Scientist Uncovers Internal Clock Able to Measure Age of Most Human Tissues

Women's Breast Tissue Ages Faster Than Rest of Body

Science Daily

Everyone grows older, but scientists don't really understand why. Now a UCLA study has uncovered a biological clock embedded in our genomes that may shed light on why our bodies age and how we can slow the process. Published in the Oct. 21 edition of Genome Biology, the findings could offer valuable insights into cancer and stem cell research.

While earlier clocks have been linked to saliva, hormones and telomeres, the new research is the first to identify an internal timepiece able to accurately gauge the age of diverse human organs, tissues and cell types. Unexpectedly, the clock also found that some parts of the anatomy, like a woman's breast tissue, age faster than the rest of the body.

Landscaping with Leaves

Learn How to Mulch Them

By TIM DOWNEY/ecoRI.org News contributor

Equipped with Gator Blades and Vulcher Safety 

Mulcher, Tim Downey’s mower turns leaves 

into tiny fragments. (Aesthetic Landscape Care)

When it comes to picking up yard “waste,” it makes more sense to leave the leaves to return to the soil. Mulch mowing is an easy way to do this, but, like me, you may have encountered challenges to successfully mulch-mow while maintaining the look clients have come to expect.

After 15 years in the landscape business, I took a hard look at how my practices were affecting the land, but I struggled with Mother Nature’s bounty of leaves each autumn. Instead of taking a dispersed volume of material and gathering it together to make a pile that then has to be removed and disposed of, I wondered if I could take the dispersed volume of leaves, make the leaf pieces smaller and disperse them further, until they “disappeared.” 

Would that harm the lawns I was trusted to care for? Would my properties look messy? If I left all those leaves essentially in place, what would that look like?

A Trumped-Up War on Welfare

One way the top 1 percent is trying to ease concerns about inequality is pretending that our safety net is too generous to the bottom 1 percent.

For more cartoons by Steve Sack, click hre.

By Bob Lord

You’re the top 1 percent. You pocket one out of every five dollars of the nation’s income — more than double your slice of that pie in 1976. You want even more, but the masses are catching on. What do you do?

You get your minions to attack the bottom 1 percent to distract the 98 percent in the middle.

That’s why the Cato Institute recently launched a woefully contrived “study” that reached the pre-ordained conclusion that welfare pays more than work — minimum wage work that is. Forbes, a leading business publication that calls itself a “capitalist tool,” proclaimed “On Labor Day 2013, Welfare Pays More Than Minimum-Wage Work in 35 States.”

Cato is a libertarian think tank funded and dominated by the multi-billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Hidden terrorist messages found in LOL Cats

Animal News #152

By Eric Lewis

Click here for the shocking truth.

Smart Energy - how to harvest energy

From Global Warming Is Real

New use found for nose hair. Seriously

Hair Regeneration Method Is First to Induce New Human Hair Growth
Science Daily

The source of new hair: For the first time, researchers have been 

able to take human dermal papilla cells (those inside the base of human 

hair follicles) and use them to create new hairs. (Credit: 

Claire Higgins/Christiano Lab at Columbia University Medical Center.)

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have devised a hair restoration method that can generate new human hair growth, rather than simply redistribute hair from one part of the scalp to another. The approach could significantly expand the use of hair transplantation to women with hair loss, who tend to have insufficient donor hair, as well as to men in early stages of baldness. 

The study was published today in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"About 90 percent of women with hair loss are not strong candidates for hair transplantation surgery because of insufficient donor hair," said co-study leader Angela M. Christiano, PhD, the Richard and Mildred Rhodebeck Professor of Dermatology and professor of genetics & development. 

Winter squash delight

Roasted Acorn Squash with Parmesan Maple Glaze

Photo and text by KARA DiCAMILLO in EcoRI.org

Salty and sweet has to be one of my favorite flavor combinations. Bring on the stinky bleu cheese with honey, chocolate covered pretzels and salted caramel.

With this recipe, I decided to stick to that theme since acorn squash needs to be seasoned really well in order for the flavors to sing. While many recipes call for brown sugar for the glaze, I substituted local maple syrup instead.

Bossing the Poor Around

How about a bill banning soda sales at the House of Representatives' cafeterias?

For more cartoons by Steve Greenberg, click here.

By Jill Richardson

I spent a few months on food stamps this year. As a single woman in San Diego, I qualified for $70 a month — less than a dollar per meal. But I’m lucky and I’m unusual because many of my friends are farmers and gardeners and I know how to forage wild foods.

Determined to stretch my $70 a month budget to somehow cover a healthy diet, I harvested wild cactus pads and edible weeds from my neighbors’ yards. Friends gave me fruit from their trees. A farmer told me to take whatever I needed from his stand at the farmers’ market. Then I used the food stamps to acquire foods I couldn’t get for free: milk, oatmeal, beans, and so on. All organic.

When Government Is Too Small

Every American should have been in the streets when our elected officials labeled cancer care for children as "nonessential."

By Jo Comerford

For more cartoons by Jimmy Marguiles, click here.

On a damp Friday morning, 11 days into the government shutdown, a few dozen truckers took to the Capital Beltway to tell lawmakers they were angry.

They were protesting big government. Yet opinion polls showed that Americans opposed the government shutdown and were hurting because of it. At that moment, according to polls, nearly one in three Americans already felt personally affected not by too much government, but by too little — by the sudden freeze in critical services.

To be completely accurate, the entire federal government hadn’t shut down. Paychecks kept flowing to lawmakers and the plush House gym with its heated pool and paddleball courts remained open. That’s because “essential” services continued, even as “nonessential” ones ceased.

Don't waste a good pumpkin

Now that Halloween is over....

From Fake Science

VIDEO: Tea Party Republicans campaigning against other Republicans

Says 87 conservative members of Congress are Traitors.

And this is for real, not made up by Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. To our Tea Party friends, good luck!

Spinning Failure into Gold

Wall Street's greatest deception is the claim that they're brave risk takers who put their money into enterprises that create America's economic growth.

By Jim Hightower

What amazing alchemists Wall Street bankers are! They can turn failure into gold and reform into business as usual.

These sorcerers have pulled off both tricks right in front of us since their 2007 collapse. They turned that gross failure into an ongoing multi-trillion-dollar bailout by us taxpayers to restore them to even-grosser profit levels.

Then, while the public howled for lawmakers to shackle their greed, these bewitching bankers reached into their magic hat and pulled out the massive Dodd-Frank reform law that — hocus pocus — adds up to the status quo.

Zap the pain

Promising Long Term Treatment for Chronic Headache Sufferers

Science Daily

For the more than 45 million Americans who suffer from chronic headaches, relief may be on the way in the form of an electric pulse, according to a study presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY™ 2013 annual meeting. Electric stimulation of the peripheral nerve reduced average headache intensity by more than 70 percent.

With electric stimulation of the peripheral nerve, a thin insulated wire is implanted in the back of the head (occipital nerve) or in the forehead above the eyebrow (supraorbital nerve) and delivers electric pulses to block pain. The study looked into the safety and long-term usefulness of this treatment.

Never their fault

The Outsourcing Customer is Always Wrong

By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest

For more cartoons by Jeff Darcy, click here.

The corporate executives who testified at a House hearing on the botched rollout of the federal healthcare portal apparently sprayed themselves with Teflon before heading to Capitol Hill.

Blame for the fiasco did not stick to these contractors as Republican members of the Energy & Commerce Committee sought to implicate the Obama Administration and the Democrats focused on defending the Affordable Care Act.

Representatives from four contractors — CGI Federal, QSSI, Serco and Equifax — took advantage of the situation by denying any serious shortcomings on their part. In fact, they each claimed that their individual pieces of Healthcare.gov were working fine and claimed to be puzzled as to why the overall system was not working properly.

Nuclear power plants were on their own during government shut-down

And other things that make me worry, at least a little

For more cartoons by Jeff Koterba, click here.

By Will Collette

I didn’t want to alarm you, but during the recent federal government shut-down, our local nuke, the Millstone nuclear power plant only 20 miles upwind from Charlestown, was largely on its own while 90 percent of inspectors and staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were laid off.

The NRC kept on-site inspectors working (though they weren’t getting paid) and said it could have called back furloughed workers if there was an emergency. But personnel performing non-emergency work got to sit at home and wondered how they were going to pay their bills.

The shut-down may also have set back Millstone’s proposal to win NRC approval to relax the rules on the temperature of the sea water it draws from Long Island Sound to cool its reactors. Not sure if that’s good news or bad news.