Stricter labeling urged for bottled water

Consumers know less about the water they pay dearly for in bottles than what they can drink almost for free from the tap because the two are regulated differently, congressional investigators and nonprofit researchers say in new reports.

Both the Government Accountability Office and the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, recommend in reports released Wednesday that bottled water be labeled with the same level of information municipal water providers must disclose.

The researchers urged Americans to make bottled water “a distant second choice” to filtered tap water because there isn’t enough information about bottled water. The working group recommends purifying tap water with a commercial filter, however.

…..

“Consumers may not realize that many regulations that apply to municipalities responsible for tap water do not apply to companies that produce bottled water,” he said in statements opening the hearing.

The GAO noted the FDA has yet to set standards for DEHP, one of several chemicals known as phthalates that are found in many household products, while the EPA limits the presence of phthalates in tap water.

In a survey of officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the GAO found they think consumers are misinformed about bottled water.

“Many replied that consumers often believe that bottled water is safer or healthier than tap water,” according to the GAO report.

The Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group said in its report that consumers do not get enough information to determine which water is best for them.

Both groups said some bottled water brands include the same information required of tap water providers on either labels or company Web sites.

The GAO called for more research but said the FDA should start by requiring that bottled water labels tell consumers where to find out more.

Community water systems must distribute annual reports about their water’s source, contaminants and possible health concerns.

Consumers should know where all their water comes from, how it is treated and what is found in it, said Richard Wiles, senior vice president for policy and communications for the Environmental Working Group.

“If the municipal tap water systems can tell their customers this information, you would think that bottled water companies that charge 1,000 times more for this water could also let consumers know the same thing,” he told The Associated Press.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31802507/ns/health-food_safety/

Near-lightspeed nano spacecraft might be close

An artist’s conception shows an 11-pound (5-kilogram) disk-shaped nanosatellite in space, with tiny microthrusters placed around the edge of the disk.

Massive particle accelerators are exploring the world of the very small, but similar technology may someday propel needle-sized spacecraft to distances on a scale so large as to be almost unimaginable — between star systems.

Thanks to research on nano-sized thrusters that act like portable particle accelerators, tiny spacecraft might be accelerated to near-lightspeed and sent to explore nearby stars — perhaps within our lifetimes.

The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider at Europe’s CERN particle-physics lab was built with the goal of figuring out what exactly the universe is made of. The 17-mile-round machine can accelerate charged protons to nearly the speed of light. Once they reach top speed, the particles are smashed into targets, creating spectacular (and short-lived) collisions that spew out exotic forms of matter for scientists to study.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31665236/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/

Can White Paint, Reflective Windows and Closed Doors Save the Planet?

The fight against climate change has taken a rather low-tech turn lately.

• Obama’s Energy Secretary Stephen Chu wants to fight climate change by whitewashing the world’s roofs roads and pavements.
• California’s air regulators are requiring automakers, beginning in 2012, to install sun-reflecting glass in the windows of new cars sold in the state to help cut cooling needs.
• And in New York City, council members passed legislation requiring businesses to close their doors when they have the AC running.

Could we paint the world white?

These measures may lack the cutting edge appeal of a solar airplane or a Tesla, but they could make a much bigger difference. Secretary Chu explained to the UK’s The Times that his friend, and member of the California Energy Commission, Art Rosenfeld, had run the numbers on the effects of painting the world white. “Now, you smile, but he’s done a calculation, and if you take all the buildings and make their roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of color rather than a black type of color, and you do this uniformly . . . it’s the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to “all the cars on the road for 11 years”.

Since light surfaces reflect up to 80% of sunlight, compared with the 20% reflected from dark ones, whitewashing is proven cooling tech (for evidence, see a video I shot of the traditional green building techniques, including whitewashed homes, in Extremadura, Spain). Rosenfeld helped push through white roof legislation in the state of California back in 2005. Since then, all flat-roofed commercial buildings have been required to have white roofs and this year, that requirement will be expanded to both flat and sloped roof residential and commercial buildings.

Rosenfeld and his colleague Hashem Akbari would like to go global with their geoengineering idea. Given that 25% of most cities worldwide are roofs and about 35% is pavement, lightening these surfaces is a “win-win-win”, explained Akbari to the LA Times. “First, a cooler environment not only saves energy but improves comfort. Second, cooling a city by a few degrees dramatically reduces smog. And the third win is offsetting global warming.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/can-white-paints-reflecti_b_226010.html

CDC to Explore Environmental Links to Disease

This seems to fally under “well about time….”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched an environmental public-health tracking network to help scientists and the public explore potential links between environmental contaminants and chronic diseases.

While the health effects of lead and certain other contaminants are generally known, other suspected links between diseases and pollutants remain unproven, partly because environmental and health data are collected and kept separately, said Michael McGeehin, an official with the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health.

The new network brings together data that are collected across the country to monitor air quality, drinking water, and other environmental information, and allows researchers and the public to compare it against disease data, he said.

The data are limited, and don’t cover every city or state, but the CDC says it is working on improving surveillance and adding more data to cover more regions, hazards and health conditions.

The ultimate goal is to better control costly chronic conditions, Dr. McGeehin said. “About 70% of the dollars spent on health care is on chronic disease, and the environment plays a role in the development and exacerbation of those diseases,” he said.

Funded by Congress, the new network has been in development since 2002 and grew out of pilot programs the CDC funded in 16 states from California to Wisconsin, as well as New York City. Those programs have led to 73 efforts to reduce potential illness from contaminants, the CDC said.

In Massachusetts, one of the states funded, officials are working on reducing mold and moisture in schools after finding an association with prevalence of asthma, for example. New York state officials pursued restrictions on the use of “bug bombs” to eliminate pests after health data found that people in apartments and buildings adjacent to where the bombs were used reported shortness of breath and other respiratory irritation. Additional funding from Congress received in March will allow the CDC to fund programs in five more states, Dr. McGeehin said.

Janice Nolen, an environmental-policy spokeswoman for the American Lung Association, which tracks the effects of air pollution and advocates for clean air, called the new network “a good first step.” But she said better surveillance and more specific data are needed to be able to prove links between certain pollutants and diseases.

For example, examining air-quality data from the Environmental Protection Agency with information on hospitalizations of people with asthma, which the new network offers, “is helpful, but it doesn’t necessarily mean those people are in the hospital because of the air pollution,” Ms. Nolen said. More geographically narrow data—from census tracts in addition to counties, for example—would also be helpful because pollution can vary greatly within a county, she said.

“Hopefully it will spur more information and better surveillance,” she said of the new network.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124700096841007671.html#mod=rss_US_News

Vitamin D and Mental Health

As a board certified internist, I have chosen, for the last 30 years, to take a personalized approach in my practice of integrative medicine. I have worked with literally hundreds of herbs, vitamins and dietary supplements, to help my patients, often when drugs did not work. In all this time, I have not seen one nutritional supplement that has the power to affect human health as much as vitamin D. This is because Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin — it is a hormone that has the ability to interact and affect more than 2,000 genes in the body.

Over my 30 years of practicing medicine, countless times I have had to deliver or discuss with a patient their sad and possibly terminal diagnosis. Diseases like cancer and heart disease are at best life altering, and most times life threatening. When I have this kind of difficult conversation with a patient, I often reflect that if their vitamin D level had been normal for the previous many years, maybe they would never have developed this disease.

Ideally, your health care provider is your partner in exploring your vitamin D status, but patients usually do not want to visit their doctor just to ask for a vitamin D level, and many doctors are not yet up to date on the importance of vitamin D. If you use the at-home test kit and your blood level of vitamin D is low, I would encourage you to discuss this information with your physician.

(From the Author)  – I found this particularly interesting because a few weeks ago, I spoke to a highly-recommended internist about my overall health. She had me get all kinds of blood work done, and in her summary, she wrote that most of my levels looked good with exception to my vitamin D. I had a substantial deficiency that she suspected could explain my symptoms of fatigue and sluggishness.

She gave me a prescription for a potent vitamin D tablet that I’m supposed to take weekly for 10 weeks, and get my blood retested at that point. If my levels look okay, she told me to take a supplement of at least 2000 IU daily. This is my third week taking the highly leaded vitamin D and I do feel more energetic and a tad less irritable (not that any family members would agree with me).

My internist and I talked about vitamin D for about 10 minutes in her office. She said that most of her patients lately had deficiencies lately, especially her female patients. She advised me that the best way to get it, of course, was sunlight, and that sunscreen actually blocks it from your system. And she’s not totally pro-vitamin, either. She thinks that you are much better off eating healthy foods than taking supplements, that your body can’t process the high levels of vitamins and minerals that are sold in health food aisles.

But vitamin D isn’t found in any food, she explained, so that’s why it’s essential to take a supplement.

I’ve been wondering how vitamin D and mental illness are related, so I did a search and found that vitamin D does, indeed, play a role in mental illness based on these reasons from the Vitamin D Council’s website:

1. Epidemiological evidence shows an association between reduced sun exposure and mental illness.
2. Mental illness is associated with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] levels.
3. Mental illness shows a significant comorbidity with illnesses thought to be associated with vitamin D deficiency.
4. Theoretical models (in vitro or animal evidence) exist to explain how vitamin D deficiency may play a causative role in mental illness.
5. Studies indicate vitamin D improves mental illness.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/therese-borchard/vitamin-d-and-mental-heal_b_211636.html

http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue

Was Universe 1.0 Destroyed by Dark Matter?

Did dark matter destroy the universe?  You might be looking around at the way things “exist” and thinking “No”, but we’re talking about ancient history.  Three hundred million years after the start of the universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around – only to have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark.  Why?

Most believe that the first quasars, active galaxies whose central black holes are the cosmic-ray equivalent of a firehose, provided the breakup energy, but some Fermilab scientists have another idea.  Dan Hooper and Alexander Belikov posit that invisible, self-destructing dark matter may have blown up every atom in the universe.  At least it’s plausible in that if we wanted to ionize an entire universe, we’d want something that sounded that awesome.

Dark matter is a candidate for providing ionizing radiation because, if it exists at all, it’s its own antiparticle: if two dark matter particles hit each other they can blow up.  Insane as it sounds, the theory predicts that despite making up most of everything the particles themselves are so tiny, and so terribly fussy about colliding, that they can form huge structures without destroying themselves.  Positron emissions which may be an indication of exactly this kind of self-destruction have been observed by the European PAMELA satellite currently orbiting the Earth.

As theories go, this one is more awesome than accepted.  The quasar hypothesis has wide support, and crediting something we’ve never even seen with reshaping the universe may be going a little far.  Then again, that’s what modern cosmology is doing with dark matter anyway, so maybe this idea will fit right in.

 

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/was-a-universe-10-destroyed-by-dark-matter.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227054.200-dark-matter-ripped-up-early-universe.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=cosmology

Newly Discovered Audio Reveals 1969 Russian Attempt to Beat U.S. to the Moon

Dramatic and previously unheard recordings of the moment the Russians tried to gatecrash the American’s Moon landing in 1969 have today been released by The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. The recordings were made in the Control Room of the famous Jodrell Bank Observatory, where astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell and colleagues were listening to transmissions coming from the moon.

In the newly released recordings, which were made over three days in mid-July of 1969, Sir Bernard Lovell – founder of the Jodrell Bank Observatory and the man behind the famous Lovell radio telescope – can be heard narrating events. Transmissions from the Apollo 11 astronauts can also be heard in the background.

(Follow link for recording) – http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/news/2009/luna15-apollo11/

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/dramatic-and-previously-unheard-recordings-of-the-moment-the-russians-tried-to-gatecrash-the-americans-moon-landing-in-1969-h.html

On Facebook? New Algorithm Can Guess Your SSN

Two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown they can reverse engineer a person’s Social Security number using, ironically, nothing more than data from publicly available data on government sites, and the data you share with the world on Facebook.

Like many confirmation numbers we use daily, from bus tickets to software purchase codes, Social Security numbers are assigned based on a formula that uses two inputs to generate a code. The inputs for SSNs are state of birth and date of birth, two things that most people have made available on social networking sites. That alone isn’t dangerous.

The government enables the other half of the caper by making the SSNs of deceased Americans available publicly in a database called the Death Master File. This file was created to help institutions detect bogus Social Security numbers on tax and benefits forms, but it also provides a massive test dataset for someone trying to reverse engineer SSNs. Using the Death Master File, CMU engineers were able to determine which parts of the numbers correlated to which of the facts about a person’s birth. When they applied their algorithm to SSNs in the DMF that they hadn’t tested, they could accurately guess the first five numbers of a given SSN with up to 90% accuracy in smaller states, where the pool of numbers is smaller.

According to ArsTechnica, cracking the last four digits of an SSN, which are seemingly assigned at random, cuts the rate of accuracy considerably; the authors of the study were able to get a number right only after about 10 tries, more than enough failed tries to lock out an IP address on most banking sites. But they note that a botnet working in concert could attack smaller states with alarming alacrity–a virally-controlled network of 10,000 machines could crank out the identities of residents of the State of West Virginia at around 2,800 a minute, based solely on basic information from Facebook. It might be time to abandon the SSN as our primary credential in favor of something more comprehensively secure.

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/facebook-new-algorithm-can-guess-your-ssn

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/social-insecurity-numbers-open-to-hacking.ars

New Space Observations: Early Forms of Inorganic Extraterrestrial Life?

An international research team announced a breakthrough in self-replicating plasma crystals which could be an early form of inorganic life. New studies of dust that form lifelike structures suggest that extraterrestrial life may not be carbon-based at all. Researchers at the Russian Academy of Science, the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, and the University of Sydney observed particles of inorganic dust form helical structures and go through other “lifelike” changes.

If you think that’s the plot of a movie with a special effects budget and an extremely expendable cast of extras, congratulations, you just thought of something far more likely than what they claim.

The experiments took place under simulated plasma conditions, representative of space and also the primordial Earth. These inorganic structures  the team suggests may have even led to the organic molecules of life that we’re familiar with, and made from. From the Institute of Physics press release:

So, the big question: could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says (V.N.) Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.

While there’s no convincing argument restricting life to “gooey squidgy stuff”, we’re afraid this result has much more to do with advertising than actual science.  The core of their argument appears to be that certain helical structures which form in a plasma resemble the helices of DNA – anyone familiar with magnetic fields, or indeed the very idea of “one thing looking like another thing”, will realize that a helical shape does not a lifeform make.  It’s an excellent attempt to garner attention for a moderately interesting (if extremely specific) set of calculations, but that’s all.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/new-space-research-extraterrestrial-life-may-not-be-carbonbased.html

Breeding Breakthrough Helps Sushi Baron Create Sustainable Tuna

July 7 (Bloomberg) — Hagen Stehr was at home in Adelaide, Australia, on March 12 when his company’s chief scientist called with news that their bet of about $48 million on the breeding of southern bluefin tuna in captivity — a feat never accomplished before — might finally pay off.

“Big fella, you better come back,” scientist Morten Deichmann said to the 6-foot-1-inch Stehr.

Stehr, chairman of Port Lincoln, Australia-based Clean Seas Tuna Ltd., rushed more than 500 kilometers (311 miles) to his company’s fish hatchery outside Arno Bay in southern Australia. With tears in his eyes, he pushed his Toyota Land Cruiser to its top speed of 180 kilometers an hour as he raced to see the fertilized eggs for himself. As the owner of a fishing fleet during the past four decades, Stehr had helped empty the seas of the bluefin tuna used in sushi restaurants from New York to Tokyo. Now, at age 67, he believed he was on the verge of saving the tuna — and the industry that made him rich — from the threat of extinction.

“Everyone thought I was a bloody lunatic,” says the suntanned Stehr, in jeans and a checked shirt from the iconic line of boots and outdoor clothing named for R.M. Williams, an Australian bushman. “Nobody in the world had ever done this. We’ve created a sustainable fishing industry for years ahead.”

The majestic bluefin, a metallic-blue-and-silver fish, is prized by sushi lovers in Japan, the U.S. and Europe for the rich taste and creamy texture of its meat. In their zeal to feed those palates, fishermen have almost wiped out the two species of bluefin — northern and southern — while also threatening the yellowfin and bigeye tuna.

Nothing Left to Fish

The eastern Atlantic bluefin, a northern variety found in the Mediterranean Sea, will probably vanish within 10 years, says a study by marine scientist Brian MacKenzie at the National Institute of Aquatic Resources in Charlottenlund, Denmark.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=amANLM42LmeY