Science & Technology News.

[Thomas]

E-ELT (uropean Extremely Large optical/infrared Telescope) to Be Constructed in Chile
The final site has been decided
E-ELT to Be Constructed in Chile - The final site has been decided - Softpedia

The European Southern Observatory (ESO), the most prolific astronomical organization in the world, has finally decided on a final location to build its newest instrument, the European Extremely Large optical/infrared Telescope (E-ELT). The massive construction's main feature will be a whooping 42-meter-diameter primary mirror, which will ensure unprecedented observations power, even for a ground-based observatory. Once completed, the E-ELT will be the most massive instrument of its kind, and the “world's biggest eye on the sky,” according to European officials.

Finally selecting the construction site “is an important milestone that allows us to finalize the baseline design of this very ambitious project, which will vastly advance astronomical knowledge. I thank the site selection team for the tremendous work they have done over the past few years,” explains the Director General at ESO, Tim de Zeeuw. Competition for hosting the instrument has been stiff, particularly between Chile and Spain. The latter lobbied strongly at the European Union to be selected and even cited political reasons for it. But eventually, the Chile location won.

The E-ELT will therefore be built on Cerro Armazones, with a definite approval scheduled to be granted at the end of this year. If all formalities are met on time, the telescope should be operational by 2018. “In March 2010, the ESO Council was provided with a preliminary report with the main conclusions from the E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee. These conclusions confirmed that all the sites examined in the final shortlist (Armazones, Ventarrones, Tolonchar and Vizcachas in Chile, and La Palma in Spain) have very good conditions for astronomical observing, each one with its particular strengths,” ESO experts said in a statement.

“The technical report concluded that Cerro Armazones, near Paranal, stands out as the clearly preferred site, because it has the best balance of sky quality for all the factors considered and can be operated in an integrated fashion with ESO's Paranal Observatory. Cerro Armazones and Paranal share the same ideal conditions for astronomical observations. In particular, over 320 nights are clear per year,” they added.

“Adding the transformational scientific capabilities of the E-ELT to the already tremendously powerful integrated VLT observatory guarantees the long-term future of the Paranal as the most advanced optical/infrared observatory in the world and further strengthens ESO's position as the world-leading organization for ground-based astronomy,” de Zeeuw concludes.

 

[FreekiN]

Haha I am enjoying this thread. Keep posting.

 

[Gin ka Pakistan]

Brain waves , if I think "light on" my room lights will sense the waves and will turn on (probably in 2030)

 

[Thomas]

Has Noah's Ark Been Found on Turkish Mountaintop?
FOXNews.com - Has Noah's Ark Been Found on Turkish Mountaintop?

A group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers say wooden remains they have discovered on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey are the remains of Noah's Ark.

The group claims that carbon dating proves the relics are 4,800 years old, meaning they date to around the same time the ark was said to be afloat. Mt. Ararat has long been suspected as the final resting place of the craft by evangelicals and literalists hoping to validate biblical stories.

Yeung Wing-Cheung, from the Noah's Ark Ministries International research team that made the discovery, said: "It's not 100 percent that it is Noah's Ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it."

There have been several reported discoveries of the remains of Noah's Ark over the years, most notably a find by archaeologist Ron Wyatt in 1987. At the time, the Turkish government officially declared a national park around his find, a boat-shaped object stretched across the mountains of Ararat.

Nevertheless, the evangelical ministry remains convinced that the current find is in fact more likely to be the actual artifact, calling upon Dutch Ark researcher Gerrit Aalten to verify its legitimacy.

“The significance of this find is that for the first time in history the discovery of Noah’s Ark is well documented and revealed to the worldwide community,” Aalten said at a press conference announcing the find. Citing the many details that match historical accounts of the Ark, he believes it to be a legitimate archaeological discovery.

“There’s a tremendous amount of solid evidence that the structure found on Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey is the legendary Ark of Noah,” said Aalten.

Representatives of Noah's Ark Ministries said the structure contained several compartments, some with wooden beams, that they believe were used to house animals.The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human settlement on the grounds none have ever been found above 11,000 feet in the vicinity, Yeung said.

During the press conference, team member Panda Lee described visiting the site. “In October 2008, I climbed the mountain with the Turkish team. At an elevation of more than 4,000 meters, I saw a structure built with plank-like timber. Each plank was about 8 inches wide. I could see tenons, proof of ancient construction predating the use of metal nails."

We walked about 100 meters to another site. I could see broken wood fragments embedded in a glacier, and some 20 meters long. I surveyed the landscape and found that the wooden structure was permanently covered by ice and volcanic rocks."

Local Turkish officials will ask the central government in Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status so the site can be protected while a major archaeological dig is conducted.

The biblical story says that God decided to flood the Earth after seeing how corrupt it was. He then told Noah to build an ark and fill it with two of every animal species.

After the flood waters receded, the Bible says, the ark came to rest on a mountain. Many believe that Mount Ararat, the highest point in the region, is where the ark and her inhabitants ran aground.

 

[U-571]

have you ppl heard of a japnese tech remote control which fits your head and you can control TV just thinking....

 

[TruthSeeker]

Is male circumcision a humanitarian act?

By Jesse Bering

The surgical removing of foreskin from a neonate’s penis is seen by many critics as an outdated, cruel and unnecessary procedure that—although it may once have had some practical purpose in times past—is now done primarily out of blind habit and unquestioning obedience to “because I said so” authority figures. Although male circumcision is rare in Europe except for Jewish and Islamic subpopulations for which the procedure is a core part of religious group identity, about 70 percent of U.S. males—regardless of their religion—are circumcised. It’s embarrassing to admit, but growing up in Middle America, I didn’t even know what a nonmutilated penis looked like until the advent of the Internet. (Then again, I was also 14 before I realized that condoms weren’t, in fact, what old people in Florida lived in.) According to a 2003 report, the only meaningful predictor of whether parents will opt to get their infant son circumcised is whether the father’s own penis is circumcised—there’s a positive correlation, in case you’re wondering. Cut off the end of the ham—er, penis—because that’s what my daddy did and his daddy before him.

But much as I may want to join the cause to save the prepuces, the anti-circumcision stance may not be as humanitarian as it appears. Objection on the grounds that male circumcision is a somewhat bizarre, bloody and frightening ritual was probably very reasonable throughout much of modern history. But this ancient practice, which dates back at least to the Neolithic period, just happens to have important health implications today that are completely unrelated to the hollow rituals of our forebears’ foreskin removal. This strange procedure of lopping off the ends of penises may well have persevered over the eons on the shakiest grounds of justification, grounds that invoked religious, cultural or aesthetic reasons. But, ironically, it may now finally be playing a serious—even heroic—role in staving off a much more crippling problem:

Mounting evidence shows that male circumcision dramatically reduces the risk of HIV infection, at least for heterosexual males.

According to researchers writing in a 2009 issue of AIDS Patient Care and STDs, the prophylactic effect of male circumcision is owed to the following physical facts:

There are high densities of HIV target cells in the inner mucosal surface of the human foreskin … These HIV target cells lie beneath a protective layer of keratin, which is absent on the inner surface of the prepuce. By removing all or part of the foreskin, circumcision reduces both the number and susceptibility of target cells to HIV infection.

Since 2007, several randomized clinical trials have established that male circumcision could lower the risk of HIV acquisition in heterosexual men by as much as 62 percent. Sixty-two percent! So far, these studies have been limited to African populations that have been particularly hard-hit by AIDS-related casualties. In South Africa, a third of reproductive-aged women are infected. If you’re a 15-year-old living in that country today, there’s a 59 percent chance that you’ll die before reaching your 60th birthday; just 10 years ago, these odds were only 29 percent.

Here’s how the clinical trials basically worked. Thousands of adult, HIV-negative, sexually active, uncircumcised men in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa agreed to be randomly assigned to a circumcision group or a no-circumcision group. Those randomly assigned to the circumcision group had their foreskins removed by medical professionals, were told to abstain from intercourse until their wounds healed (about three weeks—there may actually be a greater risk of HIV infection during this period, so this is vital), and then were instructed to return to the clinic at six-month intervals to test for the virus. The results were unequivocal: two years later, the circumcised males were significantly less likely than their uncircumcised peers to have contracted HIV. In fact, the researchers decided to end these clinical trials early for ethical reasons: with data so clearly showing the advantages of circumcision in an environment rife with the virus, it’s hard to justify a further wait-and-see approach for those men that had been randomly assigned to the no-circumcision group.

For the Ugandan study, 22 of 2,387 circumcised men acquired HIV over the two-year period compared to 45 of 2,430 uncircumcised men who were infected during this time span. Extensive interview methods confirmed that the two groups did not differ in terms of their actual sexual behaviors, enabling the authors to conclude that the results were owed directly to the circumcision intervention. (For those data heads among you, P < 0.00001.) These numbers may not sound massive, but note that they refer to only a 24-month period; over a lifetime, they would become dramatic.

In fact, using the results from the South African study, one group of computer modellers crunched these numbers to find out how many lives mass neonatal male circumcision could potentially save in this region over a 10-year period. They concluded that male circumcision could save the lives of 300,000 people in Southern Africa alone. Move forward 20 years, they pointed out, and 2 to 7 million deaths could be averted.

It’s presently unknown whether homosexual males would also benefit from circumcision. The studies simply haven’t been done. But Beijing STD specialist Yuhua Ruan and colleagues suspect that circumcision would protect insertive partners (“tops”) against HIV much more than it would receptive partners (“bottoms”). This is because the anal mucosa is highly susceptible to trauma and so the risk of HIV infection through receptive anal sex is very high. The lesser benefit served by being on the receiving end might also apply to heterosexual couples, however. A study published in The Lancet last year found that circumcision in HIV-infected men from Uganda appeared to offer no protection against the virus to their female partners. Thus, although it’s too soon to tell, the real benefits of circumcision may be reserved primarily for heterosexual men or insertive gay men. But that’s still a lot of people whose foreskins may be compromising their health.

In a 2007 report in The Lancet, UCLA infectious disease specialist Sharif Sawires and his colleagues put it bluntly:

In regions where high HIV prevalence exposes the population to risks that have a devastating effect on entire societies, the risks associated with male circumcision could be outweighed by the potential lives saved …

We encourage multicultural, bilateral, and government agencies, along with non-governmental organizations to make this life-saving strategy affordable and safely available to relevant populations bearing the heaviest burden.

These authors certainly aren’t alone in endorsing male circumcision on HIV-preventative grounds. It is now being recommended as a crucial, relatively simple tool against the threat of AIDS by the World Health Organization and UNAIDS. Importantly, of course, these experts also hastily point out that circumcision is just one effective strategy and must be used in conjunction with other preventative measures such as condoms and education.

But prescribing routine male circumcision on HIV-preventative grounds has been met with controversy. Other leading health organizations have refused to take a position. For example, the Royal Australian College of Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics neither advocate nor denounce the procedure. As Israeli medical researchers Margherita Brusa and Michael Barlain discuss at length in their excellent review article last year in an issue of Bioethics, in some societies, “medicalizing” male circumcision intrudes on important religious and cultural rituals associated with the practice. In Jewish communities, of course, mohalim—expert circumcisers—are religious figures practicing an art that is passed down through generations, and removing the child’s foreskin is a deeply symbolic affair. In fact, it’s during the circumcision ceremony that boys are given their personal Hebrew names. (Just call me Yishai.) Tribal circumcision of young adolescents in many African nations is an important rite of passage into adulthood—another deeply engrained, essential tradition.

There is also the issue of what Brusa and Barlain refer to as the “naturalism” argument against male circumcision, which is that it is inherently wrong to alter the natural human body, particularly the bodies of infants and children who cannot give their informed consent to such an invasive procedure. On the face of it, this is an appealing position. Arguments such as “the prepuce is not a birth defect” alongside emotionally loaded images of screaming babies or graphic depictions of botched circumcisions certainly tug at our heartstrings and make us upset. But persuasive on logical grounds? Not exactly. Ultimately, the authors reject the naturalism argument. Cutting our children’s hair is “unnatural” too, much like punching holes in their earlobes and straightening their teeth through painful orthodontic procedures. Yet, as far as I’m aware, there are no societies fighting to end the travesty of these heinous crimes against nature. Similarly, arguments insinuating that foreskins would have been eliminated by natural selection if they were disadvantageous are deeply flawed. Biological evolution cannot anticipate viral arms races of the future.

You’d even struggle to get everyone on the same page about what the “natural”’ penis actually is. For Jews, the Talmud describes the foreskin as an unnecessary pathological tissue, and leaving it intact is akin to leaving the umbilical cord dangling. By contrast, the ancient Greeks and Romans saw the prepuce more as a tuft of hair or a piece of cloth; without it, the man was naked because—under typical, uncircumcised conditions—the sight of the glans penis meant sexual arousal.

What about the issue of “bodily integrity”? What gives parents the right to decide for their helpless sons? I think there’s probably more currency in this line of reasoning than in the naturalism argument. Why should we deliberately inflict harm on people under the guise of preventative therapy against a disease that they may or may not be at risk for later in life, or they might not benefit from the procedure as much as other men would? After all, who knows: your little boy might grow up to be the receptive partner in a gay relationship, or perhaps an asexual or even a monogamous zoophile in love with his horse. But do you really want to bet on those odds?

Like any surgical procedure, male circumcision isn’t without risk of unpleasant complications. In this case, haemorrhage, sepsis, fistula, meatal stenosis, removal of excessive skin and even penile loss can occur. But in medical settings, these complications are extraordinarily rare, appearing in just a fraction of cases, and male circumcision remains the most common surgical procedure practiced in the world. Of course, you might opt to give your child the luxury of choice, waiting for him to make his own informed decision about whether circumcision makes sense for him. But, if you’re anything like me, that’s one thing you’re very glad to have gotten under your belt the first week of your life. For all I know, I’ve had a phantom foreskin ever since; no pain, though, just a lot of pleasure.

I started this piece with an open mind but I’ll close by putting my cards clearly on the table. For me, if one fully appreciates the scientific findings reported by these landmark studies with sub-Saharan African men, circumcision is the more humane decision. Some minor bloodletting today could spare that child unthinkable degrees of suffering tomorrow. Nobody knows where your child will live as an adult (perhaps Africa), or how rampant HIV will be there, or whether he’ll wear a condom every time he has sex with a stranger, or whether an infected, beautiful woman will cross his path on the day he forgets to tuck a condom into his wallet. Admittedly, my own “son” is a border terrier, but this issue is still a no-brainer to me. However, I’m well aware that male circumcision is a contentious topic for many people, some of whom, aghast, will make their opinions known to me in the coming days.

But here’s a final counterpoint to anti-circumcision you may not have considered. Last year, I reported research by evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup suggesting that, owing to the increased exposure of the coronal ridge, circumcised penises may very well be more effective at withdrawing competitors’ sperm from the vaginal tracts of promiscuous females than uncircumcised penises. Having your infant son’s foreskin removed could reduce your boy’s chances of being cuckolded later on by his adulterous future wife. Now that’s thinking ahead.

Bering in Mind: Is male circumcision a humanitarian act?

 

[U-571]

scientific american, good magazine, not available in pakistan though..

 

[Thomas]

We really need sub category folders with this topic. It is to disorganized as it is now.

 

[Thomas]

Can world's largest laser zap Earth's energy woes?
By John D. Sutter, CNN
April 28, 2010 8:06 a.m. EDT
Can world's largest laser zap Earth's energy woes? - CNN.com

Livermore, California (CNN) -- Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world's largest laser -- it's the size of three football fields -- to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's formula for cooking up a sun on the ground may sound like it's stolen from the plot of an "Austin Powers" movie. But it's no Hollywood fantasy: The ambitious experiment will be tried for real, and for the first time, late this summer.

If they're successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the energy generated by the mini-star.

The lab's venture has doubters, to be sure. Nuclear fusion, the type of high-energy reaction the California researchers hope to produce, has been a scientific pipe dream for at least a half-century. It's been pitched as a miracle power source. But it hasn't yielded many results.

To make matters worse, the U.S. Government Accountability Office this month released an audit of the lab's work that cites delays and mismanagement as reasons it's unlikely the scientists will create a fusion reaction this year.

But researchers in Livermore, about an hour's drive east of San Francisco, say it's not a matter of if but when their laser-saves-the-Earth experiment will be proved successful.

"We have a very high confidence that we will be able to ignite the target within the next two years," thus proving that controlled fusion is possible, said Bruno Van Wonterghem, a manager of the project, which is called the National Ignition Facility.

That would put the lab a step closer to "our big dream," he said, which is "to solve the energy problems of the world."

How to build a star

Here is the boiled-down recipe for how the Livermore lab plans to cook up a star:

Step one: Build the largest laser in the world, preferably inside a drab-looking office building. (To do this, you'll have to suspend all previous notions about what a laser looks like. This one is basically a giant factory full of tubes. The laser beam, which is concentrated light, bounces back and forth over the distance of a mile, charging up as it goes.)

Step two: Split this humongous laser into 192 beams. Aim all of them -- firing-range style -- at a single point that's about the size of a BB.

Step three: On that tiny target, apply a smidge of deuterium and tritium, two reactive isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from seawater. Surround those atoms with a gold capsule that's smaller than a thimble.

Step four: Fire the laser!

If all goes well, the resulting reaction will be hotter than the center of the sun (more than 100 million degrees Celsius) and will exert more pressure than 100 billion atmospheres. This will smash the hydrogen isotopes together with so much force and heat that their nuclei will fuse, sending off energy and neutrons.

Voila. An itty-bitty star is born.

Miracle cure?

The fusion reaction at the heart of this recipe is the same one that fuels the sun in our solar system and other stars.

"It's the most fundamental energy source in nature," Van Wonterghem said.

Workers at the Livermore Lab insist that the reaction isn't dangerous. Their version of fusion is controlled, rather than explosive like in America's current arsenal of nuclear weapons, which include a fusion reaction.

"There's no danger to the public," said Lynda Seaver, spokeswoman for the project.

"The [worst possible] mishap is, it doesn't work."

The fusion reaction does emit radioactive neutrons. But to stop those neutrons from escaping, the Livermore lab surrounds the reaction chamber with concrete walls that are more than 6½ feet thick.

Despite the fact that the reaction will "even exceed the conditions at the center of the sun," Van Wonterghem said, the controlled fusion is expected to be incredibly small and short-lived.

The star being cooked up in Livermore this summer is expected to die 200 trillionths of a second after it's ignited, Van Wonterghem said.

And it will measure only 5 microns across, which is several times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Road to commercialization

The value of this summer's experiment in laser-induced fusion will be in proving that powerful beams of light can produce a controlled fusion reaction, Seaver said.

It will take at least another 20 years, with adequate funding, to develop a continuous fusion reaction that could heat water, create steam and turn generators at a commercial fusion power plant, she said.

Meanwhile, the project is behind schedule and over budget, according to government reports.

Since 2005, when the laser-fusion experiment was isolated in a government program called the National Ignition Campaign, the project has spent more than $2 billion, or 25 percent more than its budget of $1.6 billion, according to the April Government Accountability Office report.

And, in those recent years, the project has fallen a year off schedule, the GAO says, with the expected completion date for the research now at the end of 2012.

Seaver, the National Ignition Facility spokeswoman, said the report mischaracterizes the lab's work.

"NIF has held all its milestones. It's held to its budget. The experiments are going just fine at NIF," she said. "They're going the way we thought they would."

Construction on the Livermore laser facility began in 1997, but the laser technology needed for the experiment has been 50 years in development, she said.

Meanwhile, other labs are working on fusion projects, too.

ITER, a project in France, for example, aims to use magnets and plasma, instead of lasers, to test nuclear fusion.

Research continues in non-fusion areas of nuclear power, as well.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced in February that his foundation is funding research in a modified and more sustainable version of nuclear fission, the type of reaction that powers the world's existing nuclear reactors.

Fission involves splitting large, heavy atoms. Fusion, the star-making reaction being tried in Livermore, works the opposite way, sealing the nuclei of smaller atoms together.

The Livermore lab says it could get its fuel -- the two isotopes of hydrogen -- from seawater.

The process for extracting large amounts of deuterium and tritium from water has not been perfected, but the lab says the supply of these materials is nearly limitless.

"One gallon of seawater would provide the equivalent energy of 300 gallons of gasoline; fuel from 50 cups of water contains the energy equivalent of two tons of coal," the Livermore project's website says.

Unlike burning coal and natural gas, nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gases.

Doubts and optimism

Critics of Livermore's fusion research say it's too expensive and too theoretical.

The world needs to employ existing fixes for climate change rather than looking for a technological silver bullet that will prove to be too expensive for commercial energy production anyway, said Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist and nuclear physicist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

"If you want to do [research and development] to alleviate climate change, you have to have technologies that can be brought online soon," he said. "We don't have much time to turn this around."

Even if the facility's lasers do create a fusion reaction, the lab is still a long way from becoming a commercial power plant, he said.

"It's not going to be competitive," he said. "It's crazy to go down that road. It's kind of fun and interesting -- graduate student projects designing these concepts. But they waste a lot of money in thinking [nuclear fusion] is going to contribute to society."

Nevertheless, the scientists in Livermore remain optimistic.

Van Wonterghem holds out hope for an energy miracle from fusion and has invested his entire career in the idea. Seaver believes that what's happening at the lab is historic.

"This is something you're going to tell your grandchildren about," the spokeswoman said on a recent tour of the lab. "You were here when they were about to get fusion ignition.

"It's like standing on the hill watching the Wright brothers' plane go by."

 

[ARCHON]

seems like u guys are digging your own grave.

The ambitious experiment will be tried for real, and for the first time, late this summer.

Its gonna be a long summer.

 

[Awesome]

Has Noah's Ark Been Found on Turkish Mountaintop?
FOXNews.com - Has Noah&#39;s Ark Been Found on Turkish Mountaintop?

A group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers say wooden remains they have discovered on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey are the remains of Noah's Ark.

The group claims that carbon dating proves the relics are 4,800 years old, meaning they date to around the same time the ark was said to be afloat. Mt. Ararat has long been suspected as the final resting place of the craft by evangelicals and literalists hoping to validate biblical stories.

Yeung Wing-Cheung, from the Noah's Ark Ministries International research team that made the discovery, said: "It's not 100 percent that it is Noah's Ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it."

There have been several reported discoveries of the remains of Noah's Ark over the years, most notably a find by archaeologist Ron Wyatt in 1987. At the time, the Turkish government officially declared a national park around his find, a boat-shaped object stretched across the mountains of Ararat.

Nevertheless, the evangelical ministry remains convinced that the current find is in fact more likely to be the actual artifact, calling upon Dutch Ark researcher Gerrit Aalten to verify its legitimacy.

“The significance of this find is that for the first time in history the discovery of Noah’s Ark is well documented and revealed to the worldwide community,” Aalten said at a press conference announcing the find. Citing the many details that match historical accounts of the Ark, he believes it to be a legitimate archaeological discovery.

“There’s a tremendous amount of solid evidence that the structure found on Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey is the legendary Ark of Noah,” said Aalten.

Representatives of Noah's Ark Ministries said the structure contained several compartments, some with wooden beams, that they believe were used to house animals.The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human settlement on the grounds none have ever been found above 11,000 feet in the vicinity, Yeung said.

During the press conference, team member Panda Lee described visiting the site. “In October 2008, I climbed the mountain with the Turkish team. At an elevation of more than 4,000 meters, I saw a structure built with plank-like timber. Each plank was about 8 inches wide. I could see tenons, proof of ancient construction predating the use of metal nails."

We walked about 100 meters to another site. I could see broken wood fragments embedded in a glacier, and some 20 meters long. I surveyed the landscape and found that the wooden structure was permanently covered by ice and volcanic rocks."

Local Turkish officials will ask the central government in Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status so the site can be protected while a major archaeological dig is conducted.

The biblical story says that God decided to flood the Earth after seeing how corrupt it was. He then told Noah to build an ark and fill it with two of every animal species.

After the flood waters receded, the Bible says, the ark came to rest on a mountain. Many believe that Mount Ararat, the highest point in the region, is where the ark and her inhabitants ran aground.

The discovery on Mt. Ararat has been done many times, its where the Bible says the ship docked. Although this is an actual structure, another group of scientists searched the spot where the Quran says it docked. Mt. Judi, Cudi Dagh in Turkish. They found decomposed remains within the soil at one spot, its measurements were spot on with similar material.

Although that wasn't done by Muslim scientists like these evangelical scientists.

 

[Prometheus]

New test can spot cancer risk and save 3,000 lives a year

A screening test that takes five minutes and cuts the risk of developing bowel cancer by a third could save at least 3,000 lives a year, research has shown.

A study of more than 170,000 volunteers aged between 55 and 64 suggested that the examination of the lower colon and rectum reduced deaths by 43 per cent. The test, which involves the quick removal of growths with the potential to turn cancerous, is seen as a strategy that could transform prevention and early detection of the disease. In the study group examined, incidence of bowel cancer fell by a third.

Scientists said yesterday that the research, published on The Lancet website, made the national introduction of the one-off test for all men and women at the age of 55 a &#8220;no brainer&#8221;.

A quarter of the volunteers in the 16-year study underwent a sigmoidoscopy, where a camera mounted on a thin, flexible tube known as a Flexi-Scope was inserted about a third of the way into the bowel. Most bowel cancers stem from polyps or symptomless growths in the rectum and colon and where these were found they were removed in a safe and pain-free procedure, the researchers said.
Researchers also said that the test could save thousands of lives every year. Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer in Britain and the second biggest cancer killer.

The present screening method, called the faecal occult blood test, shows any traces of blood in stools and helps to detect the cancer at an early stage. This test, which has been extended to people over 60, would continue as it can identify cancers farther up the bowel.

Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, described the study, which started in 1994 and is the largest and longest running of its kind, as &#8220;one of those rare occasions to use the word &#8216;breakthrough&#8217; &#8221;.

He called for the next government to add the test to the bowel cancer screening programme urgently. &#8220;It is extremely rare to see the results of a clinical trial which are quite as compelling as this one and which has quite the huge impact in terms of the potential for improving cancer outcomes.&#8221;

He added: &#8220;We have a tremendous opportunity now to use this procedure to push bowel cancer cases back down the league of cancer cases in the UK.&#8221;

The scientists said that rates of bowel cancer diagnosis &#8212; about 100 people a day &#8212; would drop quickly with a national programme.

Professor Wendy Atkin, from Imperial College London, who led the research, said: &#8220;Our study shows for the first time that we could dramatically reduce the incidence of bowel cancer, and the number of people dying from the disease, by using this one-off test. No other bowel cancer screening technique has ever been shown to prevent the disease.&#8221;

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research and Cancer Research UK.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article7109833.ece

 

[jagjitnatt]

We really need sub category folders with this topic. It is to disorganized as it is now.

second that.

We need subfolders like space, material, living science, Chmistry, electronic/electrical etc.

 

[Prometheus]

second that.

We need subfolders like space, material, living science, Chmistry, electronic/electrical etc.

aliens , UFO etc.

 

[Stereotypic]

1. There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body – laid end to end they would circle the earth 2.5 times

2. At over 2000 kilometers long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth

3. The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years

4. A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons

5. A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs