Obama OKs honor for Birmingham bombing victims

President Barack Obama signs a bill designating the Congressional Gold Medal commemorating the lives of the four young girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing of 1963, Friday, May 24, 2013, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. From left are, Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala. sponsor of the bill; Lisa McNair; Thelma "Maxine" Pippen McNair mother of Denise McNair; Dianne Braddock sister of Carole Robertson; and Rev. Arthur Price Jr., pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

President Barack Obama signs a bill designating the Congressional Gold Medal commemorating the lives of the four young girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing of 1963, Friday, May 24, 2013, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. From left are, Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala. sponsor of the bill; Lisa McNair; Thelma "Maxine" Pippen McNair mother of Denise McNair; Dianne Braddock sister of Carole Robertson; and Rev. Arthur Price Jr., pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

President Barack Obama signs a bill designating the Congressional Gold Medal commemorating the lives of the four young girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing of 1963, Friday, May 24, 2013, in the Oval Office of the White House. Standing, from left are, Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., and Lisa McNair. Seated at right is Thelma "Maxine" Pippen McNair, the mother of Denise McNair. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

President Barack Obama signs a bill designating the Congressional Gold Medal commemorating the lives of the four young girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing of 1963, Friday, May 24, 2013, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Watching, from left are, Dr. Sharon Malone, wife of Attorney General Eric Holder; Attorney General Eric Holder and Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala. sponsor of the bill. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

President Barack Obama speaks to the media in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Friday, May 24, 2013, before signing a bill designating the Congressional Gold Medal commemorating the lives of the four young girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing of 1963. From left are, Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin; Birmingham Ala. Mayor William Bell; Dr. Sharon Malone, wife of Attorney General Eric Holder; Attorney General Eric Holder; Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala. sponsor of the bill; the president; Thelma "Maxine" Pippen McNair mother of Denise McNair; seated, Lisa McNair; Dianne Braddock sister of Carole Robertson, Rev. Arthur Price Jr., pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and former US Attorney Gordon Douglas Jones. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama signed legislation Friday to award Congress' highest civilian honor to four girls killed in an Alabama church bombing during the civil rights movement. He called it a tragic loss that "helped to trigger triumph and a more just and equal and fair America."

The Congressional Gold Medal will go to Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair.

Addie Mae, Carole and Cynthia, all 14, and Denise, 11, were killed when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on Sept. 15, 1963. Twenty-two others were injured.

Denise's mother and sister, and Carole's sister were among those who stood around Obama's desk in the Oval Office as he signed the bill.

"For us to be able to be in this Oval Office with so many people who have worked hard to make this day possible, and understanding that that tragic loss, that heartbreak helped to trigger triumph and a more just and equal and fair America, that's an incredible thing for us to be able to participate in," he said.

September will mark the 50th anniversary of the bombing, which helped spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Three Ku Klux Klan members were convicted of the bombing years after the attack. Two are dead and one is in prison.

While Congress widely embraced awarding the medal, the idea has divided the victims' relatives.

Some are supportive while others say they would prefer financial compensation and have little interest in the award.

Sisters of Denise and Carole sat in the House gallery during the debate and vote on the measure. Relatives of Addie Mae and Cynthia, also known as Cynthia Morris, have said they aren't interested in a medal. Addie Mae's sister lost an eye in the bombing.

Also present for the bill-signing was Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife, Sharon Malone. Her late sister, Vivian Malone Jones, was one of the first black students to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963 in defiance of racial segregation.

Reps. Terri Sewell, a Democrat, and Spencer Bachus, a Republican, led the Alabama congressional delegation's efforts to honor the bombing victims. They represent adjoining Birmingham districts in Congress.

Past recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal include George Washington, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and his wife Coretta Scott King.

___

Associated Press writer Henry C. Jackson contributed to this report.

___

Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-05-24-US-Obama-Birmingham-Bombing/id-80f055b89680465c94cea826c62cb8bf

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Can a Floating Robot Save a Polluted Canal?

Pity the Gowanus Canal. A forgotten relic of Brooklyn's industrial past, the garbage-choked waterway is now home to a putrid stew of toxic waste.

Where barges once served tanneries and paper mills, all that remains today are high levels of mercury, lead, raw sewage, cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other pollutants.

The Gowanus Canal achieved further notoriety in January 2013 when an adult dolphin chose the canal's oily waters as a place to die. A necropsy revealed the dolphin had numerous pre-existing ailments, but the event did nothing to enhance the canal's reputation. [10 Most Endangered US Rivers: 2013]

Help for the beleaguered canal, however, has arrived in an unusual form: a floating robot.

The Brooklyn Atlantis project, spearheaded by Oded Nov, assistant professor at the department of technology management and innovation at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, has created an aquatic robotic vehicle (ARV) that collects environmental data on the Gowanus Canal.

The team's ARV, roughly the size of a storage trunk, gathers water-quality data such as temperature, pH (how basic or acidic the water is), dissolved oxygen and other information. It also houses two cameras ? one underwater, one above ? to record conditions at the canal.

"The Atlantis robot was designed specifically for the Gowanus Canal," Nov told LiveScience. "We needed to design a robot that is capable of withstanding brackish water mixed with sewage and other contaminants, while also being easy to deploy and maintain."

The Gowanus Canal, a 1.8-mile (2.9 kilometers) inlet at the upper end of New York Harbor, was recently declared a Superfund cleanup site by the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency has proposed a plan to dredge and restore the channel by 2022.

Nov's academic interests extend beyond environmental technology, however. He and his students are researching how environmental data can be gathered and analyzed at the intersection of science and social media using "citizen-scientists."

For example, the Brooklyn Atlantis project encourages interested volunteers from the local community to go online and tag or describe the images collected by the ARV.

Citizen-scientists have been used with some success to monitor osprey health, track ladybug populations and search for distant galaxies.

"Brooklyn Atlantis is providing us with insight on the dynamics of volunteers' motivations, and how we can design peer-production systems to garner and retain the most user participation," Nov said. "The combination of the robot and the online citizen-science environment enables us to study such questions."

Follow us @livescience, Facebook?& Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/floating-robot-save-polluted-canal-163700083.html

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New fluorescent tools for cancer diagnosis

May 24, 2013 ? In recent years, microRNAs (miRNAs) and other non-coding RNAs are small molecules that help control the expression of specific proteins. In recent years they have emerged as disease biomarkers. miRNA profiles have been used to establish tissue origin for cancers of unknown primary origin, determine prognosis, monitor therapeutic responses and screen for disease, but clinically tractable, diagnostic methods for monitoring miRNA expression in patient samples are not currently available.

In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Thomas Tuschl and colleagues at Rockefeller University developed a multicolor fluorescence labeling method that can be used to visualize miRNAs in tissue sections, such as those recovered from biopsies.

Using this method, Tuschl and colleagues were able to identify tumor specific miRNAs in basal cell carcinoma and Merkel cell carcinoma (accompanying image) and distinguish between FFPE sections from the two tumor types.

This proof-of concept study indicates that RNA FISH could serve as a molecular diagnostic in a clinical setting. In a companion commentary, Gennadi Glinksy of Stanford University discusses how this technology could contribute to the development of RNA-based diagnostics and therapeutics.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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

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Journal References:

1. Neil Renwick, Pavol Cekan, Paul A. Masry, Sean E. McGeary, Jason B. Miller, Markus Hafner, Zhen Li, Aleksandra Mihailovic, Pavel Morozov, Miguel Brown, Tasos Gogakos, Mehrpouya B. Mobin, Einar L. Snorrason, Harriet E. Feilotter, Xiao Zhang, Clifford S. Perlis, Hong Wu, Mayte Su?rez-Fari?as, Huichen Feng, Masahiro Shuda, Patrick S. Moore, Victor A. Tron, Yuan Chang, Thomas Tuschl. Multicolor microRNA FISH effectively differentiates tumor types. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2013; DOI: 10.1172/JCI68760
2. Gennadi V. Glinsky. RNA-guided diagnostics and therapeutics for next-generation individualized nanomedicine. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2013; DOI: 10.1172/JCI69268

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

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/7wNPRAjjhC4/130524122006.htm

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Promising treatment for progeria within reach

Friday, May 17, 2013

"This study is a breakthrough for our research group after years of work. When we reduce the production of the enzyme in mice, the development of all the clinical symptoms of progeria is reduced or blocked. We have also studied cultured cells from children with progeria, and can see that when the enzyme is inhibited, the growth of the cells increases by the same mechanism as in mouse cells," says Martin Berg?, Professor at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg and research director at the Sahlgrenska Cancer Center.

Progeria is a rare genetic childhood disorder characterized by the appearance of accelerated aging. The classical form of progeria, called Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS), is caused by a spontaneous mutation, which means that it is not inherited from the parents.

Children with HGPS usually die in their teenage years from myocardial infarction and stroke.

The progeria mutation occurs in the protein prelamin A and causes it to accumulate in an inappropriate form in the membrane surrounding the nucleus. The target enzyme, called ICMT, attaches a small chemical group to one end of prelamin A. Blocking ICMT, therefore, prevents the attachment of the chemical group to prelamin A and significantly reduced the ability of the mutant protein to induce progeria.

"We are collaborating with a group in Singapore that has developed candidate ICMT inhibitor drugs and we will now test them on mice with progeria. Because the drugs have not yet been tested in humans, it will be a few years before we know whether these drugs will be appropriate for the treatment of progeria," Martin Berg? explains.

Although there are only a few hundred children in the world with progeria, the disease, children, and research have attracted a great deal of attention.

"The reason is obvious: the resemblance between progeria patients and normally-aged individuals is striking and it is tempting to speculate that progeria is a window into our normal aging process. The children develop osteoporosis, myocardial infarction, stroke, and muscle weakness. They display poor growth and lose their hair, but interestingly, they do not develop dementia or cancer," says Martin Berg?, who is also studying the impact of inhibiting ICMT on the normal aging process in mice.

###

Journal: Science Article title: Targeting Isoprenylcysteine Methylation Improves Disease Phenotypes in a Mouse Model of Accelerated Aging Authors: Mohamed X. Ibrahim, Volkan I. Sayin, Murali K. Akula, Meng Liu, Loren G. Fong, Stephen G. Young, and Martin O. Bergo

University of Gothenburg: http://www.gu.se/english

Thanks to University of Gothenburg 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/128278/Promising_treatment_for_progeria_within_reach

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Sheriff: Ex-NASCAR driver Dick Trickle dead at 71

CONCORD, N.C. (AP) ? There is that lasting image of Dick Trickle in the Winston 500 lighting up a cigarette while driving his stock car with his knees during a caution lap.

He places the cigarette through a hole he carved in his helmet for a quick toke and exhales.

The green flag hits and out the window goes the cigarette butt and back to racing goes Trickle.

"Dick always had a cigarette lighter in his car," said fellow NASCAR driver Geoff Bodine.

Trickle was a unique driver with a unique name who found cult-like status before his death Thursday.

Trickle, whose larger-than-life personality and penchant for fun won him legions of fans despite a lack of success beyond the nation's small tracks, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said. He was 71.

The Lincoln County Sheriff's Office said authorities received a call believed to be from Trickle, who said "there would be a dead body and it would be his." Authorities tried to call the number back, but no one answered.

Trickle's body was found near his pickup truck at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Boger City, N.C., about 40 miles northwest of Charlotte. Sheriff's Lieutenant Tim Johnson said foul play was not suspected.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Dick Trickle on his passing today," NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France said. "Dick was a legend in the short-track racing community, particularly in his home state of Wisconsin, and he was a true fan favorite. Personalities like Dick Trickle helped shape our sport. He will be missed."

Trickle earned his reputation as a successful short track driver before joining the Winston Cup series and earning rookie of the year in 1989 at age 48.

He competed in more than 300 Cup races. Although he never won a Cup race and won only two Busch Series races, Trickle earned cult status in the 1990s.

Former ESPN anchor Keith Olbermann would regularly mention where Trickle finished after talking about each NASCAR race. It caught on and drew snickers from race fans around the country.

Bodine said there was only one way to describe Trickle, a native of Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.

"Fun," Bodine said. "Just plain fun."

Trickle was never one to be told how to live his life.

"It's all just sad," Bodine said in a telephone interview. "We don't understand why he would do this. Hopefully we will all learn why he would do that. There was something that triggered him to take his own life. We are all really saddened by this in the racing community."

NASCAR does not keep track of short-track records, but according to the (Milwaukee) Journal-Sentinel, Trickle won more than 1,000 short-track races throughout the country during his prime. He was a seven-time winner in the regional ARTGO Challenge Series in the late 1970s and mid '80s. Trickle also captured the ASA AC-Delco Challenge Series in back-to-back years in 1984-85 before turning to Cup racing.

"Dick Trickle was one of the best race drivers of the '80s, no one knew how many races he won," said Humpy Wheeler, the former president of Charlotte Motor Speedway. "He was right there with Red Farmer and other short track drivers ? the wins kind of got so big that they blended into each other. He was a product of the rich Wisconsin soil, where they race eight races a week in the season, and he could win all of them."

Wheeler said he asked Trickle to try NASCAR in the 1980s, but Trickle initially declined because he was so successful on the short track circuit.

"He could not make enough money then as he could on those Midwest tracks, so he deferred," Wheeler recalled. "For a guy who really won at least 700 races, I could see why. In those days, unless you were a top Cup driver, you couldn't win enough money to overcompensate for that."

Trickle eventually did move to NASCAR, settling into Iron Station, N.C., where he lived for more than 20 years. Bodine said Trickle was full of stories and popular because of it.

"People everywhere knew his name," Bodine said. "That's why they used his likeness in that movie 'Days of Thunder.' He was such a character."

The main character in that popular niche racing movie, played by Tom Cruise, was named Cole Trickle.

Bodine said that a few years ago he had to back out of a celebrity cruise for patients who were on kidney dialysis. He asked Trickle to fill in.

"He made such an impression on people on that ship that everyone wanted to know when Dick was coming back," Bodine said. "They loved him. They tell me he was the last man to leave most of the bars on the ship and I believe it."

Bodine also recalled inviting Trickle to compete in one of his bobsled events in 2004 at Lake Placid, N.Y.

He said Trickle went down the first time and crashed. After being cleared by doctors to continue, Trickle tried again and crashed in the same place.

"They were doing interviews with him on TV and he was like, 'I don't know what happened, I did the exact same thing I did the first time,'" Bodine said. "And we're all looking at him like, 'Hey Dick, maybe that was the problem.'"

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sheriff-ex-nascar-driver-dick-trickle-dead-71-225300565.html

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The Dan Brown Code

Dan Brown?s latest novel, Inferno, went on sale this week and has already hit No. 1 on Amazon?s best-seller list. To mark the occasion, Slate revisits Bryan Curtis? 2006 article about witness statement in a copyright infringement case concerning his earlier novel The Da Vinci Code. As Curtis writes, the document offers numerous insights into the author?s enormous popularity and success. The piece is reprinted below.

Dan Brown, author of the mega-selling The Da Vinci Code, has brought forth his most thrilling piece of writing to date: a court document. Brown, who is being sued for copyright infringement in London by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, filed a 69-page witness statement with the British courts back in December. The London Times, the Associated Press, and other media gleefully unearthed it last week. In its textures?it is at turns snotty, contemplative, and disarmingly personal?it is clear Brown intended the brief less as a legal defense than as a literary memoir. Like the hidden ciphers the heroes of The Da Vinci Code pursue, this is the Dan Brown Code?the key to understanding the secrets of a pulp novelist.

At first glance, the document bears the giddy signatures of a Dan Brown novel. It's chopped into staccato chapters; the language is awkward ("I quite literally woke up one morning and decided to write a thriller that delved into NSA"); and its hero is a simple man who is being pursued by evil forces he doesn't quite understand. Educated at AmherstandPhillips Exeter Academy, Brown had an unusual literary awakening. He did not go the usual route, wandering into a library, bumping into Hemingway and Flaubert, and resolving right there in the stacks to become a writer. Brown resolved to become a writer when he read Sidney Sheldon's The Doomsday Conspiracy while vacationing in Tahiti. "Up until this point," he writes, "almost all of my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.) and I'd read almost no commercial fiction at all since the Hardy Boys as a child." The Sheldon book was a revelation, swift and merciless where Shakespeare, etc., had been slow and cumbersome. "[L]ife seemed to be trying to tell me something," Brown notes, adding, "I began to suspect that maybe I could write a 'thriller' of this type one day."

Brown has done a lot of thinking about what makes a successful Dan Brown thriller. He has found that it requires a few essential elements: some kind of shadowy force, like a secret society or government agency; a "big idea" that contains a moral "grey area"; and a treasure. The treasures in Brown's four novels have been a meteorite, anti-matter, a gold ring, and the Holy Grail. The shadowy forces have included the Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, and the National Security Agency. The big idea, if I'm reading him correctly, goes something like this: Is the Vatican good ? or is it evil? Is the National Security Agency for us ? or is it against us? When all of Brown's elements come together, doled out over cliffhanging chapters, with characters that exist to "move the plot along," it is like mixing the ingredients to make a cake. For example, Deception Point, Brown's third novel, is "a thriller about a meteorite discovered in the Arctic?a discovery that turns out to have profound political ramifications for an impending presidential election."

Another author might have sneered when asked to lay bare his methodology. Brown, on the other hand, appears eager to reveal every one of the secrets of the pulp novelist: "All my novels are set in 24 hours"; "All of my novels use the concept of a simple hero pulled out of his familiar world";"I intend to make Robert Langdon my primary character for years to come." My favorite secret is Brown's notion of the "thriller as academic lecture." The trick is to make your characters experts?in Brown's world, they are symbologists, cryptographers, and so forth. Then you pair them with an expert of a different discipline, making it convenient for the experts to essay to one another at some length, in the process spilling all the research you have done for your novel. (The Da Vinci Code contains dozens of loosely connected academic lectures.)I was also curious about how Brown named his protagonists. He has heroes ranging from Vittoria Vetra to Susan Fletcher?names that, in the glorious tradition of pulp writing, are either ostentatiously foreign or ridiculously dull. "I named the protagonist Robert Langdon," Brown writes of his Da Vinci and Angels & Demons hero. "I thought it was a fantastic name. It sounds very 'New England' and I like last names with two syllables ?"

One can't help but feel good about Brown's portrayal here. He is his own most fully formed character?the only one not rushing off to foil some dark international conspiracy or another; the only one who is allowed to emerge in a rush of small details. For instance, we learn that Brown's writing day begins at 4 a.m. He writes seven days a week. He keeps an hourglass on his desk and, on the hour, puts aside his manuscript to perform push-ups, sit-ups, and stretches. He does not like to write in the margins of books, but his wife doesn't feel that way. He is invariably delighted by anagrams. (He was extremely delighted to discover that Heide Lange, his literary agent, had a last name could be rearranged to spell "angel.") For a while, Brown sold books out of the back of his car. Some of his recent vacation destinations have included Tahiti, Rome, and the Mayanpyramidsat Chich?n Itz?. He is not a pack rat. He has thrown away most of the documents from his younger days, especially from his failed songwriting career, because they were "painful reminders of years spent for naught." He wrote the outline for The Da Vinci Code in a laundry room, himself planted in a lawn chair and his manuscript balanced on an ironing board.

None of this has the slightest thing to do with plagiarism. It seems that Brown, working under the restraints of the legal system, has freed himself from an even more rigid system, that of the commercial novel. When not absorbed with shadowy conspiracies or buried treasures, his prose becomes confident and disarmingly confessional. How else to explain the decision to reveal the fact that his father hid young Dan's Christmas presents around the house, providing him with treasure maps and codes to find them? Or that he once composed a music album called Angels and Demons? Or that as a student he felt profoundly movedbya professor's description of Michelangelo's Piet?? This document is a pulp novelist's renaissance. For the first time in his life, you might say Dan Brown is trying to create literature.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=8af9ef1e80e6f33d8e7c9ec5e27aacc4

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Google's conversational voice search reaches the desktop through Chrome

We're used to Google's mobile search apps letting us ask questions as we would with real people, but the desktop has usually been quite stiff. That's changing today: Google is bringing conversation-like voice search to our computers through Chrome, with no typing required. Web denizens just have to say "okay, Google," ask their question, and get back a spoken response similar to what they'd hear on their phones. The company hasn't said just how soon Chrome will incorporate the new voice features, however.

Gallery: Google I/O 2013: Google conversational voice search

Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Google

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