Distracted Driving #1 Killer of U.S. Teens
Horrifying article. I would have thought they would be talking about texting, which we can see for ourselves has people, young and old, swerving all over the highway, but no – the culprit is PASSENGERS! The death rate for teens in cars increases with each additional passenger!
The papers are full of heartbreaking obituaries, young people, men and women, who had so much potential, so much life ahead of them, and now they are gone. Heartbroken parents think of the years of joy they will miss.
Fatal Distraction: Teen Drivers And Passengers Are A Deadly Mix
Studies show that one passenger in a teen driver’s car increases fatality risk by 44%, two passengers doubles the risk
Sharon Silke Carty
AOL Auto News
Teen driving safety is one of those problems that is easy to ignore: So often the tragedies are spread out throughout small towns around the country. One lost life here, two lost there. We don’t often piece all those crashes together and realize what’s happening to our children.
Sometimes to get change, you need a tipping point. Maybe this week will be it: Since Sunday, 15 teenagers have died in major car accidents around the U.S. Six died after crashing into a pond in Ohio. Five died when they crashed into a tanker truck in Texas. Four died when they crashed into a creek in Illinois.
And that’s just the crashes that were major and notable enough to make national news. One teen in Colorado died Sunday when the teen driver of a car he was in crashed into the side of a mobile home. Three died in Indiana when the drivers, in two trucks, ran stop signs and collided head-on. A 15-year-old driver in Maryland died when he was fleeing police in a car. And there are others, many which don’t make the news. Crashes that don’t end in fatalities but left serious damage: traumatic brain injuries, crippling spinal cord issues.
“The numbers are so small and spread out geographically,” said Timothy Hollister, a teen driving safety advocate in Connecticut whose book, “Not So Fast: Parenting Teen Drivers Before They Get Behind The Wheel”, comes out in September. “It’s only when you put the numbers together nationally that people even begin to take notice.”
Driving is the No. 1 killer of teens in this country, accounting for about 25 percent of teen deaths each year. About 3,000 to 5,000 teens die annually in car wrecks, enough to fill the halls of a large high school. Or two.
Recently, the Governor’s Highway Safety Association release preliminary figures for 2012 that show a troubling trend: After 10 years of declining, teen driving deaths are on the rise.
Although teen crashes seem random and unpredictable, they actually often follow a predictable pattern: It’s likely a group of teens heading nowhere in particular, probably late at night, and going fast. Often, they’re not wearing seatbelts.
Researchers have identified the dangerous habits of young drivers, who can’t ever be considered safe behind the wheel because they are simply too novice. There’s a common thread for many fatal crashes: More than one passenger in the car, especially if those passengers are male.
The Passenger Effect
A study released last year by AAA said passengers have a huge impact on fatalities: Fatality rates went up 44 percent with one passenger under 21 years old, doubled with two passengers, and quadruples when carrying three or more passengers who are under 21 years old.
Many graduated drivers license (GDL) laws regulate how many passengers teens can have in the car before they are awarded a full license. Parents who are concerned about their teens behind the wheel want to pay close attention to this rule: Make sure your teens are driving alone mostly, with no more than one passenger. Don’t let them carpool to and from school events. Don’t let them head out for the evening with a bunch of other kids teens in one car. Remember that other passengers are a huge distraction that can turn into a fatal distraction.
Laws regarding passengers in vehicles driven by teens are “the single least enforced and most ignored rule,” Hollister said. “It’s the one piece that could make a difference. That’s parents putting convenience ahead of safety, and not understanding the dangers that every passenger in a teen driver’s car adds an additional risk.”
Catastrophic Vanishing Water in Middle East
I found this article in the Weather Underground News this morning:
DOHA, Qatar — An amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought, according to a NASA study.
The study, to be published Friday in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from 2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites which is part of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment or GRACE. Researchers found freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins had lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of its total stored freshwater, the second fastest loss of groundwater storage loss after India.
About 60 percent of the loss resulted from pumping underground reservoirs for ground water, including 1,000 wells in Iraq, and another fifth was due to impacts of the drought including declining snow packs and soil drying up. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for about another fifth of the decline, the study found.
“This rate of water loss is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents,” the authors wrote in the study, noting the declines were most obvious after a drought.
The study is the latest evidence of a worsening water crisis in the Middle East, where demands from growing populations, war and the worsening effects of climate change are raising the prospect that some countries could face sever water shortages in the decades to come. Some like impoverished Yemen blame their water woes on the semi-arid conditions and the grinding poverty while the oil-rich Gulf faces water shortages mostly due to the economic boom that has created glistening cities out of the desert.
In a report released during the U.N. climate talks in Qatar, the World Bank concluded among the most critical problems in the Middle East and North Africa will be worsening water shortages. The region already has the lowest amount of freshwater in the world. With climate change, droughts in the region are expected to turn more extreme, water runoff is expected to decline 10 percent by 2050 while demand for water is expected to increase 60 percent by 2045.
One of the biggest challenges to improving water conservation is often competing demands which has worsened the problem in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins.
Turkey controls the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters, as well as the reservoirs and infrastructure of Turkey’s Greater Anatolia Project, which dictates how much water flows downstream into Syria and Iraq, the researchers said. With no coordinated water management between the three countries, tensions have intensified since the 2007 drought because Turkey continues to divert water to irrigate farmland.
“That decline in stream flow put a lot of pressure on northern Iraq,” Kate Voss, lead author of the study and a water policy fellow with the University of California’s Center for Hydrological Modeling in Irvine, said. “Both the UN and anecdotal reports from area residents note that once stream flow declined, this northern region of Iraq had to switch to groundwater. In an already fragile social, economic and political environment, this did not help the situation.”
Jay Famiglietti, principle investigator of the new study and a hydrologist and UC Irvine professor of Earth System Science, plans to visit the region later this month, along with Voss and two other UC Irvine colleagues, to discuss their findings and raise awareness of the problem and the need for a regional approach to solve the problem.
“They just do not have that much water to begin with, and they’re in a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change,” Famiglietti said. “Those dry areas are getting dryer. They and everyone else in the world’s arid regions need to manage their available water resources as best they can.”
New Study Shows Taking Folic Acid Cuts Autism Risk 40%
I heard this yesterday on NPR and found this article today on the Huffpost/AOL News. The critical factor is that a woman needs to be taking folic acid supplements BEFORE she gets pregnant:
With autism now affecting one in 88 children in the U.S., many parents are searching for any step they can take to help lower their child’s risk of developing the disorder. A new Norwegian study joins a small but growing body of research that suggests a simple, low-cost option already exists: Taking folic acid during the earliest stages of pregnancy could lower a child’s odds of developing autism by nearly 40 percent.
“This is a relatively inexpensive way that parents can take action to possibly prevent risk of tube birth defects and autism,” Alycia Halladay, senior director for environmental and clinical Sciences for the advocacy group Autism Speaks, told The Huffington Post. Halladay did not work on the new study, which was published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday.
Researchers analyzed a sample of more than 85,000 children born in Norway between 2002 and 2008 to study the effect of taking a folic acid supplement — typically between 200 and 400 micrograms per day — from one month before a woman got pregnant to two months after. Some .10 percent of children whose moms took folic acid supplements were diagnosed with autism, compared to .21 percent of those whose moms did not — which is equal to 39 percent lower odds.
The study does not establish a cause and effect relationship between the vitamin and subsequent autism, and its authors do not know why folic acid may have a protective effect. Study researcher Pal Suren of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health told HuffPost that folic acid is critical to the synthesis of DNA, which could play some role in the connection. Folic acid may also affect how certain genes are turned on and off in the body, he hypothesized, saying it was “not biologically implausible” that folic acid supplementation has certain epigenetic effects.
The new study also raises questions about how much folic acid may be needed to lower autism risk, as well as what form it must come in.
“We do not know how other dosages would have affected the risk of autism, or whether it matters if folic acid is taken as single tablets or as part of a prenatal multivitamin supplement,” Suren said.
The researchers took steps to ensure that the decreased risk was not just because women who took folic acid were also engaged in other healthy behaviors. To control for that, they looked at fish oil use (assuming women who took fish oil were also likely to be healthy in other ways) and found no link between lower autism risk.
Since the early 1990s, groups like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Public Health Service have recommended that all women of childbearing age take 400 micrograms of folic acid daily to help prevent neural tube defects — birth defects of the brain and spinal cord including spina bifida and anencephaly. Since folic acid was added to the grain supply in 1998, the U.S. has seen a 26 percent decrease in those neural tube disorders, according to figures compiled by the March of Dimes.
The possibility of a link between folic acid consumption and lower autism risk is far more preliminary. A 2011, California-based study in the journal Epidemiology found that mothers of children with autism were less likely to have taken a prenatal vitamin in the three months before pregnancy or in the first month after getting pregnant, suggesting that so-called “periconceptional” use of prenatal vitamins may reduce autism risk. In the U.S., prenatal vitamins typically include between 400 and 800 micrograms of folic acid.
But folic acid is by no means a magic pill, experts caution. The fact that rates of autism diagnosis have skyrocketed in the past several decades despite more and more women taking folic acid shows how complex the origins of autism are. The exact causes of the disorder, which is characterized by social and communication difficulties and repetitive behaviors, are still unknown.
“This is one way that risk may be reduced, but this isn’t the only way,” said Halladay. “It’s an inexpensive way to potentially reduce the risk of autism, but there are a number of risk factors — genetics and other environmental factors — that solidly contribute to risk.”
Green Tea Fights Dementia
Green Tea Could Aid Fight Against Dementia, Study Suggests
PA | Posted: 06/02/2013 11:18 GMT | Updated: 06/02/2013 11:18 GMT
Chemicals in green tea and red wine may block the brain damage caused by Alzheimer’s disease, an early study suggests.
Scientists targeted a process that allows harmful clumps of protein in the brain to kill off neurons.
Using purified extracts of the chemicals EGCG in green tea and resveratrol in red wine, they were able to stop nerve cells from being harmed.
The findings, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, could pave the way for new drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, say the researchers.
Lead scientist Professor Nigel Hooper, from the University of Leeds, said: “This is an important step in increasing our understanding of the cause and progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s a misconception that Alzheimer’s is a natural part of ageing; it’s a disease that we believe can ultimately be cured through finding new opportunities for drug targets like this.”
Alzheimer’s is characterised by a build-up of amyloid-beta protein in the brain which clumps together to form toxic, sticky balls.
The amyloid balls latch on to molecules called prions on the surface of nerve cells. As a result, the nerve cells start to malfunction and eventually die.
“We wanted to investigate whether the precise shape of the amyloid balls is essential for them to attach to the prion receptors, like the way a baseball fits snugly into its glove,” said Dr Jo Rushworth, another member of the Leeds team.
“And, if so, we wanted to see if we could prevent the amyloid balls binding to prion by altering their shape, as this would stop the cells from dying.”
Previous research had shown that the red wine and green tea compounds are able to reshape amyloid proteins.
When they were added to amyloid balls in a test tube, the toxic clumps of protein no longer harmed human and animal brain cells.
“We saw that this was because their shape was distorted, so they could no longer bind to prion and disrupt cell function,” said Prof Hooper.
“We also showed, for the first time, that when amyloid balls stick to prion, it triggers the production of even more amyloid, in a deadly vicious cycle.”
The next step for the team is to uncover exactly how the amyloid-prion interaction destroys neurons.
Prof Hooper added: “I’m certain that this will increase our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease even further, with the potential to reveal yet more drug targets.”
Dr Simon Ridley, from the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK which part-funded the study, said: “Understanding the causes of Alzheimer’s is vital if we are to find a way of stopping the disease in its tracks.
“While these early-stage results should not be a signal for people to stock up on green tea and red wine, they could provide an important new lead in the search for new and effective treatments. With half a million people affected by Alzheimer’s in the UK, we urgently need treatments that can halt the disease. That means it’s crucial to invest in research to take results like these from the lab bench to the clinic.”
Food Trends for 2013
Found this on AOL News/Kitchen Daily.com
FOOD TRENDS FOR 201
KITCHEN DAILY 11/25/12
The Sterling-Rice Group recently announced its predictions for 2013’s top ten food trends. The list was compiled by the group’s culinary council, which is made up of chefs, restaurateurs and foodies, and it included the following:
Sour Foods -Tart and bitter flavors, such as fermented cherry juice and vinegars will take the stage.
Healthy Dining Out – Chefs will work behind the scenes to make your meals healthier by using ingredients like brown rice and vegetable stock.
Asian Comfort Foods – Thai, Vietnamese and Korean flavors will work their way into traditional American menu items.
Vegetables as Main Dishes – Veggies will take over entrées–options such as cauliflower steaks and squash noodles are becoming more common.
Kid-Friendly Versions of Adult Foods – Kids’ menus will focus less on hot dogs and grilled cheese and more on fruits, grains and authentic Asian flavors.
Local Artisans – American artisan shops will become destinations for foodies that used to travel to Europe for exotic flavors.
Individualized Servings – Menus will offer singular servings for perfectly-sized meals.
Savory Fruit – Chefs will be less interested in sugary tastes than in adding savory touches to their recipes.
All-Inclusive Menus – No diner will be left behind as restaurants offer options to accommodate all eaters.
Popcorn – Popcorn will be the snack of 2013–it will pop up in all types of food!
Gene Predicts Your Time of Death
This is absolutely fascinating to me – and no, it does not predict the day you will die, but the time of day that in all probability you will die. It’s fascinating, and you probably don’t even have to take a genetic test to make a good guess as to what time of day you might likely expire. This is from HuffPost Science:
Gene Predicts Time Of Death Down To Hour, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post | By Ryan Grenoble
Posted: 11/19/2012 2:39 pm EST Updated: 11/19/2012 3:05 pm EST
In an study published in the November 2012 issue of the Annals of Neurology scientists studying the body’s biological clock (a.k.a. the circadian rhythm) report the discovery of gene variant that not only determines the likelihood of your being a morning person, but also predicts, with unsettling accuracy, your likely time of death.
The gene typically allows for three possible combinations of nucleotides (the four molecular building blocks of DNA): adenine-adenine (A-A), adenine-guanine (A-G), and guanine-guanine (G-G), according to a written statement released by Harvard Medical School.
“This particular genotype affects the sleep-wake pattern of virtually everyone walking around,” Dr. Clifford Saper, chief of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, wrote in the statement. “And it is a fairly profound effect so that the people who have the A-A genotype wake up about an hour earlier than the people who have the G-G genotype, and the A-Gs wake up almost exactly in the middle.”
Moreover, investigators realized as some of the 1,200 older subjects in the project died that these nucleotide sequences were accurate predictors of their time of death, within a range of only a few hours. Patients with the A-A and A-G genotypes typically died just before 11 a.m., while subjects with the G-G combination tended to die near 6 p.m.
“So there is really a gene that predicts the time of day that you’ll die. Not the date, fortunately, but the time of day,” said Saper.
The Atlantic reports researchers believe their results may be due to the human body reverting to its more natural, circadian rhythm-induced state as death approaches, instead of the cycle created by social commitments.
Drunk Nate Silver
My favorite statistitian is parodied on Twitter #Drunk Nate Silver. Don’t worry Nate, they’re just jealous 🙂 :
Twitter commandeered by ‘Drunk Nate Silver’
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This story started on
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By Dorrine Mendoza, CNN
updated 5:36 PM EST, Thu November 8, 2012 | Filed under: Social Media
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CNN iReport
- Poll-cruncher Nate SIlver has inspired a parody hashtag on Twitter
- Silver correctly predicted who would win all 50 states in Tuesday’s presidential election
(CNN) — You may not have heard of Nate Silver. But the statistician, who crunches political polls for The New York Times, is having a moment.
Silver has received a flood of acclaim since his blog,FiveThirtyEight.com, correctly predicted who would win all 50 states in Tuesday’s presidential election, even as pundits were saying the race was “too close to call.”
Named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine in 2009, Silver first gained fame for developing a statistical system for forecasting the performance of pro baseball players.
He’s really good at math. And predicting things.
Now the jokesters of Twitter are paying homage with a #DrunkNateSilver hashtag that re-imagines him as a belligerent, know-it-all prognosticator.
Here are some of our favorites:
If you cannot see the Storify below, click here.
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Drunk Nate Silver stumbles through traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, screaming out what time each driver will get home. #DrunkNateSilver
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#DrunkNateSilver goes to Africa, finds the butterfly, asks it not to flap its wings, prevents the hurricane. -
#DrunkNateSilver knows the actual probability of Taylor Swift ever, ever getting back together. -
@thisisdannyg Drunk Nate Silver knows why the caged bird sings. #DrunkNateSilver -
Drunk Nate Silver knows what you did next summer.#DrunkNateSilver -
When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he discovered 3 missed calls from me.#DrunkNateSilver -
#DrunkNateSilver stopped a robbery with cluster analysis. -
Drunk Nate Silver shouting at jukebox blasting Biggie, “No! Mo money only correlates with a 42% chance of mo problems!” #drunknatesilver -
I knew Darth Vader was Luke’s father before he did.#drunknatesilver -
#DrunkNateSilver knows precisely how many boys your milkshake will bring to the yard (spoiler: not all of them) -
Drunk Nate Silver in the parking lot of Yankees stadium, spray painting the spots where next years’ home runs will land. #drunknatesilver -
#DrunkNateSilver launches his own economic recovery program: yells out next winning lottery numbers at area 7Eleven -
#DrunkNateSilver predicted I would type this. And this. -
Drunk Nate Silver knows when Ice Cube’s next good day will be. #DrunkNateSilver -
Drunk Nate Silver only reads his Choose Your Own Adventure book one time. The correct way.#drunknatesilver -
#DrunkNateSilver already knows how much employee time was wasted today with #DrunkNateSilver tweets -
Drunk Nate Silver gets home 30 seconds before the Comcast installer shows up #drunknatesilver
Fairbanks, Alaska or Brazil
I would have loved to be able to actually watch and see when the actual 2 millionth visitor visited, but as it does, life got in the way. There were things that needed doing, people that needed time and attention, and I by the time I got back to check, I had already gone over.
Using StatCounter, I was able to go back 78 people and figure out that it was either the visitor from Brasil or a visitor from Fairbanks, Alaska.
A couple times, I have thought I would quit blogging, like when I hit 5 years, then six, or maybe when I hit 2 million hits . . . Now, I don’t know. There are times when it is hard to get inspired, hard to think of anything I might have to say that you might find interesting, too.
I have a little trick. When I am stumped, I think of our aqua aerobics group in Doha, Qatar. We weren’t very serious, but we were very committed. We had to show up because the others counted on us. Our motto was “any exercise is better than no exercise” and on very cold days in January, exercise counted as sitting in the hot tub and kicking. We talked to pass the time, and not to think about exercising. We talked about books we had read, dishes we had cooked, movies we have seen, and events in the news. So when I can’t think of anything much to say, I think about my friends, the Aqua Babes (LOL!) and I can usually come up with something.
A long time ago, in Kuwait, there was a blogger called (something) Red, I followed, and she thought about quitting and asked us to give her reasons why or why not. I remember writing that we blog because it’s what we do, we write because it is something in us that needs to be written. Until I wrote that to her, I didn’t even know that I thought that. I guess that is why I keep on, because there is something in me that needs to do what I am doing, and when I don’t need to do it, I will stop.
Summer in Seattle Comes to Pensacola
(LOL, not quite there yet)
Today is a gorgeous Seattle summer day, lows last night in the low 40’s, and high today MIGHT hit 60. It’s a great day for being outside, trimming back the rose bushes, taking cuttings for some new starts. It’s a great day for mulching, weeding, all those things I dread when the weather is hot and humid.
Only tiny drawback is the mosquitos; we have both nile fever and dengue to worry about with those pesky mosquitos, as well as other mosquito borne illnesses. I actually have a beautiful mosquito netting we bought in Bruges for when we lived in Germany, with our windows open all summer, but we have our windows open so seldom it is hardly worth it to put it up, and I think it annoys Adventureman having to get in and out of bed with the net, LOL!
We still have tomatoes and peppers and eggplants ripening, our pomegranates are ready, and our lemons are beginning to ripen – it is a great day to be alive.
2,000,000 Today?
I think I am going to receive my 2 millionth visitor today, but I need to go to water aerobics, I can’t just sit by my computer and watch!
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