Zuckerberg, Schmidt, Mayer and others back FWD.us tech political lobby group

If you thought that Mark Zuckerberg's aspirations ended at command your smartphone, then think again. The Facebook chief has teamed up with a raft of other tech heavyweights including Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer and Elon Musk to form FWD.us, a political lobby group designed to promote tech-friendly causes. The first issue it wants to tackle is immigration reform to make it easier to woo foreign engineering talent, but it also has designs on scientific research, education reform and job creation. Evidently, these people still have spare time even after their stressful day jobs.

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Source: FWD.us

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Dish Network said to be interested in merger with T-Mobile

By Alan Baldwin SHANGHAI, April 12 (Reuters) - Red Bull principal Christian Horner denied on Friday that Sebastian Vettel had weakened the boss's position at the Formula One champions by ignoring orders in Malaysia last month. "Is my leadership undermined? I don't think so," the Briton told reporters at the Chinese Grand Prix, referring to his team's three successive drivers' and constructors' world championships. "I've led the team from the time that Red Bull entered the sport to those 35 victories, to those world championships," he added. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dish-network-said-interested-merger-t-mobile-030032104.html

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No plucking joke: Luxury chicken hotel even offers turndown service

Isolde Raftery , NBC News ? ? ? 19 hrs.

Chicken owners often take to urban farming blogs with this lament: Where to house the ladies when they leave town?

Bill Bezuk, owner of Eugene Backyard Farmer in Eugene, Ore., used to offer a chicken sitting service, but biking around town before and after work proved onerous, so he came up with another idea: a luxury chicken hotel.

Bezuk named it The Nest, and for now there are two suites next to Bezuk?s urban farming supply store: The Blue Andalusian and the Gold Campine. (The former is named for a rare breed with black or mottled feathers; the former is a haughty show chicken with a perky chest.)

The basic service ? fresh food, water and a safe place to sleep ? costs $2 per chicken per night. For a dollar more, Bezuk offers ?deluxe accommodations? ? organic food, fresh vegetable scraps and turndown service.

Yes, really. Turndown service.

When the store closes, which is around bedtime for chickens, Bezuk or one of his four employees will lure the hens into the enclosed area with meal worms.

The chicken hotel opened in February, and May is already booked ? another indicator that the urban chicken phenomenon continues as city councils across the country vote to approve urban livestock. Bezuk said he plans to add two more split-level chicken suites, each of which houses six to eight chickens.

Bezuk believes that he has the first chicken-boarding business in the U.S. ? there are a handful in the U.K., where chicken ownership has also ballooned in the last five years, a response to the growth of the organic and local foods movements.

There?s Fowlty Towers in Cowden, a village in south east England, and The Chicken Hotel in Cornwall, which boasts spa treatments, including emery-board pedicures to ?round the tips.?

?Rooster nails are especially a problem for the backs of their lady-friends,? The Chicken Hotel explains on its website.

(No boys allowed at The Nest in Eugene. "City regulations prohibit roos, and we want to be consistent with ordinances," Bezuk said.)

Anna Goeser, who runs Easy Acres Chicken Sitting in Los Angeles, said she hasn?t heard of any other chicken boarding business ? possibly because of the risk of spreading avian-borne illnesses. She doesn?t even know of other chicken sitters.

Goeser started her chicken sitting service three years ago with just a handful of business cards ? she says it?s grown into a successful venture. Last week, she was taking care of five flocks ? for $25 a day, or $40 if the family lives more than 10 miles away.

At each home, she wears shoe covers and gloves to reduce the risk of spreading infection.

?I have a tub and I have bleach and a lot of flip flops that I end up disposing of,? Goeser said. ?I?m not a hazmat girl, but I get intense about it.?

Back in Eugene, a mid-sized city known for its quirky and free-spirited politics, Bezuk says that keeping a clean chicken hotel is crucial. Thoroughly cleaning the coops is key to avoid the spread of mites and avian illnesses, although he believes there's little chance of that given that the chickens who stay at The Nest don?t mingle with other livestock.

Even so, after the chickens leave, he and his employees go into the suites with a shovel and bucket to scoop up the bird poop. They sprinkle diatomaceous earth ? an organic compound used in toxic liquid spills -- in the nesting boxes to absorb parasites that may be lurking.

?The challenge with The Nest is the challenge with any hotel ? avoiding overbooking and making sure that the chickens check out on time,? Bezuk said. ?Cleaning the room between guests is clearly important.?

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653351/s/2a99f364/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Cbusiness0Cno0Eplucking0Ejoke0Eluxury0Echicken0Ehotel0Eeven0Eoffers0Eturndown0Eservice0E1C9290A628/story01.htm

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Early warning signs of population collapse

Apr. 10, 2013 ? Spatial measurements of population density could reveal when threatened natural populations are in danger of crashing.

Many factors -- including climate change, overfishing or loss of food supply -- can push a wild animal population to the brink of collapse. Ecologists have long sought ways to measure the risk of such a collapse, which could help wildlife and fishery managers take steps to protect endangered populations.

Last year, MIT physicists demonstrated that they could measure a population's risk of collapse by monitoring how fast it recovers from small disturbances, such as a food shortage or overcrowding. However, this strategy would likely require many years of data collection -- by which time it could be too late to save the population.

In a paper appearing in the April 10 online edition of Nature, the same research team describes a new way to predict the risk of collapse, based on variations in population density in neighboring regions. Such information is easier to obtain than data on population fluctuations over time, making it potentially more useful, according to the researchers.

"Spatial data are more accessible," says Lei Dai, an MIT graduate student in physics and lead author of the study. "You can get them by satellite images, or you could just go out and do a survey."

Led by Jeff Gore, an assistant professor of physics, Dai and Kirill Korolev, a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow, grew yeast in test tubes and tracked the populations as they approached collapse. Yeast cells cooperate with other members of the population: Each of the organisms secretes an enzyme that breaks down sucrose in the environment into smaller sugars that it can use as a food source. All of the yeast benefit from this process, so a population is most successful when it maintains a certain density -- neither too low nor too high.

In last year's study, the researchers found that in populations of yeast that are subjected to increasingly stressful conditions, populations become less and less resilient to new disturbances until they reach a tipping point at which any small disruption could wipe out a population.

This phenomenon can be spotted quickly in yeast, which produces about 10 new generations per day, but measuring these population fluctuations for species such as fish or deer would take much more time. In hopes of finding more useful signals, the researchers turned their attention to spatial information.

There goes the neighborhood

In their new study, the researchers theorized a new type of indicator that they call "recovery length" -- the spatial counterpart to recovery time. This idea is based on the observation that populations living near the boundary of a less hospitable habitat are affected, because the neighboring habitats are connected by migration. Populations further away from the bad region gradually recover to equilibrium, and the spatial scale of this recovery can reveal a population's susceptibility to collapse, according to the researchers.

To test this idea, the researchers first established several linked yeast populations in a state of equilibrium. At the end of each day, a certain percentage of each population was transferred to adjacent test tubes, representing migration to adjacent regions.

The researchers then introduced a "bad" habitat, where only one in every 2,500 yeast survives from one day to the next. This reduction in population mimics what might happen in a natural population plagued by overfishing, or by a drastic reduction in its food supply.

The MIT team found that populations closest to the bad habitat had the hardest time maintaining an equilibrium state. Populations farther away maintained their equilibrium more easily.

"There's some distance you have to go away from the bad region in order to get recovery of the population density," Gore says. "How far you have to go before you reach equilibrium is the recovery length, and that tells you how close these populations are to collapse."

The recovery length varies based on how much stress the populations are already under.

To apply this finding to a natural population, population density would need to be measured in a range of adjacent areas at increasing distances from a good/bad boundary. This information could then be mapped to reveal the recovery length. "What's great about the recovery length is you don't need a long time series. You could just measure it at one moment in time," Gore says.

The MIT researchers are hoping to expand their studies to natural populations such as honeybees, fisheries or forests. They are also studying more complex experimental ecosystems involving several microbial species.

The research was funded by a Whitaker Health Sciences Fund Fellowship, a Pappalardo Fellowship, a National Institutes of Health Pathways to Independence Award and New Innovator Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Pew Scholars Program and the Allen Investigator Program.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Anne Trafton.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Lei Dai, Kirill S. Korolev, Jeff Gore. Slower recovery in space before collapse of connected populations. Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature12071

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/kMqAQGV-76c/130410201905.htm

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Scientists use nature against nature to develop an antibiotic with reduced resistance

Apr. 10, 2013 ? A new broad range antibiotic, developed jointly by scientists at The Rockefeller University and Astex Pharmaceuticals, has been found to kill a wide range of bacteria, including drug-resistant Staphylococcus (MRSA) bacteria that do not respond to traditional drugs. The antibiotic, Epimerox, targets weaknesses in bacteria that have long been exploited by viruses that attack them, known as phage, and has even been shown to protect animals from fatal infection by Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes anthrax.

Target selection is critical for the development of new antimicrobial agents. To date, most approaches for target selection have focused on the importance of bacterial survival. However, in addition to survival, the Rockefeller scientists believe that molecular targets should be identified by determining which cellular pathways have a low probability for developing resistance.

"For a billion years, phages repeatedly have infected populations of bacteria, and during this period of time they have identified weaknesses in the bacterial armor," says senior author Vincent A. Fischetti, professor and head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology. "We're taking advantage of what phage have 'learned' during this period for us to identify new antibiotic targets that we believe will escape the problem of resistance found for other antibiotics."

The path to identification of this new target spanned more than seven years of effort. Fischetti and his colleagues used a phage-encoded molecule to identify a bacterial target enzyme called 2-epimerase, which is used by Bacillus anthracis to synthesize an essential cell wall structure. In 2008, Fischetti's lab, with Rockefeller's Erec Stebbins and his colleagues in the Laboratory of Structural Microbiology, solved the crystal structure of this enzyme. Based on this work, the researchers identified a previously unknown regulatory mechanism in 2-epimerase that involves direct interaction between one substrate molecule in the enzyme's active site and another in the enzyme's allosteric site. Fischetti and his colleagues chose to target the allosteric site of 2-epimerase to develop inhibitory compounds, because it is found in other bacterial 2-epimerases but not in the human equivalent of the enzyme.

Through the collaboration with Astex, initiated by co-author Allan Goldberg, an inhibitor of 2-epimerase named Epimerox was developed. Raymond Schuch, a former postdoctoral researcher in Fischetti's lab, tested the inhibitor in mice infected with Bacillus anthracis. He found that not only did Epimerox protect the animals from anthrax, but the bacteria did not develop resistance to the inhibitor. The researchers also found that Epimerox was able to kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (or MRSA) with no evidence of resistance even after extensive testing. Their work was published this week in PLOS ONE.

"Since nearly all Gram-positive bacteria contain 2-epimerase, we believe that Epimerox should be an effective broad-range antibiotic agent," says Fischetti. "The long-term evolutionary interaction between phage and bacteria has allowed us to identify targets that bacteria cannot easily change or circumvent. That finding gives us confidence that the probability for developing resistance to Epimerox is rather low, thereby enabling treatment of infections caused by multi-drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA. It is a very encouraging result at a time when antibiotic resistance is a major health concern."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Rockefeller University.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Raymond Schuch, Adam J. Pelzek, Assaf Raz, Chad W. Euler, Patricia A. Ryan, Benjamin Y. Winer, Andrew Farnsworth, Shyam S. Bhaskaran, C. Erec Stebbins, Yong Xu, Adrienne Clifford, David J. Bearss, Hariprasad Vankayalapati, Allan R. Goldberg, Vincent A. Fischetti. Use of a Bacteriophage Lysin to Identify a Novel Target for Antimicrobial Development. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e60754 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060754

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/n_QjtxYcypU/130410201828.htm

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Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins And Andreessen Horowitz Team Up As "Glass Collective" To Invest In Google Glass Ecosystem

Today, Google Ventures announced a partnership with two of the biggest technology venture capital firms in the world, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, on what they’re calling the “Glass Collective.” While this isn’t a fund, the three firms will be sharing seed investment dealflow for entrepreneurs and developers who are working on Google Glass software and hardware. If one firm sees an interesting opportunity, it will go to the others with it. The hope of this collective effort is to kickstart the developer ecosystem for Glass and bring it to mainstream users as soon as possible. Steve Lee, product lead on the Glass team, confirmed that?Google will start shipping,?hopefully within the next month,?the Glass Explorer kits to developers?who showed interest in Glass when it was introduced last year at Google I/O. So the three firms want to get in front of the activity that is currently, and will be in the future, happening in the ecosystem. With the billions of dollars that the firms have, it’s safe to say that they’d like to corner the market on Glass investments immediately. This is similar to the approach that Kleiner Perkins took with its iFund, which has invested more than $450 million into mobile applications. While the forming of the group doesn’t guarantee that the two firms will participate in a round of funding for any given project, the firms do tend to invest in other companies together already, so sharing what they’re seeing among one another makes sense. It was also made clear that there are no plans to bring in any other firms, so the “Glass Musketeers” will be going at this on their own. During the announcement, Google Ventures’ Bill Maris was joined by Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. The three discussed their excitement for the immediate potential of Google Glass as a platform, not just a wearable computing product. The Glass API, called “Mirror,” was announced and shown off at this year’s SXSW. Before the meeting started, we were able to test out the latest iteration of Glass, which has come a long way in just the past few months from what I could tell. That fact, tied with the obvious implications for real businesses to form around Glass, made these firms want to jump in early. Maris started off by discussing his introduction to Glass: I first saw and heard about

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/RDLcokf1R8c/

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Mark Wahlberg And The Cast Of 'Pain And Gain' Stop By Sneak Peek Week

You don't have to wait until later this month to get a look at the biggest muscles of the summer movie season. That's because the cast of "Pain & Gain, including Mark Wahlberg, Rob Corddry, Ken Jeong and Bar Paly, plus director Michael Bay, will be stopping by MTV Sneak Peek Week to debut an [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2013/04/09/pain-and-gain-sneak-peek-week/

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