The Illustrated Man: How LED Tattoos Could Make Your Skin a Screen

• By Charlie Sorrel from Wired Magazine
  

The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.
New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.

These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chips to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example.

Chips are already used inside bodies, most notably the tiny RFID tags injected into pets. But the flexible nature of these “tattooed” circuits means they can move elastically with the body, sitting in places that a rigid circuit board couldn’t.

The first displays are sure to be primitive, but likely very useful for the patients that receive them. You won’t be getting the full-color, hi-res images that come with ink, but functional displays. This doesn’t mean that the commercial and artistic possibilities are being ignored. Philips, the electronics giant, is exploring some rather sexual uses:

It’s certainly rather creepy, but we’re sure that the inevitable next stage of playing adult movie clips on your partner’s back will be appealing to some. We, of course, are considering the geekier side of this tech. GPS, with a map readout on the back of the wrist would certainly be useful, as would chips that cover your eyeballs and can darken down when the sun is shining too bright.

And a full-body display will eventually be used for advertising. Combine this with bioluminescent ink, for example, and you could turn yourself into a small, walking version of Times Square. At least, unlike a real tattoo, you can switch this one off.

In fact, if you start to imagine the possible uses, they seems almost endless. Just like the stories that play across the body of the Illustrated Man.

Texas accidentally 'bans' straight-marriage

Way to go Texas! As always, the great state of Texas leads the way in ill-advised notions (George W Bush as Governor, thanks again for that one, cowboys) and irrational prejudices, on top of their long run at leading the nation in executions! Hee Haw!

Nov. 24, 1974: Humanity, Meet Lucy. She’s Your Mom

• By Brandon Keim

1974: Paleonanthropologist Don Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray discover the skeleton of Lucy, the first recognizably human member of the primate family tree.
One morning toward the end of his second field season in Hadar, Ethiopia, Johanson decided to put his paperwork away and go bone-hunting with Gray. After several fruitless hours, they stopped in a gully that had been searched twice before, yielding nothing.
This time, Johanson noticed a fragment of arm bone. Near it were pieces of ribs, legbones, vertebrae and skull — all, amazingly, from the same skeleton. Thus was born specimen AL 288-1, whom the world would eventually know as Lucy.
Johanson’s team found hundreds of fragments, assembling them into the skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis who lived 3.2 million years ago and stood 3½ feet tall, with an emphasis on stood. Though Lucy’s long fingers and toes hinted at the arboreal origins of humanity’s ancestors, her pelvis and knees were clearly suited for walking on the ground.
Scientists hailed A. Afarensis as the oldest human primate. To the public, Lucy was the mother of man.
“Lucy captivated people of all ages in a way I don’t remember before her. She was a game-changer in every respect. For much of the public, she brought human evolution into view for the first time,” said William Jungers, a Stony Brook University paleoanthropologist. “Anyone with even a remote interest in human evolution had not just a tooth or a skull to think about, but an entire body.”

More than 40 percent of Lucy’s skeleton was recovered, a remarkable amount in a field accustomed to drawing species-wide conclusions from bone fragments that could fit in the palm of a hand. Even today, Lucy’s one-of-a-kind completeness makes her extraordinarily valuable as a reference frame for other hominid fossils, from 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus to the Indonesian hobbits who died out just 13,000 years ago. “Lucy is more relevant than ever now,” said Jungers. “We can compare so many different body parts to hers, and get a sense from her of what’s primitive” and what’s new.
On a cultural level, the leading role played by Ethiopian scientists in excavating and subsequently studying Lucy signaled a shift in the world of anthropology, said Rick Potts, a Smithsonian Institution paleoanthropologist. “It wasn’t just a matter of an American researcher going into some other country and claiming the fame,” said Potts. “Since then, there’s been a great movement towards cooperation.” Humanity’s heritage was shared.
But the greatest cultural effect was among the public. Paleoanthropology had been a dry and esoteric field, but Lucy — named after the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky, With Diamonds,” which was on heavy rotation at camp in Hadar — wasn’t just another skeleton. She was an individual who touched their imaginations, even their hearts. Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, written by Johanson and Maitland Edey, became an international bestseller, kicking off what sometimes seems like a never-ending parade of books and documentaries about humanity’s origins.
Naming skeletons is now de rigueur among paleoanthropologists, but it’s hard to imagine any finding having as profound an effect as Lucy. It’s not, however, hard to imagine the discovery of earlier human ancestors.
Lucy is now considered “rather more humanlike” than originally thought, with many as-yet-unidentified steps linking her to the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, said Arizona State University paleoanthropologist William Kimbel, who analyzed Lucy’s bones as a student and continues to gather A. afarensis fossils in Ethiopia.
In October, researchers described Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi, a hominid who predates Lucy by more than a million years. It’s not yet clear whether Ardi was a member or an offshoot of the lineage that led to Lucy and ultimately humans. But if not Ardi, then some other fossil will almost certainly take Lucy’s place as the oldest hominid.
“Lucy once represented the beginning of the human story. Now she’s only halfway through it,” said Potts. This, of course, is the nature of science. “In August, I was on a panel with Johanson. He was asked how he felt about Lucy being supplanted. He said, ‘Lucy likes having ancestors.’”
Source: Various
Images: 1) Detail from Lucy’s World, with Lucy in the center holding a child/Viktor Deak and Reuben Negron
2) Wikipedia
Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.
See Also:

• Lucy 2.0: Famous Fossil Hominid Goes Digital
• Nov. 24, 1903: Starting Your Car Gets a Bit Easier
• June 26, 1974: Supermarket Scanner Rings Up Historic Pack of Gum
• Dec. 19, 1974: Altair 8800 Kits Go on Sale

Water On The Moon: LCROSS Kicks Ice!

• By Brian McLaughlin

Image From NASA/LCROSS

Is there water on the Moon?  The NASA LCROSS mission has determined the answer to be a resounding YES! GeekDad has covered the LCROSS mission with an article prior to the LCROSS launch by Lonnie Morgan, a pair of articles on viewing what was hoped to be a visible plume from the impact by Dana Bostic and myself, and finally a follow-up to the impact about the process of data analysis and waiting for results.  If you have missed all the coverage, the LCROSS mission impacted a spent Centaur booster into the Moon and captured data from the impact plume with the goal of finding deposits of frozen water.  Today, the LCROSS team released their preliminary findings:

The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.

Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.

NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus c[r]ater near the moon’s south pole.

Congratulations to the entire LCROSS team!

7 Diseases That Big, Juicy Steaks Could Give You

7 Diseases That Big, Juicy Steaks Could Give You
By Sara Novak, Planet Green. Posted November 5, 2009. on Alternet.org 

We know meat isn't necessarily the most healthy dietary choice; it could also be a fatal one.

More and more people are passing on meat for a wide variety of reasons. For starters, it reduces your impact on the planet. Some simply can't bare the despicable factory farming industry in this country. And the third weighing issue on the minds of the more than 2.8 percent of the U.S. population that considers themselves vegetarian, are health issues. And studies show that there are plenty of them.
Sicknesses Associated With Eating Meat

1. Prostate Cancer

According to a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology, researchers examined the dietary habits of 175,313 middle-aged men and followed them for nine years. They discovered that men who ate a diet heavy in red meat and processed meats were diagnosed with prostate cancer more often than men who ate little meat. "HCAs, a family of mutagenic compounds, are produced during the cooking process of many animal products, including chicken, beef, pork, and fish," the article said. And this is not reserved for a well done steak. The mutagens form when meat is cooked at a normal level and it is present in grilling, frying, or broiling. It appears to grow worse as the meat is cooked longer. In the end, the consumption of meat increased the risk of prostate cancer by 12 percent.

2. Heart Disease

More than 864,480 Americans died of heart disease in 2005, according to the American Heart Association. And according to a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a teaching hospital for Harvard), heart disease is directly related to meat consumption. The study involved 617,119 men and women who were 50 to 71 years old at the start of the study. At the beginning of the study, patients filled out diet information surveys and 10 years later deaths from cardiovascular disease were noted.
Results of the Study:

"Compared to people in the lowest levels of red meat consumption (average 0.32 ounces per 1000 calories), men with the highest levels of red meat consumption (average 2.39 ounces per 1000 calories) experienced a 27 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

For women with the highest levels of red meat consumption (average 2.32 ounces per 1000 calories) the results were even more dramatic. They experienced a 50 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease."

3. Osteoporosis

A group of studies done at the Cornell-China-Oxford Project on Nutrition Health and Environment, by nutritional biochemist T. Colin Campbell and his colleagues, links bone density with meat consumption. The less meat that you eat the less you'll experience a loss in bone density as you age. Osteoporosis is a reduction in bone density that occurs as we age and in turn causes bone fractures and breaks in older individuals. The disease impacts 25 million Americans, 80 percent of whom are women. According to Campbell, the study is a great explanation for why Americans, who include more calcium in their diets than Asian cultures, have five times the rate of osteoporosis compared with many Chinese and other Asians. Our much larger meat consumption rate is working against us.

4. Kidney Stones

Kidney stones are deposits that form in your kidneys in varying sizes. They are a common problem, but can be super painful. Kidney stones range in size from that of a grain of sand to the size of a marble or larger. According to Physicians Desktop Reference, foods that are high in protein, such as meat could, "encourage the formation of kidney stones."

5. Food-borne Illnesses

Food-borne illnesses have been swirling through the news all year long and it hasn't been pretty. The New York Times wrote that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, poultry is the number one source of food-borne illness. It doesn't matter how much antibiotics they pump into an abused chicken population because even still up to 60 percent of chickens sold at the supermarket are infected with live salmonella bacteria.

6. Pancreatic Cancer

High intake of dietary fats from red meat and dairy products is associated with a higher risk of pancreatic cancer, according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

"[W]e observed positive associations between pancreatic cancer and intakes of total, saturated, and monounsaturated fat overall, particularly from red meat and dairy food sources," the authors write. "Altogether, these results suggest a role for animal fat in pancreatic carcinogenesis."

7. Type 2 Diabetes in Women

A study done on women by the American Diabetes Association, found that there was a positive relationship between meat consumption and instances of Type 2 Diabetes. The study documented 1,558 recorded cases of Type 2 diabetes. After adjusting for age, BMI, total energy intake, exercise, alcohol intake, cigarette smoking, and family history of diabetes, "our data indicates that higher consumption of total red meat, especially various processed meats, may increase risk of developing Type 2 diabetes in women."
 

October 30, 2009 - New York Times

Swine Flu Hit Millions in Spring, Agency Says

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

There were 1.8 million to 5.7 million cases of swine flu in the country during the epidemic’s first spring wave, according to a new estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Thursday.
From 9,000 to 21,000 people were hospitalized as a result, and up to 800 died from April to July, when it largely faded out, according to the estimates, which were conducted by the C.D.C. and the Harvard School of Public Health and published online in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
The agency has previously refused to be more specific than to say there were “more than a million” cases. About 44,000 cases during that time were laboratory confirmed, with 5,000 hospitalizations and 302 deaths.
The agency has been working for months on a model that took into account the fact that most flu cases were not tested by doctors and that some people were hospitalized for conditions exacerbated by the flu without the flu ever having been diagnosed.
Also on Thursday, federal officials said nearly 25 million doses of swine flu vaccine were now available. That is enough so they expect many states and cities to hold vaccination clinics as early as this weekend.
“We aren’t where we want to be, but are seeing forward progress,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of immunization and respiratory disease for the disease control agency, said at a news conference.
Many Americans are frustrated because their private doctors have no vaccine and local public health clinics have canceled vaccination days because of the shortages.
Also, many parents of children who have the flu are similarly frustrated because they cannot find the antiviral Tamiflu in pediatric doses, and especially in liquid forms.
Dr. Schuchat said those shortages appeared to be local and spotty. About 300,000 courses of liquid Tamiflu were sent from the national stockpile to the states on Oct. 1 in anticipation of shortages, she said. Her agency is trying to help states move them to where they are needed.
Dr. Schuchat reassured parents who had been given children’s Tamiflu capsules that they could safely open them and mix the powder with chocolate syrup. And, she said, some pharmacy chains were opening adult capsules and mixing them with sweet syrup to make pediatric doses. She warned parents not to try doing that themselves, for fear of miscalculating and giving a child too much or too little.
Also, preliminary results from a study by Yale medical school researchers showed that babies born to women who got flu shots during pregnancy were hospitalized less often than babies whose mothers did not.
The study, which is still under way and followed 387 babies hospitalized at Yale-New Haven Hospital, was presented at a medical conference in Philadelphia.
Babies younger than six months are at serious risk if they catch flu but are still too young for flu shots, so doctors try to protect them by vaccinating their parents and siblings.
Vaccinating mothers was 89 percent effective in preventing hospitalization of infants that young, said the lead researcher, Dr. Marietta Vázquez.
At the same conference, that of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, researchers presented tantalizing preliminary evidence that statins — cholesterol-fighting drugs like Lipitor and Zocor — might help save people at risk of dying from the flu.
Statins reduce inflammation, as well as cholesterol, and much of the lung damage in life-threatening flu infections is caused by the “cytokine storm,” the inflammatory overreaction of the body’s immune system to invasion by the virus.
The study, paid for by the disease control agency, followed 2,800 people hospitalized in many states for regular flu in previous years. Those who were already on statins, presumably for heart problems, were half as likely to die in the next month as those who were not.