Top 5 iPhone and iPad apps for electronics shoppers

Breaking down the top 5 best iPhone and iPad shopping apps to help you find, compare, and buy the electronic gifts you need and want Itching to purchase a new electronic gadget or accessory and wish you could shop from the comfort of your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad? Whether...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/v24xqD3g5bs/story01.htm

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Former Langston University President Dies

',
calendar:'',
week:'{week}', dayClickable:'{date}', dayCurrent:'{date}', dayNone:'', day:'{date}', search:'' }, // Stored objects $container = $(loc), now = new Date(), current = now, minDate = new Date('12/5/2007'), station = wng_pageInfo.affiliateName||'kotv', months = ['January', 'February', 'March', 'April', 'May', 'June', 'July', 'August', 'September', 'October', 'November', 'December'], monthLengths = [31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31], // Helper methods renderTemplate = function(tpl, vars) { var retVal = templates[tpl]; if (typeof(retVal) === 'string') { for (var i in vars) { var regEx = new RegExp('\{' + i + '\}', 'g'); retVal = retVal.replace(regEx, vars[i]); } } else { retVal = null; } return retVal; }, // Renderers makeCalendar = function(date) { // Copy the date to a new object (so as not to overwrite the original) and set us to the beginning of the month date = new Date(date); date.setDate(1); current = date; var month = date.getMonth(), year = date.getFullYear(), firstDay = date.getDay(), out = '', days = '', colCount = 0, monthLength = monthLengths[month] + (month == 1 && year % 4 == 0 ? 2 : 1); // Figure up the month length taking into consideration leap years. Not accurate to 100+ years // Render the days before the start of the month if necessary for (var i = 0; i = minDate) { tpl = 'dayClickable'; } days += renderTemplate(tpl, {date:i}); colCount++; if (colCount % 7 == 0) { out += renderTemplate('week', {week:days}); days = ''; } } // Tack on the last week if (days != '') { out += renderTemplate('week', {week:days}); } // Render to the DOM out = renderTemplate('calendar', {days:out}); out = renderTemplate('controls', {month:months[month], year:year}) + out + templates.search; $container.html(out); // Determine whether the previous/next buttons should be shown date.setDate(1); if (date 12) { month = 1; year++; } makeCalendar(new Date(month + '/1/' + year)); } }, // Init init = function() { $container.addClass('gnmCalendar'); makeCalendar(now); }; init(); };

Source: http://www.news9.com/story/16391254/former-langston-university-president-dies

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5 die of food poisoning at Mexican rehab center (AP)

MEXICO CITY ? Medical officials say five recovering drug addicts died and dozens of others were sickened by soy sausage served for Christmas dinner at a rehabilitation center in western Mexico.

Authorities were investigating whether the poisoning at the center in the city of Guadalajara was accidental or intentional. Drug cartels have taken over rehabilitation centers in parts of Mexico, forcibly recruiting addicts as hit men and smugglers. The invasions have led to mass shootings at the centers that have left dozens dead.

Alhy Daniel Nunez is a spokesman for the Red Cross in the western state of Jalisco, where Guadalajara is located. He said Monday that 37 people remained hospitalized, three of them in serious condition.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/latam/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111227/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_mexico_rehab_poisoning

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Award-winning Japanese director Morita dead at 61 (omg!)

TOKYO (AP) ? Director Yoshimitsu Morita, whose films depicted the absurdity and vulnerability of everyday life in conformist Japan, has died. He was 61.

Morita, who won international acclaim over his prolific 30-year career, died Tuesday of acute liver failure at a Tokyo hospital, said Yoko Ota, spokeswoman at Toei Co., the film company behind his latest work.

Morita's movies were distinctly Japanese, depicting the fragile beauty of the nation's human psyche and visual landscape while daringly poking fun at its ridiculous tendency for rigid bureaucracy and ritualistic hierarchy.

Morita made a splash among global film buffs with 1983's "Family Game," starring Yusaku Matsuda of "Black Rain" as an offbeat tutor who forms a heartwarming relationship with a young man in a stereotypical middle-class family.

Its striking cinematography, focusing on rows and rows of identical apartments and people dining solemnly sitting side by side, was an exhilarating parody of Japanese family values.

His works were shown at many international film festivals, including Berlin and Montreal.

They included "Tsubaki Sanjuro," a 2007 remake of the 1962 classic by Akira Kurosawa, as well as works based on novels such as Soseki Natsume's poetic "Sorekara" and Junichi Watanabe's "Shitsurakuen."

"Bokutachi Kyuko A Ressha de Iko," a comedy about train lovers starring Kenichi Matsuyama of Tran Anh Hung's "Norwegian Wood," will be released posthumously next year, Toei said Wednesday.

Funeral arrangements were still undecided. Morita is survived by his wife Misao.

___

Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter at http://twitter.com/yurikageyama

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/omg_rss/rss_omg_en/news_award_winning_japanese_director_morita_dead61_055923308/43969051/*http%3A//omg.yahoo.com/news/award-winning-japanese-director-morita-dead-61-055923308.html

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Engadget's Holiday Blues-buster 2011: win a Samsung Galaxy S II, courtesy of Broadcom!

We continue into Day 3 of our week-long Holiday Blues-buster giveaway, in which we're handing out a top-of-the-line gadget to a lucky reader every single day! Today Broadcom is hoping to "connect everything" by hooking you up with an unlocked GT-I9100 Samsung Galaxy S II. That's right -- the original and international version. So if you've been following along in our contest, you know what to do. All of our newcomers, head below to the peek at the rules before entering. Good luck!

Continue reading Engadget's Holiday Blues-buster 2011: win a Samsung Galaxy S II, courtesy of Broadcom!

Engadget's Holiday Blues-buster 2011: win a Samsung Galaxy S II, courtesy of Broadcom! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tissue structure delays cancer development

Monday, December 19, 2011

Cancer growth normally follows a lengthy period of development. Over the course of time, genetic mutations often accumulate in cells, leading first to pre-cancerous conditions and ultimately to tumour growth. Using a mathematical model, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in G?ttingen, University of Pennsylvania and University of California San Francisco, have now shown that spatial tissue structure, such as that found in the colon, slows down the accumulation of genetic mutations, thereby delaying the onset of cancer. Their model could help in the assessment of tissue biopsies and improve predictions of the progression of certain cancer types.

Many types of cancer develop unnoticed in the body over a long number of years before the disease erupts. The point of departure is provided by specific genetic mutations including point mutations, copy number alterations, loss of heterozygosity, and other structural rearrangements, that gradually accumulate in the cells, leading to the formation of pre-cancerous lesions. If a certain number of mutations is reached in individual cells, the cells begin to proliferate unchecked. For some cancer types, the accumulation process can take up to 20 years. However, not everyone with pre-cancerous tissue will actually develop cancer; the formation of abnormal cells often has no medical consequences. To date, it is still unclear why tumours develop in some cases and not in others.

Using mathematical modelling, a research group headed by Erik Martens and Oskar Hallatschek of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in G?ttingen have studied how genetic mutations spread, the speed of the mutation accumulation process, and the impact of this process on the progression of pre-cancerous conditions. They have shown that the destiny of oncogenic or cancer-causing mutations depends in part on where they occur and how much competition they are exposed to from other, similar mutations. In an environment without any spatial structure, for example in the blood, genetic mutations can propagate and accumulate relatively fast. In tissue with clear spatial structure, such as that of the colon, however, it takes longer for cells to accumulate the number of mutations required for tumour formation.

The study was based on a theoretical model of evolution developed by the two Max Planck scientists. Many genetic mutations are detrimental to the mutated cells and therefore do not prosper. On the other hand, certain genetic alterations give their hosts a competitive advantage over other cells. This includes, for example, mutations that increase the rate of cell division. "That direct advantage enables cells with this type of mutation to proliferate and accumulate in the tissue; but in such cases, what is advantageous to the cell is harmful to the patient, as it may ultimately cause cancer", explains Erik Martens.

The model used in this research was based on tissue like that of the intestinal wall, which contains many pockets or crypts, each containing isolated groups of cells that may accumulate and carry different mutations. If mutations arise only rarely, they may spread unhindered through the pre-cancerous tissue. However, if other mutations occur before the first one has spread throughout the tissue, the diverse mutation clones meet and compete with one another for survival. In such cases, there are many losers and few winners, and only certain mutations are successful in establishing themselves.

In principle, advantageous mutations cannot proliferate as quickly in spatially structured cell populations as in fully mixed or structureless populations. Consequently, the competition between mutations in spatially structured tissue is often very strong, and the mutation accumulation rate is lower than in non-structured populations. According to the study, this is why structured populations take longer to reach a critical number of mutations, thereby delaying the onset of cancer.

"Even though many types of cancer arise in body tissues with clear spatial structures, most earlier models of cancer progression neglected this aspect and were based on well-mixed cell populations", explains Erik Martens. "However, it is important to integrate the structural aspect in order to better predict how pre-cancerous conditions progress. For instance, tissue with spatial structure accumulates fewer mutations over a given period than tissue with unstructured cells. It could therefore be that the number of mutations required to trigger certain types of cancer has been overestimated". The researchers hope that their findings will help improve the interpretation of tissue biopsies and contribute to more realistic predictions of cancer progression.

###

Erik A. Martens, Rumen Kostadinov, Carlo C. Maley and Oskar Hallatschek Spatial Structure Increases the Waiting Time for Cancer New Journal of Physics 13, 115014 (2011), doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/13/11/115014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/13/11/115014

Erik A. Martens and Oskar Hallatschek Interfering Waves of Adaptation Promote Spatial Mixing Genetics 189 (2011), doi: 10.1534/genetics.111.130112 http://www.genetics.org/content/189/3/1045.full.pdf+html

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft: http://www.mpg.de

Thanks to Max-Planck-Gesellschaft for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 47 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116134/Tissue_structure_delays_cancer_development

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No brakes on breast cancer cells

Friday, December 16, 2011

MicroRNAs or miRNAs are tiny RNA molecules that have only about 20 nucleotides and do not code for proteins. They regulate many important processes in cells by binding to target messenger RNAs ? the instructions for protein production ?, thus blocking production of the respective protein. In cancer, the production of some miRNAs is often reduced or amplified. This particularly affects miRNAs that regulate the activity of cancer-promoting genes.

A key molecule in the development of cancer is a transcription factor called NFkappaB, which is an important switch for many genes with inflammation-promoting effects. At DKFZ, Professor Dr. Stefan Wiemann and collaborators have now investigated whether microRNAs that affect NFkappaB production are deregulated in breast cancer. Jointly with colleagues at Heidelberg and Tuebingen University Hospitals, the DKFZ team studied over 800 miRNAs and discovered a family of RNA molecules known as miR-520, which particularly strongly reduce the production of NFkappaB. "If the cells produce less NFkappaB, the production of inflammation-promoting signaling molecules is reduced. This puts a brake on cancer growth, because these signaling molecules promote invasive capacity, formation of new vessels and metastasis," says Ioanna Keklikoglou, a doctoral student Wiemann's department, explaining this mechanism.

However, miR-520 does not only act like a cancer brake by suppressing NFkappaB. In addition, Wiemann's team discovered that this microRNA also blocks another cancer-promoting signaling pathway that is triggered by growth factor TGF-beta. TGF-beta signals cause malignant cells to be less firmly anchored in the tissue and, thus, better able to invade surrounding organs ? a characteristic feature of cancer cells.

Subsequently, the DKFZ researchers studied the question of whether the findings obtained in cancer cells in the culture dish are also involved in breast cancer. Studying tumor tissue samples of 76 patients, the team discovered that tumors which have already spread to the lymph nodes produce less miR-520 than those which have not yet spread. However, this connection was only found in tumors that do not produce receptors for the female sexual hormone, estrogen (ER-negative tumors).

"Our findings clearly demonstrate that miR-520 is a genuine cancer brake that suppresses the malignant behavior of tumor cells in two different ways at once," said Stefan Wiemann, commenting on the findings reported in his now published work. "This cancer brake appears to fail in many ER-negative breast tumors ? and also in cells of other types of cancer, as colleagues have now demonstrated." ER-negative breast cancer is particularly difficult to treat in many cases. Developing a microRNA therapy that blocks several cancer-promoting signaling pathways at once may therefore be an interesting option.

###

I Keklikoglou, C Koerner, C Schmidt, JD Zhang, D Heckmann, A Shavinskaya, H Allgayer, B G?ckel, T Fehm, A Schneeweiss, ? Sahin, S Wiemann and U Tschulena: MicroRNA-520/373 family functions as a tumor suppressor in estrogen receptor negative breast cancer by targeting NF-kappaB and TGF-b signaling pathways. Oncogene 2011, DOI: 10.1038/onc.2011.571

Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres: http://www.helmholtz.de/en/index.html

Thanks to Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 121 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116107/No_brakes_on_breast_cancer_cells

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At Home: Tough Love Experts!

Fans of the hit VH1 show Tough Love Miami have occasionally seen the huge Philly condo where Steve and JoAnn Ward do the legwork for the business end of their hit reality show, but what viewers don?t know is that the Wards also use their Philadelphia home base as a gathering spot for family dinners. In fact, the entire Ward brood is planning to spend much of the upcoming holidays relaxing at the space, which is actually a converted industrial property that was rehabbed and turned into an ultra-modern loft.

?It?s like our party house,? says Steve, who admits that when they are taping at their Philly abode, occasionally his mom, JoAnn, will cook meals for the entire crew. ?Everyone loves her chicken cacciatore,? says Steve.

The Tough Love Miami special airs Sunday, December 18 at 8 p.m. ET.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InTouchWeekly/~3/Db-qtkCcnJ0/at_home_tough_love_experts.php

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Euro under pressure as EU summit optimism fades (AP)

FRANKFURT, Germany ? Investors have soured on the latest attempt to resolve the European debt crisis.

Stocks tumbled around the world Wednesday, the euro slid to an 11-month low and borrowing costs spiked for heavily indebted Italy. The markets' jitters reflect rising doubts about the deal European Union leaders reached at a summit last Friday in Brussels.

The agreement requires the 17 countries that use the euro and nine other EU countries to balance their budgets and gives the International Monetary Fund up to euro200 ($264 billion) to help countries with high debt loads.

But there's growing disappointment that the new EU treaty:

? Doesn't reduce existing government debt levels;

? Doesn't do much to promote the long-term growth that would shrink those burdens;

? Doesn't provide enough money to reassure financial markets that Italy and Spain can keep paying their bills.

"Fiscal discipline is needed in the long term, but it doesn't address today's crisis," says Athanasios Vamvakidis, head European currency strategist at Merrill Lynch-Bank of America. "There isn't enough money to stop the run on sovereign bonds of Italy and Spain. Investors don't want to buy their debt."

It was also unclear how the agreement, which is being written into a treaty, would be enforced and whether some of the countries that signed on might end up dropping out because of resistance to budget cuts back home. Britain has rejected the deal.

"Markets like quick fixes and have no patience with the length of the political processes," says Gianni Toniolo, a professor of economics and history at Duke University.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi praised the agreement made in Brussels. But so far he has rejected calls for the bank to make large-scale purchases of European bonds, something financial markets are hoping for and that would help put downward pressure on government borrowing costs.

The Dow Jones industrials fell 131 points, or 1.1 percent, to 11,823. The euro traded below $1.30 for the first time since January 12, hitting a low of $1.2973. Some of that is loss of confidence in the assets of the 17 euro nations, but it's also the result of two quarter-point interest rate cuts from the European Central Bank. The cuts lower the return on euro-denominated holdings and can induce investors to move money elsewhere.

European stock markets fell broadly. Germany's DAX dropped 1.7 percent; France's main stock index lost 3.3 percent.

Italy held its last bond auction of the year on Wednesday and it didn't go well. Investors demanded even more money to lend to the eurozone's third-largest economy. Italy paid 6.47 percent interest to borrow euro3 billion ($3.95 billion) for five years, up from 6.30 percent just a month ago.

The higher rates reflected investors' fears over the inadequacy of last week's agreement to keep eurozone governments from piling up more debt in the future. Italy has a staggering euro1.9 trillion ($2.5 trillion) in outstanding debt, and its economy is too large for Europe to bail out. Greece, Ireland and Portugal have been bailed out.

European officials are scheduled to meet Thursday to work out the details of the treaty negotiated in Brussels, according to one European official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential.

The new treaty aims to impose tighter rules on how much money eurozone governments can spend. EU leaders agreed to limit deficits to 0.5 percent of economic output in regular economic times and to better enforce penalties against countries whose deficits rise too high.

The treaty will not be signed until March, at the earliest.

Several knotty issues must be resolved, including how budget rules contained in the new treaty will be reconciled with those in the basic treaty of the European Union, which remains unchanged. Another detail to be sorted out is whether countries signing on to the new treaty can legally rely on EU institutions, such as the European Commission and the European Court of Justice, to enforce its rules.

Governments and national parliaments are also leery of transferring too much sovereignty to Brussels or their fellow euro members.

"The process of negotiating the final deal to suit all will only add to doubts about its relevance in the long run ? meanwhile the immediate crisis continues," said Elisabeth Afseth, an analyst at Evolution Securities.

Meanwhile, European banks are under mounting pressure. The German government announced Wednesday it was reactivating its financial sector rescue fund. And the European Banking Authority said last week that the continent's banks need to raise about euro115 billion ($149 billion) to protect lenders against market turmoil, including bad government debt.

German banks need to raise euro13.1 billion ($17 billion); the country's second-biggest bank, Commerzbank AG, has been told it needs to raise euro5.3 billion ($6.89 billion).

Last week's summit did come up with a commitment from EU governments to loan up to euro200 ($264 billion) to the International Monetary Fund, which could help out the eurozone. Yet not all countries have made firm commitments to do this, and some poorer countries in Eastern Europe that do not use the euro are not happy about being asked to help pay for richer countries' mistakes.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas said he is personally against contributing the roughly 90 billion koruna (euro3.5 billion; $4.6 billion) that is sought, although his country has not made a final decision. In Slovakia, which uses the euro, the leader of a center-right party in the government said he has an "overall negative" view of the plan.

Leaders did agree to start a new euro500 billion ($659 billion) euro backstop fund, the European Stability Mechanism, a year ahead of time in July. But there are doubts about whether it is enough to soothe markets.

Many economists say the European Central Bank will eventually have to step up its so-far limited purchases of government debt ? because only that will keep borrowing costs down.

ECB President Mario Draghi has said governments shouldn't count on central bank bailouts; instead he said they should cut deficits and take steps to improve growth to win back bond market confidence.

Until recently, the euro had been surprisingly resilient against the dollar, despite the pressures heaped upon it by the debt crisis. That is partly because interest rates in Europe have been so much higher than those in the U.S., where the Federal Reserve has kept its main interest rate near zero percent.

That interest rate differential has helped offset the concerns investors naturally felt as the European debt crisis raged and threatened to undermine Europe's banking system and the currency itself.

But the ECB has cut rates twice since early November, giving investors one less motive to buy euros. That is one reason the euro lost ground Wednesday.

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says the market's impatience likely will pay off ? by putting pressure on European leaders to find a lasting solution to the crisis. "You need a certain amount of market volatility because otherwise these decisions will never be made," he says.

__

AP Business Writers Paul Wiseman in Washington and Bernard Condon in New York contributed. Steinhauser contributed from Brussels

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/eurobiz/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111214/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_europe_financial_crisis

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Will airborne launch pads replace the Space Shuttle program?

Stratolaunch Systems, founded by?Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is planning to build a huge carrier aircraft that will launch unmanned rockets into space. ?

Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen is planning to build a spaceship that could replace the Space Shuttle this decade.

Skip to next paragraph

Allen is hoping his new company ? called Stratolaunch Systems ? will launch unmanned rockets from a flying carrier plane to ferry government and commercial payloads into space and back, and eventually evolve to human space missions.

The initiative comes only months after the United States retired the Space Shuttle program after 30 years, opening the door to private enterprise to supply space vehicles.

Allen's rocket will be launched from a massive carrier aircraft powered by six jumbo jet engines, to be constructed by Scaled Composites, a unit of defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. The rocket itself will be made by private space company SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal.

The first test flight is targeted within five years.

"I have long dreamed about taking the next big step in private space flight," said Allen in a statement. "To offer a flexible, orbital space delivery system."

Allen - listed by Forbes magazine as the world's 57th richest person, with a fortune of $13.2 billion - is the latest in a line of tech billionaires with interests in the privatization of space travel.

His space ambitions put him alongside Musk and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to put people into space at an affordable price, rather than the millions of dollars it has cost up to now. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is also looking to transport passengers into sub-orbital space.

Allen, who made up the name Microsoft, co-founded what became the world's biggest software company with Bill Gates in 1975.

Lacking Gates' single-minded drive for business success, he left Microsoft in 1983, as he dealt with a first battle with cancer. He recently survived a second course of treatment for a different type of cancer, but says he is healthy now.

Allen's interests and investments range far and wide, but are focused on his native Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

He owns the Seattle Seahawks professional football team, the

Trail Blazers basketball team in Portland, and his investment firm developed much of the South Lake Union neighborhood which is central to Seattle's re-emergence as a technology center.

He is a generous donor to the University of Washington and is funding new research into the brain.

For leisure pursuits, he owns one of the world's largest yachts and built the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. Allen's memoir, titled "Idea Man", was published earlier this year.

(Editing by Gunna Dickson)

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/qW6uERNlVOc/Will-airborne-launch-pads-replace-the-Space-Shuttle-program

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Steve Nelson: I'm Dreaming of a Newt Christmas

'Tis just weeks before Christmas and all through the land,
The prospects for Republicans aren't looking so grand.
As dear Santa is donning his festive red suit,
Both on network and cable, all we hear of is Newt.

Pawlenty dropped out, then we lost Herman Cain,
Of initial contenders, only several remain.
Perry stays on, though we know he can't win it,
For whenever he opens his mouth... foot is in it.

And Bachmann, my goodness, her campaign is failin',
She's enough to make feminists love Sarah Palin.
And then there's Ron Paul, a most loveable crank,
That he can't be elected, lucky stars we must thank.

Another one who simply can't find a quorum,
Is the earnest young moralist, Richard Santorum.
No matter how much sanctimony he floats,
It seems nobody, listens, he garners no votes.

And what must be going through Romney's poor mind?
When no matter who falters, he still stays behind.
Like the kid on the playground, with brand new gym shoes,
Mitt's the very last pick, for they all know he'll lose.

How ironic for Huntsman, another Latter-Day Saint,
Is losing to Gingrich, (who a Saint he sure ain't!)
Huntsman and Mitt, Mormon men all their lives,
And it's Newt who's had fun taking multiple wives!

But Newt is the man, and he's most entertaining,
And the fun just gets better, as the polls show him gaining.
He takes millions from Freddie, "just consulting," he claims,
Nope, he'd never take money to advance Freddie's aims.
He never would lobby, he's just a historian,
He proclaims with a sneer and a tone quite stentorian.

And among the grand plans he declares for the nation,
Is a whole new approach to poor kids' education.
Clean toilets! Sweep floors! That will teach them to learn,
How to get off the dole... their own keep they should earn.
Because black kids in poverty have it too easy,
The fathers are lazy and the mothers are sleazy.

Political memories have too rapid extinction,
For we seem to forget Newt's most ignoble distinction.
His greatest achievement, not campaigns or speeches,
Is how Congress addressed Newt's deep ethical breaches.

Peers delivered a stern, quite direct, reprimand,
And fined Newt the Speaker about $300 grand,
In all of our history, only once this transpired.
(If it happened to you or to me, we'd be fired.)

But Newt's made of Teflon and his every transgression,
Just goes poof as he genuflects, goes to Confession,
Whatever his faith at the time happens to be,
He's got some religion to lean on, to say, "Forgive me."

But even if Newt wins each coming primary,
Imagine the huge load of baggage he'll carry!
But let's not complain, not be driven to tears,
'Cause it also means Barack gets another 4 years!

But enough about Newt, 'tis the season for joy,
And to all Huff Post readers, to each girl and each boy,
Whether atheist, Muslim, or fan of the Pontiff,
Merry Christmas to some and to others, Good Yontiff!

?

Follow Steve Nelson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/snelson0248

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-nelson/twas-the-night-before-christmas-parody_b_1144308.html

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Kardashians, Cowell are 'most fascinating'

Nov.?? What do Britain's Pippa Middleton and the U.S. Kardashian family have in common?

They are all among the 10 most fascinating people of 2011, according to veteran U.S. journalist Barbara Walters.

Middleton, 28, younger sister of Prince William's new wife Kate, was named on Wednesday along with British reality TV guru Simon Cowell, singer Katy Perry and businessman Donald Trump as making the list in Walter's annual ABC TV special.

Walters will announce the No. 1 most fascinating person of 2011 when the 90-minute show "Barbara Walters Presents the 10 Most Fascinating People of 2011" airs on Dec. 14.

Other celebrities making up the top 10 most prominent names in entertainment, sport and pop culture include baseball star Derek Jeter, and "Modern Family" actors Eric Stonestreet and Jesse Tyler Ferguson who play a gay couple on the Emmy-winning TV comedy.

Middleton found unexpected fame during the British royal wedding in April when she wore a figure-hugging white dress as maid of honor to her sister Kate. She has been a constant fixture in U.S. and British celebrity media ever since.

Story: Kourtney Kardashian pregnant with second child

Socialite sisters Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian and their mother Kris ? the biggest reality TV stars in the United States ? found new fame in 2011 when Kim held a lavish summer TV wedding after a whirlwind romance that ended in her filing for divorce just 72 days later.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45501091/ns/today-entertainment/

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Occupy hangover for cities, protesters

Los Angeles police officers cleared out the Occupy LA encampment early Tuesday morning. KNBC-TV reports.

After a long night for police and protesters, Occupy encampments in Los Angeles and Philadelphia were empty Wednesday morning. The cities were dealing with the?aftermath of the two-month occupations ? legal battles and park clean-up. And though the mass roundup in Los Angeles remained largely nonviolent, it sparked debate over whether jail officials were being unnecessarily punitive.

The Los Angeles police worked throughout the night to process the 292 people arrested, all but two of whom who were booked for refusing to leave City Hall and nearby intersections after the city declared those to be unlawful assemblies. Bail for the misdemeanor charges?was set at $5,000 each.

Masked sanitation workers hauled away 25 tons of debris from the lawns around Los Angeles City Hall after police raided the protesters' camp in the middle of the night and arrested more than 300 people.

In Philadelphia, dozens of police patrolled a plaza outside City Hall after sweeping it of demonstrators and arresting 50.

Mass arrest
Because of the large number of arrests in Los Angeles, protesters were taken to three different jail facilities for booking, and spokesmen who were reached said they did not know how many remained in custody at 2 p.m. PST.

A bail bondsman in Los Angeles said that?he had received three calls from family members on behalf of protesters, but that he couldn?t help until they were completely processed. He said that could take up to 24 hours.

?We are not able to move forward on these bonds is because they are still processing people in,? said Greg Rynerson, an owner of Rynerson?s Bail Bonds. The procedures ? getting fingerprinted, photographed, run through background checks ? normally take one to six hours after arrest, he said.

?But when you have this kind of volume, I imagine the jail staff is completely overwhelmed,? he said.

By accounts from both sides, the police operation in Los Angeles remained largely peaceful. There was one arrest for interfering with a law enforcement officer and one for battery on a police officer, according to LAPD public information officer Andrew Smith.

?The people who were arrested pretty much were volunteers to be arrested ? as they have at other rallies,? Smith said.

At a news conference Wednesday morning, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck proclaimed his officers' operation a success.

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

A Los Angeles police officer walks through the vacated site of Occupy LA outside City Hall on Wednesday. Demonstrators were camped here for two months to protest economic inequality and financial system excesses.

"The world was watching? and what the world saw was an elegant operational plan that was brilliantly executed by America's finest police force," Beck said.

NBC Los Angeles reported that the final holdouts at the encampment ? a dog and three people in a tree house ? were removed by officers using a Bomb Assault Tactical Control Assessment Tool ? basically a souped-up forklift.

The operation might help?Los Angeles police?shed their bad reputation for abuse.

?On Los Angeles ? it is no longer the most violent police force in America,? said attorney Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit human rights litigation organization in New York.The National Lawyers Guild, which has been supporting the Occupy protesters, condemned the arrests, peaceful or not.

LA police: 'Brilliantly executed' raid on Occupy camp

?The Los Angeles Police Department is deliberately refusing to release anyone arrested in the Occupy raids with a notice to appear,? said Carol Sobel, NLG board member. ?The city is holding them in jail on $5,000 bail until they can be arraigned by a judge, which can take up to 48 hours. This punishes people for exercising their First Amendment rights.?

Protesters posting on the Occupy Los Angeles?website disagreed about whether the police action was peaceful. Participants were urging protesters to send in raw video footage they collected to document alleged abuses.

There have been no formal complaints about police treatment in the action, said Bruce Borihanh, an?LAPD spokesman.

Looking ahead, the city of Los Angeles was dusting off a landscaping plan for the park around city hall, timely grounds work that will effectively prevent people from using it, according to a senior city hall staffer who said was not authorized as a spokesperson.

What?s next for occupiers?
Protesters across the nation were pondering how to proceed with the movement's ?occupation? phase ending.

In the past few weeks, police broke up encampments in other cities as Portland, Ore., Oakland, Calif., and New York, where the sit-down protests against social inequality and corporate excesses began in mid-September, The Associated Press reported.

Demonstrators are still at it in places like Boston and Washington, which each had encampments of about 100 tents Wednesday. Dozens of protesters are fighting eviction from a community college campus in Seattle.

Police clear Los Angeles and Philadelphia encampments. NBC's Chris Clackum reports.

The camps may bloom again in the spring, organizers told the?AP, and next summer could bring huge demonstrations at the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions, when the whole world is watching. But for now they are promoting dozens of smaller actions, such as picketing the president in New York and staging sit-ins at homes marked for foreclosure.

"We intend to use this for what it is ? basically six months to get our feet underneath us, to get strong," said Phil Striegel, a community activist in San Francisco.

Protesters elsewhere also refuse to concede defeat.

Meet Nashville's square-dancing Occupiers

In New York City on Wednesday evening, groups of marchers threaded their way through traffic to demonstrate at the Sheraton Hotel, where President Barack Obama was due to speak. They included a group of "peace grannies," people playing drums and other instruments, and others carrying American flags and Occupy signs.?

Protesters in Philadelphia planned a march from the city's well-to-do Rittenhouse Square to police headquarters Wednesday afternoon and also called for a "victory march" for Friday or Saturday, the AP reported.

"Occupy Philly is alive and well," said Katonya Mosley, a member of the group's legal collective. She said members have been communicating via list serves, text messages and email and planned to continue meeting in cafes and other spaces. Local groups have also offered to donate space for the protesters to continue meeting, Mosley said.

While one faction received a permit for a scaled-down protest across the street, she said, Occupy Philadelphia as a whole hasn't decided whether to go that route. The city has said any new permit would include a ban on camping.

In St. Louis, protesters whose camp was broken up by police on Nov. 12 planned to march to the Federal Reserve Bank office on Thursday. John Mills, a technical writer, called the dissolution of the camp a minor setback.

"It's dampened some spirits, but I think people are just as passionate, just as excited and just as ready for change as they were before," Mills said.

Click here to follow Kari Huus on Facebook.

Source: http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/30/9124091-occupy-hangover-for-cities-protesters

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Why does Mars Curiosity rover have a laser raygun?

NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, is armed with a laser to zap rocks, not Martians. The laser can vaporize rocks at a distance of 23 feet.

Yes, NASA's Mars rover has a laser gun.

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But there are no plans for Curiosity to zap Martians.

This cool little laser ? and it is tiny ? is designed to vaporize a pin-head sized area of Martian rock. The laser heats up the rock, and turns it into a glowing ionized gas. It's part of an instrument on the rover Curiosity known as the "ChemCam." The ChemCam observes the flash of vaporized rock and analyzes the spectrum of light to identify the chemical elements in the rock. The laser has a range of about 23 feet.

Here's how NASA describes the process:

"The pinhead-size spot hit by ChemCam's laser gets as much power focused on it as a million light bulbs, for five one-billionths of a second. Light from the resulting flash comes back to ChemCam through the instrument's telescope, mounted beside the laser high on the rover's camera mast. The telescope directs the light down an optical fiber to three spectrometers inside the rover. The spectrometers record intensity at 6,144 different wavelengths of ultraviolet, visible and infrared light. Different chemical elements in the target emit light at different wavelengths."

If the ChemCam analysis proves interesting, the Curiosity rover can move in and drill or scoop up an actual sample of the rock. The pulse laser can also be used to "dust off" an interesting rock formation with a series of short bursts.?

NASA officials note that earlier Mars rover missions have been unable to identify some of the lighter elements, such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, lithium and boron. They note, for example, that a Mars mission in 2005 looked at an outcrop called "Comanche," and it took years of analyzing indirect evidence before the team could confidently infer the presence of carbon in the rock. ChemCam can identify carbon with one shot.

The idea for putting a laser on a Mars rover is traced by NASA back to 1997. At the time, Roger Wiens was a geochemist with the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, and was working on an idea for using lasers to investigate the moon. Wiens visited a chemistry laboratory building where a colleague, Dave Cremers, had been experimenting with a different laser technique. Cremers set up a cigar-size laser powered by a little 9-volt radio battery and pointed at a rock across the room.

"The room was well used. Every flat surface was covered with instruments, lenses or optical mounts," Wiens recalls in a NASA web site. "The filing cabinets looked like they had a bad case of acne. I found out later that they were used for laser target practice."

The ChemCam fits into Curiosity's mission to understand the chemistry of Mars and is? "an important next step in addressing the issue of life in the universe,"? John Grotzinger, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.,? told The Christian Science Monitor's Pete Spotts recently.

The Mars mission, launched Saturday Nov. 26, aims to reconstruct from the planet's minerals the history of water, a liquid essential to life as researchers currently understand it. As Spotts wrote:

"The record of environmental conditions early in the planet's history, when it was thought to have been at its wettest, is believed to be written in the layers of rock the Mars Science Laboratory's team has identified in Gale Crater, a 100-mile-wide impact feature with a mountain that soars three miles high from the center of the crater's floor.

After an eight-and-a-half-month cruise, a nail-biting final descent aims to place the six-wheeled robotic chemist squarely in the crater.

If all goes well, Curiosity will initially spend 98 weeks traversing some 12 miles or more ? driving, drilling, then analyzing the drill tailings to help build a picture of the environments that existed at the location as the planet made the transition from a wet planet, to a periodically wet planet, to the desiccated orb humans are visiting today."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/5liVUZ3-w2A/Why-does-Mars-Curiosity-rover-have-a-laser-raygun

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