The Jim Bakker Show

Belgian scientists make novel water-from-urine machine

Belgian scientist Derese pours water from a machine that turns urine into drinkable water and fertilizer using solar energy, at the University of Ghent

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A team of scientists at a Belgian university say they have created a machine that turns urine into drinkable water and fertilizer using solar energy, a technique which could be applied in rural areas and developing countries.

While there are other options for treating waste water, the system applied at the University of Ghent uses a special membrane, is said to be energy-efficient and to be applicable in areas off the electricity grid.

“We’re able to recover fertilizer and drinking water from urine using just a simple process and solar energy,” said University of Ghent researcher Sebastiaan Derese.

The urine is collected in a big tank, heated in a solar-powered boiler before passing through the membrane where the water is recovered and nutrients such as potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus are separated.

Under the slogan #peeforscience, the team recently deployed the machine at a 10-day music and theater festival in central Ghent, recovering 1,000 liters of water from the urine of revelers.

The aim is to install larger versions of the machine in sports venues or airports but also to take it to a rural community in the developing world where fertilisers and reliable drinking water are short in supply, Derese said.

As was the case with previous projects the research team was engaged in, the water recovered from the city festival will be used to make one of Belgium’s most coveted specialties – beer.

“We call it from sewer to brewer,” Derese said.

(Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek; editing by Philip Blenkinsop/Jermey Gaunt)

Florida health department investigates possible local Zika transmission

(Reuters) – Florida health officials said on Tuesday they are investigating a case of Zika virus infection that does not appear to have stemmed from travel to another region with an outbreak.

The statement from the Florida Department of Health did not specify whether the Zika case was believed to have been transmitted via mosquito bite, sexual contact or other means.

The department said the case was reported in Miami-Dade County and that it is working with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on an epidemiological study.

The department also reiterated guidance to Florida residents on protecting themselves from mosquitoes that may carry the virus.

“Zika prevention kits and repellant will be available for pickup … and distributed in the area under investigation,” the health department said in a statement. “Mosquito control has already conducted reduction and prevention activities in the area of investigation.”

Zika, which can cause a rare birth defect and other neurological conditions, has spread rapidly through the Americas. A small number of cases of Zika transmitted between sexual partners have also been documented.

There has yet to be a case of local transmission by mosquitoes in the continental United States, though more than 1,300 people in the country have reported infections after traveling to a Zika outbreak area.

U.S. officials have predicted local outbreaks to begin as the weather warms, particularly in southern states such as Florida and Texas.

(Reporting by Michele Gershberg in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Bernard Orr)

U.S. GMO food labeling bill passes Senate

A customer picks up produce near a sign supporting a ballot initiative in Washington state that would require labelling of foods containing genetically modified crops at the Central Co-op in Seattle, Washington October 29, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Redmond

By Chris Prentice

(Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved legislation that would for the first time require food to carry labels listing genetically-modified ingredients, which labeling supporters say could create loopholes for some U.S. crops.

The Senate voted 63-30 for the bill that would display GMO contents with words, pictures or a bar code that can be scanned with smartphones. The U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) would decide which ingredients would be considered genetically modified.

The measure now goes to the House of Representatives, where it is expected to pass.

Drawing praise from farmers, the bill sponsored by Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas and Democrat Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan is the latest attempt to introduce a national standard that would override state laws, including Vermont’s that some say is more stringent, and comes amid growing calls from consumers for greater transparency.

“This bipartisan bill ensures that consumers and families throughout the United States will have access, for the first time ever, to information about their food through a mandatory, nationwide label for food products with GMOs,” Stabenow said in a statement.

A nationwide standard is favored by the food industry, which says state-by-state differences could inflate costs for labeling and distribution. But mandatory GMO labeling of any kind would still be seen as a loss for Big Food, which has spent millions lobbying against it.

Farmers lobbied against the Vermont law, worrying that labeling stigmatizes GMO crops and could hurt demand for food containing those ingredients, but have applauded this law.

Critics like Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, say the bill’s vague language and allowance for electronic labels for scanning could limit its scope and create confusion.

“When parents go to the store and purchase food, they have the right to know what is in the food their kids are going to be eating,” Sanders said on the floor of the Senate ahead of the vote.

He said at a news conference this week that major food manufacturers have already begun labeling products with GMO ingredients to meet the new law in his home state.

Another opponent of the bill, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, said it would institute weak federal requirements making it virtually impossible for consumers to access information about GMOs.

LOOPHOLES

Food ingredients like beet sugar and soybean oil, which can be derived from genetically-engineered crops but contain next to no genetic material by the time they are processed, may not fall under the law’s definition of a bioengineered food, critics say.

GMO corn may also be excluded thanks to ambiguous language, some said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) raised concerns about the involvement of the USDA in a list of worries sent in a June 27 memo to the Senate Agriculture Committee.

In a letter to Stabenow last week, the USDA’s general counsel tried to quell those worries, saying it would include commercially-grown GMO corn, soybeans, sugar and canola crops.

The vast majority of corn, soybeans and sugar crops in the United States are produced from genetically-engineered seeds. The domestic sugar market has been strained by rising demand for non-GMO ingredients like cane sugar.

The United States is the world’s largest market for foods made with genetically altered ingredients. Many popular processed foods are made with soybeans, corn and other biotech crops whose genetic traits have been manipulated, often to make them resistant to insects and pesticides.

“It’s fair to say that it’s not the ideal bill, but it is certainly the bill that can pass, which is the most important right now,” said American Soybean Association’s (ASA) director of policy communications Patrick Delaney.

The association was part of the Coalition for Safe and Affordable Food, which lobbied for what labeling supporters termed the Deny Americans the Right to Know, or DARK Act, that would have made labeling voluntary. It was blocked by the Senate in March.

(Reporting by Chris Prentice in New York; Additional reporting by Karl Plume in Chicago, Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles and Kouichi Shirayanagi and Eric Beech in Washington; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Ed Davies)

NASA’s Juno spacecraft loops into orbit around Jupiter

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – NASA’s Juno spacecraft capped a five-year journey to Jupiter late Monday with a do-or-die engine burn to sling itself into orbit, setting the stage for a 20-month dance around the biggest planet in the solar system to learn how and where it formed.

“We’re there. We’re in orbit. We conquered Jupiter,” lead mission scientist Scott Bolton, with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, told reporters on Tuesday. “Now the fun begins.”

Juno will spend the next three months getting into position to begin studying what lies beneath Jupiter’s thick clouds and mapping the planet’s gargantuan magnetic fields.

Flying in egg-shaped orbits, each one lasting 14 days, Juno also will look for evidence that Jupiter has a dense inner core and measure how much water is in the atmosphere, a key yardstick for figuring out how far away from the sun the gas giant formed.

Jupiter’s origins, in turn, affected the development and position of the rest of the planets, including Earth and its fortuitous location conducive to the evolution of life.

“The question I’ve had my whole life that I’m hoping we get an answer to is ‘How’d we get here?’ That’s really pretty fundamental to me,” Bolton said.

Jupiter orbits five times farther from the sun than Earth, but it may have started out elsewhere and migrated, jostling its smaller sibling planets as it moved.

Jupiter’s immense gravity also diverts many asteroids and comets from potentially catastrophic collisions with Earth and the rest of the inner solar system.

Launched from Florida nearly five years ago, Juno needed to be precisely positioned, ignite its main engine at exactly the right time and keep it firing for 35 minutes to become only the second spacecraft to orbit Jupiter.

If anything had gone even slightly awry, Juno would have sailed helplessly past Jupiter, unable to complete a $1 billion mission.

The risky maneuver began as planned at 11:18 p.m. EDT as Juno soared through the vacuum of space at more than 160,000 mph (257,500 kph).

NASA expects Juno to be in position for its first close-up images of Jupiter on Aug. 27, the same day its science instruments are turned on for a test run.

Only one other spacecraft, Galileo, has ever circled Jupiter, which is itself orbited by 67 known moons. Bolton said Juno is likely to discover even more.

Seven other U.S. space probes have sailed past the gas giant on brief reconnaissance missions before heading elsewhere in the solar system.

The risks to the spacecraft are not over. Juno will fly in highly elliptical orbits that will pass within 3,000 miles (4,800 km) of the tops of Jupiter’s clouds and inside the planet’s powerful radiation belts.

Juno’s computers and sensitive science instruments are housed in a 400-pound (180-kg) titanium vault for protection. But during its 37 orbits around Jupiter, Juno will be exposed to the equivalent of 100 million dental X-rays, said Bill McAlpine, radiation control manager for the mission.

The spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, is expected to last for 20 months. On its final orbit, Juno will dive into Jupiter’s atmosphere, where it will be crushed and vaporized.

Like Galileo, which circled Jupiter for eight years before crashing into the planet in 2003, Juno’s demise is designed to prevent any hitchhiking microbes from Earth from inadvertently contaminating Jupiter’s ocean-bearing moon Europa, a target of future study for extraterrestrial life.

(Editing by Kim Coghill and Andrew Heavens)

Human flights to Mars still at least 15 years off: ESA head

By Maria Sheahan and Ashutosh Pandey

DARMSTADT, Germany (Reuters) – Dreaming of a trip to Mars? You’ll have to wait at least 15 years for the technology to be developed, the head of the European Space Agency (ESA) said, putting doubt on claims that the journey could happen sooner.

“If there was enough money then we could possibly do it earlier but there is not as much now as the Apollo program had,” ESA Director-General Jan Woerner said, referring to the U.S. project which landed the first people on the moon.

Woerner says a permanent human settlement on the moon, where 3D printers could be used to turn moon rock into essential items needed for the two-year trip to Mars, would be a major step toward the red planet.

U.S. space agency NASA hopes to send astronauts to Mars in the mid-2030s and businessman Elon Musk, head of electric car maker Tesla Motors, says he plans to put unmanned spacecraft on Mars from as early as 2018 and have humans there by 2030.

The ESA’s Woerner said it would take longer.

A spacecraft sent to Mars would need rockets and fuel powerful enough to lift back off for the return trip and the humans would need protection from unprecedented physical and mental challenges as well as deep-space radiation.

Woerner would like to see a cluster of research laboratories on the moon, at what he calls a “moon village”, to replace the International Space Station when its lifetime ends and to test technologies needed to make the trip to Mars.

That could be funded and operated by a collection of private and public bodies from around the world, he said in an interview at the ESA’s Operations Centre.

“There are various companies and public agencies asking to join the club now, so they want to do different things, resource mining, in situ research, tourism and that kind of stuff. There is a big community interested,” he told Reuters.

“The moon village is a pit stop on the way to Mars,” Woerner said, adding that new 3D printing technology could be used to build material and structures out of rocks and dust, doing away with the cost of transporting everything needed for a mission.

“To test how to use lunar material to build some structures, not only houses, but also for a telescope or whatever, will teach us also how to do it on Mars,” he said.

The ESA, working with Russia, in March sent a spacecraft on a seven-month journey as part of the agency’s ExoMars mission, which will use an atmospheric probe to sniff out signs of life on Mars and deploy a lander to test technologies needed for a rover scheduled to follow in 2020.

Woerner said Europe was looking at ways to lower the cost of launches but did not plan to copy Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is trying to develop relatively cheap, reusable launch vehicles.

“We should not copy. To follow and copy does not bring you into the lead. We are looking for totally different approaches,” Woerner said, adding the ESA was examining all manner of new technologies, including air-breathing engines that do not need to tap into oxygen from a spacecraft’s tank.

(Additional reporting by Reuters TV; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Record 1,284 planets added to list of worlds beyond solar system

An artist's concept depicts select planetary discoveries made to date by NASA's Kepler space telescope

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – Astronomers have discovered 1,284 more planets beyond our solar system, with nine possibly in orbits suitable for surface water that could bolster the prospects of supporting life, scientists said on Tuesday.

The announcement brings the total number of confirmed planets outside the solar system to 3,264. Called exoplanets, the bulk were detected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which searched for habitable planets like Earth.

The new planets were identified during Kepler’s four-year primary mission, which ended in 2013, and previously had been considered planet-candidates.

Scientists announcing the largest single finding of planets to date used a new analysis technique that applied statistical models to confirm the batch as planets, while ruling out scenarios that could falsely appear to be orbiting planets.

“We now know there could be more planets than stars,” Paul Hertz, NASA’s astrophysics division director, said in a news release. “This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe.”

Of the new planets, nearly 550 could be rocky like Earth, NASA said. Nine planets are the right distance from a star to support temperatures at which water could pool. The discovery brings to 21 the total number of known planets with such conditions, which could permit life.

Kepler looked for slight changes in the amount of light coming from about 150,000 target stars. Some of the changes were caused by orbiting planets passing across, or transiting, the face of their host stars, relative to Kepler’s line of sight.

The phenomenon is identical to Monday’s transit of Mercury across the sun, as seen from Earth’s perspective.

The analysis technique, developed by Princeton University astronomer Tim Morton and colleagues, analyzed which changes in the amount of light are due to planets transiting and which are due to stars or other objects.

The team verified, with a more than 99 percent accuracy, that 1,284 candidates were indeed orbiting planets, Morton said.

The results suggest that more than 10 billion potentially habitable planets could exist throughout the galaxy, said Kepler lead scientist Natalie Batalha, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The nearest potentially habitable planet is about 11 light years from Earth.

“Astronomically speaking, that’s a very close neighbor,” she said.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Letitia Stein and James Dalgleish)

Battling cancer with light

By Ben Gruber

(Reuters) – Researchers have for the first time used a technique called optogenetics to prevent and reverse cancer by manipulating electrical signals in cells.

Lead author on the study Brook Chernet injected frog embryos with two types of genes, an oncogene to predispose them to cancer and another gene to produce light sensitive “ion channels” in tumor-type cells.

Ion channels are passageways into and out of the cell that open in response to certain signals. When the channels are open, the movement of ions into or out of the cell creates an electrical signal.

The researchers were able to activate the channels on tumor-type cells by exposing the embryos to light. By activating the channels and adjusting the electrical signals in the cells, the team was able to both prevent and reverse tumor formation in 30 percent of cases, according to the study.

“You can turn on the light, in this case it’s blue light and you blink this blue light at this tumor, I believe it’s 24 hours, and the tumor goes away,” said researcher Dany Adams, a co-author on the paper.

This latest success builds on years of research from Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts University.

“We call this whole research program cracking the bioelectric code,” said Levin, professor and chair of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

By targeting the electrical patterns in cells, it’s possible to control how fast they divide and what information they share with their neighbors, says Levin.

“The idea is much like the brain when neuroscientists try to figure out the semantics of electrical states in the brain, we try to figure out how patterns are encoded in electrical states in the body,” he added.

The use of optogenetics to control ion channels has been an important research tool for neuroscientists studying the brain and nervous system. This is the first time the technique has been applied to cancer research.

“The electrical communication amongst cells is really important for tumor suppression. The bigger picture is to understand how these voltages are passed among cells and how they control the transfer of chemical signals among cells,” Levin said.

“We need to crack this bioelectrical code. We really need to figure out how computations in tissues and decision making about pattern and cell behavior and so on are encoded in electrical signaling. That is sort of the next ten years,” he added.

The role of optogenetics in cancer treatment for humans is still unclear, but the underlying science of how electricity functions in the body has the potential to unlock new ways of treating all types of disease in years to come.

The study was published in the journal Oncotarget last month.

Duo Storms Bring Potential Flooding and Snow to High Plains and Rockies

Duo storm systems over the Midwest and Rockies is likely to produce heavy rainfall capable of flooding, severe thunderstorms, and even snow.

The Weather Channel reports that the High Plains will see severe thunderstorms and even some flooding as the 4-5 day period of rain falls over the area. Some parts of the plains may even set all-time monthly records for April.

Many areas in the Plains from South Dakota to Texas could see at least 3 inches of rainfall through Tuesday evening. Parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas could see around 5-8 inches of rain over the next few days.

Additionally, this storm could produce severe thunderstorms with large hail, damaging winds, and possibly tornadoes.

And if that weren’t enough, the High Plains may also see snow as Winter Storm Vexo hits the Rockies this weekend.

The National Weather Service has issued winter storm warnings for parts of Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. So far, The Weather Channel has reported that Nebraska and South Dakota will be the only states in the High Plains to possibly see snow.

Winter Storm Vexo will also bring strong winds that could reach gusting speeds of 30-50 mph and may cause power outages throughout the Rockies and High Plains.

New “Superbug” Gene Found in People and Pigs in China Makes Bacteria Antibiotic-Resistant

Scientists in China have made the “alarming” discovery that another line of defense against infection may have been breached. In research studies led by Hua Liu from the South China Agricultural University, they have identified infectious bacteria that may be resistant to antibiotics.

The University published their work in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal finding the gene called mcr-1, on plasmids – mobile DNA that can be easily copied and transferred between different bacteria.

According to several news reports, these untreatable superbugs originated in animals before spreading to humans and are highly resistant to antibiotics known as polymyxins, our last line of defense against disease when all else fails.

They include E.coli, the pneumonia bug Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa which can trigger serious lung, blood, and surgical infections.

Professor Nigel Brown, president of Britain’s Microbiology Society, said: “This discovery that resistance to polymyxins can be transferred between bacteria is alarming.

“Now that it has been demonstrated that resistance can be transferred between bacteria and across bacterial species, another line of defense against infection is in danger of being breached.

“We need careful surveillance to track the potential global spread of this resistance, and investment in research to discover new drugs with different modes of action.”

According to Reuters, researchers warned that these findings suggest “the progression from extensive drug resistance to pandrug resistance is inevitable.”

“(And) although currently confined to China, mcr-1 is likely to emulate other resistance genes … and spread worldwide.”

Leonid Meteor Shower At Peak Tonight

Tonight, tiny sand sized bits of debris and dust from the Temple-Tuttle comet will pass the earth, fall through it’s atmosphere and ignite. This show, called the Leonid Meteor Shower fills the sky every November and features up to a dozen meteors seen an hour.

The Leonids appear to be coming from the constellation Leo the Lion (hence their name) in the east, but they should be visible all the way across the sky. Leonids strike the Earth’s atmosphere at a zipping 158,000 mph, the fastest of any meteor shower.

Skywatching experts say that the best time to see the annual mid-November show will be between midnight and dawn.

As always, the best place to watch is said to be away from city light, preferably in a rural location with little light pollution. Since the eye can take up to 45 minutes to adapt to the dark, USA Today advises skywatchers to be patient so that the falling stars become brighter to them as the night wears on.

According to NASA, the waning crescent moon should leave skies dark enough for a decent show.

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