Category: …and everything else

In a study comparing wild rodents with their laboratory counterparts, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found evidence that may help to explain why people in industrialized societies that greatly stress hygiene have higher rates of allergy and autoimmune diseases than do people in less developed societies in which hygiene is harder to achieve or considered less critical.

The moral of the story? Ix-nay the frackin antibiotic soaps!

Rats, like humans, contemplate problems by carefully weighing the costs and benefits of a situation before making decisions, according to a new study on Wistar rats, a rodent developed for research.

The study is the first to demonstrate that a non-human animal creates a desired ratio, or standard, to decide between options requiring varying levels of effort and that yield different rewards.

Finally, in a touch of good environmental news, Bush creates a huge national refuge:

The nation’s newest national monument, which will be given a native Hawaiian name based on suggestions from state residents, covers an archipelago stretching 1,400 miles long and 100 miles wide in the Pacific Ocean.

The region is home to more than 7,000 species, at least a fourth of them found nowhere else.

The decision to create the nation’s 75th national monument immediately sets aside 140,000 square miles of largely uninhabited islands, atolls, coral reef colonies and underwater peaks known as seamounts to be managed by federal and state agencies.

Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will manage nearly all of it, said the new protected area would dwarf all others.

“It’s the single-largest act of ocean conservation in history. It’s a large milestone,” Lautenbacher said. “It is a place to maintain biodiversity and to maintain basically the nurseries of the Pacific. It spawns a lot of the life that permeates the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

Everyone, just about, has already seen this, but hey: How NOT to steal a SideKick II. At least now it’ll be easier for me to keep track of what’s going on…

Patrick over at Making Light says:
Just now posted to the Baen Books discussion board by Baen author Julie Cochrane, and reproduced on various SF-oriented sites:

Okay, people, here’s what’s going on.

Jim Baen is in the ICU after a stroke, it is serious, Toni [Weisskopf] and a relative are there with him. Now you know as much as we do about his condition.

Baen Books is functioning under the very detailed emergency plans that Jim has in place.

Please don’t send cards or flowers. Please do send whatever prayers are appropriate to your faith.

When we know more, we’ll let you know.

Thanks,

Julie

Jim Baen has been responsible for publishing most of the science fiction books I’ve read in the last 15 years. My thoughts are with him and his family; here is hoping for speedy resolution.