Human-chimp genetic differences: New insights into why humans are more susceptible to cancer and other diseases

ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2012) ? Ninety-six percent of a chimpanzee's genome is the same as a human's. It's the other 4 percent, and the vast differences, that pique the interest of Georgia Tech's Soojin Yi. For instance, why do humans have a high risk of cancer, even though chimps rarely develop the disease?

In research published in September's American Journal of Human Genetics, Yi looked at brain samples of each species. She found that differences in certain DNA modifications, called methylation, may contribute to phenotypic changes. The results also hint that DNA methylation plays an important role for some disease-related phenotypes in humans, including cancer and autism.

"Our study indicates that certain human diseases may have evolutionary epigenetic origins," says Yi, a faculty member in the School of Biology. "Such findings, in the long term, may help to develop better therapeutic targets or means for some human diseases. "

DNA methylation modifies gene expression but doesn't change a cell's genetic information. To understand how it differs between the two species, Yi and her research team generated genome-wide methylation maps of the prefrontal cortex of multiple humans and chimps. They found hundreds of genes that exhibit significantly lower levels of methylation in the human brain than in the chimpanzee brain. Most of them were promoters involved with protein binding and cellular metabolic processes.

"This list of genes includes disproportionately high numbers of those related to diseases," said Yi. "They are linked to autism, neural-tube defects and alcohol and other chemical dependencies. This suggests that methylation differences between the species might have significant functional consequences. They also might be linked to the evolution of our vulnerability to certain diseases, including cancer."

Yi, graduate student Jia Zeng and postdoctoral researcher Brendan Hunt worked with a team of researchers from Emory University and UCLA. The Yerkes National Primate Research Center provided the animal samples used in the study. It was also funded by the Georgia Tech Fund for Innovation in Research and Education (GT-FIRE) and National Science Foundation grants (MCB-0950896 and BCS-0751481). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigators and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.

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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. Jia Zeng, Genevieve Konopka, Brendan?G. Hunt, Todd?M. Preuss, Dan Geschwind, Soojin?V. Yi. Divergent Whole-Genome Methylation Maps of Human and Chimpanzee Brains Reveal Epigenetic Basis of Human Regulatory Evolution. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2012.07.024

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/BBbwr8gVKtQ/120823142735.htm

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Seven Superstars Sheamus wants to fight

If there?s one thing that World Heavyweight Champion Sheamus has made abundantly clear during his dominant reign as titleholder, it?s that The Great White loves to fight.

And, knowing Sheamus' affinity for fisticuffs, WWE.com caught up with the champion himself following his SummerSlam victory over Alberto Del Rio to talk about what other Superstars he?d love to fight in defense of his illustrious title. The Celtic Warrior gave a pretty good indication of his willingness to take on all comers, saying, "As champion, you want to face everybody. You want to know that you?re better than everybody."

Sheamus then proceeded to rattle off seven names. And, while each Superstar he mentioned is different in style and approach, one thing remained constant ? each of the seven would-be challengers are tough-as-nails competitors who would keep most champions up at night, just knowing that they?re out there with an eye on the title.

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Source: http://www.wwe.com/shows/smackdown/seven-superstars-sheamus-wants-to-fight

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India faces Twitter backlash over Internet clampdown

5 hrs.

Devidutta Tripathy and Satarupa Bhattacharjya , Reuters

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The Indian government faced an angry backlash from Twitter users on Thursday after ordering Internet service providers to block about 20 accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security.?

The backlash came as New Delhi turned up the heat on Twitter, threatening "appropriate and suitable action" if it failed to remove the accounts as soon as possible. Several Indian newspapers said this could mean a total ban on access to Twitter in India but government officials would not confirm to Reuters that such a drastic step was being considered.?

There was no immediate response from Twitter, which does not have an office in India. There are about 16 million Twitter users in the South Asian country.?

Also read:?India cracks down on Internet after communal violence

The government has found itself on the defensive this week over what critics see as a clumsy clampdown on social media websites ? including Google, YouTube and Facebook ? that has raised questions about freedom of information in the world's largest democracy.

"Dear GOI (Government of India), Keep your Hands Off My Internet. Else face protest" tweeted one user, @Old_Monk60.

India blocked access to more than 300 Web pages after threatening mobile phone text messages and doctored website images fuelled rumors that Muslims, a large minority in the predominantly Hindu country, were planning revenge attacks for violence in the northeastern state of Assam, where 80 people have been killed and 300,000 have been displaced since July.?

Fearing for their lives, tens of thousands of migrants fled Mumbai, Bangalore and other cities last week. The exodus highlighted underlying tensions in a country with a history of ethnic and religious violence.

Also read:?India: Text message threats, rumors came from Pakistan?

According to documents obtained by Reuters, the government has targeted Indian journalists, Britain's Daily Telegraph, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera television in its clampdown on Internet postings it says could inflame communal tensions.?

The directives to Internet service providers listed dozens of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter pages. A random sampling of the YouTube postings revealed genuine news footage spliced together with fear-mongering propaganda.?

Indian journalists targeted?
The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.?

"Every company, whether it's an entertainment company, or a construction company, or a social media company, has to operate within the laws of the given country," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the Ministry of Communications.?

Twitter has been instructed to remove 28 pages containing "objectionable content", an interior ministry official said.?

"If they do not remove the pages, the Indian government will take appropriate and suitable action," he added.?

The government has ordered Internet service providers to block the Twitter accounts of veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta and television anchor Shiv Aroor. Some appeared to have begun complying with the order on Thursday as Twitter users reported difficulties in accessing their pages.?

"It is a political decision, because of my criticism of the government," said Gupta, who was an official in the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.?

The government's actions triggered a storm of criticism from Twitter users, with the hashtags #Emergency2012 and #GOIBlocks among the top trending topics on Twitter in India on Thursday. Some compared the situation with the state of emergency imposed by the government in 1975, when some journalists were jailed.?

The Centre for Internet and Society, which analyzed the 300 banning orders, found that they contained "numerous mistakes and inconsistencies". Some of the banned websites belonged to people trying to debunk the rumors, for example, it said.?

"This isn't about political censorship. This is about the government not knowing how to do online regulation properly," said CIS program manager Pranesh Prakash.?

India's parliament last year passed a law that obliges Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticized at the time by rights groups and social media companies.?

Additional reporting by Ross Colvin, Annie Banerji and David Lalmalsawma.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/india-faces-twitter-backlash-over-internet-clampdown-960989

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From my World to Yours

Kiaara was banished from another planet with a spell that makes one "disappear." However, Kiaara did not merely fade from existence; instead, she was sent to Earth.

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Rewired visual input to sound-processing part of the brain leads to compromised hearing

ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2012) ? Scientists at Georgia State University have found that the ability to hear is lessened when, as a result of injury, a region of the brain responsible for processing sounds receives both visual and auditory inputs.

Yu-Ting Mao, a former graduate student under Sarah L. Pallas, professor of neuroscience, explored how the brain's ability to change, or neuroplasticity, affected the brain's ability to process sounds when both visual and auditory information is sent to the auditory thalamus.

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The auditory thalamus is the region of the brain responsible for carrying sound information to the auditory cortex, where sound is processed in detail.

When a person or animal loses input from one of the senses, such as hearing, the region of the brain that processes that information does not become inactive, but instead gets rewired with input from other sensory systems.

In the case of this study, early brain injury resulted in visual inputs into the auditory thalamus, which altered how the auditory cortex processes sounds.

The cortical "map" for discriminating different sound frequencies was significantly disrupted, she explained.

"One of the possible reasons the sound frequency map is so disrupted is that visual responsive neurons are sprinkled here and there, and we also have a lot of single neurons that respond to both light and sound," Pallas said. "So those strange neurons sprinkled there probably keeps the map from forming properly."

Mao also discovered reduced sensitivity and slower responses of neurons in the auditory cortex to sound.

Finally, the neurons in the auditory cortex were less sharply tuned to different frequencies of sound.

"Generally, individual neurons will be pretty sensitive to one sound frequency that we call their 'best frequency,'" Pallas said. "We found that they would respond to a broader range of frequencies after the rewiring with visual inputs."

While Pallas' research seeks to create a basic understanding of brain development, knowledge gained from her lab's studies may help to give persons who are deaf, blind, or have suffered brain injuries ways to keep visual and auditory functions from being compromised.

"Usually we think of plasticity as a good thing, but in this case, it's a bad thing," she said. "We would like to limit the plasticity so that we can keep the function that's supposed to be there."

The research was supported by National Science Foundation grant IBN-0451018, National Institutes of Health Grant EY/MH 12696, the Georgia State University Research Foundation, and a scholarship from the GSU Brains and Behavior program.

The study is "Compromise of Auditory Cortical Tuning and Topography after Cross-Modal Invasion by Visual Inputs," Mao, Y. and Pallas, S. L., Journal of Neuroscience, 32(30):10338-10351.

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Journal Reference:

1. Y.-T. Mao, S. L. Pallas. Compromise of Auditory Cortical Tuning and Topography after Cross-Modal Invasion by Visual Inputs. Journal of Neuroscience, 2012; 32 (30): 10338 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6524-11.2012

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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_health/~3/nO1o8CyYA88/120822125220.htm

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Art from Office Supplies? The ?migr? Experience of Peter Meller ...

Imagine a European scholar with the immense cultural knowledge of an Erich Auerbach or an Erwin Panofsky; someone also on the run from the twin threats of Nazism and Communism. Now plunk him down in late-1960s flower-power Santa Barbara. How would he react? What would he write? What if he couldn't write? Then take this hypothetical scenario a step further, and grant our mythical ?migr? knowledge not only of the high art of Europe, but also of the key objects and languages of antiquity. Against his apparent writer's block, pit his extreme facility with drawing, his active, ironic imagination, and an abundance of nervous energy. He may not write his great book, but he will leave behind evidence of his erudition in a more unusual form--a vast archive of brilliant and original graphic art. Cardboard boxes and filing cabinets stuffed with drawings, prints, and even paper airplanes prove conclusively that once upon a time, someone possessed the confident draftsmanship of a William Steig or a Saul Steinberg, the directness of a Mad Men-style advertising genius, and the range of reference and sensibility of an Aby Warburg or a Meyer Shapiro all at once.

The strange truth is that just such a mythical figure once existed: Peter Meller. Although the art of UCSB professor emeritus Peter Meller is only now becoming available to the public, Meller actually does represent just such a fascinating and nearly lost chapter in the epic story of the European intelligentsia who moved to Southern California to escape Nazism and World War II. Through a pair of exhibitions organized by the UCSB Art, Design and Architecture Museum currently on view in Santa Barbara, and a publication, The Zodiac of Wit: Peter Meller and the Graphic Imagination by Robert Williams, Peter Meller's secret career as an artist is finally reaching an audience.

Unlike its elusive creator, who never sought recognition beyond a small circle of intimate friends and family for his prodigious output, Peter Meller's graphic art is extraordinarily accessible. He deemed his charming (and scary) origami "harpy" paper airplanes to be suitable for children's play, (and much to the dismay of their parents) so did the children who received them.

Despite the fact that Meller was a professor of art history who possessed a commanding knowledge of the Renaissance and of classical culture, he chose standard office supplies as his media, in the process elevating such lowly items as rubber erasers and liquid Wite-Out to the ironic status of contemporary stand-ins for the techniques and materials of the Italian Renaissance, and even for the illustrated vases of Greek and Roman antiquity. His favorite method of printmaking was to make multiple exposures of a drawing on a standard office-type photocopier. It is Meller's gift for working with these decidedly "minor" or non-standard emergent technologies that gives his brilliant and learned images their unique place in the history of art. Through this darkly comical and highly self-aware vision, Peter Meller, whose work was virtually unknown until after his death at age 85 in 2008, may still earn his place alongside such of his contemporaries as Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch as one of our region's greatest ?migr? ironists.

As a professor of art history at UCSB from 1968 to 1994, Meller earned the respect and gratitude of his students and colleagues for his deep knowledge of European culture, particularly of the Renaissance and classical antiquity, and for the dry wit of his extraordinarily well-informed lectures and seminars. Yet, on the level of publication, that great academic standard of productivity, Meller's output remained relatively sparse. Certain manuscripts, including a projected translation of Lucretius' philosophical poem De Rerum Natura, were lost during his years of exile in Italy, and while at UCSB, although he published several well-received articles, the big book that would make his reputation alongside Gombrich and Panofsky never materialized. His son-in-law, John Moore, who has now taken over managing the large archive of Meller's work, remembers him as someone who exemplified his contemporary and fellow-?migr? Theodor Adorno's concept of a "damaged life." "No one knew he was an artist on this scale," said Moore, referring to the many thousands of individual works and hand-carved ink stamps in his possession, adding that Meller's "involvement [with creating graphics] was not exactly casual."

The two shows now on view, one at the UCSB Art, Design, & Architecture Museum through September 16, and the other, also organized by the AD&A but located in downtown Santa Barbara at the Jane Deering Gallery on East Canon Perdido (that one will be up through September 29) demonstrate the range and ingenuity of a major artist, albeit one who celebrated the joys of working in supposedly minor genres. Meller's gift manifested in many ways--he made drawings, prints, sculptures, ink stamps, printed silk scarves, and even refrigerator magnets (!), but he never lost sight of his beloved antiquities, which were a common source of imagery and inspiration. For example, in the remarkable photocopy image of Aristotle and Phyllis, Meller recalls a common story about how Aristotle's uxorious nature led his overbearing wife to ride on his back.

Elsewhere Meller brought forth mythological figures and loaded them with ironic sympathy for the limitations imposed by human vulnerabilities. His Mary Magdalene uses a mirror to admire her recently acquired halo, and his numerous cupids, satyrs, and fauns rarely meet with the kind of reception they expect. His wise Minerva, her lips pursed as she learns something from an intelligent pig, is unforgettable, even as the classical reference that served as the inspiration for the image remains obscure. The fate of his reputation as an artist remains to be seen, but for now it is clear that the art of Peter Meller has much to offer audiences today, and the UCSB AD&A Museum is to be congratulated for making his work widely available for the first time.

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Top Image: "Aristotle and Phyllis." Photocopy. | Peter Meller.

Source: http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/santa-barbara/peter-meller-a-double-life-in-art.html

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Special operators to anti-Obama groups: zip it

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A group of retired special operations and CIA officers who claim President Barack Obama revealed secret missions and turned the killing of Osama bin Laden into a campaign centerpiece are coming under criticism from some of their own.

Some special operations officers say the activist veterans are breaking a sacred military creed: respect for the commander in chief.

"This is an unprofessional, shameful action on the part of the operators that appear in the video, period," U.S. Army Special Forces Maj. Fernando Lujan wrote on his Facebook page, to a chorus of approval from colleagues.

A Green Beret who returned last year from Afghanistan, Lujan says that attaching the title of special operator with any political campaign is "in violation of everything we've been taught, and the opposite of what we should be doing, which is being quiet professionals."

On its website, the group called Special Ops OPSEC, short for operational security, says that Obama has taken too much personal credit for the Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden and hasn't recognized sufficiently the SEALs who actually carried out the raid. The group also claims that the Obama White House released classified details of the raid for the making of a Hollywood film, a claim that has not been proven.

"This is not to criticize the president personally, and the president himself," the group's founder, former Navy SEAL Scott Taylor, said in an interview Tuesday. "But at the same time, we feel he is ultimately responsible for cracking down on these leaks."

Known officially as a Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund, the group is listed as a social welfare organization, which allows it to receive unlimited financial contributions without disclosing the donors. Its identified members have Republican ties.

The group is one of a handful of groups of special operations veterans formed in the past few months that criticize the president.

Special Ops OPSEC's 20-minute video selectively edits the speech Obama delivered after the bin Laden raid, deleting the times he thanked the intelligence and military teams for the operation, and ending on reverberating repletion of his phrase "I directed."

Taylor says the president's use of the word "I'' overshadowed his few lines thanking the team.

"Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden," Navy SEAL Ben Smith says in the video. "The work that the American military has done killed bin Laden."

The head of U.S. Special Operations Command sees it differently.

"Make no mistake about it, it was the president of the United States that shouldered the burden for this operation, that made the hard decisions," the leader of the raid, Adm. Bill McRaven, said at this summer's Aspen Security Forum.

"I don't take these folks too seriously," President Barack Obama told the newspaper The Virginian-Pilot on Monday. "One of their members is a birther who denies I was born here, despite evidence to the contrary." Special Ops OPSEC member ret. Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, who appears in the group's film, has publicly questioned Obama's birth in Hawaii.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., compared the group's campaign to the "Swift Boat" attacks that questioned his service during the Vietnam War. Though later discredited, the claims were partially blamed for unseating his 2004 presidential campaign.

"I honor and appreciate the service of my fellow veterans, but a false attack is a false attack ? no matter who's making it," Kerry said in a statement Monday.

Transcripts of interviews obtained by Judicial Watch showed minimal information was revealed to the Hollywood filmmakers, but Taylor claims that battlefield protocols were changed as a result of briefings to both the filmmakers and the media.

A similar group, Special Operations for America, openly advocates "for the election of Mitt Romney and like-minded candidates." Registered as a super PAC, the group is run by former Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke, a Montana state senator who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in the Republican primary.

"They have a good point. I wish there was better OPSEC (operational security), and fewer leaks," said retired Navy SEAL Capt. Rick Woolard, who commanded several SEAL units. "But I would prefer that SEALs and other special operators would sit down and shut the hell up."

___

Online:

http://www.opsecteam.org/index.html

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-08-21-Campaign-Special%20Operations/id-72d40abadf4a4323a4f21eae2ad97c04

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