Hospitals see surge of superbug-fighting products

Using ultraviolet light, a machine disinfects a hospital room at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y., Wednesday, March 20, 2013. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Using ultraviolet light, a machine disinfects a hospital room at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y., Wednesday, March 20, 2013. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Michael Claes, 62, who contracted a superbug while in the hospital, poses for a photograph while recovering at home in New York, Monday, April 8, 2013. Claes caught a bad case of a diarrheal illness caused by Clostridium dificile, while he was a kidney patient last fall at New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Michael Claes, 62, who contracted a superbug while in the hospital, shows a bottle of one of his daily medications on Monday, April 8, 2013 as he recovers at home in New York. Claes caught a bad case of a diarrheal illness caused by Clostridium dificile, while he was a kidney patient at New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital in fall 2012. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Using ultraviolet light, a machine disinfects a hospital room at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y., Wednesday, March 20, 2013. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Using ultraviolet light, a machine disinfects a hospital room at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y., Wednesday, March 20, 2013. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

NEW YORK (AP) ? They sweep. They swab. They sterilize. And still the germs persist.

In U.S. hospitals, an estimated 1 in 20 patients pick up infections they didn't have when they arrived, some caused by dangerous 'superbugs' that are hard to treat.

The rise of these superbugs, along with increased pressure from the government and insurers, is driving hospitals to try all sorts of new approaches to stop their spread:

Machines that resemble "Star Wars" robots and emit ultraviolet light or hydrogen peroxide vapors. Germ-resistant copper bed rails, call buttons and IV poles. Antimicrobial linens, curtains and wall paint.

While these products can help get a room clean, their true impact is still debatable. There is no widely-accepted evidence that these inventions have prevented infections or deaths.

Meanwhile, insurers are pushing hospitals to do a better job and the government's Medicare program has moved to stop paying bills for certain infections caught in the hospital.

"We're seeing a culture change" in hospitals, said Jennie Mayfield, who tracks infections at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

Those hospital infections are tied to an estimated 100,000 deaths each year and add as much as $30 billion a year in medical costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency last month sounded an alarm about a "nightmare bacteria" resistant to one class of antibiotics. That kind is still rare but it showed up last year in at least 200 hospitals.

Hospitals started paying attention to infection control in the late 1880s, when mounting evidence showed unsanitary conditions were hurting patients. Hospital hygiene has been a concern in cycles ever since, with the latest spike triggered by the emergence a decade ago of a nasty strain of intestinal bug called Clostridium difficile, or C-diff.

The diarrhea-causing C-diff is now linked to 14,000 U.S. deaths annually. That's been the catalyst for the growing focus on infection control, said Mayfield, who is also president-elect of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.

C-diff is easier to treat than some other hospital superbugs, like methicillin-resistant staph, or MRSA, but it's particularly difficult to clean away. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers don't work and C-diff can persist on hospital room surfaces for days. The CDC recommends hospital staff clean their hands rigorously with soap and water ? or better yet, wear gloves. And rooms should be cleaned intensively with bleach, the CDC says.

Michael Claes developed a bad case of C-diff while he was a kidney patient last fall at New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital. He and his doctor believe he caught it at the hospital. Claes praised his overall care, but felt the hospital's room cleaning and infection control was less than perfect.

"I would use the word 'perfunctory,'" he said.

Lenox Hill spokeswoman Ann Silverman disputed that characterization, noting hospital workers are making efforts that patients often can't see, like using hand cleansers dispensers in hallways. She ticked off a list of measure used to prevent the spread of germs, ranging from educating patients' family members to isolation and other protective steps with each C-diff patient.

The hospital's C-diff infection rate is lower than the state average, she said.

Westchester Medical Center, a 643-bed hospital in the suburbs of New York City has also been hit by cases of C-diff and the other superbugs.

Complicating matters is the fact that larger proportions of hospital patients today are sicker and more susceptible to the ravages of infections, said Dr. Marisa Montecalvo, a contagious diseases specialist at Westchester.

There's a growing recognition that it's not only surgical knives and operating rooms that need a thorough cleaning but also spots like bed rails and even television remote controls, she said. Now there's more attention to making sure "that all the nooks and crannies are clean, and that it's done in perfect a manner as can be done," Montecalvo said.

Enter companies like Xenex Healthcare Services, a Texas company that makes a portable, $125,000 machine that's rolled into rooms to zap C-diff and other bacteria and viruses dead with ultraviolet light. Xenex has sold or leased devices to more than 100 U.S. hospitals, including Westchester Medical Center.

The market niche is expected to grow from $30 million to $80 million in the next three years, according to Frost & Sullivan, a market research firm.

Mark Stibich, Xenex's chief scientific officer, said client hospitals sometimes call them robots and report improved satisfaction scores from patients who seem impressed that the medical center is trotting out that kind of technology.

At Westchester, they still clean rooms, but the staff appreciates the high-tech backup, said housekeeping manager Carolyn Bevans.

"We all like it," she said of the Xenex.

At Cooley Dickinson Hospital, a 140-bed facility in Northampton, Mass., the staff calls their machines Thing One, Thing Two, Thing Three and Thing Four, borrowing from the children's book "The Cat in the Hat."

But while the things in the Dr. Seuss tale were house-wrecking imps, Cooley Dickinson officials said the ultraviolet has done a terrific job at cleaning their hospital of the difficult C-diff.

"We did all the recommended things. We used bleach. We monitored the quality of cleaning," but C-diff rates wouldn't budge, said nurse Linda Riley, who's in charge of infection prevention at Cooley Dickinson.

A small observational study at the hospital showed C-diff infection rates fell by half and C-diff deaths fell from 14 to 2 during the last two years, compared to the two years before the machines.

Some experts say there's not enough evidence to show the machines are worth it. No national study has shown that these products have led to reduced deaths or infection rates, noted Dr. L. Clifford McDonald of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

His point: It only takes a minute for a nurse or visitor with dirty hands to walk into a room, touch a vulnerable patient with germy hands, and undo the benefits of a recent space-age cleaning.

"Environments get dirty again," McDonald said, and thorough cleaning with conventional disinfectants ought to do the job.

Beyond products to disinfect a room, there are tools to make sure doctors, nurses and other hospital staff are properly cleaning their hands when they come into a patient's room. Among them are scanners that monitor how many times a health care worker uses a sink or hand sanitizer dispenser.

Still, "technology only takes us so far," said Christian Lillis, who runs a small foundation named after his mother who died from a C-diff infection.

Lillis said the hospitals he is most impressed with include Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago, where thorough cleanings are confirmed with spot checks. Fluorescent powder is dabbed around a room before it's cleaned and a special light shows if the powder was removed. That strategy was followed by a 28 percent decline in C-diff, he said.

He also cites Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill., where the focus is on elbow grease and bleach wipes. What's different, he said, is the merger of the housekeeping and infection prevention staff. That emphasizes that cleaning is less about being a maid's service than about saving patients from superbugs.

"If your hospital's not clean, you're creating more problems than you're solving," Lillis said.

___

Online:

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/hai/

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-04-29-Disinfecting%20Robots/id-0c529490a0e4438295df6d3d8cbca31d

Paige Butcher

ECB gears up for rate cut, likely this week

By Sakari Suoninen

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The European Central Bank is likely to cut the main euro zone interest rate at its monthly meeting on Thursday as the bloc's economy has weakened further.

Since the last policy meeting on April 4, there have been few signs of the economy returning to growth, threatening the recovery which the ECB has said it expects to start in the second half of this year.

There are also increasing signs of weakness spreading to the euro zone's core. Confidence fell in April and did so by more than expected, data showed on Monday, highlighting the souring mood among companies and consumers since March, after an optimistic start to the year.

Weaker reports, combined with ECB policymakers' statements showing renewed appetite for rate cuts, has changed economists' views and a narrow majority now forecast one when the Governing Council convenes in Bratislava, one of the two meetings it holds annually outside its Frankfurt base.

Senior sources involved in the deliberations say momentum is building for action to help a euro zone economy which has slipped back into recession, a move that some policymakers wanted to take earlier this year.

In a Reuters poll, 43 of 76 economists said they expected the 17-country bloc's central bank to cut rates by 25 basis points to 0.5 percent. At the same time, 57 of 66 said a cut would not have much impact on the economy.

"Most Council members have reached a point where they say we can't keep on doing nothing," RBS economist Richard Barwell said. "They probably feel that cutting rates would be better than doing nothing."

ECB Vice-President Vitor Constancio said last week that the central bank stood ready to act, adding that there was still room to cut rates.

But, as the poll shows, a sizeable minority think the ECB is not ready to cut yet.

A separate Reuters poll of euro money market dealers on Monday showed only half of the 22 expected the ECB to cut on Thursday. None of the 11 traders who replied to a question about the impact of a rate cut on interbank lending thought it would have any.

REASONS NOT TO

"A rate cut is not a done deal and the exact timing of the move remains very uncertain," Unicredit economist Marco Valli said.

ECB Executive Board member Joerg Asmussen has said lower rates would have little impact on economies in the euro zone's crisis-stricken south, because they do not reach the consumers and businesses in those countries.

Another argument for waiting another month is that the ECB often moves rates when it has new data, and it will publish the next set of economic projections in June.

The ECB offers banks unlimited funds in its refinancing operations, and the excess liquidity has pushed money-market rates well below the main refi rate.

The deposit rate, currently at zero, acts as a floor for money markets, and the ECB has made clear it has no appetite to take it into negative territory, which means that the ECB may choose to keep it, as well as the 1.5 percent interest rate on overnight lending, on hold even if the main rate is cut.

Thus, short-term money market rates are unlikely to fall further even if the main refi rate is cut.

A rate cut would, however, profit banks. They have close to 870 billion euros of central bank funds, and a 25 basis point cut would reduce banks' interest payments more than 2 billion euros annually.

Those favoring a cut also argue that it could have an important signaling effect, showing that the ECB is not done and could take more measures in the future.

The bank has mulled ways to stimulate lending to small companies, which have difficulties finding funding, especially in southern Europe, but it does not appear ready to announce anything concrete yet.

(Editing by Mike Peacock)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ecb-gears-rate-cut-likely-week-135936141.html

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Studying Earth To Learn About Mars

Southern Utah's landscape looks a lot like images from the Mars rovers. Marjorie Chan explains how Utah geology might help explain data sent back from Mars missions. Charles Killian describes how people are simulating what it might be like to one day live and work on Mars.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/04/26/179224935/studying-earth-to-learn-about-mars?ft=1&f=1007

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Stocks surge after fake tweet scare

Dow briefly plunges 143 points after fake AP tweet about explosions at the White House. But the market recovers and the Dow closes 152 points higher. Strong quarterly earnings boost stocks.

By Steve Rothwell,?AP Markets Writer / April 23, 2013

Glenn Kessler, right, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last week. Stocks, which plunged briefly on a fake AP tweet, quickly recovered and then surged.

Richard Drew/AP/File

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Companies that do the best when the economy is improving led the market higher Tuesday after several of them reported strong quarterly earnings.

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Coach, a maker of luxury handbags, and Netflix, which streams TV shows and movies over the Internet, were winners after announcing profits that impressed investors. Financial?stocks?rose after Travelers' earnings beat the expectations of financial analysts who follow the company.

That's a change from earlier this year. The?stock?market's surge in 2013 has been led by so-called defensive industries such as health care, consumer staples and utilities. Investors buy those?stocks?when they're unsure about the direction of the economy and want to own companies that make products people buy in bad times as well as good. Until now, they've been less enthusiastic about?stocks?of companies that provide discretionary goods and services and do best in good times.

"For a change we are actually seeing more cyclical parts of the economy lead the market," said Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at RDM Financial Group.

PSA: Twitter is down for some, as is iCloud and the iTunes Store (update: Twitter back up!)

Nope, it's not your picture of "the best duck confit I've ever had" that's causing that Twitter post to error out -- the service is down for "some users," according to a Twitter status page update. It's unknown what's causing the issue (again, probably not your photweet), but we're assured "engineers are currently working on this issue." We're experiencing some snags ourselves, usually resulting in tweets timing out before publishing. Hang tight!

But maybe don't try to while away your time on the iTunes Store or by backing up your phone to iCloud, as those services are also experiencing some downtime issues this morning. An Apple support page lists both as seeing "some users affected;" we'll just have to assume engineers are also hard at work on fixing that. As always, we'll let you know when things get better.

Update: Looks like Twitter is all back to normal, and the company says, "this issue has been resolved." Apple, on the other hand, is still having issues with Apple ID and Game Center login.

Filed under: Apple

Comments

Source: Twitter, Apple

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/23/psa-twitter-icloud-itunes-issues/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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NYC proposes raising age for cigarette purchases

In this March 18, 2013 file photo cigarette packs are displayed for sale at a convenience store in New York. No one under 21 would be able to buy cigarettes in New York City under a proposal unveiled Monday, April 22, 2013 to make the city the most populous place in America to set the minimum age that high. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, file)

In this March 18, 2013 file photo cigarette packs are displayed for sale at a convenience store in New York. No one under 21 would be able to buy cigarettes in New York City under a proposal unveiled Monday, April 22, 2013 to make the city the most populous place in America to set the minimum age that high. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, file)

NEW YORK (AP) ? No one under 21 would be able to buy cigarettes in the city under a proposal unveiled Monday to make it the most populous place in America to set the minimum age that high.

Extending a decade of moves to crack down on smoking in the nation's largest city, the measure aims to stop young people from developing a habit that remains the leading preventable cause of death, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said as she announced the plan. Eighty percent of the city's smokers started lighting up before they were 21, officials say.

"The point here is to really address where smoking begins," she said, flanked by colleagues and the city's health commissioner. With support in the council and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's backing, the proposal has the political ingredients to pass.

But it may face questions about its effectiveness and fairness. A retailers' representative suggested the measure would simply drive younger smokers to neighboring communities or corner-store cigarette sellers instead of city stores, while a smokers' rights advocate called it "government paternalism at its worst."

Under federal law, no one under 18 can buy tobacco anywhere in the country. Four states and some localities have raised the age to 19, and at least two communities have agreed to raise it to 21.

A similar proposal has been floated in the Texas Legislature, but it's on hold after a budget board estimated it would cost the state more than $42 million in cigarette tax revenue over two years.

To public health and anti-smoking advocates, the cost to government is far outstripped by smoking's toll on human lives.

They say a higher minimum age for buying tobacco discourages, or at least delays, young people from starting smoking and thereby limits their health risks.

"Curtailing smoking among these age groups is critical to winning the fight against tobacco and reducing the deaths, disease and health care costs it causes," said Susan M. Liss, executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Smoking has become less prevalent overall in New York City over the last decade but has plateaued at 8.5 percent among the city's public high school students since 2007. An estimated 20,000 of them smoke today.

It's already illegal for many of them to buy cigarettes, but raising the minimum age would also bar slightly older friends from buying smokes for them.

City officials cited statistical modeling, published in the journal Health Policy, that estimated that raising the tobacco purchase age to 21 nationally could cut the smoking rate by two-thirds among 14-to-17-year-olds and by half among 18-to-20-year-olds over 50 years. Texas budget officials projected a one-third reduction in tobacco product use by 18-to-20-year-olds.

A higher minimum tobacco purchase age could cut into sales that make up 40 percent of gross revenues for the average convenience store, said Jeff Lenard, a spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores. But he suggested younger smokers might just go outside the city ? the minimum age is 19 in nearby Long Island and New Jersey, for instance ? or to black-market merchants.

To smoker Audrey Silk, people considered old enough to vote and serve in the military should be allowed to decide whether to use cigarettes.

"Intolerance for anyone smoking is the anti-smokers' excuse to reduce adults to the status of children," said Silk, who founded a group that has sued the city over previous tobacco restrictions.

Advocates for the measure say the parallel isn't voting but drinking. They cite laws against selling alcohol to anyone under 21.

The nation's largest cigarette maker, Altria Group Inc., had no immediate comment, spokesman David Sutton said. He has previously noted that the Richmond, Va.-based company, which produces the top-selling Marlboro brand, supported federal legislation that in 2009 gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco products, which includes various retail restrictions.

Representatives for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. didn't immediately respond to phone and email inquiries. Based in Winston-Salem, N.C., it makes Camel and other brands.

The age limit is already 21 in Needham, Mass., and is headed toward 21 in another Boston suburb, Canton. The Canton Board of Health agreed to the change this month, but it's not yet implemented, said Public Health Director John L. Ciccotelli.

Plans call for an annual study of whether smoking declines among Canton high-school students ? and eliminating the measure in five years if it doesn't, he said.

In Needham, the high school smoking rate has dropped from about 13 percent to 5.5 percent since the 21-year-old threshold took effect in 2006, Public Health Director Janice Berns said. It's not clear how much of the decline is due to the age limit.

Since Bloomberg took office in 2002, New York City helped impose the highest cigarette taxes in the country, barred smoking at parks and on beaches and conducted sometimes graphic advertising campaigns about the hazards of smoking.

Last month, Bloomberg proposed to keep cigarettes out of sight in stores and to stop shops from taking cigarette coupons.

A council hearing on those and the age limit proposal is set for May 2.

Several New York City smoking regulations have survived court challenges. But a federal appeals court said last year that the city couldn't force tobacco retailers to display gruesome images of diseased lungs and decaying teeth.

Quinn, a leading Democratic candidate to succeed Bloomberg next year, has often been perceived as an ally of his.

Bloomberg also has pushed a number of other pioneering public-health measures, such as compelling chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus, banning artificial trans fats in restaurants and attempting to limit the size of sugary drinks. A court struck down the big-beverage rule last month, but the city is appealing.

While Bloomberg has led many anti-smoking initiatives, this one arose from the council ? particularly Councilman James Gennaro, who lost his mother to lung cancer after she smoked for decades.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Felberbaum in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2013-04-22-Anti-Smoking-NYC/id-67edfd1cb42a406f848ea9945fe6baae

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X-rays reveal coexisting structures in glass

Apr. 10, 2013 ? The craft of glassmaking extends way back in time. It was over five-thousand years ago when humankind learned how to make glass. Even prior to this discovery, humans had been using naturally occurring glass for tool making. Despite this long and rich history and widespread use of glass, surprisingly little is known about the interplay between the mechanical properties of glasses and their inner structures. For the first time, researchers from Amsterdam University (The Netherlands) and DESY have now monitored subtle structural changes in a glass made from microscopic silica spheres, which they exposed to shear stress. Using a unique experimental setup at DESY's PETRA III X-ray source, the scientists discovered coexisting structural states in the glass and related them to its flow behavior.

The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Glasses are substances that can transition from a fluid state into a non-fluid glassy state. Unlike water, which freezes from a fluid into an ordered solid, the glassy phase retains a fluid-like structure with little order. Nevertheless, the material becomes highly viscous or even hard in the glassy state. Numerous other materials, including metallic alloys, polymers, and colloids, exhibit a liquid-glass transition. "Toothpaste, for instance, behaves similarly to glass, and so do foams, gels, and cr?mes," says Dmitry Denisov, the study's first author from Peter Schall's group at Amsterdam University.

Model for more complex systems

In their study, Denisov and his colleagues prepared a glass from silicon dioxide, or silica. They added silica spheres that were a mere fifty-millionths of a millimeter in diameter to water. Much like fat particles in milk, the spheres are dispersed throughout the water, forming what is known as a colloid. When the spheres make up 58% of the entire volume, the dispersion's motion arrests -- the colloid is in its glassy phase. For smaller volume fractions, the colloid remains in its liquid state. "Our spherical silica beads all have approximately the same diameter and the glass can be mathematically described rather easily," Denisov explains. "Hence, our system is a good starting point for modeling more complex systems with a liquid-glass transition."

The researchers were particularly interested in studying a phenomenon termed "shear banding." When they shear the glass by moving its horizontal layers parallel to one another, the stress response in the glass is divided into two regions, or bands, in which particles move with different speeds. "Shear banding has been known for a long time. The different bands can be made visible with confocal microscopy, and mechanical measurements show that something happens in the sample," says Denisov. "However, when we examined the interactions between particles in the different bands, we found the interactions to be the same. In fact, the structural differences between the two bands are so small that people initially thought they did not exist." To prove otherwise, the research team turned to a more sensitive method.

Unique experimental setup

At PETRA's experimental station P10, the researchers filled their sample between two horizontal plates. One of the plates was stationary while the other was rotated to shear the sample. With this setup, called a rheometer, the scientists tracked the glass' mechanical response, including changes in its viscosity. Simultaneously, PETRA's intense X-ray beam traveled through the sample, examining its inner structure. When X-rays scatter off particles inside a sample, they form a characteristic scattering pattern behind it, from which researchers can gain knowledge of the sample's structural order and the average particle-particle distances. "When we altered the shear rate in our experiment, we were able to see how the average distance between silica spheres in the glass varied," says DESY scientist Bernd Struth. "These structural changes have never been seen before."

Key to the experimentalists' success was the unique geometry of the setup, which Struth designed together with DESY engineer Daniel Messner. The PETRA lightsource emits X-rays in the horizontal plane. However, liquid samples have to be probed vertically, since they have to be placed horizontally in order to prevent them from dripping out of the setup. X-rays are not easily redirected by a mirror, but a unique optical element deflects the beam so that it traverses the sample in a vertical direction. "The structural changes in the glass are very small," Struth points out. "We can only measure them precisely when we average over a small amount of sample, which is only achievable in our geometry."

The researchers determined that shear stress in the colloidal glass results in a higher structural order and an increased vertical distance between particles. Thereby, layers of the suspension glide along each other with more ease and, thus, shear flow in the sample is facilitated. "Normally, you would expect the shear stress in the sample to increase with the applied shear rate," Struth says. In fact, this is what the researchers observed when they started rotating the rheometer's plate faster and faster. "Above a certain shear rate, however, the mechanical response of the glass no longer changes. When we continue increasing the shear rate, the shear stress remains constant until we reach a second distinct shear rate, above which the stress becomes larger again." The explanation for the region of constant stress is shear banding. "In this region, two bands with different velocities and viscosities coexist," explains Denisov. "The bands change dynamically with the shear rate, but when we measure the shear stress in the sample, averaged over the two bands, the stress is constant."

Small changes, big effect

However, what exactly happens structurally in the shear banding region? "The structural parameters that we obtained from X-ray scattering correlate with the mechanical observations. The order and the average particle-particle distance in the two bands are different, suggesting that two different structures coexist," Denisov says. "Previous studies indicated that the structure may be the same in the different bands. We proved that this is not the case." Since the observed structural changes are very small, they have not been resolved in earlier studies.

In general, the researchers established that small structural variations in the colloid glass have a large impact on its flow behavior. For the smallest shear rate applied in their experiment, the viscosity of the glass was ten thousand times larger than the viscosity at the largest shear rate. In contrast, the observed structural change over the same range was only less than three percent. "Small changes in the glass structure on the microscopic scale correspond to large changes in the mechanical properties on the macroscopic scale," Denisov summarizes.

"Our methodology enabled us to observe structural modifications in a glassy state that we know relatively little about," Struth emphasizes. "The new data can be used in simulations that will improve our understanding of such systems." Given the variety of systems with a liquid-glass transition and the widespread use of glasses in human culture, gaining insights into the intimate link between structure and flow behavior of glasses is an exciting perspective.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Matthias Alfeld, Wout De Nolf, Simone Cagno, Karen Appel, D. Peter Siddons, Anthony Kuczewski, Koen Janssens, Joris Dik, Karen Trentelman, Marc Walton, Andrea Sartorius. Revealing hidden paint layers in oil paintings by means of scanning macro-XRF: a mock-up study based on Rembrandt's ?An old man in military costume?. Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 2013; 28 (1): 40 DOI: 10.1039/C2JA30119A

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/gXM4eINPHSA/130410131229.htm

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FuzeBox Adds 50K New Enterprise Subscribers In Q1 2013, Debuts Improved iPad Client

San Francisco-based virtual meeting player FuzeBox has had some impressive success to kick-off 2013, posting a 200 percent rise in demand for its product in the initial quarter of the year, with 50,000 new subscribers added in just a few short months. The company also now counts 30 percent of the Fortune 500 among its clients, and is debuting new features for its iPad client to help continue its adoption as more meeting attendees shift to mobile.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/sAhI61aRjeQ/

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Consume with Care: Could Retail Clinics Help Reduce Hospital Readmissions?

Preliminary findings offer encouragement, but integration with hospitals is key

By Erica Westly

Image: Flickr/Chapendra

The U.S. has one of the highest hospital readmission rates in the world. About 20 percent of Medicare patients wind up being readmitted within 30 days after discharge, according to government data. In Canada and England, that figure is only about 8 percent. Hospitals have tried a variety of strategies including patient counseling and home visits to lower readmissions, with mixed results. The office that administers Medicare is hoping that new financial penalties, part of the Affordable Care Act, will push hospitals to tackle the problem more aggressively. This year nearly two thirds of the hospitals in the U.S. will be penalized for having high readmission rates and will lose a combined total of $280 million in Medicare reimbursements. The cut in payments is scheduled to increase from up to 1 percent this year to 2 percent next year, and then to 3 percent in 2015.

The problem of hospital readmissions is challenging because the reasons behind them are complicated and varied. For example, heart failure and pneumonia are two of the most common diagnoses associated with hospital readmission, but a study published in 2009 found that most patients who return to the hospital after having one of these conditions do so for seemingly unrelated problems, such as injuries or adverse drug reactions. Similarly, some studies have suggested that decreasing the length of hospital stays lowers readmission rates, whereas others have linked shorter hospital stays with increased readmissions.

Still, experts have argued that hospitals could go a long way toward reducing readmissions just by ensuring that patients receive proper follow-up care after discharge. To this end, some hospitals are partnering with retail clinics, such as Walgreen's TakeCare and CVS's MinuteClinic. These clinics have pharmacies on site, flexible hours and typically don't require appointments. Plus, many patients are already visiting these stores to shop, adding a convenience factor that a doctor's office or urgent care center can't match. Research suggests that these clinics have become increasingly popular since they debuted in 2006. A study published in the journal Health Affairs last fall found that visits to retail clinics quadrupled between 2007 and 2009.

Last summer the University of California, Los Angeles, began a partnership that connects its hospitals to 11 CVS clinics. Improving patients' access to follow-up care after hospital discharge is a primary goal. ?A lot of patients getting discharged from the hospital don't have a primary care giver to follow up with, and even if they do, they might not be able to get an appointment right away,? says David Feinberg, CEO of the U.C.L.A. Hospital System. CVS has similar partnerships in other cities, including Cleveland and Atlanta.

So far, data on the success of the U.C.L.A. partnership are only anecdotal, but Feinberg and his colleagues are so satisfied with the results that they're expanding the program into three more clinics. ?I just think it's great for the convenience factor,? he says. ?This brings us out into the community in a way that I think could be really beneficial.?

Past attempts at managing heart disease and other chronic illnesses at commercial clinics have not always been successful. A 2011 study of eight such clinics published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that none reduced hospital visits or readmissions. But those clinics weren't directly integrated with hospitals, says Nancy McCall, a health care policy expert at RTI International and co-author author of the study. ?That seems to be necessary to have any impact on reducing readmissions,? she says. The CVS hospital-partnered clinics, in contrast, are connected to hospitals' electronic health records systems, enabling coordinated care between the two teams.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=b71647a7830cdfe0b994ba33f7a2d87e

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Virgin Mobile offers $100 rebate to T-Mobile turncoats, now through May 31st

In the wake of T-Mobile's recently unveiled Simple Choice plans, Virgin Mobile is capitalizing on the shakeup by playing a value card of its own. Now through May 31st, the Sprint-owned MVNO is offering $100 credit to all T-Mobile subscribers willing to port their number to Virgin Mobile. Study the numbers for yourself and the deal seems a no-brainer, as Virgin matches T-Mobile's unlimited scheme with a monthly bill of only $55, which rings in $5 less than the UnCarrier's $60 (2.5GB) alternative. Naturally, that's where Virgin Mobile hopes the conversation ends, but we don't need to tell you that there's quite a difference in speed between Virgin's EV-DO / WiMAX service and the speedier HSPA+ / LTE alternative from T-Mobile. That said, if your inner cheapskate is tingling, you'll now find an extra $100 incentive to make the switch.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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Via: Electronista

Source: Virgin Mobile

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Ford says Focus tops world car sales in 2012

(Reuters) - Ford Motor Co said its Focus model was the world's best-selling passenger car in 2012, boosted by demand from China and the United States, citing data from automotive consulting firm Polk.

The carmaker sold 1,020,410 Ford Focus compact cars last year, it said on Tuesday. (http://link.reuters.com/dyx27t)

More than one out of four Focus cars were sold in China, with registrations in the world's biggest auto market up 51 percent, according to Polk.

Focus was launched in China in late March last year.

U.S. sales were up 40 percent in 2012, said the carmaker, whose line-up also includes the popular F-Series pickup trucks.

The overall industry has posted annual sales increases in the double digits since 2009, when it hit the worst annual sales rate since World War Two, adjusted for population.

(Reporting by Garima Goel in Bangalore; editing by Jason Neely)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ford-says-focus-tops-world-car-sales-2012-065008098--finance.html

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Pentagon struggles with high cost of health care

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The loud, insistent calls in Washington to rein in the rising costs of Social Security and Medicare ignore a major and expensive entitlement program ? the military's health care system.

Despite dire warnings from three defense secretaries about the uncontrollable cost, Congress has repeatedly rebuffed Pentagon efforts to establish higher out-of-pocket fees and enrollment costs for military family and retiree health care as an initial step in addressing a harsh fiscal reality. The cost of military health care has almost tripled since 2001, from $19 billion to $53 billion in 2012, and stands at 10 percent of the entire defense budget.

Even more daunting, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that military health care costs could reach $65 billion by 2017 and $95 billion by 2030.

On Wednesday, when President Barack Obama submits his fiscal 2014 budget, the Pentagon blueprint is expected to include several congressionally unpopular proposals ? requests for two rounds of domestic base closings in 2015 and 2017, a pay raise of only 1 percent for military personnel and a revival of last year's plan to increase health care fees and implement new ones, according to several defense analysts.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel insisted this past week that the military has no choice as it faces a $487 billion reduction in projected spending over the next decade and possibly tens of billions more as tea partyers and other fiscal conservatives embrace automatic spending cuts as the best means to reduce the government's trillion-dollar deficit.

The greatest fiscal threat to the military is not declining budgets, Hagel warned, but rather "the growing imbalance in where that money is being spent internally." In other words, money dedicated to health care or benefits is money that's not spent on preparing troops for battle or pilots for missions.

Hagel echoed his predecessors, Leon Panetta, who said personnel costs had put the Pentagon on an "unsustainable course," and former Pentagon chief Robert Gates, who bluntly said in 2009 that "health care is eating the department alive."

In his speech last past week, Hagel quoted retired Adm. Gary Roughead, the former Navy chief, who offered a devastating assessment of the future Pentagon.

Without changes, Roughead said, the department could be transformed from "an agency protecting the nation to an agency administering benefit programs, capable of buying only limited quantities of irrelevant and overpriced equipment."

The military's health care program, known as TRICARE, provides health coverage to nearly 10 million active duty personnel, retirees, reservists and their families. Currently, retirees and their dependents outnumber active duty members and their families ? 5.5 million to 3.3 million.

Powerful veterans groups, retired military officer associations and other opponents of shifting more costs to beneficiaries argue that members of the armed forces make extraordinary sacrifices and endure hardships unique to the services, ones even more pronounced after a decade-plus of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Members of the military have faced repeated deployments, had to uproot their families for constant moves and deal with limits on buying a home or a spouse establishing a career because of their transient life. Retirement pay and low health care costs are vital to attracting members of the all-volunteer military.

"If you don't take care of people, they're not going to enlist, they're not going to re-enlist," said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Resistance in Congress to health care changes was evident in the recently passed spending bill to keep the government running through Sept. 30. Tucked into the sweeping bill was a single provision stating emphatically that "none of the funds made available by this act may be used by the secretary of defense to implement an enrollment fee for the TRICARE for Life program."

The program provides no-fee supplemental insurance to retirees 65 and older who are eligible for Medicare. The Pentagon repeatedly has pushed for establishment of a fee, only to face congressional opposition.

The provision in the spending bill blocking an enrollment fee had widespread support among Republicans and Democrats, according to congressional aides. The Pentagon, nonetheless, is expected to ask again in the 2014 budget for an enrollment fee.

The department also is likely to seek increases in fees and deductibles for working-age retirees and try again to peg increases in them to rising costs as measured by the national health care expenditure index produced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That index rose 4.2 percent in 2012 and is projected rise by 3.8 percent this year.

In recent years, Congress has agreed to tie any future increases to the typically smaller percentage increase in military retirees' cost-of-living adjustment, which this year is 1.7 percent.

Either way, a military retiree under age 65 and their family members pay a far smaller annual enrollment fee than the average federal worker or civilian ? $230 a year for an individual, $460 for a family. There is no deductible.

Lawmakers' other response was to establish the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission to study the issue of benefits and offer recommendations on how the Pentagon can address the problem. The commission was created in this year's defense authorization bill.

"Nobody wants to touch it because people are confused about who it impacts," said Lawrence Korb, a former assistant defense secretary and now a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress. "It's not going to impact people on active duty. It's not going to impact veterans because they're taken care of by the VA. Basically (it's) working-age retirees."

Korb said he wished Hagel has been more explicit in his warning about the impact of benefit costs.

"He did lay it out that we're going to have to do something or we're going to end up like General Motors and spending everything on people not working for us anymore."

Gordon Adams, a professor at American University who was a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget, said limited savings in the short term from changes in retirement rules or other benefits present a challenge in making the case for change.

"The savings are downstream, but you only get downstream if you get in the boat now," Adams said. "Otherwise you never get downstream, you're just waiting at the dock all the time because you don't think it'll save you money up front."

_____

Follow Donna Cassata on Twitter: http://twitter.com/DonnaCassataAP.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-04-08-Military%20Health%20Care/id-41e58ff9d7354154997c7f01e905bebb

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French photographer held four months by Afghan insurgents escapes

By Hamid Shalizi and Dylan Welch, Reuters

KABUL - A French photographer kidnapped in Afghanistan four months ago fled his captors on Monday and was now safe in the hands of officials from his embassy, the Afghan Interior Ministry said.

---

A second French hostage in Afghanistan was freed by his captors, a spokesman for France's foreign ministry said, without providing any details.

Twenty-nine-year-old freelance Pierre Borghi had been chained up in a crudely dug hole covered by a trap door but managed to escape and reached a checkpoint manned by government security guards in central Wardak province, an Afghan official said.

Borghi, from Grenoble in southeastern France, was brought to the Interior Ministry's headquarters in Kabul at about 4:30 p.m. (1200 GMT) and left in the company of French embassy officials less than an hour later, ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said.

He was in good health, Sediqqi said. The French embassy declined to comment.

Borghi was snatched by four armed men from a street in a busy area of the capital Kabul on Nov. 28 and had been held in several locations, including the back of a vehicle, the Afghan official said.

He said it was likely that Borghi was first taken by organized criminals and then sold to insurgents.

The captors, wearing turbans wrapped around their faces, had filmed Borghi several times and told him they were, variously, Taliban, Haqqani and al Qaeda, the official said.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

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Celebrities That Opted To Remove Their Fun Bags!

Celebrities That Opted To Remove Their Fun Bags!

Many women in Hollywood have breast enlargement surgery to market themselves at the beginning of their careers, only to make the decision to remove them years later. Heather Morris, Victoria Beckham and Sharon Osbourne have all had their breast implants removed. Sharon Osbourne Sharon Osbourne revealed that she had her breast implants removed after realizing ...

Celebrities That Opted To Remove Their Fun Bags! Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News

Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/04/celebrities-that-opted-to-remove-their-tig-ol-bitties/

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Study: Mammograms Still Beneficial To Beat Cancer For Older ...

DETROIT (WWJ) ? A new study suggests that mammograms for older women may still be beneficial for survival.

Dr. Michael Simon, Professor of Oncology at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit says there?s been an ongoing debate over when women should begin having annual mammograms.

This study looked at the interval between mammograms and breast cancer death. More than 9,000 breast cancer patients were studied.

?We looked at women that had a mammogram ? and this is the mammogram interval before their diagnosis ? so, was their last interval less than a year?

• Mammogram Study
• Dr. Michael Simon

Was it one-to-two years; two-to-five years or more than five years? And, we found that for women that had a longer interval; women over all ? these are women aged 50 and older ? and women with a longer interval were more likely to die from breast cancer,? said Dr. Simon.

The findings, which also held for women over aged 75, are being presented Sunday in Washington, DC at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Source: http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2013/04/07/study-mammograms-still-beneficial-to-beat-cancer-for-older-women/

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Clayton Christensen Talks Venture Capital, Crowd Funding, And How To Measure Your Life

Editor?s note:?Derek?Andersen?is the founder of?Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs. There are few people whose impact on entrepreneurs and business in general you hear about as frequently as Clayton Christensen. Clay’s body of work includes co-founding a?publicly?traded company, being a Rhodes Scholar,?writing one of the most influential?business books?of our generation,?fighting cancer?and a stroke that forced him to relearn to speak, teaching thousands at the Harvard Business School, and raising five children. He has accomplished gigantic things, not to mention he stands 6 ’8″ and today is also his birthday so please wish?him?well. When I heard he would speak at Startup Grind 2013, excitement and then panic raced through my bald head. Luckily one of the very best in the business, Mark Suster of GRB Partners was gracious enough to come and represent the startup community at the interview. Mark has written?a great recap?of his conversation, but it seems appropriate to followup with this audience and share the entire interview from a few weeks ago. The Innovator’s Dilemma?as you might know outlines how companies with historically successful products and market share will be disrupted and beaten unless they are innovative again and again. Clayton also recently co-authored?How Will You Measure Your Life??which explains how like in business you need to plan in order to be successful in your personal life or you run the risk of failing your family and betraying your values. Read or watch the?fascinating?interview below. ———————– MARK:? Welcome to StartUp Grind!? I thought we would start with the disruption of education.? Because you?re a professor and I thought that would put me on more comfortable grounds. CLAYTON: Perfect. MARK:? We?ll come right back to venture capital, I promise.? What are your feelings about education in America ? the doubling over the last few years of consumer debt over education, and the fact that technology might just make what you do much more available at a lower cost for more people, which in itself matches I think your definition of disruption, and what?s going on with Udemy and Stanford and other places.? I?d love to hear that. CLAYTON:? Boy, it?s a great question.? I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999.? Because you could see this coming.? I haven?t yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School.?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/qaBImNFpoB8/

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How US energy policy fails to address climate change

To manage energy supplies and climate change risks, the United States has done little in terms of policy that makes sense given the gravity of the climate change challenges it and the world face, Cobb writes.

By Kurt Cobb,?Guest blogger / April 6, 2013

Wind turbines of the Smoky Hill Wind Farm dot the countryside near Ellsworth, Kan. Perhaps the simplest way to manage the energy transition we must undergo would be to impose a high and ever rising tax on carbon, Cobb writes.

Orlin Wagner/AP/File

Enlarge

Current U.S. energy policy is, in fact, a hodgepodge of disconnected policies designed for specific constituencies with no coherent goal. The country has subsidies for fossil fuels, subsidies for nuclear power, subsidies for wind and solar, and subsidies for insulating and retrofitting buildings. We also have energy standards for some appliances and miles per gallon standards for automobiles.

Skip to next paragraph Resource Insights

Kurt Cobb?is the author of the peak-oil-themed thriller, 'Prelude,' and a columnist for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen.?He is a founding member of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas?USA, and he serves on the board of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. For more of his Resource Insights posts, click?here.

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What never gets asked and answered definitively in the policy debate is this: What should our ultimate goal be and when should we aim to achieve it? The first part of the question has elicited so many answers from so many constituencies that I may not be able to represent them all here. But here is an attempt to categorize the main lines of thinking concerning the country?s energy goals:

1. Seek the cheapest price for energy with the implication that environmental consequences should not be tallied as part of the cost.
2. Complete a transition to renewable energy as quickly as possible while drastically reducing the burning of fossil fuels.
3. Replace all fossil fuel energy with nuclear power.
4. Develop all sources of energy to make sure we have enough at reasonable prices. This is often called the ?all-of-the-above strategy.?

Goal 1 is really the argument put forth by the fossil fuel industry and therefore a defense of the status quo. Goal 2 is the dream of every climate change activist and clean-tech executive. Goal 3 seemed to be gaining some momentum before the accident at Japan?s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant dashed hopes for a widespread nuclear renaissance.

Goal 4 is being touted?by my congressman?who heads the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and it is?the policy of Obama administration. The so-called all-of-the-above strategy is the de facto energy policy of the United States, and the one which I described above as a hodgepodge of disconnected policies designed for specific constituencies with no coherent goal.?

Lincoln Mitchell: Mike Huckabee's Reductio ad Hitlerum

Former Arkansas governor, and formerly relevant national political figure, Mike Huckabee is guilty of the latest right wing reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy. The Tea Party and right wing penchant for comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin is evidence not of any totalitarian tendencies on the part of Obama. Instead it is evidence that right wing contempt for science is now rivaled by contempt for learning anything about history.

Stalin and Hitler are among the most brutal murderers and dictators of the 20th, or any other, century. Most of the world knows this. To the right wing of the Republican Party, apparently, Stalinism is a system of governance where the marginal tax rate exceeds 35 percent, while the Nazi regime, according to Huckabee's newest insight, was one characterized by gun control.

Stalin and Hitler are now figures from history. As recently as 1996, the Republican Party nominated somebody who had fought and been injured fighting the Nazis. For most of the 20th century there were numerous members of Congress who had either served their country during World War II or been victims of Naziism, but that is not the case anymore. Similarly, most of the people on the far right are too young to have any personal memory of the Soviet Union. Perhaps this is why these accusations now come so much more easily to the leaders of the right wing today.

Using Communists and Nazis as a way to bludgeon one's political opponents with powerful, if poorly constructed, political arguments is nothing new, but it is seems much more frequent now, with Obama a much bigger target than any previous president. Most of the more aggressive of these attacks come not from powerful Republican politicians but from media personalities like Huckabee, Tea Party activists or people on the fringes of political life. The failure of Republicans in more senior positions to speak out against this has now become so ordinary that it is rarely remarked upon, but it is still significant.

The leap from a moderate increase to the marginal tax rate to the Gulags, or from regulating guns to committing genocide and plunging the world into war, are enormous and exist primarily in the heads of angry right wing fear mongers rather than in anything approaching reality. While most rational citizens know enough to dismiss the assertions as outrageous hyperbole, significantly, some citizens believe these claims. Moreover, constantly making these comparisons does lasting damage to the political fabric of the U.S.

The debate around gun regulation is important; and it is essential that both sides are heard. It is also true that there are some citizens who do not think government agencies should have all the guns and the people should have none. This is a legitimate view around which a solid argument can be built, regardless of whether or not it ends up carrying the day. However, the notion that if the guns are taken away, dictatorship, war and genocide will follow is absurd and degrades the very argument it seeks to support.

Therein is the major problem facing the right, and the Republican Party, on a number of issues, not just guns. On too many issues the right has made an argument based on a creative interpretation of history or science. The enduring memory of the opposition to the new health care bill was imagined "death panels" and calling Obama a communist for seeking to create a health care program that is much more oriented around the private sector than that of almost any other industrialized country. The opposition to marriage equality is often presented with illogical arguments about the supposed danger of raising a child in anything other than a family with one parent of each gender, in spite of the absence of any evidence supporting this. Similarly, the mystical right wing faith in tax cuts as the answer to any economic ill, has undermined the ability of the right to be relevant in discussions of economic policy.

This is a strategy aimed entirely at mobilizing the far right Republican base rather than persuading a majority Americans of either the the validity of the conservative position or the competence and maturity of the politicians who hold these views. While it is disappointing and perhaps surprising that so many Americans view Obama as a communist, and how few prominent conservatives object to the frequent reductio ad Hitlerum from the right, it remains the case that a majority of Americans reject these assertions. Comparing Obama to Stalin and Hitler has been a losing political strategy but has also demonstrated a right wing willingness to play fast and loose with history and a failure to take the crimes of those two despots seriously, that is genuinely appalling.

?

?

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Follow Lincoln Mitchell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LincolnMitchell

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lincoln-mitchell/mike-huckabees-ireducto-a_b_3033369.html

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Pamper evening raises ?920 for Cancer Research

Pamper evening raises ?920 for Cancer Research

7:00am Saturday 6th April 2013 in Headlines By Morwenna Blake

A PAMPERING evening held in Durrington raised ?920 for Cancer Research.

Stacey Voce, who was diagnosed with cervical cancer two years ago when she was just 24 years old, organised the event to raise money to help others who find themselves in a similar position.

Miss Voce, who lives in Amesbury, is taking part in this month?s London Marathon for the charity and the pamper evening, held at the Vanessa Chilvers Dance Studio on March 15, was to boost her fundraising effort.

She said: ?All the ladies seemed to enjoy themselves and got massively pampered.

?Because it was such a success and I have been asked loads by all the ladies when the next pamper evening, I am looking to hold another Ladies Charity Pamper Evening in August.?

Source: http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/journalnewsindex/10336731.Pamper_evening_raises___920_for_Cancer_Research/?ref=rss

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Russia: NKorea suggests evacuating diplomats

MOSCOW (AP) ? Russia's foreign minister says Moscow doesn't understand why North Korea has suggested that Moscow and other countries close their embassies in Pyongyang, and he says he's concerned about the high tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Minister Sergey Lavrov was quoted Friday during a visit to Uzbekistan as saying that Russia is in touch with China, the United States, Japan and South Korea ? all members of a dormant talks process with North Korea ? to try to figure out the motivation.

"We are very perturbed about the supercharged tensions, which for now are verbal. We want to understand the causes of this proposal," Lavrov said, according to the Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti.

About two dozen countries have embassies in North Korea. A spokesman for the Russian embassy there, Denis Samsonov, told Russian media that the embassy was working normally.

Russia has appeared increasingly angry with North Korea as tensions roiled following a North Korean nuclear test and the country's subsequent warnings to South Korea and the United States that it would be prepared to attack.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich on Thursday strongly criticized North Korea for its "defiant neglect" of U.N. Security Council resolutions. A ministry statement Friday after the embassy evacuations proposal said "We are counting on maximum restraint and composure from all sides."

A spokesman for Britain's Foreign Office said his government was considering its next move in North Korea but that it regarded the North Korean suggestion to embassies as an effort to portray the United States as a threat.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/russia-nkorea-suggests-evacuating-diplomats-131611920.html

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Shutting down DNA construction: How senescence halts growth of potential cancers

Friday, April 5, 2013

Researchers from The Wistar Institute explain a new molecular mechanism behind the phenomenon of oncogene-induced senescence. By depriving the cell of the ability to make new nucleotides?the building blocks of DNA molecules?cells can suppress cancer development by forcing a damaged cell into a senescent state, where the cell remains alive yet cannot reproduce.

According to the researchers, their findings may offer a new strategy to strengthen the effects of anti-cancer drugs and chemotherapies.

Their results, which appear in the April 25 issue of Cell Reports (available online now), show how a senescent cell may become cancerous if supplied with a new source of nucleotides. Their experiments were performed using nevi?the technical term for moles?and melanoma cells, but the underlying mechanism may apply to all human cells.

"Oncogene-induced senescence is an automatic mechanism that arrests the growth of normal cells when an oncogene or cancer-causing gene is activated to prevent the progression of these cells into cancer," said Rugang Zhang, Ph.D., associate professor in The Wistar Institute Cancer Center's Gene Expression and Regulation program. "We identified how an oncogene can set senescence into motion by suppressing RRM2, an enzyme necessary for producing nucleotides."

Without the nucleotide building blocks of DNA, Zhang says, the cell cannot multiply. When new sources of nucleotides are introduced, however, the cell goes into overdrive, becoming cancerous.

Zhang offers an analogy comparing senescence to a construction site, where workers continue to build as long as they have a steady supply of bricks. When an oncogene is activated, it is like hiring an excess of workers. A normal cell's typical defense mechanism is to cancel orders for new bricks. When all the excess workers quickly run through their supply of bricks, the construction site shuts down. This is essentially senescence. If you suddenly flood the site with new building materials, the workers go into overdrive, building wildly without supervision. In the case of cancer, this causes the cells to put DNA building into overdrive?starting the endless cycles of cell growth and division that are the hallmark of cancer.

Wistar's Katherine Aird discusses the Zhang Lab's findings on the mechanics of oncogene-induced senescence. In the April 25, 2013 issue of the journal Cell Reports, they demonstrate how DNA damage can cause a cell to become senescent, a state where growth is halted. (A mole on your skin is an example of a senescent cell you see every day.) They show how this happens as cells suppress the ability to generate nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA). When you supply the cell with new sources of nucleotides, the cell will go into a frenzy of multiplication -- a hallmark of cancer.

Credit: The Wistar Institute

To explore how oncogene-induced senescence works, Zhang and his colleagues compared human moles (essentially, pre-cancerous lesions in a senescent state) to cancerous melanoma cells. They found that stable, senescent cells experienced a dramatic decrease in the available number of nucleotides. This was linked to the suppression of RRM2, a gene whose protein is important for making nucleotides. Further, they linked this RRM2 suppression to mutations in BRAF or NRAS, proteins that control the cycle of growth and replication within cells that have been labeled "oncogenes" because their mutation is linked to melanoma and other cancers. Indeed, they report that melanoma patients with high levels of RRM2 fare worse, overall.

Since cells that lacked nucleotides became senescent, the researchers wondered what would happen if they resupplied the cell with nucleotides?in essence, providing eager workers more bricks. They found that, even in cells with an inactive RRM2 gene, the cell rapidly resumed growing and dividing. Such an event in moles, for example, could be what causes melanoma.

"Moles are probably the most visible example of the effect of oncogene-induced senescence in human cells," said Katherine M. Aird, Ph.D., lead author of the study and postdoctoral fellow in the Zhang laboratory at Wistar. "The cells within a mole may have arrested growth, but they are still alive, and may regain activity, even turning cancerous. That is why your dermatologist might tell you to keep an eye on a seemingly benign mole, as changes in its size, color or shape could indicate that it is no longer benign."

According to Aird, if you could stabilize senescence, perhaps by targeting RRM2, it could put the brakes on even drug-resistant cells.

"This mechanism also suggests a strategy for patient therapy," Aird explained. "If we can decrease RRM2 activity, it could force tumor cells into a stronger senescent state, perhaps improving the effectiveness of chemotherapy or targeted drugs."

###

The Wistar Institute: http://www.wistar.org

Thanks to The Wistar Institute for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127608/Shutting_down_DNA_construction__How_senescence_halts_growth_of_potential_cancers

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