An Exceptionally Normal Asteroid Explaination

With news of a meteorite hitting Russia today, people have many questions. Are we all going to die? Is that bigger asteroid going to hit earth? Were the Mayans two months off on their calendar?

Unfortunately for the doom and gloomers, it does not look like any of these scenarios are going to come to pass. Here is the cut and dry truth of the situation:

 

What exactly happened in Russia this morning?

Answer: A meteorite. The loud noises were sonic booms. The booms came after the meteorite flashed through the sky because light travels faster than sound. That’s why sci-fi movies feature “light-speed” not “sound-speed.”

 

Was it a meteor, meteoroid, meteorite or alien ship that hit Russia?

Answer: Well, first we can rule out the alien ship. Everyone knows alien ships self-destruct into tiny jellybean flavored rainbow fragments if they begin to crash. This means it was a meteoroid, meteorite or meteor.

Meteoroids are pieces of natural space junk that are just kinda floating around in space and orbiting the sun. While they are up in space, they are meteoroids and they stay that way until they enter the atmosphere.

A meteor is that space junk that’s now shooting through the atmosphere and hasn’t hit anything yet. It’s basically a shooting star. So, the thing that hit Russia started as a meteor and was a meteor when it was picked up on those awesome Russian dash cams.

Once it blew apart and pieces hit the ground, those pieces became meteorites. So, anything that actually hit the ground in Russia was a meteorite.

So, depending on how anal you are about definitions you could say that Russia experienced everything but an alien ship this morning.

Why was the meteor caught on so many dash cams? Were the Russians expecting this? Are they in on the conspiracy?

Answer: Dash cams are pretty popular in Russia as a way to kill conspiracies. There is a lot of insurance fraud and people who will intentionally throw themselves in front of moving vehicles to collect insurance money. The scams are so wide spread in Russia that more than half of all vehicles there have the cams installed. It’s a case of CYA syndrome, and a way to kill small conspiracies, not the Russians being in on some “secret” alien landing gone wrong.

Did the Russians nuke it from orbit?

Answer: Ok, Russia does have an anti-missile system, and it does have missiles in that area. However, it is highly unlikely that they were able to nuke the object as it fell from the sky. It was simply flying too fast, and there was no warning or heightened alert that would lead to them watching for it. Most of Russia’s defenses are also centered around Moscow. While there are weapons in that area, it does not appear that the Russians nuked anything this morning. We should all give a sigh of relief that this incident happened today and not during the height of the Cold War though.

Are you SURE the Russians didn’t nuke it?

Answer: At this point in time, no. The nukes used for this type of operation tend to be fairly clean because they are designed for use over a countries own population. While there have been no reports of increased radiation, there is always the chance that something was nuked and it was too far up and too clean to be detected. So, you don’t necessarily need to recycle your tin-foil hat just yet.

Could this be part of the huge comet/asteroid/alien ship that is schedule to pass by the earth today?

Answer: It’s highly unlikely due to the trajectory of the object. The bigger object is on a north-south course; this one was not on the same course and is unlikely to be part of the bigger asteroid.

Wait a minute, What Asteroid??

Answer: A large asteroid, romantically named DA14 is scheduled to pass close by the earth today. It will be more than 17,000 miles away from the earth, but due to how much space is in space, this is considered a close flyby.

Come on, this HAS to be more than a coincidence, right??

Answer: Not really. Stuff falls from the sky all the time. Besides, if you are on Russian time the meteoroid hit yesterday and the asteroid passes by tomorrow. Totally different dates, so that should completely debunk your conspiracy theory, bro.

Is it possible the Mayans were off by two months?

Answer: Either you think the Mayans saw the future or not. Pick a side and stick to it. There is no possibility of the asteroid hitting earth, so unless you think they were off by two months and totally wrong about the end of the world, you are wrong and need to let it go already.

The Exceptionally Normal Guide to the Piracy Fallacy

While everyone says they are against piracy due to the fact that it cheats artists/creators out of their hard earned cash, I don’t think very many people understand how piracy directly affects these people. As a writer, I think all the Internet piracy buzz is a waste of time and money. There are already copyright laws that protect businesses, and pirated media on the Internet is not this huge money sink for artists that the entertainment business claims it is. Congress can write bills all they want, but nothing they do will permanently end the piracy of books, music movies and other media. The little guy or gal, like me, would not see a huge benefit even if they did manage to legislate away all forms of piracy.

 

When all is said and done, the ones hurt by piracy are primarily the distributors of creative media, not the ones who create it. This would be the movie studio who wants to make millions on a theater release of a movie, not the guy or girl who wrote the script or the multitudes of others who contribute to the process. They do not see the huge profits that the distributors of the movies do. The movie business is particularly harsh in this regard, and I would recommend that everyone should become more knowledgeable about “Hollywood accounting”  before becoming outraged about the starving artists out there.

 

The book business is much the same. Publishers take the lion’s share of the money compared to what a typical author makes. We aren’t talking about Stephen King level authors; we are talking about the other 95% of authors out there that are normal people, like you and me.

 

The distribution companies are in big trouble with the internet. It used to be that in order to have a book, movie or whatever published, you had to go through one of the big publishers/distributors. The Internet has drastically changed this, but it has not happened over night. It’s been a slow process over the past decade and a half. The distributers have had ample opportunity to realize the problems that modern technology poses towards their business models and instead of adapting, they fight it. This fight over piracy today echoes the way the entertainment industry claimed home video was going to kill their companies when VCRs first became mainstream.

 

The Internet makes things convenient. If someone wants to watch a movie tonight, it’s much easier to watch it via Netflix, iTunes or Vimeo than it is to go to Wal-Mart and buy the DVD. They should be embracing this and finding ways to make money on the VOD trend rather than trying to kill the Internet. The music industry had a golden opportunity many years ago when they took down Napster. They could have used the demise of Napster as a perfect opportunity to create a marketplace like iTunes for music. Instead of innovating, they pursue legal battles and heavy lobbying. That $94 million the MPAA paid to lobbyists could have been used to develop a solution similar to iTunes, but they choose to fight technology rather than embrace it. The distribution industry is greedy and they would rather see innovation die rather than embrace it themselves.

 

Going back to the point of piracy and the artist involved, the innovative nature of the Internet has made success more obtainable for the “little guy” than the distribution and publishing industries ever have. For a great example, look at the publishing industry. EBooks have opened up an entirely new world of opportunity for writers. Yes, eBooks can be pirated. But, they also allow writers to release their material without having to sign away rights and profits to a greedy publisher.

With Kindle books, Amazon takes a cut, but it is nothing near the amount a publisher would take, and Amazon has allowed many writers to actually sell books directly to the public instead of having to find a publisher, which would likely reject the majority of their work, first. Look at Amanda Hocking as an example. Think she would enjoy as much success going through a publisher first? In the traditional model, she would probably wouldn’t have anything published yet and would be facing the disappointment and frustration of publisher after publisher rejecting her work instead of making money off of it.

 

When you think of starving artists, think of people like Amanda Hocking instead of Stephen King. In the literary world, there are many more success stories like this. Music and movies tend to have more obstacles for the independent artist, due to the way the entertainment industry still has a choke hold on distribution. But, what if there was a medium for music and movies similar to the kindle? Wouldn’t this benefit the everyday artist much more than what the MPAA does?

 

From the entertainment industry’s point of view, losing control of distribution is a very bad thing. This is how they make money. If an artist can distribute their work on their own and keep more of the profits, why would they need the distribution provided by the entertainment industry? The artist would be the winner in this scenario. They have more control over their work, they receive more of the profit, their work is more available to the public and it is easier to release new work.

Thinking about these aspects is troubling the execs in the field. This is how they make the big bucks, and the Internet could take those big bucks out of their hands. That is why the fight piracy. It’s not because they care about the artist, it’s because they care about themselves. But, to win public approval they spin the situation so it looks like it is all about the starving artist.

They cook the numbers on piracy to insane levels. If you do the math, the losses claimed by the industry due to pirating come out to roughly $800 for every citizen in America, including children. I’m not sure about you guys, but I know my kids haven’t downloaded $800 worth of pirated goods from the Internet this year. So, where do these numbers come from? Yes, I realize not everyone pirates, but is it really logical to believe those that do are truly doing it at this scale and to this effect?

 

Also, if your kid did pirate a couple movies, is that really a sale lost from the movie industry? If they wanted to watch Jennifer’s Body and couldn’t download it illegally, would you have bought it for them or would they simply not watch the movie? That’s also assuming that everything that gets downloaded is also watched. Judging from the people I have known, most of them don’t even sit down and watch have the stuff they pirate.

Even the government says the numbers released by the entertainment industry can’t be trusted. Check out this report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office:

http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-423

If you don’t want to read the report, here’s a quote you should consider:

Three widely cited U.S. government estimates of economic losses resulting from counterfeiting cannot be substantiated due to the absence of underlying studies.

 

Those numbers that the entertainment industry loves to throw around are unsubstantiated, but they don’t mention that in their press releases, do they? Instead, they claim that money is being stolen directly from the pockets of the poor starving artists.

Finally, aside from numbers cooked up by the entertainment industry, where is the true proof that piracy is costing artist’s money? There have actually been studies that show pirates buy more music than other people. They try a bunch of stuff, find stuff they like and then buy more stuff from that artist.

Here’s a couple articles on the subject:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and-movie-piracy-really-hurt-the-u-s-economy/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music

 

If piracy completely kills the ability for artists to distribute their work over the Internet, then why are Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and other businesses like them doing so well? I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a lot easier to pay $3 for an episode of Justified on iTunes than it is to attempt to pirate it. I have to imagine that’s that case for many other people out there as well.

 

The entertainment industry needs to stop fighting piracy and spend those resources making their products easily accessible over the Internet instead.

The Exceptionally Normal Guide to the 1/18/12 Internet Blackout

If you have not heard about the impending Internet blackout yet, chances are you will know about it by the end of the day on Wednesday. In a widespread protest of the SOPA act, many popular websites will either shutdown or boldly state their distaste with this proposed legislation on Wednesday. However, many people aren’t even aware of what SOPA is and why they should be joining in on the protest.

What Is SOPA?

SOPA is short for the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA is a piece of legislation funded by the entertainment industry. The bill was announced by Texas Representative, Lamar Smith in late October 2011. Interestingly enough, Smith’s top donors for his 2012 campaign have been members of the TV, Movie and music industries. Surely this is all just a coincidence and Rep. Smith is not just acting in his own best interests. After all, a publically elected official would never trade the public’s freedom for kickbacks, right?

Unfortunately, if SOPA passes that is exactly what will happen. In short, the bill is designed to allow the entertainment industry to set up a giant content filter around the United States. If they say a site is hosting pirated movies, music or other media, that site will then be blocked for U.S. citizens. SOPA is designed to act like a giant nanny, restricting American’s from accessing “naughty” Internet content.

The method for adding sites to the giant “naughty” list is scary in itself. Any site accused of having illegal content could be blocked. Don’t like that pizza place down the street? If they have a forum, upload some illegal files and you could get them put on the naughty list. Any website that hosts user content, like Twitter, Facebook or forums that allow uploads could find themselves on the naughty list due to content that their users upload. Even if their TOS states no illegal content, the site itself would still be on the hook. Additionally, this could be a deathblow to a large number of e-commerce sites. Digital media sites would be the hardest hit, with investments drying up and American traffic blocked from visiting. Even your blog could end up on the naughty list in the name of stopping piracy.

 

While at first glance this act seems to be about targeting piracy, the ramifications go much deeper than stopping a naughty file sharer. Freedom of Speech aside, this ill-conceived act would actually make the Internet as a whole less secure for everyday people accessing completely legal sites, like bankofamerica.com. In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security has made a number of security improvements across the Internet known as DNSSEC. DNSSEC helps ensure that when you type in bankofamerica.com, you connect directly with BoA and your surfing session with them is a secure tunnel that cannot be broken into by hackers. Unfortunately, SOPA is not compatible with DNSSEC and all of these security improvements would go up in smoke.

 

As if invalidating these security improvements isn’t folly enough, the supporters of SOPA have not really researched whether or not their bright idea would actually work in the real world. On paper, it looks good to them. They see SOPA as a way to cut off access to websites that are illegally sharing their property.  But, how would they block these sites?

The answer is they expect your ISP to monitor all of your web traffic. Every ISP in the country would have to monitor the web traffic of every customer they provide service to. Then, they would be tasked with blocking access to sites that are deemed “naughty.” In short, every ISP in the country would log and monitor every web request you make and everyone would be going through a giant web content filter each time they wish to view a webpage. The most noticeable effect of this would be latency. This will immediately slow down the speed at which every website in the world loads for American citizens.

When you type in a URL, like google.com, your ISP will have to run your request through the filter and check to see if it’s on the “naughty” list. While this may take fractions of a second for a single web request, when an ISP is doing this for every web request made by every single one of their customers, it can significantly slow down the flow of information on the Internet. Instead of being an Information Superhighway, the Internet would become more like an Information Tollway. Each website request would be stopped for questioning before being allowed to proceed.

 

The quick and dirty summary of SOPA:

• Freedom of Speech would be permanently limited with the government and entertainment industry deciding which sites American citizens can access
• Even your personal blog can be added to the naughty list if someone adds illegal or copyrighted content to the comments
• All the security improvements made by DNSSEC would be tossed out the window
• There would no longer be truly “secure” connections to websites, including your banking site
• It would take longer to access  every website on the Internet

 

However, even though there are numerous downsides to SOPA, at least we could all sleep soundly at night knowing that Rep. Smith and his friends in the entertainment business are able to make more money. Oh wait, that’s not exactly true either. Well, for the entertainment business at least, Rep. Smith will likely be laughing all the way to the bank on this one.

Would SOPA Even Help The Entertainment Industry?

There is quite a bit of evidence that is widely available showing that piracy does not significantly affect the amount of money made by the entertainment industry. The facts and figures about lost profits thrown around by TV and movie executives are largely bullshit. When the entertainment industry makes up crazy numbers about lost profits due to piracy they forget to include one crucial bit of information: most movies, music and other media is complete crap that people still wouldn’t buy if piracy wasn’t possible.

To put it simply, people are not going to buy a copy of a shitty movie just because they can no longer download it. They just won’t make any attempt to watch it because no one wants to pay good money for shitty media.

Adding to the fuzzy math done by the entertainment industry is the fact that they also don’t take into account the amount of people who do legally own music or movies but download it from the net because of the convenience factor. For the vast majority of computer users, it’s a lot easier to download season one of Storage Wars than it is to try to rip it from the DVD set to your PC. If a person already owns the season on DVD, they typically are not going to be willing to shell out the money to buy it again just so they can watch it on their laptop while traveling.

These factors all combine to make SOPA a bloated piece of ill-conceived legislation that strips away the rights of American citizens, will cost every ISP in the country millions of dollars and won’t help the starving artists in the movie and music industry one bit. It’s truly mindboggling to try to figure out how this bill has gotten this far, and why anyone in their right mind would support it. That is except Rep. Smith. I think his motives here are, to quote Mr. Blagojevich, “Golden.”

 

What Is The Internet Blackout?

It’s not just normal citizens that are having a major issue with this bill; many large companies and IT businesses see SOPA as a slap in the face as well. Basically, many organizations are calling SOPA a bad idea that would stifle innovation and threaten free speech. Even tech giant Google has publicly spoken out against the act, but other sites plan to take direct action. Thus, on 1/18/12 a number of internet sites are planning to go black in protest of the bill. While this might be a bit of an inconvenience to normal web surfers, the underlying hope is that it will spread awareness of the dangers of this bill quickly to the mainstream, and voting, public.

Sites scheduled to take part in the blackout:

• Wikipedia
• Boing Boing
• Reddit
• Cheezburger Network
• Destructoid
• Mojang
• Major league Gaming

 

Some of the sites and businesses that have publicly spoken out against SOPA:

• Yahoo
• Google
• WordPress
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Twitter
• AOL
• LinkedIn
• eBay
• Mozilla
• The ACLU
• Human Rights Watch
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Kaspersky Lab
• The Cato Institute

 

 

 

 

Mapping the Origins of the Universe

As with many other great discoveries, the road to mapping the origins of the universe was marked by irony, the unnecessary scraping of bird shit, accidental discoveries and the contributions of truly great minds.

The Big Bang theory was first explained in 1931 by Georges Lemaitre, who ironically was a Catholic priest. He drew upon the work of previous scientists, such as Albert Einstein, and described the singularity and its expansion.

However, he did not use the phrase “big bang” to describe this occurrence. The term “big bang” was not coined until the 50’s when scientist Fred Hoyle used it as a derogatory term to slight a theory he personally did not believe in. Hoyle firmly believed that the universe was static and this “expansion” theory was hogwash. Much to his dismay, his bitter words did nothing to discredit the theory and became part of the standard scientific lexicon.

The Big Bang Theory contends that the universe began as point known as the singularity. Everything that would exist in the universe was compressed into this tiny dot. Then, an explosion caused the singularity to expand at an insanely fast rate and created all the contents of the universe in fractions of a second.

The quest for validating the “Big Bang” via microwaves had its roots in post WWII America, when many scientists who contributed to the Manhattan project began to turn their attention to the cosmos. With this attention directed at the stars, scientists and engineers began to search for ways to not only study the distance stars and planets but to also study the origins of the universe itself.

Optical telescopes had hard limits and satellite scopes such as the Hubble Telescope were still science-fiction, so these great minds sought other ways to study the heavens and probe the beginnings of the universe.

CMBR and the Big Bang
When the Big Bang occurred, the universe would have been a very, very hot place. As it cooled, the universe would then be filled with radiation that is basically the ‘left-over” heat. This radiation is known as “cosmic microwave background radiation.”

In 1948, the existence of cosmic microwave background radiation was predicted by three scientists; George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman. Alpher and Herman went on to pretty accurately predict the temperature, or frequency, this left-over heat should be residing at.

Knowing that these microwaves should exist and the frequencies they should be at, scientists were then left trying to devise a method to detect these rays, which are invisible to the naked eye. However, the finding the correct tools to detect these rays would be a long road in itself.

Why is CMBR Important?
With optical telescopes, the background between galaxies and stars is completely dark since there is nothing giving off light to illuminate this empty space. With a radio telescope, scientists could gather and analyze data from the radio frequencies which also inhabit these dark spaces because they were no longer dependent on visible light.

However, there was a limitation with the radio frequencies. While the radio spectrum provides data on these dark regions, the data is completely uniform. While radio waves allowed scientists to see further, what they saw was pretty monogamous and did not yield any clues into the formation of the universe. It was like viewing a sky full of clouds.

This is where microwave frequencies would come into play. Due to the way the microwaves scatter, a glimpse at the microwave radiation in the universe would be like being able to peel apart clouds on a cloudy night and catching a glimpse at the stars that were previously obscured by those clouds. Instead of just seeing the dim light of a cloudy and overcast night, scientists would be able to see the stars beyond the clouds for the first time.

The ability to view CMBR would grant scientists the ability to see how this radiation had diffused across the universe after the Big Bang, but they first needed to figure out exactly how to see it.

The Road to Detecting CMBR
Radio shortwave communications were used as early as 1931, and by the 1940’s radio telescopes were already in use and detecting radio frequencies originating from space. What these telescopes were not detecting were microwave frequencies on the radio spectrum.

By this time, it was already predicted that microwaves emanating from distant stars and even the big bang
could be detected via the radio spectrum. While this information was available in the late 40’s and scientists already had access to radio telescopes, it still took over a decade of careful study and experimentation for scientists to actually stumble upon a way to capture and analyze the microwaves.

In 1964, a team of Princeton scientists, led by Robert Dicke, began construction on what was called a “Dicke Radiometer,” which was specially designed to detect those waves in the frequencies they were thought to appear in.

At the same time and less than 50 miles away, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were busy constructing a communications antenna for Bell Laboratories.

Both Dicke’s team of scientists and the engineers at Bell Labs were having serious issues. The team at Princeton knew the rays were out there but could not seem to find them at the frequencies they should have appeared at. At Bell Labs, the communications antenna was plagued with “noise” that the engineers could not seem to get rid of.

Penzias and Wilson exhaustively rebuilt components, covered every seam and rivet in duct tape and even carefully swept their antenna clean of “white dielectric material,” or in layman’s terms, bird shit. None of this helped and they were still plagued by a constant hiss of background noise that made experimenting with their antenna impossible.

In what may have been a strong effort to avoid cleaning more bird shit, Penzias and Wilson finally made a call to Princeton, in hopes that someone on the staff there would be able to help them track down and eliminate the source of their noise. They reached Robert Dicke, who immediately realized what the “noise” was.
Penzia and Wilson had been detecting cosmic background radiation, the very microwaves that Dicke and his Princeton team were searching desperately for.

The Noble Peace Prize
Penzia and Wilson were awarded the 1978 Noble Peace Prize for this finding even though they had purely stumbled upon it and had no clue what it was. Although the Princeton team did not receive official prizes or recognition, they were finally able to detect microwave frequencies.

Results of Viewing CMBR
By analyzing the CMBR waves, cosmologists could find no other explanation for the waves and their fluctuations other than the Big Bang model. The findings corresponded directly with the evidence they expected to find left behind by the Big Bang. The result of decades of work done by the brightest minds in science gained sudden validation, and humanity was afford a view into the history of the universe unlike anything that had previously been imagined.

To put this discovery in perspective, Alan Guth used a fantastic analogy in “The Inflationary Universe.” He compared our view of the universe to looking down at the sidewalk from the hundredth floor of the Empire State Building. Before the detection of cosmic microwave background radiation, the most distant objects science had detected were on about the 60th floor of the building and this was as far as science could “see.” With this discovery, suddenly the view was cleared all the way down to a half of an inch of the sidewalk.

Even though the road was lined with bird shit, irony and accidental discoveries, the detection of CMBR remains one of the greatest finds in recent scientific history. This discovery single-handedly expanded and changed everything science knew about the beginnings of the universe.

Is Everything We “Know” About Dinosaurs Wrong?

Researchers at the University of Adelaide have declared that everything we think we know about dinosaurs could be completely wrong. The Australian-based research team contends that science has gotten even the basic facts about the prehistoric beasts horrifically wrong.
The Aussie research team lead by Roger Seymour has declared that dinosaurs were not the slow-moving, lumbering cold-blooded beasts that science has long led us to believe they were. Instead, Seymour contends that his research proves they were warm-blooded, fast-moving and highly active critters.
Seymour’s team reached this conclusion by carefully analyzing tiny holes which occur in the thigh bones of the extinct beasts.

The holes are known to scientists as “nutrient foramen” and provide the blood supply to the living cells located inside the bones. Similar studies on human bones have strongly suggested that the hole size is directly correlated to the maximum rate of active exercise that a person can achieve. Larger holes mean that the individual is capable of higher and longer levels of strenuous activity than those possessing small holes. When Seymour’s team analyzed the dinosaur bones, they discovered that the hole size does not correctly correlate with the level of activity that the beasts are suspected of maintaining.
Instead of the holes matching the profile of an organism with cold blood and low activity levels, the holes matched the profile of active, warm-blooded organisms. After adjusting for size differences, the researchers were surprised to find that the size of the nutrient foramen holes found in the dinosaurs suggest that they were drastically more active than modern day mammals are.
This particular study examined the nutrient foramen of 10 unique dinosaur species from 5 different dinosaur groups, and the findings were consistent across the board. Surprisingly, this is not the first study to strongly suggest that our perception of dinosaurs as cold-blooded and sluggish is completely incorrect. Several recent studies have reached the conclusion that the creatures were warm-blooded and active. These independent conclusions were all reached by different research methods, which studied specific physical traits of the creatures.
Among the most notable recent studies, a study published in June examined the isotopes found in the teeth of sauropods and contends that those creatures maintained the same body temperature levels that are found in modern humans. While the results of these studies may disrupt the foundation of what we believe about the prehistoric beasts, this situation is a welcomed reminder that not all scientific beliefs are written in stone, and science can be corrected when new evidence surfaces.

India’s Deadly Tapwater

Water in India has gotten so bad that it can kill, literally. In a country with more citizens owning cellphones than toilets, the water is harboring dangerous bacteria at frightening levels. The water in India has been shown to include a wide range of nasty bugs including everything from cholera to pneumonia.
The entire country of India suffers greatly from an extreme lack of sanitation, so it is no surprise that all the water is under a boil order. The most common ill caused by the dirty water are bladder infections, which tend to strike women more than men. The big concern is now that the bacteria is growing increasingly antibiotic resistant and may soon become completely untreatable.
India is the world’s second quickest growing economy right now, yet over fifty percent of the population does not even have access to any type of toilet. Instead, these people are forced to “do their business” in fields, on railroad tracks and riverbanks and in any other open places they can find. Only 20% of India’s population even has indoor plumbing. For those who do have indoor plumbing, often the water supplies only run for a few hours daily- giving bacteria time to breed inside pipes.
Given these situations, it is easy to see how the water has gotten in such a dangerous state.

Brain Shrinkage May Hold Key To Early Alzheimer’s Detection

New research suggests that the brain shrinkage that precedes Alzheimer’s may be visible on MRI’s up to ten years before patients begin showing symptoms of the disease. Alzheimer’s disease tends to be a devastating and fatal diagnosis with patients slowly losing both memory and control over bodily functions. There is no current cure, but medical researches harbor hope that early intervention may help improve the patient’s quality of life.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School working in conjunction with Chicago’s Rush University made the discovery while studying brain scans taken of a group of test patients.  The doctors focused on the use of MRI technology because it is widespread and readily available for patient use. Because MRI technology is accessible to so many people, there is hope that it can eventually be used as a screening tool for patients.
During the study, the teams performed MRI scans on a group of people over the age of 70. Then they later repeated the tests and analyzed the results.  When comparing the scans done of patients who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s during the study, they found that the signs of the disease could be recognized as early as ten years prior to the onset of the disease.
When they divided the patients into groups based upon the amount of brain tissue located in key areas of the brain, the results were startling. 55 percent of the patients with the lowest rankings developed the disease during this relatively short time frame. However, none of the patients who had the highest measurements were diagnosed with the disease and remained healthy. For those with average amounts of brain tissue, the diagnosis rate was around 20 percent, with lower levels being more prone to succumbing to the disease than higher levels. As part of the study, patients from both Boston and Chicago were used, and the results were very similar regardless of geographic location. This control was put in place to help rule out geographic factors coming into play.
Researchers hope that measurements like these may one day help doctors screen for the disease early, giving more time for aggressive treatments to be sought. There is great optimism that there will be a cure or treatment developed in the future and screening such as this can help match at risk patients with these treatments as early as possible.

Organ Donation Could Help Families Pay Funeral Bills

Funerals are always costly affairs, and paying for the proper send off of a loved one can be quite expensive; but what if the deceased person could exchange their no longer needed organs for covering these costs? A new Swedish study has suggested that funeral costs should be exchangeable for organ donations from the deceased.
Exchanging organs for profit or money is prohibited in Sweden, just as it is in the United States. However, this study demonstrated that the costs associated with trading the deceased organs for memorial  services and funeral fees is low enough not to encourage the exchanges to become criminal. Also, due to the donor being deceased this type of exchange does not seem likely to garner abusive participants who would use the program as a way to sell off organs for profit.
Currently in Sweden, as well as the rest of the developed world, it is not uncommon for those who can afford to travel to impoverished nations to do so in order to outright purchase organs from donors there. If more organs were available through programs such as this, this criminal trade would diminish as the availability of legitimately obtained organs raised.
This program would provide Swedes with about 30,000 kronor or $4,800 USD to cover either funeral expenses or to donate to a charity of their choosing. Since the donor is required to be deceased and the sum is so small, it would not tend to give rise to large numbers of fraud.
Not only would this program provide financial relief for families to pay for the funeral services for their loved one, but it would also have the benefit of potentially saving and changing the lives of several people via the donated organs. Given the high demand for donor organs and the need to mitigate funeral costs, this study provides a solution that seems to offer the best possible solution for both sides of the equation.
Although there are no current programs that trade funeral expenses for organ donation, it is easy to donate corpses to science and donors or their families can choose how the bodies are to be used. When trying to figure out how to economically dispose of Grandpa’s remains keep in mind that donating bodies to science provides doctors with test subjects for surgeries and is of great value to medical professionals and scientists alike.

FBI Documents Reveal Shockingly Normal Explaination For Roswell

The FBI has recently added thousands of declassified documents to their searchable online information vault, and this has UFO fanatics claiming that evidence of Roswell has finally been released.  With the discovery of searchable items relating to the incident in the FBI’s online vault, conspiracy theorists have again begun raving that there is proof of a government cover-up. Unfortunately, it does not seem like any of the conspiracy theorists have taken the time to actually read the documents.
Roswell New Mexico sprung into the spotlight after an air force incident in 1947. Reports were sent in stating that an Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, had crashed outside the town. The United States military dispatched to the site, cleaning up the remains of the crashed object.

While the U.S. military has consistently maintained the object was simply a test balloon, conspiracy theorists latched on to the claim it was a flying saucer, complete with space aliens neatly tucked inside. The debates raged for years, and ultimately lead to government inquiries being performed. The inquiries supported the government statement, yet debate still rages about the contents of the crash site.
When the FBI made its files easily searchable online in April, many jumped to say that finally the government had published proof of the Roswell cover-up and that the public was finally to have access to direct proof that the military had engaged in a cover up, including an elusive “smoking-gun” handwritten memo.
UFO supporters claim there was a handwritten memo that detailed the crashed alien ship, which the government had been covering up. The memo in question actually has been released by the FBI and is searchable in the online vault.

As the conspiracy theorists claim, this “smoking-gun” actually does provide an excellent description of the crashed object, and even refers to it as resembling “a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector.” This ordinary description is not quite what the UFO fans had been hoping for; instead of describing a crashed alien ship, it lends credence to the government’s statement that the object was a crashed weather balloon.

It seems that the conspiracy theorists are partially correct about the vaults containing evidence of Roswell. However, it is not the evidence they are craving to discover or willing to accept as truth. Instead of documents which contain evidence of a cover-up or conspiracy, the declassified information only supports what the government has claimed all along.

NASA Declares Spirit Dead

NASA has declared Spirit, the Mars rover, dead after engineers failed to revive the vehicle following the end of the Martian winter. Despite desperate attempts to revive the hibernating Mars rover, NASA officially decided to cease transmitting to the rover on May 25, 2011.

Spirit first landed on Mars on January 3, 2004, beginning what was intended to be a 3 month mission. This mission was completed with ease and Spirit along with its twin sibling, Opportunity, then went on to complete additional goals, exceeding even the greatest hopes for the rovers’ abilities and design. Although Opportunity continues to be mobile and operational, Spirit has been plagued with injuries over the past few years.

The rover drove backwards for years after having one of its front wheels break and then became permanently stuck in soft soil in 2009. The rover then served as a stationary research station until March of 2010, when NASA lost communications with the vehicle. The rover was facing a harsh Martian winter with total darkness and temperatures lower than -55 Celsius, but it was hoped that Spirit had gone into hibernation mode and would reawaken when the Martian summer arrived in March 2011.

Unfortunately, attempts to reawaken the rover have proven to be futile and NASA has decided to reallocate resources from the unresponsive device and begin focusing on the still-functioning Opportunity rover instead. If scheduling permits, the Deep Space Network may intermittently listen for signals from the vehicle, but there will no longer be a concentrated effort made to contact Spirit.

Not only did this rover exceed expectations, but it also captured the attention of the nation and world becoming a symbol of the American dream and upholding the ideal that any dreams can come true with hard work and determination.

A quote from Sofi Collis, the third grader who named the rovers, puts it best:

“I used to live in an orphanage. It was dark and cold and lonely. At night, I looked up at the sparkly sky and felt better. I dreamed I could fly there. In America, I can make all my dreams come true. Thank you for the ‘Spirit’ and the ‘Opportunity.’”

For now, Spirit may be dark and lonely on a planet 35,000,000 miles from home. However, hope remains that one day human hands may once again reach the rover, lovingly dust it off and then return it home to Earth. Once home, it could inhabit a well-earned place in a museum showing the triumphs of both human tenacity and scientific advancements alike.