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Safari Consultant / Full-time Salaried – Travelweek

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Posted on March 6, 2017

LION WORLD TRAVEL is the foremost North American tour operator specializing in affordable luxury African safaris. For more than 50 years, travelers have relied on and trusted LION WORLD TRAVEL for their award-winning product offering, renowned expertise, focus on personalized customer service, and incredible value.

LION WORLD TRAVEL is a member of The Travel Corporation (TTC), which also includes Trafalgar Tours, Contiki, Insight Vacations, The Red Carnation Hotel Collection and Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection.

Job Description: SAFARI CONSULTANT

Salary: Dependent on experience

Location: Lion World Travel offices, 33 Kern Road, Toronto

A crucial part of the Lion World Travel client service team, the SAFARI CONSULTANT establishes immediate relationship and rapport with each one of our highly-valued clients, including many of our very best travel agent partner high-achievers. The SAFARI CONSULTANT serves as an extension of our greatly respected and well-established brand, and leads the charge in our commitment to service at each communications touchpoint.

The successful SAFARI CONSULTANT follows established processes to confidently and persuasively use their refined sales and relationship building skills to shape and close each sale.A master of the subtleties of consultative communication, the SAFARI CONSULTANT is driven to please each client with their outstanding customer service delivery, with the intention to earn and retain client confidence at each travel stage.

A keen attention to detail is crucial, as is a natural anticipation of client need. This is especially vital when verifying client itineraries against expressed and implied need, and ensuring all services have been reserved and blocked appropriately on the server.Product familiarity and expertise is critical, and your insatiable curiosity and commitment to improving your knowledge of the product features and components, seasonality, geography and pricing, distinguishes you as a team professional.

Duties include but are not limited to:

Key required skills:

If you are interested in applying for the position of SAFARI CONSULTANT please forward your Resume and Cover Letter to doris.phillips@ttc.com

To apply you must be legally able to work in Canada. Only candidates selected for further consideration will be contacted.

Safari Consultant / Full-time Salaried - Travelweek

Torpoint family sell everything they own to travel the world house-sitting – Cornwall Live

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

A family from south east Cornwall have been travelling around the world for three years after they sold everything they used to own.

In 2014, Joanna and Sean Bailey, from Torpoint, made the decision to leave their old life behind and travel the world. They haven't looked back since.

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Joanna said the couple were a bit fed up with life at the time.

She said: "We had one child in school who was not loving the experience and were living hand-to-mouth financially, feeling like life was one big hamster wheel of working, paying and never having time to enjoy things.

"I'd been writing online in a freelance capacity for a couple of years and we figured that actually a lower cost of living elsewhere in the world would allow us to spend more time with the kids and enjoy our life, rather than just slogging it out to meet the high cost of living in the UK."

The couple decided to embrace a nomadic lifestyle. When their son Jack reached eight years old they told his school they would be home-educating him from then on. Their daughter Charlotte was four.

The Baileys also gave notice on their rented house and spent the next four weeks selling and donating everything they owned.

Joanna said: "It was pretty scary, but actually quite cathartic to shed all the 'stuff' we'd been carting around.

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"We moved in to my mother-in-law's once the contract was up on the house which was super cramped, but gave us the chance to sell the last few bits and prepare to leave the UK.

"We bought a motorhome and kitted it out with everything we thought we would need, and in September we set sail for Holland."

"We toured Europe for most of that year, although we did fly home for Christmas. Then we went back out in June having loved our experience and ready to go further afield.

"The weather in Europe was a little bit compromising, as it meant we spent a lot of time in Spain just to escape the cold and wet. We decided then to head east and flew out there after spending the summer with family."

Read more: Police want help identifying these men acting suspiciously on CCTV in Liskeard

From September 2015 to Christmas 2016 the family toured South East Asia; Thailand, Malaysia, Borneo, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

"It was amazing," Joanna said. "That was when we discovered house-sitting.

"We sat at a lovely house (probably worth about a million pounds, so way nicer than anywhere we'd ever be able to afford ourselves) and wondered why we hadn't done it before."

The family signed up with TrustedHousesitters.com - a site where people can apply to house-sit for free in exchange for looking after a resident pet.

Joanna said: "We love animals, so it was fantastic to be able to look after the dogs and cat as well as enjoying the amazing home.

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"Since we got back to the UK, we've decided to do more house-sitting as it gives us more space. It means we can cook for ourselves and lets us enjoy a different take on the countries we visit. We house-sat in Honiton for a month in January, looking after two dogs, two cats, two pigs, four goats and a flock of chickens!

"It was awesome and close enough to Plymouth that we could visit friends and family and invite them up for meals etc.

"We left the UK again at the start of Feb and are just wrapping up a house-sit in France."

From there the family plan to go to Italy and then Switzerland.

Joanna said: "We are travelling with a 4x4 which has a roof tent fitted so when we aren't house-sitting we can camp.

"So far so good, its been a truly outstanding experience for all of us."

Read more: Torpoint football boss describes horrific moment his captain's leg broke in two

The family pay for travel with Joanna's writing work, house-sitting for free accommodation and always cooking their own meals.

"Life is quite cheap when you don't have council tax/utilities etc to pay for too," Joanna said.

The mum-of-two admitted it hasn't always been an easy journey, but she doesn't regret the decision to make the leap abroad and home school her children, Jack, now 10, and Charlotte, six.

"In Southeast Asia particularly we got sick occasionally and it's not fun being poorly when you're living in hostels etc.

"Money can be tight at times, but we tighten our belts when we need to. The kids really miss having children of their own age to play with and we miss our friends and family back home too.

"Home-schooling definitely has its up and downs. We only 'work' for about an hour to two hours a day, which is when we do workbooks or online learning appropriate to their ages. Mostly they're very good about this, but some days they can be a bit resistant.

"Our main focus though is on 'worldschooling' which is all about learning about other cultures, religions and societies and taking them to enriching places like museums, churches, animal sanctuaries etc.

"I think being accepting of other people is one of the most important lessons we can give them in our modern society. Showing them that things can be 'different' without being 'wrong'. I hope they are soaking it up like little sponges and will grow up to be kind adults as a result."

There are no plans to stop travelling any time soon - they still have America and Canada to experience. South America is also on the list and Sean has promised Joanna New Zealand for her 40th birthday.

Joanna had some words of advice for anyone considering the leap she and her family made.

She said: "Just do it. It's probably the scariest thing we've ever done, but it's also the best thing we've ever done. There's a really big supportive community of families from all over the world who are doing similar things, so it's not as terrifying or as lonely as you'd think.

"We've never looked back."

Read more: See all the latest news from around Cornwall.

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Torpoint family sell everything they own to travel the world house-sitting - Cornwall Live

Travel ban rollout shows all is not well in Trumpworld – The Sydney Morning Herald

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Washington: Is it possible that Donald Trump has tweeted himself into irrelevance?

There are two ways to look at the crazed Twitter storm early on Saturday, in which the US President accused former president Barack Obama of criminally ordering wiretaps on Trump Tower.

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As US President Donald Trump signs a revised travel ban order, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says, "We will continue to challenge it."

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On a visit to Jakarta, Malcolm Turnbull has singled out the majority Muslin country as an example of tolerance and respect. Courtesy ABC News 24.

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Republicans in the US House of Representatives unveil the long-awaited legislation to repeal much of the Obamacare healthcare law, including its expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor.

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Ben Carson has an alternative, if perplexing view on immigration, saying those who came "in the bottom of slave ships worked even longer, even harder for less".

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Venezuela lashes out at "coward" Pedro Kuczynski after the Peruvian President made remarks about Latin America and Hugo Chavez while visiting the US last week.

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What are the major changes in President Trump's temporary travel ban for a number of majority-Muslim nations?

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High-stakes talks begin between leaders in Northern Ireland, in the hope of saving their power-sharing government..

As US President Donald Trump signs a revised travel ban order, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says, "We will continue to challenge it."

Were the tweets an after-the-fact distraction from Attorney-General Jeff Sessions complicating Trump's Russia nightmare, with his failure to disclose his meetings with the Russian ambassador and then his embarrassing recusal from any Justice Department deliberations on the various Russian-links inquiries; or was this a pre-emptive smokescreen for the shortcomings of Trump's revised executive order on migration,released on Monday morning?

Or did Trump's bout of tweeted rage serve to shine a light on a little-noticed body of evidence on the Trump campaign's Russian connections that warrants further investigation, because any request by the security agencies for court approval for the kind of surveillance alleged by Trump required it to produce a body of believable evidence?

The fallout needs to be unpacked in parts. But first, that new executive order.

Monday's unveiling was very different to that of its predecessor. For starters, the TV cameras were not wheeled in to record Trump fixing his signature to the new document and, despite Trump's protests about unnamed sources, the administration officials who explained the document in media briefings insisted that their names not be published.

And despite claims by the administration, the new document has its problems.

Iraq has been removed from the original list of seven countries from which travellers have been banned, which is interesting, given that it is a global hotbed of terrorism. But none of the other hotbed countries in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world has been added.

In an attempt to counter a key criticism of the original order that citizens of the banned countries had not been involved in terror strikes in the US the administration sought to firm up the national security justification for the order by claiming that 300 people who had entered the US as refugees were the subject of counter-terrorism investigations, but it refused to disclose their nationalities.

In any event, The Washington Post reports that a Homeland Security report on the terrorist threat posed by people from the seven countries has concluded that citizenship was an "unreliable" threat indicator and that people from the affected countries have rarely been implicated in US-based terrorism.

Also, the new order does nothing to quash the claim by former New York mayor and Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani that Trump had asked him to take the "Muslim ban" that candidate Trump had called for and to "show me the right way to do it legally".

But back to the Trump tweets.

In tweeting as he did on Saturday, Trump has created an unprecedented circumstance FBI director James Comey is effectively calling him a liar; Trump's Republican colleagues in Congress are not rushing to support him; and even his loyal staffers are choosing their words carefully.

"I think he firmly believes that this is a story," spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in one interview, and in another: "Look, I think he's going off information that he's seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential."

Another problem is that, if or when Trump is proved wrong, he'll look like a bit of a dill. In the event that it's provedthat a wiretapping court order was issued, in all probability without Obama's knowledge, it would mean that a federal court had been convinced there were genuine reasons of national security for such an order on which, more later.

The torrent of leaks driving Trump nuts continues.

In assembling a remarkable portrait of Trump as "mad steaming, raging mad" on the weekend, The Washington Post had co-operation from no less than 17 White House officials and others in Trump's circle. One went on the record: "He was pissed. I haven't seen him this angry," his friend and Newsmax chief executive Christopher Ruddy said of two weekend encounters with the President.

Gnawing at Trump, apparently, is the then-and-now comparison at this stage of the Obama presidency, Obama seemingly was getting things done.

Even Trump thought as much at the time, saying of Obama's first press conference in February 2009: "First of all, I thought he did a great job tonight. I thought he was strong and smart, and it looks like we have somebody that knows what he is doing finally in office, and he did inherit a tremendous problem. He really stepped into a mess."

Each week is supposed to be a reboot for Trump. Last week his well-received address to the joint houses of Congress was supposed to be a fresh start, but it was bombed out of the water by reports on the Sessions meeting with ambassador Sergey Kislyak. This week too was to be a reboot, with the new migration executive order and a promised definitive plan to "repeal and replace" Obamacare but Trump's weekend tweets are keeping Russia on the boil.

All is not well in Trumpworld.

Apparently Trump's newly minted Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has been deemed incapable of selling the death of Obamacare and the birth of whatever is to replace it so Trump has given the task to Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

And Sessions is in hot water too for revealing his meetings with the ambassador in answer to a question during his confirmation hearing that didn't ask if he had any such meetings.

The whole White House gang reportedly is furious with the Attorney-General's stumbles and Trump, in particular, is fuming that Sessions caved to demands that he recuse himself without consulting the White House, as various aspects of Trump's Russian links which are being investigated by several of the intelligence agencies that Trump so loathes and by five congressional committees.

ThePost's portrait of Trump's tantrums: "[He] simmered with rage... He upbraided [his advisers] over Sessions' decision to recuse himself, believing that Sessions had succumbed to pressure "

The New York Times had more: "[He] railed at aides about the recusal, singling out the White House counsel's office and the communications staff in a tirade visible through the window to a nearby television camera."

The leaks are not to be underestimated as a cause of presidential anger. Republican congressman and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes told the Post: "It's not paranoia at all when it's actually happening. It's leak after leak after leak from the bureaucrats in the [intelligence community] and former Obama administration officials - and it's very real.

"The White House is absolutely concerned and is trying to figure out a systemic way to address what's happening."

The FBI's Comey is being circumspect his dismissal of Trump's charge against Obama is being sourced to unnamed officials. But James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, didn't beat around the bush.

Asked if a secret intelligence warrant had been issued, Clapper bluntly told NBC's Meet the Press: "Not to my knowledge, no. There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign."

Had there been such an order or an application for one, Clapper insisted that he would "absolutely" have been informed of it. "I can deny it," he said.

Asked to substantiate the Trump tweets, the White House cited a selection of news reports from the BBC and Heatstreetin Britain and The New York Times and Fox News in the US, all of which touch on an aspect of the Russia investigations.

An analysis by the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez says: "The allegation made by various news sources is that, in connection with a multi-agency intelligence investigation of Russian interference with the presidential election, the FBI sought an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorising them to monitor transactions between two Russian banks and four persons connected with the Trump campaign

"[But] there's nothing here to suggest either the direct involvement of President Obama nor any clear indication of a violation of the law."

The Cato analysis then summarises a Breitbart News report that reportedly was critical in winding up the Trump Twitter storm "the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorisation to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media".

It then concludes: "None of this is really supported by the public record In short, both Breitbart and Trump have advanced claims far more dramatic than anything the public evidence can support".

Awarding Trump four Pinocchios, the Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler writes: "Only two articles, both with British roots, have reported that a FISA court order was granted in October to examine possible activity between two Russian banks and a computer server in the Trump Tower. This claim has not been confirmed by any US news organisations.

"Moreover, neither article says President Obama requested the order or that it resulted in the tapping of Trump's phone lines. We're still waiting for the evidence "

So, executive orders will come and go, but the Russia mess remains and Trump's soundness of mind continues to be questioned even in Republican circles.

"We have as president a man who is erratic, vindictive, volatile, obsessive, a chronic liar, and prone to believe in conspiracy theories," conservative commentator and former George W. Bush policy chief Peter Wehner told the Post. "And you can count on the fact that there will be more to come, since when people like Donald Trump gain power they become less, not more, restrained".

On the weekend White House spokesman Sean Spicer pushed back on reporters' demands for more detail on Trump's attack on Obama: "If we start down the rabbit hole of discussing this stuff, we end up in a very difficult place."

As my old colleague Tommy Taylor would say: "Too right, Sean. You sprayed a bib-full."

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Travel ban rollout shows all is not well in Trumpworld - The Sydney Morning Herald

Trump Travel Ban Comes Just as World Oil Execs Meet in Texas – Bloomberg

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

As President Donald Trump was signing his latest travel ban, restricting people from six predominately Muslim countries from entering the U.S., oil and natural gas executives from around the world were gathering in Houston for one of the industrys biggest events of the year.

The ban, which restricts entry by people from countries including oil-rich Iran and Libya, hasnt affected attendance at the CERAWeek conference that draws leaders of major energy companies to Texas annually, saidJerre Stead, chairman and chief executive officer ofIHS Markit Ltd, which organizes the gathering. Trumps latest directive removed Iraq from an initial list of seven countries whose citizens cant travel to the U.S. for the next 90 days.

The impact would be zero with the travel ban for oil and gas companies, Stead said in an interview at CERAWeek on Monday, the first day of the conference. Weve got everyone here including the minister of Iraq. We got them all in and everything worked fine.

IHS estimated that 3,000 delegates from more than 60 countries were attending CERAWeek.

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While Trump is limiting travel from some countries key to oil and gas markets, hes also promised to roll back energy regulations. That would be positive for the industry, provided the pledge doesnt go too far, Stead said. Trump is expected to target the Clean Power Plan, a set of Obama-era rules that aim to cut greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity generation. Last week, he signed an order to rescind and rewrite federal water regulations.

The number of regulations that were added in the last eight years is staggering, Stead said. Im hopeful that Congress cleans up the regulations that were put in place that are not helpful, while leaving in place rules that serve a purpose.

Stead also sees the potential introduction of a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions as positive for the industry.

For the first time theres a very serious discussion about carbon tax, said Stead, who will retire at the end of the year after joining IHS as executive chairman in 2000.

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Trump Travel Ban Comes Just as World Oil Execs Meet in Texas - Bloomberg

Fujitsu to Deliver Deep Learning Supercomputer to RIKEN – TOP500 News

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Japanese computer maker Fujitsu has announced it will build a deep learning supercomputer for RIKEN that will be used to spur research and development of AI technology. The new machine, which is schedule to go into operation in April, will be a blend of NVIDIA DGX-1 and Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX2530 M2 servers.

The yet-to-be-named system will be used at the Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP), a group established by RIKEN in 2016 that specializes in R&D related to AI, big data, IoT and cybersecurity. The mission statement summarizes their work as follow: Our center aims to achieve scientific breakthrough and to contribute to the welfare of society and humanity through developing innovative technologies. We also conduct research on ethical, legal and social issues caused by the spread of AI technology and develop human resources.

Its intended user base will be AI researchers at universities and other institutions in Japan, as well as practitioners in the field in healthcare, manufacturing, and other commercial domains. Of particular interest are AI technologies that can help solve domestic issues of particular relevance to the Japanese, such as healthcare in aging populations, response strategies to natural disasters, regenerative medicine, and robotics-based manufacturing.

According to Fujitsu, the new system will deliver four half-precision (16-bit floating point) petaflops, essentially all of which are derived from the DGX-1 servers. Each server houses eight Tesla P100 GPUs, representing 170 peak teraflops at half-precision. Fujitsus contribution will be integrating the 32 of the DGX-1 boxes with 24 of its own PRIMERGY RX2540 M2 servers, along with a Fujitsu-made storage system. The latter is made up of six PRIMERGY RX2540 M2 PC servers, which will run FEFS, a parallel file system developed by Fujistu. The storage itself will consist of eight ETERNUS DX200 S3 units, and one ETERNUS DX100 S3 unit.

This is the third supercomputer unveiled in Japan within the last six months that has been significantly influenced by AI requirements. The first, known as the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) was announced by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) at SC16 in November. When completed in late 2017, this 130-petaflop (half-precision) system which will be used to help support commercial AI deployment in Japan. The second system, TSUBAME 3.0, will be Tokyo Techs attempt to bring a lot of AI capability into the next generation of this lineage. This system is expected to deliver 47 half-precision petaflops when installed later this summer.

Both ABCI and TSUBAME 3.0 will fulfill the role of a general-purpose supercomputer, running conventional HPC application alongside deep learning workloads. Unlike those two systems, the RIKEN machine, besides being quite a bit smaller, also looks to be completely devoted to running deep learning applications.

Originally posted here:

Fujitsu to Deliver Deep Learning Supercomputer to RIKEN - TOP500 News

IBM Sets Stages for Quantum Computing Business – TOP500 News

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

IBM has revealed its intentions to commercial its quantum computing technology being developed under its research division. Although the company didnt offer a definitive timeline or even a roadmap for the product set, it set down some markers on what such an endeavor would entail.

In a nutshell, IBM plans to build systems on the order of 50 qubits in the next few years and make them commercially available as part of its cloud offering. These IBM Q machines will be universal quantum computers, rather than the kinds of quantum annealing systems that D-Wave offers today. As such, they promise to be much more powerful and have a wider application scope. At 50 qubits, they should be able to perform some types of computation that would be impossible to do on a classical system of any size. In general, those are problems where the solution space encompasses so many possibilities that good old binary digits dont offer much help. Some of the most notable commercial application areas include drug discovery, financial services, artificial intelligence, computer security, materials discovery, and supply chain logistics.

For IBM, this represents the second step for an effort that began last May, when the company made its five-qubit platform freely available to the public via the companys cloud. Such accessibility attracted more than 40,000 users, who in aggregate, have run over 275,000 quantum computing experiments on the device. A number of courses and research studies have been developed around the platform at various institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, the University of Waterloo in Canada, and cole polytechnique fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.

That early system has relatively few qubits and is not able to beat a classical computer at anything meaningful, but it has been able to demonstrate the potential of the technology. Its based on IBMs current quantum computing platform, which uses superconducting circuitry developed in-house and manufactured in their own fabs. The technology is silicon-based, but incorporates niobium as well.

According to Dave Turek, Vice President of Exascale Systems at IBM, the research division is toying with at least six more variants of the technology, and most of these experiments are already sporting more than five qubits. Turek says they are trying to get a feel for the interactions between the various underlying materials, interconnect topologies and other features that make such a system useful and stable.

There are several factors that you have to manage simultaneously to increase the size of the system. Just producing qubits is actually a pretty trivial thing to do at this stage for us, explained Turek. But to produce them in a context where you are demonstrating entanglement and preserving coherence and scalability therein lies the trick.

A big part of that trick is ensuring the universality of the platform. IBM is intent on this aspect and wants to make sure everyone knows they are not offering something akin to a D-Wave quantum annealer. To drive that point home, theyve developed the metric of quantum volume, which is essentially a way of measuring the quantum-ness of a computing system. It incorporates not just the number of qubits, but also the interconnectivity in the device, the number of operations than can be run in parallel, and the number of gates that can be applied before errors make the device behave essentially classically. Whether this will catch on as the Linpack of quantum computing remains to be seen.

Setting aside the business roadmap for a moment, the company also released a new API for the initial cloud-based system. It promises to help developers more easily exploit the technology without having to know the intricacies of quantum physics. In concert with the new API is an upgraded simulator, which can model a device with up to 20 qubits. Although, you wont get the performance of real hardware, it will allow developers to play with problems that dont fit in a five-qubit system. Those two additions just touch on how IBM has been building out the software ecosystem over the past year or so. You can get a more complete picture by visiting the companys quantum computing programming webpage.

Although IBM made no mention about how their IBM Q products would be positioned relative to their traditional system offerings, Turek did speculate that early versions could be employed as accelerators to classical systems, where offloading certain algorithms onto the qubits made sense. Certainly, IBM has some experience with this model inasmuch it employs NVIDIA GPUs as floating point accelerators in its own Power servers today. At least in the short run, Turek thinks its likely that these quantum systems will be as an adjunct to conventional HPC machines to do quantum computations.

The analogy breaks down a bit when you realize the GPUs are just faster than their host processors by one to three orders of magnitude, at most -- for certain types of computations, whereas quantum processors will be able to execute algorithms that will not run on a classical host in any reasonable amount of time. Thats motivation enough for IBM to keep this technology in-house.

In fact, the company sees quantum computing as one the major technology pillars of its future, alongside its Watson and blockchain products in terms of strategic importance. The biggest challenge for IBM, as always, will be the competition. Setting aside D-Wave, there are perhaps 10 to 20 quantum projects that could be fairly close to a commercial release. They come from rivals as diverse as Google, Microsoft and Intel.

IBM is as well positioned as any of these. Its been working on the problem for nearly four decades and has accumulated expertise in all the adjacent areas along the way chip technology, superconductivity, applications domains, and system software. Its narrowed its focus on the most promising technologies and thrown the less promising ones over the side. And now they are at the point where, as Turek says, we can see the horizon.

Images: Cloud-based experimental system; Five-qubit chip. Source: IBM.

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IBM Sets Stages for Quantum Computing Business - TOP500 News

Researchers Say It’s Possible to Build a Self-Replicating DNA … – Sputnik International

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Tech

01:24 07.03.2017(updated 06:23 07.03.2017) Get short URL

All existing computers, fromthe building-sized Sunway Taihulight supercomputer inChina tothe device you are using toread this article, are based onthe principles ofa Turing machine. Named forManchester's own Dr. Alan Turing, Turing machines are theoretical devices that run ona set ofstrict instructions. A typical deterministic Turing machine (DTM) might have a direction: "If my state is A, then perform task 1."

The DNA computer would however be a non-deterministic universal Turing Machine (NUTM). An NUTM is a Turing machine that can solve multiple tasks atonce that a DTM can only solve one ata time. In the example above, an NUTM might have the direction: "If my state is A, then perform tasks 1-1,000,000,000" thus performing a trillion tasks simultaneously.

Imagine a computer program designed tosolve a maze. The program comes toa fork inthe road. An ordinary electronic computer chooses one path and sees where it leads, trying another if that first path fails toget it outof the maze. An NUTM can go downevery path simultaneously byreplicating itself, thus solving the maze far more quickly.

The problem is, ofcourse, how tobuild a computer that can rapidly replicate itself. Manchester's solution is tobuild a processor outof DNA molecules, which "is an excellent medium forinformation processing and storage."

AP Photo/ Li Xiang/Xinhua

"It is very stable, asthe sequencing ofancient DNA demonstrates. It can also reliably be copied, and many genes have remained virtually unchanged forbillions ofyears," the study said, adding that, "As DNA molecules are very small, a desktop computer could potentially utilise more processors thanall the electronic computers inthe world combined and therefore outperform the world's current fastest supercomputer, while consuming a tiny fraction ofits energy."

Team member Ross King said that while DNA computers were first proposed inthe 1990s, the Manchester group is the first todemonstrate that such a machine is feasible. They claim that Thue, a theoretical programming language written in2000 byJohn Colagioia, can convert existing computers intoNUTMs.

NUTMs should not be confused withquantum computers. Quantum computers exploit quantum mechanics toprocess ata much faster rate thanelectronic computers. Quantum computers are probabilistic Turing machines (PTM) which might say: 'if my state is A, then perform task 190 percent ofthe time and task 210 percent ofthe time." Quantum computers would be much faster thanelectronic computers, butwhile theoretical quantum computers are inthe works inlaboratories all overthe world, no one has found a way tobuild one that functions inthe real world.

The University ofManchester team claims that their NUTM model would be superior toquantum computing. "Quantum computers are an exciting other form ofcomputer, and they can also follow both paths ina maze, butonly if the maze has certain symmetries, which greatly limits their use," said King.

Flickr/ Wellcome Images

More importantly, quantum computers would still rely onsilicon chips, just likeelectronic computers. As small asthose chips can get, they are unlikely tobecome smaller thana single DNA molecule. The less space a processor takes up, the more you can fit intoone computer.

Humanity is closer toquantum computers thanto those that are DNA-based. But whether the notion ofa computer made fromDNA excites or terrifies you, it is worth remembering that we humans run ona biocomputer. It's called a brain.

Researchers Say It's Possible to Build a Self-Replicating DNA ... - Sputnik International

Stem Cell Therapy An Option For ENC Patients | Public Radio East – Public Radio East

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Stem cell therapy is a quickly advancing treatment being used across the country. Now, its becoming more prevalent in eastern North Carolina to those living with chronic pain an alternative to surgery. The minimally invasive procedure is showing results in alleviating back, knee, hip and shoulder pain. Though stem cell therapy is classified by the Food and Drug Administration as experimental, patients say theyre finding relief. Meet New Bern resident and a local endodontist Dr. Donnie Luper. He was skeptical of the procedure at first.

How did you know what those stem cells were going to differentiate into? I mean was I going to grow a foot out of my shoulder or something like that?

Luper tore his rotator cuff 25 years ago during a tubing incident on the Trent River. A subsequent fall during a golf trip in 2015 sent him to a specialist.

I went to see a shoulder surgeon in Richmond. He told me that he didnt think it was a complete tear of my rotator cuff, that I could probably have a minor surgical procedure done and I asked him about stem cell.

After talking with a friend who opted for stem cell treatment for her knee pain, Luper decided to find out more.

My option was if I would have had that shoulder surgery and they had do that bicep tendon repair, I mean I would have been in a sling for six weeks and probably not working for three months.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, stem cells sometimes called the bodys master cells - have the ability to divide and develop into many different cell types. Each new cell has the potential to remain a stem cell or become another type of cell, such as a nerve cell, a skin cell, or a red blood cell. They may also help repair the body by dividing to replenish cells that are damaged by disease, injury or normal wear. Parkinsons disease, spinal cord injuries, damaged organs and cancer could all be possibly treated with the use of stem cells, but more research is needed. Dr. Angelo Tellis is the owner/physician of Aegean Medical, which provides stem cell therapy to patients in Cary, Jacksonville, Morehead City and New Bern.

The adult stem cells we call multipotent stem cells so they can only differentiate into very specific or certain kinds of tissue. Whereas the embryonic stem cells we call pluripotent and can become a variety, almost any tissue. But I only deal with adult stem cells, theyre found to be more useful in clinical applications.

Dr. Tellis says adult stem cells are more responsive to growing tissue in very specific locations. When patients go into Dr. Tellis office for the two hour procedure, he starts by numbing an area of the abdomen and performing liposuction to collect one or two syringes of body fat.

Stem cells can be found in a lot of different tissues throughout the body, but theyre actually in one of the highest concentrations in your own body fat.

The stem cell sample is combined with platelet rich plasma or PRP collected through a blood draw.

That has a lot of the chemical signals and messengers that activate stem cells. So Ill typically combine that with some of the stem cells collected from the body fat and then go under x-ray guidance and put it exactly in the targeted location where we want to create that healing process.

Soreness and stiffness can be expected immediately following the procedure and for about a week after. Dr. Tellis says the results tend to improve with time, taking about three to six months for full recovery. This was Lupers experience in 2016.

Really didnt have to take any pain medications. The joint was really sore over the weekend just because of the injection of the fluid there and after that, I had a small amount of discomfort, but nothing I really had to take medication for.

After three months, Luper says he felt 90 percent better. But he decided to get a second opinion from a shoulder surgeon.

And he told me he thought the stem cells had done a lot but that I still had one little bone spur that was rubbing against the muscle and constantly tearing the little bit of the muscle.

After surgery, Luper says his left shoulder started feeling significantly better in about a month. He was also able to return to one of his favorite pastimes golf. While surgery helped eliminate all of his pain, Luper believes stem cells helped regenerate tissue that was damaged years ago.

He said my rotator cuff muscle didnt even look like it had been torn. I actually tore that, Im sixty now, and I actually tore that when I was 34, 35 tubing on the river and I had to do physical therapy for about three months, but he said he saw absolutely no evidence that Id ever had a rotator cuff tear.

Even though some have found relief and possibly a cure through stem cell therapy, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved any stem cell-based products for use, other than HEMACORD (HE-muh-cord). According to their website, the use of stem cells raises safety concerns such as excessive cell growth, the development of tumors as well as cells migrating from the site of administration and differentiating into inappropriate cell types. And then, theres the cost of the procedure, which is not covered by insurance. The price for the treatment ranges from $2,500 to $5,000. But for those who want to avoid major surgery and the downtime associated with recovery, the risk and cost may be worth it.

If Id have surgery, my deductible would have been that because I have an out-of-pocket max. And I would want to do anything to avoid surgery, especially something that would keep me out of work for three months.

The FDA recommends that consumers interested in stem cell therapy should start a conversation with their doctor about the potential risk to benefit ratio. In addition to Aegean Medical, Advanced Health and Physical Medicine in Greenville and Regenerative Medicine Clinic of Wilmington also provide stem cell therapy in eastern North Carolina.

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Stem Cell Therapy An Option For ENC Patients | Public Radio East - Public Radio East

Hospital group invests $20M in stem cell therapy biotech – FierceBiotech

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Hospital group Sanford Health has invested $20 million in InGeneron to support clinical trials of a stem cell regenerative medicine. The Series D gives Sanford a financial stake in an adipose-derived stem cell therapy it is testing in a clinical trial at its network of healthcare facilities.

InGeneron began working with Sanford on an 18-person trial of its stem cell injection in patients with partial thickness rotator cuff tears around the turn of the year. And the network of 45 hospitals and close to 300 clinics has now tightened its ties to InGeneron by investing $20 million in the Houston, TX-based regenerative medicine company. InGeneron sees benefits in strengthening its relationship with Sanford.

This significant investment demonstrates Sanfords commitment to be an active participant in InGeneron as well as being our clinical trial site of choice. Our joint efforts will enable the company to make regenerative cell therapies available to clinical practice and to establish a leading position in the application of adipose-derived regenerative cells, InGeneron President Ron Stubbers said in a statement.

Sanford runs the two trial sites that are enrolling patients in the aforementioned 18-person trial. Both sites specialize in orthopedics and sports medicine. Rotator cuff injuries are associated with overhead sports, such as baseball and tennis. The healthcare system is presenting its close involvement with InGeneron as a positive for the patients it serves because it facilitates early access to an experimental therapy.

The treatment entails processing adipose tissue harvested during liposuction to create a mixture containing stem cells and nutrients. This mixture is injected into the site of the injury. In the trial, one-third of participants will form a control arm and receive a cortisone injection instead of stem cells.

The exec team tells FierceBiotech that the first patients were enrolled in the feasibility trial for rotator cuff tendinopathy in January, with U.S. regulatory market approval "anticipated in 2020."

InGeneron last raised money last year through a $4.5 million seed round. That financing, which came 10 years after InGeneron was founded, followed studies of the companys cell therapies in knee surgeries. InGeneron also makes biomedical equipment for collecting and processing adipose tissue.

The biotech has and its subsidiaries on both sides of the Atlantic has a team of 30 people, and has raised $38 million to date.

Is Alzheimer’s treatment of injecting stem cells into the brain a breakthrough or quackery? – The Mercury News

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

More than eight years after he realized something was wrong, after, as he described it, My brain went

Whats the word? Foggy, Jack Sage finally said after several seconds of silently coaxing his synapses to fire.

More than eight years after his brain went foggy, four years after he was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease and two years since he began an innovative and extremely invasive therapy, Sage said he is being flooded by memories that seem new, or, at the very least, feel easier to retrieve. His daughter, Kate, thought Sage had suddenly begun to open up about his past because he knew his time was growing short.

He should not know who I am at this point, Kate said.

His doctor, Christopher Duma, hopes Jack Sage goes down in history as the one-man turning point in the treatment of Alzheimers disease, while others are skeptical about what Duma has done to Sages brain. Everyone agrees that Alzheimers disease is an exploding problem.

The California Alzheimers Disease Data Report from 2009 projected a 67 percent increase between 2015 and 2030 in residents in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties living with Alzheimers disease up to 498,137. The same report references a study, between 2000 and 2004, in which 58 percent of the deaths among people 65 and older in California were attributed to Alzheimers disease. New numbers will be released Tuesday.

The Alzheimers Association reported that 610,000 Californians 65 or older had the disease in 2016, and it estimated increases to 690,000 by 2020 and 840,000 by 2025.

On a cool recent night, Sage, a handsome, fit, 82-year-old, sat next to his wife Gloria talking about his children (It is significant that Sage remembers their names James, 46, Kate, 50, and Kelly, 56), recalling when he and Gloria moved into the Newport Beach house with a view of the Pacific Ocean (1990), laughing about their first date at the Bel-Air Country Club (1979), recounting his years as a labor negotiator and executive for Del Monte, Allied Chemical and Continental Airlines (1970s and 60s) and going all the way back to the jack hammering he did in the nickel mines (mid-1950s) in Northern Ontario, Canada.

At this point in his illness, his doctor said he should be having more trouble remembering the perilous tunnels of the Sudbury nickel mine.

You drill into the granite, Sage said. You put dynamite in the rock. You dynamite it. Then you shovel out whats left.

And mining, you might say, is what is happening in Jack Sages brain.

Sages series of recollections, including his exploits on the golf course in Indian Wells where he has a second home and plays several days a week flashbacks representing the three main components of long-term memory: semantic (recalling the meaning of words), episodic (recalling autobiographic milestones) and procedural (recalling how to accomplish tasks) prompted a grin from Duma, the brain surgeon who, for $10,000 per treatment and without insurance coverage, cut a hole in the back of Sages head and injected a stem cell serum that had been sucked out of Sages love handles.

Is this the Alzheimers breakthrough the world has been waiting for? Or, is this unproven medical procedure what University of Minnesota bioethicist Leigh Turner calls quackery and flimflam? Is this an unsafe, money-grab it is being conducted outside the approval process of the Food and Drug Administration preying on the most vulnerable among us?

Turner has written extensively and critically about the Cell Surgical Network (CSN), for which Duma, whose home hospital is Hoag in Newport Beach, is listed as a network physician. The CSN promotes the stem cell revolution, which its literature claims, is an appropriate treatment for people suffering from a variety of inflammatory and degenerative conditions in other words, for cancer, diabetes, bad knees and hips as well as multiple uses in cosmetic surgery.

You dont just start dumping things into peoples brains, Turner said. The problem is people may spend a lot of money and find there is no benefit. He (Duma) is exposing people to serious harm. Fat cells dont belong in peoples brains.

Sage is the first patient in Phase I of a clinical study officially called Intracerebroventricular injection of autologous abdominal fat-derived, non-genetically altered stem cells. Sage was the first Alzheimers patient anywhere to have his own liposuctioned cells injected directly into his brain. He has received eight injections (about two months apart) since November 2014.

Duma quickly offers a qualifier. It is far too early to tell if what he has done to Sage will indeed change the world. He said Sage and, later, 19 other patients have not been harmed by the procedure, and that safety is the only criteria in Phase I. Whether the treatment is effective is a question for Phase II, for which Duma is hoping to attract private funding. Also, he wrote a letter to the national Alzheimers Association asking for $700,000 to continue his work. He was instructed to apply officially later this year. If he gets the grant, the fees for his patients would be waived.

Early in the process, Duma is excited by Sages results.

Sages most recent cognition scores have risen from 45 on the 100-point Memory Performance Index in March 2015 to 54 in September 2015. The volume of his hippocampus the memory center of the brain has grown from the fifth percentile before his first treatment to the 28th percentile after his fourth treatment to the 48th percentile after his eighth treatment.

My golf game is getting better, said Sage, who, heart permitting, plays several times per week. Sages brain isnt his only problem. He has a long history of heart ailments that have required the insertion of 12 stents to keep his arteries open.

You cant make a global conclusion based on one patient, but its a huge turning point, Duma said with the confidence of someone who probes brains for a living.

Duma is somewhat of a maverick in the medical world, a brain surgeon who regularly shuns a scalpel for the gamma knife, a futuristic laser for removing brain tumors. He is known outside the operating room for playing keyboards in bands that specialize in 1970s-era covers of groups such as Genesis, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. As a child, he was a classmate of John F. Kennedy Jr. at The Browning School in New York City. We called him John John, Duma said.

Duma realizes he will face opposition to his stem cell/brain injection therapy. But, as in all breakthroughs, someone has to be first.

I could have harmed people, he said. I took an enormous leap.

Not much hope

Alzheimers patients dont get better.

They get diagnosed, lose their dignity and die.

The speed at which death occurs is the only variable.

In the depressing world of Alzheimers treatment, Sage and Duma represent equal parts hope and skepticism. The Orange County Register contacted universities and research centers across the country, including Stanford, Harvard, Duke, Florida International, UC Davis, and some of the interview requests were denied while other calls were not returned. Very few medical experts want to talk about the combination of stem cells and Alzheimers disease, apparently because they know so little about it.

An Alzheimers patient improving because of therapy? Im hopeful its true. Im hopeful its true for all patients, said Joshua Grill, the co-director of the Memory Impairments Neurological Disorders (MIND) institute at UC Irvine. We are in dire need.

But, Grill continued, One study does not a revolution make. Ive never read anything about this (Dumas work), and I dont know what science is behind it.

Dean Hartley, Director of Science Initiatives at the Alzheimers Association, knew about Dumas work.

This is new territory, Hartley said. But with one patient, No, you cannot say this is a game-changer.

Hartley said many studies fail at the Phase II level, where more and more people are exposed to the therapy.

Still, Hartley said Dumas work is encouraging.

We want to see things like this happen, Hartley said.

Its not as if Duma is conducting his research in secret. He spoke about his study in public forums twice last year Sept. 28 at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons in San Diego, and Oct. 1 at the International Society for Cellular Therapy in Memphis.

Duma said he is nearly finished writing a paper about his work that he hopes will be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The stem cell idea

In 1993, Christopher Duma was working at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles when he and his colleagues began injecting stem cells into the brains of patients with Parkinsons disease. They were making some progress, he said, but politics intervened. Some of the stem cells they were using came from aborted fetuses. Pressure from anti-abortion groups shut that program down.

Fifteen years later, Duma was assisting plastic surgeon Michael Elam on a face-lift on a Parkinsons patient when Elam said, We need to talk about stem cells.

Elam introduced Duma to Drs. Mark Berman and Elliot Lander, the founders of the Cell Surgical Network.

Berman and Lander had been separating stem cells from fat by using a centrifuge (which they own the patent for) and injecting them into knees and hips and other places where injuries had occurred. Their work had passed an Institutional Review Board after 1,524 patients were treated with no adverse effects, Berman said.

If you want to repair an injury, Berman said, the best tissue is the stem cell.

In 2013, Duma suggested a new target for stem cell therapy: the brain.

Duma, with Berman, Lander and Elam as co-authors, tried to begin a study of brain/stem cell injections. But their first attempt at Institutional Review Board approval was denied because they hadnt done animal testing. So they got Dr. Oleg Kopyov at Cal State Northridge to conduct tests on rats.

With the help of Kopyovs work, Duma got Institutional Review Board approval. They chose not to take the usual next step FDA approval.

The Institutional Review Board was expecting us to go through the FDA, Lander said. But there are hundreds of obstructions. The FDA approval process usually takes between eight and 12 years, according to the online journal Medscape.com.

Duma said stem cells present a quandary for the FDA because stem cells are not a drug, and theyre not food. Clinics that take stem cells out of the body and put them back in without additives argue that they are exempt from FDA mandates.

We have been harvesting fat from abdomens and putting them in the brain during brain surgeries since the 1920s, Duma said. We do it nearly on every case for pituitary tumors, acoustic and skull base tumors and for conditions of spinal fluid leakage since the 1920s. If the FDA ruled that harvested autologous fat cannot be used in the brain, then it would change nearly a century of neurosurgical standard of care.

Someday, Duma said he hopes the FDA will recognize his work.

The work cant wait, he said.

The brave one

In August 2013, Jack Sage staggered into the office of Dr. William Shankle in Newport Beach.

Shankle, a renowned expert in cognitive disease he is the author of the Memory Performance Index that is used around the world diagnosed Sage with two problems: Alzheimers disease and hydrocephalus (fluid on the brain). Sage needed a shunt in his brain to drain the fluid and relieve the pressure.

So Shankle walked him down the hall (their offices are yards apart on the same floor in the same building) and introduced Sage to Christopher Duma, medical director of Hoag Hospitals Brain Tumor Program, and the surgeon who would put in the shunt.

Duma remembers that first meeting. Sage was in straight-line cognitive decline, Duma said.

Shankle would not grant an interview about Duma or his treatment. Shankle said he is wary of hocus pocus about Alzheimers disease without saying that Duma has done anything wrong. More than a decade ago, Shankle tried a surgical stem cell therapy on patients. He removed patients stem-cell-rich omentum, a fatty sheath covering the abdomen, cut open their skulls and stretched the omentum directly on their brain. Four of the six patients he studied had serious complications from the surgery.

The patients improved in cognitive tests, but the surgery was too much for them.

The method of delivering the treatment was radical (surgical transposition of the greater omentum to the surface of the brain while keeping the blood supply intact), Shankle wrote in an email. After showing that it really works, my goal was to never do the surgery again but find a different way of delivering these critical factors less invasively.

Sage was the patient Duma had been waiting for.

Jack was a man who was doomed, Duma said. He looked like classic Alzheimers. He had no ability to follow a train of thought. He was asking and re-asking the same questions. People like Jack are there, but theyre not there.

Sage was perfect for Duma for other reasons. He has always been a fitness nut cycling, tennis, golf, skiing and 10K runs were all part of his lifestyle. Kate Sage said he has been ordering salmon and spinach for dinner at restaurants for years.

Jack is the experimental model, Duma said. He is the brave one.

During two years of treatments, Sage has either maintained or slightly improved his cognitive health. He had a major heart attack in 2016, making his brain less of a cause for concern than his heart.

Kate said she doesnt know if Dumas treatment is working.

Its hard for me to say this is miraculous, Kate said.

She said she doesnt worry about his brain as much anymore.

Hes going to drop dead with some kind of a heart thing, she said. Hes not going to lose his memory.

Jack Sage

The tragedy of Alzheimers disease is that it not only steals the history that makes us who we are. It takes our skills, our beliefs, our independence, our ability to love.

So far, Jack Sage is still Jack Sage. Obviously, he doesnt know if he would be the same without Dumas treatments.

I can tell Im getting better and better, Sage said. Is that pure optimism? The Placebo Effect?

In January, Jack Sages drivers license came up for renewal. He said hes able to remember driving directions without problem. He still navigates the route from his home in Newport Beach to his other home in Indian Wells. But, he was required to pass the written test, and Sage feared he wouldnt be able to remember the complex rules of the road.

I was worried, he said.

But he passed, and his license was extended five years.

His improved memory, he said, sometimes catches him by surprise.

These memories come up when I dont even think about it, Sage said.

Sometimes, the memories take Sage places he doesnt want to go.

When he worked in the nickel mines in the 1950s, he and his first wife had a son.

His name was Mark, Sage said, speaking slowly as if the memory was bubbling up from depths he didnt want to consider. We rented a house with a playroom. My wife went shopping, and I was upstairs

I was working on my school work for McMaster University

Mark fell

we had a drainage basin inside the house

when I got to him, he was gone

Sage stopped talking as if flooded by new emotions over the death of his son.

We were distraught, he said. It was tough times for years.

In the murky world of Alzheimers therapy, Jack Sage is still mining.

Contact the writer: ksharon@scng.com

Is Alzheimer's treatment of injecting stem cells into the brain a breakthrough or quackery? - The Mercury News

Spirituality is India’s strength: PM Narendra Modi – Economic Times

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

NEW DELHI: India's spirituality is its strength but unfortunately some people link it to religion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said today.

Addressing a function here to commemorate the centenary celebrations of the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India (YSS), he said Yoga is the first step towards the journey of spirituality.

Modi said the world compares India on the basis of its population, GDP or employment rate, but the world has neither known nor recognised India for its spirituality.

"India's spirituality is its strength. But, it is unfortunate that some people link spirituality to religion. But both spirituality and religion are different," he said.

The prime minister also hailed Yogi Paramahansa who left the shores of India to spread his message but remained connected to India all the time.

The YSS was founded in 1917 by Paramahansa.

A special postage stamp to commemorate the occasion was also released by Modi.

Recalling the words of former President APJ Abdul Kalam who felt that India's spiritualness is its strength and this process should continue, he said that the spirituality of the country has been strengthened by India's sages and saints.

Modi's remarks come in the backdrop of a debate over the attempts by political parties to polarise society on the lines of religion especially during elections.

Talking about Yoga, he said it is the simple entry point to a spiritual world.

"Yoga is the entry point to spirituality. Yoga is the entrance point to one's spiritual journey. One should not consider it as the last point, as it is simply the entry gate to the spiritual world," he said.

"Once an individual develops an interest in Yoga and starts diligently practicing it, it will always remain a part of his or her life," he added.

The prime minister also recalled that the path shown by "Yogi ji" was not about "Mukti" (salvation) but "Antaryatra" (quest within).

He said the 'Kriya Yoga' practised by Paramahansa revitalises the subtle currents of life energy in the body.

Remembering the last words of Paramahansa, the prime minister said his teachings are so humane and full of compassion towards all.

Modi was later given a memento with the Yogi's last words inscribed on it, which speak about the strength of spirituality of his motherland.

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Spirituality is India's strength: PM Narendra Modi - Economic Times

Assessing Nurses’ Knowledge of Spiritual Care Practices Before and After an Educational Workshop – Healio

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Assessing Nurses' Knowledge of Spiritual Care Practices Before and After an Educational Workshop
Healio
The purpose of this pretestposttest study was to determine whether a spiritual care educational workshop would increase nurses' knowledge, self-awareness, and abilities regarding spiritual care practices. The Spirituality and Spiritual Care Rating ...

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Assessing Nurses' Knowledge of Spiritual Care Practices Before and After an Educational Workshop - Healio

Ani Choying Drolma: Nepal’s rock star nun – News8000.com – WKBT

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

John Oliver Experiences Entertaining Enlightenment With The Dalai Lama – Decider

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Economic Times

John Oliver Experiences Entertaining Enlightenment With The Dalai Lama
Decider
Traditionally, the Dalai Lama serves as the political and spiritual leader of Tibet, and he has earned the indignation of the Chinese government by fighting for Tibet's freedom. The Dalai Lama now lives in exile from Tibet in India, and at the age of ...
Dalai Lama tells John Oliver that Chinese leaders have the common sense part of their brain missingShanghaiist

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John Oliver Experiences Entertaining Enlightenment With The Dalai Lama - Decider

The Scary Health Risk Facing Redheads – Men’s Health

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Men's Health

The Scary Health Risk Facing Redheads
Men's Health
They can credit a gene called MC1R for their striking hair color. At a basic level, the gene provides instructions for making a certain kind of protein involved in pigmentation of hair, skin, and eyes. That's why redheads also tend to be paler than ...
Redheads Could Be More Likely To Develop Parkinson's After Gene ...Huffington Post UK

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The Scary Health Risk Facing Redheads - Men's Health

Update: See the Floridians who made it into ‘The Redhead Project’ – Palm Beach Post

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

From Miami all the way to Seattle, 124people reached out toThe Redhead Project after The Palm Beach Post published an article on the January casting call in Stuart.

Hundreds of redheads from all over the country have been photographed by NYC photographer Keith Barraclough, 55, as part of this project.

Why redheads? Barraclough wanted toexpose the different personalities and styles of natural-born redheads who never get their photos professionally taken. And, in a way, hes letting the models challenge the stereotypes.

Portrait of Charlee for The Redhead Project Keith Barraclough Photography/Photo by Keith Barraclough

Barraclough says the main difference between the redheads in Florida compared to other states is their lifestyle.

Their interests, hobbies and their sunny, laid back Southern style stand out, such as their coastal props birdcage, shells, snorkel equipment, surfing t-shirt, tennis gear and warm weather attire, the photographer told The Palm Beach Post.

Only 11 Floridians had their photographs taken back in January during the 2-day casting call in Stuart, Florida. Why only 11? The turnout was far greater than expected.

Portrait of Drake for The Redhead Project Keith Barraclough Photography/Photo by Keith Barraclough

More than 110 redheads were left out from the January shoot some who werent even in Florida at the time but they were individually notified via e-mail that they might still have a shot at being featured in this nationwide search.

We will contact everyone we heard from in January, said project manager Kate Lorenz.We are actively working on plans for a return to the Treasure Coast, sometime this summer, ideally.

Dont forget it. Pin it!

See the Floridians who made it into The Redhead Project.

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Update: See the Floridians who made it into 'The Redhead Project' - Palm Beach Post

Private Cygnus Spacecraft to Launch NASA Cargo to Space Station Soon – Space.com

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

In the Space Station Processing Facility high bay at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a crane is used to lower a protective covering around the Cygnus pressurized cargo module on Feb. 21.

The private spaceflight company Orbital ATKis targeting March 19 for its seventh cargo flight, dubbed OA-7, to the International Space Station.

Packed with supplies and science gear, the Cygnus cargo craft is scheduled to blast off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocketfrom Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida during a 30-minute launch window beginning at 10:56 p.m. EDT (0256 GMT on March 20).

Along with more than 7,500 lbs. (3,400 kilograms) of cargo and supplies for the astronauts aboard the space station, Cygnus will carry several science experiments, including dozens of cubesats, a new habitat for growing plants and targeted cancer therapies.

Tehcnicians and engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida load supplies and scientific research materials onto the Cygnus spacecraft's pressurized cargo module for the Orbital ATK CRS-7 mission to the International Space Station.

During a prelaunch teleconference Monday (March 6), Henry Martin, small-satellites mission coordinator for NanoRacks in Houston, noted that 38 cubesats, or microsatellites, will hitch a ride to space on the Cygnus cargo craft. Four of the 38 satellites will deploy directly from the Cygnus craft during the flight, and the rest will be deployed from the space station. A group of 28 cubesats from around the world will fly on OA-7 before being deployed from the space station for the QB50 mission, which seeks to investigate Earth's lower thermosphere, the part of the atmosphere that starts at about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the planet's surface and extends into outer space.

A new plant-growing habitat will also fly to the space station with OA-7. The Advanced Plant Habitatwill be the largest plant-growth system ever launched to the orbiting laboratory and will allow astronauts to grow larger crops than they could previously, Howard Levine, project scientist at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said during the teleconference. [Plants in Space: Photos by Gardening Astronauts]

Orbital ATK's Cygnus cargo craft, covered in a protective shroud, arrives at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Feb. 23.

One of the experiments flying to the space station on OA-7 will test how new cancer-fighting drugs work in microgravity. By sending this experiment to space, researchers can see how the cancer drug works in 3D as opposed to 2D tests done on a petri dish in a laboratory on Earth, principal project investigator Sourav Sinha CEO of Oncolinx LLC, which develops antibody-drug conjugates said during the teleconference. The project, titled "Efficacy and Metabolism of Azonafide Antibody-Drug Conjugates in Microgravity," seeks to increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs while reducing side effects.

Another biology experiment will use magnets to study cell cultures as they grow into 3D shapes in microgravity. During the teleconference, Glauco Souza, principal investigator of the biotechnology startup Nano3D Biosciences in Houston, discussed how magnetized cells and tools will make it easier to study and handle cell cultures in space and make experiments with cell cultures easier to reproduce. This will be the first time that magnets are used for biological studies in space, Souza said. The first cells that astronauts aboard the space station will study using this experiment are lung cancer cells. [How Space Station Tech Is Helping the Fight Against Cancer]

Another experiment, called Red-Data 2, from Terminal Velocity Aerospace in Atlanta, will send along a new type of data-recording device that will ride inside the Cygnus cargo craft as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere while stuffed with nonrecyclable waste from the space station. Both Cygnus and the experiment will burn up upon re-entry, but Red-Data 2 will provide data about the conditions the spacecraft encounters along the way. This experiment may come in handy for testing new heat shields for NASA, John Dec, an engineer at Terminal Velocity Aerospace and principal investigator for the project, said during the teleconference.

For its last cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station, Orbital ATK's Cygnus cargo craft carried a flame experiment and several other science projects. Find out more about the science aboard the last Cygnus mission here.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Private Cygnus Spacecraft to Launch NASA Cargo to Space Station Soon - Space.com

NASA weather satellite sends striking lightning images – CNET

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

In January, we watched in wonder as NASA's GOES-16 satellite forwarded a gorgeous view of our Blue Marble back to Earth. The satellite is on a mission to monitor Earth weather, but it also specializes in tracking lightning strikes and thunderstorms. NASA shared some of its first lightning images on Monday.

The GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument is the first of its kind. It essentially looks for brief, bright flashes of light that indicate the presence of lightning, including both in-cloud and cloud-to-ground strikes.

"When combined with radar and other satellite data, GLM data may help forecasters anticipate severe weather and issue flood and flash flood warnings sooner," says NASA. It can also help monitor areas where lightning causes wildfires.

NASA sees dramatic Earth weather from space (pictures)

GOES-16, a joint project from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, hangs out about 22,300 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the planet and keeps an eye on the Western Hemisphere.

NASA released a video animation of lightning events during a Texas storm in mid-February as an example of what GOES-16 can see from above. A still image, also released on Monday, collects one hour of GLM lightning data shown over a gray-scale picture of Earth. Bright red, orange and yellow areas note the optical intensity of strikes.

The satellite launched in November 2016 on a mission to monitor everything from hurricanes to solar flares. The lightning mapper is just one of a suite of high-tech tools designed to help forecasters track storms and issue timely severe weather warnings.

The GOES-16 Goestationary Lightning Mapper gathers lightning data. This image shows one hour of data.

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NASA weather satellite sends striking lightning images - CNET

NASA Develops New Tool to Protect Astronauts From Deadly ‘Storms’ – NBCNews.com

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

A composite image of a coronal mass ejection as seen from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft (gold), the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (red), and the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory's K-Cor coronagraph (blue). NASA/ESA/SOHO/SDO/Joy Ng and MLSO/K-Cor

Researchers who developed the new technique used an instrument called a coronagraph, which blocks the sun's bright light and allows astronomers to see what's going on in the sun's corona, or outer atmosphere. With this tool, scientists from NASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado found a way to detect SEP activity tens of minutes earlier than current forecasting techniques allow, which will ultimately help protect astronauts in space, NASA officials said a statement.

Most of the current space-weather research uses space-based coronagraphs. The new technique, by contrast, employs ground-based coronagraphs, which can deliver observations "almost instantly, and at a much higher time resolution than satellite instruments," NASA officials said.

"With space-based coronagraphs, we get images back every 20-30 minutes," Chris St. Cyr, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. "You'll see the CME in one frame, and by the time you get the next frame which contains the information we need to tell how fast it's moving the energetic particles have already arrived [at Earth]."

Solar particles released during a

The researchers' findings, published Jan. 30 in the

"Currently, processed images from K-Cor are available on the internet in less than 15 minutes after they're taken," Joan Burkepile, a study co-author based at NCAR and principal investigator for the K-Cor instrument,

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NASA spacecraft avoids collision with Martian moon Phobos – Fox News

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Danzig

Close call! NASA's Mars-orbiting spacecraft shifted course last week to avoid a collision with Mars' dark moon Phobos.

The MAVEN spacecraft short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN has been orbitng Mars for more than two years, monitoring the Red Planet's atmosphere. On Feb. 28, it performed a rocket motor burn to speed up just a little bit and change trajectories to avoid crossing paths with Phobos, NASA officials said in a statement. The total speedup was just 0.4 meters per second, which is less than 1 mile per hour.

Researchers noticed that Phobos and MAVEN had a chance of colliding March 6. That gave them a week of advance notice in order to pull off the small maneuver to avoid a crash. Now, the two will miss each other by about 2.5 minutes (before, their orbits were crossing the same point within just 7 seconds of each other). This is the first time the spacecraft has moved to avoid encountering Phobos, officials said in the statement. [Mars Photos from NASA's MAVEN Probe]

"Kudos to the [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] navigation and tracking teams for watching out for possible collisions every day of the year, and to the MAVEN spacecraft team for carrying out the maneuver flawlessly," Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator and researcher at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said in the statement.

Phobos is a lumpy, asteroid-size moon orbiting very close to Mars, streaked with stretch-mark grooves . Phobos and its slightly smaller sister moon Deimos are both dark gray, which makes them among the least reflective objects in the solar system . Phobos has been moving closer to Mars over time and is destined for an eventual descent into the planet one collision that moon won't avoid.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains . Follow us @Spacedotcom , Facebook and Google+ . Original article on Space.com .