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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071231/ap_on_re_us/banned_words

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:45:37 GMT

`Surge' makes the banned-words list

By JEFF KAROUB, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 31, 2:56 PM ET

DETROIT - Resist the urge to say you will "wordsmith" your list of New Year's resolutions rather than write one. And don't utter, "It is what it is" when you fail to meet your first goal.

Those are two of the 19 words or phrases that appear in Lake Superior State University's annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. The school in Michigan's Upper Peninsula released its 33rd list Monday, selecting from about 2,000 nominations.

Among this year's picks are "surge," the term for the troop buildup in Iraq. "Give me the old days, when it referenced storms and electrical power," Michael Raczko of Swanton, Ohio, said in nominating the word.

The list also included "waterboarding," "perfect storm," "under the bus" and "organic." Also: "It is what it is," which Jeffrey Skrenes of St. Paul, Minn., said "accomplishes the dual feat of adding nothing to the conversation while also being phonetically and thematically redundant."

Sadly for grammar's guardians, the lighthearted list isn't binding, as evidenced by the continued use of past banned words and phrases such as "erectile dysfunction," "i-anything" and "awesome."

Still, university spokesman Tom Pink, part of a committee that evaluates submissions, takes his syntactic success where he can find it.

His office once received a letter from an Arizona Supreme Court justice who said he posted that year's list on a bulletin board and prohibited all attorneys from using those words.

___

On the Net:

Lake Superior State University's banished words: http://www.lssu.edu/banished

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:44:55 GMT

gee... i just realized it's new year's day. x). happy new year's. :)

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/23/america/habeas.php

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:51:32 GMT

J. Edgar Hoover sought mass arrests in 1950, document shows

By Tim Weiner

Sunday, December 23, 2007

A newly declassified document from 1950 shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage." The FBI would "apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security, Hoover's proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under "a master warrant attached to a list of names" provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. "The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States," he wrote. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus."

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration's decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended "unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it." The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include "threatened invasion" or "attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory."

Hoover's plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The plan called for "the permanent detention" of 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.

The FBI, he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow. So the bureau had arranged for "detention in Military facilities of the individuals apprehended" in those states.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have comprised one judge and two citizens. But the hearings "will not be bound by the rules of evidence."

Hoover's July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and Truman signed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" if the president declared a national emergency. But no known evidence suggests any president approved Hoover's proposal.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:51:00 GMT

hehe coincidentally the day i decide to post an article after a while of not posting it's the 500th day of this xanga. :)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070927/od_afp/sciencejapanbiologyanimal_070927185409

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:55:59 GMT

No need for dissection as see-through frogs jump in

by Miwa Suzuki Thu Sep 27, 2:54 PM ET

TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese researchers have succeeded in producing see-through frogs, letting them observe organs, blood vessels and eggs under the skin without performing dissections.

"You can see through the skin how organs grow, how cancer starts and develops," said the lead researcher Masayuki Sumida, professor at the Institute for Amphibian Biology of state-run Hiroshima University.

"You can watch organs of the same frog over its entire life as you don't have to dissect it. The researcher can also observe how toxins affect bones, livers and other organs at lower costs," he told AFP.

Dissections have become increasingly controversial in much of the world, particularly in schools where animal rights activists have pressed for humane alternatives such as using computer simulations.

Sumida said his team, which announced the research last week at an academic conference, had created the first transparent four-legged creature, although some small fish are also see-through.

The researchers produced the creature from rare mutants of the Japanese brown frog, or Rena japonica, whose backs are usually ochre or brown.

Two kinds of recessive genes have been known to cause the frog to be pale.

Sumida's team crossed two frogs with recessive genes through artificial insemination and the offspring looked normal due to the presence of more powerful genes. But crossing the offspring led to a frog whose skin is transparent from the tadpole stage.

"You can see dramatic changes of organs when tadpoles mutate into frogs," said Sumida, whose team is seeking a patent.

Such frogs could theoretically exist in the wild but it is "virtually impossible" they would naturally inherit so many recessive genes, Sumida said.

The transparent frogs can also reproduce, with their offspring inheriting their parents' traits, but their grandchildren die shortly after birth.

"As they have two sets of recessive genes, something wrong must kick in and kill them," Sumida said.

While the researchers relied on artificial insemination, they said that genetic engineering could also produce transparent and even illuminating frogs.

Sumida said researchers could also inject into the transparent frogs an illuminating protein attached to a gene, which would light up the gene once it manifests -- for example, showing at what stage cancer starts.

Sumida said it would be unrealistic to apply the same method to mammals such as mice as their skin structure is different.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070924/sc_nm/frogs_deformities_dc

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:54:42 GMT

Frog deformities blamed on farm and ranch runoff

By Will Dunham Mon Sep 24, 5:30 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Horrific deformities in frogs are the result of a cascade of events that starts when nitrogen and phosphorus from farming and ranching bleed into lakes and ponds, researchers said on Monday.

These nutrients from fertilizers and animal waste create dramatic changes in aquatic ecosystems that help a certain type of parasitic flatworm that inflicts these deformities on North American frogs, researchers said.

"You can get five or six extra limbs. You can get no hind limbs. You can get all kinds of really bizarre, sick and twisted stuff," Pieter Johnson, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Many ecologists have expressed alarm over the plight of the world's amphibians and the role of human activities in their declining populations.

"We continue to see malformed amphibians all over the place and yet very little is being done to address those questions or even understand them," Johnson said.

While scientists had blamed parasitic infections for deformities seen in recent years in some types of amphibians, this study documented how runoff from farms and livestock ranches drives the process.

The runoff sets in motion a series of events in lakes and ponds where frogs live, the researchers said.

The nutrients stimulate the growth of algae, which in turn increases the population of snails. Microscopic parasitic worms called trematodes infect the snails -- and more snails means more worms.

ATTACK OF THE 'ZOMBIES'

The worms reproduce asexually inside the snails, which Johnson said are turned into "zombies" castrated by the parasites, allowing the worms to expel thousands of offspring.

The worms then swarm over tadpoles -- the water-dwelling larvae of frogs -- and burrow at the spots where limbs are developing, forming cysts and causing developmental deformities.

But how would a worm benefit from an amphibian having such deformities? Predators such as birds eat the infected frogs and spread the worm back into the ecosystem through defecation. Deformed frogs are more easily caught and eaten, benefiting the worm's life cycle, Johnson said.

To examine the role of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff on the process, the researchers created 36 ponds in Wisconsin and stocked them with snails and frog tadpoles. They added nitrogen and phosphorus and observed the consequences.

The ponds with added nitrogen and phosphorus had their snail population, parasitic worm egg production and infection rate of frogs increase greatly, according to the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Johnson said an important area of research is tracking connections between nutrient runoff from all kinds of sources into aquatic environments, and the emergence of disease in people or wildlife.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070914/ap_on_sc/trout_from_salmon

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:54:05 GMT

Salmon spawn baby trout in experiment

By LAURAN NEERGAARD, Associated Press Writer Fri Sep 14, 3:08 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Papa salmon plus mama salmon equals ... baby trout? Japanese researchers put a new spin on surrogate parenting as they engineered one fish species to produce another, in a quest to preserve endangered fish.

Idaho scientists begin the next big step next month, trying to produce a type of salmon highly endangered in that state — the sockeye — this time using more plentiful trout as surrogate parents.

The new method is "one of the best things that has happened in a long time in bringing something new into conservation biology," said University of Idaho zoology professor Joseph Cloud, who is leading the U.S. government-funded sockeye project.

The Tokyo University inventors dubbed their method "surrogate broodstocking." They injected newly hatched but sterile Asian masu salmon with sperm-growing cells from rainbow trout — and watched the salmon grow up to produce trout.

The striking success, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, is capturing the attention of conservation specialists, who say new techniques are badly needed. Captive breeding of endangered fish is difficult, and attempts to freeze fish eggs for posterity so far have failed.

"They showed nicely that ... they produced the fish they were shooting for," said John Waldman, a fisheries biologist at Queens College in New York.

"Future work should look to expand this approach to other fishes in need of conservation, in particular, the sturgeons and paddlefish," he added. "We have a lot of species of fish around the world that are really in danger of becoming extinct."

The Japanese researchers' ultimate goal: Boost the rapidly dwindling population of bluefin tuna, a species prized in a country famed for its tuna appetite.

"We need to rescue them somehow," said Goro Yoshizaki, a Tokyo University marine scientist who is leading the research.

First, Yoshizaki's team started with "salmonids," a family that includes both salmon and trout, and one of concern to biologists because several species are endangered or extinct.

Initial attempts to transplant sperm-producing cells into normal masu salmon mostly produced hybrids of the two species that didn't survive.

This time, Yoshizaki engineered salmon to be sterile. He then injected newly hatched salmon with stem cells destined to grow into sperm that he had culled from male rainbow trout.

Once they were grown, 10 of 29 male salmon who got the injections produced trout sperm, called milt.

Here's the bigger surprise: Injecting the male cells into female salmon sometimes worked, too, prompting five female salmon to ovulate trout eggs. That's a scientific first, Yoshizaki said.

The stem cells were still primitive enough to switch gears from sperm-producers to egg-producers when they wound up inside female organs, explained Idaho's Cloud.

Then Yoshizaki used the salmon-grown trout sperm to fertilize both wild trout eggs and the salmon-grown trout eggs. DNA testing confirmed that all of the dozens of resulting baby fish were pure trout, he reported.

Moreover, those new trout grew up able to reproduce.

Those first experiments, funded by a Japanese research institute, used still fairly plentiful species to develop the technique. Now comes Idaho's attempt to prove if the method is really useful in trying to produce the endangered sockeye salmon.

Last January, Yoshizaki helped University of Idaho scientists collect and freeze immature sperm tissue from young sockeye salmon being raised at a state-run hatchery. Next month, he'll be back to help Cloud thaw the tissue and implant it into sterile rainbow trout.

In Japan, Yoshizaki is focused on bluefin tuna, noting that standard "marine ranching" techniques are difficult for tuna that can reach man-size.

He has begun experiments into how to produce baby tuna from mackerel, which are nearly a thousand times smaller than adult tuna. If it works, "we can save space, cost and labor," he predicted in an e-mail interview.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070927/ap_on_re_us/sept11_story_questioned

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:53:07 GMT

Woman's 9/11 survival story questioned

Thu Sep 27, 11:45 AM ET

NEW YORK - A nonprofit organization for 9/11 survivors removed its president after questions were raised about her harrowing account of how she survived but lost a loved one in the World Trade Center attack.

Tania Head has said that she was badly burned on the 78th floor of the south tower, that she was saved by a man who died trying to save others, and that a dying man handed her his inscribed wedding ring, which she later returned to his widow.

She also said her husband, or fiance, died in the north tower.

The New York Times reported Thursday that none of her claims had been verified. She has described her 9/11 experiences at speaking engagements and led Tribute WTC Visitor Center tours, and her account has appeared, among other places, on the Web site of the World Trade Center Survivors Network.

The board of the nonprofit organization removed her as president and director this week.

"Tania Head is no longer associated with the World Trade Center Survivors' Network," according to a statement on the group's Web site. "Our organization was created so that those affected by the terrorist attacks could help each other through crisis and its aftermath."

Head also is no longer giving tours at the Tribute center. "At this time, we are unable to confirm the veracity of Tania Head's connection to the events of Sept. 11," said the center's CEO, Jennifer Adams.

The Times said Merrill Lynch & Company, where Head told people she had worked, had no record of her employment. She has claimed she had a romantic relationship with a man who is a confirmed 9/11 victim, but the Times said his family and friends had never heard of Head and they discount details of her story.

No telephone listing exists for a Tania Head in New York City. A message left by The Associated Press at a local telephone number for an Alicia Head — a name the Times said Head had also used — was not immediately returned Wednesday.

The Times said Head canceled three interviews in recent weeks, citing her privacy and emotional turmoil, and declined to provide details to corroborate her story. She also told the newspaper she had done nothing illegal and had not filed any claim with the federal Victim Compensation Fund.

She earned no money as president of the survivors group or as a tour guide at ground zero, according to the Times.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070904/od_afp/hongkongeducation_070904160137

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 22:12:57 GMT

University 'very easy' for Hong Kong nine-year-old

Tue Sep 4, 12:01 PM ET

HONG KONG (AFP) - Hong Kong's youngest ever university student said he was already bored with his "very easy" classes as he started his mathematics course on Tuesday.

The nine-year-old maths genius gained two grade As and a B in his A-levels in England -- normally taken by 18-year-olds.

March Boedihardjo told reporters gathered at Hong Kong Baptist University he was excited about starting school, but the classes were not stimulating.

"I've learned it a year or two years ago," Boedihardjo said as reporters peppered him with questions and cameras flashed around him.

The boy appeared impatient with the endless questions from reporters and kept asking his father when they could leave.

Boedihardjo did not have a good impression of his classmates either.

"They made no response (in classes). They just listened in the class and didn't interact with each other," he said.

The boy said that his old school friends "wanted to play", unlike the university students.

The university accepted Boedihardjo last month and has designed a special five-year course for him that will lead to a masters degree.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070808/ap_on_sc/human_evolution

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 14:00:14 GMT

Fossils challenge old evoluton theory

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Wed Aug 8, 5:57 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Surprising research based on two African fossils suggests our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, challenging what had been common thinking on how early humans evolved.

The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution — that one of those species evolved from the other.

And it further discredits that iconic illustration of human evolution that begins with a knuckle-dragging ape and ends with a briefcase-carrying man.

The old theory is that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became human, Homo sapiens. But Leakey's find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years. She and her research colleagues report the discovery in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.

The paper is based on fossilized bones found in 2000. The complete skull of Homo erectus was found within walking distance of an upper jaw of Homo habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. That makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis, researchers said.

It's the equivalent of finding that your grandmother and great-grandmother were sisters rather than mother-daughter, said study co-author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London.

The two species lived near each other, but probably didn't interact, each having its own "ecological niche," Spoor said. Homo habilis was likely more vegetarian while Homo erectus ate some meat, he said. Like chimps and apes, "they'd just avoid each other, they don't feel comfortable in each other's company," he said.

There remains some still-undiscovered common ancestor that probably lived 2 million to 3 million years ago, a time that has not left much fossil record, Spoor said.

Overall what it paints for human evolution is a "chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us," Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.

That old evolutionary cartoon, while popular with the general public, is just too simple and keeps getting revised, said Bill Kimbel, who praised the latest findings. He is science director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and wasn't part of the Leakey team.

"The more we know, the more complex the story gets," he said. Scientists used to think Homo sapiens evolved from Neanderthals, he said. But now we know that both species lived during the same time period and that we did not come from Neanderthals.

Now a similar discovery applies further back in time.

Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist and co-author of the Leakey work, said she expects anti-evolution proponents to seize on the new research, but said it would be a mistake to try to use the new work to show flaws in evolution theory.

"This is not questioning the idea at all of evolution; it is refining some of the specific points," Anton said. "This is a great example of what science does and religion doesn't do. It's a continous self-testing process."

For the past few years there has been growing doubt and debate about whether Homo habilis evolved into Homo erectus. One of the major proponents of the more linear, or ladder-like evolution that this evidence weakens, called Leakey's findings important, but he wasn't ready to concede defeat.

Dr. Bernard Wood, a surgeon-turned-professor of human origins at George Washington University, said in an e-mail Wednesday that "this is only a skirmish in the protracted 'war' between the people who like a bushy interpretation and those who like a more ladder-like interpretation of early human evolution."

Leakey's team spent seven years analyzing the fossils before announcing it was time to redraw the family tree — and rethink other ideas about human evolutionary history. That's especially true of most immediate ancestor, Homo erectus.

Because the Homo erectus skull Leakey recovered was much smaller than others, scientists had to first prove that it was erectus and not another species nor a genetic freak. The jaw, probably from an 18- or 19-year-old female, was adult and showed no signs of malformation or genetic mutations, Spoor said. The scientists also know it isn't Homo habilis from several distinct features on the jaw.

That caused researchers to re-examine the 30 other erectus skulls they have and the dozens of partial fossils. They realized that the females of that species are much smaller than the males — something different from modern man, but similar to other animals, said Anton. Scientists hadn't looked carefully enough before to see that there was a distinct difference in males and females.

Difference in size between males and females seem to be related to monogamy, the researchers said. Primates that have same-sized males and females, such as gibbons, tend to be more monogamous. Species that are not monogamous, such as gorillas and baboons, have much bigger males.

This suggests that our ancestor Homo erectus reproduced with multiple partners.

The Homo habilis jaw was dated at 1.44 million years ago. That is the youngest ever found from a species that scientists originally figured died off somewhere between 1.7 and 2 million years ago, Spoor said. It enabled scientists to say that Homo erectus and Homo habilis lived at the same time.

___

On the Net:

Nature: http://www.nature.com