How has the burden of different diseases, injuries, and risk factors moved up or down over time?

How has the burden of different diseases, injuries, and risk factors moved up or down over time? Explore ranks and changes for causes or risk factors based on deaths for 1990 and 2010. Also, see specific rank change of causes or risk factors from 1990 to 2010. You can explore these ranks by age group, sex, and region. http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/gbd/visualizations/gbd-2010-change-leading-causes-and-risks-between-1990-and-2010#.US9dyy7n4YM.email

Oddly, the moon rotates on it's axis.

Does the Moon rotate on its axis? Full moon. Image credit: NASA The Moon is familiar; it always looks the same. We know that the Earth rotates, that’s why the Sun, Moon and stars seem to move through the sky every day. But does the Moon rotate? And if the Moon rotates, why do we alway see the same side – it never seems to change. Well, the Moon does rotate. In fact, the Moon takes 27.3 days to turn once on its axis. But the Moon also takes 27.3 days to complete one orbit around the Earth. Because the Moon’s rotation time is exactly the same amount of time it takes to complete an orbit, it always presents the same face to the Earth, and one face away. Because it only presents one face to the Earth, astronomers say that the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth. Although the Moon looks like a perfectly smooth ball, it has slight differences in the shape of its gravity field. A long time ago, the Moon did rotate. But each time it turned, the Earth’s gravity tugged at it, slowing down its rotation until it only presented one face to the Earth. At that point, the Moon was tidally locked, and from our perspective, it doesn’t seem to rotate. Many other moons in the Solar System are also tidally locked to their planet. In fact, most of Jupiter’s large moons are tidally locked. So, to answer the question: does the Moon rotate? The Moon rotates once every 27.3 days; the same amount of time that it takes to go around the Earth, and so it always presents the same face to the Earth. Here’s an article about the far side of the Moon; the one we never see from Earth. Here’s an article about the rotation of the Sun. Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/19699/does-the-moon-rotate/#ixzz2MCbv5MSU

Eukaryotes: Where would we be without them?

The origin of the eukaryotic cell is considered a milestone in the evolution of life, since they include all complex cells and almost all multicellular organisms. The timing of this series of events is hard to determine; Knoll (2006) suggests they developed approximately 1.6–2.1 billion years ago. Some acritarchs are known from at least 1650 million years ago, and the possible alga Grypania has been found as far back as 2100 million years ago.[8] Organized living structures have been found in black shales of the Palaeoproterozoic Francevillian B Formation in Gabon, dated at 2.1 billion years old. Eukaryotic life could have evolved at that time.[9] Fossils that are clearly related to modern groups start appearing an estimated 1.2 billion years ago, in the form of a red alga, though recent work suggests the existence of fossilized filamentous algae in the Vindhya basin dating back perhaps to 1.6 to 1.7 billion years ago.[10] Biomarkers suggest that at least stem eukaryotes arose even earlier. The presence of steranes in Australian shales indicates that eukaryotes were present in these rocks dated at 2.7 billion years old.[11][12]

What I Learned Today

Music: Milk Carton Kids (2 guys, guitars, sweet harmonies, hot lead melodies), Daniel Johnston ( bi polar, odd but strangely has a wide following, documentary: the devil and Daniel Johnston, terrible singer, 2 steps down from Moldy Peaches). How to spot a liar. Interesting TED talk by Pamela Meyer.For the past two years, photographer Lisa Kristine has traveled the world, documenting the unbearably harsh realities of modern-day slavery. She shares hauntingly beautiful images -- miners in the Congo, brick layers in Nepal -- illuminating the plight of the 27 million souls enslaved worldwide. (Filmed at TEDxMaui)

Lot's of water....but a bit out of reach

Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Existence--In Space BY CHARLES FISHMAN | 07-27-2011 | 12:27 PM Around a black hole 12 billion light years away, there's an almost unimaginable vapor cloud of water--enough to supply an entire planet's worth of water for every person on earth, 20,000 times over. Scientists have found the biggest and oldest reservoir of water ever--so large and so old, it’s almost impossible to describe. The water is out in space, a place we used to think of as desolate and desert dry, but it's turning out to be pretty lush. Researchers found a lake of water so large that it could provide each person on Earth an entire planet’s worth of water--20,000 times over. Yes, so much water out there in space that it could supply each one of us all the water on Earth--Niagara Falls, the Pacific Ocean, the polar ice caps, the puddle in the bottom of the canoe you forgot to flip over--20,000 times over. The water is in a cloud around a huge black hole that is in the process of sucking in matter and spraying out energy (such an active black hole is called a quasar), and the waves of energy the black hole releases make water by literally knocking hydrogen and oxygen atoms together. The official NASA news release describes the amount of water as “140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans," which isn’t particularly helpful, except if you think about it like this. That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is. Mind you, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 400 billion stars, so if every one of those stars has 10 planets, each as wet as Earth, that’s only 4 trillion planets worth of water. The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water. Truly, that is one swampy patch of intergalactic space. Equally stunning is the age of the water factory. The two teams of astrophysicists that found the quasar were looking out in space a distance of 12 billion light years. That means they were also looking back in time 12 billion years, to when the universe itself was just 1.6 billion years old. They were watching water being formed at the very start of the known universe, which is to say, water was one of the first substances formed, created in galactic volumes from the earliest time. Given water’s creative power to shape geology, climate and biology, that’s dramatic. “It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” says Matt Bradford, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and leader of one of the teams that made the discovery. (The journal article reporting the discovery is titled, without drama, “The Water Vapor Spectrum of APM 08279+5255: X-Ray Heating and Infrared Pumping over Hundreds of Parsecs.”) It is not as if you’d have to wear foul-weather gear if you could visit this place in space, however. The distances are as mind-bogglingly large as the amount of water being created, so the water vapor is the finest mist--300 trillion times less dense than the air in a typical room. And it’s not as if this intergalactic water can be of any use to us here on Earth, of course, at least not in the immediate sense. Indeed, the discovery comes as a devastating drought across eastern Africa is endangering the lives of 10 million people in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. NASA’s water discovery should be a reminder that if we have the sophistication to discover galaxies full of water 12 billion light years away, we should be able to save people just an ocean away from drought-induced starvation. The NASA announcement is also a reminder how quickly our understanding of the universe is evolving and how much capacity for surprise nature still has for us. There’s water on Mars, there’s water jetting hundreds of miles into space from Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, there are icebergs of water hidden in the polar craters of our own Moon. And now it turns out that a single quasar has the ability to manufacture galaxies full of water. But it was only 40 years ago, in 1969, that scientists first confirmed that water existed anywhere besides Earth. Read the latest installment of this series: Americans Guzzling More Bottled Water Than Ever" Charles Fishman is the author of The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, published by Free Press / Simon & Schuster. © 2011, Charles Fishman. Read more from The Big Thirst on FastCompany.com. 

What I Learned Today: Matt Mills, Augmnted Reality

Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts demonstrate Aurasma, a new augmented reality tool that can seamlessly animate the world as seen through a smartphone. Going beyond previous augmented reality, their "auras" can do everything from making a painting talk to overlaying live news onto a printed newspaper. Ted

What I learned today: Mina Bissell

Mina J. Bissell, Ph.D., is an Iranian American biologist and a world-recognized leader in the area of the role of extracellular matrix (ECM) and microenvironment in regulation of tissue-specific function, with special emphasis on breast cancer. Mina Bissell, Ph.D., biologist She was born in Tehran, Iran and brought up in a well-educated and well-to-do family. By the time she graduated from high school, Bissell was the top graduate in her year in Iran.[1] A family friend, through the American Friends of Iran, encouraged Bissell to come to the United States.[2] She enrolled at Bryn Mawr, then transferred to Radcliffe_College where she earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry. She obtained a PhD in bacteriology from Harvard Medical School and was awarded an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.[3] She joined Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as a staff biochemist in 1972 and subsequently became a Senior Scientist, Director of Cell & Molecular Biology, Director of the Life Sciences Division, and Distinguished Scientist.[4] In 1996, she received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award and medal, the highest scientific honor bestowed by the United States Department of Energy. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, Bissell is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Mellon Award from the University of Pittsburgh, the Eli Lilly/Clowes Award of the American Association for Cancer Research, and the Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society.[5]