By Sally Jenkins, Rick Maese and Scott Clement, Published: May 16, 2013 at 7:40 pm

They remember the hard hits – most of them, at least. The brain-rattlers that left them blank-eyed and disoriented, they have no recollection of at all. But the ones that snapped ligaments, rendered bones the consistency of crushed ice or bent joints in ways they ought not to bend are still felt every morning years later.

A career in the National Football League creates echoes good and bad. Some reverberate in medical records, others in luxuries from rich contracts. But the most vivid ones for many former players come when they get out of bed each day and put their feet on the floor. If the NFL confers wealth – a rookie’s base pay next season will be $405,000 – it exacts a heavy price: lifelong hurt.

A Washington Post survey of retired NFL players found that nearly nine in 10 report suffering from aches and pains on a daily basis, and they overwhelmingly – 91 percent – connect nearly all their pains to football.

“I hurt like hell every morning when I wake up,” says former linebacker Darryl Talley, 52.


more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/feature/wp/2013/05/16/do-no-harm-retired-nfl-players-endure-a-lifetime-of-hurt/

by HOWARD BERKES
May 17, 201312:47 PM

The tragic deaths of 29 coal miners in a massive explosion in 2010 have provided new evidence of a resurgence of the disease known as black lung.

On Monday, a team of pathologists and lung disease experts will present the results of a detailed study of lung tissue from some of the victims of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia. They'll describe the findings at the American Thoracic Society's annual conference in Philadelphia this weekend.

"Our pathology �— where we actually see the lung tissue, we actually see the scars, we see the dust — confirms we're seeing a problem," says Robert Cohen, the lead researcher and chairman of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Cook County Health and Hospitals System in Illinois.

Cohen's team reviewed lung tissue obtained from autopsies of seven of the Upper Big Branch victims. Only seven families of the deceased coal miners granted permission for the study.

Six of the seven samples bore telltale scarring that indicates black lung. One of the samples showed a "fairly advanced form of the disease."

more

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/05/17/184758863/doctors-confirm-black-lung-in-victims-of-mine-blast

17 May 2013

Joe Farman, one of three British scientists who discovered a ‘hole’ in the ozone layer, died on 11 May (see obituaries in the Guardian and the Telegraph).

It was exactly 28 years ago yesterday (on 16 May 1985) that Joe Farman, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin published their finding in Nature. It prompted global action to ban chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, the man-made chemicals that were breaking down ozone high in the atmosphere. The ozone hole still appears above Antarctica every spring, but it is on the mend and scientists hope that it will be completely healed in the next century.

The paper is the subject of episode two of our new podcast series, The Nature PastCast.

In the podcast, Farman’s colleague Jonathan Shanklin recalls sifting through a backlog of ozone data from the British Antarctic Survey’s station at Halley Bay. At first, he remembers, Farman thought that the springtime dip in ozone was a one-off. Shanklin says he was the ‘little voice’ in the background that convinced Farman that the dip in ozone had happened every spring for several years, demonstrating a systematic decline.

Unfortunately, Farman himself was too unwell to be interviewed for our podcast, but his version of events can be heard in an interview published by the British Library, as part of their Oral Histories project.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/05/co-discoverer-of-ozone-hole-dies.html

This remarkable chandelier from Hilden & Diaz projects a 360° shadow of trees and roots onto the walls surrounding it. Titled Forms in Nature the light was partly inspired by the drawings of Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist, naturalist, and philosopher (among other things) who is perhaps most famous for discovering thousands of new animal species and mapping them to a genealogical “tree of life”. Hilden & Diaz describe via their website that the shadows in their light are actually upside down:



more
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/05/chandelier-projects-tree-shadows-onto-the-wall/

by DL Cade · May 17, 2013


Photographer Nicolas Reusens has always been interested in insects, so when he purchased his first DSLR three years ago, he immediately dove into the art of macro photography. By using the technique known as focus stacking — combining several images taken at different depths of field — he’s generated some truly eye-popping photos of creepy crawlies from all over the world.

When we say all over the world, we’re not exaggerating. Reusens is half Swedish by birth and lives in Spain, but over the past three years, he has travelled to Costa Rica three times, Malaysia twice, South Africa twice, the Peruvian Amazon, Ecuador, Mexico and more to find and photograph his subjects.

His choice to user focus stacking arose from a need to increase his depth of field without stopping down his aperture. Stopping down the aperture requires longer exposure times, and in some cases leads to diffraction and reduced sharpness.

By combining anywhere from 2 to 200 exposures (no, we didn’t add an extra zero, Reusens actually uses that many exposures for some of his more extreme macro shots) using Zerene Stacker, he creates images that he tells us would be “physically impossible with normal imaging equipment”:


Read more at http://petapixel.com/2013/05/17/focus-stacked-macro-photos-of-bugs-by-photographer-nicolas-reusens/#wk5l9UFbe59dBGPs.99

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Obama scandal!

By Tom Toles

At last. The left is angry at Obama because his administration has overbuilt the national security state, and the right is mad because Obama is Obama, still, and still president, so whatever will do. Too aggressive, not aggressive enough, too much war, not enough war, which way IS the wind blowing today?

The size of the national security state is an argument that is overdue in any case. The problem here is that too many people secretly WANT an overblown national security apparatus. Exhibit A? Airports. Need an example of Americans’ willingness to submit to truly bovine-like humiliation for some peace of mind that is unrelated in any way to risk probabilities? Americans are funny in their fears, as they shuffle forward with their removed shoes in the plastic bins. They will gladly stroll into a medical system that regularly mis-diagnoses and mis-treats and kills tens of thousands of them each and every year (see Monday’s blog), but the vanishingly remote possibility that a TERRORIST might do them in, and that’s a death worse than fate itself.

But anyway, why did Obama change up his promised restraint on national security? Guessing time! Here’s MY guess! He saw some pretty alarming intelligence when he took office. He might have also run the political calculation. How would Americans respond to ANY kind of lapse in security? (Hint: BENGHAZI!) Conclusion? Little downside in the direction of too much security. And again, what do a LOT of Americans secretly want? Government intercepting EVERY call, EVERY email, EVERY group activity (except tea party ones) so as to reduce the terror risk down to zero. As long as “the FIRST job of a president is to protect the safety of the American people” is an applause line, that’s the direction we’ll be going. If Obama falters here, Americans already have their shoes off ready to throw at him.