Saturday, August 27, 2005

Does e-mail make you dumber?

Sorry for not updating my blog for so long..have been really busy and stressed. Anyway..this is a rather interesting article from Discover, August: If you feel like a zombie at work, perhaps you’re suffering from infomania, the term the Hewlett-Packard affiliate in Britain coined for people addicted to e-mail, instant messaging, and text messages.

A recent study for the company found that British workers’ IQ test scores drop temporarily by an average of 10 points when juggling phones, e-mails, and other electronic messages—more of an IQ drop than occurs after smoking marijuana or losing a night’s sleep. “This is a very real and widespread phenomenon,” said Glenn Wilson of the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, who conducted the tests on some 1,100 volunteers. Just how long it takes to recover is unclear.

The study found that modern-day communications have become addictive: Sixty-two percent of adults check work messages after office hours and on vacation. Half of those surveyed reply to an e-mail immediately or within 60 minutes. About 20 percent were “happy” to interrupt a business or social meeting to respond to a telephone or e-mail message. Yet 89 percent of those surveyed found it rude for colleagues to do so.

Whether infomaniacs are less intelligent is another question. “It didn’t affect their IQ at all; it affected their performance on an IQ test,” says Bob Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University. “When you’re taking an IQ test, you probably want to be really focused. That’s the antithesis of the state you get into when you do a lot of multitasking.

The human brain has evolved different modes for concentrating on a single thing versus jumping from one thing to another. “The reason we have these systems that quickly shift between each other is because what’s right for you now might not be right later,” Stickgold says. “There are basic brain-stem mechanisms that will cause you to shift and focus your attention on a change in stimulus.”

Whether that change is a saber-toothed tiger popping out of the woods or a phone ringing suddenly, the consequences are the same. “The switch signal comes fast and powerfully. This system knows at a moment like this that what’s important is to shift your state quickly, and damn the cost. And the cost is that it takes several minutes to shift back,” says Stickgold. “That’s the way we’re wired.”


haha..well..I would agree that yes, e-mailing, instant messaging and text messaging can be addictive (considering the fact that I was addicted to it before but now a little too busy with my life that I'm not that addicted now..lol). But I guess it's a means of communicating with our family and friends in a more closer way? I mean..when we speak face-to-face we may not have the courage to say things but through means of communicating through the net and phone we may actually say more things than we want to and may also be more closer that when we meet for lunch or something,a conversation could be so easily started, it just with communication. Sometimes the prospect of recieving e-mails, instant messsaing with friends after a busy day and text messaging just makes them addictive.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Climate warning as Siberia melts

Sorry for not updating for a week again..have been realli busy...Anyway, this article is a pretty urgent news I just read in NewScientist . Details: "The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.

Similar warming has also been taking place in Alaska: earlier this summer Jon Pelletier of the University of Arizona in Tucson reported a major expansion of lakes on the North Slope fringing the Arctic Ocean.

The findings from western Siberia follow a report two months ago that thousands of lakes in eastern Siberia have disappeared in the last 30 years, also because of climate change (New Scientist, 11 June, p 16). This apparent contradiction arises because the two events represent opposite end of the same process, known as thermokarsk.

In this process, rising air temperatures first create "frost-heave", which turns the flat permafrost into a series of hollows and hummocks known as salsas. Then as the permafrost begins to melt, water collects on the surface, forming ponds that are prevented from draining away by the frozen bog beneath. The ponds coalesce into ever larger lakes until, finally, the last permafrost melts and the lakes drain away underground.

Siberia's peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.

His colleague Karen Frey says if the bogs dry out as they warm, the methane will oxidise and escape into the air as carbon dioxide. But if the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.

An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting permafrost as a major source of feedbacks that could accelerate climate change by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. "Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released," said the project's chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia."

I was reading this article and omg-ing all the way..it's realli shocking and this is one evidence showing that climate warming is going to get worse with the release of so much methane. It's getting more and more serious now. And I think it was on wednesday, I watched the news and it reported that it was snowing in Melbourne and Tasmania and probably moving to Queensland..I was shocked..I just found an article about it: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200508/s1434243.htm . Here it says "Snow is falling in low-lying areas of Victoria and Tasmania for the first time in up to 50 years, as a cold snap hits south-eastern Australia.", "Stephanie Jones from the newsagency at Korumburra south-east of Melbourne says it was snowing when she drove to work at 5:30 this morning.
"It's horrible," she said. "It's snowing and raining and wet and cold. It stuck around about 25 minutes, then it started to rain and then about 8:30am it started to snow again.
"It looks like it's set - it's snowing now, it's covering the road white
." It's realli weird for it to be raining and then snowing..and it's like supposed to be summer now..how can it be snowing? Even Autumm doesn't have snow.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on
the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years.

Saturday, August 06, 2005

World not set to deal with flu

Sorry for not blogging for so long..have been really busy..Anyway..I've found that article about the diagnostic kit thing..but I'll first talk about this article since it's a more urgent problem. Well this is a rather long article so I'll cut it short. For the full article go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/30/AR2005073001429.html . Well, I heard about this report on a news radio station this morning so I went to look for this article and I found this similar to the one on the radio and it's rather scary to know somehow : "Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades -- the H5N1 "bird flu" in Asia -- is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.

If the virus were to start spreading in the next year, the world would have only a relative handful of doses of an experimental vaccine to defend against a disease that, history shows, could potentially kill millions. If the vaccine proved effective and every flu vaccine factory in the world started making it, the first doses would not be ready for four months. By then, the pathogen would probably be on every continent.

The public, conditioned to believe in the power of modern medicine, has heard little of how poorly prepared the world is to confront a flu pandemic, which is an epidemic that strikes several continents simultaneously and infects a substantial portion of the population.

The secretary or the chief of staff -- we have a discussion about flu almost every day," said Bruce Gellin, head of HHS's National Vaccine Program Office. This week, a committee is scheduled to deliver to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt an updated plan for confronting a pandemic.

Despite these efforts, the world's lack of readiness to meet the threat is huge, experts say.

In hopes of slowing a pandemic's spread, public health specialists have been debating proposals for unprecedented countermeasures. These could include vaccinating only children, who are statistically most likely to spread the contagion; mandatory closing of schools or office buildings; and imposing "snow day" quarantines on infected families -- prohibiting them from leaving their homes.

Other measures would go well beyond the conventional boundaries of public health: restricting international travel, shutting down transit systems or nationalizing supplies of critical medical equipment, such as surgical masks.

But Osterholm argues that such measures would fall far short. He predicts that a pandemic would cause widespread shutdowns of factories, transportation and other essential industries. To prepare, he says, authorities should identify and stockpile a list of perhaps 100 crucial products and resources that are essential to keep society functioning until the pandemic recedes and the survivors go back to work.

Pandemics are caused by strains of virus that are highly contagious and to which people have no immunity. Such strains are rare. They arise from the chance scrambling and recombination of an animal flu virus and a human one, resulting in a strain whose molecular identity is wholly new.

The microbe called influenza A/H5N1 appeared in East Asia in 1996 and has flared periodically since. It is highly contagious and lethal in chickens, but it can be carried without symptoms in some ducks -- a combination that helps keep it in circulation.

Birds occasionally infect humans, and scientists recently found evidence that the virus is sometimes passed person to person. That form of transmission is now difficult and rare, but the virus could evolve so that it becomes easy and common.

If H5N1 never becomes easily transmissible in human beings, it will never become a pandemic. If it does become transmissible, the consequences are difficult to imagine. But history provides some clues.

The "Spanish flu" in 1918 and 1919 was the biggest and, along with AIDS, the most important infectious disease outbreak of the 20th century. It is on the short list of great disasters in human history.

At least 50 million people, and possibly as many as 100 million, died when the world's population was 1.9 billion people, one-third its current size.

Tests are underway at three U.S. hospitals on an experimental vaccine against H5N1. But it is not the first H5N1 vaccine.

As the first, small hedge against disaster, the government last fall ordered 2 million doses of H5N1 vaccine from Sanofi Pasteur, one of the country's three flu vaccine makers, even though nobody yet knows whether it works.

A half-dozen other countries are also working on pandemic vaccines. But making enough to fight an outbreak is a tall order.

About 300 million flu shots are made worldwide each year. The vaccine protects against three flu strains. If the global production capacity were directed to make only H5N1 vaccine, the output could be 900 million shots.

Can the world produce more flu shots? Not easily.

In theory, even a modest amount of vaccine might be useful. Fighting disease outbreaks is like fighting fires. You do not have to hose down the whole world to put the fire out, but you do have to hose down the perimeter to keep it from spreading. It might be possible to contain an H5N1 outbreak at its source if the surrounding population were immediately vaccinated.

In the absence of a vaccine, the only pharmaceutical bulwark against H5N1 is oseltamivir. It can shorten the illness's duration, and if taken immediately after exposure, it can even prevent infection. But the world's supply of the drug is limited.

Sold as Tamiflu, it is manufactured by just one company, the Swiss giant Roche, in a laborious, expensive process that takes eight months.

Would having lots of vaccine or oseltamivir make a difference?

In a study published last year, Ira M. Longini Jr. of Emory University ran a mathematical model of what might happen if a pandemic such as the 1957 Asian flu, which was caused by a virus far milder than bird flu, hit the United States.

He and his colleagues estimated that with no vaccine or antiviral drugs, there would be 93 million cases and 164,000 deaths. Vaccinating 80 percent of people younger than 19 -- the group most responsible for spreading the virus -- "would reduce the epidemic to just 6 million total cases and 15,000 total deaths in the country."

Giving that group eight weeks of oseltamivir would have the same effect, at least temporarily. But it would take the equivalent of 190 million courses of treatment -- more than anyone thinks the country will have in the next few years.

Somewhat more realistic is deploying the drug to where the outbreak begins. One researcher, Neil M. Ferguson of Imperial College in London, said in an interview that results of his not-yet-published mathematical modeling "are encouraging."

But unless antiviral drugs squelch a pandemic at the outset, their ultimate usefulness will be small. Without widespread immunity through vaccination or infection, the virus will simply move into a population when the drugs run out."

I remembered watching this show on channelnewsasia, it's like a documentary from national geographic..it's called "End Day" or sth liddat..It's a show whereby they show four different endings in the same day and they are all predicted by scientists. I missed the first part of the show and i thk it showed the ending like in the movie "the day after tmr" . Anyway so I watched the second part of it on Tuesday and they showed an ending whereby there was a flu epidemic and the flu strain was highly contagious that many people contracted it and it looks pretty bad..Yep..so..what if it really happens? It's realli hard to imagine..*sigh* Anyway, I'll post the article abt the diagnostic kit next time as i'm rather busy now and I'm having dinner soon too. Remember..for this full article go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/30/AR2005073001429.html .