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So the other day I was looking up the death rate on SARS, which turned out to be something like 9.6%, higher than I thought, and it got me to thinking how SARS would compare to, say, the Spanish Flu. That in turn got me to reading about the Spanish Flu, and apparently, there's some new research on said pandemic, including its puzzling and seemingly unpredictable lethality.

One theory is that the virus strain originated at Fort Riley, Kansas, by two genetic mechanisms — genetic drift and antigenic shift — in viruses in poultry and swine which the fort bred for local consumption. But evidence from a recent reconstruction of the virus suggests that it jumped directly from birds to humans, without traveling through swine.[12] On October 5, 2005, researchers announced that the genetic sequence of the 1918 flu strain, a subtype of avian strain H1N1, had been reconstructed using historic tissue samples.[13][14][15] On 18 January 2007, Kobasa et al reported that infected monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) exhibited classic symptoms of the 1918 pandemic and died from a cytokine storm.[16]

This might lend credence to some of the bird flu fears, with the caveat that modern bird flu is almost impossible to catch unless you slaughter poultry for a living.

What though, is a cytokine storm?

When the immune system is fighting pathogens, cytokines signal immune cells such as T-cells and macrophages to travel to the site of infection. In addition, cytokines activate those cells, stimulating them to produce more cytokines. Normally this feedback loop is kept in check by the body. However, in some instances, the reaction becomes uncontrolled, and too many immune cells are activated in a single place. The precise reason for this is not entirely understood, but may be caused by an exaggerated response when the immune system encounters a new and highly pathogenic invader. Cytokine storms have potential to do significant damage to body tissues and organs. If a cytokine storm occurs in the lungs, for example, fluids and immune cells such as macrophages may accumulate and eventually block off the airways, potentially resulting in death.

So basically what you're talking about here is an immune hyperreaction, like an allergy. The stronger your immune system was, the more likely it was to overreact. Thus the odd spike in the mortality of the Spanish Flu, the reason it hit the young and healthy HARDER than their older and younger relatives, as opposed to the normal pattern.

Source: Wikipedia (Spanish Flu)
Wikipedia (Cytokine Storm)

Hologrammatic
So some Australian astronomers figured out a way to take a 3D picture, or hologram, of the interestellar dust medium.

Neat.

Sources: Slashdot
The Physics Arxiv Blog

PTSD
So a new study out offers hope that many symptoms of returning Iraq vets, previously labeled as organic brain injuries, may be caused by Post-Traumatic Stress, and thus more easily treated.

This however comes with a caveat -- the military pays a lot less for PTSD treatment than it does for brain injury, in keeping with its long-standing policy of discriminating against those with mental illness (even going so far as to charge some with cowardice if they seek help).

"The military doesn't want to diagnose people with brain injury," he said. "So what they'll do is play it off as PTSD as the sole injury for everyone, because PTSD and traumatic brain injury have very similar symptoms," he said. "The disability [compensation] is a lot higher for traumatic brain injury. What the military is saying is, you can't be diagnosed from a brain injury unless you get better from PTSD. It's kind of like a paradox."

My question is, why can't we adequately treat both? Medical research shouldn't be used to harm people like this, but that's life under the Bush administration, for sure.

Source: CNN.com

So the Navy's Got a New Toy
The world's most powerful rail-gun.

Which is why the news that BAE Systems has delivered a functional, 32-megajoule Electro-Magnetic Laboratory Rail Gun (32-MJ LRG) to the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., is exciting. Installation of the laboratory launcher is currently under way, and according to BAE, this is the first step toward the Navy's goal of developing a tactical 64-megajoule ship-mounted weapon.

The lab version doesn't look particularly menacing -- more like a long, belt-fed airport screening device than like a futuristic cannon -- but the system will fire rounds at up to Mach 8, drawing on tremendous amounts of electricity to generate the current for each test shot.

Yes, the Navy has ambitious plans to build enormously powerful electrically operated ships and use their spare juice capacity when at rest to fire huge rail-guns. The goal is hyperaccurate shelling from 200 miles away.

Pity we're nowhere near making it work.

While the 32-MJ LRG should start firing soon, it could take another 13 years for a 64-megajoule system to be built and deployed on a ship. The Marines, in particular, are interested in the potential for rail guns to deliver supporting fire from up to 220 miles away -- around 10 times further than standard ship-mounted cannons -- with rounds landing more quickly and with less advance warning than a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Effective rail guns will require a major breakthrough in materials between now and 2020, to keep the guns themselves from being shredded by each high-velocity barrage.

Source: Military.com

Colorful Mercury
So NASA's MESSENGER probe, which is en route to a final orbit and year-long orbital survey of Mercury, which is largely unmapped to this day, swung by the innermost planet recently, and tried out a few of its gizmos.

Unlike the last probe to see Mercury, MESSENGER has, say, color optics, so they produced a false-color three-tone image to test them out as it flew away and found out that Mercury might resemble the moon in black and white, but not in color.

Color differences on Mercury are subtle, but they reveal important information about the nature of the planet's surface material. A number of bright spots with a bluish tinge are visible in this image. These are relatively recent impact craters. Some of the bright craters have bright streaks (called "rays" by planetary scientists) emanating from them. Bright features such as these are caused by the presence of freshly crushed rock material that was excavated and deposited during the highly energetic collision of a meteoroid with Mercury to form an impact crater. The large circular light-colored area in the upper right of the image is the interior of the Caloris basin. Mariner 10 viewed only the eastern (right) portion of this enormous impact basin, under lighting conditions that emphasized shadows and elevation differences rather than brightness and color differences. MESSENGER has revealed that Caloris is filled with smooth plains that are brighter than the surrounding terrain, hinting at a compositional contrast between these geologic units. The interior of Caloris also harbors several unusual dark-rimmed craters, which are visible in this image. The MESSENGER science team is working with the 11-color images in order to gain a better understanding of what minerals are present in these rocks of Mercury's crust.

The false color image is built from infrared, red and violet, so some of Mercury's colors would be human visible, and this doesn't say anything about the middle of the spectrum. Still, Mercury has splashes of red and blue at least. Better to my mind than the same old grey-white-black combo we have in our night sky.

Source: Messenger Site