NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. (AP) ? FBI agents investigating the Boston Marathon bombings have visited the Rhode Island home of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's (TAM'-ehr-luhn tsahr-NEYE'-ehv) in-laws and carried away several bags.
FBI spokesman Jason Pack confirms agents went to the North Kingstown home of Katherine Russell's parents Monday. Russell, Tsarnaev's widow, has been staying there.
Russell did not speak to reporters as she left her attorneys' office in Providence later in the day. Attorney Amato DeLuca says she's doing everything she can to assist with the investigation.
Attorneys have previously said Russell and her family were in shock when they learned of the allegations against her husband and brother-in-law, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-HAHR' tsahr-NEYE'-ehv).
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a gun battle with police. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction.
By: Kay Andrus Jak wspomniaem poprzednio, postpowanie Tomb Raidera przenosi nas na tajemnicz wysp gdzie w pobliu Japonii gry pc. Lokacja jest w pewnym sensie otwarta, a w zwizku spord tym moemy j niemal swobodnie przemierza. Gdyby nie mamy ochoty tego sprawia na piechot, wiecznie jest dozwolone posuy si ogniska, umoliwiajce szybkie podrowanie (zabrako innych rodkw transportu). Napisaem, i dociekanie jest prawie dowolna. Obecnie wyjaniam. Teraz, chodzi o owo, i umiejtnoci Lary, w miar progresji w grze, rosn. Gwoli przykadu, pierwotnie nie jestemy w stanie docieka strzaami spord przywizan a do nich lin, natomiast w zwizku spord tym, nie dotrzemy w miejsca, ktre wymagaj uycia tego gadetu. Jednakowo jest w przypadku prowizorycznych cian, wykonanych ze skrawkw blach, oraz desek owinitych drutem kolczastym. Te pierwsze danie moemy upyn owszem spord wykorzystaniem granatnika, natomiast drugie otwieraj swoje podwoje nie prdzej po tym, gdy potraktujemy je rutem z shotguna. Podobnych rozwiza jest coraz nieco tudzie co najwaniejsze, blisko i do pewnego stopnia kontroluj eksploracj wyspy, nie s w adnym wypadku uciliwe tudzie speniaj swoje obowizek po cichu, nie irytujc gracza niewidzialnymi cianami natomiast podobnymi gupotami. Sama ostrw owo prawdziwe arcydzieo. Dziedzina jest sporych rozmiarw tudzie cigiem ulega zmianie. Zaczynamy na play, chwil w dalszym cigu przedzieramy si za porednictwem rodek grska kraina, nastpnie jaka zalana jaskinia, tajemnicza obiekt sakralny, grd, rzecz rozbita statku a do licha i troch, wiele innych. Prawdopodobnie, e Deweloper powici moc czasu na owo, tak aby wszystkie miejscwki miay wasny wyjtkowy natura natomiast nie dochodzio do sytuacji, w ktrej wpadajc a do nowej lokacji, zastanawiamy si bd moe wczeniej tu nie bylimy. Wszyscy, poczwszy odkd grafikw koncepcyjnych, dziki artystw odpowiedzialnych wewntrz architektur, na osobach modelujcych nierzeczywisty wiat skoczywszy spisali si na medal.
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DAHSHOUR, Egypt (AP) ? Egyptian youths protested Monday at a key historic site, demanding that authorities put a stop to looting and construction that threatens one of the nation's oldest pyramids and burial grounds.
Illegal construction of a new cemetery has been going on for months in part of a 4,500-year-old pharaonic necropolis. The expansion has encroached on the largely unexplored complex of Dahshour, where Pharaoh Sneferu experimented with the first smooth-sided pyramids that his son Khufu, also known as Cheops, employed at the more famous Giza Plateau nearby, when he built the Great Pyramid.
Authorities issued an order in January to remove the construction equipment, instructing the Interior Ministry's police to implement it, but no action has been taken.
Also, a security vacuum that followed Egypt's 2011 popular uprising has encouraged looters to step up their illegal digs, clashing with guards at the site.
On Monday, dozens of young protesters at the site about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Cairo held up a sign that read: "God does not bless a nation that gives up its heritage."
Ramadan Mohammed, a 20-year old student from the nearby village of Mansheyet Dahshour, said he witnessed looting himself. He said he wanted to show that Dahshour residents were not responsible and should not to be blamed.
"I'm here to see the government's response," Mohammed said, with the shadow of Pharaoh Sneferu's Bent Pyramid looming in the background. "The military was in control of the country all this past period, they should have protected the site and caught the looters. Instead, they stood there doing nothing," he complained.
Antiquities experts warn that construction of the new cemetery also endangers the ancient complex.
Villagers say their cemeteries are full, but authorities do not give permits or land for new ones, so they grabbed what they insist is empty desert land to erect family tombs.
The area, designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, also includes the adjacent Valley Temple and the 3,800-year-old Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III.
Nearby is Sneferu's Bent Pyramid, some 700 years older, with its distinctive bent sides believed to have been caused when the builders had to correct the angle halfway through construction. Farther away is the Red Pyramid, where Sneferu's builders got the angles right, producing the first smooth-sided pyramid, evolving from the stepped structures built by earlier dynasties.
Antiquity restoration specialist Marwa el-Zeini, who was at the protest, blamed authorities for failing to stop the cemetery construction.
Mohamed Youssef, head of antiquities for Dahshour, dismissed the protest as a media stunt.
Monica Hanna, an independent archaeologist who has worked at Dahshour, praised the local initiative.
"It's the first time the local community is taking a step forward, rather than the academics," Hanna said. "Previously, it would always appear that the academics were against the residents."
In this April 24, 2013, photo, Trader Gordon Charlop, center, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. World stock markets mostly rose Monday April 29, 2013 as weaker-than-expected U.S. growth added to expectations that central banks will continue easy monetary policies to support economic recovery. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this April 24, 2013, photo, Trader Gordon Charlop, center, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. World stock markets mostly rose Monday April 29, 2013 as weaker-than-expected U.S. growth added to expectations that central banks will continue easy monetary policies to support economic recovery. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
BANGKOK (AP) ? Asian stock markets rose Tuesday, brushing off tepid Japanese manufacturing data after the Standard & Poor's 500 index closed at another all-time high.
Better-than-expected pending homes sales for March renewed faith in the U.S. economic recovery. The number of Americans who signed contracts to buy homes reached the highest level in three years. Wages and spending in the U.S. also rose last month.
However, data out of Japan showing only modest improvement in manufacturing dampened sentiment there. Factory output rose 0.2 percent in March, its fourth straight monthly increase. However, the number fell short of expectations and analysts continue to believe the country's economic recovery remains relatively weak.
"While export revenues have been boosted strongly by yen depreciation and consumers' confidence has also jumped, the recovery in export volumes and actual consumer spending remained comparatively slow," analysts at DBS Bank Ltd. in Singapore said in a commentary.
Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell 0.4 percent to 13,824.66. Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.7 percent to 22,745.44. South Korea's Kospi advanced 1 percent to 1,962.86.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 added 0.8 percent to 5,168.80. Benchmarks in Indonesia, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand and the Philippines also advanced.
Sentiment also has been boosted in recent days by expectations that the European Central Bank will reduce interest rates on Thursday.
The Federal Reserve concludes a policy meeting Wednesday and is not expected to make changes in its super-loose monetary policy. On Friday, U.S. nonfarm payrolls data for April will be published, a key gauge of employment in the world's No. 1 economy.
On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.7 percent to close at 14,818.75 on Monday. The S&P 500 rose 0.7 percent to 1,593.61, a record high. The Nasdaq composite index rose 0.9 percent to 3,307.02.
Benchmark oil for June delivery was down 17 cents to $94.33 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $1.50 to finish at $94.50 on the Nymex on Monday.
In currencies, the euro fell slightly to $1.3095 from $1.3097. The dollar fell to 97.94 yen from 98.01 yen.
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama joked Saturday about his plans for a radical second-term evolution from "strapping young Muslim Socialist" to retiree golfer, all with a new hairstyle like first lady Michelle's.
Obama used this year's annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner to poke fun at himself and some of his political adversaries, asking if it was still possible to be brought down a peg after 4? years as commander-in-chief.
Entering to the rap track "All I Do Is Win" by DJ Khaled, Obama joked about how re-election would allow him to unleash a radical agenda. But then he showed a picture of himself golfing on a mock magazine cover of "Senior Leisure."
"I'm not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be," the president remarked, and then recounted his recent 2-for-22 basketball shooting performance at the White House Easter Egg hunt.
But Obama's most dramatic shift for the next four years appeared to be aesthetic. He presented a montage of shots featuring him with bangs similar to those sometimes sported by his wife.
Obama closed by noting the nation's recent tragedies in Massachusetts and Texas, praising Americans of all stripes from first responders to local journalists for serving the public good.
Saturday night's banquet not far from the White House attracted the usual assortment of stars from Hollywood and beyond. Actors Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Claire Danes, who play government characters on series, were among the attendees, as was Korean entertainer Psy. Several Cabinet members, governors and members of Congress were present.
And despite coming at a somber time, nearly two weeks after the deadly Boston Marathon bombing and 10 days after a devastating fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, the president and political allies and rivals alike took the opportunity to enjoy some humor. Late-night talk-show host Conan O'Brien headlined the event.
Some of Obama's jokes came at his Republican rivals' expense. He asked that the GOP's minority outreach begin with him as a "trial run" and said he'd take his recent charm offensive with Republicans on the road, including to a book-burning event with Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson would have had better success getting Obama out of office if he simply offered the president $100 million to drop out of last year's race, Obama quipped.
And on the 2016 election, the president noted in self-referential irony that potential Republican candidate Sen. Marco Rubio wasn't qualified because he hasn't even served a full term in the Senate. Obama served less than four years of his six-year Senate term before he was elected president in 2008.
The gala also was an opportunity for six journalists, including Associated Press White House Correspondent Julie Pace, to be honored for their coverage of the presidency and national issues.
The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza won the Aldo Beckman Award, which recognizes excellence in the coverage of the presidency.
Pace won the Merriman Smith Award for a print journalist for coverage on deadline.
ABC's Terry Moran was the winner of the broadcast Merriman Smith Award for deadline reporting.
Reporters Jim Morris, Chris Hamby and Ronnie Greene of the Center for Public Integrity won the Edgar A. Poe Award for coverage of issues of national significance.
Rodney Allen Rippy poses for a photo outside Compton City Hall in March during his campaign for mayor. He finished 10th among 12 candidates.
By John Rogers, The Associated Press
COMPTON, Calif. -- Before he suddenly surfaced in the race for mayor of this hardscrabble Los Angeles suburb, Rodney Allen Rippy's name was likely to evoke that question inspired by that class of former child stars who didn't die young, end up in jail or a celebrity rehab series: "Whatever happened to that guy?"
Rippy was just 3 in 1972, when he became the toast of a generation as the pint-sized TV pitchman for the Jack In The Box fast-food chain. When he picked up a hamburger that looked as a big as a hubcap and tried to cram it into his mouth, America was entranced. When he finally said, "Too bigga eat!" a national catchphrase was born.
Soon the cute, chubby-cheeked youngster with the Afro as big as his head was hanging out in Hollywood with Michael Jackson. He made movie cameos and recorded a hit album called "Take Life a Little Easier."
Then the 1970s ended, and so did Rippy's career.
More than 30 years later, he resurfaced as a candidate for mayor in a city known variously over the years as the birthplace of gangsta rap, the murder capital of the country and the home of the drive-by shooting.
Although he got only 75 votes, finishing 10th among 12 candidates, his earnest but futile campaign raised the inevitable question of where he had been.
Rippy never strayed far from Hollywood, it turns out. He simply stepped away from the cameras.
When his Jack In The Box career ended about the time he was finishing high school, he went to college and earned a marketing degree.
"I wanted to continue to act, but at the time acting was a thing that unless you were really burning hot, you better have something on the back burner," he said recently over lunch at a Compton restaurant down the street from City Hall.
Seeing how the adults around him had turned a cute little kid from Long Beach into a national star, he decided marketing was the way to go.
He formed Ripped Marketing Group in 2000 and has promoted everything from smokeless cigarettes to leisure wear to country music. It gave him the idea, he says, that he could promote Compton too. He wanted to change the image of a city that, although financially troubled, has seen crime and gang violence drop precipitously in recent years.
He wasn't the first child star to remerge from anonymity to run for office. His contemporary, the late Gary Coleman, did the same when he launched his quixotic campaign for governor of California in 2003.
Unlike Coleman and many other former child stars, Rippy never got into a fistfight with an autograph seeker. He hasn't been caught in a crack house or drunkenly crashed his car.
"Don't get me wrong, I know the good, the bad, the ugly, but I have sense enough to stay away from it," he said. "My mom always said, 'Rodney, you need to understand this: It's very easy to get into trouble. It's very difficult to get out."
The Afro and the chubby cheeks are gone, but Rippy's appearance often has people scratching their heads, wondering where they've seen him before. Their reaction when they find out is sometimes like that of Saudia Pearsall's.
"THE RODNEY ALLEN RIPPY?" the waitress shouted with glee after she spotted him at a back table.
"Ahhhhh! I might vote for you just because I like you," she added, laughing. "That little Afro. 'This burger's too bigga eat!'"
A day later, she was having second thoughts, realizing she didn't know much about his campaign.
Her reaction ? delight at meeting a celebrity but wondering what the heck he's doing here ? is something Rippy says he sees often.
Rippy lost out on a marketing job once, when the person he was to work for started to believe he was being punked for a reality show: "He thought it was some kind of game, like I had some sort of hat-cam on."?
? 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Chrysler Group Plans to Invest Nearly $20 Million in Toledo Machining Plant
- Investment to increase capacity for production of torque converters for new generation, fuel-efficient nine-speed transmission - Company's total investment in U.S. facilities over $5.2 billion since June 2009
April 26, 2013 , Auburn Hills, Mich. - Chrysler Group LLC announced today that it will invest $19.6 million in its Toledo Machining Plant in Perrysburg, Ohio, to increase capacity of the torque converter it's machining for the nine-speed transmission. With this announcement, the Company's total investments in its U.S. operations since June 2009 increase to over $5.2 billion.
The new torque converters will be paired with the next generation, fuel efficient nine-speed front-wheel drive transmission being assembled at Chrysler Group's Indiana (Kokomo, Ind.) Transmission Plant I. The new transmission will debut in the 2014 Jeep? Cherokee.
"The new nine-speed transmission is a critical part of our strategy to meet fuel economy requirements over the next several years and Toledo Machining will play an integral role in bringing this transmission to market," said Scott Garberding, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing, Chrysler Group LLC. "Securing this additional investment is a testament to the dedication and commitment of the plant's workforce and helps secure its future long-term."
The investment will fund the installation of new equipment and tooling for additional machining and assembly capacity. Installation is expected to begin in the third quarter of 2014 and will be completed by the end of 2014.
In August 2011, a $72 million investment in Toledo Machining was announced to modernize the plant to produce the eight- and nine-speed torque converters on two new production lines and a new steering column for the Dodge Dart and Jeep Cherokee. These installations will be complete in the third quarter this year.
"We're very pleased that Chrysler is once again investing in the Toledo Machining Plant and the skilled workforce there," said General Holiefield, Vice President and Director, UAW Chrysler Department. "This will help preserve and enhance jobs in the area and give a greater measure of security to our members and their families well into the future."
In February, the Company announced that it was investing $374 million in several of its Kokomo, Ind., facilities, including establishing a new manufacturing site in Tipton, Ind., to increase production capacity of the nine-speed transmission.
Toledo Machining currently produces torque converters for Kokomo Transmission (Ind.), Indiana Transmission I and II (Kokomo, Ind.), Sterling Heights Assembly (Mich.), and Toluca (Mex.).
The plant also produces steering columns for the following assembly plants: Warren Truck (Mich.), Belvidere (Ill.), Sterling Heights (Mich.), Toledo Assembly Complex (Ohio); Windsor (Ont.), Toluca (Mex.), Saltillo (Mex.), Arab American Vehicles (Egypt) and Carabobo (Venezuela).
MOSCOW (AP) ? The patients of the small psychiatric hospital in a Russian village were asleep or under sedation as the clock neared 2 a.m. The windows were barred and the nearest firefighters were miles away, with some impeded by rough roads and others not able to cross a nearby canal.
When a blaze broke out and spread through the wooden rafters, all of this made for a prescription for tragedy: 38 people died and only three escaped.
The one-story brick-and-wood hospital building that caught fire long before dawn Friday housed patients with severe mental disorders, Health Ministry officials said. The fire started in a wooden annex, emergency authorities said, and then spread to the 1950s main brick building, which had wooden beams.
Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said half of the patients took sedatives at night. She insisted the patients weren't tied to their beds and were not given any medication that would leave them unconscious and unable to escape.
At least 29 of the dead were burned alive, federal Investigative Committee spokeswoman Irina Gumennaya said.
Fire trucks took about an hour to reach the scene, coming from a town 50 kilometers (30 miles) away and struggling over roads in poor condition. Firefighters from a slightly nearer town also were dispatched, but found that a ferry crossing a canal near the hospital was out of service because of high water.
Investigators said the 38 dead included 36 patients and two doctors. They said a nurse managed to escape and save one patient, while another patient got out on his own. The Emergencies Ministry also posted a list of the patients indicating they ranged in age from 20 to 76. Gumennaya told Russian news agencies that most of the people died in their beds.
Moscow region Governor Andrei Vorobyev said some of the hospital windows were barred. Gumennaya cited the surviving nurse as saying that the doors inside the hospital weren't locked.
Ministry for Emergency Situations workers and fire fighters work at a site of a fire of a psychiatric hospital Friday morning, April 26, 2013. At least 38 people died in the fire in the psychiatric ... more? Ministry for Emergency Situations workers and fire fighters work at a site of a fire of a psychiatric hospital Friday morning, April 26, 2013. At least 38 people died in the fire in the psychiatric hospital outside Moscow late Thursday night. Police said the fire, which broke out at about 2 a.m. local time (6 p.m. Eastern, 2200 GMT) in the one-story hospital in the Ramenskoye settlement, was caused by a short circuit. (AP Photo/Pavel Sergeyev) less? Investigators said they are looking at violations of fire regulations and a short circuit as possible causes for the blaze that engulfed the hospital in the Ramensky settlement, about 85 kilometers (50 miles) north of Moscow.
Vorobyev told Russian state television that the fire alarm seems to have worked, but the fire spread too quickly.
Skvortsova told state TV the hospital had all the necessary fire equipment, but conceded mental hospitals should be better equipped for emergencies than the current law requires.
President Vladimir Putin called for a thorough investigation into the deadly fire and asked regional authorities to pay more attention to safety regulations.
Russia has a poor fire safety record, with about 12,000 deaths reported in 2012. By comparison, the U.S., with a population double Russia's, recorded around 3,000 fire deaths in 2011.
A 2006 fire at a drug treatment facility with barred windows and locked doors in Moscow killed 45. In one of the most high-profile cases of negligence, more than 150 people died in a nightclub in the city of Perm after a pyrotechnic show ignited a wooden ceiling.
Parts of Utah's Great Salt Lake are 10 times saltier than the ocean. But the lake is host to plenty of life, including salt-loving microbes that can turn the lake's water bubblegum pink. Bonnie Baxter, director of the Great Salt Lake, discusses how the bugs might hold the secrets to better sunscreen, hydrogen fuel cells?even life on Mars.
Melatonin injections delayed symptom onset and reduced mortality in a mouse model of the neurodegenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In a reportpublished online ahead of print in the journalNeurobiology of Disease, the team revealed that receptors for melatonin are found in the nerve cells, a finding that could launch novel therapeutic approaches.
Annually about 5,000 people are diagnosed with ALS, which is characterized by progressive muscle weakness and eventual death due to the failure of respiratory muscles, said senior investigator Robert Friedlander, M.D., UPMC Endowed Professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology and chair, Department of Neurological Surgery, Pitt School of Medicine. But the causes of the condition are not well understood, thwarting development of a cure or even effective treatments.
Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone that is best known for its role in sleep regulation. After screening more than a thousand FDA-approved drugs several years ago, the research team determined that melatonin is a powerful antioxidant that blocks the release of enzymes that activate apoptosis, or programmed cell death.
"Our experiments show for the first time that a lack of melatonin and melatonin receptor 1, or MT1, is associated with the progression of ALS," Dr. Friedlander said. "We saw similar results in a Huntington's disease model in an earlier project, suggesting similar biochemical pathways are disrupted in these challenging neurologic diseases."
Hoping to stop neuron death in ALS just as they did in Huntington's, the research team treated mice bred to have an ALS-like disease with injections of melatonin or with a placebo. Compared to untreated animals, the melatonin group developed symptoms later, survived longer, and had less degeneration of motor neurons in the spinal cord.
"Much more work has to be done to unravel these mechanisms before human trials of melatonin or a drug akin to it can be conducted to determine its usefulness as an ALS treatment," Dr. Friedlander said. "I suspect that a combination of agents that act on these pathways will be needed to make headway with this devastating disease."
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University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences: http://www.upmc.com/Pages/default.aspx
Thanks to University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences for this article.
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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have described a missing link in understanding how damage to the body's cellular power plants leads to Parkinson's disease and, perhaps surprisingly, to some forms of heart failure.
These cellular power plants are called mitochondria. They manufacture the energy the cell requires to perform its many duties. And while heart and brain tissue may seem entirely different in form and function, one vital characteristic they share is a massive need for fuel.
Working in mouse and fruit fly hearts, the researchers found that a protein known as mitofusin 2 (Mfn2) is the long-sought missing link in the chain of events that control mitochondrial quality.
The findings are reported April 26 in the journalScience.
The new discovery in heart cells provides some explanation for the long known epidemiologic link between Parkinson's disease and heart failure.
"If you have Parkinson's disease, you have a more than two-fold increased risk of developing heart failure and a 50 percent higher risk of dying from heart failure," says senior author Gerald W. Dorn II, MD, the Philip and Sima K. Needleman Professor of Medicine. "This suggested they are somehow related, and now we have identified a fundamental mechanism that links the two."
Heart muscle cells and neurons in the brain have huge numbers of mitochondria that must be tightly monitored. If bad mitochondria are allowed to build up, not only do they stop making fuel, they begin consuming it and produce molecules that damage the cell. This damage eventually can lead to Parkinson's or heart failure, depending on the organ affected. Most of the time, quality-control systems in a healthy cell make sure damaged or dysfunctional mitochondria are identified and removed.
Over the past 15 years, scientists have described much of this quality-control system. Both the beginning and end of the chain of events are well understood. And since 2006, scientists have been working to identify the mysterious middle section of the chain ? the part that allows the internal environment of sick mitochondria to communicate to the rest of the cell that it needs to be destroyed.
"This was a big question," Dorn says. "Scientists would draw the middle part of the chain as a black box. How do these self-destruct signals inside the mitochondria communicate with proteins far away in the surrounding cell that orchestrate the actual destruction?"
"To my knowledge, no one has connected an Mfn2 mutation to Parkinson's disease," Dorn says. "And until recently, I don't think anybody would have looked. This isn't what Mfn2 is supposed to do."
Mitofusin 2 is known for its role in fusing mitochondria together, so they might exchange mitochondrial DNA in a primitive form of sexual reproduction.
"Mitofusins look like little Velcro loops," Dorn says. "They help fuse together the outer membranes of mitochondria. Mitofusins 1 and 2 do pretty much the same thing in terms of mitochondrial fusion. What we have done is describe an entirely new function for Mfn2."
The mitochondrial quality-control system begins with what Dorn calls a "dead man's switch."
"If the mitochondria are alive, they have to do work to keep the switch depressed to prevent their own self-destruction," Dorn says.
Specifically, mitochondria work to import a molecule called PINK. Then they work to destroy it. When mitochondria get sick, they can't destroy PINK and its levels begin to rise. Then comes the missing link that Dorn and his colleague Yun Chen, PhD, senior scientist, identified. Once PINK levels get high enough, they make a chemical change to Mfn2, which sits on the surface of mitochondria. This chemical change is called phosphorylation. Phosphorylated Mfn2 on the surface of the mitochondria can then bind with a molecule called Parkin that floats around in the surrounding cell.
Once Parkin binds to Mfn2 on sick mitochondria, Parkin labels the mitochondria for destruction. The labels then attract special compartments in the cell that "eat" and destroy the sick mitochondria. As long as all links in the quality-control system work properly, the cells' damaged power plants are removed, clearing the way for healthy ones.
"But if you have a mutation in PINK, you get Parkinson's disease," Dorn says. "And if you have a mutation in Parkin, you get Parkinson's disease. About 10 percent of Parkinson's disease is attributed to these or other mutations that have been identified."
According to Dorn, the discovery of Mfn2's relationship to PINK and Parkin opens the doors to a new genetic form of Parkinson's disease. And it may help improve diagnosis for both Parkinson's disease and heart failure.
"I think researchers will look closely at inherited Parkinson's cases that are not explained by known mutations," Dorn says. "They will look for loss of function mutations in Mfn2, and I think they are likely to find some."
Similarly, as a cardiologist, Dorn and his colleagues already have detected mutations in Mfn2 that appear to explain certain familial forms of heart failure, the gradual deterioration of heart muscle that impairs blood flow to the body. He speculates that looking for mutations in PINK and Parkin might be worthwhile in heart failure as well.
"In this case, the heart has informed us about Parkinson's disease, but we may have also described a Parkinson's disease analogy in the heart," he says. "This entire process of mitochondrial quality control is a relatively small field for heart specialists, but interest is growing."
###
Chen Y, Dorn GW. PINK1-phosphorylated mitofusin 2 is a Parkin receptor for culling damaged mitochondria. Science. April 26, 2013.
Washington University School of Medicine: http://www.medicine.wustl.edu
Thanks to Washington University School of Medicine 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.
Hey, it?s?Daydrinker! Though I have expanded my horizons when it comes to adult beverages, I still enjoy a girlie drink ?er, I mean ?dessert cocktail? ? every now and then. Lucky for me, and all the rest of you secret (or not so secret) girlie-drinkers looking to sip yourself into a diabetic coma, Jackson has plenty to offer in the sugary spirits department.
Here?s one you may want to try on your next night (or day) on the town? especially if you love coffee.
The Governor at BRAVO!
The Setting: BRAVO! Italian Restaurant & Bar
The Specs: Captain Morgan, small shot of espresso, a pinch of salt, caramel syrup, simple syrup
The Skinny: If you ignore the fact that it?s chilled and served in a martini glass, this tastes like the richest, most decadent?cup of coffee you?ve ever had. The espresso and the sweetness from the syrups were the dominant flavors for me. I could tell?there was alcohol in it, but I wouldn?t have been able to pinpoint what kind had I not already known the drink contained rum.
If you enjoy sweet coffee drinks, and a sweet take on coffee-flavor, you?re probably going to love The Governor. This is easily one of my new favorite dessert?cocktails.
In other words, this Governor gets the Daydrinker vote.
Editor?s Note: Show your?EatJXN Card?at?BRAVO! Italian Restaurant & Bar?and get 2-for-1 Desserts.?This?is just?one of the more than forty restaurants and eateries,?including tons of new additions for 2013, where you?ll be treated to a little something extra when you show your EATJXN Card. Don?t have your card yet??Get it now!
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Seattle police call it one of the boldest attempted drug thefts they have seen: A woman impersonating a nurse, apparently addicted to painkillers, crept through the hospital rooms of patients and tried to steal medication from their IV machines.
"It's pretty unusual, pretty brazen," Seattle police spokeswoman Renee Witt said on Wednesday. "It really shows how desperate this woman is and how powerful addiction can be."
Police are looking for the woman who, dressed in a shirt that resembled scrubs and wearing clogs on her feet, entered a man's room at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle on April 13 and began fiddling with his pain medication IV machine.
The patient did not recognize the woman and when he asked what she was doing, she promptly left, police said.
When the man's real nurse came into the room, she noticed his IV line had been cut and pain medication was dripping on the floor. The machine had pry marks, where the intruder apparently had tried to access pain medication, police said.
Shortly afterward, the same woman was spotted on another floor of the hospital peering into patient rooms, Witt said. She told a staff member she was there to check the IV machines.
The woman went into a room and again tinkered with a patient's IV machine, police said. As she left, a relative of the occupant noticed blood dripping on the floor and saw that lines to the patient's IV machine had been cut.
Witt said neither patient suffered any injuries, and the only thing stolen was about 2 feet of tubing from the patient-controlled medication machines and possibly some pain medication from the tubes.
Police said the woman appeared confident both in talking to hospital staff and in walking into patients' rooms. They released images of the woman on Wednesday and asked for the public's help in identifying her.
(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis, Cynthia Johnston and Peter Cooney)
An investigational treatment for an inherited form of Lou Gehrig's disease has passed an early phase clinical trial for safety, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Massachusetts General Hospital report.
The researchers have shown that the therapy produced no serious side effects in patients with the disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The phase 1 trial's results, available online in Lancet Neurology, also demonstrate that the drug was successfully introduced into the central nervous system.
The treatment uses a technique that shuts off the mutated gene that causes the disease. This approach had never been tested against a condition that damages nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.
"These results let us move forward in the development of this treatment and also suggest that it's time to think about applying this same approach to other mutated genes that cause central nervous system disorders," says lead author Timothy Miller, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology at Washington University. "These could include some forms of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease and other conditions."
ALS destroys nerves that control muscles, gradually leading to paralysis and death. For treatment of the disease, the sole FDA-approved medication, Riluzole, has only a marginal effect.
Most cases of ALS are sporadic, but about 10 percent are linked to inherited mutations. Scientists have identified changes in 10 genes that can cause ALS and are still looking for others.
The study focused on a form of ALS caused by mutations in a gene called SOD1, which account for 2 percent of all ALS cases. Researchers have found more than 100 mutations in the SOD1 gene that cause ALS.
"At the molecular level, these mutations affect the properties of the SOD1 protein in a variety of ways, but they all lead to ALS," says Miller, who is director of the Christopher Wells Hobler Lab for ALS Research at the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders at Washington University.
Rather than try to understand how each mutation causes ALS, Miller and his colleagues focused on blocking production of the SOD1 protein using a technique called antisense therapy.
To make a protein, cells have to copy the protein-building instructions from the gene. Antisense therapy blocks the cell from using these copies, allowing researchers to selectively silence individual genes.
"Antisense therapy has been considered and tested for a variety of disorders over the past several decades," Miller says. "For example, the FDA recently approved an antisense therapy called Kynamro for familial hypercholesterolemia, an inherited condition that increases cholesterol levels in the blood."
Miller and colleagues at the University of California-San Diego devised an antisense drug for SOD1 and successfully tested it in an animal model of the disease.
Merit Cudkowicz, MD, chief of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, was co-PI of the phase I clinical safety trial described in the new paper. Clinicians at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Methodist Neurological Institute in Houston gave antisense therapy or a placebo to 21 patients with SOD1-related ALS. Treatment consisted of spinal infusions that lasted 11 hours.
The scientists found no significant difference between side effects in the control and treatment groups. Headache and back pain, both of which are often associated with spinal infusion, were among the most common side effects.
Immediately after the injections, the researchers took spinal fluid samples. This let them confirm the antisense drug was circulating in the spinal fluid of patients who received the treatment.
To treat SOD1-related ALS in the upcoming phase II trial, researchers will need to increase the dosage of the antisense drug. As the dose rises, they will watch to ensure that the therapy does not cause harmful inflammation or other side effects as it lowers SOD1 protein levels.
"All the information that we have so far suggests lowering SOD1 will be safe," Miller says. "In fact, completely disabling SOD1 in mice seems to have little to no effect. We think it will be OK in patients, but we won't know for sure until we've conducted further trials."
The therapy may one day be helpful in the more common, noninherited forms of ALS, some of which may be linked to problems with the SOD1 protein.
"Before we can consider using this same therapy for sporadic ALS, we need more evidence that SOD1 is a major contributor to these forms of the disorder," Miller says.
###
Washington University School of Medicine: http://www.medicine.wustl.edu
Thanks to Washington University School of Medicine 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.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday the Boston bombing proved his tough line on insurgents in the North Caucasus was justified and that Russia and the United States must step up cooperation on security.
After receiving almost 2 million questions from the Baltic Sea to Russia's far east, Putin used his annual "hotline" dial-in to present the image of a man still in control a year into his third term and not afraid of criticism at home and abroad.
"If we truly join our efforts together, we will not allow these strikes and suffer such losses," he said in the phone-in, which critics say is looking increasingly outdated as he fields often predictable questions from loyal factory workers, airforce pilots and struggling mothers.
But this time he made sure there were some critical voices in the audience, with former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin taking him to task over economic decline. Putin shrugged off his criticism by jokingly calling him a "slacker".
Looking stern and occasionally shifting forward in his chair to make a point, Putin took questions on issues ranging from pensions and roads to the ethnic Chechens suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings.
He avoided criticizing the U.S. failure to prevent the bombings despite Russian concerns about the brothers, but he took the chance to justify using heavy force against Islamist militants who oppose Russian rule in the North Caucasus.
"We have always said that action is needed and not declarations. Now two criminals have confirmed the correctness of our thesis," the former KGB spy said.
Putin, who first asserted his authority by crushing a Chechen independence bid in a war over a decade ago, has long said the United States underestimates the security threat posed by the Islamist militants and rejected international accusations that Moscow's use of force in the region has been heavy-handed.
His remarks underlined his intention to use heightened concern over security to win closer cooperation with the United States in the run-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics next February.
The Olympics are a pet project for Putin and intended as a showcase of what Russia can achieve. A fatal attack on the Games would put those efforts in doubt.
PM'S DISMISSAL UNLIKELY
Putin, 60, was taking part in his first phone-in with the Russian public since returning to the presidency last May after four years as prime minister.
The phone-in, broadcast nationwide, has been an almost annual event since 2001 - he did not do one last year.
Critics say the format has become outmoded and shows Russia has not moved with the times under Putin, who is accused by the opposition of being out of touch and allowing the country to stagnate economically and politically.
But Putin, whose approval rating still hovers above 60 percent, spoke fluently and looked at ease as he reeled off figures and answered questions - all of which he appeared to expect - as he sat at a desk behind a laptop in a suit and tie.
One of his aims was clearly to show he has reasserted his grip on power, which was undermined just over a year ago during the biggest street protests since he first rose to power.
The protests have since dwindled and the opposition remains disjointed although critics accuse him of violating human rights with a clampdown on dissenters.
Putin also used the call-in to play down suggestions that he disagrees with his government over economic policy and show he will not respond to calls to dismiss Dmitry Medvedev, the long-time ally whom he replaced as president last year.
There has been speculation for months in the media and among political analysts that Putin could make Medvedev a scapegoat if Russia's economy continues to slide towards recession.
But in response to a question, Putin said: "There is no division between the government and the president, or the presidential administration (on the economy)."
He acknowledged there may be many complaints about the government's work but, indicating it needed time to prove itself, he said: "The people have only been in their jobs about a year."
(Additional reporting by Steve Gutterman, Douglas Busvine and Katya Golubkova; Editing by Elizabeth Piper)
Canadian police thwarted a terrorist attack on a US-Canada train by two men directed by Al Qaeda in Iran. Yes, Al Qaeda in Iran, say police.
By David Clark Scott,?Staff writer / April 22, 2013
RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia said on Monday in Toronto, that police had arrested and charged two men with an Al Qaeda-supported plot to derail a VIA passenger train.
Aaron Harris/Reuters
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Two men were arrested Monday and charged with plotting a "major terrorist attack" on a Canada-US passenger train.
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Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser, who live in Montreal and Toronto, were acting alone, but were operating with support from Al Qaeda in Iran, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Al Qaeda in Iran?
Assistant RCMP Commissioner James Malizia, the officer in charge of federal policing operations, said the plot was supported by ?Al Qaeda elements in Iran.?? He also said that Al Qaeda provided "direction and guidance" to the alleged plot.
The link to Iran is a curious one. Al Qaeda leaders and Iran's leaders have not been known allies. Al Qaeda is a Sunni-based movement. Iran is predominantly Shiite. Canadian officials made clear that they weren't connecting the alleged plot to the Iranian government. But the presence of Al Qaeda leaders, who fled from Afghanistan to Iran after September 11, 2001, has been known for some time.
As Peter Bergen, wrote for CNN last month, "According to US documents and officials, in addition to [Suleiman] Abu Ghaith, other of bin Laden's inner circle who ended up in Iran include the formidable military commander of al Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Special Forces officer who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, as well as Saad bin Laden, one of the al Qaeda's leader older sons who has played some kind of leadership role in the group."
What prompted the Bergen "Strange Bedfellows: Iran and Al Qaeda" article was the recent capture of Osama Bin Laden's son-in-law, Suleiman Abu Ghaith. As Reuters reported, "he was captured on Feb. 28 and brought secretly to the?United States?... Law enforcement sources say he was detained in?Jordan?by local authorities and the FBI after was believed to have been expelled from?Turkey." But for most of the past decade Abu Ghaith had been living in Iran.
"Current and former US officials said that group, known to US investigators as the Al Qaeda "Management Council," was kept more or less under control by the?Iranian government, which viewed it with suspicion."
Bergen describes the life of Al Qaeda members in Iran is a loose form of house arrest.? They are allowed to go out shopping, for example, but with restrictions.
This latest example of an Al Qaeda-Iran tie will raise some eyebrows.
And how serious was this latest terrorist threat in Canada?
Charges include conspiring to carry out an attack against, and conspiring to murder persons unknown for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group, according to the RCMP press release. "It was definitely in the planning stage but not imminent," RCMP chief superintendent Jennifer Strachan told reporters. But she declined to give more details.
Neither men were Canadian, and Canadian law enforcement officials did not state their nationality, but some media reports described them as Tunisians.
US officials?told Reuters that the attack plotters were targeting a rail line between New York and Toronto, but Canadian police did not publicly confirm which route was the target.
Canadian law enforcement officials praised the cooperation between various agencies, including the FBI, the US Department of Homeland Security, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada Border Services Agency, and various local Canadian police departments.
The CBC News says that it's "highly placed sources" tell them that the suspected terrorists have been under surveillance for more than a year in Quebec and southern Ontario.
The two men are reportedly to appear in a Toronto court Tuesday, and more details may be forthcoming in that hearing.
BULLECOURT, France (AP) ? When Didier Guerle fulfilled his grandfather's dying wish and had the fields of his farm searched, he set off a chain of events that brought people together across continents, and one family across generations.
The farmer called in his friend Moise Dilly, an expert in metal detection. Soon enough, Dilly came across something hidden underneath the lush grassland. "I took a spade and some time later I hit a shoe. There still was a bone in it."
As his grandfather had predicted, beneath the brutal World War I battleground, the remains and possessions of dead soldiers were found, including the silver identity bracelet for British Lt. John Harold Pritchard. Dilly's metal detector had been set off by a gun or other piece of metal on a body.
On Tuesday, almost a century after his death in the trenches, Pritchard finally found a proper grave and a ceremonial reburial in neighboring Ecoust-St. Mein, attended by his family and England's Prince Michael of Kent. Finally, he was no longer among the ranks of soldiers whose bodies were never found in the carnage of the Great War.
Pvt. Christopher Douglas Elphick and two unidentified men were buried in the same ceremony, which comes as nations prepare to mark World War I centenary commemorations next year.
Family members of Pritchard, a soldier chorister who performed as a child at the enthronement of British King Edward VII, sang for him at the white gravestone that now marks his memory. Among them was a great niece who used musical scores from his own choir days to study to become a professional singer. The grave is one of tens of thousands dotting the fertile fields in northern France which were scene to some of humanity's worst bloodshed.
"Lost for many years. Your battle is won," the etching on the stone says.
Among the crowd at the war cemetery stood Mark Cain, an American collector who came into possession of Pritchard's ceremonial sword about a dozen years ago. He became interested in the object and got in touch with the British armed forces archives about it. When he learned from the archives that Pritchard's remains had been found, he knew there was only one thing to do: give the sword back to the family.
"The sword has been traveling between continents for 100 years perhaps," Cain said. "I have been very honored to return it."
Pritchard's family was profoundly moved by the generosity. "I persuaded him to come to the burial because I cannot thank him enough," said Janet Shell, Pritchard's great-niece.
The value of the sword? "They will tell you it is priceless," Cain said after Pritchard's family was handed the sword by Prince Michael.
For Shell, it was music that reunited the family across a century. As a chorister of St. Paul's Cathedral, Pritchard has been on a remembrance plaque of the cathedral since 1921. Pritchard left for the war in the first wave of 1914 but came back to England after he was injured twice. "He was given the option of staying but John said 'no,' he wanted to get back to his men," she said.
The night before he left for France for the final time in 1916, he was stationed at the Tower of London. He played the piano for his mother and sister Ida and sang to a verse of poet Lord Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" ? a metaphor about impending death which ends: "I hope to see my Pilot face to face/When I have crost the bar."
And the day's leaden clouds broke for Janet and three other professional singers in the family, as they brought the ceremony to an end with a moving a cappella rendition of the same song.
"It was sort of fitting in some way," said Shell. "It could not have been a better moment."
"Now this is bringing together four generations and we will never forget."
Pritchard was killed on May 15, 1917, in a nighttime battle which stopped his watch at midnight. He died in the second battle of Bullecourt on the Hindenburg Line, a fight that instead of saving the village fully razed it. Thousands of dead were scattered on both sides. Australians who fought there called it the "blood tub" and the two-week battle had little impact on the Great War itself.
The impact on the locals, though, was deep. Bullecourt literally had to be rebuilt from the mud up. Some people had no idea where their house once stood.
When Guerle's grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Savary, returned from the war, he wanted to forget, even though he knew bodies were strewn on his land.
"He told us that when I'm dead, you have to get all the soldiers out," said Guerle.
Out of respect, the land behind the farm was never ploughed, and only lightweight sheep were allowed to graze. "We did not want to trample the dead," Guerle said.
Neither he nor anyone else knows how many soldiers are still buried in his fields.
But Dilly said: "I guarantee you that there are still a lot of them there."
North Carolina State University researchers studying aquatic organisms called Daphnia have found that exposure to a chemical pesticide has impacts that span multiple generations ? causing the so-called "water fleas" to produce more male offspring, and causing reproductive problems in female offspring.
"This work supports the hypothesis that exposure to some environmental chemicals during sensitive periods of development can cause significant health problems for those organisms later in life ? and affect their offspring and, possibly, their offspring's offspring," says Dr. Gerald LeBlanc, a professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at NC State and lead author of a paper on the work. "We were looking at a model organism, identified an important pathway for environmental sex determination, and found that there are chemicals that can hijack that pathway."
Environmental cues normally determine the sex, male or female, of Daphnia offspring, and researchers have been working to understand the mechanisms involved. As part of that work, LeBlanc's team had previously identified a hormone called methyl farnesoate (Mf) that Daphnia produce under certain environmental conditions.
The researchers have now found that the hormone binds with a protein receptor called the Mf receptor, which can regulate gene transcription and appears to be tied to the production of male offspring.
In experiments, the researchers exposed Daphnia to varying levels of an insecticide called pyriproxyfen, which mimics the Mf hormone. The pyriproxyfen exposure resulted in Daphnia producing more male offspring and fewer offspring in total, with higher doses exacerbating both effects.
"At high concentrations, we were getting only male offspring, which is not good," LeBlanc says. "Producing fewer offspring, specifically fewer female offspring, could significantly limit population numbers for Daphnia."
And low exposure concentrations had significant impacts as well. At pyriproxyfen concentrations as low as 71 nanograms per liter, or 71 parts per trillion, the Daphnia would still produce some female offspring. But those females suffered long-term reproductive health effects, producing significantly smaller numbers of offspring ? despite the fact that they had not been exposed to pyriproxyfen since birth.
"We now want to know specifically which genes are involved in this sex determination process," LeBlanc says. "And, ecologically, it would be important to know the impact of changes in population dynamics for this species. Daphnia are a keystone species ? an important food source for juvenile fish and other organisms."
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The paper, "A Transgenerational Endocrine Signaling Pathway in Crustacea," was published April 17 in PLOS ONE. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Ying Wang, a research associate at NC State; Charisse Holmes and Elizabeth Medlock, Ph.D. students at NC State; and Gwijun Kwon, a research technician at NC State. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
North Carolina State University: http://www.ncsu.edu
Thanks to North Carolina State University 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.
Pasadena, CA. Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of a blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most-distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays. But its emission spectrum appears highly unusual.
A team including Carnegie's Michele Fumagalli used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to set a lower limit for the blazar's redshift (z ? 0.6035). An object's redshift value is a measurement of how much the wavelength of the light from it that reaches Earth is stretched by the expansion of the Universe. Thus, it reveals the object's age and distance. This blazar's redshift corresponds to a distance of at least 7.4 billion light-years. Their work will be published by The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.
Over such a great distance, a substantial proportion of the gamma rays should be absorbed by the extragalactic background light, but calculations that account for the expected absorption yield an unexpected emission spectrum for the blazar.
"We're seeing an extraordinarily bright source that does not display the characteristic emission expected from a very high-energy blazar," said lead author Amy Furniss, University of California Santa Cruz.
The findings may indicate something new about the emission mechanisms of blazars, the extragalactic background light, or the propagation of gamma-ray photons over long distances. It was not thought that such high-energy gamma-ray sources could be seen at such great distances. The research should allow scientists to better understand cosmological models that predict the extragalactic background light.
The extragalactic background light (EBL) is the diffuse radiation from all stars and galaxies, a dim but pervasive glow that fills the universe. When a high-energy gamma-ray photon collides with a lower-energy EBL photon, they annihilate and create an electron-positron pair. The farther gamma rays have to travel, the more likely they are to be absorbed by this mechanism. This limits the distance to which sources of very high-energy gamma rays can be detected.
Measuring the EBL directly is extremely difficult because there are so many bright sources of light in our immediate neighborhood. In addition to estimates based on cosmological models, astronomers have used galaxy counts to set a lower limit for the EBL. Using a model close to this lower limit to calculate the expected absorption of very high-energy gamma rays from PKS 1424+240, the team derived an intrinsic gamma-ray emission spectrum for the blazar. The results, however, deviate from the expected emission based on current blazar models, which are thought to result from a relativistic jet of particles powered by matter falling onto a supermassive black hole at the center of the host galaxy.
Gamma rays from PKS 1424+240 were first detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and subsequently by the ground-based instrument VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System), which is sensitive to gamma-rays in the very high-energy (VHE) band from about 100 GeV to more than 10 TeV. To determine the redshift of the blazar--a measure of how much the light from an object has been stretched to longer wavelengths by the expansion of the universe--the researchers used archival data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.
###
The other co-authors on the paper are David Williams, J. Xavier Prochaska, Joel Primack, also of UCSC; Charles Danforth and John Stocke of the University of Colorado; Meg Urry of Yale University; Alex Filippenko of UC Berkeley; and William Neely of the NF/ Observatory.
Support was provided by NASA awarded through grants from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA; the National Science Foundation award PHY-0970134; NASA grants NNX08AC146 and NAS5-98043 to the University of Colorado at Boulder ; NASA/Fermi grants GO-31089 and NNX12AF12GA; NSF grant AST-1211916; the Christopher R. Redlich Fund; the TABASGO Foundation; and NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HF-51305.01-A.
KAIT and its ongoing operation were made possible by donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the NSF, the University of California, the Sylvia & Jim Katzman Foundation and the TABASGO Foundation.
The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.
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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.
Pasadena, CA. Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of a blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most-distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays. But its emission spectrum appears highly unusual.
A team including Carnegie's Michele Fumagalli used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to set a lower limit for the blazar's redshift (z ? 0.6035). An object's redshift value is a measurement of how much the wavelength of the light from it that reaches Earth is stretched by the expansion of the Universe. Thus, it reveals the object's age and distance. This blazar's redshift corresponds to a distance of at least 7.4 billion light-years. Their work will be published by The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.
Over such a great distance, a substantial proportion of the gamma rays should be absorbed by the extragalactic background light, but calculations that account for the expected absorption yield an unexpected emission spectrum for the blazar.
"We're seeing an extraordinarily bright source that does not display the characteristic emission expected from a very high-energy blazar," said lead author Amy Furniss, University of California Santa Cruz.
The findings may indicate something new about the emission mechanisms of blazars, the extragalactic background light, or the propagation of gamma-ray photons over long distances. It was not thought that such high-energy gamma-ray sources could be seen at such great distances. The research should allow scientists to better understand cosmological models that predict the extragalactic background light.
The extragalactic background light (EBL) is the diffuse radiation from all stars and galaxies, a dim but pervasive glow that fills the universe. When a high-energy gamma-ray photon collides with a lower-energy EBL photon, they annihilate and create an electron-positron pair. The farther gamma rays have to travel, the more likely they are to be absorbed by this mechanism. This limits the distance to which sources of very high-energy gamma rays can be detected.
Measuring the EBL directly is extremely difficult because there are so many bright sources of light in our immediate neighborhood. In addition to estimates based on cosmological models, astronomers have used galaxy counts to set a lower limit for the EBL. Using a model close to this lower limit to calculate the expected absorption of very high-energy gamma rays from PKS 1424+240, the team derived an intrinsic gamma-ray emission spectrum for the blazar. The results, however, deviate from the expected emission based on current blazar models, which are thought to result from a relativistic jet of particles powered by matter falling onto a supermassive black hole at the center of the host galaxy.
Gamma rays from PKS 1424+240 were first detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and subsequently by the ground-based instrument VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System), which is sensitive to gamma-rays in the very high-energy (VHE) band from about 100 GeV to more than 10 TeV. To determine the redshift of the blazar--a measure of how much the light from an object has been stretched to longer wavelengths by the expansion of the universe--the researchers used archival data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.
###
The other co-authors on the paper are David Williams, J. Xavier Prochaska, Joel Primack, also of UCSC; Charles Danforth and John Stocke of the University of Colorado; Meg Urry of Yale University; Alex Filippenko of UC Berkeley; and William Neely of the NF/ Observatory.
Support was provided by NASA awarded through grants from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA; the National Science Foundation award PHY-0970134; NASA grants NNX08AC146 and NAS5-98043 to the University of Colorado at Boulder ; NASA/Fermi grants GO-31089 and NNX12AF12GA; NSF grant AST-1211916; the Christopher R. Redlich Fund; the TABASGO Foundation; and NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HF-51305.01-A.
KAIT and its ongoing operation were made possible by donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the NSF, the University of California, the Sylvia & Jim Katzman Foundation and the TABASGO Foundation.
The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.
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The Setting: BRAVO! Italian Restaurant & Bar![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 23-Apr-2013
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