southbeach's Blog

Mother Stops Son's Cancer Treatments
Date: Jan 5th, 2008 4:25:26 pm - Subscribe
Mood: zen


Joshua , 10, of the U.K., had an ependymoma diagnosed six years ago and has had to undergo a catalogue of intense treatment including surgery and chemotherapy. But doctors could not remove the tumor entirely, despite their best efforts over a number of years.

Now Clare and Andrew Ginns, who have divorced, have decided that their son should no longer endure painful procedures and lengthy hospital stays.
Clare Ginns, 41, said: “I have been making this decision for a long, long time. We have always known that one day it may come to this.

“We had a meeting with doctors and both Andrew and I decided there and then that we would take the opportunity to tell them we were not doing anything else. There were a lot of tears, but it’s not a way to live a life.”
Ginns said that doctors failed at first to diagnose the tumor, a type of glioma that attacks the brain and spinal cord, but that her persistence had helped to persuade them to carry out more tests. She added: “If you have got a (sick) child and you know in your heart of hearts something is wrong just keeping knocking on doors. He was not born with it. He was a perfectly normal, average 4-year-old.”
Now his parents want him to spend his remaining precious years on holiday, at school or playing with friends, instead of inside a hospital.

hm... what you think about ?
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Giant bird-like dinosaur found
Date: Dec 25th, 2007 10:21:01 pm - Subscribe
Mood: young


Researchers in China have unearthed the bones of a gigantic bird-like dinosaur, dwarfing anything else in its category.

Alive, the beast is thought to have been 8 metres long, 3.5 metres high at the hip and 1,400 kilograms in weight — 35 times as heavy as its next largest family members and 300 times the size of smaller ones such as Caudiperyx . It has been classified as a new species and genus: Gigantoraptor erlianensis .

The evolution of bird-like features had long been thought to be accompanied by a decrease in size, meaning the smaller the species, the more bird-like it is likely to be and vice versa. The new discovery shows that isn't necessarily true.

Gigantoraptor had long arms, bird-like legs, a toothless jaw, and probably a beak. There are no clear signs as to whether it was feathered. However, judging from its close affinity to other dinosaurs known to have been feathered, Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing speculates that it was.

The largest animal known to have had feathers is the extinct Stirton's thunder bird, which weighed in at 500 kilograms.

Comparison of the animal with other known dinosaurs — looking at more than a hundred characteristics, including limb proportions — puts Gigantoraptor firmly in the Oviraptoridae family.

The bones date from the Late Cretaceous epoch, about 85 million years ago.
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Lead From Processors
Date: May 23rd, 2007 4:24:56 pm - Subscribe
Mood: awful


Intel has already removed about 95 percent of the toxic metal since 2004 and will eliminate the remainder - 0.02 grams - beginning with a new line of chips that go into production later this year. Tin/lead solder used to connect the processor to the motherboard will be replaced with an alloy comprised instead of tin, silver and copper.


Rival chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. says it also is working to reduce the amount of lead in its microprocessors. Sunnyvale-based AMD began shipping processors with reduced lead content in 2005.
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