Direct-Pages.comDirect Pages is the internet project of Blogs Content Syndication

Thirty-eight percent of drug abusers who were given the vaccine produced anti-cocaine antibodies. Over the course of seven weeks, these subjects were 45 percent likely to have a cocaine-free pee test, as opposed to 35 percent for those who got placebo vaccine instead.

The vaccine works similar to vaccines for microorganisms, training your body to view cocaine as a bad invader. The shots, which include a cocainelike substance (succinylnorcocaine), encourage the body to pump out antibodies against cocaine. The antibodies bind to the coke, which prevents it from getting into the brain, and theoretically prevents people from getting high. Right now, only about 38 percent of the subjects who got the vaccine produced high levels of antibodies, so there’s room for improvement.

Study leader Dr. Thomas Kosten, a psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine, told Popsci.com that they’re planning to confirm the results in a larger study in six cities in January and that the vaccine could become widely available in two to three years.

The study was published in the October issue of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

Researchers tested the spray before and after sleeping because sleep is thought to help the brain solidify long-term memories while purging extraneous details from the day. First, they read an emotional story to 17 volunteers. Then the participants were given a nasal spray of either the molecule interleukin-6 or a placebo. The next morning, the people were asked to remember as many words from the story as they could. It turned out that people who had taken interleukin-6 had better recall of words the story they had heard than those in the control group. (The researchers, who published their findings in the October issue of The FASEB Journal, didn’t find any effect for nonemotional stories.)

What is particularly curious about this study is the identity of what was going up people’s snouts: interleukin-6. This molecule is primarily known as having an important role in the immune system, but researchers noted that its levels rise in the body (including the brain) when people sleep. Now it seems that it might be helping you remember emotional memories, as well.

And what if you don’t want to remember something terrible and emotional from the day? One thing’s for sure: don’t go sticking any interleukin-6 up your nose.

The new fossil indicates that our ancestors were less chimplike than heretofore thought

By analyzing the skeleton (which included hands, feet, limbs, pelvis, and skull), researchers estimate that she was about four feet tall and weighed about 110 pounds. She was adept at both climbing through trees (with help from opposable big toes) as well as standing on two legs.

Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago, about a few million years after the lineages of people and chips split. All in all, the research suggests that humans’ and chimpanzees’ last common ancestor was pretty different from current-day apes, which have gained a lot of adaptations for swinging through the trees since then. Read: You certainly did not descend from a chimp, and the thing you descended from wasn’t as chimpy as you might have been picturing.

Ardi was revealed at a press conference this morning. The 11 scientific papers detailing her bones and lifestyle will be published tomorrow in the journal Science.

They use live video feeds (sometimes from many angles) to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioral simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

They use motion capture data to help their animated humans move realistically, and were able to extrapolate cars’ motion throughout an entire stretch of road from just a few spotty camera angles.

From their video of an augmented virtual Earth, you can see if the pickup soccer game in the park is short a player, how traffic is on the highway, and how fast the wind is blowing the clouds across the sky.

Up next, they say they want to add weather, birds, and motion in rivers.

They will present their paper at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality next month, but you can read a draft PDF here.

The students first analyzed the networks of people who publicized their sexual orientation on Facebook. Turns out that statistically speaking, gay men have more gay friends than straight guys do. So then, they used an algorithm to run the stats on men who kept mum about their sexual orientation on the site. Their computer program was able to correctly identify 10 men whom the students personally knew to be gay in the real world but who hadn’t shared that fact on Facebook. (The algorithm didn’t work as well with women or with bisexual Facebookers.)

The students completed the project for a class on ethics and the Internet and hope to publish it in a scientific journal.

Their project is far from the first study showing that a simple computer program can sleuth out details you might prefer to keep private by looking at your social network on the Internet. Earlier this year, computer scientists correctly linked 30 percent of anonymous Twitter and Flickr accounts with a simple algorithm that compares who’s following who on each site. And other researchers have used Internet social networks to correctly identify peoples’ political affiliations or where they live.

It’s a good reminder to take a look at your privacy settings. Because you might inadvertently be sharing things you’d rather keep to yourself. Even if you’re only declaring to the world that someone’s your friend.

[via Boston Globe]

The effort is part of NASA’s desire to investigate how the human body can cope with long-term low gravity situations, for long stints on the ISS and future trips beyond our own moon. One way to model microgravity is to apply a strong magnetic field that opposes gravity, which repels the water in animals’ bodies and levitates them slightly.

Although mice might initially freak out (understandably–I bet they got some levitating mouse pee, too), they were able to adjust to a levitated lifestyle in about four hours. Scientists have previously levitated frogs and grasshoppers, but a mammal model is more useful for learning about gravity’s effects on humans.

I only wish that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab had a video or a photo from a better angle (yes, I asked). And someday when someone powers up a human-sized version, I want a ride.

[Via Live Science]

That’s a heck of a lot of cadmium telluride, the semiconductor they use for their thin film cells.

The largest solar plant currently in operation is a mere 60-megawatt plant in Spain, according to pvresources.com.

First Solar and China officially signed a memorandum of understanding, which is still up for final negotiations. The plan is to start building a 30-megawatt phase this summer, adding more and more until the final phase is complete in 2019.

Earlier this year, First Solar became the first company to produce solar cells at less than a dollar per watt, crossing the boundary thought to make solar power competitive with traditional energy sources.

[Via First Solar and NY Times: Green Inc.]

A long-hypothesized particle, stuff of tantalizing detection attempts and thrilling sci-fi novels, may have finally been sighted.

A magnet has a north and a south pole. If you cut that magnet in two, you get two magnets, each with its own north and south poles. No matter how far you subdivide a magnetic material, this is what happens. Both north end and south end. Theory and indirect measurements support the existence of matter with just one pole: a monopole. Scientists have searched in all kinds of materials — in particle colliders, in moon dust, in cosmic radiation — to no avail.

But now, a pair of papers in Science and another pair available on arXiv.org demonstrate convincing evidence of a substance that has monopoles: spin ice crystals (such as Dy2Ti2O7, in case you want to get your hands on some). The crystals seem to have tiny north points and separate tiny south points — less than a nanometer apart, but still separate.

[Via Nature News]

It’s on!

At a conference last week, Tevatron physicists threw down the gauntlet, vowing that by 2011, the Tevatron accelerator (located at Fermi National Accelerator Lab outside Chicago) will be able to definitively prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson.

Tevatron is currently the highest-energy particle collider, until the LHC starts up again this November (fingers crossed). The poor, ailing LHC will still maintain its dominance in the search for dark matter, which isn’t Tevatron’s specialty.

Which one will end the universe is still up for grabs.

[Via New Scientist]

The Death Risk Rankings site was compiled by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and seems to have about a zillion ways to organize the data. It’s quite cumbersome to use, so I’m going to save you the effort.

I generated tables for cause of death by age group and by sex. Here’s some of the highlights and a cheat sheet on how to find your own data.

For American females, ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is still accidents (32.3 percent), followed by cancer and homicide. Are women dying more from cancer than men? No. Looking at the the raw numbers, deaths from cancer are about the same between the ladies and the gents, but the women aren’t getting murdered or having deadly accidents to nearly the same extent.

The trends on my charts seem to make sense. Young people dying of accidents and murder; older people dying of cancer and heart attacks. But some of it is creepy, like knowing that if I were to die this year, there’s a 5.1percent chance it would be from an infection or parasite. Yeech.

PS: If you just want to know the date you’re most likely to die, just Google “when will I die.” A bunch of rough death calculators will run the stats on your age, sex, and a couple of health factors and spit out the engraving for your tombstone.

How I found this data, a cheat sheet.
1) Set Step 1 to “Causes of Death”
2) Set Step 2 to “Age Categories”
3) Set Step 3 to your sex and nationality. (You can also refine by your state and race, if you wish.)
4) Step 4: Submit
5) Under “Causes of Death across Age Categories”, go to “Pick a Metric to Display” in the lower right-hand column and click the radio-button for “% of Deaths” or “# of Deaths.”

Anyone else find some interesting trends or disparities?