America Has The Right Type Of Mosquito For The Zika Virus – Yale Epidemiologist

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The Zika virus, which has caused a surge in infant birth defects in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years, and which has now spread to the U.S., is carried by a type of mosquito common in the Southern states, according to Dr. Albert Icksang Ko, an epidemiologist at Yale.

“The mosquito vector for Zika is genus Aedes mosquitos, of which Aedes aegypti as well as Aedes albopictus is found to infest regions of North America, such as Mexico and southern U.S,” Ko, Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at Yale, told The Speaker.

Ko, whose work focuses on the health problems which have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity, commented on the possible future of the virus:

“This is a potentially serious public health threat since it can be transmitted rapidly to regions where the mosquito vector is in sufficient abundance and because of the risk it poses to causing birth defects in newborns whose mothers were infected during pregnancy.”

zika virus
Dr. Albert Icksang Ko

The as-yet untreatable virus has been found in a half-dozen cases in the U.S. over the past two weeks. In all cases the mother had recently travelled to a Latin American or Caribbean country.

A U.S. travel warning is currently in effect advising pregnant women to avoid travel from 22 countries in which the Zika virus is common.

Ko told us that human biological responses to the virus — such as immunity in already-affected areas — are not yet understood.  “We presume that after an immunocompetent individual is infected with zika virus they will develop lifelong immunity shortly after infection as with other flavirus infectionsm but we don’t have direct evidence at this point.”

The Zika virus has been known since 1947 when it was identified in Uganda. The virus was initially found in a rhesus monkey during yellow fever research. Seven years later, in 1954, the virus was discovered in a human in Nigeria. Cases were rare until 2007 when larger outbreaks began in several Pacific Island nations.

CDC map of affected areas

Venus Flytraps: Scientists Discover How They Work

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An accumulation of action potentials is behind Venus Flytraps’ “decision” to keep closed and start producing digestive enzymes once their trap sensors are triggered, scientists at Universität Würzburg have found.

“The carnivorous plant Dionaea muscipula, also known as Venus flytrap, can count how often it has been touched by an insect visiting its capture organ in order to trap and consume the animal prey,” said Rainer Hedrich of Universität Würzburg in Germany.

The researchers wanted to understand how Venus Fly traps decide to close and how they decide they have something to digest. After all, the researchers noted, closing their traps around an object and filling with digestive enzymes is biologically costly, and sometimes their sensors are triggered by stimuli that are not prey at all — “false alarms.”

The researchers sought to test this by implanting artificial sensors in a Venus Flytrap. The sensors are thin spikes that stick out of the inside of the plant’s interior walls. They then flicked the sensors to cause the plant to close. When the scientists continually flicked the sensors, the plant became excited and began to produce the acidic digestive bath that fills their closed lobes.

By means of accumulated action potentials, the plant understands that what it has caught is in fact a struggling insect. It also understands the size of the insect by the number of the sensors it triggers.

Fruit fly

“The number of action potentials informs [the plant] about the size and nutrient content of the struggling prey,” Hedrich said. “This allows the Venus flytrap to balance the cost and benefit of hunting.”

To eat, the scientists concluded, a Venus Flytrap requires at least five contacts with its sensors. The second trigger closes the plant, the third and further triggers activate touch hormones and begin the production of digestive enzymes, and the fifth begins the uptake of nutrients.

The report, “The Venus Flytrap Dionaea muscipula Counts Prey-Induced Action Potentials to Induce Sodium Uptake,” was completed by Böhm and Scherzer et al, and was published in the journal Current Biology.

By Andy Stern

Chinese Vancouverite Aided Chinese Military In Theft Of F-35 Blueprints, Report Claims

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The Globe and Mail has caused a court “book of record” to be released from the Vancouver court in which a trial against a Chinese Vancouverite accused of spying for China is taking place. The most recent development: Two unnamed co-conspirators in the case have been found to be Chinese soldiers.

Allegedly, Su Bin, a 50-year old entrepreneur living in Vancouver, helped the Chinese cyper-spying operation steal American fighter jet plans by providing focus for the hacking efforts of the Chinese soldiers. This help was documented in intercepted emails, according to the court documents.

In the trial, based on a U.S. charge, the two Chinese soldiers were referred to only as “unindicted co-conspirators” “affiliated with mulitiple organizations and entities.” No mention was made that they were tied to the Chinese army.

The Globe and Mail-obtained court documents show that the two had been explicitly referred to as “two Chinese military officers.” The two Chinese soldiers have also been identified by U.S. authories, according to the documents, although the names are not revealed by the Globe-obtained documents.

By Devon James

Read more: Chinese soldiers implicated in U.S. military hacking case

Fracking Operation Ordered To Shut Down After Earthquake

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A Repsol fracking operation was ordered to shut down this week after an earthquake shook the region around Fox Creek, Alberta.

The earthquake measured 4.8 on the Richter scale — large enough to rattle pictures handing on walls, according to Fox Creek mayor Jim Ahn, who reported that he thought a truck had rolled by his building when the 1.5-second earthquake took place.

That was enough, though, for Alberta Energy Regulator to shut down the Repsol Oil & Gas site 35 kilometers north of the town.

Jim Ahn
Fox Creek mayor Jim Ahn

The province’s energy regulator shuts down any fracking site when there is an earthquake of 4.0 or greater magnitude in the area.

Scientists will now investigate whether fracking was the cause of the earthquake. If confirmed to be the cause, the quake would be the largest found to be caused by fracking in Canada.

Currently, the largest fracking-caused earthquake in Canada is a 4.6 magnitude quake that took place in northeastern B.C. last summer.

By Andy Stern

BC University Is Giving Students A Nap Room

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BCIT is providing a power-nap room, hoping to allow some of their students — already sleeping in other parts of the school — to boost their energy levels.

The sleep room, launched Monday, is available to book for hour periods between 12:30 and 5 p.m. four days per week — Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Students can check bed availability at any time on the university’s online portal.

There are 10 beds in the low-lit room — which is also a racquetball court — and a station where students can pick up clean pillow cases and sanitizer. Students are required to spray and wipe the vinyl beds after use.

The nap room has a set of rules provided by the BCIT Student Association. Cell phone noise and talking is prohibited in the nap room and beds are not allowed to be pushed together.

The room was initiated after BCIT authorities noticed students sleeping all over the campus and realized that their students must be very tired. In addition to the benefits of alertness during classes, the school also hopes to cut down on driving accidents. Many BCIT students commute to the university from significant distances.

BCIT nap room schedule
Students are already using BCIT’s new nap room

The new nap room will be available to students for one booking per week “to start,” according to the BCITSA, and they have plans to eventually allow one booking per day.

BICTSA
Photos: BCITSA

Agricultural Researchers Propose Agri-CERN, Europe-Wide Community Of Shared Research And Equipment

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ECOFE (European Consortium for Open Field Experimentation), a network of agricultural resources at various locations around Europe, has been proposed by a group of scientists in order to do for agricultural science what CERN has done for nuclear research.

The organization would be a community of research stations across Europe — from an outpost in Sicily to a field in Scotland. Among the benefits looked forward to by the researchers behind the project are the ability to study a wide range of soil properties, atmospheric conditions, and temperatures, and, prospectively, the ability to finance more expensive equipment, which would be shared.

For example, open-field installations that allow researchers to study the effects of artificially elevated levels of carbon dioxide, would be a shared cost and a shared tool.

“Present field research facilities are aimed at making regional agriculture prosperous,” said co-author Hartmut Stützel of Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. “To us, it is obvious that the ‘challenges’ of the 21st century–productivity increase, climate change, and environmental sustainability–will require more advanced research infrastructures covering a wider range of environments.”

The benefits of community research are also associated with potential downsides: researchers would have to sacrifice some of their scientific autonomy in order to focus on targeted research goals.

“It will be a rather new paradigm for many traditional scientists,” said Stützel but I think the communities are ready to accept this challenge and understand that research in the 21st century requires these types of infrastructures. We must now try to make political decision makers aware that a speedy implementation of a network for open field experimentation is fundamental for future agricultural research.

The report is titled “The Future of Field Trials in Europe: Establishing a Network Beyond Boundaries.” It was completed by Drs. Stutzel, Nicolas Bruggermann, and Dirk Inze, and was published in the journal Cell.

By Andy Stern

Chimpanzees Require “Trust” Of Friends

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Chimpanzees played the trust game to find out the basis of individual preference for other chimps

Trust is the foundation of close relationships in the world of chimpanzees, according to anthropologists at Max Planck Institute.

“Humans largely trust only their friends with crucial resources or important secrets,” said Dr. Jan Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “In our study, we investigated whether chimpanzees show a comparable pattern and extend trust selectively toward those individuals they are closely bonded with. Our findings suggest that they do indeed, and thus that current characteristics of human friendships have a long evolutionary history and extend to primate social bonds.”

Previous studies of chimpanzee friendships had shown that the animals were attracted to sociable partners for friendships, and that they extended their favors to those they preferred. The Max Plank researchers wanted to know if the basis for this preference was “trust.”

Research situation of chimps
Research situation of chimps

In order to find out, the researchers spent five months at Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya. They set up an arena where the Sweetwaters chimps could play “the trust game” — a game in which two separated chimpanzees get to decide if their partner gets a delicious treat or a less savory one. The partner in turn has the opportunity to share some of their treat back with the one who pulled the rope that opened the door to the treat.

The best case scenario is considered to be that the chimp with the rope will provide the other with the tasty treat, and the other will share some with the first chimp.

Before the researchers put the chimps in the experimental setting, the researchers observed the chimpanzee group to decide for each chimp which other animal was their favorite and least favorite. These two would be paired up against the first chimp in the game.

Each chimp played 12 rounds of the game with each their favorite and least favorite group member.

The result was that chimps were ” significantly more likely to voluntarily place resources at the disposal of a partner, and thus to choose a risky but potentially high-payoff option, when they interacted with a friend as compared to a non-friend.”

The researchers interpreted this finding to mean that chimpanzees show much greater trust when it comes to friends than non-friends.

“Human friendships do not represent an anomaly in the animal kingdom,” Engelmann said. “Other animals, such as chimpanzees, form close and long-term emotional bonds with select individuals. These animal friendships show important parallels with close relationships in humans. One shared characteristic is the tendency to selectively trust friends in costly situations.”

The report, “Chimpanzees Trust Their Friends,” was completed by Drs. Jan Maxim Engelmann and Esther Herrmann and was published in the journal Current Biology. View the research paper at this link.

By Andy Stern

Islamic Extremists Killed 27,000 People In 52 Countries In 2015

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In the previous year, Islamic violence took the lives of over 27,000 people and critically injured another 26,000, according to an extremism watch organization that tracks Islamic attacks. 2015’s attacks took place in 52 countries worldwide, and included 475 suicide attacks.

The Religion of Peace, an organization that collects information about attacks motivated by Islamic ideas and tallies various statistics, published their yearly figures Friday on their website.

The December figures — 225 deaths and 273 critically injured in 47 separate attacks, brought the totals for the 2015 year to 27,435 deaths and 26,144 critically injured in 2,849 separate attacks in 52 countries.

The numbers provided by TROP are actually lower than what the total deaths would be, the organization’s editor Glen Roberts told The Speaker, because the organization relies on news reports for their tallies. Not all deaths are reported in the news, and deaths that occur after news has been published are usually not included.

2015 Islamic Violence numbers

The numbers have remained fairly consistent since TROP’s first entries, which date back to the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001.

Read more: Islamic terrorists have committed 25,000 separate violent acts worldwide

“It looks like there have been only 12 days since the beginning of 2005 without at least one Islamic attack,” Roberts noted.

There are an average of 5 separate attacks every day that result in at least one death, motivated by Islamic ideas, according to TROP. The numbers tallied do not include deaths like honor killings, although the group does monitor these incidents as well.

Sources: TROP

Bangkok Police’s New Year’s Gift: Traffic Fines Reduced To 100 Baht

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Bangkok Metropolitan Police have announced a “New Years Gift” to the city: traffic tickets will be reduced to just 100 baht starting today.

The gift has a serious side: the metro police are dealing with a massive backlog of unpaid traffic tickets. Because the repercussions associated with not paying these tickets are usually insignificant, many people simply leave them unpaid.

The gift doesn’t extend to all offenders, however. Traffic crimes that affect other people are not included in the deal. These crimes include DUIs, illegal parking, and driving on sidewalks.

However, crimes such as not wearing a helmet on a motorbike or not wearing a seatbelt in a car are eligible, so long as the fine was originally for less than 1,000 baht.

The traffic fine promotion will end Jan. 15, 2016, after which time all traffic fines will return to their regular rates.

By Andy Stern

Polish Mass Political Assassination Plotter Sentenced

Brunon Kwiexien
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For plotting to blow up an in-session Parliament, Polish former university professor Brunon Kwiexien has been sentenced to 13 years prison.

On Monday a Polish court handed down the sentence to the former Krakow University of Agriculture chemistry professor.

Kwiecien, 48, an unaffiliated nationalist, cited as motives for the crime, planned in 2012, a belief that his country was headed in the wrong direction and the issue of what he referred to as foreigners holding government positions.

Kwiecien did not deny his plans when arrested.

When the police were tipped off, they found four tonnes of explosives in a car which Kwiecien planned to use to kill the president, prime minister and others during a hearing on the budget.

By Andy Stern

Facebook Open Sources Its AI Server

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Facebook’s AI hardware is now, like its software, open source, joining a broad movement towards outsourcing the world’s artificial intelligence intelligence. Facebook also stated it hoped independent AI technicians would develop deep learning tech superior to what the company currently uses, and that it would buy this technology.

The tech giant has developed deep learning technology, which it uses for Facebook-related functions like identifying faces in pictures and curating news feeds, but can also apply to a wide range of computing tasks.

Through the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s custom hardware designs — a GPU-based server called “Big Sur” — will join Google’s and others’ open source deep learning designs. The hope is that more workers will devote themselves to these projects and become familiar with using the technology.

Deep learning technology involves building computers that function similar to the neural networks of animal brains. The computers store masses of data, form neural networks between the data, and draw inferences from the data based on need.

Yann LeCun, head of the Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research lab, commented on the move to make the company’s AI open source, “This is a way of saying, ‘Look, here is what we use, here is what we need. If you make hardware better than this, we’ll probably buy it from you.'”

By Andy Stern

Canada Selling Bottled Air To China

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A Canadian company is now selling bottled air to China, and supplies are selling out.

Vitality Air, and Edmonton-based company, is bottling air from Banff and Lake Louise, world-famous Canadian vacation destinations. The hand-bottled air is then shipped around the world.

For around $13 per bottle, Chinese are buying stocks out.

“We shipped a sample of 500 [bottles] to China,” Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam said this week. “They sold out within a week-and-a-half.”

The company already has sold 1,000 of their next shipment of 4,000 bottles to China as well.

The air is being sold in orders of 10 bottles, according to the company, which markets their product on China’s eBay equivalent, Taobao.

India has also started to buy Vitality’s air.

The company is having a hard time keeping up with demand since starting selling online last June, due to the hand-bottling involved in their product.

Each bottle contains 3 liters of air, which equates to approximately 80 breaths. In a relaxed state, breathing steadily, it would take 4 minutes to breathe the air contained in one can, although consumers may prefer to draw out their enjoyment by sipping at the air over a longer period of time.

By Andy Stern