Addicts who have been clean for many years may continue to battle the urge to return to their old habbits.  Sometiemes they win the battle, often times they loose.  Many addicts have tried rehab and go not only one time, but two or three and still fail.  Most rehab centers use 12 step programs along with counseling.  Few rehab centers use the anti-addictive pills.  The pills, naltrexone are said to prevent the urge or craving to use alcohol again.  They have been available for use in alcoholics for sveral years and some users swear by them.

Injections are given for a period of time and then stopped.  Doctors tell the patients that if they feel the urge or craveing again, they can come back for additonal dosage.  One person who started treatment 8 years ago, while naltrexone was still in the trial phase says that he has been clean ever since.  He can walk throug a bar, see the sights and smell the smells without even carving a drink.  He can even sit at the bar and drink soda and tell a frined who offers to buy him a drink that he is fine with his soda.

Andrea Ivory has decided that just surviving breast cancer is not enough.  She is determined that more women take control of their own health and she is doing something about it.  She has built an army to combat this problem.  The FBHI, or Florida Breast Health Initiative, Ivory formed with the idea of going from house to house to promote education and awareness of breast cancer.

While empowering all women to get involved, they spend much of their time seeking out women who don’t have insurance and are over the age of thirty-four.  This group is more likely to be diagnosed too late to survive the cancer.  The FBHI has since its inception has helped fund more than five hundred mammograms.  The founder believes that the only way to beat the enemy is by detecting it early. Some of those who have been helped through this effort have become volunteers to help spread the word.

While going through her own health battle, she realized how fortunate she was to have been provided with health coverage.  That got her thinking about all of those women who are not covered.  She likens this to a war and believes that she and her army of volunteers on the front line.  She plans to win this one, too.

For most of us a blackhole exists only in a Sci-fi flick.  In real life they cannot be seen, but astronomers see evidence of their existence.  In fact they actually see evidence of millions of them.  You could never actually enter a black hole and live, but scientist are using computers to simulate what would happen if you could.  You would feel waves of force pulling you in as you are stretched through spaghettification, a process that makes everythin stretched thin because the force of gravity on your feet is so much greater than your head.

Everything, even light is pulled toward the center of the black hole and nothing gets out.  The scientist say that it is like falling off a waterfall into space.  Everything inside the black hole is torn apart.  Fortunately we do not have to worry about ever falling into a black hole.  While the sun is only 8 light minutes away, the nearest black hole is 3,000 light years away.  That means that if you are traveling at the speed of light it would take you 3,000 years to get there.  Even our fastes rockets do not approach light speed.  We are at a very, very safe distance.

At the university of Georgia, scientist are working in research on a product called Biochar as a possible solution.  This process takes all kinds of animal and plant waste and instead of allowing them to rot in a land fill, heats them to a to tempratures as high as 1000 degrees farinheight where they give off gases and result in a porus charcoal.  The gases given off are trapped and used as fuel for cars or generation of electricity.  The biochar is in fields to help slow water evaporation and encourage naturel enhancement of the soil.

Estimates ar that use of this procedure could reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 8% over a corse of 50 years.  Farmers in the Amazon have used the process for many years and it has resulted in a fertil soils that need no fertilizer even 500 years later.  Enriching the soil has the added advantage of allowing increased production without having to cut more forestland in the rainforest.  Trees in the rainforest are significantly important in stopping global warming as they use carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the production of glucose.    Cutting these trees is thought to have significantly increased the greenhouse gases that have contributed to global warming.

On Sunday evening Facebook had a big announcement.  On the blog of its developer a post informed everyone that the major standard on which the Facebook people have been working for the last several months is ready to go.  The “Open Stream” API (Activity Streams) is the first time that this huge new standard will be used.

In simpler terms, this will let third party operators see content that is posted to feeds, such as videos, notes and links.  It will also allow them to view what’s going on in the social network’s other built in applications.

One of the developers of this new type of stream, says that this will put the days of just posting blogs on the Web, in the past.  Until now, the other developers could just get updates on the status of their stream. Now they will actually be able to interact with them using these new Activity Streams’ applications.  Quicker changes and other issues can be handled now using this technology.

Those who developed this hope that this will make communication the way it should be.  Fast and efficient messages between people and their servers is the goal.  Like e-mail or chat, this will soon become a very widely used tool.

It is getting harder to deal with this economic crisis in places where there at least some employment opportunities.  Imagine living an area where the businesses are just leaving or downsizing so much that the chances of getting work are nearly impossible.  Such is the case in a small county in North Carolina.  In the little town of Spruce Pine, the unemployment rate is not just a problem, it is nearing catastrophe.  One couple shared their story of struggle with CNN.  They both have lost their jobs.  He returned to school to get his GED and then got new job training.  In his new field of expertise, he got a job again, only to lose it quickly due to downsizing.  She has also taken the learning a new skill route, but has little hope of finding employment.

Their county has just over 15,000 residents, two thousand of which have lost their jobs within the last 3 years.  The mill that once employed a large number of the residents, now serves as a food pantry.  The organizer of the pantry says that it is barely meeting the needs of the community as the jobless rate skyrockets.  The town has decided to take some action, though.  They are preparing to become a tourist attraction by selling locally crafted goods.  The leaders believe that this will breathe new life into a dying community.  They only hope that the people can hold on until business starts coming in.

Edo Berger heard an alarm Thursday morning as a satellite sensed a ten second energy blast called a “gamma ray burst” originating from space. Once the alert was recorded, telescopes the world over pointed towards the blast and soon became aware of infrared radiation. Then Berger got ready to see the light which should have come next. It didn’t come.

Berger said, in a phone interview, “We were kind of blown away. We immediately knew what that meant,”

It means that he found the oldest thing that has been seen so far — a gigantic star blowing up thirteen billion years ago. He calculates that at the time the star exploded, the universe was a mere six hundred million years old.  He went on to explain that in simpler terms.  What he saw on that early morning was a glimpse of about ninety-five percent back into the beginning of all time as we know it.

Berger, who is an astronomy assistant professor at Harvard University, said the when the star, known now as GRB 090423, blew up it emitted a million times more energy than our sun will throughout it’s entire existence.  To the nearest approximation, the star was between thirty to one hundred times bigger than the sun at the time it exploded.

Its gamma radiation was sensed by the NASA satellite, Swift. Hawaii’s Gemini Observatory detected its infrared radiation.

It seems that due the economy everything is being downsized.  Looking around at autos and computers, you will see smaller is the new better.  There is one industry that is taking a different view on that idea, though.  Some fashion lines are making the smart move to expand, rather than downsize, their products.

Both Forever 21 and Target, known as “cheap chic emporiums,” will be launching fashion lines exclusively targeted at plus-size teenagers.  Coming in the spring, the lines will let girls of all sizes have choices in apparel, that before were only available to those under the plus size categorization.

Faith 21, by Forever 21, will add sizes extra large to double extra large to the teen’s choices.  Target has named their new addition Pure Energy.  It will have sizes up to size thirty.

Already shoppers are expressing excitement over the upcoming changes.  They are looking forward to the chance at going to one place to shop with their friends that will have choices for all.  They also believe that this change is way overdue.  The statistics seem to be in their favor.  Most designers offer nothing over a size ten, although the average woman in the United States is a size fourteen.

We have known for many years that smoking is harmful to your health.  Many smokers try to quit but for whatever reason are unable to do so.  Even the warnings on the packages of cigarettes do little to deter smoking. 

Another warning about smoking and its harmful effects will probably do little to stop the smoker from picking up his cigarette.  However there is a simple test for one carcinogen in the smoker’s urine whose presence is related to the smoker’s likelihood of developing lung cancer. 

While this test may not cause the smoker to stop his bad habit, it may cause smokers to be screened more often.  As with any cancer, the sooner a tumor is found, the more likely it will be cured.  A person with a high level of both nicotine and of the carcinogen NNAL is eight and one half times as likely to develop cancer as the smoker with lower levels. 

The researchers still say that the best advice that can be given to any smoker is to stop smoking.  Twenty-three percent of all smokers in the U.S say that they would quit if they could.  Perhaps this test will give them the impetus that they need to quit. 

For many years now users of Macs have felt relatively safe using their computers.  While pc users have suffered though viruses, worms and Trojans,  Mac users have had virtually no such problems.  Computer security researchers warn that the protection Mac users have enjoyed may soon be changing.  These researchers feel that the immunity may have simply have been a numbers game.  There are far more PC’s than there are Mac’s.  Just as a company wants to use its advertising dollars to reach the greatest audience, designers of the computer infections have simply ignored Mac’s-until now.  This new threat is a Trojan horse.  It sneaks into your computer with anther program that the user installs into his computer.

This particular program infected only those machines which had installed a pirated version of iWork.  Once installed the program, a botnet, allows you’re the programmer to take control of you Mac.  Files can be opened and the security of your system compromised.  Although this attack affected very few Mac’s (Conflicker by contrast was infected up to 10 million computers) it shows that Mac users are no longer immune to such infections.  Although Apple is diligently seeking to prevent more compromises of user’s systems, the attacks will continue, just as the attackers have continued to work around PC virus protection.