You’ve got mail and an STD in Brazil

August 21, 2009 by Nick

RIO DE JANEIRO – You’ve got mail — and possibly an STD. The Brazilian Health Ministry has created a Web site to let people inform partners they’ve got a sexually transmitted disease via an e-mailed virtual postcard. The official in charge of the ministry’s STD and AIDs programs notes that many people have a hard time telling partners they’re infected. Read the full story

TEHRAN, Iran — Government opponents shouted “Allahu Akbar” and “Death to the Dictator” from Tehran’s rooftops in the pouring rain on the eve of student demonstrations planned for Monday. Authorities choked off Internet access and warned journalists working for foreign media to stick to their offices for the next three days.

The measures were aimed at depriving the opposition of its key means of mobilizing the masses as Iran’s clerical rulers keep a tight lid on dissent. Government opponents are seeking, nonetheless, to get large numbers of demonstrators to turn out Monday and show their movement still has momentum. Read the full story

Planets circle the stars that dot the heavens.

Before 1995, we couldn’t have said that with any certainty. Now we know of more than 300 planets orbiting distant stars, and we have a fleet of telescopes looking for them. The ultimate goal is to find another Earth orbiting a star like the Sun, but the quest on the way to that Holy Grail has yielded some strange benchmarks.

Meet the planet COROT-exo-3b. It orbits a star slightly larger, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. The star is not an unusual one in any way, but the planet is definitely weird: it orbits the star in just over 4 days, which is pretty close in, though not a record breaker in and of itself. What’s bizarre is that it has about the same diameter of Jupiter, but has 21.6 times Jupiter’s mass. That makes it denser than lead.

If I could stand on the surface of this planet, I’d weigh 4200 kilograms*. That’s over 9000 pounds! Read the full story

The mechanics of slowing light down, as well as speeding it up, is governed by methods and equations that are pretty well understood. Now scientists just have to figure out what to do with it.

Most people learn in physics class that light goes one speed: faster than anything else. Because of its long, rich history, this 300 million meters per second is generally treated as an established fact. In the last few decades, though, scientists have been playing around with light’s speed. But, as that history noted, researchers have started playing around with exceptions, based on the premise that “nothing in normal space can go faster than light, but if you can do funny things to space, you can go faster than light.” Read the full story

1. Don’t

2. Drive slower

3. Don’t tail gate. And don’t drive beside people.

4. Beware of bridges (over and under), declines, and inclines.

5. If you lose traction and there is snow nearby, try to veer toward the snow gently. Read the full story

Some Houston-area school districts will dismiss students early Friday because of the possibility of snow and icy roads.

Anahuac ISD will dismissed all students at 12:30 p.m.

Awty International School will close early Friday. Primary School students will be released at 12:30 p.m. Secondary School students will be released at 1:15 p.m. Read the full story

Decorated Veteran, 90, Fights to Raise Flag in His Yard

A veteran of three wars who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor is now facing an unlikely enemy — his neighbors.

Col. Van T. Barfoot, 90, has raised the Stars and Stripes every day at sunrise and lowered them every day at sunset since he served in the U.S. Army. But on Tuesday he received a letter from the law firm that represents his homeowners’ association, ordering him to remove the flagpole from his Richmond, Va. yard by 5 p.m. on Friday or face “legal action.” Read the full story

By JEFF BAENEN (AP) – 8 hours ago

MINNEAPOLIS — Jesse Ventura is back for another stab at TV stardom, this time hosting a program that digs into conspiracy theories, including alternate views of what was behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the purpose of a sprawling research center in remote Alaska.

The former Minnesota governor, professional wrestler and Navy SEAL stars in “Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura,” which premieres Wednesday night on truTV. The cable network, part of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., has ordered seven episodes of the hourlong weekly series. Read the full story

Marijuana’s addiction potential may be no big deal, but it’s certainly big business.

According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of “drug dependence” (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for “drug dependence.”

Nevertheless, it is pot — not booze or cigarettes — that has the federal government seeing red and clinical investigators seeing green. As I reported for AlterNet last year, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which overseas more than 85 percent of the world’s research on controlled substances, recently appropriated some $4 million in taxpayers’ dollars to establish the nation’s first-ever Center for Cannabis Addiction. Its mission: to “develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction.” Read the full story

ScienceDaily (Oct. 19, 2009) — The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.

It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System. Read the full story

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so. Read the full story

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — Adrian Gibbs, the virologist who said in May that swine flu may have escaped from a laboratory, published his findings today, renewing discussion about the origins of the pandemic virus.

The new H1N1 strain, which was discovered in Mexico and the U.S. in April, may be the product of three strains from three continents that swapped genes in a lab or a vaccine-making plant, Gibbs, and fellow Australian scientists wrote in Virology Journal. The authors analyzed the genetic makeup of the virus and found its origin could be more simply explained by human involvement than a coincidence of nature. Read the full story

At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, and “surreptitious removal of objects by women.” Read the full story

The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, two generations of self-styled assassination investigators, probably never will be satisfactorily resolved. Each new release of documents from the various bureaucracies involved in the nearly half century old investigation may only deepen the apparent contradictions.

Within this morass of facts. however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper’s nest at the Texas Book Depository. So was his palm print. He had also bought the ammunition. His cartridge cases were found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight. Read the full story

For the first time in history, the Federal Reserve Bank may be facing an audit. On Thursday, the House Finance Committee passed a bill (HR 1207) that authorizes the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a wide-ranging audit of the Fed’s secretive deals with foreign central banks and major U.S. financial institutions.

HR 1207, sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), currently has 313 co-sponsors in the House from both sides of the aisle, which is a veto-proof majority. A companion bill in the Senate (S 604) has 30 co-sponsors.

Glenn Greenwald, an investigative reporter writing for Salon.com, points out what may be the most significant aspect of the passage of HR 1207: Read the full story

BANGALORE: After water, it’s magnet . Chandrayaan-1 has discovered and confirmed for the first time the presence of magnetic spheres on the side of the moon—the side we cannot see from the earth. This could theoretically mean a longer and secure stay for astronauts on moon.

There had been speculation for long but the confirmation was made by Sara, the instrument jointly made by Isro, European Space Agency and Sweden. The findings by Sara, not yet published, were made known by top scientists on the sidelines of the platinum jubilee celebrations of the Indian Academy of Sciences at IISC. The discovery of magnetic forces comes after the discovery of water molecules by M3—the Nasa instrument on Chandrayaan-1. Read the full story

Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.

The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.

Female drinkers did not benefit to the same extent, the study in Heart found.

Experts are critical, warning heavy drinking can increase the risk of other diseases, with alcohol responsible for 1.8 million deaths globally per year. Read the full story