App lets you play video games with your vagina - 



Last June, we reported on the K-Goal, a smart Kegel exercise aid that was marketed as a “Fitbit for your ladybits.” Now, much like the FitBit, the K-Goal has spawned a series of other wearable fitness gadgets: Introducing Skea, a Kegel exercise aid fundraising on Kickstarter that essentially lets you play video games with your vagina.

Short for “Smart Kegel Exercise Aid,” Skea is the brainchild of game designer Tom Chen, who designed the gadget with his company Linkcube when his wife became incontinent shortly after giving birth. (Or, as he charmingly puts it in the Kickstarter promo video, “when she found herself unable to control her piss, she was really pissed off.") Doctors recommend that she do regular Kegel exercises to treat her incontinence, which inspired him to create the Skea.

Of course, no one likes to exercise regularly, and Kegel exercising is no exception: Unless you get off on the thrill of sitting in your conference room, clenching and unclenching while your boss drones on about this quarter’s sales figures, it’s hard to make time to do them every day.

That’s why Chen created an in-app game that you can control with your pelvic muscles to motivate women to do their exercises. The game, Alice In Continent (get it, you guys? Get it? It took me a second, to be perfectly honest) is basically a Temple Run-esque runner game that asks you to navigate your avatar around various obstacles, such as “Rabbit Leg-pullers,” “Lava leaks,” and something called “Collagen Elixirs.”

As you play the game, an embedded pressure sensor in the Skea detects your pelvic muscle contractions and synchs wirelessly to your smartphone. So instead of using your finger to guide your avatar, you just have to squeeze tight and think of Chris Pratt shirtless holding a baby sloth. (If that isn’t enough to do it for you, much like the kGoal, the Skea also provides biofeedback in the form of small vibrations, which is as awesome an incentive to get women to exercise as any.)

Obviously, the gamification aspect of the Skea is kind of silly—as is the above promo video, which features more urinary incontinence puns than you can, to adapt the common parlance, shake your vagina at. But despite the Skea’s ludicrous marketing, Kegel exercise aids offer legitimate health benefits to women: Research shows that doing Kegels on a daily basis not only decreases your risk of developing urinary incontinence, it also helps you achieve stronger, more frequent orgasms during sex. Our only advice: Try not to play Alice In Continent on the train, otherwise some curious kid might ask how you’re controlling it without your finger.

Read more -

http://www.dailydot.com/technology/skea-kegel-exercise-aid/

Woman tracks down the mother who abandoned her as a baby... only to realise she has unwittingly married her BROTHER -

Woman tracks down the mother who abandoned her as a baby... only to realise she has unwittingly married her BROTHER - 



A woman went in search of her long-lost mother - and discovered she has unknowingly married her own brother.
Adriana, 39, and her husband Leandro, 37, have been together for seven years and have a six-year-old daughter.
The Brazilian couple - who didn't want to reveal their surnames - spent their lives trying to find their respective mothers, who were both called Maria, and had both abandoned their children when they were still babies.

But neither ever imagined - until this week - that the women they had both been searching for could have been the same person.
Adriana, a cosmetics saleswoman, hadn't seen her mother since she was just one, when she left home leaving her to be raised by the girl's father.

Meanwhile, truck driver Leandro found out aged eight that his own mother had also abandoned him, and that the woman he knew as his mum was actually his step-mother.
While Leandro stayed in the same town where he was born in the state of Sao Paulo, southeast Brazil, Adriana moved away to work as a housemaid, was married for 15 years and had three children.
The pair met for the first time ten years ago after Adriana's marriage broke down and she moved back to her home town, and they soon fell in love and moved in together.

Still unable to forget the give up the search for her mother, last month Adriana decided to contact a a radio station in their town to ask for help - and this week the two were reunited live on air.
But at the end of the interview on Radio Globo's 'The Time Is Now' programme, which specialises in finding lost relatives, the mother revealed she also had a son who didn't know her, Leandro.

As it becomes clear that it is the same Leandro that she was married to, Adriana is heard weeping uncontrollably: 'I don't believe that you're telling me this. Leandro is my husband,' she sobs.
At the end of the interview she says: 'Now I'm scared to go home and find out that Leandro doesn't want me any more. I love him so much.'
Adriana and Leandro - who never married legally - yesterday told Radio Globo that they would stay together, despite the bombshell that they are actually brother and sister.
Adriana said: 'Only death is going to separate us. All this happened because God wanted it to happen.
'Of course it would have been different if we had known all this before, but we didn't and we fell in love.
'We thought it was funny that both our mothers had the same name, but it is a common name so we just thought it was a coincidence.
'At first we were really knocked by it all. But we had a family meeting and told everyone that we are going to stay husband and wife, whatever anyone might think.
'We have so many plans together, nothing's going to break us up, nothing.'
The couple said they don't blame their mother for leaving them, have spoken with her a number of times since and plan to meet up soon.

Read more: -
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2718216/Woman-tracks-mother-abandoned-baby-realises-unwittingly-married-BROTHER.html

GeoFencing - Schools use new software to monitor students social media posts -

GeoFencing - Schools use new software to monitor students social media posts - 



Officials in western Maryland’s Washington County schools will be tracking students’ social media activity while at school using new software that scans for keywords like “kill” or “bomb.”     
studentsmartphone

The district is using software called Social Sentinel that employs “geofencing” protocol to determine when students are on school grounds and scans their Twitter, Facebook and other social media posts for evidence of violent threats, harassment, drug or alcohol use, or similarly dangerous language, WJLA television station reports.

District officials are assuring the public that student privacy won’t be violated because the “geofencing” protocol limits tracking to when students are at school, a public place.

“School officials said the goal is to protect student safety. Examples of such posts that will be tracked include those that feature keywords like ‘kill,’ ‘bomb,’ and others,” the news station reports. “School officials said they will also be consulting with parents and members of student government for feedback on what additional keywords should be added to the watch-list.”

Once the software nabs posts with words administrators don’t like, someone – the news station didn’t report who – will read the posts closer to determine if there’s anything fishy going on. Depending on the context of a threatening post, it will either be forwarded to police or school officials, according to WJLA.

The Washington County district is only one of four in the nation employing the student snooping software, which runs $20,000 per year. District superintendent Clayton Wilcox told the Herald-Mail it will be in place for the district’s middle and high schools when students return from summer break in two weeks.

“The software will search sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Meetup, Tumblr, Vimeo, and Google Plus, with other sites expected to be added, according to a presentation Tuesday to the Washington County Board of Education,” the Herald-Mail reports.

While the program would seem to raise objections from students, parents or faculty, no serious objections were cited in media reports.

The Washington County Teachers Association President Denise Fry did, however, raise mild concerns about the potential perception that “’Big Brother is watching,’ and whether the software might be used for other purposes,” according to the Herald-Mail.

And while Wilcox touted the system’s ability to track social media posts precisely within school bounds, he acknowledged that the geofencing feature can be expanded, and it seems as though school officials are already peaking into Pandora ’s Box.

During the meeting, (Wilcox) did mention that one day the school system might want to expand it, if officials hear about gang activity or a fight just off campus,” the Herald-Mail reports.

Read more - 

http://eagnews.org/schools-use-new-software-to-monitor-students-social-media-posts/

British police raided an English country pub in search of a stolen wooden relic believed by some to be the Holy Grail -

British police raided an English country pub in search of a stolen wooden relic believed by some to be the Holy Grail - 



British police raided an English country pub this week in search of a stolen wooden relic believed by some to be the Holy Grail - a cup from which, according to the Bible, Jesus is said to have drunk at his final meal before crucifixion.

The Grail has captivated religious experts for centuries, spawning myriad theories about its location and inspiring numerous fictional accounts from the Middle Ages onwards.

The object of the police search, which was unsuccessful, was a frail wooden bowl known as the Nanteos Cup that has been attributed with healing powers since the 19th century, attracting pilgrims and others who believe it may be the Holy Grail itself.

After receiving a tip-off, a team of eight officers and a police dog arrived on Sunday morning at the Crown Inn, a village pub in the rural English county of Herefordshire.

"They turned the place upside down. They came with fibre optic cameras to look in all the corners and nooks and crannies, and under the floorboards ... they were clearly serious about it," the pub's landlady, Di Franklyn, said.

Police said the relic, a dark wooden cup kept inside a blue velvet bag, had been stolen from a house in the area about a month ago. Photographs available online show a bowl-shaped vessel with around half its side missing.

"We get a few rogues and scallywags in the pub, but no one who's quite on the level of stealing a priceless ancient artefact," Franklyn said.

The cup takes its name from Nanteos Mansion, a country house in Wales where the vessel is reported to have been stored until 1952 after 16th-century monks fleeing King Henry VIII's dissolution of England's monasteries sought refuge there.

The cup was said to have been brought to Britain after Jesus' death by Joseph of Arimathea, the biblical figure who provided Christ with a tomb and, according to legend, brought Christianity to Britain.

Scientists who have examined the cup have said it almost certainly dates from many centuries after the crucifixion, and is not made of the olive wood that might have been expected for a Middle Eastern drinking vessel.

Read more - 

http://news.yahoo.com/british-police-raid-pub-search-holy-grail-163716296.html

Ebola Cases Mix With Malaria Amid ‘Slow-Motion Disaster’ -

Ebola Cases Mix With Malaria Amid ‘Slow-Motion Disaster’ - 



As the death toll rises in West Africa amid the worst Ebola outbreak on record, a separate threat is compounding the problem: the rainy season and the malaria that comes with it.

In Sierra Leone, with the most Ebola cases in the epidemic, a fearful population is failing to seek medical attention for any diseases, health officials say. If they have malaria, the feeling is they don’t want to go near a hospital with Ebola cases. If it’s Ebola, they don’t believe the hospitals can help them anyway, instead turning to traditional healers.

It’s a widening challenge complicated by the fact that Ebola, malaria and cholera share common symptoms early on, including fever and vomiting, which can cause confusion among patients, said Cyprien Fabre, head of the West Africa office of the European Commission’s humanitarian aid department.

“We now have increased mortality for these other diseases” as well, Fabre said by telephone from Freetown, the country’s capital, after visiting Ebola treatment centers in Kenema and Kailahun near the eastern border. “This is a slow-motion disaster.”

The issue threatens to further undermine health and welfare in Sierra Leone, which has the world’s highest rate of child and maternal mortality, Fabre said.

The outbreak has killed 932 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone since it was first reported in March, according to the World Health Organization. That includes 45 deaths from Aug. 2 to Aug. 4, the health group said.

Broken Heart

“I’m afraid of going to the hospital because if they don’t tell you about having Ebola, it will be something else that will break your heart,” said Ibrahim Kalokoh, a 34-year-old disc jockey, in an interview in Freetown. “If I am experiencing malaria symptoms, I would rather rush to a pharmacy and buy drugs than go to the hospital.”

The Deadliest Disease on Earth

“Right now,” he added, “going to the hospital is the worst you can suggest to me, with all the Ebola noise around.”

Beyond the fear are other issues contributing to the problem, according to Fabre. Health workers afraid of getting infected are becoming increasingly reluctant to help out, and one treatment center has exceeded its capacity of 88 beds.

Mushroom Hospitals

“Health-care practitioners are afraid to accept new patients, especially in community clinics all across the country,” Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said. “Consequently, many common diseases which are especially prevalent during the rainy season, such as malaria, typhoid and common cold, are going untreated and may lead to unnecessary and preventable deaths.”

As traditional healers pick up the slack, Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma today ordered the closing of so-called “mushroom hospitals” run by untrained doctors and nurses in impoverished areas.

A Spanish priest, Miguel Pajares, is the first Ebola-infected European citizen to be returned home, according to newspaper El Pais. Pajares arrived in Spain this morning and is being cared for at a hospital in Madrid, the newspaper said. Two Americans who were infected with the disease were brought back to the U.S. in the last week.

The Ebola virus is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person. There is no approved cure. Standard treatment is to keep patients hydrated, replace lost blood and use antibiotics to fight off opportunistic infections. The hope is that the body’s immune system will eventually beat the disease.

Death Rate

In the past, the death rate for the disease was about 90 percent. The rate in the recent outbreak has been about 60 percent, probably because of earlier treatment, health officials have said.

A number of aid organizations are contributing in West Africa. In July, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave a $1 million grant to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, which is providing medical and hygiene supplies to the region, according to a statement. In Sierra Leone, help is on the way from the International Red Cross, which is building a new treatment center near Kenema, the health ministry said this week.

Unlike the facility in Kailahun, a typical tent-like structure built by Doctors Without Borders, the existing clinic in Kenema is inside the local hospital, where isolation units and separate wards have been carved out, Fabre said. Patients afraid of coming in contact with Ebola are avoiding such hospitals and aren’t getting treated for other ailments, he said.

Shaking Hands

In the capital of Freetown, chlorine has taken over the city. At the entrance of supermarkets, sidewalks, offices, religious houses, and even some private homes in the capital, there are plastic buckets filled with water and chlorine for the washing of hands. Religious leaders are also advising people to limit touching and clustering.

“We have asked our congregants to lay the right hand on the chest, and lower the head a little as a sign of greeting instead of shaking hands until we have no new cases of Ebola,” said Sheik Alie Yunus Kallay, a member of the Interreligious Council Taskforce on Ebola.

In neighboring Liberia, protective equipment for health workers is an urgent need, said Ernest Gaie, country director in Liberia for the Washington, D.C.-based charity Africare. And as in Sierra Leone, medical staff’s fear of infection has left some hospitals understaffed, according to Gaie.

Stretched Resources

Protective gear “would help these lives and help regain the confidence that the health workers have lost,” Gaie said in a telephone interview from Monrovia, the country’s capital. “Unless the health workers are in those facilities, I’m sorry, the families are not going to take people who are showing symptoms there.”

Resources are stretched across West Africa as the humanitarian community is also facing crises in other parts of the world, such as Gaza and Syria. That’s contributing to a “pessimistic” mood among aid groups, Fabre said.

“It’s far from being over,” he said. “We are still behind the epidemic spreading.”

Read more - 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-06/malaria-cases-mix-with-ebola-amid-slow-motion-disaster-.html

Picture it: Facial recognition to find Lost Dogs -

Picture it: Facial recognition to find Lost Dogs - 



Any worried pet owner who has spent days hanging posters, making phone calls and knocking on neighbors' doors hopes there's a more scientific way to find a lost dog.

That became a reality when facial recognition technology successfully reunited a pet at San Diego County Animal Services with its owners. Joanne Cox's family in San Diego turned to FindingRover.com, a website and app that uses technology built by university researchers, to reconnect with their dog Roxy, a Shiba inu.

The website keeps a database of photos from the three county shelters and tries to match eight distinctive facial markers on dogs with images uploaded by users searching for lost pets. Eyes and noses are important areas that differentiate pooches, including eye size and their position near the snout.

FindingRover.com founder John Polimeno wants to expand the photo database to improve the odds of more happy endings, with shelters elsewhere set to sign on. He's also showing it to rescues, veterinarians and dog groups and is visiting other countries.

The website is unique in using facial recognition but stands among many online tools people increasingly use to find lost pets. There are alarm systems, social media alerts and apps that post rewards or call people in neighborhoods.

Plus, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the largest and oldest humane society in the U.S., has its own mobile app for recovering missing pets. It offers tips on the best ways to search and allows users to create a digital flier to share on social media.

"Through research, the ASPCA has found that the best method for pet owners to find their lost pet is to get out the door, search their neighborhood, post flyers, check their local shelters and make sure that their pets have ID tags with updated information," said Dr. Emily Weiss, vice president of ASPCA shelter research and development.

Facial recognition worked for the Cox family after Roxy bolted during a thunderstorm in late July. Five days after the dog disappeared, the family's 10-year-old daughter created a free Finding Rover account and the technology matched her uploaded photo to one taken at the shelter.

"Within four hours of her arrival to the shelter, we were there to pick her up," Joanna Cox said in an email.

Every dog entering San Diego County's three shelters is added to the photo database. Daniel deSousa, the system's deputy director, says the program can work two ways:

- Someone finds a dog, takes its picture and sends it to the database, where a match generates a notice to the owner. The owner then can call the good Samaritan and arrange a pickup.

- Dogs coming in to the shelters have their photos run against the database. If there's a match, the owner gets a call.

The technology powering Finding Rover was built by Steven Callahan and John Schreiner of the University of Utah's software development center. They found the eight markers on dogs are far fewer than the 128 points on the human facial recognition program.

"People are sort of uniform, the shape of their faces, skin tones, all their eyes, noses and mouths are in the same general location," Callahan said. But dogs' eyes and snouts are in different places.

It's difficult to measure accuracy, Callahan said, but if there are 100 dogs in a database, a top-three match would be hit 98 percent of the time.

"It worked surprisingly well, better than I thought it would. I had low expectations," Callahan said. "It would take off if you had all the shelters in an area" included.

Read more - 

http://www.myfoxny.com/story/26212416/picture-it-facial-recognition-to-find-lost-dogs

Forget neighing! Horses talk with their EARS: use subtle body language to communicate their thoughts -

Forget neighing! Horses talk with their EARS: use subtle body language to communicate their thoughts - 



Horse whisperers take note: If you want to better understand your equine friends, then study their ears.
A study has revealed that just like humans, horses read each other’s faces. But, unlike us, they gain important information by specifically examining the ears.
It seems that when a horse is interested in something, it pricks up its ears and swivels them towards whatever has caught its attention.


This movement is so important that, if its ears are covered up, another horse struggles to know what it is thinking.
EAR MOVEMENTS TRANSLATED
Horses have very mobile ears, they can only swivel them round, point them forward, pull them up or flatten them back 
When a horse's ears are flopping down, it means the creature is relaxed.
But pinned back, and the horse is expressing anger. 
When a horse is interested in something, it pricks up its ears and swivels them towards whatever has caught its attention. 
The ability to read each other’s interest level is disrupted when the ears are covered up, the researchers found. 
The finding comes from University of Sussex researchers who studied what makes one horse pay attention to another horse.
They began by taking photos of a horse looking to one side at bucket of food.

They then placed a picture on a post between two buckets of food, led another horse into the barn and watched which bucket it went to.
They almost always took their cue from the pictured animal and chose the bucket it seemed to be looking at.
However, when the photo was manipulated, so that the horse’s eyes were covered up, the results were no better than chance.
This suggests the horse’s gaze conveys important information.
More surprisingly, covering up the ears had the same effect – meaning they are also key to communication.
Researcher Jennifer Wathan (CORR), a PhD student, said: ‘Our study is the first to examine a potential cue to attention that humans do not have: the ears.


Read more: - 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2715693/Neighing-Horses-talk-EYES-EARS-Creatures-use-subtle-body-language-communicate-thoughts.html

MIT researchers can listen to your conversation by watching your potato chip bag - 



Imagine someone listening in to your private conversation by filming the bag of chips sitting on the other side of the room. Oddly specific, I know, but researchers at MIT did just that: They’ve created an algorithm that can reconstruct sound (and even intelligible speech) with the tiny vibrations it causes on video.

When sound hits an object, it makes distinct vibrations. “There’s this very subtle signal that’s telling you what the sound passing through is,” said Abe Davis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the paper. But the movement is tiny – sometimes as small as thousandths of a pixel on video. It’s only when all of these signals are averaged, Davis said, that you can extract sound that makes sense. By observing the entire object, you can filter out the noise.

This particular study grew out of an earlier experiment at MIT, led by Michael Rubinstein, now a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England. In 2012, Rubinstein amplified tiny variations in video to detect things like the skin color change caused by the pumping of blood. Studying the vibrations caused by sound was a logical next step. But getting intelligible speech out of the analysis was surprising, Davis said.

The results are certainly impressive (and a little scary). In one example shown in a compilation video, a bag of chips is filmed from 15 feet away, through sound-proof glass. The reconstructed audio of someone reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in the same room as the chips isn’t crystal clear. But the words being said are possible to decipher.

In most cases, a high-speed camera is necessary to accomplish the feat. Still, at 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second, the camera used by the researchers is nothing compared to the best available on the market, which can surpass 100,000 frames per second. And the researchers found that even cheaper cameras could be used.

“It’s surprisingly possible to take advantage of a bug called rolling shutter,” Davis said. “Usually, it creates these artifacts in the image that people don’t like.” When cameras use rolling shutter to capture an image, they don’t capture one single point in time. Instead, the camera scans across the frame in one direction, picking up each row at a slightly different moment.

By doing so, the camera happens to encode information at a much higher rate than its actual frame rate. For the researchers, that meant being able to analyze vibrations that should have happened too quickly for capture on film. “It kind of turns a two-dimensional low-speed camera into a one-dimensional high-speed camera,” Davis explained. “As a result, we can recover sounds happening at frequencies several times higher than the frame rate of the camera, which is remarkable when you consider that it’s just a complete accident of the way we make them.”

There are definitely limitations to the technology, Davis said, and it may not make for better sound reconstruction than other methods already in use. “Big brother won’t be able to hear anything that anyone ever says all of a sudden,” Davis said. “But it is possible that you could use this to discover sound in situations where you couldn’t before. It’s just adding one more tool for those forensic applications.”


Davis and his colleagues care more about applications in scientific research. “This is a new dimension to how you can image objects,” he said. “It tells you something about how they respond physically to pressure, but instead of poking and prodding at them, all you need is to play sound at them.”



Read more -

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/08/04/mit-researchers-can-listen-to-your-conversation-by-watching-your-potato-chip-bag/

Male bass switch sex - male fish with eggs in their testes show up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed -

Male bass switch sex - male fish with eggs in their testes show up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed - 



At first she was surprised. Then she was disturbed. Now she’s a little alarmed. Each time a different batch of male fish with eggs in their testes shows up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, Vicki Blazer’s eyebrows arch a bit higher.

In the latest study, smallmouth bass and white sucker fish captured at 16 sites in the Delaware, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers in Pennsylvania had crossed over into a category called intersex, an organism with two genders.

“I did not expect to find it quite as widespread,” said Blazer, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist who studies fish. Since 2003, USGS scientists have discovered male smallmouth and largemouth bass with immature eggs in several areas of the Potomac River, including near the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant in the District.

The previous studies detected abnormal levels of compounds from chemicals such as herbicides and veterinary pharmaceuticals from farms, and from sewage system overflows near smallmouth-bass nesting areas in the Potomac.

Those endocrine-disrupting chemicals throw off functions that regulate hormones and the reproductive system. In the newest findings, at one polluted site in the Susquehanna near Hershey, Pa., 100 percent of male smallmouth bass that were sampled had eggs, Blazer said.

A magnification of a cross-section view of a smallmouth bass' testes that shows immature eggs, which are round circles on the monitor. 
With the mutant bass, she said, “we keep seeing . . . a correlation with the percent of agriculture in the watershed where we conduct a study.”

The fish that were dissected and analyzed by researchers swam downstream from farms and animal feed operations, where rains wash manure filled with various chemicals and hormones into streams and rivers.

It was a familiar finding. After the first intersex bass were found in the Potomac, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a remarkable discovery in follow-up research at Blue Plains: “We found female germ cells in the testes of 82 percent to 100 percent of the male smallmouth bass and in 23 percent of the males from . . . largemouth bass,” the agency said.

It is a problem that extends well beyond the Chesapeake Bay region, which includes the District, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Intersex bass were found by the USGS in the Columbia, Colorado and Mississippi river basins in 2009. Scientists have yet to identify a single chemical responsible for causing male fish to become part female.

In urban areas, estrogen products are often flushed down drains, contaminating water. In rural areas, natural animal hormones, much of it estrogen, is excreted in manure, which is spread on fields and washed into water by rain.

“I think it’s a complex mixture of chemicals,” said Blazer, who authored the study with nine researchers.

The findings published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment coincided with a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project that says there is far more nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Chesapeake Bay than states and the Environmental Protection Agency have led residents to believe.

The report, “Murky Waters: More Accountability Needed for Agricultural Pollution in the Chesapeake Bay,” says monitoring of fertilizers and other chemicals used at farms, particularly large animal feed operations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, is too lax under the bay cleanup plan that is being enforced by the EPA.

Read more -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/as-more-male-bass-switch-sex-a-strange-fish-story-expands/2014/08/03/89799b08-11ad-11e4-8936-26932bcfd6ed_story.html

Man-made 'breathing' leaf is an oxygen factory for space travel -

Man-made 'breathing' leaf is an oxygen factory for space travel - 



One of the persistent challenges of manned space exploration is that pesky lack of oxygen throughout much of the universe. Here on Earth, trees and other plant life do us a real solid by taking in our bad breath and changing it back to clean, sweet O2.

So what if we could take those biological oxygen factories into space with us, but without all the land, sun, water, soil, and gravity that forests tend to require? This is the point where NASA and Elon Musk should probably start paying attention.

Royal College of Art graduate Julian Melchiorri has created the first man-made, biologically functional leaf that takes in carbon dioxide, water, and light and releases oxygen. The leaf consists of chloroplasts -- the part of a plant cell where photosynthesis happens -- suspended in body made of silk protein.

"This material has an amazing property of stabilizing (the chloroplast) organelles," Melchiorri says in the video below. "As an outcome I have the first photosynthetic material that is living and breathing as a leaf does."

In addition to its potential value to space travel, Melchiorri also imagines the technology literally providing a breath of fresh air to indoor and outdoor spaces here on Earth. The facades of buildings and lampshades could be made to exhale fresh air with just a thin coating of the leaf material.

But perhaps best of all, a man-made breathing leaf could be the key to not just space travel but space colonization. No need to figure out how to till that dry, red Martian dirt to get some nice leafy trees to grow; we could just slap them on the inside of the colony's dome and puff away.



Read more- 

http://www.cnet.com/news/this-man-made-breathing-leaf-is-an-oxygen-factory-for-space-travel/