A classified assessment by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) says climate change could threaten U.S. security in the next 20 years by causing political instability, mass movements of refugees, terrorism, or wars over water. The House Intelligence Committee will get a briefing today on the main findings and the full report will be released Monday, June 30th.

It's the perfect storm of buzzwords. This might be check and mate for environmental activists. Relating global warming to terrorism is a masterstroke of logical and cultural hand trickery but what can Big Oil do, deny there is terrorism? No one is more impacted by sea level rise than the Dutch so look for that military build-up in Holland over the next few years. The Belgians have it coming.

The assessment itself is confidential, because the other 6 billion of us won't be impacted by global warming or world wars over water, but thankfully some analyses used as raw material will be open, including a series of studies done by Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). On commission from NIC, CIESIN ranked countries by looking at three climate risks: sea-level rise, increased water scarcity, and an aggregate measure of vulnerability based on projected temperature change, compared with nations' ability to adapt.

The sexual and feminist revolutions were supposed to free women to enjoy casual sex just as men always had but according to Professor Anne Campbell from Durham University in the UK (1), the negative feelings reported by women after one-night stands suggest that they are not well adapted to fleeting sexual encounters.

Men are more likely to reproduce and therefore to benefit from numerous short-term partners. For women, however, quality seems to be more important than quantity. Also for women, finding partners of high genetic quality is a stronger motivator than sheer number, and it is commonly believed that women are more willing to have casual sex when there is a chance of forming a long-term relationship.

This University of Copenhagen press release says that they would like to be first to create a quantum computer. They have made no more progress than anyone else, really, but want us all to know that they are thinking about it.

We liked it so much we are just printing it as is:

Bassinet use in 2006 was nearly double what it was in 1992, and even though more than 45% of infants between the ages of 0-2 months use them, little is known about bassinet safety.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has guidelines regarding bassinet construction but there are no government safety standards for bassinets. In 2005, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) revised its recommendations for a safe infant sleep environment, suggesting a separate but nearby sleeping arrangement (i.e. roomsharing without bedsharing).

Two studies in The Journal of Pediatrics evaluate the frequency of bedsharing and the potential risk factors of bassinet use.

The proliferation of voluntary carbon offset programs seems like a great way for individuals to help fight climate change. But do carbon offset programs really work? That's the question for Bill Stanley, Science Lead for Carbon Strategies, Climate Change Team at The Nature Conservancy.

Lawrence Hamilton, of Charlotte, VT, asks:

"Are carbon offset programs and forest protection efforts providing real solutions for reducing global carbon emissions? And how do these programs help reduce pollution from mercury, arsenic and other "baddies" that often accompany carbon emissions?"

Bill Stanley, Science Lead for Carbon Strategies, Climate Change Team, replies:

For lemurs, genetic diversity and scent complexity go hand in hand during the breeding season, say researchers from Duke University and the Centre d'écologie fonctionnelle et évolutive (CNRS / Universités Montpellier 1, 2 and 3 / ENSA Montpellier / CIRAD / École pratique des hautes études de Paris).

Male lemurs are able to signal their genetic quality through an olfactory cue. The perfume attracts females and provides the basis for their choice of reproductive partner.

Olfaction, little studied in primates until now (1), is a significant means of communication in certain monkeys, and especially in lemurs. These mammals, which live almost exclusively in Madagascar, include more than thirty species. One of the best known is the ring-tailed lemur, Lemur catta, a highly social species that lives in small, female-dominated groups. In this species, olfactory communication plays an essential role in social relations.

NEW YORK, June 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- First Rotating Skyscraper to be Self Powered and Completely Prefabricated

Visionary Italian architect Dr. David Fisher today announced the launch of the revolutionary Dynamic Tower, the world's first building in motion, to be constructed in Dubai and Moscow with other locations planned worldwide.

A new study of African lions says climate extremes, which would include the increased frequency of droughts and floods predicted by global warming models, can create conditions in which diseases that are tolerated individually might converge and cause mass extinction of livestock or wildlife.

The study suggests that extreme climatic conditions are capable of altering normal host-pathogen relationships and causing a "perfect storm" of multiple infectious outbreaks that could trigger epidemics with catastrophic mortality.

Led by scientists at the University of California, Davis, the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota, the research team examined outbreaks of canine distemper virus (CDV) in 1994 and 2001 that resulted in unusually high mortality of lions in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater. CDV periodically strikes these ecosystems, and most epidemics have caused little or no harm to the lions.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins say that epigenetic marks on DNA - chemical marks other than the DNA sequence - do indeed change over a person's lifetime, and that the degree of change is similar among family members.

The team suggests that overall genome health is heritable and that epigenetic changes occurring over one's lifetime may explain why disease susceptibility increases with age, they say in their article in the June 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

If epigenetics does contribute to such diseases through interaction with environment or aging, says Andrew P. Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H, a professor of molecular biology and genetics and director of the Epigenetics Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, a person's epigenetic marks would change over time. So his team embarked on an international collaboration to see if that was true. They focused on methylation-one particular type of epigenetic mark, where chemical methyl groups are attached to DNA.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, in the U.S. alone, foodborne pathogens are responsible for 76 million illnesses every year. Of the people affected by those illnesses, 300,000 are hospitalized and more than 5,000 die. These widespread outbreaks of food-borne illnesses are attributed, in part, to the fast-paced distribution of foods across the nation. Recently, raw tomatoes caused an outbreak of salmonellosis that sickened more than 300 people in at least 28 states and Canada.

University of Georgia researchers have developed an effective technology for reducing contamination of dangerous bacteria on food. The new antimicrobial wash rapidly kills Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 on foods ranging from fragile lettuce to tomatoes, fruits, poultry products and meats. It is made from inexpensive and readily available ingredients that are recognized as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The new technology, which has commercial application for the produce, poultry, meat and egg processing industries, is available for licensing from the University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc., which has filed a patent application on the new technology.