chikungunya

We probably have climate change to "thank" for the spread of this latest tropical disease.  I wonder what else is lurking in the jungle?  Oh boy, we are going to be living in an area (south Texas) that is expected to be inundated with this one.  Duck and cover!

CHIKUNGUNYA, A HIGHLY INFECTIOUS DISEASE, MAY SOON ARRIVE IN THE U.S.

Al-Jazeera America

Asian tiger mosquito

When Clare Rourke woke up one morning March of last year with a sore toe, she didn’t worry too much about it. She, her husband and their three daughters were living in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, for a few months as part of a family year abroad. She and her husband had traveled widely — through India, the Middle East and South America — and had never been seriously ill. And they took necessary precautions, making sure everyone in the family received the recommended vaccinations.

But by the middle of that day, Rourke was sicker than she had ever been before. “I hurt in so many places — my feet, hand, wrists, ankles, elbows, knees,” she says. “I actually remember thinking that I just might die.” Her joints were so swollen, hot and painful that she couldn’t rest her elbows on the bed. Her temperature rose to 104 degrees. “I felt like something was attacking me and I was seriously losing the fight,” she says. That night, two of her daughters also became achy and feverish, and within a few days, all three had rashes on their hands, legs and arms. They were infected with chikungunya, a virus originally from Central Africa.

The virus, transmitted by mosquito bites, was rampaging through Yogyakarta — part of an outbreak that has stretched across the Indian Ocean, India and Southeast Asia since 2005. Now it is roaring through the Western Hemisphere. In December 2013, the first locally transmitted case of chikungunya in the Americas was identified on the Caribbean island of St. Martin. As of mid-April, more than 25,000 cases had been reported across the region, from the Dominican Republic to French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America.

Public health officials suspect the virus may already be in Puerto Rico, and they predict it will make the leap to the continental United States within months. “There’s nothing to stop this outbreak from continuing to spread,” says Lyle Petersen, director of the division of vector-borne diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infections are likely to escalate this summer, when the Caribbean rainy season sets in and mosquito populations climb. Chikungunya seems poised to join a handful of tropical diseases — including dengue, Chagas’ disease and West Nile — that are spreading across the southern United States.

The good news is that the initial symptoms — sudden fever, rash, headache and aching joints — generally clear up within a week or two, and the disease is rarely fatal. So far in the Caribbean outbreak, six people have died from it.  

But there is no vaccine and no treatment. And as Rourke found out, many of those infected suffer from severe joint pain long after the initial illness. In the Makonde language of East Africa, chikungunya means “that which bends up,” and that’s exactly what Rourke did for months, hobbling about her house and leaning on furniture to support her. Even maximum doses of painkillers like ibuprofen made little difference. A neighbor, seeing her limp down the street, gave her a local remedy, a syrupy medicine, but that didn’t help either. Finally, steroids brought some relief.

It’s not known what percentage of people infected with the virus develop long-lasting joint pain. In an outbreak in 2005 and 2006 on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, about one-third of the population was infected, giving researchers a good opportunity to study the disease. Local physicians working with researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris followed one set of chikungunya patients who had been sick enough to be sent to the hospital, finding that about 60 percent still had significant arthritic pain three years later. People over the age of 35 and those with diabetes were more likely to be affected. “It’s going to make you feel awful for a long time,” says Kristy Murray, an infectious-disease specialist and associate vice chair for research at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. “It’s really debilitating.”

Read the rest here.

The Week in Science

It's hard to keep up with the world of science. Hey, what's new with the Bible these days? Same old shit?  

Beards: http://bit.ly/1haZaFD

Sexual organs: http://bit.ly/1eOQEC5
New moon: http://bit.ly/1inhVu9
Time lapse of the eclipse: http://bit.ly/1mfdMJu
Stem cells: http://bit.ly/Qp5wvH
Esophagus: http://bit.ly/1nfSKNG
Graphene: http://bit.ly/1j4ABNb
Blood: http://bit.ly/1noPih1

Herbivore ancestor: http://bit.ly/1i07et5

Hep C: http://bit.ly/1gwegGl
Depression: http://bit.ly/1pht70V
Video of the meteorite explosion: http://bit.ly/1mmN6Xi
Exoplanet: http://bit.ly/1r35BQN
Watch the Falcon 9 launch: http://bit.ly/1jkGIf6
Hubble image: http://bit.ly/1mlB8zD
Sperm RNA: http://bit.ly/1m6i6gK

Jesus!

So they "celebrate" Easter with brightly colored eggs and rabbits?

IF this person named Jesus ever existed in the first place, which is doubtful.  

CBD research

What is CBD?  Well, in addition to "Central Business District" CBD is the shorthand term given to Cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive compound found in cannabis.  CBD is showing great promise in the limited medical trials conducted so far, and anecdotally.

Just look at the some of the effects achieved thus far, most still anecdotally.  

Some Potential Health Benefits of CBD:

• CBD has been found to be anti-spasmodic and antiepileptic, which could be beneficial for those who suffer from epilepsy, Dravet's Syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), ALS, among others.
• At high doses (more than several hundred mg) CBD can be a sedative, and also helps insomniacs stay asleep longer. In low doses, CBD has been found to be alerting.
• CBD is effective as an anti-inflammatory, anti-anxiety (anxiolytic) and relieving for nausea (anti-emetic)
• CBD is a powerful pain reliever (analgesic)
• CBD has been shown to inhibit cancer cell growth (anti-carcinogenic).
• CBD helps the immune system function more efficiently.
• CBD is a neuro-protectant and a powerful antioxidant. It has applications in treatment for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cerebral ischemia as well as brain and nerve damage from strokes.
• CBD is an anti-psychotic and recent research has indicated it is effective in treatment of schizophrenia.
• CBD could be effective in easing symptoms of a wide range of difficult-to-control conditions, including: rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, alcoholism, PTSD, epilepsy, MS, antibiotic-resistant infections and neurological disorders, to name a few.
• CBD as been found to be effective in treating gastrointestinal disorders like Irritable Bowel Disorder (IBD), Crohn's Disease, or Ulcerative Colitis.

There is finally some research underway on CBD.  Read up on a lot of it here.

CBD - it's about being healthy, not high.  They say that, as a rule, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.  But there is an exception to every rule, except that one.

Lawrence Lessig

Will you join the fight for campaign finance reform?  Lawrence Lessig gives an important TED talk.

Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system.

graphene miracle

I have always had a (naive?) feeling that technology would ultimately "save" us from destroying ourselves and/or the planet.  The product in the article below - graphene - looks like to be a part of that puzzle.  That, and the rapidly decreasing prices of solar and wind power.  We probably have all the technology and answers we need.  Just wrestling them past the current special interests who "run" things is the real challenge.

Bend It, Charge It, Dunk It: Graphene, the Material of Tomorrow

by Nick Bilton, the New York Times

Graphene transistors visible on a piece of flexible plastic. Graphene is not only the hardest material in the world, but also one of the most pliable.

Graphene is the strongest, thinnest material known to exist. A form of carbon, it can conduct electricity and heat better than anything else. And get ready for this: It is not only the hardest material in the world, but also one of the most pliable.

Only a single atom thick, it has been called the wonder material.

Graphene could change the electronics industry, ushering in flexible devices, supercharged quantum computers, electronic clothing and computers that can interface with the cells in your body.

While the material was discovered a decade ago, it started to gain attention in 2010 when two physicists at the University of Manchester were awarded the Nobel Prize for their experiments with it. More recently, researchers have zeroed in on how to commercially produce graphene.

The American Chemical Society said in 2012 that graphene was discovered to be 200 times stronger than steel and so thin that a single ounce of it could cover 28 football fields. Chinese scientists have created a graphene aerogel, an ultralight material derived from a gel, that is one-seventh the weight of air. A cubic inch of the material could balance on one blade of grass.

“Graphene is one of the few materials in the world that is transparent, conductive and flexible — all at the same time,” said Dr. Aravind Vijayaraghavan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester. “All of these properties together are extremely rare to find in one material.”

So what do you do with graphene? Physicists and researchers say that we will soon be able to make electronics that are thinner, faster and cheaper than anything based on silicon, with the option of making them clear and flexible. Long-lasting batteries that can be submerged in water are another possibility.

In 2011, researchers at Northwestern University built a battery that incorporated graphene and silicon, which the university said could lead to a cellphone that “stayed charged for more than a week and recharged in just 15 minutes.” In 2012, the American Chemical Society said that advancements in graphene were leading to touch-screen electronics that “could make cellphones as thin as a piece of paper and foldable enough to slip into a pocket.”

Dr. Vijayaraghavan is building an array of sensors out of graphene — including gas sensors, biosensors and light sensors — that are far smaller than what has come before.

And last week, researchers at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, working with Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, said that Samsung had figured out how to create high-quality graphene on silicon wafers, which could be used for the production of graphene transistors. Samsung said in a statement that these advancements meant it could start making “flexible displays, wearables and other next-generation electronic devices.”

Sebastian Anthony, a reporter at Extreme Tech, said that Samsung’s breakthrough could end up being the “holy grail of commercial graphene production.”

Samsung is not the only company working to develop graphene. Researchers at IBM, Nokia and SanDisk have been experimenting with the material to create sensors, transistors and memory storage.

When these electronics finally hit store shelves, they could look and feel like nothing we’ve ever seen.

James Hone, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, said research in his lab led to the discovery that graphene could stretch by 20 percent while still remaining able to conduct electricity. “You know what else you can stretch by 20 percent? Rubber,” he said. “In comparison, silicon, which is in today’s electronics, can only stretch by 1 percent before it cracks.”

He continued: “That’s just one of the crazy things about this material — there’s really nothing else quite like it.”

The real kicker? Graphene is inexpensive.

If you think of something in today’s electronics industry, it can most likely be made better, smaller and cheaper with graphene.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley made graphene speakers last year that delivered sound at quality equal to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones. And they were much smaller.

Another fascinating aspect of graphene is its ability to be submerged in liquids without oxidizing, unlike other conductive materials.

As a result, Dr. Vijayaraghavan said, graphene research is leading to experiments where electronics can integrate with biological systems. In other words, you could have a graphene gadget implanted in you that could read your nervous system or talk to your cells.

(A video on graphene is here.  They won't let me embed it.)

But while researchers believe graphene will be used in next-generation gadgets, there are entire industries that build electronics using traditional silicon chips and transistors, and they could be slow to adopt graphene counterparts.

If that is the case, graphene might end up being used in other industries before it becomes part of electronics. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid for the development of a graphene-based condom that is thin, light and impenetrable. Carmakers are exploring building electronic cars with bodies made of graphene that are not only protective, but act as solar panels that charge the car’s battery. Airline makers also hope to build planes out of graphene.

If all that isn’t enough, an international team of researchers based at M.I.T. has performed tests that could lead to the creation of quantum computers, which would be a big market of computing in the future.

So forget plastics. There’s a great future in graphene. Think about it.

Original.

Looks like about the only thing that graphene cannot do is wipe your ass and change the babies' diaper.  Hey, wait a minute!!