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The Obama administration reiterated its support Monday for repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” law and policy as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
worked to strip language repealing the ban from the annual defense authorization bill. Putting on a Seder every year can be a bit
of a challenge in Paris.TV
on the Radio are working on new music and have started to lay down some songs in the studio Progr[...] In “The Lying Lesson,†a new play by Craig Lucas, Bette Davis goes into semi-hiding in a Maine town in 1981 and meets a young woman who may not be as innocent as she seems. Since NASA’s Curiosity rover made its extraordinary Aug. 6 touchdown on Mars, it has been roving the Martian landscape, returning startling images.
So far, the rover has revealed rust-colored canyons and the remains of what appears to be an ancient riverbed  a sign that the Red Planet may have once supported water, or even life.
information back to Earth.
Chen, who studied aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, was the deputy chief of the rover’s descent and landing team, and spent the last 10 years puzzling over how to safely land the car-sized rover on Mars. His team’s ultimate game plan involved a heat shield, a parachute, several rocket engines and, most daringly, a bungee cord-style sky crane.
“I worked 10 years for seven minutes to go well,†Chen says, adding as understatement, “It was a pretty good ride.â€Â
Chen returned to MIT on Wednesday to relive that ride, along with Curiosity team members Bobak Ferdowsi SM ’03 and Steven Sell, a former member of MIT’s Space Systems Laboratory. Speaking to a packed
lecture hall in MIT’s Media Lab, the team members recounted their paths from MIT to the Mars mission, and their rollercoaster of emotions leading up to the rover’s “landing day.â€Â
‘I don’t think any of us knew how big this would be’Sell, who oversaw the deployment of Curiosity’s sky crane, recalled running through a mental checklist in the tense moments before the landing was confirmed.
“You start scrolling through every analysis you did, and thinking, ‘Did I carry the two?’†Sell said.
In fact, in the hours prior to the rover’s landing, there wasn’t much for NASA engineers to do but wait.
For 10 years, thousands of people worked to design, build and test the
rover, its landing equipment, and its intricate suite of scientific instruments.
Last November, the team armed the rover with its tools and commands, and
launched it to Mars, an experience Ferdowsi likened to “sending your kid off to college.†The hours leading up to Curiosity’s landing were, as Sell remembers, a time when “activities shut down, and we were mostly listening. It was the first time we could breathe.†It was during this period when members in the control room started getting texts from family and friends who were watching NASA’s live feed of the landing. Ferdowsi remembers receiving images of crowds watching in New York’s Times Square. “I don’t think any of us knew how big this would be,†said Ferdowsi, who has since attracted widespread attention for his unique style: on landing day, a Mohawk dyed red, white and blue. While the hours before the landing were relatively quiet, the last seven minutes  the time it took for the rover to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the planet’s surface  was a hair-raising experience. The 14-minute lag in getting signals from the rover to Earth meant that the craft would sit on Mars, successfully or not, for an agonizing period before the scientists would know its fate. The team had developed a simulation testbed to gauge the rover’s trajectory, and the engineers ran the simulation just ahead of the actual rover, in an attempt to predict a successful landing. In the one fluke of the night, the simulation delivered heart-stopping news: “Someone said that the testbed failed, and that we slammed into Mars,†Ferdowsi recalled. Chen, who was monitoring the rover’s signals, confirmed
otherwise, micro niche finder successful touchdown at 1:32 a.m. EDT  an announcement that
set off whoops and cheers from the control room
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Remembering the moment, Chen joked, “Sometimes people say JPL stands for ‘Just Plain Lucky.’â€ÂFrom
MIT to MarsLuck may have had a part in the landing, but Chen also credits his experience at MIT  particularly his years as
an AeroAstro undergraduate. Like today’s AeroAstro students, Chen went through the
department’s “Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate†program, a hands-on learning experience in which students take a project from an idea to a working prototype, learning to adapt and adjust a design to make it work.
“We basically did the same at JPL,†Chen said, noting that when he first arrived there after graduating from
MIT, Curiosity was in the very initial stages of design.
“It had two arms, and no sky crane, and looked very different,†Chen said.
In refining a design, he said, “you wandered the wilderness a lot.â€Â
For students who may be considering a career in aerospace, and future Mars missions in particular, Sell has one piece of advice: “Keep in touch with your colleagues. Aerospace is a small world.†Ferdowsi’s experience bolsters Sell’s advice.
After graduation, he learned of a fellow MIT student who accepted a job at JPL. Shortly before leaving, the friend submitted Ferdowsi’s resume for review.
JPL offered Ferdowsi a job, and put him to work on the then-fledgling Mars mission. “You did whatever needed doing,†Ferdowsi said.
Opportunities for Mars-related work may crop up in the near future, as Chen is just starting a new JPL project, drawing up a concept for a next-generation Mars rover. “I just got back on the merry-go-round again,†he said. The Islanders made the postseason for the first time since 2007. To many Republicans and the Obama administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government’s mortgage giants, are ill. But rather than healing them, both sides agree that the companies should be left to die and that their support for the housing market should wither away.
Revlon says it is moving to an “agile” data infrastructure and turning its 3.6 petabytes of business data into a “business driver” through a private cloud architecture. Carnival Corp & Plc said on Friday said that
its Carnival Legend ship, on the last leg of a seven-day Caribbean cruise, was having technical difficulties that were affecting its sailing speed. British actor will produce and take leading role in adaptation of Suzanne Rindell’s jazz-age novelKeira Knightley will star in and take a producer’s role on the jazz-age period piece The Other Typist, according to the Hollywood Reporter.Based on Suzanne Rindell’s 1920s-set debut novel, published in the UK this month, the film will centre on a lonely young typist living in a downtrodden police precinct on New York’s Lower East Side who befriends an exotic, stylish new
arrival at her workplace.
Together, Rose and Odalie explore the Big Apple’s seedy yet glorious underworld.The Guardian’s
John O’Connell has compared Rindell’s book with other famous examples of the “unreliable narrator”, such as Patricia Highsmith’s
The Talented Mr Ripley and Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, both of which have been made into films.
The novel has also drawn comparisons with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and – perhaps inevitably, given the high-profile debut of Baz Luhrmann’s starry
big-screen version – F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.The Hollywood Reporter does not make clear whether Knightley is to play the prudish Rose or the enigmatic and charismatic Odalie. The Other Typist has been picked up by 20th Century Fox offshoot Fox Searchlight, which produced another recent tale of two young women with diametrically opposed personalities, the Oscar-winning Black Swan.
The new film does not yet have a director attached.Keira
KnightleyFilm adaptations20th Century FoxDramaAlfred HitchcockBaz LuhrmannF Scott FitzgeraldBen Childguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
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content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Stanford’s Chiney Ogwumike has become the first player to win Pac-12 Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season.
If you’re fat-burning-furnace little whiplash from recent nutritional news, no wonder. The bride is in law school and the groom is an editor at The Atlantic. The intention is likely to be helpful and ensure that you can see the text you’re typing or the options in the select element.
This is fine, of course. What’s annoying is that the browser doesn’t zoom back out once you’re done with the control, so you have to pinch the screen and manually zoom out.
Not showstopping, but rather annoying.
This behaviour seems to be the same for all browsers that use WebKit, which as far as I know means all iOS browsers except Opera Mini (which does not auto-zoom form controls). International team will synthesise genome of brewer’s yeast with a view to creating strains that make biofuel, vaccines and drugsBritain’s latest bid to embrace the futuristic science of synthetic biology will be revealed by the government on Thursday when it announces plans to make new strains of brewer’s
yeast.Researchers
will receive nearly £1m to create a synthetic chromosome for the single-celled organism that since Neolithic times has been exploited for its ability to turn sugar into alcohol.The scientists are joining an international effort to build the world’s first synthetic yeast genome from scratch, using groundbreaking techniques that are set to transform the field of biology.Experts
from Britain, the US, China and India aim to make synthetic versions of all of the organism’s 16 chromosomes by 2017, and incorporate them into living cells a year later.Once they have made all of the genetic parts of the yeast they hope to press ahead with designing new strains that churn out useful substances such as industrial chemicals, vaccines and biofuels.Though
practical applications are some way off, the painstaking work to recreate the organism’s genetic machinery will give scientists vital insights into the molecular biology of life.David
Willetts, the
science minister, is expected to announce UK backing for the project at a synthetic biology conference at Imperial College London on Thursday.”Using engineering techniques to construct or recreate genes is a technology that could massively improve human wellbeing. It could feed us, fuel us and heal us,” Willetts told
the Guardian.
“You transform the output of your agriculture, make much more environmentally friendly forms of energy, and use it for tackling diseases.”It’s early stages, but Britain has a strong presence in this, and these technologies are already being used.”Brewer’s yeast, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has more than 6,000 genes, a third of which are similar to genes found in humans. The UK team from Imperial College, Edinburgh and Cambridge universities will focus their efforts on chromosome 11.If the team achieves its goal, this will be the first time scientists have built the whole genome of a “eukaryotic” organism – one that stores its DNA in a nucleus.
Plants and animals are eukaryotes, whereas bacteria – which lack nuclei – are known as prokaryotes.In 2010, a team led by Craig Venter, the pioneering US geneticist, reported that they had built the first synthetic genome of a bacterium. Many scientists saw the work as a major step forward for synthetic biology, but critics, including some religious groups, accused the team of “playing God”. The organism, Mycoplasma mycoides, causes mastitis in goats.Paul Freemont, who will co-lead the UK arm of the project at the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College, said building synthetic yeast was “a massive leap forward” compared with Venter’s work.Speaking to journalists in London, he added that the project was not a step towards
making human chromosomes. “We’re not wild west cowboys.
It’s not going to happen,” he said.Willetts warned that fears over the potential risks of synthetic biology could harm progress in a field that the government is banking on to help reinvigorate the economy. The chancellor has listed synthetic biology as one of “eight great technologies” singled out for extra UK investment.Funding for the yeast project is part of a £60m package
for synthetic biology that Willetts will announce. The rest will pay for DNA synthesis facilities and new centres that boost research and help scientists turn their discoveries into products.”Europe
cannot become a museum of forex growth bot technologies,” he said. “There isn’t an ‘Amish folk option’ where you can stick with it and just accept that America and China are going to do all these future technologies. Are we just going to be on the receiving end of technologies developed
elsewhere, or do we want our scientists to be up there and helping to shape them?”Jef Boeke, who is the overall head of the project at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, said it could lead to the development of synthetic yeast strains that can survive in high alcohol concentrations, paving the way for the manufacture of bioethanol and other green fuels. Other designer strains could be used to produce vaccines, such as one against hepatitis B, and drugs, including the antimalarial artemisinin.But he said “the real payoff” was the fresh understanding of biology the project would bring.Biochemistry and molecular biologyChemistryMicrobiologyBiologyDavid WillettsIan Sampleguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Over the past 13 years, Panama City has been racing to become a world-class metropolis, and for travelers, the changes have been enormous. Nobel prizewinning scientist who created a new frontier in molecular geneticsFrançois Jacob, who has died aged 92, was awarded the 1965 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine as a result of his perceptive model of gene function in bacteria. Based on meticulous research and put forward jointly with Jacques Monod, it created a new frontier in molecular genetics by establishing the sequential translation and location of individual genes which together endow a bacterium with specific capabilities. Now universally known as the Jacob-Monod model, this first interpretation has since been shown to be substantially correct.Built upon the hypothesis of the coded helical structure of genetic material, DNA, put forward by Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, Jacob’s scientific work provided the first experimental confirmation of the existence and exacting role of the messenger RNA (mRNA), which carries the negative print of information from the genes to the cell’s protein factories (ribosomes) for the production of specific proteins.
The cells of living organisms throb with dynamic and complex functions involving many proteins, enzymes and biochemical steps, whose production sequence is critical.This implies
an elegantly controlled co-operative triggering of many individual genes which create a sequence of different specific but temporary messenger RNAs that, in turn, are translated into the correct sequence of enzymes needed for a required biochemical process.
Jacob set out to unravel these complexities for a single important biochemical change.The scientific search for the “transforming principle” – the specific substance of genetic material – had begun in earnest in the 1930s and had
led, for example, to the identification in 1938 of RNA in tobacco mosaic virus by Frederick Bawden and Norman Pirie in the UK. Through laboratory strains of common bacteria, such as pneumococcus, it finally led in 1944 to the identification by Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty in America of DNA as the sole genetic material responsible for transforming one strain into another.
Parallel work was going on fitfully in wartime Europe, although in France the chosen experimental organism was usually the ubiquitous, large and easily handled gut bacterium, Escherichia coli (E coli).Like many bacterial species, this organism has evolved rapid ways
of altering its reproductive method and metabolism to cope with changes in its environment.
Among other capabilities, E coli can replicate by sexual conjugation, as well as by simple division, and can switch from glucose to lactose as its primary nutrient.
To use lactose it must first break it down into its glucose and galactose components.
Jacob exploited these characteristics, first by developing techniques through which to interrupt conjugation at intervals of a few minutes – allowing him to determine the sequence of genes transmitted from one organism to another.
Then, using hybrid organisms and experimental transfer from one pure nutrient medium to the other, he mapped the sequence of genes, messenger RNAs and enzymes employed by E coli in the step by step biochemistry of the nutrient switching process which this triggered.This
was a tour google sniper review of laboratory skill that carried bacteriology, the still embryonic speciality of molecular genetics and the dynamic details of cellular biochemistry, to new levels of precision.
Jacob discovered that in E coli all the genes needed for the nutrient switching process were clustered closely together in the genome as if to facilitate rapid sequential use.
With Monod, he coined the name “operon” for such a cluster and, because of their compactness and apparent efficiency, operons were at first thought likely to be universal in living organisms.In essence, this was the research that earned Jacob his Nobel prize – awarded jointly with Monod and André Lwoff – and which, in the context of the prokaryotes (the bacteria and the blue-green algae, now called the cyanobacteria), still stands. But, as molecular genetics and the techniques of gene-mapping widened to embrace more complex organisms (the eukaryotes), it was found that in these the individual genes needed for a specific sequence of biochemical steps are often widely separated and that the same gene may be used in several different and sometimes simultaneous processes. It was also discovered that some RNAs have a much longer lifetime in these organisms than in bacteria.Born in Nancy, north-eastern France, Jacob went to the Lycée Carnot in Paris.
When his medical studies were disrupted by the second world war he joined the Free French Forces under General Charles de Gaulle. He served as an officer in Libya and Tunisia and was seriously injured in 1944.
After the allied victory, he was awarded the Croix de la Libération and, as a result of his injuries, was unable to fulfil his prewar ambition to become a surgeon.Instead, after qualifying as a medical doctor at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1947, he turned to research and, within 20 years, had emerged as a world leader in bacterial genetics. He was head of the cellular genetics unit at the Pasteur Institute from 1960 until his retirement in 1991, serving as president of the Pasteur from 1982 to 1988, and was professor of cellular genetics at the College of France from 1965 to 1992. An honorary member of several scientific academies in Europe, he was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society in London in 1973.
In addition to his 200-plus scientific papers, he wrote the books The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (1970), The
Possible and the Actual (1981) and an autobiography, The Statue Within (1987).He
had three sons and a daughter with his first wife, the pianist Lise Bloch, whom he married in 1947. She died in 1983.
In 1999 he married Geneviève Barrier.•
François Jacob, geneticist, born 17 June 1920; died 19 April 2013• Anthony Tucker died in 1998Nobel
prizesBiochemistry and molecular biologyGeneticsScience prizesMedical researchPeople in scienceFranceAnthony Tuckerguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds A J.D. Power and Associates study finds that the largest banks have gotten better at
making their customers happy.
An update of a four-year-old Stanford University study that found many charter school students were not performing as well as those in public schools now shows better results in a few states. Australia’s Brett Rumford eased to a second successive victory on the European Tour when he pulled away from the field to record a four-shot triumph at the China Open on Sunday. World leaders promised to give all children access to primary school by 2015, but the goal is proving elusive, with the
economic downturn hitting education aid. The Yankees’ season grew more challenging after General Manager Brian Cashman lashed out at Alex Rodriguez, and news came that surgery would sideline Mark Teixeira.
Air Force Tech. Sgt. Heather Sommerdyke spent $12,000 on two liposuction surgeries last spring. She was running eight to 10 miles, six days a week.
She even switched to a starvation diet.
It was all part of a last-ditch effort to
trim her waistline to the 35.5-inch maximum for female airmen. She … A couple of Crimson Tide fans from Mississippi were most impressed with the dining options at Barclays