TOKYO (AP) — An earthquake of magnitude 7.3 struck early Saturday off Japan's east coast, the U.S. Geological Survey said, triggering small tsunamis but causing no apparent damage.
Japan's meteorological agency said the quake was an aftershock of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck the same area in 2011, killing about 19,000 people and devastating the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant.
Tsunamis of up to 40 centimeters (15 inches) were reported Saturday at four areas along the coast, but a tsunami advisory was lifted less than two hours after the quake.
Japanese television images of harbors showed calm waters. The quake hit at 2:10 a.m. Tokyo time (1710 GMT) about 290 kilometers (170 miles) off Fukushima, and it was felt in Tokyo, some 300 miles (480 kilometers) away.
"It was fairly big, and rattled quite a bit, but nothing fell to the floor or broke. We've had quakes of this magnitude before," Satoshi Mizuno, an official with the Fukushima prefectural government's disaster management department, told The Associated Press by phone. "Luckily, the quake's center was very far off the coast."
Mizuno said the operator of the troubled Fukushima plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said no damage or abnormalities have been found.
Japan's meteorological agency issued a 1-meter (3-foot) tsunami advisory for a long stretch of Japan's northeastern coast, and put the quake's magnitude at 7.1. The U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not post warnings for the rest of the Pacific.
The meteorological agency reported tsunamis of 40 centimeters in Kuji city in Iwate prefecture and Soma city in Fukushima, as well as a 20-centimeter tsunami at Ofunato city in Iwate and a 30-centimeter tsunami at Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture.
All of Japan's 50 nuclear reactors remain offline as the government decides whether they meet more stringent requirement enacted after the 2011 quake, which triggered multiple meltdowns and massive radiation leaks at the Fukushima plant about 250 kilometers (160 miles) northeast of Tokyo.
A string of mishaps this year at the Fukushima plant has raised international concerns about the operator's ability to tackle the continuing crisis.
Nuclear Regulation Authority Chairman Shinichi Tanaka has scheduled a Monday meeting with Tokyo Electric's president to seek solutions to what he says appear to be fundamental problems.
Drone strikes in Pakistan are in the spotlight after that country's Prime Minister visited the U.S., and a new report detailed hundreds of civilian casualties from American attacks. But how do people in Pakistan view drones? Host Michel Martin speaks to freelance journalists Aisha Sarwari and Madiha Tahir to find out.
NEW YORK (AP) — "Fifty Shades of Grey" has its male lead, again.
Jamie Dornan has been cast as Christian Grey, the lead role that Charlie Hunnam withdrew from recently. Dornan will star alongside female lead Dakota Johnson, with Sam Taylor-Johnson directing. Shooting is planned to begin in November, with a release in August next year.
Hunnam's departure left the project momentarily reeling. The big-screen adaption of E L James' bestselling erotic novel has been carefully followed by its fans, who were critical of Hunnam's casting.
The 31-year-old Dornan, a former model from Northern Ireland, is relatively unknown. He's starred in the British TV series "The Fall" and the ABC series "Once Upon a Time."
Unlike with Hunnam, social media reaction to Dornan's casting was generally positive.
Jennifer Haselberger, former top canon lawyer for the archdiocese, found stored files detailing how some priests had histories of sexual abuse. She resigned in April.
Jennifer Simonson/Minnesota Public Radio
Jennifer Haselberger, former top canon lawyer for the archdiocese, found stored files detailing how some priests had histories of sexual abuse. She resigned in April.
Jennifer Simonson/Minnesota Public Radio
The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has been rocked in recent weeks by revelations from a top-level whistle-blower. The former official says church leaders covered up numerous cases of sexual misconduct by priests and even made special payments to pedophiles.
The scandal is notable not only because of the abuse but also because it happened in an archdiocese that claimed to be a national leader in dealing with the issue.
To understand what's happening now, it helps to go back to 2002, when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops faced a crisis brought on by its failure to remove abusive priests from ministry.
'I Wanted Them To Do The Right Thing'
Archbishop Harry Flynn of St. Paul and Minneapolis emerged as a national leader on the issue, urging bishops at a now-historic conference in Dallas to root out what he called a cancer in the church.
"This is a defining moment for us this morning as bishops," he said at the time.
Back in Minnesota, Flynn assured the faithful that the worst problems lay elsewhere and this archdiocese wasn't going to cover up abuse.
Flynn retired in 2008 and was replaced by Archbishop John Nienstedt, who hired a young canon lawyer named Jennifer Haselberger to oversee church records.
As priests came up for promotion, Haselberger searched church files for any disciplinary problems. Digging deeper, she found separate stored files detailing how some priests had long histories of sexual addiction and abuse. She warned Nienstedt about what she'd learned, she says.
"I wanted them to do the right thing," Haselberger says. "I wanted them to take allegations seriously. I wanted them to get offending priests out of ministry. I wanted them to be disclosing to the police and working with law enforcement to make sure that our churches were safe for children, and the vulnerable and the elderly."
She then discovered that some abusive priests got special payments, like the Rev. Robert Kapoun, who for 14 years received nearly $1,000 a month on top of his pension.
Kapoun retired in the late '90s after admitting in court that he sexually abused boys. He now lives in a half-million-dollar lake home. Because of his history of abuse, he's supposed to be carefully monitored.
Kapoun says he doesn't have much contact with the church these days. He says he does meet occasionally with priests to discuss "news and happenings in the world, and so on."
Haselberger says that for her, one of the last straws came when a priest was arrested for and convicted of sexually abusing children.
Several years earlier, Haselberger had examined the lengthy file of that priest, Curtis Wehmeyer. Documents showed he had approached young men for sex in a bookstore.
Haselberger says she gave the information to Nienstedt. Soon after, he appointed Wehmeyer pastor of two parishes.
A top church deputy, the Rev. Kevin McDonough, says he didn't realize Wehmeyer was abusing children until after his arrest.
"Nothing, nothing, nothing in this man's behavior known to us would have convinced any reasonable person that he was likely to harm kids," McDonough says.
Lawsuits And Calls For A Resignation
Haselberger resigned in protest in April, but she says she felt burdened by what she knew.
"Because I was still having to look people in the face who I knew that I had information that they needed," she says. "And the fact that I had this and they didn't, and no one was going to be telling them, was really difficult."
So Haselberger shared the church's secrets with Minnesota Public Radio News in a series of interviews this fall.
Nienstedt has declined to be interviewed on tape. In an emailed response to questions, he denied breaking any laws or covering up abuse. Earlier this month, his top deputy stepped down as the crisis widened.
Victims of abuse are preparing to file lawsuits now allowed under a new state law as the archdiocese braces for what could be a massive financial blow.
Thomas Doyle, a Catholic priest who warned bishops in the '80s of a looming abuse crisis, says it's remarkable the revelations are coming from an insider.
"What has been happening, it seems to me, in St. Paul has been almost a chain reaction," he says. "There's something systemic; it's not accidental."
Doyle says the reckoning comes as prosecutors seem increasingly willing to file criminal charges against church leaders.
Nienstedt has responded to the scandal by creating a task force to review church policies.
But some parishioners, and even priests here, are calling for him to resign. They say they feel betrayed by church leaders who led them to believe that their archdiocese remained a safe place for children.
Researchers track lethal prostate cancer to determine clonal origin
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
25-Oct-2013
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Contact: Corinne Williams press_releases@the-jci.org Journal of Clinical Investigation
Prostate cancer has variable manifestations, ranging from relatively benign localized tumors to widespread life-threatening metastases. The origin of most prostate cancer metastases can be traced back to the primary tumor; therefore, understanding the mutations in the primary tumor that promote cancer spread is of great interest. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Srinivasan Yegnasubramanian and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University track the development of lethal prostate cancer in a patient. Using tissue samples taken throughout the progression of the cancer, the authors identified the origin of the lethal clone. Surprisingly, in this case the lethal clone originated from a small, low-grade foci in the primary tumor and not from the larger high-grade region of the tumor. In the accompanying commentary, Rose Brannon and Charles Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center discuss the importance of individual case studies and how a comprehensive database of such studies is needed to identify common patterns in cancer progression.
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TITLE: Tracking the clonal origin of lethal prostate cancer
AUTHOR CONTACT: Michael C. Haffner
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, MD, USA
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/70935?key=0fe6ce6bb3bf4e8a509a
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Researchers track lethal prostate cancer to determine clonal origin
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
25-Oct-2013
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Contact: Corinne Williams press_releases@the-jci.org Journal of Clinical Investigation
Prostate cancer has variable manifestations, ranging from relatively benign localized tumors to widespread life-threatening metastases. The origin of most prostate cancer metastases can be traced back to the primary tumor; therefore, understanding the mutations in the primary tumor that promote cancer spread is of great interest. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Srinivasan Yegnasubramanian and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University track the development of lethal prostate cancer in a patient. Using tissue samples taken throughout the progression of the cancer, the authors identified the origin of the lethal clone. Surprisingly, in this case the lethal clone originated from a small, low-grade foci in the primary tumor and not from the larger high-grade region of the tumor. In the accompanying commentary, Rose Brannon and Charles Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center discuss the importance of individual case studies and how a comprehensive database of such studies is needed to identify common patterns in cancer progression.
###
TITLE: Tracking the clonal origin of lethal prostate cancer
AUTHOR CONTACT: Michael C. Haffner
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, MD, USA
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/70935?key=0fe6ce6bb3bf4e8a509a
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
NEW YORK (AP) — The first piece of a nearly $4 billion redevelopment of the World Trade Center transportation hub debuted Thursday with the official opening of an underground concourse that passes through an area that has been closed since 9/11.
The gleaming, marble-paved expanse is expected to smooth the way for tens of thousands of commuters and visitors. It ultimately will feature retail outlets, but it offers something new right now: A passageway that links businesses and ferry service to the west of the trade center site to New Jersey-bound PATH trains and the rest of lower Manhattan to the east.
Prior to Sept. 11, pedestrians used a bridge over heavily traveled West Street. Since the attacks destroyed the bridge, they've used a temporary bridge or crossed the streets at street level. The temporary bridge is being dismantled and is not in use.
"The original World Trade Center site eliminated the street grid because that was the fashion of the times," Port Authority of New York and New Jersey executive director Patrick Foye said at Thursday's ribbon cutting. "This restores that street grid and adds an underground grid that literally spans the length of lower Manhattan."
Foye noted that designing the $3.9 billion transportation hub, scheduled to be completed in 2015, provided the opportunity for a "do-over" of sorts that focuses more on linking multiple modes of transportation than the original World Trade Center site did.
The hub will connect the PATH rail system, ferry service, New York City subway lines and the Fulton Street Transit Center. Gone will be the days, Foye said, of commuters having to cross busy streets and trudge up and down stairs to make transit connections, Foye said.
The approximately 600-foot-long underground concourse, which features 40,000 square feet of Italian marble, will house stores and restaurants on two levels, also by 2015. The Port Authority is partnering with Westfield Group to develop and lease the more than 350,000 square feet of retail space. Westfield had signed a long-term retail deal with the Port Authority not long before Sept. 11 and signed a new deal for the redeveloped site in early 2008.
Other components of the redeveloped World Trade Center site will be rolled out over the next several months.
The 72-story 4 World Trade Center is scheduled to open next month, and One World Trade Center, once known as the Freedom Tower, is expected to have its official opening in early 2014.
The first new PATH rail platform to replace the temporary platforms that have been used since Sept. 11 should open by the end of this year or early in 2014, Steven Plate, World Trade Center construction director, said.
Yards from where hurrying commuters passed through the temporary PATH station Thursday, workers continued the construction of the massive, 800,000-square-foot transportation hub, whose dominant feature will be an "oculus," two wing-like sections of arches separated by a huge skylight.
"To use a football analogy, we feel like we're on the 20-yard line and we're about to punch it in," Plate said.
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian investigators say a female suicide bomber has struck a passenger bus in the southern city of Volgograd, killing five people and injuring at least 20 others.
The state ITAR-Tass news agency cited Valery Safonov, an official with Russia's main investigative agency, saying the suspected bomber was the partner of a militant. He did not say where that militant was from.
The spokesman for the Investigative Committee confirmed that the explosion was an act of terrorism.
Monday's explosion was the first on a bus in Russia since a 2008 bombing carried out by a female suicide bomber in the North Caucasus, a region in southern Russia where an Islamic insurgency is simmering.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
A bomb blast rocked a passenger bus in the southern Russian city of Volgograd on Monday, killing at least five people and injuring 17 others, officials said.
The blast was caused by "an unspecified explosive device," the National Anti-Terrorism Committee said in a statement.
There was no immediate information about who might have carried out the bombing or why. The anti-terrorism agency, which is part of the Federal Security Service, said investigators were on the scene.
A total of 40 people were on the city bus at the time of the explosion, said Irina Gogolyeva, a spokeswoman for the Emergency Situations Ministry. She said at least five died and 17 were injured.
Many of the injured were hospitalized in serious condition, the state news agency ITAR-Tass reported.
OS X Mavericks operating system already accounts for 5.5% of North American web traffic from Apple’s operating systems just 24 hours after release, ad tracking firm Chitika tells us. The rate of adoption easily surpasses OS X Mountain Lion which hit 1.6% over the same period following its debut.
Note that this is a measurement of Apple’s OS X web share specifically, not an overall measurement of traffic from all operating systems. It’s simply a notation of how fast Apple has managed to get folks to upgrade to its new OS.
Obviously making Mavericks free spurred adoption massively this time around, and the curves of adoption here look a lot like Apple’s iOS 7, which already accounted for a majority of iOS installs just a few days after release. We’ve written about Apple’s move to make Mavericks free and the gauntlet that it throws to competitors like Microsoft — but adoption rates are very clearly another great byproduct of the decision.
Pre-release OS X Mavericks exhibited low levels of usage due to beta-version activity from developers,” says Chitika. “24 hours following Mavericks’ public release the afternoon of October 22, adoption rates hit 5.5% of all Mac OS X Web traffic. This significantly outpaces OS X Mountain Lion, which took approximately four days to reach the same level.”
If you’re curious about methodology, Chitika sampled ‘millions of U.S. and Canadian Mac OS X-based online ad impressions running through the Chitika Ad Network’. The data used to make the chart was drawn from impressions catalogued across the time frame of October 22 through October 23, 20.
I’ve been blogging a lot over the past week or so about the risk of an insurance market "death spiral" -- where young people stay away, so the only people buying insurance are old and sick, causing the cost of insurance to rise over time and pushing ever more healthy young people out of the market.
Adrianna McIntyre says that we shouldn’t worry; there’s a provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that deals with this:
Continuing this week's feature Sense of Place: Detroit, we welcome The Hounds Below to the World Cafe. Even before the popular garage rock band The Von Bondies started to dissolve in 2009, lead singer Jason Stollsteimer was already writing the poppier songs that make up the repertoire of the Hounds. Stollsteimer committed to the new band in 2011; the group released its debut, You Light Me Up In The Dark, the following year.
In Wednesday's session, we talk with Stollsteimer about Detroit rock 'n' roll. The musician also expands upon the new bands springing up in the city, and where the Hounds like to peform live. The group's live set features four songs, including the title track from its debut.
A court order forcing former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's email provider to turn over its master encryption key undermines a critical security feature used by major Internet services, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Thursday.
The EFF, a digital rights watchdog, filed a brief on Thursday in support of the email provider, Lavabit, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Lavabit founder Ladar Levison was found in contempt of court for resisting an order to turn over his company's private SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) key, used to encrypt communications for 400,000 users. He is appealing.
The U.S. government is believed to have sought access to the account of Snowden, who gave out a Lavabit email address after arriving in Russia, but he has not been named in the court documents.
Turning over the private SSL key would have allowed the government to potentially access the communications of all of Lavabit's users, violating the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against overly broad warrants.
"This is like trying to hit a nail with a wrecking ball," the EFF wrote in its brief.
Service providers including Facebook, Google, Bank of America and Amazon rely on SSL -- designated by "https" in a browser's address field -- to protect communications with users.
"Facebook has a single private key that protects the communications of over 1.26 billion users," the EFF wrote. "In the case of Facebook, having the private key used by the company would give unfettered access to the personal information of almost 20 percent of all of the human beings on the planet obtained through the Facebook site for three years."
The EFF argued that the breach of private keys could have a profound effect on the U.S. economy, with service providers likely to move to legal jurisdictions "that afford more protections for privacy and security."
Lavabit was initially served with a pen register order that required it to provide metadata association with the email account the government sought. But like other privacy-focused email and VPN service providers, Lavabit's systems were designed to not retain that information.
The company was then served with a warrant to turn over its private SSL key. Levison opted in early August to shut down Lavabit's service, saying he could no longer guarantee the privacy of users.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk
AAAOct. 24, 20134:08 PM ET Kennedy cousin Skakel seeks release on bond AP
FILE - In a Friday, April 26, 2013 file photo, Michael Skakel, right, talks to Jessica Santos, one of his defense attorneys, during his appeal at State Superior Court in Vernon, Conn. On Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, Skakel's conviction in the death of Moxley was set aside and new trial ordered by a Connecticut judge, Thomas Bishop, who ruled that Sherman failed to adequately represent him when he was found guilty in 2002. Skakel's current attorney, Hubert Santos, said he expects to file a motion for bail on Thursday. If a judge approves it, Skakel could then post bond and be released from prison. (AP Photo/The Stamford Advocate, Jason Rearick, Pool, File)
FILE - In a Friday, April 26, 2013 file photo, Michael Skakel, right, talks to Jessica Santos, one of his defense attorneys, during his appeal at State Superior Court in Vernon, Conn. On Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, Skakel's conviction in the death of Moxley was set aside and new trial ordered by a Connecticut judge, Thomas Bishop, who ruled that Sherman failed to adequately represent him when he was found guilty in 2002. Skakel's current attorney, Hubert Santos, said he expects to file a motion for bail on Thursday. If a judge approves it, Skakel could then post bond and be released from prison. (AP Photo/The Stamford Advocate, Jason Rearick, Pool, File)
FILE - Martha Moxley, shown at age 14 in this 1974 file photo, was murdered on Oct. 30, 1975. Michael Skakel's conviction in the death of Moxley was set aside and new trial ordered Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013 by a Connecticut judge, Thomas Bishop, who ruled that Skakel's trial attorney failed to adequately represent him when he was found guilty in 2002. Skakel's current attorney, Hubert Santos, said he expects to file a motion for bail on Thursday. If a judge approves it, Skakel could then post bond and be released from prison. (AP Photo, File)
FILE - In a Thursday, April 18, 2013 file photo, former Michael Skakel defense attorney Michael Sherman testifies at Michael Skakel's habeas corpus hearing at State Superior Court in Rockville, Conn. On Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, Skakel's conviction in the death of Moxley was set aside and new trial ordered by a Connecticut judge, Thomas Bishop, who ruled that Sherman failed to adequately represent him when he was found guilty in 2002. Skakel's current attorney, Hubert Santos, said he expects to file a motion for bail on Thursday. If a judge approves it, Skakel could then post bond and be released from prison. (AP Photo/Stamford Advocate, Jason Rearick, Pool, File)
In a Wednesday June 5, 2002 file photo, Thomas Skakel, stands outside the court in Norwalk Conn., during a coffe break for the jury deliberation phase of his brother Michael Skakel's trial for the October 1975 murder of Martha Moxley. On Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, Michael Skakel's conviction in the death of Moxley was set aside and new trial ordered by a Connecticut judge, Thomas Bishop, who ruled that Skakel's defense attorney failed to adequately represent him when he was found guilty in 2002. Among other issues, the judge wrote that the defense could have focused more on Thomas Skakel, who was an early suspect in the case because he was the last person seen with Martha Moxley. Had Sherman done so, "there is a reasonable probability that the outcome of the trial would have been different," the judge wrote. (AP Photo/Douglas Healey, File)
FILE - In this April 30, 2013 file photo, Michael Skakel leaves the courtroom after the conclusion of trial regarding his legal representation at State Superior Court in Vernon, Conn. A Connecticut judge on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, granted a new trial for Skakel, ruling his attorney failed to adequately represent him when he was convicted in 2002 of killing his neighbor in 1975. (AP Photo/The Greenwich Time, Jason Rearick, Pool, File)
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Lawyers for Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel filed a motion Thursday seeking his release from prison on bond while he awaits a new trial in the 1975 slaying of neighbor Martha Moxley.
Skakel's conviction was set aside Wednesday by Connecticut Judge Thomas Bishop, who ruled that Skakel's trial attorney, Michael Sherman, failed to adequately represent him when he was found guilty in 2002 in the golf club bludgeoning of Moxley when they were 15 in wealthy Greenwich.
Skakel's current attorney, Hubert Santos, filed a motion Thursday afternoon in Rockville Superior Court seeking a $500,000 bond. If a judge approves it, Skakel could then post bond and be released from prison.
"We're very, very thrilled," Santos said. "I always felt that Michael was innocent."
Bridgeport State's Attorney John Smriga said prosecutors will appeal both the decision and the request for bond. He said they remain confident in the jury' verdict.
"The state's case relied on Michael Skakel's uncontested connection to the murder weapon, strong evidence of motive, substantial evidence of consciousness of guilt, nearly a dozen incriminating admissions and three unequivocal confessions," Smriga said in a statement.
During a state trial in April on the appeal, Skakel took the stand and blasted Sherman's handling of the case, portraying him as an overly confident lawyer having fun and basking in the limelight while making fundamental mistakes from poor jury picks to failing to track down key witnesses.
Sherman has said he did all he could to prevent Skakel's conviction and denied he was distracted by media attention in the high-profile case.
As of Thursday afternoon, no date for a bond hearing had been set.
The folks over at Gear Junkie got a chance to visit the product development lab at North Face's new headquarters in Alameda, California, and one of the many new innovations they were shown was this wonderful runner's jacket that uses a clever ventilation system to cool you down.
Microsoft has just posted first quarter earnings that suggest it's faring well despite a tough PC market. Although the company's revenue was down from the previous quarter to $18.5 billion, its net profit climbed to $5.2 billion; both figures were double-digit improvements over the same quarter a ...
Natural dyes from common (and a few uncommon) ingredients: A new video by the American Chemical Society
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
24-Oct-2013
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Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 202-872-6042 American Chemical Society
From crimson red to lavender to mustard yellow, vibrant hues can be coaxed from common and a few uncommon ingredients to add color to fabrics. The American Chemical Society's (ACS') Bytesize Science series explains the chemistry behind natural dyes with a new episode filmed at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. The episode is available now on http://www.BytesizeScience.com.
"The process of this is taking natural things from the earth like fruits and vegetables, different roots and taking the color from them and translating them into a fiber," says Sahara Johnson, an intern at the Textile Arts Center. In the video, she demonstrates how to dye material using ingredients from the grocery store plus one color source that's a little harder to get, a bug found on cacti. Johnson pours chopped red cabbage into one large metal pot. Into another, she adds cochineal bugs, which have been used for centuries for their red pigment.
As Johnson dyes white silk lavender and pink in the pots of colored water, the video explains the chemistry of the different dyes and how acidity can change their colors. Acidic lemon juice, for example, can turn a bowl of cabbage dye from purple to red, but adding baking soda, which is basic, transforms it into a blue-green hue.
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Subscribe to Bytesize Science on YouTube for more videos that uncover the chemistry in everyday life.
For more entertaining, informative science videos and podcasts from the ACS Office of Public Affairs, view Prized Science, Spellbound, Science Elements and Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions.
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 163,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
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Natural dyes from common (and a few uncommon) ingredients: A new video by the American Chemical Society
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
24-Oct-2013
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Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 202-872-6042 American Chemical Society
From crimson red to lavender to mustard yellow, vibrant hues can be coaxed from common and a few uncommon ingredients to add color to fabrics. The American Chemical Society's (ACS') Bytesize Science series explains the chemistry behind natural dyes with a new episode filmed at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. The episode is available now on http://www.BytesizeScience.com.
"The process of this is taking natural things from the earth like fruits and vegetables, different roots and taking the color from them and translating them into a fiber," says Sahara Johnson, an intern at the Textile Arts Center. In the video, she demonstrates how to dye material using ingredients from the grocery store plus one color source that's a little harder to get, a bug found on cacti. Johnson pours chopped red cabbage into one large metal pot. Into another, she adds cochineal bugs, which have been used for centuries for their red pigment.
As Johnson dyes white silk lavender and pink in the pots of colored water, the video explains the chemistry of the different dyes and how acidity can change their colors. Acidic lemon juice, for example, can turn a bowl of cabbage dye from purple to red, but adding baking soda, which is basic, transforms it into a blue-green hue.
###
Subscribe to Bytesize Science on YouTube for more videos that uncover the chemistry in everyday life.
For more entertaining, informative science videos and podcasts from the ACS Office of Public Affairs, view Prized Science, Spellbound, Science Elements and Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions.
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 163,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
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New testing strategy detects population-wide vitamin and mineral deficiencies
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24-Oct-2013
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Contact: Catherine Kolf ckolf@jhmi.edu 443-287-2251 Johns Hopkins Medicine
Could speed mass intervention in developing countries
Johns Hopkins researchers have demonstrated that levels of certain proteins in the bloodstream may be used to estimate levels of essential vitamins and minerals without directly testing for each nutritional factor. The team's use of a new strategy allowed them to indirectly measure amounts of multiple nutrients in multiple people at the same time, an advance that should make it possible in the future to rapidly detect nutritional deficiencies of an entire population, apply remediation efforts and test their worth within months instead of years.
A summary of the study, which analyzed the levels of five vitamins and minerals in 500 undernourished Nepalese children, was published in the October issue of The Journal of Nutrition.
"Currently, levels of each vitamin or mineral are measured by different tests which are often performed in different labs, so the whole process can take three or four years to detect widespread deficiencies," says Keith West, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., the George G. Graham Professor of Infant and Child Nutrition. "That's too long to wait when the proper growth and cognitive development of children are on the line."
According to West, over 30 vitamins and minerals are essential to human health, and conventional methods for measuring their levels rely on running multiple different tests for each person. The time and cost involved are high enough to be entirely prohibitive at the population level (several hundreds of thousands of dollars), especially in developing countries, he says.
To overcome this barrier, the team focused on what all vitamins and minerals have in common: that each does its job by interacting with proteins throughout the body. Because methods already exist for simultaneously identifying the relative amounts of hundreds of proteins in a single sample of blood, the team wondered if some of those protein levels could be correlated with the levels of their associated nutrients, and thus act as "proxies" for the nutrients.
Using blood samples taken from 500 6- to 8-year-old Nepalese children, the researchers first analyzed the levels of vitamins and minerals according to conventional methods, and then they used a method called mass spectrometry to identify and quantify proteins levels in the same samples. They focused on five nutrients (vitamins A, D and E, and copper and selenium) and five proteins that were already known to be closely related to them. However, instead of performing a separate test for each nutrient's protein, they analyzed all five proteins, plus many others in the samples, in a single experiment.
"Mass spectrometry allows us to measure the quantities of 500 to 1,000 proteins in the blood at one time," says Robert Cole, Ph.D., director of the Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Facility. "Not only that, we can mark all of the proteins from a single sample with a chemical tag that identifies them in the resulting data," he adds, and "because there are eight different tags available, we could tag eight different samples and then mix them together and analyze the eight samples at the same time, directly comparing the samples and saving a lot of time."
At the heart of their experiment, says West, lies the assumption that there are proteins in the bloodstream whose quantities reliably change with the levels of certain nutrients. For example, retinol binding protein (RBP) binds to vitamin A and carries it through the bloodstream to every part of the body, so the researchers theorized that levels of RBP in the children's blood would be a good proxy for their vitamin A levels. To test this assumption, they compared their mass spectrometry results with those of conventional methods for measuring nutrient levels, and found that, for each nutrient, there were often not just one but several proteins whose levels were significantly correlated with the nutrient levels obtained by conventional means.
According to West, there is reason to believe that other vitamins and minerals will also have good proxy proteins. Their goal is to create a simple, portable test kit that would measure many proxy proteins from a single sample in a single test for under $100 per sample. "That would allow us to determine the level of nutrient deficiencies in a whole population within a few months," says West. "Then we could implement a remedy, like fortifying foods with particular nutrients -- something tailored to the needs and habits of the particular population -- and then follow up with more tests later to make sure the remedy is working."
The lure of easily and cheaply monitoring many nutrient-related proteins at once also opens the possibility that the new method could be used to monitor nutritional changes in a population over time. The team expects this technique could also be used to measure natural changes, like hormone levels, in healthy subjects and to track changes in protein levels that occur due to the progression of difficult-to-define diseases like Alzheimer's.
###
Other authors of the report include Tatiana Boronina, Lauren DeVine and Robert O'Meally of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Ingo Ruczinski, Kerry Schulze, Parul Christian, Shelley Herbrich, Lee Wu, James Yager and John Groopman of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
This work was supported by grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GH 5241, GH 614), the Sight and Life Research Institute and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
On the Web:
Link to article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3945/jn.113.175018
Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Facility: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/msf/
Dr. West: http://www.jhsph.edu/faculty/directory/profile/1155/West,_Jr./Keith
Media Contacts:
Catherine Kolf
443-287-2251 ckolf@jhmi.edu
Tim Parsons
410-955-7619 tmparson@jhsph.edu
Vanessa McMains
410-502-9410 vmcmain1@jhmi.edu
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New testing strategy detects population-wide vitamin and mineral deficiencies
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
24-Oct-2013
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Contact: Catherine Kolf ckolf@jhmi.edu 443-287-2251 Johns Hopkins Medicine
Could speed mass intervention in developing countries
Johns Hopkins researchers have demonstrated that levels of certain proteins in the bloodstream may be used to estimate levels of essential vitamins and minerals without directly testing for each nutritional factor. The team's use of a new strategy allowed them to indirectly measure amounts of multiple nutrients in multiple people at the same time, an advance that should make it possible in the future to rapidly detect nutritional deficiencies of an entire population, apply remediation efforts and test their worth within months instead of years.
A summary of the study, which analyzed the levels of five vitamins and minerals in 500 undernourished Nepalese children, was published in the October issue of The Journal of Nutrition.
"Currently, levels of each vitamin or mineral are measured by different tests which are often performed in different labs, so the whole process can take three or four years to detect widespread deficiencies," says Keith West, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., the George G. Graham Professor of Infant and Child Nutrition. "That's too long to wait when the proper growth and cognitive development of children are on the line."
According to West, over 30 vitamins and minerals are essential to human health, and conventional methods for measuring their levels rely on running multiple different tests for each person. The time and cost involved are high enough to be entirely prohibitive at the population level (several hundreds of thousands of dollars), especially in developing countries, he says.
To overcome this barrier, the team focused on what all vitamins and minerals have in common: that each does its job by interacting with proteins throughout the body. Because methods already exist for simultaneously identifying the relative amounts of hundreds of proteins in a single sample of blood, the team wondered if some of those protein levels could be correlated with the levels of their associated nutrients, and thus act as "proxies" for the nutrients.
Using blood samples taken from 500 6- to 8-year-old Nepalese children, the researchers first analyzed the levels of vitamins and minerals according to conventional methods, and then they used a method called mass spectrometry to identify and quantify proteins levels in the same samples. They focused on five nutrients (vitamins A, D and E, and copper and selenium) and five proteins that were already known to be closely related to them. However, instead of performing a separate test for each nutrient's protein, they analyzed all five proteins, plus many others in the samples, in a single experiment.
"Mass spectrometry allows us to measure the quantities of 500 to 1,000 proteins in the blood at one time," says Robert Cole, Ph.D., director of the Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Facility. "Not only that, we can mark all of the proteins from a single sample with a chemical tag that identifies them in the resulting data," he adds, and "because there are eight different tags available, we could tag eight different samples and then mix them together and analyze the eight samples at the same time, directly comparing the samples and saving a lot of time."
At the heart of their experiment, says West, lies the assumption that there are proteins in the bloodstream whose quantities reliably change with the levels of certain nutrients. For example, retinol binding protein (RBP) binds to vitamin A and carries it through the bloodstream to every part of the body, so the researchers theorized that levels of RBP in the children's blood would be a good proxy for their vitamin A levels. To test this assumption, they compared their mass spectrometry results with those of conventional methods for measuring nutrient levels, and found that, for each nutrient, there were often not just one but several proteins whose levels were significantly correlated with the nutrient levels obtained by conventional means.
According to West, there is reason to believe that other vitamins and minerals will also have good proxy proteins. Their goal is to create a simple, portable test kit that would measure many proxy proteins from a single sample in a single test for under $100 per sample. "That would allow us to determine the level of nutrient deficiencies in a whole population within a few months," says West. "Then we could implement a remedy, like fortifying foods with particular nutrients -- something tailored to the needs and habits of the particular population -- and then follow up with more tests later to make sure the remedy is working."
The lure of easily and cheaply monitoring many nutrient-related proteins at once also opens the possibility that the new method could be used to monitor nutritional changes in a population over time. The team expects this technique could also be used to measure natural changes, like hormone levels, in healthy subjects and to track changes in protein levels that occur due to the progression of difficult-to-define diseases like Alzheimer's.
###
Other authors of the report include Tatiana Boronina, Lauren DeVine and Robert O'Meally of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Ingo Ruczinski, Kerry Schulze, Parul Christian, Shelley Herbrich, Lee Wu, James Yager and John Groopman of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
This work was supported by grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GH 5241, GH 614), the Sight and Life Research Institute and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
On the Web:
Link to article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3945/jn.113.175018
Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Facility: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/msf/
Dr. West: http://www.jhsph.edu/faculty/directory/profile/1155/West,_Jr./Keith
Media Contacts:
Catherine Kolf
443-287-2251 ckolf@jhmi.edu
Tim Parsons
410-955-7619 tmparson@jhsph.edu
Vanessa McMains
410-502-9410 vmcmain1@jhmi.edu
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
I know, I know: these days it seems like nearly everyone and their mother is trying to cash in on the mobile messaging app craze. And at first glance, a new Android messaging app called Emu seems like just another claimant to the throne.
It’s not. It’s much, much better. Rather than try to build a new online messaging platform from scratch and then agonize over ways to make it stand out amid a sea of competitors, Emu co-founders Gummi Hafsteinsson and Dave Feldman* decided to take a stab at making our run-of-the-mill SMS conversations smarter.
To hear them tell it, the process of actually getting things done via SMS is an awfully tedious one. Let’s say you’re trying to set wrangle up a friend up to go to the movies with you — it sounds straightforward enough, but there are plenty of sub-steps to tackle if you break it all down. What movie are you going to see? Better fire up that Fandango app. Are both of you free next Thursday? A quick peek at your calendar app should clear that up.
You get where I’m going. Meanwhile, at first glance, Emu doesn’t seem like much more than a handsome replacement for the stock Android SMS app. And hey, if that’s all Emu wound up being, it’d still probably find a following. But Emu’s special sauce comes in the form of information pop ups that appear in your messaging stream when it detects certain snippets of conversation.
You see, the application quietly monitors your conversation and chews on that corpus in search of time, location, and action triggers. If you text a friend to ask if they want to see Gravity, a list of nearby theaters and showtimes will appear. Ditto for restaurants, except it’s OpenTable listings that appear in your feed. And once the conversation starts turning to times, your calendar entries for the span of a few hours pops up to make sure you’re not double booking yourself. Emu is also smart enough to keep track of information that appeared earlier in your exchange — if you first asked your friend if they were free next Friday, listings for that day would be the ones to pop up.
The app has been chugging along in beta for the past few weeks now, and early users only had access to two of the more rudimentary features — the aptly named Marco Polo feature let users share their locations (which are no longer visible after 30 minutes), and a sort of Mailbox-esque burying feature that lets user temporarily archive incoming messages.
Curiously enough, neither of them originally wanted to make a messaging app considering the inevitable comparisons to other competitors. But the more they pondered, the more sense it made.
“If we want to be this ambient assistant,” Feldman noted, “Why not do it where people are already talking?”
The overarching Emu vision is an awfully ambitious one. Eventually they want Emu to process and facilitate all of the conversations on your phone, whether they’re conducted over voice calls, email, or text messages. And even broader than that, they’re hoping to popularize the notion of building these smart assistants into applications beyond your phone.
This may all sound a little outlandish, but co-founder Hafsteinsson isn’t exactly a stranger to building digital assistants — after a run as a Google product manager he went on to become VP of Product at Siri back when its flagship product was the namesake app. Meanwhile, Feldman (a former AOLer who worked on TC’s last big redesign) tackled the app’s UX and ultimately came up with a clean, easy to use design that certainly nets Emu some style points.
Emu certainly isn’t the only startup trying to bake contextually aware assistants into new things either — Disrupt alum Expect Labs has been snapping up capital from the likes of Samsung Ventures and Telefonica to see its own approach to surfacing information before users even know they need it. If these guys have their way, we may soon enter the age of the omnipresent assistant carefully offering data that aligns with our needs. Until then, you can check out Emu for yourself here.
*Disclosure: Dave Feldman was formerly an EIR at CrunchFund, which was created by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. But none of that has anything to do with how I found out about Emu, or why I think it’s so cool.
"Jacco Gardner was way too young when The Zombies recorded Odessey and Oracle in 1968, but it sounds like he was a fly on the wall. Gardner is a 20-something from the Netherlands making music with digital harpsichords. Such fun." - Bob Boilen
"James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) at right introduced a decoy band of costumed characters called The Reflektors, shortly before Arcade Fire appeared on a different stage." - Bob Boilen
"A bit pixilated, but these are the masks the decoy band members were wearing when they rolled up in a limo for the show. Everyone thought they were members of Arcade Fire, but were they?" - Bob Boilen
"Australian singer Courtney Barnett. I saw her three times during the festival and couldn't get enough of her. One of my favorite performers." - Bob Boilen
"This may be the best new thing for me at CMJ: complete with robot voice, banjo, samples, drums, and film... and they rock. It's the multimedia group Public Service Broadcasting." - Bob Boilen
"This guy fell asleep next to one of the speakers at a Yuck show. Toward the end, Yuck guitarist Max Bloom helped the man to his feet, strapped his guitar over the man's shoulders and walked him to center stage. The man staggered a bit before falling down head over heels. And so ends another CMJ." - Bob Boilen
Bob Boilen
Every fall, hundreds of bands flock to New York City for the annual CMJ Music Marathon, a large festival where independent, new and emerging musicians hope to be discovered. All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen was among the countless journalists, bloggers, college radio DJs, record label reps and others who attempted to navigate the sea of live performances, hoping to find new music to love and share.
On this week's show, Bob's joined by music critic Maria Sherman and WSPN's Becka Schwartz to talk about and play some of their favorite discoveries out of the hundreds of shows they saw, including D.C. punks Priests, British multimedia duo Public Service Broadcasting, rockabilly singer King Dude, '60s-era soul from Nick Waterhouse and many more.
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Microsoft has just posted first quarter earnings that suggest it's faring well despite a tough PC market. Although the company's revenue was down from the previous quarter to $18.5 billion, its net profit climbed to $5.2 billion; both figures were double-digit improvements over the same quarter a ...