Ladywriter

TMI

well, when a mutie shark comes up and bites somebody in the ass ala a sci fi b movie....

If Kizaru if light and Teach is darkness.... unfortunately even light can't escape a black hole. It begs the question who will/can fight/defeat Teach if that fat bastard shows up. I almost expect him to because of the summons the Shichibukai got and he wants to prove himself in front of the others as the strongest. He also intends to kill Whitebeard and take his place. The Bannaro Island fight that triggered this event we're soon going to see, could it be that Teach is really going to tear up that part of the Grand Line and Red Line ie the holy city above the archipeligo where Ace will face his execution? Maybe some rampaging will collapse part of the red line filling in the hole and blocking off the New World to anymore new guys. I don't think a logia type has a chance against Teach primarialy because they arent used to taking blows BUT I do think that Smokers seas stone based weapon could put a hurt on Teach. Makes me wonder if at some point Ussop will develop seastone shot to weaken or negate the powers of DF users they're fighting......

go go cali...

hmmm... up and down the stairs 20 to 40 times a day push mowing a couple acres a week spring/ summer/ fall diggin my garden Shoveling the godamn driveway in winter all the fun squatting dusting and cleaning anything below 2 feet high; stretches to vacuum the walls and cealing, wash the walls celing cupboards... chasing wild animals out of the yard the dog is too blind to see... and I throw pilates and tai chi in there when I'm not getting enuff exercise.

thats messed up. it looks different from different angels.

same shit different chapter.

maybe we'll get a real fight.... I hope for the best but expect the usual

These fights r gettin dangerous How many scary Kuma copies are runnin around there? Dino DF awesomeeeeeee

I could prolly give up most meat as long as I had Mushrooms Funk, do they still do the farmers market in front of Wegmans?

OMG the pet love thing!!!!!!!!! Love it Love it Love it Things like this prove to me that animals are capable of experiencing emotions reserved for humans and that they do have an extensive long term memory.

It's just common sense not to put chemicals in yer body while preggers

I haven't watched this in a while. I'll have to check out a few eps.

I think he means how it is that chicken legs (dark meat) is cheaper then chicken breast (the white meat). 70% ground beef is cheaper n greasier then 90% and so on. Unhealthy/ less healthy processed foods loaded up with sodium, bad carbs, sugar, fat, other preservatives are generally cheaper then fresh cuts of meat. Fruits and vegi prices are high unless yer buying the locally grown stuff. A lot of fruit/veg's are irradiated before packaging so if you can buy the locally grown stuff yer better off.

yer perfect pet X'D

I'll look into this for ya. Its pathetic a bag of greasy chips cost less then a bag of apples

yeah SB's bible thumping sux but they do have good vids. 300 mph winds.. major suckage. The sick part is the ppl who survive something like that are all the assholes in the DUMB's I want a bomb shelter

link Variety of mutations keep brain from forming proper connections WASHINGTON - Harvard researchers have discovered half a dozen new genes involved in autism that suggest the disorder strikes in a brain that can't properly form new connections.The findings also may help explain why intense education programs do help some autistic children — because certain genes that respond to experience weren't missing, they were just stuck in the "off" position. "The circuits are there but you have to give it an extra push," said Dr. Gary Goldstein of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, which wasn't involved in the gene hunt but is well-known for its autism behavioral therapy. The genetics suggest that "what we're doing makes sense when we work with these little kids — and work and work and work — and suddenly get through," he said. But the study's bigger message is that autism is too strikingly individual to envision an easy gene test for it. Instead, patients are turning out to have a wide variety, almost a custom set, of gene defects. "Almost every kid with autism has their own particular cause of it," said Dr. Christopher Walsh, chief of genetics at Children's Hospital Boston, who led the research published in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Autism spectrum disorders include a range of poorly understood brain conditions, from the mild Asperger's syndrome to more severe autism characterized by poor social interaction, impaired communication and repetitious behaviors. It's clear that genes play a big role in autism, from studies of twins and families with multiple affected children. But so far, the genetic cause is known for only about 15 percent of autism cases, Walsh said. Large chunks of missing DNA So Walsh's team took a new tack. They turned to the Middle East, a part of the world with large families and a tendency for cousins to marry, characteristics that increase the odds of finding rare genes. They recruited 88 families with cousin marriages and a high incidence of autism, from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. They compared the DNA of family members to search for what are called recessive mutations — where mom and dad can be healthy carriers of a gene defect but a child who inherits that defect from both parents gets sick. In some of the families, they found large chunks of missing DNA regions that followed that recessive rule. The missing regions varied among families, but they affected at least six genes that play a role in autism. Here's why this matters: All the genes seem to be part of a network involved in a basic foundation of learning — how neurons respond to new experiences by forming connections between each other, called synapses. In the first year or two of life — when autism symptoms appear — synapses rapidly form and mature, and unnecessary ones are "pruned" back. In other words, a baby's brain is literally being shaped by its first experiences so that it is structurally able to perform learning and other functions of later life. Troubles sculpting the brain "This paper points to problems specifically in the way that experience sculpts the developing brain," explained Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund the work. Some earlier research had pointed to the same underlying problem, so these newly found genes "join a growing list to suggest that autism is a synaptic disorder," he said. If that sounds discouraging, here's the good news: The missing DNA didn't always translate into missing genes. Instead what usually was missing were the on/off switches for these autism-related genes. Essentially, some genes were asleep instead of doing their synapse work. "I find that hopeful" because "there are ways that are being discovered to activate genes," Walsh said. "This might be an unanticipated way of developing therapies in the long term for autism: Identifying these kids where all the right genes are present, just not turned on in the right way." At Kennedy Krieger, Goldstein thinks the work may provide a gene-level explanation for why some children already are helped by intense therapy. "We have trouble getting through to these children, but with repeated stimulation we can do it," he said. "These are circuits that have an ability not so much to recover but to work around the problem.

Physical evidence ties southernmost continent to long-disappeared Rodinia link updated 6:44 p.m. ET, Mon., July. 28, 2008 A solitary chunk of granite, small enough to heft in one hand, is key evidence that Australia and parts of Antarctica were once attached to North America, a new study suggests. The Earth's continents are thought to have collided to become supercontinents and broken apart again several times in Earth's 4.5 billion year history. The most recent supercontinent was Pangaea, which began to break apart about 200 million years ago; the landmasses that comprised Pangaea eventually wandered into the current configuration of continents. Several supercontinents predating Pangaea have been proposed by geologists, including one dubbed Rodinia that existed about 1.1 billion years ago. For several decades, researchers have theorized that part of the ancient supercontinent Rodinia broke away from what is now the southwestern United States around 800 million to 600 million years ago, eventually drifting southward to become eastern Antarctica and Australia. The idea is known as the southwestern United States to East Antarctica (SWEAT) hypothesis. But there was little physical evidence that could tie the southernmost continent to the long-disappeared Rodinia. Until scientists stumbled upon this rock, that is. Granite rock belt John Goodge of the University of Minnesota-Duluth and his team were searching in Antarctica's Transantarctic Mountains for rocks carried along by ice rivers that could provide clues to the composition of the underlying crust of Antarctica, which in most places is buried under 2 miles of ice. One rock, found atop the so-called Nimrod Glacier, was later determined to be a very specific form of granite with what Goodge describes as having "a particular type of coarse-grained texture." Chemical tests run on the rock later revealed that it has a chemistry "very similar to a unique belt of igneous rocks in North America" that stretch from California through New Mexico to Kansas, Illinois and eventually New Brunswick and Newfoundland in Canada, Goodge said. This belt of rock was a part of what is called Laurentia, thought by some geologists to be the core of Rodinia. The belt stops suddenly at its western margin, leading geologists to suspect that some piece of crust had rifted away from what is now the West Coast of the United States. "It just ends right where that ancient rift margin is," Goodge said. "And these rocks are basically not found in any other part of the world." That a small chunk of this rock should turn up on a glacier high in the mountains of Antarctica is strong evidence in support of the SWEAT model, the researchers say. "There's no other explanation for how it got where we found it," Goodge said. Biological change At the time that this rift occurred, a massive change in Earth's biota, the Cambrian explosion, was also happening. "During the Cambrian explosion about 520 million years ago we started seeing this huge expansion in the diversity of life forms," Goodge said. Piecing together Rodinia helps provide a geological context in which this diversification occurred. The shifting configuration of landmasses, collisions between them, as well as erosion and the influx of chemicals into the seas may have provided the nutrients for that expanding diversity of lifeforms. "Something helped trigger that big radiation in life," Goodge said. The study, detailed in the July 11 issue of the journal Science, was funded by the National Science Foundation. koolies

article Report published after White House passed on regulating emissions updated 7:06 p.m. ET, Mon., July. 14, 2008 WASHINGTON - Government scientists detailed a rising death toll from heat waves, wildfires, disease and smog caused by global warming in an analysis the White House buried so it could avoid regulating greenhouse gases.In a 149-page document released Monday, the experts laid out for the first time the scientific case for the grave risks that global warming poses to people, and to the food, energy and water on which society depends. "Risk (to human health, society and the environment) increases with increases in both the rate and magnitude of climate change," scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency said. Global warming, they wrote, is "unequivocal" and humans are to blame for the relatively recent jump in temperatures. The document suggests that extreme weather events and diseases carried by ticks and other organisms could kill more people as temperatures rise. Allergies could worsen because climate change could produce more pollen. Smog, a leading cause of respiratory illness and lung disease, could become more severe in many parts of the country. At the same time, global warming could mean fewer illnesses and deaths due to cold. "This document inescapably, unmistakably shows that global warming pollution not only threatens human health and welfare, but it is adversely impacting human health and welfare today," said Vickie Patton, deputy general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund. "What this document demonstrates is that the imperative for action is now." No regulation, at least for now While the science pointed to a link between public health and climate change, the Bush administration has worked to discourage such a connection. To acknowledge one would compel the government to regulate greenhouse gases. The administration on Friday dismissed the scientists' findings when it made clear that the Clean Air Act was the wrong tool to control global warming pollution. Instead, the administration asked for public comment on a range of ways to reduce greenhouse gases from cars, airplanes, trains and smokestacks under the 1970 law. A better solution, the EPA said, would have Congress writing a law aimed just at global warming. Jonathan Shradar, a spokesman for EPA chief Stephen Johnson, said that while the administrator knows that "the science is clear and that climate change is a significant issue", Johnson did not want to make a "rash decision under the wrong law." "Once there is an endangerment finding, then the Clean Air Act is activated and regulation may begin," Shradar said. White House rejected e-mail In December, the White House refused to open an e-mail from the EPA that included the finding that climate change endangered public welfare. The determination was based on an earlier, and similar version of the document released Monday. At the time, the White House insisted on removing all references to the science, according to Jason Burnett, a former adviser to Johnson on climate issues. Burnett, a Democrat, has charged that Vice President Dick Cheney's office deleted portions of congressional testimony last October prepared by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that made similar assertions on the health effects of global warming. The White House contends the testimony was changed because of doubts about the science. After the release of the EPA analysis, industry representatives suggested the link between climate change and health was weak. "The question is not a scientific one. It is a legal and political question, of how much impact justifies the extraordinary use of the Clean Air Act," said Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a coalition of power companies. While no one doubts that more people die in a heat wave, the question is whether that death is "related to manmade greenhouse gas emissions," he said. keh

article MSNBC staff and news service reports updated 10:58 a.m. ET, Mon., July. 14, 2008 MOSCOW - Russian scientists are evacuating a research station built on an Arctic ice floe because the ice has melted to a fraction of its original size, a spokesman said. The North Pole-35 station, where 21 researchers and two dogs live in huts, will be taken off the floe in the western Arctic Ocean this week instead of in late August as originally planned, said Sergei Balyasnikov of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg. The research crew landed in early September on the 1.2- by 2.5-mile floe near the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. During its westward drift of more than 1,550 miles, the floe shrank to just 1,000 by 2,000 feet. "The evacuation is ahead of schedule because of global warming," Balyasnikov said. Just last April, the ice floe was long and strong enough to build an air strip in order to fly out several researchers. The nuclear-powered icebreaker Arktika will escort the research vessel Mikhail Somov to the station, which is drifting between the Franz Josef Land archipelago and the island of Novaya Zemlya in the western Arctic. The researchers are packing up their winterized huts and equipment to prepare for the ships' arrival, Balyasnikov said. Collecting data Over the last 60 years, Russia has organized dozens of stations that collect data on weather and Arctic flora and fauna. Soviet polar researchers were hailed as heroes, and the results of their journeys were once hailed as unique achievements of Communist science. Russia recently resumed the tradition of using polar research to make political points. Russia last year sent an expedition to plant a Russian flag on the seabed under the North Pole and said research indicates a massive underwater mountain range in the area, which is believed to contain huge oil and gas reserves, is part of Russia's continental shelf. The drifting research station was one of Russia's contributions to global research allied under the umbrella of the International Polar Year. Some 50,000 scientists and technical staff from more than 60 countries are jointly researching the role of the Arctic and Antarctica in shaping the climate and the earth's ecosystems. Among the projects carried out on North Pole 35 was one focusing on sea ice, which has contracted significantly in recent years during the Arctic summer. The scientists first boarded the ice floe near Wrangel Island and then traveled west across the North Pole.

article Warming, drought will make heat stress 'bigger issue,' expert says FRESNO, Calif. - Sunscreen for fruits and vegetables is being tested in Australia and Chile, and now California farmers are checking it out courtesy of a local vendor.Just like people damage their skin in the sun, produce can also get nasty burns. That's why farmers are increasingly applying sunscreen to their crops to prevent skin blistering, heat stress and blemishes. Sunspots on a Granny Smith apple can mean the difference between the lowest price for juice or the more lucrative fresh fruit market. As for nuts, last year buyers paid on average 3-cents a 1 pound more for sunscreen-protected nuts than untreated ones, said grower Ed Lagrutta as stood in the bed of his Chevy Silverado inspecting a San Joaquin Valley walnut grove in its second year of sunscreen tests. With yields topping 2,000 pounds an acre, it adds up, he said. "With the costs of production going up, growers are looking to increase their margins wherever they can," said Lagrutta, an adviser for Western Farm Services who farms 20 acres and runs tests on hundreds more. Climate change and drought in Australia and California's Central Valley have meant challenging growing conditions for farmers that are affecting the quality, yields and price of produce. Sunscreens alleviate at least one worry for farmers, who lose money with each fruit or vegetable that develops sun damage. "I spend a lot of time studying drought," said Eric Wood, Ph.D., a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University and an expert on hydrology and climate change. "Under climate change, heat stress will become a bigger issue for plants, especially when it creates new heat-released disease. Corn under stress is reflected in smaller ears and lower yields." Plants react to sun stress like humans. They perspire — a process called transpiration — which means the more temperatures rise, the more water they need. As drought grips several of the world's key growing regions, scientists are looking at ways to conserve by helping plants use less. SPF 45 Liquefied clay has been used for years, but now a California company is finding positive results with an SPF 45 product made of multicrystaline calcium carbonate crystals that are engineered to specifically deflect ultraviolet and infrared light from the plants and trees on which it is sprayed. The product keeps out the bad light, but lets in the good photosynthesis rays that aid ripening. The sunscreen has been tested in Australia and Chile, where UV rays affect production, and is in the second year of field tests in California. Tests show its immediate impact is increasing yields by diminishing stress and heat-related defects, but officials at Purfresh in Fremont hope the product also can play a role in water and energy conservation by increasing a plant's water efficiency. "We are where Silicon Valley meets the Central Valley," said Purfresh chief executive David Cope, who left information technology after 25 years for what he describes as "clean technology." "We're using technology to address food and water availability, which affects consumer prices," he said. The company has gained attention for its ozone sanitation system for water, produce packing and cold storage stabilization. But it was its new sunscreen Purshade that lured 20 U.S. and international farm product researchers and advisers to a walnut grove near Visalia, Calif., last week. The product also is being tested on tomatoes, grapes, kiwis and lychees in Australia, said Kerrie Mackay, who works for a company that sells crop protection products in Queensland, which she says is in 140-year drought. "Sunburning is a big problem for us," she said watching Lagrutta compare the telltale yellowing on one block of walnuts with a uniformly green plot sprayed with Purfresh. "We have some of the highest UV intensity in the world. With drought and climate change, finding ways to use water more efficiently is always important to us." Winery's been using, too Amador County's Shenandoah Valley in the arid Sierra Nevada foothills is far from the temperate Napa Valley, but Dick Cooper of Cooper Vineyards has been growing 100 acres of premium wine grapes since the 1980s by using vine canopies to shade bunches. When vines transpire, they don't use the water to produce stems, leaves and fruit. In dry years like this one vine vigor is slow and exposed bunches of his pinot grigio shrivel into something resembling an olive pit, he said. For the second year, he sprayed Purshade sunscreen on several of his blocks of white grape varietals to help protect them. He says that during the crush the calcium carbonate crystals drop to the bottom of the fermentation tanks with the rest of the sediment that comes in on grapes, so taste isn't affected. "I'm not an expert on anything, but I'm always interested in trying anything," he said. "When my vines don't put up enough canopy, I like to give them a little help." I'm split on this. Hopefully it will help produce bigger better fruits but on the other hand what are the side effects for us and other organisms in the environment?

By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer In the countdown to the Beijing Olympics, NBC News' Adrienne Mong spoke with a number of people who know Beijing intimately about how their city has changed and the challenges it faces going forward. From pollution to the rapid pursuit of progress, below are a series of links where an environmentalist, a businessman, and a Fulbright scholar describe Beijing "In their own words." Environmental activist Lo Sze Ping is the Greenpeace Campaign Director in China. A Hong Kong native, he studied and lived in the U.S. for several years before moving to Beijing in 2001. Lo describes his experience in the Chinese capital, where he says people are aware of environmental issues -- not in the abstract but in the concrete day-to-day sense. He also reminds us that "that China cannot be not part of the picture" when it comes to battling for a cleaner planet." VIDEO: Greenpeace: 'The acute pollution in China is right in your face.' Coming home to change Gong Li is a Beijing native who left his homeland in 1987 after graduating from Tsinghua University (known as China’s MIT) to pursue graduate studies in the U.K. and then a career in the information technology industry in the U.S. In 2001, he finally returned to a radically changed Chinese capital and told NBC News Producer Adrienne Mong how it took him a couple of years to readjust to being home. VIDEO: Coming home to Beijing Rapid transformation Susan Brownell first came to China in 1985 to study at Beijing University, also known as Beida and described as China’s Harvard. A national level track athlete in the U.S., she joined the track team at Beida and began competing in national college competitions across China. Brownell is now an anthropologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and is back in the Chinese capital on a Fulbright fellowship. She discussed China's transformation in sports and society. VIDEO: China's transformation

Tiny tree shrew can drink you under the table Mini mammals subsist on a diet roughly equivalent to 100 percent beer The Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrew could drink the most annoying drunken fratboys under the table. A new study found that the tiny animal subsists on a diet roughly equivalent to 100 percent beer, drinking up the fermented nectar of the flower buds of the bertam palm plant. The nectar can reach up to 3.8 percent alcohol content, one of the highest alcohol concentrations ever recorded in a natural food. Though some animals, such as bats and birds and of course, humans, are known to imbibe on occasion, the tree shrews could be nature's biggest lushes. "There are other animals that do drink alcohol but not on a continuous basis," said researcher Marc-André Lachance, a microbiologist at the University of Western Ontario. "For bats and birds it would be just at the time that the plants are producing fruit. These animals are doing that around the clock and all year round. That's pretty unique." Amazingly, though the tree shrews drink like fish, they don't seem to get drunk. The researchers, led by Frank Wiens of Germany's University of Bayreuth, videotaped regular nocturnal feeding sessions and followed the movements of radio-tagged tree shrews. Though they measured blood-alcohol concentrations in the animals higher than those in humans with similarly high alcohol intake, the tree shrews showed no signs of intoxication. "They seem to have developed some type of mechanism to deal with that high level of alcohol and not get drunk," Lachance told LiveScience. "The amount of alcohol we're talking about is huge — it's several times the legal limit in most countries. So if we can figure out why these animals are able to cope with it perhaps it could be used to develop medicines to help people deal with alcohol poisoning." The discovery is particularly intriguing because the tree shrew is believed to be very similar to the last common ancestor of all living primates. The researchers hypothesize that this ancestor may have consumed alcohol at moderate or high levels, which could explain why humans have some tolerance for alcohol. In the case of the tree shrews, the animals could have developed the ability to handle high volumes of alcohol because the bertam palm was the best source of food available in their habitat. "This plant in that part of Malaysia is quite widespread," Lachance said. "It's a very spiny, very uninviting plant. The lower buds from which the alcohol comes out are very sharp. You can easily hurt yourself on them. I speak from experience." As nectar accumulates in the bertam palm's flower buds, a complex yeast community there ferments the nectar. This process happens continually year-round, so the plant offers a continuous source of food, since alcohol is energy-rich. The findings are detailed in the July 28 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. X'D

I love Onizuka. just had to share X'D