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The Groningen professors Bauke Dijkstra and Lubbert Dijkhuizen have deciphered the structure and functional mechanism of the glucansucrase enzyme that is responsible for dental plaque sticking to teeth. This knowledge will stimulate the identification of substances that inhibit the enzyme. Just add that substance to toothpaste, or even sweets, and caries will be a thing of the past.

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We have the technology … almost.

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British news is always much more interesting than American news.

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Get in touch with your inner Corleone.

‘Realtor Connie Profaci’? A good touch….

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We have the technology.

My question is: How did they find out he had this setup? Eh?

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Here’s the part I like:

A fisherman holds the shark which was identified by an Egyptian diver as the shark which attacked four tourists in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

How? Fingerprints?

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Yes, it’s a steam powered record player. Playing a punk LP. The Sex Pistols – God save the Queen (Victoria obviously).

You know you want one.

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EVERYTHING YOU’D WANT TO KNOW ABOUT VIKINGS is IN THAT BOOK.

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Yet the animal that may well be New Zealand’s most bizarrely instructive species at first glance looks surprisingly humdrum: the tuatara. A reptile about 16 inches long with bumpy, khaki-colored skin and a lizardly profile, the tuatara could easily be mistaken for an iguana. Appearances in this case are wildly deceptive. The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means “peaks on the back” — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.

In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Certain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.

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A fascinating list, and some pretty recent stuff; which makes me wonder what else is out there waiting to turn up.

Peter Suderman ponders the implications.

As I noted yesterday, the authors of the recent health care overhaul legislation failed to include a severability clause in the text of the law. A severability clause is inserted into legislation in order to protect the bulk of the law should one provision be deemed unconstitutional. But as because the PPACA has no severability clause, a court—at least in theory—could take down the entire law if it decided that the mandate was unconstitutional.

Oops.

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TechCrunch is one of the better technical blogs, and they’ve assembled their “Greatest Hits” in a separate space. This link is to the pointer post. Highly recommended.

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Latin will undergo a revival in state schools under Coalition plans to put it on an equal footing with modern foreign languages.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Power Line does a recap.

Actually, we probably spend less time talking about Sarah Palin than almost any political web site–a fact of which I am rather proud. But, for those who need a daily Sarah fix, here it is.

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The need for embryonic stem cells recedes in importance faster and faster.

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Wouldn’t mind having one of these.

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William Fox of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and John Vesecky, his colleague at UC Santa Cruz, are working on a modified radar gun that can identify suicide bombs worn under the clothing. To do this, they cataloged the most common arrangements of looped wires used to construct “suicide vests,” and developed software that can identify the radar cross-section of each. So far, results have been pretty good: according to New Scientist, “telltale factors in the polarisation of the reflected signals” allowed them to correctly identify volunteers dressed as bombers up to ten meters away, roughly eighty-five percent of the time.

Not sure how much good that will do, since the typical blast radius of a suicide bomber’s vest is rather more than ten meters, but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.

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Genetic testing of villagers in a remote part of China has shown that nearly two thirds of their DNA is of Caucasian origin, lending support to the theory that they may be descended from a ‘lost legion’ of Roman soldiers.

Jeremy Wagstaff is always worth reading.

Counting the number of followers a candidate has on Facebook, for example, is apparently a pretty good indicator of whether they’ll do well at the ballot box. The Daily Beast set up something called the Oracle which scanned 40,000 websites—including Twitter—to measure whether comments on candidates in the recent U.S. elections were positive, negative, neutral or mixed. It predicted 36 out of 37 Senate races and 29 out of 30 Governors’ races and nearly 98% of the House races. That’s pretty good.

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Works for me. It would solve a lot of problems.

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Lord Justice Leveson called for new research to be carried out to ensure fingerprinting is “robust” and reliable.

“There is growing unease among fingerprint examiners and researchers that the century old fingerprint identification process rests on assumptions that have never been tested empirically,” he said.

Speaking about the use of expert evidence in court cases, the senior judge said it was vital to have a “methodology and a hypothesis that are capable of withstanding robust testing”.

“Arguably, as it currently stands, the science of fingerprint identification does not,” he added.

He’s right. The premise that fingerprints are unique is merely an assumption, indulged in for the sake of convenience.

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Experts dissecting the computer worm suspected of being aimed at Iran’s nuclear program have determined that it was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.

Their conclusion, while not definitive, begins to clear some of the fog around the Stuxnet worm, a malicious program detected earlier this year on computers, primarily in Iran but also India, Indonesia and other countries.

The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. American officials have suggested it originated abroad.

We have the technology.

Wonder what it’s like to be an Israeli, and have a government that knows its ass from a hole in the ground?

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John Stossel goes behind the scenes.

It’s not what we don’t know that causes us trouble. It’s what we know that isn’t so.

It’s logical to think that grass-fed steers might be better for the environment, but so often what sounds logical is just wrong.

Don’t believe me? Dr. Jude Capper, an assistant professor of dairy sciences at Washington State University, has studied the data.

Capper said: “There’s a perception out there that grass-fed animals are frolicking in the sunshine, kicking their heels up full of joy and pleasure. What we actually found was from the land-use basis, from the energy, from water and, particularly, based on the carbon footprints, grass-fed is far worse than corn-fed.”

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Scientists at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Modular Solid State Technologies EMFT in Munich have developed dressing materials and plasters which indicate pathological changes in the skin. If an infection is present, the color of the dressing changes from yellow to purple.

Now that’s clever.

Read it. The inventor of Mathematica is optimistic.

The most important is that programs a user might specify with short pieces of natural language must typically be short—and readable—in the computer language. Because otherwise the user won’t be able to tell—at least not easily—whether the program that’s been produced actually does what they want.

A second, somewhat related, criterion is that it must be possible for arbitrary program fragments to stand alone—so that large programs can realistically be built up incrementally, much like a description in natural language is built up incrementally with sentences and the like.

Well, to get the first of these characteristics requires a very high-level language, in which there are already many constructs already built in to the language—and well enough designed that they all fit together without messy “glue” code.

And to get the second characteristic essentially requires a symbolic language, in which any piece of any program is always a meaningful symbolic expression.

Well, conveniently enough, there is one language that satisfies rather well both these requirements: Mathematica!

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Don’t say you never learn anything useful here.

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Utopia approaches.

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The new discovery by Dr Leo James and colleagues transforms the previous scientific understanding of our immunity to viral diseases like the common cold, ‘winter vomiting’ and gastroenteritis.

It shows that antibodies can enter cells and that once inside, they then trigger a response, led by a protein called TRIM21.

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And about time, too.

Google, of course.

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A detailed genetic study of one of the first farming communities in Europe, from central Germany, reveals marked similarities with populations living in the Ancient Near East (modern-day Turkey, Iraq and other countries) rather than those from Europe.

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The utensil was actually described way back in 1988 by archaeologist David Sherlock in his seminal work A combination Roman eating implement, published in the Antiquaries Journal, [xlix, 310-311] and which harks back to Sherlock’s earlier opus Roman folding spoons [Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 62, 1976, p.128-129].

The gadget was manufactured between AD201 and AD300.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Communications, like publishing, is in the middle of changing from a caterpillar to a butterfly, without benefit of cocoon. And we’re all caught in the process, which can be pretty disconcerting. Hopefully things will settle down soon.

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You, too, can do Footfall.

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Hah!

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A really beautiful model.

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Slow news day.

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A great idea, if you’ve got a bulletproof ABM system. Otherwise, it’s just the Mother of All Juicy Targets that you have conveniently placed with in easy spitting range of the Chinese mainland.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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These new figures come from my new favorite toy, Maersk’s online shipping rates calculator. The Danish superfirm A.P. Møller – Mærsk Gruppen is the largest shipping group in the world, with offices in 135 countries, 120,000 employees, and roughly 600 container ships, capable of carrying more than 2 million 20? containers at any given time. They’ve also got a thoroughly badass IT system, which they’ve now made accessible to the general public.

Okay, it’s not exactly Amazon.com, or even Fedex. To use Maersk’s calculator, you need to register with the site, download a client browser certificate and accept three server certificates from Maersk before you can access their secure site. But once you do, it’s just a few short clicks before you can calculate the cost of shipping a 20? container of “umbrellas, sun umbrellas, walking-sticks, seat-sticks, whips, riding-crops and parts thereof” (yes, that’s one of the available categories, along with “bone and meal”, “ores, slag and ash” and “straw, esparto, other plaiting materials and articles of straw, esparto, other plaiting materials) from Auckland to Dubai: $2451.02.

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Toppan Printing has demonstrated a credit card with a colour screen and keypad, claiming that you don’t need a mobile phone to manage mobile commerce.

The card, which at 3.9mm thick squeezes into the definition of such, has a 2.2-inch colour screen with a 320×240 resolution, but most importantly Toppan Printing reckons it will cost under $25 when production ramps up next year. As highlighted by NFC World: a card like this makes proximity payments viable without relying on a mobile telephone.

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An uphill road.

The issue, in the eyes of the campaign: The justices joined a 7-0 opinion ruling that a state law limiting marriage to between a man and a woman violated the constitutional rights of equal protection.

So why not all seven? Apparently its a ‘sustain’ election, not an impeachment.

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Death will not release you….

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Law firms looking to bolster their profits might want to consider electing a managing partner with powerful looks.

That is the conclusion to be drawn from a somewhat bizarre study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, in which the photos of 73 managing partners from leading US firms were judged on the basis of “dominance, maturity, attractiveness, likability, and trustworthiness.”

Dominance and maturity in particular were strong predictors of law firm profitability, according to this press release about the study, which was conducted by a professor at the University of Toronto and one from Tufts University.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know. Besides, lawyers have money, and funding is where you find it.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.