Tech fix for Africa's big farming challengebefore last year, George Wainaina's tiny shop selling agricultural goods
and they will go to any lengths to protect them oe including poisoning or killing the hungry beasts.
According to Dr Charles Musyoki, a senior scientist in carnivore issues for Kenya Wildlife Service, the flickering lights is applied an ingenious design intervention that introduces a"serious risk consideration  for the lions.
and in the way people with visual disabilities handle them. Take another example: the Harrier jump jet.
In this film, ecological economist Dr Trista Patterson, lead scientist with The Nature Conservancy Dr M Sanjayan,
"We feel it's our responsibility to deal with our segment in a very aggressive way, Â Dr John Tracy,
But people like Boeing's Dr Tracey believe it will happen.""We are convinced that sustainable biofuels can provide a way to reduce the CO2 by between 60 and 80%on an airplane,
a mildly narcotic leaf that is chewed daily (and is blamed partly for a host of other problems,
let alone calling an ambulance to your home, can be a monumental challenge. Â"Ninety-five percent of the Yemeni population has received never a postal letter,
But, for those who think that TED only offers the positive, Dr Kaled Alamarie, an environmental protection scientist from the New york city Department of Environmental Protection
including hi-tech medical sensors that could, it was claimed, help extend the lives of the 97%of the Yemeni population who never make it past the age of 65.
and for thousands of years honey has been used for its medicinal value. Â Â Â Â Aside from being a healthy and natural sweetener,
honey is an antimicrobial, antibacterial, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and antifungal. Yet the production of honey is a very slow, decentralized process.
medical bills, increase their land and invest in more livestock-or hives. Shelf lifealthough beekeeping is a traditional oe
In the United states, according to the Centers for Disease Control, one third of teenage deaths are associated with car crashes.
or are addicted we simply to the new? There's no doubt that our consumption of resources from food to gadgets has risen dramatically over the past 60 years,
and much of the world seems to be in the grip of a shopping epidemic.
and calculus. Though I eventually got over my contempt for mathematics, there was a time in which
There's an old saying among people who work in public health: Tobacco is the only legal product that,
Decades of research have documented thoroughly the health problems that result from inhaling tobacco smoke oe more than a dozen different types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema and other respiratory diseases, among others.
 says Stephen Hecht from the University of Minnesota Cancer Center, who studies tobacco carcinogens oe substances that cause cancer.
 says Neal Benowitz, a pharmacologist from the University of California, San francisco. Potent drugas always with toxicology,
it's the dose that makes the poison, and a laundry list of ingredients is a poor way of assessing a product's true risk.
And, they cause similar patterns of DNA damage to those seen in actual tumours. The route of exposure also matters.
This highly addictive drug isn't a carcinogen, but it's not entirely benign either.
or promote the growth of blood vessels that bring oxygen and nutrients to tumours. But both of these claims come from studies in lab-grown cells."
"The big thing about nicotine is the addiction. Â Nicotine is a potent drug oe it's the one chemical that keeps smokers inhaling all the rest.
Nicotine's addictive properties have led to some spectacular backfires in attempts to create safer cigarettes.
and have been linked to mouth, oesophageal and pancreatic cancers. The one possible exception is snus, a Swedish product that's not unlike a"tobacco-stuffed teabag  that you stick under your lips.
Snus is billed as the reason for Sweden's low rates of lung and oral cancers
and there's a possibility that it still poses a cancer risk, Â says Benowitz. Indeed, some recent studies have suggested that snus users have a higher risk of pancreatic cancer,
and a higher risk of dying from cancer.""If you simplistically said everyone stopped smoking and used snus,
there'd be a tremendous health benefit, but the question is whether they would do that,
 says Benowitz. His concerns are that snus could make it harder for active smokers to give up their habit by fuelling nicotine addiction,
or act as a gateway drug that entices nonsmokers to start.""It's probably better than smoking,
An analysis from the US Food and Drug Administration showed that some still contained detectable traces of nitrosamines."
even after more data comes In this reflects a tension in public health circles: given smoking is so addictive and damaging,
or even ethical to reduce that harm by advocating products that are safer, but still not safe?"
and the spread of disease and introduced species. As many as 30%of all species may be lost over the next four decades, conservationists estimate.
We've also been spreading pests and diseases from place to place often causing local extinctions.
when we've introduced diseases such as flu, smallpox, HIV or malaria to places where the local people haven't developed adequate immunity.
Meanwhile, we've been artificially boosting the populations of certain select species, such as cows, dogs, rice, maize and chickens oe most
In the Galapagos, plagues of blackberry bushes originally from The himalayas are simply being controlled, whereas rats and goats that eat the food of rare tortoises are being eliminated.
Only last month, New york's Department of health and Mental hygiene, a resource for other people with bed bug infestations, had to fumigate one of its floors.
a pest management consultant in Suffolk and author of the London survey, says that UK bedbug numbers began decreasing in the 1930s, thanks to changes in social housing and public health policies,
where is the chemical cure this time around? Or, is there any relief to be found in the myriad bed bug products and services on the market, from growth regulators to heat treatments?
chemical companies must provide extensive toxicity data to prove it is safe for indoor use,
because bed bugs are known not to spread disease. Finally, there is the problem of insecticide resistance. Even DDT, the supposed miracle cure, wasn't immune to this.
Five years after the pesticide was in widespread use in the US, DDT-resistant bed bugs popped up in Hawaii;
in the 1950s and 1960s, resistant strains were found elsewhere in the US and in Japan, Korea, Iran, Israel and French guiana,
Planets, pandemics and powerthe vanishing groves Ross Andersen Aeon 16 october 2012 A superb essay on the world's oldest trees, the bristlecone pines of California,
Where will the next pandemic come from? And how can we stop it? David Quammen Popsci 15 october 2012 The best guess:
A human disease that comes from wildlife, probably from a subgroup known as RNA VIRUSES. They're highly adaptable, jump species,
I have asked eminent disease scientists and public-health officials the same two-part question: 1) Will a new disease emerge, in the near future,
sufficiently virulent and transmissible to cause a pandemic capable of killing tens of millions of people?
and 2) If so, what does it look like and from where does it come? Their answers to the first part have ranged from maybe to probably.
Their answers to the second have focused on zoonoses, particularly RNA VIRUSES. The prospect of a new viral pandemic, for these sober professionals, looms large.
They say it might happen anytime. Alpha centauri and the new astronomy Lee Billings Centauri Dreams 16 october 2012 The discovery of a new planet outside our solar system is a fascinating development,
He'd contracted bacterial meningitis and fallen into a coma in which state he'd experienced visions of intense beauty.
the conclusions the doctor drew from his sublime adventures seemed alarmingly unscientific. Fearing that something may have misfired in his own brain
Harris enlisted the opinion of a neuroimaging expert to interpret Dr Alexander's account of his experience.
if they are buying counterfeit medications. Or Safaricom'S m-Pesa service which has provided more than 15 million users in Kenya with a safe way to send money home
Here at Grameen Foundation, we also work closely with the Ghana Health Service and its network of"Community Health Workers  to be more effective and efficient in delivery of health services.
 We are exploring creative ways to extend the network of"cash-in and cash-out  points used by a mobile money operator in Uganda to reach deeper into the socioeconomic pyramid.
as we have found with our Mobile Midwife service that offers advice to expectant mothers,
and Sproxil relies on large pharmaceutical companies to cover costs of its fake drug identification service.
Over the coming years, community health workers, agricultural extension agents, financial services agents and the growing number of cash-in and cash-out points for mobile money will increasingly be empowered by mobiles.
There, on the fifth floor, one lab is trying to catch everything from fraudulent fish, to mislabeled toy cats, to illegally prepared sheep placenta in traditional Chinese medicine.
Instead, they often get parts of the animal in the form of pills, snippets of hair,
identify bird flu and figure out what plants the bees that made your honey were pollinating. Damon Little, a curator at the New york Botanical gardens has used it to see
As a result the US Food and Drug Administration announced at the end of last year it will expand its use of DNA testing in inspections of seafood manufacturers and restaurants.
The German chemist Fritz Haber invented a way of converting the nitrogen in air into liquid ammonia (NH3.
Software can then be used to remove the points above the ground, according to University of Alabama archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak,
and trialled a text-based agricultural education platform called Kuza Doctor (Kuza is the Swahili word for growing).
Ëoenot sexy'Kuza Doctor got a boost recently when it won the Young Farmers Idea Contest  sponsored by Africa Rural Connect,
 She says she will plough the prize money from Africa Rural Connect into the development of the next phase of Kuza Doctor.
Zedeck says that they hope to also sell the new Kuza Doctor tool in conjunction with an Android phone for around $75.
she calls it) to let the community help diagnose pest and disease problems and showcase their work.
"Proof  comes in many forms, from fuzzy photographs and shaky videos to plaster casts of footprints and tufts of hair.
when Sykes visited Dr Michel Sartori, the Director of the Museum of Zoology in Lausanne in Switzerland.
because the keratin oe a kind of biological plastic that encases the hair shaft-Â protects the DNA that it contains from the contamination
such as at Genbank (managed by the National institutes of health in the US). If the sequence is different to those known from existing species it may be a new species. The more DNA that is used, the more reliable the comparison.
 says Dr Murray Cox from the Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Massey University in  New zealand."
For example a"Yeti finger  that lay in the Royal College of Surgeons museum in London
and adapted for use to store everything from milk, fruit and certain medicines. In Ghana, for example, a modified design allows the mama mboga oe ladies who run market stalls oe to display her fruit
environmentalists and demographers predicting humanity's collapse through famine, wars and epidemics, if we don't check our population.
improved medicines and other rescuing remedies. Indeed, there are some examples of where population increase has led to resources being conserved better
What Bridgeman experienced in the theatre has been observed in clinics previously oe the most famous case being Sue Barry,
who according to the author and neurologist Oliver Sacks first experienced stereovision while she was undergoing vision therapy.
Her visual epiphany came during the course of professional therapy in her late-forties. The question is why after several decades of living in a flat,
The Roman physician Galen observed that images received by the two eyes are slightly different,
Depth of fieldin Bridgeman's case, he was left with a condition called alternating exotropic strabismus, often called"lazy eye Â
"It's not included in any of the standard tests that optometrists do, Â says Laurie Wilcox, a vision specialist at York University in Toronto."
Sue sought therapy after experiencing side effects from her vision problems. Most of it involved training her eyes to converge on a single point
 says Leonard Press, a vision therapist in Fair Lawn, New jersey.""Either you have a lot of eye-strain
or instability and you stop watching oe you quit. Or, if you're going to continue watching
She was driving home from the clinic when she first felt it. Space yawned open
Attention grabbingunlike most clinical settings, which primarily push the patient to recognise a disparity between the images coming from the two eyes,
3d movies use all kinds of stimuli, delivering depth in every way possible. When Levi layered monocular cues into his training exercises,
even though they're concerned about entertainment, not therapy.""It's intuitive that monocular cues, which partially stereoblind people rely on every day are essential to the quality of their 3d experience.
Make therapy fun. Press, the vision therapist in New jersey, thinks that one of the reasons Hugo changed Bridgeman's vision was
because it was able to hold his attention continuously for more than two hours. In the clinic, that can be a huge challenge."
"One of the problems with vision therapy is that it's like physical therapy, in the sense where you have to do repetitive activities
and it gets boring, Â says Press. Doctors do the best they can, but therapy techniques rely on simple geometric shapes that lack the artistry that keeps an audience engaged."
"I think it's going to be the next frontier, Â says Press.""Just like teachers are figuring out how to use ipad technology better to keep the kids engaged,
we can and should be doing a little better job giving people vision therapy targets that keep them stereoscopically engaged.
 That could mean designing better visual exercises or just sending them out to the movies.
a rapid increase in human activity driven by population expansion, globalisation, technological and communications improvement, improved farming methods and medical advances.
I've been vaccinated against killers from polio to tuberculosis to measles; I've had an inside toilet and bathroom with hot and cold running water;
a free education and health service; and hunger has been a pleasant and soon-relieved sensation rather than a chronic debilitating experience.
acid rain poisoned rivers, lakes and soils, eroded buildings and monuments; refrigerant chemicals ate away at the protective ozone layer;
and producing a deluge of toxin and plastics waste that will take centuries to degrade.
London and New york are falling over themselves to attract this new breed of label-obsessed consumer addicts.
however, inappropriate flooding of vegetation can cause greenhouse gas emissions and poison the water for fish.
Under the headline"Death Apple By His Bed Â, the Daily mail of 11 june 1954 covered the coroner's findings that this"bachelor  who"lived alone  committed suicide by means of a cyanide soaked apple
with claims that Turing poisoned it so he could mimic the one in his favourite fairytale, Disney's Snow white,
Technology and innovation has saved already us from plagues, low crop yields, water shortages, reliance on fossil fuels and more.
and charcoal contains several toxic substances, including carbon monoxide, heavy metals and tar. Some water-pipes are sold with mouthpieces containing cotton filters or a plastic mesh.
but a report by the World Health Organisation says there is no evidence that these mouthpieces reduce the harm.
which the authors say could have been the early stages of carbon monoxide poisoning. But what do we know about any long-term consequences?
but suggest that smokers of water-pipes could be at long-term risk for nicotine dependence, cardiovascular disease and even cancer.
 Professor Hani Najm, Head of Cardiac Surgery at National guard Health Affairs in Saudi arabia told me in an interview that he fears that water-pipe smoking could result in an escalation in heart disease in the Gulf states.
and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional.
or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this site.
if you're in any way concerned about your health
Citizen science enters a new eraearthquake researchers have a problem. So do scientists trying to investigate the spread of deadly malaria.
Whilst conservationists trying to get a handle on the state of illegal logging may have it worst of all.
Swiss malaria researchers need to run enormous numbers of calculations to simulate the spread of malaria worldwide;
For example, malariacontrol. net simulates the spread of the disease on computer oe helping governments decide how to invest most effectively on, for instance, bednets versus vaccines.
In 2005, The swiss Tropical and Public health Institute's 40-strong office computers struggled to run the enormous numbers of epidemiological simulations needed to get"real-world  results.
Last September, scientists reported the structure of a key enzyme that allows HIV to replicate,
making it an obvious target for drugs. The precise protein structure had stumped them for almost 15 years,
In January this year, gamers produced the first crowdsourced protein redesign oe revving up the performance of an enzyme for one of the most important reactions organic chemists use to build compounds ranging from drugs to pesticides.
However, with tiger parts attracting a high price on the Asian health potions market, poaching remains a highly profitable prospect in this impoverished region.
a pair of eyes (to fight epilepsy) for $170, and powdered tiger humerus (for treating ulcers and typhoid) for $3, 200 per kilo in Seoul, according to the conservation charity.
Dropping numbersi was in Nepal to see one of the country's estimated breeding population of 120-one of perhaps 3,
There is no evidence whatsoever that potions made from tiger parts have a medicinal effect that cannot be attained using other ingredients.
However, Noah died two days later of an infection unrelated to the cloning process. And like the guar, other attempts to clone endangered species through somatic cell nuclear transfer tended to be one-offs.
They are impervious to cancer and do not feel pain from acids. To endow ordinary lab mice with these traits Church will try to partially rewrite the genomes of mouse stem cells.
and medicine for Nature Newsif you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Future,
Meal-in-a-pill: A staple of science fictionit is a constant theme of early science fiction,
the man or woman of the future pops a pill on to their tongue, knocks it back and is satisfied almost immediately.
he eventually swallows the pill, before declaring that"the roast beef was a little bit tough  and lamenting"the good old days Â. But if you look back to these"good old days Â,
the roots of the meal-in-a-pill stem not from the fertile minds of science fiction writers,
 Patriarchal pill pastichesanti-feminist fiction of the time lampooned this fascination with the meal pill.
In the 1920s and 30s the meal pill showed up in popular media as something inevitable, with a touch of the scary.
In one, a construction worker on a ledge digs through his pockets to realise that he has left his meal pill at home;
a grocer plonks six turkey dinner meal pills on to the counter for a lady buying thanksgiving supplies;
the ladies of the house reflect on the"antique  dirty dishes, a relic thanks to the meal pill.
including the meal-in-a-pill. Rather than derive pleasure from food, it was instead something to be controlled
but sustenance for life and man must simply swallow the pill as the future of food came barrelling towards him.
and is one that has reared repeatedly its head when talking about food pills. For example in his 2006 book Meals to Come:
and hope that they will never rely on pills for food, they presume future generations will conform to whatever Ëoescience finds'oe pills, algae or other dystopian horrors.
 Tablets gain groundbut this submissive attitude disappeared in the 1960s, to be replaced by one of techno-utopianism, driven by the glamour and excitement of the space race.
In the age of space travel, meal pills were seen as the next logical step in the evolution of food oe the ultimate in efficiency and a triumph of man over nature.
whilst the emergence of dehydrated and condensed foods mean that food pills were once again back on the menu for future-gazers.
Triumphantly, the last panel of the comic declares that chemists could now set up efficient factories"to meet all the food shortages anywhere in the world Â
the promise of the 1960s seemed to be"a meal pill in every pocket Â. As with so many visions of the future,
however, the meal-in-a-pill turned from an object of fascination to one of ridicule.
and pills that could help stave off hunger, but the idea of a three course meal remains as remote as the depiction of New york in Just Imagine.
In 1936 the Jefferson city Post-Tribune ran an article recounting the views of a Dr Milton A Bridges of Columbia University.
Human beings are never going to eat pills for meals  pills can never be made to contain sufficient caloric volume.
and minerals needed for a meal in pill form. But you can't get calories except by eating food.
 It seems that humans were seduced by the idea of a meal-in-a-pill,
A variety of meal pills were served: tutti-frutti pills, a brown pill for the meat course and a miniature chocolate pellet for dessert.
The ladies in attendance were no doubt content to"play future Â, until reality came back to bite them.
Records show that after the pills they all sat down to coffee and plates of sandwiches
lower disease resistance, stunt growth and even cause blindness, which greatly increases a person's risk of death in the developing world.
fear that this genetically modified strain could contaminate and harm other vital rice strains. But rather than importing genes from another organism
researchers are now trying to find maize strains that naturally produce high levels of beta-carotene.
and their collaborators screened around 300 maize strains, and unearthed some with boosted beta-carotene levels.
Combining all that and more gives farmers precise information about variety in plant health, size and even nitrogen needs.
and avoid environmental harm by not adding unnecessary fertiliser or water, Khosla says.""But with precise input management, farmers can also influence grain yield and efficiency.
which started out as an industrial-strength bloodstain remover used only in hospitals. Doctors and nurses observed that it worked
just as well removing ordinary stains from clothing. Its maker, Henkel, now sells it to defeat oedirt, blood,
Ernest Mahler, the head of research at Kimberly-clark, had started hay fever and using the tissue as a disposable handkerchief.
Kotex arose when World war i Red cross nurses discerned that a cellulose wadding product meant for wound dressing also worked well as a sanitary pad.
when she set to work baking a preservative-free loaf of bread for her allergy-prone son. She had baked never a loaf in her life,
but she finally started turning out bread so good her family doctor prescribed it to other patients.
it might just succeed 1. Scientists Hope To Record Our Dreams After Successful Experiments Using Brain Implants A group of scientists,
Dr. Cerf with the California Institute of technology, figured out how to let users oethink images on and off of a computer screen.
The Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine uses this money game, along with brain scanning fmri machines, to literally measure
but we do need a cure for Alzheimers disease and Parkinsons disease. Recent experiments show that dead brain cells in mice (which are mammalian like us) can be regenerated with immature brain cells.
or that Suda is a lunatic (which is a common criticism of professors). 6. Brain Experiment:
The injection was marginal (a mere 0. 1%increase) but in the future, who knows? Gages breed of man/mice lab creations are known as chimeras, not unlike the geep (half-goat, half-sheep) or mule (half-ass, half-horse.
Interestingly, the use of chimeras even for scientific research into diseases is an ethical and legal powder keg.
citing issue with the resulting creature being oetoo human. http://www. msnbc. msn. com/id/10441350/ns/health-cloning and stem cells 8. Robot powered by rats brain in bizarre British experiment
and won a Nobel prize in the process. http://nobelprize. org/educational/medicine/split-brain/background. html LINK Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati b
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