List of Foods With High Trans Fat Content

Trans fats give food a thicker, richer taste.  Foods with trans fats last a lot longer on the shelves of your grocery store.  But the chemical make up of trans fats can be very bad for your heart, because these fats have all the "bad" cholesterol of saturated fats like butter, and, additionally, they can lower "good cholesterol" and increase inflammation.

Some food factories and some fast food chains have removed or reduced the amount of trans fats in the food they offer.  But many haven’t done so.

Here, finally, is a straightforward list of 22 foods with high trans fat content.

French fries
Anything fried or battered
Pie and piecrust
Margarine sticks
Shortening
Cake mixes and frostings
Pancakes and waffles (even homemade mixes for pancakes)
Fried chicken
Ice cream
Non-dairy creamers
Microwave popcorn
Biscuits and sweet rolls
Cookies
Ground beef
Breakfast sandwiches
Frozen or creamy beverages
Meat sticks
Asian crunchy noodles
Frozen dinners
Crackers
Canned chili (get turkey chili instead)
Packaged pudding
               
                      Summarized from:
http://health.yahoo.net/articles/nutrition/photos/22-worst-foods-trans-fat  

Political Cartoons Are Going Downhill

Who Polices Political Cartooning?

By Bill Rall, picked up by Uexpress
An Art Form in Crisis Ignores the Rot Within

"Ted Rall, mop-headed antiestablishment political cartoonist, has abundant talent, a 1,400-drawing portfolio, seven years' experience, the acclaim of peers and the approval of newspaper editors who, every so often, print his work. What he lacks is someone who will hire him full-time."

That's from The New York Times.

In 1995.

Editorial cartooning, a unique art form whose modern version originated in 18^th century France and has become more pointed, sophisticated and effective in the United States than any other country, was in big trouble back then. Newspapers, the main employers of political cartoonists, were closing and slashing budgets. Those that survived were timid; cowardly editors rarely hire, much less retain, the controversial artists who produce the best cartoons, those that stimulate discussion.

Things are worse now.

Much worse.

Hard numbers are difficult to come by but the number of full-time professional political cartoonists now hovers around 30. In 1980 there were about 300. A century ago, there were thousands.

Cartoonists blame tightfisted publishers and shortsighted editors for their woes. Many decry news syndicates for charging low rates for reprinted material. "If an editor can get Walt Handelsman and Steve Kelley for ten bucks a week, why would he pay $70,000 a year for a guy in his hometown?" asked Handelsman, then the cartoonist for The New Orleans Times-Pacayune, in the 1995 Times piece cited above.

There's also the Internet. As happened across the world of print media, the Web created more disruption than opportunity. Dozens of cartoonists tried to sell animated editorial cartoons to websites. Two succeeded.

Digitalization decimated the music business, savaged movies and is washing away book publishing. If the titans of multinational media conglomerates can't figure out how to stem the tide, individual cartoonists who make fun of the president don't stand a chance.

We can only control one thing: the quality of our work. It pains me to admit it, but to say we've fallen down on the job would be to give us too much credit.

We suck.

Day after day, year after year, editorial cartoonists have been churning out a blizzard of hackwork. Generic pabulum relying on outdated metaphors--Democratic donkeys, Republican elephants, tortured labels, ships of state labeled "U.S." sinking in oceans marked "debt," cars driving off cliffs, one hurricane after another, each labeled after some crisis new or imagined. Cut-and-paste art styles slavishly lifted from older cartoonists down to the last crosshatch. Work so bland and devoid of insight or opinion that readers can't tell if the artist is liberal or conservative. Cartoons that make no point whatsoever, such as those that mark anniversaries of news events, the deaths of corporate executives like Steve Jobs, and even holidays (for Veterans Day: "freedom isn't free").

To be sure, editors and publishers have hired and promoted the very worst of the worst. Prize committees snub brilliance and innovation in favor of safe and cheesy.

In the end, however, it's up to the members of any profession to police themselves individually and collectively. I often say, no one can publish your crappy cartoon if you don't draw it in the first place.

Amazingly my colleagues have chosen to ignore the existential crisis that faces American political cartooning. Rather than rise to the challenge, their work is becoming even safer and blander.

Moreover, we cartoonists are failing to hold one another to basic journalistic standards. This year political
cartooning has been hit by two plagiarism scandals. David Simpson, a long-time Tulsa political cartoonist with a history of this sort of thing, was fired by the weekly paper there after he got caught tracing old cartoons by the late Jeff MacNelly on a lightbox. Jeff Stahler, a cartoonist familiar to readers of USA Today, was recently forced to resign by The Columbus Dispatch after long-standing rumors of stealing ideas exploded into a series of too-close-for-comfort pairings of his work and classic material from The New Yorker.

They're only the tip of the iceberg.

There are plagiarists who have Pulitzer Prizes sitting on their shelves.  There are even more "self-plagiarists"--people who shamelessly recycle the same exact cartoon, changing labels on the same image in order to meet a deadline. They shortchange their readers and their clients--and collect the biggest salaries in the business.

Meanwhile, it is impossible for the "young" generation of talented cartoonists who came out of the alt weekly newspapers--those under 50--to find work at all.

Within the mainstream of the profession the general consensus is that we should keep quiet and wait for the storm to pass. They make excuses for serial plagiarists, self-plagiarists, and hacks. At this writing the professional association for political cartoonists, which in 2009 imposed its first penalty for plagiarism in its 50-year history under my presidency, has still failed to act to enforce that rule or issue a code of ethics.

"This is bad for the profession," I heard from more than one colleague after the Stahler story broke. "Let's be quiet."

No.

What's bad for the profession is bad work. How can we expect editors and publishers to respect us unless we respect ourselves?

(Ted Rall is the author of "The Anti-American Manifesto." His website is tedrall.com.)

http://news.yahoo.com/polices-political-cartooning-160124866.html

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Comments by the blog author

 

Great American political cartoonists like Herb Block and Bill Mauldin did a lot to shorten the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Not only were the cartoons well-drawn, ironic, and memorable, but they were drawn with detail, especially the facial expressions.
Johnson was drawn as a cold-blooded, power brokering manipulator, which in fact was what he was. Nixon was shown with shifty eyes, a scowl, and a certain bluffing exterior over his interior fear.

A great cartoon artist can show the citizens what a powerful man is really like underneath it all. But that takes talent, and the profession is shrinking. As it shrinks, it is promoting the doodlers who can’t draw a face accurately or elicit a shock-humor laugh.

As political cartoons get duller and cornier, spinners and calculating politicians gain. This is a sad situation for informed citizens.

The Real Santa

The History of Santa Claus:

Seven Interesting Facts

By The Week's Editorial Staff , December 23, 2011

From why he wears a red suit to when he got hitched to Mrs. Claus, a look at the mythmaking behind jolly old St. Nick

As Christmas approaches, children around the world have Santa on the brain. They're anxiously wondering if they've been overly naughty or sufficiently nice, and eagerly daydreaming about their potential gift hauls. But exactly how did the jolly, bearded North Pole resident evolve into the cultural icon we know today? Here, seven interesting facts about his evolution:

1.  He was real... sort of

Folklore may have turned Santa Claus into a toy distributor who mans a sleigh led by eight flying reindeer, but he is actually based, loosely, on a real person. Born around the year 270, St. Nicholas was the Bishop of Myra, a town in what is now Turkey. He earned a reputation as an anonymous gift giver, says MSNBC, by paying the dowries of impoverished girls and handing out treats and coins to children — often leaving them in their shoes, set out at night for that very purpose. Since his death, Nicholas has been canonized as the patron saint of children.

2.  He's only been 'Santa Claus' for 200 years

A Dutch tradition kept St. Nicholas' story alive in the form of Sinterklaas, a bishop who traveled from house to house to deliver treats to children on the night of Dec. 5. The first anglicizing of the name to Santa Claus was in a story that appeared in a New York City newspaper in 1773.

3.  Satire first sent Santa down a chimney

In his satiric 1809 book A History of New York, Washington Irving did away with the characterization of Santa Claus as a "lanky bishop," says Whipps. Instead, Irving described Santa as a portly, bearded man who smokes a pipe. Irving's story also marked the first time Santa slid down the chimney, says the U.K.’s Independent.

4.  "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" introduced the reindeer

Clement Moore's 1822 poem A Visit From Saint Nicholas — which is now more commonly referred to as "Twas the Night Before Christmas" — was first published anonymously in the Troy, N.Y., Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823. The 56-line poem introduced and popularized many of Santa's defining characteristics — chiefly, that he drove a sleigh guided by "eight tiny reindeer."

5.  Coca-Cola created the modern Mr. Claus

When Father Christmas first began showing up in illustrations, he wore many different colored robes: Green, purple, blue, and brown, among others. Beginning in the late 1800s, it became popular to outfit Santa in a red suit. Artist Louis Prang depicted him that way in a series of Christmas cards in 1885, and The New York Times reported on the red garments in 1927. But the modern image of Santa Claus as the jolly man in the red suit was seared into American pop culture in 1931, when artist Haddon Sundblom illustrated him that way for a widely-circulated campaign for Coca-Cola.

6.  The department store Santa is a 120-year-old tradition

In 1890, Massachusetts businessman James Edgar became the first department store Santa, according to The Smoking Jacket. Edgar is credited with coming up with the idea of dressing up in a Santa Claus costume as a marketing tool. Children from all over the state dragged their parents to Edgar's small dry goods store in Brockton, and a tradition was born.

7.  Santa was a bachelor until the late 1800s

The first mention of a spouse for Santa was in the 1849 short story A Christmas Legend by James Rees. Over the next several years, the idea of Mrs. Claus found its way into several literary publications, like the Yale Literary Magazine and Harper's Magazine. But it wasn't until Katherine Lee Bates' widely-circulated 1889 poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride that Santa's wife was popularized ("Goody" is short for "Goodwife," or "Mrs.")

http://news.yahoo.com/history-santa-claus-7-interesting-facts-124200094.html

Sources for the above Santa history: Colour Lovers, Independent, MSNBC, The Smoking Jacket

Four Big 2011 Science Breakthroughs

By The Week's Editorial Staff, December 23, 2011

From neutrinos to new planets, a look at some of the year's most important discoveries

1. Upending the laws of physics
Researchers at the CERN laboratory in Geneva announced in September that they'd clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. That finding directly contradicts Albert Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity, which holds that nothing can outrun light. If neutrinos can, they could arrive at a destination before they even left, opening the prospect of time travel. Or could it be that neutrinos move through an undiscovered fifth dimension, separate from the three dimensions of space and one of time that we know about? Those ideas are so shocking that even the CERN team "wanted to find a mistake" in their data, says team leader Antonio Ereditato. But they didn't. And so far, further testing has failed to dismiss the finding, says theoretical physicist Matthew Strassler, as "a doorway into something fundamental and deep we don't know about nature."

2. Reasons to listen to your gut
Bacteria in our intestines may play a major role in the health of our minds and bodies. German researchers have discovered that just as each human being has a specific blood type, each of us also has one of three separate families of bacteria residing in our guts. A person's "enterotype" likely establishes itself in infancy and appears to affect everything from how well food is digested to how drugs are absorbed. The discovery of the three distinct gut ecosystems "was a surprise, and it's good news," says researcher Peer Bork. The finding could help physicians diagnose and treat serious digestive disorders, and also help explain why the effects of medicines and nutrients vary widely from person to person. Further studies have shown that ingesting a bacteria species found in certain yogurts and cheeses calms stressed-out mice — pointing to the prospect of treating psychiatric disorders with microbes instead of drugs.

3. Closing in on alien life
A galaxy-wide search for Earth-like planets has returned a startling number of candidates. Using NASA's Kepler space telescope, astronomers this year announced they'd spotted 2,326 new worlds and counting. Ten of those planets are close in size to our own and orbit their suns in the "habitable zone," where temperatures could be balmy enough to support liquid water — and potentially life. The best contender yet, Kepler-22b, looks to be a hospitable 72 degrees and circles a star very similar to our sun. The data pouring in from the spacecraft, launched in March 2009, are "game-changing," says Kepler principal investigator William Borucki. "It's just a tremendous amount of new knowledge." Already, other researchers are scanning the most promising Kepler finds for signs of alien life.

4. A new weapon against aging
The fountain of youth might one day flow within our own cells. Scientists working with mice have discovered that if they remove a special kind of cell that promotes aging, a host of age-related conditions disappear: The genetically modified rodents didn't develop cataracts, their skin didn't wrinkle, and they maintained high levels of energy throughout their lives. The so-called senescent cells have lost the ability to divide, and as they build up in aging tissue, they release toxins that destroy robust neighboring cells. Scientists devised a way of killing off those senescent cells, and the procedure "suggests therapies that might work in real patients," says Norman E. Sharpless, an expert on aging. If purging the cells works in people as it does in mice, the treatment could ward off a host of age-related diseases, from cancer to dementia, and keep us vigorous longer.

http://news.yahoo.com/4-biggest-scientific-breakthroughs-2011-122400135.html

Higgs Boson Still AWOL

LHC researchers Still Can’t Find Higgs Boson, Settle for New "Chi" Particle
By Jason Mick (blog – picked up by TechDaily) December 22, 2011

The LHC does what every good particle smasher does -- find a new type of subatomic particle

The Large Hadron Collider has finally began to fulfill its potential. After a string of early malfunctions, the world's largest collider has set records for the highest energy particle collisions. Now, even as the smashing continues, the hard part begins -- combing through the mountains of data looking for interesting discoveries.

At the top of their wish list is the legendary Higgs boson, nicknamed the "God Particle", by the more colorful media establishment. The Higgs boson is a theoretically predicted particle that would confirm the standard model of particle physics, explaining why some particles have mass and others don't. Alternatively if the supersymmetry model holds true, up to five Higgs boson variants could be observed, disproving some of the standard model's theory.

I. LHC Finds a New Particle -- but not the Higgs Boson, Yet

Well, some of the data collected thus far has been scoured through, and disappointingly no evidence of the Higgs boson emerged. Instead researchers discovered a new kind of Chi (X) particle.

The Chi (X) particle is composed of a bottom quark (also known as a "beauty" quark) and its anti-particle equivalent, the anti-bottom quark.

Quarks are tiny subatomic particles, which make up the constituents of atoms -- like electrons, protons, and neutrons. Any particle made up of quarks is called a hadron. Their are two kinds of hadrons -- those made up of three quarks (baryons) and those made up a quark/anti-quark pair (meson). Since the new Chi particle is composed of a quark/anti-quark combination, it belongs to the meson subclass of the greater hadron family.

Mesons have integer spins, meaning that they are bosons (like the Higgs boson!). Boson particles obey Bose-Einstein statistics.

Chi mesons have a isospin of 0 (which dictates their strong interactions) and a positive G-parity on that isospin. Together this is represented in shorthand as 0+. The previously discovered chi particles had positive (P) parity and C-parity, and angular momentum values ranging from 0 to 2. The previously known Chi mesons are -- χb0(2P) (0+0++), χb1(2P) (0+1++), χb3(2P) (0+2++). The new particle is a "higher energy" Chi particle, in that it has a higher angular momentum number of 3. It's been dubbed χb(3P) -- (0+3++). Given the mass of the bottom quark -- over four times the mass of a proton -- it is unlikely that the LHC would have enough energy to create higher energy Chi particles.

II. LHC Passes a Time-Honored Accelerator Rite of Passage

Andy Chisholm, a PhD student from Birmingham, England, who worked on the project told BBC News that the location of the new Chi particle was a lucky find. He comments, "Analysing the billions of particle collisions at the LHC is fascinating. There are potentially all kinds of interesting things buried in the data, and we were lucky to look in the right place at the right time."

Finding its first particle is sort of a right of passage in the particle collider world. Past accelerators like FermiLab's Tevatron labored for years or more before finding their first particle, then went on to find many more particles over a fruitful run.
University of Birmingham physicist, Professor Paul Newman comments on this right of passage, stating, "This is the first time such a new particle has been found at the LHC. Its discovery is a testament to the very successful running of the collider in 2011 and to the superb understanding of our detector which has been achieved by the Atlas collaboration already."

Thus far at least 175 mesons have been discovered.

With each new meson discovered physicists creep a bit closer to understanding the strong force. This understanding helps them better known what to look for when trying to find the kind/kinds of Higgs boson(s) predicted by the standard and supersymmetry theories of particle physics. In that sense the discover of the new Chi quark may not be a "pay dirt" hit so to speak, but it's also not entirely a wash in the Higgs boson chase.

It also provides a bit of validation and good publicity, desperately needed to help the public appreciate the value of the accelerator -- which cost approximately $4.4B USD to build, and another billion or so to operate. Keeping the 17 mile, 28 km (circumference) accelerator productive will help it avoid a fate similar to America's Tevatron. If they can do that, physicists can continue their merry hunt for the Higgs boson and a better understanding of how our universe works on the most fundamental level.

Sources: Arxiv [Printserver; CERN] at http://arxi.orglabs/1112.5154 , BBC News at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16301908

Unedited from:

http://www.dailytech.com/LHC+Researchers+Still+Cant+Find+Higgs+Boson+Settle+for+New+Chi+Particle/article23584.htm
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              Comments by the Blog Author

I was tooling along calmly through this article, trying to groove on the subatomic physics of the research, when suddenly a chill ran up my spine and I stopped cold. Here’s what made me gasp and take a deep breath:

"Thus far at least 175 mesons have been discovered."

Whoa! We pump enormous energy into particles, speed them up near the speed of light, and smash them. In doing so, we pump energy into the smashed shards of matter. There are 175 different theoretical shards of one type of matter, the "meson." All 175 of these are short-lived particles.

What is this going to tell us about the large amount of "missing’ mass in the "standard model" of subatomic physics? What have we learned from these short-lived, perhaps synthetic and manmade particles? Not much. But if we find a different shard and describe it, more funding will be forthcoming.

Let’s compare this expensive contraption, the Large Hadron Collider, to some genuine and obviously fructive science, the periodic table of the elements. The periodic table was the source of the February 24, 2011 entry of this blog, itself the most viewed of all the postings to date.

At the end of that posting, I wrote this afterward:
"Charles Janet (1849-1932) devised a periodic chart which flows easily and without breaks through the increasing shell levels. Janet also conceived of an element "zero" consisting of two neutrons (with no electrons nor protons) as well as negative matter in a negative periodic table, in other words, he correctly theorized the existence of anti-matter. Janet died in 1932, just before the discovery of the neutron, the positron [itself the first known anti-matter particle] and heavy hydrogen (which is a hydrogen elemental atom with a second neutron). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Janet – the special periodic chart at this link shows the elements in clear, increasing shell order. Janet's correct speculations, though he was neither a physicist nor a chemist, show the intuitive power and probable truth to his model of the periodic table of the elements. His correct speculation of the existence of antimatter commands high respect."                                     --February 24, 2011 conclusion of that blog entry

So a clever and inventive examination of the periodic table – by a non-chemist and non-physicist – correctly predicted the existence of antimatter. Where is this kind of power and accuracy in modern physics?

We don’t have a physics model that will reveal to us (not just physicists, but all of us who know how to think scientifically) what the Higgs Boson is or why it is unnecessary. How many large Hadron colliders do we have to build to find it?

I speculate that the answer is "an infinite number." We are charging up a blind alley. The LHC will teach us less about physics than the energized and short-lived hyper-radioactive heavy elements have taught us about chemistry. It’s an inefficient, white elephant of a piece of equipment, smashing matter into shards (175 mesons!) that don’t reassemble into a coherent overall model.

I offer the physics community a better idea. Note the way photons boil off a strip of metal in an incandescent light. Note the way photons are emitted from florescent gas when electricity flows through that gas –- this is because the electricity raises the outer shell levels of some of the atoms, which return to a normal shell level and either create or reveal a photon in the process of "going down" to a lower shell level.

"How does this happen?" The photon is the smallest known particle. It’s so small we can’t even measure its mass. Let’s look into that. Let’s find out a lot more about this very fundamental, very stable particle (it can travel through space unchanged for at least 13 billion years). Let’s see what a STABLE small particle will offer us in terms of modeling subatomic physics. We can look at this process backwards, as well – the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein earned a Nobel Prize in 1921. How is it that a "massless" photon can eject an entire electron?

Answers to these simple questions come first in physics. Let’s grossly expand our understanding of a small, stable subatomic particle, the photon, until we know what it does, how it does it, whether it forms crystals, and how much it weighs. Then, and only then, if we need it, build a LHC. Or perhaps, instead, we should build a cheaper, cleverer machine that will tell us more about physics.

In the meantime, I condemn the CERN collider as a white elephant.

Email Fraud Is Cleverer Than Ever

By Deb Shinder, Tech Republic, December 12, 2011

Takeaway: Email-based cybercrime continues to thrive, but even the savviest users might fall for a clever scheme.  Deb Shinder offers tips to help you and your users remain vigilant.

Use of the communications infrastructure for for illegal or fraudulent purposes has been a problem since the inception of such systems. The U.S. Congress passed legislation outlawing mail fraud in 1872. It was inevitable that, when an electronic substitute came along, criminals would take advantage of it to further their scams.

Phishing may seem like "old news," but the phishing emails continue to pour in. During the holiday season, they become more prevalent - and in some cases, more sophisticated. And even if you think you’re too smart to be taken in, if you’re really smart, you’ll heed the seasonal advice that "You better watch out" and look closely before you click on links or attachments in any email messages, no matter who appears to have sent them.

Perhaps even more important, be sure to warn those in your organization or household, who may not be as tech-savvy as you, of the need to be particularly vigilant now. Don’t assume that just because they’ve been warned before, they won’t fall prey to the new tricks; busy people caught up in the spirit of the holidays tend to be more vulnerable.

Don’t be provoked into a hasty reaction

Scammers have a whole arsenal of tactics they use to try to get you to react, from pulling on your heartstrings with tales of starving children or puppies about to be euthanized to scaring you half to death with "official notices" from the IRS or your credit card company. Even if you’ve seen it all, some messages can evoke a visceral reaction that could cause you to click before you think - and that’s exactly what the criminals are going for.

My husband and I both experienced a moment of shock when we received copies of an email purporting to be from our wireless phone provider. It was formatted in the same way as the real messages we frequently get from the provider, but this time, instead of notifying us that our monthly statement was ready in the average amount we usually see, it announced that the bill was almost $2000!

It’s not like this was completely impossible. My husband had just returned from a trip to Russia, where he had taken his phone. We had gotten a genuinely shocking bill in the amount of over $800 a few years ago when he went to Israel and didn’t realize the ramifications of data roaming. And even though he had taken care to keep data turned off this time, my first thought was that he messed up and ran up another big bill.

But before I clicked on anything, I looked a little more closely. The return address appeared to be from verizonwireless.com, but wait a minute - the message was sent to one of my secondary email accounts, which is not the one that’s on file with Verizon. Upon further examination, the language in one place wasn’t quite right, either. An examination of the headers revealed the truth: the message originated from an address outside the country, and authentication results showed that the IP address did not match the VZW.com address shown.

Many computer users, however, undoubtedly react emotionally to the large amount of money they "owe" and click the link to get the details before checking out the message more thoroughly. And it’s not as if current email software always makes it easy to even find the Internet headers. In Outlook 2010, for example, you have to open the message, go to the File tab, and click the Properties button. That’s not particularly intuitive for someone who doesn’t do it all the time.

Because people often run up larger bills during the holidays than at other times of the year, scammers will take advantage of your fear that the big bill might actually be legit to try to fool you into clicking a link that will take you to a malware-laden site or downloading an attachment that contains a malicious payload.

You can’t necessarily trust "trusted" senders

We all have certain people whose messages we trust because we trust them. We know grandma isn’t going to (intentionally) send us porn links or viruses, but if grandma is technically naïve, we also know that her computer might very well have gotten infected without her knowledge. Thus, even though we trust grandma herself explicitly, we may not consider her to be a trusted sender.

The real danger comes from those we believe to be too security-conscious or too expert to have to worry about. A sad fact that I learned back when I was a police officer was that firearms instructors - those who had the most knowledge and experience with guns - so often experienced "ADs" (accidental discharges).

Likewise, it was the long-time traffic cops, the ones who had been doing stops for decades, who most often made the mistakes that led to them being shot when walking up to a vehicle. The reason for this is complacency - that sense that because you have experience and knowledge about something, you’re immune to its dangers. It leads you to let your guard down, to be less cautious than you should. And IT security professionals are just as prone to it as experts in any other field.

In fact, those who are most "expert" in IT tend to be the very ones who are most likely to turn off protective measures, such as blocking of attachments with particular file extensions, or use workarounds to defeat measures that are intended to keep them safe from malware.

Email dangers

There are three primary vectors for attacks via email: attachments, HTML mail, and links in the body of email messages. Opening attachments can activate the installation of viruses, trojans or worms that are embedded in the files. Scripts can be hidden in HTML pages. Links can take users to malicious web sites that surreptitiously dump "drive-by downloads" onto the system, or to phishing sites that resemble legitimate sites and thus trick the user into providing personal information and/or financial account information.

Cybercriminals use all of these techniques to attack systems, steal information, and commit other illegal acts.

Criminals can use email itself as the "weapon" in a denial of service attack. Email bombing is a term used to describe the sending of huge numbers of email messages to a victim in order to overload the email server or individual account. This can be done by subscribing the victim to a large number of high volume mailing lists, or by using tools for automating the bombing process that are made available through some black hat hacker sites.

Criminals often create "spoofed" email messages that appear to come from a source other than the actual sender. They may also use email anonymizer services to disguise the origin of their messages.

Email can, of course , be used for the same criminal purposes for which postal mail has been used.

Threatening email messages may constitute the crime of terrorist threat, assault by threat, or other specific offenses (depending on the laws of the state or country where they’re received). Email that doesn’t rise to the level of physical threats may fall under cyberstalking or harassment statutes.

White collar crime (financial crimes such as embezzlement, insurance fraud, bank fraud, blackmail, bribery, credit card fraud, insider trading, and so forth) often involve the use of email. Both violent and non-violent criminals use email because it’s convenient and leaves less physical evidence. Sending spam - unwanted commercial messages - maybe be considered a crime, too, under the U.S. federal CAN SPAM Act and various state laws.

Just as email can be the weapon in a cybercrime, email can also be the victim - that is, criminals may intercept others’ email messages to harvest the addresses, personal information or company trade secrets.

Preventing and stopping email-related cybercrime

Victims of email-related crime often don’t report the crimes to authorities because they believe there’s little that can be done. It’s certainly true that jurisdictional issues and the difficulty of identifying the perpetrators can make it difficult to prosecute these crimes, but a concerted effort by both individuals and businesses, in conjunction with law enforcement agencies, has brought down a number of criminal operations that used email to do their dirty deeds.

The partnering of large corporations with government to bring more resources to the effort to track down and disable cybercriminals can make a big difference, as well. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit’s work on bringing down major botnets such as Rustock and Kelihos has helped reduce global spam levels. The DCU has also teamed up with Microsoft Research to use technology to track child sex trafficking. A group of private sector organizations called the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance, with members such as McAfee and TrendMicro, recently announced its intent to work with governments in fighting online crime.
The civil court system can be used against email abusers, in place of or in conjunction with criminal laws.

Because the level of proof is lower in civil cases, it may be easier to win cases against cybercriminals there. Microsoft’s lawsuits against the Rustock and Kelihos defendants were instrumental in the take-down of those bots. In a recent civil judgment, Yahoo won a $610 million award from scammers who tricked Yahoo Mail customers into providing personal information by running an email-based lottery scheme.

Of course, from the point of view of the victims, an ounce of crime prevention is worth a pound of prosecution. Companies and individuals can take steps to keep cybercriminals out of their email systems or to prevent the malicious code they send from doing damage. Firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-malware software is a given. All computer users should be educated on best email practices, including basics such as:

• not opening unexpected attachments
• not clicking hyperlinks
• setting mail clients to display mail in plain text instead of HTML
• protecting the privacy of your primary email account, and using a "throwaway" web mail account for purposes such as registering on websites and mailing lists, or giving your address to anyone who might use it for spamming or sell it to someone who does.

Companies can cut email risks by using web forms on their websites as a means for people to contact them, instead of publishing company email addresses.

Encryption can thwart the plans of thieves to harvest information from email messages, and it’s also important to remember to completely destroy the email messages stored on a computer’s hard drive if you give the computer to someone else or recycle it. The safest route is to physical destroy the drive; if that’s not feasible, use a program that overwrites the data multiple times. Remember that simply deleting files or even formatting a drive does not erase the data on it.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/email-fraud-threatens-even-the-savviest-users-dont-get-complacent/7050?tag=nl.e550  

Positive Quiddity: Scientific Advances Against Alzheimer's

By Eric Pfeiffer, The Sideshow, December 19, 2011

Scientists have isolated a gene in mice that works to give them "super memories" and reverses the course of several degenerative mental illnesses like Alzheimer's. And because of the similarity of mice and human brains, a powerful brain pill for humans may now not be far off.

The brains of both mice and humans release a gene known as PKR, which is triggered by the onset of Alzheimer's. But the newly discovered gene can apparently block PKR's release--a development that not only can reverse the course of degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, but induces a state of "super
memory" in the mice it has been tested on.

"If we were to find an inhibitor, a molecule, a drug that will specifically block PKR, we should be able to do the same [in humans]," Maura Costa-Mattioli, who led the research study at Baylor University, told the Vancouver Sun. "And we did."

"We recognize that PKR plays a dual role, one in regulating simple everyday processes like the way neurons talk to each other [for] memory, but also has a stress response," added John Bell, a senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute who also contributed to the study.
More from the Sun:

A virus is one form of stress that triggers PKR, but Alzheimer's patients' brains also experience PKR-releasing stress, said Bell, whose cancer research led him to create PKR-deficient mice which he shared with Costa-Mattioli's lab. Researchers found that when PKR is genetically suppressed in mice, another immune molecule, called gamma interferon, increases communication between neurons, improving memory and making brain function more efficient, Costa-Mattioli said.

Reportedly, when PKR is blocked, the gamma interferon can work more or less spontaneously to improve brain functions--and can be activated via a simple PKR-inhibitor injection into a mouse's stomach rather than through more conventional and drawn-out gene therapy. The possible application for humans would lead to something like taking a "brain pill" to treat diseases like Alzheimer's, or simply to give the memory a significant boost:

When the researchers tested the PKR-deficient mice in a series of memory tests, those mice were able to pick up on patterns and remember them on the first try, while the other mice needed days to figure out how to solve the puzzle. The PKR-deficient mice consistently showed significantly better memory and learning abilities than their counterparts.

Of course, Costa-Mattioli said the goal is not to create a new society of super-memory powered people.

"Let's say we'd compare with Viagra. People use Viagra at whatever age, let's say 60, 65. But someone (who) is 40 goes to buy it, they can get it," he said. "But this is not our goal . . . Our goal would be to treat people who have a memory problem."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/super-memory-pill-possibly-alzheimer-cure-could-around-162010613.html

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There are more insights based on additional research on the protein that inhibits brain memory in mice at the February 29, 2012 Daily Quiddity blog.