News Stories

[Clarste]

Originally Posted by Vinak

i was thinking more in line of helping amputee's walk again. the technology can be refined and placed in smaller equipment that fit inside prosthetic legs.
I know a guy with an amputated leg, its not fun watching him struggle to get up and walk into the next room or do any other task that require two legs. man is too damn proud to ask for help.

Yeah, but it's fundamentally a robot leg with sensors and stuff. The person wouldn't be able to control it naturally. That's why I compared it to a wheelchair (the ones with motors). At best you'd have a little remote control for your legs. Cybernetic prosthetics would be great, but I don't see this robot as being a step in that direction.

Er... basically it's got its own brain, so I don't see how the technology would be too useful as a replacement for limbs, which would preferably be controlled by the user rather than themselves.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Clarste

Yeah, but it's fundamentally a robot leg with sensors and stuff. The person wouldn't be able to control it naturally. That's why I compared it to a wheelchair (the ones with motors). At best you'd have a little remote control for your legs. Cybernetic prosthetics would be great, but I don't see this robot as being a step in that direction.

Er... basically it's got its own brain, so I don't see how the technology would be too useful as a replacement for limbs, which would preferably be controlled by the user rather than themselves.

I bet my waifu that it can't dance the foxtrot nor quickstep.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Red-faced Asian drinkers face higher cancer risk

Chicago (March 23): Asians who get red in the face when they drink too much alcohol have a higher risk of getting cancer of the oesophagus, American and Japanese researchers said on Monday (March 23).

They said about a third of East Asians — Chinese, Japanese and Koreans — have an enzyme deficiency that causes their skin to flush when they drink alcohol, and this trait puts them at higher risk of developing oesophageal cancer, an especially deadly type with five-year survival rates of 12 to 31 per cent.

"People are fairly well aware of this physical characteristic, which is sometimes called the Asian alcohol response or the Asian flush," said Dr Philip Brooks of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, whose study appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

"I don't think people are aware that it is a warning sign for being at risk of oesophageal cancer when they drink alcohol. That is what we wanted to point out," said Dr Brooks, who worked on the study with Dr Akira Yokoyama from the Kurihama Alcohol Centre in Japan.

He estimates that at least 540 million people have this alcohol-related increased risk for oesophageal cancer, adding that doctors should ask patients of East Asian descent of they have a history of facial flushing when they drink.

And he said university health professionals need to be aware of the link between facial flushing and cancer risk since many young people experiment with heavy drinking in college.

- REUTERS

[Irenicus]

So Guan Yu was under risk of cancer when he drank?

[Shadow Kira01]

Japan FM expresses doubts over missile defense

Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone said "it would be difficult" to shoot down fragments from a failed launch of the North Korean missile.

"Our country has never done this before. And we don't know how or where it may come flying," Nakasone told reporters Tuesday.

He was echoing an unidentified top official, who said Monday that "there is no way you can hit a bullet if you exchange pistol fire in a distant duel, according to Kyodo and other Japanese media.

[Nosauz]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Red-faced Asian drinkers face higher cancer risk

guess no more booze cruises for me, and considering its in Plos with an impact factor thats double digits means its pretty legit

seriously though... i blame my fathers crappy genes, because my grandfather used to work in a distellery and all he did was make alcholo and drink it, hes 80+ and he drank so much that it started causing stomach ulcers... but i digress... genetics is such a fickle bitch... lol to the RNG

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Red-faced Asian drinkers face higher cancer risk

Thanks for the heads up.... both my sons inherited that "red face" effect from drinking from their mother (which means they never could lie about whether they'd had a drink or not --nor could she lie to her dad either ). But #2 son is off at college and I forwarded the study itself to him.

We're definitely not abstainers from sake, beer, mixed drinks.... but I'd just like them to be in a "no more than a few drinks a week" frame of mind.

[WhiteWings]

Anything is bad in excess. Always set limits on the amount of drinks, depending on the drink, and never go over it. Cross your line and you always regret it one way or another later.

Really. If I was working in Asia it'd be harder though with immense peer pressure from co-workers.

[Shadow Kira01]

Pentagon questions growing Chinese military power

When the world is pumping funds to save the ailing economy, China is pumping funds to expand their military might. It definitely gives off a troublesome feeling..

[yezhanquan]

Well, China is playing catchup to the US. If we look at per capita expenditure, China ranks way below the US and many European countries. China has its plate full in terms of domestic affairs. It doesn't need, or want, a foreign adventure.

[SeedFreedom]

Actually, i don't think the article is saying that drinking is leading to cancer, only if you do get red, check for cancer earlier. The two seem to be correlated, but not cause and effect. Unless i'm reading it wrong then totally disregard this.


Edit: It seems i am wrong. I only scanned the blurb pasted so i mis-read it.

[Terrestrial Dream]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Red-faced Asian drinkers face higher cancer risk

Yeah I have that exact problem, once I drank a shot of an alchol my face got all red and I had a headache soon after. Anyhow nice to know about this, still even though both of my parents have this gene none of my family members have history cancer and my grandparents are still in alive and well.

And yeah I am going to have a social problem if I can't drink .

[TinyRedLeaf]

Play Crysis — without a PC

San Francisco (March 25): Music and movies can be streamed over the Internet, so why not video games?

A startup founded by technology entrepreneur Steve Perlman says it has developed a technology to deliver video games on demand, an idea that threatens to eventually take consoles out of the equation.

OnLive Inc, Perlman's Palo Alto, California-based company, unveiled its technology on Tuesday night (March 24) at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Seven years in the works, OnLive says it has developed a way to stream video games without any lag that humans can notice. So the instant you press a button to shoot something on the screen, the gun goes off.

This has not been possible before, because unlike with music and movies, which can be compressed before being streamed, video games are interactive and require instant responses. That has meant video games needed to be played on consoles packed with computing power, like the Xbox or the PlayStation, or downloaded to personal computers that could process some of the data that enabled games to run.

OnLive's technology gets around that limitation with a new form of compression that lets its game servers communicate with players over broadband connections in real time. This also means OnLive's service can work on older computers, even those without a graphics processing unit that has until now been an essential component of gaming. Through a "MicroConsole" about the size of an iPod, OnLive's service will also be available for television sets.

In a recent demonstration, OnLive showed off Crysis, a complex shooter game that's currently only available for PCs, played on a TV set through the little "console" and on a Mac laptop. "It's the last console you'll need," said Mr Perlman, a former principal scientist at Apple who in 1995 co-founded WebTV, bringing Internet access to TV sets. He later sold WebTV to Microsoft Corp for more than US$500 million.

Mr Patrick Seybold, a spokesman for Sony Corp — maker of the PlayStation consoles and publisher of titles like Killzone 2 and LittleBigPlanet — said the company has a "competitive offering for consumers" with games distributed via both the Internet and disks.

- ASSOCIATED PRESS

AnimeSuki thread on this new technology was created yesterday.

[Nosauz]

Originally Posted by SeedFreedom

Actually, i don't think the article is saying that drinking is leading to cancer, only if you do get red, check for cancer earlier. The two seem to be correlated, but not cause and effect. Unless i'm reading it wrong then totally disregard this.

If you actually read the journal article they say its causation. Basically when your body breaksdown the alchohol it turns the ethanol into a carcinogenic substrate and with the phenotype of asian flushing, that carinogenic substrate never gets broken down, which over high frequent accumulation causes cancer. Basically its like haves oxide in esophogeal tract causing the cells in your esophagus to mutate into cancerous cells.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Vengeful dragon rising against 'white terror'

As Western economies flounder, China sees a chance to assert itself — carefully

THE room is stuffy on a sunny spring afternoon, and many of those packed into it must have regretted bringing their coats. The lucky ones have taken the few seats available. The rest are crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in this hotel-room office, listening intently to an hour-and-a-half rant on the threat of American imperialism and how the global economic crisis will result in growing confrontation between China and the West.

Sitting in front of a large portrait of a young Mao Zedong, Mr Zhang Hongliang knows how to play to his nationalist, liberal-despising audience. His rambling discourse ranges from adulation of Mao to scorn of the United States (it has neither history nor culture), to warning of a "white terror" if rightists (liberals) prevail. The economic crisis is entirely the West's fault, and as it deepens the West will turn on China. Now is the time to build an aircraft carrier. A war with the US would be "lose-lose", but China should not be afraid of it.

China’s "leftists" are becoming more active as the global economy sputters. Mr Zhang belongs to an extreme fringe that pines for Maoist egalitarianism, state ownership and the certainty that the US is an enemy. His seminar was organised by Maoflag, one of a clutch of like-minded websites in China whose nationalist, pro-communist rhetoric is suffused with a sense of their country as victim, yearning for revenge. Frequenters of these forums took heart from a flurry of spontaneous celebrations around the country last December to mark Mao's 115th birthday. The government preferred to play it down.

Few would suggest that radical Maoists are poised to make a comeback. But their nationalism has a broad appeal. As China surveys the world, with the West in financial turmoil and its leaders seemingly desperate for the world's third-largest economy to come to its aid, it sees strategic opportunities. Even before the financial crisis began to hit the country late last year, nationalism had been boiling up.

In public, Chinese leaders still try to reassure...but China certainly delights in the notion that its global power is growing. As one Western diplomat put it, the meeting between President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Mr Hu Jintao, in the margins of the G20 summit in London next Wednesday (April 2) will be far more important than the G20 meeting itself. China stole the limelight at the last G20 summit by announcing a 4 trillion yuan (US$565 billion) stimulus package just before it. Rumours continue to circulate that it has another up its sleeve. That would please everyone.

But China is not (yet, anyway) seeking to knock the US off its perch. It is pushing for a greater say for itself and other developing countries in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), over which the Americans, in effect, wield a veto. But it is not demanding a veto of its own. At a press conference on March 13, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao avoided saying whether China would give more funding to the IMF to strengthen its ability to deal with the financial crisis.

How much China gives, diplomats believe, will depend on how much of a say it gets. An article in the official China Daily newspaper last Tuesday (March 17) quoted an influential Chinese economist, Mr Yu Yongding, as saying China should not give much to the IMF — not least because certain countries on the IMF's rescue list, particularly some from Europe, had an "anti-China mentality".

- THE ECONOMIST

China: Ditch the greenback as reserve currency

Shanghai (March 24): China has called for ditching the United States dollar as the international reserve currency, sweeping away a decades-old system to stabilise the world monetary climate and protect its massive foreign-exchange reserves.

The governor of the People's Bank of China, Mr Zhou Xiaochuan, said he wants to replace the greenback, installed as the world's reserve currency after World War II, with a different standard run by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

China — the top holder of US Treasury bonds with US$739.6 billion as of January, according to American figures — earlier expressed concern over its investment as the world's largest economy battles a deep recession.

"The outbreak of the crisis and its spillover to the entire world reflected the inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system," Mr Zhou wrote in an essay posted on the bank's website on Monday (March 23).

Mr Zhou's comments come ahead of the G20 summit starting next Wednesday (April 2) in London, where world leaders and international organisations including the IMF are to discuss reforming the financial system. He suggested the IMF's Special Drawing Rights (SDR) could serve as a super-sovereign reserve currency as it would not be easily influenced by the policies of individual countries.

However, China's proposal was unlikely to lead anywhere because the SDR is not a currency system backed up by a government, independent Shanghai-based economist Andy Xie said.

Mr Xie said the proposal was probably a protest aimed at Washington's plan to buy US$1 trillion of its own debt, diluting the value of China's dollar reserves and raising fears of inflation.

"It's a sad situation. China is America's banker. America owes so much to China, but it's not afraid of China," he said. "China is America's hostage. It's not the other way around."

- AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

See Tibet vs China vs the world for previous rants against China.

For ongoing discussions on the deepening global recession, see Economic Crisis of 2008/2009.

[LynnieS]

I almost decided to post this in the "Economic Crisis" thread, but this is also an... interesting news story as well.

President of Brazil blames white people for crisis

Originally Posted by Taken from the FT...

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday blamed the global economic crisis on “white people with blue eyes” and said it was wrong that black and indigenous people should pay for white people’s mistakes.

Yes... It all makes so much sense now!

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by LynnieS

I almost decided to post this in the "Economic Crisis" thread, but this is also an... interesting news story as well.

President of Brazil blames white people for crisis

Yes... It all makes so much sense now!

That is the biggest piece of cowpat I have ever heard. This is called small attempting to act big. For someone who never amounted much to the world, nor really DID anything to change the world, the Brazilian President sure dares to open his trap wide and pour nonsense out of it.

Sure the Americans have made a huge mistake by screwing up the entire world economy, but there is no need to throw the blame and pummel someone who is trying to correct his mistakes. After all, everyone makes them.

No offence to fellow Brazilians here, just shooting the President in his mouth .

Anyway did anyone here of the grass-mud-horse mascot against the Chinese censorship of youtube?

[sa547]

Originally Posted by LynnieS

I almost decided to post this in the "Economic Crisis" thread, but this is also an... interesting news story as well.

President of Brazil blames white people for crisis

Yes... It all makes so much sense now!

Yet another case of grandstanding. *shakes head* When's the next coming presidential election in Brazil?

Seriously, as this is a global problem not confined anymore in developed countries, every country must resolve the problems caused by this economic crisis rather than wasting time playing the blame game.

[Vexx]

I suspect he was going for the "rich old white guys" Good Old Boys meme and seriously missed. There's the total "white skin blue-eyed vote" in Brazil he just tossed away (yes, those exist there).

[danin8r44]

Let's look at this from another light. For the first time in a long time the Jews aren't being blamed. The tables have completely turned since ww2.