Picking up an E. coli bug from your pet might lead to a urinary tract infection, according to Minneapolis-based researchers.

“Sharing
of E. coli strains among humans and pets within a household, including
strains that can cause urinary tract infections, is extremely common,”
Dr. James R. Johnson told Reuters Health.

Harboring the same strain of the bug implies that it is passed from one person or animal to another.

Johnson and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota
investigated the extent to which E. coli strains were shared between
humans and pets in 63 households. They identified 152 people, 48 dogs,
26 cats, and 2 other animals that had stool samples that tested
positive for E. coli. Five of the humans had an acute urinary tract
infection.

In the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the researchers
report that the same strain of E. coli was shared by several of the
inhabitants within a household in 68 percent of the domiciles. That
included three of the five households in which one person had a urinary
tract infection.

Given the high rate of E. coli strain sharing,
Johnson concluded: “If future research shows that this process
increases the risk of urinary tract infection for household members,
this could lead to new options for preventing such infections.”

SOURCE: Journal of Infectious Diseases, January 15, 2008.

China (Reuters) – Chinese scientists are trying to find out which
errant genes are responsible for diabetes and certain forms of cancer
that have long plagued Chinese populations, a geneticist said.

Rising
affluence, richer diets and a sedentary lifestyle have led to an
alarming rise in cases of diabetes in China in recent decades, while
cancers of the esophagus, lungs, breast, stomach and colon have plagued
Chinese people for a much longer time.

The partly state-funded
Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), which completed the mapping out of
the first Chinese human genome in 2007, is trying to figure out which
genes may be responsible for these chronic and even terminal illnesses.

“We are doing disease gene mapping, to find causal (gene)
variants for certain diseases in Chinese populations,” said Gao Yang,
vice general manager of BGI’s Shenzhen branch, which was mainly
responsible for the sequencing of the first Chinese genome.

“We are most interested in diabetes and five types of cancer.”

BGI is collaborating with Chinese hospitals on the cancer project and foreign institutions on diabetes.

“We will be sequencing DNA samples provided by hospitals,” Gao told Reuters in a weekend interview .

Chinese doctors now rely on western data when making diagnoses and
deciding on drug protocols, which Gao said was far from ideal.

“When
deciding how to administer drugs to a Chinese breast cancer patient,
for example, it’s important to consider her genetic makeup. From
diagnosis to drug dosage, it may be a very different story,” said Gao.

“With
our own data, we can have personalized medicine. Even if it’s the same
disease, you may need a different drug or dosage if you have a
different genetic makeup.”

SEQUENCING THE PANDA GENOME

The institute is currently mapping out the genome of China’s
giant panda. “We may use the information to better protect this
endangered species and understand its evolution,” said Gao.

The
institute also has its eye on a few infectious agents, such as the
Hepatitis B and human papilloma viruses (HPV) that are especially
problematic for Chinese populations — although a better or faster cure
may be decades away.

Asia is largely ignorant about Hepatitis B,
the 10th leading cause of death worldwide. Chronic Hepatitis B affects
360 million people globally, and of these, 281 million are in Asia.

One in four will die from either cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver, or liver cancer later in life.

HPV is a major cause of cervical cancer.

“We want to develop
better (and less expensive) detection tools. For now, HPV detection
kits are very expensive and HPV infections mainly take place in poorer
areas,” Gao said.

“As for Hepatitis B virus, drug resistance is
serious, so we need to design more sensitive and cost effective
diagnostic tools. By sequencing the virus, we can see how it is
mutating, so that better drugs can be designed,” he said.

Experts
say 10 percent of China’s more than 1.3 billion population carry the
Hepatitis B virus, with the figure reaching as high as 16 percent in
certain parts in the south.

Source

General Information

Not all people with diabetes develop foot problems. In many cases serious problems can be prevented by an understanding of what can happen to feet and how to take care of them.

What are the types of diabetic foot problems?

People with diabetes are more prone to infection. They can also develop neuropathy (damaged nerves) or peripheral vascular disease (blocked arteries) of the legs and either can lead to foot ulceration. Infection and foot ulceration, alone or in combination, often lead to amputation. This happens to about 3000 people in Australia each year. Neuropathy and peripheral vascular disease can also cause distressing pain in the lower limbs.

Can diabetic foot problems be prevented?

Theoretically, if diabetes is well controlled it should be possible to avoid these foot problems. However, as it is not always possible to achieve good diabetic control and as severe neuropathy and peripheral vascular disease cannot be easily reversed, many people with diabetes are at risk of developing foot problems. Therefore it is important to know how best to minimize the risk of foot problems and how best to treat them.

What are the steps that can be taken to prevent or treat foot problems?

Good diabetic control is always helpful. However, by itself, it is often not enough.
For people with diabetes who have not yet developed active infection or ulceration, the important thing is to grade the degree of risk and then to provide them with appropriate foot care education to minimize the risk of developing active foot problems.
For people already with infection or ulceration, the important thing is to urgently treat the infection and heal the ulcer. The treatment required for ulceration due to neuropathy or peripheral vascular disease may be quite different. Therefore it is necessary to distinguish the different types.
For people with pain, the important thing is to determine whether it is due to neuropathy or vascular disease because the treatment is again quite different.

Even the best drugs currently available cannot weed out HIV from all of its hiding places within the body, according to a new study of HIV patients in the United States. The discovery seems to confirm doctors’ suspicions that once the virus gains a foothold, it can never be fully eradicated from the body.

After years of aggressive drug treatment, the virus still hides out in significant reservoirs, particularly in tissues surrounding the gut lining, the researchers report. Cells in these tissues, a part of the immune system called ’gut-associated lymphoid tissue’, remain infected with the virus even though the patient may be leading an apparently healthy life.

Many HIV patients can manage their infection with a cocktail of drugs called antiretroviral therapies (ARTs). These can reduce their ’viral load’ – the amount of virus circulating in the blood plasma – to undetectable levels.

But the new study shows that even in such ’non-infectious’ patients the virus is still lurking in gut tissues, and still infecting other immune cells in the blood.

"It might not ever be possible to completely eradicate the virus from the body, even though people are doing well," says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the research. He adds, however, that this doesn’t mean that patients will be more likely than previously thought to pass on the virus to others.

Incurable

The finding underlines HIV’s status as an ’incurable’ infection, although in many cases doctors are able to stave off the onset of full-blown AIDS by giving patients sustained courses of drugs.

Indeed, so effective are current drugs that most say…

HIV should now be seen as a chronic disease requiring lifelong management, in the same way as diabetes or chronic hypertension. "It’s not a death sentence," says Deenan Pillay of University College London, an expert on antiviral treatments.

Earlier this month, the Swiss National AIDS Commission broke with convention by declaring that HIV-positive patients who had had successful antiretroviral treatment could be declared ’non-infectious’ through sex. Other health agencies still maintain that the only safe way to prevent HIV transmission is to practice safe sex, particularly by using a condom.

The new results show that even state-of-the-art drugs cannot stop HIV replicating in certain body tissues, Pillay says. "We have always known that current paradigms of treatment are not sufficient. If anything, this demonstrates that there’s even further to go."

Fauci and his colleagues studied eight HIV patients, who had been taking ART drugs for several years, and in one case nearly a decade. All were in good health with low blood plasma levels of the virus. But when the researchers took biopsies of their gut lymphoid tissue, they found that HIV was still present, and levels of CD4+ cells – the cells targeted by the virus – were lower than normal.

The researchers also compared DNA from HIV found in the gut with DNA from HIV found in white blood cells , and found that they were very similar, indicating that the two tissues constantly re-infect one another as the virus replicates; the gut reservoir is not isolated from the rest of the body. The results are published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Stamped down early

Pillay argues that HIV tests should be given to more patients who show the flu-like symptoms of early infection, in a bid to identify more people who have only just been exposed to the virus. Because the virus colonizes the gut tissues early in infection, rapid intervention may help to reduce the size of this viral reservoir. That could in turn make it easier to keep blood plasma viral loads low during the course of the disease.

Reducing viral reservoirs by early intervention could particularly help patients without access to top-of-the-range drug treatments, Pillay suggests.

Fusion weapons

Fission weapons discussed above are ultimately limited in their destructive capability by the sheer size a subcritical mass can assume — and be imploded quickly enough by high explosives to form a supercritical assembly. The largest known pure fission weapon tested had a 500 kiloton yield. This is some thirty-eight times the release which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Not satisfied that this was powerful enough, designers developed thermonuclear (fusion) weapons.

Fusion exploits the energy released in the fusing of two atoms to form a new element; e.g. deuterium atoms fusing to form helium, ²H + ²H = ⁴He₂ , as occurs on the sun. For atoms to fuse, very high temperatures and pressures are required. Only fusion of the lightest element, hydrogen, has proven practical. And only the heavy isotopes of hydrogen, ²H (deuterium) and ³H (tritium), have a low enough threshold for fusion to have been used in weapons successfully thus far.

The first method tried (boosting) involved simply placing ³H in a void within the center of a fission weapon, where tremendous temperatures and high pressures were attendant to the fission explosion. This worked; contributing energy to the overall explosion, and boosting the efficiency of the Pu fissioning as well (fusion reactions also release neutrons, but with much higher energy).

Because ³H is a gas at room temperature, it can be easily ’bled’ into the central cavity from a storage bottle prior to an explosion, and impact the final yield of the device. This is still used today, and allows for what is termed ’dial-a-yield’ capability on many stockpiled weapons.

Multistage thermonuclear weapons — the main component of today’s strategic nuclear forces — are more complex. These employ a ’primary’ fission weapon to serve merely as a trigger. As mentioned above, the fission weapon is characterized by a tremendous energy release in a small space over a short period of time. As a result, a very large fraction of the initial energy release is in the form of thermal X-rays.

These X-rays are channeled to a ’secondary’ fusion package. The X-rays travel into a cavity within a cylindrical radiation container.

The radiation pressure from these X-rays either directly, or through an intermediate material often cited as a polystyrene foam, ablates a cylindrical enclosure containing thermonuclear fuel (shown in blue at left); this can be Li²H (lithium deuteride).

Running along the central axis of this fuel is a rod of fissile material, termed a ’sparkplug’.

The contracting fuel package becomes denser, the sparkplug begins to fission, neutrons from this transmute the Li²H into ³H that can readily fuse with ²H (the fusion reaction ³H + ²H has a very high cross-section, or probability, in typical secondary designs), heat increases greatly, and fusion continues through the fuel mass.

A final ’tertiary’ stage can be added to this in the form of an exterior blanket of ²³⁸U, wrapping the outer surface of the radiation case or the fuel package. ²³⁸U is not fissionable by the slower neutrons which dominate the fission weapon environment, but fusion releases copious high energy neutrons and this can fast fission the ordinary uranium.

This is a cheap (and radiologically very dirty) way to greatly increase yield. The largest weapon ever detonated — the Soviet Union’s ’super bomb’, was some 60 MT in yield, and would have been nearer 100MT had this technique been used in its tertiary. Again, to control the yield precisely, ³H may be bled from a separate tank into the core of the primary, as shown in the hypothetical diagram on the left of a modern thermonuclear weapon.

This primary/secondary/tertiary or multistage arrangement can be increased — unlike the fission weapon — to provide insane governments with any arbitrarily large yield.

	Rare photo of the actual shrimp device used in Castle Bravo. Note the cylindrical geometry, and the emergent spherical fission trigger on the right. Light pipes leading to ceiling are visible near the fission trigger and at two points along the secondary for transmitting early diagnostic information to remote collection points, before they themselves are destroyed. Note the ’danger, no smoking’ sign at lower left. 15MT, 1954.

Fusion, or thermonuclear weapons, are not simple to design nor are they likely targets of construction for would-be terrorists today.

Many aspects of the relevant radiation transport, X-ray opacities, and ultra-high T and D equations-of-state (EOS) for relevant materials are still classified to this day (though increasing dissemination of weapons-adaptable information from the inertially-confined fusion (ICF) area may change this in time). Keeping such information classified makes good sense.

Typical appearance of a thermonuclear weapon detonation — from many miles away.
(Castle Romeo, 7MT, 1954)

An Indonesian fisherman who feared that he would be killed by tree-like growths covering his body

Dede, now 35, baffled medical experts when warty "roots" began growing
out of his arms and feet after he cut his knee in a teenage accident.

The welts spread across his body unchecked and soon he was left unable to carry out everyday household tasks.

Sacked from his job and deserted by his wife, Dede has been raising his two children – now in their late teens – in poverty, resigned to the fact that local doctors had no cure for his condition.

To make ends meet he even joined a local "freak show", parading in front of a paying audience alongside victims of other peculiar diseases.

But now an American dermatology expert who flew out to Dede’s home village south of the capital Jakarta claims to have identified his condition, and proposed a treatment that could transform his life.

After testing samples of the lesions and Dede’s blood, Dr Anthony Gaspari of the University of Maryland concluded that his affliction is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a fairly common infection that usually causes small warts to develop on sufferers.

Why ?!

Dede’s problem is that he has a rare genetic fault that impedes his immune system, meaning his body is unable to contain the warts.

The virus was therefore able to "hijack the cellular machinery of his skin cells", ordering them to produce massive amounts of the substance that caused the tree-like growths known as "cutaneous horns" on his hands and feet.

Dede’s counts of a key type of white blood cell are so low that Dr Gaspari initially suspected he may have the Aids virus. …..

BUT ..

tests showed he did not, and it became clear that Dede’s immune condition was something far rarer and more mysterious.

Warts aside, he had enjoyed remarkable good health throughout his life – which would not be expected of someone with a suppressed immune system – and neither his parents nor his siblings have shown signs of developing lesions.

Solution

Dede’s condition can be largely cleared up by a daily doses of a
synthetic form of Vitamin A, which has been shown to arrest the growth
of warts in severe cases of HPV.

The most resilient warts could then be frozen off and the growths on his hands and feet surgically removed.

Sources [1] [2]

As i was talking in earlier post about the effect of propanethiol S-oxide and some other enzyme in the onions which emits tears from your eyes .

_{Info For Onion Criers}

Onions produce the chemical irritant known as syn-propanethial-S-oxide. It stimulates the eyes’ lachrymal glands so they release tears. Scientists used to blame the enzyme allinase for the instability of substances in a cut onion. Recent studies from Japan, however, proved that lachrymatory-factor synthase, (a previously undiscovered enzyme) is the culprit

1. Lachrymatory-factor synthase is released into the air when we cut an onion.
2. The synthase enzyme converts the sulfoxides (amino acids) of the onion into sulfenic acid.
3. The unstable sulfenic acid rearranges itself into syn-ropanethial-S-oxide.
4. Syn-propanethial-S-oxide gets into the air and comes in contact with our eyes. The lachrymal glands become irritated and produces the tears!

BUT recently i found that scientist are working and trying to disarm that crying bomber in a quest against natural tears agonist .

Japanese researcher recently pinpointed the eye-irritating chemical that cut-up onions release: It’s called lachrymatory factor synthase. the researcher says he can eliminate the gene (basic hereditary unit) that creates the tear-jerker chemical–without ruining an onion’s taste….. !!!!!

Good news for cooks, but would it be for the onion? "It’s reasonable to
assume that Mother Nature incorporated the chemical to afford some
protection," says chemist Eric Block at the State University of New
York in Albany.

can they do it .. can’t they . will that have some side effects on humans !?

who know . we’ll just wait and see

Sources [1] [2] [3]

Parasites occasionally change the behavior or looks of their host, but a nasty tropical nematode alters both, making its ant host’s parasite-filled abdomen resemble a ripe red berry. According to UC Berkeley and Univ. of Arkansas biologists, this behavior is a strategy the nematode evolved to entice birds to eat the ant’s abdomen and
spread the parasite in their droppings.

A newly discovered parasite so dramatically transforms its host, an ant, that the ant comes to resemble a juicy red berry, ripe for picking, according to a report accepted for publication in The American Naturalist. This is the first example of fruit mimicry caused by a parasite .

Sources [1] [2] [3]

i fonund this collection of album covers and it’s really the worst i’ve ever see EVER

i don’t know what these designers think about when they made such things it’s really ……….

can’t express it but i know that first impression lass for ever and if i saw any cover like this .. i’m sure it’ll last forever

i can only show you 2 covers thanks god ,, you can check the rest here

_{P.S i don’t know any of the people behind that work , it’s totally personal opinion}

Fission weapons

Nuclear weapons exploit two principle physical, or more specifically nuclear, properties of certain substances: fission and fusion.

Fission is possible in a number of heavy elements, but in weapons it is principally confined to what is termed slow neutron fission in just two particular isotopes: ²³⁵U and ²³⁹Pu. These are termed fissile, and are the source of energy in atomic weapons. An explosive chain reaction can be started with relatively slight energy input (so-called slow neutrons) in such material.

An actual ²³⁹Pu ingot, alloyed with gallium for improved physical properties

Isotopes are ’varieties’ of an element which differ only in their number of neutrons. For example, hydrogen exists as ¹H ²H and ³H — different isotopes of the same chemical element, with no, one, and two neutrons respectively. All the chemical properties, and most of the physical properties, are the same between isotopes. Nuclear properties may differ significantly, however.

The fission, or ’splitting’ of an atom, releases a very large amount of energy per unit volume — but a single atom is very small indeed. The key to an uncontrolled or explosive release of this energy in a mass of fissile material large enough to constitute a weapon is the establishment of a chain reaction with a short time period and high growth rate. This is surprisingly easy to do.

Fission of ²³⁵U (uranium) or ²³⁹Pu (plutonium) starts in most weapons with an incident source of neutrons. These strike atoms of the fissile material, which (in most cases) fissions, and each atom in so doing releases, on average, somewhat more than 2 neutrons. These then strike other atoms in the mass of material, and so on.

If the mass is too small, or has too large a surface area, too many neutrons escape and a chain reaction is not possible; such a mass is termed subcritical. If the neutrons generated exactly equal the number consumed in subsequent fissions, the mass is said to be critical. If the mass is in excess of this, it is termed supercritical.

Fission (atomic) weapons are simply based on assembling a supercritical mass of fissile material quickly enough to counter disassembly forces.

The majority of the energy release is nearly instantaneous, the mean time from neutron release to fission can be of the order of 10 nanoseconds, and the chain reaction builds exponentially. The result is that greater than 99% of the very considerable energy released in an atomic explosion is generated in the last few (typically 4-5) generations of fission — less than a tenth of a microsecond.

This tremendous energy release in a small space over fantastically short periods of time creates some unusual phenomena — physical conditions that have no equal on earth, no matter how much TNT is stacked up.

Plutonium (²³⁹Pu) is the principal fissile material used in today’s nuclear weapons. The actual amount of this fissile material required for a nuclear weapon is shockingly small.

Below is a scale model of the amount of ²³⁹Pu required in a weapon with the force that destroyed the city of Nagasaki in 1945:

In the Fat Man (Nagasaki) weapon design an excess of Pu was provided. Most of the remaining bulk of the weapon was comprised of two concentric shells of high explosives. Each of these was carefully fashioned from two types of explosives with differing burn rates. These, when detonated symmetrically on the outermost layer, caused an implosion or inward-moving explosion.

The two explosive types were shaped to create a roughly spherical convergent shockwave which, when it reached the Pu ’pit’ in the center of the device, caused it to collapse.

The Pu pit became denser, underwent a phase change, and became supercritical.

A small neutron source, the initiator, placed in the very center of this Pu pit, provided an initial burst of neutrons — final generations of which, less than a microsecond later, saw the destruction of an entire city and more than 30,000 people..

Nearly all the design information for weapons such as these is now in the public domain; in fact, considering the fact that fission weapons exploit such a simple and fundamental physical (nuclear) property, it is no surprise that this is so. It is more surprising that so much stayed secret for so long, at least from the general public.

A neutron reflector, often made of beryllium, is placed outside the central pit to reflect neutrons back into the pit. A tamper, often made of depleted uranium or ²³⁸U helps control premature disassembly. Modern fission devices use a technique called ’boosting’ (referred to in the next section), to control and enhance the yield of the device.

Today’s nuclear threat lies mostly in preventing this fissile special nuclear material (often referred to as SNM) from falling into the wrong hands: once there, it is a very short step to construct a working weapon.

What we do now to keep these devices out of the hands of groups like Al-Qaeda is vital to civilized peoples.

A schematic of a hypothetical ’boosted’ fission weapon
(showing unnecessary ²³⁵U)

The gadget device used in the Trinity test: the world’s first nuclear weapon test.
Note spherical geometry and the HE detonator arrangement. New Mexico, 21KT, 1945.

Typical fission weapon, shortly after detonation at the Nevada test site, with roughly the same yield as the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. Reddish vapor surrounding the plasma toroid includes intensely radioactive fission fragments and ionized nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere. (Grable, 15KT,