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| Chemistry Nobel honors research on life-giving ribosome |
Two Americans and an Israeli were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for painstakingly mapping out the thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome -- work that paves the way for new antibiotics.
Inside all animals, plants and bacteria are DNA molecules that contain the blueprint for life. Ribosomes are an organism's protein factories. They use the information in the DNA to make the tens of thousands of proteins that enable the organism to function properly.
These proteins include hormones, enzymes and hemoglobin, which transports oxygen.
From a medicinal standpoint, the ribosome is important because it is what antibiotics target.
In a bacterial strain, antibiotics bind to the ribosomes, preventing them from making the proteins the bacteria need to survive.
Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath shared the $1.4 million prize for mapping the position of the thousands and thousands of atoms that make up ribosomes. Their three-dimensional models showed how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome.
"These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering," said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize.
Read the full article at CNN.com
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| 9 Oct 2009 - 12:23 by daisy |
General
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| Commentary: Fist bumps, handshakes and the flu |
By David B. Givens
Special to CNN
Editor's note: David B. Givens is Director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Washington. He is the author of "Love Signals: A Practical Field Guide to the Body Language of Courtship" (St. Martin's, New York, 2005), "Crime Signals: How to Spot a Criminal Before You Become a Victim" (St. Martin's, 2008), and the forthcoming "The Body of Work: Sightreading the Language of Business, Bosses, and Boardrooms." His online Nonverbal Dictionary is used around the world as a reference tool.
The H1N1 swine flu virus is putting our most familiar gesture of greeting -- handshakes -- at risk.
As an anthropologist who watches people for a living, I can tell you that human beings touch their own faces with their own fingertips hundreds, if not thousands of times a day.
Repeated face touching -- especially finger contact with eyelids, lips, and nostrils -- is as predictable as blinking. You'll observe hand-to-face gestures in every culture and society, as well as in our closest primate relatives, the monkeys and apes.
There's nothing wrong with face touching. Nothing, that is, unless you're afraid of germs. And today, many of us around the world are terrified by these tiny organisms, especially ones that cause swine flu.
Merely by shaking the hand of someone infected by the swine-flu virus, we risk infection each time we inadvertently reach up and touch our faces. Physicians urge that we wash right after shaking hands. But since the anthropologist in me knows that, as a primate, you'll touch your face before washing, germs will inevitably visit unsuspecting lids, lip, and noses.
The human handshake itself, meanwhile, is a widespread gesture used for meeting, greeting, and sealing a deal. It's a ritualized gripping of another's hand, with one or more up-and-down (or, in Texas, sideways) motions followed by a quick release.
Since the fingertips and palm of the hand are exquisitely sensitive, the shake itself can be deeply personal. We instantly feel the warmth or coolness, dryness or moistness, and firmness or weakness of another's grip. Sensory input from a hand's thermal and pressure receptors to the brain's sensory cortex and then to deeper, emotional brain areas can be intense.
If you travel to France, be prepared to shake hands dozens of times a day. Office workers in Paris, for example, may shake in the morning to greet, and in the afternoon to say goodbye, to colleagues.
Outside vendors and technicians will handshake with everyone present when they enter or leave an office. The risk of hand-carried flu virus is thus greater here than it is in the United States, where handshaking is far less frequent.
Contrast this to the Japanese practice of giving fewer handshakes, still, in favor of polite bows of the head. In all three nations, casual face touching is frequent, but germs in Tokyo are less apt to spread through handshakes. In Islamic nations, it is strictly taboo for men to shake hands in public with women. So, Muslim couples are less likely to exchange swine-flu germs through manual contact than are business men and women in, say, Seattle, Washington.
Since in much of the world a handshake is both a visual and a tactile index of your concern for other people, it's hard to hold one back. In North America, Latin America, and Europe, when someone holds out a hand, it's difficult not to just take a step forward and shake. You don't want, after all, to seem rude...
So, what are we face-touchers in the rest of the world to do?
Read the full article at CNN.com
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| 8 Oct 2009 - 13:36 by daisy |
General
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| Guilty Pleasure: Wizard of Oz |
70 years later, the munchkins from the classic "Wizard of Oz" reflect and it is our guilty pleasure.
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| 7 Oct 2009 - 13:30 by daisy |
General
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| Worked to death: When going to work kills |
A spate of suicides at France Telecom has put the spotlight on workplace stress and the devastating impact it can have on employees.
There have been 24 suicides and 13 attempted suicides among France Telecom employees since the beginning of 2008.
Labor unions blame restructuring and poor working conditions for creating a climate of stress.
Last week a 51-year old father of two jumped to his death from a bridge. He was reported to have left a letter blaming his death on the "atmosphere" at work, according to media reports.
The deputy chief executive of France Telecom Monday resigned in the wake of the staff suicides.
Wenes said in a message to staff: "Despite the hard edge of the technological and economic fight, especially in our business, nothing can justify men and women putting an end to their lives. Today, like before, I cannot accept it."
Patricia Pegg Jones is health and well-being program leader at the Work Foundation. She told CNN that the economic downturn has increased pressures on employees.
"In the current recession people have less control; there's more uncertainty and a lack of security," she said.
She told CNN there is evidence that workers are more likely to suffer from stress in the recession and also a higher incidence of "presenteeism" -- when employees go to work despite being unwell.
Pegg Jones says that a lack of workplace autonomy can also impact employees' health, with research showing that workers who have less control over their work are more likely to be ill.
She said employers can help workers in times of uncertainty by being open and communicating effectively with them, explaining what changes are in store.
"Employers have to recognize that people take changes differently; some people can deal with the uncertainty and other people undergo a paralysis," she told CNN.
"It's important to recognize that workers don't all respond same way to restructuring and the impact of recession."
Stress is one workplace hazard that can be detrimental to employees' health, but working too hard can be just as dangerous. In Japan, deaths among overworked employees are so common there is even a word to describe the phenomenon -- "karoshi," or "death from overwork."
Toshiro Ueyanagi is a lawyer specializing in cases of "karoshi." He told CNN that most deaths related to overwork are from heart attacks and strokes and that overwork can also result in mental illness.
Ueyanagi says it can be hard to prove that a death is the result of overwork and while the Japanese government recognized 377 cases of "karoshi" last year, he believes the number could be closer to 10,000.
"I think there are two reasons why "karoshi" is prevalent in Japan -- a hard-working tradition and very weak laws and regulation in the workplace," he told CNN.
Ueyanagi says the word "karoshi" came into common use around 1990, when Japanese workers began working longer hours in response to competition from overseas and in response to the recession at the time.
He adds that despite increased awareness of the dangers of overwork, de-regulation and increased global competition mean that Japanese workers are working harder than ever.
Read the full article at CNN.com
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Editorial
I have experienced the problems of health decline due to long hours and high stress, I doubt there are few people who can claim otherwise. What are we to do about this? We have come to live in a world where your value is only what you can earn. Your children are taught at school to value themselves by their earning potential, which naturally translates into how they view their parents. How heartbreaking is it for a parent to tell a child they do not have enough money to buy them that new cool pair of shoes every one else has. So the parent works longer hours, tiring themselves and taking time away from their family, to try to provide more money to support that very family. Its a lose/lose situation for everyone when we have to give up the close knit family unit that produces well adjusted and morally strong adults in order to try to meet the financial expectations, or even just financial requirements, of supporting our families.
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| 6 Oct 2009 - 11:48 by daisy |
General
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| Why we love those rotting, hungry, putrid zombies |
They smell bad, can't talk and generally possess a single-minded hunger for human flesh.
So why, exactly, do we love zombies so much?
According to experts -- and, yes, there are zombie experts -- it's because for all their limitations, the brain-rotted, animated corpses are so darned versatile -- helping reflect whatever our greatest fears happen to be at the time.
"You can't shoot the financial meltdown in the head -- you can do that with a zombie," said Max Brooks, author of the best-selling "Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z" -- which is currently in development to become a movie.
"All the other problems are too big. As much as Al Gore tries, you can't picture global warming. You can't picture the meltdown of our financial institutions. But you can picture a slouching zombie coming down the street."
Zombies initially shuffled onscreen in 1932 as the mindless minions of horror movie legend Bela Lugosi in the film "White Zombie." This weekend, they'll chase a shotgun-and-banjo-toting Woody Harrelson through an amusement park when "Zombieland" opens.
They've also starred in video games, music videos, pop songs and books, picking up a devoted, if not obsessive, set of fans along the way.
Since ancient times, monster stories have been used to channel other concerns about life and death, said Andrea Wood, a graduate fellow at Georgia Tech who teaches the course "Apocalyptic Nightmares of the Living Dead" and is working on a book about zombies in popular culture.
But the zombie, she said, offers a uniquely blank canvas.
"Since the zombie doesn't have the long literary tradition of the vampire or a number of other monsters, it allows artists a degree of autonomy to conceptualize the zombie any way they see fit," said Wood.
Early zombie films like "White Zombie" and 1943's "I Walked With a Zombie" stick to the monster's Caribbean voodoo traditions, in which some sort of evildoer uses magic to force the recently deceased to do his bidding.
It's no coincidence, says Peter Dendle, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University-Mont Alto, that such stories emerged during the Great Depression.
"The United States that prided itself on individuality and hard work found itself standing in soup lines," said Dendle, author of "The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia" and other works about the undead. "The terror in Haiti is not so much being attacked by a zombie, but becoming one -- having your life and soul taken from you and placed under someone else's will."
In 1968, director George A. Romero re-imagined the monsters as flesh-eating ghouls, creating the pop-culture zombie identity that exists to this day. In the turbulent late '60s, Romero's zombies helped provide some thinly veiled commentary on race, class and the breakdown of the American Dream.
Since then, zombie movies have given viewers a way to consider, if indirectly, problems such as natural disasters, technology gone awry, deadly viruses and the daily grind of their own lives.
Nervous about warfare and military secrets? Wait until they unleash a poisonous nerve gas in "Planet Terror." Think animal-rights activists go too far? Watch them rescue and release a monkey that spreads the "Rage" virus in "28 Days Later."
And then there's one of the most basic human fears of all, the fear of death.
"[With zombies] we see the process of decay as it happens right before our eyes," Wood said. "They are this kind of perverse manifestation of humans' desire for immortality gone horribly awry."
CNN.com
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| 2 Oct 2009 - 12:09 by daisy |
General
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