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Monday, July 1, 2013
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Obama to announce new power initiative for Africa
U.S. President Barack Obama, left, stands for a moment of silence for Nelson Mandela during an official dinner with South African President Jacob Zuma at the Presidential Guest House on Saturday, June 29, 2013, in Pretoria, South Africa. The visit comes at a poignant time, with former South African president and anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela ailing in a Johannesburg hospital. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
U.S. President Barack Obama, left, stands for a moment of silence for Nelson Mandela during an official dinner with South African President Jacob Zuma at the Presidential Guest House on Saturday, June 29, 2013, in Pretoria, South Africa. The visit comes at a poignant time, with former South African president and anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela ailing in a Johannesburg hospital. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama toast during an official dinner hosted by South African President Jacob Zuma at the Presidential Guest House on Saturday, June 29, 2013, in Pretoria, South Africa. The visit comes at a poignant time, with former South African president and anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela ailing in a Johannesburg hospital. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama wave as they depart Waterkloof Air Base for a flight to Cape Town on Sunday, June 30, 2013, in Centurion, South Africa. The president is in South Africa, embarking on the second leg of his three-country African journey. The visit comes at a poignant time, with former South African president and anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela ailing in a Johannesburg hospital. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Performers dressed in traditional Xhosa outfits dance at the wedding of Sbongiseni Tetani and his wife Charity from the Xhosa tribe, near the home of former South African president Nelson Mandela house in Qunu, South Africa, Saturday, June 29, 2013. President Barack Obama plans to visit privately Saturday with relatives of former South African President Nelson Mandela, but doesn't intend to see the critically ill anti-apartheid icon he has called a "personal hero." (AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam)
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) ? President Barack Obama on Sunday will announce a new initiative to double access to electric power in sub-Saharan Africa, part of his effort to build on the legacy of equality and opportunity forged by his personal hero, Nelson Mandela.
Obama, who flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town Sunday, will pay tribute to the ailing 94-year-old Mandela throughout the day. The president and his family will visit Robben Island, where the anti-apartheid leader spent 18 years confined to a tiny cell, including a stop of the lime quarry where Mandela toiled and developed the lung problems that are ailing him today.
The White House said Obama's guide during his tour of the island will be 83-year-old South African politician Ahmed Kathrada, who was also in captivity at the prison for nearly two decades and guided Obama on his 2006 visit to the prison as a U.S. senator. The president will also view the prison courtyard where Mandela planted grapevines that remain today, and where he and others in the dissident leadership would discuss politics, sneak notes to one another and hide writings.
Following the tour, Obama will deliver what the White House has billed as the signature speech of his weeklong trip at the University of Cape Town, an address that will be infused with memories of Mandela.
During that speech, Obama will unveil the "Power Africa" initiative, which includes an initial $7 billion investment from the United States over the next five years. Private companies, including General Electric and Symbion Power, are making an additional $9 billion in commitments with the goal of providing power to millions of Africans crippled by a lack of electricity.
Gayle Smith, Obama's senior director for development and democracy, said more than two-thirds of people living in Sub-Saharan African do not have electricity, including 85 percent of those living in rural areas.
"If you want lights so kids can study at night or you can maintain vaccines in a cold chain, you don't have that, so going the extra mile to reach people is more difficult," Smith said.
The U.S. and its private sector partners will initially focus its efforts on six African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and Tanzania, where Obama will wrap up his trip later this week. Former President George W. Bush, who supports health programs throughout the continent, will also be in Tanzania next week, and the White House did not rule out the possibility that the two men might meet.
Obama will also highlight U.S. efforts to bolster access to food and health programs on the continent. His advisers said the president sees reducing the poverty and illness that plague many parts of Africa as an extension of Mandela's example of how change can happen within countries.
The former South African president has been hospitalized in critical condition for three weeks. Obama met Saturday with members of Mandela's family, but did not visit the anti-apartheid icon in the hospital, a decision the White House said was in keeping with his family's wishes.
Obama's weeklong trip, which opened last week in Senegal, marks his most significant trip to the continent since taking office. His scant personal engagement has come as a disappointment to some in the region, who had high hopes for a man whose father was from Kenya.
Obama has visited Robben Island before as a U.S. senator. But since being elected as the first black American president, Obama has drawn inevitable comparisons to Mandela, making Sunday's visit particularly poignant.
The president said he's also eager to bring his family with him to the prison to teach them about Mandela's role in overcoming white racist rule, first as an activist and later as a president who forged a unity government with his former captors.
He told reporters Saturday he to "help them to understand not only how those lessons apply to their own lives but also to their responsibilities in the future as citizens of the world, that's a great privilege and a great honor."
Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, said Mandela's vision was always going to feature prominently in the speech. But the former South African leader's deteriorating health "certainly puts a finer point on just how much we can't take for granted what Nelson Mandela did."
Harkening back to a prominent theme from his 2009 speech in Ghana ? his only other trip to Africa as president ? Obama will emphasize that Africans must take much of the responsibility for finishing the work started by Mandela and his contemporaries.
"The progress that Africa has made opens new doors, but frankly, it's up to the leaders in Africa and particularly young people to make sure that they're walking through those doors of opportunity," Rhodes said.
Obama will speak at the University of Cape Town nearly 50 years after Robert F. Kennedy delivered his famous "Ripple of Hope" speech from the school. Kennedy spoke in Cape Town two years after Mandela was sentenced to life in prison.
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Saturday, June 29, 2013
PayPal: Screw It, We're Gonna Make Money for Spaceships
PayPal is used by almost 130 million people, generates a lot of revenue, and made its backers very, very wealthy. It's a model company. But, that's apparently not enough, and PayPal just announced it will create a way for astronauts to buy things, in space. OK.
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Thursday, June 27, 2013
Ingested nanoparticle toxicity
June 26, 2013 ? Ingestion of commonly encountered nanoparticles at typical environmental levels is unlikely to cause overt toxicity, according to US researchers. Nevertheless there is insufficient evidence to determine whether chronic exposures could lead to subtle alterations in intestinal immune function, protein profiles, or microbial balance.
Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, researchers have compared existing laboratory and experimental animal studies pertaining to the toxicity of nanoparticles most likely to be intentionally or accidentally ingested. Based on their review, the researchers determined ingestion of nanoparticles at likely exposure levels is unlikely to cause health problems, at least with respect to acute toxicity. Furthermore, in vitro laboratory testing, which often shows toxicity at a cellular level, does not correspond well with in vivo testing, which tends to show less adverse effects.
Ingrid Bergin in the Unit for Laboratory Animal Medicine, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Frank Witzmann in the Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology, at Indiana University School of Medicine, in Indianapolis, explain that the use of particles that are in the nano size range (from 1 billionth to 100 billionths of a meter in diameter, 1-100 nm, other thereabouts) are finding applications in consumer products and medicine. These include particles such as nano-silver, which is increasingly used in consumer products and dietary supplements for its purported antimicrobial properties. Nanoparticles can have some intriguing and useful properties because they do not necessarily behave in the same chemical and physical ways as non-nanoparticle versions of the same material.
Nanoparticles are now used as natural flavor enhancers in the form of liposomes and related materials, food pigments and in some so-called "health supplements." They are also used in antibacterial toothbrushes coated with silver nanoparticles, for instance in food and drink containers and in hygienic infant feeding equipment. They are also used to carry pharmaceuticals to specific disease sites in the body to reduce side effects. Nanoparticles actually encompass a very wide range of materials from pure metals and alloys, to metal oxide nanoparticles, and carbon-based and plastic nanoparticles. Because of their increasing utilization in consumer products, there has been concern over whether these small scale materials could have unique toxicity effects when compared to more traditional versions of the same materials.
Difficulties in assessing the health risks of nanoparticles include the fact that particles of differing materials and shapes can have different properties. Furthermore, the route of exposure (e.g. ingestion vs. inhalation) affects the likelihood of toxicity. The U.S. researchers evaluated the current literature specifically with respect to toxicity of ingested nanoparticles. They point out that, in addition to intentional ingestion as with dietary supplements, unintentional ingestion can occur due to nanoparticle presence in water or as a breakdown product from coated consumer goods. Inhaled nanoparticles also represent an ingestion hazard since they are coughed up, swallowed, and eliminated through the intestinal tract.
Based on their review, the team concludes that, "Ingested nanoparticles appear unlikely to have acute or severe toxic effects at typical levels of exposure." Nevertheless, they add that the current literature is inadequate to assess whether nanoparticles can accumulate in tissues and have long-term effects or whether they might cause subtle alterations in gut microbial populations. The researchers stress that better methods are needed for correlating particle concentrations used for cell-based assessment of toxicity with the actual likely exposure levels to body cells. Such methods may lead to better predictive value for laboratory in vitro testing, which currently over-predicts toxicity of ingested nanoparticles as compared to in vivo testing.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/nzJGeyWJ0NU/130626143120.htm
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Wednesday, June 26, 2013
How fish swim: Researchers examine mechanical bases for the emergence of undulatory swimmers
June 24, 2013 ? How do fish swim? It is a simple question, but there is no simple answer.
Researchers at Northwestern University have revealed some of the mechanical properties that allow fish to perform their complex movements. Their findings, published on June 13 in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, could provide insights in evolutionary biology and lead to an understanding of the neural control of movement and development of bio-inspired underwater vehicles.
"If we could play God and create an undulatory swimmer, how stiff should its body be? At what wave frequency should its body undulate so it moves at its top speed? How does its brain control those movements?" said Neelesh Patankar, professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. "Millennia ago, undulatory swimmers like eels that had the right mechanical properties are the ones that would have survived."
The researchers used computational methods to test assumptions about the preferred evolutionary characteristics. For example, species with low muscle activation frequency and high body stiffness are the most successful; the researchers found the optimal values for each property.
"The stiffness that we predict for good swimming characteristics is, in fact, the same as the experimentally determined stiffness of undulatory swimmers with a backbone," said Amneet Bhalla, graduate student in mechanical engineering at McCormick and one of the paper's authors.
"Thus, our results suggest that precursors of a backbone would have given rise to animals with the appropriate body stiffness," added Patankar. "We hypothesize that this would have been mechanically beneficial to the evolutionary emergence of swimming vertebrates."
In addition, species must be resilient to small changes in physical characteristics from one generation to the next. The researchers confirmed that the ability to swim, while dependent upon mechanical parameters, is not sensitive to minor generational changes; as long as the body stiffness is above a certain value, the ability to swim quickly is insensitive to the value of the stiffness, the researchers found.
Finally, making a connection to the neural control of movement, the researchers analyzed the curvature of its undulations to determine if it was the result of a single bending torque, or if precise bending torques were necessary at every point along its body. They learned that a simple movement pattern gives rise to the complicated-looking deformation.
"This suggests that the animal does not need precise control of its movements," Patankar said.
To make these determinations, the researchers applied a common physics concept known as "spring mass damper" -- a model, applied to everything from car suspension to Slinkies, that determines movement in systems that are losing energy -- to the body of the fish.
This novel approach for the first time unified the concepts of active and passive swimming -- swimming in which forcing comes from within the fish (active) or from the surrounding water (passive) -- by calculating the conditions necessary for the fish to swim both actively and passively.
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013
NSA Whistleblower Snowden Requests Asylum In Ecuador After Leaving Hong Kong And Travelling To Russia
Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program and a number of similar government initiatives over the course of the last few weeks, has left Hong Kong and is currently in transit in Moscow. According to Wikileaks, which has been providing legal assistance to Snowden, he “is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.” That democratic nation, the earliest reports suggested, was Venezuela, with Moscow just being the first stop on his journey. Now, however, it looks like Ecuador, which also offered asylum to Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange, has taken an interest in this case, too. Earlier this week, it seemed Snowden was going to head for Iceland. Update (9:58am PT): It now looks as if Snowden has indeed applied for asylum in Ecuador. The country’s foreign minister just tweeted this: The Government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward J. #Snowden— Ricardo Patiño Aroca (@RicardoPatinoEC) June 23, 2013 Wikileaks has also updated its press release to read: “He is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.” We have updated this story to reflect that. The Ecuadorean Ambassador is still here at Moscow airport. It looks like Ecuador is Edward Snowden's destination http://t.co/ZUfwND94nJ— Daniel Sandford (@BBCDanielS) June 23, 2013 As far as we can see, there are no direct flights that connect Moscow to Ecuador’s capital of Quito, so if Snowden would travel commercially (and the distance is out of the reach of most standard business jets), he will likely have to make another stop. Cuba would be a likely candidate and it was discussed earlier today when it still looked as if Snowden was heading to Venezuela. The U.S. has revoked Snowden’s passport, though, which shouldn’t be a problem for entering Ecuador, but it could complicate his travels through another country. Snowden was allowed to leave Hong Kong legally, Hong Kong’s government said today, because the U.S.’s request for the issue of a warrant of arrest “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.” Hong Kong asked the U.S. for more information, but because it didn’t receive this yet, it had “no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.”Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/DDYyUPgioJg/
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Monday, June 24, 2013
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