News of the Web

Random Interwebs News

Drunk Man Nearly Hit By *Two* Trains
Simple story. A drunk driver got his van stuck on some train tracks and then got out and stood staring vacantly while the oncoming train sped toward him. A Good Samaritan type pulled him off the track in time to prevent Train A from plowing into him, as it did his car... which Train B hit a few moments later, coming in the opposite direction, creating a big splashy fireball. Both trains were traveling at 60 mph.

The Darwin Awards are cheated once again.

Source: ABC Local 7 Chicago

I'm Sure He Cares, Too
A federal judge has reiterated that the Navy cannot use its high powered sonar in environmentally sensitive areas, due to the evidence that it explodes the ears of whales and so forth. After the last ruling, Bush signed a waiver saying, no matter what courts say, the Navy can, in fact, use the sonar however it pleases. The judge has sent a ruling back, noting that he does not, in fact, have the power to waive away the law like that.

Watch and see if he cares. The Navy, maybe. El Presidente? Nope.

Source: Raw Story

Political Prosecution Continues
So Governor Siegelman's saga continues, with the Bush administration putting the kybosh on a 60 minutes story about how, mysteriously, the one Democrat in a corruption probe was the only person to face prosecution, has been held without bail on appeal, has an obviously hostile judge, etc etc.

Honestly.

Source: Atlargely.com

Repairs
Repairs are beginning on the series of internet cables (now up to 4) severed by unknown causes around the Middle East, which is good. They're hoping to get a better idea what the problem is when they haul the severed slices up, naturally.

This whole situation is odd, especially as Egypt is now saying that it wasn't a ship anchor that caused their outage.. at least, no ship was supposed to be there.

Weeeeeird.

A lot of people have made some vaguely hysterical speculation about terrorism, or this being the first salvo in a US military campaign, but I'm not buying it. As terrorist acts go, these are remarkably non-terrorizing. It would seem to involve a lot of work, and isn't actually making much of an impact. If you want to terrorize people, you disrupt their daily lives with VIOLENCE, not inconvenience. Blow up marketplaces, shoot up a mosque, that sort of thing. Being briefly without Yahoo won't exactly make people try to destroy their government.

As for the US doing it, I don't see that either. The whole point of the internet design, as originally envisioned by the DARPA types in the Cold War, is that it can be quickly routed around damaged physical segments. Originally these were to be old-fashioned telephone exchanges in the continental US, so Washington could continue sending out commands to nuke the commies after they'd already reduced much of the country to a shimmering sea of green glass, but the core principles are the same.

Sure enough, after each cut, service is largely restored within a day. They just route to another cable.

Our military may be many things, but technologically they're not dumb. They know the strengths and weaknesses of the net design; if they wanted to, say, cripple it, they could take down some or all of the root servers that attach names to IP addresses for the whole world; all of them, every last one, is under the control of the US government, as a legacy of the era when we, you know, built the internet.

So we could do the same amount of damage with a flick of a switch and a thumb of our nose. Actually, a lot more damage. Why bother with this penny-ante stuff that mostly has affected countries with tech or financial industries in the area, like India and the rich Gulf Emirates?

Me, I lean toward possible organized crime. The Russkie mob has been known for years to threaten websites and companies with attacks on their electronic infrastructure to get protection money; these cables cost a ton to lay and a ton to repair, and the companies that own them have very, very deep pockets. You can't knock out a country's internet, or inspire blood-soaked terror with these stunts, but you could really affect some giant telco's bottom line... it'd be cheaper to pay off some eastern european tech-thugs than constant repair work, that's for sure.

But hey, just a theory. It could be Cthulhu for all we know.

Source: Raw Story

Burger Phone
So Juno, the big indie candidate for the Oscars this year, had a retro looking plastic burger telephone in the movie. Supposedly they even used it as a promotional gimmick when sending out their review copies. There has since been a spike in sales of the Burger phone.

Feh. Who needs landline phones anyway? They're a big hassle.

Source: It Was Raw Story but their archives page is impossible.
Actual Phone:

Science News

Science is Still Awesome


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