Storm response: Red Cross NWLA heads to Homer

HOMER, LA (KSLA) -

Assistance is now available for residents in Homer, where storms caused significant damage overnight into Tuesday morning.

The American Red Cross of Northwest Louisiana says they have sent two teams to the area armed with cleanup supplies for residents, including tarps, water and comfort kits.

Three or four more teams are expected to fan out Wednesday across the area to assist with damage assessment and render aid.

Copyright 2012 KSLA. All rights reserved.

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Storm response: Red Cross NWLA heads to Homer

Red Fang, OMSI rocks, the Parson Red Heads, Black Prairie, Anya Marina: Music Notes

Meanwhile, in Greece, chaos, soccer, and Red Fang melting faces.

Go Red Fang, go!

Don't you just love this band? They're loud, they're fun, they're drunk, they like pizza. They like pizza so much you can now order a picture disc edition of their latest record, "Murder the Mountains." It looks like a pizza. A pizza that says Red Fang.

Go Red Fang, go!

They're in Boise tonight, working their way toward New Jersey on June 23 when they'll be part of Metallica's Orion music festival.

And then back to Europe for July into early August and then a Sept. 5 Musicfest NW show at the Roseland Theater.

We might need to come up with a better phrase for concerts than "adult shows." It's funny when Laura Veirs says it in the context of the "kid show-adult show-kid show-adult show" touring she was doing earlier this year.

But when OMSI says it, well, sometimes a submarine is just a submarine, right?

OMSI After Dark.

That doesn't sound any less sexy like.

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Red Fang, OMSI rocks, the Parson Red Heads, Black Prairie, Anya Marina: Music Notes

Red Cross Heads to Ruidoso

Monday, June 11, 2012 - 21:21

El Paso- The Red Cross is packing up and heading to Ruidoso. The state of New Mexico reached out to the agency and the Red Cross is making sure everyone has things they may need. Whether it be personal products they may have left behind or just some hope and reassurance about the road ahead of them. Freddy Martinez, the Red Cross emergency response manager says the Red Cross is prepared. "We're going out there, we're taking blankets, we're taking personal hygiene products, and daily necessities the people may need. They have no tooth brushes and no hand soap." Martinez adds they Red Cross only excepts monetary donations. Monetary donations can be made on their website at http://www.redcrosselpaso.org.

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Red Cross Heads to Ruidoso

NASA | Suomi Sees Asian Fires Migrate To North America – Video

11-06-2012 08:56 Research scientist Colin Seftor talks about images from the OMPS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite. Suomi (NPP) launched in the fall of 2011. These images show smoke from Asia that migrates to North America. Seftor explains the importance of aerosols to the studies of climate as well as how critical it is to collect long term data records. This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast: Or find NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Facebook: Or find us on Twitter:

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How NASA's Curiosity rover could 'discover' Teflon on Mars

Teflon from the drill on NASA's Curiosity rover could contaminate Martian soil, say scientists, creating misleading evidence of an ancient alien civilization that had developed nonstick cookware.

An unexpected contamination problem has cropped up for NASA's next Mars rover, but scientists are confident the huge robot will still be able to complete its mission after it lands on the Red Planet in August.

NASA scientists discussed the contamination concern and a new Mars landing plan for the car-sizeCuriosity roverin a teleconference with reporters today (June 11). The contamination issue, they said, concerns the rover's drill.

When Curiosity ultimately bores into a Martian rock, small amounts of Teflon and other contaminants from the drill will likely seep into the sample, NASA officials said. These introduced materials may make it tougher for the Curiosity team to search for organic carbon the building blocks of life as we know it here on Earth on the Red Planet.

While researchers are still working to get a handle on the problem, they don't think it will significantly hinder the Curiosity rover or its $2.5 billion mission, which is officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).

Right now, the overall sense on the mission team is that "it's not a serious problem, because we see so many potential ways to work around this that we could use," Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told reporters today. [Curiosity - The SUV of Mars Rovers]

Meanwhile, Grotzinger and his team also said today that they have trimmed down the landing zone for the Curiosity rover in order to bring it closer to its final target: a huge mountain inside Mars' giant Gale Crater.

Curiosity launched in late November and is due to touch down inGale Crateron the night of Aug. 5. After it lands, it will embark on a roughly two-Earth-year mission to determine if the Gale Crater area is, or ever was, capable ofsupporting microbial life.

The 1-ton rover will use10 science instrumentsto get at the question. One of those instruments, known as Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, is a chemistry laboratory stripped down to the size of a microwave oven.

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How NASA's Curiosity rover could 'discover' Teflon on Mars

NASA Langley Celebrates Five-Year Partnership With Sierra Nevada

HAMPTON, Va. - Engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center are marking five years of collaboration with Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) Space Systems in Louisville, Colo., as partners in the design and development of the Dream Chaser(R) Space System.

NASA Langley and SNC joined forces to update Langley's HL-20 lifting body vehicle design into the Dream Chaser orbital crew vehicle, which is being developed as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. Langley engineers had devised a development plan for the HL-20 in the 1980s and 90s, creating pilot landing scenarios in simulators, testing designs in wind tunnels and even building a full-scale model - with the help of universities - to study crew challenges.

"We're thrilled to see our HL-20 design being advanced by Sierra Nevada and glad to have the chance to work with the company on the further development of its Dream Chaser," said Robbie Kerns, manager of the Commercial Space Projects Office at NASA Langley.

"NASA Langley has been an engaged and supportive partner since the beginning of our Dream Chaser Program," said Mark Sirangelo, Corporate Vice President and head of Sierra Nevada Space Systems. "The Dream Chaser was born at NASA through the great work of the Langley Center. We would not be where we are without the talented NASA people, past and present, who have enabled our Dream Chaser vehicle to start its operational flight testing." Sirangelo recently visited NASA Langley in Hampton, Va., as part of this commemoration and for a joint corporate/government executive session on the program.

The NASA-SNC team has joined together with engineers at United Launch Alliance, makers of Dream Chaser's launch vehicle, the Atlas V, to perform buffet tests on the launch vehicle/orbitalcrew vehicle stack. Testing just completed in NASA Langley's Transonic Dynamics Tunnel will evaluate the pressure fluctuations the launch vehicle stack mayexperience during its ascent to low Earth orbit.

SNC is one of several companies working to develop commercial crew transportation capabilities under the Commercial Crew Development Round 2 (CCDev2) agreement with NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP). NASA's CCDev effort is being led by NASA's Kennedy Space Center and supported by NASA technical experts across the agency, including NASA Langley for a variety of technical areas.

NASA also is developing the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS), a crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket that will provide an entirely new capability for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. Designed to be flexible for launching spacecraft for crew and cargo missions, SLS and Orion will expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit and enable new missions of exploration across the solar system.

For more information about NASA Langley, please go to: http://www.nasa.gov/langley

For more information on NASA's commercial Crew Program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew

For more information about Sierra Nevada, visit: http://www.SNCSpace.com

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NASA Langley Celebrates Five-Year Partnership With Sierra Nevada

Space Leaders Charge NASA Doesn't Demand Right Stuff From Climate Science Programs

Seven Apollo astronauts, along with two former NASA Johnson Space Center directors and several former senior management-level technical experts, have recently lodged formal complaints to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. regarding the dismal and embarrassing state of the agency's climate science programs.

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Space Leaders Charge NASA Doesn't Demand Right Stuff From Climate Science Programs

NASA astronauts train for deep space mission deep below the sea

Because NASA's NEEMO missions put participants in a hostile, alien environment, they're good analogs for expeditions to asteroids, planets, moons or other space destinations, officials said.

Four aquanauts descended to an undersea research base off the Florida Keys Monday (June 11), kicking off a 12-day mission designed to help future spaceflyers explore near-Earth asteroids.

The four adventurers entered the Aquarius research station which sits 62 feet (19 meters) down in the ocean about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) off Key Largo at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) Monday, NASA officials said.

The 16th expedition in the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations program, or NEEMO, has now officially begun. BecauseNEEMO missionsput participants in a hostile, alien environment, they're good analogs for expeditions to asteroids, planets, moons or other space destinations, officials said.

NEEMO aquanauts can simulate living on a spacecraft and test techniques forfuture space missions. NASA can also weigh down the participants to varying degrees, to simulate different gravity environments.

NEEMO 16 will focus on ways to help future astronauts explore near-Earth asteroids, a key priority for NASA. Two years ago, President Barack Obama instructed the space agency to work toward sending humans to a nearby space rock by 2025. [Gallery: Visions of NASA Asteroid Mission]

"We're trying to look out into the future and understand how we'd operate on anasteroid," NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, NEEMO principal investigator, said in a statement. "You don't want to make a bunch of guesses about what you'll need and then get to the asteroid to find out it won't work the way you thought it would. NEEMO helps give us the information we need to make informed decisions now."

NEEMO 16's undersea crew consists of astronaut Dottie M. Metcalf-Lindenburger, Japanese spaceflyer Kimiya Yui, European Space Agency astronaut Timothy Peake and Cornell University professor Steven Squyres, who is also the lead scientist for NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers.

The crewmembers' activities over the next 12 days will focus on three core areas dealing with communication delays, figuring out optimum crew sizes and coming up with ways to attach to asteroids (and stay attached to a space vehicle during excursions).

Metcalf-Lindenburger, Yui, Peake and Squyres will stay underwater for the duration of NEEMO 16, which concludes June 22.

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NASA astronauts train for deep space mission deep below the sea

NASA Embraces Amazon Cloud, Leaves OpenStack Behind

NASA will be storing information on nebulas only on Amazon soon. Image: bobfamiliar/Flickr

NASA was one of the primary driving forces behind OpenStack, an effort to provide an open source alternative to Amazons widely popular cloud services. But as OpenStack takes off in other places, the space agency is turning away from the open source platform and into the arms of Amazon.

As Amazon happily pointed out on its Amazon Web Services blog, NASA chief information officer Linda Cureton recently told the world that in moving part of its infrastructure to Amazons cloud, the space agency can save about a million dollars a year. With Amazon Web Services, or AWS, you get instant access to online storage and virtual servers so you neednt set up your own hardware.

Cureton discussed a host of other technologies set to come online at the space agency. But there was no mention of OpenStack, an open source platform that lets you build an Amazon-like service inside your own data center. The idea is that you can give your employees instant access to computing resources in much the same way Amazon provides such virtual infrastructure to the world at large.

NASA co-founded the project with Rackspace in 2009, after years of developing code for its own internal infrastructure, but as Gigaom reported in late May, the space agency is now halting development of software for the open source platform.

Since its inception, many of the key contributors of NASAs OpenStack project have left the space agency for the private sector. Chris Kemp, a former chief technology officer at NASA, left to found Nebula, an outfit that offers hardware devices for building Openstack clouds. Joshua McKenty founded Piston Cloud Computing, which seeks to bring a version of OpenStack to traditional businesses. And several other members of the team that built NASAs OpenStack code now work for Rackspace.

McKenty says that Curetons plans are certainly a win for Amazon, but plays down the impact of her decisions, saying she has authority over the practices of the agencys central operation, but not over the individual NASA research centers, including NASA Ames, where OpenStack was developed. As a whole, he believes, NASA is still a diverse mix of cloud technologies such as Terramark and Lockheed Martin.

I see this totally out of context with whatever else NASA is doing as far as data center consolidation, virtualization, private cloud, all the stack software and everything else, McKenty tells Wired.

In addition to Rackspace, OpenStack is backed by HP, Cisco, IBM, and Red Hat, and project organizers claim over 3,000 contributors. A spokesman for NASA said that while the agency still had interest in the platform, its needs were being met through commercial offerings i.e. Amazon Web Services and others.

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NASA Embraces Amazon Cloud, Leaves OpenStack Behind

UPDATE 1-Nanotechnology business boosts Oxford Instruments' profit

* FY adj profit 42 mln stg vs 26.2 mln last year

* Rev up 29 pct to 337.3 mln stg

* Raises final div 12 pct to 7.23 pence

June 12 - High (Euronext: HCO.NX - news) -technology tools maker Oxford Instruments Plc said its full-year adjusted profit rose 60 percent on strong performance across its nanotechnology, industrial and services business.

The company said revenue from its nanotechnology business, which represents 44 percent of total revenue, rose 26 percent to 154 million pounds ($238.87 million).

Revenue from industrial products rose 28.5 percent to 129.1 million pounds while services business sales grew 32.5 percent to 56.3 million pounds.

Revenue rose 29 percent to 337.3 million pounds.

April-March adjusted pretax profit rose to 42 million pounds from 26.2 million pounds.

Order intake was up 23.5 percent at 337.8 million pounds.

Shares in the company, which raised its final dividend by 12 percent to 7.23 pence, closed at 1208 pence on Monday on the London Stock Exchange (LSE: LSE.L - news) . ($1 = 0.6447 British pounds) (Reporting by Monika Shinghal in Bangalore;)

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UPDATE 1-Nanotechnology business boosts Oxford Instruments' profit

Nanotechnology business boosts Oxford Instruments' profit

June 12 - High-technology tools maker Oxford Instruments Plc said its full-year adjusted profit rose 60 percent on strong performance across its nanotechnology, industrial and services business. The company said revenue from its nanotechnology business, which represents 44 percent of total revenue, rose 26 percent to 154 million pounds ($238.87 million). Revenue from industrial products rose 28 ...

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Nanotechnology business boosts Oxford Instruments' profit

How worms are pioneering remote control medicine

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

If you want to make the worm turn, try using magnets. By implanting nanoparticles in nerve cells in a nematode's head, Arnd Pralle and his team from the State University of New York in Buffalo can make a wriggling worm alter its course when exposed to a magnetic field.

In this video, you can see how both a single treated worm, as well as a whole group, can quickly be triggered to change direction. A third clip shows that in the same scenario, an untreated worm doesn't alter its behaviour.

These nematodes are just one example of how living cells can be controlled remotely. By using other hosts, and implanting nanoparticles in ion channels, DNA strands or antibodies, medical treatments could be activated instantly from afar, leading to a new generation of drugs that can be set off with a smartphone app.

To find out more about recent developments in wireless medicine, read our full-length feature, Wireless medicine: Turn on, tune in, control life.

If you enjoyed this post, see how a roundworm can be stunned by UV light or watch how (contrary to what you might think) obstacles can help worms speed through an obstacle course.

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How worms are pioneering remote control medicine

Asia's First Graphene Nano-Tech Facility Opens In Singapore

June 13, 2012 11:53 AM

Asia's First Graphene Nano-Tech Facility Opens In Singapore

SINGAPORE, June 13 (Bernama) -- A S$15 million Micro and Nano-Fabrication facility has opened at the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Graphene Research Centre, the first nano-science and nano-technology facility of its kind in Asia dedicated to graphene.

The Centre, set up in August 2010 as part of the NUS Faculty of Science, is involved in projects totalling over S$100 million, and aims to be a world leader in the emerging field of graphene research.

Helmed by Professor Antonio H. Castro Neto, who is one of the world leaders in graphene research, the Centre is set up under scientific advising by Professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, from Manchester University in the UK and winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of graphene.

NUS President Professor Tan Chorh Chuan said: "Graphene is one of the most interesting and promising materials of our time although its unique properties have yet to be fully explored.

"We look forward to seeing novel discoveries and innovative breakthroughs emerge from the Centre, putting Singapore in the forefront of research in revolutionary new materials."

There is an intense global drive towards graphene commercialisation. Graphene grown by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) could be a game changer in the industry of transparent conductive coatings (TCC) essential for the modern display, lighting touch panel, and photovoltaic industries. This market is expected to reach annually US$55 billion by 2020.

Solution-processed graphene is expected to have a major impact on batteries, catalysts and composite materials, reaching a projected market value of US$675 million in 2020.

Neto said: "Our research addresses immediate growth, synthesis, transfer and doping problems of existing approaches. We aim to break current technological bottlenecks for industry adoption by meeting the industrial benchmarks of conductivity and optical transparency for graphene and by improving size and conductivity of graphene flakes from solution at a low cost.

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Asia's First Graphene Nano-Tech Facility Opens In Singapore

Nanoparticles found in moon glass bubbles explain weird lunar soil behaviour

(Phys.org) -- A stunning discovery by Queensland University of Technology soil scientist Marek Zbik of nanoparticles inside bubbles of glass in lunar soil could solve the mystery of why the moon's surface topsoil has many unusual properties.

Dr Zbik, from Queensland University of Technology's Science and Engineering Faculty, said scientists had long observed the strange behaviour of lunar soil but had not taken much notice of the nano and submicron particles found in the soil and their source was unknown.

Dr Zbik took the lunar soil samples to Taiwan where he could study the glass bubbles without breaking them using a new technique for studying nano materials call synchrotron-based nano tomography to look at the particles. Nano tomography is a transmission X-ray microscope which enables 3D images of nanoparticles to be made.

This video is not supported by your browser at this time.

View a 3D image from inside the lunar bubble using transmission X-Ray microscopy. You can see what is inside the lunar bubble with 3D glasses.

"Instead of gas or vapour inside the bubbles, which we would expect to find in such bubbles on Earth, the lunar glass bubbles were filled with a highly porous network of alien-looking glassy particles that span the bubbles' interior.

"It appears that the nanoparticles are formed inside bubbles of molten rocks when meteorites hit the lunar surface. Then they are released when the glass bubbles are pulverised by the consequent bombardment of meteorites on the moon's surface.

"This continuous pulverising of rocks on the lunar surface and constant mixing develop a type of soil which is unknown on Earth."

Dr Zbik said nanoparticles behaved according to the laws of quantum physics which were completely different from so called 'normal' physics' laws. Because of this, materials containing nanoparticles behave strangely according to our current understanding.

"Nanoparticles are so tiny, it is their size and not what they are made of that accounts for their exceptional properties.

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Nanoparticles found in moon glass bubbles explain weird lunar soil behaviour

AMP Receives 40% Increase in Abstract Submissions

Newswise Bethesda, MD, June 13, 2012: the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) announced a record-breaking number of abstract submissions for the AMP 2012 Annual Meeting on Genomic Medicine, marking a 40% increase over last year. The Meeting will be held October 25-27, 2012 in Long Beach, CA. An increase in the number of meeting attendees and exhibitors is anticipated as well. "The record growth in every phase demonstrates clearly how well-recognized it is that AMP offers the meeting of the year in molecular diagnostics and genomics," stated Iris Schrijver, MD, AMP President.

Growth in recent years and the spike in this years AMP Annual Meeting participation mirror the marked growth in the field of molecular pathology. AMP has had consistent growth in the number of abstracts submitted and number of attendees at the annual meeting, but the increase this year blew the lid off even our expectations, noted Mary Steele Williams, Executive Director, The AMP 2012 Annual Meeting on Genomic Medicine promises to be jam-packed with attendees and exciting scientific exchange.

As the only organization dedicated solely to the practice and science of molecular pathology, it is natural that the AMP Annual Meeting serves as the showcase for translational research, clinical practice, and practical technical discussions in all aspects of molecular diagnostics and genomic medicine. Abstract topics submitted for this years meeting span the breadth of molecular diagnostics, including the use of next generation sequencing in a clinical setting; novel tools for the detection of infectious agents; development and validation of new molecular tests; detection and analysis of various biomarkers in cancer.

Session topics chosen for this years meeting include; integrating pharmacogenomics into health care, utility of next generation sequencing, new molecular pathology CPT codes, and many more. AMP expects a record number of poster presentations at this years AMP Annual Meeting. With 400+ posters plus more than 30 hours of educational sessions and 55 presentations, this years event is expected to be the largest to date.

ABOUT AMP: The Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) is an international medical professional association dedicated to the advancement, practice, and science of clinical molecular laboratory medicine and translational research based on the applications of molecular biology, genetics, and genomics. For more information, please visit http://www.amp.org.

CONTACT: Mary Steele Williams mwilliams@amp.org (301) 634-7921

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AMP Receives 40% Increase in Abstract Submissions

Ottawa Hospital eyes expansion into cutting-edge ‘molecular medicine’

OTTAWA The Ottawa Hospital is looking to gain a foothold in the fast-growing field of personalized medicine, which involves using gene sequencing to help doctors predict which drugs would work best for a particular patient.

The hospital has drawn up plans to set up a molecular diagnostics lab with the technology to decode hundreds of genes, or even the entire genomes of patients, which could yield new approaches for treating cancer and other serious diseases.

Details of the plan are still being worked out, and no funding has yet been committed to the project. The hospital is looking to raise $380,000 in seed money to get the lab off the ground. Another $1 million would have to be raised to buy the gene-sequencing equipment.

Hospital officials say the lab would mark a key step in making the relatively new technology of DNA sequencing a standard part of medical care. It would also position the hospital for an emerging field in which the medical establishment has placed great hope: studying entire genomes all of a patients DNA and identifying every mutation involved in a particular disease.

Experts say the approach would enable treatments to be customized to an individual patients genetic profile, which is miles away from the traditional trial-and-error method of giving every patient the same drugs in the hope of benefiting the fortunate few.

Down the road, the hospital wants to establish a teaching program that would train a new generation of pathologists with the skills to practise personalized medicine.

This is a very realistic vision, and I want Ottawa to be positioned as a provincial centre of excellence for molecular diagnostics, said Paula Doering, the hospitals vice-president of clinical programs.

Currently, the use of gene sequencing is most advanced in cancer care. Doctors use the information to guide more precise treatment, or to tailor drugs to the genetic traits of patients, with the goal of giving them a better chance of survival.

The idea is to avoid wasting precious time and money on potentially ineffective treatments, which expose countless patients to harmful side effects and inflate the nations drug spending.

Of the 7,000 cancer patients who are treated annually at The Ottawa Hospital, a high proportion receive testing for selective genes or chemical markers, especially if they have certain types of breast, lung, colorectal or gastrointestinal cancer, said Dr. David Stewart, the hospitals head of medical oncology.

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Ottawa Hospital eyes expansion into cutting-edge ‘molecular medicine’

MW3: Perth Cyclone + Reasons why I haven’t been uploading – Video

11-06-2012 21:10 Regular uploading tonight. I tried uploading a trials a few hours ago but it failed due to network error.. winds are still picking up, I feel im going to be blown away. Changed my mind, im going to stick to stupid playthroughs of games. Sorry CoD Scene but im sticking with playthroughs! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Come watch the most Krayziest gaming clips around. --- With me commentating over them with humourous and stupid commentary. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Send in your clips for What Happens Next here : Send in your clips for KrayzeeKlips Channel here : --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Follow meh on the interwebz Gamertag: Krayzee x -- I don't accept friend invites, but I will use this for when I play with subs Twitter: -- Rarely use twitter, only to answer questions Facebook: -- I use this most. Skype: krayzeex --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Playlists: Max Payne 3 Walkthrough : Trials Evolution Custom Maps : MW3 Live : The Krayzee Klub : The Binding of Isaac :

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MW3: Perth Cyclone + Reasons why I haven't been uploading - Video