Deborah Campbell, Author at Argyll Free Press

Arabs Plan to Build Artificial Mountain to Squeeze More Rainwater

May 6, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

The United Arab Emirates is heavily investing in the construction of a rainmaking artificial mountain.

The United Arab Emirates recently announced that it plans to construct a mountain that can help the small nation have better control over the weather. While money for the project is not a problem, some scientists are skeptical about the plan.

The UAE currently has both the logistics and brain power to pull off such a feat. The Arab nation has already built an artificial island off the coast of its luxury city, Dubai, and a man-made ski hill inside the Mall of the Emirates.

But scientists are skeptical about the usefulness of an artificial mountain that could bring down more rainwater.

According to a local newspaper, the UAE’s government is currently working with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) to plan the first phase of the project. About $400,000 have been already poured into the project to see whether building a mountain could bring more moisture to the bone-dry region.

The UAE currently spends about $600,000 every year for cloud-seeding operations. Planes disperse water-retaining chemicals such as magnesium, sodium chloride, and potassium chloride into clouds in an effort to trigger rainfall.

But the state believes that the cloud-seeding would be easier and more fruitful if there was an artificial mountain around that can create clouds, which can be later seeded more efficiently.

Roelof Bruintjes, lead researcher involved in the ambitious project recently told the press that his team was currently looking for the best type of mountain to collect moisture. Scientists are especially interested in the mountain’s height and slope inclination.

“We will have a report of the first phase this summer as an initial step,”

Bruintjes said.

Nevertheless, some researchers don’t believe a man-made mountain could be rain-inducing. They argue that the mountain would need a long ridge instead of a cone. Otherwise, the air would just hover over the mountain. Plus, mountains generate rain on the upslope side, so scientists don’t expect any benefit for the lower regions.

Experts also explained that the Arab Peninsula’s dry weather is influenced by the wind patterns coming from global atmospheric circulations, which no mountain is able to change.

Skeptics also believe that taxpayer money would be better spent on a research project designed to learn why a hot and humid area surrounded by the ocean is showered by so little rainfall.

Image Source: Pixabay

Huge Voluntary Recall of Frozen Fruits and Veggies over Listeria Fears

May 5, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

A Listeria outbreak triggered a huge voluntary recall of frozen fruits and vegetables in all 50 states.

About 350 products sold under 42 separate brands were recalled at four major retailers in all 50 states over fears that they may be contaminated with Listeria. The voluntary recall came after seven people were rushed to the hospital, of whom two died.

The foods were recalled by CRF Frozen Foods, a primary frozen fruit and vegetable supplier for grocery chains like Wal-Mart, Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Jewel-Osco. The company announced that only the products that were processed at its Pasco, Wash., plant starting May 1, 2014, were recalled.

The huge recall comes after CRF Frozen Foods’ less impressive voluntary recall of 15 products last week. Reportedly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has contacted the company telling it that seven people in three states got sick after consuming its products.

CDC investigators suspect that a Listeria infection may be behind the hospitalizations. Two of the seven people died, the agency reported. The sick patients were between 56 and 86 years old, doctors said.

Listeriosis is a food-borne infection that affects people who consume products contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes bacteria. The diseases affected especially people with compromised or weak immune systems including the elderly, pregnant women, and newborns.

CRF recently apologized for the inconvenience of the latest recall and urged buyers who have in their homes the recalled products not to eat them.

The company explained that hazardous products have a Best by or Sell by date between Apr. 26, 2016 and Apr. 26, 2018.

Customers can get a refund at the stores they bought the products from or simply discard them. The 350 recalled products include frozen fruits and vegetables both organic and nonorganic including frozen potatoes, stir fry casseroles, cherries, blueberries, strawberries, onions, leeks, Italian beans, corn, carrots, broccoli, and many more.

You can check whether you should throw away a suspicious item in your freezer by checking the Food and Drug Administration’s website.

Experts caution that listeriosis is the most lethal foodborne disease. While healthy people can keep the infection in check, it usually kills one in five people if it gets into the blood stream.

Seniors aged 65 or more have a fourfold risk of getting infected than young adults while pregnant women are 10 times more likely to get sick and transmit the infection to their babies.

Image Source: Pixabay

Study Links A Sweet Tooth in Toddlers with Obesity

April 19, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

Is there a difference between toddlers who prefer sweet or savory snacks? According to a new study, there is. Those who prefer cookies over chips are at risk of experiencing weight gain, possibly even growing to an unhealthy weight.

For the study, researchers asked mothers of 209 children to have the toddler fast for one hour. Then, the child would be given a large lunch and after, a tray of snacks both sweet and salty. The children could eat as much as they wanted.

According to Julie C. Lumeng, a behavioral pediatrician and the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and a researcher in the study, “eating in the absence of hunger is associated with being overweight among older children.”

However, this is the first study that studies the link between overeating and younger children. Toddlers who preferred sweet foods after already eating a substantial meal were found to be at a greater risk of weight gain.

Researchers discovered that the children between 1 and 3 years of age who ate more desserts on a full belly and who became visibly upset when the food was removed, were also the children to experience gradual gain in body fat by the time they were 33 months old.

The team was surprised by these findings, seeing that those who preferred chips and other salty treats did not experience the same increase in body fat.

Lumeng explained that the tendency to eat even when you’re no longer hungry only becomes more of a problem with age, sometimes leading to lifelong complications regarding weight gain.

According to this study, medical researchers need to find ways to suppress this drive to eat before children turn 3 years old.

The findings are also relevant to parents because it helps them regulate food intake for healthy growth in their toddlers.

It’s easier to prevent a lifelong struggle with being overweight by making sure the child avoids the concerning treats than letting the child deal with it when he or she grows up.

Moreover, the study published in the journal Pediatrics, April edition, also shows that there’s a previously unknown connection between sweet treats and obesity, a drive to eat more that researchers should investigate further.

The team hopes to find whether or not there are ways to treat this particular compulsion, which could mean conducting a follow-up study.
Image Source: CTV News

Married Cancer Patients Fare Better Than Their Single Counterparts

April 11, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

A new study suggests that being married can be a powerful medicine in the fight against. Researchers at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California found there might be a connection between a wedding ring and a higher survival rate.

According to the report, single men diagnosed with cancer had a death rate 27 percent greater than married male patients. Meanwhile, the survival rate for single female patients was 19 percent lower than their married counterparts.

Leading research scientist Scarlett Lin Gomez said the difference were actually “quite notable,” comparable to some of the more clinical factors often associated with cancer prognosis, like types of treatment or stages of the disease.

Researchers also found that the financial advantages of marriage have almost nothing to do with health benefits, which rely solely on the emotional bonds of matrimony. Gomez said the patterns could not be fully explained by married patients having greater economic resources.

While factors like living in a higher socioeconomic status neighborhood, or having health insurance, did play a role, albeit a small one, they could not explain the greater survival rate among the married.

The study noted that the connection between marital status and cancer prognosis did not prove a cause-and-effect link.

Studies conducted over the past 10 to 15 years have found similar benefits for married cancer patients, but the reduced death rate was always attributed to the love and support a patient receives from their spouse.

But at the same time, there’s better access to insurance and a greater combined income available for people who are married. So Gomez’s team set out to see if it’s love or money that makes the married patient healthier and improves their survival chances.

For the study, researchers looked at the health records of almost 800,000 adults in California, all of whom had been diagnosed with invasive cancer between 2000 and 2009. Their medical outcome was followed through 2012.

The findings, featured in the journal Cancer, suggested that a higher financial status had little impact on a patient’s chance of beating cancer. Instead, the support and care of a spouse played a significant role in reducing stress and improve the outcome overall.

A husband or a wife can provide nourishing meals, drive you to doctor’s appointments, and make sure you take your medicine. It also helped to have someone to counsel you through the stress of cancer treatment, someone who’s there to listen to you.
Image Source: The Guardian

Could Pig Hearts Eventually Save Human Lives?

April 6, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

According to a major discovery featured in the journal Nature Communications, cardiac patients might soon be able to have pig hearts beating in their chests, in what might prove to be a significant advance in cross-species organ transplantation.

In light of the dire shortage of organ donors, medical science has been long searching for ways it could save human lives with the help of animal hearts, lungs or livers. However, organ rejection has remained a stubborn obstacle in the way of success.

However, a team of scientists from the United States and Germany has reported the successful transplantation of pig hearts in baboons, primate cousins of humans, and keeping them alive for a record 2.5 years.

They used a combination of targeted immune-suppressing drugs and gene modification to achieve this amazing feat.

According to study co-author Muhammad Mohiuddin of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Maryland, this could be the intermediate step that brings science closer to using these organs in humans.

Mohiuddin said that organ transplants between different species – also known as xenotransplants – could hold the key to saving thousands of lives annually, lives that would otherwise be lost because of the shortage of human organs available for transplantation.

In the latest experiments with five baboons, the group of researchers broke their own records by getting the hearts to survive for up to 945 days.

While the new hearts did not replace those of the monkeys, they were connected to the circulatory system through the baboon abdomen via two large blood vessels.

This method that attempts to lower the risk of organ rejection keeps the baboon’s own heart pumping the blood while the transplanted heart beats like a normal heart. Donor organs are often perceived as a threat by a recipient’s immune system because it is foreign to the body.

For the trials, the donor organs were taken from genetically-modified pigs; in other words, the high tolerance of the pig to the immune response made the hearts invisible to the recipient’s natural defense system.

Also, the baboons were administered drugs that suppress the immune response. But while this achievement is encouraging, are pig hearts safe for humans?

Give our genetic proximity to primates, these animals were long thought to be the best donor candidates. However, experiments going back to the 1960s showed that primate kidneys, hearts, and livers were rejected in a matter of months.

So maybe pigs are better donors, which we’ll find out after Mohiuddin’s team experiments with full pig-to-baboon heart transplants. According to him, pig hearts could eventually make their way into human chests.
Image Source: UPI

Uncovering the Mysteries of the Moon Enceladus

March 30, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

Ever since its discovery more than two centuries ago and its close-up study that the Cassini space craft performed on it in 2005, Enceladus is still a mystery to scientists. The reason behind that is its high concentration of water and water ice as well as what is believed to be an entire south polar subsurface ocean that goes as deep as 10 kilometers.

But that is not even the most fascinating feature about the sixth largest moon of Saturn. An act that Enceladus puts on and was first noticed thanks to the Cassini space craft more than 10 years ago is its intricate series of geysers that happen over long periods of time. While the phenomenon is a hauntingly amazing process to witness, scientists have yet to be able to explain why it takes place and how come they don’t freeze in the harsh temperature of negative 198 degrees Celsius (or -324.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

For starters, scientists believe that the reason eruptions would last longer than they do on Earth would be them taking place through a pipe-like system that puts a lot of space between them.

However, the discovery of these geysers bring an extra ounce of proof that Enceladus may, indeed, be hiding a large subsurface ocean at its south pole, below the fissures that researchers occasionally also call ‘tiger stripes’. If such an ocean truly exists, it could explain the geysers as being the result of what on Earth we would consider tidal forces. However, because it is completely hidden with a thick layer of ice at the surface, the forces would act upwards instead, creating the geysers and their continuous eruptions.

The timing of the eruptions has – for a while – left scientists in a pickle as they would always take place approximately five hours later than they would’ve if they were caused by tidal forces as the scientists had predicted. But that is no reason the theory should be immediately rendered invalid. Researchers have theorized that there are various scenarios in which such delay could exist based on a model that functions on a separate series of variables.

According to the results of this model, scientists can finally find out whether they were right to predict a subsurface ocean as well as explain the nature of the geyser eruptions that turn Enceladus into one of the most intriguing space objects we have witnessed in our solar system.

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Apple to Benefit Research with Their New CareKit

March 22, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

With what was probably the most easily forgotten detail discussed yesterday at Apple’s press event, the introduction of Apple CareKit, the tech giant actively begins working with doctors, researchers and other types of medical staff to understand and study the various afflictions that can befall us. CareKit is somewhat similar to the default Health applications in the sense that it tracks a lot of information with a little assistance from the user. However, it focuses more on real health concerns rather than keeping in check a generic and healthy lifestyle.

CareKit is a new software framework that has been designed by Apple to allow developers to create various apps that keep track of different medical conditions. This framework can ultimately help both the user and medical staff; by monitoring symptoms, medication, reactions to the medication applied and plans, the users along their family members, doctors or nurses can take action a lot sooner with a variety of health concerns.

Not only that, but anyone can actively make use of CareKit to observe and understand their own health, to study the various effects that medication or different types of foods or sugars have on them. Similarly, researchers could make use of the data coming from numerous individuals to perform their own study or research, which can only truly result in a further betterment of healthcare worldwide.

CareKit will be released next month as an open source framework, allowing members of the developer community to create apps and build functionalities based on four basic modules that Apple is bringing alongside their software. The modules in question are:

Care Card. This module will allow the user to plan actions such as taking medication or performing physical exercises as part of a therapy, allowing them to track their progress or set reminders using a variety of iDevices.
Symptom and Measurement Tracker. This module is responsible for allowing the user to record a variety of data regarding symptoms, temperature, how they feel, pain levels or fatigue by the use of surveys, progressive timeline of photos or the sensors that are baked into the devices.
Insight Dashboard. One of the simpler modules, Insight Dashboard is in charge of mapping symptoms next to the action items that have been entered into the system to show how treatments are working.
Lastly, Connect. This is the part of the software that allows the user to communicate and share information with the parties involved, ranging from family members to doctors that are in charge of their medication and treatment.

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The Dangerous Aspects of Owning Smart Cars

March 18, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

As automobiles become more computerized, they tend to inherit the same dangers that a computer itself would be exposed to. While previous types of vehicles would – in essence – only be threatened by the prospect of having your keys stolen or your alarm system jammed and turned off, the ideas that all these new, modern cars plan to include are a lot more vulnerable to cybersecurity threats.

This is something that the FBI and the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has warned carmakers about. This comes as a highly valid concern on behalf of carmakers and owners of ‘smart’ automobiles, as previous year was reason enough for Fiat and General Motors Co to reconsider some of their security systems for vehicles and the synced smartphones.

In July 2015, 1.4 million Fiat Chrysler cars in the U.S. were recalled at the company’s centers to install extra security software after a particular magazine report started raising some concerns at the prospect of hacking cars. Meanwhile, General Motors Co also strengthened their smartphone app security through an update, after finding out that a fairly unequipped hacker could take control of some of the functions of a hybrid electric Chevrolet Volt.

BMW AG also announced that it had fixed a weakness in their software that may have allowed hackers to remotely open doors of vehicles without effort.

While no real-world attack of the sorts has ever taken place, it was increasingly worrisome when engineers and programmers came to the conclusion that the 2014 Jeep Cherokee could’ve easily had its steering, transmission and brakes hacked in and taken control of remotely, endangering the life of drivers, on top of threatening their possessions.

In order to protect owners from these dangers, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of Global Automakers opened an information sharing and analysis center last year to help propagate all the information available on this topic and help prevent real life attacks from happening. The public was also warned about fake emails that hackers could send, pretending to offer software updates from individuals’ cars and mobile phones, and therefore accidentally giving away the very key to their vehicles.

Now imagine what potential hackers could have on the autonomous vehicles that we expect to become a reality by the year 2030. Hijacking cars, kidnapping attempts and other terrifying prospects of the sort could be something that both carmakers and users will have to concern themselves with.

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Twitch TV Opens New Paths of Interactive Streaming

March 15, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

The largest and most popular streaming platform, Twitch is looking for new methods of engaging the viewers and broadcasters alike, but giving both parties a way to interact in other ways than just via chat. Currently, there is a well-felt limit to the interaction between the viewer and the host of the channel that he is watching, simply because the level of involvement of the former is limited.

However, Amazon-owned Twitch is working on two whole new features that hope to change this limitation and give game developers some more tools to work with in order to change a portion of the gaming world and its community as it is today. The two planned features were announced yesterday at the Game Developers Conference and come as a conclusion that the company drew after the high success of the Twitch Plays Pokemon, and the other similar projects that followed such as Twitch Plays Mario and Twitch Plays Dark Souls.

The first of the two planned tools was dubbed ‘Developer Success’ and it revolves around an API, along with guidance and assistance for developers and the studios they belong to in regards to direct Twitch integration. By providing this kind of help to video game makers, Twitch opens new paths for all types of interactive gaming that can be done through their platform and not necessarily through a multiplayer feature. A few of such games already exist as they were made purely for the experience of live streaming and public involvement and cooperation: Streamline, Superfight and Wastelanders.

Secondly, Twitch also brings a new initiative the is partly related to the Twitch integration. To be more exact, the ‘Stream First’ concept is aiming to become the next video game subgenre that picks up knowledge gathered from the community and streamers until now and uses that as basis for the creation of new video games.

Although the three games mentioned earlier are still in their very early stages of development, they can already showcase the potential of gaming that bases its very structure on these two new features that Twitch is trying to bring out into the spotlight. For example, in Wastelanders, broadcasters may create teams of viewers that they can lead in battle, while other viewers can interact with them via chat controls that allow them to make changes to the battlefield and alter the course of the game.

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The Ford Car That Not Even Armor Piercing Bullets Can Break

March 11, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

No, unfortunately it’s not the Bat Mobile being placed in the service of American police task forces; instead, it is a new technique in building police interceptor sedans and SUVs that Ford applies in car doors that can stop armor-piercing bullets. That way, Ford will become the first in the United States to reach the very highest of body armor standards, as they were set by the Justice Department. That being said, the doors that Ford has designed can stop even a .30 caliber bullet shot from an AK-47 or other high-powered rifles of the likes.

Ballistic panels are something that Ford has been offering the police since early 2008 but were not approved until now. The reason behind this is the simple fact that Ford’s previous models of bulletproof doors would only protect against handgun fire and non-armor piercing bullets. The original request for better-protected vehicles came from police teams in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. That led Randy Freiburger, a Ford engineer, to start working on designing a better-protected car that included top notch bullet protection.

And it turns out that the United States is far from the danger of armor-piercing ammunition minus the very few and occasional occurrences; studies state that in some states outside of the U.S., however, armor-piercing bullets are a threat that can be encountered on a daily basis.

The manner in which Ford managed to achieve top grade ballistic protection in their vehicle doors is via a build that implies two different layers of material. The first one – the outer layer – is ceramic tile that falls into the ballistic grade category. It’s not impenetrable, but its effect on the bullet is what counts: as soon as a bullet hits this surface, its energy is dispersed, and the material causes the bullet to break down into pieces.

Then the second layer comes into action. This one is made from aramid fiber, and it is the very same material that is normally used for Kevlar. The purpose of the second layer is to catch the shrapnel from the bullet from causing further damage. Engineers who have designed the panels mentioned that in the event that a bullet hits in the same place twice, the door would still be able to withstand the impact to some degree.

However, this new change comes at a cost. The ballistic door panels weigh a lot more and cost more too. The current price that a Ford-built armor-piercing bullet proof car door costs a minimum of $1,500.

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