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FILE - In this July 4, 2011 file photo, Britain's Prince William heads toward a Sea King helicopter for a training exercise, in Dalvay-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Prince William joined a frantic rescue mission Sunday, Nov. 27, 2011, after a cargo ship sank in the Irish Sea, leaving several crew members still missing. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Paul Chiasson, file)
FILE - In this July 4, 2011 file photo, Britain's Prince William heads toward a Sea King helicopter for a training exercise, in Dalvay-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Prince William joined a frantic rescue mission Sunday, Nov. 27, 2011, after a cargo ship sank in the Irish Sea, leaving several crew members still missing. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Paul Chiasson, file)
Holyhead breakwater is seen during high seas, Sunday Nov. 27, 2011. Six people are missing and two have been rescued after a cargo ship sank in the Irish Sea early on Sunday in gale force winds off the coast of north Wales, British authorities said. Holyhead Coastguard said the Swanland cargo ship, with eight people on board and carrying thousands of tons of limestone, sent a mayday call reporting that the vessel's hull had cracked in poor weather conditions. (AP Photo/Peter Byrne, PA) UNITED KINGDOM OUT
LONDON (AP) ? Prince William joined a frantic search and rescue mission Sunday after a cargo ship sank in the Irish Sea, leaving several members of the Russian crew missing.
The second in line to the British throne, who is a Royal Air Force helicopter and known professionally as Flight Lt. William Wales, was aboard an aircraft which rescued two crew members early Sunday, after their vessel's hull cracked in gale force winds off the coast of north Wales.
Britain's defense ministry said William had been co-pilot of the helicopter, which carried two people back to his base RAF Valley, on the Welsh island of Anglesey.
Authorities said five people remain missing after the Cook Islands-registered Swanland cargo ship, which had eight people on board and was carrying thousands of tons of limestone, sent a mayday call.
Holyhead Coastguard said one body had been recovered from the sea, but that the fate of the other crew members was not yet known.
"We know that at least some of them are wearing immersion suits and have strobe lighting with them, however sea conditions are challenging at best," said Jim Green, a coastguard spokesman.
Rescue helicopters from RAF Valley and from Dublin coastguard base in Ireland were initially sent to the scene, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of the Llyn peninsula in north Wales.
Helicopters from RAF Chivenor, in southwest England, and the Irish Coastguard are continuing to search for the missing crew, along with boats from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
"Two RNLI lifeboats, along with four search and rescue helicopters and two other commercial boats, are searching for the remaining six crew," the RNLI said in a statement.
Gale force winds battered the Irish Sea on Sunday and the coastguard said it is believed the poor condition could have caused the incident.
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TEHRAN, Iran ? Iran's parliament on Sunday approved a bill requiring both Iran and Britain to withdraw their respective ambassadors from each other's countries, following London's support of recently upgraded U.S. sanctions on Tehran.
Tehran's relations with Britain have become increasingly strained over the past few months, largely driven by increasing tensions over Tehran's disputed nuclear program. The West says Iran is developing weapons; Tehran denies the claims.
During an open session broadcast live by state radio, 171 out of 196 lawmakers present voted for the bill requiring Iran to reduce its relationship with Britain to the level of charge d'affaires within two weeks. Ismail Kowsari, a lawmaker and one of the sponsors of the bill, told the official IRNA news agency that the bill would lead to the removal of ambassadors.
Britain's Foreign Office on Sunday said the decision to order the country's ambassador, Dominick John Chilcott, to leave Tehran was regrettable.
"This unwarranted move will do nothing to help the regime address their growing isolation, or international concerns about their nuclear program and human rights record," the ministry said in a statement. "If the Iranian government acts on this, we will respond robustly in consultation with our international partners."
The bill needs ratification by a constitutional watchdog to be a law. It also requires reduction of the volume of trade to a "minimum" level. It allows Iran's foreign ministry to restore ambassador-level relations if the "hostile policy" of Britain changes.
Parliament's decision is seen as a reaction to London's support of a new U.S. package of sanctions in Iran. The measures were coordinated with Britain and Canada and build on previous sanctions to target Iran's oil and petrochemical industries and companies involved in nuclear procurement or enrichment activity.
The annual volume of trade between Iran and Britain is about $500 million.
Iranian oil exports are a large component of this trade. In the first six month of 2011, Iran sold some 11,000 barrels of crude to Britain per day, some 0.5 percent of Iran's daily production.
British Midland International airline carries some 80, 000 between Tehran and London per year in its daily flight. Some 100.000 Iranians live in Britain.
The tension between the two countries is not limited to the nuclear dispute.
Earlier in October, the mayor of Tehran ordered a lawsuit to be filed contesting the ownership of the land on which Britain's embassy has stood since the 19th century.
In September, Iran detained and summoned a group of people for their alleged links to BBC's Farsi-language service.
Since the turmoil which followed Iran's 2009 elections, Tehran has repeatedly accused Britain of fomenting unrest. London denies the charge.
___
Associated Press writer David Stringer contributed to this report from London.
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Getty ImagesIn the past, when Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh has supplied his version of an on-field incident that resulted in a penalty or a fine, he seemed persuasive.
After Thursday?s Haynesworthy performance against the Packers, Suh?s effort to talk his way out of trouble comes off as pathetic.
?What I did was remove myself from the situation the best way that I felt in me being held down in the situation that I was in,? Suh said, via NFL.com.? ?My intentions were not to kick anybody, as I did not.? [I was] removing myself, as you see, I?m walking away from the situation.? And with that I apologize to my teammates, and my fans and my coaches for putting myself to be in position to be misinterpreted and taken out of the game.?
It gets better.? Or, for Suh, worse.
?I was on top of a guy being pulled down and trying to get up off the ground, which is why you see me pushing his helmet down,? Suh said.? ?As I?m getting up, I?m getting pushed so I?m getting myself unbalanced. . . .? With that a lot of people are going to interpret it as or create their own storylines, . . . but I know what I did, and the man upstairs knows what I did.?
What Suh did requires no interpretation.? He aggressively pushed the head of Evan Dietrich-Smith into the ground, and Suh stomped on Dietrich-Smith?s arm as Suh started to walk away.
?I understand in this world because of the type of player and type of person I am, all eyes are on me,? Suh said.? ?So why would I do something to jeopardize myself, jeopardize my team, first and foremost?? I don?t do bad things.? I have no intentions to hurt someone.? If I want to hurt him, I?m going to hit his quarterback as I did throughout that game.?
He needs to quit while he?s not ahead.
?If I see a guy stepping on somebody I feel like they?re going to lean into it and forcefully step on that person or stand over that person,? Suh said.? ?I?m going in the opposite direction to where he?s at.?
It?s an amazingly flimsy, and perhaps delusional, effort to explain what was obvious to anyone with eyes.? Apart from the ultimate penalty that will be imposed on Suh by the league office ? and plenty of people believe a suspension is coming ? Suh needs to be concerned about the impact of his behavior and his lame explanation of it on his marketability.? From Subway to Chrysler to any other company that has chosen to give Suh a lot of money to endorse its products, that money could be drying up, quickly.
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WELLINGTON, New Zealand ? Prime Minister John Key enters New Zealand's elections Saturday with an overwhelming popularity undimmed by an eleventh-hour scandal and with a historic chance to win an outright majority for his center-right party.
If opinion polls hold, Key's National Party would be the first party to secure a majority on its own since the country abolished a winner-take-all voting system and replaced it in 1996 with a proportional one that generally results in a more fractured parliament.
Anything short of a majority, however, and Key will need to find political partners to form a stable government.
What's not in doubt is Key's personal popularity ? despite a scandal in recent days over a recorded conversation. After three years in power, polls show the former currency trader is far more popular than his main opponent, Labour party leader Phil Goff. Key has earned the nickname "Teflon John" for the way that nothing politically damaging seems to stick to him.
"He's a clever strategist and a good manager," said Jennifer Lees-Marshment, a political studies lecturer at the University of Auckland.
She said Key has been adept at knowing when to forge ahead with policies and when to pull back. His common touch was reassuring to people when a deadly earthquake struck Christchurch in February, she said, and enabled him to share in their excitement in October when the country's national All Blacks team won the Rugby World Cup.
Key's campaign has focused primarily on the economy. He's promising to bring the country back into surplus and begin paying down the national debt within three years. Part of his plan to achieve that is to sell minority stakes in four government-owned energy companies and in Air New Zealand.
That's where the center-left Labour party has found its biggest point of difference. Goff is promising not to sell anything and to raise money by other means, including by introducing a capital gains tax and by raising the age at which people get government pensions by two years to 67.
On the campaign trail, however, those issues got crowded out by something that became known as the teapot tape saga.
Key had invited media along to an Auckland cafe where he was meeting a political ally. After a photo opportunity, Key asked the media to leave in order to talk privately with the man.
However, one cameraman left a recording device running in a cloth pouch. Key complained to the police, saying it was an illegal recording of a private conversation. But the cameraman maintained that he'd taped the conversation inadvertently in the confusion of the media scrum, and besides, it wasn't a private setting anyway.
The tape has never been publicly aired, although opponents, who may have been leaked transcripts, claim the prime minister makes rude and embarrassing political comments. Three days before the election, police began serving search warrants on four media outlets, seeking the tape and related material.
Lees-Marshment said she thinks the saga had a curious effect. At first, she said, people thought Key might have something to hide. But then they tired of the attention given to the story, she said, and may have begun feeling more sympathetic toward Key.
"It became a story about the story," she said. "The voters got put off by it."
The saga certainly didn't seem to do much to boost the campaign of Goff, who was effectively shut out of any coverage for a few days. Labour's lackluster polling, about 28 percent, has pundits speculating Goff will be replaced as leader of the party within days of the election.
But the teapot saga did seem to boost the fortunes of Winston Peters, who leads the small New Zealand First party. Peters grabbed the headlines with pointed criticism of Key over the affair and his poll numbers shot up.
Another winner in the election is likely to be the Green party, which is polling about 12 percent, putting it on target for its best ever showing.
Voters in the election will also decide whether to keep their electoral system, in which parties get a proportion of parliamentary seats based on the proportion of the votes they receive. Some want to return to a winner-takes-all format, although polls indicate most favor sticking with their current system.
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DES MOINES, Iowa ? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is defending a TV ad that quotes President Barack Obama out of context, signaling he's ready for bare-knuckled campaigning despite sharp complaints from Democrats and some neutral observers.
Romney said while campaigning in Iowa Wednesday that the ad is fair game, and underscores how the former Massachusetts governor stressing his decades in the private sector intends to confront the president if Romney is the GOP nominee next year.
The ad which began airing in New Hampshire Tuesday uses audio of then-Sen. Obama campaigning in the state in 2008, saying: "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.
The ad omits any acknowledgement that Obama was quoting the campaign of his opponent, 2008 GOP nominee John McCain. Instead, the ad leaves the impression that it is Obama who does not want to discuss the economy.
Romney told reporters in Des Moines his campaign distributed the ad with a press release noting the words were originally from Obama's opponent.
"There was no hidden effort on the part of our campaign. It was instead to point out that what's sauce for the goose is now sauce for the gander," Romney said, after addressing more than 300 employees of a downtown insurance company. "This ad points out, now, guess what, it's your turn. The same lines used on John McCain are now going to be used on you, which is that this economy is going to be your albatross."
It's a more aggressive tone for Romney, who all along in his second bid for the GOP nomination has cast himself as the field's most prepared candidate to tackle the economy. Now, he is signaling that he'll pull no punches with Obama.
"How we will beat President Obama is by speaking day in and day out about the one topic he does not want to talk about. And that's the economy," Romney said, with U.S. Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican who endorsed him Wednesday, by his side. "If I'm the nominee, he'll be trying to take me apart."
Democrats roundly criticized the ad as misleading.
PolitiFact, a non-partisan campaign watchdog, referred to the ad's use of Obama's past comment as "ridiculously misleading," and noted the campaign could have conveyed the point that the tables had turned on Obama "without distorting Obama's words."
Romney's appearances in Iowa Wednesday reflect his recent stepped-up his activity in the state that will hold the first caucuses on Jan 3.
While just his fifth visit to the state this year, it was his third in about a month.
In the meantime, his small campaign staff has grown modestly, been in regular touch with the statewide network of supporters he has held onto since his second-place finish in the 2008 caucuses. He is organizing a series of telephone question-and-answer sessions with thousands of Iowans, and is planning to unveil campaign ads in Iowa soon.
He still has not appeared with his Republican competitors in the state, having skipped three events over the past month.
Romney has said he plans to debate his GOP rivals in Iowa. There are debates scheduled December 10 in Des Moines and five days later in Sioux City.
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The Texas Supreme Court suspended the family-law judge who was caught on video beating his 16-year-old daughter. The move could signal that views on corporal punishment of kids are changing ? even in the South.?
The Texas Supreme Court has suspended the Texas family-law judge whose daughter secretly videotaped him belt-whipping her, suggesting to some observers that, even in the socially conservative South, where?corporal punishment is seen as important in shaping character,?the fine line between discipline and abuse is shifting.?
Skip to next paragraphTexas' highest court on Tuesday suspended Aransas County Judge William Adams with pay while the State Commission on Judicial Conduct investigates. Judge Adams,?who makes rulings on whether parents are fit to oversee their children, found himself at the center of a national firestorm when his 23-year-old daughter, Hillary, posted a video to YouTube in October that showed him beating her. The incident had taken place in 2004.?
Adams maintains that he did nothing wrong, and the investigation could exonerate him, but the fact that the Texas court took this step is significant, says?David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire Crimes against Children Research Center.
"We're in a normative shift regarding views on corporal punishment, and what shifts the fastest are views on extremes of what is tolerated," says Mr. Finkelhor. "This video is in the cusp area where there's a lot of controversy right now."
In the YouTube clip, Adams says, "Go get the belt. The big one. I'm going to spank her now." As Hillary wails and begs her father to stop, he lashes her with a belt across the legs.
Ms. Adams says she posted the video to force her father to get help for personal issues. He said the beating looked worse than it was, and that he had the right to discipline a child who had been caught uploading pirated music. Moreover, he alleges that his daughter posted the video in retaliation for his demand that she either return to college or he'd take away her car and cell phone.
Though the statute of limitations for any child-abuse charges has passed, experts say the behavior in the video would likely not qualify as child abuse under current laws, anyway.
Socially, the South is more supportive of corporal punishment to discipline a child, laws and studies show. For example, all Southern states except Virginia allow corporal punishment in schools, while no states in the Northeast or on the West Coast do. In addition, a?recent study by Southern Methodist University researcher George Holden, which?videotaped 37 north Texas parents, showed that nearly all hit or swatted their child in a 36-hour period.?
On Tuesday, Adams waived a preliminary hearing on his suspension, admitted no guilt, and agreed to cooperate with the investigation. How the court's judicial conduct board deals with Adams may be the ultimate indicator of how far attitudes on corporal punishments have shifted in society's eyes.
"I'll be interested to know whether the suspension is a fig leaf to say [the Supreme Court] is taking it seriously or are they really taking it seriously," says Finkelhor.
Another Texas court is expected to rule Wednesday on whether to uphold a restraining order on Adams that keeps him from visiting his 10-year-old daughter, who lives with his ex-wife.
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Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2011/11/23/movember-mustache-brad-pitt-daniel-day-lewis-ben-kingsley/
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BOSTON (Reuters) ? Fidelity Investments gives a select group of employees an unusual perk. It lets them make unsecured loans to the company at annual interest rates that have paid them nearly 20 percent in recent years.
"It was the best investment I could have made," said Ani Chitaley, a former Fidelity senior vice president. "When I left (in 2007) to start my own company, I had to give them up. That was a sad day."
The promissory notes, officially called junior subordinated debentures, have become a key but expensive source of capital for the world's second-largest mutual fund over the past decade.
The interest on the debt is tax deductible and some of the debentures also double as an equity substitute for top performers and other insiders.
Several current and former Fidelity executives, who did not want to be identified for this story, said the debenture program is a relic of the past when Fidelity's profit margin was substantially higher. And they argue the expensive debt puts the company at a competitive disadvantage.
Analysts at Moody's Investors Service have singled out the employee-held debenture debt as an area of concern.
"In our view, the debentures carry substantial coupon rates that have driven FMR's interest expense to very high levels," Moody's analyst Dagmar Silva wrote in an October 27 research note. "...Fidelity's net income margins have consistently been more in line with our expectations for lower rated firms, in part due to its corporate structure."
Fidelity spokeswoman Anne Crowley said the company uses the internal debt to make investments to grow its businesses and better serve its customers. Fidelity declined to make executives available for comment.
ADVANTAGES OF PRIVATE OWNERSHIP
"We believe our private ownership and capital structure gives us many strategic and competitive advantages that make us very comfortable with our approach," Crowley said.
Analysts at Moody's said that, as a private company, Fidelity can focus on long-term objectives without the distraction of quarterly profit expectations.
"Being private, however, limited the financial flexibility of the company to some extent, by preventing it from accessing the public markets for fresh equity capital," Moody's said.
Closely held Fidelity is secretive about its financial statements, but documents obtained by Reuters show that $5.1 billion in subordinated debentures was outstanding in early 2010. More than half of that amount was in junior subordinated debentures. In all, subordinated debentures accounted for 41 percent of the $12.6 billion in debt on the balance sheet of Fidelity's parent, FMR LLC.
In 2007, some of Fidelity's junior debentures generated interest rates between 18.5 percent and 19.5 percent for employees and shareholders. In 2008, the range was 13 percent to 16 percent. And in 2009, it was 8.5 percent to 13.7 percent, according to financial disclosures reviewed by Reuters.
The returns are in stark contrast to investors scrounging for a few basis points of yield from money-market funds amid historically low interest rates. The yield on the 10-year treasury, for example, is about 1.94 percent.
Some participants have been known to borrow money to take full advantage of Fidelity's debentures. Some series of these debentures allow employees to put them back to the company at five- to seven-year intervals.
They are held by a select group of employees, including Fidelity Chairman Edward Johnson III and his family. The program is kept hush-hush. Participants have to sign confidentiality agreements, and availability is usually limited to several hundred employees for each issue. Fidelity employs about 39,000.
SLIMMER CASH COW
But Fidelity isn't the cash cow it once was. Over the past decade, index funds and exchange-traded funds have eroded the market share of the Boston-based company. To make matters worse, investors have lost their appetite for Fidelity's bread-and-butter product: stock mutual funds.
In a recent speech heard by only a small gathering of mutual fund industry executives, Fidelity Asset Management President Ronald O'Hanley warned there could be low stock market participation in the next decade, much like the 1950s.
That leaves Fidelity with a large amount of expensive debt while its higher-margin stock funds suffer from an industry-wide trend of redemptions. There is a direct correlation between Fidelity's management fees and the S&P 500, which is down about 7 percent in 2011.
In 2002, Fidelity generated operating income that was 7.3 times its interest expense. In recent years, that figure has been only 2.3 times to 4.3 times interest expense, financial statements show.
Standard & Poor's analyst Charles Rauch said in a May research report that FMR's overall capitalization was "on the low side" because the company needs substantial tangible equity to support other financial services businesses, such as insurance and brokerage, and its noncore strategic investments.
During the three-year period that ended December 31, 2009, FMR generated, on average, $20 in total revenue for every dollar in interest expense. During the three-year period that ended in 2002, that ratio was much higher, 38-to-1.
CONCERN MITIGATED SOMEWHAT
Most of Fidelity's competitors are publicly-traded companies, which incur their own compensation costs when they issue stock options and restricted stock to key executives and employees.
Moody's, which has a negative outlook and an "A2" rating on the company, said its concern is mitigated to some extent by FMR's high level of cash and liquid investments on its balance sheet.
FMR deducts debenture interest payments to reduce the taxable income that flows to its shareholders, which include top executives and the Johnson family.
Organized as an S-Corporation in 2007, FMR pays little if any federal income tax. This allows taxable income deductions and credits for federal income tax purposes to flow directly to shareholders. To keep its S-corporation status, FMR cannot have more than 100 shareholders.
In early 2010, FMR sold $63.6 million in debentures to about 600 participants, according to U.S. regulatory filings. The interest rate is typically two times the prime lending rate (currently 3.25 percent), plus what insiders call a 2 percent to 3 percent kicker.
Some of FMR's senior debt is much cheaper, though. Yen-denominated debt, for example, has had annual interest rates below 2 percent, according to financial statements.
In any given year, though, Fidelity's operations can generate between $2 billion and $3 billion in cash flow. And the company's investment portfolio, which has topped $10 billion in recent years, includes a large amount of low-risk, liquid assets, credit-rating analysts have said.
Fidelity can lower annual payouts on junior debentures because one component of the interest rate is pegged to meeting profit targets, financial records show. Fidelity typically asks employees to redeem the debt when they leave the company.
(Reporting by Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
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In this photo released by the Royal Australian Navy, Danish Crown Prince Frederik, in a khaki coat, and invited guests, onboard an ADF RHIB tour Sydney Harbour in Australia Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. Denmark's Prince Frederik and Princess Mary are in Australia with their four children for an official weeklong visit. (AP Photo/Royal Australian Navy, Brenton Freind)
In this photo released by the Royal Australian Navy, Danish Crown Prince Frederik, in a khaki coat, and invited guests, onboard an ADF RHIB tour Sydney Harbour in Australia Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. Denmark's Prince Frederik and Princess Mary are in Australia with their four children for an official weeklong visit. (AP Photo/Royal Australian Navy, Brenton Freind)
In this photo released by the Royal Australian Navy, Danish Crown Prince Frederik, center, poses with member from the 2nd Commando Regiment in Australia Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. Denmark's Prince Frederik and Princess Mary are in Australia with their four children for an official weeklong visit. (AP Photo/Royal Australian Navy, Brenton Freind)
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) ? Danish Crown Prince Frederik and his Australian-born wife, Crown Princess Mary, have arrived in the national capital to meet Australia's leaders during their official weeklong visit.
The couple were guests of honor at a lunch at Parliament House on Tuesday after a private meeting with Prime Minister Julia Gillard in her office.
The couple and their four children landed in Australia on Saturday and spent the next two days in Sydney, where they met in a nightclub during the 2000 Olympics.
Since their last official visit as guests of the Australian government in 2005, the couple have made private visits to Australia in 2006 and 2008.
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Journalist Nicholas Blanford's comprehensive account of the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is well-paced and gripping.
If you have trouble keeping Hezbollah (Lebanon) and Hamas (Gaza Strip) straight and are not sure where Lebanon fits into the fractious geopolitics of the Middle East, Nicholas Blanford can lead you through the minefields ? ideological, ethnic, and religious ? to the Promised Land.? He has lived in, and reported on Lebanon for various media, including this newspaper, for one third of his life, since 1994.
Skip to next paragraphAs the author thoroughly documents in Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah?s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel, the militant group has become the most powerful non-state army in the world, and the dominant political and military force within a deeply divided Lebanon.? It reached this point thanks to heavy subsidies from Syria and Iran. In a previous book, Blanford wrote about the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, whose murder has been linked to four members of Hezbollah ? presumably acting on behalf of Syria.
For Damascus, Hezbollah is a bargaining chip in its efforts to get the Golan Heights back from Israel, while Tehran views the group, in part, as a deterrent against a possible Israeli or American attack on its nuclear facilities.? If Iran is attacked, the rockets will fly from Lebanon into Israel and the Lebanese people again will be caught in the ensuing crossfire. While it bills itself as the great defender of Lebanon (even after Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000), Hezbollah has a challenge in serving so many masters patriotically.
Blanford has covered three major battles between Hezbollah and Israel ? in 1996, 2000 and 2006 ? and countless raids and skirmishes.? He has watched the weapons, tactics, and strategies evolve, if that is the right word for an ever more deadly progression. He documents this in great, sometimes numbing detail: the reader will learn about many marvelous new weapons systems, such as the SA-24 Grinch missile, an alleged improvement on the SA-18 Grouse.
Mostly, however, Blanford?s narrative is well-paced and gripping. He has dodged bullets and rockets, viewed the gruesome result for those who weren?t so lucky, been interrogated and jailed, and sipped tea with men responsible for hundreds of merciless killings. He has done all of this to report on a conflict that exhibits no hope of a peaceful resolution. The cessation of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel is as likely as the demise of hurricanes.
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ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2011) ? Many experts believe that advanced biofuels made from cellulosic biomass are the most promising alternative to petroleum-based liquid fuels for a renewable, clean, green, domestic source of transportation energy. Nature, however, does not make it easy. Unlike the starch sugars in grains, the complex polysaccharides in the cellulose of plant cell walls are locked within a tough woody material called lignin. For advanced biofuels to be economically competitive, scientists must find inexpensive ways to release these polysaccharides from their bindings and reduce them to fermentable sugars that can be synthesized into fuels.
An important step towards achieving this goal has been taken by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a DOE Bioenergy Research Center led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
A team of JBEI researchers, working with researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), has demonstrated that introducing a maize (corn) gene into switchgrass, a highly touted potential feedstock for advanced biofuels, more than doubles (250 percent) the amount of starch in the plant's cell walls and makes it much easier to extract polysaccharides and convert them into fermentable sugars. The gene, a variant of the maize gene known as Corngrass1 (Cg1), holds the switchgrass in the juvenile phase of development, preventing it from advancing to the adult phase.
"We show that Cg1 switchgrass biomass is easier for enzymes to break down and also releases more glucose during saccharification," says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI's Deconstruction Division and was one of the principal investigators for this research. "Cg1 switchgrass contains decreased amounts of lignin and increased levels of glucose and other sugars compared with wild switchgrass, which enhances the plant's potential as a feedstock for advanced biofuels."
The results of this research are described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled "Overexpression of the maize Corngrass1 microRNA prevents flowering, improves digestibility, and increases starch content of switchgrass."
Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant organic material on earth. Studies have consistently shown that biofuels derived from lignocellulosic biomass could be produced in the United States in a sustainable fashion and could replace today's gasoline, diesel and jet fuels on a gallon-for-gallon basis. Unlike ethanol made from grains, such fuels could be used in today's engines and infrastructures and would be carbon-neutral, meaning the use of these fuels would not exacerbate global climate change. Among potential crop feedstocks for advanced biofuels, switchgrass offers a number of advantages. As a perennial grass that is both salt- and drought-tolerant, switchgrass can flourish on marginal cropland, does not compete with food crops, and requires little fertilization. A key to its use in biofuels is making it more digestible to fermentation microbes.
"The original Cg1 was isolated in maize about 80 years ago. We cloned the gene in 2007 and engineered it into other plants, including switchgrass, so that these plants would replicate what was found in maize," says George Chuck, lead author of the PNAS paper and a plant molecular geneticist who holds joint appointments at the Plant Gene Expression Center with ARS and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. "The natural function of Cg1 is to hold pants in the juvenile phase of development for a short time to induce more branching. Our Cg1 variant is special because it is always turned on, which means the plants always think they are juveniles."
Chuck and his colleague Sarah Hake, another co-author of the PNAS paper and director of the Plant Gene Expression Center, proposed that since juvenile biomass is less lignified, it should be easier to break down into fermentable sugars. Also, since juvenile plants don't make seed, more starch should be available for making biofuels. To test this hypothesis, they collaborated with Simmons and his colleagues at JBEI to determine the impact of introducing the Cg1 gene into switchgrass.
In addition to reducing the lignin and boosting the amount of starch in the switchgrass, the introduction and overexpression of the maize Cg1 gene also prevented the switchgrass from flowering even after more than two years of growth, an unexpected but advantageous result.
"The lack of flowering limits the risk of the genetically modified switchgrass from spreading genes into the wild population," says Chuck.
The results of this research offer a promising new approach for the improvement of dedicated bioenergy crops, but there are questions to be answered. For example, the Cg1 switchgrass biomass still required a pre-treatment to efficiently liberate fermentable sugars.
"The alteration of the switchgrass does allow us to use less energy in our pre-treatments to achieve high sugar yields as compared to the energy required to convert the wild type plants," Simmons says. "The results of this research set the stage for an expanded suite of pretreatment and saccharification approaches at JBEI and elsewhere that will be used to generate hydrolysates for characterization and fuel production."
Another question to be answered pertains to the mechanism by which Cg1 is able to keep switchgrass and other plants in the juvenile phase.
"We know that Cg1 is controlling an entire family of transcription factor genes," Chuck says, "but we have no idea how these genes function in the context of plant aging. It will probably take a few years to figure this out."
Co-authoring the PNAS paper with Chuck and Simmons were Christian Tobias, Lan Sun, Florian Kraemer, Chenlin Li, Dean Dibble, Rohit Arora, Jennifer Bragg, John Vogel, Seema Singh, Markus Pauly and Sarah Hake.
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WASHINGTON ? Police departments around the country are working to shield their radio communications from the public as cheap, user-friendly technology has made it easy for anyone to use handheld devices to keep tabs on officers responding to crimes.
The practice of encryption has grown more common from Florida to New York and west to California, with law enforcement officials saying they want to keep criminals from using officers' internal chatter to evade them. But journalists and neighborhood watchdogs say open communications ensure that the public receives information that can be vital to their safety as quickly as possible.
D.C. police moved to join the trend this fall after what Chief Cathy Lanier said were several incidents involving criminals and smartphones. Carjackers operating on Capitol Hill were believed to have been listening to emergency communications because they were only captured once police stopped broadcasting over the radio, she said. And drug dealers at a laundromat fled the building after a sergeant used open airwaves to direct other units there ? suggesting, she said, that they too were listening in.
"Whereas listeners used to be tied to stationary scanners, new technology has allowed people ? and especially criminals ? to listen to police communications on a smartphone from anywhere," Lanier testified at a D.C. Council committee hearing this month. "When a potential criminal can evade capture and learn, `There's an app for that,' it's time to change our practices."
The transition has put police departments at odds with the news media, who say their newsgathering is impeded when they can't use scanners to monitor developing crimes and disasters. Journalists and scanner hobbyists argue that police departments already have the capability to communicate securely and should be able to adjust to the times without reverting to full encryption. And they say alert scanner listeners have even helped police solve crimes.
"If the police need to share sensitive information among themselves, they know how to do it," Phil Metlin, news director of WTTG-TV, in Washington, said at the council hearing. "Special encrypted channels have been around for a long time; so have cellphones."
It's impossible to quantify the scope of the problem or to determine if the threat from scanners is as legitimate as police maintain ? or merely a speculative fear. It's certainly not a new concern ? after all, hobbyists have for years used scanners to track the activities of their local police department from their kitchen table.
David Schoenberger, a stay-at-home dad from Fredericksburg, Va., and scanner hobbyist, said he understands Lanier's concerns ? to a point.
"I think they do need to encrypt the sensitive talk groups, like the vice and narcotics, but I disagree strongly with encrypting the routine dispatch and patrol talk groups. I don't think that's right," he said. "I think the public has a right to monitor them and find out what's going on around them. They pay the salaries and everything."
There's no doubt that it's increasingly easy to listen in on police radios.
One iPhone app, Scanner 911, offers on its website the chance to "listen in while police, fire and EMS crews work day & night." Apple's iTunes' store advertises several similar apps. One promises to keep users abreast of crime in their communities.
Though iPhones don't directly pick up police signals, users can listen to nearly real-time audio from police dispatch channels through streaming services, said Matthew Blaze, director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania and a researcher of security and privacy in computing and communications systems.
The shift to encryption has occurred as departments replace old-fashioned analog radios with digital equipment that sends the voice signal over the air as a stream of bits and then reconstructs it into high-quality audio. Encrypted communication is generally only heard by listeners with an encryption key. Others might hear silence or garbled talk, depending on the receiver's technology.
The cost of encryption varies.
The Nassau County, N.Y., police department is in the final stages of a roughly $50 million emergency communications upgrade that includes encryption and interoperability with other law enforcement agencies in the region, said Inspector Edmund Horace. Once the old system is taken down, Horace said, "You would not be able to discern what's being said on the air unless you had the proper equipment."
The Orange County, Fla., sheriff's office expects to be encrypted within months. Several police departments in the county are already encrypted, and more will follow suit to keep officers safe, said Bryan Rintoul, director of emergency communications for the sheriff's office.
In California, the Santa Monica police has been fully encrypted for the past two years and, before that, used a digital radio system that could be monitored with expensive equipment, said spokesman Sgt. Richard Lewis.
Still, full encryption is cumbersome, difficult to manage and relatively rare, especially among big-city police departments who'd naturally have a harder time keeping track of who has access to the encryption key, Blaze said.
The more individuals or neighboring police agencies with access, the greater the risk that the secrecy of the system could be compromised and the harder it becomes to ensure that everyone who needs access has it, Blaze said.
Relatively few local police departments are actually encrypted, Blaze said, though some cities have modern radio systems for dispatch that are difficult to monitor on inexpensive equipment. The systems can, however, be intercepted with higher-end scanners.
"I would not be surprised if a lot of departments that do it would switch back to non-encryption. The practical difficulties of trying to maintain an encrypted system at scale start to become apparent," he said.
Some departments have studied full encryption but decided against it, including police in Greenwich, Conn.
"Because we've always retained the ability to encrypt traffic on a case-by-case basis when we need to, in a community like Greenwich, I think the transparency we achieve by allowing people to listen to our radio communications certainly outweighs any security concern we have," said Capt. Mark Kordick.
And some departments have tried to compromise. The Jacksonville, Fla., sheriff's office leased radios to the media, allowing them to listen to encrypted patrol channels. That practice ended last summer out of concern about maintaining the confidentiality of radio transmissions, said spokeswoman Lauri-Ellen Smith.
In D.C., Lanier says the department is stepping up efforts to advise the public of developing crimes through Facebook, Twitter and an email alert system. Officers will use an unencrypted channel starting next month to alert the public to traffic delays, said spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump. But the chief has refused to give radios to media organizations, which continue to assail the encryption.
"What about the truly terrifying crimes?" Metlin, the news director, asked at the hearing. "What if, God forbid, there is another act of terrorism here? It is our jobs to inform the public in times of emergency."
Rick Hansen says he's been listening to police communications since he was an adolescent and says efforts to shut them make government less transparent. The Silver Spring, Md., man says sensitive information could be kept off the airwaves on a selective basis.
"Yes, it's a concern ? and it's something that can be addressed through proper procedures and processes as opposed to turning out the lights on everybody," he said
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Researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a "super strain" of yeast that can efficiently ferment ethanol from pretreated pine -- one of the most common species of trees in Georgia and the U.S. Their research could help biofuels replace gasoline as a transportation fuel.
"Companies are interested in producing ethanol from woody biomass such as pine, but it is a notoriously difficult material for fermentations," said Joy Doran-Peterson, associate professor of microbiology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
"The big plus for softwoods, including pine, is that they have a lot of sugar that yeast can use," she said. "Yeast are currently used in ethanol production from corn or sugarcane, which are much easier materials for fermentation; our process increases the amount of ethanol that can be obtained from pine."
Before the pinewood is fermented with yeast, however, it is pre-treated with heat and chemicals, which help open the wood for enzymes to break the cellulose down into sugars. Once sugars are released, the yeast will convert them to ethanol, but compounds produced during pretreatment tend to kill even the hardiest industrial strains of yeast, making ethanol production difficult.
Doran-Peterson, along with doctoral candidate G. Matt Hawkins, used directed evolution and adaptation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a species of yeast used commonly in industry for production of corn ethanol, to generate the "super" yeast.
Their research, published online in Biotechnology for Biofuels, shows that the pine fermented with the new yeast can successfully withstand the toxic compounds and produce ethanol from higher concentrations of pretreated pine than previously published.
"Others before us had suggested that Saccharomyces could adapt to harsh conditions. But no one had published softwood fermentation studies in which the yeast were pushed as hard as we pushed them," said Doran-Peterson.
During a two-year period, Doran-Peterson and Hawkins grew the yeast in increasingly inhospitable environments. The end result was a strain of yeast capable of producing ethanol in fermentations of pretreated wood containing as much as 17.5 percent solid biomass. Previously, researchers were only able to produce ethanol in the presence of 5 to 8 percent solids. Studies at 12 percent solids showed a substantial decrease in ethanol production.
This is important, said Doran-Peterson, because the greater the percentage of solids in wood, the more ethanol that can be produced. However, a high percentage of solids also places stress on the yeast.
"Couple that stress with the increase in toxic compounds, and the fermentation usually does not proceed very well," she said.
Pine is an ideal substrate for biofuels not only because of its high sugar content, but also because of its sustainability. While pine plantations account for only 15 percent of Georgia's trees, they provide 50 percent of harvested timber, according to Dale Greene, professor of forest operations in UGA's Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. The loblolly pine that Doran-Peterson and Hawkins used for their research is among the fastest growing trees in the American South.
"We're talking about using forestry residues, waste and unsalable timber," said Peterson, "Alternatively, pine forests are managed for timber and paper manufacturing, so there is an existing infrastructure to handle tree-farming, harvest and transportation for processing.
"The basic idea is that we're trying to get the yeast to make as much ethanol as it can, as fast as it can, while minimizing costs associated with cleaning or washing the pretreated pine. With our process, no additional clean-up steps are required before the pine is fermented," she said.
###
University of Georgia: http://www.uga.edu
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CANBERRA (Reuters) ? One Australian high school student offered visiting U.S. President Barack Obama a suggestion to raise his popularity -- team up with a top celebrity like the teenage pop star Justin Bieber.
In one recent opinion poll, 51 percent of respondents disapproved of the way Obama was doing his job. But, he was still ahead of his Republican rivals with a year to go before he seeks re-election.
The suggestion came during his two-day trip to Australia, when Obama and Prime Minister Julia Gillard were grilled by a group of 14 to 16 year-olds studying journalism at Canberra's Campbell High School.
One student asked about the future direction of the U.S. education system.
A second asked Obama if he had ever considered teaming up with "a high profile celebrity such as Justin Bieber," a Canadian-born teenage pop idol, to appeal to more people.
Obama laughed off the question and said he interacts with a lot of celebrities.
"Hopefully if I'm going to be successful it's going to be because of the ideas I put forward and not because I'm hanging out with Justin Bieber," he told the students.
"Although he is a very nice young man and I'll tell him you said hi."
(Reporting by James Grubel and Laura MacInnis, Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)
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MELBOURNE, Australia ? Tiger Woods made the first move, reaching out to shake hands with his ex-caddie, that went a long way toward dousing the endless chatter over their acrimonious breakup.
Twelve holes later, as short a Presidents Cup match that has ever been played, Steve Williams had the last laugh.
In the 112 matches of various formats that Woods has played in his professional career, he never had a loss like this one. Playing again with Steve Stricker, an American tandem that was unbeatable two years ago, they didn't win a hole and didn't make a birdie in tying the Presidents Cup record for the worst loss ever, 7 and 6.
Adam Scott ? with Williams on his bag, kept his distance from Woods until they shook hands on the 12th green ? and K.J. Choi rarely missed a shot in piling up pars and more than enough birdies. The foursomes match ended with Scott rolling in a 25-foot birdie putt on the 11th, and stuffing his approach into 10 feet for Choi's birdie on their final hole.
"We were just slightly off," Woods said. "On a golf course like this, it doesn't take much."
That match was the biggest surprise on an opening day that featured a few unlikely twists at the end, with the Americans making two late rally to halve matches and leaving Royal Melbourne with a 4-2 lead over the International team.
It was the third straight time the Americans have won the opening session.
"We are more excited than we were an hour-and-a-half before the day ended," U.S. captain Fred Couples said. "Our guys fought hard."
Dustin Johnson and Matt Kuchar, 3 down with seven holes to play, won the last two holes with pars to halve their match against the Aussie duo of Jason Day and Aaron Baddeley. Nick Watney and Bill Haas were 2 down with four holes to play and managed a halve against Geoff Ogilvy and Charl Schwartzel.
"My guys felt like they let a few matches slip away, no question about it," International captain Greg Norman said. "But they all understand. It's the game of golf. It does happen. Their heads are really held high. They are not worried about the next three days going forward. They all feel like they are playing extremely good golf."
The other matches were never close.
Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk, partners for the first time since the Ryder Cup in 1999, won five holes in a six-hole stretch for a 6-and-5 win over Retief Goosen; Bubba Watson and Webb Simpson were 7 under through 16 holes in a 4-and-2 win over Ernie Els and Ryo Ishikawa; and David Toms and Hunter Mahan took advantage of sloppy play by K.T. Kim and Y.E. Yang in a 4-and-3 win.
But it was that last match that brought so much scrutiny ? first with the handshake, then the way Scott and Choi slapped around an American team that had been 6-1 going into the Presidents Cup.
They were the last to tee off, and the second match to finish. That's how big this blowout was.
"K.J. and I didn't get it out of position today, which is a good thing on this golf course," Scott said. "We both played very well. They got out of position a couple of times, and they didn't play their best. Yeah, a good win. Because they were a tough team last time, took a lot of points off us. So it was pleasing to get one up there."
The caddie squabble meant nothing to Scott, who has tried to stay out of the fray, even after Williams disparaged Woods with a racial comment while getting roasted at a caddies award dinner two weeks ago in Shanghai.
Woods didn't make too much of it, either.
"I put my hand out there to shake it, and life goes forward," he said. "There's some great things that Steve and I did, and that's how I look at it. I know he probably looks at it differently than I do, but hey ? life goes forward, and I'm very happy with what we've done in our career together."
Stricker was playing for the first time since Sept. 25 at the Tour Championship because of a neck injury that weakened his left arm. He hooked a tee shot on the par-5 second that kept them from a birdie, though neither of them played well. It was Woods who put them in a bunker on the fifth, and whose tee shot went through the fairway and into an unplayable lie in a bush, both leading to bogeys during a key stretch early in the round when fell 4 down.
The only other match in Presidents Cup history that lasted 12 holes was in Sunday singles in 1996, when David Frost beat Kenny Perry.
Woods and Stricker started their partnership by winning six straight matches, though the last two were big losses ? 6 and 5 against Lee Westwood and Luke Donald at the Ryder Cup last year in Wales, and the 7-and-6 loss to Scott and Choi.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that while the Americans staked themselves to the 4-2 lead, their only loss ? and their weakest team ? was Woods and Stricker. Couples split them up for Friday's fourballs ? Woods with Johnson, Stricker with Kuchar, although that was the plan earlier in the week.
It will be the first time since the 2007 Presidents Cup at Royal Montreal that Woods has another partner besides Stricker.
The greater concern for the International team was making up yet another deficit. It led in five matches at some point during the opening session, and the Americans never led in three of the six matches.
The last match might have hurt the worst, with Aaron Baddeley hitting his tee shot into the right rough, leading to a second straight bogey, and Johnson holing a 6-foot par on the 18th to earn a half-point.
"There's no worse feeling than letting down your other 10 team members," Norman said. "Sometimes you feel worse for the player than the player feels for himself. These guys are trying their guts out to put points on the board and they were playing very, very well coming to the end of the day. It's just the way it played out, unfortunately for us."
Norman hopes a change in weather helps with his team's experience at Royal Melbourne. Storms are expected, along with a change in wind, forcing the matches to start Friday morning.
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ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2011) ? Many infections, even those caused by antibiotic-sensitive bacteria, resist treatment. This paradox has vexedphysicians for decades, and makes some infections impossible to cure.
A key cause of this resistance is that bacteria become starved for nutrients during infection. Starved bacteria resist killing by nearly every type of antibiotic, even ones they have never been exposed to before.
What produces starvation-induced antibiotic resistance, and how can it be overcome? In a paper appearing this week in Science, researchers report some surprising answers.
"Bacteria become starved when they exhaust nutrient supplies in the body, or if they live clustered together in groups known as biofilms," said the lead author of the paper, Dr. Dao Nguyen, an assistant professor of medicine at McGill University.
Biofilms are clusters of bacteria encased in a slimy coating, and can be found both in the natural environment as well as in human tissues where they cause disease. For example, biofilm bacteria grow in the scabs of chronic wounds, and the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis. Bacteria in biofilms tolerate high levels of antibiotics without being killed.
"A chief cause of the resistance of biofilms is that bacteria on the outside of the clusters have the first shot at the nutrients that diffuse in," said Dr. Pradeep Singh, associate professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of Washington, the senior author of the study. "This produces starvation of the bacteria inside clusters, and severe resistance to killing."
Starvation was previously thought to produce resistance because most antibiotics target cellular functions needed for growth. When starved cells stop growing, these targets are no longer active. This effect could reduce the effectiveness of many drugs.
"While this idea is appealing, it presents a major dilemma," Nguyen noted. "Sensitizing starved bacteria to antibiotics could require stimulating their growth, and this could be dangerous during human infections."
Nguyen and Singh explored an alternative mechanism. Microbiologists have long known that when bacteria sense that their nutrient supply is running low, they issue a chemical alarm signal. The alarm tells the bacteria to adjust their metabolism to prepare for starvation. Could this alarm also turn on functions that produce antibiotic resistance?
To test this idea, the team engineered bacteria in which the starvation alarm was inactivated, and then measured antibiotic resistance in experimental conditions in which bacteria were starved. To their amazement, bacteria unable to sense starvation were thousands of times more sensitive to killing than those that could, even though starvation arrested growth and the activity of antibiotic targets.
"That experiment was a turning point," Singh said. "It told us that the resistance of starved bacteria was an active response that could be blocked. It also indicated that starvation-induced protection only occurred if bacteria were aware that nutrients were running low."
With the exciting result in hand, the researchers turned to two key questions. First does the starvation alarm produce resistance during actual infections? To test this the team examined naturally starved bacteria, biofilms, isolates taken from patients, and bacterial infections in mice. Sure enough, in all cases the bacteria unable to sense starvation were far easier to kill.
The second question was about the mechanism of the effect. How does starvation sensing produce such profound antibiotic resistance? Again, the results were surprising.
Instead of well-described resistance mechanisms, like pumps that expel antibiotics from bacterial cells, the researchers found that the bacteria's protective mechanism defended them against toxic forms of oxygen, called radicals. This mechanism jives with new findings showing that antibiotics kill by generating these toxic radicals.
The findings suggest new approaches to improve treatment for a wide range of infections.
"Discovering new antibiotics has been challenging," Nguyen said. "One way to improve infection treatment is to make the drugs we already have work better. Our experiments suggest that antibiotic efficacy could be increased by disrupting key bacterial functions that have no obvious connection to antibiotic activity."
The work also highlights the critical advantage of being able to sense environmental conditions, even for single-celled organisms like bacteria. Cells unaware of their starvation were not protected, even though they ran out of nutrients and stopped growth. This proves again that, even for bacteria, "what you don't know can hurt you."
The Burroughs Welcome Fund, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research supported this research.
The results are contained in the Science article, "Active starvation responses mediate antibiotic tolerance in biofilms and nutrient-limited bacteria."
In addition to Nguyen and Singh, the researchers on the study were Amruta Joshi-Datar, Elizabeth Bauerle, Karlyn Beer, and Richard Siehnel of the Departments of Medicine and of Microbiology at the UW, James Schafhauser of McGill University, Francois Lepine of INRS Armand Frappier in Canada, Oyebode Olakanmi and Bradley E. Britigan of the University of Cincinnati, and Yun Wang of Northwestern University.
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Source: http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/11/bmw-i3-advancing-automotive-sustainability/
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The cat's out of the bag, thanks to Barnes & Noble's letters to the ITC about their dispute with Microsoft. Rather than roll over and pay Microsoft what they demand like some big names in Android have done, B&N is fighting tooth and nail against the Redmond Devil Microsoft. It's fairly long, and apt to make your eyes bleed if you're not a lawyer, but you can see the full scope of the letter and attachments (which actually name the patents and quickly dismiss their validity) at the source link. Carry on past the break to read our layman's version.
Source: Groklaw. Thanks, John!
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? Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 Posted: Nov 11th, 2011 Posted: Nov 11th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 Posted: Nov 10th, 2011 |
| Posted: Nov 14th, 2011 | |
| Regulating cancer cell migration and invasion using ROS and Cav-1 | |
| (Nanowerk News) An investigation by a group of Thai researchers has demonstrated that Caveolin-1 (Cav-1) plays an important role in the migration and invasion of human lung cancer cells and that these effects are regulated by cellular reactive oxygen species (ROS). The group used transfected human lung cancer cells with Cav-1 plasmid which were incubated and cultured prior to performing migration assay. | |
| "The result of this investigation shows the effect of ROS on cell migratory functions is dependent on Cav-1 expression and is associated with Akt activity" said Dr. Ubonthip Nimmannit of National Nanotechnology Center (NANOTEC). "The activation of Akt activity by Cav-1 helps to mediate cancer cell migration and is likely to play an important role in the ROS induced effect on cell motility alteration". | |
| The investigation reveals the differential role of individual ROS on cancer cell mortility and Cav-1 expression helps to better understand tumor progression and metastasis which is considered important in cancer research. | |
| Collaborators on this investigation included Chulalongkorn University, West Virginia University, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, West Virginia, and NANOTEC. The researchers reported their investigation in a paper published by the Journal of Biological Chemistry. |
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Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=23384.php
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