Thursday, October 17, 2013
U.S. Government Will FINALLY Reopen! House Republicans Caved & The #Shutdown Is OVER!
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Evidence suggests early Britons ate roasted toads
In this photo provided by The University of Buckingham and taken Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, artifacts gathered from an archaeological site known as Blick Mead are cleaned and sorted in Amesbury, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) west of London, England. Archaeologists said Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013 that an excavation about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from Stonehenge has unearthed a host of clues about the diet of prehistoric Britons. Among them: A tiny, partially burnt toad bone which suggests they snacked on amphibians thousands of years before the practice became associated with the French. (AP Photo/Justine Kibler)
In this photo provided by The University of Buckingham and taken Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, artifacts gathered from an archaeological site known as Blick Mead are cleaned and sorted in Amesbury, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) west of London, England. Archaeologists said Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013 that an excavation about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from Stonehenge has unearthed a host of clues about the diet of prehistoric Britons. Among them: A tiny, partially burnt toad bone which suggests they snacked on amphibians thousands of years before the practice became associated with the French. (AP Photo/Justine Kibler)
LONDON (AP) — Britons sometimes make fun of the French for feasting on frog. But now a new discovery suggests their prehistoric ancestors may have had a taste for toad.
The University of Buckingham said Wednesday that a promising excavation near Stonehenge has unearthed a host of clues about the diet of prehistoric Britons. Among them: A tiny, partially burnt leg bone which suggests the hunter-gatherers living in what's now known as the United Kingdom snacked on amphibians.
The charred bone was found alongside the remains of fish and aurochs — the wild ancestor of today's cattle — at a site called Blick Mead in the town of Amesbury, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) west of London.
Natural History Museum and University College, London, researcher Simon Parfitt said that the dig had provided experts a glimpse of a Mesolithic menu that also included fish, hazelnuts, berries, deer, and boar. He called the discovery of what appeared to be leftovers from a meal of roast toad "really intriguing."
"Being English, we don't eat frogs," he noted.
The toad finding has yet to be peer-reviewed, and one expert — Bournemouth University archaeologist Tim Darvill — expressed skepticism over what he called "the frog story."
Still, he and other outside experts voiced excitement about the dig where the bone was found, with Darvill calling it "the most significant find in the Stonehenge landscape for many years."
Andy Rhind-Tutt, a former mayor of Amesbury and the chairman of the Amesbury Museum and Heritage Trust, said the dig was turning up thousands of flint tools and animal bones, pointing to what he said may turn out to be a major prehistoric settlement just over a mile (about 2 kilometers) from the world-famous circle of standing stones.
Parfitt said the find suggests "that there's more to the site than just Stonehenge.
"There's a much deeper history to the specialness of that place," he said.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2013-10-16-Britain-Toad%20for%20Dinner/id-ca679ecc9a2d41f8b79ee9ef6b9028a7Related Topics: Ink Master Washington Navy Yard Placenta National Tequila Day von miller
Smart Reviews From Stupid Celebrities: ‘All Is Lost’ An Open Water Thriller
Warning: there’s barely dialogue in this film. There is no need for a script. It is all carried out in actions. And boy, what a terrifying experience! It takes a heavyweight actor to breathe life into this film. And that superstar actor is Robert Redford. He’s the main character of ‘All Is Lost,’ and ...
Copyright - Stupid Celebrities Gossip 2013. If you see this content on any other website, it has been stolen. Please report.
Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/10/smart-reviews-from-stupid-celebrities-all-is-lost-a-doomed-sea-adventure/Similar Articles: Mexico vs Panama Heisenberg eagles 9 news catherine zeta jones
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Les News, 101613
Mischa's Breakdown, Bey's New Song? McCartney Supports Miley
- • Torsoswaps are a thing now. [Buzzfeed]
- • Sigourney Weaver believes that gorillas are superior to humans. [Queerty]
- • Nina Dobrev and Derek Hough are dunzo. [PopSugar]
- • Mischa Barton has she suffered a “full-on breakdown”. [GossipCop]
- • The Portland Trailblazers are the first NBA team to officially support marriage equality. [Towleroad]
- • You want a Bigotti? You better work, bitch. [Oh La La]
- • Elle magazine completely covers up Melissa McCarthy on their cover. [Newser]
- • Google Maps reunites families. [Heavy]
- • Is Beyoncé planning to release a new single on December 3? [Idolator]
- • Afrojack drops a new track. [arjanwrites]
- • Paul McCartney is Team Miley. [Starpulse]
- • Wrecking Ball acoustic. [Global Grind]
- • The first couple of Canada. [LaineyGossip]
- • Jeremy Jackson (Baywatch) is 33, John Mayer is 36, Wendy Wilson of Wilson Phillips is 44, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers is 51, Suzanne Somers (Three’s Company) is 67 and Angela Lansbury is 88 years old. Click HERE to see who else is celebrating a birthday today.
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CDC Director: In the Shutdown, 'We Are Juggling Chainsaws'
The CDC’s Emergency Operations Center in Atlanta, from which it monitors disease outbreaks around the world.
Left: Currently. Right: Before the shutdown began.
We’re now on the sixteenth day of the federal shutdown. As I write, the Senate has announced a deal to avoid a debt default and open the government. It remains to be seen whether that will work, or how fast. Yesterday, on Day 15, I had a long conversation with Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about what this shutdown has meant for his agency, its employees, and the health of Americans, and the world. I have lightly edited the conversation for clarity.
Maryn McKenna, WIRED: You’re on Day 15 of sending home 68 percent of your 13,000-person staff, in Atlanta and around the world. How is the CDC coping?
Thomas R. Frieden, CDC: Every day this goes on, it gets harder to manage. We’re used to juggling things at CDC, but this is like juggling chain saws.
We’ve got two-thirds of our staff out. The exempt staff, the ones who are here, are here just because of a happenstance of how they’re paid: They are people who are on multi-year money, or grant money, or people in the Commissioned Corps, the uniformed Public Health Service. Of the people who are furloughable, 95 percent are furloughed.
I walk through the offices and talk to the remaining staff to thank them for being here. A woman who was the only person on her floor said to me, “We have no idea what we’re missing right now.” For years people have asked me, ‘Do you sleep well, knowing all these terrible threats we face?” And I’ve always said, “I sleep great because I know we have fantastic staff on watch.” And now I’m not sleeping.
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director, CDC (via GoogleImages)
MM: Can you go into a little more detail about the staff you kept and lost?
TRF: About 2,500 are on what’s informally called good money; they’re paid for by grants or PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) or the President’s Malaria Initiative or mandatory Vaccines for Children Program. So they’re not on an annual appropriation. And then another 900 or so are commissioned officers. They can be redeployed, so we’re using them to manage everything from databases to feeding lab animals. But of the remaining 9,500 people at CDC, we’ve only got 500 here.
We went through every center, every office, every division, every branch, every team, and said: For whom do we have a legally acceptable argument to say, if they’re not here, it would be either “an imminent threat to health,” that’s the phrase, or “a risk to property”? And those we could keep.
I said to folks in Washington on Day 1 of this: What we find to be an imminent threat to health on Day 1 is going to be very different on Day 10 or 15. So we’re having to bring back two or three people here, four or five people there, because problems are getting out of hand. And pretty much everyone is working without pay.
MM: How have your programs been affected? For instance, foodborne outbreaks – lots of people are concerned about the Salmonella outbreak in chicken right now – or flu surveillance?
TRF: The broader question is, what are the outbreaks that we don’t know about? At any one time, we’re investigating 25 or 30 clusters of illness. Initially we had sent home the vast majority of the staff working on foodborne disease. When it became clear that [the shutdown] was going to go on more than a week, we called a bunch of them back. But our monitoring systems throughout the agency are working at really skeletal levels and that means we have more blind spots, we may be slower to respond, and we may be less effective at prevention.
For instance, here’s what we’re responding to right now: An outbreak of Legionella in a residential facility in Alabama. An outbreak of tuberculosis in another state. An investigation of a fatal case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever on an American Indian Reservation in Arizona where we’ve been working for two years to control that disease. A serious healthcare-associated infection outbreak in Baltimore. A cluster of infants who have been dying, or getting severely ill, in another part of the country. A cluster of meningitis in a university in the northeast that is going to require a very complicated response. An outbreak of hepatitis B in healthcare.
‘For every day of government shutdown, about one million emails at CDC go unread.’
Every day in this country, there are births and deaths and hospitalizations and surgical procedures and emergency department visits and infections, and HIV and TB, and people who get sick from contaminated foods. For every day that goes by, there’s a less intensive investigation, less effective prevention of situations like this. If I had to use one phrase to describe what’s happening: This is a self-inflicted wound.
MM: In other parts of the government – at the National Institutes of Health, for instance – scientists have spoken about having to shut down their experiments, euthanize their lab animals. Is any research at CDC imperiled?
TRF: Sure – though part of the problem is that with so many people out, we don’t have perfect visibility, so I’m not sure of everything that’s being damaged. We’ve asked to bring people in for a half-day to identify things like that. For instance: We’re studying tickborne diseases. We had to call someone in to feed the ticks, because if the tick colonies die, the research is lost. There are other problems for which we are running clinical trials and had to stop enrollment. That means those trials will have to go on for longer. And that’s going to cost lots of money.
“A woman who was the only person on her floor said to me, ‘We have no idea what we’re missing right now.’”
We’ve also got training programs that we’re very concerned about. People come for a one-year training, they lose a month of it, they may lose their certification. We may have to pay them to stay on another month at the end of that. Quite a few of our Epidemic Intelligence Service officers (the CDC’s front-line disease detectives, who serve two years) are not Commissioned Corps and therefore are not here. What will we do when their two years are up and they didn’t receive their full training? That’s a good question.
MM: What will it take to bring the CDC up to full strength when this situation is over? It sounds as though you can’t just flip a switch.
TRF: I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. For every day of government shutdown, about one million emails at CDC go unread – millions of pieces of information. I just authorized someone to come back to look at reports from the laboratories that deal in select [biowarfare] agents. Our inspectors are all furloughed, but their inspected entities actually report directly to their designated inspector to say whether they’ve got a problem. No one has checked those emails.
There’s stuff like that all over the agency. We were about to scale up our efforts to increase HPV vaccination to prevent cervical cancer. We have healthcare-associated infection work in every state. You almost don’t know where to start.
Plus, there are huge staff issues here. All of us have a mass of emotions about the shutdown: frustration; anxiety, about what are we missing; guilt, about why are we not doing the things we have committed to. And there’s anger, that we aren’t being allowed to serve the people we want to serve.
Tags: Lake Natron survivor
Feedly updated with speed improvements, new widget
Feedly 17 also includes new 'discover' section, Galaxy Gear support
RSS reader Feedly emerged as one of the major players in the news-reading world following the demise of Google Reader earlier in the year. And now the Feedly app for Android has undergone a major overhaul, bringing improved performance across the board, as well as new features and an updated home screen widget.
Feedly says the new version of the app boasts 300% faster start times, as well as a new, more fluid scrolling experience. There've also been some visual changes, with fonts being re-tooled for easier readability. And a long-standing gripe — the auto-refresh feature when switching back to the app — has been addressed too. What's more, there's a new "discover" section within the app, populated with some of the day's most popular stories.
Other changes include new Facebook SDK integration and support for Samsung's Galaxy Gear smartwatch. (A reference to Android 4.4 KitKat support being added was quickly scrubbed from the changelog — make of that what you will.)
In any case, Feedly users can grab the latest version of the app from Google Play right now. Hit the link up above to get downloading.
Source: Feedly Blog
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Study ties chemical to possible miscarriage risk
FILE - This Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012 file photo shows a sculpture made of empty water bottles in Burlington, Vt. New research presented by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine on Monday, Oct. 14, 2013 suggests that high levels of BPA, a chemical in many plastics and canned food linings, might raise the risk of miscarriage in women prone to that problem or having trouble getting pregnant. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File)
FILE - This Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012 file photo shows a sculpture made of empty water bottles in Burlington, Vt. New research presented by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine on Monday, Oct. 14, 2013 suggests that high levels of BPA, a chemical in many plastics and canned food linings, might raise the risk of miscarriage in women prone to that problem or having trouble getting pregnant. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File)
BOSTON (AP) — New research suggests that high levels of BPA, a chemical in many plastics and canned food linings, might raise the risk of miscarriage in women prone to that problem or having trouble getting pregnant.
The work is not nearly enough to prove a link, but it adds to "the biological plausibility" that BPA might affect fertility and other aspects of health, said Dr. Linda Giudice, a California biochemist who is president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The study was to be presented Monday at the group's annual conference in Boston. Last month, ASRM and an obstetricians group urged more attention to environmental chemicals and their potential hazards for pregnant women.
BPA, short for bisphenol-A, and certain other environmental chemicals can have very weak, hormone-like effects. Tests show BPA in nearly everyone's urine, though the chemical has been removed from baby bottles and many reusable drink containers in recent years. The federal Food and Drug Administration says BPA is safe as used now in other food containers.
Most miscarriages are due to egg or chromosome problems, and a study in mice suggested BPA might influence that risk, said Dr. Ruth Lathi, a Stanford University reproductive endocrinologist.
With a federal grant, she and other researchers studied 115 newly pregnant women with a history of infertility or miscarriage; 68 wound up having miscarriages and 47 had live births.
Researchers analyzed blood samples from when the women were discovered to be pregnant and divided them into four groups based on BPA levels. Women in the top quarter had an 80 percent greater risk of miscarriage compared to those in the bottom group even though they were similar in age and other factors. However, because the study is relatively small, there was a big range of possible risk — from only slightly elevated to as much as 10 times higher.
"It may be that women with higher BPA levels do have other risk factors" for miscarriage that might be amplified by BPA, Lathi said.
The study is not cause for alarm, but "it's far from reassuring that BPA is safe" for such women, she said.
To minimize BPA exposure, avoid cooking or warming food in plastic because heat helps the chemical leak out, she said. Don't leave water bottles in the sun, limit use of canned foods and avoid handling cash register receipts, which often are coated with resins that contain BPA.
"It's impossible to avoid it completely," Lathi said.
___
Follow Marilynn Marchione on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2013-10-14-US-MED-Chemicals-Fertility/id-17b395956aa94e9ba67b5e67c9db0ec6Similar Articles: Miley Cyrus Pregnant Kliff Kingsbury teresa giudice
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