Head lice, also known as pediculosis capitis, cause itching and outrage when they're detected, most often on the heads of schoolchildren. Increasingly, the bugs are becoming resistant to common pesticides.
By Tia Ghose LiveScience
Lice genes could offer insights into human migration, according to new research.
The new analysis also suggests that efforts to eradicate the blood-sucking parasites may need to focus on local populations, rather than trying to tackle the creatures globally.
The findings,?published Wednesday?in the journal PLOS ONE, could help scientists understand how lice evolve resistance to insecticides.
Human hitchhikers Lice have fed off primates for more than 25 million years, although they may have first become a human scourge when humans donned clothes.
As humans conquered the globe, these parasitic hitchhikers went along for the ride. Past work had studied the genetics of lice, but relied on DNA that passes on from the maternal line, making it difficult to get a complete picture of human migration. [Tiny & Nasty: Images of Things That Make Us Sick]
Towards that end, Marina Ascunce, an entomologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History Museum, and her colleagues analyzed nuclear DNA, genetic material that is passed on from both male and female lice, in 75 specimen from 10 sites across four regions: Asia, North America, Central America, and Europe. They also collected clothing lice from people in Nepal and Canada.
Past migration They found that lice from Honduras closely resembled Asian lice.
"Lice from Honduras may have been brought by the first people in America, and that's why we see this closer genetic affinity," Ascunce told LiveScience.
By contrast, lice from New York were more closely related to European parasites, likely reflecting North America's waves of European colonization over the centuries, Ascunce said.
In addition, because there is not much gene flow between different lice populations, insecticides could be more effective if they target genetic vulnerabilities specific to local populations, she said.
While the study is preliminary, a more thorough sampling of worldwide lice could provide insight into why head lice differ from clothing lice, which harbor in clothing and can spread deadly diseases.
Genetic analysis could also reveal when and where humans interbred with Neanderthals and other archaic hominid species, the researchers write in the paper.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose?or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook?and Google+.?
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
School choice
should be the foundation of any successful school system. This includes
learning options of all kinds, including online learning, private
schools, charter schools, homeschooling and more.
While
alternative learning options provide much-needed options for students,
these programs should not be exempt from performance reviews.
In
a surprise move, the Chicago Public Schools, or CPS, school board
announced on Feb. 21 that it plans to close two charter high school
campuses this year ? the Mirta Ramirez Computer Science High School, run by ASPIRA, and the Dusable Leadership Academy, run by the Betty Shabazz International Charter School.
Most charter high schools have outperformed
their traditional public school counterparts. In fact, charter schools
held the top nine spots for 2012 ACT scores for open-enrollment,
non-selective public high schools in Chicago. During the past five
years, top charter schools? ACT scores have increased 17 percent while
traditional public schools have gained only 5 percent.
Still, there are a handful of charter schools that have not raised student achievement.
Marta
Ramirez is one of them. It has performed poorly on almost every measure
during the past three years. Nearly 0 percent of its students exceeded
state standards on the Prairie State Achievement, or PSAE, exam. Its
average ACT score was 15.6 ? more than 5 points below what ACT considers
college-ready. Only 38 percent of graduates enrolled in college.
Dusable
performed even worse. None of its students exceed state standards on
the PSAE exam. Its average ACT score was 15.2.? Its one-year dropout
rate is just 4 percentage points higher than the CPS average of 6.7
percent.? ?
Consistently poor-performing
schools should be closed, regardless of whether they are public or
charter. This includes schools like Marta Ramirez and Dusable, which
have failed to raise student achievement since they opened.
Continuing to provide them with money is a waste of taxpayer dollars that would be better utilized by charter schools that have proven results, like Chicago International Charter Schools and the Noble Network of Charter Schools.
Why
do these poor-performing schools continue to survive despite failing to
improve student achievement? The lack of a competitive market in
education. ?
Creating a system that allows
parents to choose from multiple schools, not just their neighborhood
school and a handful of charter schools, would likely force schools like
Marta Ramirez and Dusable to reform or go out of business.
Working toward this sort of system should be the aim of Illinois policymakers.
Josh Dwyer is Director of Education Reform at the Illinois Policy Institute
CHICAGO (AP) ? Advanced breast cancer has increased slightly among young women, a 34-year analysis suggests. The disease is still uncommon among women younger than 40, and the small change has experts scratching their heads about possible reasons.
The results are potentially worrisome because young women's tumors tend to be more aggressive than older women's, and they're much less likely to get routine screening for the disease.
Still, that doesn't explain why there'd be an increase in advanced cases and the researchers and other experts say more work is needed to find answers.
It's likely that the increase has more than one cause, said Dr. Rebecca Johnson, the study's lead author and medical director of a teen and young adult cancer program at Seattle Children's Hospital.
"The change might be due to some sort of modifiable risk factor, like a lifestyle change" or exposure to some sort of cancer-linked substance, she said.
Johnson said the results translate to about 250 advanced cases diagnosed in women younger than 40 in the mid-1970s versus more than 800 in 2009. During those years, the number of women nationwide in that age range went from about 22 million to closer to 30 million ? an increase that explains part of the study trend "but definitely not all of it," Johnson said.
Other experts said women delaying pregnancy might be a factor, partly because getting pregnant at an older age might cause an already growing tumor to spread more quickly in response to pregnancy hormones.
Obesity and having at least a drink or two daily have both been linked with breast cancer but research is inconclusive on other possible risk factors, including tobacco and chemicals in the environment. Whether any of these explains the slight increase in advanced disease in young women is unknown.
There was no increase in cancer at other stages in young women. There also was no increase in advanced disease among women older than 40.
Overall U.S. breast cancer rates have mostly fallen in more recent years, although there are signs they may have plateaued.
Some 17 years ago, Johnson was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer at age 27, and that influenced her career choice to focus on the disease in younger women.
"Young women and their doctors need to understand that it can happen in young women," and get checked if symptoms appear, said Johnson, now 44. "People shouldn't just watch and wait."
The authors reviewed a U.S. government database of cancer cases from 1976 to 2009. They found that among women aged 25 to 39, breast cancer that has spread to distant parts of the body ? advanced disease ? increased from between 1 and 2 cases per 100,000 women to about 3 cases per 100,000 during that time span.
The study was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
About one in 8 women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime, but only 1 in 173 will develop it by age 40. Risks increase with age and certain gene variations can raise the odds.
Routine screening with mammograms is recommended for older women but not those younger than 40.
Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the American Cancer Society's deputy chief medical officer, said the results support anecdotal reports but that there's no reason to start screening all younger women since breast cancer is still so uncommon for them.
He said the study "is solid and interesting and certainly does raise questions as to why this is being observed." One of the most likely reasons is probably related to changes in childbearing practices, he said, adding that the trend "is clearly something to be followed."
Dr. Ann Partridge, chair of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's advisory committee on breast cancer in young women, agreed but said it's also possible that doctors look harder for advanced disease in younger women than in older patients. More research is needed to make sure the phenomenon is real, said Partridge, director of a program for young women with breast cancer at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The study shouldn't cause alarm, she said. Still, Partridge said young women should be familiar with their breasts and see the doctor if they notice any lumps or other changes.
Software engineer Stephanie Carson discovered a large breast tumor that had already spread to her lungs; that diagnosis in 2003 was a huge shock.
"I was so clueless," she said. "I was just 29 and that was the last thing on my mind."
Carson, who lives near St. Louis, had a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation and other treatments and she frequently has to try new drugs to keep the cancer at bay.
Because most breast cancer is diagnosed in early stages, there's a misconception that women are treated, and then get on with their lives, Carson said. She and her husband had to abandon hopes of having children, and she's on medical leave from her job.
"It changed the complete course of my life," she said. "But it's still a good life."
Canada's NEOSSat space telescope was launched Monday atop an Indian rocket. It will monitor two groups of asteroids whose proximity to the sun makes them hard to see from Earth.
By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / February 25, 2013
In this frame grab made from dashboard camera video shows the Chelyabinsk asteroid on Feb. 15, about 930 miles east of Moscow. Efforts to discover near-Earth asteroids received a potential boost Monday with the launch of Canada's NEOSSat space telescope.
AP Video/AP
Enlarge
Efforts to discover near-Earth asteroids ? including those that are potentially hazardous ? received a potential boost Monday with the launch of the Canadian Space Agency's Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat).
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Housed in a spacecraft the size of a large suitcase, the space telescope physically is a munchkin among behemoths. Its light-gathering mirror is only about 6 inches across.
But from its orbit nearly 500 miles above Earth, NEOSSat will be able to view faint near-Earth asteroids in a region of space that is tough for terrestrial telescopes to tackle.
The $25 million NEOSSat mission is one of seven satellites the Indian Space Agency lofted Monday aboard a single rocket launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, some 50 miles north of Chennal, on India's east coast.
Ground stations have made contact with NEOSSat, "and the basics are green," says Alan Hildebrand, a researcher at the University of Calgary in Alberta and the project's lead scientist.
To date, astronomers say they have discovered between 90 and 95 percent of the approximately 1,000 near-Earth asteroids estimated to be larger than half a mile across.
In 2005, Congress instructed NASA to hunt for smaller asteroids ? setting a goal of finding 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids 500 feet wide and larger by 2020.
But as the Chelyabinsk asteroid demonstrated on Feb. 15, objects far smaller can inflict damage. At about 55 feet across, and with a mass estimated at 10,000 tons, the asteroid exploded high over the Ural mountains. The shock waves damaged an estimated 4,300 buildings and injured nearly 1,500 people.
With tens of millions of objects this size orbiting the sun, the recurrence rate for collisions with a Chelyabinsk-like object averages once every 100 years, according to Paul Chodas, with NASA's Near-Earth Objects Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
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SYDNEY (Reuters) - Elephant seals wearing head sensors and swimming deep beneath Antarctic ice have helped scientists better understand how the ocean's coldest, deepest waters are formed, providing vital clues to understanding its role in the world's climate.
The tagged seals, along with sophisticated satellite data and moorings in ocean canyons, all played a role in providing data from the extreme Antarctic environment, where observations are very rare and ships could not go, said researchers at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystem CRC in Tasmania.
Scientists have long known of the existence of "Antarctic bottom water," a dense, deep layer of water near the ocean floor that has a significant impact on the movement of the world's oceans.
Three areas where this water is formed were known of, and the existence of a fourth suspected for decades, but the area was far too inaccessible, until now, thanks to the seals.
"The seals went to an area of the coastline that no ship was ever going to get to," said Guy Williams, ACE CRC Sea Ice specialist and co-author of the study.
"This is a particular form of Antarctic water called Antarctic bottom water production, one of the engines that drives ocean circulation," he told Reuters. "What we've done is found another piston in that engine."
Southern Ocean Elephant seals are the largest of all seals, with males growing up to six meters (20 feet) long and weighing up to 4,000 kilograms (8,800 lbs).
Twenty of the seals were deployed from Davis Station in east Antarctica in 2011 with a sensor, weighing about 100 to 200 grams, on their head. Each of the sensors had a small satellite relay which transmitted data on a daily basis during the five to 10 minute intervals when the seals surfaced.
"We get four dives worth of data a day but they're actually doing up to 60 dives," he said.
"The elephant seals ... went to the very source and found this very cold, very saline dense water in the middle of winter beneath a polynya, which is what we call an ice factory around the coast of Antarctica," Williams added.
Previous studies have shown that there are 50-year-long trends in the properties of the Antarctic bottom water, and Williams said the latest study will help better assess those changes, perhaps providing clues for climate change modeling.
"Several of the seals foraged on the continental slope as far down as 1,800 meters (1.1 miles), punching through into a layer of this dense water cascading down the abyss," he said in a statement. "They gave us very rare and valuable wintertime measurements of this process."
(Reporting by Pauline Askin, Editing by Elaine Lies and Michael Perry)
NEWPORT NEWS, Virginia (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday warned of threats to Navy readiness and the government released hundreds of illegal immigrants due to budget pressure as automatic government spending cuts crept closer.
In the latest event staged by the White House to warn of the possible damage to public services, Obama spoke at the Newport News Shipbuilding shipyard where scheduled maintenance to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has been delayed by the budget crisis.
"The threat of these cuts has already forced the Navy to cancel the deployment, or delay the repair of certain aircraft carriers. One that's currently being built might not get finished," he warned.
The $85 billion across-the-board budget cuts are due to begin on Friday, and might eventually force the government to scale back on a host of services such as air traffic control, law enforcement and food safety inspections.
"These cuts are wrong. They are not smart. They're not fair. They are a self-inflicted wound that doesn't have to happen," he told workers in Newport News, Virginia.
In a move criticized by Republicans as a dangerous political stunt, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency released several hundred detained illegal immigrants in order to save money in preparation for the cuts.
An agreement in Congress would halt the cuts, but with days to go before the ax starts to fall, the two parties do not agree on what to replace them with. There have been hardly any budget talks between the parties since New Year.
Republicans seek different, more targeted, spending cuts than entailed in "sequestration," as the automatic cuts are known in Washington budget parlance. They complain that Obama is overplaying worries about sequestration to promote long-held plans to close tax loopholes.
House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner accused Obama of using "our military men and women as a prop in yet another campaign rally to support his tax hikes."
Boehner, under pressure by conservatives not to cave to Obama's demand for higher taxes, said members of the Democratic-controlled Senate need to "get off their ass" and pass legislation that would blunt the impact of the cuts.
In the Senate, Republicans struggled to come up with a unified plan for replacing the cuts, with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell saying lawmakers should simply pass a law giving the president flexibility on how the reductions would be carried out. Obama rejected that idea.
In a sign of how far they are from halting sequestration, congressional Republicans and the White House have been trying to blame each other for the cuts, which both Democrats and Republicans agreed to in a 2011 plan to fix an earlier budget crisis.
BLAME SHARED FOR CUTS
"The president's been running around acting like the world's going to end because Congress might actually follow through on an idea he proposed and signed into law - all the while pretending he's somehow powerless to stop it," said McConnell.
Americans blame both Obama and congressional Republicans for the sequestration crisis, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll released on Tuesday.
Twenty-five percent of people said Republicans in Congress were responsible for sequestration, 23 percent blamed Obama and 5 percent pointed to congressional Democrats. Thirty percent said all of them were to blame.
With a trip to a defense-heavy region of the country, Obama is seeking to draw attention to how the cuts would play out in communities where the military is a major source of jobs.
Defense spending makes up 9.8 percent of Virginia's gross domestic product.
But sequestration will be brought in gradually, and no shock to the economy is expected on Friday when it starts.
IMMIGRANTS RELEASED
"The impact of this policy won't be felt overnight but it will be real," Obama said. "The longer these cuts are in place the greater the damage."
The planned cuts will be phased in over seven months, giving lawmakers time to halt the worst effects, possibly in budget talks later in March.
But the Obama administration is highlighting a series of cuts to public services which are threatened.
The release of several hundred illegal immigrants due to budget pressures was criticized by the Republican head of the House Judiciary Committee as a political stunt to pressure Congress to put off sequestration.
"It's abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities to promote his political agenda on sequestration," U.S. Representative Bob Goodlatte said in a statement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement released the immigrants while their deportation cases proceed. ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said serious offenders were still being held.
Sequestration might be stopped as part of negotiations next month over another unrelated fiscal issue: a continuing resolution to fund government operations.
But House Republicans think they are in a strong bargaining position as there is not likely to be public outcry when the cuts start, unlike the "fiscal cliff" crisis at the New Year when the threat of tax hikes for most working Americans kept pressure on lawmakers to reach a deal.
The sequestration cuts apply in equal measure to non-defense spending and defense spending.
The reductions will force the Pentagon to put most of its 800,000 civilian employees on unpaid leave for 22 days, slash ship and aircraft maintenance and curtail training, Defense Department officials have told Congress. Pentagon contracting and acquisitions personnel were authorized last week to consult with their industry counterparts about the upcoming spending cuts.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in testimony on Tuesday to the Senate Banking Committee, urged lawmakers to avoid the spending cuts, warning that combined with earlier tax increases it could create a "significant headwind" for the economic recovery.
(Additional reporting By Patricia Zengerle and Roberta Rampton in Washington; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Tim Dobbyn and Doina Chiacu)
Posted by keithsawyer in Uncategorized. Tags: american law institute, copyright, dcma, georgetown law school, patent, stephen breyer trackback
Justice Breyer?s Lunch Talk
I?ve just participated in a small conference on copyright and patent law, hosted by the American Law Institute and Georgetown University Law Center, a few steps from Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Of the 40 people in the room, I was the only one who was not a lawyer or a legal scholar?I was invited to contribute perspectives from creativity research. I was honored to be in the room, because these were some of the most highly respected people working in intellectual property?scholars from Stanford and NYU; senior legal counsel from Google and Walt Disney; judges on the Federal Circuit Court; and our lunch speaker, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He impressed the hell out of me?a great speaker, savvy in the political ways of Washington, and a brilliant mind. The smartest guy in the room?and in this room, that was saying a lot.
Although a lot of the legal terminology went over my head??doctrine of equivalence? and ?settled expectation??it was really stimulating. After all, the research shows that one of the best ways to stimulate creativity is to learn something about a new field related to your own. I give this advice in my new book, Zig Zag (on pages 67 and 68):
Branch out: Always start with your core area of expertise?but don?t stop there. Branch out and study subjects in every area that is somehow related to your problem?.Successful creators are curious by nature. They ask questions and listen closely to the answers, even when the information has no obvious relationship to what they?re working on at the moment.
This conference was perfect for me, because intellectual property lawyers think about creativity every day, but using a totally different language and perspective from my creativity research colleagues. Here are some of the key themes I took from the day:
The panel I spoke on discussed how (and whether) patents and copyrights provide incentives to creators to create. The research shows, not very much. Creators almost never think about patents or copyrights; when they do, they mostly get annoyed and consider them to be a hassle. Lots of creativity takes place in areas which are not eligible for patents or copyrights?from top chefs inventing new recipes, to the time-consuming and effortful work of writing fan fiction.
Do judges even need to pay attention to what these scholars think patents and copyrights should do? After all, isn?t the role of a judge simply to interpret the statutes as written by Congress? I was a bit surprised to discover that pretty much everyone in the room thinks this is na?ve and simplistic. The statutes are thought to be broad and ambiguous, open to interpretation. And after ten or twenty years, things change so much?and so much case law develops?that the statute really isn?t that helpful any more.
Justice Breyer was asked, ?We have a bumper crop of IP cases before the Supreme Court; is there an increased interest in these issues?? Breyer?s response was that the legal community has been saying that the Federal Circuit Court (which handles all patent appeals for the entire U.S.) has become ?too patent friendly,? and the Supreme Court is listening and essentially, checking to see if that?s true.
A common theme was the tension between generality and specificity. Patent law is general?it applies to all technologies and scientific domains. One could imagine a more specific regime; for example, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) is a statute concerning intellectual property that is specific (to digital rights and copyrights) rather than general. My sense was that the consensus was in favor of general regime and against specific regimes. A second manifestation of this tension is with the courts; the Federal Circuit Court handles all patent appeals, which means those judges develop specialized knowledge about patents. Before the Federal Circuit was created, patent appeals were heard in the regional District Courts, by judges who heard appeals of every kind of decision?a more general role. Most scholars seem to think this is a good idea, although the Federal Circuit has been widely criticized, as Justice Breyer noted, for being too patent friendly.
The stated theme of the conference was ?bringing together copyright and patent law in court,? and I?m not sure we got any good answers for how to do that. But I probably only think that because I?m not part of this legal community; the folks I met there told me that copyright experts and patent experts are like people from two different planets, who rarely come together. In the courts, the Federal Circuit handles patents and the District Courts handle copyrights. So I?m pretty sure the conference organizers would consider the event a success, simply by getting copyright people and patent people in the same room together.
I stayed one extra day, and toured several museums. The high point was visiting the old Patent Office, just a few blocks from the conference, which had a special exhibit of historic patent models from the 19th century. The building also houses the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. And?it?s a bit geeky?but I also loved the Postal History Museum, in the old post office building right next to Union Station. If you want to learn about facer-canceller machines, or about the handmade artwork in old cancellation stamps, this is the place for you!
The internet is full of hundreds of social networks, most are unique niche markets but overall there are four major social networks that I believe every business should consider using.
The internet may be a big place but there are four social media companies that stand out above the rest for customer service and online marketing, each has a specific flavour and in most cases, each should be used in some way by your company
Facebook
With roughly a hundred trillion billion users (ok I don?t think it?s quite that many but it?s really huge) ?Facebook is the white whale of online marketing. It has a special business focussed section called Facebook Pages which is similar to the regular Facebook for users but allows businesses,?celebrities?etc. to create business specific profiles with everything from hours of operation to custom apps.
The Facebook page allows businesses to have Followers (or Fans) which works much like a one directional friendship in the regular user to user version of Facebook.
When should a company use Facebook? I would say all?businesses?should have a Facebook Page for their company, regardless of market since there?s an excellent chance that your employees, business contacts, and customers also have a Facebook profile.
How often should you update Facebook? This depends a lot on the type of content your Facebook profile displays but highlighting interesting sales, blog posts, employment?opportunities, etc. with your Facebook is a great use of the service. Remember, Facebook is about people and not advertising, if you have a fun video about your company to share this is a great forum for it.
http://facebook.com
Twitter
Twitter is a social media service designed for short bursts of communications, limited to 140 characters per message. It?s well indexed and provides a quick resource for finding answers quickly.
Relationships on Twitter are called Follows and work one direction at a time,?because?of this it?s possible for people to follow your business without your business following them back and is perfect for companies looking for?disseminate?information to a large audience but is?somewhat?limited since many Twitter messages will get lost in the sea of other Twitter messages.
When should a company use Twitter??All businesses should at least maintain a Twitter profile, and most should actively monitor their Twitter account for enquires the same way the use email (called Direct Messages in Twitter terms). Twitter increases in value dramatically when you?re sharing items that are likely to be shared by people with similar interests.
How often should you update Twitter??The nature of Twitter is one of rapid information, while it depends greatly on the company and the nature of a business on Twitter I would recommend business owners plan to monitor Twitter on an ongoing basis, reply to customers hourly throughout a work day, and post unique interesting content daily if they hope to see a return on their investment. Interesting posts, jobs, events, local news, etc are all great Twitter content.
http://twitter.com
Pinterest
The Pinterest social media platform is all about sharing images from websites, as such it is ideal for unique businesses such as catering, wedding planning, tourism, small retail, etc. to generate interest in products and services but doesn?t?accommodate?corporate messages well.
When should a company use Pinterest??If your business creates beautiful, unique product that would appeal to the visually focussed then Pinterest might be right for you. Remember, Pinterest is focussed on a consumer level market, so if you?re selling benefit plans it might not be right for you!
How often should you update Pinterest??Whenever you?re contributing something visually striking to the world, or have found some eye candy to share with your friends.
http://pinterest.com
Linkedin
Of the big four, Linkedin is the most corporate of all of them. It?s primary focus is business, as such your Connections (similar to Friends on Facebook) are business?colleagues, suppliers, and customers more often than people you?d play hockey with.
The site is great for finding skilled staff, researching prospective hires, building business networks, and promoting yourself into a business community.
When should a company use Linkedin??If your business is focussed on commercial growth, and business-to-business marketing more than consumer level marketing, Linkedin is the best for reaching your business peers and finding new suppliers, staff, and client research.
How often should you update?Linkedin??Linkedin should be updated regularly, to reflect large projects and employment status changes, to list job postings, mergers etc.
In 1965, a growing tide of Black male joblessness spurred the prediction by then Assistant U.S. Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan that the Black family would experience considerable disruption in the coming years. Moynihan?s famous analysis, ?The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,? had stated that the Black family, ?battered and harassed by discrimination,? was ?the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community.?
For law professor and author Michelle Alexander, the mass incarceration of Black men stemming from the prosecution of the ?War on Drugs? has created social conditions among African-Americans far more devastating than what Moynihan predicted 48 years ago. ?It?s been said that things have worsened since the Moynihan Report was released, and I would say that is a considerable understatement,? she said Friday at the Urban Institute think tank and Fathers Incorporated organization policy forum, ?Black Families Five Decades after the Moynihan Report.?
?A revolution has occurred since Moynihan issued the so-called infamous report. A new caste system has emerged in poor communities of color?a caste system that has resulted in not only millions being locked up and permanently locked out, but a caste system that has managed to destroy [and] decimate Black families in the United States,? Alexander told forum attendees in a riveting keynote speech.
Alexander, author of the widely-praised The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and an Ohio State University law professor, said the nation passed up the opportunity to help create better social conditions for Blacks and others. Instead of pursuing policies that might have made it possible to stem the tide of joblessness that has disproportionately curtailed opportunities for Black men over the past half century, the U.S. pursued criminal justice policies that has seen the nation?s prison population swell from 300,000 to well over 2 million, she noted.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, non-Hispanic Blacks accounted for 39.4 percent of the total prison and jail population in 2009. In 2010 Black males were imprisoned at the rate of 4,347 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents of the same race and gender. White males were incarcerated at the rate of 678 inmates per 100,000 U.S. White male residents and Hispanic males were incarcerated at the rate of 1,755 inmates per 100,000 U.S. Hispanic male residents.
Noting that studies have shown that Blacks consume illicit drugs at a rate roughly comparable to other racial and ethnic groups, Alexander pointed to the disproportionately high prosecution of Black males for non-violent drug offenses as a significant factor in the high rate of Black male incarceration.
?In the years since the Moynihan Report, we?ve made a profound choice. Rather than good schools, we have built high-tech prisons. Rather than create good jobs and invest in the communities that need it most, we have embarked upon an unprecedented race to incarcerate that has left millions of Americans locked up and locked out,? she said.
Forum speakers and commentators featured in a short film about the Moynihan Report noted that, despite the controversy surrounding the report?s release, the analysis was fundamentally a plea to the nation to ensure economic opportunity for Black families. ?The Moynihan Report was a call to action with the principal focus on jobs, which got lost I must say,? Columbia University economist Irwin Garfinkel said in the Moynihan legacy video that was presented during the policy forum.
?Remember who Moynihan was. He was working for the Department of Labor? And the Labor Department has always and was then a principal advocate for jobs,? Garfinkel said. Moynihan later became a U.S. senator representing the state of New York.
Other forum speakers noted that the current statistical portrait of Black families bears out what the Moynihan Report predicted. ?The very numbers for Black families that so alarmed Moynihan in the 1960s have grown worse over time, and not just for Blacks. In fact, on many of the measures that Moynihan had looked at, White families are looking like what Black families looked like about 50 years ago,? said
Dr. Gregory Acs, director of the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
?In the early 1960s, about one in five Black children was born outside of marriage compared to about one in 50 White children. Now by 2010, non-marital child bearing had skyrocketed. Nearly three in four Black children were born outside of marriage and nearly three in 10 White children were born outside of marriage,? Acs said.?
Among the policy forum participants were Kenneth Braswell, executive director of Fathers Incorporated; Helen Mitchell, director of strategic planning and policy development in the Office of U.S. Representative Danny Davis; filmmaker Janks Morton, producer of ?What Black Men Think?; Dr. Jeffrey Shears, director of the Social Work Research Consortium in the Department of Social Work at the University of North Carolina?Charlotte; and Dr. Margaret Simms, director of the Low-Income Working Families project at the Urban Institute.
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Ten myths, half-truths and misunderstandings about Black history
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? Michelle Obama made a surprise appearance at the Oscars, opening the envelope that contained the name of the Best Picture winner, "Argo."
Appearing via streaming video from the White House, Mrs. Obama said all of the nominees demonstrated that "we can overcome any obstacle."
She said that message is "especially important for our young people" and thanked Hollywood for encouraging children "to open their imaginations."
The first lady was introduced by Jack Nicholson, who noted that the Best Picture trophy is usually announced solo.
Mrs. Obama wore a silver, art deco-inspired gown by Indian-born American fashion designer Naeem Khan. It was the same dress she wore for the Obamas' dinner with the nation's governors at the White House Sunday night.
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Cash crop ... Jason, of the Academy of Cannabis Culture and Technology in Seattle, Washington, with plants grown legally for research and medical purposes.
I was part-way through an interview with a defence lawyer and an AIDS activist when a warm sensation stole over me.
I had been in the activist's illegal grow-house, inspecting a little stainless steel mixing bowl full of capsules of intensely concentrated cannabis oil he had extracted the night before from two garbage bags full of buds. Their skin was greasy and they glowed a dull green when I held them up to the light.
Half an hour later we were discussing medical uses of pot when their voices seemed to fade and I found myself gazing happily at a door.
''Can those things make you stoned just by touching them?'' I asked the activist.
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''Ah, shit,'' he said. ''Sorry.'' He added unhelpfully: ''Jesus. Look at your eyes.''
I had come to Washington state to write about how the authorities had legalised marijuana after a referendum in the November presidential election, a move that shocked the rest of the nation.
Washington - like Colorado, which passed different measures to similar effect - did not take the baby step of decriminalising use of the drug, nor did it legalise by stealth by broadening a medical marijuana program.
Instead, voters chose to legalise and regulate the growth, processing, sale and possession of marijuana for recreational purposes.
This, says the former Washington State Bar Association president Salvador Mungia, one of the reform's champions, is how alcohol prohibition ended 80 years ago. First states stopped enforcing federal laws. Then they stopped enforcing the mirroring state laws the federal government had demanded they introduce. Then they began repealing their own laws, dismantling the legal foundations of prohibition.
Perhaps. Either way, getting to know your way around Washington state's hazy pot politics can be a little jarring. Proponents of the new laws tend to look like Mungia, who as he sits in a suit at the conference table of an upmarket law office preparing for a deposition, tells me he has never smoked pot, let alone inhaled.
Among the fiercest opponents of the drug laws is Sensible Washington, a pro-pot advocacy group that has been fighting for the repeal of laws against marijuana for years.
From the window in his corner office in the fifth floor of the glassy Seattle State House, the City Attorney, Pete Holmes, looks out at three stolid public buildings, all linked by a forbidding overhead bridge that casts shadows over two of Seattle's main streets.
It is an enclosed tunnel through which felons are escorted high above two of the city's main avenues from a jail, over an administration building and into the courthouse. But the bleak windowless shaft looks more industrial than pedestrian.
''It's ugly as hell,'' says Holmes as he looks at the skyline. He is talking about the architectural blight, but once you've spoken to him for a while you realise he could be talking about the pointless machinery of arrest, incarceration and release.
Holmes became the Seattle City Attorney in 2010 after a campaign in which he argued against the building of a planned new jail. He said as the city's chief prosecutor he could bring down the number of prison beds needed by targeting prosecutions more carefully, particularly by abiding by a citizens' initiative in 2003 decreeing that Seattle police should consider the marijuana possession laws as their lowest priority.
Shortly after he was elected, Holmes announced he would no longer prosecute people for marijuana possession. The police made their feelings known by baiting him with increased arrests.
Meanwhile another group was putting together different reforms that would have strengthened the protections for medical marijuana users. At the time, under Washington state law people with doctors' certificates were not protected from arrest, although they had a strong defence if arrested. Finally, the state's governor, concerned that passing such a law would force state employees to break federal laws, vetoed the bill.
''That was the last straw for me,'' says Holmes. He was sure prohibition had failed. The state was awash with ''BC bud'' - cannabis that flowed south from British Columbia across the border in Canada, as well as the marijuana, crystal meth and heroin that followed the smuggling lines up from Mexico. A study showed it was easier for a 14-year-old to buy pot than a six-pack of beer. And despite his own moratorium on prosecutions in Seattle, people were flowing through the prison system across the state after being convicted on small possession charges.
Holmes had moral concerns, too. ''Prohibition has been implemented in a racially disproportionate manner,'' he says. ''It has made us the No. 1 jailer nation on the planet, both in absolute and relative terms, and it has made criminal enterprises incredibly wealthy.
''One statistic from the US Justice Department that appears to be pretty solid shows that of the Mexican drug trade, 60 per cent is marijuana ? That means 60 per cent of the 50,000 murders [in the Mexican drug war], 60 per cent of the lawlessness.''
He began discussing what real marijuana reform would look like with Alison Holcomb, the American Civil Liberties Union drug policy director in Washington. They decided reforms should recognise the efficacy of medical marijuana for some patients, while dismantling the farce that for a time had led to the existence of more pot dispensaries in Seattle than Starbucks outlets.
Reforms should replace the black market with a legal market and generate tax revenue for the state.
As the two bounced drafts of a bill back and forth, Holcombe built a political campaign. By the time what became known as Initiative 502, or I-502, was passed, $US6 million ($5.8 million) would be raised and spent on the campaign and its associated polling and focus group testing. Those backing the bill wanted to know not so much what marijuana users wanted from the law, but what the rest of society did not want. Then they set about allaying those fears.
Driving under the influence would be banned and strictly policed, and possession would be illegal for anyone under 21. Using pot would be legal, but only in private - Seattle would not become a new Amsterdam.
In 2011, Holmes went public with an opinion piece in the conservative Seattle Times advocating an end to marijuana prohibition. He was stunned a couple of days later when the paper endorsed his position in its editorial. So was the left-leaning weekly publican The Stranger, which wrote: ''You could've knocked our stoned, tax-and-spending asses over with a feather when the Times editorial board wrote on February 18: 'Marijuana should be legalised, regulated and taxed.'''
The Stranger reported that former and serving police and judiciary backed the reform, as did the entire city council. And many state politicians were on-side.
After a generation of failure by the pro-pot activists, Holcomb and Holmes saw their reform pass easily on presidential election night last November. Suddenly marijuana possession was legal in Washington, and the state's Liquor Control Board found itself having to quickly build a regulatory system.
Under that system, by the end of the year it is expected the state will begin issuing three types of licence for the growth, processing and sale of pot.
No one person or company will be allowed to own two licences. Growers will sell to processors, who will package marijuana products and produce foodstuffs and drinks to be sold by retailers.
At each step along the way, the state will put out its hand for 25 per cent tax.
The state budge office predicts the cost of legal marijuana will be comparable to the black-market price of about $US13 a gram.
People will legally be able to buy one ounce (28 grams) of smokable marijuana, 16 ounces of edible products or 72 ounces of THC-infused liquids.
Approved retailers will be allowed to sell marijuana products only, and they must not be established within 1000 feet (about 330 metres) of schools. However, growing crops of pot will remain illegal.
A few blocks down the hill from Holmes's office, Doug Hiatt of Sensible Washington shares some battered old rooms with a few other defence lawyers, and from there he leads an angry campaign against the reforms.
He wears his greying hair in a ponytail and is prone to T-shirts with anti-drug war slogans. He has been fighting to legalise pot since he first defended a jailed AIDS patient 20 years ago. His problem is not that I-502 liberalises the drug laws, but that they did not go far enough and make further reform harder. He speaks in long, loud frenetic bursts of language laden with detail and obscenity. After a 20-minute blast shortly after we met, I tell him: ''Mate, you're going to have a heart attack.'' ''I'm not going to have a heart attack,'' he bellows back. ''I'm going to f---ing kill somebody.''
One of Hiatt's main concerns is the new driving-under-the-influence laws - now known as ''green DUI''. As part the campaign to win mainstream support, those backing 1-502 made the laws against green DUI tougher than those against alcohol. Those caught with more than five nanograms of active marijuana per millilitre of blood face prosecution. For those under the age of 21, there is no legal level of pot in the system.
The impact on young people and medical marijuana patients could be catastrophic, Hiatt says .
''You try and get a student loan with a green DUI on your record. Try and get insurance.''
That night we drive out through the Seattle suburbs to a grow-house being constructed by Dale Rogers. Rogers was found to be HIV-positive in 1987, when he was 18, though he is in good health today.
Pot's anti-nausea properties have helped him keep down the mountains of pills he needs to take. It has stimulated his appetite and helped him gain weight. It has decreased his stress and improved his sleep. And it was the only drug that effectively treated his crippling neuropathy.
As an activist and member of a medical marijuana collective, Rogers has made no secret of the fact he has broken the medical marijuana laws, but he has never been arrested - partly, he and Hiatt believe, because of his high profile.
Now Rogers worries he might fall foul of the new laws. While he can own an ounce of pot, he can't grow the drug in bulk, nor share it among other patients - the point of his collective. Nor does not want to buy pot from the newly licensed stores, because, like many medical marijuana users, he has built relationships with specialist growers.
Rogers shows me the equipment he used the night before to refine his marijuana concentrate, then hands me the capsules I naively pick up to inspect. Soon I start fading out.
Hiatt is on a rhetorical role. He believes only the complete repeal of all anti-marijuana laws, coupled with minimal regulation, will kill the black market.
''The only thing that competes with the black market is a free market,'' he says. ''If you ain't got a free market, you ain't going to solve the problem - I don't care if it's marijuana or peanut butter.
''Goddammit, Nick, if I outlawed peanut butter tomorrow, there's going to be a f---ing black-market in peanut butter three days later.''
Holmes disagrees. ''People don't make gin in their bathtubs any more,'' he says. ''It's easier to buy it in a shop.''
As for prohibition, since the new law was passed, Holmes has taken calls from officials in many other states asking how it was overturned.
Now they all have to wait to see if the federal government will step in to preserve prohibition from above.
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?On Friday evening, a few minutes before 10 o?clock,? the account begins, ?I was standing with a friend in Thirty-fourth-street, near the southwest corner of Madison-avenue, when we observed a luminous body rising rapidly from behind the houses on the southerly side of the street.?
The author believed the light at first to be ?a fire-balloon, made of green tissue paper, and quite near us.?
But within moments, the apparition that appeared in the heavens on a July evening in 1860 Manhattan showed its true self.
?The meteor soon emerged from the clouds and came on rapidly eastward,? the anonymous author wrote to The New York Times. ?It lost its greenish color, and broke up into four parts, which continued their journey all in the same line. The first two had the appearance of blazing torches whose flames are driven backward by the wind.?
One of the most striking things about the Russian fireball last week was how impossibly improbable and exotic it seemed. Who would ever witness such a thing?
But from 1807 ? only 13 years after science recognized the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites ? when a 300-pound space boulder screamed across the Connecticut sky and burst open across farmers? fields 50 miles northeast of New York City, to the modern day, when, in 1992, a football-size projectile shot through a car trunk in Westchester County, the New York region has seen more than its share of meteors and meteorites, including some of literature?s most significant landings.
Statistically speaking, of course, the odds of a heavenly body falling are spread evenly across the entire planet. But the local population density means more potential witnesses to any cosmic debris that passes this way.
The heyday of local fireball sightings would appear to have been the 19th century: The Times carried such reports on a semiregular basis.
?This morning at 1:40 the most beautiful meteor seen in this vicinity for years flashed across the northern sky nearly from horizon to horizon,? read an 1875 dispatch from Utica, N.Y. One from Schroon Lake, N.Y., in 1880 began, ?Lake-side cottage in this pleasant Summer resort had a narrow escape from destruction by a meteor last night.?
Eight of the 14 meteorites collected in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut listed in the Meteoritical Society?s database fell from the sky in the 1800s.
Not to mention all the mistaken sightings, and even hoaxes. A fist-size ?curious meteorite? of ?bright vivid green? that was ?soft and plastic? upon landing at Troy and Fulton Avenues in Brooklyn during a storm in 1887 does not seem to have made it into the record books. (Nor has the object mentioned in a Times article in 1897 that began ?Prof. Wiggins believes that the aerolite that fell near Binghamton a few nights ago, and is alleged to have contained a piece of iron with hieroglyphics, was really a message from Mars.?)
Denton S. Ebel, a cosmochemist and curator of the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History, theorized that meteor and meteorite sightings were to some extent casualties of the modern age.
?People?s habits have changed,? he said on Wednesday. ?And there?s more light pollution. Also there?s more noise pollution. People spend more time watching TV, especially in the night. I just think that people aren?t as in touch with the natural world as they used to be and that includes meteorites.?
This is not to say that the 20th century was without its highlights. In 1936, after a blinding light flashed over New Jersey, Abram M. Decker of Red Bank found a 13-ounce fragment that had apparently fallen through his work shed, bent a screwdriver and buried itself 20 inches in the ground. It gave him, The Times reported, a ?bad fright.?
In 1971, a 12.3-ounce meteorite came to rest in the ceiling of Paul and Minnie Cassarino?s home in Wethersfield, Conn., south of Hartford. Their son used a handkerchief to pick it up. In 1982 in the same town, Robert and Wanda Donahue?s evening television viewing was interrupted by a meteorite that bounced around the living room.
A compilation of amateur videos taken in several states in 1992 as a meteor zoomed overhead. It fell to earth at Peekskill, N.Y.
And on a Friday night in 1992, camcorder-wielding high school football fans across several states tracked the voyage of a fireball of nickel, iron and stone that eventually found its way to 207 Wells Street in Peekskill, N.Y. Its 27-pound remnant smashed through the trunk of Michelle Knapp?s 1980 Chevrolet Malibu at a speed of about 160 miles an hour.
Things continue to fall from local skies in the 21st century. In 2007, a metallic meteorite described by a Rutgers scientist as ?a good candidate for the core of an asteroid? crashed into a house in Freehold Township, N.J. and damaged a bathroom.
Or did it? Dr. Ebel and several colleagues at the museum and the City University of New York concluded that the object was man-made, and it is not recognized in the Meteoritical Society database.
?It was probably a piece of airplane debris that was tumbled around on a runway, then caught in tire treads, and then dropped when landing gear was deployed over Northern NJ,? Dr. Ebel wrote in an e-mail. ?Air bases and airports in abundance. A nice story.?
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Home ? Jaguars ? Jarvis Jones Will Not Workout at NFL Combine
Fan favorite and high pass rushing prospect Jarvis Jones will not be working out at the NFL Combine this year. ?Per Adam Schefter, Jones will focus on his Pro Day in Georgia.
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Jones is a favorite of many Jacksonville Jaguars fans, so it is disappointing that he won?t be doing the same events alongside other linebacker and defensive end prospects. ?With some health issues already a prominent part of his career, it will be important for Jones to still get checked out by doctors to prove that he is not having any issues that could derail his status as a top-10 or top-15 pick.
While the Jags aren?t really looking for a pass rushing linebacker, outside of the LEO position, it would have been nice to see if Jones could compete against Damontre Moore and Bjoern Werner. ?I guess we?ll have to wait until his Pro Day in Athens.
- Luke N. Sims
Feel free to leave comments on here or visit us at?Facebook?or?Twitter!
Contact: Leigh MacMillan leigh.macmillan@vanderbilt.edu 615-322-4747 Vanderbilt University Medical Center
On the front lines of our defenses against bacteria is the protein calprotectin, which "starves" invading pathogens of metal nutrients.
Vanderbilt investigators now report new insights to the workings of calprotectin including a detailed structural view of how it binds the metal manganese. Their findings, published online before print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could guide efforts to develop novel antibacterials that limit a microbe's access to metals.
The increasing resistance of bacteria to existing antibiotics poses a severe threat to public health, and new therapeutic strategies to fight these pathogens are needed.
The idea of "starving" bacteria of metal nutrients is appealing, said Eric Skaar, Ph.D., MPH, associate professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology. In a series of previous studies, Skaar, Walter Chazin, Ph.D., and Richard Caprioli, Ph.D., demonstrated that calprotectin is highly expressed by host immune cells at sites of infection. They showed that calprotectin inhibits bacterial growth by "mopping up" the manganese and zinc that bacteria need for replication.
Now, the researchers have identified the structural features of calprotectin's two metal binding sites and demonstrated that manganese binding is key to its antibacterial action.
Calprotectin is a member of the family of S100 calcium-binding proteins, which Chazin, professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry, has studied for many years. Chazin and postdoctoral fellow Steven Damo, Ph.D., used existing structural data from other S100 family members to zero in on calprotectin's two metal binding sites. Then, they selectively mutated one site or the other.
They discovered that calprotectin with mutations in one of the two sites still bound both zinc and manganese, but calprotectin with mutations in the other site only bound zinc. The researchers recognized that these modified calprotectins especially the one that could no longer bind manganese would be useful tools for determining the importance of manganese binding to calprotectin's functions, Chazin noted.
Thomas Kehl-Fie, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Skaar's group, used these altered calprotectins to demonstrate that the protein's ability to bind manganese is required for full inhibition of Staphylococcus aureus growth. The investigators also showed that Staph bacteria require manganese for a certain process the bacteria use to protect themselves from reactive oxygen species.
"These altered calprotectin proteins were key to being able to tease apart the importance of the individual metals zinc and manganese to the bacterium as a whole and to metal-dependent processes within the bacteria," Skaar said. "They're really powerful tools."
Skaar explained that calprotectin likely binds two different metals to increase the range of bacteria that it inhibits. The investigators tested the modified calprotectins against a panel of medically important bacterial pathogens.
"Bacteria have different metal needs," Skaar said. "Some bacteria are more sensitive to the zinc-binding properties of calprotectin, and others are more sensitive to the manganese-binding properties."
To fully understand how calprotectin binds manganese, Damo and Chazin with assistance from Gnter Fritz, Ph.D., at the University of Freiburg in Germany produced calprotectin crystals with manganese bound and determined the protein structure. They found that manganese slips into a position where it interacts with six histidine amino acids of calprotectin.
"It's really beautiful; no one's ever seen a protein chelate (bind) manganese like this," Chazin said.
The structure explains why calprotectin is the only S100 family member that binds manganese and has the strongest antimicrobial action, and it may allow researchers to design a calprotectin that only binds manganese (not zinc). Such a tool would be useful for studying why bacteria require manganese and then targeting those microbial processes in new therapeutic strategies, Chazin and Skaar noted.
"We do not know all of the processes within Staph that require manganese; we just know if they don't have it, they die," Skaar said. "If we can discover the proteins in Staph that require manganese the things that are required for growth then we can target those proteins."
The team recently was awarded a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (AI101171) to advance their studies of calprotectin and how it works to limit bacterial infections and in other inflammatory conditions.
"Nature stumbled onto an interesting antimicrobial strategy," Chazin said. "Our goal is to really tease apart the importance of metal binding to all of calprotectin's different roles and to take advantage of our findings to design new antibacterial agents."
###
The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (CA009582, HL094296, AI091771, AI069233, AI073843, GM062122). Skaar holds the Ernest W. Goodpasture Chair in Pathology; Chazin holds the Chancellor's Chair in Biochemistry and Chemistry and is director of the Vanderbilt Center for Structural Biology.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Leigh MacMillan leigh.macmillan@vanderbilt.edu 615-322-4747 Vanderbilt University Medical Center
On the front lines of our defenses against bacteria is the protein calprotectin, which "starves" invading pathogens of metal nutrients.
Vanderbilt investigators now report new insights to the workings of calprotectin including a detailed structural view of how it binds the metal manganese. Their findings, published online before print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could guide efforts to develop novel antibacterials that limit a microbe's access to metals.
The increasing resistance of bacteria to existing antibiotics poses a severe threat to public health, and new therapeutic strategies to fight these pathogens are needed.
The idea of "starving" bacteria of metal nutrients is appealing, said Eric Skaar, Ph.D., MPH, associate professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology. In a series of previous studies, Skaar, Walter Chazin, Ph.D., and Richard Caprioli, Ph.D., demonstrated that calprotectin is highly expressed by host immune cells at sites of infection. They showed that calprotectin inhibits bacterial growth by "mopping up" the manganese and zinc that bacteria need for replication.
Now, the researchers have identified the structural features of calprotectin's two metal binding sites and demonstrated that manganese binding is key to its antibacterial action.
Calprotectin is a member of the family of S100 calcium-binding proteins, which Chazin, professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry, has studied for many years. Chazin and postdoctoral fellow Steven Damo, Ph.D., used existing structural data from other S100 family members to zero in on calprotectin's two metal binding sites. Then, they selectively mutated one site or the other.
They discovered that calprotectin with mutations in one of the two sites still bound both zinc and manganese, but calprotectin with mutations in the other site only bound zinc. The researchers recognized that these modified calprotectins especially the one that could no longer bind manganese would be useful tools for determining the importance of manganese binding to calprotectin's functions, Chazin noted.
Thomas Kehl-Fie, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Skaar's group, used these altered calprotectins to demonstrate that the protein's ability to bind manganese is required for full inhibition of Staphylococcus aureus growth. The investigators also showed that Staph bacteria require manganese for a certain process the bacteria use to protect themselves from reactive oxygen species.
"These altered calprotectin proteins were key to being able to tease apart the importance of the individual metals zinc and manganese to the bacterium as a whole and to metal-dependent processes within the bacteria," Skaar said. "They're really powerful tools."
Skaar explained that calprotectin likely binds two different metals to increase the range of bacteria that it inhibits. The investigators tested the modified calprotectins against a panel of medically important bacterial pathogens.
"Bacteria have different metal needs," Skaar said. "Some bacteria are more sensitive to the zinc-binding properties of calprotectin, and others are more sensitive to the manganese-binding properties."
To fully understand how calprotectin binds manganese, Damo and Chazin with assistance from Gnter Fritz, Ph.D., at the University of Freiburg in Germany produced calprotectin crystals with manganese bound and determined the protein structure. They found that manganese slips into a position where it interacts with six histidine amino acids of calprotectin.
"It's really beautiful; no one's ever seen a protein chelate (bind) manganese like this," Chazin said.
The structure explains why calprotectin is the only S100 family member that binds manganese and has the strongest antimicrobial action, and it may allow researchers to design a calprotectin that only binds manganese (not zinc). Such a tool would be useful for studying why bacteria require manganese and then targeting those microbial processes in new therapeutic strategies, Chazin and Skaar noted.
"We do not know all of the processes within Staph that require manganese; we just know if they don't have it, they die," Skaar said. "If we can discover the proteins in Staph that require manganese the things that are required for growth then we can target those proteins."
The team recently was awarded a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (AI101171) to advance their studies of calprotectin and how it works to limit bacterial infections and in other inflammatory conditions.
"Nature stumbled onto an interesting antimicrobial strategy," Chazin said. "Our goal is to really tease apart the importance of metal binding to all of calprotectin's different roles and to take advantage of our findings to design new antibacterial agents."
###
The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (CA009582, HL094296, AI091771, AI069233, AI073843, GM062122). Skaar holds the Ernest W. Goodpasture Chair in Pathology; Chazin holds the Chancellor's Chair in Biochemistry and Chemistry and is director of the Vanderbilt Center for Structural Biology.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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I stayed one extra day, and toured several museums. The high point was visiting the old Patent Office, just a few blocks from the conference, which had a special exhibit of historic patent models from the 19th century. The building also houses the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. And?it?s a bit geeky?but I also loved the Postal History Museum, in the old post office building right next to Union Station. If you want to learn about facer-canceller machines, or about the handmade artwork in old cancellation stamps, this is the place for you!
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Public release date: 21-Feb-2013
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