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Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Immense numbers of sharks each year are slaughtered for their
fins—not meat, just their fins. This harvest helps feed a growing
appetite throughout Asia for a popular soup, one with snob appeal
comparable to that of caviar. Indeed, a single bowl of shark-fin soup
can cost $100 in a high-end Hong Kong restaurant. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com
The key
ingredient of shark-fin soup is cartilage, which after hours of
simmering, takes on the |
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . To combat insect resistance to the widely used pesticide Bt, an
international research team has announced a new way to restore the
pesticide's punch. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
The insect-killing Bt toxins take their name from Bacillus thuringiensis,
the bacterium that makes them. Genetic engineers have borrowed the
bacterium's toxin-making genes and inserted them into cotton, corn, and
other crops so that the plants can make |
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Small-town America has a life-enhancing lesson for people who are at
least 50 years old: Individuals, those in the heartland's middle class,
anyway, who have a positive outlook about aging live around 7� years
longer than those who take a dim view of their prospects as seniors. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/
"People
who have positive views about themselves as they age somehow cope with
society's negative attitudes toward the elderly," says |
Large stone-cutting tools dubbed hand axes regularly appear at
prehistoric archaeological sites from India westward across southern
Asia into Europe and Africa. In 1944, Harvard anthropologist Hallam L.
Movius Jr. proposed that those prehistoric populations, living 1.6
million to 200,000 years ago, existed on one side of a geographical
line that separated them from groups in central and eastern Asia, where
early humans fashioned much simpler stone implements. Now, the
discovery of ancient |
With commercial airline traffic
expected to top one billion passengers annually by 2016 (compared with
the 769 million who flew in 2007), there are more aircraft than ever
taxiing, taking off and landing on airport runways. All of this
airfield congestion requires technology that can monitor what is
happening at the dizzying pace it is occurring, and radar, a World War
II–era invention, is not up to the task. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire
Recognizing this, the |
Peter Parker is lucky he was bitten by a spider and not a
silkworm. Not only does “Spider-Man” have way more superhero panache than
“Silkworm-Man,” but of all the silks made by various creatures, spider silk is
the standout. Exceedingly strong, yet elastic and lightweight, spider silks are
ideal for a range of materials, from bulletproof vests to scaffolding for
growing cartilage.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/ http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/ Scientists are coming closer to unraveling |
Somewhere between the laptop and the smart phone, the computer
industry has long believed there could be a small, low-cost device that
would please consumers and sell well.
The device would be more versatile than, say, an iPhone, but much
cheaper and more portable than, say, a ThinkPad. The trouble is, every
attempt to create such a category of computer has met with failure --
until now.
5:39Walt
Mossberg gives an overview of netbooks, |
Louis J. Sheehan. I almost laughed out loud at the start of last night’s episode of Knight Rider.
Mike Traceur sat in KITT’s driver’s seat, reading a dossier, and
watching football as he cruised down some scenic highway—and why not,
when he’s got a car that can drive itself. Which is when it hit me:
I’ve been writing about Knight Rider for weeks without looking into
where we are on the whole self-driving car thing! I mean, a car that
drives itself has to come before a talking |
 NASA’s next robotic Mars
explorer may be meticulously designed to trundle over the Martian
landscape, but it’s having trouble getting off the planet Earth. Huge
cost overruns and technical difficulties may cause the $2 billion
dollar [sic] Mars Science Laboratory to be delayed or canceled
outright, members of a NASA advisory committee were warned on Oct. 2.
“Our problem is enormous,” said Jim Green, director of the space
agency’s Planetary Science Division, as project costs soar up to
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http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping In ecosystems across the country, the automobile
has moved to the top of the food chain, meaning that thousands of
moose, cougars, and bears are meeting their ends on asphalt. Now, the Colorado Department of Transportation is hoping that high-tech wild-life detectors might cut down on roadkill.
The testing site for the new detectors is a
particularly deadly mile of Highway 160, where 70 percent of all
reported collisions between 1999 and 2003 were |
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Pioneering ecologist Joseph Grinnell in 1914 began a seven year survey
of the animals living in Yosemite National Park in California. Even
then, human impacts such as the transformation of the Central Valley
into an agricultural oasis were changing the landscape and the animals
who lived there.
Nearly a century later, one cause for the transformation of California wildlife has come to overshadow all others: global warming.
Now scientists have found |
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Analyses of trees and other organic material buried in a riverbank
near Lake Superior’s northwestern shore shed
new light on how much and when the lake level varied soon after the end of the last
ice age.
Researchers have long known that the water level in Lake
Superior has fluctuated, but pinning down the dates of those variations has
been tough, says Matthew Boyd, a paleoecologist at Lakehead
University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Many techniques |
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Excavations in the 17th-century fort at Jamestown, Va., have yielded
the grave of a high-ranking male colonist. Physical and historical
evidence indicates that the man was one of the community's leaders,
according to William Kelso, archaeology director of the Association for
the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities' Jamestown Rediscovery project. http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com
The
most exciting possibility is that the grave, which included a |
Louis J. Sheehan. Genetic material that Italian researchers extracted from the bones of European Stone Age Homo sapiens, sometimes called Cro-Magnons, bolsters the theory that people evolved independently of Neandertals, the team proposes. Fossils of two anatomically modern H. sapiens
found in a southern Italian cave yielded mitochondrial DNA, which is
inherited from the mother, say Giorgio Bertorelle of the University of
Ferrara in Italy and his colleagues. The DNA contains chemical |
Louis J. Sheehan. A garden hose, a tin can, duct tape, metal piping, kitchen
cleaner, and gasoline: That is all television icon MacGyver needed to make a
flame-thrower to ward off a swarm of killer ants. In the real world,
technologies that are affordable and practical are not so simple to create, but
they can make a huge impact on people's lives. Instead of calling on complex solutions (reliant on engines and
imported resources) for low-tech problems (such as
cooking and |
If Homo sapiens can stick it out on Earth for
another two billion years, our descendants may witness quite a show in
the night sky. Researchers estimate that the Milky Way will collide
with its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, at around that
time—well before the sun collapses into a white dwarf, perhaps
destroying the Earth in the process.http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com This close encounter of the galactic kind could easily kick our
solar system to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, |
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Brain areas that typically play a key role in vision instead
contribute to language skills among blind people, a new study finds.
This observation underscores the brain's ability to adapt to individual
circumstances, say Leonardo G. Cohen of the National Institute of
Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md., and his colleagues. The
scientists administered a verbal task to nine adults with normal sight
and nine adults who had lost their sight by age 4. |
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Medical society official faces indecency charge
MECUM
Saturday, August 23, 2008
BY DAVID WENNER AND MATTHEW KEMENY
Of The Patriot-News
Derry Twp. police have accused a top Pennsylvania Medical Society executive of exposing himself in a public rest room at Hersheypark.
Roger F. Mecum, 65, of the 100 block of Dogwood Drive, Hershey, has been on personal leave since his July 31 arrest, the society's spokesman Chuck Moran said Friday.
Mecum is charged with indecent exposure and open lewdness, both
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A massive, earthquake-induced gash that cuts through eastern Africa
contains evidence of three rainy phases during the Stone Age. They
might have spurred the evolution of modern humanity's direct ancestors
as well as of many other mammal species, scientists suggest. Extended
intervals of heavy rains created deep lakes in several parts of eastern
Africa at times critical in human evolution, according to a team led by
geologist Martin H. Trauth of Potsdam (Germany) University. Ancient
lakes |
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