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Social Media Is A Faster Source For Unemployment Data Than Government

Government unemployment data today are what Nielsen TV ratings were decades ago - a flawed metric...

Gestational Diabetes Up 36% In The Last Decade - But Black Women Are Healthiest

Gestational diabetes, a form of glucose intolerance during pregnancy, occurs primarily in women...

Object-Based Processing: Numbers Confuse How We Perceive Spaces

Researchers recently studied the relationship between numerical information in our vision, and...

Males Are Genetically Wired To Beg Females For Food

Bees have the reputation of being incredibly organized and spending their days making sure our...

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While an alarming number of wealthy people think organic food contains no chemicals, the opposite is true. Not only is everything chemical, the most organic of organic Thanksgiving meals is stuffed full of mutagens and carcinogens, at least in environmental toxicology studies on rats.

But in the real world, outside environmental fundraising, Thanksgiving dinner is not only harmless, it might even be beneficial. The turkey Americans eat on Thursday contains Strain 115, which produces the MP1 antibiotic that targets staph infections, strep throat, severe gastrointestinal diseases and roughly half of all infectious bacteria.

Australia recently had an election where they asked for a dramatic departure from previous fiscal policies. 

The reasons were simple, in hindsight. Everyone wanted more money from an increasingly larger government but incomes were declining. Inflation is still happening, government employees still get raises, but average Australian income declines showed what government claims about economic health did not.  

Increases and declines in economies have always happened but new work in the Economic Analysis and Policy journal finds that people are not better off than they were 20 years ago.  

There is a perception that 'the wealthy' are opposed to more taxes and income redistribution in America. But the wealthy already pay an alarming amount in taxes and 47% remain loyal to tax-cutting politicians every election cycle.

People have ideological reasons to oppose government redistribution of their work, of course, but it may also be relative. Someone who is in a poor neighborhood but doing better than others may not like the idea of higher taxes either, according to a paper in Psychological Science.

Bitcoin calls itself the new money and says it can be minted and exchanged on the Internet, faster and cheaper than a bank.

It's gotten a lot of attention but how anonymous is it? Not very, if you have computers and about $1,500.

Several groups worldwide have shown that it is possible to find out which transactions belong together, even if the client uses different pseudonyms but it has only recently become clear that it is also possible to reveal the IP address behind each transaction. 

Results presented at the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer Symposium in Barcelona show "extremely promising" early phase 1 clinical trial results for the investigational drug AG-120 against the subset of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) harboring mutations in the gene IDH1.

The finding builds on phase 1 results of a related drug, AG-221, against IDH2 mutations, presented at the most recent meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. Results at this stage are preliminary, based on 17 patients.

The IDH1 mutation is found in 15-20 percent of all cases of AML, totaling about 3,500 cases of IDH1 AML per year.

Researchers using a new chemical process have converted the cellulose in sawdust into hydrocarbon chains, building blocks for gasoline.

 Cellulose is the main substance in plant matter and is present in all non-edible plant parts of wood, straw, grass, cotton and old paper.  These hydrocarbons can be used as an additive in gasoline or as a component in plastics. 

"At the molecular level, cellulose contains strong carbon chains. We sought to conserve these chains, but drop the oxygen bonded to them, which is undesirable in high-grade gasoline. Our researcher Beau Op de Beeck developed a new method to derive these hydrocarbon chains from cellulose," explains Professor Bert Sels.