The good news: If you liked Windows 8, its first major update is going fix a ton of the little things that bothered you. The bad news: You might not like Windows 8. And there's nothing here that will change that. At least there's a Start button!
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In this week's Ask A VC episode, Freestyle Capital's Dave Samuel joined us in the studio to discuss his investment philosophies and more. Samuel also talked about how and why his co-founder relationship with Josh Felser has been so successful. The duo co-founded Spinner (acquired by AOL for $320 million), and Grouper (acquired by Sony for $65 million). In 2011, Fesler and Samuel formally launched Freestyle Capital, which makes investments in early-stage startups.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/0WMdKagonbc/
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May 16, 2013 ? Johnny Cash may have preferred this galaxy's burning ring of fire to the one he sang about falling into in his popular song. The "starburst ring" seen at center in red and yellow hues is not the product of love, as in the song, but is instead a frenetic region of star formation.
The galaxy, a spiral beauty called Messier 94, is located about 17 million light-years away. In this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, infrared light is represented in different colors, with blue having the shortest wavelengths and red, the longest.
Starburst rings like this can often be triggered by gravitational encounters with other galaxies but, in this case, may have instead been caused by the galaxy's oval shape. Gas in the ring is being converted into hot, young stars, which then warm the dust, causing it to glow with infrared light.
The outer, faint blue ring around the galaxy might be an optical illusion. Astronomers think that two separate spiral arms appear as a single unbroken ring when viewed from our position in space.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .
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Public release date: 5-May-2013
Share ] Contact: Todd Datz
tdatz@hsph.harvard.edu
617-432-8413
Harvard School of Public Health
Boston, MA A new study led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK has, for the first time, used genome sequencing technology to track the changes in a bacterial population following the introduction of a vaccine. The study follows how the population of pneumococcal bacteria changed following the introduction of the 'Prevnar' conjugate polysaccharide vaccine, which substantially reduced rates of pneumococcal disease across the U.S. The work demonstrates that the technology could be used in the future to monitor the effectiveness of vaccination or antibiotic use against different species of bacterial pathogens, and for characterizing new and emerging threats.
The study appears online May 5, 2013 in Nature Genetics.
"This gives an unprecedented insight into the bacteria living and transmitting among us," said co-author William Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at HSPH. "We can characterize these bugs to an almost unimaginable degree of detail, and in so doing understand better what helps them survive even in the presence of an effective vaccine."
Pneumococcal disease is caused by a type of bacteria called Streptococcus pneumoniae, which is present in many people's noses and throats and is spread by coughing, sneezing, or other contact with respiratory secretions. The circumstances that cause it to become pathogenic are not fully understood. Rates of pneumococcal diseasean infection that can lead to pneumonia, meningitis, and other illnessesdropped in young children following the introduction of a vaccine in 2000. However, strains of the bacteria that are not targeted by the vaccine rapidly increased and drug resistance appears to be on the rise.
The research, led by HSPH co-senior authors Hanage; Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology; and Stephen Bentley, senior scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, aimed to better understand the bacterial population's response to vaccination. Whole genome sequencingwhich reveals the DNA code for each bacterial strain to an unprecedented level of detailwas used to study a sample of 616 pneumococci collected in Massachusetts communities from 2001 to 2007.
This study confirmed that the parts of the bacterial population targeted by the vaccine have almost disappeared, and, surprisingly, revealed that they have been replaced by pre-existing rare types of bacteria. The genetic composition of the new population is very similar to the original one, except for a few genes that were directly affected by the vaccine. This small genetic alteration appears to be responsible for the large reduction in the rates of pneumococcal disease.
"The widespread use of whole genome sequencing will allow better surveillance of bacterial populations even those that are genetically diverse and improve understanding of their evolution," said Lipsitch. "In this study, we were even able to see how quickly these bacteria transmit between different regions within Massachusetts and identify genes associated with bacteria in children of different ages."
"In the future, we will be able to monitor evolutionary changes in real-time. If we can more quickly and precisely trace the emergence of disease-causing bacteria, we may be able to better target interventions to limit the burden of disease," said Bentley.
###
Support for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the AXA Foundation.
"Population Genomics of Post-Vaccine Changes in Pneumococcal Epidemiology," Nicholas J. Croucher, Jonathan A. Finkelstein, Stephen I. Pelton, Patrick K. Mitchell, Grace M. Lee, Julian Parkhill, Stephen D. Bentley, William P. Hanage, Marc Lipsitch Nature Genetics, online May 5, 2013
Harvard School of Public Health brings together dedicated experts from many disciplines to educate new generations of global health leaders and produce powerful ideas that improve the lives and health of people everywhere. As a community of leading scientists, educators, and students, we work together to take innovative ideas from the laboratory and the classroom to people's livesnot only making scientific breakthroughs, but also working to change individual behaviors, public policies, and health care practices. Each year, more than 400 faculty members at HSPH teach 1,000-plus full-time students from around the world and train thousands more through online and executive education courses. Founded in 1913 as the Harvard-MIT School of Health Officers, the School is recognized as America's first professional training program in public health.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of the world's leading genome centres. Through its ability to conduct research at scale, it is able to engage in bold and long-term exploratory projects that are designed to influence and empower medical science globally. Institute research findings, generated through its own research programmes and through its leading role in international consortia, are being used to develop new diagnostics and treatments for human disease.
[ | 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.
Public release date: 5-May-2013 Share ] Contact: Todd Datz
tdatz@hsph.harvard.edu
617-432-8413
Harvard School of Public Health
Boston, MA A new study led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK has, for the first time, used genome sequencing technology to track the changes in a bacterial population following the introduction of a vaccine. The study follows how the population of pneumococcal bacteria changed following the introduction of the 'Prevnar' conjugate polysaccharide vaccine, which substantially reduced rates of pneumococcal disease across the U.S. The work demonstrates that the technology could be used in the future to monitor the effectiveness of vaccination or antibiotic use against different species of bacterial pathogens, and for characterizing new and emerging threats.
The study appears online May 5, 2013 in Nature Genetics.
"This gives an unprecedented insight into the bacteria living and transmitting among us," said co-author William Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at HSPH. "We can characterize these bugs to an almost unimaginable degree of detail, and in so doing understand better what helps them survive even in the presence of an effective vaccine."
Pneumococcal disease is caused by a type of bacteria called Streptococcus pneumoniae, which is present in many people's noses and throats and is spread by coughing, sneezing, or other contact with respiratory secretions. The circumstances that cause it to become pathogenic are not fully understood. Rates of pneumococcal diseasean infection that can lead to pneumonia, meningitis, and other illnessesdropped in young children following the introduction of a vaccine in 2000. However, strains of the bacteria that are not targeted by the vaccine rapidly increased and drug resistance appears to be on the rise.
The research, led by HSPH co-senior authors Hanage; Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology; and Stephen Bentley, senior scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, aimed to better understand the bacterial population's response to vaccination. Whole genome sequencingwhich reveals the DNA code for each bacterial strain to an unprecedented level of detailwas used to study a sample of 616 pneumococci collected in Massachusetts communities from 2001 to 2007.
This study confirmed that the parts of the bacterial population targeted by the vaccine have almost disappeared, and, surprisingly, revealed that they have been replaced by pre-existing rare types of bacteria. The genetic composition of the new population is very similar to the original one, except for a few genes that were directly affected by the vaccine. This small genetic alteration appears to be responsible for the large reduction in the rates of pneumococcal disease.
"The widespread use of whole genome sequencing will allow better surveillance of bacterial populations even those that are genetically diverse and improve understanding of their evolution," said Lipsitch. "In this study, we were even able to see how quickly these bacteria transmit between different regions within Massachusetts and identify genes associated with bacteria in children of different ages."
"In the future, we will be able to monitor evolutionary changes in real-time. If we can more quickly and precisely trace the emergence of disease-causing bacteria, we may be able to better target interventions to limit the burden of disease," said Bentley.
###
Support for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the AXA Foundation.
"Population Genomics of Post-Vaccine Changes in Pneumococcal Epidemiology," Nicholas J. Croucher, Jonathan A. Finkelstein, Stephen I. Pelton, Patrick K. Mitchell, Grace M. Lee, Julian Parkhill, Stephen D. Bentley, William P. Hanage, Marc Lipsitch Nature Genetics, online May 5, 2013
Harvard School of Public Health brings together dedicated experts from many disciplines to educate new generations of global health leaders and produce powerful ideas that improve the lives and health of people everywhere. As a community of leading scientists, educators, and students, we work together to take innovative ideas from the laboratory and the classroom to people's livesnot only making scientific breakthroughs, but also working to change individual behaviors, public policies, and health care practices. Each year, more than 400 faculty members at HSPH teach 1,000-plus full-time students from around the world and train thousands more through online and executive education courses. Founded in 1913 as the Harvard-MIT School of Health Officers, the School is recognized as America's first professional training program in public health.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of the world's leading genome centres. Through its ability to conduct research at scale, it is able to engage in bold and long-term exploratory projects that are designed to influence and empower medical science globally. Institute research findings, generated through its own research programmes and through its leading role in international consortia, are being used to develop new diagnostics and treatments for human disease.
[ | 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.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-05/hsop-gsp050113.php
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CHALDOVAR, Kyrgyzstan (AP) ? An American military tanker refueling plane carrying three crew members crashed Friday in the rugged mountains of Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian nation where the U.S. operates an air base key to the war in Afghanistan.
There was no immediate word on the fate of the crew. If any of them managed to eject from the KC-135 plane, the search for them would be complicated by the harsh terrain in the region.
The U.S. base in Kyrgyzstan, called the Transit Center at Manas, said it had no immediate information on the cause of the crash, but a resident of the agricultural and sheep-grazing area said the plane exploded in flight.
"I was working with my father in the field, and I heard an explosion. When I looked up at the sky I saw the fire. When it was falling, the plane split into three pieces," Sherikbek Turusbekov said.
The crash site is near Chaldovar, a village about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of the base. Pieces of the plane, including its tail, lay in a grassy field bordered by mountains; the air was infused with the heavy stench of petrol.
The base, which is adjacent to the Manas International Airport outside the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, was established in late 2001 to support the international military campaign in Afghanistan. It functions as an interim point for troops going into or out of Afghanistan and as a home for the tanker planes that refuel warplanes in flight.
The base has been the subject of a contentious dispute between the United States and its host nation.
In 2009, the U.S. reached an agreement with the Kyrgyz government to use it in return for $60 million a year. But the lease runs out in June 2014, and the U.S. wants to keep it longer to aid in the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan is reluctant to extend the lease.
On Monday, a Boeing 747 cargo plane crashed just after takeoff from the U.S. military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, killing all seven people aboard.
__
AP writers Jim Heintz in Moscow and Robert Burns in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.
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ATHENS, Greece (AP) ? A lawmaker from Greece's extreme-right Golden Dawn party allegedly tried to punch the mayor of Athens on Thursday, swinging at him but reportedly missing and hitting a 12-year-old girl instead.
The confrontation came hours after police used pepper spray to prevent the nationalist party from distributing free food to Greek citizens only in the city's main Syntagma Square in defiance of a municipal ban the mayor had vowed to uphold.
Once a marginal group, Golden Dawn saw a meteoric rise in the polls in recent years, becoming Greece's third most popular party as the country slid further into financial crisis and unemployment skyrocketed. Its members have been repeatedly accused of involvement in violent attacks against immigrants and others.
"The only thing these people know is the language of violence," Mayor Giorgos Kaminis said after the incident, in which he said lawmaker Giorgos Germenis also tried to pull out a gun before being restrained by the mayor's bodyguards.
Germenis showed up at a municipal charity event where Kaminis was handing out gifts to children of unemployed parents ahead of Sunday's Orthodox Easter.
"This man sneaked in, we didn't notice him ... and he tried to hit me," Kaminis told Vima FM radio. "At the last minute my personal guards stopped him." The mayor said Germenis had a gun tucked into the back of his waist band, and attempted to pull the weapon out.
Television footage showed the mayor's bodyguards struggling with Germenis as a woman carrying a baby scurried out of the room. The security guards pinned the lawmaker against a wall before marching him out of the building.
Greek media said the blow intended for Kaminis ended up hitting a girl, leaving her with a bruised forehead but no serious injuries.
"Extreme actions, especially when their victims are innocent 12-year-old children, do not befit our democracy," said government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou.
Golden Dawn issued a statement denying a girl had been hit and vowing to sue Kaminis and his security guards. For his part, Kaminis intends to sue Germenis for the attempted attack, the municipality's press office said. Police said they were investigating complaints against the lawmaker for threats and brandishing a weapon.
Golden Dawn had announced it would hand out free Easter food to Greeks only on Thursday. Kaminis had banned any such events in the city's main square, and vowed Wednesday not to allow the "soup kitchen of hate" to take place.
But party members with Golden Dawn logo emblazoned across the backs of their black T-shirts arrived more than two hours before the announced time with a truck carrying meat, potatoes and other goods and began handing out bags of food after checking recipients' identity cards.
Scuffles broke out with riot police, who used pepper spray to repel party members wielding Greek flags on thick wooden sticks.
Giving up on the idea of a charity handout in the capital's main square, the party moved the distribution to its own offices in downtown Athens ? not far from where Kaminis later attended the separate municipal charity event.
"Today in Syntagma Square, the law was implemented against the Golden Dawn neo-Nazis who once again displayed their wares: racist hatred, the use of violence and bullying," said Fofi Gennimata, spokeswoman of the Socialist PASOK party that is a junior member of the governing coalition.
Though Golden Dawn rejects the neo-Nazi label, its website shows great fondness for Nazi literature and symbols.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/greek-lawmaker-accused-trying-punch-mayor-161816271.html
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Though the attention that comes along with being the child of a celebrity can often be unwanted, at least there is one major perk to having famous, good-looking parents: great genes.
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NEW YORK (AP) ? Parents are reporting more skin and food allergies in their children, a big government survey found.
Experts aren't sure what's behind the increase. Could it be that children are growing up in households so clean that it leaves them more sensitive to things that can trigger allergies? Or are mom and dad paying closer attention to rashes and reactions, and more likely to call it an allergy?
"We don't really have the answer," said Dr. Lara Akinbami of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the senior author of the new report released Thursday.
The CDC survey suggests that about 1 in 20 U.S. children have food allergies. That's a 50 percent increase from the late 1990s. For eczema and other skin allergies, it's 1 in 8 children, an increase of 69 percent. It found no increase, however, in hay fever or other respiratory allergies.
Already familiar with the trend in food allergies are school nurses, who have grown busier with allergy-related duties, like banishing peanuts at school parties or stocking emergency allergy medicine.
Sally Schoessler started as school nurse in 1992 in New York state, and didn't encounter a child with a food allergy for a few years. But by the time she left school nursing in 2005, "there were children in the majority of classrooms" with the disorder, said Schoessler, who now works at the National Association of School Nurses in Silver Spring, Md.
Food allergies tend to be most feared; severe cases may cause anaphylactic shock or even death from eating, say, a peanut. But many food allergies are milder and something children grow out of. Skin conditions like eczema, too, can be mild and temporary.
It's been difficult getting exact numbers for children's allergies, and the new report isn't precise. It uses annual surveys of thousands of adults interviewed in person. The report compares answers from 1997-1999 to those from 2009-2011.
Parents were asked if ? in the previous year ? their child had any kind of food or digestive allergy, any eczema or skin allergy, or any kind of respiratory allergy like hay fever.
The researchers did not ask if a doctor had made the diagnosis or check medical records. So some parents may have been stating a personal opinion, and not necessarily a correct one.
"We see a lot of kids in clinic that really aren't" allergic to the foods their parents worry about, said Dr. Morton Galina, a pediatric allergist at Atlanta's Emory School of Medicine.
For example, hives are sometimes blamed on a certain food when a virus was the actual cause, he added.
But experts also said they believe there is a real ? and unexplained ? increase going on, too.
One of the more popular theories is "the hygiene hypothesis," which says that exposure to germs and parasites in early childhood somehow prevents the body from developing certain allergies.
The hypothesis argues that there is a downside to America's culture of disinfection and overuse of antibiotics. The argument has been bolstered by a range of laboratory and observational studies, including some that have found lower rates of eczema and food allergies in foreign-born children in the U.S.
There could be other explanations, though. Big cities have higher childhood allergy rates, so maybe some air pollutant is the unrecognized trigger, said Dr. Peter Lio, a Northwestern University pediatric dermatologist who specializes in eczema.
Some suspect the change has something to do with the evolution in how foods are grown and produced, like the crossbreeding of wheat or the use of antibiotics in cattle. But Lio said tests haven't supported that.
Emory's Galina said the new CDC statistics may reflect a recent "sea change" in the recommendations for when young children should first eat certain foods.
In families with a history of eczema or food allergies, parents were advised to wait for years before introducing their young children to foods tied to severe allergies, like peanuts, milks and eggs. But professional associations changed that advice a few years ago after research suggested that allergies were more likely in those kids when the foods were delayed.
The old advice "was exactly the wrong thing to do," and could have contributed to some of the increased cases, Galina said.
The CDC report also found:
? Food and respiratory allergies are more common in higher-income families than the poor,
? Eczema and skin allergies are most common among the poor.
? More black children have the skin problems, 17 percent, compared to 12 percent of white children and about 10 percent of Hispanic children.
The mother of a 13-year-old girl, who is black, runs an eczema support group in suburban Washington, D.C. Renee Dantzler says roughly half the families in her group are African-American. Eczema is an itchy skin condition, which often occurs on the arms or behind the knees. The cause isn't always clear.
Her daughter, Jasmine, started getting rashes at 6 months and got much worse when she was 4.
"Her whole body would flare. If she ate something, you would kind of hold your breath," Dantzler said. "And she's allergic to every grass and tree God made."
Her daughter took to wearing long sleeves and pants, even in hot weather, so people wouldn't see her skin scarred ? and whitened in spots ? from scratching. She began to improve about four years ago with steroid creams and other treatments and has gradually become less self-conscious about her skin, Dantzler said.
She's now on a school track team, which means wearing shorts.
"She's the only one on the team with long socks," her mom said.
___
Online:
CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/parents-see-more-food-skin-allergies-children-140157398.html
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Maria Fernanda Medina, 7, wraps herself in a United States flag as she marches with her father, Jorge, during a May Day demonstration in San Francisco, Wednesday, May 1, 2013. Demonstrators demanded an overhaul of immigration laws Wednesday in an annual, nationwide ritual that carried a special sense of urgency as Congress considers sweeping legislation that would bring many of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally out of the shadows. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Maria Fernanda Medina, 7, wraps herself in a United States flag as she marches with her father, Jorge, during a May Day demonstration in San Francisco, Wednesday, May 1, 2013. Demonstrators demanded an overhaul of immigration laws Wednesday in an annual, nationwide ritual that carried a special sense of urgency as Congress considers sweeping legislation that would bring many of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally out of the shadows. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Thousands of people march during a May Day rally in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday, May 1, 2013. In celebration of May Day, people have gathered across the country to rally for various topics including immigration reform. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Car wash workers with the Community Labor Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) Carwash Campaign march during a May Day rally in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday, May 1, 2013. In celebration of May Day, people have gathered across the country to rally for various topics including immigration reform. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Alma Banuelos, left, with Emilia Hernandez shout slogans during a rally in downtown Los Angeles Wednesday, May 1, 2013. In celebration of May Day thousands have gathered for an immigration reform rally in downtown Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
Troy Flores wears a costume during a May Day demonstration in San Francisco, Wednesday, May 1, 2013. Demonstrators demanded an overhaul of immigration laws Wednesday in an annual, nationwide ritual that carried a special sense of urgency as Congress considers sweeping legislation that would bring many of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally out of the shadows. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Demonstrators demanded an overhaul of immigration laws Wednesday in an annual, nationwide ritual that carried a special sense of urgency as Congress considers sweeping legislation that would bring many of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally out of the shadows.
Thousands joined May Day rallies in dozens of cities from Concord, N.H., to Bozeman, Mont. In Salem, Ore., Gov. John Kitzhaber was cheered by about 2,000 people on the Capitol steps as he signed a bill to allow people living in Oregon without proof of legal status to obtain drivers licenses.
In Vermont, more than 1,000 people assembled on the Montpelier Statehouse lawn. And in New York, thousands of demonstrators marched in downtown Manhattan waving banners and banging on drums in a scene reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street's heyday.
The generally lively gatherings across the country were marred late Wednesday as a few dozen protesters in Seattle began pelting police with objects ? possibly rocks and other items ? and officers responded with pepper spray. The sport of vilolence came hours after a march for immigration reform by thousands of protesters had ended. The clashes were reminiscent of the gathering a year ago when some protesters broke windows and set fires.
The May Day crowds paled in comparison to the massive demonstrations of 2006 and 2007, during the last serious attempt to introduce major changes to the U.S. immigration system. Despite the large turnouts six years ago, many advocates of looser immigration laws felt they were outmaneuvered by opponents who flooded congressional offices with phone calls and faxes at the behest of conservative talk-radio hosts.
Now, immigrant advocacy groups are focusing heavily on contacting members of Congress, using social media and other technology to target specific lawmakers. Reform Immigration for America, a network of groups, claims more than 1.2 million subscribers, including recipients of text messages and Facebook followers.
Many of Wednesday's rallies featured speakers with a personal stake in the debate. Naykary Silva, a 26-year-old Mexican woman in the country illegally, joined about 200 people who marched in Denver's spring snow, hoping for legislation that would ensure medical care for her 3-year-old autistic son.
"If you want to do something, you do it no matter what," Silva said. "There's still more work to do."
Police in New York restrained several demonstrators, but the marches were peaceful.
Gabriel Villalobos, a Spanish-language talk radio host in Phoenix, said many of his callers believe it is the wrong time for marches, fearful that that any unrest could sour public opinion. Those callers advocate instead for a low-key approach of calling members of Congress.
"The mood is much calmer," said Villalobos, who thinks the marches are still an important show of political force.
In Los Angeles, a band playing salsa classics from the back of a truck led a march up Broadway. Demonstrators waved American flags and signs with messages such as "Stop deportations."
"I've held the same job for six years, but I don't have papers," said Mario Vasquez, a supermarket butcher who brought his two Chihuahuas. "Immigration reform would help me and my family and for everybody here."
In downtown Chicago, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin told thousands of demonstrators that America had a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to change immigration laws.
"We need to seize that opportunity," said the Illinois Democrat, who is part of a bipartisan group of eight senators who introduced the legislation last month.
May Day rallies began in the United States in 2000 during a labor dispute with a restaurant in Los Angeles that drew several hundred demonstrators, said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Crowds grew each year until the House of Representatives passed a tough bill against illegal immigration, sparking a wave of enormous, angry protests from coast to coast in 2006.
The rallies, which coincide with Labor Day in many countries outside the U.S., often have big showings from labor leaders and elected officials.
Demonstrators marched in countries around the world, with fury in Europe over austerity measures and rage in Asia over relentlessly low pay, the rising cost of living and hideous working conditions that have left hundreds dead in recent months alone.
The New York crowd was a varied bunch of labor groups, immigrant activists and demonstrators unaffiliated with any specific cause. Among them was 26-year-old Becky Wartell, who was carrying a tall puppet of the Statue of Liberty.
"Every May Day, more groups that have historically considered themselves separate from one another come together," she said.
In Brea, a Los Angeles suburb, a small group opposed to the legislation stood on a freeway bridge waving signs at motorists. One read, "No Amnesty."
___
Spagat reported from San Diego. Associated Press writers contributing to this report included Meghan Barr in New York, Morgan True in Concord, N.H., Lauren Gambino in Salem, Ore., Gene Johnson in Seattle, Sara Burnett in Chicago, Edwin Tamara in Los Angeles and Alexandra Tilsley in Denver.
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May 1, 2013 ? An interdisciplinary team of researchers has created the first digital cameras with designs that mimic those of ocular systems found in dragonflies, bees, praying mantises and other insects. This class of technology offers exceptionally wide-angle fields of view, with low aberrations, high acuity to motion, and nearly infinite depth of field.
Taking cues from Mother Nature, the cameras exploit large arrays of tiny focusing lenses and miniaturized detectors in hemispherical layouts, just like eyes found in arthropods. The devices combine soft, rubbery optics with high performance silicon electronics and detectors, using ideas first established in research on skin and brain monitoring systems by John A. Rogers, a Swanlund Chair Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his collaborators.
"Full 180 degree fields of view with zero aberrations can only be accomplished with image sensors that adopt hemispherical layouts -- much different than the planar CCD chips found in commercial cameras," Rogers explained. "When implemented with large arrays microlenses, each of which couples to an individual photodiode, this type of hemispherical design provides unmatched field of view and other powerful capabilities in imaging. Nature has developed and refined these concepts over the course of billions of years of evolution." The researchers described their breakthrough camera in an article, "Digital Cameras With Designs Inspired By the Arthropod Eye," published in the May 2, 2013 issue of Nature.
Eyes in arthropods use compound designs, in which arrays of smaller eyes act together to provide image perception. Each small eye, known as an ommatidium, consists of a corneal lens, a crystalline cone, and a light sensitive organ at the base. The entire system is configured to provide exceptional properties in imaging, many of which lie beyond the reach of existing human-made cameras.
The researchers developed new ideas in materials and fabrication strategies allowing construction of artificial ommatidia in large, interconnected arrays in hemispherical layouts. Building such systems represents a daunting task, as all established camera technologies rely on bulk glass lenses and detectors constructed on the planar surfaces of silicon wafers which cannot be bent or flexed, much less formed into a hemispherical shape.
"A critical feature of our fly's eye cameras is that they incorporate integrated microlenses, photodetectors, and electronics on hemispherically curved surfaces," said Jianliang Xiao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at University of Colorado Boulder and coauthor of the study.
"To realize this outcome, we used soft, rubbery optics bonded to detectors/electronics in mesh layouts that can be stretched and deformed, reversibly and without damage."
The fabrication starts with electronics, detectors and lens arrays formed on flat surfaces using advanced techniques adapted from the semiconductor industry, said Xiao, who began working on the project as a postdoctoral researcher in Rogers' lab at Illinois. The lens sheet -- made from a polymer material similar to a contact lens -- and the electronics/detectors are then aligned and bonded together. Pneumatic pressure deforms the resulting system into the desired hemispherical shape, in a process much like blowing up a balloon, but with precision engineering control.
The individual electronic detectors and microlenses are coupled together to avoid any relative motion during this deformation process. Here, the spaces between these artificial ommatidia can stretch to allow transformation in geometry from planar to hemispherical. The electrical interconnections are thin, and narrow, in filamentary serpentine shapes; they deform as tiny springs during the stretching process.
According to the researchers, each microlens produces a small image of an object with a form dictated by the parameters of the lens and the viewing angle. An individual detector responds only if a portion of the image formed by the associated microlens overlaps the active area. The detectors stimulated in this way produce a sampled image of the object that can then be reconstructed using models of the optics.
Over the last several years, Rogers and his colleagues have developed materials, mechanics principles and manufacturing processes that enable classes of electronics that can bend, twist, and stretch like a rubber band. This device technology has been used in fields ranging from photovoltaics, to health/wellness monitors, to advanced surgical tools and digital cameras with designs of the mammalian eye.
"Certain of the enabling ideas build on concepts that originated in our labs a half dozen years ago," Rogers remarked. "Ever since, we have been intrigued by the possibility of creating digital fly's eye cameras. Such devices are of longstanding interest, not only to us but many others as well, owing to their potential for use in surveillance devices, tools for endoscopy, and other applications where these insect-inspired designs provide unique capabilities."
The other co-lead authors of the paper are Young Min Song, Yizhu Xie, and Viktor Malyarchuk, all of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Co-authors include Ki-Joong Choi, Rak-Hwan Kim and John Rogers at Illinois; Inhwa Jung of Kyung Hee University in Korea; Zhuangjian Liu of the Institute of High Performance Computing A*star in Singapore; Chaofeng Lu of Zhejiang University in China and Northwestern University; Rui Li, of Dalian University of Technology in China; Kenneth Crozier of Harvard University; and Yonggang Huang of Northwestern.
The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/NbaqFGdyeWc/130501131949.htm
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LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Candice Bergen is producing a film about her late father, the famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.
The big-screen project will tell the story of Bergen's dad and his ventriloquist's dummy that became an unlikely celebrity, spokeswoman Heidi Schaeffer said. The movie will be based on Candice Bergen's 1984 memoir, "Knock Wood."
In a statement, "Murphy Brown" star Bergen said her father was overshadowed by the 3-foot-long wood character named Charlie McCarthy, who got the best lines while the reserved Edgar Bergen played straight man.
"This creation took over and eclipsed the creator," Candice Bergen said. "It was the dummy that wouldn't die. All the fan mail initially went to Charlie. And Edgar wasn't really welcome at parties in the beginning unless Charlie was with him. It was totally surreal."
James Francis Trezza and Pam Widener, who are producing the film with Bergen, said they want to introduce a new generation to the early days of American show business, from vaudeville through the birth of TV, and explore how Bergen navigated its changes.
Barbara Turner, who worked with Trezza and Widener on the Oscar-winning Jackson Pollock biographical film "Pollock," is writing the script.
Charlie "was truly Bergen's alter ego and, perhaps more interestingly, he was America's alter ego," producer Widener said in a statement. "At a time when manners and standards ruled the airwaves, Charlie said the unsayable and got away with it."
A flirtatious radio exchange between Charlie and sexy actress Mae West in 1938 drew NBC's ire, but the popularity of Bergen and his sidekick was unaffected.
"I find it endlessly fascinating that a reserved man, a man who had difficulty expressing his feelings, fell into the profession of a ventriloquist on radio," his daughter said. "And that the person he created was this devil-may-care, no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners dummy."
Edgar Bergen died in 1978 at the age of 75, after beginning a farewell series of performances in Las Vegas. Charlie McCarthy found a home at the Smithsonian Institution.
A release date for the film, titled "Charlie McCarthy," was not announced.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/candice-bergen-producing-film-her-famed-father-191735461.html
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