Space Shuttle Lights Up Night Sky

 

No one really pays attention to shuttle launches these days, but I just thought this was an amazing photo.

National Geographic: Space shuttle Discovery lit up the sky over Daytona Beach, Florida, this weekend in NASA’s first night launch since 2002. After weather-related delays on December 7 and 8, the shuttle—bound for the International Space Station—blasted off with a crew of seven from Kennedy Space Center at 8:47 p.m. ET on December 9. NASA suspended night launches after the 2003 Columbia disaster in order to photograph shuttle fuel tanks in flight.

Also check out Top Ten Videos of 2006 from National Geographic News, for clips like Giant Octopus Battles Shark, Puffer Fish vs. Otter & Swimming With Stingrays

The free software movement and social justice

Watch Even Moglen’s 2006 Keynote at the International Plone Conference Eben delivered an inspiring and wide-ranging talk that traced the connections between the free software movement, the One Laptop Per Child project, and the past three hundred years of modern industrial economic development, and placed our work into the larger context of the ongoing journey towards freedom and equality for all people. From: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/56884

Frontline: The Other Drug War

Frontline PBS: Through interviews with consumers, legislators, scientists, top industry leaders and analysts, “The Other Drug War” explores the tension between the high cost of scientific innovation and society’s need to keep drugs and health care affordable.

A wonderful site with a great deal of information. Addresses issues such as: Will controlling the prices of prescription drugs hinder innovation? What would happen if the U.S. instituted price controls on prescription drugs? Pros and Cons of drug advertising and marketing.

Prime Minister’s Question Time

Official 10 Downing Street Website where you can view PMQT each week.

I’ve always loved watching Question Time on C-SPAN. It’s refreshing to hear an intellignet, heated debate about current issues. I wonder if Bush could stand up to this once a week.

Prime Minister’s Questions (officially Questions to the Prime Minister) is a constitutional convention in the United Kingdom, where every Wednesday when the House of Commons is sitting the Prime Minister spends half an hour answering questions from Members of Parliament (“MPs”). The practice of regularly asking the Prime Minister of Britain questions in parliament in a fixed period was started in the 1950s. Backbench MPs wishing to ask a question must enter their names on the Order Paper. The names of entrants are then shuffled in a ballot to produce a random order in which they will be called by the Speaker of the House of Commons. The first formal question on the Order Paper, posed by simply saying “Number One, Mr. Speaker”, is to ask the Prime Minister if he/she will list his/her engagements for the day. The Leader of the Opposition is allowed six supplementary questions (which he/she will normally use as two groups of three), and the leader of the third largest party (currently the Liberal Democrats) has two. The Speaker tries to alternate between government and opposition questioners.

BBC Documentary (very short) about PMQT

Since the televising of Parliament, Prime Minister’s Questions (or “PMQs”) have formed an important part of British political culture. Because of the natural drama of this confrontation, it is the most well-known piece of Parliamentary business. Tickets to the Strangers Gallery (public gallery) for Wednesday are the most sought-after Parliamentary tickets. One of Tony Blair’s first acts as Prime Minister was to replace the two 15-minute sessions, held on a Tuesday and Thursday, with a single 30 minute session on a Wednesday – a move for which he was criticised.

Role of microcredit in ending global poverty

Download mp4 Streaming

The University Channel has provided a wonderful program with Dr. Muhammad Yunus at the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Yunus is a Bangladeshi banker and economist. He is the developer and founder of the concept of microcredit, the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Yunus is also the founder of Grameen Bank. In 2006, Yunus and the bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below” (Wikipedia).

It’s inspiring to hear Dr. Yunus talk about the ideas behind the Grameen Bank. Often the tendency when thinking about “big” things like global poverty can be to throw your hands up and wonder if there is any way that any one person can make a difference in his lifetime. Dr. Yunus, however, has taken an original idea, conceived against the conventional wisdom that you can’t give poor people loans because they will never pay back, and changed the way the world approaches solutions for poverty.

Google Maps for Mt. Bikers with GPS

MTBGuru is a new site that enables bikers, hikers and runners to upload GPS info, along with photos and comments, from their routes that get mashed up with Google Maps to create an ever-expanding trail resource. Mostly Bay Area now but that is changing (http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/56608). This site could be useful to us if some routes are uploaded for the southeast. You can even link it up with Google Earth for a cool perspective

The Key to Heart Health from Wine

Scientific American: Wine’s beneficial effects on heart health depend more on the traditional vintner’s art than the wonder molecule resveratrol. Resveratrol, a molecule found in the skin of red grapes, among other places, has been found to have a host of health effects, most recently prolonging the life spans of obese mice. But the natural wonder drug does not play a role in the beneficial effects of wine drinking, according to research published in the November 28 issue of Nature. “There are some fascinating effects of resveratrol in animal systems,” notes plant biochemist Alan Crozier of the University of Glasgow. “To get similar doses into humans through red wine, you would have to consume more than 1,000 liters of red wine a day.” Because drinking that much wine is beyond even the hardiest oenophile–yes, even those in France–Crozier and his colleague Roger Corder of Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry in London set out to identify exactly the compounds in red wine that promote heart health. Using the endothelial cells that line human artery walls, the researchers tested which compounds in wine had the greatest effect. The tests showed that flavonoids called oligomeric procyanidins–essentially condensed tannins, the compounds that impart bitterness to young reds–suppressed production of the peptide responsible for hardening arteries.

Using French census data, the two researchers then compared regions that had unusually long-lived men with the wine produced in those areas. The Nuoro province of Sardinia and the Gers region of southwestern France both support relatively more men who survive past 75 years of age. Not coincidentally, these regions also produce local wines that are as much as four times richer in procyanidins than other wines. Traditional wine-making techniques proved key: by allowing the grapes to linger on the vine for as long as possible and then leaving them to ferment for as long as four weeks (compared with the more typical one-week period of major wineries, which keeps the level of harsh tannins low), vintners in these regions produce prodigious amounts of procyanidin. Also crucial are the type of grape involved (Tannat in Gers, a small, seedy fruit rarely grown outside the southwest of France) and the elevation at which it is grown (ultraviolet helps catalyze the production of procyanidins in the high-elevation vineyards of Sardinia). Of course, understanding exactly how procyanidins work in the human body remains to be investigated, and the researchers plan to dose people with the compound in a future clinical trial. In the meantime, a few glasses of wine–particularly a full-bodied one–remain a recipe for a stronger heart.