Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/294867408?client_source=feed&format=rss
olympics chariots of fire nbc Medal Count Sam Mikulak London 2012 diving Tim Berners-Lee
Friday, March 29, 2013
Roll Call: Porter Novelli, Rubenstein PR, Widmeyer ... - Mediabistro
Top firm Porter Novelli announced the addition of industry vet Fred Shank to its roster in the role of senior vice president, consumer practice. Shank joins Porter Novelli after spending nearly four years in a VP position at Edelman PR, where he worked as a strategic leader on accounts for clients like Heineken, Starbucks and Kraft. In his new role Shank will report to?Darl?n Monterisi, managing director of the firm?s New York office. (Release)
Richard Rubenstein, president of Rubenstein Public Relations (RPR), announced that Katie Matulonis has joined the firm as social media manager to advise RPR?s clients on new strategies for developing their digital presence, oversee the agency?s social media properties and develop new business opportunities. Matulonis brings several years of experience in social media community management and consumer and lifestyle communications to her new role after working with consumer, luxury and hospitality brands at Goldstein Communications. Her most notable achievement was growing one brand?s fanbase from zero to over 120,000 in six months on a minimal budget.? (Release)
Widmeyer Communications announced the addition of digital media expert Jerri Ann Henry as digital account lead on the higher education and public affairs teams. Henry has led grassroots, digital and advertising campaigns for companies, coalitions and candidates in the agricultural, energy and telecomm industries. She spent two years as digital director at JDA Frontline where she was responsible for all digital advertising, outreach and research. (Company Website)
Public strategy firm Mercury announced the addition of Rick Wiley, Political Director of the Republican National Committee, and Ashley Walker, 2012 Florida Sstate director for President Obama?s re-election Campaign, to its staff. Wiley, who will serve as managing director in the firm?s Washington, D.C. headquarters, comes to the firm after serving two years as Political Director of the RNC and guiding the ?ground game? for the Romney/Ryan 2012 ticket. Walker, who will serve as managing director of Mercury?s Florida operations, oversaw all aspects of the Obama/Biden 2012 campaign in one of the most competitive states in the presidential race. She also served as Florida State Director of Organizing for America, the Obama campaign?s grassroots/social media operations outfit. (Release)
Bandy Carroll Hellige Advertising (BCH) selected Elizabeth Friedland to serve as general manager of the agency?s Indianapolis office. In her new role, Friedland will direct the overall strategy and operations of the Indianapolis office. She joined BCH in early 2011, serving first as the senior public relations manager before being promoted to the role of public relations supervisor. Friedland is also a regular contributor to Talent Zoo?s PR blog Flack Me, which is very cool. (Company Website)
Shore Fire Media announced the opening of its Nashville office, the expansion of?its Digital Media department, staff member?promotions, and the?addition of new staff members. Jacquelyn Marushka?has joined Shore Fire as general manager of its new Nashville office. Marushka comes to Shore Fire from Sony?Music Entertainment?s?Provident Label Group where she rose to vice president of Public Relations?over 14 years with the company. Carrie Tolles has?been named director of publicity; she previously held the position of senior account executive after joining Shore Fire in 2005 from the?Associated Press. Former senior account executive Elizabeth Lutz has?been named director of publicity; she joined Shore Fire in?2008 after working for Weber Shandwick Worldwide in Boston. (MusicRow)
?
burmese python ferris bueller god bless america earned income credit florida primary 2012 super bowl matthew broderick
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Blind cavefish are hard of hearing, too
Daphne Soares
The cavefish Typhlichthys subterraneus is both blind and hard of hearing.
By Joseph Castro
LiveScience
After generations of living underground and in perpetual darkness, species typically lose their eyesight. Scientists have observed this phenomenon in a range of creatures, including moles, shrimp, flatworms and fish. But new research shows that compared with their surface-dwelling relatives, at least two species of amblyopsid cavefish are partially deaf, in addition to being blind.
"The first hypothesis we had was that these fish that lost their sight should have an increase in hearing capabilities," said lead researcher Daphne Soares, a sensory neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. "It was a big surprise when we found they were a little deaf, and it took a while to come up with an understanding of what was happening."
In humans, the loss of sight is sometimes accompanied by better hearing, at least in people who became blind early in life. But until now, research looking at blind fish species hasn't shown the same phenomenon. For example, the cave and surface forms of the Mexican tetra?(Astyanax mexicanus) hear equally well; same thing goes for the molly Poecilia mexicana.
For their study, Soares and her colleagues decided to look at Amblyopsidae, a small, mostly subterranean family of freshwater fish located in the Eastern and Central regions of the United States. Cave amblyopsids are some of the most comprehensively studied cavefish in the world, because of the range of adaptations they have for living in the dark, such as sensory organs that detect water flow. [Photos: The Extraordinary Evolution of Blind Cavefish]
The team compared the hearing capabilities?of two amblyopsid cave species, Typhlichthys subterraneus and Amblyopsis spelaea, with their closest amblyopsid surface relative, Forbesichthys agassizii. They tested how the brains of fish responded to sounds of varying frequencies and loudness, resulting in hearing profiles for each species. The researchers found that the three species could hear equally well at lower frequencies; however, only the surface species could hear frequencies higher than 800 Hz, and up to 2 kHz. Moreover, the researchers discovered that the cave amblyopsids had lower densities of hair cells ? auditory receptors in the ear that are essential for hearing ? than the surface amblyopsids.
But these findings left the question: Why did the blind fish evolve to have poorer hearing than their sighted relatives? The team figured it must be something in the environment, so they measured the ambient noise?in the aquatic cave and surface habitats. They found the noise in the underground streams peaked near 1 kHz, which lines up with the frequencies the cavefish are deaf to. The cavefish's hearing threshold stops around where the noise in their habitat picks up.
"The caves are very loud with the sound bouncing off the walls and stuff," Soares said. "It would not be very adaptive for the fish to hear at a frequency where the environment is so loud."
With their blindness and difficulty hearing, the two cavefish species likely navigate their surroundings ? and find food and mates?? using their hypersensitivity to water vibrations, Soares said. The team is now interested in seeing if the cavefish found in other parts of the world have undergone similar changes. "We are trying to really understand how animals adapt to the world's diversity of extreme environments," she said.
The research was detailed Tuesday in the Journal Biology Letters.
Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
nor easter nor easter veep los angeles kings earth day timothy leary jonathan frid
Researchers attach Lyme disease antibodies to nanotubes, paving way for diagnostic device
Mar. 26, 2013 ? Early diagnosis is critical in treating Lyme disease. However, nearly one quarter of Lyme disease patients are initially misdiagnosed because currently available serological tests have poor sensitivity and specificity during the early stages of infection. Misdiagnosed patients may go untreated and thus progress to late-stage Lyme disease, where they face longer and more invasive treatments, as well as persistent symptoms.
Existing tests assess the presence of antibodies against bacterial proteins, which take weeks to form after the initial infection and persist after the infection is gone. Now, a nanotechnology-inspired technique developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania may lead to diagnostics that can detect the organism itself.
The study was led by professor A. T. Charlie Johnson of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences along with graduate student Mitchell Lerner, undergraduate researcher Jennifer Dailey and postdoctoral fellow Brett R. Goldsmith, all of Physics. They collaborated with Dustin Brisson, an assistant professor of biology who provided the team with expertise on the bacterium.
Their research was published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
"When you're initially infected with the Lyme disease bacterium, you don't develop antibodies for many days to a few weeks," Johnson said. "Many people see their physician before antibodies develop, leading to negative serological test results. And after an initial infection, you're still going to have these antibodies, so using these serological diagnostics won't make it clear if you're still infected or not after you've been treated with antibiotics."
The research team's idea was to flip the process around, using laboratory-produced antibodies to detect the presence of proteins from the organism. This is an extension of previous work Johnson's lab has done connecting other biological structures, such as olfactory receptors and DNA, to carbon nanotube-based devices.
Carbon nanotubes, rolled-up lattices of carbon atoms, are highly conductive and sensitive to electrical charge, making them promising components of nanoscale electronic devices. By attaching different biological structures to the exteriors of the nanotubes, they can function as highly specific biosensors. When the attached structure binds to a molecule, that molecule's charge can affect the electrical conduction of the nanotube, which can be part of an electrical circuit like a wire. Such a device can therefore provide an electronic read-out of the presence, or even concentration, of a particular molecule.
To get the electrical signal out of these nanotubes, the team first turned them into transistor devices.
"We first grow these nanotubes on what amounts to a large chip using a vapor deposition method, then make electrical connections essentially at random," Johnson said. "We then break up the chip and test all of the individual nanotube transistors to see which work the best."
In their recent experiment, Johnson's team attached antibodies that naturally develop in most animals that are infected with the Lyme disease bacterium to these nanotube transistors. These antibodies naturally bind to an antigen, in this case, a protein in the Lyme bacterium, as part of the body's immune response.
"We have a chemical process that lets us connect any protein to carbon nanotubes. Nanotubes are very stable, so we have a very reactive compound that binds to the nanotube and also has a carboxylic acid group on the other end. For biochemists, getting any kind of protein to bind to a carboxylic acid group is just child's play at this point, and we have worked with them to learn how to perform this chemistry on the side wall of nanotubes. "
After using atomic-force microscopy to show that antibodies had indeed bound to the exteriors of their nanotube transistors, the researchers tested them electrically to get a baseline reading. They then put the nanotubes in solutions that contained different concentrations of the target Lyme bacteria protein.
"When we wash away the solution and test the nanotube transistors again, the change in what we measure tells us that how much of the antigen has bound," Johnson said. "And we see the relationship we expect to see, in that the more antigen there was in the solution, the bigger the change in the signal."
The smallest concentration the nanotube devices could detect was four nanograms of protein per milliliter of solution.
"This sensitivity is more than sufficient to detect the Lyme disease bacterium in the blood of recently-infected patients and may be sufficient to detect the bacterium in fluids of patients that have received inadequate treatment," Brisson said.
"We really want the protein we are looking to detect to bind as close to the nanotube as possible, as that is what increases the strength of the electrical signal," Johnson said. "Developing a smaller, minimal version of the antibody -- what we call a single chain variable fragment -- would be a next step.
"Based on our previous work with single chain variable fragments of other antibodies, this would probably make such a device about a thousand times more sensitive."
The researchers suggested that, given the flexibility of their technique for attaching different biological structure, eventual diagnostic tools could incorporate multiple antibodies, each detecting a different protein from the Lyme bacterium. Such a setup would improve accuracy and cut down on the possibility of false-positive diagnoses.
"If we were to do this type of test on a person's blood now, however, we would say the person has the disease," Johnson said. "The first thought is that if you detect any protein coming from the Lyme organism in your blood, you are infected and should get treatment right away."
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Mitchell B. Lerner, Jennifer Dailey, Brett R. Goldsmith, Dustin Brisson, A.T. Charlie Johnson. Detecting Lyme disease using antibody-functionalized single-walled carbon nanotube transistors. Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2013; 45: 163 DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2013.01.035
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/jKHfAQDeP-s/130326194140.htm
abraham lincoln vampire hunter their eyes were watching god lara logan manu ginobili sports illustrated swimsuit 2012 aretha franklin whitney houston paul williams
Analysis: Southeast Asia ready to build, but will investors come?
By Stuart Grudgings and Neil Chatterjee
KUALA LUMPUR/JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia is seeking European investors for $9 billion worth of water, road, air and seaport projects in what will be a litmus test of Southeast Asian countries' ability to seize on ripe financial conditions to upgrade decrepit infrastructure.
Easy global liquidity and investors' eagerness to tap one of the world's few fast-growing regions should create a sweet spot for the region to fill the $600 billion in infrastructure needs the Asian Development Bank identifies over the next decade.
But infrastructure experts say a shortage of projects offering compelling returns, coupled with stifling bureaucracy and regulatory uncertainty, threatens to undermine the ambitious plans of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.
"There's a lot of money floating around but it's money looking for a return," said Bert Hofman, the World Bank chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific.
After years of chronic underspending, governments in the region of 600 million people have begun to sharply raise their infrastructure budgets to improve transport and energy networks.
Indonesia, the biggest regional economy, estimates it alone needs $150 billion worth of new infrastructure, but is only willing to finance 15 percent and has seen few takers so far for the public-private partnerships (PPPs) it is relying on.
Jakarta hopes that will change after a roadshow to Europe this year to market 16 projects from water treatment to ports.
"We're market-sounding," Chatib Basri, chief of the country's investment board, told Reuters. Speaking in Jakarta after a trip to Paris to meet potential investors, Basri said he saw demand coming from France and Germany.
The projects include water and waste treatment plants in the country's most populous Java island, a sector that could be of interest to firms such as France's Veolia Environment
The projects also include an airport in Java and seaports, in an archipelago of 17,000 islands where an inadequate transport network means high logistics costs.
CHEAP MONEY, ROBUST GROWTH
Having fixed their public finances following a regional financial crisis in the late 1990s, Southeast Asian governments can borrow more cheaply than ever, while local conglomerates and banks are cash-rich on the back of robust economic growth.
A rapidly growing middle class is pressuring politicians to ease nightmarish traffic conditions in "mega-cities" such as Jakarta and Manila, while the massive plane orders being placed by low-cost airlines AirAsia and Lion Air attest to the dramatic growth in regional air travel.
This month, Thailand's cabinet approved a plan to borrow $68 billion to build rail, roads and water plants by 2020. That came days after the operator of Bangkok's SkyTrain, BTS Group Holdings Pcl
Indonesia and the Philippines, far-flung archipelagos with a combined population of 340 million, have passed laws to improve cooperation with the private sector to solve their bottlenecks.
ATTRACTING FUNDS
But attracting private funds remains difficult. Project finance lending in Southeast Asia fell 6.3 percent last year to $13.5 billion, Thomson Reuters data shows.
The Philippines, whose recent history is littered with failed or delayed infrastructure plans, has prepared at least 16 PPPs worth more than $4 billion.
So far, only two projects have been successfully bid out. Some foreign firms -- which face tight restrictions on investment -- say they have been put off by a lack of government guarantees on pricing.
In Indonesia, only two PPP projects offered since 2006 have made it to the construction phase -- a 2,000 megawatt coal-fired power plant in Java and an expressway in Bali. Even then, the power project has been delayed by land acquisition problems.
As well as investor-unfriendly lands laws, projects can be held up by sometimes conflicting national and local authorities. Moreover, returns in Indonesia and the Philippines often fail to reflect such risks, said Johan Bastin, chief executive of Singapore-based infrastructure private equity firm CapAsia.
"In my view, the institutional capabilities at local administrative level are underdeveloped, the regulatory regimes largely untested and the judiciary systems somewhat arbitrary," he said. "The returns we see in the markets seem to assume that these problems will be dealt with over time."
He said annual returns on projects were often about 3-5 percent below an "acceptable" level of around 15-20 percent.
MORE PUBLIC MONEY
The passage of a new land acquisition law last year should help jumpstart Indonesia's infrastructure pipeline, although it will only apply to future investments.
Meanwhile, the struggle to attract private investors means governments may have to play a bigger role. Long-delayed plans to build a mass-rapid transit system to relieve Jakarta's 10 million people of monster traffic jams are a case in point.
After plans for a pure private-sector solution were abandoned long ago, it has been held up for years by wrangling between Jakarta and the national government over how to pay back a $1.6 billion Japanese loan for the project.
While public infrastructure spending is rising in the region, it remains well below where it should be, economists say.
Indonesia, which spends only around 3-3.5 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, plans to raise its infrastructure budget by about 11 percent this year. The Philippines aims to double its infrastructure spending from 2.6 percent of GDP. China spends about 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure.
Some governments' ability to expand infrastructure spending is hampered by heavy outlays on subsidies. Indonesia spent about $22 billion last year on fuel subsidies, and the prospects for reform are dim ahead of a presidential election in 2014.
"Southeast Asia has to rethink radically its strategy on infrastructure," said Frederic Neumann, co-head of Asian economic research at HSBC. "I'm not inclined to bet this is happening really on a broader scale."
(Additional reporting by Rosemarie Francisco in Manila and Orathai Sriring in Bangkok; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-southeast-asia-ready-build-investors-come-210525518--finance.html
Capital STEEZ George Bush After Christmas Sales 2012 Charles Durning Webster Ny Mcdonalds Restaurants Open on Christmas Day
OpenELEC 3.0 Linux distro gets official, supports 'more hardware than ever'
The OpenELEC Linux distro came out of beta with its official 3.0.0 version this week, and according to its makers nearly every part has been upgraded since the 2.0 release last year. This release of the media center package is based on XBMC 12.1 and as such includes its assortment of updates, as well as specific improvements for the Raspberry Pi, MC001 devices, Apple TV and AMD hardware. If you're on 2.0 you'll need to manually update to the new version. Hit the source link for a full changelog and instructions on how to get it all working.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD
Source: OpenELEC.tv
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/5Hc1wPkW-BY/
full force odd fellows eli whitney blake griffin dunk on kendrick perkins kendrick perkins steve jones emily maynard
Monday, March 25, 2013
Cyberattackers Brewed Special Malware Cocktail for South Korea
Cybersecurity news had a distinctive international flavor last week. In South Korea, a cyberattack from unknown sources disrupted portions of the nation's banking and broadcast industries. During the attacks, a North Korean Human Rights website based in Washington, D.C. was also defaced.
melissa gilbert dancing with the stars dandelion wine cough matt groening brandon phillips summerfest summerfest
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)