On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user’s privileges on all of the company’s recent operating systems, including Vista. And over the weekend a Silicon Valley computer security firm said it had notified Microsoft that it had also found that flaw, as well as five other vulnerabilities, including one serious error in the software code underlying the company’s new Internet Explorer 7 browser. 

The browser flaw is particularly troubling because it potentially means that Web users could become infected with malicious software simply by visiting a booby-trapped site. That would make it possible for an attacker to inject rogue software into the Vista-based computer, according to executives at Determina, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that sells software intended to protect against operating system and other vulnerabilities. NYT (reg/req)

For decades, flyers have stoically battled the modern-age problem of jet lag, viewing its accompanying grogginess, burning eyes, headaches, insomnia and fatigue as more of a nuisance than a potential health issue.

The study has focused new attention on the problem and raised questions about whether severe jet lag can be harmful to health. It also has drawn attention to work by other researchers looking into ways to help vacationing families and business travelers avoid jet lag. The study is one of the first hard scientific looks into the health effects of jet lag, experts said. Washington Post (reg/req)

A croak is how male green frogs tell other frogs how big they are. The bigger the male, the deeper the croak. The sound of a big male is enough to scare off other males from challenging him for his territory.

While most croaks are honest, some are not. Some small males lower their voices to make themselves sound bigger. Their big-bodied croaks intimidate frogs that would beat them in a fair fight. 

Green frogs are only one deceptive species among many. Dishonesty has been documented in creatures ranging from birds to crustaceans to primates, including, of course, Homo sapiens. “When you think of human communication, it’s rife with deception,” said Stephen Nowicki, a biologist at Duke University and the co-author of the 2005 book “The Evolution of Animal Communication.” “You just need to read a Shakespeare play or two to see that.” NYT (reg/req)

Either way, Sigmund Freud, scribbling in the pages of a Swiss hotel register, appears to have left the answer to a question that has titillated scholars for much of the last century: Did he have an affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays?

Rumors of a romantic liaison between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds, have long persisted, despite staunch denials by Freud loyalists. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s disciple and later his archrival, claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed to an affair to him. (The claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung’s part.) And some researchers have even theorized that she may have become pregnant by Freud and have had an abortion. 

What was lacking was any proof. But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud’s own psychology. NYT (reg/req)

Conservationists insist the "big dry" is almost certainly the result of climate change and warn that Australia is on the brink of environmental disaster. Other experts believe such hysteria is wildly misplaced and that the country shouldn't panic. BBC

Import penetration, as it is called, worried economists and policymakers when it first became noticeable 20 years ago. Many considered factory production a crucial component of the nation’s wealth and power. As imports gained ground, however, that view changed; the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up.

Or as Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, put it: “We want people who can design iPods, not make them.” 

But over the long run, can invention and design be separated from production? That question is rarely asked today. The debate instead centers on the loss of well-paying factory jobs and on the swelling trade deficit in manufactured goods. When the linkage does come up, the answer is surprisingly affirmative: Yes, invention and production are intertwined.

“Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory,” said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. “In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability.” NYT (reg/req)

Doctors in recent years had become excited over substances in the blood that appeared to be powerful new predictors of a heart attack. These substances included C-reactive protein, or CRP; homocysteine; and BNP, or B-type natriuretic peptide.

An increasing number of family doctors have been ordering expensive tests for these substances, and some patients have started requesting them, in hopes of identifying people who do not have the standard risk factors but are still likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke.

But the new research, by scientists at the highly regarded Framingham Heart Study, found that tests of CRP, BNP, homocysteine and seven other substances are only a couple of percentage points better at predicting outcomes than the standard, commonsense risk factors that doctors have known for decades.

The difference in accuracy was considered so small as to be negligible. The AP via NYT (reg/req)

"Not everyone sitting down to a bowl of cereal will necessarily absorb the same number of calories from it," says Jeffrey Gordon, lead author of the papers and a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. 

About two-thirds of adults, about 136 million Americans, are overweight or obese, the government says. These findings open up a new area of research, says Sam Klein, a study co-author and professor of gastroenterology at the university.

"It's not just your brain and your body fat and your body organs involved in your energy balance equation," he says. "It may also be the bugs that are in your body as well." USA Today

This is why sales of home-organizing products, like accordion files and labelmakers and plastic tubs, keep going up and up, from $5.9 billion last year to a projected $7.6 billion by 2009, as do the revenues of companies that make closet organizing systems, an industry that is pulling in $3 billion a year, according to Closets magazine. 

This is why January is now Get Organized Month, thanks also to the efforts of the National Association of Professional Organizers, whose 4,000 clutter-busting members will be poised, clipboards and trash bags at the ready, to minister to the 10,000 clutter victims the association estimates will be calling for its members’ services just after the new year. 

But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands. NYT (reg/req)

"The reality of the situation is that most people had premarital sex, and it's been that way for several decades," says Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute, a New York City-based non-profit organization that studies reproductive and sexual health. USA Today

FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, a leading advocate of the rule, has argued that government officials often stymie competition by delaying decisions on awarding cable franchises to telephone companies and by imposing exorbitant fees and conditions. As a result, cable operators often have been able to maintain a virtual monopoly on television services, resulting in steadily increasing prices for consumers, according to Martin. Washington Post (reg/req)

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will.
The Economist 

The researchers also showed that the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did the basic exercises followed by later sessions were three times as fast as those who got only the initial sessions when it came to activities of daily living, such as reacting to a road sign, looking up a number in a telephone book or checking the ingredients on a medicine bottle -- abilities that can spell the difference between living independently and needing help. Washington Post (reg/req)

In addition to activities like walking, jogging, cycling and swimming that promote endurance, cardiovascular health and weight control, there is a dire need for exercises that improve posture and increase strength, flexibility and balance. These exercises can greatly reduce the risk of injuries from sports and endurance activities, the demands of daily life, falls and other accidents. NYT (reg/req)

The Pentagon says injuries and deaths among U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq rose 32% during the period from mid-August to mid-October over the previous three months. Both the average number of attacks each week and the average number of people killed or wounded in those attacks were at their highest levels since the United States handed over power to the Iraqi government in June 2004. USA Today

Real-time weather data and the positions of the International Space Station and shuttle could be included. The deal will also see scientists from both institutions working together to solve complex computational problems. 

"This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars," said NASA administrator Michael Griffin. BBC

The entrepreneur has been selling handmade Christmas stockings for 12 years, the last eight of them online. Working from the attic of her three-story Rock Island, Ill., Victorian house, Ms. Murphy makes a couple of thousand stockings a year. During the busy months, October through December, her sister and niece come over to help her cut, tack and stitch.

But her business, Aunt Joy's Personalized Christmas Stockings, is facing a new, high-tech hurdle, thanks to Microsoft Corp's. new Internet Explorer 7 Web browser. IE7 has a security feature that will turn Web-address bars green and display owners' identities when consumers visit secure sites from businesses verified as legitimate. The color change will be a boon for consumers, who have been barraged in recent years with "phishing" scams designed to lure them to fake versions of popular Web sites, like eBay or their bank, to filch their account numbers. The hope is that the program will help reduce fraud, lift trust and boost e-commerce.

But browsers won't turn green when customers visit Ms. Murphy's site. That's because sole proprietorships, general partnerships and individuals won't be eligible for the new, stricter security certificates that Microsoft requires to display the color. There are about 20.6 million sole proprietorships and general partnerships in the U.S., according to 2003 and 2004 tax data from the Internal Revenue Service, though it isn't clear how many are engaged in e-commerce. Wall Street Journal

People compare signals from each ear to locate the source of a noise. But the prevailing notion has been that mammals can't follow the same strategy for smells, because their nostrils are too close together to get distinct signals.

"We debunked that," said Noam Sobel of the University of California, Berkeley, who reported the new results Sunday with graduate student Jess Porter and others on the website of the journal Nature Neuroscience. The work will appear in the journal's January issue.

The report isn't the first to suggest the two-nostril idea. But Sobel and colleagues have now "opened the doors for full consideration of it," said an expert familiar with the work, neuroscientist Charles Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The AP

At the same time, Americans spent more of their lives than ever — about eight-and-a-half hours a day — watching television, using computers, listening to the radio, going to the movies or reading.

This eclectic portrait of the American people is drawn from the 1,376 tables in the Census Bureau’s 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, the annual feast for number crunchers that is being served up by the federal government today. NYT (reg/req)

The big-screen version of a two-part British television series follows the noted biologist as he embarks on a global road-trip to the veritable bastions of theological conviction—the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a Christian conservative stronghold in Colorado Springs, a Hassidic community in the heart of London—bullying, berating and heckling the devoutly faithful he encounters along his way. In These Times

The sarcophagus, which dates back to at least A.D. 390, has been the subject of an extended excavation that began in 2002 and was completed last month, the project's head said this week. The AP

The matches were found on the seat of a woman who had attempted to conceal the odour of flatulence with the matches, Nashville airport authorities said. BBC

Mary Cheney, 37, and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, 45, are expecting a baby in late spring, said Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for the vice president.

"The vice president and Mrs. Cheney are looking forward with eager anticipation" to the arrival of their sixth grandchild, McBride said. The AP

Among several widely used treatments for prostate cancer, one stands out for its profit potential. The approach, a radiation therapy known as I.M.R.T., can mean reimbursement of $47,000 or more a patient.

That is many times the fees that urologists make on other accepted treatments for the disease, which include surgery and radioactive seed implants. And it may help explain why urologists have started buying multimillion-dollar I.M.R.T. equipment and software, and why many more are investigating it as a way to increase their incomes. 

Already, dozens of the nation’s 10,000 urologists have purchased the technology for intensity modulated radiation therapy, which is what I.M.R.T. stands for, and some of them are recommending its use for growing numbers of their patients. 

Critics see a potential conflict of interest on the part of urologists, the specialists who typically help prostate patients choose a course of treatment. The critics say that urologists who can profit from the new form of therapy may be less likely to recommend other proven approaches, which for some older men can involve forgoing treatment altogether. NYT (reg/req)

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.

The government calls the system critical to national security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some privacy advocates call it one of the most intrusive and risky schemes yet mounted in the name of anti-terrorism efforts.

Virtually every person entering and leaving the United States by air, sea or land is scored by the Homeland Security Department's Automated Targeting System, or ATS. The scores are based on ATS' analysis of their travel records and other data, including items such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered. The AP via The Washington Post (reg/req)

The Antikythera Mechanism, discovered more than 100 years ago in a Roman shipwreck, was used by ancient Greeks to display astronomical cycles. 

Using advanced imaging techniques, an Anglo-Greek team probed the remaining fragments of the complex geared device. 

The results, published in the journal Nature, show it could have been used to predict solar and lunar eclipses. 
NYT (reg/req)

They told the Radiological Society of North America that the best position in which to sit at your desk is leaning slightly back, at about 135 degrees. BBC

Mandate for the new majority: Curb the president's power to torture. The Village Voice

“This helps to fill in critical moments in ancient classical Greece,” said William Noel, the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum here and the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Hyperides “is one of the great foundational figures of Greek democracy and the golden age of Athenian democracy, the foundational democracy of all democracy.” NYT (reg/req)

A dozen states as well as environmental groups and large cities are trying to convince the court that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate, as a matter of public health, the amount of carbon dioxide that comes from vehicles.

Carbon dioxide is produced when fossil fuels are burned. It is the principal "greenhouse" gas that many scientists believe is flowing into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, leading to a warming of the earth and widespread ecological changes.

The Bush administration intends to argue before the court on Wednesday that the EPA lacks the power under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The agency contends that even if it did have such authority, it would have discretion under the law on how to address the problem without imposing emissions controls. The AP

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Sunday he sees his idea as a way to deter politicians from launching wars and to bolster U.S. troop levels insufficient to cover potential future action in Iran, North Korea and Iraq.

"There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," Rangel said. The AP

Bouchaib Silm, a researcher with the terrorism department at Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, said websites are becoming more modern in design, incorporating content designed to hook a younger generation of sympathizers and potential recruits.

Sites can no longer simply show videos of Osama bin Laden giving an hourlong speech as he sits in front of a bare wall, Silm said.

"The young of today will not listen to him," he said. "They will get bored. So the recruiters need something new to attract them." The AP

The new research helps confirm and extend the possible benefits of the substance, resveratrol, and offers new insight into how it works -- apparently by revving up the metabolism to make muscles burn more energy and work more efficiently. Mice fed large doses could run twice as far as they would normally.

In addition, the scientists for the first time produced evidence linking the biological pathway activated by the substance to human physiology, showing that the same genetic switch resveratrol mimics seems to naturally endow some people with faster metabolisms. Washington Post (reg/req)

The migration of progenitor cells is controlled by a protein called thymosin beta 4, already known to help reduce muscle cell loss after a heart attack. 

The discovery opens up the possibility of using the protein to develop more effective treatments for heart disease. BBC

Up to 80 gunmen, dressed in camouflaged Interior Ministry uniforms in dozens of unmarked four wheel-drive vehicles and pickup trucks with tinted glass, surrounded and blocked all roads leading to the Directorate of Scholarships and Cultural Relations at Andalus Square at 9:30 a.m., Wednesday. http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/

The scientists found that people with the highest blood levels of an omega-3 fatty acid called docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, were about half as likely to develop dementia as those with lower levels. 

The substance is one of several omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids found in fatty fish and, in small amounts, in some meats. It is also sold in fish oil or DHA supplements. The researchers looked for a reduced risk associated with seven other omega-3 fatty acids, but only DHA had any effect. NYT (reg/req)

Researchers led by Gene Block and Alec Davidson of the University of Virginia noticed that, in an earlier experiment, a surprising number of elderly rats died when the daily cycle of light followed by darkness was altered so that the light came six hours earlier. To examine whether there really was a link they conducted a separate experiment using three groups of mice. The Economist

In fact, chances of being healthy in old age are better than even for people who at mid-life have normal blood pressure, good grip strength and several other physical characteristics associated with being fit and active.

These include normal levels of blood glucose and fats in the blood called triglycerides - both also associated with avoiding excess calories and eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.

Other habits long linked with good health and well-being - avoiding smoking and excess alcohol, and being married - also improved chances of surviving well into the 80s. 

The study involved 5,820 Japanese-American men from the Hawaiian island of Oahu, who were followed for up to 40 years, but the researchers said the results likely apply to women and men of other ethnic heritage, too. The AP

Iraq's higher education minister immediately ordered all universities closed until security improvements are made, saying he was "not ready to see more professors get killed." The AP via The Washington Post (reg/req)

Chief amongst the goods the ship was carrying were hundreds of jars of garum - a fish sauce which was a favourite condiment for rich Romans. BBC

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.

The images, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, pinpoint the most active areas of the brain. The images are the first of their kind taken during this spoken religious practice, which has roots in the Old and New Testaments and in Pentecostal churches established in the early 1900s. The women in the study were healthy, active churchgoers.

“The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” said Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, leader of the study team, which included Donna Morgan, Nancy Wintering and Mark Waldman. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them,” he said.
NYT (reg/req)

That type of freedom during six years in the United States gave Farhan a taste for expressing himself that he was unable to satisfy when he returned to Saudi Arabia in 2001.

"You can't write whatever you want in the newspaper here; you can't even lift up a poster in protest," said Farhan, 31, a computer programmer who attended Eastern Washington University in Spokane. "On the blog, it's a different world. It was the only way to express myself the way I wanted."

Farhan is part of a growing wave of young Arabs who have turned to blogging to bypass the restrictions on free expression in a predominantly authoritarian, conservative and Muslim region. Blogging is so novel here that the equivalent term in Arabic, tadween, to chronicle, was coined only this year. But it has spread rapidly among the increasingly urban youth and in the process has loosened the limits of what's open for discussion. 
Washington Post (reg/req)

Well, I’m not celebrating. I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that Donald Rumsfeld has been given the kiss-off. But let’s get this straight: It wasn’t Rumsfeld who stood up in front of the UN and identified two mobile latrines as biological weapons labs, was it, General Powell?

It wasn’t Rumsfeld who told us our next warning from Saddam could be a mushroom cloud, was it Ms. Rice?

It wasn’t Rumsfeld who declared that al-Qaida and Saddam were going steady, was it, Mr. Cheney?

Yes, Rumfeld is a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a duplicitous chickenhawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and tinker-toy Napoleon - but he didn’t appoint himself Secretary of Defense.

Rummy’s the puppet — but the problem is the puppeteer. GregPalast.com

So last spring, in an attempt to wrest more value out of its shares, Morgan Stanley launched a campaign to shake up the way the company is structured. That effort, which heated up even more this week, has the potential to not only change the fundamental ownership of the Times, but offers a chilling peek at a possible future for many of the nation's most important newspapers. PRWeek

Speaking on BBC One's Question Time programme last night, he accused the US government of telling the Iraqi court to delay the verdict to coincide with the midterm elections. The Guardian

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller warned the threat was "serious" and "growing." She said future attacks could be chemical or nuclear and that many of the plots were linked to al-Qaeda. BBC

They were hired by Patna's Municipal Corporation on Wednesday after the city's tax arrears ran into the millions, said Atul Prasad, the municipal administrator.

Sari-clad eunuchs were out in force with municipal tax collectors in Patna, the Indian Express reported.

"Pay the tax, pay the Patna Municipal Corporation tax," chorused the eunuchs on the doorstep of their first target, Ram Sagar Singh, who owed 100,000 rupees, or about $2,240 dollars.A mortified Singh promised to pay within a week, the report said.

India has an estimated 1 million eunuchs. Rulers once castrated boys to create eunuchs to work in their harems. But eunuchs today are generally males with partial genitals or who opt for castration because of strong female feelings.

They often make a living on tips for dancing at weddings and blessing newborn babies, and are believed to be stubborn and not take no for an answer. Associated Press; Agence-France Presse

Some observatories held special viewing parties for the public. The entire transit was visible from the western US, south-east Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the South Pacific. BBC

Geophysicists such as Harvard University's Paul Hoffman have debated the idea for decades, arguing that rocky glacial deposits from at least two eras, one from around 600 million years ago and another around 2.2 billion years ago, prove the planet had an entirely ice-covered crust at those times. USA Today

The scientists have learned about the changing makeup of the vanished gases by teasing subtle clues from fossilized soils, plants and sea creatures. They have also gained insights from computer models that predict how phenomena like eroding rocks and erupting volcanoes have altered the planet’s evolving air. “It’s getting a lot more attention,” Michael C. MacCracken, chief scientist of the Climate Institute, a research group in Washington, said of the growing field.

For the first time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that analyzes global warming, plans to include a chapter on the reconstructions in its latest report, due early next year.

The discoveries have stirred a little-known dispute that, if resolved, could have major implications. At issue is whether the findings back or undermine the prevailing view on global warming. One side foresees a looming crisis of planetary heating; the other, temperature increases that would be more nuisance than catastrophe.  NYT (reg/req)

In language rare for a central bank official, Yellen suggested that high priority be given to improving education, tax credits and other aspects of the social safety net, despite the cost in dollars and possible impact on economic efficiency, according to the text of her lecture at the University of California, Irvine.

"Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people," Yellen said. USA Today