ONE FOR THE RECORD DECEMBER 27 2013 28 ISON METEORS NIBIRU YELLOWSTONE CANARY ISLANDS – Video

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ONE FOR THE RECORD DECEMBER 27 2013 28 ISON METEORS NIBIRU YELLOWSTONE CANARY ISLANDS
ONE FOR THE RECORD DECEMBER 27 2013 28 ISON METEORS NIBIRU YELLOWSTONE CANARY ISLANDS I created this video with the YouTube Video Editor (http://www.youtube....

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ONE FOR THE RECORD DECEMBER 27 2013 28 ISON METEORS NIBIRU YELLOWSTONE CANARY ISLANDS - Video

Japan rescues balloonist trying to reach islands

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TOKYO: A Chinese man who tried to fly a hot-air balloon hundreds of kilometres to islands disputed between Beijing and Tokyo was rescued by Japans coastguard after ditching in the sea, an official said yesterday.

The 35-year-old took off from Chinas Fujian province on Wednesday morning in an attempt to land on one of the Tokyo-controlled islands, the Japan Coast Guard official said.

It was an ambitious goal hot-air balloons travel largely at the mercy of the wind, and the islands are tiny specks in the East China Sea 359 kilometres away from the take-off point.

They are hotly disputed between Beijing, which regards them as its territory and calls them Diaoyu, and Tokyo, which calls them Senkaku. Tensions have at times reached feverish heights.

In the event the pilot sent a request for help several hours into his flight and ditched in the sea, with a Japanese rescue helicopter picking him up 22 kilometres south of his goal, the official said.

The man, who was unhurt, was handed over to a Chinese patrol ship outside Japanese territorial waters, he added.

Photos distributed by the Japan Coast Guard showed a striped, multicoloured balloon drifting half-deflated in the steely blue waters.

Reports identified the man as Xu Shuaijun, a balloonist who in 2012 became the first man to pilot a hot-air balloon over northeast Chinas Bohai Bay.

On his verified account on Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, Xu posted a short message declaring that he had been returned safely to the city of Fuqing in Fujian province.

I have returned safely, Xu wrote. Thanks everyone for your concern.

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Japan rescues balloonist trying to reach islands

Health care administrator who favors ‘individualized medicine’ looks for less costly alternatives to Obamacare

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INDIANA--James Hamilton is convinced that health care can be better and less costly, but the Affordable Care Act won't get America to that promising future.

Hamilton, 63, is the executive director of a physician group in northeast Indiana, and he's worked in health-care administration for nearly 30 years. Those bright prospects he sees for the future of health care are centered on "individualized medicine"; its proponents believe it will allow doctors to thwart many diseases by acting on individual genes in patients' bodies.

The ACA, also known as Obamacare, "really was nothing more than insurance reform," said Hamilton, who lives near Leo-Cedarville. He's not looking to today's Republican Party to offer an alternative, either. Republicans "are on the same playing field as the ACA," he said. "Just insurance reform."

To help make his case, Hamilton has a written a book, "A Short Treatise on a Common Sense Framework for Health Care Reform," published late in 2013. It's a thin book, only 48 pages long, but it's enough room for Hamilton to pack in an intelligently sketched outline of an alternative course for health care.

This is the foundation: Make the same kind of commitment to understanding the human genome that we made to landing astronauts on the moon. The human genome was mapped a decade ago, and now is the time to pay for years of additional research so that doctors can routinely block the action of genes and avert or reverse medical problems.

"It presses the edge of my understanding, but some of the work is just phenomenal," Hamilton says of the emerging techniques of genetic intervention in medicine. Experts in the field typically forecast that benefits of gene therapies could be available in 10-20 years, Hamilton said.

Naturally, bringing this vision of radically better medical treatments to pass won't be simple.

The research needed in a crash use-the-genome project would be expensive, expensive enough that Hamilton has not seen an estimate and doesn't offer one himself. But he does note that actually averting the onset of costly diseases could cut costs fundamentally, instead of reconfiguring or capping payments or taxes used to fund the ACA.

And there's another significant hurdle: America has to start peeling costs out of the current health-care system during this decade or two of transition to "individualized medicine" that relies on genetic testing and treatment.

Decades in health-care administration have given Hamilton many ideas on that front, which he includes in his book, such as:

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Health care administrator who favors ‘individualized medicine’ looks for less costly alternatives to Obamacare

MIT Economist Seeks Facts in Health-Care Policy Debate

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Photographer: Kelvin Ma/Bloomberg

MIT Ford Professor of Economics Amy Finkelstein, who studies the economics of health... Read More

MIT Ford Professor of Economics Amy Finkelstein, who studies the economics of health and healthcare, poses for a portrait at MIT in Cambridge. Close

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MIT Ford Professor of Economics Amy Finkelstein, who studies the economics of health and healthcare, poses for a portrait at MIT in Cambridge.

Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Theres no shortage of theories about health-care policy. Amy Finkelstein wants facts.

Her newest research, based on data from Oregon, builds on her agenda: measuring the effects of health programs with scientific rigor. She and colleagues found that Medicaid coverage increased emergency department visits by 40 percent, according to the latest findings in their continuing study, released yesterday in the journal Science.

Weve shown that there are real benefits but also real costs to Medicaid, said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor. My fervent hope, and I dont think its entirely nave, is that this will lead to a more informed public-policy discussion.

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Finkelsteins pursuit of policy-relevant evidence has placed her at the pinnacle of her field. When the American Economic Association awards committee selected her for its 2012 John Bates Clark Medal, it called her the leading scholar in health economics. Winners of the medal, awarded annually to an economist under the age of 40, include 12 Nobel Prize laureates and two White House chief economists.

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MIT Economist Seeks Facts in Health-Care Policy Debate

Health care act hits South Whidbey fire district volunteers

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While millions of Americans get health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, the 85 volunteer firefighters and emergency medical technicians of South Whidbey Fire/EMS are in limbo.

The legislation commonly known as Obamacare may force volunteer fire districts to pay for health insurance for volunteers, though not until 2015. A clause in the act states that companies with more than 50 workers must buy health insurance or pay a fine of $2,000 per volunteer if coverage is not offered. However, a discrepancy between the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor has put fire districts on hold. The IRS labels volunteer firefighters as employees if theyre on the job more than 30 hours per week, but the Department of Labor considers them volunteers.

Part of our challenge is that we have two federal organizations to satisfy, said South Whidbey Fire/EMS Chief Rusty Palmer.

The health insurance issue is one fire districts across the United States of America and Whidbey Island are facing, or rather, waiting to face. Legislation that would exempt volunteer emergency workers was introduced in Congress on Dec. 10, clarifying that qualified emergency services volunteers are not considered employees under the health care act.

Im confident that will pass, Palmer said. ... if Congress fails to pass an exemption for emergency workers, that will give us a challenge.

Palmer said he did not have an estimate of how much it would cost South Whidbey Fire/EMS to insure its qualified volunteers. Definitions of what constitutes as a working hour need to be ironed out, he said, giving an example of a volunteer who may be on-call for 24 hours and never respond to an emergency. Does that count as work for the purposes of the health care act?

We have some volunteers who take one call a week, so they may be out two hours, Palmer said. Right now, your guess is as good as mine. Were at the whim of the federal government. I can tell you I would not imagine it would be cheap.

The Bronze plan, which covers 60 percent of health care costs, costs about $249 per month before cost assistance. However age, gender, location and other factors vary the cost. If South Whidbey Fire/EMS was penalized for not offering health care to its volunteers, the penalty would total $170,000. The district could buy insurance through the health care exchange for $3,000 per volunteer, if necessary.

North Whidbey Fire and Rescue, which has 70 volunteers, was also concerned about the health care act.

North Whidbey Fire Chief Marv Koorn said the district could stay under the 50 person full-time limit while hoping the emergency volunteer exemption was approved by Congress.

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Health care act hits South Whidbey fire district volunteers

Organic Food Advocate, Colle Farmers Market, Comments on Hawaiian Surfers Protesting Genetic Engineering

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Bohemia, NY (PRWEB) January 03, 2014

Colle Farmers Market, an organic food advocate, responds to an article published by Surfer Magazine on December 18th, which discusses the protests involving genetic engineering on Hawaiian soil.

According to the Surfer Magazine article titled Surfers Say No to GMOs, Hawaiian citizens and organic advocates were protesting against the genetic engineering experiments happening in Hawaii. The article says Kamehameha Schools leased 1000 acres of land to Monsanto, the company that has been performing the genetic modification experiments.

Most developed countries have banned this type of experimentation, mainly because of the potential environmental harm these experiments could have. However, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically engineered foods are still legal in the United States.

The article says, "This push came on the heels of the recently passed Kauai Bill 2491legislation requiring companies to disclose their use of GMOs, pushed through after the city council overturned the mayors veto weeks before the opening of Hawaiis legislature."

A representative from Colle Farmers Market, an organic food advocate, says if more people adopted an organic lifestyle, the amount of GMO foods will decrease. We should be eating food the way nature intended, he says. Organic food is all natural, and free from preservatives, chemicals, and pesticides. Humans were not designed to eat food made in a lab or developed with chemicals. We were made to eat fresh food. GMOs are genetically engineered organisms that are produced in a lab and have the potential to significantly harm our bodies and environment.

The Colle rep says organic food also helps to keep the soil healthy. GMOs and conventional farming can have horrible affects on the ground soil, he says. By advocating and adopting an organic lifestyle, farmers and consumers can ensure help keep the environment healthy. We applaud these Hawaiians and surfers for standing up for what they believe in and raising awareness.

Colle Farmers Market is an E-Commerce enabled farmers market community that is passionate about sustainable consumption and responsible conservation. The Colle movement is dedicated to connecting natural product vendors, organic farmers and all people who are living an organic and natural lifestyle.

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Organic Food Advocate, Colle Farmers Market, Comments on Hawaiian Surfers Protesting Genetic Engineering

Embryonic stem cell rejection problem fixed, study says

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One of the toughest problems facing embryonic stem cell therapy, immune rejection of transplanted cells, may have been solved, according to a UC San Diego-led research team.

The cells can be made invisible to the immune system by genetically engineering them to make two immune-suppressing molecules, according to the study. Researchers tested the approach in mice given a human immune system. Immune functioning in the rest of the animal remained active.

If the approach works in people, patients receiving transplanted tissue or organs made from embryonic stem cells wouldnt have to take harsh immune-suppressing drugs, said study leader Yang Xu, a UC San Diego professor of biology.

Human embryonic stem cells. The green markers indicate the presence of a protein expressed only in these cells. / Samantha Zeitlin, 2006 CIRM fellow

Researchers placed genes in the stem cells to produce the two molecules, called CTLA4-lg and PD-L1, naturally made in the body. The mice accepted transplants of heart and skin cells derived from the engineered stem cells. They rejected transplants derived from regular embryonic stem cells.

The study was published online Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Its findings will have to be confirmed for safety and effectiveness before human trials can be considered, which will take years.

Three scientists given the paper for comment had mixed reactions. While they praised the works scientific prowess, two said genetically engineering the transplanted cells could cause serious side effects that might preclude their use.

The researchers employed a clever strategy to use the immune systems natural regulatory systems, said Mitchell Kronenberg, president of the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology.

This is an especially promising approach, because it avoids the toxic side effects of the drugs now used to suppress the rejection response, and therefore this is an important step forward in showing the feasibility of using human embryonic stem cells from unrelated donors, Kronenberg said.

More skeptical were Jeanne Loring, a stem cell researcher at The Scripps Research Institute, and Craig M. Walsh, associate director of the Institute for Immunology at UC Irvine.

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Embryonic stem cell rejection problem fixed, study says

Novel non-invasive therapy prevents breast cancer formation in mice

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Jan. 1, 2014 A novel breast-cancer therapy that partially reverses the cancerous state in cultured breast tumor cells and prevents cancer development in mice, could one day provide a new way to treat early stages of the disease without resorting to surgery, chemotherapy or radiation, a multi-institutional team led by researchers from the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University reported January 1 in Science Translational Medicine.

The therapy emerged from a sophisticated effort to reverse-engineer gene networks to identify genes that drive cancer. The same strategy could lead to many new therapies that disable cancer-causing genes no current drugs can stop, and it also can be used to find therapies for other diseases.

"The findings open up the possibility of someday treating patients who have a genetic propensity for cancer, which could change people's lives and alleviate great anxiety," said Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Wyss Institute Founding Director. "The idea would be start giving it early on and sustain treatment throughout life to prevent cancer development or progression." Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Between breast self-exams, mammograms, MRIs, and genetic tests, more women than ever are undergoing early tests that reveal precancerous breast tissue. That early diagnosis could potentially save lives; however, few of those lesions go on to become tumors and doctors have no good way of predicting which ones will. As a result, many women currently undergo surgery, chemotherapy and radiation who might never develop the disease. What's more, some women with a high hereditary risk of breast cancer have chosen to undergo preemptive mastectomies.

A therapy that heals rather than kills cancerous tissue could potentially help all these patients, as well as men who develop the disease. But to date the only way to stop cancer cells has been to kill them. Unfortunately, the treatments that accomplish that, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, often damage healthy tissue, causing harsh side effects.

The Wyss Institute researchers thought they could do better by spotting new genes that drive breast cancer and developing targeted genetic therapies to block them. First they had to identify the culprit genes among the thousands that are active in a cell at any moment. Molecular biologists typically convict these culprits through guilt by association; for example, when looking for cancer-causing genes, they search for individual genes that become active as cancer develops. But because genes in cells work in complex networks, that approach has led to some false convictions, with innocent genes being fingered for crimes they did not commit.

To improve the odds of finding the real culprits, Ingber teamed up with Wyss Institute Core Faculty member Jim Collins, Ph.D., a systems biology expert who has developed a sophisticated mathematical and computational method to reverse-engineer bacterial gene networks. Collins is a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the William F. Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University, where he leads the Center of Synthetic Biology.

First, Hu Li, Ph.D. a former Wyss Institute postdoctoral fellow who is now an Assistant Professor of Systems Pharmacology at the Mayo Clinic, honed the computational network to work for the first time on the more complex gene networks of mice and humans. The refined method helped the scientists spot more than 100 genes that acted suspiciously just before milk-duct cells in the breast begin to overgrow. The team narrowed their list down to six genes that turn other genes on or off, and then narrowed it further to a single gene called HoxA1 that had the strongest statistical link to cancer.

The researchers wanted to know if blocking the HoxA1 gene could reverse cancer in lab-grown cells from mouse milk ducts. Amy Brock, Ph.D., a former Wyss Institute postdoctoral fellow who is now an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, grew healthy mouse or human mammary-gland cells in a nutrient-rich, tissue-friendly gel. Healthy cells ensconced in the gel formed hollow spheres of cells akin to a normal milk duct. But cancerous cells, in contrast, packed together into solid, tumor-like spheres.

Brock treated cancerous cells with a short piece of RNA called a small interfering RNA (siRNA) that blocks only the HoxA1 gene. The cells reversed their march to malignancy, stopping their runaway growth and forming hollow balls as healthy cells do. What's more, they specialized as if they were growing in healthy tissue.

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Novel non-invasive therapy prevents breast cancer formation in mice