And here face down upon your desk
Watching through the waiting night
You feel the coming of a test
The gathered rising of a blight

You feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of loss and woe
Upon the world's markets the vast
And ever climbing shadows grow

So last night, for those of you who weren't around, our very own PhillyGal pulled a 'TTFN' on us, signing off from DailyKos due to (hopefully temporary) health issues, leaving all of us at the mercy of an innumerable parade of ill-conceived candidate diaries.

The question is, are we going to stand still for that?

Are we going to just sit idly by and stare at diary upon diary about politics? Do we really want the finest cat blog in the world to get turned into some kind of political web site?

Never! I say, without quotation marks but with italics, just to show you how impassioned I am: Never!

We must take this burden upon ourselves, and strive to uphold the finest ideals of the Cat Diaries which made Daily Kats what it is today.

According to news reports, in the wake of a dismal 0.14% showing in the Iowa caucuses, Uncommitted will be announcing a withdrawal from the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Edwards Edwards Obama Clinton Obama Edwards Clinton Obama.

Edwards Edwards Edwards? Clinton Obama. Obama Edwards Clinton? Clinton. Edwards, Clinton. Obama Obama Obama. Edwards Obama Clinton; Obama Obama Obama. Clinton Clinton Edwards: Obama Obama Obama. Obama Edwards Clinton, Clinton Edwards Obama, Obama Edwards Clinton.

Dodd?

Clinton. Clinton Clinton Clinton Clinton. Edwards Clinton. Obama Clinton. Clinton Clinton. Obama. Edwards!

Edwards Edwards Edwards — Clinton Obama. Obama? Obama. Edwards? Edwards. Clinton? Clinton.

Edwards Edwards Edwards Biden Edwards Edwards Edwards.

New Scientist is reporting that ESA scientists at Darmstadt and American scientists at Green Bank have picked up the carrier wave signal from the Huygens probe, indicating that it has deployed successfully into the atmosphere of Titan.

Actual telemetry from Huygens, if any, won't be available until later this afternoon, pending retransmission by the orbiting Cassini spacecraft.

Back on Friday, I asked which Republicans I should vote for in the primary election on tuesday. I'm voting in the GOP primary because there are no Democrats running for office anywhere in my county. So my choice is to either go pick up a Democratic primary ballot, and pick between several decent candidates for Zell -ack, ptui!- Miller's Senate seat, or pick a GOP ballot, and vote in that election and every other election on the ballot.

I already know that I'm voting for Johnny Isakson in the GOP Senate primary; in most of the other races, all I'm really hoping for is to find people to vote against.

So this is a final shout out to all dKossacks who are local to GA6, or who are otherwise familiar with GA6 politics, to help me out. Do you have any thoughts about the various candidates? Are there any who are notably better or worse than the others?

Yesterday, ihlin posted a diary about an article from The Christian Science Monitor discussing "How Georgia Turned from Blue to Red". In replying to the diary, I said, in passing, "For what it's worth, though, y'all don't have to worry about me turning all Republican on you" — which is, of course, why I'm about to ask which Republicans I should vote for in next week's primary.


Let me explain.

In an interview with the Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Michael Moore says that he's fine with people downloading his movie off the internet.

"I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that," he said.

"I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I'm happy this is happening."

Once upon a time, before his macular degeneration, macular translocation, numerous indecisive laser treatments, and one spectacularly unsuccessful experimental surgery, my father had Ted Williams-like eyesight. 20/10 in one eye, 20/15 in the other. These days, he needs a big-ass magnifying glass to read the screen of his own computer monitor.

Despite this, my father, who devoted forty years of his life to the Air Force, is so furious at George Bush and his cabal of crooks in the White House that he spends an entirely inordinate amount of time writing angry letters to the editors of the Tampa Tribune and the St. Pete Times, excoriating the administration for its innumerable failings. Magnifying glass in his left hand, face pressed up against the screen, he patiently pecks away at the keyboard with his right hand, giving voice to his outrage over Bush's latest outrage.

Alas, neither the journalistically superior (and generally liberal) Times, nor the conservative and inferior Tribune, had ever printed one of his letters. Until now. And ironically, his breakthrough came with the Tribune.

A pair of recently announced breakthroughs have yielded some surprising and hopeful results in both the fight to solve the mystery of Alzheimer's Disease, and in our overall understanding of the brain.

Three years ago, researchers at Duke University Medical Center succeeded in "re-training" adult fat cells into cartilage cells, and, eventually, bone cells, something which had previously only been possible using stem cells. Of course, fat, cartilage, and bone have significant similarities, being mesenchymal, or connective tissue. A year later, however, a different team of Duke University Medical Center researchers managed to turn fat cells into something resembling nerve cells, which are not mesenchymal.

According to Science Daily, the latest issue of Experimental Neurology carries a follow-up from those researchers, Kristen Safford and Henry Rice (he's the one with the beard), which demonstrates that their laboratory-created cells appear to actually behave as nerve cells. The ability to create nerve cells in the lab using leftover liposuction junk, as opposed to embryonic stem cells, could have obvious implications in the fight against Alzheimer's Disease.

Sure to be lost in the clamor of Ronald Reagan's death are two different stories which highlight the legacy of the man who preceded him, Jimmy Carter.

Shortly before Ronald Reagan died today, Jimmy Carter joined him as being one of the few living Americans to have a naval vessel named after him with the christening, at the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, of SSN-23, the Seawolf-class nuclear submarine Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan, of course, has an aircraft carrier named after him, the Nimitz-class CVN-76 Ronald Reagan.

It is one of the quirky little ironies of life that the only non-documentary movie Admiral Chester W. Nimitz ever appeared in was none other than 1957's Hellcats of the Navy, a Ronald Reagan film which was also the only movie in which he appeared with his wife, Nancy. In that movie, Reagan portrayed the skipper of a submarine, the USS Starfish.

There's Junk DNA, and then there's Junk DNA: A pair of scientific results announced in Boston recently seem to demonstrate that some Junk DNA isn't junk at all, whereas other Junk DNA is even junkier than anyone ever suspected.

First off, Science Daily is reporting that researchers at Hardvard Medical School have discovered that some stretches of Junk DNA, long thought to be useless, actually act to regulate other stretches of DNA which are useful.

At the same time, New Scientist reports on a conference in Boston, where researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California announced that great swathes of Junk DNA which researchers had previously thought of as important were, in fact, so inconsequential that they could be arbitrarily deleted without any noticable effect.

Science Daily is reporting that researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have demonstrated a multiple drug treatment regimen which significantly reduces cocaine use in nonhuman primates.

In the June issue of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Dr. Leonard Howell and his team report on a therapy which involves simultaneous use of Dopamine Transport Inhibitors and Seratonin Transport Inhibitors to help break the grip of cocaine addiction. While they have yet to identify an optimum set of dosage levels for the therapy, this could obviously have significant impact on human drug treatment programs, as well as hopefully reducing the massive societal costs associated with crimes committed by drug-crazed monkeys.

In the "Political Insider" column of today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Tom Baxter and Jim Galloway raise some interesting points about the rapidly fading popularity of George Bush:

With the president's coattails getting shorter, the GOP is looking to Georgia for a candidate who'll be a secure choice able to go after the independent voters that Bush may be losing, Johnny Isakson has begun arguing.

[....]

There is the implication that, with Bush numbers falling, Republican money will have priorities other than Georgia in November — but that an Isakson win would free the national party of any such burden here.

Good news for folks who can't be bothered to sleep: Researchers have figured out a way to make caffeine work even better!

Perhaps more significantly, researchers are coming to a fuller understanding of exactly how caffeine works to keep individuals awake and alert.

Science Daily reports that a team of researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, among other places, have discovered that frequent small doses of caffeine are more effective than occasional large doses of caffeine at preventing the onset of sleep. Their approach, reported in the May issue of the journal Sleep, grew out of a theoretical model of caffeine's interaction with the two distinct physiological processes responsible for drowsiness in humans.

Science Daily points to a study from UC-Santa Barbara and Woods Hole, published in the May 6 Geophysical Research Letters, which shows that phytoplankton appear to have a larger role in global climate control than previously suspected. It has long been known that phytoplankton are the primary mechanism for carbon sequestration; however, careful analysis of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) levels associated with phytoplankton in the Sargasso Sea have shown that the plankton form part of a closed feedback loop regulating cloud cover and surface UV levels in the oceans.

When stressed by increasing levels of ultraviolet radiation, phytoplankton generate and release DMS as a defense mechanism. The DMS molecules rise to the ocean surface and atmosphere, where they break down and combine with other molecules to form nucleation sites for clouds. So an increase in UV leads to an increase in DMS, which leads to an increase in cloud cover, which leads to less UV radiation at the surface, which leads to happy plankton, safe from the damaging UV radiation. This should also act to counter, to a slight extent, the effects of global warming, which is good news for those of us who aren't phytoplankton.

From the May 2004 Journal of Clinical Investigation, by way of Science Daily, comes a report of an unusual new approach to serious chronic pain management which has, so far, shown extraordinary success in veterinary trials by selectively "deleting" certain nerve cells used to transmit pain signals. The idea sounds a bit scary on the face of it, but the results they outline certainly sound encouraging:

So effective was the treatment in eight dogs severely affected by osteroarthritis, cancer-related pain, or both, all eventually became more active and later walked with slight or no limps. Just as importantly, none showed any adverse side effects from the treatment, their temperaments were improved, and their need for other pain-controlling medications was eliminated or greatly reduced.

In a study whose results could make a great deal of difference to criminal investigations around the world, New Scientist magazine has reported that maggot-dating of corpses could be substantially less accurate than previously supposed.

In the first multi-year controlled experiment on insect infestation of dead bodies, Melanie Archer of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Melbourne, Australia, placed five pig carcasses in scavenger-proof wire cages and observed them for insect activity regularly for four months. She then repeated the experiment each season for two years.

Unexpectedly, the life cycles of several commonly observed carrion insects varied considerably from one year to the next, depending on variations in climate, local insect populations, and, potentially, a variety of other currently unknown factors. This could lead to significant margins of error in forensic estimates of time of death.

"The estimates are not as tight as some forensic scientists imply in court," Archer has concluded. "We need to introduce some rigour."




Yes, that's right — she's calling for more mortis rigor.