Staphylococcus aureus: Why it just gets up your nose

Dec. 27, 2012 ? A collaboration between researchers at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology and the Department of Microbiology at Trinity College Dublin has identified a mechanism by which the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) colonizes our nasal passages. The study, published December 28 in the open access journal PLOS Pathogens, shows for the first time that a protein located on the bacterial surface called clumping factor B (ClfB) has high affinity for the skin protein loricrin.

S. aureus is a major human pathogen, with the potential to cause severe invasive diseases. It is a major cause for concern in hospitals and healthcare facilities, where many infections are caused by strains resistant to commonly used antibiotics [MRSA]. Interestingly, S. aureus persistently colonizes about 20% of the human population by binding to skin-like cells within the nasal cavity. Being colonized predisposes an individual towards becoming infected so it is vital that we understand the mechanisms involved.

ClfB was previously shown to promote S. aureus colonization in a human nasal colonization volunteer study. This paper now identifies the mechanism by which ClfB facilitates S. aureus nasal colonization. Purified ClfB bound loricrin with high affinity and this interaction was shown to be crucial for successful colonization of the nose in a mouse model. A knockout mouse lacking loricrin in its skin cells allowed fewer bacterial cells to colonize its nasal passages than a normal mouse. When S. aureus strains that lacked ClfB were used nasal colonization could not be achieved at all. Finally it was shown that soluble loricrin could reduce binding of S. aureus to human nasal skin cells and that nasal administration of loricrin reduced S. aureus colonization of mice.

Rachel McLoughlin, the study's corresponding author and Lecturer at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin concludes, "Loricrin is a major determinant of S. aureus nasal colonization." This discovery therefore opens new avenues for developing therapeutic strategies to reduce the burden of nasal carriage and consequently infections with this bacterium. This is particularly important given the difficulties associated with treating MRSA infections.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Public Library of Science.

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Journal Reference:

1. Mulcahy ME, Geoghegan JA, Monk IR, O'Keeffe KM, Walsh EJ, et al. Nasal Colonisation by Staphylococcus aureus Depends upon Clumping Factor B Binding to the Squamous Epithelial Cell Envelope Protein Loricrin. PLOS Pathog, 2012 DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1003092

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

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

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/QOrR-A2v5mo/121227173334.htm

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SKorea's president-elect faces NKorea uncertainty

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? Park Geun-hye promises to reach out to North Korea with more humanitarian aid and deeper engagement after she moves into South Korea's presidential Blue House on Feb. 25. Pyongyang, however, may be in no mood to talk anytime soon.

Park's declarations ahead of Wednesday's election that she will soften five years of hard-line policy rang true with voters, even as they rejected her opponent's calls for a more aggressive pursuit of reconciliation with the North.

A skeptical North Korea may quickly test the sincerity of Park's offer to engage ? possibly even before she takes office. She is both a leading member of the conservative ruling party and the daughter of the late anti-communist dictator Park Chung-hee, and Pyongyang has repeatedly called her dialogue offers "tricks."

Outgoing President Lee Myung-bak's tough approach on North Korea ? including his demand that engagement be accompanied by nuclear disarmament progress ? has been deemed a failure by many South Koreans. During his five years in office, North Korea has conducted nuclear and rocket tests ? including a rocket launch last week ? and it was blamed for two incidents that left 50 South Koreans dead in 2010.

But reaching out to North Korea's authoritarian government also has failed to pay off. Before Lee, landmark summits under a decade of liberal governments resulted in lofty statements and photo ops in Pyongyang between then-leader Kim Jong Il and South Korean presidents, but the North continued to develop its nuclear weapons, which it sees as necessary defense and leverage against Washington and Seoul.

Analysts said Park's vague promises of aid and engagement are not likely to be enough to push Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions, which Washington and Seoul have demanded for true reconciliation to begin. To reverse the antipathy North Korea has so far shown her, Park may need to go further than either her deeply conservative supporters and political allies or a cautious Obama administration will want.

"North Korea is good at applying pressure during South Korean transitions" after presidential elections, said Yoo Ho-yeol, a professor at Korea University in South Korea. "North Korea will do something to try to test, and tame, Park."

Even the last liberal president, Roh Moo-hyun, a champion of no-strings-attached aid to Pyongyang, faced a North Korean short-range missile launch on the eve of his 2003 inauguration.

North Korea put its first satellite into space with last week's rocket launch, which the U.N. and others called a cover for a test of banned ballistic missile technology.

Despite the launch, Park says humanitarian aid, including food, medicine and daily goods meant for infants, the sick and other vulnerable people, will flow. She says none of the aid will be anything that North Korea's military could use. She's open to conditional talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The aid won't be as much as North Korea will want, to be sure, and it won't be as much as her liberal challenger in Wednesday's election, Moon Jae-in, would have sent. Park's conditions on aid and talks also could doom talks before they begin.

Pursuing engagement with North Korea "really would have to be her top priority for her to be a game-changing kind of leader on the issue," said John Delury, an analyst at Seoul's Yonsei University. He added that Park is more likely to take a passive, moderate approach.

"In the inter-Korean context, there's not a big difference between a passive approach and a hostile approach," Delury said, "because if you don't take the initiative with North Korea, they'll take the initiative" in the form of provocations meant to raise their profile.

North Korea was not a particularly pressing issue for South Korean voters, who were more worried about their economic futures and a host of social issues. But it is of deep interest to Washington, Beijing and Tokyo, which had been holding off on pursuing their North Korea policies until South Korean voters chose their new leader.

The next Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is a hawk on North Korea matters who has supported tighter sanctions because of the rocket launch.

The U.S. had attempted to warm relations with North Korea with an aid-for-nuclear-freeze deal reached with Pyongyang in February, but that collapsed in April when the North conducted a failed rocket launch.

Washington could use a new thaw on the Korean Peninsula as a cover to pursue more nuclear disarmament talks, analysts say, but the Obama administration will also likely want a carefully coordinated approach with Seoul toward Pyongyang.

Park's North Korea policy aims to hold talks meant to build trust and resolve key issues, like the nuclear problem and other security challenges. Humanitarian assistance to the North won't be tied to ongoing political circumstances, though her camp hasn't settled details, including the amount.

Park also plans to restart joint economic initiatives that were put on hold during the Lee administration as progress occurs on the nuclear issue and after reviewing the projects with lawmakers.

Park's statement that she's willing to talk with Kim Jong Un "practically means she's willing to give more money to North Korea," which is Pyongyang's typical demand for dialogue, said Andrei Lankov, a scholar on the North at Seoul's Kookmin University.

But the heart of the matter ? North Korea's nuclear program ? might be off limits, no matter how deeply the next Blue House decides to engage.

"North Korea isn't going to surrender its nukes. They're going to keep them indefinitely," Lankov said. "No amount of bribing or blackmail or begging is going to change it. They are a de facto nuclear power, period, and they are going to stay that way."

___

AP writer Hyung-jin Kim contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/skoreas-president-elect-faces-nkorea-uncertainty-101950602.html

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2012 - the year of the mobile | Verulam Web Design

There can be little doubt that this has been the year that mobile internet usage has stopped being something that only the teenagers do and become mainstream. Numerous statistics on mobile internet usage from early 2012? suggest that around 30% of all internet usage is from a mobile phone*. It is widely expected that most people will use the internet via a mobile device in 2013.

New smartphones have clearly been designed with this in mind. Several android devices, like the Galaxy, have screens almost as large as the new iPad Mini. I have recently got an iPhone 5 and initially wondered why the handset has a longer, thinner design. Apart from allowing an extra row of apps on the screen, the extra screen length actually makes browsing much easier in landscape mode. Yes you have to scroll, but the larger screen length allows even my older eyes to read text more easily. The higher resolution screen ? 1136 x 640 pixels (up from 960 by 640 pixels for the iPhone 4), adds to the user experience and clarity of web browsing. I now often browse sites on my iPhone first, especially if I?m clicking on website links within emails, which I invariably access first from a mobile device, if I?m not in front of my laptop when they come in.

So what does it all? mean? Quite simply design for mobile and tablet devices is something we now consider as important as designing for browsers on traditional laptop/desktop computers. We liase with clients to define a mobile strategy, whether the client requires a specific mobile website (that is different to the main website), a ?responsive? design ( same website content, but often styled differently, or with some sections not shown) or whether they require a mobile app in addition or instead.

2013 will see further huge changes in how people access web content and how businesses approach their online strategy. It is an exciting time to be involved in the digital domain.

* 2012 Mobile Internet Usage article ? http://www.gpmd.co.uk/blog/2012-mobile-internet-statistics/#PageComments_holder

Source: http://verulamwebdesign.co.uk/2012-the-year-of-the-mobile

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More funerals in Newtown as gun control debate swirls

NEWTOWN, Connecticut (Reuters) - Six more victims of the Newtown school shooting will be honored at funerals and remembrances on Wednesday, including the school principal who was killed with 20 of her students and five other staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The massacre of so many children, most of them just 6 or 7 years old, has shocked the United States and the world, renewing debate over gun control in a nation where the right to bear arms is protected by the Constitution and fiercely defended by many.

Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old shooter, carried hundreds of rounds of ammunition in extra clips and shot his victims repeatedly, one of them 11 times. He also shot and killed his mother before driving to the school, and then killed himself.

The family of Principal Dawn Hochsprung invited mourners to visit at a local funeral home on Wednesday afternoon, though the burial was due to be private at an undisclosed time.

Another of the teachers, Victoria Soto, was among those to be buried at a funeral on Wednesday.

Funerals were also scheduled for 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, 7-year-old Daniel Barden and 6-year-old Caroline Previdi, while the family of 7-year-old Chase Kowalski invited mourners to a public visitation and prayer vigil.

The surviving children from Sandy Hook Elementary faced another day at home as school authorities and parents made plans for an eventual return to a different location - the unused Chalk Hill School in nearby Monroe, where a sign across the street read, "Welcome Sandy Hook Elementary!"

At Sandy Hook itself, well wishers and mourners had left tributes such as candles, flowers and stuffed animals. A heavy rain that fell most of Tuesday had soaked many of them and extinguished some of the candles, leaving a smell of burned wax in the air as police continued their investigations inside.

They have said the investigation could take months and have revealed nothing yet about Lanza's motive.

Well wishers came to the town from as far afield as Iowa. Beth Howard said she had driven 17 hours from Eldon, Iowa, in an effort to do whatever she could to help. She joined a group of people from New Jersey who decided to bake pies for residents of the town to show their solidarity and support.

"It has already made the trip worthwhile," said Howard, describing the smiles she got from local residents.

The first of many funerals was held on Monday and two children were laid to rest on Tuesday. Most of the town's schools reopened on Tuesday, but there was no immediate word on when the Sandy Hook students would be back in the classroom.

The impact of the shooting was felt in the business world on Tuesday when private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP said it would sell its investment in the company that makes the AR-15-type Bushmaster rifle that was used by Lanza.

The powerful gun industry lobby, the National Rifle Association, broke its silence on Tuesday for the first time since the shootings, saying it was "shocked, saddened and heartbroken" and was "prepared to offer meaningful contributions" to prevent such massacres.

The NRA uses political pressure against individual lawmakers and others to press for loosening constraints on gun sales and ownership across the United States while promoting hunting and gun sports.

The group, which said it had not commented until now out of respect for the families and to allow time for mourning and an investigation, planned a news conference on Friday.

The massacre prompted some Republican lawmakers to open the door to a national debate about gun control, a small sign of easing in Washington's entrenched reluctance to seriously consider new federal restrictions.

(Additional reporting by Greg Roumeliotis, Edith Honan, Dan Burns, Patricia Zengerle, David Ingram, Chris Francescani; Writing by Claudia Parsons; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/schools-reopen-newtown-washington-talks-gun-control-002828916.html

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Three Books for the Cooks on Your Gift List | Food and More with ...

Need a last-minute gift for a home cook in your life? A new cookbook is never unwelcome. Whether it ends up in a kitchen shelf, on a den coffee table or in the bedside nightstand stack, an intriguing cookbook always finds a place in the home of someone who thinks about good food.

Here are three of the year?s best new cookbooks, tailored to different kinds of cooks:

For the classicist: ?The Essential James Beard: 450 Recipes that Shaped the Tradition of American Cooking? by James Beard, edited by Rick Rodgers with John Ferrone (St. Martin?s Press, $35).

Compiled from 12 of the big guy?s classic volumes, this book pretty well taps into the collective unconscious of midcentury America in the way ?Mad Men? never will. Flip through the pages, and you see those recipes your mother cursed her way through for one of those dinner parties when you had to eat early and go upstairs to watch TV while daddy?s boss came over to the house. We?re talking chicken with 40 cloves of garlic as well as sole poached in vermouth with cream and butter. We?re talking souffl?: cheese or crab souffl? to start the meal, frozen lemon souffl? to end it. We?re talking fancy in that vaguely but not quite totally European way that dinner party food never is anymore.

But James Beard was also a champion of real, everyday American food as well. He has recipes for potatoes Anna as well as fully loaded baked potatoes, done just right. And twice-baked potato skins, which were apparently a Beard favorite long before fern bars got a hold of them. This book makes you hungry for a kind of food you rarely see exalted anymore.

For the Southerner: ?Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking? by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart (Gibbs Smith, $45).

Here?s the season?s one must-have for anyone with a Southern cooking library. These two longtime friends and collaborators show more than a little nerve evoking the name of Julia Child?s masterwork, ?Mastering the Art of French Cooking.? But they deliver the goods with this comprehensive and deeply researched 7-700720-page volume. The text does a terrific job of explaining the historical underpinnings of Southern cooking methods and the development of the Southern palate. (It offers a great rejoinder to those annoying Yankees who mock the Southern sweet tooth but ignore the uniquely Southern use of vinegar and tingly spice, or fail to notice the brilliant textures of Southern fare.)

Like Child, the authors make the decision to divide the sections by food group rather than region, so the chapter on vegetables and sides is followed by one on eggs, and then we?re on to fish and shellfish. This organization has some obvious advantages for the cook planning dinner, but that means you don?t get an upfront discussion of regional differences between, say, the Appalachians and the Louisiana coast. It?s there, along with sidebars on the different kinds of seasoning pork, from fatback to streak o? lean. You just have to look for the information as you page through. There?s much pleasure in the reading here.

For the Health-minded Cook: ?The New Way to Cook Light: Fresh Food & Bold Flavors for Today?s Home Cook? by Scott Mowbray and Ann Pittman (Oxmoor House: $34.95).

Of all the books that have stacked up on my desk, this is the one that has gotten the most attention from coworkers who?ve asked to take it for a spin. Written by the editors of ?Cooking Light? magazine, this colorful, easy-reading book bursts with ideas. From quick weeknight meals like spiced, honey-brushed chicken thighs to dinner-party ideas like chilled fresh corn soup with king crab and chives, it dishes up a lot of vivid food for your consideration. Small sidebars on technique (such as instructions for cubing a butternut squash) accompany recipes when warranted. Kudos go the editors for paying attention to the international pantry widely available in any good supermarket these days. Soba noodle salad, spicy Thai chicken and coconut soup, and bok choy with soy-ginger drizzle are all good recipes that any home cook can shop for and prepare with ease. Folks who need a concise, well-written recipe and like to see a calorie and nutrition count will love this book.

- by John Kessler for the Food & More Blog

Source: http://blogs.ajc.com/food-and-more/2012/12/18/three-books-for-the-cooks-on-your-gift-list/?cxntfid=blogs_food_and_more

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Scientists construct first detailed map of how the brain organizes everything we see

Dec. 19, 2012 ? Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.

The result -- achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips -- is what researchers call "a continuous semantic space."

Some relationships between categories make sense (humans and animals share the same "semantic neighborhood") while others (hallways and buckets) are less obvious. The researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout.

"Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organized. Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed look ever at the visual function and organization of a single human brain," said Alexander Huth, a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study published Dec. 19 in the journal Neuron.

A clearer understanding of how the brain organizes visual input can help with the medical diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. These findings may also be used to create brain-machine interfaces, particularly for facial and other image recognition systems. Among other things, they could improve a grocery store self-checkout system's ability to recognize different kinds of merchandise.

"Our discovery suggests that brain scans could soon be used to label an image that someone is seeing, and may also help teach computers how to better recognize images," said Huth.

It has long been thought that each category of object or action humans see -- people, animals, vehicles, household appliances and movements -- is represented in a separate region of the visual cortex. In this latest study, UC Berkeley researchers found that these categories are actually represented in highly organized, overlapping maps that cover as much as 20 percent of the brain, including the somatosensory and frontal cortices.

To conduct the experiment, the brain activity of five researchers was recorded via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as they each watched two hours of movie clips. The brain scans simultaneously measured blood flow in thousands of locations across the brain.

Researchers then used regularized linear regression analysis, which finds correlations in data, to build a model showing how each of the roughly 30,000 locations in the cortex responded to each of the 1,700 categories of objects and actions seen in the movie clips. Next, they used principal components analysis, a statistical method that can summarize large data sets, to find the "semantic space" that was common to all the study subjects.

The results are presented in multicolored, multidimensional maps showing the more than 1,700 visual categories and their relationships to one another. Categories that activate the same brain areas have similar colors. For example, humans are green, animals are yellow, vehicles are pink and violet and buildings are blue.

"Using the semantic space as a visualization tool, we immediately saw that categories are represented in these incredibly intricate maps that cover much more of the brain than we expected," Huth said.

Other co-authors of the study are UC Berkeley neuroscientists Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu and Jack Gallant.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Berkeley.

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

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Journal Reference:

1. Alexander?G. Huth, Shinji Nishimoto, An?T. Vu, Jack?L. Gallant. A Continuous Semantic Space Describes the Representation of Thousands of Object and Action Categories across the Human Brain. Neuron, 2012; 76 (6): 1210 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.10.014

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

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

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/IxW3LE7iLv4/121219142257.htm

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The Most Exciting Audio Advancements of the Year

Changes in a speaker's audio quality might not be quite as noticeable as a big jump in a screen's pixel density, but the sound of a movie can have a much bigger effect on how you experience it. In short, good audio ain't just for audiophiles. Here's the sound technology that changed the aural universe this year. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/yw8OKNQFVYk/

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