Groups wanting to protect Liberty Park seek change in bill

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Nearly six decades ago, Morris Pesin and his family left their Jersey City home to visit the Statue of Liberty, not realizing the ordeal that lay ahead of them.

They spent 21/2 hours stuck in heavy tunnel traffic and waiting in a long line for the Battery Park ferry before arriving at the statue.

There, Pesin realized how much closer Jersey City was to the statue than New York and how ugly his hometown's neglected waterfront appeared, with its decaying piers and abandoned railroad yards.

He launched a crusade to transform the land into a family park with ferry service, and, with other advocates, fought for their goal, finally achieved in time for the nation's bicentennial in 1976.

Today, his son, Sam Pesin, president of the Friends of Liberty State Park, is fighting with others - environmental, preservation, community, and parks advocacy groups - to keep the site from being "developed inappropriately."

They believe a last-minute addition to a bill the New Jersey Legislature passed shortly before Christmas may open the door to privatization and commercialization of the park.

The 80-page measure - the Hackensack Meadowlands Agency Consolidation Act - is awaiting the signature of Gov. Christie, who has until early February to act. Christie has a policy of not commenting on legislation before him.

"My dad called this sacred public land," said Sam Pesin, a preschool teacher in Jersey City whose nonprofit friends group advocates for the waterfront attraction. "It's scarce open urban space near the Statue of Liberty.

"If the governor signs this bill," he said, "it will dishonor the Statue of Liberty, the spirit of America, and the democratic process."

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Groups wanting to protect Liberty Park seek change in bill

Liberty Villages crowd-funded bus cancelled due to potential transit rules violation

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Passengers waiting to get on the Liberty Village Express bus on Oct. 6, 2014. 680NEWS/Carl Hanstke

The alternate transit option for people who live in Liberty Village has been cancelled.

A bus, dubbed the Liberty Village Express, was supposed to run on Monday as an alternative to the chronically busy 504 King streetcar.

The luxury coach, which went from Liberty Village to Union Station, did a trial run last fall, but the organizers told the CBC that after consulting with a lawyer, they decided not to do it again as it may violate city transit rules.

The crowd-funded project was launched by Toronto start-up company Line Six. who felt residents in the area were being under-serviced by the TTC.

Residents in Liberty Village have complained of overcrowded streetcars on King Street. The 504 King streetcar is the busiest of the TTCs surface routes and carries about 60,000 riders a day.

Bus route of the Liberty Village Express. SOURCE: ridelinesix.com

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Liberty Villages crowd-funded bus cancelled due to potential transit rules violation

What are free schools? Does the failure of Durham Free School indicate the model is flawed?

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THE abrupt demise of Durham Free School, the closure of which was announced by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan after a damning Ofsted report, will come as no surprise to critics of the free school movement.

The brainchild of former Education Secretary, Michael Gove, and inspired by experimental schools in Sweden and the United States, free schools were part of the Coalition Governments Big Society initiative.

Influenced by libertarianism, the idea was to allow parents, teachers, charities, businesses and religious groups to set up their own schools.

The vision was that free schools would be an independent but state-funded school which was open to all abilities.

Crucially, like mainstream academy schools, the new free schools would not be controlled by their local educational authority.

But free schools would continue to be subject to the same schools admissions code as all other state-funded schools.

Free schools are governed by non-profit charitable trusts that sign funding agreements with the Education Secretary.

In order to set up a free school, founding groups must submit detailed applications to the Department of Education.

While there are additional start-up funds available to new free schools, mainstream funding is on the same basis as other state schools.

The new model has spread slowly around the country and the North-East still only has a handful of examples.

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Annunaki, Elohim and Human Genetics: Basis, Bias, or BS? Please Share! – Video

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Annunaki, Elohim and Human Genetics: Basis, Bias, or BS? Please Share!
This video covers the HARD SCIENCE behind the properties observed in DNA and various aspects of the Origins of Life. We will cover various concepts of geneti...

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Genetics underpinning antimalarial drug resistance revealed

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Largest genome-wide study of parasite provides clearest picture yet of genetic changes driving artemisinin resistance

The largest genome-wide association study to date of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum unveils a complex genetic architecture that enables the parasite to develop resistance to our most effective antimalarial drug, artemisinin. The results could help to improve early detection of emerging artemisinin resistance.

The global research collaboration analysed 1612 samples from 15 locations in Southeast Asia and Africa finding 20 mutations in the kelch13 gene, a known artemisinin resistance marker, that appear to work in concert with a set of background mutations in four other genes to support artemisinin resistance.

"Our findings suggest that these background mutations emerged with limited impact on artemisinin resistance -- until mutations occurred in the kelch13 gene," explains Dr Roberto Amato, a first author and Research Associate in Statistical Genomics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Oxford University's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. "It's similar to what we see with pre-cancerous cells which accumulate genetic changes but only become malignant when they acquire critical driver mutations that kick-off growth."

The variety of kelch13 mutations associated with artemisinin resistance, with new variants continually emerging, makes it difficult to use this gene alone as a marker for genetic surveillance.

Monitoring parasite populations for a specific genetic background - in this case, a fixed set of four well-defined mutations in the fd, arps10, mdr2, and crt genes - could allow researchers to assess the likelihood of new resistance-causing mutations emerging in different locations, helping to target high-risk regions even before resistant parasites take hold.

"We are at a pivotal point for malaria control. While malaria deaths have been halved, this progress is at risk if artemisinin ceases to be effective," says Nick Day, Director of the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok, Thailand. "We need to use every tool at our disposal to protect this drug. Monitoring parasites for background mutations could provide an early warning system to identify areas at risk for artemisinin resistance."

Researchers also uncovered new clues about how artemisinin resistance has evolved in Southeast Asia. By comparing parasites from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh, scientists found that the distribution of different kelch13 mutations are localised within relatively well-defined geographical areas.

Whilst artemisinin resistant parasites do appear to have migrated across national borders, this only happened on a limited scale and, in fact, the most widespread kelch13 mutation, C580Y, appeared to have emerged independently on several occasions. Notably parasites along the Thailand-Myanmar border appear to have acquired this mutation separately from those in Cambodia and Vietnam. Crucially, parasite populations in both regions possess the genetic background mutations, even though they are clearly genetically distinct.

There remain many unanswered questions. "We don't yet know the role of these background mutations," says Dr Olivo Miotto, a first author and Senior Informatics Fellow at MORU and the Centre for Genomics and Global Health. "Some may not affect drug resistance directly, but rather provide an environment where drug resistance mutations are tolerated. Since kelch13 has hardly changed in 50 million years of Plasmodium evolution, we can assume that this gene is essential to parasite survival. Therefore, kelch13 mutations may severely handicap mutant parasites, compromising their survival unless some other change can counteract this negative effect."

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Genetics underpinning antimalarial drug resistance revealed

Researchers Open 'Pandora's Box' of Potential Cancer Biomarkers

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Newswise ANN ARBOR, Mich. A new analysis opens the door to discovery of thousands of potential new cancer biomarkers.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center analyzed the global landscape of a portion of the genome that has not been previously well-explored long non-coding RNAs. This vast portion of the human genome has been considered the dark matter because so little is known about it. Emerging new evidence suggests that lncRNAs may play a role in cancer and that understanding them better could lead to new potential targets for improving cancer diagnosis, prognosis or treatment.

We know about protein-coding genes, but that represents only 1-2 percent of the genome. Much less is known about the biology of the non-coding genome in terms of how it might function in a human disease like cancer, says senior study author Arul M. Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology and S.P. Hicks Professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

The researchers pulled together 25 independent datasets totaling 7,256 RNA sequencing samples. The data was from public sources such as The Cancer Genome Atlas project, as well as from the Michigan Center for Translational Pathologys archives. They applied high-throughput RNA sequencing technology to identify more than 58,000 lncRNA genes across normal tissue and a range of common cancer types.

Results of the study appear online in Nature Genetics.

We used all of this data to decipher what the genomic landscape looks like in different tissues as well as in cancer, Chinnaiyan says. This opens up a Pandoras box of all kinds of lncRNAs to investigate for biomarker potential.

The complete dataset, named the MiTranscriptome compendium, has been made available on a public website, http://www.mitranscriptome.org, for the scientific community to explore.

The researchers also identified one lncRNA, SChLAP1, as a potential biomarker for aggressive prostate cancer. SChLAP1 was more highly expressed in metastatic prostate cancer than in early stage disease. SChLAP1 was found primarily in prostate cancer cells, not in other cancers or normal cells, which gives researchers hope that a non-invasive test could be developed to detect SChLAP1. Such a test could be used to help patients and their doctors make treatment decisions for early stage prostate cancer.

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Researchers Open 'Pandora's Box' of Potential Cancer Biomarkers

Chiropractor North Port Florida: Grappin Chiropractic Clinic Client Review – Video

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