Bill Gates Monitored Microsoft Employees’ Work Hours by Memorizing Their License Plates

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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates used to memorize employees’ license plate numbers so that he could keep track of when they were arriving at work and leaving.

Gates, who is now co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, described his intense management style from Microsoft’s early days during an interview on the BBC Radio 4 program “Desert Island Discs.”

“I had to be a little careful not to try and apply my standards to how hard [others at the company] worked. I knew everybody’s licence plate so I could look out the parking lot and see, you know, when people come in,” he said. “Eventually I had to loosen up as the company got to a reasonable size” . . .

The philanthropist also described his relationship with Apple co-founder and tech icon Steve Jobs during the radio interview.

“Steve really is a singular person in the history of personal computing in terms of what he built at Apple,” he said. “For some periods, we were completely allies working together – I wrote software for the original Apple II. Sometimes he would be very tough on you, sometimes he’d be very encouraging. He got really great work out of people.” (Read more from “Bill Gates Monitored Microsoft Employees’ Work Hours by Memorizing Their License Plates” HERE)

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What’s That Word? Marijuana May Affect Verbal Memory

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Years of smoking pot may have an effect on a person’s verbal memory, which is the ability to remember certain words, a new study finds.

For every five years of marijuana use, researchers found that, on average, one out of two people remembered one word fewer from a list of 15 words, according to the study.

Long-term use was not, however, significantly associated with decreases in other measures of cognitive function, such as processing speed or executive function, the researchers wrote in the study, published today (Feb. 1) in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Executive function includes skills such as planning and focusing.

To examine the effects of long-term marijuana use, the researchers studied participants who were enrolled in the long-running Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. The CARDIA study included more than 5,000 adults who initially enrolled in the study between ages 18 and 30. During a series of follow-up visits, the participants reported if they had used marijuana in the previous month. At the 25-year follow-up, the participants were given a series of cognitive tests that looked at verbal memory, processing speed and executive function.

While long-term marijuana use was associated with worse performance in all three tests, after the researchers adjusted for other factors (such as use of other substances and depression), they found that only the association between long-term use and verbal memory was statistically significant (meaning the associations between marijuana use and both processing speed and executive function may have been due to chance). (Read more from “What’s That Word? Marijuana May Affect Verbal Memory” HERE)

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Apple Just Announced Recall on This One Item Due to Major Safety Risk

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Apple customers should check the inside slot of their wall plug adapters because they could pose an electrical shock risk.

The mega tech company initiated a voluntary recall of wall plug adapters sold between 2003 and 2015 because they could break, leading to safety concerns of electrical shock.

“Customer safety is always Apple’s top priority, and we have voluntarily decided to exchange affected wall plug adapters with a new, redesigned adapter, free of charge,” the company said in a public statement on Thursday.

The two-prong AC wall plug adapters can be identified by four or five characters, or no characters, on the inside slot that attaches to the power adapter. The redesigned versions have only three characters. The company hasn’t stated how many of the products were sold, but most were sold outside the United States. They were sold in continental Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and Korea for Macs, iPads and some IOS devices. They were sold in the U.S. as part of the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit. Asian countries are not included in the worldwide recall. (Read more from “Apple Just Announced Recall on This One Item Due to Major Safety Risk” HERE)

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Facebook Bans Firearms Sales

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Facebook says it’s cracking down on online gun sales, announcing Friday a new policy barring private individuals from advertising or selling firearms on the world’s largest social network.

The new policy applies also to Facebook’s photo-sharing service Instagram. It comes after gun control groups have long complained that Facebook and other online sites are frequently used by unlicensed sellers and buyers not legally eligible to buy firearms.

Facebook “was unfortunately and unwittingly serving as an online platform for dangerous people to get guns,” said Shannon Watts of Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that launched a public campaign to convince the social network to change its policies two years ago. (Read more from “Facebook Announces Stricter Policy on Firearms Sales” HERE)

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Panic on SECOND American Airlines Flight as Mystery Fainting Illness Hits Passengers and Crew

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Unnerved passengers feared for their lives after a plane was forced to make an emergency landing when passengers and crew passed out mid-flight.

The American Airlines flight, which was flying from Brazil to the United States, was travelling at a height of more than 30,000ft when three members of staff became ill.

This is the second time this week that the US airline has been forced to ground a plane as a result of a mystery illness on board .

According to reports, Flight 904 which left Rio de Janeiro for Miami around 11pm yesterday, but was forced to change direction and land in Brasilia, Brazil.

Four people complained of lightheadedness sparking fears there could be contaminated air on board. (Read more from “Panic on SECOND American Airlines Flight as Mystery Fainting Illness Hits Passengers and Crew” HERE)

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Zika Virus Could Become ‘Explosive Pandemic’

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By BBC. US scientists have urged the World Health Organisation to take urgent action over the Zika virus, which they say has “explosive pandemic potential”.

Writing in a US medical journal, they called on the WHO to heed lessons from the Ebola outbreak and convene an emergency committee of disease experts.

They said a vaccine might be ready for testing in two years but it could be a decade before it is publicly available.

Zika, linked to shrunken brains in children, has caused panic in Brazil.

Thousands of people have been infected there and it has spread to some 20 countries. (Read more from “Zika Virus Could Become ‘Explosive Pandemic'” HERE)

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Scientists Plan to Use Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes to Fight the Spread of Zika Virus

By Drew Prindle. If you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past week, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the recent Zika virus outbreak by now. The virus, which is currently spreading across the Americas, has been linked to a rare birth defect known as microencephaly, a condition in which infants are born with abnormally small heads and brains. Since the outbreak, there’s been a sizable uptick in infants born with this condition. The World Health Organization estimates that as many as 4 million people could be infected with the virus — and to make matters worse, there’s currently no vaccine to help stop it from spreading.

But all is not lost. Biologists are taking a bold new approach to stop the virus from spreading any further. Rather than developing a new vaccine or keeping mosquito populations at bay with insecticides, biotech firm Oxitec plans to fight the spread of Zika by deploying swarms of genetically engineered mosquitoes that will prevent virus-carrying bugs from multiplying.

The science behind it all is immensely complicated, but the overall idea is actually pretty easy to grasp. Basically, Oxitec has created a genetically modified breed of the Aedes aegypti mosquito — the species that is primarily responsible for spreading the Zika virus. This GM version (called OX513A), has been engineered to carry a gene that causes offspring to die before they reach reproductive age. When Oxitec releases these OX513A mosquitoes into the wild, they mate with females and produce offspring that never fully mature — eventually leading to a sizable reduction in the Aedes aegypti populaiton, and (hopefully) a noticeable decrease in the spread of the Zika virus. (Read more from “Scientists Plan to Use Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes to Fight the Spread of Zika Virus” HERE)

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Mystery Illness Forces American Airlines Flight to Return to London

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An American Airlines flight bound for Los Angeles was forced to return to London’s Heathrow Airport Wednesday after at least six people on board fell ill.

The Daily Telegraph reported that one member of the Boeing 777’s cabin crew fainted and five others complained of feeling unwell. With the aircraft, Flight 109, in the air over southwest Iceland, the captain made the decision to return to Heathrow.

Paramedics and fire crews surrounded the plane as it landed approximately five hours after it had taken off. The Telegraph reported that the passengers’ luggage was briefly taken away for inspection before being returned to them.

“About 2.5 hours into the flight just as we were passing Iceland we had a Tannoy announcement asking for any doctors, nurses or medical professionals on board to report to the boarding doors to assist with unwell passengers,” passenger Lee Gunn told The Daily Mirror. “The lights then came on in the cabin and there was lots of commotion.” (Read more from “Mystery Illness Forces American Airlines Flight to Return to London” HERE)

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Largest Solar System Ever Discovered Dwarfs Our Own

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Photo Credit: University of Hertfordshire/Neil CookA huge alien world orbits 600 billion miles (1 trillion kilometers) from its host star, making its solar system the largest one known, a new study reports.

Astronomers have found the parent star for a gas-giant exoplanet named 2MASS J2126, which was previously thought to be a “rogue” world flying freely through space. The planet and its star are separated by about 7,000 astronomical units (AU), meaning the alien world completes one orbit every 900,000 years or so, researchers said. (One AU is the average distance from Earth to the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km).

For comparison, Neptune lies about 30 AU from the sun, Pluto averages about 40 AU from Earth’s star and scientists think the newly hypothesized “Planet Nine” never gets more than 600 to 1,200 AU away from the sun.

“The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it’s certainly in a very long-distance relationship,” study lead author Niall Deacon, of the University of Hertfordshire in England, said in a statement . . .

Deacon and his colleagues analyzed databases of rogue planets, young stars and brown dwarfs— strange objects bigger than planets, but too small to ignite the internal fusion reactions that power stars — to see if they could link any of them together. (Read more from “Largest Solar System Ever Discovered Dwarfs Our Own” HERE)

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Is Alzheimer’s Transmittable?

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For the second time in four months, researchers have reported autopsy results that suggest Alzheimer’s disease might occasionally be transmitted to people during certain medical treatments — although scientists say that neither set of findings is conclusive.

The latest autopsies, described in the Swiss Medical Weekly on [the] 26th [of] January, were conducted on the brains of seven people who died of the rare, brain-wasting Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). Decades before their deaths, the individuals had all received surgical grafts of dura mater — the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord. These grafts had been prepared from human cadavers and were contaminated with the prion protein that causes CJD.

But in addition to the damage caused by the prions, five of the brains displayed some of the pathological signs that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers from Switzerland and Austria report. Plaques formed from amyloid-β protein were discovered in the grey matter and blood vessels. The individuals, aged between 28 and 63, were unusually young to have developed such plaques. A set of 21 controls, who had not had surgical grafts of dura mater but died of sporadic CJD at similar ages, did not have this amyloid signature.

Transplant trouble

According to the authors, it is possible that the transplanted dura mater was contaminated with small ‘seeds’ of amyloid-β protein — which some scientists think could be a trigger for Alzheimer’s — along with the prion protein that gave the recipients CJD. (Read more from “Is Alzheimer’s Transmittable?” HERE)

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NFL Conducting Comprehensive Investigation of Peyton Manning

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The NFL says it is conducting a comprehensive review of allegations that Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning had human growth hormone delivered to his house.

There’s no timetable to complete the investigation, but it’s not expected before the Denver plays Carolina in the Super Bowl on Feb. 7 . . .

Al Jazeera reported last month that an intern at an Indianapolis anti-aging clinic was secretly recorded suggesting that Manning’s wife received deliveries of HGH, which is banned by the league. Manning, then with the Colts, was rehabbing from shoulder surgeries. (Read more from “NFL Conducting Comprehensive Investigation of Peyton Manning” HERE)

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