SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — A 6.6-magnitude earthquake rocked central Chile on Thursday, causing buildings to sway in the capital and nervous people to run out into the streets.
But Chile's emergency services office said no damages to infrastructure were immediately reported and discarded the possibility of a tsunami.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake's epicenter was located about 65 kilometers (40 miles) southwest of the city of Coquimbo. Its depth was 10 kilometers (6 miles).
Chile is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries. A magnitude-8.8 quake and the tsunami it unleashed in 2010 killed more than 500 people, destroyed 220,000 homes, and washed away docks, riverfronts and seaside resorts.
Leading cause of heart disease ignored in North America's poorest communities
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Deborah Elson deborah.elson@sabin.org 202-621-1691 Public Library of Science
Inaction has jeopardized the health and economic well-being of millions
A leading cause of heart disease remains overlooked in North America's most impoverished communities, researchers said today in an editorial published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Chagas disease has rendered a heavy health and economic toll, yet insufficient political and medical support for gathering specific data, providing diagnosis and treatment, and developing new tools has impeded much-needed breakthroughs.
"We have already identified critical steps to save lives and make breakthroughs in Chagas disease control in North America," said Dr. Peter Hotez, the editorial's lead author, director of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. "This is an achievable public health goal that will also reduce the disease's detrimental economic burden. Greater medical awareness, scientific cooperation between key countries, and public-private partnerships will help us beat this scourge."
Chagas disease is a parasitic infection most commonly transmitted through blood-feeding triatomine bugs, but it can also be spread through pregnancy, blood transfusion, and contaminated food or drink. Up to 30% of infections result in debilitating and life-threatening heart disease and severe intestinal and liver complications. People living in extremely impoverished communities are most vulnerable because of poor-quality housing and inadequate access to health care, education and vector control.
Chagas disease infects an estimated 10 million people worldwide; however, much less is known about the true disease burden in North America. According to some preliminary estimates, Mexico ranks third, and the United States seventh, in terms of the number of infected individuals with Chagas disease in the Western Hemisphere, where 99% of the cases occur.
It is also estimated that 40,000 pregnant North American women may be infected with T. cruzi at any given time, resulting in 2,000 congenital cases through mother-to-child transmission.
A lack of facilities offering diagnosis and treatment of Chagas disease has prevented at-risk and infected people from receiving the critical and often life-saving attention they need. While two drug treatments currently exist, they cause undesirable adverse effects, are unsafe for pregnant women and are not approved for use in the United States.
"The research community is pushing science as hard as possible to ensure we get new treatments to people living with Chagas disease, but we need to ensure that governments prioritize the disease," said Dr. Bernard Pecoul, a co-author of the editorial and Executive Director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi). "It is urgent to diagnose and treat patients with what we have available today, until research and development efforts deliver true breakthroughs for the millions in need." DNDi has produced a pediatric dosage form of benznidazole for children with Chagas disease, and is currently developing new drug candidates for a truly novel, safe, effective and affordable treatment for all patients.
The Sabin Vaccine Institute's Product Development Partnership (Sabin PDP), in partnership with Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital and with support from the Slim Initiative for the Development of Neglected Tropical Diseases and from the Southwest Electronic Energy Medical Research, has initiated development for a new therapeutic vaccine.
###
In addition to Dr. Hotez and Dr. Pecoul, the paper's authors include Eric Dumonteil, Autonomous University of Yucatan (UADY); Miguel Betancourt Cravioto, Carlos Slim Health Institute; Maria Elena Bottazzi, National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development; Roberto Tapia-Conyer, Carlos Slim Health Institute; Sheba Meymandi, Olive View-UCLA Medical Center; Unni Karunakara, Medecins Sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders; Isabela Ribeiro, DNDi; and Rachel M. Cohen, DNDi.
PLEASE ADD THE FOLLOWING LINK TO THE PUBLISHED ARTICLE IN ONLINE VERSIONS OF YOUR REPORT: http://www.plosntds.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pntd.0002300
(Link will go live upon embargo lift)
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Leading cause of heart disease ignored in North America's poorest communities
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
[
| E-mail
]
Share
Contact: Deborah Elson deborah.elson@sabin.org 202-621-1691 Public Library of Science
Inaction has jeopardized the health and economic well-being of millions
A leading cause of heart disease remains overlooked in North America's most impoverished communities, researchers said today in an editorial published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Chagas disease has rendered a heavy health and economic toll, yet insufficient political and medical support for gathering specific data, providing diagnosis and treatment, and developing new tools has impeded much-needed breakthroughs.
"We have already identified critical steps to save lives and make breakthroughs in Chagas disease control in North America," said Dr. Peter Hotez, the editorial's lead author, director of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. "This is an achievable public health goal that will also reduce the disease's detrimental economic burden. Greater medical awareness, scientific cooperation between key countries, and public-private partnerships will help us beat this scourge."
Chagas disease is a parasitic infection most commonly transmitted through blood-feeding triatomine bugs, but it can also be spread through pregnancy, blood transfusion, and contaminated food or drink. Up to 30% of infections result in debilitating and life-threatening heart disease and severe intestinal and liver complications. People living in extremely impoverished communities are most vulnerable because of poor-quality housing and inadequate access to health care, education and vector control.
Chagas disease infects an estimated 10 million people worldwide; however, much less is known about the true disease burden in North America. According to some preliminary estimates, Mexico ranks third, and the United States seventh, in terms of the number of infected individuals with Chagas disease in the Western Hemisphere, where 99% of the cases occur.
It is also estimated that 40,000 pregnant North American women may be infected with T. cruzi at any given time, resulting in 2,000 congenital cases through mother-to-child transmission.
A lack of facilities offering diagnosis and treatment of Chagas disease has prevented at-risk and infected people from receiving the critical and often life-saving attention they need. While two drug treatments currently exist, they cause undesirable adverse effects, are unsafe for pregnant women and are not approved for use in the United States.
"The research community is pushing science as hard as possible to ensure we get new treatments to people living with Chagas disease, but we need to ensure that governments prioritize the disease," said Dr. Bernard Pecoul, a co-author of the editorial and Executive Director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi). "It is urgent to diagnose and treat patients with what we have available today, until research and development efforts deliver true breakthroughs for the millions in need." DNDi has produced a pediatric dosage form of benznidazole for children with Chagas disease, and is currently developing new drug candidates for a truly novel, safe, effective and affordable treatment for all patients.
The Sabin Vaccine Institute's Product Development Partnership (Sabin PDP), in partnership with Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital and with support from the Slim Initiative for the Development of Neglected Tropical Diseases and from the Southwest Electronic Energy Medical Research, has initiated development for a new therapeutic vaccine.
###
In addition to Dr. Hotez and Dr. Pecoul, the paper's authors include Eric Dumonteil, Autonomous University of Yucatan (UADY); Miguel Betancourt Cravioto, Carlos Slim Health Institute; Maria Elena Bottazzi, National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development; Roberto Tapia-Conyer, Carlos Slim Health Institute; Sheba Meymandi, Olive View-UCLA Medical Center; Unni Karunakara, Medecins Sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders; Isabela Ribeiro, DNDi; and Rachel M. Cohen, DNDi.
PLEASE ADD THE FOLLOWING LINK TO THE PUBLISHED ARTICLE IN ONLINE VERSIONS OF YOUR REPORT: http://www.plosntds.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pntd.0002300
(Link will go live upon embargo lift)
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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.
Sure, it's got a protective Gorilla Glass 3 coating, but there's only one way to really protect that new Nexus 5: cases. If you're breathlessly refreshing the Play store for a shot at ordering Google's new handset, you may want to check out the associated bumper case (available in black, grey, red ...
Yeah, yeah. The new Nexus 5 is the first with Android 4.4. But if you're sitting on one of those other Nexus devices — as in 2012's Nexus 4 and Nexus 10, and the Nexus 7 (we presume both the 2012 and 2013 versions of it), know this: You'll be getting KitKat in the coming weeks as well.
In addition, the Google Play Edition Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One also will be updated.
We’ll also be rolling out the Android 4.4 update worldwide in the next few weeks to all Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10 devices, as well as the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One Google Play Edition devices.
But the U.S. intelligence agency needed some security of its own, so it developed a NoSQL data store called Accumulo, with built-in policy enforcement mechanisms that strictly limit who can see its data.
At the O’Reilly Strata-Hadoop World conference this week in New York, one of the former National Security Agency developers behind the software, Adam Fuchs, explained how Accumulo works and how it could be used in fields other than intelligence gathering. The agency contributed the software’s source code to the Apache Software Foundation in 2011.
“Every single application that we built at the NSA has some concept of multi-level security,” said Fuchs, who is now the chief technology officer of Sqrrl, which offers a commercial edition of the software.
In the parlance of NoSQL databases, Accumulo is a simple key/value data store, built on a shared-nothing architecture that allows for easy expansion to thousands of nodes able to hold petabytes worth of data. It features a flexible schema that allows new columns to be quickly added, and comes with some advanced data analysis features as well.
Accumulo's killer feature
Accumulo’s killer feature, however, is its “data-centric security,” Fuchs said. When data is entered into Accumulo, it must be accompanied with tags specifying who is allowed to see that material. Each row of data has a cell specifying the roles within an organization that can access the data, which can map back to specific organizational security policies.
It adheres to the RBAC (role-based access control) model. This approach allowed the NSA to categorize data into its multiple levels of classification—confidential, secret, top secret—as well as who in an organization could access the data, based on their official role within the organization. The database is accompanied by a policy engine that decides who can see what data.
This model could be used anywhere that security is an issue. For instance, if used in a health care organization, Accumulo can specify that only a patient and the patient’s doctor can see the patient’s data. The patient’s specific doctor may change over time, but the role of the doctor, rather than the individual doctor, is specified in the database.
The NSA found that the data-centric approach “greatly simplifies application development,” Fuchs said.
Because data today tends to be transformed and reused for different analysis applications, it makes sense for the database itself to keep track of who is allowed to see the data, rather than repeatedly implementing these rules in each application that uses this data.
“Since the applications in this model can push down the security model into the database and companion components, you don’t have to solve that in the application,” Fuchs said. As a result, “it is a lot cheaper to build that application,” Fuchs said.
This is not the NSA’s first foray into releasing open-source applications built on the role-based access model. In 2000, the agency released SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux), which allows administrators to create policies that dictate what actions each program on a computer can execute, based on the user’s role. SELinux was subsequently rolled into the mainline Linux kernel.
Joab Jackson , IDG News Service
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service. More by Joab Jackson
According to a recent article on Smithsonian.com, the notion that poison candy is routinely distributed to unsuspecting children on Halloween is a myth perpetrated by advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers in the 1980s and ’90s. But historically, candy meant for young consumers has sported poisonous-sounding, WTF wrappers and packages that most self-respecting 2013 parents would be dismayed to see dumped out of their children’s trick-or-treat bags. [CandyWrapperMuseum.com, Collecting Candy.com, CandyWrapperArchive.com, and Pez.com.]
Sex determiner gene of honey bee more complicated that previously assumed
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Dr. Martin Hasselmann martin.hasselmann@uni-koeln.de 49-022-147-01586 University of Cologne
Cologne biologist recognizes huge significance of finding for bee keeping
Bee colonies consist of a queen bee, lots of female worker bees and some male drones. The gene that determines the sex of the bees is much more complex than has been assumed up until now and has developed over the course of evolution at a very high rate. This is the finding of an international team of scientists under the direction of Dr. Martin Hasselmann of the Institute for Genetics of the University of Cologne. The study has been published in the renowned Oxford journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Male honey bees (Apis mellifera) hatch from fertilized eggs and females from fertilized ones. In these fertilized eggs, the condition of the complementary sex determiner (csd) gene is of crucial significance for the creation of female workers. The queen bee, who, in the course of their mating flight, mate with different drones multiple times, passes on to fertilized eggs a random combinations of two csd copies, so-called alleles. If these alleles are different enough, they develop into a female. If the csd gene, in contrast, is present in the fertilized eggs in two identical versions, diploid drones develop. These are, however, eaten by worker bees after they hatch.
Up until now, it was assumed that there were up to 20 csd alleles. In the dataset, which the research team under the direction of Hasselmann collected from all over the world and examined, there were, however, 53 csd alleles found in localities (in Kenya), and worldwide at least csd 87 alleles. Using an evolutionary model, the scientists extrapolated 116 145 csd alleles. New csd alleles were created in a relatively quick period for evolution: ca. every 400,000 years. A region inside the csd gene in particular represents a hot-spot with a high evolutionary rate that, together with certain amino acid mutations, decisively contributes to the formation of new csd alleles in the flanking regions.
The vitality of a bee population depends on, amongst other things, the genetic diversity of sex determining alleles. These new findings are therefore very important for apiculture for minimizing the danger of inbreeding and thereby the production of diploid drones.
###
PD Dr. Martin Hasselmann has been the director of the research group "Population Genetics of Social Insects" at the University of Cologne as a DFG Heisenberg stipendiary since May 2012. His research foci include the social insects honey bees, bumble bees and stingless bees, the unique biology of which can be used as models to decipher the genetic fundaments of environmental interaction and evolutionary innovation.
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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.
Sex determiner gene of honey bee more complicated that previously assumed
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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]
Share
Contact: Dr. Martin Hasselmann martin.hasselmann@uni-koeln.de 49-022-147-01586 University of Cologne
Cologne biologist recognizes huge significance of finding for bee keeping
Bee colonies consist of a queen bee, lots of female worker bees and some male drones. The gene that determines the sex of the bees is much more complex than has been assumed up until now and has developed over the course of evolution at a very high rate. This is the finding of an international team of scientists under the direction of Dr. Martin Hasselmann of the Institute for Genetics of the University of Cologne. The study has been published in the renowned Oxford journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Male honey bees (Apis mellifera) hatch from fertilized eggs and females from fertilized ones. In these fertilized eggs, the condition of the complementary sex determiner (csd) gene is of crucial significance for the creation of female workers. The queen bee, who, in the course of their mating flight, mate with different drones multiple times, passes on to fertilized eggs a random combinations of two csd copies, so-called alleles. If these alleles are different enough, they develop into a female. If the csd gene, in contrast, is present in the fertilized eggs in two identical versions, diploid drones develop. These are, however, eaten by worker bees after they hatch.
Up until now, it was assumed that there were up to 20 csd alleles. In the dataset, which the research team under the direction of Hasselmann collected from all over the world and examined, there were, however, 53 csd alleles found in localities (in Kenya), and worldwide at least csd 87 alleles. Using an evolutionary model, the scientists extrapolated 116 145 csd alleles. New csd alleles were created in a relatively quick period for evolution: ca. every 400,000 years. A region inside the csd gene in particular represents a hot-spot with a high evolutionary rate that, together with certain amino acid mutations, decisively contributes to the formation of new csd alleles in the flanking regions.
The vitality of a bee population depends on, amongst other things, the genetic diversity of sex determining alleles. These new findings are therefore very important for apiculture for minimizing the danger of inbreeding and thereby the production of diploid drones.
###
PD Dr. Martin Hasselmann has been the director of the research group "Population Genetics of Social Insects" at the University of Cologne as a DFG Heisenberg stipendiary since May 2012. His research foci include the social insects honey bees, bumble bees and stingless bees, the unique biology of which can be used as models to decipher the genetic fundaments of environmental interaction and evolutionary innovation.
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Sure, it's got a protective Gorilla Glass 3 coating, but there's only one way to really protect that new Nexus 5: cases. If you're breathlessly refreshing the Play store for a shot at ordering Google's new handset, you may want to check out the associated bumper case (available in black, grey, red ...
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