Do you know of any kid who has dipped his feet in the Pacific Ocean lately? It may be a strange question to ask, but a study indicates that 73% of kids these days have never done so.

Even curious is the fact that video games and other media have again taken flak for kids' being supposedly out of touch with nature. More on this topic in the full article after the jump.

The average person will probably have nothing in mind about his own solid waste except to get rid of it by flushing it. Thank goodness they didn't have johns 14,000 years ago or we might have less clues about our ancestors. Recently discovered in Oregon is the oldest native American DNA, and it's all because someone's feces lasted so long. Full story after the jump.

The Federal government has given permission to Washington state and Oregon to issue death sentences to a common killer: Sea lions. While they may seem cute, feeding frenzies orchestrated by these marine mammals are contributing heavily to the dwindling population of migratory Pacific Northwestern salmon. Find out more in the full article up ahead.

Cloning has received its fair share of controversy and glowing cats, but it does have its advantages. One of these advantages is the ability to preserve. That is the idea behind New York City's project to clone "historical" trees from Central Park. Details in the full article.

First it was a sheep; now it's a monkey. Thanks to a technical breakthrough pioneered by Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a Russian-born scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre in Beaverton, scientists have been able to clone dozens of monkey embryos from adult monkeys.

More monkey business after the jump!

An article was posted last time about how women are more vulnerable to alcohol than men. Now a new study from Oregon Health and Science University has gathered evidence that suggests that women are also more vulnerable to alcohol withdrawal.

Using mice as their subjects, scientists first identified alcohol-related gene pathways and then subjected these mice to a series of alcohol-related tests (lucky mice). We all know that an alcohol is a poison that kills slowly. One of the scarier things it does is cell death in the brain.

What the researchers found upon studying the mice was that during withdrawal, the males' genes just clear up while the females experienced cell death. This suggests that females are literally more susceptible to brain damage from alcohol.

They also found that during consumption, testosterone rises in females and drops in males. Scientists are now trying to see whether testosterone may play a part in alcohol damage immunity. They aren't ruling out the possibility that the males just experience cell death at a later date though.

Ironically, last October a study on rats revealed that alcohol improves memory.

If you have a male war veteran in your family, you would do well to know that they're at double the rate of committing suicide than civilians. This alarming fact came from a study recently published in the July issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The study itself was written by health researches hailing from both Portland and Oregon universities. Mark Kaplan, lead author and professor in the School of Community Health at Portland State University, revealed his findings:

We clearly demonstrated that independent of when they served in the military, veterans were all equally at risk for suicide. What’s more, we showed that veterans were at a greater risk of dying of suicide when compared to the non-veteran population.

He also cited impaired functional status or disabilities which the veteran may have been afflicted with during his tour of duty. This definitely adds to the risk of suicide among male veterans.

And it's not just broad generalization at work here, either. Instead of relying on Vietnam-era veterans or clinical populations, the researchers actually evaluated a sample of the general population, using a representative data set from 104,026 veterans nationwide.

Other conclusions derived from the study are:

•   Whites and those with 12-plus years or more of education are at greater risk for suicide.
•   The risk of death from other causes such as disease or accidents did not differ between veterans and non-veterans.
•   Overweight vets had a lower risk for suicide.
•   Activity limitation increased veterans' risk factors.
•   Veterans are 58% more likely to be use firearms to commit suicide than non veterans.

Certainly sobering news for us who have veterans in our families, isn't it? And it's not just us who should worry about this news. Bentson McFarland, M.D., reminds family members as well as healthcare providers to be specially aware when it comes to individuals having served in previous wars - the increased risk of suicide is simply nothing to scoff at.

Beneath the land that surrounds Oregon's Blue Mountain lurks a creature of colossal proportions, able to kill entire forests at a whim and making dinosaurs, blue whales and woolly mammoths look like gnats along the way. It's threatening to consume another hapless forest in time and what are we doing about it? Absolutely nothing.

The creature described is called Armillaria and it's a huge fungus the size of 1,600 football fields. It's subterranean in nature and feeds off the local vegetation by attaching tentacle-like structures on to roots and draining life away.

For almost a decade, it was disputed whether the Armillaria is a group of fungi or one huge creature. With the advent of DNA identification technology, it was discovered that it is, indeed, just a single creature. Scientists have considered eliminating it to preserve forests, but were stumped on how to do it. There's just not enough weed whacker out there to kill it, so a live-and-let-live policy was adopted.

The organism is estimated to be some 8,000 years old and is believed to be capable of growing some more. If this happens, fir forests surrounding the area could be in trouble. The good thing is that the humongous fungus grows very slowly, so we might still devise a plot to stop it before a full-blown catastrophe happens.

Sometimes, nature heals better naturally. Consider Ian Malcolm from the Jurassic Park novel: he pointed out that the earth has been around much longer than we have. Certainly it has means of healing itself and adapting to times better than we do. In the case of forests destroyed by wildfires, this applies too.

A study done by an Oregon State University team found out that in the aftermath of wildfires, even the those that experienced great fires manage to sprout seedling even without the humans doing anything, within five to ten years. Natural regeneration of forests after a wildfire may take longer, but it creates a more diversified forest.

In this regard, wildfires are seen both as an agent of destruction and renewal. The Hindus understand this better with their goddess Kali, the goddess of destruction as well as rebirth. Sometimes it could be better to let forests regenerate on their own after a wildfire; they may have better coping mechanisms than we could ever provide them.

The Oregon study found hundreds of trees per acre in various types of forests, equal to or greater than the density of most older forests, even 19 years after the fire. The researchers even saw a lot of seedlings far away from the surviving trees that could still provide them. How did the seedlings ever get there? Nature must have her own ways...

The tales of Sinbad the Sailor are based on voyages of exploration by Muslim Arab sailors during the Middle Ages. Zheng-He, the famous Chinese admiral whose ships reached the east coast of Africa and possibly the Oregon coast was also a follower of Islam.

A representative of the Muslim world is now posed to relive a religion devoted to mathematics, science and exploration. Muszaphar Shukor, a 34-year-old doctor will become Malaysia's first astronaut when he blasts off on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft just about a year from now. Malaysian army dentist Faiz Khaleed, 26, will be the back-up astronaut. They will now travel to Moscow's Star City for a year of training.

Shukor and Khaleed were chosen from a list of 10,000 applicants. "I feel honoured and blessed to be picked," Shukor says. "I've dreamed to go to space since I was 10 years old. My favourite TV programmes have been Star Trek and the Star Wars movies."