From Lisa Lossong
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Random Screen Grabs - June 18, 2011
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2 Unusual Traits Blended in Germany’s E. Coli Strain
The E. coli bacteria that killed dozens of people in Germany over the past month have a highly unusual combination of two traits and that may be what made the outbreak among the deadliest in recent history, scientists there are reporting. One trait was a toxin, called Shiga, that causes severe illness, including bloody diarrhea and, in some patients, kidney failure . The other is the ability of this strain to gather on the surface of an intestinal wall in a dense pattern that looks like a stack of bricks, possibly enhancing the bacteria’s ability to pump the toxin into the body. With the two traits combined in one strain of E. coli bacteria, “now they are highly virulent,” said Dr. Matthew K. Waldor, an infectious-disease expert at Harvard Medical School who was not connected with the new research. The new findings, by a team led by Helge Karch of the University of Münster, are being published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases. They...
An Engineering Feat by Birds That Doubles as Home for a Brood
I live in a nice clapboard house and work in a gleaming steel-and-glass skyscraper, but after reading “ Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer and Build ” I feel cheated. I’ll never get to enjoy the comforts of the nest of a long-tailed tit. As Peter Goodfellow, the book’s author, points out, the dome-shaped nest is one of the most beautiful and skillful constructions in the animal kingdom. The average one contains a couple of hundred sprigs of moss and several thousand lichen flakes, woven together with purloined spider silk and lined with feathers. A nice place for a nap, if you are six inches long. “It’s an amazing creation,” Mr. Goodfellow, who has had the pleasure of watching long-tailed tits nest in his garden in Plymouth, England, said in a telephone interview. “What’s doubly astonishing is that they use it just once.” Mr. Goodfellow is a retired teacher of English language and literature and a lifelo...
New web naming rules to change Internet browsing - CNN.com
The change could mean a rush to register new domain names -- especially in the porn industry. (CNN) -- Coming soon to a website near you: dot-anything A group charged with overseeing the development of the Internet voted Monday to relax the rules on website naming conventions -- potentially triggering a virtual domain name gold rush to rival the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. At a meeting in Singapore, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- also known by its acronym ICANN -- approved the change to allow domain names using any combination of letters and numbers, including non-Latin characters. "ICANN has opened the Internet's naming system to unleash the global human imagination," said Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN. "We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind." Full article at cnn.com Posted via email from Moments of Awareness