DEAR ABBY: I have a relative who is very ill. She's not expected to survive. She has a 1-year-old daughter, "Whitney," and a husband who isn't particularly interested in parenting once his wife is gone. My husband and I have a 3-year-old, and my husband would like to have more children. I love this relative and the little girl, but I'm not interested in raising another child. I'm fine with just one.My husband feels we have the love and resources to provide Whitney with a good life. I respect the fact that he feels this way, but I work full time. ...
What with cloud storage becoming more and more affordable, chances are you've got a stack of old hard drives just laying around somewhere. At least one. You could just throw them away, or leave them to languish, or you could throw caution to the wind and make one into a cotton candy machine. Just in time for Easter. More »
About 150 to 200 patients of Dr. W. Scott Harrington, who's accused of unsanitary practices, line up outside the Tulsa Health Department North Regional Health and Wellness Center to be screened for hepatitis and the virus that causes AIDS, Saturday, March 30, 2013, in Tulsa, Okla. Oklahoma officials say 7,000 patients of Harrington's in the past six years will receive letters that warn that poor hygiene at Harrington's two clinics created a public health hazard. (AP Photo/Tulsa World, James Gibbard) ONLINE OUT; TV OUT; TULSA OUT
About 150 to 200 patients of Dr. W. Scott Harrington, who's accused of unsanitary practices, line up outside the Tulsa Health Department North Regional Health and Wellness Center to be screened for hepatitis and the virus that causes AIDS, Saturday, March 30, 2013, in Tulsa, Okla. Oklahoma officials say 7,000 patients of Harrington's in the past six years will receive letters that warn that poor hygiene at Harrington's two clinics created a public health hazard. (AP Photo/Tulsa World, James Gibbard) ONLINE OUT; TV OUT; TULSA OUT
This Thursday, March 28, 2013 photo shows the dental offices of Dr. Scott Harrington at 2111 S. Atlanta Place in Tulsa, Okla. Health officials on Thursday, March 28, 2013 urged thousands of patients of an Oklahoma oral surgeon to undergo hepatitis and HIV testing, saying unsanitary conditions behind his office's spiffy facade posed a threat to his clients and made him a "menace to the public health." (AP Photo/Tulsa World, Michael Wyke) ONLINE OUT; TV OUT; TULSA OUT
This 1977 license picture provided by the Oklahoma Board of Dentistry shows Dr. Scott Harrington. Health officials urged thousands of patients of Harrington, an oral surgeon, to undergo hepatitis and HIV testing, saying unsanitary conditions behind his office's spiffy facade posed a threat to his clients and made him a "menace to the public health." (AP Photo/Oklahoma Board of Dentistry)
This Thursday, March 28, 2013 photo shows the dental offices of Dr. Scott Harrington at 2111 S. Atlanta Place in Tulsa, Okla. Health officials on Thursday, March 28, 2013 urged thousands of patients of an Oklahoma oral surgeon to undergo hepatitis and HIV testing, saying unsanitary conditions behind his office's spiffy facade posed a threat to his clients and made him a "menace to the public health." (AP Photo/Tulsa World, Michael Wyke) ONLINE OUT; TV OUT; TULSA OUT
TULSA, Okla. (AP) ? Hundreds of patients of an Oklahoma oral surgeon accused of unsanitary practices showed up at a health clinic Saturday, looking to find out whether they were exposed to hepatitis or the virus that causes AIDS.
Letters began going out Friday to 7,000 patients who had seen Dr. W. Scott Harrington during the past six years, warning them that poor hygiene at his clinics created a public health hazard. The one-page letter said how and where to seek treatment but couldn't explain why Harrington's allegedly unsafe practices went on for so long.
Testing for hepatitis B, hepatitis C and the virus that causes AIDS began at 10 a.m. Saturday, but many arrived early and stood through torrential downpours. The Tulsa Health Department said 420 people were tested Saturday at its North Regional Health and Wellness Center. Screenings resume Monday morning.
Kari Childress, 38, showed up at 8:30 a.m., mainly because she was nervous.
"I just hope I don't have anything," said Childress, who had a tooth extracted at one of Harrington's two clinics five months ago. "You trust and believe in doctors to follow the rules, and that's the scariest part."
Inspectors found a number of problems at the doctor's clinics in Tulsa and suburban Owasso, according to the state Dentistry Board, which filed a 17-count complaint against Harrington pending an April 19 license revocation hearing. According to the complaint, needles were reinserted into drug vials after being used on patients, expired drugs were found in a medicine cabinet and dental assistants, not the doctor, administered sedatives to patients.
One patient, Orville Marshall, said he didn't meet Harrington until after he had two wisdom teeth pulled about five years ago at the Owasso clinic. A nurse inserted the IV for his anesthesia; Harrington was there when Marshall came to.
"It's just really scary. It makes you doubt the whole system, especially with how good his place looked," said Marshall, 37.
An instrument set reserved for use on patients with infectious diseases was rusty, preventing its effective sterilization, and the office autoclave ? a pressurized cleaner ? was used improperly and hadn't been certified as effective in at least six years, according to the complaint.
Dr. Matt Messina, a Cleveland dentist and a consumer adviser for the American Dental Association, said creating a safe and hygienic environment is "one of the fundamental requirements" before any dental procedure can be performed.
"It's not hard. It just takes effort," he said.
Weekly autoclave testing can be performed for less than $400 annually, according to the website of the Autoclave Testing Services of Pearl River, New York.
Autoclaves typically can be purchased for $1,000 to $8,000, depending on their size and features. And an average dental practice can expect to pay more than $40,000 a year in equipment, tools and supplies alone, according to several dental organizations.
Attempts to reach Harrington have been unsuccessful. No one answered the door Thursday at his Oklahoma home, which property records show is worth more than $1 million. His practice a few miles away, in a tony section of Tulsa where plastic surgeons operate and locals congregate at bistros and stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue, has a fair-market value of around $851,000.
Property and tax records show Harrington owns another residence in Carefree, Ariz., in an area of upscale homes tucked into in the boulder-strewn mountains north of Phoenix.
Nobody was at home Saturday at the low-slung, 1950s-style vacation home, across from the Boulders Resort. Neighbors said they had seen a lot of activity at the home in recent weeks.
Harrington's malpractice lawyer, Jim Secrest II, did not respond to phone messages left Thursday or Friday. A message at Harrington's Tulsa office said it was closed and an answering service referred callers to the Tulsa Health Department.
Suzy Horton, an old friend of Harrington's, said she can't believe the allegations about the man who removed two of her teeth in the early '90s. Horton's ex-husband sold Harrington his home in Carefree ? a home where she once lived.
"I've been to dentists my whole life, so I know what a professional office looks like," Horton, who now lives in Phoenix, said in a telephone interview. "His was just as professional as anybody."
Horton hasn't seen Harrington in years, but she said he has sent her a Christmas card and wreath every year since her 1999 divorce.
"It was a long time ago, so I suppose anything can change, but the kind of person they're portraying in the news is not the kind of person who sends you a Christmas" card, she said.
___
Associated Press writers Traci Carl in Carefree, Ariz., and Jeannie Nuss in Little Rock, Ark., contributed to this report.
Mar. 28, 2013 ? It?s a nocturnal aquatic predator that will eat anything that fits in its large mouth.
Dark and sleek, it hides beneath the water waiting for prey. A Texas Tech University researcher says the target will never know what hit them because they probably can?t smell the voracious pirate perch.
After careful investigations, William Resetarits Jr., a professor of biology at Texas Tech, and Christopher A. Binckley, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Arcadia University, found that animals normally attuned to predators from their smell didn?t seem to detect the pirate perch. It could be the first animal discovered that is capable of generalized chemical camouflage that works against a wide variety of prey.
The team published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal The American Naturalist.
Thankfully, at five-and-a-half inches long, only insects, invertebrates, amphibians and other small fish need worry about the danger hiding near the bottom among the roots and plantlife, Resetarits said.
?We use the term ?camouflage,? because it is readily understandable,? he said. ?What we really are dealing with is some form of ?chemical deception.? The actual mechanism may be camouflage that makes an organism difficult to detect, mimicry that makes an organism difficult to correctly identify, or cloaking where the organism simply does not produce a signal detectable to the receiver.?
Resetarits said pirate perch aren?t really perch at all, but related to the Amblyopsid cave fish family. Fossils from this fish date back about 24 million years ago.
They make their homes in freshwater ponds and streams in the Eastern United States. Once considered for the aquarium market, the fish got its name because of its penchant for eating all tank mates.
?Pirate perch have some unique aspects to their morphology and life history, but they are generalist predators, and so should have been avoided by prey animals like all the other fish tested,? he said. ?For some reason, they weren?t avoided at all.?
To test their theory, Resetarits and Binckley ran a series of experiments in artificial pools housing 11 different species of fish, including pirate perch.
The fish were kept at bay at the bottom of the pools with screens so that they could not prey on the beetles and tree frogs that colonized the water.
When it came to choosing a pool, the beetles and frogs consistently steered clear of the water with other fish species in them, most likely because they could smell the presence of fish in the water. However, they had no qualms about moving into pools containing the pirate perch.
?We were incredibly surprised,? Resetarits said. ?It took a while for us to pull this all together. When we first observed it with tree frogs, we were very surprised and puzzled. But when the same lack of response was shown by aquatic beetles, we were quite literally flabbergasted. We continued to do experiments with other fish and always got the same results. All fish except pirate perch were avoided.?
Exactly what the pirate perch is doing to hide isn?t yet known, he said. Researchers want to determine how the pirate perch are either scrambling chemical signals or masking their odor. Once they have identified chemical compounds that might explain the behavior, they will return to the field to test with the same tree frogs and beetles as well as other organisms known to respond to fish chemical cues, such as mosquitoes and water fleas.
?We will also test whether this chemical deception works against the pirate perch?s own predators,? Resetarits said. ?Of course, other critical questions that we are working on include just how much advantage in terms of prey acquisition do pirate perch gain as a result of chemical deception. Does this phenomenon occur in closely related species, such as cavefish? Are there prey species that have found a way around the chemical deception? There are many questions now, and I think we have just scratched the surface.
?I think the most important aspect is not the bizarre, just-so story, but the fact that there is no reason to believe that chemical camouflage is less common than visual camouflage. Humans? sense of smell is just not very sophisticated, so we can?t simply ?notice? examples of chemical camouflage the way we do visual camouflage. I think chemical camouflage is likely quite common. We are starting pursuit of the larger question, starting with close relatives of pirate perch.?
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Journal Reference:
William J. Resetarits, Christopher A. Binckley. Is the Pirate Really a Ghost? Evidence for Generalized Chemical Camouflage in an Aquatic Predator, Pirate PerchAphredoderus sayanus. The American Naturalist, 2013; : 000 DOI: 10.1086/670016
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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
?One in ten people say they are addicted to their smartphone, a poll has revealed. And more owners than ever are seeking expert help. The US study of 2,000 college students found ten per cent claimed to have a full-blown addiction to the gadgets. Eighty-five per cent constantly checked theirs for the time, while three-quarters slept beside it. Meanwhile counsellor Peter Smith reported a ten per cent increase in Brits seeking help for smartphone addiction at his clinic in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset. He said: ?Smartphone users feel they?ve got more control to communicate with whoever they want, whenever they want. But ironically, it?s that sense of control that creates the anxiety. It?s made younger people more reliant on maintaining those contacts ? which can create issues from bullying, to being marginalised and excluded. People lose track of time, becoming socially isolated and before they know it, can?t stop. Not having your phone raises your heart rate and signs of panic. These symptoms are almost identical to alcoholism or addiction to gambling, food or drugs? (The Sun, March 21, 2013)
The news report above appeared in The Sun newspaper last week, and as part of that article I was asked to devise a 10-item ?smartphone addiction test? for Sun readers?which I did (and can be found at the end of today?s blog). As regular readers of my blog will be aware, I have been studying ?technological addictions? for over two decades and I coined the term ?technological addictions? in a paper I wrote back in 1995. Although I have published a lot of papers on various technological addictions (e.g., slot machine addiction, video game addiction, internet addiction, etc.), I have only ever published one study on mobile phone addiction (with some of my research colleagues in Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain).
Our study was published last year in the Anales de Psicologia, and comprised 1,879 students from Catalonian educational institutions (322 students of Ramon Llull University, and 1,557 secondary school students). We surveyed the students using the 10-item ?Questionnaire on Cell Phone Related Experiences? (Cuestionario de Experiencias Relacionadas con el Movil [CERM]), a psychometric instrument developed by Dr. Marta Beranuy and her colleagues in 2009. The CERM examines two areas of cell phone use conflicts and communicative/emotional use.
Our study reported that frequent problems with cell phone use were reported by 2.8 % of the participants. Problematic use was greatest in the youngest age groups. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most used applications were text-messaging and making calls. We carried out a regression analysis and found that the types of cell phone use that contributed the most to problematic use were text-messaging and playing games, whereas making calls contributed the least. Our results suggest that very few young people have problems with cell phones, in contrast with the findings of previous studies in Spain that reported pathological cell phone rates of 7.9%-10.4%. Our results suggested that females have some difficulties with phone use. Other researchers have also reported that females use cell phones more than males, and perceive their use as more problematic than. We also noted in our paper that cell phones are becoming more varied in their use and new applications such as the playing of games appears to be more attractive to males.
Traditionally, the use of cell phones has been for communication and as such, the risk of problematic use was minimal. However, this risk of problematic use and/or addiction could be potentially higher for smartphones that include applications that promote the altering of user identity (e.g., gaming, social networking, etc.).
We also argued that some people may confuse habitual use of such technology as an addictive behaviour (when in reality it may not be). For instance, some people may consider themselves cell phone addicts because they never go out of the house without their cell phone, do not turn their cell phone off at night, are always expecting calls from family members or friends, and/or over-utilise cell phones in their work and/or social life. There is also the importance of economic and/or life costs. The crucial difference between some forms of game playing and pathological game playing is that some applications involve a financial cost. If a person is using the application more and is spending more money, there may be negative consequences as a result of not being able to afford the activity (e.g., negative economic, job-related, and/or family consequences). High expenditure may also be indicative of cell phone addiction but the phone bills of adolescents are often paid for by parents, therefore the financial problems may not impact on the users themselves.
It is very difficult to determine at what point cell phone use becomes an addiction. The cautiousness of researchers suggests that we are not yet in a position to confirm the existence of a serious and persistent psychopathological addictive disorder related to cell phone addiction on the basis of population survey data alone. This cautiousness is aided and supported by other factors including: (a) the absence of any clinical demand in accordance with the percentages of problematic users identified by these investigations, (b) the fact that the psychometric instruments used could be measuring ?concern? or ?preoccupation? rather than ?addiction, (c) the normalisation of behaviour and/or absence of any concern as users grow older; and (d) the importance of distinguishing between excessive use and addictive use.
All researchers agree in the necessity of longitudinal studies in order to check if perception of the problematic use of cell phones still exists over time. Many university students on the basis of self-report claim to have been ?addicted? to texting/instant messaging during some period of their adolescence. Our research suggests they are simply describing a period of their development with strong needs of social ties rather than a true addiction. If any of you reading this really want to know if you may have a problem with your smartphone, then you can take this test I devised. If you answer ?yes? to six or more of these statements, it may be indicative of a problematic and/or addictive use of your smartphone.
(1)? ?My smartphone is the most important thing in my life?
(2)? ?Conflicts have arisen between me and my family and/or my partner about the amount of time I spend on my smartphone?
(3)? ?My smartphone use often gets in the way of other important things I should be doing (working, education, etc.)?
(4)? ?I spend more time on my smartphone than almost any other activity?
(5)? ?I use my smartphone as a way of changing my mood?
(6)? ??Over time I have increased the amount of time I spend on my smartphone during the day?
(7)? ?If I am unable to use my smartphone I feel moody and irritable?
(8)? ?I often have strong urges to use my smartphone?
(9)? ?If I cut down the amount of time I spend on my smartphone, and then start using it again, I always end up spending as much time on my smartphone as I did before?.
(10) ?I have lied to other people about how much I use my smartphone?
Just remember that excessive use does not necessarily mean addiction, and the difference between a healthy enthusiasm and addiction is that healthy enthusiasms add to life, and addictions take away from them.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Beranuy, M., Oberst, U., Carbonell, X., & Chamarro, A. (2009). Problematic Internet and mobile phone use and clinical symptoms in college stu- dents: The role of emotional intelligence. Computers in Human Behavior, 25, 1182?1187.
Carbonell, X., Chamarro, A., Beranuy, M., Griffiths, M.D. Obert, U., Cladellas, R. & Talarn, A. (2012). Problematic Internet and cell phone use in Spanish teenagers and young students. Anales de Psicologia, 28, 789-796.
Carbonell, X., Guardiola, E., Beranuy, M., & Belles, A. (2009). A bibliomet- ric analysis of the scientific literature on Internet, video games, and cell phone addiction. Journal of Medical Library Association, 97(2), 102-107.
Beranuy, M., Chamarro, A., Graner, C., & Carbonell, X. (2009). Validacion de dos escalas breves para evaluar la adiccion a Internet y el abuso de movil. Psicothema, 21, 480-485.
A NASA spacecraft scanning for the most powerful explosions in the universe has captured a photo of Comet ISON, an icy wanderer that could potentially dazzle stargazers when it swings close to the sun later this year.
NASA's Swift satellite, which is typically used to track intense gamma-ray bursts from distant stars, photographed Comet ISON on Jan. 30, with the space agency unveiling the photo today (March 29). By tracking the comet over the last two months, Swift has allowed astronomers to learn new details about how large the comet is and how fast it is spewing out gas and dust.
"Comet ISON has the potential to be among the brightest comets of the last 50 years, which gives us a rare opportunity to observe its changes in great detail and over an extended period," said Lead Investigator Dennis Bodewits, an astronomer with University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) who helped obtain the new image.
Some astronomers have predicted that ISON could be the "Comet of the Century" when it makes its closest approach to the sun in late November. But a recent analysis found that the comet is not brightening as expected, and may have a ways to go to meet such expectations.
Comet ISON was first discovered in September 2012 by Russian astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok using the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) located near Kislovodsk. The comet's official designation is Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON). [See more photos of Comet ISON]
Swift's Comet ISON view
Bodewits and his university colleagues teamed up with the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., to capture new views of Comet ISON using the Swift spacecraft. The satellite's Jan. 30 photo shows the comet as a bright, fuzzy white ball. At the time, Comet ISON was about 375 million miles (670 million kilometers) from Earth and 460 million miles (740 million km) from the sun.
"Using images acquired over the last two months from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT), the team has made initial estimates of the comet's water and dust production and used them to infer the size of its icy nucleus," NASA officials wrote in a statement.
Swift's observations revealed that Comet ISON is currently shedding about 112,000 pounds (51,000 kilograms) of dust and about 130 pounds (60 kg) of water every minute, an odd mismatch for such an anticipated comet.
All comets are made of dust and frozen gases that mix together to form a sort of "dirty snowball" in space, NASA officials explained. Water ice in comets typically stays frozen until the comet approaches within three times the Earth's distance to the sun, at which time the water ice heats up and changes directly into gas (a process called sublimation), creating jets of material that can brighten the comet.
"The mismatch we detect between the amount of dust and water produced tells us that ISON's water sublimation is not yet powering its jets because the comet is still too far from the sun," Bodewits said. "Other more volatile materials, such as carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide ice, evaporate at greater distances and are now fueling ISON's activity."
Currently, Comet ISON is about 5,000 times fainter than the dimmest object the human eye can see.
NASA's Comet ISON campaign
NASA's Swift spacecraft is one of several satellites and probes to observe Comet ISON as it passes through the inner solar system. The space agency has formed the Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) to make the most of the comet's visit.
On Oct. 1, the comet will pass within 6.7 million miles (10.8 million km) of Mars, and may be spotted by orbiters around the Red Planet. [Comet ISON's Path Through Solar System (Video)]
"During this close encounter, Comet ISON may be observable to NASA and ESA spacecraft now working at Mars," said Michael Kelley, a UMCP astronomer and also a Swift and CIOC team member. "Personally, I'm hoping we'll see a dramatic postcard image taken by NASA's latest Mars explorer, the Curiosity rover."
On Nov. 28 ? 58 days after swing close by Mars ? Comet ISON will make its closest approach to the sun, flying within 730,000 miles (1.2 million km) of the star's surface during the encounter. Several sun-watching observatories will be tracking the comet at that time, and ISON may even become visible in the daytime sky to observers who block the sun's light with their hand, NASA officials said.
The comet will make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 26, coming with 39.9 million miles (64.2 million km) of the planet as a late Christmas present.
But whether Comet ISON will live up to its celestial hype or fizzle out in a whimper still remains to be seen, astronomers warned. The comet must still survive the approach into the inner solar system, as well as its close encounter with the sun.
"It looks promising, but that's all we can say for sure now," Matthew Knight, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory said. "Past comets have failed to live up to expectations once they reached the inner solar system, and only observations over the next few months will improve our knowledge of how ISON will perform."
Editor's note: If you snap an amazing photo of Comet ISON or any other celestial object, and you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please send images and comments, including location information, to Managing Editor Tariq Malik at?spacephotos@space.com.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him?@tariqjmalik?and?Google+. Follow us?@Spacedotcom,?Facebook?and?Google+.?Original article on?SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) ? Three of four reptiles that were swiped from a science museum and thrown together into a garbage bag during a heist were recovered Friday, though a 3-foot-long ball python remained at large, officials said.
The 3?-foot savannah monitor lizard, a 7-foot-long red-tailed boa constrictor and another 3-foot-long ball python were in good condition, said Mary Ellen Wright, the director of the Fresno Discovery Center. Authorities were searching for the missing python in an area frequented by a suspect, who has been arrested.
Wright had been worried about the reptiles' confinement together in the bag "because they are mortal enemies," she said.
"It would be like throwing two pit bulls in a locked room," she added, noting that the monitor lizard has sharp, 2-inch claws.
The reptiles were taken in a robbery that has perplexed museum officials and authorities, who have not released a motive. The museum's education coordinator, Ian Goudelock, said the suspect didn't appear to be out to intentionally hurt the animals though the museum planned to have the reptiles checked by a veterinarian.
"It's just a strange theft. We're still trying to figure out why," he said. "It does kind of more or less have a happy ending."
Surveillance video showed the suspect broke into the Central California museum sometime late Wednesday or early Thursday, smashed the tanks that held the four reptiles ? worth hundreds of dollars ? and popped them into a garbage bag.
The suspect also went into the center's gift shop and stole children's toys, the phone system and the security monitor, the Fresno Bee reported.
Fresno police have not released the name of the suspect.
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Information from: The Fresno Bee, http://www.fresnobee.com
When Google soft launched its new Gmail composer last October, it did so in a preview release that gave users the option to test it out andturn it off. Not so anymore, because starting today that resizable, pop-up window is now the default interface for its web Gmail client. The widespread change was apparently spurred by abundant positive feedback from users that found the new layout bolstered multitasking -- a claim we're not entirely sold on. Regardless of your feelings towards this permanent switch, it's headed your way soon and should finish rolling out "over the next few days." So, turn and face the change, people -- it's not like you have a choice.
Mar. 28, 2013 ? A team led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) has unveiled a new technique for vaccine design that could be particularly useful against HIV and other fast-changing viruses.
The report, which appears March 28, 2013, in Science Express, the early online edition of the journal Science, offers a step toward solving what has been one of the central problems of modern vaccine design: how to stimulate the immune system to produce the right kind of antibody response to protect against a wide range of viral strains. The researchers demonstrated their new technique by engineering an immunogen (substance that induces immunity) that has promise to reliably initiate an otherwise rare response effective against many types of HIV.
"We're hoping to test this immunogen soon in mice engineered to produce human antibodies, and eventually in humans," said team leader William R. Schief, who is an associate professor of immunology and member of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center at TSRI.
Seeking a Better Way
For highly variable viruses such as HIV and influenza, vaccine researchers want to elicit antibodies that protect against most or all viral strains -- not just a few strains, as seasonal flu vaccines currently on the market. Vaccine researchers have identified several of these broadly neutralizing antibodies from long-term HIV-positive survivors, harvesting antibody-producing B cells from blood samples and then sifting through them to identify those that produce antibodies capable of neutralizing multiple strains of HIV. Such broadly neutralizing antibodies typically work by blocking crucial functional sites on a virus that are conserved among different strains despite high mutation elsewhere.
However, even with these powerful broadly neutralizing antibodies in hand, scientists need to find a way to elicit their production in the body through a vaccine. "For example, to elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies called VRC01-class antibodies that neutralize 90 percent of known HIV strains, you could try using the HIV envelope protein as your immunogen," said Schief, "but you run into the problem that the envelope protein doesn't bind with any detectable affinity to the B cells needed to launch a broadly neutralizing antibody response."
To reliably initiate that VRC01-class antibody response, Schief and his colleagues therefore sought to develop a new method for designing vaccine immunogens.
From Weak to Strong
Joseph Jardine, a TSRI graduate student in the Schief laboratory, evaluated the genes of VRC01-producing B cells in order to deduce the identities of the less mature B cells -- known as germline B cells -- from which they originate. Germline B cells are major targets of modern viral vaccines, because it is the initial stimulation of these B cells and their antibodies that leads to a long-term antibody response.
In response to vaccination, germline B cells could, in principle, mature into the desired VRC01-producing B cells -- but natural HIV proteins fail to bind or stimulate these germline B cells so they cannot get the process started. The team thus set out to design an artificial immunogen that would be successful at achieving this.
Jardine used a protein modeling software suite called Rosetta to improve the binding of VRC01 germline B cell antibodies to HIV's envelope protein. "We asked Rosetta to look for mutations on the side of the HIV envelope protein that would help it bind tightly to our germline antibodies," he said.
Rosetta identified dozens of mutations that could help improve binding to germline antibodies. Jardine then generated libraries that contained all possible combinations of beneficial mutations, resulting in millions of mutants, and screened them using techniques called yeast surface display and FACS. This combination of computational prediction and directed evolution successfully produced a few mutant envelope proteins with high affinity for germline VRC01-class antibodies.
Jardine then focused on making a minimal immunogen -- much smaller than HIV envelope -- and so continued development using the "engineered outer domain (eOD)" previously developed by Po-Ssu Huang in the Schief lab while Schief was at the University of Washington. Several iterative rounds of design and selection using a panel of germline antibodies produced a final, optimized immunogen -- a construct they called eOD-GT6.
A Closer Look
To get a better look at eOD-GT6 and its interaction with germline antibodies, the team turned to the laboratory of Ian A. Wilson, chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology and a member of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center at TSRI.
Jean-Philippe Julien, a senior research associate in the Wilson laboratory, determined the 3D atomic structure of the designed immunogen using X-ray crystallography -- and, in an unusual feat, also determined the crystal structure of a germline VRC01 antibody, plus the structure of the immunogen and antibody bound together.
"We wanted to know whether eOD-GT6 looked the way we anticipated and whether it bound to the antibody in the way that we predicted -- and in both cases the answer was 'yes'," said Julien. "We also were able to identify the key mutations that conferred its reactivity with germline VRC01 antibodies."
Mimicking a Virus
Vaccine researchers know that such an immunogen typically does better at stimulating an antibody response when it is presented not as a single copy but in a closely spaced cluster of multiple copies, and with only its antibody-binding end exposed. "We wanted it to look like a virus," said Sergey Menis, a visiting graduate student in the Schief laboratory.
Menis therefore devised a tiny virus-mimicking particle made from 60 copies of an obscure bacterial enzyme and coated it with 60 copies of eOD-GT6. The particle worked well at activating VRC01 germline B cells and even mature B cells in the lab dish, whereas single-copy eOD-GT6 did not.
"Essentially it's a self-assembling nanoparticle that presents the immunogen in a properly oriented way," Menis said. "We're hoping that this approach can be used not just for an HIV vaccine but for many other vaccines, too."
The next step for the eOD-GT6 immunogen project, said Schief, is to test its ability to stimulate an antibody response in lab animals that are themselves engineered to produce human germline antibodies. The difficulty with testing immunogens that target human germline antibodies is that animals typically used for vaccine testing cannot make those same antibodies. So the team is collaborating with other researchers who are engineering mice to produce human germline antibodies. After that, he hopes to learn how to drive the response, from the activation of the germline B cells all the way to the production of mature, broadly neutralizing VRC01-class antibodies, using a series of designed immunogens.
Schief also hopes they will be able to test their germline-targeting approach in humans sooner rather than later, noting "it will be really important to find out if this works in a human being."
The first authors of the paper, "Rational HIV immunogen design to target specific germline B cell receptors," were Jardine, Julien and Menis. Co-authors were Takayuki Ota and Devin Sok of the Nemazee and Burton laboratories at TSRI, respectively; Travis Nieusma of the Ward laboratory at TSRI; John Mathison of the Ulevitch laboratory at TSRI; Oleksandr Kalyuzhniy and Skye MacPherson, researchers in the Schief laboratory from IAVI and TSRI, respectively; Po-Ssu Huang and David Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle; Andrew McGuire and Leonidas Stamatatos of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute; and TSRI principal investigators Andrew B. Ward, David Nemazee, Ian A. Wilson, and Dennis R. Burton, who is also head of the IAVI Neutralizing Center at TSRI.
The project was funded in part by IAVI; the National Institutes of Health (AI84817, AI081625 and AI33292); and the Ragon Institute.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Scripps Research Institute.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Joseph Jardine, Jean-Philippe Julien, Sergey Menis, Takayuki Ota, Oleksandr Kalyuzhniy, Andrew McGuire, Devin Sok, Po-Ssu Huang, Skye MacPherson, Meaghan Jones, Travis Nieusma, John Mathison, David Baker, Andrew B. Ward, Dennis R. Burton, Leonidas Stamatatos, David Nemazee, Ian A. Wilson, and William R. Schief. Rational HIV Immunogen Design to Target Specific Germline B Cell Receptors. Science, 28 March 2013 DOI: 10.1126/science.1234150
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.
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Johnny Depp will answer fans' questions about "The Lone Ranger" in a live online session.
Disney announced Thursday that Depp and co-star Armie Hammer will discuss the anticipated adventure film on April 17 after showing 20 minutes of exclusive footage to about 400 fans at a Las Vegas theater.
Director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer also will participate in the session, which is to stream live on Yahoo Movies and Livestream.
Fans outside of Las Vegas can submit questions for "The Lone Ranger" team through Twitter and watch the film's trailer online. The extended footage, though, is just for those in Las Vegas.
The promotion coincides with the annual CinemaCon convention, where Disney is expected to offer a similar presentation for theater owners. "The Lone Ranger" releases July 3.
Mar. 27, 2013 ? A new look at conditions after a Manhattan-sized asteroid slammed into a region of Mexico in the dinosaur days indicates the event could have triggered a global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush and tree on Earth and led to the extinction of 80 percent of all Earth's species, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
Led by Douglas Robertson of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, the team used models that show the collision would have vaporized huge amounts of rock that were then blown high above Earth's atmosphere. The re-entering ejected material would have heated the upper atmosphere enough to glow red for several hours at roughly 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- about the temperature of an oven broiler element -- killing every living thing not sheltered underground or underwater.
The CU-led team developed an alternate explanation for the fact that there is little charcoal found at the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, boundary some 66 million years ago when the asteroid struck Earth and the cataclysmic fires are believed to have occurred. The CU researchers found that similar studies had corrected their data for changing sedimentation rates. When the charcoal data were corrected for the same changing sedimentation rates they show an excess of charcoal, not a deficiency, Robertson said.
"Our data show the conditions back then are consistent with widespread fires across the planet," said Robertson, a research scientist at CIRES, which is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Those conditions resulted in 100 percent extinction rates for about 80 percent of all life on Earth."
A paper on the subject was published online this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Co-authors on the study include CIRES Interim Director William Lewis, CU Professor Brian Toon of the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and Peter Sheehan of the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin.
Geological evidence indicates the asteroid collided with Earth about 66 million years ago and carved the Chicxulub crater in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula that is more than 110 miles in diameter. In 2010, experts from 33 institutions worldwide issued a report that concluded the impact at Chicxulub triggered mass extinctions, including dinosaurs, at the K-Pg boundary.
The conditions leading to the global firestorm were set up by the vaporization of rock following the impact, which condensed into sand-grain-sized spheres as they rose above the atmosphere. As the ejected material re-entered Earth's atmosphere, it dumped enough heat in the upper atmosphere to trigger an infrared "heat pulse" so hot it caused the sky to glow red for several hours, even though part of the radiation was blocked from Earth by the falling material, he said.
But there was enough infrared radiation from the upper atmosphere that reached Earth's surface to create searing conditions that likely ignited tinder, including dead leaves and pine needles. If a person was on Earth back then, it would have been like sitting in a broiler oven for two or three hours, said Robertson.
The amount of energy created by the infrared radiation the day of the asteroid-Earth collision is mind-boggling, said Robertson. "It's likely that the total amount of infrared heat was equal to a 1 megaton bomb exploding every four miles over the entire Earth."
A 1-megaton hydrogen bomb has about the same explosive power as 80 Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs, he said. The asteroid-Earth collision is thought to have generated about 100 million megatons of energy, said Robertson.
Some researchers have suggested that a layer of soot found at the K-Pg boundary layer roughly 66 million years ago was created by the impact itself. But Robertson and his colleagues calculated that the amount of soot was too high to have been created during the massive impact event and was consistent with the amount that would be expected from global fires.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Colorado at Boulder.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Douglas S. Robertson, William M. Lewis, Peter M. Sheehan, Owen B. Toon. K-Pg extinction: Reevaluation of the heat-fire hypothesis. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 2013; DOI: 10.1002/jgrg.20018
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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Blue is to Windows as Gemini is to Office. Any questions? Well, that's unfortunate -- we don't have a ton of answers. What we do know, courtesy of some top-notch ZDNet reporting, is that Microsoft's next Office release is codenamed "Gemini," and that it could be making its way to your desktop by the end of this year. The site quotes a potential fall ship date, at least for the first release, which is set to include new versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word. Rumor has it that the next version will be somewhat platform-independent, and will rely heavily on the Office 365 subscription concept. Beyond that, there isn't really much to share, but you're welcome to hit up our source link for a few more (minor) details.
EEG identifies seizures in hospital patients, UCSF study findsPublic release date: 27-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jason Socrates Bardi jason.bardi@ucsf.edu 415-502-6397 University of California - San Francisco
Electroencephalogram is underused tool for diagnosis, say authors
Electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures and records electrical activity in the brain, is a quick and efficient way of determining whether seizures are the cause of altered mental status (AMS) and spells, according to a study by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco.
The research, which focused on patients who had been given an EEG after being admitted to the hospital for symptoms such as AMS and spells, appears on March 27 in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
"We have demonstrated a surprisingly high frequency of seizures more than 7 percent in a general inpatient population," said senior investigator John Betjemann, MD, a UCSF assistant professor of neurology. "This tells us that EEG is an underutilized diagnostic tool, and that seizures may be an underappreciated cause of spells and AMS."
The results are important, he said, because EEG can identify treatable causes of AMS or spells, and because "it can prompt the physician to look for an underlying reason for seizures in persons who did previously have them."
Seizures are treatable with a number of FDA-approved anticonvulsants, he said, "so patients who are quickly diagnosed can be treated more rapidly and effectively. This may translate to shorter lengths of stay and improved patient outcomes."
In one of the first studies of its kind, Betjemann and his team analyzed the medical records of 1,048 adults who were admitted to a regular inpatient unit of a tertiary care hospital and who underwent an EEG. They found that 7.4 percent of the patients had a seizure of some kind while being monitored.
"As I tell my patients, seizures come in all different flavors, from a dramatic convulsion to a subtle twitching of the face or hand or finger," said Betjemann. "There might be no outward manifestation at all, other than that the person seems a little spacey. It's easily missed by family members and physicians alike, but can be picked up by EEG."
Another 13.4 percent of patients had epileptiform discharges, which are abnormal patterns that indicate patients are at an increased risk of seizures.
Almost 65 percent of patients had their first seizure within one hour of EEG recording, and 89 percent within six hours.
"This is good news for smaller hospitals that don't have 24 hour EEG coverage, but that do have a technician on duty during the day," Betjemann said.
He speculated that lack of 24-hour coverage is a major reason that EEG is not used as an inpatient diagnostic tool as often as it might be. "This paper shows that, fortunately, it's not necessary. Almost two thirds of patients with seizures can be identified in the first hour, and almost 90 percent in the course of a shift."
EEGs are easy to obtain, painless and noninvasive, said Betjemann. "The technician applies some paste and electrodes and hooks up the machine. All the patient has to do is rest in bed."
Betjemann said that the next logical research step would be a prospective study. "We have to start at the beginning, see if patients are altered when they are admitted, and do an EEG in a formal standardized setting. Then we'd want to see how often EEG is changing the management of patients either starting or stopping medications," he said. "A patient may be having spells, and an EEG might tell you this is not a seizure, and that it's important not to treat it with anti-epileptic medications."
###
Co-authors of the study are Ivy Nguyen, BS, Carlos Santos-Sanchez, MD, Vanja C. Douglas, MD and S. Andrew Josephson, MD, of UCSF.
Ivy Nguyen was awarded a Quarterly Research Fellowship by UCSF Dean's Office Medical Student Research Program.
UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
EEG identifies seizures in hospital patients, UCSF study findsPublic release date: 27-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jason Socrates Bardi jason.bardi@ucsf.edu 415-502-6397 University of California - San Francisco
Electroencephalogram is underused tool for diagnosis, say authors
Electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures and records electrical activity in the brain, is a quick and efficient way of determining whether seizures are the cause of altered mental status (AMS) and spells, according to a study by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco.
The research, which focused on patients who had been given an EEG after being admitted to the hospital for symptoms such as AMS and spells, appears on March 27 in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
"We have demonstrated a surprisingly high frequency of seizures more than 7 percent in a general inpatient population," said senior investigator John Betjemann, MD, a UCSF assistant professor of neurology. "This tells us that EEG is an underutilized diagnostic tool, and that seizures may be an underappreciated cause of spells and AMS."
The results are important, he said, because EEG can identify treatable causes of AMS or spells, and because "it can prompt the physician to look for an underlying reason for seizures in persons who did previously have them."
Seizures are treatable with a number of FDA-approved anticonvulsants, he said, "so patients who are quickly diagnosed can be treated more rapidly and effectively. This may translate to shorter lengths of stay and improved patient outcomes."
In one of the first studies of its kind, Betjemann and his team analyzed the medical records of 1,048 adults who were admitted to a regular inpatient unit of a tertiary care hospital and who underwent an EEG. They found that 7.4 percent of the patients had a seizure of some kind while being monitored.
"As I tell my patients, seizures come in all different flavors, from a dramatic convulsion to a subtle twitching of the face or hand or finger," said Betjemann. "There might be no outward manifestation at all, other than that the person seems a little spacey. It's easily missed by family members and physicians alike, but can be picked up by EEG."
Another 13.4 percent of patients had epileptiform discharges, which are abnormal patterns that indicate patients are at an increased risk of seizures.
Almost 65 percent of patients had their first seizure within one hour of EEG recording, and 89 percent within six hours.
"This is good news for smaller hospitals that don't have 24 hour EEG coverage, but that do have a technician on duty during the day," Betjemann said.
He speculated that lack of 24-hour coverage is a major reason that EEG is not used as an inpatient diagnostic tool as often as it might be. "This paper shows that, fortunately, it's not necessary. Almost two thirds of patients with seizures can be identified in the first hour, and almost 90 percent in the course of a shift."
EEGs are easy to obtain, painless and noninvasive, said Betjemann. "The technician applies some paste and electrodes and hooks up the machine. All the patient has to do is rest in bed."
Betjemann said that the next logical research step would be a prospective study. "We have to start at the beginning, see if patients are altered when they are admitted, and do an EEG in a formal standardized setting. Then we'd want to see how often EEG is changing the management of patients either starting or stopping medications," he said. "A patient may be having spells, and an EEG might tell you this is not a seizure, and that it's important not to treat it with anti-epileptic medications."
###
Co-authors of the study are Ivy Nguyen, BS, Carlos Santos-Sanchez, MD, Vanja C. Douglas, MD and S. Andrew Josephson, MD, of UCSF.
Ivy Nguyen was awarded a Quarterly Research Fellowship by UCSF Dean's Office Medical Student Research Program.
UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
This Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013, shows the Blackberry Z10 in Toronto. BlackBerry delivered a US$98-million profit in its fourth quarter of 2012, surprising analysts who had expected the smartphone maker to report a loss as it launched its new high-end touchscreen smartphone. The Waterloo, Ont.-based company, which spent much of the quarter rolling out its BlackBerry Z10 in the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere, said it shipped about one million of the smartphones during the reporting period. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Frank Gunn)
This Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013, shows the Blackberry Z10 in Toronto. BlackBerry delivered a US$98-million profit in its fourth quarter of 2012, surprising analysts who had expected the smartphone maker to report a loss as it launched its new high-end touchscreen smartphone. The Waterloo, Ont.-based company, which spent much of the quarter rolling out its BlackBerry Z10 in the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere, said it shipped about one million of the smartphones during the reporting period. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Frank Gunn)
TORONTO (AP) ? Research In Motion Ltd., once written off as dead amid fierce competition from more modern mobile devices such as the iPhone, surprised Wall Street Thursday by returning to profitability and shipping more BlackBerry 10 phones than expected in the most recent quarter.
It will take several quarters, though, to know whether RIM is on a path toward a successful turnaround. RIM just entered the crucial U.S. market with the new phone last week. And despite selling a million BlackBerry 10 phones in other countries, RIM lost subscribers for the second consecutive quarter.
Thursday's earnings report provided a first glimpse of how the BlackBerry 10 system, widely seen as crucial to the company's future, is selling internationally and in Canada since its debut Jan. 31. The 1 million new touch-screen BlackBerry Z10 phones were above the 915,000 that analysts had been expecting for the quarter that ended March 2. Details on U.S. sales are not part of the fiscal fourth quarter's financial results because the Z10 wasn't available there after the quarter ended.
Investors appeared mostly happy with the financial results. RIM's stock rose as high as $15.55 as trading opened Thursday after the release of results, though it saw a sharp drop in the final hour of trading and closed at $14.45, down 12 cents.
Many analysts had written RIM off last year, but now believe the Canadian company has a future.
"I thought they were dead. This is a huge turnaround," Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said from New York.
Misek said the Canadian company "demolished" the numbers, especially its gross margins. RIM reported gross margins of 40 percent, up from 34 percent a year earlier. The company credited higher average selling prices and higher margins for devices.
"This is a really, really good result," Misek said. "It's off to a good start."
The new BlackBerry 10 phones are redesigned for the new multimedia, Internet browsing and apps experience that customers are now demanding.
The BlackBerry, pioneered in 1999, had been the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people and other consumers before the iPhone debuted in 2007 and showed that phones can handle much more than email and phone calls. RIM faced numerous delays modernizing its operating system with the BlackBerry 10. During that time, it had to cut more than 5,000 jobs and saw shareholder wealth decline by more than $70 billion.
In the most recent quarter, RIM earned $98 million, or 19 cents a share, compared with a loss of $125 million, or 24 cents a share, a year earlier. After adjusting for restructuring and other one-time items, RIM earned 22 cents a share. Analysts surveyed by FactSet had been expecting a loss of 31 cents.
Revenue fell 36 percent to $2.7 billion, from $4.2 billion. Analysts had expected $2.82 billion.
RIM shipped 6 million BlackBerry devices, including 1 million on the new system. But RIM lost about 3 million subscribers to end the quarter with 76 million. It's the second consecutive quarterly decline for RIM, whose subscriber based peaked at 80 million last summer.
Bill Kreyer, a tech analyst for Edward Jones, called the decline "pretty alarming."
"This is going to take a couple of quarters to really see how they are doing," Kreyer said.
The company also announced that co-founder Mike Lazaridis will leave the company. He and Jim Balsillie had stepped down as co-CEOs in January 2012 after several quarters of disappointing results, but Lazaridis said he stayed on as vice chairman and a board director to help new CEO Thorsten Heins and his team with the launch of the BlackBerry 10. With that underway, Lazaridis plans to retire May 1. He said he has no plans to sell his 5.7 percent stake in the company.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Lazaridis said the board wanted both him and Jim to stay, but Lazaridis decided "it was the right time" to leave.
Heins, formerly RIM's chief operating officer, has spent the past year cutting costs and steering the company toward the launch of new BlackBerry 10 phones. Lazaridis said Heins has done an excellent job completing the BlackBerry 10 system and launching it around the world.
"The results speak for themselves," Lazaridis said.
Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said RIM returned to profitability much sooner than expected. He said it was driven by higher gross margins, cost reductions and the sale of the new BlackBerry.
In a research note, Wu wrote that RIM "is here to stay with stabilization in its business and balance sheet" but said the key question remains whether the company can maintain momentum in an industry dominated by Apple and Google's Android software.
The Z10 has received favorable reviews since its release, but the launch in the critical U.S. market was delayed until late this month as wireless carriers completed their testing.
A version with a physical keyboard, called the Q10, won't be released in the U.S. for two or three more months. The delay in selling the Q10 complicates RIM's efforts to hang on to customers tempted by the iPhone and a range of devices running Android. Even as the BlackBerry has fallen behind rivals in recent years, many users have stayed loyal because they prefer a physical keyboard over the touch screen on the iPhone and most Android devices.
RIM, which is changing is formal name to BlackBerry, said it expects to break even in the current quarter despite increasing spending on marketing by 50 percent compared with the previous quarter.
"To say it was a very challenging environment to deliver improved financial results could well be the understatement of the year," Heins said during a conference call with analysts.
Heins said more than half of the people buying the touch-screen Z10 were switching from rival systems. The company didn't provide details or specify whether those other systems were all smartphones. He said the Q10 will sell well among the existing BlackBerry user base. It's expected in some markets in April, but not in the U.S. until May or June.
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Public release date: 27-Mar-2013
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