pets.

From a genetic perspective, only a few allele differences can make a vast behavioral gap or lead to volatility. Chimpanzees also are anywhere from 2 to 5X as strong as humans for certain activities, including vastly superior arm and forearm strength...evidenced by the strange birthday cake incident of two years ago and last week's disaster, both in the U.S.

Labels: chimps, expressions, gene, seed

So much for the Afterglow. NASA image shows
orange and yellow globules of light, merging images from
Swift's UltraViolet/Optical and X-ray telescopes.

Billions and billions of light years away....in fact 12.2 billion, according to calculations prepared by Joachen Greiner's team at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, which used the GROND (Gamma-Ray burst Optical/Near-Infrared Detector) on a mountain top in Chile.

It is the largest gamma-ray explosion ever recorded, an estimated 3,000 times to 5 billion times the intensity of visible light. Detected in September in the constellation Carina, Latin for ship's keel, which is immediately contiguous with the constellations Puppis (the poop deck) and Vela (the sails) in the Southern Hemisphere. Claudius Ptolemy listed these three components together as Argo Navis, in his first century sky catalog. A report is appearing from SLAC through Eureka Alert, based on work done by NASA's Fermi telescope, GROND, and SLAC.

"If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," astronomer Frank Reddy of NASA said.

"Already, this was an exciting burst," says Julie McEnery, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "But with the GROND team's distance, it went from exciting to extraordinary."

"Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to figure them out," added Large Area Telescope Principal Investigator Peter Michelson, a Stanford University physics professor affiliated with the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

In an interesting coincidence, the star Eta Carinae, only 7,500 light years away in our own galaxy, has been flagged as the most potent nearby gamma-ray threat for Earth, and was the source of a false-supernova scare in 1843. At 100 solar masses, it is regarded as a young, unpredictable, and risky star, prone to starbursts.


Image courtesy of Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Hubble ST

Labels: carina, Chile, eta carinae, Fermi, goddard, Greiner, GROND, mcEnery, michelson, Reddy, SLAC

According to Discovery's Rossella Lorenzi, scientists have used a CT scanner ten billion times brighter than the sun to reveal the face of a singing temple priestess in ancient Egypt, who was mummified in Thebes during the Late period.

Meres-amun, "she lives for Amon," was the priestess' name. Her cartonnage coffin bore hieroglyphs cluing us in to her occupation: 'Singer in the interior of the temple of Amon.' Meres-Amun will be on the cover of Archaeology Magazine in the March/April 2009 issue. (Generating eyeballs, a byline article is titled "Drugs and Looting, the Crystal Meth Connection")

Her position would be to recite hymns, chant, consult oracles, and sing during venerations of the god and use objects including a sistrum (think tambourine), an ivory clapper, cult vessels, and a harp (see image below).


Harp, New Kingdom, Dynasties 18-20, c. 1400-1100 BC, OIM 19474
She is the first mummy to be analyzed using the powerful 256-slice Phillips iCT scanner, in the most sensitive and specific archaeoforensic X-ray conducted to date.

According to radiologist Michael Vannier, Meres-amon was 5 feet, 6 inches tall, where a 'normal' woman's height at the time was about 5 feet. Her features were regular with wide-spaced eyes, and she had an overbite. "Meresamun was, until the time of her death at about 30, a very healthy woman," Vannier said. "The lack of arrest lines on her bones indicates good nutrition through her lifetime and her well-mineralized bones suggest that she lived an active lifestyle." The findings are detailed here. A few other mummies of Late period women show terrible cavities and tooth problems, including infected abcesses that may have burst and led to blood poisoning, and death, though Meres-amun shows only worn teeth attributable to grit from the grinding stone used to mill flower being baked into the daily bread. A preference for sweets and honey amongst the leisure class often led to these dental issues.



Meres-amun was brought to the University of Chicago through the efforts of famed Chicago Egyptian archaeologist Dr. James Henry Breasted, circa 1920. Breasted and the Oriental Institute were principally financed by John D. Rockefeller. (Breasted and family at Abu Simbel, 1906 image, below)



The exhibit is profiled at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. There also is a link here to the full 135 page report (PDF) indexed on the web.

Labels: breasted, cartonnage, chicago, diva, meresamon, meresamun, teeter, vannier

The Salt Creek Oil Fields, 7 miles West of Los Angeles, 1910, near present-day Wilshire Blvd. (image: U.C. Berkeley wesite)

Going down Wilshire Boulevard toward downtown LA you might pass the offices of various record labels, the La Brea Bakery, and the infamous tar pits, where nearly a century ago, a vast trove of fossilized bones encased in asphalt were found.

It's an unusual location because a water seep or spring intersects with a geological incline that underlies a layer of crude oil, which forms a viscous trap of asphalt beneath the surface of the water. As animals came to drink, some were stuck, becoming prey for scavengers in a process that has been going on for 38,000 years.

Scientists will announce tomorrow the discovery of Zed, an almost complete mammoth skeleton found in an ancient riverbed under an old parking lot. Over tens of thousands of years, the oil seeps have changed their location by a few hundred feet. Working quickly to extract the fossils before construction begins on a new parking facility for a neighboring art museum, a total of 23 large boxes were filled with palaeontological material, the source of the name "project 23." When the announcement is made on Wednesday, February 18, it is estimated that the inventory of the associated museum will double, in what is termed a "palaeontolgical Christmas" by researcher Andie Thomer.

One third party scientist hailed the find: "Usually these things are either lost in the mixing or not recovered in the processing of the oily sand and soil they occur in," said paleontologist Jere H. Lipps of the University of California, Berkeley in an email to AP writers.

The tar pits themselves are a rare occurrence on the North American continent. They are also known in Iraq, Iran, and the Caspian sea area, but not necessarily with the palaeontological richness.

As a result of lightning storms, these oil springs would sometimes catch fire and may have served as inspiration for the fire altar in the Zoroastrian religion. Herodotus refers to the following example:

The Fire-fountain of Hit

At the town of Hit or Hid, near Baghdad in Iraq, there were famous and ancient naphtha springs: the ground was yellow limestone covered with a layer of crystalized gypsum, from which issued springs with salt or bitterly sulphurous water; various gases escaped in large bubbles from these springs, and bitumen flowing on the surface of the upwelling resembled dirty scum. Deposits of salt rimmed the springs. The bitumen issued from these springs with a peculiar sound, was scooped up with palm leaves, stored in large pieces, then diluted with lime and exported by boat. Harvesting bitumen was a local business. There were many pitch or bitumen springs in the vicinity, and naphtha springs as well.


Silver coin of Shapur II, Sassanid Shah n-shah, 240 C.E. with fire-altar)

Labels: 23, brea, la, lipps, tarpits, thomer, zed

Since we support innovation in all its forms - fighting Alzheimer's, freeing up music and film, getting out of the way so we can learn more about the universe and earth - where we live, being green, and so forth; it's disappointing to note that an exciting new twist in football, perhaps the most interesting thing since Bill Walsh's famed west coast offense, the run-and-shoot, or Al Davis' vertical passing game secret weapon back in run-it-up-the-middle 1960's, has now been declared illegal.

We certainly hope there is some kind of appeal process.

Pioneered by two crazy Californians, (coaches at Piedmont High School in Northern California, in the East Bay) the A-11 offense throws a wrinkle at defenses by making every player eligible to receive a pass, rather than just backs and receivers. It leveled the playing field, so to speak, by giving the Davids a chance against perennial Goliaths.

You can read more about the decision here. No, we don't cover sports very much here but this case of innovative creativity deserves some focus.

Labels: a-11, capistrano, davis, piedmont, raiders, riverside, run_and_shoot

Genetics expert Dr. George Church, a prominent scientist, estimates that for a $30 million investment, a living Neanderthal could be brought to life in an updated version of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park.

Only this time, it's science - not science fiction.

Who will fund the project? Here are some ideas.

Studios: An investment of $30 million could easily be recouped by a domestic feature film, international distribution fees, DVDs, VOD, and of course, merchandising. Theme park attractions also pop into the imagination like sugar plums. Of course, "America's Favorite Neanderthal" a reality TV show, could follow,

Yahoo!: A weird way to breathe vibrancy into the brand while shattering the matrix. "Don't be a Caveman, Use the New and Improved Yahoo!" Of course, Yahoo could option the rights off to the studio and be sponsor/executive producer.

Microsoft: The Caveman could make an appearance in each new Microsoft store to attract the curious.

The Neanderthal X Project. Teams of smart, underfed doctoral students compete to flesh out the best plan to resuscitate said Caveman.

These are just a few ideas.

Labels: churh, neanderthal, xprize

A new study examines atrophy in the brain, signs of early Alzheimer's, and test scores from the mini mental status exam, a 1970's questionnaire administered verbally by health practitioners to assess rough changes in mental fitness. Atrophy was detected via the work of Linda K. McEvoy, Ph.D., of the University of California San Diego, and colleagues with the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), analyzing magnetic resonance images from 139 healthy controls, 84 patients with mild Alzheimer's disease and 175 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), using volumetric segmentation and cortical surface reconstruction methods, then measured with the test scores.

Labels: atrophy, mcevoy, mmse, UCSD

Just when you thought you could get no escape from digital media - all over your home, on the phone, in your office - everywhere - innovations are coming which will increase proximity by an order of magnitude.

Tattoos that provide sensation matching an actor's emotions may be on the way, along with contact lens-like video inserts that provide a HD experience with no visible hardware.

Eventually, the signal will simply tap into the optic nerve - playing TV directly in your brain and giving advertisers unfettered access to trumpet their message. On the other hand, such technologies also can be used for immersive education.

BrainSense, here we come.

Labels: contact, eyeballs, HD, tattoo

If you don't build a strawbale house, there's always the option of an eco-treehouse. This could be something as simple as a perch in an oak tree like the Berkeley tree sitters who may have used their favored position to disrupt quarterback play. Those attending lofty heights often become philosophical or spiritual. Think Symeon Stylites or other anchorites.

A little more elaborate is this clear glass box, a showpiece of cubism, but also "green."

Labels: anchorites, cubism, stylites, symeon

That's right. We lose 500,000 skin cells per hour. They die, flake, and sluff off at an astounding pace. The skin makes up 16.6% of our weight. Scientists think the combination of skin and its special features plus running - were the two key adaptations that led to humanity's prominence, and are inter-related.



(note: human discussion starts at around 7:00 of this clip and goes on to part V)

Labels: flake, humanity, running, scientists, skin

An article from goodplum, via Pete Cashmore.

Labels: cashmore, goodplum, hulu, mashable

Gradually spreading throughout the world's oceans, Turritopsis, a tiny 5 mm creature has developed a unique response to physical stress. When conditions become bleak enough, either through injury, starvation, or environmental alteration and end of life is faced, a unique transformational process ensues. It is not known why most specimens, in the absence of extraordinary stress, simply die like other species.

Essentially, in those cases where excessive stress is accumulated by the organism, a process is triggered where its cells are empowered to convert themselves from one organizing form to another. Muscle cells may become nerve cells or even sperm or egg cells. The jellyfish turns itself into a bloblike cyst, which then develops into a polyp colony, essentially the first stage in jellyfish life.

Through asexual reproduction, the resulting polyp colony can spawn hundreds of genetically identical jellyfish, near perfect copies of the original adult.

This unique approach to hardship may be helping Turritopsis swarms spread throughout the world's oceans, according to Pia Miglietta, a researcher at Penn State.

The unique cellular conversion process of Turritopsis may offer potential to anti-aging researchers searching for chemical compounds and transmitters that can transform the aging process by neutralizing free radicals, possibly sweeping away lacunae and bugs in repetitively replicated DNA code (bad code leads to flawed cells as we age) and instigating cellular genesis. It seems to be an organism that can turn back the clock, literally morphing from an adult into a newborn state.

Article at Nationalgeographic.com

Labels: antioxidant, dna, free_radical, miglietta, penn_state, turritopsis

Peter Hoffman, a professor at McGill University, wrote a book about Claus von Stauffenburg, the protagonist of Valkyrie, which explains the philosophical and religious underpinnings of his opposition to National Socialism and Hitler.

Also, note the claim that the photos of von Stauffenburg were photoshopped to look more like Tom Cruise (advanced in various media) seems to be false.

The photo above, one of those used to advance the "photoshopped" argument, illustrates a natural resemblance - more than typically is the case between actors and the figures they portray. Furthermore, the book edition dates from 2003.

As a Prussian officer, his extended family and cousin Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg were descended from the General Johan David Ct. von Wartenburg who won fame for breaking with Napoleon in the Russian campaign and fomenting Prussian independence. A march, the Yorckscher march, was written by Ludwig van Beethoven in celebration, and retains its designation as Beethoven's 1st march...see video below...

Labels: hitler, hoffman, McGill, stauffenberg, von

Here's another article on the impact of coffee consumption on the brain, showing the benefits.

Labels: brain, coffee

That Fox and NBC revealed - during the Super Bowl-that Hulu is nothing more than an alien experiment targeting brains everywhere, designed to pacify the masses and turn all brains into cisterns of 1-minute oatmeal.

Before this happens, humanity should get one final shot at rehab, as we mentioned before.

The revelation certainly generated many eyeballs (that's the number of viewers who watch, times 2).

In the battle for eyeballs (the optical nerve is the highest bandwidth pathway into the brain) on the Internet, Frank Addante, crossing the Rubicon, was hailed as overall imperator of online media amongst private companies by Tony Perkins in NY.

Disclosure: We were quite early investors in L90, where Frank was CTO and a co-founder. It eventually reached a market capitalization of nearly $1 billion. In fact, I did the technology due diligence on adMonitor, comparing it to all extant systems. It eventually was sold to DoubleClick. The adMonitor name has now been picked up by another company.

Labels: addante, fox, hulu, nbc, rubicon