Boston bomb investigation extends to Russia

BOSTON (AP) ? From Boston and Washington to Russia, investigators pressed for answers Wednesday about the Muslim radicalism believed behind the Boston Marathon bombing, while more than 4,000 mourners paid tribute to an MIT police officer who authorities say was gunned down by the bombers.

Among the speakers at the memorial service in Cambridge was Vice President Joe Biden, who condemned the bombing suspects as "two twisted, perverted, cowardly, knockoff jihadis."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was listed in fair condition as he recovered from wounds suffered during a getaway attempt. He could get the death penalty if convicted of plotting with his older brother, now dead, to set off the pressure-cooker bombs that killed three people and wounded more than 260 on April 15. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in a shootout with police.

The bombs were detonated by remote control, according to U.S. officials close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. It was not clear what the detonation device was, but the charges against Dzhokhar say he was using a cellphone moments before the blasts.

U.S. officials also said Dzhokhar has told interrogators he and his brother were angry about the U.S. wars in Muslim Afghanistan and Iraq.

After closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill with the FBI and other law enforcement officials, lawmakers said earlier this week that it appeared so far that the brothers were radicalized via the Internet instead of by direct contact with any terrorist groups, and that the older brother was the driving force in the bomb plot.

In Russia, U.S. investigators traveled to the predominantly Muslim province of Dagestan and were in contact with the brothers' parents, hoping to gain more information.

The parents, Anzor Tsarnaev and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, plan to fly to the U.S. on Thursday, the father was quoted as telling the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. The family has said it wants to bring Tamerlan's body back to Russia.

Investigators are looking into whether Tamerlan, who spent six months in Russia's turbulent Caucasus region in 2012, was influenced by the religious extremists who have waged an insurgency against Russian forces in the area for years. The brothers have roots in Dagestan and neighboring Chechnya, but had lived in the U.S. for about a decade.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bagpipes wailed as students, faculty and staff members and throngs of law enforcement officials paid their respects to MIT police officer Sean Collier, who was ambushed in his cruiser three days after the bombing.

The line of mourners stretched for a half-mile. They had to make their way through tight security, including metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs.

Boston native James Taylor sang "The Water is Wide" and led a sing-along of "Shower the People."

Biden told the Collier family that no child should die before his or her parents, but that, in time, the grief will lose some of its sting.

"The moment will come when the memory of Sean is triggered and you know it's going to be OK," Biden said. "When the first instinct is to get a smile on your lips before a tear to your eye."

The vice president also sounded a defiant note.

"The purpose of terror is to instill fear," he said. "You saw none of it here in Boston. Boston, you sent a powerful message to the world."

In another milestone in Boston's recovery, the area around the marathon finish line was reopened to the public, with fresh cement still drying on the repaired sidewalk. Delivery trucks made their way down Boylston Street under a heavy police presence, though some damaged stores were still closed.

"I don't think there's going to be a sense of normalcy for a while," Tom Champoux, who works nearby, said as he pointed to the boarded-up windows. "There are scars here that will be with us for a long time."

___

Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy and Bob Salsberg in Boston, Lynn Berry in Moscow, and Kimberly Dozier, Adam Goldman, Eric Tucker, Matt Apuzzo, and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/boston-bomb-investigation-extends-russia-215024259.html

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Reliance Communications Partners With Twitter To Offer Free, Unlimited Access To The Service In India

For those in the United States and other locations that are lucky enough to be able to purchase huge data packages for their smartphones, thinking about deciding to “tweet or not to tweet” based on the cost that it could incur is a foreign concept, pun intended. For cell customers in India, it’s a very real situation, and Reliance Communications has partnered with Twitter to bring free, unlimited access to the social network to its prepaid GSM subscribers. This is yet another example of how important Twitter has become in our daily lives and how integral the communication platform is to locations all over the world. The service will be bundled with live cricket match updates, the most popular sport in the country. A customized version of the Twitter app has been created, reminding customers that they’re getting free access thanks to Reliance Mobile. If someone taps a link to an outside site, they will be reminded that doing so might incur extra charges. Reliance is the first operator to partner with Twitter in India, and its Chief Revenue Officer of Wireless, Nilanjan Mukherjee, had this to share: We are delighted to be the first operator to partner with Twitter in India on Twitter Access and offer the first of its kind unlimited Twitter access on our superior network. Our partnership with Twitter in India further strengthens our offering on the social media platform and is in line with our continuous efforts to offer innovative products with incredible affordability for our customers. Since prepaid cell phones are prominent in countries like India, signing deals like this makes the services more attractive. Back to how important cricket is to India’s culture, though. Mukherjee feels like this announcement could cause a “significant shift” of cricket fans to move over to Reliance. That’s knowing your customers. [Photo credit: Flickr]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-6dE4dIKRD0/

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Kenny Scharf Arrested & NYPD Asks Him For Autographs

Art Sucks:

One of NYC's own living art legends, Kenny Scharf was arrested in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Friday night for spray painting a black and white cartoon drawing of a snake in his signature style on private property.

Kenny is one of the last of a dying breed of graffiti artist-cum-art stars of the 1980s, and arresting him for graffiti at this point is almost laughable. I can only speculate that the ultra-high police presence, in connection with the entire city of Boston being in lockdown may have had New York's Finest a little more hypervigilant than usual.

Read the whole story: Art Sucks

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/23/kenny-scharf-arrested-nypd-asks-for-autographs_n_3138261.html

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Israeli scientists discover why soft corals have unique pulsating motion

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have discovered why Heteroxenia corals pulsate. Their work, which resolves an old scientific mystery, appears in the current issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US).

One of the most fascinating and spectacular sights in the coral reef of Eilat is the perpetual motion of the tentacles of a coral called Heteroxenia (Heteroxenia fuscescens). Heteroxenia is a soft coral from the family Xeniidae, which looks like a small bunch of flowers, settled in the reef walls and on rocky areas on the bottom of the reef. Each "flower" is actually a living polyp, the basic unit which comprises a coral colony. Apparently, the motion of these polyps, resembling flowers that are elegantly spreading out and closing up their petals, is unique in the animal kingdom.

Except for the familiar swimming motion of jellyfish, no other bottom-attached aquatic animal is known to perform such motions. Pulsation is energetically costly, and hence there must be a reasonable benefit to justify this motion.

The perpetual motions of jellyfish serve them for swimming, predation and feeding. The natural explanation would be that that the Heteroxenia's spectacular motions are used for predation and feeding, however several studies indicate that these corals do not predate on other animals at all. If predation is not the reason for pulsating, there must be another explanation to justify the substantial energetic expense by the Heteroxenia.

Maya Kremien found the answers to these questions, while working on her master's research at the Interuniversity institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat under the supervision of Prof. Amatzia Genin from the Hebrew University and Prof. Uri Shavit from the Technion in a joint research funded by the National Science Foundation.

After watching several coral colonies with an underwater infrared-sensitive camera night and day, the researchers found their first surprising discovery: Heteroxenia corals cease to pulsate and take a half-hour break every single day in the afternoon hours. At this stage, the afternoon "siestas" remained unexplained.

The labs of Prof. Genin and Prof. Shavit conduct work on the interaction between biological processes of aquatic creatures and the water motions which surround them. Apparently aquatic animals affect the flow and at the same time are absolutely dependent on that flow. In order to solve the mystery of the Heteroxenia coral, the research team developed (as part of Ph.D. work by Tali Mass) an underwater measuring device called PIV (particle imaging velocimetry), which allows measurement of the flow field just around the coral very accurately. The system consists of two powerful lasers, an image capturing system and computation ability. A special set of lenses releases a sheet of light in short, powerful pulses so that the imaging system can capture pairs of snapshots of natural particles moving with the flow. The computational system then performs a mathematical analysis of the pairs of photos, producing a huge database of flow field maps, from which the flow speed, characteristics of solutes transport, and turbulent mixing intensity are calculated.

The measurements were performed at night with the support of divers who volunteered to assist the research team. It was found that if a diver lightly touched the coral, the polyps "close" and remain motionless for a few minutes, after which the coral returns to its normal pulsation activity. The researchers used this behavior in order to repeatedly measure the flow field around the Heteroxenia during pulsation and rest.

This video shows pulsating coral in Gulf of Eilat, Israel.

Credit: Victor China

These measurements led to the research group's next discovery. Analysis of the direction of water flow indicated that the motion of the polyps effectively sweeps water up and away from the coral tissues into the ambient water. Corals need carbon-dioxide during daytime and oxygen during nighttime, as well as nutrients (such as phosphate and nitrogen) during day and night. One of the challenges for coral colonies is to render their surrounding waters rich in essential commodities by efficiently mixing the water around them.

By using the sophisticated measuring system, the researchers calculated the mixing intensity of the water as a result of the coral's pulsation. The unexpected discovery was that even though the polyps' motions are uncoordinated (i.e. each polyp starts its period of motion at a different time), the accumulated effect of the polyps' activity is a significant enhancement of the flow around the colony, particularly in the upward direction which sweeps water away from the coral, hence reducing the probability of re-filtration of the same water.

However, these findings still did not yet answer the question of why a coral would invest so much energy to move its tentacles. After receiving a permit from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, the research team collected a few Heteroxenia colonies from the sea in order to run a series of laboratory experiments. All corals were returned back to their original location after the experiment terminated. The Hypothesis was that the pulsation motions enhance the coral's photosynthesis rate.

Corals are among the most ancient creatures surviving on our planet. One of the "secrets" of their amazing survival abilities is that they "host" photosynthetic algae in their tissues. The symbiotic algae provides the coral with essential nutrients and lives off the waste of the coral.

In a previous study of the same research team (which the results of were also published in PNAS) it was found that the motion of water around corals is essential in order to enhance the efflux of oxygen from the coral tissues. Without water motion, the oxygen concentration in the coral tissues would rise and the photosynthesis rate would drop.

The answer to the question as to why the Heteroxenia pulsates was finally revealed through the lab experiments. First, the photosynthesis rate of a pulsating Heteroxenia was measured, and it was found to be on an order of magnitude higher than that of a non-pulsating colony. Next, in order to prove that the mechanism of pulsation is intended to sweep away oxygen, the researchers artificially increased the oxygen concentration in the measurement chamber so that even when the coral managed to mix water via pulsation, it was replacing oxygen-rich water with new water, which, unfortunately for the coral , was also rich in oxygen. And indeed it was found that the photosynthesis rate was low in this case, and even when the coral was constantly pulsating, the oxygen concentration remained high and photosynthesis remained low, as if the coral was at rest (i.e. not pulsating).

The elegant motion of Heteroxenia has been fascinating the scientific society and capturing the attention of researchers for nearly 200 years (Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, 1744-1829), yet it has not been explained. Now, in the study of Kremien, Genin and Shavit, it was found that the pulsation motions augment a significant enhancement in the binding of carbon dioxide to the photosynthetic enzyme RuBisCo, also leading to a decrease in photorespiration. This explanation justifies the investment of energy in pulsation -- the benefit overcomes the cost. In fact, thanks to pulsation, the ratio between photosynthesis to respiration in Heteroxenia is the highest ever measured in stony and non-pulsating soft corals.

The findings of this study indicate that pulsation motions are a highly efficient means for sweeping away water from the pulsating body, and for an increased mixing of dissolved matter between the body and the surrounding medium. These two processes (expulsion of medium and mixing of solutes) may lead to future applications in engineering and medicine. Currently the research group is focusing on attempts to broaden the results of this study and on developing mathematical models which could serve various applicative purposes.

###

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: http://www.huji.ac.il

Thanks to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 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/127885/Israeli_scientists_discover_why_soft_corals_have_unique_pulsating_motion

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White House refuses to say if Obama still supports disclosing library donors (Washington Bureau)

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U.S. child porn suspect captured after 5 years

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Investigators say Eric Justin Toth's five-year run as a fugitive began when he was fired from his teaching job at a prestigious private school in Washington after being confronted about images of child pornography taken with a school camera in the man's possession.

It ended over the weekend when Nicaraguan authorities, acting on a tip, found him living in that Central American country ? with phony passports, driver's licenses and credit cards, authorities said. The FBI is investigating why Toth was living there and has previously said he may have been advertising as a nanny or tutor while on the lam.

Now, investigators are trying to piece together how he avoided capture even after he was added to the FBI's Most Wanted list, a notorious designation reserved for those considered dangerous criminals and that has featured the likes of Osama bin Laden and Whitey Bulger. Prosecutors are encouraging any other abuse victims to come forward as they proceed with a federal child pornography case against the 31-year-old Toth, who was ordered held without bond during a brief court appearance Tuesday.

"The fact that he is a known child predator and that he's been on the run for five years, we assume that there's potentially other victims in other places that he's been over the past five years," said Valerie Parlave, the head of the FBI's Washington field office.

A federal public defender assigned to Toth didn't immediately return a call seeking comment. Phone listings for possible relatives of Toth either declined to comment or did not return phone messages.

The arrest on Saturday, in a city near Nicaragua's border with Honduras, ended a frustrating international manhunt for the computer-savvy third-grade teacher and former camp counselor.

There were tantalizing clues along the way ? a fake suicide note in Minnesota, an apparent sighting at a shelter in Arizona, a tip that led agents on an extensive search of South America. Yet Toth continued to elude authorities, even as pictures of his bespectacled and sometimes bearded face were featured on news programs, billboards around the country and the FBI's list.

The big break came from a tip last week after a female tourist who encountered Toth in a social setting recognized him and contacted authorities, said FBI spokeswoman Jacqueline Maguire.

Toth first arrived in Nicaragua in October and appeared to have spent at least part of his time there creating false identities and ID documents, police said. When his house was raided, police found passports, driver's licenses and credit cards from three banks, under different names, suggesting he was preparing new false identities to use, said national Police Chief Aminta Granera. Toth was living under an assumed name, authorities said, and the FBI used records of a recent purchase to pinpoint his whereabouts.

Federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint Tuesday charging Toth with possessing and producing child pornography, charges that together carry a maximum 50-year prison sentence. Toth wore a blue jail jumpsuit, his hair considerably longer than in the photographs the FBI had made public, and he spoke softly in response to a judge's perfunctory questions.

Prosecutors revealed no new details of their case in court. But according to the complaint, multiple images of child pornography ? including one video in which Toth allegedly appeared alongside an undressed young boy ? were located in June 2008 on a media card found inside his classroom at Beauvoir, a private elementary school on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral.

Although "not the most socially adept guy," he was an engaged teacher who helped students think outside the box in math and logic and who even incorporated lessons on why people do or don't do the right things, recalled Michele Booth Cole, whose daughter was in one of Toth's classes.

"He wasn't teaching from the textbook. It was really much more creative and thought-provoking for the kids," said Cole, executive director of Safe Shores ? the DC Children's Advocacy Center, which helps abused children.

The media card with the pornographic images was found in in a box addressed to Toth at the school's address, the complaint says. Although some of the images showed children laughing and playing, others were every parent's nightmare, said Ron Machen, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Those include photographs and videos showing the hand of an adult male fondling a boy, the complaint says. Another video, taken in what appears to be a classroom at the school, shows a man investigators believe to be Toth with an undressed prepubescent boy.

Toth was fired after the images were discovered by fellow school employees and escorted from the school. He disappeared immediately, long before anyone could arrest him.

But there were soon clues that would set agents in motion.

His car was found later that summer in a long-term parking lot at the Minneapolis airport along with a fake suicide note inside that claimed he was going to kill himself in a nearby lake. But no body was found, and investigators concluded it was a ruse.

"Clearly he was trying to throw investigators off at that point," said FBI Special Agent Kyle Loven, an agency spokesman in Minneapolis.

He was believed to have been sighted in Phoenix in 2009, apparently working as a quasi-counselor at a shelter under an assumed name, the FBI has said. He was gone before agents could get to him.

Authorities also believe Toth, who is from the Midwest, traveled while on the run to Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

In April 2012, the FBI, concerned that the trail was going cold and that Toth's experience in interacting with children and earning their trust might be putting other kids at risk, announced that it was adding him to the bureau's Most Wanted fugitives list, where he filled a slot left vacant by the death of bin Laden.

Ron Hosko, then the special agent in charge of the criminal division of the FBI's Washington field office, said at the time, "This is a dangerous person because of his nature, because he is a child predator, because of his ability to groom both adults and potentially these children to develop some sorts of bond of trust."

___

Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York and writers Luis Manuel Galeano in Managua, Nicaragua, and Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

___

Follow Tucker on Twitter at http://twitter.com/etuckerAP

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-child-porn-suspect-captured-5-years-215920356.html

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Opiates & Barbiturates Drug Abuse/Addiction Detox Rehab Film

Both opiate and barbiturate users suffer the same problems trying to quit and need help. The first step to recovery is to examine the patient?s history. Learning about their past and present physical health can do a great deal towards providing effective treatment. A physical must be done to determine the addict?s state of health. Pale eyes, dilated pupils, nose damage and dry mouth and lips can all be signs of an addict. Drug abusers will usually have an enlarged kidney, liver or spleen, constipation, hemorrhoids, venereal disease and tracks. When opiate users check in for detoxification, they will normally display drowsiness, itchiness, flushed skin and a low blood pressure. Barbiturate users will generally show signs of an unsteady walk, rapid eye moment, poor reflects, slurred speech and sometimes be in a semi-comatose state. During their detoxification, opiate users may be plagued with anxiety, irritability, lack of sleep, sweating, runny nose, dilated pupils, increased pulse, loss of appetite, high temperature, vomiting and diarrhea. Barbiturate users will normally be restless, lack energy, experience nausea, have cramps, twitch, have tremors, vomit and, if untreated, they can die. Because the clinic will not always know whether they are dealing with an opiate or barbiturate user, they will keep an exact sleep log on their patients. If insomnia occurs on the first night, there is a good chance that the patient is a barbiturate. Both types of users will be slowly weaned off drugs by using a smaller and smaller amount of another drug. Once the process is complete, both types are strongly encouraged by their doctors to seek help from counseling if they really want to have a drug-free life. They may no longer be addicted to drugs; but they can easily fall back into the same patterns if they do not make life changes and find counseling after they leave the clinic. See the full length video at: www.qualityinformationpublishers.com

Source: http://detox.fitnessthroughfasting.com/liver-detox-2/opiates-barbiturates-drug-abuseaddiction-detox-rehab-film.php

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