With a bend of the knees and an arch of the back, a Japanese engineer today set a world flight record for a paper plane, keeping his hand-folded construction in the air for 26.1 seconds.

Using a plane specially designed for "long haul" flights, Takuo Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima earlier, but achieved with a plane that was held together with cellophane tape.

Today's flight, inside a Japan Airlines hangar near Haneda airport in Tokyo, was the longest by an unadulterated model. "I felt a lot of pressure," Toda told the Associated Press after his feat. "Everything is a factor ‑ the moisture in the air, the temperature, the crowd."

The record was all the more satisfying for having been achieved with a plane that stayed true to the traditions of origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. He folded his 10cm aircraft by hand from a single sheet of paper and did not use scissors or glue.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2009) -- Going back for a second dessert after your holiday meal might not be the best strategy for living a long, cancer-free life say researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. That's because they've shown exactly how restricted calorie diets -- specifically in the form of restricted glucose -- help human cells live longer.

This discovery, published online in The FASEB Journal, could help lead to drugs and treatments that slow human aging and prevent cancer.

"Our hope is that the discovery that reduced calories extends the lifespan of normal human cells will lead to further discoveries of the causes for these effects in different cell types and facilitate the development of novel approaches to extend the lifespan of humans," said Trygve Tollefsbol, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Center for Aging and Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "We would also hope for these studies to lead to improved prevention of cancer as well as many other age-related diseases through controlling calorie intake of specific cell types."

To make this discovery, Tollefsbol and colleagues used normal human lung cells and precancerous human lung cells that were at the beginning stages of cancer formation. Both sets of cells were grown in the laboratory and received either normal or reduced levels of glucose (sugar). As the cells grew over a period of a few weeks, the researchers monitored their ability to divide, and kept track of how many cells survived over this period.

They found that the normal cells lived longer, and many of the precancerous cells died, when given less glucose. Gene activity was also measured under these same conditions. The reduced glucose caused normal cells to have a higher activity of the gene that dictates the level of telomerase, an enzyme that extends their lifespan and lower activity of a gene (p16) that slows their growth. Epigenetic effects (effects not due to gene mutations) were found to be a major cause in changing the activity of these genes as they reacted to decreased glucose levels

By Sid Perkins,  Science News

A SHOCKING BITE
Sinornithosaurus may have subdued its prey with venom that flowed into a victim through unique grooves in many of the dinosaur's teeth, a new study suggests. Triangular depressions on the creature's upper jaw (arrow) likely held venom-producing glands.National Academy of Sciences

Well-preserved fossils of a feathered dinosaur that lived about 124 million years ago -- along with certain aspects of its teeth and skull -- suggest that the turkey-sized creature was venomous.

Sinornithosaurus was unearthed in China and first described by scientists about 10 years ago, but the telling details of the creature's cranial anatomy are just now being reported, says David Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Most of the teeth in each side of the creature's upper jaw have grooves that run from the base of each tooth to the tip, a characteristic seen in some of today's venomous reptiles. A large triangular depression on the creature's upper jawbone -- a feature not previously reported in other dinosaurs or their relatives -- probably held venom-producing glands, Burnham and his colleagues report online December 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Venom flowing from those glands probably pooled in reservoirs at the base of each grooved tooth until the dino bit its prey, Burnham says.

A few of Sinornithosaurus' narrow teeth were quite a bit longer than the others. Modern creatures that have a similar variability in tooth length typically bite and hold their prey, Burnham says. So, he and his colleagues speculate, Sinornithosaurus probably used its venom to quickly stun struggling victims, which probably included small-to-medium-sized birds, by sending them into shock.

Naomi Wolf described all this in 1991, in her pathbreaking book The Beauty Myth. "The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us," she wrote. But Wolf was writing before plastic surgery was considered a prerequisite for ongoing employment, before Botox, before ubiquitous Brazilian waxes, before images of natural breasts started seeming like an odd retro novelty. Almost 20 years later, the period Wolf was writing in seems like a prelapsarian paradise of female self-acceptance.

Given the way women perceived as unattractive are treated, it's no wonder so many find the pressure intolerable and seek surgical relief. Laurie Essig, author of a forthcoming book on plastic surgery, recently reported that a third of plastic surgery patients make less than $30,000 a year; many pay for their surgeries with credit cards charging usurious interest rates. Blogging on True/Slant, Essig argues that it's unfair to tax these women further, especially since there's no objective way to figure out which operations are and are not necessary. "'Necessary' is an impossible word when it comes to cosmetic surgery because ultimately, almost none of it is necessary for pure physical survival, but we are social animals who increasingly depend on 'first impressions' to survive," she writes.

There's some truth to what she says, but stretching the term "necessary" to encompass cosmetic surgery means acquiescing to the last decade's most pernicious trends. The more time women are compelled to spend fighting their own bodies, the less they have to fight for anything else.

Look, the Sunday morning talk shows are broken. As works of journalism they don't work. And I don't know why this is so hard for the producers to figure out.

The people who host and supervise these shows, the journalists who appear on them, as well as the politicians who are interviewed each week, are quite aware that extreme polarization and hyper-partisan conflict have come to characterize official Washington, an observation repeated hundreds of times a month by elders in the Church of the Savvy.  Ron Brownstein wrote a whole book on it: The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America

Holiday tidings come from NASA's Voyager 2 this week, offering a view of deep space beyond our sun's solar system.

Now speeding through space at more than 34,000 miles-per-hour, the 1977 space probe resides more than 8.3. billion miles away from the sun. That is twice as far as Pluto. Two years ago, Voyager 2 passed into the region of space where the sun's solar wind peters out as it plows into the interstellar gases of our Milky Way galaxy. And now it's giving us some news from this region, called the "heliosheath," by astrophysicists.

"This is a magic mission," says space scientist Merav Opher of George Mason University. in Fairfax, Va.. "After all these years, Voyager 2 is still working and sending us first hand (on-site) data."

Voyager 2's vantage, revealed in the Dec. 24 Nature journal in a study led by Opher and colleagues, shows that beyond the solar system, the galaxy's magnetic field is unexpectedly strong, about twice as much as expected, and unexpectedly tilted. Our galaxy is essentially a twin-armed flat disk of stars 100,000 light years across rotating around a spherical ball of stars in its center (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles.).

In a move essential to Florida's efforts to develop an expanded commercial launch industry, the U.S. Senate passed legislation late Wednesday that would extend federal liability protection for commercial space launch providers against catastrophic events.

Every time a commercial company launches rocket with any payload, the potential third-party liability is enormous--a rocket could conceivably do billions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure and people.

Under the measure approved by the Senate, the U.S. government would continue for three more years to indemnify commercial launch operators against third-party claims for launch-related damages that exceed $500 million, up to a total of $1.5 billion.

Rising prices and better alternatives may mean curtains for netbooks.

The small portable computers were popular in 2009, but some industry watchers are convinced that their popularity is already waning.

"The days of the netbook are over," said Stuart Miles, founder and editor of technology blog Pocket Lint.

As prices edge upwards, net-using habits change and other gadgets take on their functions, netbooks will become far less popular, he thinks.

"Technology has advanced so much that it's outmanoeuvred itself," he said. "You wouldn't go for something so basic anymore."

The aim is to let citizens report problems to their governments more easily and accurately; and to put public information, which otherwise may be buried in file cabinets and Excel files, at the fingertips of taxpayers.

By some accounts, the trend is turning the government-voter relationship on its head and could usher in a new era of grassroots democracy.

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