From an article in Rolling Stone about mercury and autism:

The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe,” Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the [Institute of Medicine’s] Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. “We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

Over the last decade, genetically modified crops have become widespread in agriculture. One of the more successful of these are Bt crops - transgenic plants that express genes derived from Bacillus thuringensis. These genes allow the plants to produce toxins which specifically affect certain groups of insects. Since these plants do not need to be sprayed, and since the toxins are relatively specific, the environmental effects appear to be lower than conventional agriculture.

Cyanide is poison. Detective writers like it. Gold miners like it. The environment; not so much. In the year 2000 cyanide got into the Tisa river and then into the Danube through a small Austrian gold-mining company's efforts using cyanide to extract gold and silver from solutions. Fish, birds and wild animals died and millions of inhabitants in Hungary were deprived of drinking water.

To prevent future occurrences of that kind, Russian researchers from the Krasnoyarsk State University and the Institute of Chemistry and Applied Chemistry have developed an original method for extracting gold and silver from multicomponent solutions.

A team of scientists from the University Paris Descartes has solved the structure of two proteins that allow bacteria to gain resistance to multiple types of antibiotics, according to a report in EMBO reports this month. This work provides new clues as to how bacteria adapt to resist antibiotics and how to design new drugs that counteract this defense mechanism.

Frédéric Dardel and colleagues crystallized both the narrow and broad-spectrum resistance forms of the antibiotic-modifying acetyltransferase enzyme. Their report reveals that the enzyme has a flexible active site that can evolve to accommodate new antibiotics, allowing the bacteria to break them down and render them useless. This explains why this type of enzyme is now carried by many bacteria struggling for survival in the antibiotic age.

What do farmers think about GM crops? They like 'em - they like better crops with fewer pesticides and they feel that government has not listened when it counts so business has filled the void.

A group at the Open University, led by Professor Andy Lane, has taken the first systematic look at what large-scale, commodity farmers – not those mainly involved in organic growing - think about genetically-modified crops.

Lane and his colleagues found that both farmers who have been involved in GM crop trials and those who have not, regard GM as a simple extension of previous plant breeding techniques, such as those which have produced today’s established crop types. They regard GM crops as an innovation which they would assess on its merits. Their real interest is in how GM crops would work in practice and whether they can contribute to the profitability of their farms. The research suggests that these farmers do not think that GM raises any issues of principle, or that it is a matter of right or wrong.

Digital logic, or bits, is the only paradigm for the IT world, and up to now researchers used it almost exclusively to study quantum information processing. But European scientists say that an analog approach is far easier in the quantum world.

Modern computing is digital, a series of 1s and 0s that, once combined, create powerful information processing systems. The system is so simple – on or off, yes or no – that it almost seems dumb. It is that very simplicity that gives digital computing its power. It works very well - but there is a problem. Silicon circuits are getting so small that they will soon be bumping up against a fundamental physical limit.

The newspaper, that daily chronicle of human events, is undergoing the most momentous transformation in its centuries-old history. Online versions are proliferating, attracting young readers, and generally carving out a sizable swath of the news business. In the United States alone, 34 million people have made a daily habit of reading an online newspaper.

An online news site can change minute by minute and generate a different front page for each reader. The most interesting and useful customization involves capturing information about the readers' interests from their past behavior. There's already a model for that--the recommendation systems used by Web sites like Amazon, TiVo, and Netflix.

Researchers at the Department of Artificial Intelligence (DIA) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing (FIUPM) have, in conjunction with Madrid’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, developed an algorithm that is capable of processing 30 images per second to recognize a person’s facial expressions in real time and categorize them as one of six prototype expressions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

Applying the facial expression recognition algorithm, the developed prototype is capable of processing a sequence of frontal images of moving faces and recognizing the person’s facial expression. The software can be applied to video sequences in realistic situations and can identify the facial expression of a person seated in front of a computer screen.

The human nervous system consists of the brain and spinal marrow, which constitute the central nervous system (CNS), and sensory nerve cells that comprise the peripheral nervous system (PNS).

Information from our surroundings-sight, smell, hearing, etc.-are transmitted from specific sensory nerve cells in the PNS to the central nervous system, where it is processed and governs our response. These processes require the two nervous systems to be functionally connected.

NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate has amended its NASA Research Announcement to solicit additional research proposals. The Research Opportunities in Aeronautics 2007 has been amended to include new topics in support of the Subsonic Rotary Wing Project.