Here's a report that 23% of British 12 and 13 year-olds now suffer from myopia. That's compared to 10% in the 1960's.

The increase is being attributed to kids playing outside less and spending more time focused on computer and cell-phone screens.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/new...421027.ece

I'm guessing that cell-phone screens are especially bad, since they are so small that eyes have to strain to resolve small features and text. Once eyes are acclimated to doing that, it's probably harder for them to adjust to focusing on larger things farther than a few inches away.

A fantasy landscape painting should transport you to another world. It should haunt you with a memory of a place you've never seen before. See if these do it for you:

"Breakthrough study has uncovered a potential root cause of asthma and a drug that reversed symptoms in lab tests. The finding brings hope to the 300 million asthma sufferers worldwide who are plagued by debilitating bouts of coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath and tightness in the chest.

While the breakthrough will be welcomed by all asthma sufferers, it will particularly excite the 1 in 12 patients who do not respond to current treatments.

The study - led by Cardiff University in the UK - reveals for the first time that the calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) plays a key role in causing the airway disease.

The team used human airway tissue from asthmatic and nonasthmatic people and lab mice with asthma to reach their findings.
In the journal Science Translational Medicine, they describe how manipulating CaSR with an existing class of drugs known as calcilytics reversed all symptoms.

Calcilytics block the calcium-sensing receptor and were originally developed for the treatment of osteoporosis - a condition that makes bones more likely to break - also referred to as "brittle bone disease."

One of the crucial study results is that the symptoms the drug reversed include airway narrowing, airway twitchiness and inflammation - all of which make breathing more difficult.

Daniela Riccardi, principal investigator and a professor in Cardiff's School of Biosciences, describes their findings as "incredibly exciting," because for the first time they have linked airway inflammation - which can be triggered for example by cigarette smoke and car fumes - with airway twitchiness. She adds:

"Our paper shows how these triggers release chemicals that activate CaSR in airway tissue and drive asthma symptoms like airway twitchiness, inflammation, and narrowing. Using calcilytics, nebulized directly into the lungs, we show that it is possible to deactivate CaSR and prevent all of these symptoms."

While the finding is likely to be welcomed by all asthma sufferers, it will particularly excite the 1 in 12 patients who do not respond to current treatments and who account for around 90% of health care costs associated with the disease.

Could be treating asthma patients in 5 years - huge implications for other airway diseases

Calcilytics were first developed about 15 years ago for the treatment of osteoporosis, but while they proved safe and well tolerated in trials, results have been disappointing in patients with osteoporosis.

However, the fact they have already been developed and tested gives researchers the unique opportunity to repurpose them and hugely reduce the time it usually takes to bring a new drug to market.

Once funding is secured, the team hopes to be testing the drugs on humans within the next 2 years. Prof. Riccardi concludes:

"If we can prove that calcilytics are safe when administered directly to the lung in people, then in 5 years we could be in a position to treat patients and potentially stop asthma from happening in the first place."=====http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/292947.php

Several readers have called my attention to yet another amazing case of mimicry, this time in a tephritid fly (the “true” fruit flies). Most people became alerted to this by a semi-viral tw**t by Ziya Tong, which notes that “Goniurellia tridens is a 3-in-1 insect,” and that the photo below was taken by Peter Roosenschoon in Dubai. Roosenschoon is a conservation officer at the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve.

Those aren’t ants bedecking the fly’s wings; they’re the normal wing markings of this species. But why would a fly have antlike markings on its wing? [UPDATE: Note comments at bottom where an ant expert and two others (including Matthew) think that these are spiderlike markings. I’m coming around to that point of view.]

The issue is discussed in a New York Times‘s “Dot Earth” column by Andrew Revkin, which refers back to the original article in the original article by Anna Zacharias in The National, a United Arab Emirates newspaper. Zacharias describes it:

The image on the wing is absolutely perfect,” says Dr Brigitte Howarth, the fly specialist at Zayed University who first discovered G tridens in the UAE. [JAC: the species has been known since 1910, and is found in the Near and Middle East, Asia, and Asia.]

. . .In the UAE alone, 27 picture wing species are known. Some have wings bearing simple shapes but others, like G tridens, are far more complex.

Dr Howarth first saw G tridens on an oleander shrub in northern Oman. “I was looking at the stem of the leaves and I noticed that there were some insects crawling around. When I sort of honed in I started to notice what I thought was a couple of ants moving around.”

At first she suspected an infestation on the fly’s wings. “But it was so symmetrical that I thought, ‘oh this is not possible’. When I got it under the microscope I realised that these were insects painted onto the wings.”

In contrast to its wings and brilliant green eyes, the fly’s body is a dull greenish grey – “almost cryptically coloured,” says Dr Howarth – that blends into the leaves where it is found

Here’s a photo (uncredited) of a pinned specimen from The National:

But why the ant markings? Howarth, interviewed by Zacharias, explains:

When threatened, the fly flashes its wings to give the appearance of ants walking back and forth. The predator gets confused and the fly zips off.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Why doesn’t the fly just “zip off” by flying away when it sees a predator? Confusing a predator by waving your wings just wastes time. Now some tephritids have spider-like markings on them, and that makes more sense. Apparently the predator is a jumping spider, and when it sneaks up on a fly, it sees the spider markings, mistakes them for another spider of its species, and displays to it. That display gives away the spider’s presence, allowing the fly to get away. But I can’t see this happening with ants."

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com...mic-wings/

April 23, 2015
Remember when George Bush's ranch got buzzed by a UFO?
By Christopher Carson

"If what follows sounds like a scene from the sci-fi disaster flick Independence Day, imagine what President George W. Bush must have thought on the night of January 8, 2008 as he contemplated his ranch home in Crawford, Texas.

At around 8:00 pm, an enormous, hovering craft with ridiculously bright lights, at least 1,000 feet long (though some witnesses said a mile long), was tracked on multiple radars heading straight for the president's ranch at low speed. The craft lacked a required transponder, was totally unidentified, did not respond to any attempts at communication, and was flying through restricted airspace.

The craft had been observed during the previous hour and a half by a multitude of witnesses, including a constable, a former air traffic controller, the chief of police, and a private pilot. It was apparently doing the impossible. The object was alternately hovering, slowly cruising at low altitude, and suddenly accelerating to over 2,000 miles per hour. No known aircraft of any nation is remotely this size or can perform maneuvers like this.

The private pilot, Steve Allen, told the local paper that "[w]e all flipped out. I didn't sleep a wink last night." Allen had been at the home of Mike Odom in Selden about 6:15 p.m. when they suddenly noticed flashing lights about "3,500 feet above ground level." Mr. Allen estimated the speed of the craft at "about 3,000 miles per hour," heading toward Stephenville.

President Bush must surely have expressed some frustration at the response of the United States Air Force. Later FOIA requests for radar data and flight logs from Carswell Air Station revealed that a squadron of F-16 Fighting Falcons was in the air nearby for 71 minutes during the incident. So was an AWACS surveillance jet, which did loitering figure-8s over the area for four whole hours. Were they tracking the object? Sure. Radar data clearly shows the object being "skin painted" by multiple sources. But at no time did the ten F-16s actually intercept the craft or attempt to force it to land.

Basically, the unidentified craft was buzzing the Western White House, for reasons wholly unknown. The president must have expressed some chagrin over the laxity of his protection, and that of the public, only seven years after 9/11.

At first, the Air Force denied that any jets at all were up in the air at the time in question. Nearly two weeks later, facing a public outcry, spokesman Maj. Karl Lewis had to reverse himself, admitting that there were indeed ten F-16s in the vicinity.

"In the interest of public awareness, Air Force Reserve Command Public Affairs realized an error was made regarding the reported training activity of military aircraft," his news release said. And the craft sighting? Oh, it was only the lights from the F-16s themselves, said the Air Force.

But where, seven years later, are the pilots who were monitoring, but pointedly not intercepting, the UFO? We haven't heard from any of them. The national media, after only Larry King raised the matter on his nightly CNN show, never expressed so much as a whine of interest in whether the president's house was going to be, or could have been, bombed to smithereens in January of 2008. If you've not heard of this incident, or the Chicago O'Hare sighting above United Gate C-17 of November 2006, or the gonzo flight of Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 above Alaska in 1986, it is because no one in the U.S. media sees fit to cover these cases, or interview the pilots, radar controllers, base commanders, or anyone else about them. There is a conspiracy, all right – one of silence. Time to end it.

Christopher S. Carson, formerly with the American Enterprise Institute, holds a master's in national security studies from Georgetown University.

If what follows sounds like a scene from the sci-fi disaster flick Independence Day, imagine what President George W. Bush must have thought on the night of January 8, 2008 as he contemplated his ranch home in Crawford, Texas.

At around 8:00 pm, an enormous, hovering craft with ridiculously bright lights, at least 1,000 feet long (though some witnesses said a mile long), was tracked on multiple radars heading straight for the president's ranch at low speed. The craft lacked a required transponder, was totally unidentified, did not respond to any attempts at communication, and was flying through restricted airspace.

The craft had been observed during the previous hour and a half by a multitude of witnesses, including a constable, a former air traffic controller, the chief of police, and a private pilot. It was apparently doing the impossible. The object was alternately hovering, slowly cruising at low altitude, and suddenly accelerating to over 2,000 miles per hour. No known aircraft of any nation is remotely this size or can perform maneuvers like this.

The private pilot, Steve Allen, told the local paper that "[w]e all flipped out. I didn't sleep a wink last night." Allen had been at the home of Mike Odom in Selden about 6:15 p.m. when they suddenly noticed flashing lights about "3,500 feet above ground level." Mr. Allen estimated the speed of the craft at "about 3,000 miles per hour," heading toward Stephenville.

President Bush must surely have expressed some frustration at the response of the United States Air Force. Later FOIA requests for radar data and flight logs from Carswell Air Station revealed that a squadron of F-16 Fighting Falcons was in the air nearby for 71 minutes during the incident. So was an AWACS surveillance jet, which did loitering figure-8s over the area for four whole hours. Were they tracking the object? Sure. Radar data clearly shows the object being "skin painted" by multiple sources. But at no time did the ten F-16s actually intercept the craft or attempt to force it to land.

Basically, the unidentified craft was buzzing the Western White House, for reasons wholly unknown. The president must have expressed some chagrin over the laxity of his protection, and that of the public, only seven years after 9/11.

At first, the Air Force denied that any jets at all were up in the air at the time in question. Nearly two weeks later, facing a public outcry, spokesman Maj. Karl Lewis had to reverse himself, admitting that there were indeed ten F-16s in the vicinity.

"In the interest of public awareness, Air Force Reserve Command Public Affairs realized an error was made regarding the reported training activity of military aircraft," his news release said. And the craft sighting? Oh, it was only the lights from the F-16s themselves, said the Air Force.

But where, seven years later, are the pilots who were monitoring, but pointedly not intercepting, the UFO? We haven't heard from any of them. The national media, after only Larry King raised the matter on his nightly CNN show, never expressed so much as a whine of interest in whether the president's house was going to be, or could have been, bombed to smithereens in January of 2008. If you've not heard of this incident, or the Chicago O'Hare sighting above United Gate C-17 of November 2006, or the gonzo flight of Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 above Alaska in 1986, it is because no one in the U.S. media sees fit to cover these cases, or interview the pilots, radar controllers, base commanders, or anyone else about them. There is a conspiracy, all right – one of silence. Time to end it."

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015...z3Y9ttLiGm
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The Extraordinary Banality of the Ordinary as Art
By ERIC FELTEN
Aug. 9, 2012 5:55 p.m. ET

Next week at the Chicago Cultural Center an artist named Jim Zimpel will present a work called "Angle." He will take the stage with fishing rod, bait bucket and some fish in a barrel. He will fish. And as part of the "installation" he will let five people each Sunday take turns holding the rod. If any manage to catch a fish, they get to choose whether to release or eat it. Thus is angling transformed from an art into Art.

Feel free to roll your eyes.

Mr. Zimpel's fishy conceit is part of a retrospective of "Industry of the Ordinary," a collaborative led by artists Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson, "whose work," according to the Chicago Cultural Center, "is a celebration of the everyday."

Of course, art has long captured or expressed the everyday. Camille Pissarro was fond of farmhands harvesting; Pieter Bruegel painted children playing games in the street. Nothing could have been a more commonplace subject than hunting back when caves were canvases. But that's not the sort of art being celebrated in Chicago—not the ordinary as subject, but the ordinary presented as art itself.

Messrs. Brooks and Wilson have mounted dozens of conceptual works over the years, presenting the everyday with a postmodern wink-and-a-nudge. They have often handed out T-shirts with quotes or slogans. Take the project in which "Industry of the Ordinary host a Fancy Dress Ball to which attendeés are invited to come as a particular political personality." And then—oh, I'm sorry, that was all there was to it.

One day the artists of the ordinary took a table-football game out onto Michigan Avenue and played a match "first to 1000 goals."

And consider the project in which the artists walked an "ice sculpture of the Ten Commandments from the Museum of Contemporary Art to the Art Institute of Chicago." As the tablets melted, the artists bottled the run-off and offered it to passers-by.

If the goal of such silliness is to be ordinary, it succeeds—the melting ice schtick is so commonplace it's become shopworn. A pair of politically minded artists recently announced they will carve the phrase "Middle Class" in large blocks of ice and leave the blocks to melt in parks outside the Republican and Democratic conventions. A few years ago a Brazilian artist froze a thousand little figurines and sat them on some Berlin city steps in the summer. They melted. (Thus were we taught a lesson about the perils of global warming.)

Once upon a time the stunt of presenting the ordinary with all the self-seriousness of high art was strange and startling. But by now these would-be novelties are far past being novel: It's been nearly a century since Marcel Duchamp presented a urinal as a work of art. It was the font of much (far too much) to come. What was once provocative is perfectly pedestrian, such as the 2004 work "Phosphorus," in which "Industry of the Ordinary drink a crate of beer and document the change in color of their urine."

The art of the ordinary may well be art (as it would seem anything that claims to be "art" is by definition "art"), but that doesn't mean it does anything for us. Is it too much to ask for art that is extraordinary?

We have an unfortunate tendency to turn art into sport—television is lousy with singing competitions, dance competitions, design competitions. It doesn't exactly make for great art. But that doesn't mean art can't learn something valuable from sports. Why have so many of us watched the Olympics over the past couple of weeks? It isn't for the maudlin tales of loss and hardship (stories all too ordinary, alas); it isn't just to indulge in a little nationalistic medal counting; it isn't because we've been dying to find out who will triumph in the women's handball final. No, we watch to marvel at those who do things that most of us can't do. We long to be astonished.

Most of us would hesitate to hazard any sort of jump off the 10-meter diving platform, let alone hurl ourselves toward the water twisting and twirling in unison with another fearless wonder. The gymnastics competitions give us the spectacle of young women doing backflips on a piece of wood 4 inches wide. And then there are the men, as heavily muscled as they are diminutive, doing the "iron cross"—holding themselves aloft from the rings with their arms straight out from their bodies. It's a simple feat of strength, but we are amazed at it. Arts should strive for feats that amaze—feats of beauty or truth or revelation. A Bernini bust astounds us, not just because the likeness is so real we expect it to speak, but because we recognize it as a surpassing triumph of man over marble.

Touting the forthcoming "Industry of the Ordinary" retrospective, Chicago culture commissioner Michelle T. Boone praised the exhibit for "blurring the boundaries between artist and the viewer." But there's something to be said for certain basic boundaries in art, notably the ones that separate those with remarkable talents from those whose gifts are—how shall we put it?—mundane.

What we want from art is the extraordinary. Whether it's in execution or concept, I'm eager for art that rivets us because it couldn't have been done by just anyone. Don't show me the ordinary. Show me what man at his most accomplished, most imaginative, most skilled, most perceptive can achieve. That's the art that makes us thrill to be human."====http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000087239...4213909048

http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blo...-timer.htm

EXCERPT: [...] The change that increased revenue by 9% was the addition of a small countdown timer showing how much time was left for next-day delivery.

[...] A timer creates a sense of urgency in visitors. Urgency relates to some well-established principles of persuasion psychology: scarcity and fear of missing out (FoMO). [...] When an item is thought to be in short supply, it is more desirable than the same item in abundance.

FoMO can refer to either missing out on social interactions or, more broadly, any desirable opportunity. It’s behind behaviors like compulsively checking Facebook, and is exploited by marketers in many ways.

[...] Timers can be particularly powerful triggers for urgency. First, they are specific.

[...] Second, unlike most of the content on the website, the timer isn’t static. Our brains are constantly scanning the environment for danger and opportunity, and quickly dismiss whatever hasn’t changed lately as unimportant. Something that is moving, or that is different from we last saw it, is far more likely to get our attention.

[...] If there’s good science behind the countdown timer concept, and virtually all conversion optimization experts think they will improve conversion, why do so few sites have them? ....

http://www.livescience.com/50563-hpv-vac...lence.html

EXCERPT: Women who receive the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine may be more likely to be infected with certain high-risk strains of the virus than women who do not get the vaccine, according to a new study.

The findings suggest that, although the vaccine is effective in protecting against four strains of HPV, women who received it may still benefit from getting another, recently approved HPV vaccine that protects against nine strains of the virus, the researchers said.....