Channel 42
Science is the answer to everything.

At 11 a.m. EDT on Oct. 1, the eighteenth tropical depression of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season was born. He’s a little guy, but is likely going to grow up to be a tropical storm and get the name Olaf later today or tomorrow. He’s not, however, expected to reach hurricane strength.

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Hundreds of thousands of seniors are likely to lose income — and tens of thousands will also lose some or all of the in-home and supportive care they rely on — as budget cuts resulting from California’s 2009 fiscal crisis start to go into effect as of today, according to a new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, “California Budget Cuts Fray the Long-Term Safety Net.”

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Being a typhoon seems to be the “in thing” lately for tropical cyclones in the Western Pacific, and Melor is now one of the “in crowd.” NASA’s QuikScat and Aqua satellites helped the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center confirm that Melor now has sustained winds near 115 knots. The Marianas Islands have posted watches and warnings anticipating Melor’s arrival.

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Researchers at Iowa State University have identified an enzyme that helps make tuberculosis resistant to a human’s natural defense system. Researchers have also found a method to possibly neutralize that enzyme, which may someday lead to a cure for tuberculosis, a contagious disease that kills 1.5 to 2 million people worldwide annually.

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High-risk surgery patients experienced shorter hospital stays when their care was co-managed by hospitalists and their surgeons, a study has found. And, patients reported they were treated by doctors with more courtesy and respect.

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People taking one of several drugs commonly prescribed to treat Alzheimer’s disease are more likely to be hospitalized for a potentially serious condition called bradycardia than patients not taking these medications.

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At simultaneous press conferences in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Oct. 1, UC Berkeley’s Tim White and members of an international research team showed off their reconstruction of a fossil skeleton of our oldest ancestor yet. The skeleton, dubbed Ardi and dating from 4.4 million years ago, is a million years older than Lucy and revolutionizes our understanding of how humans evolved from the last common ancestor of apes and humans.

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The brain’s neural mechanisms keep straight which color belongs to what object, so one doesn’t mistakenly see a blue flamingo in a pink lake. But what happens when a color loses the object to which it is linked? Research shows for the first time, that instead of disappearing along with the lost object, the color latches onto a region of some other object in view — a finding that reveals a new basic property of sight.

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A McMaster University study has found that surgical masks appear to be as good as N95 respirators in protecting health-care workers against influenza.

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University of Maryland biologists have genetically mapped the sex chromosomes of several species of cichlid fish from Lake Malawi, East Africa, and identified a mechanism by which new sex chromosomes may evolve.

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