Thanksgiving Myth: Turkey Makes You Sleepy

You've probably heard it many times: There's a natural chemical in turkey called tryptophan that makes you sleepy after the Thanksgiving meal. First of all, what is tryptophan? It's an amino acid--one of the building blocks of proteins. The body also uses tryptophan in a multi-step process to make serotonin, a neurotransmitter (a chemical involved in brain cell communication) in the brain that helps regulate sleep. But the notion that the turkey is responsible for the Thanksgiving evening sleepiness is a myth:

For tryptophan to have a sedative effect, it must be taken on an empty stomach. After a "modest" Thanksgiving meal of turkey, stuffing, vegetables, sweet potatoes, gravy, rolls, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream, you aren't going to experience any sedative effects of tryptophan in the turkey.

 

Also, tryptophan is present in ALL meats. And cheddar cheese, gram for gram, has even more. No one seems to connect them with sleep, right? Turkey gets singled out for no other reason than being eaten during the biggest meal of the year.

By the way, the first group to come to America to escape religious persecution were the French, not the Pilgrims.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Citigroup: Another One Bites the Dust

Are you keeping score? Some the big events over the past 3 months: First, the government seized control of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, extending as much as $200 billion in Treasury to support the two companies. Then, in one of the most dramatic days in Wall Street’s history, Merrill Lynch (Wall Street's third largest bank) agreed to sell itself to Bank of America, while another prominent securities firm, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Reserve agreed to an $85 billion bailout (later raised to $150 billion) that gave the government control of one of the world's largest insurance companies, AIG. On Sept. 20, the Bush Administration asked Congress for $700 billion to bail out firms with bad mortgage debt, the largest since the Great Depression. In late September, the government seized control Washington Mutual, in by far the largest failure of a US bank in history. That same week, the government gave the "Big Three" automakers a $25 billion dollar low interest loan (they are now requesting a $25 billion bailout from the government). Wells Fargo then bought Wachovia for cheap. After announcing that it would be cutting 53,000 jobs last week, Citigroup had to be rescued by the government in a $20 billion bailout this past weekend. As part of the plan, the Treasury and the FDIC will guarantee against the "possibility of unusually large losses" on up to $306 billion of risky loans and securities backed by commercial and residential mortgages. What does all that add up to? (and I didn't mention the failure of Bear Stearns in March or any of the events outside of the US) Let's just say that $700 billion Congress approved was a drop in the bucket:

The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

 

For a full breakdown of the where the government is spending that $700 billion, check this out. Reuters has a great timeline of the crisis.

Obama sketched out his plan for dealing with the crisis during the announcement of his pick for Treasury Sec, Timothy Geithner:

Obama's Cabinet Takes Shape

Although President-elect Barack Obama has made few official announcements (today was the first) about his choices for Cabinet positions, at least six of the major posts likely have been decided, according to news reports last week that almost invariably cited anonymous sources. This morning, Obama announced his choice for Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. He's relatively young at 47, but has good experience:

He played a pivotal role in the intense negotiations which took place before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and also helped forge the deals involving AIG and JP Morgan.

A proponent of major reform in the financial system in order to avoid further turbulence, he is no stranger to the Treasury, where he served as under-secretary for international affairs towards the end of the Clinton administration.

According to a report in the New York Times last week, Hillary Clinton has decided to accept the Secretary of State Position: 

The role, though a supporting one, would make her one of the most influential players on the international stage, and it would represent at least one more act for one of the nation’s most prominent public families, as former President Bill Clinton would also become an ad hoc member of the Obama team.

Other Cabinet posts: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who lost to Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, will be named Commerce secretary. Eric Holder, who served as deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, will be Attorney General, former Democratic Senate Minority leader Tom Daschle is expected to be named Health & Human Services secretary, and Arizona governor Janet Napolitano will be tapped for Homeland Security secretary. All in all it looks like Obama is assembling a very experienced and competent set of advisors. This is a team that can definitely hit the ground running.

Half Baked Alaska

Since the election, many Republicans are calling her the future of the party. With clips like this, I sure hope so! Watch the guy in the background..

Clueless. What am I thankful for? I'm thankful that this woman keeps giving us an endless stream of things to laugh at.

UPDATE:

An Alaska blogger tells us that when the photographer who filmed the scene, Scott Jensen, told Palin what was going on behind her she said, "no worries." Of course, she's denying that now.

Apparently, feelings of gratitude for the mere existence of Sarah Palin are truly bipartisan (this is not a joke, by the way):

UPDATE #2:

The Liberals respond..

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

500,000,000

500 Million. That's how much Barack Obama raised during the 21 month campaign.

In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama's online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

"You looked at the money being raised online in the same way that you looked at the crowds who came to the rallies," Joe Rospars, the 27-year-old director of Obama's new-media department, told The Post. "You were constantly surprised at the number of people who were coming out to see him," and, when it came to online donations, "people exceeded our expectations as to what they were willing to do."

A Step Closer to Jurassic Park

In his novel Jurassic Park, the late Michael Crichton thrilled us with the idea that reviving dinosaurs was a possibility. Although DNA sequencing (the process of determining the exact order of the chemical building blocks that make up DNA) was a very new technology at the time (the longest genome that had ever been sequenced was a virus), almost 20 years later, hundreds of animal genome sequences have been published. This week scientists have, for the first time, sequenced the genome of an extinct animal: the woolly mammoth:

Their groundbreaking achievement has them contemplating a once unimaginable future when certain prehistoric species might one day be resurrected. "It could be done. The question is, just because we might be able to do it one day, should we do it?" asked Stephan Schuster, the Penn State University biochemistry professor and co-author of the new research. 

The million-dollar project is a first rough draft, detailing the more than 3 billion DNA building blocks of the mammoth, according to the study published in Thursday's journal Nature. It's about 80 percent finished. But that's enough to give scientists new clues on the timing of evolution and the deadly intricacies of extinction.

The project relied on mammoth hair found frozen in the Siberian permafrost, instead of bone, giving biologists a new method to dig into ancient DNA. Think of it as CSI Siberia, said Schuster. 

Does that mean that we will have herds of mammoths roaming the midwest plains? Not anytime soon: 

It is a fair bet that a complete genome and closely related species would make it easier to pull a Crichton on a mammoth than on a dinosaur. But easier is far from easy. To put flesh on the bones of the draft sequence — to go from a genome to a living, breathing beast — would require you to master, at the very least, the following steps: defining exactly the sequence or sequences you want for your creatures; synthesizing a full set of chromosomes from these sequences; engulfing them in a nuclear envelope; transferring that nucleus into an egg that would support it; and getting that egg into a womb that would carry it to term. None of those steps is currently possible. 

Breakthrough: Woman Receives Windpipe Built From Her Stem Cells

A woman has become the world's first recipient of windpipe tissue constructed from a combination of donated tissue and her own cells. Stem cells harvested from the woman's bone marrow were used to populate a stripped-down section of windpipe received from a donor, which was then transplanted into her body:

The transplant operation was performed on the patient, Claudia Castillo, in June in Barcelona, Spain, to alleviate an acute shortage of breath caused by a failing airway following severe tuberculosis. After a severe collapse of her left lung in March, she needed regular hospital visits to clear her airways and was unable to take care of her children.

According to her doctors, the only conventional option remaining was a major operation to remove her left lung which carries a risk of complications and a high mortality rate.

We are terribly excited by these results,” said Prof. Paolo Macchiarini of the University of Barcelona, who performed the operation. “Just four days after transplantation the graft was almost indistinguishable from adjacent normal bronchi.” Two months after the surgery, lung function tests on Ms. Castillo “were all at the better end of the normal range for a young woman.”

The transplant showed “the very real potential for adult stem cells and tissue engineering to radically improve their ability to treat patients with serious diseases. We believe this success has proved that we are on the verge of a new age in surgical care.”

Stem cells: An Introduction

One of the goals of this blog is to increase scientific literacy. After writing the post above, I thought this might be a good opportunity to talk a bit more about stem cells. What are stem cells, anyway? Without stem cells, wounds would never heal, your skin and blood could not continually renew themselves, fertilized eggs would not grow into babies, and babies would not grow into adults. Stem cells are quite unlike the specialized, or differentiated, cells in your body — such as the nerve cells, muscle cells and blood cells that enable you to function. In contrast, stem cells are the body's silent reserves. They spring into action when you need replace cells in your body. For example, due to the acid used to digest food, stem cells are needed to constantly replace the lining of your stomach.

A fertilized egg is the ultimate stem cell, as it is the source of every type of cell in the body (also known as "totipotent"). Within three to six days after a human egg is fertilized, it has grown into a ball of a few hundred cells called a blastocyst (which is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence). Within this ball lie a small number of cells that will go on to develop into the embryo (the rest form the placenta and other supportive tissues). These are known as embryonic stem cells, and they have the potential to produce all the cell types in the human body (what we call "pluripotent"; these cells can form every cell type, but not placenta). This is what makes them so valuable.

Scientists hope to use stem cells to replace or rejuvenate damaged tissue (which is what was done in the post above). Researchers are also exploring ways to use stem cells to treat diabetes, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, heart disease and vision and hearing loss, among others. And this would only be the beginning. In the future, many scientists expect that we will be able to use stem cells to grow entire organs. Have heart disease? Let's collect some of your stem cells and grow them into a new heart! Importantly, because the stem cells are your own, they won't be rejected by your body (which is the main problem with transplants today). In a upcoming post, I'll discuss the politics of stem cell research.

The Real Cause of the Economic Crisis

The latest economic news is grim. Most of the world's major industrial countries, including the US, UK, Japan, Russia, and most of Europe are already in or close to recession. GM may fail. Banking giant Citigroup, whose stock is down 68% so far this year, announced today that it would be cutting more than 50,000 jobs. 

An excellent piece in the Daily Kos tells us about one of the root causes of the economic crisis, the credit default swap:

Subprime mortgages (and all mortgages, really) are a fraction of the current problem. The bailout would have been enough to buy out every subprime mortgage in foreclosure across the country. In fact, it was enough to do that several times over. So why not do that?

The reason is that the purpose of the bailout (at least as Treasury Secretary Paulson sees it) isn't to stop mortgage foreclosures, but to save the banks. And the banks have some self-inflicted problems that make those mortgages an afterthought.

For example, the wonderful credit default swap. In essence, credit default swaps are (or were) nothing but insurance policies for loans. And yet in 2007 the total number of credit default swaps traded far exceeded the value of all loans. In fact, it may have touched $70 trillion dollars, which puts it above the gross domestic product of the entire planet.

What role did they play in the financial crisis? Check out this great report by 60 Minutes.

The mastermind? Phil Gramm. If you want to learn more about how we got into this mess, I recommend this article and this one. 

A Master of Disguise

That the octopus evolved to camouflage itself so perfectly is amazing enough (they use specialized skin cells which can change color, opacity, and reflectiveness), but it's even more incredible when you learn that these animals do not possess color vision:

Did you know that an octupus can learn to open screw-on containers? Here are other interesting facts about octopuses (no, the plural is not octopi). Wired Science has some fun animal videos.

President v2.0

During his presidency, FDR occasionally went on the radio, in what came to be called his “fireside chats,” to directly address the nation as he steered it through the Depression and WWII. Every president that followed continued the tradition. President-elect Barack Obama announced that he will be updating the practice for the digital age by converting his weekly radio addresses into four minute-long YouTube videos. Spokeswoman Jen Psaki explained:

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent."

President-elect Obama plans to to publish these weekly updates through the Transition and then from the White House. This week's address concerns the current economic crisis:

Obama has also added a transition website, Change.gov, soliciting suggestions from citizens and providing a guide to the people and procedures behind the transfer of executive power. I think this is pretty smart and - hopefully - a sign of a new era of direct involvement for Americans in the government.

Why They Lost

Republican moderates such as former NJ governor Christine Todd Whitman understood the party's problems 4 years ago:

The Republican Party had been taken hostage by "social fundamentalists," the people who base their votes on such social issues as abortion, gay rights and stem cell research. Unless the GOP freed itself from their grip, we argued, it would so alienate itself from the broad center of the American electorate that it would become increasingly marginalized and find itself out of power.

Unless the Republican Party ends its self-imposed captivity to social fundamentalists, it will spend a long time in the political wilderness. On Nov. 4, the American people very clearly rejected the politics of demonization and division. It's long past time for the GOP to do the same.

Of course, McCain decided to go in the opposite direction by choosing social fundamentalist (and know-nothing) Sarah Palin as his VP nominee. We know how well that worked out. That doesn't mean that they learned their lesson, however. Apparently, there is a war going on within the Republican party to decide whether it will go towards the right or the center (represented by moderates like Whitman). I'm curious about Palin's political future because I think she'll be a good barometer for the Republican Party, as to which faction will have won out. If Palin runs in 2012, then it means the social fundamentalists have won the internal fight for the soul of the Republican Party, and the GOP will likely continue its slide into well-deserved electoral oblivion.

Hillary for Secretary of State?

The Secretary of State plays a central role in positioning America on the global stage and representing our interests abroad, as well as acting as an adviser to the President. It is the single most powerful and visible role in the Cabinet. I think she would be a great representative of the U.S. to the world and it's a role for which she is definitely qualified. According to an article on Bloomberg.com:

Two Obama advisers confirm the idea has been discussed, though they say they don't know how seriously the president-elect is considering it or whether Clinton would accept it.

If Obama picks her, the Republicans will be quick to claim, “that’s not change!” Of course, they would criticize Obama if he picked a relatively unknown figure, too. 

UPDATE:

The Huffinton Post is reporting:

President-elect Barack Obama offered Sen. Hillary Clinton the position of Secretary of State during their meeting Thursday in Chicago, according to two senior Democratic officials. She requested time to consider the offer, the officials said.

She ain't talking, though:

Googling with your Voice

Good news for iPhone people: 

Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone.

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

Don't fret, Blackberry users. Google plans to make the software available to other phones. By the way, the iPhone is now an electronic book reader too.

To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before..

The first-ever pictures of planets outside our solar system were released today:

Yeah, it doesn't look like much to me, either (by the way, the star is in the middle and the planet is a white speck inside the small box--the larger box is a magnification). Regardless, it's an important achievement:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star.

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the "Southern Fish."

Could there be intelligent life there? Probably not:

Fomalhaut is burning hydrogen at such a furious rate through nuclear fusion that it will burn out in only 1 billion years, which is 1/10th the lifespan of our sun. This means there is little opportunity for advanced life to evolve on any habitable worlds the star might possess.

Fightclub

And I thought the Democrats and Republicans had differences..

Conservative Philosophy "lies in ruins"

P.J. O' Rourke (known for his combination of conservative economic views and liberal views on vices such as sex and drugs) admits the conservatives had their chance and blew it:

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Protect marriage, ban divorce..

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Tracking Flu Outbreaks Using Google

Trends in Google search queries can be quite interesting and informative. A new Google site uses the tendency of people to seek online help for health problems, such as flu (which by the way, kills 500,000 people worldwide every year). The New York Times explains:

Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors. That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Man, technology is a beautiful thing.

You Don't See This Everyday

Someone on FOX actually makes sense..

Here's to HIGHER Gas Prices

Obviously the economic crisis is hurting a lot of people. Just last week the government announced that nearly 1.2 million Americans have lost their jobs this year alone. Although drivers see falling gas prices as a welcome turn of events, I for one am hoping that gas doesn't get any cheaper (or even goes up again--at least a bit).

Why? Cheap gas will prolong our dependence on foreign sources of oil. As long as gas is cheap, venture capitalists will be reluctant to fund companies developing alternative fuel sources and people will be more tempted to buy SUVs again (you’ve noticed the increasing number of small cars and hybrids on the road, haven’t you?). Not to mention, we will continue to send billions to some of the worst regimes in the world (in effect, funding terrorism). As James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, points out, "We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves." Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Friedman explains further in his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded:

$4-a-gallon gasoline is really starting to affect driving behavior and buying behavior – in way that $3-a-gallon gas did not. The first time we got such a strong price signal, after the 1973 oil shock, we responded as a country by demanding and producing more fuel-efficient cars. But as soon as oil prices started falling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we let Detroit get us re-addicted to gas guzzlers, and the price steadily crept back up to where it is today. We must not make that mistake again.

For this reason, Friedman and others are advocating an increase in the gasoline tax or setting a minimum price of $3-$4 for gas (which is still half the going rate in Europe today). 

Would you be willing to pay more for gas?