If your friends and family get fat, chances are you will too, researchers report in a startling new study that suggests obesity is "socially contagious" and can spread easily from person to person.
The large, federally funded study found that to be true even if your loved ones lived far away. Social ties seemed to play a surprisingly strong role, even more than genes are known to do.
"We were stunned to find that friends who are hundreds of miles away have just as much impact on a person's weight status as friends who are right next door," said co-author James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego.
(snip)
Obesity is a global public health problem. About 1.5 billion adults worldwide are overweight, including more than 400 million who are obese. Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese.
Of course, maybe the population is biased towards obese individuals because the silly BMI index has convinced us that we're all obese?
So what say you? Are you friends with people who share your body composition? Or no?
If you're here for the first time then you probably won't remember (or dislike) 3CB for what 3rd Coast Bodybuilding wasn't. Third Coast was SUPPOSED to be a blog dedicated to bodybuilding, fitness, etc. What it turned out to be was a pain in the butt to update with reliable information. As a result of this I've rebranded and am starting up 3CB which will be much more Texas related in its focus and will delve into issues surrounding fitness in Texas, and dabble occasionally into the world of bodybuilding.
Exactly how many landmines buried in the Korean peninsula is a state secret. Some estimates put the figure at over 2 million in the 2.5-mile wide DMZ and about 1 million more in the 6-mile wide Military Control Zone. Though thousands are being removed to make way for rail and road links and many more have become non-functional through environmental wear, they can easily be replaced with the millions stored in stockpiles throughout the countryside.
*
Also a state secret are their locations. Of course, one only has to draw one line in the north and one in the south to generally know where not to go traipsing about. For everyone, this is enough. For military war strategists, however, maps would definitely be of some help. But then again, some of the land mines perhaps may have become a secret even to those who keep the official records, as one typhoon years ago showed what could happen.
As Koreans begin to clear up after the floods [caused by Typhoon Olga], they are being warned of the danger posed by landmines and other explosives dislodged by floodwaters from the heavily-fortified border zone between North and South Korea.
The South and its ally, the US, are thought to have placed about one million landmines and anti-tank explosives along the border.
Marines say they are looking for 150 mines which may have been dislodged. Reports say just four have been found so far.
Artillery shells and more than 7,000 other pieces of ammunition have been swept away defence ministry officials say.
Not clarified in the article is the fact that those landmines were washed out of the DMZ or storage sites into areas frequented by civilians. And though 150 sounds like small change, just one is needed to ruin an entire family.
Also not mentioned is that this sort of thing apparently happens periodically, not only through flooding but also from erosion, landslide, melting snow, and other natural elements.
For another case of unexploded ordnances shifting from their original locations, check out this briefing paper prepared by Human Rights Watch on the landmines in Mozambique affected by catastrophic flooding in 2000.
*
(Sarah Pickering, Landmine, 2005.)
(Sarah Pickering, Fuel Air Explosion, 2005.)
(Sarah Pickering, Artillery, 2006.)
*
Last year, TIME Europe reported on a remarkable research being done by Jarne Ellehold and Carsten Meier into possibly using a common type of weed to detect landmines.
“On scrubby flatland outside Copenhagen Airport,” we read, “on old army shooting ranges that have been seeded with land mines,” their biotech start-up company, Aresa, is growing large patches of thale-cress that have been genetically modified “so that its leaves turn red when the plant comes in contact with nitrogen dioxide — a compound that naturally leaches into the soil from unexploded land mines made from plastic and held together by leaky rubber seals.”
While more experiments are still needed, initial results seem to show that the weeds are indeed turning red where they should be.
*
Not to be outdone by the plant kingdom, some Croatian bees are learning to become mine detectors.
According to BBC News, Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University and his colleagues are training honey bees to sniff out explosives that might have been missed by de-mining teams.
Training the bees to find mines takes place in a large net tent pitched on a lawn at the university's Faculty of Agriculture.
A hive of bees sits at one end, with several feeding points for the bees set up around the tent.
But only a few of the feeding points contain food, and the soil immediately around them has been impregnated with explosive chemicals.
The idea is that the bees' keen sense of smell soon associates the smell of explosives with food.
So like libidinous sows to truffles, they follow the scent of TNT while a special heat-sensitive camera tracks their every move. And if they've been trained properly, they should then “settle on areas of ground that smell of explosives,” their collective buzzing turned into an alarm bell.
But unlike those prized hogs, the weight of the insects won't trigger the discovered landmines, blowing them up into smithereens or into tonight's dinner.
*
Locating buried bombs is one thing; rendering them harmless is another, something which the thale-cress and Croatian bees are incapable of doing.
Fortunately, as but one example of a phytoremediating organism, there is the white-rot fungus Phlebia radiate, specifically mentioned by New Scientist in a short article about Robert Riggs' idea for what Subtopia brilliantly referred to as fungoidal bomb-hacking.
The invention, according to the patent application, entails mixing dormant fungal spores encased in biodegradable pellets into the explosive material. If the bomb explodes, so goes the fungal package as well. But if it remains undetonated, moisture will eventually find its way inside, allowing the spores to grow and proliferate. As the fungi become metabolically active, they begin to eat their way out of the capsules. And once they make contact with the explosive material, they too will begin metabolizing and degrading it.
Just so they won't feel left out, here are the other fungi mentioned by Riggs that are quite suitable for his invention: Ascomycete mycelia; Bjerkandera sordidicola sp BOS55; Pycnoporus cinnabarinus; Stachybotrys; Inonotius dryophilus; Perenniporia medulla-panis; Ganoderma oregonense; Trametes versicolor; Phellinus badius; Agaricus bisporus; Pieurotus ostreatus; Lentinula edodes; and Phanerochaete Chrysosporium.
Who wants to bet that somebody is now planning, if not already in mid-experiment, to genetically modify one of those? Because why involved yourself into making yet more bombs just to make them safer when you could forgo the manufacturing process altogether?
So: after surveying the weather and cosulting your manual on the wind dispersal pattern, you spray the special spores onto a minefield using a hydroseeder, the same one that groundskeepers to seed green grass on golf courses, and which Ares also used to cover their experimental field with thale-cress. Once on the ground, and activated by the meerest contact with soil, they begin sniffing out the tell-tale chemical signs of explosives, burrowing deep into the ground, their rhizomes following the scent of nitrogen diozide until they touch metal or plastic. The feast begins thereafter.
Moving away from landmines for the moment, it is worth mentioning, at this point, this recent article from National Geographic News regarding three species of fungi that apparently “grew larger and faster when exposed to high levels of radiation, even when deprived of nutrients.”
These fungi, we learn, contain “black pigment melanin -- a substance also present in human skin,” and “observations suggest that the pigment may play a role in the fungi similar to that of chlorophyll in plants, which traps energy from sunlight and converts it to 'food energy' needed to sustain life.”
Potentially, then, with edible mushrooms containing melanin or with plants genetically grafted with genes from these self-feeding fungi, you can grow your own food without the sun or gas-guzzling artificial light sources. In tunnel cities charged with ambient radioactivity. In Martian-bound colonial spaceships constantly bathed with cosmic rays. Or on the surface of Mars itself, in barrel vaulted greenhouses half-buried in solar irradiated soil.
To quickly revert back to the earlier subject of biodetection, we'll note that the article goes on to quote John Dighton, a fungi specialist who has done research at Chernobyl. He says, “Fungi that have been previously exposed to ionizing radiation have a propensity to direct their growth towards sources [of the radiation].”
Like Croatian bees to TNT, no?
*
(Above is the Shewanella oneidensis eating away some bits of the iron oxide mineral, hematite. An ideal candidate for bioremediation, they can neutralize uranium, nitrates, and other substances harmful to humans.)
*
Having now amassed a menagerie of sorts, there is only one thing left to do: you cultivate a garden out in the DMZ.
You take Aresa's entire supply of altered thale-cress, Kezic's colonies of trained bees, Rigg's bomb-eating mushrooms, and every other pytho-Frankensteins we haven't yet heard about or still inside petri dishes unspliced and awaiting reconstruction. And don't forget to take those field-tested Dutch hydroseeders, too. Or better yet, you build a bigger, jet-powered hydroseeder that can coat a hundred football fields in 5 seconds or less with your special slurry of bioremediators and mulch.
Once the landscape has been coated, you wait for a week or two, maybe interviewing soldiers for the visitor's guide and tourist brochures in the meantime or taking in the sights. Soon patches here and there become hosts to thriving communities, lush with prismatic vegetation and bustling with activity, and whose biodiversity may only be matched by the Amazon. And because the design and technology actually works, the land mines underneath these small parcels of land are getting dissolved, folding back into the earth.
The thrill-seekers descend en mass, navigating around these strange arboretums which they cannot enter. Off limits, unless they are really that adventurous. Consequently, the barren interstitial zones get littered with well-worn foot paths, which consolidate, after much further use, into a highly ordered Serpentine circulation system. Hints of Capability Brown perhaps. And maybe of John Loudon, via the furnishings of “exotic” plants. Or Gertrude Jekyll's impressionistic “hardy flower borders”?
And what's a picturesque garden without framed, scenic views for histrionics and philosophical musings. They will be created collaboratively. Not accidentally, as everything here has been designed intentionally, unlike the quasi-wilderness of the involuntary park.
From Google Earth, the arboretums resolve into curlicued, self-interlacing parterres. Edenic parterres, it must be qualified. For much like the first, these new Edens have been made inaccessible by our own follies. We can only gaze at them in exile, and only through acts of redemption could we possibly be allowed to enter.
So it started with one very minor edit to the template, specifically, to replace the four lines from a Reginald Arkell poem with a Robert Smithson quotation, but that led to another tiny edit and then another one and then another and another. It simply snowballed from there. And after a week of almost nonstop tweaking, the tweaking still goes on.
We've been using browsershots.org to see what the blog now looks like in Windows, and because it's an easy option, in Linux as well. The site checks out fine on MSIE 7.0, but on previous versions, not so well. Fortunately, we won't be concerning ourselves with those older versions of MSIE.
However, we definitely want to resolve one problem on Firefox 2.0: the images are not loading. We absolutely have no idea why that is. Is it because they are transparent PNGs? Is it because the images are set (for the moment) to “private” on our Flickr account? Is it because of the machines and the network used by browsershots.org? Is it what?
In any case, please let us know what other problems you see layout-wise.
Tunneling into the abyss to gaze out into the firmament. It's the Super-Kamiokande once more, simply because the whole thing's so incredibly beautiful, here photographed after its reconstruction and before it was filled with 50,000 tons of pure heavy water. Once disused again, can we have it, rent free? It'll be the summer residence for Pruned.
Download some high-resolution photos from here to decorate your websites and blogs.
