"The Lost World", published in 1912, is not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous work but his account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago has lasted into modern times in a way Sherlock Holmes has not - at least until the new Robert Downey movie comes out with him in the starring role.

In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affected animals so that they could assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus might emerge and determine how dangerous it would be.

Their reasoning was that the worst fears of infectious disease experts - that the H5N1 avian influenza virus  circulating in parts of Asia might combine with a human-adapted flu virus, namely if someone with a flu virus also contracted the avian virus - might result in a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world.   A pandemic of the kind not seen in almost a hundred years.

Filligent, a Hong Kong-based biotech company, is mobilizing stocks of its anti-infective BioMask to help combat the global spread of the deadly new Mexican strain of Influenza A.   The BioMask is the first medical face mask to kill the Influenza A virus within seconds of contact while retaining the breathability required by front-line workers and children, who are often the first to fall in a contagious episode.

If pizza isn't already on the list of 7 greatest inventions of the post-modern world (because nothing goes with wanting to strangle someone who invokes Foucault like a nice slice of pepperoni) a new discovery may put it there; the physics of the perfect pizza toss have inspired Monash University to design the next generation of micro motors  ... thinner that a human hair.

The idea that far distant particles can somehow 'talk' to each other led Einstein to call it 'spooky action at a distance'.

Having confirmed its existence, scientists today are learning how to use this 'spooky action' as a helpful tool. Now a team of physicists at the University of Bristol and Imperial College London have harnessed this phenomenon to shed light on another unusual and previously difficult aspect of quantum physics - that of distinguishing between two similar quantum devices.

In the everyday world any process can be considered as a black box device with an input and an output; if you wish to identify the device you simply apply inputs, measure the outputs and determine what must have happened in between.

Autism is a complex brain disorder that impairs social, communications and behavioral development.  It is often characterized by extreme behavior.   A new study by University of Utah School of Medicine researchers and conducted with Utah children says kids  who are firstborn or breech or whose mothers are 35 or older when giving birth are at significantly greater risk for developing an autism spectrum disorder.

Firstborn?   Those are  50% of all kids in America.   

In the April 27, 2009,issue of  Pediatrics, the researchers say that:

Women who give birth at 35 or older are 1.7 times more likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), compared with women between the ages of 20-34;