News

Who will get sick?

“Imagine that a simple test could tell whether you were going to come down with the flu or a cold even before you get hit by a sore throat, runny nose or fever,” Jennifer Corbett Dooren writes in The Wall Street Journal. “Scientists at Duke University [in Durham, N.C.] and at other research centres have been working to develop such a predictive test by delving deep into the mechanics of how viruses affect people at the molecular level. In early encouraging results, the researchers have identified a handful of genes that are activated by viruses, but only in those people who subsequently came down with flu or cold. … Now the scientists are trying to simplify the process. Although there are major hurdles ahead, the aim is to develop a portable device, about the size of a BlackBerry, that can quickly determine if someone is on the way to being sick.”

Don't blame me

Researchers have found yet another unfortunate condition that is highly communicable: blame, Tom Jacobs reports for Miller-McCune.com. “Observing someone blame another for their lack of success ‘increased the likelihood that people would make subsequent blame attributions for their own, unrelated failures,' according to a paper just published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Deflecting responsibility, in other words, is infectious.”

News for paranoiacs

“In Utah, the National Security Agency is building a $2-billion [U.S.] storage facility that will house and analyze all forms of electronic communication … a potential yottabyte of everyone's (formerly) personal data,” Gizmodo.com reports. “So how big is a yottabyte? CrunchGear puts it well: ‘There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte.' … To be fair, the yottabyte figure is just one estimate generated by a Pentagon think tank. The facility could hold a mere hundreds of petabytes. But either way, the prospect is as unsustainable as it is frightening. This one facility will burn through as much electricity as the entirety of Salt Lake City. All this data comes from the book The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid.”

Finding predementia

“Memory and language tests can reliably reveal ‘hidden' early dementia, say U.K. experts,” BBC News reports. “Most dementias are missed for years as the symptoms can be elusive until considerable brain tissue is lost. But doctors from Oxford found they were able to spot very early warning signs when they looked closely enough.” Over 20 years, the researchers regularly tested a group of 241 healthy elderly volunteers. Their findings are reported in the journal Neurology:

“… [T]he patients who went on to develop mild cognitive impairment or predementia stumbled on tasks involving language expression, learning and recall. For example, they had greater difficulty remembering the name for common objects or animals and explaining the meaning of a given word.”

“And those who were older and who scored lower on the language or memory tests tended to deteriorate more quickly.”

“Early literary works by authors who have later been diagnosed with Alzheimer's show similar changes in language use – simpler narratives and a smaller vocabulary.”

That old excuse

“A 29-year-old man who claimed he was attacked and stabbed by three people – skinheads or Hispanic males – confessed Monday night that he stabbed himself because he didn't want to go to work, Edgewater [Colo.] Police said [Tuesday],” The Denver Post reports. The man walked into his employer, a Blockbuster video store, and reported the attack. He had a deep stab wound to his lower leg that required numerous stitches and several superficial knife wounds. He confessed the deception when detectives confronted him after seeing no attack on video surveillance cameras from a nearby store and his changing stories about who attacked him.

Jailhouse news

A Texas state appeals court has upheld a 4,060-year prison sentence for a convicted child rapist, the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram reports. James Kevin Pope had been found guilty of 40 counts of sexual assaults of three teenage girls over a 20-month span. He will not be eligible for parole until 3209.

A Buddhist bank robber in Germany has had his request for his cat to have visiting rights to him in jail turned down by a court – despite his plea that it is the reincarnation of his mother, The Daily Telegraph reports. Peter Keonig, 46, is serving five years for armed robberies. “I know it is mummy,” he said. “She looks after me just the way she did. I need to see her like other prisoners see their wives and children.” The court turned down Mr. Keonig's request because he couldn't produce proof of the reincarnation. However, it did say the convict would be allowed to write to the cat.

Thought du jour

“Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.”

– Steven Soderbergh, U.S. filmmaker