“Play It Again God”

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Wearing a purple sweatsuit and leaning on a cane, Gloria Allen, 82, was hobbling down a hallway in a public housing project in Morningside Heights, knocking on doors and shouting, “Recycling education!”

There was no answer at the next apartment, but as soon as she detected movement inside, Ms. Allen, a retired printing-company worker, began her pitch.

“Please come out, baby,” she purred. “Please come out so we can educate you on how to recycle.”

The typical neighborhood environmentalist is often pictured as young and affluent, the kind of person who can afford a hybrid car and screen-printed hemp fabrics. But at General Grant Houses, a sprawling public housing development off West 125th Street in Manhattan, the eco-conscious are mainly people like Ms. Allen and Sarah Martin, who as leaders of the residents’ association fret as much about backed-up pipes as they do about recycling.
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A human growth factor that stimulates blood stem cells to proliferate in the bone marrow reverses memory impairment in mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s disease, researchers at the University of South Florida and James A. Haley Hospital found.

The granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (GCSF) significantly reduced levels of the brain-clogging protein beta amyloid deposited in excess in the brains of the Alzheimer’s mice, increased the production of new neurons and promoted nerve cell connections.
The findings are reported online in Neuroscience and are scheduled to appear in the journal’s print edition in August.
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A rare and extremely valuable copy of the United States Declaration of Independence has been discovered in Britain.

The document, which is in perfect condition, is believed to be one of only 200 ever printed and was found among files at the National Archives in Kew in Richmond, Surrey.

Stumbled upon by an American antiquarian bookseller carrying out research, the Dunlap print of the declaration was printed on July 4, 1776 and brings the total of known surviving copies worldwide to 26.

The last discovery of a Dunlap print was at a flea market in 1989, and it sold at auction in 2000 for 8.14 million US dollars.

Dunlaps were the first official printings of the Declaration of Independence and were named after John Dunlap, the printer whose name is given at the bottom of each copy.

This manuscript was hidden among correspondence from American colonists that had been intercepted by the British in the 18th century.

The finding of the poster-size document brings the number of copies held at the National Archives to three, and despite its value, Mel Hide, a spokeswoman from the National Archives said they will not be selling the print.

She said: “We will protect and preserve this copy. It is unlikely to go on display because we already have one on show at the Archive’s museum.”
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Scientists from Texas are batty over a new discovery which could lead to the single most important medical breakthrough in human history—significantly longer lifespans. The discovery, featured on the cover of the July 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal, shows that proper protein folding over time in long-lived bats explains why they live significantly longer than other mammals of comparable size, such as mice.

“Ultimately we are trying to discover what underlying mechanisms allow for some animal species to live a very long time with the hope that we might be able to develop therapies that allow people to age more slowly,” said Asish Chaudhuri, Professor of Biochemistry, VA Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas and the senior researcher involved in the work.
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By KEITH BRADSHER

DUNHUANG, China — As the United States takes its first steps toward mandating that power companies generate more electricity from renewable sources, China already has a similar requirement and is investing billions to remake itself into a green energy superpower.

Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Beijing is starting to change how this country generates energy. Although coal remains the biggest energy source and is almost certain to stay that way, the rise of renewable energy, especially wind power, is helping to slow China’s steep growth in emissions of global warming gases.

While the House of Representatives approved a requirement last week that American utilities generate more of their power from renewable sources of energy, and the Senate will consider similar proposals over the summer, China imposed such a requirement almost two years ago.

This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up.
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BY ZAK FAILLA
DAILY NEWS WRITER

Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are anxiously awaiting a very special delivery on July 4th – thousands of pizzas.

Troops will feast on 28,000 pizzas from UNO Chicago Grill that were shipped from JFK Airport for Operation Pizza Surge last week.

“It’s difficult to give the soldiers a piece of home from over here,” said DHL Express managing director Adrian Watts, which is shipping the pizzas in special containers so they’re fresh when they arrive in the battlefield. “They know how hard people are working to do this – and that’s as important to them as the pizzas.”

The idea to ship the pizzas, which will feed about 100,000 soldiers, came from retired Master Sgt. Mark Evans, founder of the nonprofit organization Pizzas 4 Patriots.

“When this idea started, it was just 300 pizzas, then it exploded to 2,000 – and now this,” said Evans.

It may be just a pizza, Evans said but “it tells them ‘Thanks for making the world a safer place.’”
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By LiveScience Staff

A new battery, small and thin, weighs almost nothing and can be printed in a process similar to silk-screening shirts.

The printable battery is expected to cheap and easy to mass produce and could be used in disposable receipts or cards, engineers in Germany announced today.

“Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each,” said Andreas Willert, of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS, where Reinhard Baumann led the battery’s development.

The battery weighs less than 1 gram and is less than 1 millimeter thick. It runs at 1.5 volts. Placing several in a row can produce up to 6 volts.

A standard AAA battery weighs about 11.5 grams and also runs at 1.5 volts.
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She got the white-glove treatment for her return to US waters, after a harrowing Atlantic crossing.

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

As you search out your own swimming hole over the July 4 weekend, consider the tale of Willy, an errant Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle who’s back in her native warm waters off the US East Coast – thanks to a US diplomat in London who got Willy a one-way ticket home.

Willy’s is unabashedly a feel-good summer holiday story, with adventure, a do-gooder, and an irresistible animal. Who wouldn’t fall for a fin-flapping, mottled turtle with plaintive eyes and a life-threatening sea-crossing on her résumé?

But Willy’s tale is also a reminder that not all of the nation’s diplomatic business is about international conflict, or terrorism, or belligerent regimes posing nuclear threats. Sometimes a diplomat’s work is about addressing the needs of marooned American citizens – and in this case that “citizen” happened to be a rare turtle.
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(CNN) — Debra Bader was taking a walk in the woods with her 53-year-old husband one morning when suddenly he collapsed. At first she thought the situation was hopeless.

Debra Bader was prompted to perform CRP on her husband, Christopher, after recalling a public service ad.

“I looked at him and said, ‘He’s dead,’ because he wasn’t moving or making any sounds at all,” Bader remembers. “But I pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and called 911, and then a public service announcement I’d heard on the radio popped into my head.”

The one-minute PSA from the American Heart Association instructed listeners, in the event of cardiac arrest, to perform chest compressions very hard to the beat of the 1970s Bee Gees song “Staying Alive.” When someone suffers cardiac arrest, as pop singer Michael Jackson did last week, the heart stops functioning completely, and brain death begins within four to six minutes if the victim doesn’t receive help.

“I sang the song and gave directions to the EMTs at the same time. It was like, ‘Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive — take a right here, take a left here — Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive — take this path down here — Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,’ ” Bader remembers.

For 15 minutes Bader, who had never taken a CPR class, beat on her husband’s chest until the ambulance arrived and the EMTs delivered a shock to his heart with a defibrillator. Christopher Bader survived, but 95 percent of people who go into cardiac arrest die before they get to the hospital.
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A construction worker dangled from a heavy-duty chain supported by a crane to rescue a woman from the swirling waters of the Des Moines River on Tuesday afternoon.

The dramatic rescue was met with cheers from spectators who had gathered on the banks of the river and nearby bridges after the boat the woman was in went over the Center Street dam.
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