Some airplane toilets to get even smaller -

Some airplane toilets to get even smaller - 


The most uncomfortable seat on the plane is about to become even more awkward. Some airline bathrooms will soon shrink from their already miniature 3ft by 3ft area.
According to the Daily Mail, Delta Airlines is the first carrier to try out the new smaller lavatories. The mini restrooms will be fitted to Delta’s 737-900 aircraft, allowing for four extra seats in economy class.
The move to tinier airborne toilets comes at a time when the airline industry is working to cut costs and maximize revenue. Shrinking the square footage of their sky-high latrines will allow air carriers to squeeze in more seats and eke out a bit more profit.
“On airplanes, it is all about how you use the real estate,” Sebastien Weber, chief executive of Zodiac Aerospace – a Los Angeles-based firm that builds aircraft toilets – told the Wall Street Journal.
The airline said that the lavatory won't be noticeably smaller on the inside and will be just slightly smaller than the standard 3 ft x 3 ft coach class lavatory, according to the Journal. 
While aircraft restrooms are not technically required by the Federal Aviation Administration, since the 1930’s commercial airlines have come to a common understanding that passengers will need to relieve themselves during flight.
Hopefully the carriers don't ignore the past eight decades of in-flight toilet innovation. It's clear that as airlines begin to tighten up on budgets, they aren’t hesitating to shrink the most important seat on the plane.


Read more: - 

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2013/04/03/airplane-toilets-to-get-even-smaller/?intcmp=features

Report: Third of US West Coast Children Hit With Thyroid Problems Following Fukushima -

Report: Third of US West Coast Children Hit With Thyroid Problems Following Fukushima - 


Still think that the Fukushima nuclear meltdown of 2011 never affected the United States public? Young children born in the United States West Coast, right in the line of fire for radioactive isotopes, have been found to be 28% more likely to develop congenital hypothyroidism than infants born the year before the incident.
The study followed children born in California, Alaska, Washingto, Hawaii, and Oregon between 1 and 16 weeks after the horrific meltdown at Fukushima back in March 2011. Published in the Open Journal of Pediatrics by researchers affiliated with the Radiation and Public Health Project, the information further lends credence to previous documentation regarding the way in which radioactive fallout ended up on US soil.
The researchers explained how radioactive fallout affected the entirety of the US in varying degrees:
“Fukushima fallout appeared to affect all areas of the U.S., and was especially large in some, mostly in the western part of the nation,” they wrote.
Fukushima’s Effects on The US
The findings are likely no surprise to those who have been following the effects of Fukushima closely, as back in 2011 numerous reports surfaced regarding the ways in which Fukushima’s radioactive waste had made its way to the US geography in a big way. Despite Japanese officials downplaying the incident and its real devastating health consequences, even so much as to ignore the fact that Fukushima radiation was detected in Tokyo far beyond the evacuation zone, US scientists were quick to reveal their own measurements to the scientific community.
Read: How to Boost Your Thyroid Naturally
Even as far away as Boston, highly radioactive objects known as ‘hot particles’ were detected by 2 out of 3 monitoring stations.
Scientists from UC Berkley detailed even more concerning reports following the disaster, finding the highest cesium content in topsoil for each California location was consistent. The recordings were posted online along with the date of finding:
Sacramento, CA Topsoil on Aug. 16, 2011: Total Cesium @ 2.737 Bq/kg
Oakland, CA Topsoil on Sept. 8, 2011: Total Cesium @ 2.55 Bq/kg
Alameda, CA Topsoil on Apr. 6, 2011: Total Cesium @ 2.52 Bq/kg
San Diego, CA Topsoil on June 29, 2011: Total Cesium @ 2.51 Bq/kg
Sonoma, CA Topsoil on Apr. 27, 2011: Total Cesium @ 2.252 Bq/kg
But the levels were nothing compared to what Marco Kaltofen, PE, of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) recorded from his research. In his report presentation, entitled  ‘Radiation Exposure to the Population in Japan After the Earthquake’, Kaltofen found samples on US soil that were 108 times greater than what UC Berkley researchers were reporting.

Read more - 
http://naturalsociety.com/third-us-west-coast-children-thyroid-problems-fukushima/

Bitcoins Go Parabolic - in the last 48 hours has surged by 50% from $94 to $141 -

Bitcoins Go Parabolic - in the last 48 hours has surged by 50% from $94 to $141 - 


In the last 48 hours, the price of the virtual currency has surged by 50% from $94 to $141 as the rate of expansion goes more than parabolic. This leaves us with the question, which line item on the Fed's Balance Sheet is 'Virtual Currency Transactions'... what better way to destroy an up and coming currency competitor than to blow a bubble in it and explode it?

That is a 14x rise since the start of the year...

Read more - 
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-03/bitcoins-go-parabolic

Being overweight may protect against serious injury in traffic accidents -

Being overweight may protect against serious injury in traffic accidents - 


Pedestrians are struck most often by cars while in the crosswalk, with the signal on their side.

Taxicabs pose a disproportionate threat to cyclists, who often compete for the same sliver of curbside roadway.

And for those who do get hit, an unexpected factor may protect against serious injury: being overweight.

These are among the findings of a medical study of injured pedestrians and cyclists in New York,  conducted by a team of trauma surgeons, emergency physicians and researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center.

From December 2008 to June 2011, the group studied more than 1,400 pedestrians and cyclists treated at Bellevue Hospital Center after collisions. Most occurred in Manhattan and western Brooklyn, stretching along the busiest corridors of a city where street safety and traffic engineering have been trumpeted as defining legacies of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s tenure.

Perhaps the report”s most surprising finding was that excessive weight may prove a boon for injured pedestrians.

Victims with an above-normal body mass index were found to have less severe injuries than their counterparts. “It is not implausible that a greater proportion of torso and extremity fat may protect against injury,” the report said.

Dr. Spiros G. Frangos, the study’s senior author, noted that overweight and obese patients fared worse once admitted to a hospital, but that perhaps “that extra layer offers some protection at the time of the injury.”

The study could help inform transportation planning in the city, as administration officials – with whom the authors corresponded throughout their research – evaluate how best to engineer the streets to reduce the types of injuries suffered in these cases.

Many of the results, published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, reinforce common intuitions about the city’s traffic flow. Others seem to defy conventional wisdom. But all combine to sketch a portrait of a New York where personal habits and choices – like listening to music, wearing a bicycle helmet or hailing a cab – can change a life.

“Undoubtedly, behaviours can be improved across the three major parties: pedestrians, cyclists and drivers,” Frangos said in an interview. “The bottom line is: What else can we do as we go down this path of pushing a bicycling agenda, which should be good for the city?”

While some studies, including a 2010 city Transportation Department report on pedestrian safety, have focused on the frequency, location and timing of accidents, the Bellevue report has focused on the patients themselves. Data was obtained through victim self-reporting shortly after a collision, combined with medical records and accounts from witnesses and first responders.

In some cases, it seemed, the awareness level of the pedestrian or cyclist may have been compromised. Among patients 18 and older, 15 percent of pedestrians and 11 percent of cyclists were found to have consumed alcohol before the collision – a figure that stood out to transportation officials whose focus is often reckless driving.

“Obviously it’s better for people to be walking than driving,” Matthew Roe, a senior planning and research manager for the Transportation Department’s Division of Traffic and Planning, said of the city’s intoxicated travelers. “But it’s something probably worth thinking about in the future.”

About 8 percent of both pedestrians and cyclists said they were injured while using an electronic device, including a cellphone or music player. For victims ages 7-17, the numbers climbed to more than 10 percent of pedestrians and nearly 30 percent of cyclists.

In a finding unlikely to surprise the city’s cyclists, about 40 percent of injured riders were hit by taxis, compared with 25 percent of the pedestrians. More than 80 percent of cyclists rode with traffic flow, but fewer than a third wore helmets.

Read more - 

http://www.wheels.ca/news/extra-weight-an-unexpected-benefit-in-traffic-accidents/

The Big Banks Are Recklessly Gambling With Our Money, And It Will Cause The Global Financial System To Collapse -

The Big Banks Are Recklessly Gambling With Our Money, And It Will Cause The Global Financial System To Collapse - 

Have you ever wondered how the big banks make such enormous mountains of money?  Well, the truth is that much of it is made by gambling recklessly.  If they win on their bets, they become fabulously wealthy.  If they lose on their bets, they know that the government will come in and arrange for the banks to be bailed out because they are “too big to fail”.  Either they will be bailed out by the government using our tax dollars, or as we just witnessed in Cyprus, they will be allowed to “recapitalize” themselves by stealing money directly from our bank accounts.  So if they win, they win big.  If they lose, someone else will come in and clean up the mess.  This creates a tremendous incentive for the bankers to “go for it”, because there is simply not enough pain in this equation for those that are taking the risks.  If the big Wall Street banks had been allowed to collapse back in 2008, that would have caused a massive change of behavior on Wall Street.  But instead, the big banks are still recklessly gambling with our money as if the last financial crisis never even happened.  In the end, the reckless behavior of these big banks is going to cause the entire global financial system to collapse.

Have you noticed how most news reports about Cyprus don’t even get into the reasons why the big banks in Cyprus collapsed?

Well, the truth is that they collapsed because they were making incredibly reckless bets with the money that had been entrusted to them.  In a recent article, Ron Paul explained how the situation played out once the bets started to go bad…

The dramatic recent events in Cyprus have highlighted the fundamental weakness in the European banking system and the extreme fragility of fractional reserve banking. Cypriot banks invested heavily in Greek sovereign debt, and last summer’s Greek debt restructuring resulted in losses equivalent to more than 25 percent of Cyprus’ GDP. These banks then took their bad investments to the government, demanding a bailout from an already beleaguered Cypriot treasury. The government of Cyprus then turned to the European Union (EU) for a bailout.

If those bets had turned out to be profitable, the bankers would have kept all of the profits.  But those bets turned out to be big losers, and private bank accounts in Cyprus are now being raided to pay the bill.  Unfortunately, as Ron Paul noted, what just happened in Cyprus is already being touted as a “template” for future bank bailouts all over the globe…

The elites in the EU and IMF failed to learn their lesson from the popular backlash to these tax proposals, and have openly talked about using Cyprus as a template for future bank bailouts. This raises the prospect of raids on bank accounts, pension funds, and any investments the government can get its hands on. In other words, no one’s money is safe in any financial institution in Europe. Bank runs are now a certainty in future crises, as the people realize that they do not really own the money in their accounts. How long before bureaucrat and banker try that here?

Unfortunately, all of this is the predictable result of a fiat paper money system combined with fractional reserve banking. When governments and banks collude to monopolize the monetary system so that they can create money out of thin air, the result is a business cycle that wreaks havoc on the economy. Pyramiding more and more loans on top of a tiny base of money will create an economic house of cards just waiting to collapse. The situation in Cyprus should be both a lesson and a warning to the United States.

This is an example of what can happen when the dominoes start to fall.  The banks of Cyprus failed because Greek debt went bad.  And the Greeks were using derivatives to try to hide the true scope of their debt problems.  The following is what Jim Sinclair recently told King World News…

When people say that the Cypriot banks lost because of being in Greek debt, what was one of the Greeks’ greatest sins? They used over-the-counter derivatives in order to hide the real condition of their balance sheet.

Depositor money, brokerage money, and clearing house money have been tangled up in the mountain of derivatives as the banks have used this cash to speculate in an attempt to make huge bonuses for bank executives.

As I have written about so many times, the global quadrillion dollarderivatives bubble is one of the greatest threats that the global financial system is facing.  As Sinclair explained to King World News, when this derivatives bubble bursts and the losses start soaring, the big banks are going to want to raid private bank accounts just like the banks in Cyprus were able to…

What do you think happens when Buffett reports that he made $10 billion in derivatives? Somebody else lost $10 billion and it was most likely one financial institution. There is no question that what we are seeing right now is not isolated to Cyprus. It has happened everywhere, but is has been camouflaged by making the depositors and the banks whole. What Cyprus will reveal is that losses do not stop with the bank’s capital. Losses roar right through bank capital and take depositors’ money.

This could have all been avoided if we had allowed the big Wall Street banks to collapse back in 2008.  Reckless behavior would have been greatly punished and banks would have chosen to do business differently in the future.

David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, says that because we bailed out the big banks it was a signal to them that they could go back and freely engage in the same kind of reckless behavior that they were involved in previously…

Essentially there was a cleansing run on the wholesale funding market in the canyons of Wall Street going on. It would have worked its will, just like JP Morgan allowed it to happen in 1907 when we did not have the Fed getting in the way. Because they stopped it in its tracks after the AIG bailout and then all the alphabet soup of different lines that the Fed threw out, and then the enactment of TARP, the last two investment banks standing were rescued, Goldman and Morgan [Stanley], and they should not have been. As a result of being rescued and having the cleansing liquidation of rotten balance sheets stopped, within a few weeks and certainly months they were back to the same old games, such that Goldman Sachs got $10 billion dollars for the fiscal year that started three months later after that check went out, which was October 2008. For the fiscal 2009 year, Goldman Sachs generated what I call a $29 billion surplus – $13 billion of net income after tax, and on top of that$16 billion of salaries and bonuses, 95% of it which was bonuses.

Therefore, the idea that they were on death’s door does not stack up. Even if they had been, it would not make any difference to the health of the financial system. These firms are supposed to come and go, and if people make really bad bets, if they have a trillion dollar balance sheet with six, seven, eight hundred billion dollars worth of hot-money short-term funding, then they ought to take their just reward, because it would create lessons, it would create discipline. So all the new firms that would have been formed out of the remnants of Goldman Sachs where everybody lost their stock values – which for most of these partners is tens of millions, hundreds of millions – when they formed a new firm, I doubt whether they would have gone back to the old game. What happened was the Fed stopped everything in its tracks, kept Goldman Sachs intact, the reckless Goldman Sachs and the reckless Morgan Stanley, everyone quickly recovered their stock value and the game continues. This is one of the evils that comes from this kind of deep intervention in the capital and money markets.

The lessons that we were supposed to learn from the crisis of 2008 have not been learned.

Instead, the lure of huge returns and big bonuses has caused a return to the exact same behavior that caused the crisis of 2008 in the first place.  The following is one example of this phenomenon from a recent articleby Wolf Richter…

The craziness on Wall Street, the reckless for-the-moment-only behavior that led to the Financial Crisis, is back.

This time it’s Citigroup that is once again concocting “synthetic” securities, like those that had wreaked havoc five years ago. And once again, it’s using them to shuffle off risks through the filters of Wall Street to people who might never know.

What bubbled to the surface is that Citigroup is selling synthetic securities that yield 13% to 15% annually—synthetic because they’re based on credit derivatives. Apparently, Citi has a bunch of shipping loans on its books, and it’s trying to protect itself against default. In return for succulent interest payments, investors will take on some of the risks of these loans.

Yes, the Dow hit another new all-time high today.  But the derivatives bubble that hangs over the global economy like a sword of Damocles could burst at literally any moment.  When it does, the damage is going to be incalculable.

In a previous article entitled “Why Is The World Economy Doomed? The Global Financial Pyramid Scheme By The Numbers“, I noted a couple of statistics that show why derivatives are such an enormous problem…

-$212,525,587,000,000 – According to the U.S. government, this is the notional value of the derivatives that are being held by the top 25 banks in the United States.  But those banks only have total assets of about 8.9 trillion dollars combined.  In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 24 to 1.

-$600,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 – The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives generally fall within this range.  At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives to global GDP is more than 21 to 1.

When the derivatives bubble finally bursts, where are we going to get the trillions upon trillions of dollars that will be needed to “fix” things this time?

And sadly, the reality is that we are quickly running out of time.

It is important to keep watching Europe.  As I noted the other day, the European banking system as a whole is leveraged about 26 to 1 at this point.  When Lehman Brothers finally collapsed, it was leveraged about 30 to 1.

And the economic crisis over in Europe just continues to get worse.  It was announced on Tuesday that the unemployment rate in the eurozone is at an all-time record high of 12 percent, and the latest manufacturing numbers show that manufacturing activity over in Europe is in the process of collapsing.

So don’t be fooled by the fact that the Dow keeps setting new all-time record highs.  This bubble of false hope will be very short-lived.

The unfortunate truth is that the global financial system is a complete and total mess, and at this point a collapse appears to be inevitable.

Read more - 

http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_Big_Banks_Are_Recklessly_Gambling_With_Our_Money%2C_And_It_Will_Cause_The_Global_Financial_System_To_Collapse/25096/0/38/38/Y/M.html

Stanford creates biological transistors, the final step towards computers inside living cells -

Stanford creates biological transistors, the final step towards computers inside living cells - 


Bioengineers at Stanford University have created the first biological transistor made from genetic materials: DNA and RNA. Dubbed the “transcriptor,” this biological transistor is the final component required to build biological computers that operate inside living cells. We are now tantalizingly close to biological computers that can detect changes in a cell’s environment, store a record of that change in memory made of DNA, and then trigger some kind of response — say, commanding a cell to stop producing insulin, or to self-destruct if cancer is detected.

Stanford’s transcriptor is essentially the biological analog of the digital transistor. Where transistors control the flow of electricity, transcriptors control the flow of RNA polymerase as it travels along a strand of DNA. The transcriptors do this by using special combinations of enzymes (integrases) that control the RNA’s movement along the strand of DNA. “The choice of enzymes is important,” says Jerome Bonnet, who worked on the project. “We have been careful to select enzymes that function in bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, so that bio-computers can be engineered within a variety of organisms.”

Like a transistor, which enables a small current to turn on a larger one, one of the key functions of transcriptors is signal amplification. A tiny change in the enzyme’s activity (the transcriptor’s gate) can cause a very large change in the two connected genes (the channel). By combining multiple transcriptors, the Stanford researchers have created a full suite of Boolean Integrase Logic (BIL) gates — the biological equivalent of AND, NAND, OR, XOR, NOR, and XNOR logic gates. With these BIL gates (pun possibly intended), a biological computer could perform almost computation inside a living cell.

You need more than just BIL gates to make a computer, though. You also need somewhere to store data (memory, RAM), and some way to connect all of the transcriptors and memory together (a bus). Fortunately, as we’ve covered a few times before, numerous research groups have successfully stored data in DNA — and Stanford has already developed an ingenious method of using the M13 virus to transmit strands of DNA between cells. (See: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram.) In short, all of the building blocks of a biological computer are now in place.

This isn’t to say that highly functional biological computers will arrive in short order, but we should certainly begin to see simple biological sensors that measure and record changes in a cell’s environment. Stanford has contributed the BIL gate design to the public domain, which should allow other research institutes, such as Harvard’s Wyss Institute, to also begin work on the first biological computer. (See: The quest for the $1000 genome.)

Moving forward, though, the potential for real biological computers is immense. We are essentially talking about fully-functional computers that can sense their surroundings, and then manipulate their host cells into doing just about anything. Biological computers might be used as an early-warning system for disease, or simply as a diagnostic tool (has the patient consumed excess amounts of sugar, even after the doctor told them not to?) Biological computers could tell their host cells to stop producing insulin, to pump out more adrenaline, to reproduce some healthy cells to combat disease, or to stop reproducing if cancer is detected. Biological computers will probably obviate the use of many pharmaceutical drugs.

Read more - 

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/152074-stanford-creates-biological-transistors-the-final-step-towards-computers-inside-living-cells