Mexican Army Drug Offensive

Faced with the risk of losing half of Mexico to a network of marauding drug traffickers, the Mexican army is digging in for a major new offensive into the heart of Zeta country.

According to Excelsior, the Mexican army is building a string of new bases across the Zeta cartel’s stomping grounds of Tamaulipas to support some 13,000 soldiers currently patrolling the state. This means nearly 30 percent of the Mexican army’s counter-cartel troops are fortifying directly in the Zetas’ homeland (more are fighting the Zetas elsewhere), and it’s a sign Mexico’s cartel strategy has finally found its main enemy. (Danger Room)

 Uh uh, expect more bloody news out of Mexico. Good luck.

The perfect water filter

Researchers from the home of graphene, the University of Manchester in England, have discovered — seemingly by chance — one of the most important properties of graphene yet: It’s impermeable to everything but water. It is the perfect water filter. 

In an experiment, the University of Manchester researchers filled a metal container with a variety of liquids and gases and then covered it with a film of graphene oxide. Their most sensitive equipment was unable to register any molecules leaving the container, except water vapor. The graphene oxide filter even prevented helium gas from escaping, which is notoriously finicky. (Extreme Tech)

Coup deta in Papua New Guinea

Rebel soldiers have seized Papua New Guinea's military headquarters, deposing the country's top defence official and demanding the reinstatement of the ousted prime minister, Sir Michael Somare.

The self-proclaimed new leader of the country's defence forces, retired Colonel Yaura Sasa, insisted he was not mounting a coup. But he warned that the military would take unspecified action unless Peter O'Neill stood down within a week and Somare was reinstated, as ordered by the supreme court last month.(Guardian)

The Good Fat

It is brown fat, actually brown in color, and its great appeal is that it burns calories like a furnace. A new study finds that one form of it, which is turned on when people get cold, sucks fat out of the rest of the body to fuel itself. Another new study finds that a second form of brown fat can be created from ordinary white fat by exercise.(NY Times)

What we can derived from these results is: exercise, especially in Winter and take cold shower. 

Tahrir on Jan 25

The marches were the largest I have seen and this picture showed that this is the largest gathering in Tahrir since Jan 25 last year.

Totally Drug Resistant TB

Indian doctors have reported the country's first cases of "totally drug-resistant tuberculosis," a long-feared and virtually untreatable form of the killer lung disease.

It's not the first time highly resistant cases like this have been seen. Since 2003, patients have been documented in Italy and Iran. It has mostly been limited to impoverished areas, and has not spread widely. But experts believe there could be many undocumented cases.

No one expects the Indian TB strains to rapidly spread elsewhere. The airborne disease is mainly transmitted through close personal contact and isn't nearly as contagious as the flu. Indeed, most of the cases of this kind of TB were not from person-to-person infection but were mutations that occurred in poorly treated patients.

What's more, there's a debate within the public health community about whether to even label TB infections as totally drug resistant. The World Health Organization hasn't accepted the term and still considers the cases to be what's now called extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR. However, Dr. Paul Nunn, a coordinator at the WHO's Stop TB Department in Geneva, said there is ample proof that these virtually untreatable cases do exist.(MSNBC)

Fuck, this is really bad news.