Chocolate

There is a theory that chocolate slows down the aging process. It may not be true, but should you dare take the chance?

Unwanted Catalogs

When you receive unwanted catalogs or other paper mail from specific sources, call the (usually toll-free) customer service number of the organization or business and request that your name be removed from their mailing list.

Other options are to make your request via e-mail from the company's website, or via letter or postcard.

Since the mailing label will help the company identify how you are listed in its files, have the label handy when you call, or tape it to the postcard if you make a written request. Sign and date your request. Think of the cycle, they print the stuff, send it to the post office, which delivers it to our mailbox, and we take the paper from the mailbox, and deliver it to the garbage. What a waste. Literally!

Double Chicken

 KFC Double Down Sandwich - Two pieces of bacon and two slices of cheese smothered with the Colonel’s Sauce and two fried chicken patties as buns. Mmmm!

Speaking of Chicken

Did you ever wonder what chicken poop is good for? A study last month Aug, 2008 shows that shooting ranges in Japan have extremely high levels of lead in the soil. To get rid of this, they developed a method of remediating the contamination by mixing the soil with chicken poop to reduce the bad environmental impacts from the lead.

The study  (published in the Journal of Environmental Quality this past month, and last year at the Soil Science Society of America) demonstrated that the amendment reduced the toxicity characteristic leaching by 90%. It also showed that levels were reduced even further when plants were grown in the amended soil.

Smell This

The male gypsy moth can 'smell' the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away.

Cool Charger

 An 8in x 6in universal recharging pad with a conductive surface that powers up to four mobiles and iPods at a time from the mains. You attach a specific adaptor sleeve to the device to charge, then simply place it on the pad.

A recharge is said to take as long as with a conventional charger. The pad comes with one sleeve (you choose), and others can be bought separately, with major phone brands such as Apple, BlackBerry, Motorola and Nokia supported.

The Duracell MyGrid that you see here is one of those that can charge several mobiles at one time including products from Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry, as well as the iPhone and iPod touch. It should be available in October for $80. 

You have to buy a device (sleeve) to plug into your devices so they can attach to the surface. Seems like a multiple power cord strip with less cords.

Brain Gel

An injectable hydrogel could aid recovery from brain injury by helping stimulate tissue growth at the site of the wound, researchers say.

Research on rats suggests the gel, developed by Dr. Ning Zhang at Clemson University, South Carolina, and made from synthetic and natural sources, may spur growth of stem cells in the brain. She predicted the gel may be ready for human testing in a few years.

Following a brain injury the tissues tend to swell up and this causes the loss of more cells, compounding the damage caused by the original wound. The standard treatments attempt to minimize this secondary damage at the site of the injury, for instance by lowering the temperature or relieving the build up of pressure, but their impact is often limited.

Scientists believe that transplanting donor brain cells into the wound to repair tissue damage is potentially a more productive approach, but while this method has produced limited results when used to treat brain injuries. The donor cells do not tend to thrive at the site of injury, or to stimulate repair. This could be due to inflammation and scarring at the injury site, and the lack of supportive tissue and blood supply to provide the necessary nutrients.

The advantage of the new gel, which is injected into the injury in liquid form, is that it can be loaded with different chemicals to stimulate various biological processes.

First, Dr. Zhang used it to help re-establish a full blood supply at the site of a brain injury in rats, potentially providing a much more friendly environment for donor cells to thrive. In follow-up work, she loaded it with immature human stem cells and the chemicals they needed to develop into fully fledged adult brain cells. After eight weeks of treatment with this mixture rats with severe brain injuries showed signs of making a significant recovery.

Quotable

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." -Ben Franklin

Bad Ad

Wow, this recession really has taken its toll. Now these Benjamin Franklins are only worth 001 dollars each.

Look close.

Quotable

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Scuttlebutt

The origin of the word scuttlebutt, which is nautical parlance for a rumor, comes from a combination of 'scuttle' - to make a hole in the ship's hull and thereby causing her to sink - and 'butt' - a cask used in the days of wooden ships to hold drinking water (or wine). The cask from which the ship's crew took their drinking water, like a water fountain, was the "scuttlebutt".

Even in today's Navy a drinking fountain is referred to as such. Since the crew used to congregate around the scuttlebutt, that is where the rumors about the ship or voyage would begin. Thus, rumors are 'talk from the scuttlebutt' or just 'scuttlebutt'. That reminds me. Did I tell you what Tom said. . .

Mona Lisa

I have noticed that way too many blogs have pictures to reduce the amount of creative writing needed. Here is an example showing the Mona Lisa.

This site that has over four thousand pictures of the Mona Lisa from the sublime to the ridiculous and everything in between. A real time waster, but interesting.