WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Singapore's police have pledged to share with the FBI evidence they collected in the death of Shane Todd, an American engineer found hanged in his Singapore apartment in June, Singaporean foreign minister, K. Shanmugam, said on Tuesday.
Todd's death is at the center of what has become a delicate bilateral issue between Singapore and the United States.
Senator Max Baucus, who represents Todd's home state of Montana, has been pressing for more U.S. involvement into the inquiry into his death. He said he would "stop at nothing" to satisfy Todd's parents or determine that there had been no transfer of technology that might jeopardize U.S. national security.
"Today's meeting is about getting answers, getting complete answers," said Baucus, who is also chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade deals.
"So far we're unable to get the answers we need to know what happened to Shane, Shane Todd. We're unable to know the degree to which there might have been some breach of national security. So far answers have not been forthcoming," Baucus said.
Todd's parents contend the 31-year-old's death was not a suicide, but that he was murdered because of his involvement in a project between Singapore's Institute of Microelectronics, or IME, and the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei shortly before his death.
Shanmugam and Singapore's ambassador to the United States, Ashok Kumar Mirpuri, met with Baucus at his Senate office and then held a news conference about Todd's case. Shanmugan was meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry on issues including the case on Wednesday.
"We are committed to working with and making it clear exactly what happened and getting to the bottom of it," Shanmugan said.
"The Singapore police force will be happy to share the evidence it has obtained and the FBI can look through it," he said.
He said all of the government's evidence would be presented for public enquiry, where Todd's family could hire lawyers and take part, and that Singapore had felt it was inappropriate to discuss the case before the enquiry.
Huawei said last month it had not worked with an institute in Singapore on any projects in Todd's field of expertise, which was Gallium Nitride (GaN), an advanced semiconductor material that has both commercial and military purposes.
Shanmugan said the IME is subject to "very rigorous audit" to ensure there was no improper transfer of technology. "We are very happy for a U.S. team to come down and look at the projects and it will be very clear that there was no transfer of technology."
(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; editing by Jackie Frank)
The Mars rover Curiosity analyzed the inside of a rock it drilled and found that the sample was likely formed in standing water 'so benign' you likely could have drunk it, researchers say.
By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / March 12, 2013
This image released by NASA shows the Curiosity rover holding a scoop of powdered rock on Mars. The rover recently drilled into a Martian rock for the first time and transferred a pinch of powder to its instruments to analyze the chemical makeup.
NASA/AP
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The verdict is in: Mars's Gale Crater was habitable in its distant past, perhaps during the same period in which microbial life was establishing itself on Earth between 3 billion and 4 billion years ago.
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That is the conclusion scientists have reached after NASA's Mars rover Curiosity analyzed the first sample ever culled from deep in a rock on another planet.?Curiosity used a first-of-its-kind drill to extract the sample.
Now, only seven months into its mission ? a period set aside primarily for testing the rover's various instruments ? Curiosity has already given researchers the answer to the broad, basic question they set out to answer: Did Mars ever host environments suitable for life?
The issue of habitability is "in the bag," said John Grotzinger, a planetary geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and the mission's lead scientist, during a press briefing announcing the results on Tuesday.
The minerals in the tiny, gray, ground-rock sample exposed by Curiosity's drill speak of abundant standing water, conditions neither too acidic or too alkaline for life, and the minerals that would have provided a ready energy source for microbes, if any had been there.
The patch of Gale Crater Curiosity is exploring would have been "so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," he said.
The drill is crucial to Curiosity's mission because Mars's oxidizing atmosphere changes the chemical qualities of the exterior of rocks. To see the fuller story of the planet's geologic history, scientists need to drill past the surface.
With the first test of the rover's drill system, it turns out, the research team "hit pay dirt," added David Blake, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. He's the lead scientist for CheMin, one of two mini-labs inside Curiosity's chassis that analyze the mineral and chemical compositions of rock and soil samples.
Even before Curiosity arrived, evidence from orbit suggested that the floor of Gale Crater would be an excellent choice to test the proposition of habitability. The crater sits on the border between the Martian highlands and lowlands, forming a catch basin for any water flowing downhill.
From orbit, the landing site centered on what looked like the downhill edge of an alluvial fan ? eroded sediment that spread out, fan-like, from summits along the crater rim.
Last year, hundreds of attendees gathered together at Pilsen's Union Park for the first-ever T.G.I.F. rally, battling a surprise summer rain to be there. Standing for "Transgender, Gender Non-Conforming, Intersex Freedom," the event sought to bring together these three groups for their own pride event. The event often got the misnomer of "Trans* Pride," but it was more than that. The day saw speakers, musicians and a performance of What's the T? from About Face's Youth Theatre, which looks at the intersections of race, class and gender in Boystown through the eyes of youth. The event was families and communities coming together to organize, to dialogue and to celebrate their togetherness. This was a day for everyone.
Chicago performer Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero at T.G.I.F. 2012
They say that lightening doesn't strike twice, but that won't stop T.G.I.F. organizer KOKUMO from trying. She wants the event to become a yearly "incubator for leaders, artists, activists, as well as community members" and an "asylum" for those who need it:
"Because in lieu of CeCe McDonald, a young black transwoman in prison for self-defense, we are forced to combine power with pride," she said. "We have to navigate this current movement of T.G.I. media visibility to political might. No more T.G.I. youth of color or otherwise should have to worry about their lives being stolen from them by bigots or the government."
Last year, KOKUMO laid the groundwork for a yearly event. This year she wants to take the opportunity to move the conversation further. "T.G.I.F. 2013," will play up themes of community and celebration. However, KOKUMO is looking to move beyond your typical pride celebration. For T.G.I. groups that are often marginalized in the larger queer umbrella, KOKUMO wants a moment of visibility and mobilization; to go from a place of awareness to movement. KOKUMO believes we need a T.G.I. Stonewall:
The T.G.I. community started the Gay Rights Movement but had it co-opted from us and renamed due to white and male privilege. We were the ones who started the Compton Riots and Stonewall Uprising. So I find it interesting that it took us 30 years to get to a place societally where honest and intentional conversations around T.G.I. experiences are finally being listened to. What's happening now is what should have happened when the fight to end AIDS began 30 years ago. The T.G.I. sex workers who were also dying in droves were completely ignored or disrespectfully counted as male-identified people. And that is why T.G.I.F. is happening. The time for patiently waiting for somebody to save our lives is over. TGI people are doing the work for themselves. That's the thing about courage, you don't know you have it until you're left with no choice but to use it.
Photo of KOKUMO singing with Chicago's Queer Choir
KOKUMO wants this year's event to include DJs, performers from Cyon Flare to Angelica Ross and keynotes from co-organizer Alexis Martinez, Nick Kay and Pidgeon Pagonis. Also included will be services from SAGE Community Health, Test Positive Awareness Network (TPAN) and Transformative Justice Law Project, which will hold a clothing drive and a name change mobilization effort for attendees who need assistance in navigating the process to legally alter your birth name to your chosen name.
However, events don't pay for themselves. KOKUMO also has to secure a stage, equipment and pay for the park deposit -- which lept to $3,075 this year. Movement building doesn't come cheap. You need to be able to afford the tools. That's why KOKUMO is asking for $10,000 to put together this year's event, which will cover most of the $13,340 budget. Although KOKUMO initially wasn't sure whether or not to ask for that much money, organizers decided that they needed to put it all out there in their ask. This weekend, the T.G.I.F. team put together a campaign video for the 2013 gathering (planned for Union Park on July 28), which organizers call "Transcending Pride, Evolving Movements."
In a Saturday meeting (that WBEZ got an exclusive invite to), organizers argued that the event needed to "go big or go home" this year. As a friend, KOKUMO asked me for my opinion of the fundraising campaign's prospects. She was concerned she might not reach her goal. I responded with something that my mother used to tell me as a kid, whenever I felt like I couldn't do something: "If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will." She needed to believe that the movement could rally behind her. I believe it will.
T.G.I.F.'s Indiegogo campaign will launch next Tuesday on the fundraising platform. To me, it's the ultimate demonstration of community. Although Chicago's mainstream pride events are attended by sweeping cross-sections of the community, with everyone from shirtless club kids to old ladies, babies and dogs attending, the event is bought and paid for largely by corporations. As much as the Pride parade is a yearly reminder of togetherness, it's a celebration of capitalism -- of beer advertisements and discarded trash. The trash that lines the sidewalks of Halsted every year after Pride is a symbol of the negative externalities of fundraising. Hannah Arendt once coined the phrase "the banality of evil." Call this instead the "banality of business."
Instead of littering the community with outside cash, KOKUMO's mission is to have an event built for the community, by the community -- by asking them to chip in. She wants to make celebrating T.G.I. togetherness sustainable by building a movement of friends, supporters and allies. In her fundraising video, KOKUMO explains that this event isn't just about cash. It's about building a space for people to go and giving them a platform where they can have their voices represented and recognized. It's about taking the next step. According to KOKUMO, "when the most oppressed people began to save themselves, that's revolutionary."
At the end of the video, KOKUMO puts it with her trademark directness: "The revolution will be T.G.I. The question is: Will you be ready?"
This article was originally posted on WBEZ.
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Ventana Research completed an in-depth benchmark research project on?long-range planning?recently. As?I define it, long-range planning is the formal quantification of the strategic plan and how that strategy is expected to play out over a period of time. The benchmark demonstrated that there?s room for improvement in almost every aspect of the long-range planning process. Almost all (95%) of those participating in the research see the need to advance their process. The research confirmed that long-range planning does not work well in isolation. Greater integration of the annual budget with the long-range plan and deeper integration of individual capital projects and initiatives are two ways to enhance the value of long-range planning process.
One of the main objectives companies have for long-range planning is to assist in the development of the annual budget. This was cited by seven out of 10 participants (69%), the highest percentage among specific five choices provided and ahead of optimally allocating capital or project investments, which was selected by 64 percent. Since almost all company budgets are focused only on a single fiscal year, long-range planning enables executives to look past the current period and get a formal picture of the follow-on years. For that reason, a bit more than half have fully (12%) or mostly (44%) integrated their long-range planning process with operational planning and budgeting. By the same token, almost half have not put them together to any meaningful degree. Our research shows that organizations that have fully or mostly integrated long-range planning with their annual budgeting process get better results. Companies that integrate long-range planning and budgeting react faster to changes in their environment: Two-thirds of those that have fully or mostly integrated the two types can respond to changes immediately or soon enough, compared to just 22 percent of those companies that have little or no integration. The more integrated companies seldom said that it takes them too long to complete their long-range planning process (29%), compared to nearly half (47%) of those that are integrated only somewhat or not at all. Organizations that tightly integrate short- and long-term planning can improve agility if, for example, discussions of near-term allocations include consideration of market or economic contingencies and how best to deal with outcomes, if they establish and follow structured processes that kick in to deal with such changes and if senior executives clearly and consistently communicate long-term strategy and objectives.
An important objective of long-range planning is deciding on which capital investments to make and which major corporate initiatives to pursue. We asked participants to assess how well their process works and compared these results with the quality of these investment choices and found that there is a positive correlation between the overall quality of the process and the decisions that stem from it. Most companies (83%) with a good process make consistently good choices compared to 35 percent that only have an adequate process and just 10 percent of those that say their process is inadequate. A good planning process is one which addresses key people-related issues (clear communications and training, for example), access to consistently timely and accurate data necessary for planning and software that supports effective process execution, agile response to changing conditions and deeper insight into factors driving results.
Companies also differ in the degree to which they explicitly integrate planning for capital projects and initiatives with their long-range plans. This has been more common (though by no means universal) in companies with a project-centric business model (in industries such as engineering and construction, aerospace and shipbuilding, to name three). Or for pharmaceutical and other long-cycle companies that need long-range visibility as, for example, they transition beyond drug trial phases into sales, production and distribution. Increasingly, though, even shorter cycle businesses such as electronics are incorporating capital and project planning to manage their rapidly evolving products and product families. As well, asset-intensive businesses that need more intelligent management of capacity and maintenance can benefit from greater integration of capital project details in their long-range plans.
About one-fourth (26%) of organizations participating in the benchmark research report that their strategic plans are highly integrated with the management of individual projects, while 61 percent integrate the two somewhat and 10 percent say they are not integrated at all. Only 19 percent of very large organizations (those with 10,000 or more employees) have highly integrated the two, likely because their size makes this difficult to manage (especially if they are using spreadsheets in the process). We cross-tabulated companies? assessment of the quality of their long-term planning process with the degree of integration of capital projects and major initiatives with the long-range planning process and found there is a positive correlation. Integrating capital projects and initiatives with long-range planning results in a better process: nearly all (85%) of those with a highly integrated process say theirs works well or very well, compared to 63% that have a somewhat integrated process and just 22% that have not integrated these at all. There also is a correlation between the degree of integration and the quality of alignment of long-range planning with a company?s strategy. The results were similar to the previous point: 9 out of 10 that have a highly integrated process also create long-range plans that are well aligned with strategy, compared to 7 out of 10 that have somewhat integrated approach and just one-third where there is no integration.
Strategic planning is the formal conceptualization of a corporation?s strategy and its individual supporting elements (such as product strategy, sales and marketing strategy, pricing strategy and financial strategy ? to name four). The strategic planning is a high-level process aimed at translating a company?s core approach to its business and environment into words to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of its strategy. Strategic planning can ? and often does ? occur in isolation from the details of running a company. Long-range planning cannot. It is the formal quantification of the strategic plan and how that strategy is expected to play out. Our research shows that many if not most types of businesses benefit when there is an iterative approach in the long-range planning process that combines the big picture with the details.
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Rob heads up the CFO and business research focusing on the intersection of information technology with the finance organization and business. The financial performance management (FPM) research agenda includes the application of IT to financial process optimization and collaborative systems; control systems and analytics; and advanced budgeting and planning.?
Mar. 11, 2013 ? Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.
The team, made up of members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers. The amplifiers are so small, in fact, that 76 of the chips -- including everything they need to self-heal -- could fit on a single penny. In perhaps the most dramatic of their experiments, the team destroyed various parts of their chips by zapping them multiple times with a high-power laser, and then observed as the chips automatically developed a work-around in less than a second.
"It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself. It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits," says Ali Hajimiri, the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. "We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance."
The team's results appear in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.
Until now, even a single fault has often rendered an integrated-circuit chip completely useless. The Caltech engineers wanted to give integrated-circuit chips a healing ability akin to that of our own immune system -- something capable of detecting and quickly responding to any number of possible assaults in order to keep the larger system working optimally. The power amplifier they devised employs a multitude of robust, on-chip sensors that monitor temperature, current, voltage, and power. The information from those sensors feeds into a custom-made application-specific integrated-circuit (ASIC) unit on the same chip, a central processor that acts as the "brain" of the system. The brain analyzes the amplifier's overall performance and determines if it needs to adjust any of the system's actuators -- the changeable parts of the chip.
Interestingly, the chip's brain does not operate based on algorithms that know how to respond to every possible scenario. Instead, it draws conclusions based on the aggregate response of the sensors. "You tell the chip the results you want and let it figure out how to produce those results," says Steven Bowers, a graduate student in Hajimiri's lab and lead author of the new paper. "The challenge is that there are more than 100,000 transistors on each chip. We don't know all of the different things that might go wrong, and we don't need to. We have designed the system in a general enough way that it finds the optimum state for all of the actuators in any situation without external intervention."
Looking at 20 different chips, the team found that the amplifiers with the self-healing capability consumed about half as much power as those without, and their overall performance was much more predictable and reproducible. "We have shown that self-healing addresses four very different classes of problems," says Kaushik Dasgupta, another graduate student also working on the project. The classes of problems include static variation that is a product of variation across components; long-term aging problems that arise gradually as repeated use changes the internal properties of the system; and short-term variations that are induced by environmental conditions such as changes in load, temperature, and differences in the supply voltage; and, finally, accidental or deliberate catastrophic destruction of parts of the circuits.
The Caltech team chose to demonstrate this self-healing capability first in a power amplifier for millimeter-wave frequencies. Such high-frequency integrated chips are at the cutting edge of research and are useful for next-generation communications, imaging, sensing, and radar applications. By showing that the self-healing capability works well in such an advanced system, the researchers hope to show that the self-healing approach can be extended to virtually any other electronic system.
"Bringing this type of electronic immune system to integrated-circuit chips opens up a world of possibilities," says Hajimiri. "It is truly a shift in the way we view circuits and their ability to operate independently. They can now both diagnose and fix their own problems without any human intervention, moving one step closer to indestructible circuits."
Along with Hajimiri, Bowers, and Dasgupta, former Caltech postdoctoral scholar Kaushik Sengupta (PhD '12), who is now an assistant professor at Princeton University, is also a coauthor on the paper, "Integrated Self-Healing for mm-Wave Power Amplifiers." A preliminary report of this work won the best paper award at the 2012 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium. The work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by California Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Kimm Fesenmaier.
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Journal Reference:
Steven M. Bowers, Kaushik Sengupta, Kaushik Dasgupta, Benjamin D. Parker, Ali Hajimiri. Integrated Self-Healing for mm-Wave Power Amplifiers. IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 2013; : 1 DOI: 10.1109/TMTT.2013.2243750
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The best way to get the attention of a bunch of sleep-deprived, possibly hungover SXSW Interactive attendees? Coffee-slinging robotic arms, naturally. GE's fully embracing Austin's caffeinated food trick culture with a pair of Barista Bots, arms that operate similarly to your standard 3D printer, moving along the X, Y, Z axes to extrude coffee through a syringe, atop of a latte's foam. The process starts when one of the robot's human barista counterparts takes a shot of an image with a webcam, digitizing it on a nearby computer. Then the arm goes to work.
It's an imperfect science, of course. For one thing, foam is a really difficult canvas to work on, what with all the unevenness of constantly popping bubbles. There's also an awful lot of wind in Austin today, and with all those people inside, the van did a little bit of rocking. We saw some more complex images that didn't come out particularly well (facial scans, for one thing), so we decided to throw something a simpler at the 'bot, drawing our "e" logo on a sheet of paper.
Raleigh?s Dos Taquitos restaurant must fork over almost $50,000 in back pay to 26 employees the U.S. Department of Labor says were shortchanged.
Investigators from the department?s Wage and Hour Division found that Dos Taquitos violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and child labor laws. They said the restaurant paid workers a weekly salary that sometimes averaged less than the federal minimum wage. The workers didn?t receive overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week.
Plus, investigators found that a 14-year-old employee worked longer hours than child labor laws permit and it failed to document the ages of workers under 18.
Dos Taquitos agreed to settle the case instead of going to court.
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U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks to members of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Airborne Division during his visit to Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks to members of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Airborne Division during his visit to Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks to members of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division at Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel poses for a picture with a member of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division during his visit to Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel participates in the awarding of a Purple Heart to Sgt. Jeremyah Williams of the 426 Brigade Support Battalion, at Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AP) ? U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he believes U.S. officials will be able to work things out with Afghan leaders who have ordered special operations forces out of Wardak province, even though the deadline for their removal is Monday.
Hagel's comments came on his first trip to Afghanistan as defense secretary. His first morning in Kabul was marked with a suicide bombing outside the Afghan Defense Ministry that a Taliban spokesman said was a message to the visiting Pentagon chief. At least 19 people were killed in the bombing, and Hagel said he could hear the explosion from the safe location where he was at a meeting a distance away from the site.
"We're in a war zone, I've been in war. So, shouldn't be surprised when a bomb goes off or there's an explosion," Hagel said.
Hagel is expected to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who ordered the U.S. forces to leave the province just outside Kabul because of allegations that Afghans working with the commandos were involved in abusive behavior and torture.
"I feel confident that we'll be able to work this out," Hagel told reporters during a stop at Jalalabad Airfield, where he met with commanders and spoke to troops.
A senior defense official said that while it's not yet clear what will come out of Hagel's meeting with Karzai, the U.S. believes the door is not closed to resolving the issues.
A coalition official who works with special operations forces said Saturday that while the commandos are ready to pull out, their operations are continuing at this point, and there is some hope that an 11th hour negotiation can be reached that will allow them to stay. The official said the Afghan forces in Wardak are not yet ready to operate without the continued assistance and training from the U.S. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
According to Brigadier Adam Findlay, NATO's deputy chief of staff of operations and a member of the Australian military, an option would be to replace the special operators with conventional military forces. Findlay said NATO officials have made provisional plans to withdraw the commandos if Karzai sticks to his edict after meetings this weekend with Hagel and the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Joseph Dunford.
"What we've got to try to do is go to a middle ground that meets the president's frustration," but also keeps insurgents from using Wardak as a staging ground to launch attacks on the capital, Findlay told The Associated Press Saturday.
The order for the U.S. forces to leave comes despite worries that Wardak could be more vulnerable to the Taliban and insurgents. The official who works with commando forces said the U.S. does not want to create an opening for insurgents to more easily make their way to Kabul.
U.S. officials also insist they have seen no evidence that American forces were involved in the abuse of Afghan civilians.
"Each of those accusations has been answered, and we're not involved," said NATO's Findlay. "There are obviously atrocities occurring there, but it's not linked to us, and the kind of atrocities we are seeing, fingers cut off, other mutilations to bodies, is just not the way we work."
On Saturday Hagel flew to Bagram Air Field, about an hour outside the capitol, where he met with Maj. Gen. William Mayville, the U.S. commander of forces in the east. He also met with the commander of special operations forces in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Raymond Thomas.
There are about 10,000 U.S. and coalition special operations forces in the country training Afghan local police and commando units as well as battling insurgents.
Hagel ? who received two Purple Hearts after being wounded twice in Vietnam ? later handed out his first combat awards as Pentagon chief. He pinned Purple Hearts onto Sgt. Jeremyah Williams and PFC Harry Hikes, two 101st Airborne Division soldiers who were involved in a car bomb attack about 100 feet from their post at a base entry point. After the brief ceremony at Jalalabad Air Base, Williams said it was "an honor and a privilege" to receive his Purple Heart from Hagel.
Speaking to about 200 troops at the Jalalabad base, Hagel made it clear that he knows what they and their families are going through. He fielded several questions from soldiers worried about how the ongoing budget battle in Washington will affect their retirement and other benefits. He told them he is committed to insuring that their pay and benefits are not hurt, even though the $53 billion in cuts over the remainder of this fiscal year will "make our jobs more difficult."
Hagel's trip comes at a turning point in the conflict, as U.S. and NATO allies set their timetable for the withdrawal of combat troops and pressure mounts on the U.S.-led effort to train the Afghan forces. And he must manage the transition as the U.S. ramps up what will be a difficult and expensive extraction of equipment from the country even as Congress slashes billions of dollars from the defense budget.
He has said he wants to use the trip to better understand what's going on in Afghanistan and to get an assessment on the progress of the Afghan forces as they prepare to take over the security of their own country.
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AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier contributed to this report from Kabul.
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BEIJING (Reuters) - Incoming Chinese president Xi Jinping's first trip as head of state will take him to Africa, the government said on Saturday, as China seeks to cement a growing trade and energy relationship that has caused alarm bells to ring in Washington.
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said that Xi, scheduled to take over formally from Hu Jintao as national leader next week, would visit South Africa, Tanzania and Republic of Congo, as well as Russia, though he provided no exact dates.
"China and Africa are good brothers, good friends and good partners. The visit by China's new national chairman to Africa fully shows the importance we attach to Sino-African ties," Yang told a news conference at China's annual parliament meeting.
While in South Africa Xi will attend a summit of BRICS nations -- made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- which will be held in Durban at the end of March, he added.
China has courted Africa for decades, but its efforts have kicked into high gear in recent years as Beijing seeks to satisfy growing demand for raw materials and energy for its booming economy, now the world's second largest.
Last year Hu offered $20 billion in loans to African countries over the coming three years, part of what China says is a no-strings-attached aid policy widely appreciated in Africa.
Many Western nations though say China turns a blind eye to rights abuses and corruption in handing out aid and loans in its bid to get access to resources like oil, copper and timber.
U.S. Senator Chris Coons, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs, called on Thursday for early renewal of U.S. trade benefits for Africa as part of a broader strategy to counter growing Chinese investment and influence on the continent of nearly one billion people.
Yang said such concerns were unwarranted, and that China's interest in Africa was not meant to exclude any other country and was in line with the African people's wishes.
"Now all countries are pushing forward their cooperation with Africa, and China sincerely welcomes such a development," he added.
"At the same time we hope that all parties will view China-Africa cooperation in an objective light and respect Africa's choice of its own development partners. We hope that there will be more exchanges and mutual learning and less suspicion or accusations."
(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones, writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Jonathan Standing and Michael Perry)
Contact: David Salisbury david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu 615-343-6803 Vanderbilt University
These days the core of the Milky Way galaxy is a pretty tame place...cosmically speaking. The galactic black hole at the center is a sleeping giant. Existing stars are peacefully circling. Although conditions are favorable, there doesn't even seem to be much new star formation going on.
But there is growing evidence that several million years ago the galactic center was the site of all manner of celestial fireworks. A pair of assistant professors Kelly Holley-Bockelmann at Vanderbilt and Tamara Bogdanovi? at Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with an explanation that fits these "forensic" clues.
Writing in the March 6 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the astronomers describe how a single event a violent collision and merger between the galactic black hole and an intermediate-sized black hole in one of the small "satellite galaxies" that circle the Milky Way could have produced the features that point to a more violent past for the galactic core.
"Tamara and I had just attended an astronomy conference in Aspen, Colorado, where several of these new observations were announced," said Holley-Bockelmann. "It was January 2010 and a snow storm had closed the airport. We decided to rent a car to drive to Denver. As we drove through the storm, we pieced together the clues from the conference and realized that a single catastrophic event the collision between two black holes about 10 million years ago - could explain all the new evidence."
The most dramatic of these extraordinary clues are the Fermi bubbles. These giant lobes of high-energy radiation - caused by particles moving nearly the speed of light - extend some 30,000 light years above and below the Milky Way center. If they were glowing in visible light they would fill about half of the night sky. But they radiate X-ray and gamma-ray light, so you need X-ray vision to see them. The discovery was reported by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Another puzzling characteristic of the GC, the astronomer's abbreviation for the galactic center, is the fact that it contains the three most massive clusters of young stars in the entire galaxy. The Central, Arches and Quintuplet clusters each contain hundreds of young, hot stars that are much larger than the Sun. These stars typically burn out in "only" a few million years because of their extreme brightness, so there had to have been a relatively recent burst of star formation at the GC.
The supermassive black hole that dominates the center of the Milky Way weighs in at about four million solar masses and is roughly 40 light seconds in diameter: only nine times the size of the sun. Such an object produces intense gravitational tides. So astronomers were surprised to discover a number of clumps of bright new stars closer than three lights years from the black hole's maw. It wouldn't be that surprising if the stars were being sucked into the black hole, but they show every sign of having formed in place. For this to happen, the clouds of dust and gas that they formed from must have been exceptionally dense: 10,000 times thicker than the other molecular clouds in the GC.
While there is an excess of young hot stars in the galactic core, there is also a surprising dearth of older stars. Theoretical models predict that the density of old stars should increase as you move closer to the black hole. Instead, there are very few old stars found within several light years of the sleeping giant.
When she got home from the conference, Holley-Bockelmann recruited Vanderbilt graduate student Meagan Langto work on the problem with them. With the assistance of Pau Amaro-Seoane from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, Alberto Sesana from the Institut de Cincies de l'Espai in Spain, and Vanderbilt Research Assistant Professor Manodeep Sinha, they came up with a theoretical model that fits the observations and makes some testable predictions.
The scenario began about 13 billion years ago, when the path of one of the smaller satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way is diverted so that it began drifting inward toward the core. According to a recent study, this may have happened dozens of times in the lifetime of the Milky Way. As the satellite galaxy a collection of stars and gas with an intermediate-sized black hole with a mass equal to about 10,000 suns spiraled in, most of its mass was gradually stripped away, finally leaving the black hole and a handful of gravitationally bound stars.
About 10 million years ago, the stripped down core of the satellite galaxy finally reached the galactic center. When two black holes merge, they first go through an elaborate dance. So the smaller black hole would have circled the galactic black hole for several million years before it was ultimately consumed.
As the smaller black hole circled closer and closer, it would have churned up the dust and gas in the vicinity and pushed enough material into the galactic black hole in the process to produce the Fermi bubbles.
The violent gravitational tides produced by the process could easily have compressed the molecular clouds in the core to the super densities required to produce the young stars that are now located on the central black hole's doorstep.
In addition, the vigorous churning would have swept out the existing stars from the area surrounding the massive central black hole. In fact, the astronomer's model predicts that the black holes' merger dance should have flung a large number of the missing old stars out into the galaxy at hyper velocities, thus explaining the absence of old stars immediately around the super-massive black hole.
"The gravitational pull of the satellite galaxy's black hole could have carved nearly 1,000 stars out of the galactic center," said Bogdanovi?.
"Those stars should still be racing through space, about 10,000 light years away from their original orbits."
It should be possible to detect these stars with large surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey because these stars would be traveling at much higher velocities than stars that have not undergone this type of interaction. So discovery of a large number of "high velocity stars" racing outward through the galaxy would strongly support the proposed scenario of the Milky Way and satellite galaxy merger.
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The research was supported by National Science Foundation Career Grant AST-0847696 and National Aviation and Space Administration grants NNX08AG74G and PF9-00061 as well as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Visit Research News @ Vanderbilt for more research news from Vanderbilt. [Media Note: Vanderbilt has a 24/7 TV and radio studio with a dedicated fiber optic line and ISDN line. Use of the TV studio with Vanderbilt experts is free, except for reserving fiber time.]
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Contact: David Salisbury david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu 615-343-6803 Vanderbilt University
These days the core of the Milky Way galaxy is a pretty tame place...cosmically speaking. The galactic black hole at the center is a sleeping giant. Existing stars are peacefully circling. Although conditions are favorable, there doesn't even seem to be much new star formation going on.
But there is growing evidence that several million years ago the galactic center was the site of all manner of celestial fireworks. A pair of assistant professors Kelly Holley-Bockelmann at Vanderbilt and Tamara Bogdanovi? at Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with an explanation that fits these "forensic" clues.
Writing in the March 6 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the astronomers describe how a single event a violent collision and merger between the galactic black hole and an intermediate-sized black hole in one of the small "satellite galaxies" that circle the Milky Way could have produced the features that point to a more violent past for the galactic core.
"Tamara and I had just attended an astronomy conference in Aspen, Colorado, where several of these new observations were announced," said Holley-Bockelmann. "It was January 2010 and a snow storm had closed the airport. We decided to rent a car to drive to Denver. As we drove through the storm, we pieced together the clues from the conference and realized that a single catastrophic event the collision between two black holes about 10 million years ago - could explain all the new evidence."
The most dramatic of these extraordinary clues are the Fermi bubbles. These giant lobes of high-energy radiation - caused by particles moving nearly the speed of light - extend some 30,000 light years above and below the Milky Way center. If they were glowing in visible light they would fill about half of the night sky. But they radiate X-ray and gamma-ray light, so you need X-ray vision to see them. The discovery was reported by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Another puzzling characteristic of the GC, the astronomer's abbreviation for the galactic center, is the fact that it contains the three most massive clusters of young stars in the entire galaxy. The Central, Arches and Quintuplet clusters each contain hundreds of young, hot stars that are much larger than the Sun. These stars typically burn out in "only" a few million years because of their extreme brightness, so there had to have been a relatively recent burst of star formation at the GC.
The supermassive black hole that dominates the center of the Milky Way weighs in at about four million solar masses and is roughly 40 light seconds in diameter: only nine times the size of the sun. Such an object produces intense gravitational tides. So astronomers were surprised to discover a number of clumps of bright new stars closer than three lights years from the black hole's maw. It wouldn't be that surprising if the stars were being sucked into the black hole, but they show every sign of having formed in place. For this to happen, the clouds of dust and gas that they formed from must have been exceptionally dense: 10,000 times thicker than the other molecular clouds in the GC.
While there is an excess of young hot stars in the galactic core, there is also a surprising dearth of older stars. Theoretical models predict that the density of old stars should increase as you move closer to the black hole. Instead, there are very few old stars found within several light years of the sleeping giant.
When she got home from the conference, Holley-Bockelmann recruited Vanderbilt graduate student Meagan Langto work on the problem with them. With the assistance of Pau Amaro-Seoane from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, Alberto Sesana from the Institut de Cincies de l'Espai in Spain, and Vanderbilt Research Assistant Professor Manodeep Sinha, they came up with a theoretical model that fits the observations and makes some testable predictions.
The scenario began about 13 billion years ago, when the path of one of the smaller satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way is diverted so that it began drifting inward toward the core. According to a recent study, this may have happened dozens of times in the lifetime of the Milky Way. As the satellite galaxy a collection of stars and gas with an intermediate-sized black hole with a mass equal to about 10,000 suns spiraled in, most of its mass was gradually stripped away, finally leaving the black hole and a handful of gravitationally bound stars.
About 10 million years ago, the stripped down core of the satellite galaxy finally reached the galactic center. When two black holes merge, they first go through an elaborate dance. So the smaller black hole would have circled the galactic black hole for several million years before it was ultimately consumed.
As the smaller black hole circled closer and closer, it would have churned up the dust and gas in the vicinity and pushed enough material into the galactic black hole in the process to produce the Fermi bubbles.
The violent gravitational tides produced by the process could easily have compressed the molecular clouds in the core to the super densities required to produce the young stars that are now located on the central black hole's doorstep.
In addition, the vigorous churning would have swept out the existing stars from the area surrounding the massive central black hole. In fact, the astronomer's model predicts that the black holes' merger dance should have flung a large number of the missing old stars out into the galaxy at hyper velocities, thus explaining the absence of old stars immediately around the super-massive black hole.
"The gravitational pull of the satellite galaxy's black hole could have carved nearly 1,000 stars out of the galactic center," said Bogdanovi?.
"Those stars should still be racing through space, about 10,000 light years away from their original orbits."
It should be possible to detect these stars with large surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey because these stars would be traveling at much higher velocities than stars that have not undergone this type of interaction. So discovery of a large number of "high velocity stars" racing outward through the galaxy would strongly support the proposed scenario of the Milky Way and satellite galaxy merger.
###
The research was supported by National Science Foundation Career Grant AST-0847696 and National Aviation and Space Administration grants NNX08AG74G and PF9-00061 as well as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Visit Research News @ Vanderbilt for more research news from Vanderbilt. [Media Note: Vanderbilt has a 24/7 TV and radio studio with a dedicated fiber optic line and ISDN line. Use of the TV studio with Vanderbilt experts is free, except for reserving fiber time.]
-VU-
[ | 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.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Sen. Rand Paul's self-described filibuster blocking confirmation of President Barack Obama's nominee to lead the CIA pushed into Thursday, more than 12 hours after the Kentucky Republican and tea party favorite began speaking.
In a show of support, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., came to the Senate floor and congratulated Paul for his "tenacity and for his conviction." McConnell also called Obama's choice, John Brennan, a "controversial nominee."
Paul, a tea party favorite and a Republican critic of Obama's unmanned drone policy, started just before noon by demanding the president or Attorney General Eric Holder issue a statement assuring that the aircraft would not be used in the United States to kill terrorism suspects who are U.S. citizens. He wasn't picky about the format, saying at one point he'd be happy with a telegram or a Tweet.
Paul said he recognized that he can't stop Brennan from being confirmed. But the nomination was the right vehicle for a debate over what the Obama White House believes are the limits of the federal government's ability to conduct lethal operations against suspected terrorists, he said.
Paul, 50, received intermittent support early on from several other conservative senators holding similar views, plus Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. Paul spoke almost continuously for five hours before Majority Leader Harry Reid tried but failed to move to a vote on Brennan.
Paul snacked on candy at the dinner hour while continuing to speak. At one point, Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who walks haltingly with a cane because of a stroke, delivered a canister of hot tea and an apple to Paul's desk, but a doorkeeper removed them. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a conservative from Texas, stood off to the side of the Senate floor in a show of support. Other well-wishers with privileges to be on the floor shook his hand when he temporarily turned the speaking over to his colleagues.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, read Twitter messages from people eager to "Stand With Rand." The Twitterverse, said Cruz, is "blowing up." And as the night went on, Cruz spoke for longer periods as Paul leaned against a desk across the floor. Cruz, an insurgent Republican with strong tea party backing, read passages from Shakespeare's "Henry V" and lines from the 1970 movie "Patton," starring George C. Scott.
Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and red tie, Paul read from notebooks filled with articles about the expanded use of the unmanned weapons that have become the centerpiece of the Obama administration's campaign against al-Qaida suspects. As he moved about the Senate floor, aides brought him glasses of water, which he barely touched. Senate rules say a senator has to remain on the floor to continue to hold it, even though he can yield to another senator for a question.
"No president has the right to say he is judge, jury and executioner," Paul said.
Not all Republicans were so enthusiastic about Paul's performance. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the prospect of drones being used to kill people in the United States was "ridiculous" and called the debate "paranoia between libertarians and the hard left that is unjustified."
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, echoed Graham. He said it is unconstitutional for the U.S. military or intelligence agencies to conduct lethal counterterrorism operations in the United States against U.S. citizens. Suggesting they can or might, Rogers said, "provokes needless fear and detracts attention from the real threats facing the country."
Later in the evening Paul, who is the son of former Texas congressman and libertarian leader Ron Paul, offered to allow a vote on Brennan if the Senate would vote on his resolution stating that the use of the unmanned, armed aircraft on U.S. soil against American citizens violates the Constitution. Democrats rejected the offer.
Reid, D-Nev., said he planned to file a motion to bring debate over Brennan's nomination to an end, if not on Thursday, then Friday or next week. Reid had pushed for a confirmation vote Wednesday. Technically, the Senate had not even started the debate on Brennan's nomination before Paul took control of the floor almost immediately after Republicans successfully blocked a vote on a federal appeals court nominee.
Along with Cruz and Wyden, Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Marco Rubio of Florida joined Paul briefly three hours into the debate but turned it back to him. Wyden has long pressed for greater oversight of the use of drones. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., appeared later in the evening to trade questions with Paul.
The record for the longest individual speech on the Senate floor belongs to former Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Holder came close to making the statement Paul wanted earlier in the day during an exchange with Cruz at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, according to Paul.
Cruz asked Holder if the Constitution allowed the federal government to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil who doesn't pose an imminent threat. Holder said the situation was hypothetical, but he did not think that in that situation the use of a drone or lethal force would be appropriate. Cruz criticized Holder for not simply saying "no" in response.
In a letter sent Tuesday to Paul, Brennan said the CIA does not have authority to conduct lethal operations inside the U.S.
Holder told Paul in a March 4 letter that the federal government has not conducted such operations and has no intention of doing so. But Holder also wrote that he supposed it was possible under an "extraordinary circumstance" that the president would have no choice but to authorize the military to use lethal force inside U.S. borders. Holder cited the attacks at Pearl Harbor and on Sept. 11, 2001, as examples.
Paul said he did not dispute that the president has the authority to take swift and lethal action against an enemy that carried out a significant attack against the United States. But Paul said he was "alarmed" at how difficult it has been to get the administration to clearly define what qualifies as a legitimate target of a drone strike.
Brennan's nomination won approval Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee after the White House broke a lengthy impasse by agreeing to give lawmakers access to top-secret legal opinions justifying the use of lethal drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects overseas.
If confirmed, Brennan would replace Michael Morell, the CIA's deputy director who has been acting director since David Petraeus resigned in November after acknowledging an affair with his biographer.
Brennan currently serves as Obama's top counterterrorism adviser in the White House. He was nominated for the CIA post by the president in early January and the Intelligence Committee held his confirmation hearing on Feb. 7.
___
Associated Press writer Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
Dining on field grasses would be ruinous to human teeth, but mammals such as horses, rhinos and gazelles evolved long, strong teeth that are up to the task.
New research led by the University of Washington challenges the 140-year-old assumption that finding fossilized remains of prehistoric animals with such teeth meant the animals were living in grasslands and savannas. Instead it appears certain South American mammals evolved the teeth in response to the gritty dust and volcanic ash they encountered while feeding in an ancient tropical forest.
The new work was conducted in Argentina where scientists had thought Earth's first grasslands emerged 38 million years ago, an assumption based on fossils of these specialized teeth. But the grasslands didn't exist. Instead there were tropical forests rich with palms, bamboos and gingers, according to Caroline Str?mberg, UW assistant professor of biology and lead author of an article in Nature Communications.
"The assumption about grasslands and the evolution of these teeth was based on animal fossils," Str?mberg said. "No one had looked in detail at evidence from the plant record before. Our findings show that you shouldn't assume adaptations always came about in the same way, that the trigger is the same environment every time."
To handle a lifetime of rough abrasion, the specialized teeth ? called high-crowned cheek teeth ? are especially long and mostly up in the animals' gums when they are young. As chewing surfaces of the teeth wear away, more of the tooth emerges from the gums until the crowns are used up. In each tooth, bone-like dentin and tough enamel are complexly folded and layered to create strong ridged surfaces for chewing. Human teeth have short crowns and enamel only on the outside of each tooth.
In Argentina, mammals apparently developed specialized teeth 20 million years or more before grasslands appeared, Str?mberg said. This was different from her previous work in North America and western Eurasia where she found the emergence of grasslands coincided with the early ancestors of horses and other animals evolving specialized teeth. The cause and effect, however, took 4 million years, considerably more lag time than previously thought.
The idea that specialized teeth could have evolved in response to eating dust and grit on plants and the ground is not new. In the case of Argentine mammals, Str?mberg and her co-authors hypothesize that the teeth adapted to handle volcanic ash because so much is present at the study site. For example, some layers of volcanic ash are as thick as 20 feet (six meters). In other layers, soils and roots were just starting to develop when they were smothered with more ash.
Chewing grasses is abrasive because grasses take up more silica from soils than most other plants. Silica forms minute particles inside many plants called phytoliths that, among other things, help some plants stand upright and form part of the protective coating on seeds.
Phytoliths vary in appearance under a microscope depending on the kind of plant. When plants die and decay, the phytoliths remain as part of the soil layer. In work funded by the National Science Foundation, Str?mberg and her colleagues collected samples from Argentina's Gran Barranca, literally "Great Cliff," that offers access to layers of soil, ash and sand going back millions of years.
The phytoliths they found in 38-million-year-old layers ? when ancient mammals in that part of the world developed specialized teeth ? were overwhelmingly from tropical forests, Str?mberg said.
"In modern grasslands and savannas you'd expect at least 35 to 40 percent ? more likely well over 50 percent ? of grass phytoliths. The fact we have so little evidence of grasses is very diagnostic of a forested habitat," she said.
The emergence of grasslands and the evolution of specialized teeth in mammals are regarded as a classic example of co-evolution, one that has occurred in various places around the world. However, as the new work shows, "caution is required when using this functional trait for habitat reconstruction," the co-authors write.
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University of Washington: http://www.uwnews.org
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Mar. 5, 2013 ? New research from Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and the Puget Sound Blood Center (PSBC) has revealed how stresses of flow in the small blood vessels of the heart and brain could cause a common protein to change shape and form dangerous blood clots. The scientists were surprised to find that the proteins could remain in the dangerous, clot-initiating shape for up to five hours before returning to their normal, healthy shape.
The study -- the first of its kind -- focused on a protein called von Willebrand factor, or VWF, a key player in clot formation. A team led by Rice physicist Ching-Hwa Kiang found that "shear" forces, like those found in small arteries of patients with atherosclerosis, cause snippets of nonclotting VWF to change into a clot-forming shape for hours at a time. The finding appears online this week in Physical Review Letters.
"When I first heard what Dr. Kiang's team had found, I was shocked," said blood platelet expert Dr. Joel Moake, a study co-author who holds joint appointments at Rice and BCM. Moake, whose research group was the first to describe how high shear stress could cause platelets to stick to VWF, said, "I had thought that the condition might last for such a short time that it would be unmeasurable. No one expected to find that this condition would persist for hours. This has profound clinical implications."
Kiang, associate professor of physics and astronomy and of bioengineering, studies the forces involved in protein folding. Proteins are the workhorses of biology. Tens of thousands are produced each second in every living cell, and each of these folds into a characteristic shape within moments of its creation. Despite its ubiquity, protein folding is an immensely complex process that is shrouded in mystery.
Kiang is a pioneer in the use of atomic force microscopes (AFM) to shed light on the fundamental physical processes involved in protein folding. The AFM has a tiny needle with a tip measuring just a few atoms across. The needle is suspended from a tiny arm that bobs up and down over a surface. Kiang's team uses the bobbing needle to grab and pull apart individual protein molecules. By stretching these like rubber bands, her team has shown it can measure the precise physical forces that hold them in their folded shape.
"In this study, we did more than just measure the forces; we used those measurements to see what state the molecule was in," Kiang said. "In this way, we were able to study the dynamics of the molecule, to see how it changed over a period of time."
Moake, a senior research scientist in bioengineering at Rice and professor of medicine at BCM, said the work is vitally important because it helps explain the workings of VWF.
"VWF is synthesized in the cells that line the walls of blood vessels, and it's stored there until the cells get signals that the vessels are in danger of injury," Moake said. "In response to those stimuli, the cell secretes VWF. It's a long protein, and one end remains anchored to the cell while the rest unfurls from the wall like a streamer."
The act of unfurling makes VWF sticky for platelets, and that begins the process of hemostasis, which prevents people from bleeding to death when blood vessels are damaged by cuts and wounds.
"The body recognizes when clotting must stop -- when there are too many strings, too much sticking, too many platelet clumps -- and it uses an enzyme to clip the long VWF strings," Moake explained. "First, it makes large, soluble versions of the strings that remain somewhat sticky, and then these large soluble portions of VWF are reduced into smaller subunits of VWF that circulate in the plasma."
Under normal conditions, these circulating subunits, which are called PVWF, fold into compact shapes and cease to be sticky to platelets. However, previous research had shown that a type of physical stress called "shear" -- which can arise in partially occluded arterial blood vessels with high flow rates -- could cause PVWF to become sticky to platelets.
"That's all we knew," Moake said. "We didn't know how the conformation of the PVWF protein changed. That is why Dr. Kiang's research is so important and makes it more likely that therapeutic interventions can be more rationally designed."
To study the problem, Kiang's lab worked closely with Moake's team at Rice's BioScience Research Collaborative and with researchers from the laboratory of co-author Jing-fei Dong, formerly of BCM and now at PSBC in Seattle. Moake's and Dong's groups prepared samples of PVWF, subjecting some to the shear stresses known to induce clot formation. Kiang's team used AFMs to test the samples. Through a combination of experiments and deductive reasoning, her team determined exactly which portion of PVWF changed its conformation during shear stress. They also determined how long the protein remained partially unfurled before relaxing into its natural shape.
"The next step will be to design new experiments that allow us to monitor the proteins as they bind to platelets and initiate clot formation," Kiang said. "That will tell us even more about the physical properties of the proteins and provide more clues about potential therapies."
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Alliance for NanoHealth, the Welch Foundation, the Mary R. Gibson Foundation and the Everett Hinkson Fund. Study co-authors include Rice graduate students Sithara Wijeratne and Eric Frey, former Rice graduate student Eric Botello, BCM researchers Hui-Chun Yeh and Angela Bergeron, Rice undergraduate Jay Patel, PSBC's Zhou Zhou and Rice senior research technicians Leticia Nolasco and Nancy Turner.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University. The original article was written by Jade Boyd.
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Journal Reference:
Sithara S. Wijeratne, Eric Botello, Hui-Chun Yeh, Zhou Zhou, Angela L. Bergeron, Eric W. Frey, Jay M. Patel, Leticia Nolasco, Nancy A. Turner, Joel L. Moake, Jing-Fei Dong, and Ching-Hwa Kiang. Mechanical Activation of a Multimeric Adhesive Protein Through Domain Conformational Change. Physical Review Letters, 2013 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.108102
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? A baby born with the virus that causes AIDS appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi who's now 2? and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.
There's no guarantee the child will remain healthy, although sophisticated testing uncovered just traces of the virus' genetic material still lingering. If so, it would mark only the world's second reported cure.
Specialists say Sunday's announcement, at a major AIDS meeting in Atlanta, offers promising clues for efforts to eliminate HIV infection in children, especially in AIDS-plagued African countries where too many babies are born with the virus.
"You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure, that we've seen," Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who is familiar with the findings, told The Associated Press.
A doctor gave this baby faster and stronger treatment than is usual, starting a three-drug infusion within 30 hours of birth. That was before tests confirmed the infant was infected and not just at risk from a mother whose HIV wasn't diagnosed until she was in labor.
"I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk, and deserved our best shot," Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview.
That fast action apparently knocked out HIV in the baby's blood before it could form hideouts in the body. Those so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly reinfect anyone who stops medication, said Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins Children's Center. She led the investigation that deemed the child "functionally cured," meaning in long-term remission even if all traces of the virus haven't been completely eradicated.
Next, Persaud's team is planning a study to try to prove that, with more aggressive treatment of other high-risk babies. "Maybe we'll be able to block this reservoir seeding," Persaud said.
No one should stop anti-AIDS drugs as a result of this case, Fauci cautioned.
But "it opens up a lot of doors" to research if other children can be helped, he said. "It makes perfect sense what happened."
Better than treatment is to prevent babies from being born with HIV in the first place.
About 300,000 children were born with HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60 percent of infected pregnant women get treatment that can keep them from passing the virus to their babies. In the U.S., such births are very rare because HIV testing and treatment long have been part of prenatal care.
"We can't promise to cure babies who are infected. We can promise to prevent the vast majority of transmissions if the moms are tested during every pregnancy," Gay stressed.
The only other person considered cured of the AIDS virus underwent a very different and risky kind of treatment ? a bone marrow transplant from a special donor, one of the rare people who is naturally resistant to HIV. Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco has not needed HIV medications in the five years since that transplant.
The Mississippi case shows "there may be different cures for different populations of HIV-infected people," said Dr. Rowena Johnston of amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. That group funded Persaud's team to explore possible cases of pediatric cures.
It also suggests that scientists should look back at other children who've been treated since shortly after birth, including some reports of possible cures in the late 1990s that were dismissed at the time, said Dr. Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco, who also has seen the findings.
"This will likely inspire the field, make people more optimistic that this is possible," he said.
In the Mississippi case, the mother had had no prenatal care when she came to a rural emergency room in advanced labor. A rapid test detected HIV. In such cases, doctors typically give the newborn low-dose medication in hopes of preventing HIV from taking root. But the small hospital didn't have the proper liquid kind, and sent the infant to Gay's medical center. She gave the baby higher treatment-level doses.
The child responded well through age 18 months, when the family temporarily quit returning and stopped treatment, researchers said. When they returned several months later, remarkably, Gay's standard tests detected no virus in the child's blood.
Ten months after treatment stopped, a battery of super-sensitive tests at half a dozen laboratories found no sign of the virus' return. There were only some remnants of genetic material that don't appear able to replicate, Persaud said.
In Mississippi, Gay gives the child a check-up every few months: "I just check for the virus and keep praying that it stays gone."
The mother's HIV is being controlled with medication and she is "quite excited for her child," Gay added.
which capital investments to make and which major corporate initiatives to pursue. We asked participants to assess how well their process works and compared these results with the quality of these investment choices and found that there is a positive correlation between the overall quality of the process and the decisions that stem from it. Most companies (83%) with a good process make consistently good choices compared to 35 percent that only have an adequate process and just 10 percent of those that say their process is inadequate. A good planning process is one which addresses key people-related issues (clear communications and training, for example), access to consistently timely and accurate data necessary for planning and software that supports effective process execution, agile response to changing conditions and deeper insight into factors driving results.
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Public release date: 6-Mar-2013
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