How can you test for disaster without freaking out all your co-workers?  Assume the best way to test for a disaster is to simulate it.  Now factor in that a typical co-worker, if they overhead that a chlorine tanker overturned in DC or that terrorists are storming the building, will likely freak out.  Is there a safe way to simulate an emergency?

Due to difficult economics and an aging population that needs social services, Finland is finding itself desperate for workers, but jobs cannot simply be created by giant corporations anymore and the only way to sustain the welfare state seems to be through new ventures and entrepreneurship.  Except government restrictions and regulations that discourage giant corporations hurt small businesses most, and Finns are conservative when it comes to risk anyway.

The Icebreaker Yermak

Vice-Admiral S. Makaroff of the Imperial Russian Navy was primarily an oceanographer.   His paper On some Oceanographic Problems, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Vol. XXII, contains, amongst detailed reports of his oceanographic investigations, an explanation of why the icebreaker Yermak^* was built.  Quite simply, the ship was intended to promote seaborne commerce where Arctic ice had always been a barrier.  It seems that Makaroff had an idea that perhaps, one day, after much experience had been gained, an icebreaker might just possibly reach the North Pole.

The genome of the medieval form of Yersinia pestis, the pathogen responsible for the Black Death in Europe between 1347 – 1351, has been reconstructed. A surprising finding is that the genes affecting its virulence apparently haven’t changed all that much between then and now.

A research team has used teeth gathered from a burial ground know to contain a lot of Black Death victims to reconstruct the genome of the medieval form of Y. pestis. After the genomic reconstruction, the researchers compared their ‘ancient pathogen’ to the extant forms of the bacterium (see figure 1). In their words:

In an obituary for biologist Robert Clarke published recently in Marine Mammal Science, I read a rather curious passage about this scientist's observations of Humboldt squid:

At first sight, the hand held tablets and screens hosted on nurse tables and held dearly to the palms of able clinical staff, may appear to be incongruous with the functional obligations of their owners and you could be forgiven to mistake them for Apple’s new iPad.

Yet, it is not an uncommon sight, to find them as reverential backpacks and requisite arsenal in the hands of medical personnel, almost akin to the ubiquitous mobile phone. Electronic health records or EHRs as they are widely known across the medical community have largely served as useful substitutes of patient case pads and potentially replaced enormous paperwork with electronic file cabinets that could store a humungous amount of history around a patient.

If words are windows into the soul, scientists are learning to be Peeping Toms: Computerized text analysis shows that psychopathic killers make identifiable word choices beyond their conscious control when talking about their crimes and that insight could lead to new tools for diagnosis and perhaps law enforcement and social media.

The words of psychopathic murderers match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, says Jeff Hancock, Cornell professor of computing and information science, and colleagues at the University of British Columbia.

Once a product starts to get credit for doing everything, there is a chance you may be in the crackpot zone.  If so, look for the downfall of green tea in 2012 because a new study says the Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) in green tea prevents weight gain.  Add that on to claims that EGCG prevents arthritis, Alzheimer's, diabetes and breast cancer and even slows AIDS.