Image via Wikipedia

Eating less, at least eating less of some foods, seems to prolong lives, but how? New research funded by the US Department of Agriculture indicates that restricted-calorie diets give a boost to your immune system.

In the study, 46 pudgy but not fat people aged 20 to 40 were fed diets that were either 30% calorie-restricted or 10% calorie-restricted for six months. The diet actually increased the function of T-cells, those rock stars of human immune systems.

Aussie Naomi Watts is perfect and she'll probably outlive us all. Image by Josh Jensen via Flickr

Let’s say you’re a single, straight woman seeking the best odds of finding a long, long, long-term relationship. Wait for the ash cloud to thin and head for Iceland.

And if you’re male and want a lovely mate with the statistically best chance at longevity? Move to Cyprus.

Men aged 15-49 and women in the same bracket have the lowest risk of death before reaching 60 in, respectively, Australia and Cyprus. That’s according to a new study led by Dr. Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the University of Washington.

As a global average, mortality rates over the last 40 years have fallen 34% for women and 19% for men. However, death rates for pretty much anyone living in countries suffering heavily from HIV infection (a lot of African nations, for example) and/or social upheaval (former Soviet nations), have increased, according to the study.

Sub-Saharan Africa death rates have reached levels not seen in the so-called rich countries since 1751 in Sweden.

Interestingly, the risk of dying for men worldwide actually rose from 1990 to 1995, when it started being a little safer to be male again. Mortality risks kept falling through the four decades for women.

In terms of the pace at which mortality rates are declining, Aussies of any gender are improving faster than just about anyone. South Korean women also are experiencing particularly steeper mortality rates.

The report’s summary made available to reporters is all but mute about mortality and the US. It notes disparagingly that the pace at which female death rates have fallen annually is less than 1.5%.

The entire report is scheduled to be posted later tonight at TheLancet.com. Here’s hoping you’re around to take a peek.

Look at the little guy doing what we should do: Just pipe down and adapt.

What’s all the fuss? When garbage and pollution are everywhere, that’ll be the new natural.

Take this snippet from (the thoroughly excellent) ClimateShifts.org:

The discussion on the problem of marine litter takes me back to an incident in Sulawesi Indonesia where school kids doing a beach clean thought that the litter was normal and started clearing up all the organic debris instead of the rubbish. Where do you start?

via Climate Shifts » Blog Archive » Marine pollution in SE Asia.

The author, Richard Unsworth answers his own question. Pick up the shells, don’t recycle them, and throw them in a landfill until the landfills overflow with all the stuff that tree-huggers love so much.

Unsworth even throws in a photo that totally makes my case — a hermit crab is using a broken soda bottle as a home. That crab doesn’t see problems. He’s got a brain half the size of a mouse poop, and the only thing he sees is opportunity.

And the crab’s doing us a favor. Of course, that little guy isn’t doing this for us, but just the same, no one’s going to step on that broken bottle. I mean, it’s moving!

Assisted colonization can have ugly side effects, a la Battlestar Galactica. Image by Tom (Todas con licencia CC, Atribución) via Flickr

Scientists perhaps viewing climate change as an inevitably, are drawing up plans to move endangered animal populations from their home turf to areas expected to become more hospitable to the critters.

Altruistic? To be sure. Practical? Perhaps for a few, narrow niches. Dangerous? Very.

In the journal Conservation Letters, University of Notre Dame researchers have proposed “assisted colonization” as one way of saving species doomed by climate change.

Sinister as it sounds, assisted colonization is part of the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Still, it’s difficult to hear the phrase and not think of all the bio chaos created by intentional and accidental species introductions. Or, for that matter, history’s many human forced marches resettlements.

Adding a species is the same as extinction in at least one respect: What seems like a tidy, contained event will have uncountable effects and side effects.

One side effect of assisted colonization will be political. If scientists can move an endangered mayfly to a better habitat, commercial interests no doubt will want to use the same logic and policy to move a frog from land coveted by developers, for example.

Saving every species is a lofty goal, while saving every species that can be saved practically is more realistic. In defining practicality, we need to make sure we aren’t masking our guilt with actions that create more chaos.

These superbugs are booze hounds!

How many times has someone on a TV show or in a movie cleaned a bloody wound with a handy bottle of liquor? A few. But what if doing that ended up making the person — and maybe even the improvising doctor — very, very sick?

Get ready for life with a superbug that is so badass that it doesn’t flee from the cleansing power of alcohol. No, Acinetobacter baumanni drinks it up like a Republican fundraiser in a bondage club.

A. baumanni used to be a fairly ordinary bacteria kept in check by antibiotics. But like other once-cowed pathogens, A. baumanni has grown resistant to antibiotics. (Check out the chart at the bottom to see where it attacks you.)

She might be a celebrity to us, but to A. baumanni, Lindsay looks like spring break.

And if researchers detect a particularly slurred and nasty attitude from this bug it might be because A. baumanni gets more virulent in the presence of ethanol according to the journal PLoS Pathogens. As we all know, ethanol is the basis for the demon drink.

Of course this means a rather long list of celebrities would be their own disease vector after the bars close. Stay away, Lindsay Lohan.

These are just some of the ways superbugs infect.

Duckie wants just one more shot at Andie. Image via Wikipedia

Fifty years ago, three researchers in Malibu, Calif., were arranging on a lab table some optical devices that, when powered up, would be the world’s first working laser.

It was the culmination of four decades of work around the world, and the realization of uncounted science fiction fever dreams. This has me wondering what the three scientists — Theodore Maiman, C.K. Asawa and I.J. D’Haenens — were thinking when their experiment was successful.

For that matter, I wonder if people today realize how integral lasers are to their everyday lives, and how much more of an impact it’s likely to have in the near future.

"mleak" has posted some of this outstanding work. See more.

Anyone could have predicted that a researcher from Carnegie Mellon would propose using lasers to burn animals’ images into slices of bologna. Could there be a better way of telling people their bologna is made of beef or pork or whatnot? Better, I guess, than printing those words on the label?

But the laser is as involved in our lives as is steel. In fact, the people of Nibiru could show up in 2012, take all the steel on the planet, and we’d be fine. Take laser technology, though, and we’d be living “Lord of the Flies.”

Here’s a quick list of pastimes that lasers have made possible, and without the horrors of a single economic bubble (Take that, Internets). In some cases, laser technology has since been usurped, but often it was the laser that created the context that resulted in the new technologies.

* Web life. Photonics directly related to the first laser allowed computers to grow from copper-wire networks linking handfuls of business offices to a network that reaches out to the orbiting space station.

This is one form holograms take today.

* Art 1. Holograms are fantastic optical illusions that also act as wax seals in securing objects as mundane as credit cards. And soon, we’ll be storing information holographically, which will create a new high-water mark for how much information you can carry in your pocket.

* Art 2. CDs changed consumers and producers alike. Portable, long-lasting, high-quality music exposed virtually everyone in the First World to influences and cultures at a pace the left radio stations rubbing their disbelieving eyes. CDs are moments away from irrelevance, but it’s hard to think that MP3 players would be here today if we were all still carrying awkward tape players that play fragile cassettes.

A scene from a Pink Floyd laser show

Art 3. It’s not so much of a thing now, but there was a time when high-schoolers across this great nation couldn’t get enough of laser light shows. These shows propped up the careers of musicians like Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues, and the power bases of narco-dictators around the globe.

* Space travel. Sounds improbable to even me, but researchers are sure they can shoot a craft into space using very powerful lasers.

* Commerce 1. Delivering parts and finished goods just in time for them to be used or put on shelves was a great goal through the 70s and 80s, but tracking and inventorying became real only when people could aim a Star Trek phaser-like device at skids and truckloads and warehouses to know where everything was and where each of it had to go.

* Commerce 2. Self-checkout scanners, still fairly new, are being ripped out and replaced by the consumer version of the phaser guns. In some stores, people are checking out as they are choosing their frozen pizzas. (Though personally, I hate going to a grocery story and paying full price when I’m doing all the cashiering.)

The object on the nose is the business end of massive laser for shooting down satellites.

* War. Experimental planes allegedly have shot down missiles using super big lasers. The rest of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars remains a confirmed dud, and we should leave it there before we start another Cold War. Ground-to-air systems are a little farther along.

NIST scientist Charlotte Moore Sitterly helped create gas lasers, but probably didn't think about their potential for hair removal

* Vanity 1. With lasers, getting “Brazilianed” happens without screams and tears. Same with the removal of back hair, mustaches, ear hair, arm-hole hair. I wouldn’t know. I’m a natural guy.

* Vanity 2. Lasers reportedly can burn away the years, whitening teeth, smoothing skin and reshaping the cornea.

* Backyard barbequing. As I write, researchers are perfecting a laser capable of killing mosquitos on the wing. Maybe people will have to wear specially colored glasses, but I wouldn’t object, and sunglass makers would could almost double their sales. There just aren’t enough hipsters stumbling from club to club for this economic sector right now.

* Rat torture. Not much to say here. Researchers are slicing rat tongues with lasers.

Image by AZAdam via Flickr

It’s been said that if Mother Earth needed an enema, she would insert it someplace very close to Newark, N.J. I’ve never lived there, so I can’t really comment.

On the other hand, I can tell you for a fact that she is getting an enema in the Dallas area. I have lived in Dallas, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a rubber tube plugged into that landscape. What I do find surprising is evidence that Mother Earth is feeling discomfort with the procedure.

The high colonic is being administered by natural gas drillers in the area who are left with salty waste water after collecting said energy resource.  They have to do something with the fluid, so they pump it into pockets that the gas had occupied.

The pumping, which occurred during the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009, coincided with a spate of small earthquakes (around magnitude 3.0) near a minor fault in North-Central Texas.

You have to be sitting pretty still to feel quakes that small, like, say when you’re getting your hair done, or having a manicure. You wouldn’t feel it through a waxing, but you might feel it while sitting in your air-conditioned Expedition while the bag boy put your groceries in the back. It probably wouldn’t startle you enough to make you reach for your concealed handgun, or wonder if you’re being raptured.

I’m saying that the quakes are small, is all I’m saying.

Of course, no one knew at the time why such a minor fault between Dallas and Fort Worth would be shifting perceptively at the time.

It took a seismological team from Southern Methodist University to correlate the two events. Whenever the pumping occurred, the Earth moved. When the pumping ended, the ground grew calm. Calmer.

Purely in the interest of science, I propose a new study, one in which really massive amounts of water (Scented? Maybe not.) are injected into the gas wells. Projected possible results:

* The cleansing ultimately gives Mother Earth a more pleasant and relaxed outlook.

* Texans build an underground armada and declare themselves a naval power.

* Fort Worth injects tons of cucumbers and announces the world’s largest pickle jar.

* Eager for a reflecting pool equal to their ego, Dallasites install neon lighting and just gaze.

* A quake comes along strong enough to make Level Land leveller.

If only nurse Rached felt secure enough to get help for her overly controlling nature

British researchers say there is an “urgent” need to study mental illness among health care professionals.

Scientists at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London say in a report titled Invisible Patients, health care workers are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and drug or alcohol abuse than people in other professions. And not only are they are less likely to get help, but they are more likely to show up at work emotionally or chemically impaired than those in other occupations.

The report is based on 201 medical papers published on the health of health care workers.

According to the researchers, fear and stigma dissuade too many health care workers from even seeking help much less submitting to treatment.

The health care culture has to be changed from stoicism and God complexes to commonsense

That's not a clown nose, Mindy; it's MRSA. I should get treatment, but how many would die if not for my selflessness?

acknowledgement of physical and emotional limitations. The report even suggests that interventions be studied as one way of convincing health care workers to get medical help sooner rather than later.

Sounds good to me, especially when you read in the study that doctors are more likely to work through a case of the flu than, say, teachers.

Interestingly, the report indicates that chiropractors seem more prone to musculoskeletal injuries, during their first few years of practice, than other professionals.

My dead Uncle Jack made me draw the white dog in the back planting a backyard bomb. Image via Wikipedia

Don’t freak out, but the voices you hear in your head are real.

A video stuffed with more pseudo-science than a Sedona, Arizona, crystal shop makes the case that your genes have a brain that’s filled with the ongoing thoughts of your ancestors.

It’s that or your soul has a brain, and your soul is passed down cumulatively from your ancestors. I can’t be sure even after repeatedly watching Dattatreya Siva Baba describe his new science, “soul genetics.”

Either way, your deceased family is standing between you and happiness by trying to make sense of your world with their experiences.

“The thoughts you are thinking may not even be your own thoughts,” according to Baba. Keep that in mind should someone trace the awful smell in the neighborhood to your basement.

The good news is that 2012 is close, says Baba. Far from being the end of time, he says, the end of the Maya calendar is the dawn of a new era, when new sciences like soul genetics will come to fruition.

We’ll be better able to tell our cranky ancestors to pipe down so we can concentrate on driving, for crissakes.

Pre-motherhood: Bristol Palin, on the left, throws it up for South-Central (Alaska).

Proving that extremely learned people can hold unbelievably ignorant notions, an acclaimed British novelist, Hilary Mantel, says that men are holding girls and women back by discouraging teen pregnancy.

Mantel, whose first novel is titled ‘Every Day Is Mother’s Day,’ told London’s Sunday Telegraph that she was “perfectly capable of setting up and running a home when I was 14.”

And why didn’t she? I mean besides laws, policies and the presumed commonsense of her parents?

Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society’s timetable,’ she said.

via Booker-prize winning artist claims girls are ready to have children at the age of just 14 | Mail Online.

Where she says “women,” in that snippet, read “girls.” And where Mantel says “in the interests of society’s timetable,” read “by male dominance.”

So, in the interest of liberating all females, men should be allowed to have sex with children who themselves should be encouraged to have children, a situation that historically has impoverished and disenfranchised women.

That could be called holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously in one’s mind. Often, being able to do so is a mark of intellectual sophistication. But Mantel’s two ideas don’t conflict so much as they annihilate each other.

Mantel might want to look around at the hyper-sexualized images of teens (or faux teens) in ads everywhere. Or even around the country clubs to see how young the trophy wives are.

I’m not so sure that men have sex with young women in order to liberate them, and I’m even less convinced that any significant segment of girls want a birth certificate more than they want a driver’s license.

What possibly is significant is that Mantel suffers from endometriosis, a terrible and incurable condition that turns her menstruation process inside out. It has prevented her from having children.

What she has gone through no doubt has added to her writing — writing that many feel is brilliant.

But anytime you find your opinions on maturity in synch with Jerry Lee Lewis, Bristol Palin and Drew Barrymore, it’s time to re-evaluate your values if not your prescription mood stabilizers.