Tribal fighting in Darfur leaves 60 dead

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) ? Renewed fighting between two Arab tribes over mining rights has left 60 people dead in the northern Darfur region, Sudan's state news agency said Sunday.

The state news agency said fighting on Saturday was the worst since a cease-fire agreement was reached last month. The agency said fighting began when a group of armed tribesmen in vehicles and riding camels attacked the El-Sireaf area in North Darfur.

Sudan's western region of Darfur has been afflicted by violence since 2003, when rebels took up arms against the central government in Khartoum. Fighting also periodically erupts between tribes in the area.

According to the United Nations, more than 100 people have been killed and other 70,000 displaced from their homes because of recent tribal warfare in Darfur. The United Nation-African Union Mission in Darfur said in a report issued last month that the deaths and displacement resulted from clashes between the Abbala and Beni Hussein tribes in Jabel Amir, the site of gold mines in North Darfur state.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tribal-fighting-darfur-leaves-60-dead-121235951.html

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Explain It to Me Again, Computer

Karl Popper in the 1980s.

Courtesy of the London School of Economics Library/Flickr/Wikipedia

This article arises from Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University. On Feb. 28-March 2, Future Tense will be taking part in Emerge, an annual conference on ASU?s Tempe campus about what the future holds for humans. This year?s theme: the future of truth. Visit the Emerge website to learn more and to get your ticket.

When scientists think about truth, they often think about it in the context of their own work: the ability of scientific ideas to explain our world. These explanations can take many forms. On the simple end, we have basic empirical laws (such as how metals change their conductivity with temperature), in which we fit the world to some sort of experimentally derived curve. On the more complicated and more explanatory end of the scale, we have grand theories for our surroundings. From evolution by natural selection to quantum mechanics and Newton?s law of gravitation, these types of theories can unify a variety of phenomena that we see in the world, describe the mechanisms of the universe beyond what we can see with our own eyes, and yield incredible predictions about how the world should work.

The details of how exactly these theories describe our world?and what consists of a proper theory?are more properly left to philosophers of science. But adhering to philosophical realism, as many scientists do, implies that we think these theories actually describe our universe and can help us improve our surroundings or create impressive new technologies.

That being said, scientists always understand that our view of the world is in draft form. What we think the world looks like is constantly subject to refinement and even sometimes a complete overhaul. This leads us to what is known by the delightful, if somewhat unwieldy, phrase of pessimistic meta-induction. It?s true that we think we understand the world really well right now, but so has every previous generation, and they also got it wrong. This is why scientists love Karl Popper, who says we can never prove a theory correct, only attempt to overturn it via falsification. So we must never be too optimistic that we are completely correct this time. In other words, we think our theories are true but still subject to potential overhaul. Which sounds a bit odd.

But when properly internalized, this can be wonderfully exciting. A professor of mine once taught a class on a Tuesday, only to read a paper the next day that invalidated what he had taught. So he went into class on Thursday and told the class, ?Remember what I told you on Tuesday? It?s wrong. And if that worries you, you need to get out of science.? Science is always in this draft form and this is most clear at the frontier: where scientists work and why they find their inquiry so exciting.

As I discuss in my book The Half-Life of Facts, this is not always a process of completely forward progress, but overall we are improving our view of the world and reducing error in our understanding. This was delightfully encapsulated in a quote by Isaac Asimov: ?[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.?

As we have improved our understanding of the shape of our planet, we have overhauled what we thought it looked like, moving from flat to perfectly spherical to an oblate spheroid. And along the way, we have reduced the amount of error in the measurement of our surroundings.

But whether or not science is always moving forward or whether we think we have the final view of how the world works (which we almost certainly do not), we pride ourselves on our ability to understand our universe. Whatever its complexity, we believe that we can write down equations that will articulate the universe in all its grandeur.

But what if this intuition is wrong? What if there are not only practical limits to our ability to understand the laws of nature, but theoretical ones?

On the practical side, it?s unsurprising to recognize that science might move less quickly than it should simply due to the massive size of what we know: A single individual can comb through only so much of the literature. For example, imagine there are two papers somewhere in the literature, one of which says that A implies B, and another that says B implies C. With the incredible growth of the scientific literature, it?s impossible for anyone to be familiar with all of the papers published in all scientific disciplines, let alone the new research in one?s own subfield. So these two papers remain uncombined, until a computer program finds some way to stitch these two ideas together, recognizing that A implies C, a discovery that was practically impossible due to the vast size of the literature.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=62d8f4194ede74b44f6017494d68c383

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Video: TODAY anchors recreate their favorite childhood photos

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Richards 2.5b debt ceiling does not mean Govt will borrow that much

Published Feb 23, 2013 at 8:00 am (Updated Feb 23, 2013 at 12:29 am)

A new statutory debt ceiling of $2.5 billion should not be taken as an indication that borrowing under the new Government will increase by another $1 billion, Finance Minister Bob Richards insists.

Mr Richards told the House of Assembly that the new ceiling is at a ?realistic? level ? in contrast to the debt ceilings of previous administrations.

?It is the view of this Government that what has become the annual ritual of ratcheting up the debt ceiling gives the impression that there is indeed no debt management plan at all. This is a negative insofar as capital markets are concerned, the same entities we rely on to finance this debt,? he said.

?Therefore, we will be laying legislation, for the approval by Parliament, to raise the authorised debt ceiling to $2.5 billion. It is important to note that this only authorises the limit of Government borrowing, it does not prescribe the actual amount of borrowing.

?We do not expect the borrowing requirement to take us to that level, but we want a level that is pragmatic, realistic and static. The only adjustment to this ceiling I would like to see is an eventual downward adjustment.?

But new rules will be implemented to keep the debt affordable, he continued.

?In conjunction with the new ceiling, the Government commits to keep public debt at such a level that the net debt/GDP ratio does not exceed 38 percent. Additionally, Government recognises the desirability of achieving a net debt/revenue ratio that is below 80 percent and a debt service cost/revenue ratio that is below 10 percent. We will work toward reducing these ratios to such a level over the medium term.?

Mr Richards was reminded at the post Budget press conference that he had harshly criticised former Finance Minister Paula Cox for using debt/GPD ratio as a measure of affordability of the national debt.

But he said other performance measures were being used and Government was not comparing the country to bigger jurisdictions as had the previous administration.

Mr Richards? forecasting envisages a likely ?base case? scenario where debt could rise to just over $2 billion by 2017.

But he warned the debt could end up being as high as $4 billion if corrective action is not taken.

?The most noteworthy of the scenarios is the worst case because it merely extrapolates the current real life deficit and debt trends,? Mr Richards said.

?In other words if we do nothing and economic conditions remain as they are now, Bermuda is forecast to have a public debt of about $4 billion in five years. Debt service is forecast to be in the area of $300 million per year, making it by far the largest Government ?department?. After paying debt service and salaries there would be little left for anything else.

?The base case scenario shows debt continuing to rise to just over $2 billion and declining thereafter. The best case sees debt rolling over faster and being somewhat lower after five years. Again, we are working toward and hoping for the best case but the highest probability scenario, ie the expected case, is the base case.?

Source: http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20130223/NEWS/702239938&source=RSS

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JG Summit president Lance Gokongwei describes his father John Gokongwei Jr. as a...

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Study reveals new clues to Epstein-Barr virus

Friday, February 22, 2013

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) affects more than 90 percent of the population worldwide and was the first human virus found to be associated with cancer. Now, researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have broadened the understanding of this widespread infection with their discovery of a second B-cell attachment receptor for EBV.

The new findings, which currently appear on-line in Cell Reports, reinforce current directions being taken in the development of a vaccine to guard against EBV, and raise important new questions regarding the virus's possible relationship to malaria and to autoimmune diseases.

"Our discovery that CD35 is an attachment receptor for EBV helps explain several previously unsolved observations," explains the study's senior author Joyce Fingeroth, MD, a member of the Division of Infectious Diseases at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

First discovered in the early 1960s, EBV is one of eight viruses in the human herpesvirus family. The virus affects nine out of 10 people at some point in their lifetimes. Infections in early childhood often cause no disease symptoms, but people infected during adolescence or young adulthood may develop infectious mononucleosis. EBV is also associated with several types of cancer, including Hodgkin's lymphoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and has been linked to certain autoimmune disorders.

"EBV was the first human virus that was discovered to be a tumor virus," explains Fingeroth. "In fact, individuals who have had infectious mononucleosis have a four times increased risk of developing Hodgkin's disease." After the initial infection, the EBV virus remains in a person's body for life.

To gain entry, viruses must first attach to their host cells. For herpesviruses, receptors on the viral envelope become connected to complementary receptors on the cell membrane. In the case of EBV, the virus gains access to the immune system by attaching to primary B cells.

Nearly 30 years ago, Fingeroth and her colleagues discovered that this attachment occurs via the CD21 protein, which until now was the only known B cell attachment receptor for EBV. The recent finding that B cells from a patient lacking CD21 can be infected and immortalized by EBV had indicated that an alternative attachment receptor must exist. The identification of this second receptor -- CD35 -- by Fingeroth's team, led by first author Javier Ogembo, PhD, of BIDMC and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, not only underscores an important finding regarding primary infection but also underscores the importance of EBVgp350/220, (the virus protein that has been found to bind to both attachment receptors) for the development of a vaccine against EBV.

"The EBV glycoprotein gp350/220 is the most abundant surface glycoprotein on the virus," notes Fingeroth, adding that these results further suggest the virus fusion apparatus is the same for both receptors. "An EBV vaccine might be able to prevent infection or, alternatively, greatly reduce a person's risk of developing infectious mononucleosis and EBV-associated cancers, without necessarily preventing the EBV infection itself."

Interestingly, she adds, whereas a human has now been identified to be lacking the CD21 receptor, no persons are known to lack CD35.

"CD35 is a latecomer in evolution and in its current form, exists only in humans," says Fingeroth. "We know that it is often targeted in autoimmune diseases and was recently identified as a malaria receptor. Our new discovery may, therefore, reveal new avenues for the exploration of unexplained links between EBV, autoimmune diseases, malaria and cancer."

###

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: http://www.bidmc.harvard.edu

Thanks to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/126972/Study_reveals_new_clues_to_Epstein_Barr_virus

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