Michael Mosley: Should people be eating more fat?

Written by BBC Online

Contrary to conventional advice, eating more of some fats may be good for our health, says BBC’s Dr Michael Mosley. Mosley

It really is the sort of news that made me want to weep into my skinny cappuccino and then pour it down the sink. After years of being told, and telling others, that saturated fat clogs your arteries and makes you fat, there is now mounting evidence that eating some saturated fats may actually help you lose weight and be good for the heart.

Earlier this year, for example, a systematic review, funded by the British Heart Foundation and with the rather dry title “Association of dietary, circulating and supplement fatty acids with coronary risk” caused a stir.

Scientists from Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, amongst others, examined the links between eating saturated fat and heart disease. Despite looking at the results of nearly 80 studies involving more than a half million people they were unable to find convincing evidence that eating saturated fats leads to greater risk of heart disease.

In fact, when they looked at blood results, they found that higher levels of some saturated fats, in particular a type of saturated fat you get in milk and dairy products called margaric acid, were associated with a lower risk of heart disease.

Although there were critics, NHS Choices described this as “an impressively detailed and extensive piece of research, which is likely to prompt further study”.

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The Epstein–Barr Virus Wears Chain Mail

Written by Diana Crow, Scientific American

Electron microscopy reveals a meshlike protective layer in the viruses that cause herpes and mononucleosis, among other disorders. bacteriophages

The Epstein–Barr virus and its relatives in the herpesvirus family are known for their longevity. They persist in host tissues for years, causing diseases like mononucleosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma and herpes, and are notoriously difficult to kill. University of California, Los Angeles, biophysicist Z. Hong Zhou thinks the secret to herpesviruses’ resilience may be a layer of microscopic chain mail.

Zhou and his colleagues examined the outer shells, or capsids, of a primate herpesvirus under an electron microscope and saw a pattern of interlocking protein rings. Those rings form a mesh that can withstand intense pressures and explain why herpesviruses can maintain decades-long infections.

The study, published in the October 7 issue of Structure, marks the first time anyone has been able to bring the herpesvirus structure into focus—literally. Solving the configuration of a viral capsid requires both the ability to discern individual molecules and the ability to see how those molecules fit together in the viral shell.

Herpesviruses are so big that they don’t fit within most electron microscopes’ fields of view. Trying to understand their structure by looking at atomic-resolution images is like trying to understand the anatomy of an elephant based on extreme close-ups—easier said than done. Once Zhou’s team brought the image into focus, however, they saw a familiar pattern. The interlocking mesh pattern is very similar to the structure other virologists have found in bacteriophages, a family of viruses that infect bacteria, which suggests that herpesviruses and bacteriophages may share a common evolutionary origin. “We never would have seen that connection based on genetic sequences alone,” says Jack Johnson, a virologist at The Scripps Research Institute not involved with the study who first discovered the chain mail pattern in bacteriophages. “This study shows how important it is to actually look at the structure.”

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The Biggest Methane Leak in America Is in New Mexico

Written by Gayathri Vaidyanathan and ClimateWire

Researchers using satellite data have pinpointed New Mexico’s San Juan Basin as a major source of leaking methane in the United States. methane averages

The region was responsible for 10 percent of all the methane emissions from the natural gas sector in the country, according to a study published yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters. If gas, coal mining and petroleum sectors are included, the San Juan Basin was responsible for 5 percent of the emissions.

The region emitted 0.59 million metric tons of methane every year between 2003 and 2009, the study found. That rate is three times the amount reported in the European Union’s greenhouse gas inventory, called EDGAR. It is 1.8 times the reported value in U.S. EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.

The high emissions were recorded in 2003, prior to the advent of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique used to extract oil and gas from shale reservoirs. But parts of the oil and gas system were leaking even before fracking, said Eric Kort, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and lead author of the study.

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NASA Scientists Puzzled by Global Cooling on Land and Sea

Written by AFP, newsmax.com

The deep ocean may not be hiding heat after all, raising new questions about why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years, said the US space agency Monday. sea ice drift

Scientists have noticed that while greenhouse gases have continued to mount in the first part of the 21st century, global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising along with them, said NASA.

Some studies have suggested that heat is being absorbed temporarily by the deep seas, and that this so-called global warming hiatus is a temporary trend.

But latest data from satellite and direct ocean temperature measurements from 2005 to 2013 “found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably,” NASA said in a statement.

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DOCTOR HELL and his henchmen score Nobel for the NANO-SCOPE

Written by Lewis Page, The Register

Hefty German scientist Dr Stefan Hell – and American colleagues Eric Betzig and William Moerner – have been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of super-high-res microscopes: so hi-res, in fact, that they are really nano-scopes. nano

“Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld,” enthuses the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, conferring the prestigious boffinry gong upon the brainy trio.

The Swedish science judges go on to explain just how the three eminent scientists managed to get past the justifiably presumed limit on optical microscopy, that of half a wavelength of the light frequencies used:

Two separate principles are rewarded. One enables the method stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Stefan Hell in 2000. Two laser beams are utilized; one stimulates fluorescent molecules to glow, another cancels out all fluorescence except for that in a nanometre-sized volume. Scanning over the sample, nanometre for nanometre, yields an image with a resolution better than Abbe’s stipulated limit.

Eric Betzig and William Moerner, working separately, laid the foundation for the second method, single-molecule microscopy. The method relies upon the possibility to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. Scientists image the same area multiple times, letting just a few interspersed molecules glow each time. Superimposing these images yields a dense super-image resolved at the nanolevel. In 2006 Eric Betzig utilized this method for the first time.

Today, nanoscopy is used world-wide and new knowledge of greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis.

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Sticky Stuff

Written by Dr Klaus L.E. Kaiser

What, you don’t love ubiquitous Sticky Tape, the stuff that holds everything together? In my earlier life we called it “100-mile an hour tape.” These days you find sticky tape/stuff everywhere, especially on items you don’t like it attached to. sticky tape Their embedded bar codes helps the stores to keep track of the inventory and your personal shopping needs, perhaps even helps the government to collect higher tax revenues and so forth. How could you not like Sticky Tape?

Dawn of Sticky

When I was studying chemistry some 50 years ago, the stuff accumulating at the bottom of our test tubes, usually a dark-coloured gooey stuff of sorts was quickly discarded as “schlatz” meaning undefined goo or residue. However, towards the end of my studies, our older colleagues who were then in research positions at industry would tell us that it was their task to determine the composition and potential uses of that entire residue. Surprisingly, neither I nor many of my colleagues were enthralled by the idea of becoming professional “schlatzologists.”

That was also the time when the science field of polymerization of small molecules to extremely large and gooey mixtures of all kinds of molecules expanded like balloons in hot air. The media took notice as well with great promises of then fantastic new things, like flexible windows and other previously unheard of human needs.

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Royal Society Shows Wind Turbines Cause Hearing Loss in New Study

Written by Camilla Turner, telegraph.co.uk

Living close to wind farms may lead to severe hearing damage or even deafness, according to new research which warns of the possible danger posed by low frequency noise. windfarm sunset

The physical composition of inner ear was “drastically” altered following exposure to low frequency noise, like that emitted by wind turbines, a study has found.

The research will delight critics of wind farms, who have long complained of their detrimental effects on the health of those who live nearby.

Published today by the Royal Society in their new journal Open Science, the research was carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Munich.

It relies on a study of 21 healthy men and women aged between 18 and 28 years. After being exposed to low frequency sound, scientists detected changes in the type of sound being emitted from the inner ear of 17 out of the 21 participants.

The changes were detected in a part of the ear called the cochlear, a spiral shaped cavity which essential for hearing and balance.

“We explored a very curious phenomenon of the human ear: the faint sounds which a healthy human ear constantly emits,” said Dr Marcus Drexl, one of the authors of the report.

“These are like a very faint constant whistling that comes out of your ear as a by-product of the hearing process. We used these as an indication of how processes in the inner ear change.”

Dr Drexl and his team measured these naturally emitted sounds before and after exposure to 90 seconds of low frequency sound.

“Usually the sound emitted from the ear stays at the same frequency,” he said. “But the interesting thing was that after exposure, these sounds changed very drastically.

“They started to oscillate slowly over a couple of minutes. This can be interpreted as a change of the mechanisms in the inner ear, produced by the low frequency sounds.

“This could be a first indication that damage might be done to the inner ear.

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Martini Meltdown

Written by Dr Klaus L.E. Kaiser

The Sunday Times has reached a new height of incoherence with its science editor’s, (Jonathan Leake) column on Arctic ice cap in ‘death spiral.’  Arctic sea ice

Nothing could be further from the truth. The ice cover in the Antarctic has recently reached a new all-(recorded)-time extent and the ice cover in the Arctic appears to be on a similar path. No wonder as the frost-free days in the Arctic, above 80 N have been fewer in the last two summers and the last winter in North America was brutally cold and long.

Danish Records

The best records of temperature in the Arctic are those by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) in Copenhagen. That’s not surprising as Greenland belongs to Denmark and they have a vital interest in knowing the facts about temperature and ice there. You can find their daily records, open and free at ocean.dmi.dk.

Of particular interest are their daily records of the temperature at the latitude above 80 N, from 1958 onwards and their sea ice extent with a 30{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} minimum coverage and excluding coastal zones. Especially the latter clearly shows that the Arctic sea ice extent is anything but dwindling.

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Green Delusion Exposed on Nightly Weather Forecast

Written by Professor Vincent R Gray

The climate is always changing and these changes are presented to us every night on the weather forecast. royal forecastMeteorologists provide beautiful animated charts for the local climate and for the global climate on which they plot thousands of measurements of air pressure, wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, cyclones, anticyclones, precipitation, hurricanes and many more.
 
They are in a form from which it is possible to see how both the local and the global climate will change in the next few days and weeks and it also shows how the complexity is such that forecasts beyond this begin to become impossible.

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U.S. Government claims exclusive ownership over its “invention” of Ebola

Written by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) The U.S. Centers for Disease Control owns a patent on a particular strain of Ebola known as “EboBun.” It’s patent No. CA2741523A1 and it was awarded in 2010. You can view it here. (Thanks to Natural News readers who found this and brought it to our attention.) EBOLA

Patent applicants are clearly described on the patent as including:

The Government Of The United States Of America As Represented By The Secretary, Department Of Health & Human Services, Center For Disease Control.

The patent summary says, “The invention provides the isolated human Ebola (hEbola) viruses denoted as Bundibugyo (EboBun) deposited with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”; Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America) on November 26, 2007 and accorded an accession number 200706291.”

It goes on to state, “The present invention is based upon the isolation and identification of a new human Ebola virus species, EboBun. EboBun was isolated from the patients suffering from hemorrhagic fever in a recent outbreak in Uganda.”

It’s worth noting, by the way, that EboBun is not the same variant currently believed to be circulating in West Africa. Clearly, the CDC needs to expand its patent portfolio to include more strains, and that may very well be why American Ebola victims have been brought to the United States in the first place. Read more below and decide for yourself…

Harvesting Ebola from victims to file patents

From the patent description on the EboBun virus, we know that the U.S. government:

1) Extracts Ebola viruses from patients.

2) Claims to have “invented” that virus.

3) Files for monopoly patent protection on the virus.

To understand why this is happening, you have to first understand what a patent really is and why it exists. A patent is a government-enforced monopoly that is exclusively granted to persons or organizations. It allows that person or organization to exclusively profit from the “invention” or deny others the ability to exploit the invention for their own profit.

It brings up the obvious question here: Why would the U.S. government claim to have “invented” Ebola and then claim an exclusively monopoly over its ownership?

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INVITATION TO MEET THE GREENPEACE CONVERT

Written by Malcolm Roberts, Galileo Movement

Hugh Morgan AC has pleasure in inviting you to a luncheon to hear Dr. Patrick Moore explain why he ceased to be a member of Greenpeace. patrick moore

Date: Monday 27 October 2014

Time: 12 for 12:30 pm

Place: The Australian Club, 110 William St, Melbourne

Cost: $110 p.p. (2-course lunch incl. alcohol)

Pre-payment is required:

  •          To pay via EFT: -Galileo Movement Pty Limited, National Australia Bank Ltd., BSB: 084855, Acc. No. 191696855    please include “Moore Melbourne luncheon” as the Payment Reference.
  •          To pay via PayPal – click the Paypal “donate” button on web site: http://www.galileomovement.com.au/donations.php     please include “Moore Melbourne luncheon” as the Payment Reference.

(Dr.Moore’s visit is not sponsored by the Galileo Movement Pty. Ltd, but is using its banking facilities)

Pre-payment replaces the need to rsvp

If you have any queries, please contact Mr Des Moore on (03)9867 1235 or Mr Case Smit on (07)5473 0475.

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NASA: BIGGEST CAP OF ANTARCTIC SEA ICE SINCE 1979

Written by Warner Todd Huston, breitbart.com

A new report from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) finds that the Antarctic ice cap has exceeded 20 million square kilometers, a freeze that hasn’t been seen since 1979 when the agency began to compile records. Antarctic ice sheet

“Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s,”  the NASA website reported on October 7.

NASA went on to say:

Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost an average of 20,800 square miles (53,900 square kilometers) of ice a year; the Antarctic has gained an average of 7,300 square miles (18,900 sq km). On Sept. 19 this year, for the first time ever since 1979, Antarctic sea ice extent exceeded 7.72 million square miles (20 million square kilometers), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The ice extent stayed above this benchmark extent for several days. The average maximum extent between 1981 and 2010 was 7.23 million square miles (18.72 million square kilometers).

The single-day maximum extent this year was reached on Sept. 20, according to NSIDC data, when the sea ice covered 7.78 million square miles (20.14 million square kilometers). This year’s five-day average maximum was reached on Sept. 22, when sea ice covered 7.76 million square miles (20.11 million square kilometers), according to NSIDC.

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Particle that behaves like matter AND antimatter found: Majorana fermion

Written by Iain Thomson, The Register

Scientists at Princeton are reporting the observation of Majorana fermion, a particle first predicted over 70 years ago that behaves like matter and antimatter at the same time. st microscope

The existence of such a particle was first predicted in 1937 by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, who proposed that a particle could exhibit the behavior of both matter and antimatter in such a way that the two cancel each other out and exist in a stable, neutral state.

To test this out the Princeton boffins built a ridged base plate of ultra-pure crystals of lead, and laid down a wire of pure iron one atom wide and three atoms thick on one of the ridges.

The material was then cooled down to -272°C – just about one point above absolute zero – and viewed it using a two-story-tall scanning-tunneling microscope mounted on anti-vibration buffers. Only then were they able to glimpse the elusive particle, sort of.

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Preservationists must accept extinction as a natural occurrence

Written by Viv Forbes, Queensland, Australia

In the great Permian extinction, about 250 million years ago, about 95 per cent of ocean dwellers and 70 per cent of land dwellers disappeared. endangered horses

Many species of fish, corals, reptiles, insects and plants were eliminated. This was just one of five mass extinctions. There have also been over 20 smaller ones. Dinosaurs disappeared, as did mammoths and woolly rhinos.

These were dramatic extinctions, but many species are disappearing quietly all the time – beaten by a changing environment, volcanism, meteor impacts, aggressive predators or competition for food and living space. Earth’s inhabitants and its climate are always changing. Even now, we live in an era of recurring ice ages where life ebbs and flows as the ice comes and goes.

Probably over 95 per cent of all species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct. It should not be surprising that many species now on earth are headed for the exit.

The natural world is not a still life, where even the most fragile and ill-adapted creature is guaranteed a permanent spot. Earth’s biosphere is a moving picture and every era has its dominant actor.

Species spend varying times on the stage, and then most disappear. All species can be threatened by natural changes.

Humans are part of the natural world, and have survived so far because they have adapted to changing environments.

Preservationists think that Herculean efforts should be made to preserve every dying species.

Attempting to preserve environments of the past, they lock up land, sea and mineral resources, prohibit development and oppose water conservation. And now, in a vain attempt to preserve the climate of the recent past, they are crippling our energy supplies with futile mandates and taxes designed to force-feed “green energy”.

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Climate Change Chicanery And The Federal Agency-Academic Complex

Written by Lawrence Kogan, dailycaller.com

Confident that it can, once again, breach the constitutional separation of powers and bypass Congress, this time, by recasting a complex multilateral environmental treaty as a simple executive agreement not requiring Senate approval, the Obama administration touted its climate change bona fides to the world this past week at the United Nations Climate Summit in New York. Kogan

The President crowed about how the U.S. has significantly reduced its carbon emissions since 2006, and alluded to Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) automobile and power plant greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions control regulations triggered by EPA’s controversial 2009 Clean Air Act GHG Endangerment Findings.

Apparently, the president had been misinformed about the legal soundness of those findings and the regulations they have spawned. Indeed, White House officials should have told him that many of the climate assessments cited as scientific support for such findings did not satisfy the strict scientific peer review standards imposed by the U.S. Information Quality Act (“IQA”).

Undoubtedly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”), the U.S. government’s lead climate change agency, like EPA, would prefer to bypass the IQA if possible. The IQA requires all federal agencies to ensure the quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of the scientific information that federal agencies rely upon as the basis for regulations.

As the Daily Caller and other media have reported, the nonprofit Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development (“ITSSD”) has called upon EPAand NOAA, in new separately filed Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests, to produce records substantiating that the peer reviews performed of NOAA and other agency-developed climate assessments supporting EPA’s GHG Endangerment Findings had satisfied the IQA’s strict peer review standards. Neither agency has responded substantively to these requests, despite the EPA’s assessment of an estimated document search fee of more than USD $27,000.

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Scientists find how to beat the LED battery blues

Written by Richard Chirgwin, theregister.co.uk

All the way from the battery in a pocket to the LED TV on a wall, the colour blue is a problem: blue LEDs are less efficient than the reds or greens that make up the other two primary display colours, and that’s a problem for power consumption.

Researchers at the University of Michigan are now claiming as much as a fourfold improvement in blue OLED (organic LED) efficiency coupled with a tenfold improvement in lifetime. blue PHOLED

As the university explains here, OLEDs are either fluorescent or phosphorescent – and the latter is far more efficient than the former. PHOLEDs, as the phosphorescent varieties are known, are used for red and green pixels, but not blue.

Engineering professor Stephen Forrest explains that while blue PHOLEDs have been around for a long time, they don’t live long enough for use alongside reds and greens in consumer devices. That means fluorescent OLEDs are used for the blues, and that in turn imposes a power consumption penalty.

According to Forrest, the higher energy needed to produce light at the blue end of the spectrum (compared to red or green) is the problem his research team has been working on since 2008. That higher energy can break down the molecules in the OLEDs, when enough is poured in to get light sufficiently intense to use in a display.

In a study lead-authored by Yifan Zhang with work from doctoral student Jae Sang Lee, the researchers worked to spread the light emitting energy across enough molecules to avoid individual molecules getting burned.

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