Something to watch out for Monday and Tuesday….
This article titled “Geminid meteor shower set for clear skies” was written by Steven Morris, for The Guardian on Sunday 12th December 2010 14.35 UTCLovers of the night sky could be in for a treat tomorrow night as clear conditions are predicted for one of the best astronomical shows of the year.
Some experts believe the annual Geminid meteor shower is becoming more spectacular – though if it is, nobody is sure why – and with cloudless skies possible in many parts of the country, this year’s event could be a particularly memorable one.
At its peak and in a clear, dark sky, up to 100 meteors – or shooting stars – may be seen every hour. The best time to see it is expected to be late on Monday night and in the early hours of Tuesday after the moon has set.
In comparison with other showers, Geminid meteors travel fairly slowly, at about 22 miles per second. They are bright and have a yellowish hue, making them distinct and easy to spot.
Meteors are the result of small particles entering Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, burning up and super-heating the air around them, which shines as a characteristic short-lived streak of light. In the case of the Geminids, the debris is associated with the asteroidal object 3200 Phaethon, which many astronomers believe to be an extinct comet.
National Trust list of the best places to watch the shower
• Black Down in Sussex, the highest point in the South Downs.
• Teign Valley in Devon, within Dartmoor national park.
• Penbryn Beach, on the Ceredigion coast in west Wales.
• Stonehenge area in Wiltshire – chalk downland and crystal clear skies.
• Wicken Fen nature reserve in Cambridgeshire – dark skies and nocturnal wildlife.
• Mam Tor in Derbyshire, an escape from the bright lights of cities such as Sheffield.
• Friar’s Crag in Cumbria, jutting out into Derwentwater.
This article was amended on 13 December 2010. The original time-lapse image appeared to show the tracks of stars not meteors. It has been replaced.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Interesting and relevant – maybe my life would be a lot more content 
Low doses of the anti-anxiety drug Prozac may alleviate the misery of premenstrual syndrome (PMS), scientists have found.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham found that Prozac, known generically as fluoxetine, raises levels of a sex hormone that can drop sharply in women at the end of their menstrual cycle. This sudden drop is thought to cause the symptoms of PMS.
Millions of women around the world suffer the effects of PMS every month in the week before the start of their menstrual period. Symptoms can range from anxiety and irritability to headaches or joint and breast pain.
Not all women show symptoms, but around 75% are thought to experience PMS and, in up to 40% of cases, it can interfere with daily activities. Around 3% of women can experience a severe form of PMS, a psychiatric condition known as premenstrual dysphoric disorder.
Thelma Lovick, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham, thinks she has evidence that a 2mg daily dose of fluoxetine in the final week before menstruation could alleviate PMS. She presented her work at the British Science Festival in Birmingham today and her three-year study on rats, which were induced to have PMS-like symptoms, was funded by the Medical Research Council. Lovick now plans to submit her research to a scientific journal for peer review.
“We’ve got available to us a drug that is already in production, it’s already gone through its safety tests, something we could use at very low dose to perhaps ameliorate the development of pre-menstrual syndrome in women,” said Lovick.
Normally progesterone levels fall during the pre-menstrual period and this is when symptoms appear. “Progesterone is a hormone that circulates in the bloodstream and gets into the brain,” said Lovick. “It breaks down into ALLO and it’s this change in the ALLO concentration in the brain that causes excitability in the nerve circuits in parts of the brain that are involved in emotional behaviour.”
Lovick thinks it is the sharp fall in the brain’s ALLO levels that triggers PMS symptoms. “ALLO can alter the activity of nerve cells, thus it is described as a neuroactive steroid. It enhances the activity of GABA, one of the brain’s inhibitory neurotransmitter chemicals, and in those parts of the brain that process emotional responses, ALLO normally produces calming effects.”
When the levels of progesterone, and hence ALLO, in the brain drop during the final stages of the premenstrual period, that natural inhibition is turned off. “As a consequence these brain circuits become more excitable, leaving the individual more responsive to stress, which is often manifested behaviourally as anxiety and aggressive behaviour.”
If ALLO levels could be allowed to fall gradually at the end of the monthly cycle, thought Lovick, PMS might not develop. She confirmed this idea by monitoring the hormone in rats’ brains as they were administered fluoxetine.
“Millions of women take Prozac but the dose they take it in is relatively high. One of the effects of fluoxetine is that it acts on serotonin systems in the brain, that’s why it’s used as an antidepressant. One of the things it does in addition is increase ALLO concentrations in the brain and it does this at very low doses.”
Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warned against self-medicating with fluoxetine. “Prozac is associated with a number of different side-effects. The most common is sexual dysfunction, it can lower libido and induce impotence. It can stop you sleeping and make you anxious and wound-up and affect appetite. And particularly in young people, under the age of 30, it can trigger suicidal thoughts and self-harm. I don’t know if these side-effects would occur at low doses but it would strike me as unwise to start tipping drugs out of capsules.”
Fluoxetine in sometimes prescribed as a treatment for PMS by some doctors in the US, but it is given at doses normally used in antidepressant therapy. Lovick said the standard antidepressant dose – 10-20mg per day – is inappropriate for PMS.
Her research team found that the dose required to produce a response was only a tenth of that found in the most commonly prescribed form of fluoxetine. “And you’d only be taking it for about a week so the side-effect issue should be non-existent,” said Lovick.
The team now want to take their findings out of the lab and into clinical trials.
Kendall agrees that the use of low-dose fluoxetine in PMS needs more study. “PMS makes a lot of women quite miserable and if there is something we can do for them, that would be very good. But it is premature to say this is the thing.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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I’ve always found the detailed mechanisms at the top of organisations interesting… after all it is just a bunch of people doing what people do, but there’s bit of paper which mean what they decide has to be done. Normally life proceeds without drama, as if the very ceremony involved in board meetings causes people not to question the authority of those involved.
And then sometimes you get occasions like this one – must have been quite dramatic really. I wonder how much people say “Prove you own XX of the company” and “Prove that meeting was correct” and “Show me the bit in the company rules which say I have to do what you want” – and when people decide to comply or take it to Court.
Fascinating mix of law, management, and good old interpersonal relationships – with a healthy dose of basic logistics like “We’re locked out, where can we hold this meeting?”.
It was a strange way to wrest back control of the 100-year-old family company but, after her sons locked her out, María Teresa Rodríguez – the matriarch of Spanish biscuit manufacturer Galletas Gullón – decided to call a board meeting in a car.
The meeting in the company car park, attended by her daughter Lourdes and another major shareholder as photographers surrounded the Mercedes, saw her appointed sole administrator of the company.
The 68-year-old thereby took away control of Spain’s third-biggest biscuit manufacturer from her three sons and two brothers.
The 35-minute meeting, also attended by a notary who sat in the passenger seat, was duly advertised with two posters stuck to the front windscreen.
A family feud pits the Gullón men against its women. Sons and brothers had tried to block Rodríguez’s attempts to take control by declaring the board meeting irregular and locking her out of the company HQ.
A security guard turned mother and daughter away from the front door of Spain’s biggest biscuit factory, in the western town of Aguilar de Campoo. But those in the Mercedes controlled 80% of the company. Their takeover was a shoo-in.
The man in the driver’s seat of the Mercedes was Juan Martínez, the former company chief executive fired by Rodríguez’s sons last year. He held 16% of the stock.
Rodríguez had appointed him to help her run the company after her husband, José Manuel Gullón, died in a car accident in 1983. Rodríguez herself had been executive president – until she, too, was eased out by her children.
Last year’s rebellion against them and the decision to sack Martínez sparked the feud over the business, which has 400 employees, exports to 80 countries and has an annual turnover of €162m. It also saw a court award him €8.2m for wrongful dismissal.
“The company will go to my children, but only when I decide,” she said in a recent interview.
Yesterday’s board meeting failed to resolve the underlying problems. The sons today claimed it had not been properly convened and said their mother was illegally using voting shares left to them by their father.
“None of the reasons they have given to invalidate the meeting are true,” said a spokesman for Rodríguez. “All legal actions taken by the sons and brothers of María Teresa Rodríguez pursue a single illegitimate aim: to keep hold of power.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Football: a dear friend to capitalism
My first post with the Guardian plugin – quite an intriguing process, it’s like they are actively wanting you to put the full content of articles on your site, which is very refreshing.
Anyway, I saw this a week or so ago and have to say I do somewhat agree – when I look at the energy and passion people put into being football supporters, I can’t help but be saddened. Why can’t that be put into something more personal and productive? The men who don’t know their wive’s perfume but do know every move of Manchester United? The boy who dreams of meeting Beckham to get his autograph, rather than being on the pitch himself?
It isn’t that I don’t like football, I just don’t see the point. And I am saddened when people view me as weird when I say that – what have we come to when you are weird if you want to make your own path, rather than watch a bunch of other people have fun and then argue pointlessly about details in the pub later?
As an aside, Jo and I turned up in Basel during Carnival (we wondered why we couldn’t get any hotel rooms… should have been a warning sign!) and it really was quite special. I wonder why we have nothing like that in the UK?
If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.
Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium. Most car mechanics and shop assistants feel shut out by high culture; but once a week they bear witness to displays of sublime artistry by men for whom the word genius is sometimes no mere hype. Like a jazz band or drama company, football blends dazzling individual talent with selfless teamwork, thus solving a problem over which sociologists have long agonised. Co-operation and competition are cunningly balanced. Blind loyalty and internecine rivalry gratify some of our most powerful evolutionary instincts.
The game also mixes glamour with ordinariness in subtle proportion: players are hero-worshipped, but one reason you revere them is because they are alter egos, who could easily be you. Only God combines intimacy and otherness like this, and he has long been overtaken in the celebrity stakes by that other indivisible One, José Mourinho.
In a social order denuded of ceremony and symbolism, football steps in to enrich the aesthetic lives of people for whom Rimbaud is a cinematic strongman. The sport is a matter of spectacle but, unlike trooping the colour, one that also invites the intense participation of its onlookers. Men and women whose jobs make no intellectual demands can display astonishing erudition when recalling the game’s history or dissecting individual skills. Learned disputes worthy of the ancient Greek forum fill the stands and pubs. Like Bertolt Brecht‘s theatre, the game turns ordinary people into experts.
This vivid sense of tradition contrasts with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique. There is even a judicious spot of gender-bending, as players combine the power of a wrestler with the grace of a ballet dancer. Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy, not to mention a chance to travel to Africa and back while permanently legless. Like some austere religious faith, the game determines what you wear, whom you associate with, what anthems you sing and what shrine of transcendent truth you worship at. Along with television, it is the supreme solution to that age-old dilemma of our political masters: what should we do with them when they’re not working?
Over the centuries, popular carnival throughout Europe, while providing the common people with a safety valve for subversive feelings – defiling religious images and mocking their lords and masters – could be a genuinely anarchic affair, a foretaste of a classless society.
With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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