Facebook Could Be Route to New Kidney

SEATTLE — Here's another reason for holdouts to join the social media site Facebook: It's a great place to find a kidney.

Between the kid photos and reminiscences about high school, more and more pleas for help from people with failing kidneys are popping up. Facebook and other social media sites are quickly becoming a go-to place to find a generous person with a kidney to spare, according to the people asking for help and some national organizations that facilitate matches.

Damon Brown found a kidney on Facebook after telling his story on a special page the Seattle dad created under the name, "Damon Kidney." His friends and family forwarded the link to everyone they knew and on Jan. 3 a woman his wife has known for years, but not someone they consider a close family friend, will be giving him a kidney. "She said it wasn't really for me. It was for my kids, because they deserve to have a dad around," said Brown, 38.

Brown's story is not unique, said April Paschke, a spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing, a private nonprofit organization that manages the nation's organ transplant system for the federal government.

"We see more and more people matched up by social media," she said. "It's an extension of the way we communicate. Before we found the Internet, people found other ways: through a church bulletin, word of mouth or an advertisement even."

This past year, a man in Michigan also found a kidney donor through Facebook, and a Florida woman found one through Craigslist.

Damon Brown admits he was a little embarrassed to ask for help so publicly. Except for telling close friends and family, the Seattle father of two young boys had been keeping his illness pretty quiet.

He was on the official transplant list and had started mobile dialysis through Northwest Kidney Centers but Brown was seeing his health deteriorate — he was constantly tired and achy. He couldn't sit on the bed to tell bedtime stories to 5-year-old Julian and 3-year-old Theo because he had to stay close to his dialysis machine.

"I'm a strong guy, but I would have to say, it's been rough this year," he said. Brown had put himself on the long wait list for a kidney from a deceased donor, knowing he would have to wait at least three years before he was called.

After one particularly difficult visit with his doctor, Damon and his wife, Bethany, decided to create the Facebook page, which has attracted more than 1,400 friends.

A few weeks ago, after the transplant was approved and scheduled, Brown posted the good news to his Facebook friends. More than 300 people responded: "Whoo hoo....what a great Christmas present," wrote Kelly L. Hallissey. "This is awesome!! Praying for you and your family for positive news and a great way to begin 2012!" wrote Brenda Tomtan.

Many people are not aware that kidney and liver donations can now come from living donors.

In 2010, 16,800 kidney transplants were performed in the United States, of which 6,277 came from living donors, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. An average of 46 kidney transplants take place each day in this country, while another 13 people who have been waiting for a kidney die each day. About 90,000 are on the transplant list right now.

Jacqueline Ryall, 45, said she felt a need to donate a kidney to Brown to give back her own good health and all she has been given. She's not a mom and gushed about how beautiful Damon and Bethany's kids are.

"The real reason I'm doing this is he's got kids and he's a good guy," she said. "My life is in a good place. I've been given lots and I have a responsibility to give back."

Ryall said her elderly mother does not understand why she would give a kidney to someone other than her own brother and sister, and her family is worried about her health going forward.

After her own research, however, Ryall decided it's relatively safe for a woman in good health to donate a kidney. If something is going to go wrong with her own kidneys, she has heard they usually fail in twos.

"Right now it feels like absolutely the right thing to do," she said, adding that she hopes her decision will help make other people less afraid to do the same thing.

News media coverage of his quest flooded his hospital with so many requests for information — from total strangers — that Brown said he was asked to pull back on his publicity efforts. Four people passed the initial screening and came in for tests. Now that he sees a happy ending coming for himself, Brown would like to do whatever he can to help others.

April Capone, the previous mayor of East Haven, Conn., knows what Brown means about the attraction of happy endings.

Two years ago, she was sitting in her office checking her Facebook feed, when a post from one of her constituents popped up saying he needed a kidney.

"At that moment, Carlos was at Mayo, testing to get on the transplant list," said Capone, 36. "He really didn't tell anyone he was sick. The doctor said, 'if you don't do it, no one is going to know'." So Carlos Sanchez pulled out his cell phone and posted the request and Capone responded immediately.

"I knew from the second I saw his post that I was going to be a donor," said Capone, who barely knew Sanchez at the time. Now they're as close as siblings, talk on the phone almost daily and meet for lunch regularly.

Capone said she had no personal reason for donating a kidney; she just want to save a life.

"It was the best thing I ever did with my life," she said. "I wish I had more; I would do it again."

Adapted from TIME

»»  Continue Reading...

Spacecraft Twins Arrive at the Moon

The Moon is like an aging boxer, its face scarred and distorted by a lifetime of powerful blows. In the boxer's case, those blows are delivered over the course of a few decades. In the case of the Moon, the punishment has been going on for billions of years, courtesy of comets and asteroids that carved out craters and piled up mountains all over the lunar surface. The very birth of the moon was violent: planetary scientists are pretty sure our companion world was created when a Mars-size object slammed into Earth and ripped off a Moon-size chunk.

Artist concept of GRAIL mission.

Much of our understanding of that violent history comes from rocks hauled back by the Apollo missions four decades ago. But the astronauts who gathered that evidence literally just scratched just the surface — and many of the Moon's secrets are buried far deeper.

That's why the GRAIL mission, which successfully inserted itself into lunar orbit over the weekend, is so crucial. GRAIL, the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, will be probing deep beneath the Moon's surface to analyze its interior structure in unprecedented detail. Since that structure reflects how the Moon was originally formed and the violence done to it since, GRAIL will fill in all sorts of blanks about our satellite's birth and evolution.

That's the "what," but it's the "how" that's so ingenious and that deserves a bit of explanation. GRAIL is not one, but two identical satellites that will orbit in tandem, 35 miles above the surface — GRAIL A in front, GRAIL B following tens of miles behind. If the Moon were simply a featureless, homogenous sphere of rock, the distance between A and B wouldn't change. The Moon isn't featureless, though: in some places there's extra stuff piled on the surface (mountains, crater walls) and in others there are gaping pits — the craters themselves.

When GRAIL A approaches a mountain, the peak's extra gravity pulls on the probe, making it speed up just a bit, while GRAIL B, still out of range, doesn't yet feel the tug. The distance between the two spacecraft increases, and the probes' electronics record the increase, even when the gap widens by no more than the width of a red blood cell. When GRAIL A approaches a crater, by contrast, there's a little less gravity than usual to pull it along. A slows a little, B catches up slightly, and that change is recorded as well. GRAIL B will trail GRAIL A from pole to pole, the pair completing one orbit every two hours as the Moon rotates slowly underneath. Over the mission's three-month lifespan, the twin ships will make three complete gravity maps of the entire lunar globe.

But surface features aren't all the probes will study. There are also regions of higher and lower density buried beneath the lunar surface. These mass concentrations — or mascons — are the likely result of ancient volcanism or ancient impacts. They too exert differing gravitational pull, with the denser material pulling harder than the less dense, and those differences will be detected by the GRAILs as well. So sensitive are the spacecraft that they will effectively be able to see — gravitationally speaking — all the way down to the lunar core. All of these readings will be analyzed along with one other data stream: the slight flexing the entire moon undergoes as a result of the tidal pull of the Earth. The nature of the flexing will be partly determined by what the Moon's deep structure looks like — whether the core is solid or semi-solid or molten, for example.

Best of all, there isn't the slightest doubt that this twin-satellite concept can work: it's based on the wildly successful GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) mission, which has been orbiting Earth since 2002. By noting changes in our planet's gravity, GRACE has, among other things, discovered a giant impact crater underneath the Antarctic ice sheet, measured ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica and noted depletion of groundwater during the recent U.S. drought. If GRAIL does half as well as GRACE — and there's every reason to think it will — the textbooks on selenology, or lunar geology, may have to undergo some major revisions.

Finally, it's worth noting yet another thing that makes the GRAIL mission so extraordinarily clever. Rather than take a direct route across the 250,000-mile Earth-Moon gap — a journey that took the Apollo astronauts just three days — GRAIL meandered through space on a loop-the-loop path known as a "weak boundary trajectory" that lasted more than three months, following the path of least resistance through the complex terrain created by the interacting gravitational fields of Earth, Moon and Sun. Going slow meant not only that the spacecraft needed less fuel, but also that engineers had longer to check out the probes' electronic health. Plus when GRAIL finally arrived, it took less energy to ease it into a lunar orbit .

Back in 1990, just such a "weak stability boundary" trajectory was first used to salvage the Japanese Hiten satellite, which failed in its original attempt to reach the Moon and didn't have enough fuel for a second try. In a brilliant bit of cosmic inventiveness, a mathematician-turned-rocket-scientist-turned artist named Ed Belbruno calculated a new slow, low-energy route for Hiten and saved the mission.

Fortunately, lunar experts, including MIT's Maria Zuber, GRAIL's lead scientist, won't have long to wait for the results of the mission. GRAIL should be all wrapped up by early summer, and by the time the one-year launch anniversary rolls around in September, we should know a lot more about the long and violent history of our nearest, but still largely unknown, cosmic neighbor.

Republished from TIME

»»  Continue Reading...

'Fast Five' was downloaded 9M times

'Fast Five' is the most pirated movie of 2011

"Fast Five" will probably not be at the top of many year-end movie lists -- best, worst, biggest hits or otherwise. But it is No. 1 somewhere, although probably not where its studio, Universal, would want it to be.

The movie was the most pirated film of 2011, according to data compiled by TorrentFreak. The Vin Diesel-Paul Walker-Dwayne Johnson action saga was swapped almost 9.3 million times via BitTorrent.

That's a lot, but it's way down from 2010 piracy leader "Avatar," which racked up more than 16 million downloads. TorrentFreak says the average for the Top 10 this year was also way down from 2010, although the number of BitTorrent users didn't decline.

"The Hangover Part II" and "Thor" were second and third on the list, each with more than 8 million downloads.

Best picture winner "The King's Speech" and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2" also made the Top 10, but it wasn't all hits. Middling box-office performers like "Source Code" and "Sucker Punch" also made the list. 

Here's the Top 10, per TorrentFreak:
1. "Fast Five"
2. "The Hangover Part II"
3. "Thor"
4. "Source Code"
5. "I Am Number Four"
6. "Sucker Punch"
7. "127 Hours"
8. "Rango"
9. "The King's Speech"
10. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2"

Adapted from MSN

»»  Continue Reading...

Top 3 Movies of 2011

These are top three movies of 2011:

3. 'The Descendants' 

A number of major movies this year were about looking into the past and attempting to find some sort of solace or meaning there, creatively, personally or otherwise. But as Woody Allen revealed in his "Midnight in Paris," our view of the past is often distorted by our own desires, and things weren't truly any better then than they are now. That's why there's not a whole lot of emotional truth in a simple homage. But there's a ton of it in "The Descendants," which is ultimately about taking one's eyes off the rearview mirror and peering into the future. That means letting go, and the grief that Matt King (George Clooney) and his two daughters must work through as they say goodbye to their dying wife and mother is acute and real. So is the sense of loss that Matt feels over the possibility of relinquishing his family's stake in their home state of Hawaii. In both cases, Matt comes to terms with the mistakes of the past and attempts to move forward -- forging a new relationship with his daughters now that their "primary parent" is gone, and finding a way to preserve his family's land. Your reaction to "The Descendants" may depend on what point in your life you're at while watching it. For us, it was somber, funny and terribly moving. It's a beautiful film about trying to live right now, to know the people around you and where you all come from, before everything slips away and becomes just another distant, nostalgic dream.

2. 'The Tree of Life' 

If, in one sense, the power of Terrence Malick 's filmmaking comes from its ambiguity, "The Tree of Life," has to rank as his most potent and daring work yet. The movie begins and ends with an image of a swirling energy, a smoky, dancing light which means ... what? The spark that began the universe? The essence of everything that began and will eventually end what we perceive as reality? Yes ... and ... sure, why not? With Tree," it's always more about the questions than the answers. Malick's heartfelt meditation on life's mysteries, as filtered through a portrait of a West Texas family in the 1950s, has been fashioned to allow his audience the space to experience the emotions it might evoke within themselves. So as you watch the film's three young boys caught in the middle between the physical embodiments of grace (their lovely mother, played with such tender feeling by Jessica Chastain) and nature (a never-better Brad Pitt as their stern, thwarted father), we, too, feel the push and pull between the physical and infinite aspects of the human existence. There's beauty, poetry, tyranny, death. There's the birth of the universe. There are dinosaurs! Why dinosaurs? Short answer: (Again) Why not? Long answer: Perhaps Malick is reminding us that the creatures that once held dominion over the Earth no longer exist. Could the same fate befall their successors? Or maybe that little moment of grace where the big lizard spares its sickly cousin shows a way of avoiding that destiny. Again, it's all about the questions, and Malick gives you enough to chew on here that you could return repeatedly to "Tree" for years to come, knowing (and savoring) that your experience will be different each time you watch it.

1. 'Melancholia' 

Universal and personal, blatant and mysterious, sorrowful and funny, nihilistic and yet, sublimely, romantically, celebratory, Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia" takes the black bile of its namesake -- the depression of its heroine -- and transforms the "humor" into exaltation. A terrifying, dazzling planet that, true to Dane Von Trier's dip into German romanticism, is set to destroy life on Earth: Götterdämmerung via Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" (used in the picture's rapturously beautiful overture), via Ophelia via Cassandra via Von Trier's personal mythology. Clinically depressed Justine (a stunning Kirsten Dunst, Von Trier's surrogate) does what's often expected of those afflicted -- wear a brave face and a wedding dress, embrace love, work, family (no matter how dysfunctional) and rules. Well, Von Trier cannot accept that fate, and in the picture's first half, in which Justine destroys her nuptials, her actions serve as depressive, rebellious self awareness. "What did you expect?" she asks. Indeed. And then comes planet Melancholia, inching closer, leaving stable sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) panic stricken while Justine, calmly, grimly and at times, cheekily, accepts annihilation, not as easy suicide but as a kind of cosmic extension of despair. Finally. Justine isn't wallowing in depression, she's embracing, seducing it, and in one of the picture's most exquisite moments, lying beneath it naked, basking in the glow of doom. Von Trier, a sufferer himself, sincerely understands depression (just as he understood anxiety in "Antichrist"), which may be why he maddens many. Weaving himself into his characters, he's sadistic, masochist, empathetic, self obsessed, morbid and morbidly funny and then honest and honestly confused. With "Melancholia" he grants depressives a gift. Taking Justine's depleted darkness and imbuing her with celestial life through doomsday, he, to recall another German Romantic, creates an "Ode to Joy" through heartbreaking and gloriously inspirational...woe. 

Adapted from MSN

»»  Continue Reading...