Manatee County steps up effort to clean seaweed from beaches

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County officials have recieved permission from the state Department of Environmental Protection to use more aggressive methods to clear seaweed from Coquina Beach. PAUL VIDELA/Bradenton Herald

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MANATEE -- The county has stepped up efforts to clear Anna Maria Island beaches of seaweed after receiving permission from state environmental officials to use mechanical rakes.

"It's all done, I was very pleased with the quick action of the county," said Bradenton Beach resort owner David Teitelbaum.

"They did the whole north and south of us," he said.

It was a far cry from last week, when Teitelbaum, who operates four Bradenton Beach resorts, wrote in an email message to commissioners complaining that the beaches were "a total mess," and that "the smell is simply awful."

Steve West, the local representative for the state Department of Environmental Protection, helped to provide the necessary permit to rake beaches from the

southern most end of Coquina Beach to the northern tip of Anna Maria Island, with the caveat that county crews adhere to permit requirements, such as caution around sea turtle nests, wrote Cindy Turner, county director of parks and recreation in an email update to county commissioners.

Monday, clean-up crews raked along Gulf of Mexico beaches from Cortez Road to a few blocks north of State Road 64, and then hauled the debris to a compost pile, said Holmes Beach resident Glenn Wiseman, education director for the conservation group Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch & Shore Bird Monitoring.

Wiseman rode an all-terrain vehicle alongside a mechanical beach rake in order to protect turtle nests in the sand, and help the crews to avoid shorebird nesting and foraging areas, he said.

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Manatee County steps up effort to clean seaweed from beaches

Connecticut beaches closed so Obama can fund-raise with Hollywood mogul

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Beachgoers, get lost.

Amid the peak summer season, two of Connecticuts popular public beaches -- maintained with taxpayer money -- were closed Monday to accommodate President Obamas fundraising excursion that ends with a $35,800-per-plate event at movie mogul Harvey Weinsteins mansion. And Republicans aren't happy about it.

The 238-acre Sherwood Island State Park was closed so the presidents helicopter could land and then take off after a day-long trip that began in Stamford.

The other beach, the roughly two-acre Burying Hill Beach, is adjacent to Weinsteins mansion and is owned by the town of Westport. Both beaches border the Long Island Sound.

"This is the height of hypocrisy," state House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr. told FoxNews.com.

Cafero, a Norwalk Republican, said he was so shocked to hear the parks would be closed to accommodate Obama's fundraisers that he immediate double-checked his information.

"Purely political," he said. "Can you imagine if George W. Bush in 2004 had requested that our Republican governor shut down the park? It would have made national news. This is wrong in so many ways."

This is not the first time the state park has been closed so a president could use it as an airport for reelection fundraisers in southwest Connecticut.

President Bill Clinton used the Sherwood park twice for trips that included fundraising events. He landed there in 1998 for a series of events that included a fundraiser that reportedly raised $350,000 for his party. A year later, the park was closed for much of the day for Clinton, who attended a fundraising luncheon for the Democratic National Committee and the Women's Leadership Forum that reportedly raised more than $400,000.

Obama began his trip to Connecticut with a fundraiser at the Stamford Marriott Hotel, then will attend Weinstein's evening fundraiser that is reported to include such celebrities as Anne Hathaway, Aaron Sorkin, Joanne Woodward and Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

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Connecticut beaches closed so Obama can fund-raise with Hollywood mogul

Artist Encrypts Human Rights Charter Into An Apple's DNA

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Before Charlotte Jarvis applied for a license to do so, no one in the Netherlands had ever created an entirely synthetic DNA strand. The young British artist claimed that honor during a ten-month stint at the Netherlands Proteomics Centre, while developing an installation that has sparked debate among scientists about the goals of genetics and synthetic biology.

On August 4th, Jarvis unveiled Blighted by Kenning, the project she developed during an artist residency at the center. In an old dairy warehouse on the coast of Suffolk, she has installed a small apple orchard of thirteen trees. Each tree was grown in the Hague, the seat of the International Court of Justice. And hanging in the trees, one contaminated apple is encoded with a message: the Declaration of Human Rights, developed more than sixty years ago by the United Nations. During the opening on Saturday, Jarvis mingled with the audience as she ate the contaminated apple. Others like it had been sent to scientists to be decoded (and consumed)--the exhibition includes images of scientists (like the Dean of Science at Utrecht University) eating them.

The process for using the DNA sequence as a code to represent natural text is well established, explains Jarvis. When they decode the apples DNA, her collaborators will find the Declaration encrypted in three-letter codons, a tri-nucleotide unit consisting of a specific combination of Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Guanine (G) and Cytosine (C). Jarvis originally intended to infect the apples with actual bacteria made from the DNA, but as she recently explained to Dont Panic, its nearly impossible to legally exhibit a Genetically Modified Organism in a gallery, either in the U.K. or Holland, and asking people to eat the apples would have been out of the question. Instead, she extracted the naked DNA from the bacteria, and used spray-bottles to coat the apples. Since DNA alone is no more than the building blocks used to create proteins, there are fewer restrictions on its use.

DNA is an incredibly stable substance, so it will stay on the surface of the apple for many years, she writes. In the same way that in the right circumstances DNA evidence can be retrieved decades after a crime is committed. The idea, Jarvis explains, is to involve scientists in a show of support for research about genetics and structural biology, contrary to popular opinion that such research is dangerous to humanity--a forbidden fruit, if you will.

When Blighted by Kenning is complete, scientists all over the world will have reconstructed the DNA and returned samples of it to Jarvis. Speaking over email in the days before the opening, she says she plans to continue working within the field. Its while setting up for a show that I start to have new ideas, she says. I was discussing a new genetic art project with a curator just yesterday. The Suffolk exhibition is on view until August 26th, though hilariously, its possible that some unwitting Olympic tourist has already consumed a piece of the art: Jarvis tells Dont Panic that she accidentally left one of the apples on the London Tube.

[Full interview here; Images courtesy of the artist]

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$1M gift to endow UVa-Wise biology position

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$1M gift to endow UVa-Wise biology position Published August 7th, 2012 12:58 am

WISE -- The University of Virginia's College at Wise has received a $1 million gift from the estate of Carol Phipps Buchanan to create an endowed professorship in biology at the college.

The John C. Buchanan Professorship in Biology has been established in honor of her late husband, a former state senator and Southwest Virginia physician, the college announced Monday.

Sen. Buchanan, an alumnus of the University of Virginia, operated a general medical practice in Wise from 1971 until his death on April 15, 1991.

Sen. Buchanan represented a large portion of the region in the Virginia General Assembly. During his service in the state Senate, Buchanan sponsored the first state statute to provide workers compensation for black lung disease acquired by coal miners.

Carol Phipps Buchanan was a trustee of the Columbus Phipps Foundation, which has supported UVa-Wise in the past. She was known for her strong dedication to education. A community minded yet private person, she wanted her estate used to promote education.

"We are deeply grateful to the estate of Carol Phipps Buchanan for the generous gift," said Tami Ely, vice chancellor for development and college relations. "Endowed professorships allow us to attract and retain excellent faculty at UVa-Wise, which enhances the educational experience for our students."

The only branch campus of the University of Virginia, UVa-Wise offers Virginia's only undergraduate degree in software engineering among 29 other degrees and professional programs in the liberal arts tradition of Thomas Jefferson.

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Mindray Announces Second Quarter 2012 Financial Results

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SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 6, 2012 /PRNewswire-Asia-FirstCall/-- Mindray Medical International Limited (MR), a leading developer, manufacturer and marketer of medical devices worldwide, announced today its selected unaudited financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2012.

Highlights for Second Quarter 2012

"Despite the challenging environments in various international regions, we have once again achieved very solid performance in sales, profits and cash generation," commented Xu Hang, Mindray's chairman and co-chief executive officer. "All major geographical areas have delivered strong growth for the quarter. We are particularly encouraged by our good performance in developed markets, considering the volatility of those regions over the past year. We have also improved our gross margin and the healthy cash conversion cycle reflected our efforts in improving operational efficiency. In addition, we have launched new products in our IVD line and closed the orthopedics acquisition recently. Our reagent sales are continuing to accelerate. All of these are in line with the company's strategy to capture opportunities in the fast-growing consumable products markets. Going forward, we intend to prudentlydeploy our strong cashposition and continue to look for attractive investment opportunities worldwide."

SUMMARY Second Quarter 2012

(in $ millions, except per-share data)

Three Months Ended

June 30

2012

2011

% chg

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Mindray Announces Second Quarter 2012 Financial Results

Grey's Anatomy Exclusive: Debbie Allen to Direct Again in Season 9

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Debbie Allen

Debbie Allen is returning to Grey's Anatomy!

Allen, who portrays Jackson Avery's (Jesse Williams) mother Catherine on the ABC medical series, will be directing the third episode of the upcoming season, TVGuide.com has learned exclusively.

The ninth season picks up two to three months after the Stranded Six Five (RIP Lexie!) were rescued after a plane crash. "You see the aftermath of what happened," executive producer Shonda Rhimes recently told us. "You're left with some questions as to how this happened and 'Why is this the way it is?' and 'Why is that the way it is?'"

Grey's Anatomy's Shonda Rhimes talks Season 9: Time jumps, new locations and new docs!

The second episode will jump back in time to answer those questions, while the Allen-directed episode will jump back to the present timeline, which will find some doctors outside of Seattle Grace with new jobs.

This is Allen's fifth time stepping behind the camera on Grey's Anatomy. There's no word on whether Catherine Avery, who was last seen having a fling with Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.) will also appear in the episode.

Grey's Anatomy returns Thursday, Sept. 27 at 9/8c on ABC.

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Grey's Anatomy Exclusive: Debbie Allen to Direct Again in Season 9

NanoRacks Is The UPS Of Outer Space Shipping

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Private companies, educational institutions, and other organizations who send experiments aboard the International Space Station face a challenge: Each experiment sent aboard the ISS requires extensive safety and security checks--and about 1,000 pages of documentation. In the past few years, a handful of companies worldwide have started handling all those details for space entrepreneurs. They're the FedExes and DHLs for posting packages beyond Earth.

NanoRacks, one of the first companies to enter the field, operates the first commercial laboratory in space aboard the ISS and a panel laboratory that's attached to the space station. For the price of $30,000 for educational institutions or $60,000 for commercial entities, Nanoracks handles all the logistics related to sending experiments into space. The small, for-profit company will handle the paperwork, find transportation among the many vehicles headed to the ISS, install the experiment, and take care of all governmental relations for would-be space experimenters. The standard Nanorack experiment stays in space for 30 days.

The company has delivered 41 payloads to the ISS so far and has another 80 under contract, Jeffrey Mamber, NanoRacks' managing director, tells Fast Company. Nanoracks formed in late 2009, and recognized that utilization of the Space Station could be used as a commercial pathway. If we could market commercial services for the International Space Station, we'd find a market. We signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA on September 9, 2009 and self-financed everything for the first two years, to show there is a market. We are the world's first private laboratory in space, and we created a pathway and infrastructure that didn't exist before.

Besides NanoRacks, several other companies also offer outer space logistics solutions for international clients. According to the managers of the United States' lab aboard the ISS, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), organizations sending payloads to the space station have multiple logistics options (PDF). These companies, such as Astrium, Astrotech, Bionetics, and Thales Alenia Space, form part of a tightly knit ecosystem of space logistics experts. Employees at the firms help clients with the highly complicated space travel process, as well as navigating the byzantine bureaucracies of NASA and its worldwide counterparts.

According to Mamber, NanoRacks wants to be a concierge to the stars for its clients that streamlines the NASA integration process [...] It takes nine months from contract signing to launch. We take care of everything with NASAaccess to laboratory space, the launch vehicle, deployment, everything. NASA doesn't want to deal with consumer payloads, but we do.

The primary NanoRacks lab, one of two turnkey commercial labs on the ISS, consists of proprietary equipment based around a series of plug-and-play modules. The second lab is actually located on a small external platform attached to the ISS, which gives experimenters access to outer space itself. The company's clients have included a variety of American educational institutions (including many high schools recruited through the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program), the Israeli Air Force's Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies, plus numerous commercial clients. Although manifests are available online, Mamber said that many private clients are circumspect about making details of their experiments public--many involve trade secrets as well as sensitive information.

However, sometimes information about experiments is promoted to the public. Scotland's Ardbeg whisky distillery worked with NanoRacks to conduct space experiments on their signature product. Using NanoRacks' facility, the distillery tested the behavior of flavor-altering organic compounds called terpenes in zero gravity.

Most companies working in for-profit space travel coordinate their activities, Esther Dyson, an early investor in NanoRacks, tells Fast Company. "Almost all of us work together via the Commercial Space Federation on common issues, such as regulations, raising investor interest (though we compete when it comes to actually raising the money!), encouraging space ports and the like.

NanoRacks primarily sends clients' experiments into space via government space vehicles, but recently hitched a ride aboard the private SpaceX Dragon (where an error caused students' payloads to lose critical refrigeration during the transportation process.) Shipping space is booked via NASA and the company works extensively with the space agency's staff and various space centers. Next up for NanoRacks is an iPhone-based space research platform.

[Image: NanoRacks]

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NanoRacks Is The UPS Of Outer Space Shipping

See the International Space Station in night sky this week

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By Scott Dance

10:34 a.m. EDT, August 6, 2012

Opportunities to watch the International Space Station fly over Maryland arise in the coming days.

Viewing opportunities only occur sporadically, based on the spacecrafts orbit route and its position relative to the sun and Earth. They often occur during daylight hours or when most of us are asleep, and the space station's appearance is often too faint to be seen.

When it is visible, the space station zips across the sky, appearing as a bright, steadily moving light.

Here are three viewing opportunities this week that fall during normal waking hours:

On board are some fresh crew members. Three crew members left, including NASA astronaut Jim Pettit, and three joined, including NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who is an alumna of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Have a weather question? E-mail me at sdance@baltsun.com or tweet to @MdWeather.

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See the International Space Station in night sky this week

Thunderclouds Make Gamma Rays–and Shoot Out Antimatter, Too (preview)

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Feature Articles | More Science See Inside

Thunderstorms give out powerful blasts of gamma rays and x-rays, shooting beams of particlesand even antimatterinto space. The atmosphere is a stranger place than we ever imagined

By Joseph R. Dwyer and David M. Smith | August 6, 2012|

Image: STEPHEN ALVAREZ Getty Images

Soon after the space shuttle atlantis launched a new observatory into orbit in 1991, Gerald Fishman of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center realized that something very strange was going on. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), designed to detect gamma rays from distant astrophysical objects such as neutron stars and supernova remnants, had also begun recording bright, millisecond-long bursts of gamma rays coming not from outer space but from Earth below.

Astrophysicists already knew that exotic phenomena such as solar flares, black holes and exploding stars accelerate electrons and other particles to ultrahigh energies and that these supercharged particles can emit gamma raysthe most energetic photons in nature. In astrophysical events, however, particles accelerate while moving almost freely in what is essentially a vacuum. How, then, could particles in Earth's atmospherewhich is certainly nowhere close to being a vacuumbe doing the same thing?

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Thunderclouds Make Gamma Rays--and Shoot Out Antimatter, Too (preview)

Barrios employee named Space Flight Awareness honoree

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Barrios employee Zane Goff was recently honored as a Space Flight Awareness (SFA) honoree for his work in support of NASAs International Space Station (ISS) programs at Johnson Space Center. As part of the SFA award, Goff traveled to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to view the recent arrival of the Orion Exploration Flight Test (EFT-1) flight vehicle on July 2.

Mr. Zane Goff, a Friendswood resident, was selected to receive this award for his outstanding technical leadership on the International Space Station Enhanced Processor and Integrated Communications (EPIC) development. The new EPIC card development and testing enhanced and increased the processing speed and memory capability of the ISS on-orbit Command and Control System computers. Goffs citation stated that he provided exemplary integration support for the EPIC hardware and was instrumental in resolving hardware/software integration issues that arose by providing workable solutions.

I am honored to be recognized for these efforts, said Goff. I am very proud to work in this program and with many dedicated friends and teammates. Space is no longer a dream because we build the machines that make it a reality.

As an SFA honoree, Goff traveled to Kennedy Space Center where he attended the ceremony celebrating the arrival of the Orion EFT-1. The Orion EFT-1 spacecraft, which will fly an uncrewed flight in 2014, will undergo final processing at KSC, including application of heat shielding thermal protection systems, avionics and other subsystems.

The SFA Program is a NASA managed motivational program geared at ensuring that every employee involved in human space flight is aware of the importance of their role in promoting astronaut safety and mission success in the critical, challenging task of flying humans in space by communicating and educating the government and industry workforce about human space flight.

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Barrios employee named Space Flight Awareness honoree

NASA: Mars Curiosity Beams First High-Res Pic

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In an almost giddy late-night press conference, the NASA Mars laboratory Science team celebrated the Curiosity Rover's successful landing on a "nice, flat spot -- beautiful, really beautiful" on Mars. It's a patch of dusty land that's since been immortalized in a couple of low-resolution thumbnails that arrived at mission control moments after Curiosity touched down. Now there's a new pic -- and ...

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NASA: Mars Curiosity Beams First High-Res Pic

NASA rover Curiosity makes historic Mars landing, beams back photos

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PASADENA, California (Reuters) - NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity performed a daredevil descent through pink Martian skies late on Sunday to clinch an historic landing inside an ancient crater, ready to search for signs the Red Planet may once have harbored key ingredients for life. Mission controllers burst into applause and cheers as they received signals confirming that the car-sized rover ...

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NASA rover Curiosity makes historic Mars landing, beams back photos