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It's midnight. Do you know where your teenagers are? They're up in their bedrooms, IM-ing their friends, surfing the Net, playing Halo and watching Letterman. Or maybe conjugating French verbs or reading about the Industrial Revolution. Doing anything, that is, except what they ought to be: sleeping. America's teens are chronically sleep-deprived, according to the National Sleep Foundation's annual poll. Only one in five gets the recommended nine hours of sleep on school nights, and by the time they reach their senior year of high school, many are missing out on 12 hours of sleep a week. Just ask Max...

The threat of cancellation no longer looms over the Pentagon's Airborne Laser (ABL) effort, but senior program officials say they are taking nothing for granted as they prepare for a missile-intercept demonstration in 2008. Several clear test milestones have been laid out for the ABL in 2006 so that senior Missile Defense Agency (MDA) officials will be able to measure its progress, according to Air Force Col. John Daniels, the ABL's program director. The ABL is a Boeing 747 aircraft being equipped with a high-powered chemical laser to destroy ballistic missiles in their boost phase. Boeing Co. of Chicago is...

Two new kinds of super-strong artificial muscles can convert chemical energy into a mechanical force, making them function like natural muscles, to according to a study. The muscles, which are 100 times stronger than the real thing, were reported by Von Howard Ebron and colleageus, from the University of Texas at Dallas' NanoTech Institute, in the March 17 issue of Science. They could help usher in an entirely new breed of so-called fuel-cell muscles that receive chemical fuel — such as hydrogen or methyl alcohol — through a circulatory system, convert it to mechanical energy, and store any unused energy...

A nanotechnologist has created the world's smallest and most plentiful Smiley, a tiny face measuring a few billionths of a meter across that is assembled from strands of DNA. Fifty billion Smileys, each a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, can be made at a stroke under the technique pioneered by Paul Rothemund at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). DNA, the molecule that comprises living things, has long been known for its versatility as a microscopic building block. The molecule can be "cut" using enzymes and reassembled using matching rungs in its double-helix structure. This...

MUMBAI (Reuters) - A doctor with fever and respiratory problems was under observation in Maharashtra where tens of thousands of birds were culled to contain a second outbreak of avian flu, officials said on Sunday. The latest outbreak -- in backyard poultry in Jalgaon district of Maharashtra -- was the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu, but it has not infected people so far. However, late on Saturday, a doctor walked into a local hospital and asked to be put under observation, joining a 11-year-old boy with high fever and a history of exposure to dead birds. "The doctor...

CAIRO, March 18 (Reuters) - An Egyptian woman has died of bird flu, the country's first human victim of the virus, Egypt's health ministry said on Saturday. It said a 30-year-old woman from Qaloubiyah province, about 40 kms (25 miles) north of Cairo, was taken ill on Wednesday. "They (doctors) took samples for analysis at the ministry of health laboratories ... They confirmed she was infected with bird flu. She died on Friday morning," a health ministry statement said, adding the woman had been given Tamiflu, a drug used to treat suspected cases of bird flu. The World Health Organisation...

THE lethal strain of bird flu poses a greater challenge to the world than any infectious disease, including AIDS, and has cost 300 million farmers over $10 billion in its spread through poultry around the world, the World Health Organisation said yesterday. Scientists also are increasingly worried that the H5N1 strain could mutate into a form easily passed between humans, triggering a global pandemic. It already is unprecedented as an animal illness in its rapid expansion. Since February, the virus has spread to birds in 17 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, said the WHO's Dr Margaret...

Suspected bird flu cases are being detected in the country at an alarming rate, with more people falling sick in Surakarta in Central Java, Madiun and Malang in East Java and Batam in Riau Islands province. An as-yet unnamed 12-year-old girl suspected of contracting bird flu died Wednesday night after being treated at the Moewardi Hospital in Surakarta. Her body has been sent to her hometown in Boyolali, Central Java, for burial, hospital director Mardiatmo told Antara. Blood tests for the victim have been sent to a Jakarta laboratory for confirmation. Another seriously ill suspected bird flu patient is being...

Tehran, Iran, Mar. 02 – Iran’s State Security Forces attacked female football fans in Tehran on Wednesday after they held a defiant protest against the government decision to ban women from football stadiums. Dozens of young women, who had bought tickets and hoped to cheer on their national team, were all banned from entering Tehran’s Azadi Stadium. The ban has been in force for years, but a few dozen women have challenged it in recent months. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government recently decided to enforce the ban more strongly. After being refused entry into the stands, the women organised a...

ROURKELA: About 3,000 people in Orissa's steel town of Rourkela have come down with a mysterious viral fever that has health officials completely baffled. The fever was first reported in a small group at a slum cluster in Panposh on the outskirts of Rourkela, famous for its steel plant, on Monday. Since then, it has rapidly spread to other parts of the town. The high fever is accompanied by vomiting, headache and acute colic pain, said a senior district health official. Most of the patients have been admitted to government and private hospitals. Results of blood tests on about 300...

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has been confirmed in a cat in Germany, the first time it has been positively identified in the country in an animal other than a bird, a national laboratory said today. The cat was found on the northern island of Ruegen, where most of Germany’s more-than 100 cases of H5N1-infected wild birds have been found, the Friedrich Loeffler institute said. No other details were immediately available.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: An Australian epidemiologist working at the forefront of the fight against bird flu in Indonesia says that country's failure to effectively deal with the disease it putting not only neighbouring Australia but the whole world at risk of a pandemic. Dr Andrew Jeremijenko has worked in Indonesia for eight years, most recently as the Project Leader of the Influenza Surveillance Studies for a US Naval Medical Research Group, helping the Indonesian Government. He says countries like Turkey, Vietnam and Thailand have implemented effective control programs and have since had no human deaths, but in Indonesia the deaths keep...

SOFIA, Feb. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- A young woman hospitalized last Friday in Bulgaria's second largest city of Plovdiv has died after showing symptoms of bird flu, Bulgarian state news agency BTA reported on early Monday. The patient, 27, was sent to hospital with severe bilateral pneumonia and breathing difficulties, BTA cited the chief doctor Mariana Stoicheva as saying. Stoicheva revealed the woman had worked in a local minced chicken factory, prompting the hospital to treat her as a suspicious avian flu-infected patient. Initial tests to detect the fatal H5N1 strain of bird flu virus were immediately carried out and the...

A frantic teacher and her terrified pupils sent text messages to relatives stating that they were trapped after their school disappeared under a huge mudslide in the Philippines. "We're still in one room, alive," read the message from the teacher to her mother, Pamela Tiempo. One of the pupils wrote: "We are alive. Dig us out." Only 57 people out of 1,857 survived the mudslide But the messages stopped on Friday evening, hours after the mudslide, leading rescue workers to conclude that the school had become a tomb for everyone inside, with those who sent the messages probably suffocating. Only...

(Entertainment Weekly) -- "Freedomland," a dying-to-be-cathartic drama of American racial turmoil, lets us know from the outset that we're in for a heady dose of social studies. An adaptation of Richard Price's 1998 novel (Price wrote the script himself), directed by the earnest rather than inspired Joe Roth, it's set in and around a New Jersey public housing project, and it starts by hitting us with bulletins from a war zone: a candlelight vigil for missing children, Julianne Moore slamming into the emergency room with blood -- literally -- on her hands....

JAPAN'S economy grew at more than three times the pace of both the US and Europe in the fourth quarter as consumer spending surged. The world's second-largest economy expanded at an annual 5.5 per cent pace in the three months to December 31, the Cabinet Office said in Tokyo yesterday. Japanese consumer confidence is at a 15-year high as companies hire, job prospects improve and wages rise, propelling the economy to its longest post-war expansion. The Bank of Japan may take the consumer-demand revival into account when deciding when to end its five-year deflation-fighting policy, according to Jim O'Neill, chief...

The bird flu virus is only two mutations away from a form that can spread easily between people, sparking a pandemic in which millions could die, the UN bird flu chief said in an interview published in Portugal. "Only two mutations are needed for it to become easily transmissible among humans," Dr David Nabarro, who heads the UN drive to contain the virus, told weekly newspaper Expresso. "I wake up every morning thinking that today could be the day that I will see a report about a strange case of bird flu among humans," he said. The H5N1 bird flu...

BAKU, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Azerbaijan said on Friday that the H5N1 strain of bird flu had been found in tests on wild birds. Samples from wild birds in the Caspian Sea were sent for tests to London and showed the bird flu strain was present, a spokesman for the Health Ministry said. "In some analyses the H5N1 bird flu strain was found," a spokesman for the ministry told Reuters. "Bird flu has not yet been found in the human population."

An Indian sailor who died in the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda may have been infected with bird flu, the Lithuanian health ministry said. "A member of the crew of the ship M.V. Ocean Wind, Indian citizen Shaikh Rafikque, died in Klaipeda. The suspected cause of death is bird flu," a statement from the ministry said. "Rafikque, who was the ship's cook, fell ill on February 4, according to reports from the crew," the statement said. "He died in a medical emergency vehicle on Monday," it said. A preliminary autopsy will be conducted on the 62-year-old sailor's body in Klaipeda, with...

Al-Sulaimaniya, Iraq/Cairo (dpa) - A fresh bird flu scare has erupted in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq with reports of 162 suspected cases almost two weeks after a 15-year-old girl died of the deadly strain. In the Thursday issue of pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, the head of the pre-emption committee in the Kurdistan Province Najm Eddin Mohammed announced that 162 people have been admitted to the diagnosis center on suspicion of contracting the virus. Mohammed told al-Hayat that the virus has proliferated throughout Rania, a region southwest of al-Sulaymania on the border with Turkey, and described the influx as a...