Government knew about and buried research on vaccine link to autism

Here's another figure that might give a small idea of the pharmaceutical industry's global clout --the amount spent on marketing (and "administrative costs") by the 11 biggest drug companies in 2004:

$100 billion

And here's what they reported spending on research and development that year: $50 billion.



When Dr. Marcia Angell stepped down from her post as the edtior-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine last year, she published therein a scathing parting-shot takedown of the pharmaceutical industry's impact on contemporary medical practice.



My favorite paragraph is the following, in which she says of the pharmaceutical companies' marketing budgets:

The industry depicts these huge expenditures as serving an educational function. It contends that doctors and the public learn about new and useful drugs in this way. Unfortunately, many doctors do indeed rely on drug-company representatives and promotional materials to learn about new drugs, and much of the public learns from direct-to-consumer advertising. But to rely on the drug companies for unbiased evaluations of their products makes about as much sense as relying on beer companies to teach us about alcoholism.

It's not just doctors and consumers who may be lead astray by these expenditures, however, but the very state and federal regulatory agencies we rely upon to safeguard the public health.



Quoting from government transcripts obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in a 2005 article published in Rolling Stone that:

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy.



The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur.




All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children.



"I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Verstraeten wasn't alone in expressing concern. The transcripts record Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, as saying, "You can play with this all you want,... [The results] are statistically significant."



Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, said "My gut feeling? Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."



But the conversation didn't then turn to ways to ensure public safety. Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at Delaware's Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children was more worried about the possibility that, "We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits. This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country."




Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, chimed in with the assertion that, "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands."



Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should not have been done at all," adding, "the research results have to be handled," that the results of the study, "will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group."



Adds Kennedy, at this point:

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.


Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year [2004]. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to eleven-year-olds.

Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who received $873,000 in contributions from pharmaceutical companies, slipped a "rider" into a Homeland Security bill in 2002, protecting vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits brought by those who suffer vaccine injury--this despite the fact that any vaccine-injury cases ALREADY have to be brought to trial in a special federal Vaccine Court.



Eli Lilly, the company that manufactures Thimerosal, contributed $10,000 to Frist's campaign fund the next day, then bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism.



Kennedy adds:

The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist.

But wait, there's more... On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood meeting transcripts.

But what do we read about all of this in the mainstream press? Let's see, there was the study claiming that "autism is caused by drinking during pregnancy" this week, that got global play. Last year it was "autism is caused by watching television."



And there are countless articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal assuring readers that "all reputable studies prove there's no link between vaccines and autism," that "autism rates have not gone down since ALL thimerosal was removed from ALL vaccines in 2001" and a great many characterizing concerned parents of autistic children as desperate for someone or something to blame for their children's condition or as lawsuit-hungry money grubbers.



Have autism rates gone down since thimerosal was phased out of vaccines, starting in 2001? Nobody knows. Can you believe that? Seriously, there's been no effort on the part of the CDC or any other federal agency to gather national data on that front.


California is the only state that keeps records of those receiving developmental disabilities services which are categorized by specific disability. It was California's numbers, in fact, which first confirmed what parents had long suspected---and "experts" long denied--that the rate of autism among young children in this country started skyrocketing in the 1990s.

If California's rates went down, that might be an indicator that removal of thimerosal was making some kind of a difference, right?

Let's just ignore the Associated Press article published in 2005 that announced "The number of new cases of autism in California has fallen for the first time in more than 10 years in what may be a bellwether for autism rates nationwide, according to new data compiled by the state Department of Developmental Services."

Everyone else ignored it, after all. And any parent who tries to bring it up is branded a crazed Luddite, or worse.


Michelle Malkin, with whom I don't always see eye-to-eye politically except on this topic, blogged "In defense of parents with informed vaccine skepticism" on March 24th:

The New York Times published a piece today about parents choosing not to expose their children to certain vaccines. This prompted blogger condemnations of those parents as “Bobo sociopaths” and a recommendation from Glenn Reynolds that “we should make clear that parents who, with no genuine medical reason, forego vaccinating their kids are bad parents, and bad citizens.”

Look, I could run you through the flaws in the studies routinely cited in that type of article (the Danish one, the Israeli one, etc.), or the differences in the way ethyl and methyl mercury break down in the body (not many), or the still-toxic and untested preservatives that have replaced thimerosal in multi-dose vials of vaccines, or the study performed at Columbia on the aberrant behaviors of infant mice injected with thimerosal, or the similarities in symptoms between autism and mercury poisoning,



or the fact that among thousands of Amish people in Pennsylvania (virtually non-vaccinated, as a population) only a handful of kids were found with any form of autism--one who'd been adopted in China and three who'd received vaccinations--when the expected number per that population would be around 130 affected individuals, or the hypothesis that autistic kids may lack the proper metabolic apparatus to excrete heavy metals as quickly as "typically developing" kids, or statistics on how much mercury is still in a number of shots administered routinely to infants and children and pregnant women (flu, tetanus, Rhogam, etc.)--because that's my version of the genius investor's "cabbages and sailing," these days....
(please run your mouse over the text of the previous two paragraphs to click through to studies cited--for some reason the hyperlinks aren't highlighted)

But I don't want to bore you any more than necessary, and besides, as a "bad parent and bad citizen," I'll let Kennedy speak to the history of the issue instead:

During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison."



In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within twenty-four hours of birth, and two-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."...



Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."

And now I'd like to quote some numbers recently put forth by a toxicologist named Michael F. Wagnitz, in a rebuttal letter to the editors of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Wagnitz introduced his list by writing, "Parents get angry when they see the following numbers listed on the internet. These numbers have been out there for everyone to read for years."

Here are the numbers he cited:

0.5 parts per billion (ppb) mercury = Kills human neuroblastoma cells (Parran et al., Toxicol Sci 2005; 86: 132-140).

2 ppb mercury = U.S. EPA limit for drinking water http://www.epa.gov/safewater/contaminants/index.html#mcls

20 ppb mercury = Neurite membrane structure destroyed (Leong et al., Neuroreport 2001; 12: 733-37).
200 ppb mercury = level in liquid the EPA classifies as hazardous waste. http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/hazwaste/mercury/regs.htm#hazwaste



25,000 ppb mercury = Concentration of mercury in the Hepatitis B vaccine, administered at birth in the U.S., from 1990-2001.

50,000 ppb mercury = Concentration of mercury in multi-dose DTaP and Haemophilus B vaccine vials, administered 4 times each in the 1990's to children at 2, 4, 6, 12 and 18 months of age. Current "preservative" level mercury in multi-dose flu (94% of supply), meningococcal and tetanus (7 and older) vaccines. This can be confirmed by simply analyzing the multi- dose vials.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Wagnitz has a conflict of interest: he's the father of an autistic child.

Way back near the beginning of this post, remember how I said that something happened this month which made me feel it was necessary to at long last write a blog post on, as it turns out, thimerosal?



Here's the event I spoke of: the government decided in favor of the plaintiffs in one of the first Vaccine Injury Court autism test cases to go to trial.

That's right, folks, a judge representing the United States government decided that the family of an autistic girl was entitled to a monetary award, because it indeed seens evident that her condition was caused by "routine childhood vaccinations."



The anti-vaccine-hypothesis gang got started on spinning the verdict immediately--most by claiming that the girl, Hannah Poling, wasn't "typical" of autistic children, in that she had a metabolic disorder exacerbated by vaccines, and that therefore the metabolic disorder is itself responsible for her "autistic symptoms."



There are still nearly 5,000 such cases pending in the special court. I would be cynical if I thought that might have something to do with the intensity of the spin.



And yet... the online version of Time magazine had the courage to look at the facts of the case without the disimissive attitude so many of us have come to expect from the "mainstream" media, in an article titled “Case Study: Autism and Vaccines.”

The piece opened as follows:

What happened to little, red-haired Hannah Poling is hardly unique in the world of autism. She had an uneventful birth; she seemed to be developing normally-smiling, babbling, engaging in imaginative play, speaking about 20 words by 19 months. And then, right after receiving a bunch of vaccines, she fell ill and it all stopped.


Hannah, now 9, recovered from her acute illness but she lost her words, her eye contact and, in a manner of months, began exhibiting the repetitive behaviors and social withdrawal that typify autism. “Something happened after the vaccines," says her mom, Terry Poling, who is a registered nurse and an attorney. “She just deteriorated and never came back."

Hannah Poling's father, by the way, is a neurologist.

Here's one official's response to the court's ruling in the Poling case:

"Our message to parents is that immunization is life-saving," Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the CDC's director, said at a hastily convened conference call with reporters.

"There's nothing changed. . . . This is proven to save lives and is an essential component of protection for children across America and around the world."

Gerberding further commented:

“Let me be very clear that (the) government has made absolutely no statement indicating that vaccines are a cause of autism. That is a complete mischaracterisation of the findings of the case, and a complete mischaracterisation of any of the science that we have at our disposal today.”

The Time article, however, went on to say:

...there’s no denying that the court’s decision to award damages to the Poling family puts a chink--a question mark--in what had been an unqualified defense of vaccine safety with regard to autism. If Hannah Poling had an underlying condition that made her vulnerable to being harmed by vaccines, it stands to reason that other children might also have such vulnerabilities.

As blogger Kent Heckenlively wrote in response to the article "I found myself nodding along as I read, saying, 'Yes! Yes! They’re getting it!'”

"One of the final paragraphs [in the article] is a statement which shouldn’t be controversial," he continues, "but when our community has said similar things we’ve been treated like we were primitives who wanted to take public health back to the nineteenth century." (And/or "bad parents," "bad citizens," "Bobo Sociopaths.")
Here's the paragraph he's referring to:

It’s difficult to draw any clear lessons from the case of Hannah Poling, other than the dire need for more research. One plausible conclusion is that pediatricians should avoid giving small children a large number of vaccines at once, even if they are thimerosal-free. Young children have an immature immune system that’s ill-equipped to handle an overload, says Dr. Judy Van de Water, an immunologist who works with Pessah at U. C. Davis. “Some vaccines, such as those aimed at viral infections, are designed to ramp up the immune system at warp speed,” she says. “They are designed to mimic the infection. So you can imagine getting nine at one time, how sick you could be.” In addition, she says, there’s some evidence, "that children who develop autism may have immune systems that are particularly slow to mature.”

"It’s stunning to read a paragraph like the one above in a major publication like TIME magazine," says Heckenlively, "when it’s been part of the catechism of our movement for years. It’s as if we’ve been secret believers in God in some totalitarian state and the ruler just announced he’s considering a conversion."



He also cites a report titled, "Vaccine Case - An Exception or a Precedent," from the CBS Evening News broadcast that aired on March 6, 2008, in response to the CDC having stated that Hannah Poling's case is "a singular event":

While the Poling case is the first of its kind to become public, a CBS News investigation uncovered at least nine other cases as far back as 1990, where records show the court ordered the government to compensate families whose children developed autism or autistic-like symptoms... including toddlers who had been called "very smart" and "impressed" doctors with their "intelligence and curiousity" . . . until their vaccinations.

But even if all those remaining cases pending in the Vaccine Court are ruled in favor of the plaintiff families, it doesn't mean that the families of the other estimated 500,000 kids with autism in this country will be able to sue for damages, under existing legislation. The federal government has set a three-year statute of limitations, dating from the first incidence of autistic symptoms in a child.

In light of that, I'd like to close this post with one more quotation from Dr. Marcia Angell's "farewell" editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine:

The pharmaceutical industry is extraordinarily privileged. It benefits enormously from publicly funded research, government-granted patents, and large tax breaks, and it reaps lavish profits. For these reasons, and because it makes products of vital importance to the public health, it should be accountable not only to its shareholders, but also to society at large.

May that sentiment go from Angell's lips to God's ears. And possibly Julie Gerberding's.


And look, maybe it's not the vaccines or the thimerosal that made the rate of autism go from one kid in 15,000 to one kid in 116. It could be some new additive in peanut butter, or exposure to wheat bran and Sea Monkeys.

I mean, until the mid-Seventies the "experts" claimed it was caused by overly intellectual, emotionally distant "refrigerator mothers."

We know, at least, that that last hypothesis is a load of crap. But we don't know anything else.

Isn't it time we expended a little more effort trying to really figure this thing out, and a little less of same calling the parents who are doing their best to make sense of and cope with the horrors of this disorder idiots?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm pretty fucking sick of being told how stupid I am.

I won't hold my breath waiting for that to change any time soon.

Meanwhile: smoke 'em if you got 'em.



Oh, yeah... conflict of interest: I'm the mother of a child who has autism

Chismillionaire urges everyone to see Zombie Strippers

Rated R Starring Jenna Jameson( I know can you believe it!) and Robert Englund (the original Freddie Kruger for those who forgot)

http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/zombiestrippers/index.html

trailer at www.drfoster.f2s.com

Royal Caribean: Liberty of the Seas

If you can get over your fear of the Titanic or the Poseidon Adventure...These Cruise Ships look like a lot of fun!!

Chismillionaire wants to start hailing air taxis

Tired of security nonsense and no cell phones. Here's the solution.

It may sound like something out of The Jetsons, but the era of affordable personal air travel appears to have arrived.

At least that’s the assertion of writer James Fallows, who reports in this month’s Atlantic Monthly that a company called dayjet is looking to change the way people look at air travel. How? By using a fleet of tiny Eclipse 500 Jets to inexpensively shuttle passengers back and forth to wherever it is they need to go, whenever it is that they need to get there. Anyone who has spent two hours sitting on a runway while sandwiched into the middle seat of a 25-year old MD-80 can see the appeal of this idea.

People are calling dayjet an air taxi service, and that’s essentially what it is. Let’s say I need to go from Melbourne, Florida to Mobile, Alabama. I log into the dayjet website to book my trip, entering the time that I need to get to Mobile, and when I’m available to leave. The site calculates the cost of my trip, giving me a discount if I have some flexibility in travel times.

I show up at my local rinky-dink airstrip (a big part of dayjet’s sell is that they use congestion free community airports) and a few minutes later I’m strapped into my seat and we're cleared for takeoff. There might be two other passengers on my flight, but no more than that. No security screening (I would have been fully vetted during the "membership process"), no waiting for my zone to be called. And when I’m ready to head home, my return flight is waiting for me.

dayjet doesn't always beat the commercial airlines on cost (I priced out a dayjet flight between Atlanta and Charlotte and it came to just over $1,200. The same flight on Delta: $512). But the company is betting that business travelers would rather pay the extra cash than spend three hours at the Cinnabon in some big airport because their connecting flight is late.

It’s the advent of the very light jet (VLJ) that makes an operation like dayjet feasible. The Eclipse 500 weighs 3,500 lbs (5,520 fully loaded), and travels at a maximum cruising speed of 425 mph. And with a list price of $1.5 million, it's far less expensive than the typical private jet.

But what about the likely environmental impact when scores of VLJs take to the skies? After all, a plane carrying three passengers uses more fuel than one carrying 150 (unless you’re American Airlines, and you like to fly your widebody jets nearly empty). The airline’s Bruce Holmes says that dayjet's short-haul routes target customers who would otherwise be driving, and that the the Eclipse jets match or beat automobiles in fuel consumption and carbon output per passenger mile. But Eclipse Aviation says its 500 jet gets 10 miles per gallon. That's way better than any other passenger plane out there, but not necessarily something to be bragging about when looking at the larger environmental picture.

In any case, dayjet has big plans: by the end of the year it wants to be flying to 100 cities in six states.

Wired Wiki- How to store your comics

Store Your Comics Properly

From Wired How-To Wiki

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Photo by Troy Brownfield/Wired

All right, admit it: you're smart enough to know that your comic collection probably won't make you a millionaire. On the other hand, you enjoy the form and you want to keep your books as nice as possible. What can you do to keep your four-color wonders safe and secure?

Here's our guide. Got additional advice? Log in and add it.

Contents [hide] 1 Bags and Boards 2 Common Sense Handling 3 Temperate Zones 4 Filing 5 Organization

Bags and Boards

Photo by Troy Brownfield/Wired

Bagging and boarding is essential for long-term maintenance. A few companies produce items for this purpose; Kevin Brydon of the Comic Carnival chain in Indianapolis recommends the BCW family of products. "We especially like the boards, which are guaranteed to be acid-free," he said.

Bags and boards serve a few general purposes. The bags keep your books free of dust and offer a general layer of environmental protection. A bagged book might not completely survive a coffee spill or burst pipe, but you've given it a chance. A book bagged with a board will "store straight", keeping it sharp and preventing excess wear on the binding.

Additionally a bag will slow the chemical reactions that occur due to moisture and oxygen. If you cut down the flow of oxygen or water to acidic paper then the chemical degradation will consequently by decreased. This is especially important since so many comic books were printed using acidic/wood pulp paper.

Common Sense Handling

I'm not going to go so far as to suggest the use of white gloves when handling your comics. Still, washing and thoroughly drying your hands first to prevent oily smears remains a must. Careful page-turning rather than whipping right through an issue also goes a long way toward keeping the book in good shape.

There's an extra element here. Older books tend to have been made on cheaper grades of paper. Those books tend to be more brittle and require greater care. Of course, older books are also typically worth more. If you have limited storage or care space, you might want to take care of older (or more valuable) books first. Simple date-checking or research in something like the annual Overstreet Price Guide might help you determine where to direct your limited resources.

Temperate Zones

Photo by Troy Brownfield/Wired

Conventional wisdom dictates that you store your comics in a cool, dry place. Hot and steamy might be good for the Jacuzzi, but not Jack Kirby. Slightly below room temperature (72* F) is typically a good guideline. It's also not a bad idea for your storage space to use soft light when possible.

Humidity can be a danger. That's why some prefer to tape their bags shut in the hopes of closing out excess moisture. Climate-controlled storage would be ideal, but a well-ventilated, cool, dry closet area would still work.

Filing

Photo by Troy Brownfield/Wired

A bagged and boarded book can be stored standing or stacked. Most fans prefer some filing method, as it allows the titles to be browsed easily. The traditional "long box" or a legal filing cabinet work well, but we like the new DrawerBoxes, which bring a lot of design sense to the old cardboard box. The 9" x 26" long version can hold 235 bagged and boarded comics; its encased design actually turns a cardboard long-box into a stackable filing cabinet.

Organization

Actually, that's up to you. Plastic dividers are also available, ready to be labeled alphabetically, by company, or broken down into team affiliation by universe. Not that we know anyone who does that.

Longer Lasting Lithium Ion Batteries

Powerful particles: New lithium-ion battery electrode materials, shown here under an electron microscope, can store more energy, and so do more safely, than conventional lithium-ion batteries in laptops and cell phones. Credit: Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory

Conventional lithium-ion batteries in laptops and cell phones quickly lose their ability to store energy and can catch fire if they're overcharged or damaged. Now researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL, have developed composite battery materials that can make such batteries both safer and longer lived, while increasing their capacity to store energy by 30 percent.

Last month, the researchers took a significant step toward commercializing the technology by licensing it to a major materials supply company, Toda Kogyo, based in Japan. The company has the capacity to make the materials for about 30 million laptop batteries a year, says Gary Henriksen, who manages electrochemical storage research at Argonne.

The new materials are one example of a new generation of lithium-ion electrode chemistries that address the shortcomings of conventional lithium-ion batteries. Each has its own trade-offs. For example, another material called lithium iron phosphate has better safety and durability than Argonne's materials, but it stores somewhat less energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries. Argonne's materials improve on the safety and reliability of today's laptop batteries, while also storing more energy.

The Argonne researchers have improved the performance of the positive electrodes by increasing the chemical and structural stability of the materials already used in laptop batteries. In conventional lithium-ion batteries, which have cobalt oxide electrodes, a small amount of overheating, caused by overcharging the material or by electrical shorts inside a battery, can lead to rapidly increasing temperatures inside the cell and, in some cases, combustion. That's because, as the material overheats, the cobalt oxide readily gives up oxygen, which reacts with the solvent in the battery's electrolyte and generates more heat, feeding the reactions. The Argonne researchers addressed this problem by replacing some of the cobalt oxide with manganese oxide, which is chemically more stable.

The researchers' next step was to replace some of the active metal oxide materials in the electrode with a related but electrochemically inactive material, forming a composite. This material does not store energy, because it does not release and take up lithium ions as the battery is charged and discharged. (Lithium-ion batteries create electrical current as lithium ions shuttle between positive and negative electrodes.) The inactive material makes the composite more stable than conventional electrode materials, which means it can last longer. One version of the material can last for 1,500 charges and discharges without losing much capacity, he says. That's more than double the life of conventional laptop batteries.

Inside Intel's Atom processor

Array of Atoms: This image shows the processor wafer on which Atom chips are manufactured. Each chip on the wafer contains 47 million transistors. Credit: Intel

The mobile Internet has been the next big thing for a decade. And while companies such as Nokia and Apple have made great strides with the N-series devices and the iPhone, these gadgets still don't perform as well as computers. For instance, popular sites such as MySpace and YouTube can take tens of seconds to completely load on these devices, and when they do, they sometimes don't work correctly or look right.

The problem with these gadgets, says Vijay Krishnan, a director in Intel's ultramobile group, is their microprocessor. His company's solution is a brand new lineup of small, low-power chips that play well with websites and are also designed to run media, including high-definition content. The chip line, called Atom, which was first announced in March, was displayed last week at Intel's Developer Forum in Shanghai. Company executives showed off slick-looking gadgets, called mobile internet devices (MIDs), that are expected to hit the market by the middle of the year.

"The iPhone is a great example of delivering the Internet in your pocket," says Krishnan. Apple's phone uses a processor from ARM, the company that supplies many of the chips that run on cell phones worldwide. But, he says, there are a few areas that could be improved. For instance, an Atom chip is four to six times faster than ARM chips, which translates into faster downloads and smoother video-watching experiences. In addition, he says, the chip is compatible with many Web programming languages and applications--such as JavaScript and Flash--which makes Atom more compatible with all parts of the Internet. Using a device with an Atom chip, he says, gives access to "all of the Internet, without generating errors."

To build the new chips, Krishnan says, Intel focused on power consumption. The dual-core chips in today's laptops use up to 35 watts. The Atom line, which will offer roughly the same performance as a typical chip in a four-year-old laptop, uses three watts or less. Krishnan explains that one way this is achieved is by creating six separate power states for the chip. Depending on how the device is being used, the voltage the processor uses and clock speed of its components can be varied, while certain components , such as memory cache, can be turned off when not in use. "When we use all of these power states," he says, "we're able to keep the average power on chips to 160 to 220 milliwatts." These low power requirements can noticeably extend battery life, he says.

Directory of high performance driving schools

More Than 60 Ways To Improve Your Driving

By Dan Frio, Contributor Email

Date posted: 04-06-2008

So you bit the bullet and signed up for the new Vette. Now you want to uncork it at a local track day. Or maybe you saved your shekels for the Mustang V8 and it's time to get serious about those embarrassing 60-foot times. Maybe you just want to feel a stock car underfoot at 160 mph.

Whatever your motoring pleasure, this high-performance driving school buyer's guide has what you're looking for. We've found more than 60 high-performance driving schools in 180 locations — mostly in North America, some overseas including Australia, Germany and Mexico — to satisfy your adrenal glands.

From stock cars or open-wheelers to high-performance coupes, rally or sprint cars, we found places where pros will teach you to heel-toe downshift, keep a 700-horsepower motor on boil around a half-mile dirt track and drag race like John Force. Have you ever wanted to drive a Formula 1 car? AGS Formule1 in France is your place. Off-roading? You want the Land Rover Experience.

But like most drugs, adrenaline costs. Look around this list (alphabetical by state) and you'll find thrills starting at around $300, on up to $5,000 and $10,000 fixes. Generally if you can spend $500-$2,000, you'll be a happy speed junkie for a good, solid day, maybe two or three.

Stop waiting! Drop the pedal!

Chismillionaire's Monday deal of the week

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BMW’s VERY CREATIVE AND AMAZING BILLBOARD THAT IS 65,000 SQ FT!

Posted by CARversation Published in Bmw

BMW has created a billboard that will go down in history. In Moscow, BMW put up real cars over a 65,000 sq ft. billboard promoting its ///M Series. I love marketing and I just find this very clever, I mean it sure worked(I'm writing about it). Check out the pictures below, this is way better then the Audi Super bowl ad, this is thinking outside the box.[Source BMW Blog]

Click Here to see this amazing ADVERT

Purdue's 156-Step Burger Maker Wins Rube Goldberg Contest

Pocketburgers.com might need to hire this guy... I think he is on to something

We've brought you Rube Goldberg-style clocks and toys, but none of them are a match for the 156-step device that's just won the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. This year's challenge was to assemble a burger with vegetables, condiments and two bun halves. The meat was pre-cooked... a sensible idea to avoid fires and explosions: you'll understand when you look at the great pics of the machines that MAKE took. Beneath the gallery you'll find a demo video of some of them in action. Sadly we don't have one of the complete 156-step run yet, so you'll just have to imagine its fantasticness.

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The whole idea is to create a machine that combines creative thinking with complexity in design, and, most importantly, inefficiency— much in the vein of Goldberg's cartoons.

The winning team, the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers, have had plenty of practice at this— they've won two of the previous three contests. Their machine won them a regional prize earlier in the year, and for the Nationals they added another 55 steps. With somewhere around 5,000 man-hours of work in it, the victory seems well deserved, particularly when the rules stipulate that the task must be achieved in more than 20 steps.

Mix Tapes Go Online

Perhaps its because I'm a father now, but I find myself at times becoming nostalgic for the trappings of my youth - things of days gone by that I have come to realize my son will never experience. Like this weekend when I was watching my gorgeous new Sony Bravia LCD TV in all of its 1080 glory and I looked at my kid and realized "holy crap, he's going to think this is how TV ALWAYS looked!" (and lets not even get started on the fact that 200+ channels will, to him, be the norm)

Another, more despairing, revelation came a few weeks back when I had my 14 year old nephew over for a night. We went to see Cloverfield (great flick) but on the way I thought it'd be fun to regress to my youth and stop by the only arcade I know of in the Framingham area (Fun n Games). How sad. It was understocked with crap games, mostly second and third tier fighting games, and overall it just sucked. It was then that it really hit home that kids just don't head out to the arcade to play their video games anymore...

Along those lines, another of my favorite hobbies as a kid - making mix tapes - has made the jump into the 21st century. Sure, we've been able to mix and burn CD's and copy mp3's for each other for quite some time - but even that smacked of the late 20th century. Enter two players that look to put mixtapes on line, both offering slightly different methods and neither seeming, to me at least, to be completely legal - but that's never really been an issue for me, so lets take a look at both.

Muxtape: This was the first I discovered. Sign up for a free account and you can start uploading mp3's from your computer. You get to upload 12 and though it says you are limited to 10mb in size per song, in my limited testing that didn't seem to apply. Afterwards you are presented with a unique URL that you can then send out to friends. They can't download the songs, only stream them, and I'm thinking this is how they hope to stay "legal." There are also some written limitations on uploading multiple songs from the same artist or album and you have to agree not to upload any songs that you are "not allowed to" (whatever that means), but again, in limited testing, I blatantly ignored all of their rules. The interface is slick and simple and the main benefit here is you have access to your entire library - it would appear to me to be a great way to introduce people to music you like.

Mixwit: I haven't tried this one yet, but the features look to be about the same of Muxtape with the major exception of how you add music. Rather than uploading your own mp3's, Mixwit utilizes specific Google search strings, through web interfaces such as Skreemr and Seeqpod, to search open directories around the web for songs matching your search parameters. Pretty slick, though I'm guessing if your taste tends to the obscure or lesser known you won't have much luck.

So there you go. Mixtapes for the new millennium. Go, mix, and share. Got something good? I want to hear it, unless its another Beatles clone (Bernardo).

Mother Nature… Bringing Sexy Back

Ever since Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, we knew plants could get it on.

Many years later, Mother Nature is showing a definite urge to bring her sexy back.

Inevitably some people will always tend to take their love for Mother Nature’s sexy offspring too far.

Various people throughout time have had sexual fetishes that include the use of fruit and vegetables. Some choose to avoid having real relationships with people that involve eventual let down and pain, while others are just really into mother nature.

Loving nature can have some dangers though and some countries have even decided to put warning labels on certain fruits and vegetables to limit the number of hospital visits they are receiving.

Among the list of unsavory produce on the Government’s hit list are courgettes, cucumbers, bananas, carrots and squashes, which will have to carry a Goverment Health warning that: ‘improper use is liable to corrupt and deprave, and may lead to surgical intervention’.

The banana and cucumber are so popular and enjoyed, that they even made those into vibrators.

Can’t decide between a fruit or a vegetable?

(link)

Hibernation Method Tested for Space Travel

Irene Klotz, Discovery News

April 4, 2008 -- No matter how much you like your crewmates, a three-year mission to Mars would test the even the best of relationships.

And that's not even the primary reason why future long-duration space travelers may spend part of the journey in suspended animation.

There's the tremendous expense of carrying food, oxygen and carbon dioxide scrubbers to keep astronauts alive, not to mention the hassle of processing their urine and feces.

"Wouldn't it be neat if you could just put them out?" said Warren Zapol, the head of anesthesiology at Harvard University's Massachusetts General Hospital.

One option would be to cool the crew cabin into a big chill. But body temperatures below 30 Celsius (86 degrees F) can disturb the heart's rhythm. Another possibility would be to have the astronauts breathe swamp gas.

Zapol and colleagues report in this month's Anesthesiology journal about how hydrogen sulfide -- the same stuff produced by rotten eggs and swamp gas -- slows mouse metabolism without cutting blood flow to the brain.

"The mice aren't asleep," Zapol told Discovery News. "If you pinch their tails, they respond.

"I don't know what it's like," he added, "probably some slow-motion world."

There are many questions and years of research before healthy people like astronauts would be put into hibernated states, but the procedure could find an earlier application in cases of traumatic injury when life itself is at risk.

"Sixty percent of people in war are dead right there on the field," Zapol said. "They are instantly hurt, and because there is no blood and no fluids in the field, by the time they get to a hospital they are cold and dead and there is nothing to fix.

"During this early period after trauma, if we could freeze you down or shut you down, we could restart you after we fix the aorta, or whatever has been damaged," Zapol said.

Emergency medical workers have tried cooling victims, but the amount of cold water needed to reach effective temperatures makes the technique impractical, particularly in battlefield situations.

"Corpsmen aren't walking around with 150 pounds of cold water," Zapol said. "But what if you could just fog them with hydrogen sulfide?"

During Zapol's experiment, metabolic measurements of the mice, such as their consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide, dropped as early as 10 minutes after they began inhaling hydrogen sulfide.

They remained low as long as the gas was administered. The mice returned to normal within 30 minutes after normal air started to flow.

The animals' heart rate dropped nearly 50 percent while they were breathing the gas, with no significant change in blood pressure or the strength of the heart beat. Respiration rates decreased, but there were no changes in blood oxygen levels, suggesting that vital organs were not at risk of oxygen starvation, the researchers report.

Zapol plans additional experiments on larger mammals, probably sheep.

"Before you use it on astronauts, you want to make sure it's very, very safe," he said.

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Related Links:

Irene Klotz's blog: Space Diary

Warren Zapol

NASA Vision for Space Exploration

How Stuff Works: Hibernation

Charlton Heston Passes away at the age of 84

Statement by the Family of Charlton Heston
Saturday April 5, 11:24 pm ET

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., April 5, 2008 /PRNewswire/ -- Legendary actor, civil rights leader and political activist Charlton Heston passed away today, at the age of 84. He died at his home with Lydia, his wife of 64 years, at his side. Mr. Heston was loved by his two children, Fraser Clarke Heston and Holly Heston Rochell, and his three grandchildren, Jack Alexander Heston, Ridley Rochell and Charlie Rochell.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080405/CLSA013 )

Source: Mercury Group
· Charlton Heston. · Click Here to Download Image

The Heston family issued the following statement:

"To his loving friends, colleagues and fans, we appreciate your heartfelt prayers and support. Charlton Heston was seen by the world as larger than life. He was known for his chiseled jaw, broad shoulders and resonating voice, and, of course, for the roles he played. Indeed, he committed himself to every role with passion, and pursued every cause with unmatched enthusiasm and integrity.

We knew him as an adoring husband, a kind and devoted father, and a gentle grandfather, with an infectious sense of humor. He served these far greater roles with tremendous faith, courage and dignity. He loved deeply, and he was deeply loved.

No one could ask for a fuller life than his. No man could have given more to his family, to his profession, and to his country. In his own words, "I have lived such a wonderful life! I've lived enough for two people."

A private memorial service will be held. The family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Motion Picture and Television Fund:

    MPTF
  22212 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 300
  Woodland Hills, CA  91364

a great collection of photos of Charlton are here

I’ve found God, says man who cracked the genome

From The Sunday Times

June 11, 2006

Steven Swinford

THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real.

Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.

His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,” said Collins, 56.

“I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.”

For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God”.

“When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it,” he said. “But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

Collins joins a line of scientists whose research deepened their belief in God. Isaac Newton, whose discovery of the laws of gravity reshaped our understanding of the universe, said: “This most beautiful system could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Although Einstein revolutionised our thinking about time, gravity and the conversion of matter to energy, he believed the universe had a creator. “I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details,” he said. However Galileo was famously questioned by the inquisition and put on trial in 1633 for the “heresy” of claiming that the earth moved around the sun.

Among Collins’s most controversial beliefs is that of “theistic evolution”, which claims natural selection is the tool that God chose to create man. In his version of the theory, he argues that man will not evolve further.

“I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way,” he says.

“Scientifically, the forces of evolution by natural selection have been profoundly affected for humankind by the changes in culture and environment and the expansion of the human species to 6 billion members. So what you see is pretty much what you get.”

Collins was an atheist until the age of 27, when as a young doctor he was impressed by the strength that faith gave to some of his most critical patients.

“They had terrible diseases from which they were probably not going to escape, and yet instead of railing at God they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of great comfort and reassurance,” he said. “That was interesting, puzzling and unsettling.”

He decided to visit a Methodist minister and was given a copy of C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which argues that God is a rational possibility. The book transformed his life. “It was an argument I was not prepared to hear,” he said. “I was very happy with the idea that God didn’t exist, and had no interest in me. And yet at the same time, I could not turn away.”

His epiphany came when he went hiking through the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. He said: “It was a beautiful afternoon and suddenly the remarkable beauty of creation around me was so overwhelming, I felt, ‘I cannot resist this another moment’.”

Collins believes that science cannot be used to refute the existence of God because it is confined to the “natural” world. In this light he believes miracles are a real possibility. “If one is willing to accept the existence of God or some supernatural force outside nature then it is not a logical problem to admit that, occasionally, a supernatural force might stage an invasion,” he says.

Marksman 100% Accurate

Tank Chair - Five is Alive for the Handicapped

Tank Chair is an off-road wheelchair that can go almost anywhere. Tank Chair can go through streams, mud, snow, sand, and gravel, allowing you to get back into nature.

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