AIDS Scientists Encouraged By Antibodies That Hit Monkey Virus

These HIV viruses even look a little like bull's-eyes.

A. Harrison and P. Feorino/CDC These HIV viruses even look a little like bull's-eyes.

A. Harrison and P. Feorino/CDC

Scientists have a new idea for beating HIV: Target the virus with guided missiles called monoclonal antibodies.

At least in monkeys infected with an experimental virus similar to the human AIDS virus, the approach produced what researchers call "profound therapeutic efficacy."

The results appear Thursday in two papers published by Nature — one from a Boston group and a confirmatory report from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases.

The virus plummeted to undetectable levels in animals that got potent antibodies of a type recently discovered in some humans with HIV. And the virus remained undetectable for weeks after a single antibody injection.

“ This is a really new wrinkle in a field that needs new wrinkles

- Dr. Francis Collins

Most impressive, several monkeys who started out with low levels of HIV in their blood maintained extremely low levels of the virus in their systems months after a single antibody injection.

The researchers think they may have turned these animals into so-called elite controllers — like the 1 percent of HIV patients who are able to suppress the virus even without antiviral drugs.

The scientists say their results justify experiments in humans with HIV. And the potential implications seem to be large, in at least two ways:

Periodic injections of monoclonal antibodies might be a new kind of treatment for HIV-infected humans, either alone or in combination with conventional antiviral drugs.Monoclonal antibodies might be incorporated into strategies, now being eagerly pursued by a number of scientists, to cure HIV infection — that is, to clear the virus from patients' cells, allowing them to stop taking antiviral drugs.

"The findings of these two papers could revolutionize efforts to cure HIV," two cure-seekers write in a Nature commentary. Why? Louis Picker of Oregon Health and Science University and Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco speculate that combining monoclonal antibodies with conventional antiviral drugs might turbocharge the suppression of HIV, stimulate the destruction of reservoirs of HIV-infected cells, and suppress the generalized immune activation that accompanies chronic HIV infection.

"At the very least, these results will catalyse collaborations between the massive teams of experts who have for decades worked on HIV prevention and treatment in separate venues," Picker and Deeks predict.

The findings stem from discoveries over the past year or so that some humans with HIV occasionally make antibodies to the virus that are highly potent. That insight came after years of disappointing efforts to find what researchers call broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV — or to stimulate their production with experimental vaccines.

Dan Barouch of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and his colleagues generated several types of the newly discovered antibodies in mice. They then injected the antibodies into 18 rhesus monkeys that had been infected nine months earlier with a specially concocted virus with features of both HIV (the human AIDS virus) and SIV (the simian, or monkey, version). The hybrid virus, which doesn't appear in nature, is called SHIV.

The antibody injections resulted in rapid clearance of free-floating SHIV from the animals' blood that was sustained for weeks or months, until the antibodies gradually disappeared.

There was also evidence that the antibodies stimulated the monkeys' own immune systems to target and kill the cells infected by SHIV. That needs confirmation, but if it happens that would be important because long-term control of infection requires the elimination of these hiding places — the cells that harbor viral genes that can give rise to new HIV.

The durability of the antibody treatment varied according to how much SHIV the monkeys had in their systems to start with.

The Boston researchers were so surprised by their findings that they didn't publish them until the NIH group replicated them in a smaller study.

Other scientists say the implications of this early immunotherapy study are potentially far-reaching. NIH Director Francis Collins told The Wall Street Journal that he could imagine shifting HIV treatment from daily antiviral pills to injections of monoclonal antibodies every three months. "This is a really new wrinkle in a field that needs new wrinkles," Collins says.

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Heat, Drought Draw Farmers Back To Sorghum, The 'Camel Of Crops'

A test field of sorghum outside Manhattan, Kan., planted by Kansas State University.

Dan Charles/NPR

Much of the world is turning hotter and dryer these days, and it's opening new doors for a water-saving cereal that's been called "the camel of crops": sorghum. In an odd twist, this old-fashioned crop even seems to be catching on among consumers who are looking for "ancient grains" that have been relatively untouched by modern agriculture.

Sorghum isn't nearly as famous as the big three of global agriculture: corn, rice and wheat. But maybe it should be. It's a plant for tough times, and tough places.

Sorghum "originated in the northeastern quadrant of Africa," explains Gebisa Ejeta, a plant scientist from Ethiopia and professor at Purdue University. From there, it spread across Africa, India and even into China. "It's got a lot of characteristics that make it a favorite crop for the drylands of Africa and the semi-arid tropics."

It's an essential source of food in those regions, but it's not typically a big money crop. In Africa, it's grown by subsistence farmers. It's never gotten much attention from seed companies or investors.

But it is nutritious. It can grow in soils that other plants won't tolerate. Above all, it doesn't need much water. Compared with corn, for instance, it needs one-third less water, and it doesn't give up and wilt when rains don't come on time. It waits for moisture to arrive.

It probably arrived in North America aboard slave ships. That traditional sorghum looks like an overgrown corn plant, up to 10 feet tall, with a head of seeds on top.

Today, American farmers grow two kinds of sorghum. Sweet sorghum is tall; you can use it to make a sweet syrup or just feed the whole plant to animals.

But most sorghum in the U.S. is grown for feed grain. That version of the plant is short, with seeds that come in several different colors.

Steve Henry showed me some near Abilene, Kan., on our way to the farm where he grew up. Kansas is the biggest sorghum-growing state. Out here, they call milo.

"You've got white milo, red milo, yellow milo," says Henry, scanning the field. "Basically, you have the little berries, and they're filled with starch, like like corn is filled with starch, and the starch is what we're after."

Sorghum is used for the same things as corn: high-energy feed for pigs and chickens. It also gets turned into ethanol.

But corn is far more popular. Corn produces a bigger harvest, and farmers earn bigger profits with it — at least when there's plenty of water. In the U.S., the amount of land in sorghum has been steadily shrinking.

There are signs, though, of a sorghum revival on the high plains. The reason is water, or the lack of it. From Nebraska to western Texas, cornfields have been fed with rivers of water pumped from underground aquifers, and that water is starting to run low.

Some farmers, such as Mitchell Baalman of Hoxie, Kan., are looking for crops that aren't quite so thirsty. "We're learning a lot about milo," says Baalman. "You know, nobody wants to grow milo out here; it's kind of a forgotten crop. But I tell you what, there's where our money's going to be made this year. It'll be on grain sorghum."

Ejeta, who won the World Food Prize in 2009 for his work on sorghum, says that sorghum's renaissance may depend on the price that farmers pay for water. "If water is given its real value, and you limit irrigation, or people begin to pay for water, it would be economically smarter to grow sorghum in several areas of the United States," he says.

In the latest twist to the sorghum saga, it's actually becoming somewhat trendy among consumers who are looking for something a little different, and maybe a little more healthful.

"Sorghum is naturally gluten-free; it's an ancient grain," says Earl Roemer, who set up a company called Nu Life Market to sell sorghum flour to big food companies. Roemer's sorghum mill in Scott City, Kan., is busy. "Demand is exploding!" he says. "We're seeing 25 to 30 percent increase in demand, annually. We're doing all we can to increase production." His flour goes into gluten-free baked goods and is also used in breakfast cereals containing so-called ancient grains like quinoa, amaranth and spelt.

Every week, he says, visitors from food companies large and small make the trek to western Kansas to talk about new opportunities. Next week, he says, he's traveling to Taiwan to explore international markets.

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Have a Happy Halloween!

It's Halloween! Are you ready to start the celebration? My first steps will be to prepare a pumpkin for a jack-o-lantern and then to get candy for trick-or-treating. Do you have anything special planned for Halloween this year? Here are some chemistry-type projects you can try: if(zs>0){if(zSbL250)gEI("spacer").style.height=Math.floor(e[0].height/12)+17.5+'em';else{var zIClns=[];function walkup(e){if(e.className!='entry'){if(e.nodeName=='A'||e.style.styleFloat=='right'||e.style.cssFloat=='right'||e.align=='right'||e.align=='left'||e.className=='alignright'||e.className=='alignleft')zIClns.push(e);walkup(e.parentNode)}}walkup(e[0]);if(zIClns.length){node=zIClns[zIClns.length-1];var clone=node.cloneNode(true);node.parentNode.removeChild(node);getElementsByClassName("entry",gEI("articlebody"))[0].insertBefore(clone,gEI("spacer"))}}}};zSB(2);zSbL=0

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On This Day in Science History - November 1 - Betatron

November 1st is Donald Kerst's birthday. Kerst was an American physicist who invented the betatron. The betatron is a type of cyclotron that takes electrons from a transformer and accelerates them within a vacuum tube using a large, alternating magnetic field. The name betatron is a reference to the beta particle which is a fast moving electron given off by beta decay radiation. The betatron's electrons can build up enough energy to cause nuclear transformations or strike a metal target to create x-rays and gamma rays. Betatrons are found in many applications of particle physics, radiation medicine and industry.

Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

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Burn, Bury Or Scorch? Why Destroying Syria's Chemical Weapons Is Hard

Workers in protective suits hold dummy munition during a demonstration in a chemical weapons disposal facility in Muenster, Germany, on Oct. 30.

Philipp Guelland/AFP/Getty Images

The Syrian government appears on track to make a Nov. 1 deadline to destroy its equipment for making and filling chemical weapons. But the destruction of the chemicals themselves — more than 1,000 tons of toxic ingredients — is going to be a far more daunting task.

The problem is that it's just not as easy to destroy chemical weapons as it used to be. At the end of World War II, every major world power with chemical weapons loaded them onto ships and barges and dumped them out at sea.

"The rough guestimate is [that] probably 300,000 tons or more have been dumped in every ocean of the world, except the Antarctic," says Paul Walker, director of Environmental Security and Sustainability with Green Cross International, an environmental group that tracks the impacts of weapons disposal.

The thinking at the time was that the deep ocean would be a safe place. Turns out it's not. Drums can leak dangerous toxins like mustard agents. In the years since, dumped compounds from chemical weapons have burned beachgoers and killed fishermen. Burying the weapons created just as many problems on land.

So in the late 1980s, when the U.S. and Russia decided to get rid of their huge Cold War-era caches, they tried something else: incineration. But it wasn't as straightforward as you might think, Walker says: "When you burn something, it doesn't just disappear, you know — it's physically impossible for everything to just disappear."

Incinerators had to be custom-built, along with chemical scrubbers that would clean the toxic exhaust. It took decades, and cost billions of dollars.

Things moved more quickly in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. The allies had to dispose of thousands of tons of Saddam Hussein's chemical agents. Most of it was done by incineration at a custom-built facility. But some of the munitions were too fragile, or had been damaged during the allied air attacks.

Several 122-mm rockets filled with the nerve gas sarin posed a particular problem. They couldn't be safely moved or handled, says Ron Manley, the chemist who oversaw the destruction. "Therefore the only way to destroy them was [this]: We created a fuel-air explosion and these rockets were destroyed in the fuel-air explosion."

After the first Gulf War with Iraq, a U.N. team blew up rockets that had been filled with sarin.

Getty Images

In other words, they blew them up. But environmentalist Walker says this isn't an option in 2013.

"All open burn and open detonation [disposals] now [are] prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention," he says. "Ocean dumping is prohibited. Burial is prohibited."

It would take too long to set up an incinerator or other equipment in Syria, so today, the U.S. hopes that the agents can be moved out of the country.

"My hope is that much of this material will be moved as rapidly as possible into one location — hopefully on a ship — and removed from the region," Secretary of State John Kerry told NPR's Michele Kelemen in an interview earlier this month.

Experts agree it can be done. Virtually all of Syria's chemicals are ingredients, not weapons. That means they're toxic, but safer to transport. And there's a new technique for disposal. It's called hydrolysis, and it basically involves breaking the chemicals down, using hot water and other chemicals like bleach. The waste liquid from hydrolysis still needs to be treated but is a lot less dangerous.

The bottom line is that, after decades of practice, the disposal of chemical weapons can be done safely, says Walker. "It's done in Europe all the time, [and] in many ways — in France, in Belgium and Germany, in Italy," he says.

The key will be finding a country willing to accept chemicals from Syria. With environmental regulations these days, diplomacy — not technology — will be the hard part. Norway already has declined a U.S. invitation to take the stuff, in part due to its local environmental regulations. France, Belgium and Albania, which destroyed its own chemical stocks in 2007, are thought to still be under consideration.

The international community would like to see Syria's weapons destroyed by mid-2014. Given the challenges of finding a host country, that's "a very optimistic target," says Manley. Walker adds that the destruction methods will have to comply with environmental law, which could lengthen the process.

Still, he says it is critical that a host nation be found soon: "We can't just put it on a ship," Walker says, "and have it wander the Mediterranean for the indefinite future."

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How Much Water Actually Goes Into Making A Bottle Of Water?

The amount of water to make the bottle could be up to six or seven times what's inside the bottle, according to the Water Footprint Network.

Steven Depolo/Flickr The amount of water to make the bottle could be up to six or seven times what's inside the bottle, according to the Water Footprint Network.

Steven Depolo/Flickr

Environmental activists have long claimed that bottled water is wasteful. Usually, they point to the roughly 50 billion (mostly plastic) bottles we throw away every year.

The International Bottled Water Association, ever sensitive to criticism that it's wasting precious resources, has commissioned its first ever study to figure out how much water goes into producing one liter. The results, released this month, show that for North American companies, it takes 1.39 liters to make one liter of water.

That's less than the global averages of a liter of soda, which requires 2.02 liters of water. A liter of beer, meanwhile, needs 4 liters of water, wine demands 4.74 liters. Hard alcohol, it turns out, is the greediest, guzzling 34.55 liters of water for every liter.

This, the bottled water industry says, is evidence that its product isn't so bad. "Bottled water products are extremely efficient in terms of water use compared to some other packaged beverages," says Chris Hogan, spokesman for the International Bottled Water Association.

But water activists say the IBWA study highlights a problem throughout the beverage industry: Few companies take the whole water-use picture into account when calculating their water use. Just as companies are beginning to calculate their carbon footprint, they also need to analyze their water footprints to find opportunities for conservation.

Bottled water companies (along with many other beverage companies) should include the water in their supply chain, says Ertug Ercin with the Water Footprint Network. Ercin says a true water footprint includes all freshwater used in production, including the water used for packaging.

"Packaging makes a significant footprint," he says, adding that three liters of water might be used to make a half-liter bottle. In other words, the amount of water going into making the bottle could be up to six or seven times what's inside the bottle.

Drilling for oil to make plastic, Ercin says, uses a substantial amount of groundwater. And you need water to make the paper, too, he adds.

Still, Ercin notes, bottled water packaging uses far less water than soda, which needs extra water to grow sugar and make dyes.

Hogan says that one reason why the IBWA didnt look at these issues is that it's hard to know where to stop. "You could extrapolate that ad infinitum," he says.

Hogan says some companies say they don't think they can get any more efficient, but they're trying. "Water," Hogan says," is the lifeblood of the industry and they want to be as efficient as possible."

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In Sandy's Wake, Flood Zones And Insurance Rates Re-Examined

Hide caption Neighbors in the Rockaway section of Queens, N.Y., survey homes and businesses destroyed by Superstorm Sandy on Oct. 30, 2012. Hide caption A resident traverses flooded streets as cleanup operations begin in Hoboken, N.J. The storm surge triggered deep flooding in low-lying neighborhoods. Hide caption Jackie Hoey inspects the first floor of her Long Beach, N.Y., home, which experienced heavy flooding. Hide caption In the Ocean Breeze area of Staten Island, water continued to flood neighborhoods on Nov. 1, 2012. Most homes in the seaside community were inundated by the ocean surge caused by Sandy. Hide caption Old photographs are laid out on a car hood to dry after being removed from a flooded home in Seaside Heights, N.J. At the time, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie estimated that Superstorm Sandy had cost his state $29.4 billion in damage and other economic losses. Hide caption Sand marks the floodwater line on the side of a house in Long Beach, N.Y. Hide caption Barbara Young tosses sand out her front door in Long Beach, N.Y. The storm caused massive flooding across much of the Eastern Seaboard. Hide caption An emergency responder helps evacuate two people with a boat after their neighborhood in Little Ferry, N.J., was flooded. Hide caption In one Rockaway neighborhood the historic boardwalk washed away during the storm.

When Sandy blew into East Coast communities a year ago, it was flooding that did the most damage.

That's in part because the average sea level has risen over the past century — about a foot along the mid-Atlantic coast. That made it easier for the storm to push the ocean onto the land.

And scientists say there will be many more Sandy-style storms — that is, torrential rain and wind that create heavy coastal flooding — and they'll be more frequent than in the past. But preparing people for that means changing the way they live, and that's proving politically difficult.

Sandy, in fact, wasn't such a powerful hurricane — "only" a Category 1 as it approached the shore. But a few coincidences made it freakish. Sandy hit the coastline right at high tide. It hit straight on, at a 90-degree angle. And the storm covered an enormous area.

All that happening at once is pretty unusual. But William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says there's one thing that will be part of every new Atlantic coast storm — a higher sea level.

"Sea level is changing and it is going to keep changing regardless of who or what is causing it," Sweet says. "And the impacts are going to become more and more frequent and severe and we're going to have to deal with it."

Sweet and his NOAA colleagues agree with the majority of ocean scientists — that if climate continues to warm, average sea level will continue to rise by as much as 2 feet more by 2050. That's because a warmer ocean expands in volume. Also, landlocked snow and ice will melt into the ocean. Sea level rise is higher on average along the Eastern Seaboard than most parts of the world because of wind and ocean circulation patterns in the Atlantic.

And a rising ocean means that in the future, garden-variety storms will create the kind of flooding that big storms did in the past. NOAA says the type of storm you see only once a century or so now could hit every few decades by 2050 — and every few years if sea level rises as much as some computer models predict.

"Storms of lesser magnitude and storm surges that weren't as high as Sandy will have more and more importance in terms of the way that we live our lives," Sweet says.

One thing certain to change is the way people insure property against flooding. The federal National Flood Insurance Program requires most businesses and homeowners in high-risk flood zones to buy flood insurance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency administers the program and is now remapping those flood zones. And the new zones are a lot bigger.

Robert Moore, who studies flood policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says New York City formerly had about 35,000 buildings sitting in flood zones. That number has now doubled. "The new maps that were made in the wake of Hurricane Sandy show a much larger flood plain that encompasses about 67,000 buildings," Moore says. The increase is due to changes in sea level up to now, and to changes in the built environment that shift the way runoff moves.

FEMA, in fact, expects that the increase in flood risk areas and the number of people who live in them will continue. And that's without factoring in computer model predictions about the rise of sea levels in the future.

One Year Ago: Homes in Mantoloking, N.J., sit in ruin at the end of a bridge that was wrecked by flooding from Superstorm Sandy.

Mario Tama/Getty Images One Year Ago: Homes in Mantoloking, N.J., sit in ruin at the end of a bridge that was wrecked by flooding from Superstorm Sandy.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

So, clearly more people are going to have to buy flood insurance. And insurance will cost more. That's because of a 2012 law that radically changes the flood insurance program. The law eliminates subsidies that have kept the premium rates for such policies artificially low for decades. Moore says that in some places, one-third of flood insurance policyholders have been getting subsidies.

"We've been subsidizing people to live in some of the riskiest parts of the country," Moore says, "and that is one of the reasons the national flood insurance program is so deeply in debt." Once FEMA pays off damages from Sandy, the agency will be $25 billion in the red.

Charging more for flood insurance would help mitigate that loss. But it's also a bitter pill for many. "There's a lot of pushback," Moore says. "People obviously have a little bit of sticker shock."

There's been so much sticker shock that the law passed last year (known as the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, after its main congressional sponsors) is already in jeopardy.

This week, several members of Congress are proposing a bill to delay the insurance reforms called for in the Biggert-Waters act for as much as four years. Two other bills that would soften effects of the increased cost are in play as well.

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez calls FEMA's new flood maps and insurance rates "a man-made disaster."

"Many homeowners will be forced to pay premiums that are several times higher than the current rate they pay," Menendez says.

Now, raising premiums was exactly what last year's law was expected to do. So apparently the new debate will be: How do politicians bail out FEMA without raising the rates of the people who vote them in — or out — of office?

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Putting On Einstein's Glasses

Whenever you look at the teeming, rich and oh-so-various world, if you've got the right eyes, if you've got the eyes of a mathematician, you will find patterns — simple, elegant forms hiding in everything you see. Those patterns explain why sugar dissolves in a cup of coffee, why clouds release rain, why a heavy plane can climb into the sky.

Non-mathematicians miss all this. We see the flurry of what's happening, not the tight logic underneath. But now comes this minute-and-a-half little video — a cheat sheet for math-challenged folks like me. It shows us what it's like to look around as if we were Galileo or Einstein or that kid who always raised his hand first in math class ... This is what they get to see ...

Thanks to Aatish Bhatia for sending this my way.

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Why Are Kids Who Get Less Candy Happier On Halloween?

Kids might be more satisfied if they get one, good treat instead of one good treat and one lesser treat.

iStockphoto

What makes trick-or-treaters happy is candy. And more candy is better, right?

Well, it turns that that might not actually be the case. A few years ago researchers did a study on Halloween night where some trick-or-treaters were given a candy bar and others were given the candy bar and a piece of bubble gum.

Now in any rational universe, you would imagine that the kids who got the candy bar and the bubble gum would be happier than the kids who got just the candy bar. George Wolford is a psychologist at Dartmouth College. Along with his fellow researchers, Amy Doe and Alexander Rupert, he found something quite different.

"Those children that got both the full-sized candy bar and the bubble gum second-rated how delighted they were to get these treats lower than those people that got the candy bar only," says Wolford.

To understand what actually is going on we have to go back to the crib, to an earlier study done by Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University, who won the Noble Prize in economics. Wolford calls this one of his favorite studies in all of psychology.

Kahneman recruited a bunch of doctors to conduct a study among patients getting colonoscopies. Some of the patients got the regular colonoscopy – an uncomfortable, unpleasant procedure. And the others got the same procedure but at the end of it, the doctors didn't remove the tube from the patient's bodies. They actually left the tube in there a little while longer.

Now again, in any rational world, you would imagine that the patients that got the colonoscopy with the extra discomfort would rate their overall experience as being more painful and more unpleasant. But Kahneman found out that this was actually not the case. The patients who got the extra discomfort actually thought the colonoscopy as a whole went better and they were more likely to show up for follow-up treatment.

It actually comes down to the order in which these things happen. And that's the connection with the Halloween candy study. With the Halloween candy study, the kids got the great treat first and then a lesser treat afterward.

With the colonoscopies, they got the unpleasant procedure first and then they got something slightly less unpleasant afterward. And it turns out that when we think about experiences, we don't think about the experience as a whole — we are significantly biased by how the experience ends.

So if we have a great experience that starts to go downhill, we rate the overall experience as being less good. Whereas if something starts out terribly and then starts to get better toward the end, we rate the overall experience a little bit better. Wolford actually has a theory to explain this.

"If you're in a painful experience and it's getting better, then there's a sense in which things are improving," he says. "So what you're judging is the trajectory. With positive goods, if I'm going from a nice treat to a lesser treat, the trajectory is going the wrong way."

So if you get the lesser treat first and the nicer treat second, you're likely to be very happy, but if you get the nice treat first and the lesser one second, you're likely to be more dissatisfied with the overall experience.

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Are the Miami Dolphins for Real? Let's Not Be Hasty

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Denver Broncos Overrated, New Orleans Saints Underrated

The Denver Broncos have been world-beaters when they play the league's downtrodden dregs, but when they finally play a team that's moderately competitive they barely hang on for a win, slipping by the Cowboys 51-48.

The Saints, on the other hand, were 4-0 heading into the hostile confines of Chicago's Soldier Field, where they whipped the Bears and a pretty good defense, 26-18.

The Broncos have an all-world offense, with Peyton Manning putting up ridiculous numbers. But, Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo shreds their defense with over 500 yards in the air.

And as the old ball coaches say, offense wins in the regular season, defense wins in the playoffs.

At first, I thought the Saints were winning on emotion and adrenaline. This is a team that was rudderless last year because their coach Sean Payton was at home, watching the games on TV due to the infamous "Bountygate" suspension.

They all came together in training camp with a rough edge, wanting a little payback.

But, after handling the Bears on the road, it looks like they're making a good case for legitimacy.

These are only two teams who have proven themselves under- and over-rated at this point in the season. Here are some others.

- Getty Images

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Down and Out in the NFL: Humiliated Quarterbacks

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Great Games, Great Performers This NFL Weekend

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Great Games, Great Performers This NFL WeekendBy Tim McDonaldOctober 28, 2013

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If you're a fan of the NFL, and it's safe to assume you are since you're here palling around here with the likes of me, you had a field day this weekend.

Here are just some of my highlights:

- Best game: Lions over the Cowboys 31-30. Duh.

I didn't even mind those sideline tirades from Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant. He was just pumped, like the fans. All those idiot talking heads should get off his back.

- Top performer: Calvin Johnson with 14 catches for 329 yards, the second-best receiving day in NFL history. Amazing performance.

- Runnerups: Drew Brees with five TD passes in the Saints' 35-17 win over Buffalo and Andy Dalton with the same in the Bengals' 49-9 romp over the Jets.

- Chief Lucky. Yes, it's true that Kansas City has had some luck on its side this year as the only unbeaten team in the NFL. The Chiefs keep beating teams with banged-up quarterbacks.

Still, I think it's more of a case of a matchup of a team with talent with the right kind of coach. They needed somebody like Andy Reid to guide them.

- Where's the Eagles offense? The Philadelphia offense has scored three points in the last two games. This was supposed to be the explosive story of the year, Chip Kelly's whiz-bang schoolboy offense lighting up the NFL. Maybe when they can field a healthy quarterback we'll see it.

And maybe not.

- Flightless Birds. Not many teams have sunk as fast as the Falcons. They were everybody's preseason darlings, but they lost again Sunday, this time to the lowly Cardinals.

The Falcons can't block, they can't run and they sure can't tackle. How could this same team have reached the NFC championship last year?

Atlanta is done for the year. The best the Falcons can hope for is to make it look respectable and build some momentum for next year.

- Getty Images

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Mix a Solid & Liquid to Make a Gas

Here's a simple demonstration you can do to illustrate the phases of matter and how chemical reactions can change them. Gather together an empty 20-oz plastic soft drink bottle, a small balloon, vinegar, and baking soda. Pour about a half inch of vinegar into the bottle. Put 2 teaspoons of baking soda into the balloon. You may want to use a funnel to make it easier to get the baking soda into the balloon (you can make one by rolling a sheet of paper). Shake the baking soda into the body of the balloon. Stretch the mouth of the balloon over the top of the bottle, being careful to avoid getting baking soda into the bottle. Lift the balloon so the baking soda falls into the bottle. Shake the bottle. What happened? Did the balloon inflate? Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is a base and vinegar contains an acid (acetic acid). When the solid base and the liquid acid react, they neutralize each other to form liquid water and carbon dioxide gas. The release of carbon dioxide increases the pressure of the gases in the bottle (air plus the added carbon dioxide) and inflates the balloon.

Phase Changes Quiz | Liquid Elements

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NFL on TV: Midnight Matchups?

I believe that by next year, we'll be watching Saturday morning NFL football games, right before "Ultimate Spider Man."

By 2016, every team except Jacksonville and Arizona will be allowed into the playoffs, which will last into August, right before training camp. Teams with losing records will be playing for the right to go to the Super Bowl.

Every team will have a sparkling, billion-dollar stadium - paid for by taxpayers - by 2020.

The news that the NFL playoffs could expand to 14 teams, up from 12, by next year doesn't surprise me.

The NFL is so popular now, it can do anything short of proclaiming itself the third arm of Congress and still be wildly popular with football fans.

Midnight matchups? Why not?

And here's why: The games are great. Like this week, Week Six if you're keeping track on your Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Swimsuit calendar.

- Getty Images

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NFL Smackdowns: Forget the Dolphins-Saints, look to the 49ers, Pats and Seahawks

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NFL's Biggest Losers: Houston Texans and Atlanta Falcons

Of the teams that were in the playoffs last year and have taken bizarre nosedives this year, Houston and Atlanta are the most puzzling.

At least Redskins fans can point to the specific problem: Robert Griffin III is still recovering from a very serious knee injury.

And the Vikings weren't that good to begin with.

But, the Texans and Falcons were being mentioned breathlessly as Super Bowl candidates, particularly the talent-laded Falcons.

Houston was 12-4 last year. Atlanta was 13-3.

Now, here it is week seven and they've won three games between them.

The Falcons have suffered key injuries, but what NFL team doesn't? It's their same old story: Atlanta can't make the plays when it really counts. Specifically, they can't score in the red zone.

The Texans lost four straight and were brutalized 38-13 by the Rams at home. Houston quarterback Matt Schaub leads the league in touchdown passes. To the other team.

Fans burned his jersey and when he finally got hurt, his replacement was worse. I didn't think it was possible.

That's one of the things I love about the NFL. Every year there is a bunch of surprising winners. And every year, at least one or two of last year's winners are laughable, dirt-grubbing losers.

Here are some more intriguing "takeaways" - to use cool, NFL lingo - after week six action.

- Getty Images

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Now Accepting Apologies From Denver Broncos Fans!

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Now Accepting Apologies From Denver Broncos Fans!By Tim McDonaldOctober 21, 2013

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I don't want to crow or say I told you so, or bray about my NFL IQ, or anything that might suggest I am less than modest, fair and companionable.

Nor do I want to smirk and act superior over those Denver Broncos fans who called me "dumb," "lame" and "confused."

Ha, just kidding! Yes I do!

I told you so.

Am I a prophet or what?

Denver may yet win the Super Bowl, but the path there will not be as easy as their fans seem to think. The Broncos' 39-33 loss to the Colts - which I more or less predicted - is further evidence of that.

Rabid Broncos fans are known for their, uh, rabidity, not their objectivity, but surely even they know you can't make it to the Super Bowl with a dumb, lame and confused defensive secondary.

Even with Peyton Manning. Even with Von Miller.

OK, I'm finished exacting my revenge. How about those Chiefs, the only undefeated team left in the NFL? Who'd a thunk it?

This past Sunday had some great games and some surprises, and here's my analysis of where the NFL stands today.

With my newfound credibility in Denver, I'm sure you Broncos fans will be reading.

- Getty Images

Comments (1)See All PostsSharePrevif(zs>0){if(zSbL250)gEI("spacer").style.height=Math.floor(e[0].height/12)+17.5+'em';else{var zIClns=[];function walkup(e){if(e.className!='entry'){if(e.nodeName=='A'||e.style.styleFloat=='right'||e.style.cssFloat=='right'||e.align=='right'||e.align=='left'||e.className=='alignright'||e.className=='alignleft')zIClns.push(e);walkup(e.parentNode)}}walkup(e[0]);if(zIClns.length){node=zIClns[zIClns.length-1];var clone=node.cloneNode(true);node.parentNode.removeChild(node);getElementsByClassName("entry",gEI("articlebody"))[0].insertBefore(clone,gEI("spacer"))}}}};Leave a CommentCommentsOctober 24, 2013 at 7:24 pm(1) travis says:

To be fair the colts played a good game, the broncos defense struggled yet again, but the game was still the Broncos to lose. I can pull 3 plays that had the offense made we would be making this a different story. I am of course talking about the late interception, red zone fumble, and the Decker touchdown out of bounds drop. Any of those plays go differently and the Broncos win. I believe that this game actually calls into question the Colts offense more than anything else. Either way I can sit back and keep saying week after week the chiefs aren’t as good as their record shows, it doesn’t make me a prophet or a genius to allude to some special insight because the odds are on my side that they will eventually lose a game, just like the Broncos. The fact is that they don’t have an offense that can keep pace, so I’d say look to the Broncos to stop that record.

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OK, Denver Broncos Fans: Let�s See How Your Mighty Team Competes Against Men

I'm a true believer in Peyton Manning, as any right-thinking American should be.

But, as far as the Broncos as a whole: Not so much.

They've made their rep thus far bullying the league's pink teams.

Yes, they looked good against Baltimore. Then they ripped the Giants, currently winless and friendless.

They beat the Raiders, currently, um, 2-4.

They again looked good against the Eagles, but then made Tony Romo look all-world in a 51-48 squeaker over the Cowboys.

Oh yeah, then Chad Henne of the Jaguars threw for over 300 yards against them Sunday.

Yes, that Chad Henne. Yes, those Jaguars.

Now they'll face the Colts' Andrew Luck and I don't believe I need remind anyone that Chad Henne is no Andrew Luck.

Do I?

So you Bronco boosters talk to me after this game. In the meantime, here's more on the Broncos-Colts and the other big matchups this weekend.

And if you're one of those discerning people, like me, who isn't quite ready to just hand the Super Bowl trophy over to the Broncos, let me know. I'm getting hammered here by the Bronco-Nazis.

- Getty Images

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On This Day in Science History - October 31 - Joseph Swan

Who invented the incandescent light bulb?

If you believe the advertising campaign put out by Thomas Edison, he did. Thomas Edison brought the United States the incandescent bulb using a patent issued in Great Britain by Joseph Wilson Swan. Swan invented an electric light bulb using a partial vacuum and carbonized thread as a filament. Carbon requires a lot of current to glow and the bulbs would soot over and not last very long. Edison created a bulb using a better vacuum and thinner metal filaments that required less power and glowed much brighter.

October 31st is Joseph Swan's birthday. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

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Unbeaten NFL Bullies Preying on the Weak

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Wordless Wednesday - Magic Shot Glasses

Here's a science magic trick you can perform at home or when you're out on the town. Make two liquids trade glasses! It looks like a trick, but it's really just density in action.

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A Japanese iPhone Gadget Teases The Tummy With Food Smells

Simply plug the Scentee device into your iPhone jack and let the scent of grilled meat waft your way.

YouTube Simply plug the Scentee device into your iPhone jack and let the scent of grilled meat waft your way.

YouTube

Have you ever wished that your iPhone could bring you the smell of coffee, curry or steak?

No? Well, there's a gadget for that.

Japanese company Scentee has invented a spherical iPhone attachment that can squirt out aromas ranging from flowery to savory. Each scent comes in a separate cartridge, which you can change out by opening up the device. And to power it up, all you have to do is plug it into you phone's headphone jack.

In the words of Scentee's CEO Koki Tsubouchi: "The iPod made music portable. We want to do that for scent."

If you're in the mood for food smells, Scentee has an app called Hana Yakiniku, which roughly translates to "nose grilled meat," programmed with three scents: short ribs, grilled beef and buttered potatoes.

In a promotional video, the message seems to be that the smell of meat and potatoes may be an appealing substitute for actual meat and potatoes.

The video shows a slender woman sniffing grilled beef as she chows down on plain lettuce, and a cash-strapped student happily deluded (through smell) into believing his white rice is topped with short ribs.

This marketing of imaginary meat is a bit strange, frankly. Clearly anyone who can afford this app, and an iPhone for that matter, is sufficiently nourished. And perhaps someone seriously in need of protein would not find it so amusing.

Tsubouchi insists the app is supposed to be fun, even silly. Look no further than the giant dismembered nose and promo copy describing the product as "revolutionary new deliciousness that mankind finally managed to develop after 7 million years of continuous evolution."

Still, we were curious — could the smell of meat actually satisfy cravings for it? Smell, of course, is very closely connected to taste. According to Marcia Pelchat, sensory psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, our tongues are able to distinguish between sweet, savory, bitter and tart. But "smell provides a lot of the variety in flavor," she tells us.

It's no surprise, then, that food manufactures have long been interested in using smell to manipulate our sense of taste. But to truly trick your mind into thinking you're eating beef, you would have to chomp on something that at least feels like meat. "I think you need the texture and the whole context," says Pelchat. Lettuce won't work, but fake meat might — which means this could be a good app for vegetarians with withdrawal cravings.

You'll be able to test it out for yourself in late November, when Scentee makes its U.S. debut. The Japanese will be able to purchase it a bit earlier — by mid-November. The device will retail at about $35, with the scent cartridges for $5 each.

Tsubouchi says his company is in talks with American food manufacturers, who are interested in developing advertisements that entice your nose as well as your eyes.

The company is also releasing a series of apps that link the scents to your phone's alarm clock, text messages and social media alerts. So you'll be able to wake up every morning and literally smell the roses (or the short ribs).

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Eeek, Snake! Your Brain Has A Special Corner Just For Them

Illustration by Daniel Horowitz for NPR

Anthropologist Lynne Isbell was running through a glade in central Kenya in 1992 when something suddenly caused her to freeze in her tracks. "I stopped just in front of a cobra," she says. "It was raised with its hood spread out."

Isbell, who is at the University of California, Davis, says she has spent the past couple of decades trying to understand how she could have reacted before her conscious brain even had a chance to think — cobra!

"At first I thought it was luck," she says. "But now I'm pretty sure that it's not luck. It's a reflection of 60 million years of evolutionary history working on my visual system."

The answer involves monkeys, the evolution of primate vision and a part of the brain called the pulvinar, which Isbell explains in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the years after her encounter with the cobra, Isbell developed a theory that snakes are a major reason that humans and other primates evolved really good vision.

"We have our forward-facing eyes," she says. "We have our excellent depth perception. We have very good visual acuity, the best in the mammalian world. We have color vision. So there has to be some sort of explanation for it."

Primates in parts of the world with lots of poisonous snakes evolved better vision than primates elsewhere, Isbell found out. It's no accident that lemurs in Madagascar have the worst vision in the primate world, she says. There are no venomous snakes.

But if the primate visual system really evolved to detect snakes, there should be some biological evidence of this in their brains, Isbell thought. So she teamed up with researchers in Japan to study the brains of two macaque monkeys that had probably never seen snakes.

The researchers measured the activity of individual brain cells while showing the monkeys images of snakes, faces, hands and simple geometric shapes. And the researchers found something remarkable in the pulvinar, a part of the brain's visual system that's unique to people, apes and monkeys.

"There are neurons that are very sensitive to snake images and much more sensitive to them than the faces of primates," Isbell says of that brain region. That's surprising, she says, because monkeys and other primates have brains that are highly sensitive to faces.

The finding appears to explain Isbell's experience in Kenya so long ago, when she stopped herself before she even realized she was seeing a cobra. "This part of the visual system appears to be the sort of quicker, automatic visual system that allows us to respond without even being consciously aware of the object that we are responding to," she says.

The finding was not a complete surprise to other researchers who study primates' fear of snakes. "There have been a lot of people suspecting that there must be something like this going on," says Sue Mineka, a clinical psychology professor at Northwestern University.

The new study appears to explain Mineka's own research showing that even monkeys raised in labs where there are no snakes can quickly learn to fear the reptiles. But it's still unclear whether the brain response of the monkeys in this study showed they were truly afraid of snakes or just had an innate ability to recognize the potentially venomous reptiles.

What Isbell's study does suggest is that both monkeys and humans have evolved brains that are well prepared to learn to fear snakes, Mineka says. "It's identifying a possible mechanism because there is a distinct neural signature that could then be associated with threat."

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Eeek, Snake! Your Brain Has A Special Corner Just For Them

Illustration by Daniel Horowitz for NPR

Anthropologist Lynne Isbell was running through a glade in central Kenya in 1992 when something suddenly caused her to freeze in her tracks. "I stopped just in front of a cobra," she says. "It was raised with its hood spread out."

Isbell, who is at the University of California, Davis, says she has spent the past couple of decades trying to understand how she could have reacted before her conscious brain even had a chance to think — cobra!

"At first I thought it was luck," she says. "But now I'm pretty sure that it's not luck. It's a reflection of 60 million years of evolutionary history working on my visual system."

The answer involves monkeys, the evolution of primate vision and a part of the brain called the pulvinar, which Isbell explains in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the years after her encounter with the cobra, Isbell developed a theory that snakes are a major reason that humans and other primates evolved really good vision.

"We have our forward-facing eyes," she says. "We have our excellent depth perception. We have very good visual acuity, the best in the mammalian world. We have color vision. So there has to be some sort of explanation for it."

Primates in parts of the world with lots of poisonous snakes evolved better vision than primates elsewhere, Isbell found out. It's no accident that lemurs in Madagascar have the worst vision in the primate world, she says. There are no venomous snakes.

But if the primate visual system really evolved to detect snakes, there should be some biological evidence of this in their brains, Isbell thought. So she teamed up with researchers in Japan to study the brains of two macaque monkeys that had probably never seen snakes.

The researchers measured the activity of individual brain cells while showing the monkeys images of snakes, faces, hands and simple geometric shapes. And the researchers found something remarkable in the pulvinar, a part of the brain's visual system that's unique to people, apes and monkeys.

"There are neurons that are very sensitive to snake images and much more sensitive to them than the faces of primates," Isbell says of that brain region. That's surprising, she says, because monkeys and other primates have brains that are highly sensitive to faces.

The finding appears to explain Isbell's experience in Kenya so long ago, when she stopped herself before she even realized she was seeing a cobra. "This part of the visual system appears to be the sort of quicker, automatic visual system that allows us to respond without even being consciously aware of the object that we are responding to," she says.

The finding was not a complete surprise to other researchers who study primates' fear of snakes. "There have been a lot of people suspecting that there must be something like this going on," says Sue Mineka, a clinical psychology professor at Northwestern University.

The new study appears to explain Mineka's own research showing that even monkeys raised in labs where there are no snakes can quickly learn to fear the reptiles. But it's still unclear whether the brain response of the monkeys in this study showed they were truly afraid of snakes or just had an innate ability to recognize the potentially venomous reptiles.

What Isbell's study does suggest is that both monkeys and humans have evolved brains that are well prepared to learn to fear snakes, Mineka says. "It's identifying a possible mechanism because there is a distinct neural signature that could then be associated with threat."

View the original article here

How To See Forever On Your Dirty Car

When you fall in love with science, ordinary, everyday stuff can suddenly seem extraordinary. That's how NPR Blogger and astrophysicist Adam Frank sees it — today he sees it in dust.

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Science On Shaky Ground As Automatic Budget Cutbacks Drag On

Budget cutbacks threaten a planned upgrade of the massive Titan supercomputer, seen here, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Charles Brooks/Oak Ridge National Laboratory Budget cutbacks threaten a planned upgrade of the massive Titan supercomputer, seen here, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Charles Brooks/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists use a powerful computer known as Titan to simulate everything from the inner workings of a nuclear reactor to the complicated effects of climate change on human populations — on a global scale. Until recently, Titan was the most powerful supercomputer on the planet, but now there's a new No. 1.

"The new machine is called Tianhe-2 and it's actually at the National Defense University in China," says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge.

Titan's slip from the top spot is not unusual: Nations regularly swap the No. 1 slot. But because of a series of automatic spending cuts locked into the Federal government's budget, Mason is afraid America may soon slip permanently behind.

"The issue is not so much who's No. 1 in the horse race," he says. "But we think it's important for the U.S. to always be amongst that group that is pushing the envelope."

The automatic cuts were never supposed to happen. Back in 2011, Congress passed them as a threat: If government spending wasn't brought under control by 2013 through tax increases or a more tailored set of cutbacks, these general, across-the-board cuts would go into effect. Democrats and Republicans could never reach a deal. So this spring, the cuts came in.

Everyone from preschool teachers to fighter pilots had to tighten their belts. Oak Ridge saw its budget slashed by about 7 percent in 2013 — that's nearly $100 million.

But while the lab's budget is down, its electric bill isn't. All told, Oak Ridge's machines suck up as much juice as a small town, 25 megawatts: "For every megawatt of power we use a year, it costs us about a million dollars, and that's real, cold hard cash," says Jeff Nichols, the lab's associate director for computing.

Nichols says that the lab changed pension plans and reduced benefits to make up for some of the cuts. But money will also have to come from plans for the future. Researchers had hoped to replace Titan with another superfast machine in 2017.

"As we look at the budget scenarios we're facing, that next machine is moving further and further out into the future," Mason says.

The automatic cuts are also hurting the researchers who use Titan, like Sally Ellingson, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee. She's currently teaching Titan to screen chemical compounds that could be used as drugs to treat diseases. "Recently I ran a job where I tested over 4 million compounds in just a couple hours," she says.

Ellingson is set to graduate next year, and she's already writing a grant that will allow her to continue her research.

But grant agencies like the National Institutes of Health have suffered budget cuts too. NIH says that it is funding hundreds fewer proposals than in previous years. And the approval rate for grant applications submitted to NIH was already down to 18 percent from around 30 percent in 2000, even before the automatic cuts. The National Science Foundation, another major funder, says it's only funding roughly 1 in 5 of the proposals it receives.

"It's very, very tough when you're young to get any funding at all for what you're doing. Even if you're very brilliant, such as Sally [Ellingson]," says Jeremy Smith, the head of Ellingson's supercomputing group. He sits on peer-review panels that approve government grants. These days, he says, the panels get way more proposals than they can fund.

"At least two or three of those proposals that get rejected are fantastic science," Smith says.

He says he's worried that the climate could force Ellingson out of research. "She'll have no problem getting a job, but the risk has increased now that [the job she gets] will not be inventing the new medicines and products that will drive the economy in the future," Smith says.

For now, it seems like the cuts are here to stay. To stop the automatic budget declines, Congress would have to find ways to cut the deficit, either through different cuts or by the introduction of new taxes, or both. Against the backdrop of mammoth, trillion-dollar budget battles, science is likely to get lost, warns lab director Mason. "It's easy to miss something that's a pretty small part of the federal budget," he says.

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Scientists: Asian Carp Breeding In Great Lake Tributaries

Tommy Goszewski, a technician with the U.S. Geological Survey, holds a grass carp taken from a pond at an agency lab in Columbia, Mo., in spring 2013.

AP Tommy Goszewski, a technician with the U.S. Geological Survey, holds a grass carp taken from a pond at an agency lab in Columbia, Mo., in spring 2013.

AP

Scientists have confirmed for the first time that at least one variety of Asian carp is living and breeding in the Great Lakes watershed, where it threatens stocks of native fish.

A U.S. Geological Survey and Bowling Green State University study published Monday says Asian carp taken from the Sandusky River in Ohio show the fish are "the result of natural reproduction within the Lake Erie basin."

"It's bad news," USGS Duane Chapman told The Associated Press. "It would have been a lot easier to control these fish if they'd been limited in the number of places where they could spawn. This makes our job harder. It doesn't make it impossible, but it makes it harder."

According to a USGS statement:

"If grass carp become abundant in Lake Erie, they may threaten native fish populations and could be detrimental to ducks, geese or other large aquatic birds. Grass carp were brought to the U.S. to control aquatic plants in the 1960s. They eat large quantities of aquatic plants, which could degrade areas important for spawning and early development of native fish."

While other species of Asian carp are of more concern than the Grass carp, all Asian carp require similar conditions to successfully reproduce, scientists say.

The AP reports:

"Of greatest concern in the Great Lakes region are bighead and silver carp, prolific breeders that gobble huge amounts of plankton — tiny plants and animals that are vital to aquatic food chains. Scientists say if they gain a foothold in the lakes, they could spread widely and destabilize a fishing industry valued at $7 billion."

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What You Need To Know About Babies, Toddlers And Screen Time

Eva Hu-Stiles virtually interacts with her grandmother. iPad assist by Elise Hu-Stiles.

John W. Poole/NPR Eva Hu-Stiles virtually interacts with her grandmother. iPad assist by Elise Hu-Stiles.

John W. Poole/NPR

This week, we're exploring the tech frontier through the eyes of our children. So we're starting with the littlest ones — babies. Can certain kinds of screen time help babies learn?

To find some answers, I employed the help of my 1-year-old daughter, Eva. She's still a wobbly walker and the sum total of her speaking skills sound like gibberish. But she has no problem activating Siri, the virtual assistant on my iPhone. Her 16-month-old friend, Lily, is even savvier with the gadgets.

"She knows how to turn the iPad on, she knows how to slide her finger across," says her mom, Kim Trainor.

That gets to the technology tension in modern parenting: You want your kids to be technologically adept — but without giving them so much screen time that it's not healthy for development.

"If I think about my childhood, a lot of these things didn't exist. And obviously my parents didn't have to think about what the exposure might do to us," Trainor says. The tech frontier for our kids is changing so fast that the guidelines are barely keeping up with it.

Case in point: Just two years ago, when San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media surveyed families with children 8 and under, just 8 percent owned tablets like iPads. That's now jumped five-fold — to 40 percent. And the percent of children with access to some sort of smartphones and tablets has jumped from half of those surveyed to 75 percent. (Read the full report.)

Pediatricians discourage passive screen time for children 2 and under.

Baby Lily's mom says she follows her pediatrician's guideline to discourage screen time until after her daughter turns 2. But the doctor behind the American Academy of Pediatrics 2011 policy guideline discouraging screen time for kids under 2 says it specifically concerns passive screen viewing. That is, plopping the baby in front of a TV or film, or having media on in the background.

"The concern for risk is that some kids who watch a lot of media actually have poor language skills, so there's a deficit in their language development. We also have concerns about other developmental issues because they're basically missing out on other developmentally appropriate activities," says Dr. Ari Brown, the lead author on the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement discouraging screen time for babies under 2.

On Monday, the pediatrics group released updated media guidelines for children and adolescents. While still discouraging screen time for children under 2, the policy recommends a balanced approach to media in the homes instead of blanket bans. We've laid out some of the latest thinking on screen time for babies and toddlers, below.

There's a key difference between passive screen time and active screen time.

Research indicates that activities like Skyping or FaceTime — in which the baby communicates with a live human on the screen — can actually help babies learn.

"[Lily] watched her little message from her dad who had bought her a ball and said, 'This is a ball.' " Trainor says that when Lily called her father on Skype a few days later, she associated him with the ball. "She went 'ball, ball, ball,' " Trainor says.

Vanderbilt University developmental psychologist Georgene Troseth conducts some of the country's leading research on children and screens. She says Skyping isn't like watching TV because it's a social interaction.

"We're finding pretty consistently — in fact, two recent studies with actual Skype [calls] — that children do seem to learn better when there is social interaction from a person on video. So it's kind of encouraging with FaceTime or Skype for parents and grandparents to know that [with] that interaction, the children might actually be willing to learn from a person on a screen because of the social interaction showing them what's on the screen is connected to their lives," Troseth says.

The research on touch-screen apps is unclear. Apps and games labeled "educational" may not necessarily help your child learn.

Touch-screens are taking over and babies seem especially great at working with them. Lily, the 16-month-old, showed me how she shuffles through photos on her mom's phone.

Parents, meanwhile, keep hearing about "educational" apps. Troseth says be wary, for now.

"There's nothing wrong with a toy being fun, engaging a child for an amount of time. But to promote it as being educational we really need to do research to find out, is having it be interacting, doing anything to make it easier to learn from?" she asks.

Aim for a balanced approach — for you and your baby.

Since the research on touch-screens isn't clear yet, Brown offers some advice in the meantime.

"We still have questions. If you're planning on using interactive media with your child, use it with your child, sit down with your child and engage with them because that's going to be more valuable than anything," Brown says.

It's valuable time with her 14-month-old daughter that taught another mom — Jennifer Grover — about her own relationship with screens.

"It's just amazing how good they are at mimicking what they see. So I've definitely had to learn to kind of rein in my attention to the laptop, or my attention to my phone in front of her, because whatever I'm doing that's what she wants to be doing," Grover says.

View the original article here

What You Need To Know About Babies, Toddlers And Screen Time

Eva Hu-Stiles virtually interacts with her grandmother. iPad assist by Elise Hu-Stiles.

John W. Poole/NPR Eva Hu-Stiles virtually interacts with her grandmother. iPad assist by Elise Hu-Stiles.

John W. Poole/NPR

This week, we're exploring the tech frontier through the eyes of our children. So we're starting with the littlest ones — babies. Can certain kinds of screen time help babies learn?

To find some answers, I employed the help of my 1-year-old daughter, Eva. She's still a wobbly walker and the sum total of her speaking skills sound like gibberish. But she has no problem activating Siri, the virtual assistant on my iPhone. Her 16-month-old friend, Lily, is even savvier with the gadgets.

"She knows how to turn the iPad on, she knows how to slide her finger across," says her mom, Kim Trainor.

That gets to the technology tension in modern parenting: You want your kids to be technologically adept — but without giving them so much screen time that it's not healthy for development.

"If I think about my childhood, a lot of these things didn't exist. And obviously my parents didn't have to think about what the exposure might do to us," Trainor says. The tech frontier for our kids is changing so fast that the guidelines are barely keeping up with it.

Case in point: Just two years ago, when San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media surveyed families with children 8 and under, just 8 percent owned tablets like iPads. That's now jumped five-fold — to 40 percent. And the percent of children with access to some sort of smartphones and tablets has jumped from half of those surveyed to 75 percent. (Read the full report.)

Pediatricians discourage passive screen time for children 2 and under.

Baby Lily's mom says she follows her pediatrician's guideline to discourage screen time until after her daughter turns 2. But the doctor behind the American Academy of Pediatrics 2011 policy guideline discouraging screen time for kids under 2 says it specifically concerns passive screen viewing. That is, plopping the baby in front of a TV or film, or having media on in the background.

"The concern for risk is that some kids who watch a lot of media actually have poor language skills, so there's a deficit in their language development. We also have concerns about other developmental issues because they're basically missing out on other developmentally appropriate activities," says Dr. Ari Brown, the lead author on the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement discouraging screen time for babies under 2.

On Monday, the pediatrics group released updated media guidelines for children and adolescents. While still discouraging screen time for children under 2, the policy recommends a balanced approach to media in the homes instead of blanket bans. We've laid out some of the latest thinking on screen time for babies and toddlers, below.

There's a key difference between passive screen time and active screen time.

Research indicates that activities like Skyping or FaceTime — in which the baby communicates with a live human on the screen — can actually help babies learn.

"[Lily] watched her little message from her dad who had bought her a ball and said, 'This is a ball.' " Trainor says that when Lily called her father on Skype a few days later, she associated him with the ball. "She went 'ball, ball, ball,' " Trainor says.

Vanderbilt University developmental psychologist Georgene Troseth conducts some of the country's leading research on children and screens. She says Skyping isn't like watching TV because it's a social interaction.

"We're finding pretty consistently — in fact, two recent studies with actual Skype [calls] — that children do seem to learn better when there is social interaction from a person on video. So it's kind of encouraging with FaceTime or Skype for parents and grandparents to know that [with] that interaction, the children might actually be willing to learn from a person on a screen because of the social interaction showing them what's on the screen is connected to their lives," Troseth says.

The research on touch-screen apps is unclear. Apps and games labeled "educational" may not necessarily help your child learn.

Touch-screens are taking over and babies seem especially great at working with them. Lily, the 16-month-old, showed me how she shuffles through photos on her mom's phone.

Parents, meanwhile, keep hearing about "educational" apps. Troseth says be wary, for now.

"There's nothing wrong with a toy being fun, engaging a child for an amount of time. But to promote it as being educational we really need to do research to find out, is having it be interacting, doing anything to make it easier to learn from?" she asks.

Aim for a balanced approach — for you and your baby.

Since the research on touch-screens isn't clear yet, Brown offers some advice in the meantime.

"We still have questions. If you're planning on using interactive media with your child, use it with your child, sit down with your child and engage with them because that's going to be more valuable than anything," Brown says.

It's valuable time with her 14-month-old daughter that taught another mom — Jennifer Grover — about her own relationship with screens.

"It's just amazing how good they are at mimicking what they see. So I've definitely had to learn to kind of rein in my attention to the laptop, or my attention to my phone in front of her, because whatever I'm doing that's what she wants to be doing," Grover says.

View the original article here

Are Dry Ice Smoke Machines Safe for Pets?

Halloween parties are the best! There are cool costumes, Halloween party beverages (especially those that glow in the dark) and spooky fog. Have you ever thought about the safety of the fog? Here's a question from a reader that you may be wondering about, too:

"... I just have one quick question that I can't seem to find the answer to anywhere. My husband and I will be throwing a small party/get-together around Halloween and we are planning on using a Fog Machine that using Dry Ice. We have a Beagle. We want to make sure that this fog machine would not cause any issues with our dog being that she isn't far from the ground, hehe."

My reply: It's true that there will be a higher concentration of carbon dioxide closer to the ground, but as long as there is air circulation in the room, it shouldn't pose a risk for your dog. If she will be present during the party, you might want to be sure she can exit the room with the fog machine at will. I don't think it's likely she will nap during the party where all the activity is taking place, but you might want to discourage her from sleeping on the floor near the machine. If she seems sleepy or irritable, I'd probably relocate her to a different room.

Dry ice sublimates to become carbon dioxide. The cool carbon dioxide sinks to the floor of the room, where it eventually mixes with the air. To some extent, the carbon dioxide will displace the warmer air, but people moving around will mix the fog into the air fairly quickly. Unless you are flooding a sealed room with carbon dioxide or using a whole lot of dry ice, the risk from the increased concentration of the gas is slight. It's a good idea to keep a watch on pets or small children, since they would be breathing a higher concentration of the gas (i.e., lower percentage of oxygen) than adults. Also, people with respiratory problems may have less tolerance to the lower oxygen concentration.

Generally speaking, water, dry ice, and liquid nitrogen fog are all very safe. How do you know if there is too little oxygen in the air? The usual tip-offs would be headache, feeling sleepy, nausea, and dizziness. If someone at a party with dry ice or liquid nitrogen fog experiences these symptoms, remove him or her to an area with fresh air. You may want to increase the air circulation for everyone else, too, or stop making fog for a while, just to be safe.

Make Dry Ice Fog | Smoke & Fire Chemistry

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Easy Homemade Desiccator

Have you ever wondered why so many products come with little packets that say 'Do Not Eat'? The packets contains silica gel beads, which absorb water vapor and keep the product dry, which is an easy way of preventing mold and mildew from taking their toll. Other items would absorb water unevenly (e.g., parts of a wooden musical instrument), causing them to warp. You can use the silica packets or another desiccant to keep special items dry or to keep water from hydrating chemicals. All you need is a hygroscopic (water-absorbing) chemical and a way to seal your container.

Common Desiccant Chemicals silica gel (the beads in those little packets) sodium hydroxide (sometimes sold as a solid drain cleaner) calcium chloride (sold as a solid laundry bleach or a road salt) Make a Desiccator

This is extremely simple. Just place a small amount of one of the desiccant chemicals into a shallow dish. Enclose an open container of the item or chemical you wish to dehydrate with the container of desiccant. A large plastic bag works well for this purpose, but you could use a jar or any airtight container.

The desiccant will need to be replaced after it has absorbed all of the water that it can hold. Some chemicals will liquefy when this occurs so that you will know they need to be replaced (e.g., sodium hydroxide). Otherwise, you'll just need to switch out the desiccant when it starts to lose its effectiveness.

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