>Bottled Water Is No Purer Than Tap Water, Group Says

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Bottled water sold in markets and convenience stores may be no more free of pollutants than the water that pours from the kitchen tap at a fraction of the cost, said an environmental group that tested samples.

Ten top-selling brands of bottled water contained a total of 38 pollutants including fertilizer, industrial chemicals, bacteria and the residue of drugs such as Tylenol, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group based in Washington, D.C. The bottled water showed an average of eight pollutants in each sample.

Americans drank more than twice as much bottled water in 2007 as they did in 1997, guzzling 8.8 billion gallons at a cost of $10.3 billion in 2007, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp., a research and consulting firm based in New York. Although commercials often show pristine mountain springs, the reality is that bottled water often comes from city water supplies, said Renee Sharp, an Environmental Working Group senior scientist.

“If you’re going to pay 1,500 times more for bottled water than for tap you’d expect that you’d be getting a cleaner, better product,” said Sharp. “And that’s not necessarily true.” – BLOOM

>Man dies in Quebec cemetery after tombstone falls on him

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A 77-year-old man died Monday night in a cemetery in Buckingham in western Quebec after a tombstone fell on top of him, police say.

Officers said the man had gone to St. Gregoire Cemetery to visit the site where his parents were buried and was digging next to a tombstone when it fell.

“It appears he moved the stone and was digging a hole around the foundation when the concrete block fell on his back,” said Const. Isabelle Poirier.

Another visitor to the cemetery noticed an apparently abandoned car on the grounds at the corner of Buckingham Avenue and Lépine Avenue and called police just after 7 p.m.

Officers searched the cemetery for the car driver and found the man under the gravestone. Paramedics pronounced him dead on the scene. – cbc

>Army developing ‘synthetic telepathy’

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Read This Thought: The U.S. Army is developing a technology known as synthetic telepathy that would allow someone to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. The concept is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG.

Vocal cords were overrated anyway. A new Army grant aims to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. No need to type an e-mail, dial a phone or even speak a word.

Known as synthetic telepathy, the technology is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG. Similar technology is being marketed as a way to control video games by thought.

“I think that this will eventually become just another way of communicating,” said Mike D’Zmura, from the University of California, Irvine and the lead scientist on the project. … Commercial EEG headsets already exist that allow wearers to manipulate virtual objects by thought alone, noted Sajda, but thinking “move rock” is easier than, say, “Have everyone meet at Starbucks at 5:30.”

One difficulty in composing specific messages is fundamental — EEGs are not very specific. They can only locate a signal to within about one to two centimeters. That’s a large distance in the brain. In the brain’s auditory cortex, for example, two centimeters is the difference between low notes and high notes, D’Zmura said.

Placing electrodes between the skull and the brain would offer more precise readings, but it is expensive and requires invasive surgery.

… Mapping the brain’s response to most of the English language is a large task, and D’Zmura says that it will be 15-20 years before thought-based communication is reality. … To those who might be nervous … , D’Zmura says not to worry. Mind-message composition would take specific conscious thoughts and training to develop them. The device would also have a on/off switch.  – msnbc

>Internet use ‘good for the brain’

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For middle-aged and older people at least, using the internet helps boost brain power, research suggests.

A University of California Los Angeles team found searching the web stimulated centres in the brain that controlled decision-making and complex reasoning.

The researchers say this might even help to counteract the age-related physiological changes that cause the brain to slow down.

The study features in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
As the brain ages, a number of changes occur, including shrinkage and reductions in cell activity, which can affect performance.

It has long been thought that activities which keep the brain active, such as crossword puzzles, may help minimise that impact – and the latest study suggests that surfing the web can be added to the list. …  – bbc

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>In dissection protest, teen’s name is now Cutout Dissection.com

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You can call her Cutout Dissection.com, or Cutout for short, but just don’t call her Jennifer. The former Jennifer Thornburg — whose driver’s license now reads Dissection.com, Cutout — wanted to do something to protest animal dissections in schools. The 19-year-old’s new name is also the Web address for an anti-dissection page of the site for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, where she is interning.

“I normally do have to repeat my name several times when I am introducing myself to someone new,” she told The Asheville Citizen-Times. “Once they find out what my name is, they want to know more about what the Web site is about.”

The Asheville High School graduate, who is working in Virginia, said she began opposing dissections in middle school after a class assignment to cut up a chicken wing made her uncomfortable. She helped create a policy at her high school that allows students who object to dissections to complete an alternative assignment. Despite her legally changing the name, she said most of her family members still call her Jennifer.

“It will take me a while,” said her dad, Duane Thornburg, who lives in Daytona Beach, Florida. “She’s still Jennifer to me. I understand why she’s done it. Believe it or not, I totally respect it.”A CD showing the treatment of animals before they are dissected finally convinced him to support his daughter’s cause, he said. – cnn

This is from Cutout’s web site:

Every year, millions of frogs, rats, cats, mice, and other animals suffer and are killed for dissection. Luckily, there are far better ways to learn biology than by torturing animals, damaging the environment, and teaching insensitivity, and it’s becoming easier every day to avoid dissection. To find out how you can help cut out dissection, [click here]

I agree with her. We can use computers. There are CD-ROM’s and virtual dissections. Only real vets and real doctors in training need this kind of experience at all. I’ve dissected a frog, a sheep brain and a cow’s eyeball. When I die, they will be waiting on the other side to kick my ass.

>’Devils’ Trails’ Are World’s Oldest Human Footprints

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It’s official: the oldest human footprints ever found are 345,000 years old, give or take 6000. Known as the “devils’ trails”, they have been preserved in volcanic ash atop the Roccamonfina volcano in Italy.

The prints were first described to the world by Paolo Mietto and colleagues of the University of Padova in Italy in 2003 after amateur archaeologists pointed them out.

At the time, the team estimated that the prints were anywhere between 385,000 and 325,000 years old, based on when the volcano was thought to have last erupted.

Now, Stéphane Scaillet and colleagues at the Laboratory of Climatic and Environmental Sciences, France, have used argon dating techniques to verify the prints’ age.

“Their more rigorous methods confirm that these are the oldest human footprints ever found,” says Mietto. The new findings also confirm that the owners of the footprints were Homo heidelbergensis. – abc

>New Gene Found That Helps Plants Beat The Heat

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Michigan State University plant scientists have discovered another piece of the genetic puzzle that controls how plants respond to high temperatures. That may allow plant breeders to create new varieties of crops that flourish in warmer, drier climates.

The MSU researchers found that the gene bZIP28 helps regulate heat stress response in Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family used as a model plant for genetic studies. This is the first time bZIP28 has been shown to play a role heat tolerance. The research is published in the Oct. 6 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We also found that bZIP28 was responding to signals from the endoplasmic reticulum, which is the first time the ER has been shown to be involved with the response to heat,” said Robert Larkin, MSU assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and corresponding author of the paper. “We’re finding that heat tolerance is a more complex process than was first thought.”

Previous research has shown that the nucleus, the “brain” of the cell, and cytosol, the fluid inside cells, play a role in how plants respond to heat. The endoplasmic reticulum, a membrane in the cell that consists of small tubes and sac-like structures, is mainly responsible for packaging and storing proteins in the cell. … sd

>Software puts cell calls and text messages on hold while you are driving.

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hen David Teater’s 12-year-old son, Joe, was killed in 2004 by a driver who was talking on a cell phone, he tried to cut back on his own habit of driving and talking. It turned out to be difficult.

“You have to remember to turn the phone off … which you never remember to do. Or you have to ignore a ringing phone, which is incredibly hard,” Teater said. “We’ve been conditioned our entire lives to answer ringing phones.”

Teater became an advocate for curbing what he calls “driving while distracted,” and now he’s part of a company with a technology that can help.

Aegis Mobility, a Canadian software company, announced Monday that it has developed software called DriveAssistT that will detect whether a cell phone is moving at car speeds. When that happens, the software will alert the network, telling it to hold calls and text messages until the drive is over.

The software doesn’t completely block incoming calls. Callers will hear a message saying the person they’re calling appears to be driving. They can hit a button to leave an emergency voice mail, which is put through immediately.

Several states, including New York and California, have introduced laws against talking on a cell phone while driving, but they still allow the use of hands-free devices like Bluetooth headsets. However, studies have shown that hands-free devices may not help. It appears that it is the distraction of dialing or talking that is dangerous.

Aegis’ software will work on phones with Windows Mobile software or Symbian software, used in phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. It uses the phone’s Global Positioning System chip to detect motion, aided by the cell-tower signal. If the phone has a Wi-Fi antenna, that can be used as well, Aegis CEO Dave Hattey said. – chron