Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/252589773?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, October 4, 2012
Falkland Islands 2012/13 cruise ship season brings new luxury visitors
If you have the opportunity and the free time to take a South American cruise, by all means do it. ?You will experience the Four Seasons all in a two week span of time and view sites you have never thought existed. ?One of my favorite places to visit is the Falkland Islands. ?This self contained society is unique and diverse. ?Their work ethics, the love of their land and the way of life is refreshing and healthy. ? Watching thousands of King Penguins wondering their homeland and learning how the people live in this remote area of the world, is truly amazing, it is a place to see not just to read about. ?My favorite day was wondering around and suddenly without warning, one King Penguin was also wondering, giving me the impression that he too was learning geography and the way of life in people.
Here are some ideas and a variety of vessels you can choose from. ?
Luxury super yacht MY Sherakhan, is one of four vessels new to the Falkland Islands visiting in?the 2012/13 season beginning next month. More often spotted in the Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas, she also ventures further afield to Patagonia, Antarctica, French Polynesia, Asia, and Panama.
Regatta (Prestige Cruises) Ocean Diamond (Quark) and Arcadia (P&O) will also pay inaugural visits.
The season will begin gently with the first vessel, Ushuaia arriving in Stanley on October 6, carrying 84 passengers and returning on October 20.
Two of the smaller class of vessels Polar Pioneer and Ocean Nova will also visit later in the month, with the far larger Costa Romantica planning to drop anchor in the Islands on October 27.
Source: http://www.offradarcruisenews.com/2012/10/falkland-islands-201213-cruise-ship.html
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Weirdly, Venus Is Both Hotter and Colder Than Earth [Space]
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Thursday, January 26, 2012
Chemists synthesize artificial cell membrane
ScienceDaily (Jan. 25, 2012) ? Chemists have taken an important step in making artificial life forms from scratch. Using a novel chemical reaction, they have created self-assembling cell membranes, the structural envelopes that contain and support the reactions required for life.
Neal Devaraj, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and Itay Budin, a graduate student at Harvard University, report their success in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
"One of our long term, very ambitious goals is to try to make an artificial cell, a synthetic living unit from the bottom up -- to make a living organism from non-living molecules that have never been through or touched a living organism," Devaraj said. "Presumably this occurred at some point in the past. Otherwise life wouldn't exist."
By assembling an essential component of earthly life with no biological precursors, they hope to illuminate life's origins.
"We don't understand this really fundamental step in our existence, which is how non-living matter went to living matter," Devaraj said. "So this is a really ripe area to try to understand what knowledge we lack about how that transition might have occurred. That could teach us a lot -- even the basic chemical, biological principles that are necessary for life."
Molecules that make up cell membranes have heads that mix easily with water and tails that repel it. In water, they form a double layer with heads out and tails in, a barrier that sequesters the contents of the cell.
Devaraj and Budin created similar molecules with a novel reaction that joins two chains of lipids. Nature uses complex enzymes that are themselves embedded in membranes to accomplish this, making it hard to understand how the very first membranes came to be.
"In our system, we use a sort of primitive catalyst, a very simple metal ion," Devaraj said. "The reaction itself is completely artificial. There's no biological equivalent of this chemical reaction. This is how you could have a de novo formation of membranes."
They created the synthetic membranes from a watery emulsion of an oil and a detergent. Alone it's stable. Add copper ions and sturdy vesicles and tubules begin to bud off the oil droplets. After 24 hours, the oil droplets are gone, "consumed" by the self-assembling membranes.
Although other scientists recently announced the creation of a "synthetic cell," only its genome was artificial. The rest was a hijacked bacterial cell. Fully artificial life will require the union of both an information-carrying genome and a three-dimensional structure to house it.
The real value of this discovery might reside in its simplicity. From commercially available precursors, the scientists needed just one preparatory step to create each starting lipid chain.
"It's trivial and can be done in a day," Devaraj said. "New people who join the lab can make membranes from day one."
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering supported this work. UC San Diego has filed a patent application on this discovery.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego. The original article was written by Susan Brown.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Itay Budin, Neal K. Devaraj. Membrane Assembly Driven by a Biomimetic Coupling Reaction. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2012; 134 (2): 751 DOI: 10.1021/ja2076873
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/CvSYYt6EIeU/120125132822.htm
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
State of the Union speech, as heard by China, India, France, Israel...
State of the Union coverage in the world's newspapers says as much about the specific concerns of other countries as it does about what President Obama actually said.
When journalists from around the world report on a speech by a sitting US president ? such as President Obama?s state of the union speech last night ? they do so with their own particular reading public in mind. The effect, for a global reader, can be confusing. Did Mr. Obama really say all of this in one speech?
Skip to next paragraphFor Chinese readers, Obama is reported to have boasted that the US is not, repeat not, declining.
For Indian readers, Obama promised to take on China and other nations that were engaged in theft of US intellectual property.
For Israelis, Obama promised an ?ironclad? commitment to the state of Israel, as well as promises to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
For South Africans, Obama gave a feisty speech, but was largely ignored by a Republican Congress who headed for the exits.
For the French, Obama was announcing his roadmap for reelection, while for the British he gave a populist speech promising a fairer America.
From a closer reading of his one hour and six minute speech, Mr. Obama does appear to have said all of these things, and a few more. But the fact that the press in each country has its own idea of what is newsworthy in a state of the union should not be surprising. It speaks volumes about how US foreign and economic policy affects that country, for better or worse.
China?s interest in America?s future makes sense. China is the US?s second-largest trading partner, and America?s ability to kickstart its economy is crucial for China?s own prosperity. US economic weakness is bad for Chinese business.
Small wonder, then, that the China Daily ? Beijing?s main English-language newspaper ? focused its attention on Obama?s confident statement, ?The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe."
"Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about," he said in his prime-time address.
Indian papers, meanwhile, saw in Obama?s tough words against intellectual piracy a reflection of its own rivalry with China. Both India and China have emerged as new economic and manufacturing bases, as more established economic powers in Europe and the America?s have slowed down. Both India and China have been competing for business and for resources in Africa, and both see themselves as the voice of the world?s impoverished, symbolized in their membership in the BRICS group of new economic powers (including Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).
But for India and China, power is a zero-sum game, and India revels in any sign of trouble for China.
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New Genetic Clues to Breast Cancer? - iVillage
SUNDAY, Jan. 22 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers have identified three new genomic regions they believe are linked with breast cancer that may help explain why some women develop the disease.
All three newly identified areas "contain interesting genes that open up new avenues for biological and clinical research," said researcher Douglas Easton, a professor of genetic epidemiology at the University of Cambridge in England.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, with about 1 million new cases annually worldwide and more than 400,000 deaths a year.
Scientists conducting genome-wide association studies -- research that looks at the association between genetic factors and disease to pinpoint possible causes -- had already identified 22 breast cancer susceptibility loci. Locus is the physical location of a gene or DNA sequence on a chromosome.
"The three [newly identified] loci take the number of common susceptibility loci from 22 to 25," said Easton.
However, the three new susceptibility loci might explain only about 0.7 percent of the familial risks of breast cancer, bringing the total contribution to about 9 percent, the researchers said.
Michael Melner, scientific program director for the American Cancer Society, said this current research adds some important new clues to existing evidence, but he agreed that the number of cases likely associated with these three variants is probably low.
"So the total impact in terms of patients would be fairly small," Melner said.
The study is published online Jan. 22 in Nature Genetics.
To find the new clues, Easton's team worked with genetic information on about 57,000 breast cancer patients and 58,000 healthy women obtained from two genome-wide association studies.
The investigators zeroed in on 72 different single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A SNP -- pronounced "snip" -- is a change in which a single base in the DNA differs from the usual base. The human genome has millions of SNPs, some linked with disease, while others are normal variations.
The researchers focused on three SNPs -- on chromosomes 12p11, 12q24 and 21q21.
Easton's team found that the variant on the 12p11 chromosome is linked with both estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer (which needs estrogen to grow) and estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer. The other two variants are only linked with ER-positive cancers, they said.
One of the newly identified variants is in an area with a gene that has a role in the development of mammary glands and bones. Easton said it was already known that mammary gland development in puberty is an important period in terms of determining later cancer risk. "But these are the first susceptibility genes to be shown to be involved in this process," he said.
One of the other SNPs is in an area that can affect estrogen receptor signaling, the researchers found.
Melner, noting some of the research is "fine tuning" of other work, said in his view the new understanding of the signaling pathways and their genetic links is the most important finding.
"When you delineate a pathway, you bring up new potential targets for therapy," he said. "The more targets you have, you open up the potential for having multiple drugs and attacking a cancer more easily, without it becoming more resistant."
Overall, Melner added, the results underscore the complexity of the different mechanisms involved in breast cancer development.
More information
For more about the genetics of breast cancer, visit the American Cancer Society.
Source: http://www.ivillage.com/new-genetic-clues-breast-cancer/4-a-421078
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Romania PM sacks foreign minister for protest remarks (Reuters)
BUCHAREST (Reuters) ? Romanian Prime Minister Emil Boc sacked his foreign minister Monday for calling anti-government protesters "inept and violent slum-dwellers" following more than a week of sometimes violent demonstrations.
Protesters in the capital Bucharest and some other cities have pelted police with bricks and Molotov cocktails during 11 days of rallies demanding Boc and President Traian Basescu resign over the introduction of economic austerity measures.
Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi last week likened the violent protesters to miners who, in the 1990s, descended on the capital to demand change, though he did distinguish between a minority of troublemakers and the peaceful majority.
Baconschi's dismissal was a gesture to defuse what have become Romania's most violent protests in more than a decade, analysts said, but they doubted it would prove effective.
"I have taken the decision to recall Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi and have forwarded a proposal to the Romanian president to remove him from his functions for the comments he made," Boc told parliament.
Romania has suffered little of the unrest that has struck other countries hit by rising economic hardship. However, anger at Basescu and his close ally Boc, who cut state salaries by a quarter and raised sales taxes, has now spilled over.
The measures to cut Romania's deficit and help rebalance the books have put it on a more solid economic footing but have cut deep in the European Union's second poorest member, where some villages and city districts still have no electricity or running water.
"This looks like a ritual sacrifice performed to calm those who are protesting," said independent political commentator Mircea Marian. "But this move is not going to yield the desired result. I expect attendance numbers at protests to rise significantly tomorrow."
ELECTIONS PENDING
Monday, several hundred demonstrators - a mixture of students, pensioners, public sector workers and professionals - gathered in the melting snow in University Square, the place where the anti-communist revolution unfolded in 1989.
A rally by some 7,000 supporters of the opposition USL last week was Bucharest's biggest since 2010 and more protests are planned for this week, most notably a demonstration by teachers and nurses Tuesday.
Romania's austerity measures have helped keep an aid deal led by the International Monetary Fund on track and maintained market confidence. But they may also have delayed the country's recovery from a deep recession and have left Boc's PDL party trailing in opinion polls on 18 percent.
The USL, a fragile leftist alliance which has also committed itself to working with the IMF, has about 50 percent support and is set to win a parliamentary election late this year.
"I totally agree with this decision," USL co-leader Victor Ponta said of Baconschi's dismissal. "But Romanians had expected much more."
(Additional reporting by Sam Cage and Luiza Ilie; Editing by Ben Harding)
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