Thursday, September 30, 2010

Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage

Source
By Chris Demorro
Staff Writer

The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.
Before we delve into the seedy underworld of hybrids, you must first understand how a hybrid works. For this, we will use the most popular hybrid on the market, the Toyota Prius.

The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right?

You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Prius’s EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.

However, if that was the only issue with the Prius, I wouldn’t be writing this article. It gets much worse.

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet.

When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.

Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.

The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.

So, if you are really an environmentalist - ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available - a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage - buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot.

One last fun fact for you: it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Fat Babies Grow Up to Be Studs


Our happy hour fact to amaze your drinking buddies with.


Male infants who gain weight rapidly in their first six months grow up to be stronger, taller, have sex earlier and with more partners than their skinny-baby counterparts.

Researchers at Northwestern University came to these conclusions after following 770 males in the Philippines from birth until their 20s. The babies who get more nutrients -- and the increase in body mass that goes with that -- maintained higher testosterone levels throughout their lives.

"Few parents realize newborn baby boys produce testosterone at levels comparable to an adult male," said Christopher W. Kuzama, who authored the study. "In this study, we show that a measure of nutrition during this brief, early period of high infancy testosterone predicts many traits measured two decades later, including age at puberty, adult height, muscle and even hormone levels."

However, we are pretty sure there is a diminishing return aspect to this finding. So, it's sill not a good idea to wean your infant boy on a diet of doughnuts and milkshakes.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

You Neanderthal!

Signs of Neanderthals Mating With Humans

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.

Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.

Experts believe that the Neanderthal genome sequence will be of extraordinary importance in understanding human evolutionary history since the two species split some 600,000 years ago.

So far, the team has identified only about 100 genes — surprisingly few — that have contributed to the evolution of modern humans since the split. The nature of the genes in humans that differ from those of Neanderthals is of particular interest because they bear on what it means to be human, or at least not Neanderthal. Some of the genes seem to be involved in cognitive function and others in bone structure.

“Seven years ago, I really thought that it would remain impossible in my lifetime to sequence the whole Neanderthal genome,” Dr. Paabo said at a news conference. But the Leipzig team’s second conclusion, that there was probably interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans before Europeans and Asians split, is being met with reserve by some archaeologists.

A degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe would not be greatly surprising given that the species overlapped there from 44,000 years ago when modern humans first entered Europe to 30,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals fell extinct. Archaeologists have been debating for years whether the fossil record shows evidence of individuals with mixed features.

But the new analysis, which is based solely on genetics and statistical calculations, is more difficult to match with the archaeological record. The Leipzig scientists assert that the interbreeding did not occur in Europe but in the Middle East and at a much earlier period, some 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, before the modern human populations of Europe and East Asia split. There is much less archaeological evidence for an overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals at this time and place.

Dr. Paabo has pioneered the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA from fossil bones, overcoming daunting obstacles over the last 13 years in his pursuit of the Neanderthal genome. Perhaps the most serious is that most Neanderthal bones are extensively contaminated with modern human DNA, which is highly similar to Neanderthal DNA. The DNA he has analyzed comes from three small bones from the Vindija cave in Croatia.

“This is a fabulous achievement,” said Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, referring to the draft Neanderthal genome that Dr. Paabo’s team describes in Thursday’s issue of Science.

But he and other archaeologists questioned some of the interpretations put forward by Dr. Paabo and his chief colleagues, Richard E. Green of the Leipzig institute, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School. Geneticists have been making increasingly valuable contributions to human prehistory, but their work depends heavily on complex mathematical statistics that make their arguments hard to follow. And the statistical insights, however informative, do not have the solidity of an archaeological fact.

“This is probably not the authors’ last word, and they are obviously groping to explain what they have found,” Dr. Tattersall said.

Richard Klein, a paleontologist at Stanford, said the authors’ theory of an early interbreeding episode did not seem to have taken full account of the archaeological background. “They are basically saying, ‘Here are our data, you have to accept it.’ But the little part I can judge seems to me to be problematic, so I have to worry about the rest,” he said.

In an earlier report on the Neanderthal genome, the reported DNA sequences were found by other geneticists to be extensively contaminated with human DNA. Dr. Paabo’s group has taken extra precautions but it remains to be seen how successful they have been, Dr. Klein said, especially as another group at the Leipzig institute, presumably using the same methods, has obtained results that Dr. Paabo said he could not confirm.

Dr. Paabo said that episode of human-Neanderthal breeding implied by Dr. Reich’s statistics most plausibly occurred “in the Middle East where the first modern humans appear before 100,000 years ago and there were Neanderthals until 60,000 years ago.” According to Dr. Klein, people in Africa expanded their range and reached just Israel during a warm period some 120,000 years ago. They retreated during a cold period some 80,000 years ago and were replaced by Neanderthals. It is not clear whether or not they overlapped with Neanderthals, he said.

These humans, in any case, were not fully modern and they did not expand from Africa, an episode that occurred some 30,000 years later. If there was any interbreeding, the flow of genes should have been both ways, Dr. Klein said, but Dr. Paabo’s group sees evidence for gene flow only from Neanderthals to modern humans.

The Leipzig group’s interbreeding theory would undercut the present belief that all human populations today draw from the same gene pool that existed a mere 50,000 years ago. “What we falsify here is the strong out-of-Africa hypothesis that everyone comes from the same population,” Dr. Paabo said.

In his and Dr. Reich’s view, Neanderthals interbred only with non-Africans, the people who left Africa, which would mean that non-Africans drew from a second gene pool not available to Africans.


Neanderthal DNA Lives On in Modern Humans

A decade after scientists first cracked the human genome, researchers announced in the May 7 issue of Science that they have done the same for Neanderthals, the species of hominid that existed from roughly 400,000 to 30,000 years ago, when their closest relatives, early modern humans, may have driven them to extinction.

Led by ancient-DNA expert Svante Pääbo of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, scientists reconstructed about 60% of the Neanderthal genome by analyzing tiny chains of ancient DNA extracted from bone fragments of three female Neanderthals excavated in the late 1970s and early '80s from a cave in Croatia. The bones are 38,000 to 44,000 years old.

The genetic information turned up some intriguing findings, indicating, for instance, that at some point after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, they mingled and mated with Neanderthals, possibly in the Middle East or North Africa as much as 80,000 years ago. If that is the case, it occurred significantly earlier than scientists who support the interbreeding hypothesis would have expected.

Comparisons with DNA from modern humans show that some Neanderthal DNA has survived to the present. Moreover, by analyzing ancient DNA alongside modern samples, the team was able to identify a handful of genetic changes that evolved in modern humans sometime after their ancestors and Neanderthals diverged, 440,000 to 270,000 years ago.

The process of sequencing was painstaking. Among the challenges were eliminating bacterial and fungal DNA, which accounted for 97% of the genetic material in the samples, and guarding against contamination from the researchers, whose DNA might be mistaken for Neanderthals'. Plus, the DNA was so fragmented that the chains were often no longer than 40 or 50 base pairs. "We used half a gram of bones to produce the 3 billion base pairs," Pääbo said in a May 5 press conference. "I really thought until six or seven years ago that it would remain impossible, at least for my lifetime, to sequence the entire genome." New sequencing technologies made it feasible, he said.

Researchers compared the Neanderthal genome with the genomes of five living people: one San from southern Africa, one Yoruba from West Africa, one Papua New Guinean, one Han Chinese and one French person. Scientists discovered that 1% to 4% of the latter three DNA samples is shared with Neanderthals — proof that Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred. The absence of Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of the two present-day Africans indicates that interbreeding occurred after some root population of early modern humans left Africa but before the species evolved into distinct groups in Europe and Asia.

The gene flow of Neanderthal DNA into early human DNA was found in only one direction: from Neanderthals to us. The study found no early modern human DNA in the Neanderthal genome. It is not clear whether interbreeding happened a few times among small populations or frequently among large populations; the genetic remnants would look the same with current technology. The Neanderthal DNA appears in the modern human genomes randomly, suggesting it offers no evolutionary benefit and is merely a genetic relic.

Finding any mixture of DNA was a surprise to the team. "We came into the project extremely biased against the idea of gene flow," said Harvard Medical School's David Reich, one of the study's authors, who specializes in examining the relationship between human populations using genomic data.

Still, other paleoanthropologists say the discovery is not entirely unexpected. There is ample archaeological evidence — including tools, habitation sites and fossils — that Neanderthals and early modern humans may have coexisted in the Middle East as much as 80,000 years ago, and certainly in Europe 30,000 to 45,000 years ago. What has been missing until now is the genetic evidence.

"The fact that they found it across the board says that the evidence must be very widespread across modern humans," says Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., who has long argued that the human fossils he has studied in France, Romania, the Czech Republic and other places show mixed ancestry. "If you can find evidence [of Neanderthals] after 30,000 years of [human] genetic shifting, then it must have been pretty important or prominent then." Trinkaus speculates that the genetic flow between Neanderthals and early modern humans might have been as high as 10% to 20%.

The new finding may prompt a tweaking of the well-known Out of Africa theory, which in its strictest interpretation says a small group of early modern humans left Africa and outcompeted and replaced all other hominids without any interbreeding. The alternate theory, known as multiregionalism, argues that distinct populations of modern humans developed simultaneously around the world and along the same evolutionary lines by swapping genes.

"What we falsify here is the very hard Out of Africa theory," said Pääbo. "We show that outside Africa there is this 1% to 4% that came from archaic humans. Of course, it's totally possible that archaic forms that we don't know contributed to Africans today. I don't think we should take this as evidence that only people outside Africa have some 'caveman' biology within them."

According to Trinkaus, many paleoanthropologists have long believed that early modern humans and Neanderthals interbred. "People have been saying this for decades," he argues. "The minority position was the position that there was no gene flow. Most people who work with the fossil record support some level of admixture."

Whatever our mixing, it is human uniqueness that has also been revealed by the sequencing. By comparing the Neanderthal genome with those of modern humans, the team identified a small number of genetic changes that were newly evolved in modern humans. Some of the changes may have arisen as a result of genetic drift, but others seem to have been positively selected for — meaning they swept through populations rapidly, possibly because they gave us some advantage.

The genes in which some of the changes occurred play a role in cognitive and physical development — such as cranial features, skin pigmentation and how we metabolize energy. The study's authors don't yet know what the specific changes signify, but in living people, mutations in some of the genes related to cognitive development contribute to conditions such as Down syndrome, schizophrenia and autism.

Despite the lingering questions, the sequencing of the genome is itself a triumph. "Sequencing ancient human DNA is extremely difficult," says computational biologist Webb Miller, part of a Penn State team that sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth in 2008 — the first such analysis of an extinct animal. (For this achievement, Miller and colleague Stephan Schuster were included among the TIME 100 honorees in 2009.)
While his own work was a technological breakthrough, "what they did was harder," Miller says. "We were working with a frozen sample, so we could get a lot more DNA from the sample. What they did technically was extremely difficult and full of land mines. And I hope they didn't hit any."

Miller adds, "This is a way cool paper. I think it's really fascinating. Some [scientists] will love it, and some of them will hate it. It's great science."

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Fat men enjoy longer lasting sex scientific research show

  • The Daily Telegraph
  • September 06, 2010 12:00AM
  • Fat man

    Longer lasting sex ... Scientific research shows fat men last longer in sex while gym junkies suffer most from premature ejaculation. Picture: Mike Keating Source: Herald Sun

    FAT men last longer in bed, while lean gym jocks are prone to premature ejaculation, a new study has found.

    The scientific research, from Erciyes University in Turkey, found that men with excess body fat develop more female sex hormones that influence their sexual performance.

    Men with high fat levels were found to have higher levels of the female sex hormone oestradiol, which disrupts the chemical balance in their body, making them last longer during sex.

    The survey’s results found fat men could last an average of 7.3 minutes during love making, while others only lasted 1.8 minutes.

    To find the results, researchers spent a year recording the body mass index (BMI) of more than 100 patients referred for specialist treatment.

    They compared these results with 100 other male patients who lasted longer during sex.

    Results concluded that the men needing treatment for premature ejaculation had lower BMI scores, meaning they were fitter.

    "We found that premature ejaculators were leaner," the report stated.

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