Google added automatic translations for 42 languages in its online document collaboration service.

The new Google Docs tool, launched Thursday, leverages the company's translation system, which applies statistical learning techniques to build a translation model out of billions of words of text.

To launch the feature, users only have to click on "translate document" from the "tools" menu. The document is then translated into the target language, and users have the option of replacing the original document with translation or making a new translated version.

The tool preserves all the formatting and layout of the original document, but that actual translation may be rough. "Translations aren't perfect, but we are continuously working on improving translation quality over time," Rita Chen, an associate product manager, said on the Google Blog.

Automatic translation, also called machine translation, is often used on corporate intranets for multilingual collaboration among employees. The technology is often applied to e-mails, Web pages, presentations and corporate documentation.

In June, Systran, a language translation provider, unveiled a hybrid machine translation server that combines rule-based machine translation and statistical machine translations. By combining self-learning and linguistic technologies, the Systran Hybrid MT server lets users customize translation programs to fit particular needs.

In March 2008, Google launched for third-party developers a language application programming interface that can be incorporated in Web applications. Using the API, applications can detect and translate blocks of text in a blog or other Web page using Javascript. Google offers a developers guide for the technology.

credited to informationweek.com

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A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.

The dot over the letter "i" is called a tittle.

A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and
down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.

A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.

Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

A 2 X 4 is really 1-1/2" by 3-1/2".

During the chariot scene in "Ben Hur," a small red car can be seen
in the distance (and Heston's wearing a watch).

On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily!
(That explains a few mysteries....)

Sherlock Holmes NEVER said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."

Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.

The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per
side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.

There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange,
purple and silver.

Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space
because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.

The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin in World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

Weatherman Willard Scott was the first Ronald McDonald.

If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will
instantly go mad and sting itself to death. (Who was the sadist who
discovered this??)

Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to s-l-o-w film down
so you could see his moves. That's the opposite of the norm.

The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in
the USA."

The original name for butterfly was flutterby.

The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which
stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player
for automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was Victrola, so they called themselves Motorola.

Roses may be red, but violets are indeed violet.

By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you cannot
sink into quicksand.

Celery has negative calories. It takes more calories to eat a
piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.

Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin
look-alike contest.

An old law in Bellingham, Washington, made it illegal for a woman
to take more than three steps backwards while dancing!

The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book
most often stolen from public libraries.

The glue on Israeli postage is certified kosher.

Bats always turn left when exiting a cave!

credited to robinsweb.com

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A treasurehunter who found a ring on a Sussex beach has restored it to its American owner 40 years after it slipped from her finger.

After finding the item, Cyril Clarke conducted a fruitless search for years, even writing to the White House, in his bid to return it.

He finally located Ellie Tucker through another American he met at a healing conference.

Mr Clarke, 90, of Bexhill, East Sussex, found the 1958 black onyx ring while scouring the beach in nearby St Leonards on a Sunday evening in July, 1987.

He said: "I was always finding earrings, keys and things like that - and I reported my find to the police.

"But no-one reported losing the ring and, realising it was quite special, I decided to try to track down the owner myself by writing to the then US President George W Bush.

"It was an American class ring and inscribed on it was Oakridge School and two faint initials J and M.

"This was in pre-computer days and it wasn't easy to find information so I wrote to the American embassy but had no response.

"I also wrote to President Bush but again had no response so it's been in my collection for all these years."

Then, in 2007, Mr Clarke met American Michelle Schrag at a healing conference in Bournemouth.

They became pen-friends and, after a year of exchanging letters, Mr Clarke flew to the US to visit Mrs Schrag at her Chicago home.

It was Mrs Schrag who managed to trace Mrs Tucker through Oakridge High School's website and officials at the Tennessee school then contacted her.

Surprisingly, it is not the first time Mrs Tucker has lost the ring and been reunited with it.

In the late 50s, she lost it on Myrtle Beach in southern California before it was returned a few years later.

She cannot remember how it ended up on a beach in the UK but was able to identify it as hers because faint initials J and M on the inside represent her maiden name.

credited to telegraph.co.uk

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A man from Yorkshire has set a new world record -by walking over 18 miles on broken glass in aid of the charity, Action for Children.

Nigel Jardine, 56, from Leeds, West Yorkshire, walked 1,060 metres in one hour around an octagonal circuit of glass at the Bageecha restaurant in his home town of Horsforth – breaking the previous record of 960 metres.

The sports coach and motivational expert carried on for 27-and-a-half hours until he had covered the equivalent of 30 kilometres, or 18 miles.

He said: "I'm used to walking on broken glass but I suppose the customers at the restaurant weren't used to watching someone do it as they tucked into their meals."

Mr Jardine was allowed five-minute breaks every hour during the challenge to have a drink, visit the lavatory or have a lie down.

His feat was in aid of Action for Children, the leading children’s charity. He said he felt a strong connection with the charity’s work because he was abused as a child mentally and physically, both at home and at school.

He said the glass walk reflected a child’s response to abuse: treading carefully, avoiding pain, not wanting to get hurt.

The manager of the restaurant, Hena Khatun, said: “Nigel is a regular customer here and we knew that he had been doing this and things like it, walking on glass and fire, for quite a while in his job.

“We got involved because he asked if we could give him the space to try the record attempt and we were happy to agree because we trust him, he’s good at what he does.

“We’ve got one huge room with capacity for about 90 seats, so we gave him one side of it and we’ve still had our usual customers come in and use the other side. It didn’t really put them off, they were surprised of course but were quite happy with it.”

credited to telegraph.co.uk

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Decontamination experts at the former nuclear site at Dounreay, northern Scotland, are using the Cillit Bang household cleaner to remove radioactive plutonium stains.

The huge site in Caithness is in the process of being decommissioned but workers found their normal cleaning fluid was slowing down the job of dismantling an experimental chemical plant used in the 1980s to recycle plutonium liquor.

One of the team suggested £1.99 Cillit Bang after watching a television advertisement that shows dirt being stripped from a 10p coin.

The four-storey chemical plant consists of a series of vessels, pipes and boxes made from steel and toughened glass. The solutions which ran through it left the steel stained with plutonium, creating a hazard for the team taking it apart.

David Hanson, project manager with Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd, said the efficacy of Cillit Bang was helping drive down the £2.6 billion cost of demolishing the site.

He said: "We need to decontaminate as much of the surfaces as possible before we can cut them up. The normal agents we'd use on steel and glass need time to dry and this slowed us down.

"The acids that had been used years ago also created problems. It meant we had to think carefully about the most effective way to wipe the plutonium from the steelwork before we could cut it up.

"One of the guys suggested Cillit Bang. He remembered seeing it dissolve the grime on a coin in an advert on TV and thought it was worth looking at. I'm very glad we did. We tested it and found it very effective."

The 15-strong clean-up team wear whole-body plastic suits with their own oxygen supply and often need four or even five layers of gloves to protect them from radiation.

Mr Manson added: "The ductwork is stainless steel and contamination levels have been significantly reduced following spray and wipedown with Cillit Bang."

Bosses at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, which is also being decommissioned, are among those who have been in touch to learn more about the discovery.

credited to telegraph.co.uk

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A small airplane was struck by three vehicles after it made an emergency landing on a California motorway.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor says the Piper PA-24 Comanche with two people on board was bound for Santa Barbara Airport on Sunday when the pilot told air traffic controllers he had run out of fuel.

He landed on the southbound side of US Highway 101, about one mile northeast of the airport.

California Highway Patrol Officer James Richards says three cars were unable to avoid the plane and crashed into it. He says the occupants of the plane and the cars were not injured.

Richards says traffic briefly backed up for miles while crews shut down the motorway to remove the plane.

credited to stuff.co.nz

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If all ice on the earth melted, the level of the oceans would rise by 64 meters. Many coastal cities would be under water, and so would the Netherlands, a significant part of which lies below sea level. However, the Dutch and the rest of the planet may rest assured: this hypothetical catastrophe could not take place anytime within the next thousand years.

Our institute has prepared an atlas of the world's snow and ice resources, which describes all the ice on the earth and even offers a map of the world without ice. It is, however, a model, not a forecast. Yet there are forecasts warning that if the global warming seen at the end of the 20th century continues for several decades, a lot of ice in the Artic Ocean will melt.

There is, however, a subtle but important qualification: if Artic ice should melt, the sea level will not change because the volume of water created by melting ice is equal to the volume of water that ice displaces when floating. The danger is different: warming could lead to the melting of huge island and continental glaciers.

The biggest of them cover the Antarctic, where 90% of the world's ice is accumulated, and Greenland. The melting of this ice could lead to a catastrophe. But is there any reason to panic? The temperature rise of 3-6 degrees Celsius over the next century promised by pessimists could not have a significant influence on the Antarctic, where the average temperature is less than 40 degrees below zero.

The processes ongoing in the permafrost are even more complicated than those in the ice. All the winters of the last decade were more or less abnormal. Because of that, the permafrost in areas just beyond the Artic began receding and melting.

The period of warming was tangible, but now it may be drawing to a close. Most natural processes on the earth are cyclical, having a shorter or longer rhythm. Yet no matter how these sinusoids look, a temperature rise is inevitably followed by a decline, and vice versa.

Studies of the ice core retrieved by Russia's Vostok Antarctic station show that this is what has been happening on earth for at least the last 400,000 years. Today, scientists say that the melting of the permafrost has stalled, which has been proved by data obtained by meteorological stations along Russia's Artic coast.

We are now studying the influence of the atmosphere and snow cover on permafrost in space and time. In the permafrost zones, a layer melts in the summer, when the temperature rises above zero. However, in the winter this layer freezes again.

This is a normal process: what melts, freezes. Yet if a winter is abnormally warm, this seasonal melted layer may not freeze back. Then the so-called "talik," a layer with a temperature of around zero, is formed. This is a very unpleasant thing for buildings and pipelines.

It seems that the permafrost should be melting if the temperature is rising. However, many areas are witnessing the opposite. The average annual temperature is getting higher, but the permafrost remains and has even started to spread. Why? An important factor is the snow cover. Global warming reduces it, therefore making the heat insulator for the permafrost thinner. Then even weak frosts are enough to freeze the ground deeper below the surface.

In many places, the frozen ground is 500-800 meters deep. Even if the highest warming forecast comes true and the temperature rises by 3-6 degrees, no more than 20 meters of frozen ground will melt. Some people are afraid that the melting permafrost will pollute the air with methane. However, frozen water takes up only 15% of the 20-meter layer, and the amount of gases dissolved there is insignificant. So we are unlikely to receive such unpleasant surprises from the permafrost within the next hundred years.

Today, scientists fear not so much global warming as changes in atmospheric circulation. In recent years, the so-called western shift has dominated, which means that air masses have been moving from the west eastwards. There has been little mention of the so-called meridian masses, moving from the south to the north and back. Now, however, the meridian shift has become more frequent.

If it goes south, it causes a spell of cold weather; if it goes north, it brings warm air masses with a lot of precipitation in the winter. This results in thaws and snow drifts on plains and in heavy snowfalls, avalanches and mudflows in the mountains. Meridian processes have been gaining in frequency lately, which promises different weather anomalies: unusually high and low temperatures, heavy rains and snowfalls and longer droughts, which in turn may lead to natural calamities.

Nikolai Osokin is a glaciologist at the Institute of Geography, the Russian Academy of Sciences.

credited to en.rian.ru

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Police said a 72-year-old pizza shop employee foiled a shotgun-point robbery by throwing a can of beer at the perpetrators. Lancaster police Lt. Todd Umstead said two men with bandanas over their faces attempted to rob Six Packs on Vine at closing time Wednesday. One of the men pointed a shotgun at the employee, who was stocking a cooler.

Umstead said the man threw a 12-ounce can of beer at the robber and both assailants fled the store.

Police said the employee could not tell if the beer struck either of the men but it was enough to chase them off.

credited to huffingtonpost.com

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This is an example of problems associated with crowd control in china... WTF ???

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A squirrel who popped up in a tourist's photo is now stealing even more scenes online.

Known as the 'Crasher Squirrel', it first appeared to spoil a photo taken by tourists in Banff, Canada, the Canadian Press reported.

The photo was posted online and has since become the latest fad to sweep the internet, magically appearing in photos with celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods, Osama bin Laden and The Beatles.

The fad has also spawned websites such as "The Squirrelizer", which allows you to digitally insert the famous squirrel into any picture.

The squirrel now has its own Facebook and Twitter pages, set up by Canadian tourism agencies.

credited to stuff.co.nz

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The party was over more than 4,000 years ago, but the remnants still remain in the gourds and squashes that served as dishware. For the first time, University of Missouri researchers have studied the residues from gourds and squash artifacts that date back to 2200 B.C. and recovered starch grains from manioc, potato, chili pepper, arrowroot and algarrobo.

The starches provide clues about the foods consumed at feasts and document the earliest evidence of the consumption of algarrobo and arrowroot in Peru. "Archaeological starch grain research allows us to gain a better understanding of how ancient humans used plants, the types of food they ate, and how that food was prepared," said Neil Duncan, doctoral student of anthropology in the MU College of Arts and Science and lead author of the study that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week. "This is the first study to analyze residue from bottle gourd or squash artifacts. Squash and bottle gourds had a variety of uses 4,000 years ago, including being used as dishes, net floats and symbolic containers. Residue analysis can help determine the specific use."

In the study, researchers recovered starch grains from squash and gourd artifacts by a method that currently is used to recover microfossils from stone tools and ceramics. First, the artifact was placed in a special water bath to loosen and remove adhering residue. Then the artifact's interior surface was lightly brushed to remove any remaining residue. The residues were collected, and starch grains were isolated from each of these sediments.

"The starch residues of edible plants found on the artifacts and the special archaeological context from which these artifacts were recovered suggest that the artifacts were used in a ritual setting for the serving and production of food," Duncan said. "The method used in this study could be used in other areas and time periods in which gourds and squash rinds are preserved."

Scientists believe the Buena Vista site, where the starch grains were recovered, served as a small ceremonial center in the central Chillon Valley. The social and ritual use of food is not well understood during this time period in Peru, but this research will enhance the potential for understanding, Duncan said.

credited to esciencenews.com

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It is amazing how things have changed in these modern times. It wasn't that long ago that when you had problems with your car, you had to hike up and down the road trying to find somebody to help you. Well those days are long gone. Now there is something known as road service. It is truly one of the great inventions of these modern times!

What is road service? It is exactly what the name suggests. If you have a problem, you simply contact the phone number provided. A service professional will be sent out to your location to assist you. The service professional is usually a local provider who will take a look at the car and make any simple repairs on the spot. If the car can't be repaired quickly and easily, they will then arrange for the car to be towed to a facility. You'll then be given a ride home or transportation will be arranged. It is a wonderful service!

If you purchased a new car in the last five years, you're probably already well aware of what road service is. It did not originate as an insurance product. Instead, car manufacturers started offering it as an enticement to buy their cars. Manufacturers such as BMW and Mercedes were some of the first to do this. As is often the case in industry, the other manufacturers started offering it once they saw how successful it was for the original manufacturers.

If you have a new car, there's no reason to buy road service as part of your car insurance. The manufacturer will cover it for an initial period that can be anywhere between three and five years depending on the program their offering. But what if that time is past? Should you buy roadside service as part of your car insurance? The answer is that you probably should not. There are a couple of reasons.

The first reason you should not buy road service as part of your car insurance has to do with the quality of the service. Simply put, other groups like AAA are far better at handling it. They've been doing it forever and they have the service down to a fine art. When you have a problem, you just call and AAA takes care of everything. As an additional benefit, you do not have to file a claim or anything of that sort. Everything is simply handled by AAA as part of the flat fee you pay for membership.

There's an additional reason why you should not buy road service as part of your car insurance that is little more subtle. Some car insurance companies consider calls for road service to constitute a claim. The premiums you pay for your insurance are determined by a number of different factors. One of the factors is the number of claims you make on your policy. You can probably see where I'm going with this. Let's assume you have three problems with cars on the road in the next five years and call for road service each time. If your insurance company considers each of those problems to be a claim, your premiums are going to skyrocket! That will be a disaster.

Road service is a great thing and you should definitely arrange to have it. That being said, including as part of your car insurance is probably not the best idea. There are other options that are better from both an economic and strategic perspective.

Thomas Ajava is with http://www.autoownersinsurancecompanies.com - find auto insurance companies near you for personalized service.

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NASA needs more cash in order to meet its goal of finding nearby space rocks that could hit Earth in a devastating impact, a new report says.

Congress ordered NASA in 2005 to find and track 90 percent of the large asteroids near Earth by 2020, but did not set aside the necessary funds required to do the job, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

Without that funding, NASA will not be able to build the new facilities and telescopes required to track potentially threatening asteroids down to the size of about 460 feet (140 meters) across, according to the interim report.

"I think they're pretty much right on," said Lindley Johnson, NASA's manager of the Near-Earth Objects program at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

Johnson told SPACE.com Wednesday that NASA has estimated it needs between $800 million and $1 billion over the course of 12 to 15 years to build and support the more sensitive telescopes required to meet its goal of tracking most of the near-Earth objects.

Astronomer Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object program office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has said that about 15 percent of the objects 460 feet wide and larger have been found, and only 5 percent of objects down to about 164 feet (50 meters) in size.

One of the top space rocks under observation is 2007 VK184, a 425-foot-wide (130 meters) asteroid that has a 1-in-2,940 chance of hitting Earth sometime between 2048 and 2057. An impact, if it occurred, would cause an explosion roughly equivalent to 150 million tons of TNT, or more than 10,000 times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

NASA is just about 85 percent complete with tracking asteroids about a half-mile (1 km) in size, Johnson said.

Hunting asteroids near Earth

Scientists estimate there are about 100,000 asteroids and comets near Earth, but only about 20,000 are expected to pose any risk of impact. As of Monday, NASA has found 6,330 of those objects, 1,000 of them flying in orbits that could potentially threaten the Earth in the future, Johnson said.

Aside from efforts to launch space-based missions to track incoming asteroids by Germany and Canada, the United States is carrying the bulk of the asteroid watch work, the new report stated. NASA currently has three separate search teams running five different telescopes to hunt for potentially threatening objects near Earth.

The recent impact on Jupiter last month of a previously unknown object has brought Earth's risk of a similar hit back to the forefront. If such an impact occurred on Earth, the results would be catastrophic, scientists have said.

"It caught us a little bit by surprise," Johnson said of the Jupiter impact, which scientists believe was caused by an asteroid or comet.

Johnson said that scientists plan to use data from NASA's new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft, which is slated to launch in late 2009 to map the night sky in more detail than ever before, to expand their search for near-Earth objects. He and his team are looking forward to the final version of the National Academy of Sciences report.

A final version of the report is slated to be completed by the end of the year.

In the meantime, NASA recently launched a new "Asteroid Watch" Web site (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch/) to keep the public current on its work to track near-Earth objects. The Web site launched July 29 to post updates and alert the public to new research and findings via updates, Twitter and an asteroid tracking widget.

Johnson said the Web site was in development long before the Jupiter impact, which occurred just over a week earlier.

"We had actually started work to bring up that Web site a couple of months ago," Johnson said. "That was just another event out of the blue."

credited to space.com

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A 60-year-old man has been convicted of groping a woman in a Minnie Mouse costume at Walt Disney World.

John William Moyer of Cressona, Pennsylvania, told the judge he is innocent.

His son said before sentencing that his father would never inappropriately touch a woman, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

He was convicted on Tuesday of misdemeanour battery and sentenced to write the victim an apology, serve 180 days probation and complete 50 hours of community service.

Moyer must also pay US$1,000 in court costs and possibly undergo a mental evaluation.

The victim says she had to do everything possible to keep Moyer's hands off her breasts.

credited to stuff.co.nz

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The Perseid meteor shower will have to fight it out with a bright moon for visibility this year, but astronomers are still predicting a dazzling show tonight.

From any vantage point in the world, you might see more than 80 meteors an hour streak across the sky during the best viewing time, when the moon's glare will be weakest—late tonight and into the wee hours of tomorrow, local cloud and lighting conditions permitting.

The highest concentration of Perseid meteors hitting Earth's atmosphere will occur tomorrow afternoon, when they'll be largely invisible.

The Perseid sky show is "always the best annual meteor shower," said Bill Cooke, the lead for NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office in Alabama.

"Visually, the best are the Geminids. But December nights are cold, and people don't want to freeze their rears off."

Perseid Meteor Shower Viewing Tips

The moon will provide some interference for the Perseids, at just over half full and rising around midnight. The best advice: Look away from the moon—and all other lights—so your eyes stay as dark-adapted as possible.

To see the Perseid meteor shower, bring a blanket to a place away from city lights and lay on your back, taking in as much of the sky as possible.

The Perseid meteors will appear to originate in the northeastern sky, near the constellation Perseus, and to shoot off in all directions, said Brian Skiff, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

"Since the radiant point is close to ... Perseus, it is common to see them streaking right along the Milky Way, even as far away as Sagittarius," he said. "After midnight, Perseus will have risen higher in the sky, and the meteors can be seen in just about any direction."

Perseids: More Than a "Geek Pickup Line"

The Perseid meteors are bits of 2,000-year-old debris left behind by the periodic comet Swift-Tuttle. Earth's atmosphere collides with the debris at more than 38 kilometers (23 miles) a second.

The meteors generally get incinerated before they can strike the ground, creating the streaks of superheated, glowing air we call shooting stars.

NASA's Cooke has made a career of studying meteors, but that wasn't always his primary reason for watching meteor showers, he said.

"It was the best way to get the girls out on a date," he said. "It was used as a geek pickup line back in my day."

In this day, the Perseids may be getting even more geek appeal. Astronomers accross the United Kingdom are prepping for "the worlds first mass participation meteor star party," on Twitter, according to the Royal Astronomical Society.

Inspired by May's Twitter Moonwatch, the Twitter Meteorwatch should feature a steady, Perseid-like barrage of shooting star photos, astronomy questions, expert answers, oohs, and ahs.

"We were amazed at how excited people were about our Twitter Moonwatch," said Richard Fleet, president of Britain's Newbury Astronomical Society, in a statement. "We had thousands of people who had probably never looked through a telescope before asking us questions directly and viewing images."

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

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Is there someone in your life who still doesn’t quite grasp what “irony” is? You can just show that person this video of Kate Gosselin on the Today Show this morning. Gosselin complained about her in-laws: “They decided to take their fame elsewhere and make money off my children. You have to understand, this has become a business for them. When they appear on talk shows…it’s a huge source of income for them to do this.” Those rascals!

I wish the camera had focused on Meredith Viera more — she definitely seemed to be dying inside with each question and answer. Especially “When you’re not with the kids, where are you, then?” Like she cares.

credited to popwatch.ew.com

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New TV ads are encouraging Brazilians to save water – by urinating in the shower.

Brazilian environmental group SOS Mata Atlantica says the campaign, running on several television stations, uses humor to persuade people to reduce flushes.

The group says if a household avoids one flush a day, it can save up to 4,380 liters (1,157 gallons) of water annually.

SOS spokeswoman Adriana Kfouri said Tuesday that the ad is "a way to be playful about a serious subject."

The spot features cartoon drawings of people from all walks of life - a trapeze artist, a basketball player, even an alien – urinating in the shower.

Narrated by children's voices, the ad ends with: "Pee in the shower! Save the Atlantic rainforest!"

credited to stuff.co.nz

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Researchers have identified what they believe is the original source of malignant malaria: a parasite found in chimpanzees in equatorial Africa.

UC Irvine biologist Francisco Ayala and colleagues think the deadly parasite was transmitted to humans from chimpanzees perhaps as recently as 5,000 years ago - and possibly through a single mosquito, genetic analyses indicate. Previously, malaria's origin had been unclear.

This discovery could aid the development of a vaccine for malaria, which sickens about 500 million people and kills about 1.5 million each year. It also furthers understanding of how infectious diseases such as HIV, SARS, and avian and swine flu can be transmitted to humans from animals.

"When malaria transferred to humans, it became very severe very quickly," said Ayala, co-author of the study that reports these findings. "The disease in humans has become resistant to many drugs. It's my hope that our discovery will bring us closer to making a vaccine."

The study appears online the week of Aug. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Human malignant malaria is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium falciparum, which is responsible for 85 percent of all infections and nearly all malaria deaths. Chimpanzees were known to carry a closely related parasite called Plasmodium reichenowi, but most scientists assumed the two had existed separately in humans and chimpanzees for the last 5 million years.

Scientists in the current study examined several new strains of the parasite found in blood taken from wild and wild-born chimpanzees in Cameroon and Ivory Coast sanctuaries during routine health exams.

A gene analysis linked one chimpanzee strain to all worldwide strains of the human malaria parasite. This connection suggests that one mosquito may have transferred malaria to humans. Because there is little genetic variance among strains of the human parasite, scientists believe the transmission occurred in the recent past - maybe 5,000 to 2 million years ago - though an exact time could not be determined.

The results support an earlier hypothesis by Dr. Ajit Varki of UC San Diego and colleagues that genetic mutations made humans first resistant to sickness from the chimpanzee parasite, then extremely susceptible to illness from the human form.

They also corroborate an earlier finding by Ayala and former UCI graduate student Stephen Rich that malignant malaria started spreading throughout the tropics and world about 5,000 years ago, when agriculture began in Africa. Rich, now a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also is the lead author of the current PNAS study.

credited to physorg.com

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