If you eat at your desk, your keyboard could be a cesspool of hazardous organisms. In a recent study, the Royal Society of Chemistry found that some keyboards in London tested positive for the E. coli virus, as well as dangerous coliform and enterobacteria.
These bad microbes result from office workers eating over their keyboards and dropping crumbs between the buttons, which are then eaten at night by mice and other varmints that leave tiny pieces of feces where they had their meal.
The next day, the clueless officer worker mashes the feces into the tips of his fingers. If he then touches his fingers to his face, or eats more food without washing his hands, he runs the risk of disease or infection.
The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday. “If the various estimates we have received… come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish,” Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program’s green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.
A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones — ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.
When Carol Weiher was having her right eye surgically removed in 1998, she woke up hearing disco music. The next thing she heard was “Cut deeper, pull harder.” She desperately wanted to scream or even move a finger to signal to doctors that she was awake, but the muscle relaxant she’d received prevented her from controlling her movements.
“I was doing a combination of praying and pleading and cursing and screaming, and trying anything I could do but I knew that there was nothing that was working,” said Weiher, of Reston, Virginia.
Weiher is one of few people who have experienced anesthesia awareness. Although normally a patient does not remember anything about surgery that involves general anesthesia, about one or two people in every 1,000 may wake up during general anesthesia, according to the Mayo Clinic. Most of these cases involve the person being aware of the surrounding environment, but some experience severe pain and go on to have psychological problems.
Microsoft is now giving its Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 away for free. The download is just over 444MB so grab it if you want it.
Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 enables hobbyists and professional or non-professional developers to create robotics applications targeting a wide range of scenarios. The R3 release is a minor update that has the functionality of the previous Standard Edition, but is available at no cost to all users. As of the R3 release there are no separate Editions and only a single download.
In a strange sort of role reversal, Chinese companies are looking at setting up factories in America. With rising land costs, unreliable electricity and a stronger currency, it has started becoming cheaper for some Chinese companies to set up plants in America instead of back home.
Chinese company Yuncheng’s American Yuncheng Gravure Cylinder plant in South Carolina is a case in point. The company bought land in Spartanburg for one fourth the cost of a similar sized property in Shanghai. Even with the more expensive American workers they have to hire, Chinese companies are finding US to be a better and less expensive place to set up shop, with several American states offering tax credits and other incentives to lure Chinese manufacturers.
This is an amazing, unbelievable – some would say shocking – revelation. Office copying machines contain hard disks that store an image of every page copied by the copier. The material is not encrypted, so if a burglar, corporate spy or identity theft ring gets hold of the copier’s hard disk, they can access a treasure trove of personal information about employees and clients. They can also access company financial information, trade secrets, pay checks… anything put on the copier is stored.
