Volcanic Eruption From Space

This is a follow up to an earlier post here. These photos were taken from the international space station as it flew overhead of the eruption.

Amazing volcano photo shows shock wave

I found this on MSNBC.

“The main plume appears to be a combination of brown ash and white steam, according to a NASA statement. The vigorously rising plume gives the steam a bubble-like appearance.

The surrounding atmosphere has been shoved up by the shock wave of the eruption, scientists said.

An amazing new picture from space reveals a volcanic eruption in its earliest stage, with a huge plume of ash and steam billowing skyward and creating a shock wave in the atmosphere.

Sarychev Peak on Matua Island is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain, northeast of Japan.

The new photo was taken June 12 from the International Space Station. NASA says volcano researchers are excited about the picture “because it captures several phenomena that occur during the earliest stages of an explosive volcanic eruption.”

Read the rest of the article HERE

More than one drink daily increases bowel cancer risk

This article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald. Click here to see the original article.

“Having more than one alcoholic drink a day is enough to dramatically increase your bowel cancer risk, Australian research shows.

Smoking, obesity, diabetes and eating large amounts of meat also push up the risk of developing the aggressive cancer, which claims 4,000 lives across the country every year.

Researchers analysed more than 100 international studies going back to the 1960s, to determine the colorectal cancer risk attached to key parts of the Australian lifestyle.

“It’s the first definitive study to quantify the role of lifestyle … on the risk of developing colorectal cancer,” said Associate Professor Rachel Huxley, of Sydney’s The George Institute.

“People who eat the highest amount of red and processed meat have about 20 per cent greater risk of developing the cancer than those who don’t eat meat.

“It’s similar with obesity: if you are obese your risk is about 20 per cent higher compared to normal weight individuals.

“But for alcohol we found that the risk was 60 per cent, and what’s classified as the highest intake isn’t very much.”

Cancer patient held at airport for missing fingerprint

From Reuters: This is the same medication (Capecitabine) that I’m on!!!.. and my fingerprints are slowly disappearing as well! Better not fly into the states anytime soon I guess.

“HONG KONG (Reuters) – A Singapore cancer patient was held for four hours by immigration officials in the United States when they could not detect his fingerprints — which had apparently disappeared because of a drug he was taking.

The incident, highlighted in the Annals of Oncology, was reported by the patient’s doctor, Tan Eng Huat, who advised cancer patients taking this drug to carry a doctor’s letter when traveling to the United States.

The drug, capecitabine, is commonly used to treat cancers in the head and neck, breast, stomach and colorectum.

One side-effect is chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet and the skin can peel, bleed and develop ulcers or blisters — or what is known as hand-foot syndrome.

“This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time,” explained Tan, senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore’s National Cancer Center.

The patient, a 62-year-old man, had head and neck cancer that had spread but responded well to chemotherapy. To prevent the cancer from recurring, he was put on capecitabine.

“In December 2008, after more than three years of capecitabine, he went to the United States to visit his relatives,” Tan wrote.

“He was detained at the airport customs for four hours because the immigration officers could not detect his fingerprints. He was allowed to enter after the custom officers were satisfied that he was not a security threat.”

Tan said the loss of fingerprints is not described in the packaging of the drug, although chronic inflammation of the palms and soles of feet is included.

“The topmost layer … is the layer that accounts for the fingerprint, that (losing that top layer) is all it takes (to lose a fingerprint),” Tan told Reuters.

“Theoretically, if you stop the drug, it will grow back but details are scanty. No one knows the frequency of this occurrence among patients taking this drug and nobody knows how long a person must be on this drug before the loss of fingerprints.”

NZer Killed in Brunei

This is from NZHerald.co.nz: Summary – A 47 year old recent breast cancer surviver is killed whist riding her bike. What is the more interesting idea to this article is that I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, or be killed in a car accident.

Does it therefore make it more ironic when you are trying to so hard to preserve your life through battling cancer with chemotherapy? I guess we all could go at any time from any unsuspecting accident, and accidents don’t discriminate over past medical history.

“A Kiwi mother killed in a hit-and-run in Brunei survived breast cancer and was due to fly back to New Zealand this week.

Lee Jefford, 47, was cycling along an expressway in Lambak Kanan on Monday when a car hit her from behind.

She was rushed to hospital but died of her injuries without regaining conciousness.

Her husband Mike Jefford, a pilot with Royal Brunei Airlines, was told when he landed a flight from Saudi Arabia on Monday night.

“We’d been on the ground for about two minutes when my best mate came on board and said ‘come with me’,” he said.

“He walked me out through the terminal to my son [12-year-old Connor] and that’s when he told me what had happened.”

Mike was taken straight to the hospital but Lee had already died.

The couple moved to Brunei about 10 years ago when Mike took a job with the airline.

Lee was cycling with a friend when she was hit. The woman told the Brunei Times newspaper she was behind Lee, who was wearing a helmet, when a car sped past and hit her.

Lee was thrown from her bike and over roadside railings into bushes. The car did not stop or even slow down.

Lee’s parents Annie and Bryan Sharp flew to Brunei immediately.

The airline paid to bring Lee’s body home this week.

Mike said Lee had been due to fly to Auckland on Friday to have a check up with her cancer specialist. She had breast cancer 2 years ago and fought hard to beat it.

“She fought the cancer really well and then some mad driver kills her,” said Mike.

Brunei police say they have found the car that hit her.”

How Somalia’s Fishermen Became Pirates

This is a really interesting article from Time.com. It’s an interesting insight into where all this piracy has come from, and the fact that it it is really the creation of the rest of the world’s own greed in Somali waters. Of course, it does not excuse the piracy that is going on at the moment, but it does mean that the west has to take responsibility for creating the industry, rather than complain about being a victim of it.

“Amid the current media frenzy about Somali pirates, it’s hard not to imagine them as characters in some dystopian Horn of Africa version of Waterworld. We see wily corsairs in ragged clothing swarming out of their elusive mother ships, chewing narcotic khat while thumbing GPS phones and grappling hooks. They are not desperate bandits, experts say, rather savvy opportunists in the most lawless corner of the planet. But the pirates have never been the only ones exploiting the vulnerabilities of this troubled failed state – and are, in part, a product of the rest of the world’s neglect.

Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia’s last functional government in 1991, the country’s 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline – the longest in continental Africa – has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country’s at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international “free for all,” with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country’s own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. According to another U.N. report, an estimated $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from the country’s coastline each year. “In any context,” says Gustavo Carvalho, a London-based researcher with Global Witness, an environmental NGO, “that is a staggering sum.”

5 Years After: Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results

This is article from Scientific American was published recently. I wonder if this approach only works in a country where drugs are rampant, or whether a slightly lower grade drug den such as NZ would benifit from this kind of law change.

“In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem-it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank. “Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they’re learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely,” report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts-defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use-are brought before what’s known as a “Dissuasion Commission,” an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Apple Places Order for 100 Million 8Gb Flash Chips

In case anyone cared…. This is the rumoured component buy up that tends to happen this time of the year prior to the new iPhone release that is speculated to be released around June/July this year.

From The Apple Blog

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions. Maybe they just want to redecorate the Cupertino campus, and they thought covering the walls in 8Gb (gigabit, not byte) flash chips would be original and visually appealing.

Actually, that’s probably the last possible reason Apple recently placed a massive order for 100 million 8Gb chips from their suppliers, most of which will come from Samsung, according to DigiTimes, the source of the report. Yes, that is a lot of chips, and apparently the whole industry will feel the strain as the NAND flash supply will be pretty tight up until the end of May, thanks to fairly large orders by Sony and Nokia, in addition to Apple.

In case you didn’t guess, Apple is most likely going to be using the new chips for the new iPhone that’s been all but confirmed as due this June in time for WWDC ‘09. The tiny chips can be combined by Apple into larger configurations of 16GB and 32GB sizes, which is what most are expecting from the new iPhone models. For those still skeptical about the new iPhone’s imminent launch, the same thing happened last year around this time before the release of the iPhone 3G, except that time the order was only half the size. Which doesn’t mean Apple is planning on producing double the launch units, but that those units will almost definitely have double the storage capacity.

Would it be too much to ask for a leapfrog of the 32GB capacity and go straight to the 64? Probably, but I’m going to anyway. Though as it is, I don’t use the 16GB I already have. But there’s a difference being needing something and wanting to be able to do something, if the mood strikes me.”

The End of Christian America

This was recently published in Newsweek.

“It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.-president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth-read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler-a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life-the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, “this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified.” As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.Published in Newsweek

….

There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.”

Click HERE to continue reading the full article

The Next Y2K…

This was published in the latest New Scientist Magazine. I have seen reports like this before, but it think this is worth reading as it sums up the situation pretty well. 2012 could be an interesting year!

“IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.