Science! Update

(Also) Researching the Cure For Boredom

Flu Season! Rabbit Season! Flu Season!
So it turns out the prognosticators who create the annual flu vaccine, making guesses on what will be the dominant strains the next year, did a really poor job this time around.

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- The flu season is getting worse, and U.S. health officials say it's partly because the flu vaccine doesn't protect against most of the spreading flu bugs.

The flu shot is a good match for only about 40 percent of this year's flu viruses, officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

The situation has even deteriorated since last week when the CDC said the vaccine was protective against roughly half the circulating strains. In good years, the vaccine can fend off 70 to 90 percent of flu bugs.

Infections from an unexpected strain have been booming, and now are the main agent behind most of the nation's lab-confirmed flu cases, said Dr. Joe Bresee, the CDC's chief of influenza epidemiology.

It's too soon to know whether this will prove to be a bad flu season overall, but it's fair to say a lot of people are suffering at the moment. "Every area of the country is experiencing lots of flu right now," Bresee said.

Oops.

Source: CNN.com

Nano Nano! Art! (Use Mork Voice on title)
Here you go, this will cheer you up a bit. Art made using electron microscopes of various sorts.

Source: Wired

Proteomics
You've probably heard of Genomics, the scientific analysis of the total information content of a living organism's genome.

There's a related field dealing with the total information content of a living organism's protein, which is a far larger amount of data (because proteins can be coded the exact same way but have many different shapes.... the mad cow disease agent is a protein that is, content wise, basically identical to one you're SUPPOSED to have, but wound up differently... think of it like those magnet word puzzle things on front of fridges. You can spell out 'Purple Monkey Dishwasher' in a straight line, or a curve, or a circle, square, etc... the 'data' is the same, but the shape can be wildly varying, and in a protein, shape determines a lot of how it works.)

Anywhoo, proteomic study of the protein content of brains with and without MS has lead to the discovery of two new proteins that, when damaged, may contribute to the symptoms of the disease.

US researchers have found two potential targets for treating multiple sclerosis after an extensive trawl through proteins in the brain.

Comparison of 2,538 proteins from MS patients with those from healthy brains showed damage in two proteins not before linked to the disease.

In mice blocking the effects of the proteins led to reversal of symptoms, the study in Nature reported.

It appears the science is coming of age, in fact.

Professor Neil Scolding, from the University of Bristol Institute of Clinical Neurosciences, said: "From the scientific perspective, the exciting thing is that it's pretty much the first time that proteomics has directly yielded a candidate molecule that is both unexpected and novel on the one hand and has therapeutic potential.

"From the clinical perspective, showing that treatment approaches predicted by this proteomic interrogation of MS tissue do have a clear impact in experimental models of MS is extremely promising.

Ahh, science. Is there anything you can't do better than superstition?

Source: BBC News

Laser Jet Spy
So apparently, in an effort to combat counterfeiting, the US government has convinced many printer manufacturers to install spy mechanisms in their laserjets. A tiny code of yellow dots is printed on color laserjet pages that codes for a unique printer ID number that can be tracked back to you, the printer.. printer.

Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of "Alias," right?

Unfortunately, the scenario isn't fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information. That means that without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. A communication tool you're using in everyday life could become a tool for government surveillance. And what's worse, there are no laws to prevent abuse.

The ACLU recently issued a report revealing that the FBI has amassed more than 1,100 pages of documents on the organization since 2001, as well as documents concerning other non-violent groups, including Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice. In the current political climate, it's not hard to imagine the government using the ability to determine who may have printed what document for purposes other than identifying counterfeiters.

Yet there are no laws to stop the Secret Service from using printer codes to secretly trace the origin of non-currency documents; only the privacy policy of your printer manufacturer currently protects you (if indeed such a policy exists). And no law regulates what sort of documents the Secret Service or any other domestic or foreign government agency is permitted to request for identification, not to mention how such a forensics tool could be developed and implemented in printers in the first place.

With no laws on the books, there's nothing to stop the privacy violations this technology enables. For this reason, EFF is gathering information about what printers are revealing and how - a necessary precursor to any legal challenge or new legislation to protect your privacy.

Unfortunately, it's the EFF we're talking about here, not the ACLU. These guys are infamous for losing in court.

Sigh.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Aral Sea
Big somewhat hippy blogpost on the Aral sea. Lots of pictures. More than a little breathless, but still probably worth a read.

Source: Naked Man in the Tree (yes, that is really the title of the blog)