Extreme drought does strange things to soils. As the moisture disappears, they lose their adhesion. This is why the gigantic dust storm just occurred in Arizona. It’s so dry that the desert itself has ceased to be a tightly packed surface. This could also be the case in a Texas town, except for the fact that this place looks wet.
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This weekend we went to a wonderful play at a theater that’s very near the hospital I was at for 6 weeks in 2004, after an aneurysm burst inside my brain. I was actually "out of it" for more like 2 months, since I spent some time at another hospital, because the ambulance always takes you to the closest place. Whitley (with the help of his brother Richard, who’s a lawyer) soon managed to get me transferred to UCLA, which was a much better place for my problem.
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There is a great shortage of organs for transplanting to people who need them–in the UK, for instance, the average wait for a new heart has risen 70% over the last 3 years and patients needing a new kidney have to wait 20% longer. This organ shortage is killing 3 people a day there (and probably many more in the US), but this probablem is finally being solved: We have synthetic blood and hearts made from YOUR OWN stem cells. Now the kind of 3 D printers used in architecture may be able to "print" new organs that can be transplanted into the human body.
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The latest Vanity Fair has a powerful, sobering article about the Saudis, US Intelligence and 911 that implies that the Kingdom bears a significant part of the responsibility because some of its princes (all now dead) were supporters of Al Quaeda and of the plot. Not only that, when Saudi intelligence came to the US with information about the plot, they were ignored. This is not about the technological issues of how the towers collapsed, etc., but about the fact that the Kingdom’s ruling family, close friends of the Bushes, were involved at the highest levels, even as their intelligence service was attempting to warn a US government that turned its back on them. To read the article, click here.
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