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One day last October, Eric York lugged the carcass of an adult mountain lion from his truck and laid it carefully on a tarp on the floor of his garage. The female mountain lion had a bloody nose, but her hide bore no other signs of trauma. York, a biologist at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, found the big cat lying motionless near the canyon’s South Rim. He was determined to learn why she died. Because the park lacks a forensics lab, he did the postmortem in his garage, in a village of about 2,000 park employees. Epidemic experts...

- YES! To begin with, let's try and fully understand what Renaissance Florence actually has accomplished, apart from making tourists feel like this: "I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear...

Many historians have assumed that Europe’s deadliest plague, the Black Death of 1347 to 1351, killed indiscriminately, young and old, hardy and frail, healthy and sick alike. But two anthropologists were not so sure. They decided to take a closer look at the skeletons of people buried more than 650 years ago. Their findings, published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the plague selectively took the already ill, while many of the otherwise healthy survived the infection. Although it may not be surprising that healthy people would be more likely to survive an...

Medieval DNA, Modern Medicine Volume 60 Number 6, November/December 2007 by Heather Pringle Will a cemetery excavation establish a link between the Black Death and resistance to AIDS? Beneath Eindhoven's modern skin of brick and asphalt lie the bones of its medieval townspeople. Studying their DNA may reveal the origin of the genetic resistance to AIDS. (Courtesy Laurens Mulkens) From the start, Nico Arts sensed that the frail remains of a child buried in front of a medieval church altar had an important story to tell. Arts is the municipal archaeologist in Eindhoven, a prosperous industrial city in the southern...

Most anybody in the mortgage business will tell you that August was a month that will live in infamy: The market was in turmoil, as doubts about the stability of subprime loans spread to other sectors of the mortgage world. How bad was it? A survey of mortgage brokers suggests that one in three consumers who recently signed purchase contracts canceled in August -- up from just 4 percent three years ago, according to the research firm that conducted the survey for Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade journal. The cancellation rate undoubtedly was fed by two scenarios playing out: Many...

More Americans Say Value Of Their Home Has Fallen Topics:Housing | Real Estate | Consumers | Economy (U.S.)By Reuters | 21 Sep 2007 | 10:48 AM ET Font size: A record 26% of U.S. homeowners say the value of their homes has fallen during the past year, above the previous peak of 24% seen in 1992, a survey released Friday showed. Reflecting the extent of the prolonged housing slump, 21% of homeowners polled in September expect the value of their home to decline in the year ahead, up from 18% in August, according to the data from Reuters/University of Michigan...

For centuries, rats and fleas have been fingered as the culprits responsible for the Black Death, the medieval plague that killed as many as two thirds of Europe’s population. But historians studying 14th-century court records from Dorset believe they may have uncovered evidence that exonerates them. The parchment records, contained in a recently-discovered archive, reveal that an estimated 50 per cent of the 2,000 people living in Gillingham died within four months of the Black Death reaching the town in October 1348. The deaths are recorded in land transfers lodged with the manorial court which – unusually for the period...

LONDON, May 7 (UPI) -- Bacteria from the same family as the Black Death was recently found inside British trash cans that are only emptied once every two weeks. A health hazards study found among some of the trash cans collected every 14 days, a strain of bacteria eerily similar to that of the one that killed 75 million people during the Middle Ages, The Daily Mail said Monday. The study found some of the bacteria found in the receptacles were from the exact family from which the yersinia pestis strain originated centuries ago. Such troubling findings were included in...

PLAGUED BY FEAR: Second of seven parts Vials reported missing and feds swarm in Previously: At a time when the government was on alert for bioterrorism attacks, Texas Tech University researcher Dr. Thomas Butler was working with federal officials to confirm the effectiveness of an antibiotic against plague. On Jan. 11, 2003, Butler discovered that 30 vials of plague bacteria from his laboratory were missing. Monday, March 27, 2006 John Mangels Plain Dealer Reporter The day was almost over when the astonishing phone call came in to the Lubbock FBI office. It was Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2003, around 5 p.m....

Plagued by fear: First of seven parts Dr. Thomas Butler was the government's go-to guy if you were worried about a plague attack - and in the hair-trigger months after Sept. 11, 2001, a lot of federal officials were. For parts of three decades, he had treated the Black Death's bloated victims in the Third World. He'd plumbed the bacteria's dark secrets in university labs in Cleveland, and later in Lubbock, Texas, searching for better ways to blunt its lethal kiss. After Jan. 11, 2003, none of that mattered. Sunday, March 26, 2006 John Mangels Plain Dealer Science On a...

Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) is one of the oldest known diseases of the plant world. Plague--known as the "black death" in medieval Europe--is one of the oldest diseases afflicting humans, and has become a focus of concern in recent years because of its potential use as a bioweapon. Now scientists have transformed TMV to infect host plants and produce immunizing proteins rather than debilitating leaf shrivel, turning greenhouse tobacco into a biofactory for plague vaccine. Biotechnology specialists Charles Arntzen and his colleagues at Arizona State University used a process developed in Germany to effect the change. First, they injected the...

Pesticides, which undergo an Environmental Protection Agency registration process that can cost up to $50 million for a single new product, has seen many excellent products withdrawn from the market despite years of successful and effective use against a wide range of insect or rodent pests. There is little incentive to introduce new ones. Too many people remained convinced the pesticides will kill them, not the pests.

This month, the New Jersey Pest Management Association issued a news release to warn against the prospect of billions of mosquitoes and threat of West Nile Fever they pose. West Nile Fever arrived in New York City in 1999 and, within three years, it had spread to California. In Washington, an executive order was signed recently to insure that avian flu does not reach these shores and, when a single case of Mad Cow Disease was discovered, the border was shut to Canadian beef. When SAARS broke out in Red China a few years ago, it too was quickly quarantined....

In the 1200’s in Europe something began to change. Most of the wealth of Europe came from the produce of land. Pollen evidence, as well as glacial evidence, prove that from 750 AD to 800 AD, and again two hundred years later from 1150 AD to 1200 AD, Europe’s weather suddenly starting warming, known as the “Medieval Warm”. Pollen studies of the beech forests along the Fernau glacier and in the Ardenes region of Northern France prove that these forests started to expand their borders during the late Eight Century from their A.D. 200 borders, and we discover that Alpine...

According to the Al Qaeda letter sent to Al Quds in London claiming responsibility for the Spanish bombings a huge operation targeting the USA is 90 percent ready. IT was stated, "Operation Winds of Black Death is in its final preparation." This was just reported on the live broadcast. No link yet.

If I were to tell you that the Congress of Racial Equality held a teach-in last month, and that among the featured speakers was one of the founders of Greenpeace, what would you suppose was the agenda? Denouncing the policies of rich-world environmentalists whose policies mean suffering and death for hundreds of millions of destitute people in poor countries, especially in Africa. That's what. Participants minced no words in their description of the event, and I intend to deliver them to you largely unminced as well, because they know what they are talking about and they've said it better than...

Although SARS does not appear to be as contagious as the 1918 Spanish flu, its mortality rate is higher. The current pandemic shows that in the future, new infectious diseases will increasingly be a global problem. Modern air transportation can spread a disease all over the world within a very brief period of time. In other words, as was the case with food-borne epidemics, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, insect-borne diseases such as the West Nile virus and AIDS, an outbreak anywhere in the world is soon a threat everywhere. As we experienced with the Hong Kong bird flu in 1997, when more...

The Black Death of the 1300s was probably not the modern disease known as bubonic plague, according to a team of anthropologists studying on these 14th century epidemics. “Although on the surface, seem to have been similar, we are not convinced that the epidemic in the 14th century and the present day bubonic plague are the same,” says Dr. James Wood, professor of anthropology and demography at Penn State. “Old descriptions of disease symptoms are usually too non-specific to be a reliable basis for diagnosis.” The researchers note that it was the symptom of lymphatic swelling that led 19th century...

Black Death 'was not plague' say experts The Black Death may not have been caused by bubonic plague after all, say US scientists. They have been looking at church records from the 14th century to find out how the disease spread. They now think it was probably some other infection passed on by human contact and not bubonic plague which relies on flea-ridden rats. Records show the disease spread along busy roads and rivers and over natural barriers which would have restricted rats. They also say there are other diseases with similar symptoms which are more likely candidates. The modern...