>More fuel economy tips

>

– The Department of Energy’s website suggests that turning off the air conditioner may improve fuel economy when driving at speeds under 40 mph.

– It’s more fuel efficient to restart the car than to leave the engine idling. (The 2008 Toyota Prius engine, among other things, shuts off automatically during stops that last more than a few seconds. )

– You can optimize your fuel economy on the highway by putting your car into overdrive, typically the transmission’s highest gear. This will allow your engine to run at a lower level of revolutions per minute, and use less energy. According to the Department of Energy, when overdrive gearing is used, “your car’s engine speed goes down. This saves gas and reduces engine wear.”

– boston

– Inflating your tires beyond the recommended level will reduce the portion of the tire in contact with the road and the resistance between the tires and the road, but over-inflating them can make for a rocky ride. Popular Mechanics has also road tested this theory and concluded that the gas mileage doesn’t improve. The difference occurs when under-inflated tires are pumped to proper levels. In fact, the Department of Energy estimates that this simple fill up can improve your gas mileage by 3.3 percent.

>Japanese patient’s ‘tumour’ turns out to be 25-year-old towel

>

Doctors who carried out surgery on a Japanese man to remove a “tumour” had good news and bad news for him. He did not have cancer — but the “growth” that had been causing him pain was in fact a 25-year-old surgical towel.

The patient had been carrying the cloth since 1983, when surgeons at the Asahi General Hospital in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo left it in him after an operation to treat an ulcer, a spokesman for the hospital said.

The man, now 49, went in to another hospital in late May after suffering abdominal pain.

When examinations found what was believed to be an eight-centimetre (3.2-inch) tumour, he underwent the operation to remove it. It was only then that surgeons realised it was a towel.

“The towel was greenish blue although we are not sure about its original colour,” the Asahi General Hospital spokesman said, adding it had been crumpled to the size of a softball.

Asahi hospital officials visited the man and apologised, he said.

The former patient has no plans to sue the hospital, which is in talks with him over compensation or other measures, the official said.

Japanese media reports said the man, who was not identified, still had his spleen removed. – yahoo

See also: Surgical Objects Left Inside About 1,500 US Patients Per Year.

Every year in the US about 1,500 people have surgical objects accidentally left inside them after surgery, according to medical studies.

“When there is significant bleeding and a sponge is placed in a patient, it can sometimes look indistinguishable from the tissue around it,” said Dr. Steven DeJong. About two-thirds of the surgical objects left behind are sponges. These objects can lead to pain, infection, bowel obstructions, problems in healing, longer hospital stays, additional surgeries and in rare cases, death.

>Computer trained to ‘read’ minds

>

A computer has been trained to “read” people’s minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words, researchers said on Thursday.

They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information.

This might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities, said Tom Mitchell of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped lead the study.

“The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge?” Mitchell said in a telephone interview.

“It is only in the last 10 or 15 years that we have this way that we can study this question.”

Mitchell’s team used functional magnetic resonance imaging, a type of brain scan that can see real-time brain activity.

They calibrated the computer by having nine student volunteers think of 58 different words, while imaging their brain activity.

“We gave instructions to people where we would tell them, ‘We are going to show you words and we would like you, when you see this word, to think about its properties,”‘ Mitchell said.

They imaged each of the nine people thinking about the 58 different words, to create a kind of “average” image of a word.

“If I show you the brain images for two words, the main thing you notice is that they look pretty much alike. If you look at them for a while you might see subtle differences,” Mitchell said.

“We have the program calculate the mean brain activity over all of the words that somebody has looked at. That gives us the average when somebody thinks about a word, and then we subtract that average out from all those images,” Mitchell added.

Then the test came.

“After we train on the other 58 words, we can say ‘Here are two new words you have not seen, celery and airplane.”‘ The computer was asked to choose which brain image corresponded with which word.

The computer passed the test, predicting when a brain image was taken when a person thought about the word “celery” and when the assigned word was “airplane.”

The next step is to study brain activity for phrases.

“If I say ‘rabbit’ or ‘fast rabbit’ or ‘cuddly rabbit’, those are very different ideas,” Mitchell said.

“I want to basically use that as a kind of scaffolding for studying language processing in the brain.”

Mitchell was surprised at how similar brain activity was among the nine volunteers, although the work was painstaking. For an MRI to work well, the patient must sit or lie very still for several minutes.

“It can be hard to focus,” Mitchell said. “Somewhere in the middle of that their stomach growls. And all of sudden they think, ‘I’m hungry — oops.’ It’s not a controllable experiment.” – msnbc

>Living computers solve complex math puzzle

>

cientists have genetically tweaked E. coli bacteria to create simple computers capable of solving a classic math puzzle, commonly called the “Burnt Pancake Problem.”

The resulting advance in synthetic biology, according to researchers, hints at the ability of tiny “living computers” to aid in data storage, evolutionary comparisons and even tissue engineering.

The mathematical problem imagines pancakes of varying sizes stacked in random order — each with a burnt side and a golden brown side. The solution requires using the minimum number of manipulations to stack the pancakes according to size, with their burnt sides all facedown. Each manipulation involves flipping one or more pancakes, reversing both their order and orientation. Scientifically, the flipping process is known as sorting by reversals and is the sort of challenge whose complexity increases dramatically with every added pancake. By the time the stack reaches 11, the problem becomes “extremely hairy,” said Karmella Haynes, a visiting adjunct professor of biology at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C.

“It’s kind of like that computer in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ ” she said, referring to a popular novel by the late Douglas Adams. “It’s been working on a problem so long that by the time it comes up with an answer, everybody forgot the question.”

At that level of complexity, “bacteria could probably outperform a conventional computer at solving the problem,” said Haynes, the lead author of a new study suggesting exactly that.

Bacteria as tiny computers
Since 2000, multiple studies have focused on the largely untapped potential for bacteria, yeast and mammalian cells to be harnessed as tiny and abundant computers. “Ours is unique in that the operation required to solve the problem takes place in a living cell,” Haynes said.

The unique in vivo system takes advantage of the remarkable storage capacity of DNA and the efficiency of molecular self-assembly, Haynes said. DNA replication and bacterial cell division can quickly create millions or even billions of parallel processors. “The more little computers you have working on the problem,” she said, “the greater the likelihood that one is going to pick the right path that will take you to the right solution.” …

To construct the eight possible solutions for how to flip two DNA “pancakes,” the group introduced both the Hin invertase enzyme and the DNA sequences it recognizes into E. coli, creating 100 distinct DNA components and intermediates in the process. In nature, Hin invertase can cut and flip a single section of DNA. For the project, the group showed that the enzyme can flip one piece, an adjacent piece or both at the same time. When correctly ordered and oriented, the combined DNA pieces were designed to reconstitute a gene allowing E. coli to grow even in the presence of the antibiotic tetracycline.

Unexpectedly, the researchers found that even some scrambled DNA arrangements confer tetracycline resistance. The wrinkle, Haynes said, underscores the need for researchers working on larger “pancake stacks” to find a reliable calling card — a distinct color change or survival of the bacteria, for instance — only when the right combination has been achieved amid a host of possibilities. Several of the project’s participants are now working toward that goal. msnbc

>Bigfoot Bounty: Reward Offered for Mysterious Monsters

>

Bigfoot and lake monsters, beware: There’s a price on your heads.

Binocular manufacturer Bushnell, along with “Field & Stream” magazine, have teamed up to offer $1 million to anyone who can “provide an unaltered photograph/video, verified and substantiated by a panel of scientific experts [including a zoologist and biologist], the evidence required to prove a Sasquatch/Bigfoot/Yeti exists.”

The contest started a few days ago and ends Dec. 15, but before heading out to claim your million, note that the rules’ fine print states that they are not liable for any injury incurred during a Bigfoot attack. A good quality Bigfoot image would make history; most photos are of such consistently poor quality that within the Bigfoot research community there’s even a name for a typical blurry “Bigfoot” image: blobsquatch.

This is, of course, a marketing promotion and not a genuine search for Bigfoot. There’s no way to authenticate a Bigfoot photograph by itself; the image is simply a two-dimensional pattern of pixels. To truly prove a Bigfoot exists, you’d need corroborating hard evidence like a body, teeth, or bones.

Bigfoot isn’t the only monster whose proof of existence commands cash. Larry Nielson, a boat owner from Lake City, Minnesota, is offering a reward for their local lake monster. Pepie, the mysterious beast said to lurk in Lake Pepin, was supposedly seen on April 28, 1871, and only rarely since then. According to Nielson, you don’t actually have to capture the beast: “The Lake City Tourism Bureau has announced a $50,000 reward for undisputable evidence that proves the existence of the real live creature living in Lake Pepin. The proof should include photographics (sic) and/or samples of skin or fins that can studied for a DNA analysis.”

Savvy marketers have been using monsters in promotions for over a century. In 1873, the great American showman P.T. Barnum offered a $50,000 reward for Champ, the monster supposedly living in Vermont’s Lake Champlain. He planned to exhibit the creature in New York, but even that fortune wasn’t enough to snare the creature, and in 1887, Barnum offered $20,000 for the monster, dead or alive. He still had no takers. More recently, Bigfoot has been used to promote everything from pizza to monster trucks to beef jerky. And virtually every town near a lake with a reputed monster has profited economically from increased tourism.

People have been searching for these mysterious creatures for years. Why is conclusive proof still elusive? There are only two alternative explanations: the monsters’ non-existence or the searchers’ incompetence. It’s possible that the animals simply don’t exist, and the “evidence” is either hoaxed or the result of honest mistakes. Or, if these monsters do exist, the searchers apparently aren’t good enough at their task and can’t find the huge animals despite decades of effort and employing high-tech equipment.

Perhaps putting a price on Bigfoot’s head will finally solve the mystery. But if history is any guide, it will just turn up more blobsquatches. – ls

>Minn. city sets reward for legendary creature

>

Some in eastern Minnesota say there’s a large, serpentlike creature living in the Mississippi River’s Lake Pepin below Maiden Rock. If it exists, it could fatten your bank account.

The Lake City Tourism Bureau has helped set up a $50,000 reward for hooking, netting or capturing the creature on a camera.

Larry Nielson owns a paddle wheeler on the lake and claims to have seen the creature, which the locals have named “Pepie.” Nielson and others would like to see the creature draw some tourists.

Boosters say the legend of Pepie comes in part from the native Dakota people that lived in the area. They refused to travel on Lake Pepin in bark canoes because of large creatures that would come to the surface and damage their boats. – ap

>Boy Badly Burned By Searing Ground

>

A young Colorado Springs boy was badly burned after he put his foot onto what geologists are calling a patch of coal waste.

Matt Bershinski received second- and third-degree burns while he was playing in the Golden Hills Park.”He started screaming and no one really knew what was going on,” Jennifer Elliot told KRDO. Firefighters said the ground where the boy burned himself looked like quicksand. Geologists said, however, that it was coal waste that had reached temperatures of 800 degrees.They first suspected the heat originated in mine shafts below the ground. Mining experts and geologists ruled that out but found a 2-foot-deep layer of coal dust. The sunshine caused the waste to spontaneously combust.Al Amundson of the state Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety says coal is constantly oxidizing and can ignite if the heat from oxidization is not carried away by wind. Officials believe the dust was dumped by workers from a mine that closed in 1957.A friend of the boy’s family told KRDO Bershinski is scheduled for surgery on both feet in Denver on Wednesday.The Parks Department plans to cover the coal waste with a thick cap of soil. – tdc

>WiFi in Libraries Blamed for Health Maladies in Paris

>

To many people, the idea that wireless networks cause health problems seems wacky.

But four libraries in Paris have switched off their wireless connections after staff members complained that electromagnetic radiation from the networks was the source of their health problems, according to an article today in the newspaper, The Connexion.

The article states that the latest library to turn off the service is at Sainte-Geneviève University. The action was taken after a staff member threatened to take early retirement on health grounds. He said his symptoms included “headaches, balance problems, general weakness, stress and sight problems.” But he also blamed electromagnetic radiation from cell phones for his maladies.

College employees in North America, too, have raised health concerns about wireless networks. A library director at Southwestern College, in Santa Fe, N.M., left her job last year, saying the wireless network played a role in her insomnia. And two years ago the president of Lakehead University, in Ontario, prohibited his institution from deploying a wireless network across campus citing concerns about students’ health.

Despite these worries, the Centers for Disease Control says scientific research does not indicate “a significant association between cell phone use and health effects.” Cell phones also emit electromagnetic radiation. But an article in Tuesday’s New York Times points out that three prominent neurosurgeons do not hold cell phones to their ears in order to reduce their brains’ exposure to radiation.—Andrea L. Foster – chron

>Here’s something you’ve probably never seen before…

>I’m not sure what this says in Russian.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about "Here’s something you’ve probably neve…", posted with vodpod

>Almost 100 mpg!

>

Almost 100 mpg!, originally uploaded by xeno735.

Here are some tips for getting 100 mpg from a 2008 Toyota Prius (That’s right, 2008!).

1) Hit the Reset button.
2) Be sure you are in “D” and not “B”. “B” is for going down long hills.
3) Inflate to 42 PSI front, 40 PSI rear.
4) Maximize coasting/lower speed driving.
5) Minimize accelerating from full stops (for example, at traffic signals).’

I’m still experimenting, but today I found that it is better to quickly get up to speed from a full stop and then coast than it is to slowly accelerate. I need to verify that in a few more conditions.