http://www.jetsongreen.com/2015/05/earth...d-men.html

EXCERPT: Earth sheltered homes are a prime example of sustainable living and this is one of the best I’ve seen. As seen on Living Big In A Tiny House, the so-called Underhill, is an impressive and unique earth-sheltered home that was constructed by Graham Hannah in Waikato, New Zealand. Underhill is built into a hillside, hence the name (which is also a reference to Lord of the Rings and the fake name Frodo uses on his travels), and overlooks a pond.... [8 images]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...164234.htm

RELEASE: The ways in which parents work together in their roles has been shown to be an important factor in relation to the behaviour of their children. However, few studies have distinguished between mothers' and fathers' perceptions of the support they receive from their partners.

Supportive co-parenting is evidenced by parents' sharing child rearing values, expressing positive emotion with each other during interactions with their child and supporting their partner's parenting efforts.

The study examined the contribution of both parents' perceptions of co-parent support and undermining in association with preschool children's behaviour.

Mothers and fathers from 106 families completed questionnaires about parenting practices and telephone interviews relating to their relationship quality and co-parenting techniques. All families consisted of both biological parents who were married or living together.

Rachel Latham's analyses showed that for fathers, perceptions of poor support from their partner were negatively associated with their children's behaviour. This related to more reported incidents of a child acting defiantly or deliberately breaking toys.

For mothers, feeling unsupported by their partners did not relate to their child's behaviour.

The findings of this study highlight the importance of involving fathers as well as mothers in the study of family and children's wellbeing.

Although the study has only established a link rather than a cause, Rachel suggests that a number of reasons may account for the findings, such as maternal gatekeeping by which the mother limits the father's child rearing input.

They may also be connected to the societal expectations of fathers.

Rachel Latham said: "Compared to mothering, the fathering role may be less clearly socially defined and fathers may withdraw from it. Whereas mothers -- and fathers -- may see the mother's role as less discretionary than fathers. Or it could be simply that fathers don't feel as confident or competent in their role because, although it is changing, commonly they are still less likely to be the primary child carer."

She adds: "My results suggest that in the long term, family therapeutic interventions that aim to improve the co-parent relationship may be informed by paying particular attention to how much fathers feel supported by their co-parent."

SpaceX tests astronaut eject button on Dragon spacecraft
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/SpaceX...t_999.html

EXCERPT: SpaceX on Wednesday launched the first flight test of the emergency astronaut escape feature on its Dragon spaceship, which aims to carry astronauts to low-Earth orbit as early as 2017. No astronauts were on board for the brief launch pad abort test, which blasted off at 9 am (1300 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.


Eerie 'X-Files' Sounds Recorded From the Edge of Space: http://news.discovery.com/space/erie-x-f...gn=rssnws1


Astronomers Measure Distance to Farthest Galaxy Yet
www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/science/astronomers-measure-distance-to-farthest-galaxy-yet.html

EXCERPT: Leapfrogging backward in time to when the universe was apparently feeling its oats, a group of astronomers reported Tuesday that they had measured a bona fide distance to one of the farthest and thus earliest galaxies known. The galaxy, more than a few billion light-years on the other side of the northern constellation Boötes, is one of the most massive and brightest in the early universe and goes by the name of EGS-zs8-1. It flowered into stardom only 670 million years after the Big Bang. The light from that galaxy has taken 13 billion years to reach telescopes on Earth. By now, however, since the universe has continued to expand during that time, the galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away, according to standard cosmological calculations....

Procaryotic cells are small simple cells that don't contain cell organelles or have their genetic material enclosed in cell nuclei. Procaryotic cells include bacteria and archaea.

Eucaryotic cells are larger cells that have organelles inside them as well as nuclei that contain genetic material organized into chromosomes. They include the cells found in single celled protozoa, fungi, plants and animals.

Procaryotic cells are believed to be older and for much of the history of life on earth procaryotic cells were all there were. Bacteria were as complicated as life on Earth got, and evolution seems to have revolved around cell chemistry. (Bacteria and archaea have very diverse chemistries.)

Archaea are members of a group of procaryotic organisms that look and behave like bacteria and once were considered to be bacteria, but now are assigned to their own group due to fundamental chemical differences.

A big mystery concerns how eucaryotic cells first appeared. How did cells make the leap from one kind of cell to the other?

The news in this post is that microbiologists are reporting the discovery of a peculiar kind of archaea, discovered in undersea hydrothermal vents off the coast of Norway, that seems to contain some of the same genes found in later Eucaryotic organisms, but not in other Procaryotes. It isn't clear what those genes are doing in these more primitive cells.

These cells do not contain mitochondria or chloroplasts, eucaryotic organelles believed to have once been free-living procaryotic cells that took up a new life as symbiotes inside the eucaryotic ancestor cells. (Mitochondria and chloroplasts still have scraps of their own DNA.)

But one of the seemingly eucaryotic genes in these archaea codes for actin, a chemical with all kinds of uses in eucaryotic cells, including phagocytosis, the ingestion of food and materials into cells. So maybe these genes tell us something about how it is that the eucaryotes' procaryotic ancestor cells originally ingested the ancestors of todays's mitochondria and chloroplasts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32610177

It always seemed to me that cellphone use is abit obsessive compulsive. Hunching over this little device updating oneself on one's "likes" and emails. I feel like it's a symptom of being hyperconnected, the state of having a nagging feeling you're missing something or some message that is vital for your peace of mind. It also acts as a social buffer from having to interact with people in your real environment, presenting the facade of having to take care of some important business and having no time to socialize. It's socially acceptable to ignore people while texting.

"A new study out this month from the Pew Research Center says 1 in 4 American teens is on the Internet almost constantly. Pew cites the widespread availability of smartphones.

Doctors say they're seeing more anxiety in kids these days, and they think the phones have something to do with it.

A leading child psychologist made headlines recently when she blamed the internet and smartphones for what she calls an "explosion in mental health problems" among young people, from suicide to self-harm.

"Something is clearly happening," said Julie Lynn Evans, "because I am seeing the evidence in the numbers of depressive, anorexic, cutting children who come to see me. And it always has something to do with the computer, the Internet and the smartphone."
Duke University Child Psychologist Robin Gurwitch says she also sees a relationship between smartphones and kids experiencing depression and anxiety.
"Teenage girls, it's the worst: 'If I miss a call, I know they're going to all talk about me,' " Gurwitch said.

The Pew Research Center says girls overwhelmingly use social media more than boys, and Dr. Gurwitch says girls may feel pressure to be online constantly.

"It becomes if I'm not connected, what does that mean? What are they saying about me? What are they doing?" Gurwitch said. "So we do see some increase in anxiety disorders."

Gerwitch says being connected, not being left out, has created a whole new worry for kids.

"I think oftentimes kids are not going to be maybe even aware or strong enough mentally to block some of that stuff out," said Dr. Holly Danneman. "And eventually it starts to just wear 'em down."

As a mother of six, Danneman has hard and fast rules about her kids' technology use - like no devices at the dinner table. Her high school-aged son and daughter have more freedom than their younger siblings, and her daughter Maria is already learning what can happen when kids make bad decisions.

"I've seen friends just get this bad reputation and never be able to get it back," Danneman said.

Rachel Folz's work life is all about technology. She's a digital marketing manager, but she and her husband leave technology at the door when they come home.

"There are no cell phones at the dinner table," Folz said.
Four-year old Lucy gets almost no internet exposure. She does have a kid's tablet, but it doesn't connect online and only gets to use it about once a week.

"We decided from early on that we wanted Lucy to have a more unplugged childhood," Folz said.

Folz says she already sees benefits like Lucy's great attention span and her kindness, but disconnecting completely is not for every family. Danneman's kids connect at different levels according to age, and she's constantly monitoring.

"I set these limits early. They know it's a one and done. It's not a two and done, it's a one and done, and don't disappoint because it's a privilege," Danneman said.

Dr. Gurwitch says parents need to set some rules for when and how often kids can connect, and stay vigilant about the content they're seeing.

"Now we can get pornography. Children can access that," she said. "They can access anorexia sites, drug sites, self harm sites."
And perhaps most important, model good behavior ourselves.

"Are parents sitting at the dinner table saying yeah, yeah tell me about your day after I answer email or a text that just came in?" Gurwitch said.

No doubt, technology helps us in many ways. Learning at school? Definitely. Teaching kids about building relationships? Maybe not. It's all about balance and finding what's right for your family.

By making conscious decisions, the Danneman and Folz families have found the right balance for theirs.

Gurwitch says there's no hard and fast rule for when kids are ready for an iPod or smartphone. She says base it on what it's being used for, and whether the child needs it to communicate with parents.

Also, if they lose track of a device or damage it too often, kids probably aren't ready for the responsibility."===http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Study...85161.html

A brief introduction to bits and why they're not the same as 0s and 1s...

https://plus.maths.org/content/informati...-questions

EXCERPT: A bit is the amount of information you need to choose between two equally probable alternatives. Imagine you are standing at the fork in the road...

[...] Navigating a series of forks in the road is, in some respects, similar to the game of 20 questions. In this game your opponent chooses a word (usually a noun), and you (the astute questioner) are allowed to ask twenty questions in order to discover the identity of this word. Crucially, each question must have a yes/no (i.e. binary) answer, and therefore the answer provides you with at most one bit of information.

Why at most? By analogy with the navigation example, where each decision at a road fork halved the number of remaining destinations, each question should halve the number of remaining possible words. A question to which you already know the answer is a poor choice of question. For example, if your question is, "Is the word in the dictionary?", then the answer is almost certainly, "Yes!", an answer which is predictable, and which therefore provides you with no information.

Conversely, a well-chosen question is one to which you have no idea whether the answer will be yes or no — there is a 50:50 chance of it being either. In this case, the answer provides exactly one bit of information. The cut-down version of 20 questions in the figure below shows...

http://www.medicaldaily.com/hepatitis-c-...ial-332128

EXCERPT: According to the World Health Organization, 130 to 150 million people worldwide suffer from chronic infections of Hepatitis C (HCV), a blood borne virus that primarily attacks the liver and can be spread through needle-sharing, contaminated medical equipment, and less often through sexual relations. These sufferers are especially vulnerable to later liver damage, either through cirrhosis or cancer, and 350,000 to 500,000 people die as a result of these diseases every year. While there are available drug treatments for acute Hepatitis C infection and its hardier chronic version, they vary in effectiveness, accessibility, and tolerance, often needing to be received via injection and coming saddled with side effects. Soon enough however, we might be looking at an entirely new playing field, with two studies in this month’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reporting the extraordinary success of an experimental multi-drug oral therapy for chronic HCV infection, even among those who hadn’t responded to previous treatment....

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/05/world/russ...index.html

EXCERPT: The wraps are off Russia's new main battle tank. Copies of the new Armata T-14 medium tank have been rumbling through Moscow this week as the Russian military practices for Saturday's Victory Day parade commemorating the end of World War II in Europe. News services have distributed several images of the tanks this week. [...] Along with exposing the tanks during the practices, Russia's Defense Ministry posted images of the Armata and other new armor on its official website under the headline, "Advanced forward-looking military hardware." More than two dozen photographs of the hardware taken during parade practice were also posted on the military's site....