Pilot badger culls to go ahead

27 February 2013 Last updated at 10:11 ET

Badger culls are set to go ahead later this year after final licence conditions were met, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has said.

The pilot culls, in Gloucestershire and West Somerset, were postponed amid fears they could not be carried out effectively last autumn.

Ministers want to hold a pilot badger cull to halt the spread of tuberculosis to cattle.

The RSPCA, which opposes the cull, said it wanted to help fund vaccination.

Mr Paterson confirmed the cull at the National Farmers Union (NFU) annual conference.

He also announced a reserve pilot will also be prepared in Dorset.

Under the plans, badgers will be shot in the open without first being trapped in cages, which is current practice.

'?1bn' cost

"I am determined that there are no further delays this year," Mr Paterson said.

"That is why we have taken the sensible step with the farming industry to elect a reserve area that can be called upon should anything happen to prevent culling in Somerset or Gloucester."

Continue reading the main story

Analysis

By Helen Briggs, BBC News

Badger culls in England were postponed at the last minute in the autumn, when it came to light that the number of badgers in the pilot areas had been vastly underestimated.

Targets have now been set - farmers are allowed to shoot up to 5,094 badgers in West Gloucestershire and West Somerset over a six-week period starting as early as the summer.

Ministers have also announced a reserve area - Dorset - in case of unforeseen problems. They have commissioned a new national survey of badger numbers - the first for more than a decade - which is due to report in July or August.

Greater certainty over the number of badgers that can be killed without the threat of removing the local population - and the issuing of full licenses to farmers - clear some of the obstacles that led to last year's delays.

However, there are still many potential conflicts. The policy of free shooting badgers has not proved popular with either the public or the majority of independent scientists.

Opponents of the badger cull have promised to continue their action, with new protests already under way.

Mr Paterson added that tackling the spread of bovine TB had cost ?500m in the past 10 years and that figure could rise to ?1bn if action was not taken.

The authorisation from Natural England states that culling can take place from 1 June and will last for six weeks. It will be repeated annually for four years.

The pilot will be independently checked to ensure it is removing enough badgers in a humane way, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.

Labour's shadow environment secretary, Mary Creagh, said scientists had branded the cull an "untested and risky approach" while more than 150,000 members of the public had signed a petition opposing it.

She said: "As incompetent Defra ministers stagger from one crisis to the next, the policing costs, paid by the taxpayer, will balloon to ?4m while bovine TB will increase in the next two years as the shooting displaces badgers.

'Scandalous waste'

"Ministers should listen to the public and the scientists and drop this cull before any more public money is wasted."

But a Defra spokesman said a cull "carried out in the right way can make a meaningful contribution" to controlling TB.

NFU president Peter Kendall also backed the cull and called for a full roll-out in 2014.

He described the 35,000 cattle that had to be slaughtered because of the disease as a "scandalous waste".

But Gavin Grant, the RSPCA chief executive, claimed studies into a cull found it would not have a major impact on the spread of TB.

"We obviously need to do something but we have to do the right thing, the cull is wrong. So if not culling, then what? The answer is vaccination," he said.

"The RSPCA, working with others has put together a costed, practical, working programme to vaccinate the badgers of the two pilot cull zones.

"We're ready to put our effort behind a funded programme if the government will match it. We'll also try and put the people on the ground to make sure it goes ahead."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-21602753#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Santa Cruz Shooting: Two Police Officers Dead After Altercation With Suspect

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/02/santa-cruz-shooting-two-police-officers-dead-after-altercation-w/

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Inbound Marketing Campaign Requires Patience | Internet ...

Inbound marketing is all the rage at the moment. It is the notion that you get customers to come to you, rather than you go out and find them. That has been a ?holy grail? for business for decades. Indeed, one of my favourite books is ?Getting Business To Come To You? which was published before much of this Internet malarkey had been invented. Wouldn?t it be marvellous if people just discovered your business, that you did not have to go out and promote yourself?

Just think of it ? no more cold calls, no more trudging round door-to-door, no more dreary networking meetings, no more stale exhibition halls. Instead, you just sit at your desk and the phone rings and the online cash register keeps on going ?ka-ching?.? It sounds a dream world, yet many online businesses are discovering that you can certainly reduce your marketing efforts if you use ?inbound marketing?, which means people come to you because they already know about you. But how?

The answer to inbound marketing is simply adding content to your web presence. The more web content you add, the more frequently you do it, then the greater the chances of people stumbling across your stuff as they wander the web. But each time I talk to businesses about that they say ?tried that, but it doesn?t really work?.

Yet, I can show them examples of businesses who have turned their marketing department into an online publishing business and who have seen significant growth as a result. I can give them links? to business blogs in tiny niche areas which have become the principal source of new business leads for those firms. Even so, business leaders still say to me ?tried it, but it didn?t work for us?.

However, new research from the folks at HubSpot now reveals why businesses think like that. The study involved over 5,000 companies who use the Internet to market their products and services, so it is substantial information. The research also includes input from over 250 business marketing experts, so the data is significant. And this is what it tells us:

Inbound Marketing Takes Six Months To Work

That?s right ? you are not going to start to see the benefits from any inbound marketing activity for around six months. True, the study did show that 17% of companies did get more traffic to their website in a few weeks, but for 68% of firms it was 7 months before anything happened. That?s over 200 days of relentless, continual adding content before most firms see anything happen in terms of additional interest in their online business.

Few business leaders want to wait that long. They are fuelled with the ?instant? online world we live in and expect to see additional traffic and new lead generation within weeks, if not days. They want to see a return on their investment in content production far sooner than the back end of the year.

The reason why so many businesses are saying ?we tried that, but it didn?t work? is because they are giving up too soon.

To be fair to HubSpot, they have always said that inbound marketing is a ?slow burn? ? indeed, they say they are surprised by the data, because it does show that some people do indeed get a rapid benefit from inbound marketing. The company has always preached patience.

So, what do you need to do in order to get business to come to you online?

Firstly, as the HubSpot research shows, the biggest benefit comes from blogging. And the companies who receive the most benefit blog EVERY DAY or MORE. So get your scribbling pens out?!

Secondly, the research confirms that you need regular ?calls to action? in order to benefit from inbound marketing.

So, if you don?t know how to organise them, please contact me?! Oh whoops ? there?s a call to action for you?!

But whatever you do ? be patient?! As this study shows, for the vast majority of people to benefit from inbound marketing it takes six or seven months. Inbound marketing is NOT a quick fix. But it certainly does lead business to come to you.

Source: http://www.grahamjones.co.uk/2013/blog/internet-marketing/inbound-marketing-campaign-requires-patience.html

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Pistorius holding memorial service for slain girlfriend

Lucky Nxumalo/City Press via AP

Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp at an awards ceremony in Johannesburg in Nov. 4, 2012.

By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

Oscar Pistorius was to hold a private memorial service Tuesday for the girlfriend he was charged with murdering.

Slain model Reeva Steenkamp was cremated and mourned at a family service last week while Pistorius was in custody during a weeklong hearing on whether he should be released on bail.

Now that the South African athlete is free on $112,000 bond, he "specifically requested the memorial service as he continues to grieve and remains in deep mourning for the loss of his partner," a statement from his representatives said.

Mike Sheehan /EPA file

Barry Steenkamp, father of Reeva Steenkamp, is embraced after her memorial service at the Victoria Park Crematorium in Port Elizabeth, South Africa on Feb. 19.

"Since it is such a sensitive issue," the statement said, "Oscar has asked for a private service with people who share his loss, including his family members who knew and loved Reeva as one of their own."

The service was to be held at the hilltop Pretoria home of his uncle, Arnold Pistorius, where he has been staying.

The sprinter known as "Blade Runner," who inspired millions when he became the first double-amputee to compete in the Olympics, has admitted he fatally shot Steenkamp, 29, his girlfriend of four months.

He said in a court statement that he heard what he thought was a prowler, grabbed his gun, rushed to the bathroom on his stumps and fired through a closed door.

Prosecutors contend that he knew Steenkamp was in the bathroom and that he meant to kill her after a Valentine's Day argument. They charged him with premeditated murder, which carries a sentence of 25 years to life.

Steenkamp's family did not attend the emotionally charged bail hearing, where Pistorius, 26, sobbed numerous times as prosecutors leveled accusations against him.

Her mother has said she wanted answers about what happened the night of the shooting. Her father said last week that if Pistorius was telling the truth, he might one day forgive him, but that if he was lying, "he will suffer."

Meanwhile, the judge who presided at the bail hearing confirmed Tuesday he was dealing with a personal tragedy: his first cousin is suspected of poisoning her 12-year-old and 17-year-old boys and then killing herself in Johannesburg over the weekend, the Associated Press reported.

The revelation was one of several twists in the Pistorius case. Last week, the chief investigator was tossed from the inquiry because attempted murder charges stemming from a police-involved shooting in 2011 had been reinstated. And Pistorius' brother is also facing a homicide charge in connection with a 2008 car accident that left a woman dead.

Cheryll Simpson of NBC News contributed to this report

Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/26/17102387-pistorius-holding-memorial-service-for-slain-girlfriend?lite

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7 Tips For Being a Responsible Cat Owner - PawNation

3.

All cats require regular home care. Daily feeding is, of course, a necessity but is only a small part of the care a cat requires. Fresh water and clean litter boxes are necessities. Scratching posts, perches, beds or other resting places, and toys are all important for meeting your cat?s basic needs. Cats also need to be groomed regularly.

RELATED: Safety For Abuse Victims And Their Pets

Grooming should include regular brushing of the hair coat, nail trimming as necessary, ear cleaning as necessary, and tooth brushing on a daily basis. Individual cats may require other grooming procedures as well, like keeping the eyes clean or bathing.

Source: http://www.pawnation.com/2013/02/26/7-tips-for-being-a-responsible-cat-owner/

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Fingering Federal Prosecutors for Racial Bias

Supreme Court justices Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer virtually seethed with rage in their roundhouse denunciation of the High Court's denial of review to Bongani Charles Calhoun. The issue again was racial bias in the prosecution of Calhoun on drug charges in Texas. The U.S. Attorney that prosecuted Calhoun quipped during the trial that when you put African Americans and Hispanics in the same room with a bag of money, what else could they be doing but a drug deal or presumably some other criminal act.

The federal prosecutor couldn't let it go at that. When mildly challenged on his blatant racial stereotyping and even more blatant prejudicing of the jury, he piled on with the even dumber quip: "What does your common sense tell you that these people are doing in a hotel room with a bag full of money, cash? None of these people are Bill Gates or computer [magnates]? None of them are real estate investors."

Breyer and Sotomayor correctly called it what it was -- outrageous prosecutorial racial bias. Their colleagues didn't agree, and Calhoun's conviction stood. But Sotomayor and Breyer's rage at the bias simply pointed up what's long been noted in far too many federal cases, and in the action and behavior of far too many federal prosecutors. That's that some will routinely and very calculatingly pander to the overt or latent racial bigotry of some judges and jurors to get a conviction. They fully know that making overt pejorative racial statements, judgments and opinions about a black or Hispanic defendant are flatly forbidden. And in theory, anyway, are the basis for an appeal, and the possibility of having a conviction overturned. But that threat hasn't deterred some prosecutors from playing the race card to get a conviction, as Breyer and Sotomayor angrily noted.

Three years before the two judges' dissent in the Calhoun case, a panel of former federal prosecutors were disturbed enough at the antics of some of their former U.S. Attorney colleagues that they mapped out in tandem with the Brennan Justice Center a series of pointed guidelines to wring out racial bias, overt or sneaky, from the line of attack of prosecutors. Their recommendations included rigorous training and education in what can and can't be said in trials, tougher management and accountability, and better relations with minority communities. The former prosecutors were emphatic that because federal prosecutors have enormous power over what cases are brought, and when they are brought, and how they are prosecuted, they have a special duty and responsibility to be fair and unbiased. The problem with that is that many aren't and this has had devastating consequences in the criminal justice system. The main one being to pump wider the gaping racial disparity in convictions and sentencing, and ultimately who packs America's prisons.

A March 2009 report, "Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System", by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, found that minorities, with the overwhelming majority of them being African Americans, represented 13 percent of the general population. But they made up nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated in federal prisons. The report made it clear that racial bias, either overt or subtle, by some prosecutors was a big reason for a significant number of those tried and convicted winding up behind bars for long stretches.

The Calhoun case also pointed to another glaring flaw in many federal prosecutions and that's the still prevalent racial disparity in drug prosecutions that have accounted for the explosion in the number of minorities behind federal bars during the last decade. This occurred despite the push by President Obama to purge the racial sentencing disparity from the drug laws.

The standard reasons given for criminalizing practically an entire generation of young blacks is that they are poor, crime-prone, which is pretty much what the prosecutor in the Calhoun case flatly said. Reports and studies by the Justice Department, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, as well as universities and foundations confirm that far more whites use and deal drugs including crack cocaine than blacks. Only a small percent of those sentenced to jail terms are major dealers.

The scapegoating of blacks for America's crime and drug problem actually began in the 1980s when much of the media quickly turned the drug problem into a black problem and played it up big in news stories and features. Many Americans scared stiff of the drug crisis readily gave their blessing to drug sweeps, random vehicle checks, marginally legal searches and seizures, evictions from housing projects and apartments. When it came to law enforcement practices in the ghettos and barrios, the denial of civil liberties protections, due process and privacy made a mockery of the criminal justice system to many blacks and Latinos.

The federal prosecutors that pander to race to get convictions don't help matters and reaffirm suspicions that prosecutorial bias is still alive and well in far too many prosecutions. Sotomayor and Breyer made that point, and a handful of former prosecutors have warned against its corrosive effects. But as the Calhoun case showed fingering prosecutors for racial bias alone won't make it go away.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network, and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.

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Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/federal-prosecutors-racial-bias_b_2768820.html

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Loaded terms: How a Pittsburgh artist beat the most bogus ...

The dispute centered around Power Hour, a boozy 60-minute drinking game in which participants throw back a specified number of alcoholic beverages?usually 60 small shots of beer?at one-minute intervals. Setting aside the wisdom of this activity, Power Hour is a time-honored tradition in certain circles, often connected to 21st birthdays, beer pong fatigue, or Edward Fortyhands ennui. The name and concept of Power Hour was already around in the late 20^th century, when I may or may not have played.

Since those beer-soaked days of yesteryear, a generation of entrepreneurs has ushered the game into the digital age, creating a dizzying array of websites with domain names like PowerHourZone, PowerHourHQ, iPowerHour, even sound-alikes like PowerHower. Many of the sites have created or curated Power Hour mixes to play during the game, often user-submitted. The sites? creators generally started them for fun, with little thought toward "monetization."

?[My site] combines three of my favorite things: web development, music, and alcohol,? Ryan Hogue at PowerHourZone told me. Most of the sites offered a substantial portion of the content at no cost, supported by ads or merchandise alone. They often link to each other, and were in contact before the drama started.

Ali Spagnola?s contribution to this mix is PowerHourAlbum. Spagnola started performing a live concert of the game at bars and events in her senior year in college. She later recorded a catchy little album of 60 different original one-minute songs, and listeners are invited to imbibe between each track. She even has a USB shotglass on a lanyard, which is probably helpful for some participants in the waning minutes of the game.

When she?s not onstage doing her high-energy show, Spagnola is self-deprecating, laid back, and artsy. She jokes she?s a ?drinking composer with a music problem.? She's produced commercial art to pay the bills, but much of her creative output is simply for the love of it. In addition to PowerHourAlbum, she?s created a number of other whimsical projects over the years, including giving away a free commissioned painting every day. The wait list on that project is now backlogged for years.

Her chilled-out demeanor becomes energetic, however, when we move from chatting about drinking games and giving away free art to discussing the lawsuit.

"It's way too easy to sneak a trademark through."

She says everything was cool in the Power Hour creative community until Steve Roose, who founded the PowerHourGame website in 2007, became drunk with power. Roose and Spagnola's correspondence was friendly at first; he offered to produce and sell her album on his site. In 2009, though, Roose applied for a trademark for the term ?Power Hour? in all digital media: CDs, DVDs, and software ?featuring a timed drinking game where players take a shot of beer every minute for an hour.?

Pete Berg of PowerHourHQ says there were several key problems with the filing. First, the Power Hour trademark should never have been issued because the term was in use long before 2000, when Steve claimed in his application that he began using it in commerce.

?If [the USPTO] had done a single Google search for ?power hour? in 2009 when Roose filed the trademark application, they would have found thousands of references to the drinking game," Berg said. "We're talking 15 minutes of research??it's not hard to find references to 'power hour' dating back to the '90s.?

Second, Berg said, regular people aren?t cutting into their drinking time to check the USPTO site for recent trademark applications: ?There is a period of time where anyone can contest a trademark application, but you have to be watching like a hawk to even know that anyone has applied for your mark."

"This information gets posted on an obscure corner of the USPTO's confusing website. They also don't make any effort to contact anyone who might also have an interest in the trademark. It's way too easy to sneak a trademark through.?

These two problems started a Kafka-esque cascade of legal wrangling that Spagnola had to deal with on her own dime, and on her own time. Once the USPTO granted the trademark to Roose, they reported that to rescind it would require Ali to secure an order from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB).

The worst part? Spagnola learned of the trademark filing early enough to file an opposition prior to its registration, ?but there was some sort of clerical error, so he was given the trademark anyway, even though my documents were submitted in time and they even acknowledged that they got them."

"After he was issued that trademark, you?d think it would be simple to take it back because it was an accident," Spagnola said. "They said they had made this error, but there nothing they could do about it. So now I had to go though lots more dollars and lots more time.?

Once the trademark was granted in 2010, Roose became enforcement actions: out went nastygrams to other Power Hour site owners, informing them of his trademark registration and ordering them to cease and desist.

?We were just doing this for fun, and Steve tried to ruin?it.?

However, Berg says, Roose didn?t Know When to Say When, to quote the long-running Budweiser ad campaign. He went beyond standard trademark enforcement to acting like ?a total asshat.?

Moreover, Berg claims, Roose took content from his site after he ignored his letter: user contributions hosted on PowerHourHQ ended up behind a paywall on Roose's homepage.

?Steve was using an oversight by the trademark office to not only try to line his pockets, but also to ruin the Power Hour party for everyone else," Berg said. " ... We were just doing this for fun, and Steve tried to ruin it.?

iPowerHour was so rattled by the behavior they changed their domain to the ultra-generic iDrinkingGame just to avoid legal hassle. Spagnola?s music was taken down from Amazon and Rhapsody, and Roose threatened to get it removed from iTunes and other platforms.

After talking to a lawyer, who warned of the high costs of fighting a successful trademark registration, Spagnola was ready to walk away. But Berg decided to do something unusual: ask the vast and sprawling Reddit community for help.

His post on the link-sharing site was meant to ?unleash the internet hate machine,? and it worked.

?It motivated Spagnola to really fight this case. It helped her raise some money for legal fees, enough to make a small dent in the bill. It also convinced her that there are enough people out there interested in her story and her Power Hour album that it was worth pursuing,? Berg said.

Adds Spagnola: ?I tried to keep it light-hearted because the internet doesn?t like people complaining, but the whole time it was really quite frustrating. The hardest part was when Steve kept prolonging things. He had the power to keep draining my money.?

Roose would not respond to her legal papers, Spagnola said, forcing her to spend more money and time to compel him to respond. She decided that since she was putting so much time and energy into saving Power Hour, she should try to recoup her investment by doing a professionally produced album and be ready to rock when the decision came down.

After three years and thirty grand out of pocket, Ali finally got a welcome call from her lawyer on New Year?s Eve, 2012. In trademark law, marks fall along a continuum from ?distinctive"?and thus enforceable?to ?generic"?uneforceable. The TTAB found that Power Hour fell in the middle, but closer to generic than distinctive. Based on the mountain of evidence Ali supplied, the TTAB determined that Steve?s Power Hour mark ?is descriptive and lacks acquired distinctiveness.?

In other words, Spagnola won big.

Roose took down his site right after the ruling, but he still hoped to make one last buck, according to Berg: ?Steve sent an anonymous email to Ali and myself a few days after losing the trademark, trying to sell his company and domain name.? The PowerHourGame site?s current design looks like one of those domain name reseller templates on a parked domain. It links to an eBay auction ending on February 25. Bids as of the last day of bidding? Zero.

Roose did not respond to a request for an interview.

Meanwhile, Spagnola and Berg are back to creating. I caught up with Berg during filming on a show in rural Michigan; he said that he and Spagnola became friends during their experiences. As for Spagnola? She?s got an IndieGoGo campaign going to support Ali?s Power Hour Freedom Victory Tour, where fans and drinkers can register their support for Spagnola before it closes at the end of February.

When informed about this story, Spagnola created the delightful song and video ? With a Beer in Your Hand,? in collaboration with filmmakers John and Elaine Wooliscroft and production designer Ben Saks.

Let?s raise a glass to Ali, to the creative spirit, and to her victory.

Illustration: Rob Beschizza. Photo: Shutterstock

Source: http://boingboing.net/2013/02/25/loaded-terms.html

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Seek Excellent Search Engine Optimisation Services Company Tools

If you are a New Zealand business owner and therefore are seeking to increase your presence online, seo tools are necessary to discover. Search engine optimization in Auckland NZ (New Zealand) resources come in a variety of forms and lots of may be utilized without an expert a great deal of money.
Auckland companies hoping to increase their search engine ranking, to inspire more people to go to their own business? internet site, also to in the end make a greater income, usually stays aggressive online by following these kinds of simple Search engine optimization in Auckland NZ (New Zealand) suggestions.
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Make use of Pay per click, a Search term Search engine optimization in Auckland NZ (New Zealand) Tool
Google is promoting a free search engine optimisation tool with regard to webmasters and also marketers. The actual search term tool permits the person to get the best key phrases and also keyword phrases for their internet site. Pay per click is a superb search engine optimisation tool as it can certainly inform you how often Google users check out a particular key phrase and which terms they typically pair it with.
While the simple characteristic that this Search engine optimization in Auckland NZ (New Zealand) tool offers is extremely educational already, particularly for organizations who are just beginning to create an online presence, Adwords goes one step further. The Google Pay per click keyword device can advise you how competitive any key phrase is, its nearby New Zealand or perhaps Auckland search volume, and it is total search volume.

Attempt Search engine optimization in Auckland NZ (New Zealand) via Google Statistics.
Search engines Statistics is yet another free of charge Search engine marketing tool provided by Google. Google Analytics allows you to observe how many individuals possess frequented your website, the length of time they remained, and what proportion are usually replicate visitors. A whole introduction to your own website?s or blog?s site visitors is found through developing a Search engines account.
Search engines Statistics is another good way to additionally know the way you are able to create your internet site using search engine optimization. The particular tool teaches you not merely how many individuals go to your internet site, but wait, how they came to find your site and that keywords they used.

Apply Search engine optimization by Using Yahoo Insights
Google Insights is yet another beneficial search engine optimization device made available from Google. Google Insights can present you with information about popular keywords and phrases. You are able to research keywords and phrases popularity over a time frame, an area, and also by group.
Auckland companies seeking to increase their SEO can consequently research their particular keywords and phrases, restricting their particular research to New Zealand as well as Auckland. This can once more be of use any time selecting or even adapting your website?s keywords.

Thanks to Yahoo, fundamental search engine optimisation resources can easily be bought to New Zealand website owners. To improve the Search engine optimization, nevertheless, the knowledge given by these power tools have to be acted upon appropriately, which is in which a specialist search engine optimisation organization can help.

Der Beitrag wurde am Tuesday, den 26. February 2013 um 22:46 Uhr ver?ffentlicht und wurde unter Allgemein abgelegt. du kannst die Kommentare zu diesen Eintrag durch den RSS 2.0 Feed verfolgen. Kommentare sind derzeit geschlossen, aber du kannst dennoch einen Trackback auf deiner Seite einrichten.

Source: http://www.damm-net.org/blog/2013/02/seek-excellent-search-engine-optimisation-services-company-tools-in-auckland-nz-new-zealand-today/

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Brain cells can outlive the body

Mauricio Lima / AFP - Getty Images file

An actual human brain is displayed inside a glass box as part of an interactive exhbition titled "Brain: A World Inside Your Head."

By Tia Ghose
LiveScience

Brain cells can live at least twice as long as the organisms in which they reside, according to new research.

The study, published Monday?in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that mouse neurons, or brain cells, implanted into rats can survive with the rats into old age, twice as long as the life span of the original mice.

The findings are good news for life extension enthusiasts.

"We are slowly but continuously prolonging the life of humans," said study co-author Dr. Lorenzo Magrassi, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pavia in Italy.

So if the human life span could be stretched to 160 years, "then you are not going to lose your neurons, because your neurons do not have a fixed lifetime."

Long-lived cells
While most of the cells in the human body are being constantly replaced, humans are born with almost all the neurons they will ever have. [10 Odd Facts About the Brain]

Magrassi and his colleagues wanted to know whether neurons could outlive the organisms in which they live (barring degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's).

To do so, the researchers took neurons from mice and implanted them into the brains of about 60 rat fetuses.

The team then let the rats live their entire lives, euthanizing them when they were moribund and unlikely to survive for more than two days, and then inspected their brains. The life span of the mice was only about 18 months, while the rats typically lived twice as long.

The rats were found to be completely normal (though not any smarter), without any signs of neurological problems at the end of their lives.

And the neurons that had been transplanted from mice were still alive when the rats died. That means it's possible the cells could have survived even longer if they were transplanted into a longer-lived species.

Life extension
The findings suggest that our brain cells won't fail before our bodies do.

"Think what a terrible thing it could be if you survive your own brain," Magrassi told LiveScience.

While the findings were done in rats, not humans, they could also have implications for neuronal transplants that could be used for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease?or Parkinson's disease, Magrassi said.

But just because brain cells may be able to live indefinitely doesn't mean humans could live forever.

Aging is dependent on more than the life span of all the individual parts in the body, and scientists still don't understand exactly what causes people to age, Magrassi said.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook?and Google+.?

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/25/17090449-food-for-thought-brain-cells-can-outlive-the-body?lite

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Advanced breast cancer edges up in younger women

CHICAGO (AP) ? Advanced breast cancer has increased slightly among young women, a 34-year analysis suggests. The disease is still uncommon among women younger than 40, and the small change has experts scratching their heads about possible reasons.

The results are potentially worrisome because young women's tumors tend to be more aggressive than older women's, and they're much less likely to get routine screening for the disease.

Still, that doesn't explain why there'd be an increase in advanced cases and the researchers and other experts say more work is needed to find answers.

It's likely that the increase has more than one cause, said Dr. Rebecca Johnson, the study's lead author and medical director of a teen and young adult cancer program at Seattle Children's Hospital.

"The change might be due to some sort of modifiable risk factor, like a lifestyle change" or exposure to some sort of cancer-linked substance, she said.

Johnson said the results translate to about 250 advanced cases diagnosed in women younger than 40 in the mid-1970s versus more than 800 in 2009. During those years, the number of women nationwide in that age range went from about 22 million to closer to 30 million ? an increase that explains part of the study trend "but definitely not all of it," Johnson said.

Other experts said women delaying pregnancy might be a factor, partly because getting pregnant at an older age might cause an already growing tumor to spread more quickly in response to pregnancy hormones.

Obesity and having at least a drink or two daily have both been linked with breast cancer but research is inconclusive on other possible risk factors, including tobacco and chemicals in the environment. Whether any of these explains the slight increase in advanced disease in young women is unknown.

There was no increase in cancer at other stages in young women. There also was no increase in advanced disease among women older than 40.

Overall U.S. breast cancer rates have mostly fallen in more recent years, although there are signs they may have plateaued.

Some 17 years ago, Johnson was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer at age 27, and that influenced her career choice to focus on the disease in younger women.

"Young women and their doctors need to understand that it can happen in young women," and get checked if symptoms appear, said Johnson, now 44. "People shouldn't just watch and wait."

The authors reviewed a U.S. government database of cancer cases from 1976 to 2009. They found that among women aged 25 to 39, breast cancer that has spread to distant parts of the body ? advanced disease ? increased from between 1 and 2 cases per 100,000 women to about 3 cases per 100,000 during that time span.

The study was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

About one in 8 women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime, but only 1 in 173 will develop it by age 40. Risks increase with age and certain gene variations can raise the odds.

Routine screening with mammograms is recommended for older women but not those younger than 40.

Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the American Cancer Society's deputy chief medical officer, said the results support anecdotal reports but that there's no reason to start screening all younger women since breast cancer is still so uncommon for them.

He said the study "is solid and interesting and certainly does raise questions as to why this is being observed." One of the most likely reasons is probably related to changes in childbearing practices, he said, adding that the trend "is clearly something to be followed."

Dr. Ann Partridge, chair of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's advisory committee on breast cancer in young women, agreed but said it's also possible that doctors look harder for advanced disease in younger women than in older patients. More research is needed to make sure the phenomenon is real, said Partridge, director of a program for young women with breast cancer at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The study shouldn't cause alarm, she said. Still, Partridge said young women should be familiar with their breasts and see the doctor if they notice any lumps or other changes.

Software engineer Stephanie Carson discovered a large breast tumor that had already spread to her lungs; that diagnosis in 2003 was a huge shock.

"I was so clueless," she said. "I was just 29 and that was the last thing on my mind."

Carson, who lives near St. Louis, had a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation and other treatments and she frequently has to try new drugs to keep the cancer at bay.

Because most breast cancer is diagnosed in early stages, there's a misconception that women are treated, and then get on with their lives, Carson said. She and her husband had to abandon hopes of having children, and she's on medical leave from her job.

"It changed the complete course of my life," she said. "But it's still a good life."

____

Online:

JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/breast/index.htm

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/advanced-breast-cancer-edges-younger-women-213007230.html

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Legal pot in Colo., Wash. poses growing dilemma

In this photo taken on Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, THC University co-founder Matt Jones, center, speaks to the first class as co-founder Freeman LaFleur, left, looks on at THC University that was held at the Tivoli in Denver. Watery failure is what inspired the ?Marijuana 101? class, which was organized by Matt Jones, a 24-year-old Web developer who wanted to get in the marijuana business without raising or selling it himself. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, THC University co-founder Matt Jones, center, speaks to the first class as co-founder Freeman LaFleur, left, looks on at THC University that was held at the Tivoli in Denver. Watery failure is what inspired the ?Marijuana 101? class, which was organized by Matt Jones, a 24-year-old Web developer who wanted to get in the marijuana business without raising or selling it himself. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, Instructor Ted Smith holds up a chemical that is recommended in growing marijuana during the first class at THC University in Denver. Smith told the first-time marijuana growers that chemical fertilizers work so quickly that some are called ?bud rocket.? (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, instructor Ted Smith uses a slide to demonstrate different types of damage to marijuana plants during class at THC University in the Tivoli in Denver. Chemical fertilizers can be finely crafted to target a specific deficiency in the plants, whether they?re lacking phosphorus, evident by telltale ?purple vein,? or potassium, a likely culprit when leaves show brown spots between the veins. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, instructor Ted Smith, left, shows Ginger and Heath Grider how to cut and plant a section of a tomato plant during class at THC University at the Tivoli in Denver. Marijuana can be grown from seed, or from a clipping off a ?mother? marijuana plant. Clones, as the clippings are called, grow faster and produce smokeable marijuana much more quickly than seeds. But seeds can be worth the wait, producing hardier marijuana. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, a textbook on Marijuana Horticulture sits on a desk during the first class at the THC University in Denver. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) ? It may be called weed, but marijuana is legendarily hard to grow.

Now that the drug has been made legal in Washington and Colorado, growers face a dilemma. State-sanctioned gardening coaches can help folks cultivate tomatoes or zucchini, but both states have instructed them not to show people the best way to grow marijuana. The situation is similar in more than a dozen additional states that allow people to grow the drug with medical permission.

That's leaving some would-be marijuana gardeners looking to the private sector for help raising the temperamental plant.

"We can't go there," said Brian Clark, a spokesman for Washington State University in Pullman, which runs the state's extension services for gardening and agriculture. "It violates federal law, and we are a federally funded organization."

The issue came up because people are starting to ask master gardeners for help in growing cannabis, Clark said. Master gardeners are volunteers who work through state university systems to provide horticultural tips in their communities.

The situation is the same in Colorado, where Colorado State University in Fort Collins recently added a marijuana policy to its extension office, warning that any employee who provides growing assistance acts outside the scope of his or her job and "assumes personal liability for such action."

The growing predicament is just the latest quandary for these states that last year flouted federal drug law by removing criminal penalties for adults over 21 with small amounts of pot. In Washington, home-growing is banned, but it will be legal to grow pot commercially once state officials establish rules and regulations.

In Colorado, adults are allowed to grow up to six marijuana plants in their own homes, so long as they're in a locked location out of public view.

At least two Colorado entrepreneurs are taking advantage of that aspect of the law; they're offering growing classes that have attracted wannabe professional growers, current users looking to save money by growing their own pot and a few baby boomers who haven't grown pot in decades and don't feel comfortable going to a marijuana dispensary.

"We've been doing this on our own, but I wanted to learn to grow better," said Ginger Grinder, a medical marijuana patient from Portales, N.M., who drove to Denver for a "Marijuana 101" class she saw advertised online.

Grinder, a stay-at-home mom who suffers from lupus and fibromyalgia, joined about 20 other students earlier this month for a daylong crash course in growing the finicky marijuana plant.

Taught in a rented room at a public university, the course had students practicing on tomato plants because pot is prohibited on campus. The group took notes on fertilizer and fancy hydroponic growing systems, and snipped pieces of tomato plants to practice cloning, a common practice for nascent pot growers to start raising weed from a "mother" marijuana plant.

Ted Smith, a longtime instructor at an indoor gardening shop, led the class, and warned these gardeners that their task won't be easy. Marijuana is fickle, he said. It's prone to mildews and molds, picky about temperature and pH level, intolerant to tap water.

A precise schedule is also a must, Smith warned, with set light and dark cycles and watering at the same time each day. Unlike many house plants, Smith warned, marijuana left alone for a long weekend can curl and die.

"Just like the military ... they need to know when they're getting their water and chow," Smith said of the plants.

The class was the brainchild of Matt Jones, a 24-year-old Web developer who wanted to get into the marijuana business without raising or selling it himself. As a teenager, Jones once tried to grow pot himself in empty Home Depot paint buckets. He used tap water and overwatered, and the marijuana wilted and died.

"It was a disaster," he recalled. Jones organized the class and an online "THC University" for home growers, but his own thumb isn't green. Jones said he'll be buying his marijuana from professional growers.

The course showed would-be grower Cael Nodd, a 34-year-old stagehand in Denver, that marijuana gardening can be an intimidating prospect.

"It seems like there's going to be a sizable investment," he said. "I want something that really tastes good. Doesn't seem like it will be that easy."

___

Wyatt reported from Denver and can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-02-25-Marijuana%20Gardening/id-99eb7342680f4919ae1fde13f77ee632

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'Identity Thief' Wins Box Office During Oscars Weekend

While Melissa McCarthy was presenting at Sunday night's show, she also took back the #1 spot at the box office.
By Ryan J. Downey

Melissa McCarthy in "Identity Thief"
Photo: Universal Pictures

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1702538/identity-thief-oscars-weekend-box-office.jhtml

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Pistorius' brother facing charge in traffic death

JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? The murder case involving Olympic star Oscar Pistorius took another unexpected turn Sunday with the news that his older brother, Carl, is himself facing charges for the death of a woman in a traffic accident.

Carl Pistorius faces a charge of unlawful, negligent killing for a 2008 road death, "in which a woman motorcyclist sadly lost her life," Kenneth Oldwage, the Pistorius family lawyer said on Sunday. The accident happened in Vanderbijlpark, south of Johannesburg. The charge of "culpable homicide" was dropped and then reinstated and will be challenged in court, the lawyer told The Associated Press.

It is the second time someone associated with the Pistorius case has been found to face a serious charge that has been dropped and then reinstated. It was revealed that the chief police investigator in the case is facing charges of seven counts of attempted murder for shooting at a vehicle with seven passengers. Following the revelations, Hilton Botha was removed from the Pistorius investigation and a new chief detective was appointed on Thursday.

To drop and then reinstate charges is "not uncommon in South African criminal law. The law specifically makes provision to allow charges to be dropped and then to be reinstated as a result of further investigations," said Jacob van Garderen, director of Lawyers for Human Rights. "It is a practical procedure, a process that is there to assist both sides."

In another twist this weekend, model Reeva Steenkamp, who was shot to death by Oscar Pistorius on Valentine's Day was on television again in a new episode of the reality show "Tropika Island of Treasure 5" even though she was buried last Tuesday.

On Monday, Oscar Pistorius must report to the police station in Brooklyn, a suburb of the nation's capital Pretoria, and sign in, a twice-weekly procedure which is part of his bail conditions.

Pistorius was released on bail Friday and stayed at the home of his uncle Arnold in Waterkloof, an affluent suburb of Pretoria, where Oscar is now staying. His brother, Carl, came to visit the house Sunday.

The problem confronting his older brother Carl is the latest complication in a case that has transfixed South Africa and much of the world.

"It's also doubly sad because it's involved with Oscar and his brother and all the family ? so they have double sort of trouble," said Johannesburg resident Jim Plester.

Lawyer Oldwage said that "Carl deeply regrets the accident" and that a blood test showed he was not drunk at the time. He said the charges had initially been dropped, only to be reinstated later.

Oscar Pistorius was charged with premeditated murder, but the athlete says he killed his girlfriend accidentally, opening fire after mistaking her for an intruder in his home.

The character of Pistorius also continued to take center stage. For many, it mirrors his public appearances as an articulate, well-spoken advocate for Paralympic athletes facing hardship. Witness statements describing Pistorius as a down-to-earth guy were presented at the hearing.

Others have described him as a reckless risk taker who has been in trouble before, such as a boating accident in 2009 which put him into a hospital intensive care unit.

But in a report on Sunday, a South African man who said Steenkamp had stayed at his home since September, described Pistorius as moody and impatient. Cecil Myers, whose daughter was close friends with Steenkamp, said in an interview in the City Press newspaper, that Pistorius will have the killing of Steenkamp on his conscience. "I hope he gets a long sentence. Gets what he deserves," said Myers.

Pistorius appeared "very nice and charming to us when they started dating," said Myers. Myers said Pistorius initially used to come into the house but later just dropped Steenkamp off and picked her up when they began to date steadily, and he described the change as a lack of respect.

Myers recalled their first date and told the newspaper: "After that he wouldn't leave her alone. He kept pestering her, phoning and phoning and phoning her."

According to Myers, Steenkamp "told me he pushed her a bit into a corner. She felt caged in."

Myers said he told Pistorius "not to force himself on her. Back off." He said that after initially agreeing with him, it appeared that Pistorius soon took no heed.

Myers declined to respond to a request for more information from Associated Press.

In the bail hearing, a character reference for Pistorius, acknowledged that "the only issue in the relationship that I was made aware of was that Reeva sometimes thought Oscar was moving a little fast."

Pistorius was born without fibula bones due to a congenital defect and his legs were amputated when he was 11 months old. He has run on carbon-fiber blades and was originally banned from competing against able-bodied peers because many argued that his blades gave him an unfair advantage. He was later cleared to compete. He is a multiple Paralympic medalist, and won a silver medal at the 2011 Daegu world championships with South Africa's 4x400 relay team. But he failed to win a medal at the London Olympics, where he ran in the 400 meter race and the 4x400 relay race.

___

AP Sports Writers Gerald Imray contributed from Centurion and John Leicester from Johannesburg. AP Writers Christopher Torchia and Andrew Meldrum contributed from Johannesburg.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pistorius-brother-facing-charge-traffic-death-180002759--oly.html

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NVIDIA Tegra 4i Phoenix reference phone hands-on (video)

NVIDIA's latest venture in the mobile world, called the 4i, was introduced last week ahead of Mobile World Congress, and fortunately the chipset maker brought the product to Barcelona embedded in a reference phone known as "Phoenix." The 8mm-thick handset, which will find a home in the labs of manufacturers and carriers (as well as the desks of many third-party devs), sports a 5-inch 1080p display, 13MP rear-facing camera, PRISM 2, Chimera, DirectTouch and LTE (we're told that most major bands are included for testing purposes). As it's not geared for general consumer use, so it's not the thinnest, sleekest or best-looking device, and the back doesn't even seem to snap completely shut. Units are being sampled as we speak, and we should expect to see devices hit the market in nine to twelve months. Since it's still pretty early in the process, we weren't able to turn on the phone or benchmark the chipset; the only exception to this rule, as you'll see in the video, was when a rep showed a gaming demo on his particular unit.

While the 4i is the smaller brother of the Tegra 4 family, it's still expected to be quite powerful. The chip, which is designed specifically for smartphones (tablets will take advantage of Tegra 4 instead), features four 28nm Cortex-A9 r4 (beefed-up from the standard A9) cores that can be clocked up to 2.3GHz, 60 GPU cores (compared to 72 on the T4) and an integrated i500 LTE baseband modem. For additional comparison, NVIDIA showed us the two sibling boards side-by-side. Head below to check out our galleries of Phoenix and the two chipsets, as well as a brief video that shows off the graphics prowess of the 4i.

Gallery: NVIDIA Tegra 4i Phoenix reference phone hands-on

Gallery: NVIDIA Tegra 4 vs 4i

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, NVIDIA

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/HVnkBqXR7zE/

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Urijah Faber and Court McGee take UFC 157 wins

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Urijah Faber and Court McGee got back on the winning track at UFC 157 on Saturday.

Faber got a first-round submission win over Ivan Menjivar. Faber and Menjivar started the fight with a rolling takedown and Faber ended up on top. He worked the top position until Menjivar got back to his feet. Faber held on, and while attached to Menjivar's back, Faber swung around and sunk in a rear naked choke. Menjivar tapped at 4:34 in the first round. The Anaheim crowd erupted for "The California Kid."

It was an important win for Faber after he lost a title fight to Renan Barao in July. The win puts him at 27-6, with five of his losses coming in title fights.

[Also: Ronda Rousey survives UFC debut, wins via first-round arm bar]

In earlier action, Court McGee punched his way to a decision win over Josh Neer. McGee used an effective strategy early on of working Josh Neer's body. Throughout the first round, Neer was hobbled by McGee's body punches. But in the second, McGee worked more on headshots. Though it wasn't as effective, McGee outstruck Neer. In the final round, McGee worked the ground game and controlled Neer while still leading on strikes. All three judges saw it 30-27 for McGee.

It was McGee's first fight at welterweight.

?I felt great at 170 lbs. This was a great move for me. I felt stronger, faster and had a lot more gas. I was told by FightMetric that I broke the record for most significant strikes ever in a welterweight fight and feel great. I could have stopped it, maybe, early with body shots but I was glad I put on a good performance.?

After the win, McGee's record is 15-3. Though he won "The Ultimate Fighter," he also lost two fights in 2012.

Other popular content on Yahoo! Sports:
? Watch: Floyd Mayweather's college football betting secret
? Michael Jordan gets minor league offer
? Alex Smith on the trading block in Indy
? Wake Forest knocks off No. 2 Miami

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/urijah-faber-court-mcgee-ufc-157-wins-042110004--mma.html

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Iran Claims Capture of Foreign Spy Drone during Military Exercise

Undated picture shows member of Iran's revolutionary guard pointing at U.S. RQ-170 unmanned spy plane as he speaks with Hajizadeh at unknown location in Iran - Reuters

Iran's Revolutionary Guard claims to have captured a "foreign spy drone" during an Iranian military drill in the south-eastern part of the country.

"A foreign spy drone was hacked outside the field of Payambar-e Azam 8 wargames on Saturday," General Hamid Sarkhelli, the spokesperson of the wargames, told reporters.

"While probing signals in the area, we spotted foreign and enemy drones which attempted to enter the area of the war game.?We were able to get one enemy drone to land," said the official, according to the IRNA agency.

It is not certain if the captured drone belongs to the US while Washington has so far not commented on the issue. Iran has seized American drones on previous occasions.

Iran has been testing its latest drones and cyber warfare units in the ongoing military drill codenamed Payambar-e-Azam 8 in Kerman province.

The Iranian army says the drills are aimed at testing the combat readiness of its forces.

"For the first time, our special modern warfare task forces are conducting specialised operations. In the other phases of the wargames, the reconnaissance as well as suicide drones, which are capable of attacking the enemies, have been used and their operational capabilities came under assessment," said Sarkhelli.

He added that Iranian cyber experts managed to tap mock-enemies' communications using their latest cyber weapons.

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Source: http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/438703/20130224/iran-foreign-drone-tehran-military-drill-wargames.htm

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The Daily Roundup for 02.25.2013

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/25/the-daily-roundup-for-02-25-2013/

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My Calendar Has Gotten Smarter In Really Dumb Ways

When I travel to the East Coast, I sometimes feel like I'm living in a time warp, as my iPhone and Google Calendar keep notifying me about meetings that had happened three hours earlier. I've already mentioned this problem on TechCrunch, in a post about the launch of smart calendar app Tempo, where I?blamed the issue on "my apparently idiosyncratic way of dealing with timezones." (In case you were wondering: I do my best to ignore timezones entirely, and if I'm traveling between zones, I put things on my calendar based on the local time of wherever I'll be on a given day.) And I can't deny that I'm pretty haplessness when it comes to using any productivity tool that's more complicated than email.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Pf_umRb7R8Q/

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Sequestration affecting congressional hiring, Rep. Goodlatte says (Washington Post)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

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Angry teachers take to social media to blast union over extracurricular activities

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Teachers walk the picket line outside Fallingbrook Community Elementary School during a one-day walkout in Ottawa on Dec. 12.

Photograph by: Chris Mikula , Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA ? Angry Ontario teachers took to social media Saturday to sound off about a surprise late evening statement on Friday from the Ontario Secondary School Teachers? Federation, recommending its members suspend their political action and resume providing extracurricular activities.

But student trustees, gathered in Ottawa for the groups?s annual board conferences, called the recommendation by the teachers group a welcome sign that relations between the government and teacher unions are heading in a positive direction.

?It means that the provincial leaders in education were listening to the student demonstrations in order to get these things back,? said Hirad Zafari, the president of the Ontario Student Trustees Association.

?It also says a lot about the future of the relations in this province because this minister of education and this premier took merely weeks to resolve such a huge problem.?

Zafari, a Grade 12 student at Don Mills Collegiate Institute in Toronto, said reinstating extracurriculars will help schools return to normal after months of ?uncertainty.? Zafari?s soccer team qualified for city finals before school sports stopped running. Now, he says his team has a chance to get back on the field before the finals in May.

?I truly believe that it?s never too late when it comes to stuff like this,? he said. ?Now we have a couple months (for extracurriculars) that actually will do a lot of good for students.?

The trustees association acts as an advocacy group for more than two million Ontario students through elected student representatives from both public and catholic schools.

Trustees communications officer and catholic school student Noah Parker said he still felt the effects of the ban even though his extracurriculars weren?t suspended.

The Grade 12 student at Notre Dame Catholic Secondary School in Burlington said his volleyball team has had to travel to Kitchener and Waterloo in order to find teams to play. The school?s Reach for the Top trivia team couldn?t compete in tournaments because there weren?t enough other teams,? he said.

Even though teachers in charge of extra curriculars are now permitted to run their clubs or sports teams, it?s not mandatory. But Zafari said he?s confident that most teachers will come around to the idea and start getting involved again.

?When one teacher begins to restart their club, restart their team, I think other teachers will follow suit,? he said. ?I also think students will be putting on the pressure in a good way, saying, ?Now that the union heads are no longer preventing (extracurriculars), if you truly do care about your students, you?ll be going back to these as well.?

While the OSSTF?s recommendation was welcomed by the student trustees, as well as parents, the news has apparently created a divide among teachers, many of whom feel that they have been betrayed by their union leadership.

Union members have been left with no details about the reasoning behind the decision to suspend political action. Members have been informed that a press conference will be held with OSSTF officials on Monday at 9:30 a.m. to answer all questions.

Calls to the OSSTF and the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, went unanswered Saturday.

With no comment coming from union leadership, many teachers took to Twitter, Facebook and other social media to voice their opinion on the matter, questioning union leadership and why the decision to halt all ongoing protests over extracurriculars was voted on by union executives and not by the union membership.

?The vote by the exec (sic) now puts the onus on individual teachers to make the decision. Pissed off enough, don?t volunteer your time, pretty simple really,? wrote one teacher with the Avon Maitland District School Board in Western Ontario, on a Facebook group for teachers called ?We ARE (sic) the Front Lines in Education?.

Some teachers even took to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne?s official Facebook page to voice their anger over the OSSTF decision.

?I don?t trust the new Liberal leadership one bit ... Count on many teachers to not return to volunteering at school as our good will has been taken for granted,? wrote a teacher with the Thames Valley District School Board near London, Ont. in response to a post Wynne made that applauded the union?s announcement.

?Many of us feel disrespected and undervalued. I have already committed to coaching hockey and soccer outside of school and will not have time to do any more. Don?t count on me to come back until a fair contract is in place, one that is negotiated and not imposed on us.?

Twitter lit up with hundreds of comments from disgruntled educators.

Michael Jursic, a teacher at Ryerson Community Public School in Toronto, was one who wasn?t afraid to use the social media platform to voice his disappointment with the union.

?Liberals 1, Teachers 0. Way to divide and conquer, Premiere (sic). You sold out your members, (OSSTF president) #KenCoran!.? said a message posted under his account name.

By noon Saturday a hashtag, #nobackrooms, had been created on Twitter to collect angry messages from teachers directed at the OSSTF and the governing Liberals.

?OSSTF has sold out members in deal with OLP (Ontario Liberal Party). #Nobackrooms. No collectively bargained agreements, no ECs (extra curriculars),? wrote a teacher at Toronto?s Western Technical & Commercial School.

? Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

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Source: http://feeds.canada.com/~r/canwest/F239/~3/S0GANJfImLw/story.html

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Laser mastery narrows down sources of superconductivity

Feb. 24, 2013 ? Identifying the mysterious mechanism underlying high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) remains one of the most important and tantalizing puzzles in physics. This remarkable phenomenon allows electric current to pass with perfect efficiency through materials chilled to subzero temperatures, and it may play an essential role in revolutionizing the entire electricity chain, from generation to transmission and grid-scale storage. Pinning down one of the possible explanations for HTS -- fleeting fluctuations called charge-density waves (CDWs) -- could help solve the mystery and pave the way for rapid technological advances.

Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have combined two state-of-the-art experimental techniques to study those electron waves with unprecedented precision in two-dimensional, custom-grown materials. The surprising results, published online February 24, 2013, in the journal Nature Materials, reveal that CDWs cannot be the root cause of the unparalleled power conveyance in HTS materials. In fact, CDW formation is an independent and likely competing instability.

"It has been difficult to determine whether or not dynamic or fluctuating CDWs even exist in HTS materials, much less identify their role," said Brookhaven Lab physicist and study coauthor Ivan Bozovic. "Do they compete with the HTS state, or are they perhaps the very essence of the phenomenon? That question has now been answered by targeted experimentation."

Custom-grown Superconductors

Electricity travels imperfectly through traditional metallic conductors, losing energy as heat due to a kind of atomic-scale friction. Impurities in these materials also cause electrons to scatter and stumble, but superconductors can overcome this hurdle -- assuming the synthesis process is precise.

For this experiment, Bozovic used a custom-built molecular beam epitaxy system at Brookhaven Lab to grow thin films of LaSrCuO, an HTS cuprate (copper-oxide) compound. The metallic cuprates, assembled one atomic layer at a time, are separated by insulating planes of lanthanum and strontium oxides, resulting in what's called a quasi-two-dimensional conductor. When cooled down to a low enough temperature -- less than 100 degrees Kelvin -- strange electron waves began to ripple through that 2D matrix. At even lower temperatures, these films became superconducting.

Electron Sea

"In quasi-two-dimensional metals, low temperatures frequently bring about interesting collective states called charge-density waves," Bozovic said. "They resemble waves rolling across the surface of a lake under a breeze, except that instead of water, here we actually have a sea of mobile electrons."

Once a CDW forms, the electron density loses uniformity as the ripples rise and fall. These waves can be described by familiar parameters: amplitude (height of the waves), wavelength (distance between waves), and phase (the wave's position on the material). Detecting CDWs typically requires high-intensity x-rays, such as those provided by synchrotron light sources like Brookhaven's NSLS and, soon, NSLS-II. And even then, the technique only works if the waves are essentially frozen upon formation. However, if CDWs actually fluctuate rapidly, they may escape detection by x-ray diffraction, which typically requires a long exposure time that blurs fast motion.

Measuring Rolling Waves

To catch CDWs in action, a research group at MIT led by physicist Nuh Gedik used an advanced ultrafast spectroscopy technique. Intense laser pulses called "pumps" cause excitations in the superconducting films, which are then probed by measuring the film reflectance with a second light pulse -- this is called a pump-probe process. The second pulse is delayed by precise time intervals, and the series of measurements allow the lifetime of the excitation to be determined.

In a more sophisticated variant of the technique, largely pioneered by Gedik, the standard single pump beam is replaced by two beams hitting the surface from different sides simultaneously. This generates a standing wave of controlled wavelength in the film, but it disappears rapidly as the electrons relax back into their original state.

This technique was applied to the atomically perfect LaSrCuO films synthesized at Brookhaven Lab. In films with a critical temperature of 26 degrees Kelvin (the threshold beyond which the superconductivity breaks down), the researchers discovered two new short-lived excitations -- both caused by fluctuating CDWs.

Gedik's technique even allowed the researchers to record the lifetime of CDW fluctuations -- just 2 picoseconds (a millionth of a millionth of a second) under the coldest conditions and becoming briefer as the temperatures rose. These waves then vanished entirely at about 100 Kelvin, actually surviving at much higher temperatures than superconductivity.

Ruling out a Suspect

The researchers then hunted for those same signatures in cuprate films with slightly different chemical compositions and a greater density of mobile electrons. The results were both unexpected and significant for the future of HTS research.

"Interestingly, the superconducting sample with the highest critical temperature, about 39 Kelvin, showed no CDW signatures at all," Gedik said.

The consistent emergence of CDWs would have bolstered the conjecture that they play an essential role in high-temperature superconductivity. Instead, the new technique's successful detection of such electron waves in one sample but not in another (with even higher critical temperature) indicates that another mechanism must be driving the emergence of HTS.

"Results like this bring us closer to understanding the mystery of HTS, considered by many to be one of the greatest problems in physics today," Bozovic said. "The source of this extraordinary phenomenon is slowly but surely running out of places to hide."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/R3e5kmat5ag/130224142911.htm

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