Video: Sitting on top

>>> to go until the iowa caucuses , the shifting sands of the race for the republican presidential nomination appear to be firming up tonight. with the latest breakout candidate, newt gingrich capitalizing on his recent surge, and now ron paul becoming a candidate to watch as we draw closer to primary season. the latest nbc news marist poll of two key early voting states conducted before herman cain 's abrupt departure from the race yesterday, is framing a contest far different than what we were looking at only a few weeks ago. nbc 's mike viqueira has the numbers and more.

>> reporter: newt gingrich this weekend, campaigning with the confidence of a front-runner.

>> i represent the world that works. obama is the world that fails.

>> reporter: with less than a month before the iowa caucus , gingrich now sits atop a new nbc marist poll, surging 21 points since october. mitt romney is down 8 to 18. ron paul is a major factor at 17%. and in new hampshire, romney still leads but gingrich had surged there too, up 19 to 23%, followed by paul and jon huntsman . the move comes a day after herman cain , appearing with wife glor gloria, effectively ended his run.

>> i am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distraction, the continued hurt caused on me and my family.

>> reporter: as the cain controversy took its toll on the former front-runner, gingrich was building steam.

>> in many ways the anybody but romney sentiment has really coalesced around the gingrich candidacy.

>> reporter: today gingrich rivals called his business and personal conduct into question.

>> we want someone who is actually going to fight washington, not someone who has been paid over $100 million in one year alone to influence it.

>> i think character is definitely an issue. you know, i think they have to make a decision based upon the person's entire record. and certainly character counts.

>> reporter: mitt romney campaigned door to door in new hampshire this weekend, and though his nomination is by no means clear, today he was the main target of the obama campaign .

>> he seems to think every day is a new day that he can simply change all of his positions depending on who his audience is or what the political circumstances and that is not what you want in a president of the united states . is that an issue? yes, that's an issue.

>> reporter: and, lester, as the campaign measures there is more gridlock in washington over extending the payroll tax cuts due to expire at the end of this month. now, the president and congressional republicans agree that they should be extended, but disagree on how to pay for it. it could cost as much as $300 billion next year to do so. if they can't come to a deal by the end of the month, it would mean an extra $1,000 in taxes next year for the average american family. lester?

>> mike viqueira, thanks. for more

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/45543651/

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Hillary St. Pierre: A Christmas Miracle

The first time I heard the wish was in April, a full eight months before Christmas, when most children have forgotten that Santa is watching and are busy planning their April vacation.

My Son, X, and I were sitting around on the floor, playing games, when X said seriously, "Mom, for Christmas, I am going to ask Santa to make you better."

"WHAT?!" I gasped, shocked.

"Where did this come from?!" I thought to myself, and worse, "How does my son know that he needs to ask for a miracle for me to be healthy?"

I thought we had done well hiding the fact my Hodgkin's Lymphoma was "incurable," and therefore, "terminal," but as so many parents do, I had underestimated what my son understood.

"I don't want toys..." He continued, nonchalantly, looking down at the toy he was playing with, "I just want you better."

Then the tears started to well up, and my heart started to break. He was willing, at the tender age of six, to give up all the toys in the world to ask for me to be healthy.

I finally got myself together to talk to him.

"You know you don't have to wait for Christmas to ask." I told him.

"You don't?!" He yelled, looking up quickly with his big brown eyes staring, curiously, like I had the answer to the all the world's problems.

"No, you don't have to wait," I said, "because God is Santa's boss. He is around all the time. Santa is a helper for one night."

"So we can start writing letters NOW?!" X screamed delightfully, half asking and half demanding.

"Yes, we can write letters, and we can pray every night..." I said, trailing off, dreamily, thinking about the possibility of my own mortality, and how it was affecting my little man.

X cut right into my thoughts, ready to start his letter to Santa, asking for me to be healthy, and praying for me to get better.

After his April request, I constantly did the math to see if I could be healthy for Christmas.

In August, I started a round of chemotherapy that required infusions every Monday for two to three months with the guarantee that I would be sick and hospitalized during active treatment, but possibly putting me in remission for November and the holiday season.

However, instead of getting better with treatment, I got worse. My lungs began to fail in August, and I underwent multiple biopsies and surgery to diagnose the problem. By the end of November, I was undiagnosed, oxygen dependent, relying only on a third of a lung to survive, and at 26 years old, instead of a miracle, I was thinking about stopping my medications and allowing nature to take its course.

But in the back of my mind I kept thinking about X's Christmas wish. Angrily, I wondered how God could do this to a child that put all his faith in him and Santa Claus asking for one selfless thing for Christmas.

But X never got angry. He never gave up hope. Instead, he kept reminding me that I'd be better for Christmas.

On Dec. 5th I was finally diagnosed with Bronchiolitis Obliterans, a life threatening complication of bone marrow transplantation scarier than cancer itself.

On Dec. 22, sicker than I'd ever been, I was wheeled into my Doctor's office. Seeing the state I was in, he recommended immediate hospitalization. Instead, I burst out crying thinking I could miss my last Christmas with my family and asked for prednisone.

Steroids are a double-edged sword in cancer care. Prednisone would alleviate the inflammation causing my lung failure, but it also would almost ensure my cancer would return.

The answer was easy. I opted for steroids.

The prednisone worked like a miracle. I could eat for the first time in months. I could play games with X. We were able to do all our Christmas traditions together, and X saw that with his determined faith his Christmas wish had come true.

It's been two years now since X made his Christmas wish. He still remembers all the letters to Santa and prayers to God he said for me to get better, but if he ever starts to forget or lose faith, I'm still here to remind him that God and Santa grant miracles, especially for Christmas.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hillary-st-pierre/christmas-wish-cancer-health_b_1127865.html

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Conservators Keep Last Supper Fresh

60-Second Science | More Science

A sophisticated air purifyication system protects The Last Supper from Milan's dirty air. Cynthia Graber reports.

December 1, 2011

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Milan is one of Europe?s most polluted cities. And that puts Leonardo da Vinci?s the Last Supper at risk. The painting has been on the wall of a dining hall in Milan?s Santa Maria Delle Grazie monestary for more than 500 years.

Particulates in the air from motor vehicles can accumulate and damage works of art. In response, Italian authorities installed a high-tech system of heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

To test its efficacy, researchers installed air monitors throughout the room housing the masterpiece, and outdoors. Over a year, they found that fine particulates were reduced indoors by 88 percent, and coarse particulates by 94 percent, compared to the levels outside. The research was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. [Nancy Daher et al, Chemical Characterization and Source Apportionment of Fine and Coarse Particulate Matter Inside the Refectory of Santa Maria Delle Grazie Church, Home of Leonardo Da Vinci?s ?Last Supper?]

The scientists say that?s a huge success.

The painting has been threatened before ? by Napoleon?s army, by the poor attempts of previous conservators, by bombs during World War II. Even airborne lipids from visitors? skin can pose a danger, mitigated by a strict regulation on the number of viewers.

But if conservation measures are successful, the Last Supper should feed art lovers for centuries to come.

?Cynthia Graber

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast]

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=2d7999b84242a984f7ee3d3f53cc4e0b

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Keeping It Real in Sci-Fi

Yet as Ridley Scott?s new Discovery Science show, Prophets of Science Fiction, chronicles, the genre deserves to be taken seriously for its ability to tease out the ethical and moral issues that accompany technological progress. Upon first hearing about Prophets, I expected the director of Alien and Blade Runner to get completely lost in space while discussing Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, and Philip K. Dick and how their work ?foreshadowed? current technologies. Despite the name (we?ll get to that later), I am happy to report that Scott delivered this concept just as efficiently as he delivered that alien baby to the screen: The show successfully brings science fiction and fact into conversation with one another. The first two episodes, for instance, pair Mary Shelley?s Frankenstein and Philip K. Dick?s entire paranoid oeuvre with J. Craig Venter?s creation of synthetic life, plus several other areas of cutting-edge science in which humans are erasing the ground rules of life, death, and reality.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=197256ad9e0f5e234ffb202d5a0d173b

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Thursday Dirt

Thursday Dirt

Celebrities With Tramp Stamps–The Frisky Hanson Brothers Launching Their Own Beer?–HollyWire Jersey Shore’s Vinny Raps About Rape?–Right Celebrity Beatles Amplifier Sells for Thousands?–The Celebrity Cafe [...]

Thursday Dirt Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News

Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2011/12/01/thursday-dirt-4/

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Shape Shifting Robot Shows Some Spine [Video]

Extreme Tech | Technology

Robots modeled after invertebrate squid, starfish and worms mimic natural movement without the need for complex and expensive mechanical components and assembly

By Larry Greenemeier ?| November 30, 2011

DO THE WORM: The researchers had their invertebrate-inspired robot execute limbolike moves to navigate underneath a glass plate elevated two centimeters above the ground. Image: Courtesy of Robert Shepherd

The notion that robots must be rigid metallic automatons made mobile by wheels, tracks or even legs has constrained the imagination of their designers. The weight of all those rods, gears and motors quickly adds up, and complex mechanical and electrical control systems are needed for robots to handle delicate objects or navigate across different types of terrain.

A team of researchers, including Harvard University chemist and materials scientist George Whitesides and Robert Shepherd, a postdoctoral fellow at Whitesides's lab, has eschewed this vertebrate-inspired approach in favor of a softer touch. Modeling their work on vastly more flexible, invertebrate squid, starfish and worms, Whitesides and his colleagues, earlier this week, reported online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that a combination of elastic polymers and pneumatic pumps has supplied the parts list for a simple robot capable of complex motion.

How complex? Their five-centimeter-thick quadruped was able to crawl and undulate its way through a space just two centimeters high. (The researchers actually executed limbolike moves to navigate their bot underneath a glass plate elevated two centimeters above the ground.) The robot, which looks like a pair of Ys joined at the stem, was made using soft lithography in two layers. Soft lithography is an approach to fabricating objects that uses a patterned elastomer as the stamp, mold or mask, as opposed to the more rigid materials used in photolithography.

The most significant breakthrough demonstrated by this flexible robot is that soft materials can provide a solution to natural movement without the need for complex mechanical components and assembly. It also demonstrates the value of considering simple animals when looking for inspiration for robots and machines, the researchers say.

The shape-shifting robot's upper, flexible layer comes embedded with a system of pneumatic channels through which air could pass. The lower one was made of a much more rigid polymer. The researchers placed the actuating layer onto the strain limiting/sealing layer? with a thin coating of silicone adhesive. Air pumped into different valves in the upper layer caused them to inflate and bend the robot into different positions. For example, the robot could lift any one of its four legs off the ground and leave the other three legs planted to provide stability, depending on which channels were inflated.

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The researchers are now exploring a variety of methods to design and make such robots autonomous. Onboard condensed-air cylinders and micro compressors are one route. "We will probably need to scale up the size of the robots a bit to support their load," says Whitesides, who is a member of Scientific American's board of advisors . "Additionally, our current tethered, soft robots can be coupled with hard robot systems to transport them to a location and support the load of the offboard cylinders and compressors."

In many applications, tethers are not a disadvantage, and in others, they are desirable or even required, the researchers say. "Remember, most robots?for example, those used in manufacturing?are fixed in place," Whitesides says, adding that autonomous movement is required for only certain tasks.

The researchers acknowledge that simple, inexpensive robots will probably not replace their more costly counterparts, but they could still have multiple uses. Robot-assisted mine rescues offer one possibility. In these, bots carrying cameras trek down narrow-diameter pipes hundreds of meters underground to search for survivors. Such robots are currently made mostly of metal and often become trapped in boreholes when cave-in aftershocks cause the ground to shift.

A potential disadvantage to these Gumbybots is that softer and more pliable material may rupture when moved across rough or sharp surfaces. Still, the researchers say that with the right mix of toughness and flexibility, they can develop robots that are cheaper to produce, lighter, able to be made big or small and much simpler to operate than their hard-metal brethren.

Advances in materials?polymers, in particular?will impact the development of soft robots by enabling them to operate in a higher pressure range, the researchers say. "We would also like elastomers that are tough, in the sense of being resistant to damage by cutting or puncture," Whitesides adds. "The area of soft robotics will provide many interesting problems for polymer scientists and materials scientists to work on."

Advances in artificial muscles would likewise assist in making these pliable robots more compact and provide more reproducible movement. "It would also allow us to mimic some of the very intricate designs to arms, tentacles or other structures directly," Whitesides says.

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Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=af249639cde4723be886c4031e5a6e4a

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'Just chill?' Relaxing can make you fatter

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Conventional wisdom says that exercise is a key to weight loss ? a no-brainer. But now, Tel Aviv University researchers are revealing that life as a couch potato, stretched out in front of the TV, can actually be "active inactivity" ? and cause you to pack on the pounds.

Such inactivity actually encourages the body to create new fat in fat cells, says Prof. Amit Gefen of TAU's Department of Biomedical Engineering. Along with his Ph.D. student Naama Shoham, Prof. Gefen has shown that preadipocyte cells ? the precursors to fat cells ? turn into fat cells faster and produce even more fat when subject to prolonged periods of "mechanical stretching loads" ? the kind of weight we put on our body tissues when we sit or lie down.

The research, which has been published in the American Journal of Physiology ? Cell Physiology, demonstrates another damaging effect of a modern, sedentary lifestyle, Prof. Gefen notes. "Obesity is more than just an imbalance of calories. Cells themselves are also responsive to their mechanical environment. Fat cells produce more triglycerides, and at a faster rate, when exposed to static stretching."

Stretching the fat

Prof. Gefen, who investigates chronic wounds that plague bed-ridden or wheelchair-bound patients, notes that muscle atrophy is a common side effect of prolonged inactivity. Studying MRI images of the muscle tissue of patients paralyzed by spinal cord injuries, he noticed that, over time, lines of fat cells were invading major muscles in the body. This spurred an investigation into how mechanical load ? the amount of force placed on a particular area occupied by cells ? could be encouraging fat tissue to expand.

In the lab, Prof. Gefen and his fellow researchers stimulated preadipocytes with glucose or insulin to differentiate them into fat cells. Then they placed individual cells in a cell-stretching device, attaching them to a flexible, elastic substrate. The test group of cells were stretched consistently for long periods of time, representing extended periods of sitting or lying down, while a control group of cells was not.

Tracking the cultures over time, the researchers noted the development of lipid droplets in both the test and control groups of cells. However, after just two weeks of consistent stretching, the test group developed significantly more ? and larger ? lipid droplets. By the time the cells reached maturity, the cultures that received mechanical stretching had developed fifty percent more fat than the control culture.

They were, in effect, half-again fatter.

According to Prof. Gefen, this is the first study that looks at fat cells as they develop, taking into account the impact of sustained mechanical loading on cell differentiation. "There are various ways that cells can sense mechanical loading," he explains, which helps them to measure their environment and triggers various chemical processes. "It appears that long periods of static mechanical loading and stretching, due to the weight of the body when sitting or lying, has an impact on increasing lipid production."

Counting more than calories

These findings indicate that we need to take our cells' mechanical environment into account as well as pay attention to calories consumed and burned, believes Prof. Gefen. Although there are extreme cases, such as people confined to wheelchairs or beds due to medical conditions, many of us live a too sedentary lifestyle, spending most of the day behind a desk. Even somebody with healthy diet and exercise habits will be negatively impacted by long periods of inactivity.

Next, Prof. Gefen and his fellow researchers will be investigating how long a period of time a person can sit or lie down without the mechanical load becoming a factor in fat production. But in the meantime, it certainly can't hurt to get up and take an occasional stroll, he suggests.

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American Friends of Tel Aviv University: http://www.aftau.org

Thanks to American Friends of Tel Aviv University 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.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/115650/_Just_chill___Relaxing_can_make_you_fatter

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