Pediatricians call to keep thimerosal in vaccines

(Reuters Health) - A mercury-containing preservative rarely used in the United States should not be banned as an ingredient in vaccines, U.S. pediatricians said Monday, in a move that may be controversial.

Vegetables in Israel Carry Heavy Pesticide Residue

Are Israelis eating a mouthful of pesticides for breakfast?

If there's one food group that Israelis love, it's vegetables. In fact, all over the Middle East, vegetables are treated with love and presented at table in infinite artful ways. And people are picky about their produce, carefully inspecting each tomato and cucumber before consenting to buy.

But health hazards lurk on the well-loved produce. According to Haaretz, 11% of produce tested by the Israel Health Ministry showed unacceptably high levels of pesticide residues. Of over 5000 samples taken from 108 kinds of foods, 56% had traces of different pesticides.

European grains avoid frost damage so far: EU unit

PARIS (Reuters) - Winter cereal crops across continental Europe avoided frost damage during a freezing spell earlier this month and should be spared in the week ahead, the European Union's crop monitoring unit said on Monday.

The Maya face Dec. 21 with ancestral calm

Amid a worldwide frenzy of advertisers and new-agers preparing for a Maya apocalypse, one group is approaching Dec. 21 with calm and equanimity — the people whose ancestors supposedly made the prediction in the first place.

Leaking Barge Spilling Fuel Oil into New York City Waters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A barge with a leaking cargo tank spilled fuel oil into a New York City waterway on Saturday, officials said.
The barge was carrying 112,000 gallons of No. [More]

The dopamine side(s) of depression

Depression is a disease with a difficult set of symptoms. Not only are the symptoms difficult to describe (how do you really describe anhedonia, before you know the word for it?), symptoms of depression manifest in different ways for different people. One person will eat more, sleep all the time, move slowly. Another will eat almost nothing, never sleep, and be irritable and nervous. They are both depressed. The only universal symptom is the feeling of...depression, and the need for successful treatment. Treatments which often take several weeks to work, are often ineffective, and which come with a host of side effects.So I was particularly intrigued when Nature published two papers this week looking at the role of dopamine in depressive-like behavior. What I particularly like is that these two papers have somewhat opposite results, due to different behavioral methods, something which I think highlights some of the problems associated with studying depression. Ed Yong covered both of the studies together fabulously over at Not Exactly Rocket Science , but I'd like to look at them both separately, to take a deeper look at each one, see what they've achieved, and what other questions they raise. So I will start with one today, and post the other tomorrow, looking at both sides of dopamine's potential role in depression. [More]

Hormones from Livestock Operations May Skew Fish Gender

Baby fish exposed to hormone-laden manure from Indiana farms were much more likely to be male than those raised in uncontaminated water, according to new research.
[More]

Farmers in Nepal Use Urine to Boost Crop Yields

SOTANG, Nepal – A two-day’s walk from the nearest road, over the hills and valleys below Mount Everest, farmer Budhiman Tamang loads a basket of cabbages to take to the weekly market. His cabbages are double the average local size, and since cabbages are sold by the kilo, they double his profit, too.
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Polar drilling effort hits snag: Boffins' search for life put on ice

Ancient Antarctic lake won't get another drilling for at least a few days
The British boffinry team hunting for life under the Antarctic ice-sheet over ancient Lake Ellsworth have run into trouble.…

Robotic Arm Controlled By Your Mind

Controlling a robotic anything with your mind is considered to be the stuff of science fiction novels, not academic research. University of Pittsburgh professor and neuroscientist Andrew Schwartz has been studying and publishing how the brain can control an external arm and hand since 2006.

Nasa to test 'sleep-inducing lights'

A lighting module that changes from blue to red is to be installed on the International Space Station to help regulate astronauts' sleeping patterns.

Samsung clashes with labor group over underage worker allegations in China

Samsung is facing accusations that the company deliberately tried to hide the employment of underage workers at a Chinese supplier, after a labor protection group said it found three girls under the age of 16 employed at the factory. On Friday, New York-based China Labor Watch said it had identified three underage workers at a factory operated by HTNS Shenzhen that assembles handsets for Samsung. The labor rights group, said it had checked the personal IDs of three workers, and also held discussions with them to verify their age.

Research In Motion Sends Invites For Jan. 30 BB10 Launch

Research In Motion this morning mailed out invitations to the media for a January 30 launch event in New York for the first devices based on the company's new BlackBerry 10 operating system software. The company is holding parallel events in Toronto, London, Paris, Johannesburg and Dubai. RIM had previously announced that

SSD prices continue to plunge

Since 2010, SSD (solid state drive) prices have plummeted 300 percent since 2010, this year reaching what researchers call the magic price point of $1-per-gigabyte of capacity. After dropping 20 percent in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10 percent in the second half of the year, according to data from IHS iSupply.

Google to Microsoft: Up yours

Last week, to hear the press tell it, Google went on a rampage against Microsoft.

Top CEOs Share how Big Data Is Transforming Our Health, Wealth and Security

In his book Managing in the Next Society Peter Drucker explains the nature of transformation. The Industrial Revolution of the 1820s occurred 40 years after James Watt’s steam engine; and the railroad concept pioneered in 1829 became transformative in the 1860s, setting the stage for national expansion in America. We see this same time pattern in the growth of data of the past few decades where now, in 2012, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day. In the simplest terms, the reason it’s now called big data is because of two new elements 1. no-SQL data utilizes parallel processing instead of sequenced processing, which dramatically escalates speed and 2. non-structured data includes blogs, emails, web logs and social media etc., which when added to traditional structured data dramatically escalates data volume.

Fake Apple Store In China

In the obscure southwestern town of Kunming, three Apple stores have cropped up. They're not as they seem.

Image problems mount in corporate Germany

Many big German companies have become embroiled in criminal investigations recently, suggesting a worsening of ethical standards in corporate Germany. But only ethics pay off in the end, business experts say.

US shale gas sparks a chemical revolution

Cheap feedstock created by the move into hydraulic fracturing has led to an expansion in ethylene projects to take advantage of the glut

Chemical boom hit by construction costs

Capital investment soars for ethane plants under development to take advantage of the US’s glut of cheap shale gas

Deep Earth tremors may foretell quakes

Tiny tremors, smaller than earthquakes, are shaking the Cascadia subduction zone deep beneath the Pacific Northwest.

VENEZUELA • Remède électoral pour Chávez

"Nous offrons à Chávez le meilleur médicament : l'Etat de
Tachira", a déclaré José Gregorio Vielma Mora, nouveau gouverneur de cet état,
l'un des

Venezuela vote triumph a "present" for sick Chavez

 CARACAS (Reuters) - Hugo Chavez's supporters dedicated their dominant regional election win to the absent Venezuelan president and turned attention back on Monday to his fight to recover from cancer surgery in Cuba.

Dutch script kiddie pwns 20,000 Twitter profiles

How much do you have in common with the other lusers?
A Dutch teenager successfully hijacked 20,000 Twitter profiles to post a message dissing their owners for being slack with security.…

The Little Known Spy Agency That Knows Your Flight Plans And Much More

This week, the Wall Street Journal had an in-depth report about how the National Counterterrorism Center won the intel jackpot, giving it the right to store and monitor almost any government database. The Journal highlights dissent within the government about the program; the former privacy czar for the Department of Homeland Security said that new rules being set for the seven-year-old NCTC constituted a "sea change" because, in the words of the WSJ, "whenever citizens interact with the government, the first question asked will be, are they a terrorist?"

Google Maps for iPhone violates European data protection law, German watchdog says

When users install Google Maps on their iPhone, the option to share location data with Google is switched on by default. By doing this, Google violates European data protection law, according to a German data protection watchdog. Google Maps for iPhone appeared in the App Store on Wednesday and was welcomed by many after Apple stumbled with its own maps application. Google Maps quickly became the most popular free app in the App Store.

Microsoft: IE mouse tracking vuln no big deal. Sort of...

Will fix it anyway. Probably...
Microsoft has dismissed allegations that Internet Explorer can allow attackers to track the position of the user's mouse cursor, arguing that the original report was self-serving and that the observed behavior does not represent a credible threat.…

Baltimore Issued Speed Camera Ticket To Motionless Car

SternisheFan sends this story from the Baltimore Sun: "The Baltimore City speed camera ticket alleged that the four-door Mazda wagon was going 38 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone — and that owner Daniel Doty owed $40 for the infraction. But the Mazda wasn't speeding. It wasn't even moving. The two photos printed on the citation as evidence of speeding show the car was idling at a red light with its brake lights illuminated. A three-second video clip also offered as evidence shows the car motionless, as traffic flows by on a cross street. Since the articles' publication, several lawmakers have called for changes to the state law that governs the way the city and other jurisdictions operate speed camera programs. Gov. Martin O'Malley said Tuesday that state law bars contractors from being paid based on the number of citations issued or paid —an approach used by Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Howard County and elsewhere. 'The law says you're not supposed to charge by volume. I don't think we should charge by volume,' O'Malley said. "If any county is, they need to change their program.'"

Won't follow Apple Store rules? How 'bout an iTASER TREAT!

Don't tase Li, bro
Police in New Hampshire have defended the tasering of a 44-year-old woman by one of its officers after she refused to leave a local Apple Store.…

McAfee warns of Project Blitzkrieg hack attack on US banks

No, not that McAfee, the other McAfee
Security firm McAfee warns that there is a credible threat of a coordinated Spring offensive against at least 30 US banks next year by Eastern European fraudsters.…

Grinchy Google to shut down another batch of services

Calendar, Sync features fall prey to 'winter cleaning'
As part of its ongoing process of pruning and streamlining its engineering efforts, Google has decided to terminate yet another batch of unloved and little-used services, in what it's calling its "winter cleaning."…

Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

Even better: It could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels
A group of researchers has released a study that claims to shoot down the common perception that clean, renewable energy from wind and solar sources is all well and good, eco-wise, but that it's too uncertain, sporadic, and pricey for widespread use.…

All Roads Lead to Natural Gas-Fueled Cars and Trucks

RoyalDutchShell is changing lanes. While oil development will continue to dominate its portfolio, the energy developer is now making plans to invest heavily in liquefied natural gas, or LNG. Shell, and others, see the export of the super-cooled natural gas as a lucrative venture.

Apple Has Its iPad Cannibalization Timed Perfectly

Ever since the iPad Mini launched, Apple watchers wondered how long it would take for the Mini to cannibalize the iPad's sales. Not long, as various figures are showing.

Boys and Girls May Get Different Breast Milk

Mother's milk may be the first food, but it is not created equal. In humans and other mammals, researchers have found that milk composition changes depending on the infant's gender and on whether conditions are good or bad. Understanding those differences can give scientists insights into human evolution.
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