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schwit1 quotes ScienceAlert: In experiments involving mice, the team found that lungs produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals' circulation. This goes against the decades-long assumption that bone marrow produces all of our blood components. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco also discovered a previously unknown pool of blood stem cells that makes this happen inside the lung tissue -- cells that were incorrectly assumed to mainly reside in bone marrow. "This finding definitely suggests a more sophisticated view of the lungs -- that they're not just for respiration, but also a key partner in formation of crucial aspects of the blood," says one of the researchers, Mark R. Looney.
The platelet-producing cells actually migrate from the bone marrow to the lungs.

University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and California State University, Dominguez Hills professor emeritus Larry Rosen explain in their book "The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High Tech World" why people have trouble multitasking, and specifically why one's productivity output is lowered when keeping up with emails, for example. Lesley McClurg writes via KQED Science: When you engage in one task at a time, the prefrontal cortex works in harmony with other parts of the brain, but when you toss in another task it forces the left and right sides of the brain to work independently. The process of splitting our attention usually leads to mistakes. In other words, each time our eyes glance away from our computer monitor to sneak a peak at a text message, the brain takes in new information, which reduces our primary focus. We think the mind can juggle two or three activities successfully at once, but Gazzaley says we woefully overestimate our ability to multitask. In regard to answering emails, McClurg writes: Gazzaley stresses that our tendency to respond immediately to emails and texts hinders high-level thinking. If you're working on a project and you stop to answer an email, the research shows, it will take you nearly a half-hour to get back on task. "When a focused stream of thought is interrupted it needs to be reset," explains Gazzaley. "You can't just press a button and switch back to it. You have to re-engage those thought processes, and recreate all the elements of what you were engaged in. That takes time, and frequently one interruption leads to another." In other words, repetitively switching tasks lowers performance and productivity because your brain can only fully and efficiently focus on one thing at a time. Plus, mounting evidence shows that multitasking could impair the brain's cognitive abilities. Stanford researchers studied the minds of people who regularly engage in several digital communication streams at once. They found that high-tech jugglers struggle to pay attention, recall information, or complete one task at a time. And the habit of multitasking could lower your score on an IQ test, according to researchers at the University of London. The saving grace is that we don't need to ditch technology as "there's a time and place for multitasking," according to Gazzaley. "If you're in the midst of a mundane task that just has to get done, it's probably not detrimental to have your phone nearby or a bunch of tabs open. The distractions may reduce boredom and help you stay engaged. But if you're finishing a business plan, or a high-level writing project, then it's a good idea to set yourself up to stay focused."

the_newsbeagle writes "Currently, the best way to check if a person has a high likelihood of developing Alzheimer's is to perform a PET scan to measure the amount of amyloid plaque in his or her brain. That's an expensive procedure. But a startup called Akili Interactive says it has developed a mobile game that can identify likely Alzheimer's patients just by their gameplay and game results. The game is based on a neuroscience study which showed that multitasking is one of the first brain functions to take a hit in Alzheimer's patients. Therefore the game requires players to perform two tasks at the same time."

An anonymous reader writes "The prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex in the human brain is thought to play a key role in drug addiction, and researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse wanted to see if manipulating cells there had a positive or negative impact on that addiction. They got some rats addicted to cocaine but not before loading them up with light sensitive proteins called rhodopsins that were placed in their prefrontal cortex, attaching to the neurons there. By shining a tuned laser light on to the prefrontal cortex, it was possible to activate and deactivate the cells. By turning them on with the laser, the addictive behavior of the rats was removed. Turning them off, even in non-addicted rats, saw the addictive behavior return or introduced."

Marian the Librarian writes "UCSF is among the first public institutions to adopt an open access policy, and is the largest scientific institution to have such a policy. The policy, voted unanimously by the faculty, will allow UCSF authors to put electronic versions of their published scientific articles on an open access repository making their research findings freely available to the public. Dr. Richard A. Schneider, who led the initiative, said, 'Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals. The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research.'"

Howard writes "Horrified by "There Be Monsters Here" tales, some members of Congress called for a ban on DNA research in the mid '70s. Because those calls were rejected, millions of people around the world can now hope for DNA-based vaccines against AIDS, malaria and other deadly diseases that have destroyed lives, communities and nations. Here's an illustration: The name of Joseph DeRisi keeps coming up in connection with deadly diseases. No, he's not a modern-day Typhoid Mary. Just the opposite. The University of California, San Francisco researcher is using his own custom-built DNA microarrays to look inside the "minds" of some serious serial killers. The "minds" are genes, and his home-brewed gene chips helped solve the SARS mystery earlier this year. Now, DeRisi has chosen malaria as his next victim. For the complete commentary, please go to Howard Lovy's NanoBot."

smoondog writes "The Matrix Reloaded is the highly anticipated sequel to Wachowski's geek epic. Time.com has opened a new preview site with pics and interviews. Make sure you check out the pics on The Matrix homepage. Too bad 2003 is so far away...."

GizmoDuck writes "I'm working in a computational chemistry lab, and we find ourselves using memory and CPU hogs like Amber and Gaussian. The CPU hogging isn't a problem, thanks to Condor, but when submitting one of the jobs that request (and pretty much require) all the physical RAM in the machines, Linux promptly starts swapping so hard that the mouse pointer in X stops moving, NFS and NIS halt, and things don't get back to normal for five minutes. I've tried toying a bit with the settings in /proc/sys/vm/kswapd to no avail. I've done some poking around on the 'net looking for answers. Faster disks and swap partitions at the beginning of the drive aren't really an option at this point. I haven't found a good solution yet. I was wondering if the /. community has any input on how to keep the system from locking during periods of necessarily high swap activity?"

PrvtBurrito writes: "About 3% of the human genome is "coded" as genes. The proteins those genes encode can be represented as long sequences of amino acids, a twenty letter alphabet. In an attempt to perhaps prove that nothing is sacred, someone has cataloged all of the english words found in known annotated protein sequences from many organisms. It looks like after cataloging over 37,000,000 characters, the longest word is chapstick and the most common word is kilter."

blakestah writes: "Well, it looks like someone on the LKML has taken upon himself to do some benchmarking of ReiserFS, ext2, and XFS using the 2.4 kernel series. It is not a real benchmark test, but kind of interesting nonetheless. See the results (in Spanish) at this LUG in Mallorca. Simple runs of dd, tar, and rm are shown, and for most of the tests XFS is pretty dern fast, beating all the others. The exception is removal of a large source tree (the kernel source), for which XFS is the slowest by a fair amount. See this kernel post for the translations of important words. It will be nice to see more such open benchmarking posted, because benchmarks provide developers goals." The contrast between FAT32 and XFS is particularly interesting to see.

Sean Mooney writes "CNN is reporting that $1000 pc that is 60,000 times faster than a PII 350 may be on the market within 18 months. Star Bridge Systems is making the field programmable gate array (FPGA) computer. These are the same guys who are making HAL, reported earlier. " I'll believe that when I see it. Although I can't think of a better way to break Moore's Law.

Ken Miller was one of the first to send in the notice that the Gray Lady of Journalism herself had noticed Linux. On the down side, you will need a free account to login for this story. But this definitly shows that Linux has made it in the Old Media world.