Friday, November 30, 2012

US birth rate falls to record low

The US birth rate hit a record low last year, led by the decline in child-bearing among foreign-born women, according to a Pew study.
The overall US birth rate decreased by 8% between 2007-10, and by 6% among US-born women, found the data.
The rate fell sharpest for those hardest hit by the recession: 14% among foreign-born women and 23% among Mexican immigrant women in particular.
The 2011 rate was the lowest since 1920, when such records began.
Previous research by Pew concluded that states with the largest economic downturn from 2007-08, were most likely to have experienced fertility declines.
Foreign and US-born Hispanic women have experienced the largest fall in household wealth since 2007.
But increased access to contraception for Latino women may also be playing a part in the falling birth rate, according to the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.
Foreign-born mothers continue to give birth to a disproportionate share of the nation's newborns.
Last year there were 3.95 million total US births, according to the preliminary data from Pew Research Center.
The overall US birth rate was 63.2 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age.
It peaked in 1957 during the Baby Boom years, reaching 122.7 per 1,000 women.

UN upgrades Palestinians' status

The UN General Assembly has voted to grant the Palestinians non-member observer state status - a move strongly opposed by Israel and the US.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the assembly the vote was the "last chance to save the two-state solution" with Israel.
Israel's envoy to the UN said the bid pushed peace process "backwards", while the US said the move was "unfortunate".
The assembly voted 138-9 in favour, with 41 nations abstaining.
Hundreds of Palestinians celebrated on the streets of Ramallah, in the West Bank, after the result was announced.
'Birth certificate'
"Sixty-five years ago on this day, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 181, which partitioned the land of historic Palestine into two states and became the birth certificate for Israel," Mr Abbas said shortly before the vote in New York.
"The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the State of Palestine," he said.
The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, said "the only way to reach peace is through agreements" between the parties, not at the UN.
"No decision by the UN can break the 4,000-year-old bond between the people of Israel and the land of Israel," he said.
Opponents of the bid say a Palestinian state should emerge only out of bilateral negotiations, as set out in the 1993 Oslo peace accords under which the Palestinian Authority was established.
Speaking after the vote, the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, urged the Palestinians and Israel to resume direct peace talks and warned against unilateral actions.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the vote "unfortunate and counter-productive", saying it put more obstacles on the path to peace.
"By going to the UN, the Palestinians have violated the agreements with Israel and Israel will act accordingly," said the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Twitter.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also called for more talks, saying the resolution underscored the need to resume meaningful peace negotiations.
The UK abstained from the vote, as did Germany. The Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands and Panama were among the nations voting with the US and Israel.
In the West Bank, crowds celebrated the vote by waving flags and chanting "God is great!"
"For the first time, there will be a state called Palestine, with the recognition of the entire world," Amir Hamdan was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.
"Today the world will hear our voice," he added.
Symbolic milestone
The Palestinians are seeking UN recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, the lands Israel captured in 1967.
While the move is seen as a symbolic milestone in Palestinian ambitions for statehood, the "Yes" vote will also have a practical diplomatic effect, says the BBC's Barbara Plett, at the UN.
It would allow the Palestinians to participate in debates at the UN and improve their chances of joining UN agencies and bodies like the International Criminal Court.
Last year, Mr Abbas asked the UN Security Council to admit the Palestinians as a member state, but that was opposed by the US.
Mr Abbas was much criticised by many Palestinians for remaining on the sidelines of the conflict earlier this month in Gaza and efforts to achieve a ceasefire with Israel.
His Fatah movement, based in the West Bank, is deeply split from the militant Hamas movement which governs Gaza.
Gaza's Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh said in a statement sent to the BBC that Hamas' "support for the UN bid is based on the 'rule of non-recognition of the occupier'... and the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland".

Meherpur transport owner leader shot dead

Unidentified criminals shot dead a joint secretary of Meherpur district bus owners' association at Gangni upazila of Meherpur Thursday night.
Sahiduzzaman Beltu, 40, was also an executive member of Gangni upazila Awami League unit, reports our Khustia correspondent.
In protest of the killing, the ruling party activists in Gangni put barricade on Kushtia-Meherpur highway on Friday.
Mizanur Rahman, officer-in-charge (OC) of Gangni Police Station said a group of seven to eight criminals went to Sahiduzzaman's two-storey building at Banumdi bazaar area around 9:15pm.
The criminals called Sahiduzzaman from the road through cell phone, said the OC quoting Sahiduzzaman’s servant Biplob.
The OC said Sahiduzzaman must have known the miscreants as he came out and took them in his house.
At one stage of talking, one of the criminals opened fire on Sahiduzzaman. He died on the spot, the OC added.
None of the Sahiduzzaman's family member was in the house during the incident.

BSF kills cattle trader in Lalmonirhat

Indian Border Security Force (BSF) shot dead a cattle trader at Gotamari border in Hatibandha upazila of Lalmonirhat Thursday evening.
The BSF members also took away the body, reports our Lalmonirhat correspondent.
The deceased was an Indian citizen, BSF informed the message to BGB
around 10:30 am on Friday morning, BGB official said.
Sources in the Gotamari Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) camp said the BSF personnel shot the man around 11:30pm when he and four other cattle traders went Bangladesh territory and was returning with a consignment of cattle through the border.
One of the cattle traders was shot dead by BSF, while rest other traders ran away from the spot.
Maj Ruhul Amin, the second in-command of BGB-31 confirmed the killing.

Space Tramp Free-floating planet

Not all planets are content to dutifully circle a star. A new rogue planet has been spied roaming free among a pack of young stars about 115 to 160 light-years from Earth.
It's not a planet in the conventional sense, because it doesn't orbit a star. Yet it's between four and seven times the mass of Jupiter, well within planetary size range. The object appears to be a young, cold planet in a cluster of about 30 stars moving together called AB Doradus, astronomers report in the December Astronomy & Astrophysics. The free-floating planet is the closest to Earth yet discovered, scientists say.
“It's quite a nice discovery probably the clearest example of a planetary mass object that's very young like this,” says astrophysicist Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire in England, who was not involved with the study.
Other potential free-floating planets have been detected before, but their ages weren't as well known. Astronomers couldn't be sure the objects were planets and not brown dwarfs, failed stars too small to sustain fusion reactions in their cores.
The newfound object, dubbed CFBDSIR2149, lies in the southern constellation Dorado. Scientists estimate the planet is between 20 million and 200 million years old, based on the assumption that it was formed around the same time as the stars that it accompanies.

It's There Too Carbon at the core

A tiny fraction of carbon helps account for the oddly light density of Earth's iron core, a new computer simulation finds.
Though the core is only 0.1 percent to 0.8 percent carbon, the iron ball is the largest reservoir of carbon on the planet, the study authors said.
An impenetrable 1,790 miles (2,890 kilometers) below the planet's surface, the core is a compelling mystery. The density of pure iron is heavier than the core's observed density, which is calculated from seismic and laboratory studies.
Even though the bulk of the core is iron, scientists have surmised it must contain a small amount of lighter elements such as oxygen and sulfur. Using computer simulations, researchers from the University of California, Davis, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing tested whether Earth's most common element, carbon, also hides in the core.
"We knew the density of the core, and we knew that metal iron and nickel alone couldn't account for that density," said Qing-Zhu Yin, UC Davis geology professor and study co-author. "You need something lighter."
Previous estimates of the carbon content of the core have differed by a factor of 20, Yin wrote in the study.
In the computer model, carbon was one of the major missing light element candidates; others included silicon, oxygen, phosphorus, magnesium, hydrogen and nitrogen. An accurate knowledge of carbon's influence can help pinpoint the exact timing of the core's formation.

Did You Know? What is the Rio Hamza?

t is name of an underground river that flows 4 Kilometres below the Amazon.
THE Amazon basin covers more than 7 million square kilometres in South America and is one of the biggest and most impressive river systems in the world. But it turns out that - until now - we have only known half the story.
Brazilian scientists have found a new river in the basin - around four kilometres underneath the Amazon River. The Rio Hamza, named after the head of the team of researchers who found the groundwater flow, appears to be as long as the Amazon but up to hundreds of times wider.

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Lust For Warmth Cozy penguin huddle

Greed is good for penguins that huddle together to avoid Antarctica's icy weather.
According to a new study, penguin groups can maximize everyone's heat when individual birds act selfishly, huddling in ways that keep them toastiest.
"Even if penguins are only selfish, only trying to find the best spot for themselves and not thinking about their community, there is still equality in the amount of time that each penguin spends exposed to the wind," study researcher Francois Blanchette, a mathematician at the University of California, Merced, who normally studies fluid dynamics, said in a statement.
Source: Live Science

Light & Genetics Neurons from Stem Cell

Researchers and patients look forward to the day when stem cells might be used to replace dying brain cells in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. Scientists are currently able to make neurons and other brain cells from stem cells, but getting these neurons to properly function when transplanted to the host has proven to be more difficult. Now, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have found a way to stimulate stem cell-derived neurons to direct cognitive function after transplantation to an existing neural network.
The study was published November 7 in the Journal of Neuroscience.
"We showed for the first time that embryonic stem cells that we've programmed to become neurons can integrate into existing brain circuits and fire patterns of electrical activity that are critical for consciousness and neural network activity," said Stuart A. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., senior author of the study. Lipton is director of Sanford-Burnham's Del E. Webb Neuroscience, Aging, and Stem Cell Research Center and a clinical neurologist.
The trick turned out to be light. Lipton and his team -- including Juan PiƱa-Crespo, Ph.D., D.V.M., Maria Talantova, M.D., Ph.D., and other colleagues at Sanford-Burnham and Stanford University -- transplanted human stem cell-derived neurons into a rodent hippocampus, the brain's information-processing center. Then they specifically activated the transplanted neurons with optogenetic stimulation, a relatively new technique that combines light and genetics to precisely control cellular behavior in living tissues or animals.
Source: Science Daily

Nano Converter Power from light and heat

A University of Texas at Arlington physics professor has helped create a hybrid nanomaterial that can be used to convert light and thermal energy into electrical current, surpassing earlier methods that used either light or thermal energy, but not both.
Working with Louisiana Tech University assistant professor Long Que, UT Arlington associate physics professor Wei Chen and graduate students Santana Bala Lakshmanan and Chang Yang synthesized a combination of copper sulfide nanoparticles and single-walled carbon nanotubes.
The team used the nanomaterial to build a prototype thermoelectric generator that they hope can eventually produce milliwatts of power. Paired with microchips, the technology could be used in devices such as self-powering sensors, low-power electronic devices and implantable biomedical micro-devices, Chen said.
"If we can convert both light and heat to electricity, the potential is huge for energy production," Chen said. "By increasing the number of the micro-devices on a chip, this technology might offer a new and efficient platform to complement or even replace current solar cell technology."
In lab tests, the new thin-film structure showed increases by as much at 80 percent in light absorption when compared to single-walled nanotube thin-film devices alone, making it a more efficient generator.
Copper sulfide is also less expensive and more environment-friendly than the noble metals used in similar hybrids.
In October, the journal Nanotechnology published a paper on the work called "Optical thermal response of single-walled carbon nanotube-copper sulfide nanoparticle hybrid nanomaterials." In it, researchers also say also found that they could enhance the thermal and optical switching effects of the hybrid nanomaterial as much as ten times by using asymmetric illumination, rather than symmetric illumination.
Coauthors on the Nanotech-nology paper from Louisiana Tech include Yi-Hsuan Tseng, Yuan He and Que, all of the school's Institute for Micromanufacturing.
"Dr. Chen's research with nanomaterials is an important advancement with the potential for far-reaching applications," said Pamela Jansma, dean of the UT Arlington College of Science. "This is the kind of work that demonstrates the value of a research university in North Texas and beyond."
Chen is currently receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop nanoparticle self-lighting photodynamic therapy for use against breast and prostate cancers. In 2010, he was the first to publish results in the journal Nanomedicine demonstrating that near infrared light could be used to heat copper sulfide nanoparticles for photothermal therapy in cancer treatment, which destroys cancer cells with heat between 41 and 45 degrees Celsius.
Next month, the Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology will publish Chen's work successfully coupling gold nanoparticles with the copper sulfide nanoparticles for the photothermal therapy. Such a material would be less costly and potentially more effective than using gold particles alone, Chen said.