Saturday 16 February 2013

Syrian state news agency says power outage plunges Damascus and southern Syria into darkness

This citizen journalism image provided by Edlib News Network, ENN, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows anti-Syrian regime protesters holding a caricature placard during a demonstration, at Kafr Nabil town, in Idlib province, northern Syria, Friday, Feb. 15, 2013. Heavy fighting for control of the international airport in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo and a major military air base nearby has killed some 150 rebels and government soldiers over the past two days, activists said Friday. (AP Photo/Edlib News Network ENN)

This citizen journalism image provided by Edlib News Network, ENN, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows anti-Syrian regime protesters holding a caricature placard during a demonstration, at Kafr Nabil town, in Idlib province, northern Syria, Friday, Feb. 15, 2013. Heavy fighting for control of the international airport in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo and a major military air base nearby has killed some 150 rebels and government soldiers over the past two days, activists said Friday. (AP Photo/Edlib News Network ENN)

(AP) ? Syrian state news agency says power outage plunges Damascus and southern Syria into darkness.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-02-16-ML-APNewsAlert/id-a2861540697741d79fa7e653be373a7a

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Heroku Admits To Performance Degradation Over The Past 3 Years After Criticism From Rap Genius

2013-02-09_1554Heroku, the popular cloud application platform, may not be as fast today as it was three years ago. Yesterday, Rap Genius' James Somers , posted a widely read blog post, arguing that Heroku had quietly changed the way it distributes tasks from Ruby on Rails apps?across the Amazon EC2 machines it makes available to its users at some point in the last few years without alerting developers of this change. Instead of intelligently routing requests to the next available server, as Heroku did in its early days, Somers argued that it now randomly distributes requests, resulting in increased queuing times. Today, Heroku's general manager Oren Teich admitted that this is indeed the case.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/emm8JriLSx0/

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Funeral held for NYC woman killed in Turkey

NEW YORK (AP) ? As the family and friends of Sarai Sierra were saying farewell on Friday to the 33-year-old New York City woman killed while on a solo vacation in Turkey, investigators there detained the siblings of a man wanted for questioning over her death.

Turkey's state-run news agency said police briefly took the two brothers and a sister of the possible suspect into custody in the northern city of Karabuk. They were released after being questioned about their brother's whereabouts. The Anadolu agency said their DNA samples were taken.

Police in Karabuk refused to comment. Turkish news reports say police want to question a scrap paper collector who used to hang around Istanbul's ancient city walls, where Sierra's body was found on Feb. 2, 12 days after she disappeared. Authorities say she sustained a fatal blow to the head.

Sierra had traveled to Turkey to explore her photography hobby. She went alone after a friend who was supposed to join her canceled for financial reasons.

That friend was among about 200 mourners who attended Sierra's funeral at Christian Pentecostal Church on Staten Island Friday morning.

In a service that featured several personal tributes, her husband, siblings and friends made clear they found solace in their faith.

"My mind is at peace," said her husband, Steven Diaz-Sierra.

"I have many questions for the Lord," he said, "but despite how tragically this came about, I know in my heart that my wife is in his presence."

Sierra was a member of the church's congregation since she was a child, and was married there in 1998.

"Whatever the circumstances of her death, she's with God," and that belief provides comfort, said the Rev. John Rocco Carlo. The pastor said it was one of the most difficult funerals he performed in his two decades at the church, because he had watched Sierra grow up.

"It's not goodbye," said her brother, David Jimenez. "We'll see her again someday. Christ promised us that."

Still, while they spoke positively of their beliefs, the tributes also acknowledged the heartbreaking loss.

"There will always be that missing space in my life, and that missing piece is you," said her sister, Christina Jimenez, as she struggled to hold back tears. "Nothing is the same now, and I doubt that will ever change."

Speaking directly to Sierra's sons ? Silas, 9, and Sion, 11 ? Carlo said: "As we grow older, we become our parents. We look like them, we act like them. We talk and walk like them.

"So when you miss your mom, look in the mirror. She's part of you."

Following the service, Sierra was buried in a cemetery steps away from the apartment building where she lived with her husband and children.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nyc-mother-killed-turkey-buried-man-wanted-185551170.html

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Friday 15 February 2013

Proteins Behind Mad-Cow Disease Also Help Brain to Develop

Prion proteins Prion proteins cause pathologies such as hamster scrapie when they misfold (right) ? but the same protein has benign functions when folded correctly (left). Image: N. Engl. J. Med. 344, 1516-1526 (2001)

Prions are best known as the infectious agents that cause ?mad cow? disease and the human versions of it, such as variant Creutzfeldt?Jakob Disease. But the proteins also have at least one known useful function, in the cells that insulate nerves, and are suspected to have more. Now researchers have provided the first direct evidence that the proteins play an important role in neurons themselves.

The team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience that prions are involved in developmental plasticity, the process by which the structure and function of neurons in the growing brain is shaped by experience.?

Prions come in two main forms: the normal version and the misfolded, infectious version. The normal version, known as cellular prion protein (or PrPC), is present in every cell of the body and helps to maintain the myelin sheath in the cells that protect the nerves.

But the molecule is abundant in neurons themselves, especially during development. Because it is tethered to the membrane, it is widely assumed to be involved in signaling between nerve cells, but little direct evidence has been found for this.

Neurobiologist Enrico Cherubini of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and his colleagues therefore decided to look at the effects of electrical stimulation on slices of tissue from the hippocampus of healthy 3?7-day-old mice and of animals genetically engineered to lack the gene that encodes the prion protein.?

They used electrodes to stimulate individual cells at the same time as the networks of young neurons showed bursts of spontaneous electrical activity, or to simultaneously stimulate pairs of cells that are connected to each other.

In the tissue from healthy animals, both procedures strengthened the links between neurons, a phenomenon known as long-term potentiation.

In mice without the prion gene, however, the stimulation had the opposite effect. In these animals, the procedure induced long-term depression, or a weakening of neuronal connections.

Ups and downs
Further experiments revealed that the potentiation in mice with cellular prion protein was caused by activation of an enzyme called protein kinase A. In the absence of cellular prion protein, however, activation of a related enzyme, called protein lipase C, caused a long-term lowering of the neuron's activity.

?This shows that [the cellular prion protein] controls the direction of plasticity in the developing hippocampus,? says Cherubini, adding that he and his colleagues now want to identify the molecules that transfer the prion signal from the membrane into the cell. ?

Long-term potentiation in the hippocampus is thought to be crucial for learning and memory, but the importance of prions is still unknown, and Cherubini would like to investigate how the proteins are involved in behavior. He also speculates that prions have a similar role in other parts of the developing brain, such as the visual cortex, and in adults.

"The function of cellular prion protein is quite mysterious, but this convincingly demonstrates that it has a crucial role in strengthening synaptic connections within developing neural networks," says R. Douglas Fields, chief of the Neural Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institute for Child Health and Development in Bethesda, Maryland.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on February 14, 2013.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=c6e7eaa859fed41a07dd965bf45a065f

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Parents of Sandy Hook victims launch #1MillionHearts campaign

A girl attempts to keep candles lit at a memorial outside Sandy Hook Elementary School. (Dylan Stableford)

Sandy Hook Promise?the organization formed last month to honor the 20 children and six adults killed in the Newtown, Conn., school shootings?has launched a social media campaign for Valentine's Day to mark the two-month anniversary of the massacre.

The group, which includes dozens of parents of the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims, is asking supporters to send virtual Valentines on Feb. 14 using the hashtag #1MillionHearts.

Participants can share the messages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest from a page on the group's website.

Alyssa Milano, rapper will.i.am and Jennifer Hudson?who performed at the Super Bowl with a Newtown children's choir?are among the celebrities who have already pledged their support for the #1MillionHearts initiative from their Twitter feeds.

"I'm sending a valentine to #Newtown with #1MillionHearts for @SandyHook," Hudson tweeted. "Join me."

Lee Shull, co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, said Valentine's Day "seemed natural to create a special way for Americans to continue channeling their love and support."

[Related: Parents of Sandy Hook victims speak, urging ?real change?]

Last month, the group held an emotional press conference in Newtown to promote a national dialogue on gun violence, mental health and school safety.

"This is a promise to do everything in our power to be remembered not as the town filled with grief and victims but as a place where real change began," Nelba M?rquez-Greene, whose 6-year-old daughter Ana was killed in the Dec. 14 shooting, said.

The group stopped short of taking sides in the gun-control debate.

"Some of us are gun owners," Tom Bittman, co-founder of the initiative, said last month. "We hunt, target shoot, protect our homes. We teach our sons and daughters how to use guns safely. [But] we're not afraid of a discussion about responsibility and accountability. The bottom line is we must act. We can't let this happen again. Doing nothing is no longer an option."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/1-million-hearts-valentines-sandy-hook-131809555.html

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