"My dog ain't pass. I ain't accepting that," Waka told MTV News after a photo shoot in Brooklyn, New York, last week. "You know that sh-- is gonna carry with me, though, because he's me and I'm him. Together we're Brick Squad, man."
Dunkin, who was an emerging talent in Waka's Brick Squad Monopoly crew, was shot and killed December 16 after an argument in an Atlanta recording studio. The day after Dunkin's death, Waka expressed his grief via Twitter. "WISH IT WAS ME ... MY F---ING RIGHT HAND IS GONE," Flocka wrote.
The "O Let's Do It" MC continued to vent over Twitter, writing, "Damn I feel dead" and "IM LOST" in reaction to the tragic news.
Flocka dedicated his upcoming June album Triple F Life: Friends, Fans and Family to Dunkin. "What's behind my Triple F Life wave? The passing of my best friend Dunk. R.I.P. Dunk," he said. "That boy there was special. That boy there was different."
In March, Vinson "Young Vito" Hardimon, the rapper who police say shot Dunkin, was indicted on charges of murder, felony murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony by a Georgia grand jury.
Before he passed, the rapper appeared alongside Waka on his 2010 debut album, Flockaveli, and on Gucci Mane and V-Nasty's BAYTL LP last year. On Halloween, he dropped Menace II Society, a 20-track mixtape that featured Gucci Mane, Roscoe Dash and Pastor Troy.
LONDON (AP) - Wigan routed Newcastle 4-0 Saturday for another remarkable win in its attempt to avoid relegation from the Premier League and severely dent its opponent's chances of qualifying for next season's Champions League.
With the fight for the title not resuming until leader Manchester United makes the short trip to second-place Manchester City on Monday, much of Saturday's play centered on the teams fighting to stay in the lucrative Premier League.
Newcastle had won six straight to move into fourth place but Wigan, which looked certain to be relegated just over a month ago, followed recent wins over Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal with first-half goals from Victor Moses (two), Shaun Maloney and Franco Di Santo.
Wigan was still last in the standings on March 17 after just one win in 14 Premier League matches but kept up its passing, attacking game to become one of the division's better teams.
Wigan is three points ahead of the three-team relegation zone. Bolton remained in 18th place despite rallying for a 2-2 draw at Sunderland through Kevin Davies' second goal of the game, while Aston Villa is still in danger after a 0-0 draw at West Bromwich Albion.
At the other end of the standings, Robin van Persie scored his 28th league goal of the season to earn third-place Arsenal a 1-1 draw at Stoke.
Nikica Jelavic scored twice as Everton scored four for the third straight league game to beat Fulham 4-0, with Toffees goalkeeper Tim Howard tipping a shot from fellow American Clint Dempsey over the crossbar. Luis Suarez had a hat trick, getting his third on a lob from midfield, as Liverpool beat Norwich 3-0. Last-place Wolverhampton, which has already been demoted, fought back from 4-1 down to draw 4-4 at Swansea.
Queens Park Rangers plays Sunday at Chelsea. Blackburn, the other side in the relegation zone, is at Tottenham also on Sunday.
Southampton was promoted Saturday after a 4-0 win over Coventry sealed its return to England's topflight after a seven-year absence.
The Saints scored twice in each half to clinch a second straight promotion as runner-up to Reading in the second-tier League Championship.
"We've put a lot of hard work in and a lot of hours and we've achieved something special this season," Southampton manager Nigel Adkins said. "Everyone works so hard at this football club and it's great to see the smiles and delight on the supporters' faces."
West Ham finished third despite a 2-1 win over Hull and will play Cardiff in the promotion playoff semifinals, with Blackpool meeting Birmingham.
---
BERLIN (AP) - Bundesliga top scorer Klaas-Jan Huntelaar had two goals to help Schalke secure automatic qualification for next season's Champions League with a 4-0 win over Hertha Berlin.
Huntelaar scored in the 32nd minute before increasing his season total to 27 goals in the 88th. Lewis Holtby and Raul Gonzalez - playing in his last game at home for Schalke - also scored.
Freiburg's 4-1 win over Cologne saved Hertha from relegation for now. Hertha is two points behind Cologne in the relegation playoff place heading to the final weekend's games.
Augsburg and Hamburg are safe after 0-0 draws at Borussia Moenchengladbach and at home against Mainz.
Borussia Dortmund - which clinched the title last weekend - celebrated with a 5-2 win at already-relegated Kaiserslautern, extending its record unbeaten run to 27 games. Second-place Bayern Munich defeated Stuttgart 2-0, allowing Bayer Leverkusen to move into fifth with a 1-0 win over Hannover.
Wolfsburg boosted its Europa League hopes with a 3-1 win over Werder Bremen, and Nuremberg won 3-2 at Hoffenheim.
---
PARIS (AP) - Lyon won its first trophy in four years, beating third-tier Quevilly 1-0 at Saint-Denis for its fifth French Cup championship.
Lisandro Lopez scored in the 28th minute.
---
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) - Levante moved into fourth place - Spain's last Champions League spot - with a a 3-1 win over Granada, and Racing Santander was relegated with a 3-0 loss at Real Sociedad.
Valdo Lopes set up second-half goals by Arouna Kone and Xavi Torres before scored on a late header for Levante.
Malaga can move back ahead of Levante with a win over third-place Valencia on Sunday, when Real Madrid would clinch its record 32nd league title if it beats Sevilla and second-place Barcelona loses at Rayo Vallecano.
---
ROME (AP) - Fabio Simplicio scored in the 88th minute to give Roma a 2-2 tie at home against Napoli, damaging the visitors' hopes of returning to the Champions League.
Marquinho put Roma ahead in the 41st, but Napoli took a 2-1 lead on goals by Juan Zuniga in the 49th and Edinson Cavani in the 67th.
Napoli and third-place Lazio each have 55 points with three games left, but Lazio holds the tiebreaker. Only the top three teams qualify for the Champions League.
Catania tied 1-1 at Palermo in a Sicilian derby, and Cagliari and Chievo Verona played to a 0-0 draw.
Juventus, which holds a three-point lead over defending champion AC Milan, is at Novara on Sunday while the Rossoneri visit Siena.
---
GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) - Motherwell beat St. Johnstone 5-1 in the Scottish Premier League to clinch a place in European competition for next season and boost its chances of reaching the qualifying rounds of the Champions League.
Michael Higdon and Nicky Law put Motherwell in control with two goals in three first-half minutes before Jamie Murphy scored the best goal with a 52nd-minute volley. St. Johnstone replied with a penalty kick but substitute Henrik Ojamaa made two late goals to help Motherwell go five points ahead in third place.
Champion Celtic hosts second-place Rangers on Sunday.
---
ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Olympiakos won its 25th Greek Cup and first since 2009, beating Atromitos 2-1 in overtime at Olympic Stadium on substitute David Fuster's header in the 119th minute. Olympiakos won its 39th Greek league title this month and completed its first double since 2009.
Rafik Djebbour put Olympiakos ahead in the 29th and Walter Inglesias tied it in the 76th.
? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Torres gets Chelsea hat trick
Roundup: Fernando Torres got his first hat trick in more than 21/2 years on Sunday to lead Chelsea to a 6-1 English Premier League win over Queens Park Rangers.
English FA talks to Hodgson about coach's job
LONDON (AP) -The English Football Association approached West Bromwich Albion manager Roy Hodgson on Sunday about filling the national coach's job, almost three months after Fabio Capello's resignation.
We know you've got questions, and if you're brave enough to ask the world for answers, here's the outlet to do so. This week's Ask Engadget inquiry is coming to us from Chris, who simply has too much money to blow on a super-laptop. If you're looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.
"I sold my business and I want to replace my laptop [HP Pavilion G6] with a completely unreasonably expensive top of the line machine. I want it to do everything I do (gaming, coding, web design) all at the same time. Apart from the fact I need two hard drive bays, I'm completely open-minded, so what should I be buying? Thank you!"
Quell your gnashing teeth, members of the 99%, he's done well for himself and now he needs our help. We were able to trick out an Alienware M18x to full capacity for $6,700 -- with an over-clocked 4GHz Intel Core i7, 32GB of RAM, two 2GB NVIDIA GTX 675m in SLI mode and 1.2TB of SSD RAID storage. That's the benchmark, folks: who out there can find something more powerful?
A 100-gigbit highway for sciencePublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Linda Vu lvu@lbl.gov 510-495-2402 DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Researchers take a 'test drive' on ANI testbed
Climate researchers are producing some of the fastest growing datasets in science. Five years ago, the amount of information generated for the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report was 35 terabytesequivalent to the amount of text in 35 million books, occupying a bookshelf 248 miles (399 km) long. By 2014, when the next IPCC report is published, experts predict that 2 petabytes of data will have been generated for itthat's a 580 percent increase in data production.
Because thousands of researchers around the world contribute to the generation and analysis of this data, a reliable, high-speed network is needed to transport the torrent of information. Fortunately, the Department of Energy's (DOE) ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) has laid the foundation for such a networknot just for climate research, but for all data-intensive science.
"There is a data revolution occurring in science," says Greg Bell, acting director of ESnet, which is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Over the last decade, the amount of scientific data transferred over our network has increased at a rate of about 72 percent per year, and we see that trend potentially accelerating."
In an effort to spur U.S. scientific competitiveness, as well as accelerate development and widespread deployment of 100-gigabit technology, the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI) was created with $62 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and implemented by ESnet. ANI was established to build a 100 Gbps national prototype network and a wide-area network testbed.
To cost-effectively deploy ANI, ESnet partnered with Internet2a consortium that provides high-performance network connections to universities across Americawhich also received a stimulus grant from the Department of Commerce's Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program.
Researchers Take a "Test Drive" on ANI
So far more than 25 groups have taken advantage of ESnet's wide-area testbed, which is open to researchers from government agencies and private industry to test new, potentially disruptive technologies without interfering with production science network traffic. The testbed currently connects three unclassified DOE supercomputing facilities: the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Oakland, Calif., the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Argonne, Ill., and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
"No other networking organization has a 100-gigabit network testbed that is available to researchers in this way," says Brian Tierney, who heads ESnet's Advanced Networking Technologies Group. "Our 100G testbed has been about 80 percent booked since it became available in January, which just goes to show that there are a lot of researchers hungry for a resource like this."
Climate 100
To ensure that researchers will use future 100-gigabit effectively, another ARRA-funded project called Climate 100 brought together middleware and network engineers to develop tools and techniques for moving unprecedentedly massive amounts of climate data.
"Increasing network bandwidth is an important step toward tackling ever-growing scientific datasets, but it is not sufficient by itself; next-generation high-bandwidth networks need to be evaluated carefully from the applications perspective as well," says Mehmet Balman of Berkeley Lab's Scientific Data Management group, a member of the Climate 100 collaboration.
According to Balman, climate simulation data consists of a mix of relatively small and large files with irregular file size distribution in each dataset. This requires advanced middleware tools to move data efficiently on long-distance high-bandwidth networks.
"The ANI testbed essentially allowed us to 'test drive' on a 100-gigabit network to determine what kind of middleware tools we needed to build to transport climate data," says Balman. "Once the development was done, we used the testbed to optimize and tune."
At the 2011 Supercomputing Conference in Seattle, Wash., the Climate 100 team used their tool and the ANI testbed to transport 35 terabytes of climate data from NERSC's data storage to compute nodes at ALCF and OLCF.
"It took us approximately 30 minutes to move 35 terabytes of climate data over a wide-area 100 Gbps network. This is a great accomplishment," says Balman. "On a 10 Gbps network, it would have taken five hours to move this much data across the country."
Space Exploration
In 2024, the most powerful radio telescope ever constructed will go online. Comprising 3,000 satellite dishes spread over 250 acres, this instrument will generate more data in a single day than the entire Internet carries today. Optical fibers will connect each of these 15-meter-wide (50 ft.) satellite dishes to a central high performance computing system, which will combine all of the signals to create a detailed "big picture."
"Given the immense sensor payload, optical fiber interconnects are critical both at the central site and from remote stations to a single correlation facility," says William Ivancic, a senior research engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. "Future radio astronomy networks need to incorporate next generation network technologies like 100 Gbps long-range Ethernet links, or better, into their designs."
In anticipation of these future networks, Ivancic and his colleagues are utilizing a popular high-speed transfer protocol, called Saratoga, to effectively carry data over 100-gigabit long-range Ethernet links. But because it was cost-prohibitive to upgrade their local network with 100-gigabit hardware, the team could not determine how their software would perform in a real-world scenariothat is, until they got access to the ANI testbed.
"Quite frankly, we would not be doing these speed tests without the ANI testbed," says David Stewart, an engineer at Verizon Federal Systems and Ivancic's colleague. "We are currently in the development and debugging phase, and have several implementations of our code. With the ANI testbed, we were able to optimize and scale our basic PERL implementation to far higher speeds than our NASA testbed."
End-to-End Delivery
Meanwhile, Dantong Yu, who leads the Computer Science Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, used the ANI testbed to design an ultra-high-speed, end-to-end file transfer protocol tool to move science data at 100 gigabits per second across a national network.
"A network like ANI may be able to move data at 100 Gbps, but at each end of that connection there is a host server that either uploads or downloads data from the network," says Yu. "While the host servers may be capable of feeding data into the network and downloading it at 100 Gbps, the current software running on these systems is a bottleneck."
According to Yu, the bottlenecks are primarily caused by the number of times the current software forces the computer to make copies of the data before uploading it to the network.
"Initially I was testing this protocol at a very local lab level. In this scenario transfers happen in a split-second, which is far from reality," says Yu. "ANI allowed me to see how long it really takes to move data across the country, from East-to West Coast, with my software, which in turn helped me optimize the code."
The Next Steps
Within the next few months, the official ANI project will be coming to an end, but the community will continue to benefit for decades to come from its investments. The 100-gigabit prototype network will be converted into ESnet's fifth-generation production infrastructure, one that will be scale to 44 times its current. ESnet will also seek new sources of funding for the 100-gigabit testbed to ensure that it will be available to network researchers on a sustained basis.
"Since its inception, ESnet has delivered the advanced capabilities required by DOE science. Many of these capabilities are cost-prohibitive, or simply unavailable, on the commercial market," says Bell. "Because our network is optimized for the needs of DOE science, we're always looking for efficient ways to manage our large science flows. ESnet's new 100-Gigabit network will allow us to do that more flexibly and morecost-effectively than ever."
###
About ESnet
ESnet provides the high-bandwidth, reliable connections that link scientists at national laboratories, universities and other research institutions, enabling them to work together on some of the world's most important scientific challenges including energy, climate science, and the origins of the universe. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, and managed and operated by the ESnet team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), ESnet provides scientists with access to unique DOE research facilities and computing resources, as well as to scientific collaborators including research and education networks around the world.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
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.
A 100-gigbit highway for sciencePublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Linda Vu lvu@lbl.gov 510-495-2402 DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Researchers take a 'test drive' on ANI testbed
Climate researchers are producing some of the fastest growing datasets in science. Five years ago, the amount of information generated for the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report was 35 terabytesequivalent to the amount of text in 35 million books, occupying a bookshelf 248 miles (399 km) long. By 2014, when the next IPCC report is published, experts predict that 2 petabytes of data will have been generated for itthat's a 580 percent increase in data production.
Because thousands of researchers around the world contribute to the generation and analysis of this data, a reliable, high-speed network is needed to transport the torrent of information. Fortunately, the Department of Energy's (DOE) ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) has laid the foundation for such a networknot just for climate research, but for all data-intensive science.
"There is a data revolution occurring in science," says Greg Bell, acting director of ESnet, which is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Over the last decade, the amount of scientific data transferred over our network has increased at a rate of about 72 percent per year, and we see that trend potentially accelerating."
In an effort to spur U.S. scientific competitiveness, as well as accelerate development and widespread deployment of 100-gigabit technology, the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI) was created with $62 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and implemented by ESnet. ANI was established to build a 100 Gbps national prototype network and a wide-area network testbed.
To cost-effectively deploy ANI, ESnet partnered with Internet2a consortium that provides high-performance network connections to universities across Americawhich also received a stimulus grant from the Department of Commerce's Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program.
Researchers Take a "Test Drive" on ANI
So far more than 25 groups have taken advantage of ESnet's wide-area testbed, which is open to researchers from government agencies and private industry to test new, potentially disruptive technologies without interfering with production science network traffic. The testbed currently connects three unclassified DOE supercomputing facilities: the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Oakland, Calif., the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Argonne, Ill., and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
"No other networking organization has a 100-gigabit network testbed that is available to researchers in this way," says Brian Tierney, who heads ESnet's Advanced Networking Technologies Group. "Our 100G testbed has been about 80 percent booked since it became available in January, which just goes to show that there are a lot of researchers hungry for a resource like this."
Climate 100
To ensure that researchers will use future 100-gigabit effectively, another ARRA-funded project called Climate 100 brought together middleware and network engineers to develop tools and techniques for moving unprecedentedly massive amounts of climate data.
"Increasing network bandwidth is an important step toward tackling ever-growing scientific datasets, but it is not sufficient by itself; next-generation high-bandwidth networks need to be evaluated carefully from the applications perspective as well," says Mehmet Balman of Berkeley Lab's Scientific Data Management group, a member of the Climate 100 collaboration.
According to Balman, climate simulation data consists of a mix of relatively small and large files with irregular file size distribution in each dataset. This requires advanced middleware tools to move data efficiently on long-distance high-bandwidth networks.
"The ANI testbed essentially allowed us to 'test drive' on a 100-gigabit network to determine what kind of middleware tools we needed to build to transport climate data," says Balman. "Once the development was done, we used the testbed to optimize and tune."
At the 2011 Supercomputing Conference in Seattle, Wash., the Climate 100 team used their tool and the ANI testbed to transport 35 terabytes of climate data from NERSC's data storage to compute nodes at ALCF and OLCF.
"It took us approximately 30 minutes to move 35 terabytes of climate data over a wide-area 100 Gbps network. This is a great accomplishment," says Balman. "On a 10 Gbps network, it would have taken five hours to move this much data across the country."
Space Exploration
In 2024, the most powerful radio telescope ever constructed will go online. Comprising 3,000 satellite dishes spread over 250 acres, this instrument will generate more data in a single day than the entire Internet carries today. Optical fibers will connect each of these 15-meter-wide (50 ft.) satellite dishes to a central high performance computing system, which will combine all of the signals to create a detailed "big picture."
"Given the immense sensor payload, optical fiber interconnects are critical both at the central site and from remote stations to a single correlation facility," says William Ivancic, a senior research engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. "Future radio astronomy networks need to incorporate next generation network technologies like 100 Gbps long-range Ethernet links, or better, into their designs."
In anticipation of these future networks, Ivancic and his colleagues are utilizing a popular high-speed transfer protocol, called Saratoga, to effectively carry data over 100-gigabit long-range Ethernet links. But because it was cost-prohibitive to upgrade their local network with 100-gigabit hardware, the team could not determine how their software would perform in a real-world scenariothat is, until they got access to the ANI testbed.
"Quite frankly, we would not be doing these speed tests without the ANI testbed," says David Stewart, an engineer at Verizon Federal Systems and Ivancic's colleague. "We are currently in the development and debugging phase, and have several implementations of our code. With the ANI testbed, we were able to optimize and scale our basic PERL implementation to far higher speeds than our NASA testbed."
End-to-End Delivery
Meanwhile, Dantong Yu, who leads the Computer Science Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, used the ANI testbed to design an ultra-high-speed, end-to-end file transfer protocol tool to move science data at 100 gigabits per second across a national network.
"A network like ANI may be able to move data at 100 Gbps, but at each end of that connection there is a host server that either uploads or downloads data from the network," says Yu. "While the host servers may be capable of feeding data into the network and downloading it at 100 Gbps, the current software running on these systems is a bottleneck."
According to Yu, the bottlenecks are primarily caused by the number of times the current software forces the computer to make copies of the data before uploading it to the network.
"Initially I was testing this protocol at a very local lab level. In this scenario transfers happen in a split-second, which is far from reality," says Yu. "ANI allowed me to see how long it really takes to move data across the country, from East-to West Coast, with my software, which in turn helped me optimize the code."
The Next Steps
Within the next few months, the official ANI project will be coming to an end, but the community will continue to benefit for decades to come from its investments. The 100-gigabit prototype network will be converted into ESnet's fifth-generation production infrastructure, one that will be scale to 44 times its current. ESnet will also seek new sources of funding for the 100-gigabit testbed to ensure that it will be available to network researchers on a sustained basis.
"Since its inception, ESnet has delivered the advanced capabilities required by DOE science. Many of these capabilities are cost-prohibitive, or simply unavailable, on the commercial market," says Bell. "Because our network is optimized for the needs of DOE science, we're always looking for efficient ways to manage our large science flows. ESnet's new 100-Gigabit network will allow us to do that more flexibly and morecost-effectively than ever."
###
About ESnet
ESnet provides the high-bandwidth, reliable connections that link scientists at national laboratories, universities and other research institutions, enabling them to work together on some of the world's most important scientific challenges including energy, climate science, and the origins of the universe. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, and managed and operated by the ESnet team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), ESnet provides scientists with access to unique DOE research facilities and computing resources, as well as to scientific collaborators including research and education networks around the world.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
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.
Prenatal exposure to insecticide chlorpyrifos linked to alterations in brain structure and cognitionPublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Timothy S. Paul tp2111@columbia.edu 212-305-2676 Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
While chlorpyrifos is no longer registered for household use in the US, it continues to be widely used around the world, as well as on many food and agricultural products throughout the US
Even low to moderate levels of exposure to the insecticide chlorpyrifos during pregnancy may lead to long-term, potentially irreversible changes in the brain structure of the child, according to a new brain imaging study by researchers from the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Duke University Medical Center, Emory University, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The changes in brain structure are consistent with cognitive deficits found in children exposed to this chemical.
Results of the study appear online in the April 30 PNAS.
The new study is the first to use MRI to identify the structural evidence for these cognitive deficits in humans, confirming earlier findings in animals. Changes were visible across the surface of the brain, with abnormal enlargement of some areas and thinning in others. The disturbances in brain structure are consistent with the IQ deficits previously reported in the children with high exposure levels of chlorpyrifos, or CPF, suggesting a link between prenatal exposure to CPF and deficits in IQ and working memory at age 7.
The study also reports evidence that CPF may eliminate or reverse the male-female differences that are ordinarily present in the brain. Further study is needed to determine the consequences of these changes before and after puberty, the researchers say.
Notably, the brain abnormalities appeared to occur at exposure levels below the current EPA threshold for toxicity, which is based on exposures high enough to inhibit the action of the key neurological enzyme cholinesterase. The present findings suggest that the mechanism underlying structural changes in the brain may involve other pathways.
According to the lead author, Virginia Rauh, ScD, Professor at the Mailman School of Public Health and Deputy Director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health, "By measuring a biomarker of CPF exposure during pregnancy, and following the children prospectively from birth into middle childhood, the present study provides evidence that the prenatal period is a vulnerable time for the developing child, and that toxic exposure during this critical period can have far-reaching effects on brain development and behavioral functioning."
"By combining brain imaging and community-based research, we now have much stronger evidence linking exposure to chlorpyrifos with neurodevelopmental problems," adds senior author Bradley S. Peterson, MD, Chief of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Director of MRI Research in the Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center.
In the current study, the researchers used MRI to evaluate the brains of 40 New York City children, ages 5 to 11, whose mothers were enrolled prenatally in a larger cohort study. Researchers compared 20 children with high exposures to CPF with 20 children with lower exposures; all exposures occurred prior to the EPA ban on household use of the chemical in 2001. They found brain anomalies were associated with the higher exposure.
Since the 2001 ban, a drop in residential exposure levels of CPF has been documented by Robin Whyatt, DrPH, a co-author on the present study and Professor of Clinical Environmental Health Sciences and Co-Deputy Director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at the Mailman School. However, the chemical continues to be present in the environment through its widespread use in agriculture (food and feed crops), wood treatments, and public spaces such as golf courses, some parks, and highway medians. People near these sources can be exposed by inhaling the chemical, which drifts on the wind. Low-level exposure can also occur by eating fruits and vegetables that have been sprayed. Although the chemical is degraded rapidly by water and sunlight outdoors, it has been detected by the Columbia researchers in many urban residences years after the ban went into effect.
###
The study was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Grants 5P01ES09600, P50ES015905, and 5R01ES08977, as well as pilot funding through ES009089; EPA STAR Grants RD834509, RD832141, and R827027; National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH068318 and K02-74677; and the John and Wendy Neu Family Foundation.
Additional co-authors included Frederica P. Perera and Megan K. Horton, Mailman School; Ravi Bansal, Xuejun Hao, and Jun Liu, Columbia University Medical Center; Dana Boyd Barr, Emory University; and Theodore A. Slotkin, Duke University.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
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.
Prenatal exposure to insecticide chlorpyrifos linked to alterations in brain structure and cognitionPublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Timothy S. Paul tp2111@columbia.edu 212-305-2676 Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
While chlorpyrifos is no longer registered for household use in the US, it continues to be widely used around the world, as well as on many food and agricultural products throughout the US
Even low to moderate levels of exposure to the insecticide chlorpyrifos during pregnancy may lead to long-term, potentially irreversible changes in the brain structure of the child, according to a new brain imaging study by researchers from the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Duke University Medical Center, Emory University, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The changes in brain structure are consistent with cognitive deficits found in children exposed to this chemical.
Results of the study appear online in the April 30 PNAS.
The new study is the first to use MRI to identify the structural evidence for these cognitive deficits in humans, confirming earlier findings in animals. Changes were visible across the surface of the brain, with abnormal enlargement of some areas and thinning in others. The disturbances in brain structure are consistent with the IQ deficits previously reported in the children with high exposure levels of chlorpyrifos, or CPF, suggesting a link between prenatal exposure to CPF and deficits in IQ and working memory at age 7.
The study also reports evidence that CPF may eliminate or reverse the male-female differences that are ordinarily present in the brain. Further study is needed to determine the consequences of these changes before and after puberty, the researchers say.
Notably, the brain abnormalities appeared to occur at exposure levels below the current EPA threshold for toxicity, which is based on exposures high enough to inhibit the action of the key neurological enzyme cholinesterase. The present findings suggest that the mechanism underlying structural changes in the brain may involve other pathways.
According to the lead author, Virginia Rauh, ScD, Professor at the Mailman School of Public Health and Deputy Director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health, "By measuring a biomarker of CPF exposure during pregnancy, and following the children prospectively from birth into middle childhood, the present study provides evidence that the prenatal period is a vulnerable time for the developing child, and that toxic exposure during this critical period can have far-reaching effects on brain development and behavioral functioning."
"By combining brain imaging and community-based research, we now have much stronger evidence linking exposure to chlorpyrifos with neurodevelopmental problems," adds senior author Bradley S. Peterson, MD, Chief of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Director of MRI Research in the Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center.
In the current study, the researchers used MRI to evaluate the brains of 40 New York City children, ages 5 to 11, whose mothers were enrolled prenatally in a larger cohort study. Researchers compared 20 children with high exposures to CPF with 20 children with lower exposures; all exposures occurred prior to the EPA ban on household use of the chemical in 2001. They found brain anomalies were associated with the higher exposure.
Since the 2001 ban, a drop in residential exposure levels of CPF has been documented by Robin Whyatt, DrPH, a co-author on the present study and Professor of Clinical Environmental Health Sciences and Co-Deputy Director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at the Mailman School. However, the chemical continues to be present in the environment through its widespread use in agriculture (food and feed crops), wood treatments, and public spaces such as golf courses, some parks, and highway medians. People near these sources can be exposed by inhaling the chemical, which drifts on the wind. Low-level exposure can also occur by eating fruits and vegetables that have been sprayed. Although the chemical is degraded rapidly by water and sunlight outdoors, it has been detected by the Columbia researchers in many urban residences years after the ban went into effect.
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The study was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Grants 5P01ES09600, P50ES015905, and 5R01ES08977, as well as pilot funding through ES009089; EPA STAR Grants RD834509, RD832141, and R827027; National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH068318 and K02-74677; and the John and Wendy Neu Family Foundation.
Additional co-authors included Frederica P. Perera and Megan K. Horton, Mailman School; Ravi Bansal, Xuejun Hao, and Jun Liu, Columbia University Medical Center; Dana Boyd Barr, Emory University; and Theodore A. Slotkin, Duke University.
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Alienware is crossing the Ivy Bridge, less than a week since announcing its refreshed family of gaming laptops. Intel's latest hardware will now lend itself to all three models, the M14x (from $1100) M17x (starting at $1500) and M18x (from $2000), replacing the existing Sandy Bridge architecture in the models we saw earlier this month. Starting with the smallest, the M14x will be powered by an Intel Core i7-3820QM (up to 2.7GHz), while larger models will get their processors nudged up to the 2.9 GHz Core i7-3920XM (M17x) and 2.9GHz Core i7-3920XM (M18x). Alienware reckons these new additions will lend a 15 percent increase to the rigs' performance (depending on use), augmenting improvements seen with new PCI Express 3.0 support, mSATA cached storage and the latest generation of NVIDIA graphics. Dell's now ready to take your order -- alongside a mind-boggling number of customization options -- at the source link below.
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Moving companies are everywhere you look. Simply typing in those words into a search engine will get you millions of results and millions of options to choose from. These companies will not have existed if people used them every day and if they were not beneficial. This is why if you need help with moving, you can turn to moving companies and have the peace of mind that they will make the process of moving from one house to another or from one office to another as simple as possible.
Moving companies help you not only take belongings from location one to location two, but many of these companies will also help you package your belongings in boxes or will wrap items that are too big to pack. Fragile items will be handled with care and will usually be transported separately and at the end of a moving day to ensure they are not damaged.
The Benefit of Furniture Removals Companies
Moving is too stressful and too time consuming to worry about every single detail. You will have to leave some of the work to someone who is not only capable, but also reliable. When you get a furniture removals company to help you move, you will automatically have much less on your plate and you can be left to focus n more important things than moving furniture from one place to another. Another benefit of getting a furniture removals company is that they will provide you with the necessary equipment and transport for moving everything.
You will be able to focus on the administrative side of moving, which includes changing your mailing address at various companies, getting all your documents, like passports and birth certificates,together and making sure nothing gets lost during the move. Furniture removals will become much easier once you decide to get help. Make sure this help is reliable.
Have You Ever Needed Relocation Services?
If you have ever had to move house, you know about relocation services. Whether your move was long distance or just around the corner, the work involved for everyone is still the same. So this usually becomes a good time to sort through your junk, and keep only the good stuff, right? Or only the things you will be needing again.
Moving house, even just from an apartment to a bigger place, relocation services can make life so much easier. You just have to make sure that you really get rid of the things you have not needed in years, and let them take care of the rest.
Especially if you relocate to another country. The movers can pack for you, but they can also pack better than you can. They use the right materials for protection of the fragile things, and then you stand a better chance of those not going into the bin upon arrival.
BEIJING - Local and overseas activists said Saturday, April 28, that the U.S. and Chinese governments were locked in delicate diplomatic negotiations over the fate of Chen Guangcheng, the blind lawyer who fled from house arrest last Sunday and is thought to be in Beijing under U.S. protection.
Those negotiations could be complicated by what activists in Beijing say is the dissident's desire not to seek political asylum in the United States but to remain in China to continue his campaign for democratic rights and the rule of law.
"He believes that China is in a period of intensive changes now, and it's not far away from the final fundamental change," said Hu Jia, a Beijing activist who said he met with Chen on Wednesday. "He told me he didn't want to ask for political asylum in the U.S. Instead, he wants to 'stay in this land and continue to fight.' "
U.S. foreign policy experts said that would put the United States in an unenviable diplomatic position on the eve of annual meetings on strategic and economic matters. They noted that although American diplomats have repeatedly urged senior Chinese officials to end abusive treatment of Chen, the Obama administration would not want to be drawn into negotiating the terms of Chen's living conditions in China, which Chinese officials would likely see as interference in their internal affairs.
At the same time, experts said, U.S. diplomats do not want to see Chen leave the embassy if he is going to be detained
again, an outcome that would set off an uproar in the international human rights community. As it is, several of the people who say they helped Chen during his escape have been detained, activists said Saturday.
"This is a pivotal moment for U.S. human rights diplomacy," Bob Fu, president of the Texas-based Christian human rights group ChinaAid, said in a statement. "Because of Chen's wide popularity, the Obama administration must stand firmly with him or risk losing credibility as a defender of freedom and the rule of law. If there is a reason why Chinese dissidents revere the U.S., it is for a moment like this."
Frank Jannuzi, head of Amnesty International's Washington office, said that the past mistreatment of Chen suggests that he should not be handed back without a Chinese government commitment to respect his rights. He added: "Whether he wants to leave the country should be a choice he makes, not one forced upon him by the U.S. government or Chinese government."
"This is one of those issues where there literally are no good options," said Kenneth Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former senior director for Asia on the National Security Council. "There is just no good way to manage this. I don't envy the people in State and the White House who have to figure out how to walk the line on this one."
With Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner due in Beijing on Tuesday for talks, Lieberthal said that "the best that can happen here is we negotiate an early departure from China" for Chen.
Yet some China experts say that Chen poses an unusual test for the country's central government. Unlike many other political dissidents, Chen has not been convicted of a crime other than obstructing traffic, and he already completed his lengthy sentence for that. Since then, he has been held by what he described in a video this week as a group of local police and thugs who have beaten him and his wife and prevented visitors from seeing him.
"There is a really, really outside chance that the central Chinese authorities would take this opportunity to ride in on a white horse and clean this up and say they were defending the rule of law. But it is unlikely," Lieberthal said. "At the end of the day, he is going to have to leave China or leave the embassy and see what he faces."
Chen's escape and the possible involvement of the U.S. Embassy in sheltering him come at an already challenging time for China's Communist rulers, who are grappling with the gravest political crisis here since the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. The firing of and investigation into once-rising star Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing party secretary, and the arrest of Bo's wife on suspicion of murder have exposed high-level corruption and leadership rifts just months ahead of what was supposed to be a carefully choreographed handover of power this fall.
The Chen case could push human rights issues to the forefront of this week's talks, which are supposed to focus on issues such as trade, currency appreciation, Iran sanctions and North Korea.
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Public release date: 30-Apr-2012
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