Research shows two gay parents are better than a songle straight one

Anti-gay marriage activists have argued vigorously that children need a mother and father. Now a new research study shows that kids do need two parents — but that gender doesn't matter.

The research, which also speaks to the issue of gay adoption, is summarized in the lead article of the new Journal of Marriage and Family. Scholars, at USC and New York University, looked at a range of existing studies, including research on gay and lesbian parents, finding that it's ideal if a child is raised by two parents who are "responsible, committed, stable," but that the gender doesn't cause radical differences.

Sociologist Timothy Biblarz of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences says in a release about the study:

Significant policy decisions have been swayed by the misconception across party lines that children need both a mother and a father. Yet, there is almost no social science research to support this claim. One problem is that proponents of this view routinely ignore research on same-gender parents. The bottom line is that the science shows that children raised by two same-gender parents do as well on average as children raised by two different-gender parents. This is obviously inconsistent with the widespread claim that children must be raised by a mother and a father to do well.

Full scientific article available via Journal of Marriage And Family

http://io9.com/5458304/research-shows-two-gay-parents-are-better-than-a-single-straight-one

Glitter-sized solar photovoltaics

Sandia National Laboratories scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used. The tiny cells could turn a person into a walking solar battery charger if they were fastened to flexible substrates molded around unusual shapes, such as clothing. 100 times less silicon generates same amount of electricity

“Eventually units could be mass-produced and wrapped around unusual shapes for building-integrated solar, tents and maybe even clothing,” he said. This would make it possible for hunters, hikers or military personnel in the field to recharge batteries for phones, cameras and other electronic devices as they walk or rest.

For large-scale power generation, said Sandia researcher Murat Okandan, “One of the biggest scale benefits is a significant reduction in manufacturing and installation costs compared with current PV techniques.”

Each cell is formed on silicon wafers, etched and then released inexpensively in hexagonal shapes, with electrical contacts prefabricated on each piece, by borrowing techniques from integrated circuits and MEMS.

Solar concentrators — low-cost, prefabricated, optically efficient microlens arrays — can be placed directly over each glitter-sized cell to increase the number of photons arriving to be converted via the photovoltaic effect into electrons. The small cell size means that cheaper and more efficient short focal length microlens arrays can be fabricated for this purpose.

High-voltage output is possible directly from the modules because of the large number of cells in the array. This should reduce costs associated with wiring, due to reduced resistive losses at higher voltages.

Clock Turned Back on Aging Muscles, Researchers Claim

Scientists have found and manipulated body chemistry linked to the aging of muscles and were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself, they said today.

The study involved a small number of participants, however. And the news is not all rosy.

Importantly, the research also found evidence that aging muscles need to be kept in shape, because long periods of atrophy are more challenging to overcome. Older muscles do not respond as well to sudden bouts of exercise, the scientists discovered. And rather than building muscle, an older person can generate scar tissue upon, say, lifting weights after long periods of inactivity.

"Our study shows that the ability of old human muscle to be maintained and repaired by muscle stem cells can be restored to youthful vigor given the right mix of biochemical signals," said study leader Irina Conboy of the University of California, Berkeley. "This provides promising new targets for forestalling the debilitating muscle atrophy that accompanies aging, and perhaps other tissue degenerative disorders as well."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/clockturnedbackonagingmusclesresearchersclaim

Bell Labs breaks optical transmission record, 100 Petabit per second kilometer barrier

Alcatel-Lucent today announced that scientists in Bell Labs, the company’s research arm, have set a new optical transmission record of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer (equivalent to 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer).

This transmission experiment involved sending the equivalent of 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago. This is the highest capacity ever achieved over a transoceanic distance and represents an increase that exceeds that of today’s most advanced commercial undersea cables by a factor of ten. To achieve these record-breaking results the Bell Labs researchers made innovative use of new detection techniques and harnessed a diverse array of technologies in modulation, transmission, and signal processing

High speed optical transmission is a key component of Alcatel-Lucent’s High Leverage Network architecture, key elements of which have already been selected by leading service providers.

http://www.physorg.com/news173455192.html

Scientists Cure Color Blindness In Monkeys

ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2009) — Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Florida used gene therapy to cure two squirrel monkeys of color blindness — the most common genetic disorder in people.

"We've added red sensitivity to cone cells in animals that are born with a condition that is exactly like human color blindness," said William W. Hauswirth, Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmic molecular genetics at the UF College of Medicine and a member of the UF Genetics Institute and the Powell Gene Therapy Center. "Although color blindness is only moderately life-altering, we've shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate, and that it can be done very safely. That's extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone diseases that really are blinding."

About five weeks after the treatment, the monkeys began to acquire color vision, almost as if it occurred overnight.

"Nothing happened for the first 20 weeks," Neitz said. "But we knew right away when it began to work. It was if they woke up and saw these new colors. The treated animals unquestionably responded to colors that had been invisible to them."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090916133521.htm

On Demand Books Turns Google's eBook Archive Back Into Paperbacks

When you think about Google Books, chances are that you are thinking about eBooks and searching books on your desktop. Starting today, however, On Demand Books, the makers of the Espresso Book Machine, will have access to Google's vast library of public domain books, and bookstores that buy an Espresso Book Machine will be able to provide on-demand printing services for any of these close to 2 million books in Google's repository.

The Espresso Book Machine can print out about 145 pages per minute at a cost of about 1 cent per page. The machine itself costs around $10,000 (ed: $100,000). On Demand Books argues that this device can revolutionize the distribution of books by decentralizing the marketplace for the distribution of books and can give libraries and bookstores a potentially unlimited inventory in their shops. In its press release about today's agreement with Google, On Demand Books likens its machine to "an ATM for books."

For now, these printers are only available in a about a dozen locations, including the University of Michigan Shapiro Library in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt. The Harvard Book Store will also soon get one of these machines as well. By early 2010, On Demand Books hopes to have sold about 35 to 40 machines and this new deal with Google will surely help the company to reach this goal.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/on_demand_books_turns_googles_public_domain_book_a.php
http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h7wxlKuKJFNcU_QllAW_0PYVgQEA

In One Study, a Heart Benefit for Chocolate

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Published: September 14, 2009

In a study that will provide comfort to chocoholics everywhere, researchers in Sweden have found evidence that people who eat chocolate have increased survival rates after a heart attack — and it may be that the more they eat, the better.

The scientists followed 1,169 nondiabetic men and women who had been hospitalized for a first heart attack. Each filled out a standardized health questionnaire that included a question about chocolate consumption over the past 12 months. Chocolate contains flavonoid antioxidants that are widely believed to have beneficial cardiovascular effects.

The patients had a health examination three months after their discharge from the hospital, and researchers followed them for the next eight years using Swedish national registries of hospitalizations and deaths. After controlling for age, sex, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, education and other factors, they found that the more chocolate people consumed, the more likely they were to survive. The results are reported in the September issue of The Journal of Internal Medicine.

Compared with people who ate none, those who had chocolate less than once a month had a 27 percent reduction in their risk for cardiac death, those who ate it up to once a week had a 44 percent reduction and those who indulged twice or more a week had a 66 percent reduced risk of dying from a subsequent heart event. The beneficial effect remained after controlling for intake of other kinds of sweets.

But before concluding that a box of Godiva truffles is health food, chocolate lovers may want to consider some of the study’s weaknesses. It is an observational study, not a randomized trial, so cause and effect cannot be definitively established. The scientists did not ask what kind of chocolate the patients ate, and milk chocolate has less available flavonoid than dark chocolate. Finally, chocolate consumption did not reduce the risk for any nonfatal cardiac event.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15choc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Fighting to Allow College Education at $99/Month

Higher education is ready to be re-invented and this re-invention should not be delayed for two decades.

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and "catastrophic" for universities.

StraighterLine is offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. It offers as many courses as you want for a flat rate of $99 a month.

If the USA and other countries truly cared about effectively educating the people, increasing the productivity of economy, then legislative efforts would be made to breakdown the barriers to effective and affordable online education. Funding could be provided to help educational institutions to transition to a new world where they are less land/building intensive and where they have less of an undergraduate cash cow. Some inferior institutions would be shutdown.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/far-more-important-than-freeing-music.html
http://www.straighterline.com/

Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2009) — Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie have, in cooperation with colleagues from Dresden, St. Andrews, La Plata and Oxford, for the first time observed magnetic monopoles and how they emerge in a real material.

Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles proposed by physicists that carry a single magnetic pole, either a magnetic north pole or south pole. In the material world this is quite exceptional because magnetic particles are usually observed as dipoles, north and south combined. However there are several theories that predict the existence of monopoles. Among others, in 1931 the physicist Paul Dirac was led by his calculations to the conclusion that magnetic monopoles can exist at the end of tubes – called Dirac strings – that carry magnetic field. Until now they have remained undetected.

In this work the researchers, for the first time, attest that monopoles exist as emergent states of matter, i.e. they emerge from special arrangements of dipoles and are completely different from the constituents of the material. However, alongside this fundamental knowledge, Jonathan Morris explains the further meaning of the results: "We are writing about new, fundamental properties of matter. These properties are generally valid for materials with the same topology, that is for magnetic moments on the pyrochlore lattice. For the development of new technologies this can have big implications. Above all it signifies the first time fractionalisation in three dimensions is observed."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903163725.htm