U.S. economy adds 146K jobs, rate falls to 7.7 pct.

The U.S. economy added 146,000 jobs in November and the unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent, the lowest since December 2008. The government said Superstorm Sandy had only a minimal effect on the figures.

The Labor Department's report Friday offered a mixed picture of the economy.

Hiring remained steady during the storm and in the face of looming tax increases. But the government said employers added 49,000 fewer jobs in October and September than it initially estimated.

And the unemployment rate fell to a four-year low in November from 7.9 percent in October mostly because more people stopped looking for work and weren't counted as unemployed.

The report "is something of a mixed bag but, on balance, it's a positive," said Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics.

Sandy's effect on the figures was much smaller many analysts had predicted. The government noted that as long as employees worked at least one day during a pay period ? two weeks for most people ? its survey would have counted them as employed.

Still, there were signs that the storm disrupted economic activity. Construction employment dropped 20,000. And weather prevented 369,000 people from getting to work ? the most for any month in nearly two years. These workers were still counted as employed.

Investors appeared pleased with the report. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 56 points in the first hour of trading.

Since July, the economy has added an average of 158,000 jobs a month. That's a modest pickup from 146,000 average in the first six months of the year.

The job growth suggests that most employers aren't yet delaying hiring because of the "fiscal cliff." That's the combination of sharp tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect next year unless the White House and Congress reach a budget deal before then.

There is "no obvious impact from the looming fiscal cliff yet," Ashworth added, "but it could still have a greater effect on December's figures."

In November, retailers added 53,000 positions. Temporary help companies added 18,000 and education and health care also gained 18,000.

Auto manufacturers added nearly 10,000 jobs.

Still, overall manufacturing jobs fell 7,000. That was pushed down by a loss of 12,000 jobs in food manufacturing that likely reflects the layoff of workers at Hostess.

Sandy forced restaurants, retailers and other businesses to close in late October and early November in 24 states, particularly in the Northeast.

Ashworth noted that hiring by companies was actually better in October than the government first thought. The overall job figures were revised lower that month because governments cut about 35,000 more jobs than first estimated.

The U.S. grew at a solid 2.7 percent annual rate in the July-September quarter. But many economists say growth is slowing to a 1.5 percent rate in the October-December quarter, largely because of the storm and threat of the fiscal cliff. That's not enough growth to lower the unemployment rate.

The storm held back consumer spending and income, which drive economic growth. Consumer spending declined in October and work interruptions caused by Sandy reduced wages and salaries that month by about $18 billion at an annual rate, the government said.

Still, many say economic growth could accelerate next year if the fiscal cliff is avoided. The economy is also expected to get a boost from efforts to rebuild in the Northeast after the storm.

Source: http://www.pjstar.com/business/x1353216321/U-S-economy-adds-146K-jobs-rate-falls-to-7-7-pct

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Eco-Friendly Home-Improvements: Britain to Show the World How ...

People often over-spend on energy bills for years without realising how much money they could be saving from making a few staple improvements to their homes. The UK government has acknowledged this and decided to take a major move in the right direction in helping people stop their houses from draining their bank accounts and energy resources.

This flagship initiative is really set to grip Britain in a house-renovating, environment-saving, bill-reducing frenzy. Its name: The Green Deal. A shocking amount of carbon emissions are constantly being released into the atmosphere, which is extremely harmful to the environment. Some seemingly small changes to properties can make all the difference in reducing these emissions. For example, one study has shown that over a 20 year period carbon emissions could be reduced by a huge 22 tonnes from one standard semi-detached household having A-rated double glazing installed.

The Green Deal proposes to make all of these home improvements financially viable for home owners across the UK. Four ways to make your home instantly more energy efficient are:

• Having a new, efficient boiler installed
• Having double glazing installed
• Having your house insulated or re-insulated
• Having solar panels installed

In the UK, the Green Deal will cover all of these measures, according to each individual property?s needs. An accredited Green Deal assessor will first visit the property and survey it to see where its inefficiencies lay, and then Green Deal installers will carry out the necessary procedures. The Green Deal is unique because it makes all of this financially viable. The average cost of having a boiler replaced is around ?2,300; an upfront cost that not many can afford. Green Deal financing means that the cost of these improvements will be added onto property owners? energy bills. But? this will never cost any more than the money they save one energy bills, leaving them no worse off. They could even stand to make some significant savings.

The Green Deal is the perfect chance for people in Britain to embrace all of the changes their properties need, without breaking the bank. As the energy wasting taking place across the globe continues to threaten the environment, it seems the UK could be setting a shining example for the direction things should be taken in when it comes to getting those carbon emissions reduced.

The Green Deal Hub?provides information on the UK government?s new home improvement scheme, which aims to make properties more environmentally friendly and reduce property owners? bill-spending.

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Source: http://greenbuildingelements.com/2012/12/06/eco-friendly-home-improvements-britain-to-show-the-world-how-its-done/

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Microchoreography: Synthetic molecule used to guide cellular 'dance'

ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2012) ? Johns Hopkins researchers have used a small synthetic molecule to stimulate cells to move and change shape, bypassing the cells' usual way of sensing and responding to their environment. The experiment pioneers a new tool for studying cell movement, a phenomenon involved in everything from development to immunity to the spread of cancer.

"We were able to use synthetic molecules small enough to slip inside the cell and activate a chemical reaction controlling cell movement, bypassing most of the steps that usually lead up to this reaction," says Andre Levchenko, Ph.D., a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Institute for Cell Engineering, whose lab collaborated with that of Takanari Inoue, also from the school of medicine, on the study.

"As a result, we came up with a new model to describe one of the more fundamental and important cellular processes and a better understanding of cell movements critical for cancer progression and immune response." A report on the study was published Nov. 26 on the website of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Like bacteria wiggling through a drop of pond water, many types of human cells move too, including fibroblasts, which patrol the skin and make repairs; immune cells, which rush to the site of infections; and nerve cells, which must travel great distances during development, Levchenko says. Similarly, in order to metastasize or spread, a tumor's cells must break off and migrate to a new part of the body.

Because of its role in cancer and immunity, these cellular dances are a hot area of research at present, Levchenko says. However, it is difficult to study the natural process for stimulating movement, in which signaling proteins bind to receptor molecules on the surface of the cell, setting off a complex chain reaction that ultimately propels the cell in a certain direction. In addition to the problem of complexity of the molecular interaction network, another difficulty is that cells decide which way to move by comparing the signal concentration on one side of the cell to the concentration on the other. "Stimulating a cell differently on one side than on the other side is not a trivial thing to do, because cells are incredibly small -- about one-tenth the width of a human hair," Levchenko explains.

To deal with the first problem, Benjamin Lin, a member of Levchenko's team who led the study, joined forces with Inoue's research group to take advantage of a novel method relying on a small molecule able to get between the fat molecules of the cell membrane and into the cell. Once inside, it would bind to two slightly modified proteins in the network that stimulates movement; the new complex of three molecules would in turn trigger the critical protein Rac, which falls somewhere in the middle of the choreographed chain reaction that leads to movement. By analyzing which enzymes in the chain reaction were ultimately activated by the synthetic molecule and which weren't, the researchers could tell whether they were downstream or upstream of Rac in the chain.

To create a fine enough biochemical gradient of the synthetic molecule to guide a cell in a specific direction, the researchers built a silicone-based chip with tiny liquid-dispensing channels running along the surface. When they loaded the channels with a solution containing the synthetic molecule, and placed human cells on the surface, they could stimulate one side of a cell more than the other, and induce it to move. "Neither synthetic molecules nor microfluidic devices had been used before in this particular way, and the results exceeded all our expectations," says Levchenko. "The cells responded very dramatically, moving in the direction we specified, and changing their shapes."

In addition to providing researchers with powerful new tools for studying cell movement, the experiment is a step forward for the budding field of synthetic biology. "If a researcher decides to grow new tissue for transplantation, it could be useful to have a cue that enforces cell migration and assembly," Levchenko says.

Other authors on the paper are Benjamin Lin, Tasuku Ueno, Ph.D., C. Joanne Wang, Ph.D., Andrew Harwell and Takanari Inoue, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins; and William R. Holmes, Ph.D., and Leah Edelstein-Keshet, Ph.D., of the University of British Columbia.

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences and National Cancer Institute (grant numbers GM092930, GM072024, GM084332, and CA15578).

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine.

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Journal Reference:

1. B. Lin, W. R. Holmes, C. J. Wang, T. Ueno, A. Harwell, L. Edelstein-Keshet, T. Inoue, A. Levchenko. PNAS Plus: Synthetic spatially graded Rac activation drives cell polarization and movement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1210295109

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

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/wwMx9-_qcNU/121205112824.htm

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Google brings indoor Maps to Germany, says more Euro expansion to come

Not many would argue that Google's indeed quick to bring its latest and greatest software creations to many folks around the globe. More specifically, the Mountain View-based company announced today that its handy indoor Maps are now available in Germany, giving people there the ability to easily find their way around airports, shopping centers and even museums -- much like those in the UK and US have been able to do for some time now. According to Google, the indoor Maps availability in Germany solidifies its plan to "focus on our users in Europe," where the overall coverage "will be expanded and fast."

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Google (Germany)

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/qoxuh23MpNg/

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Earliest known dinosaur discovered

LONDON (Reuters) - Researchers have found what could be the earliest known dinosaur to walk the Earth lurking in the corridors of London's Natural History Museum.

A mysterious fossil specimen that has been in the museum's collection for decades has now been identified as most likely coming from a dinosaur that lived about 245 million years ago - 10 to 15 million years earlier than any previously discovered examples.

The creature was about the size of a Labrador dog and has been named Nyasasaurus parringtoni after southern Africa's Lake Nyasa, today called Lake Malawi, and Cambridge University's Rex Parrington, who collected the specimen at a site near the lake in the 1930s.

"It was a case of looking at the material with a fresh pair of eyes," Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum, who worked on the study, told Reuters. "This closes a gap in the fossil record and pushes back the existence of dinosaurs."

The London fossil was studied by researchers in the 1950s but no conclusion was reached and nothing was published, said Barrett. "It was a mystery what it was ... It just became this mythical animal."

Two features of the London fossil, together with a similar sample subsequently spotted at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, are strong evidence that the animal belongs with the dinosaurs, the researchers said.

The bone tissues in the upper arm show marks of rapid growth, common in dinosaurs, and they also have a feature known as an elongated deltopectoral crest that anchored the upper arm muscles, a feature unique to dinosaurs.

"Although we only know Nyasasaurus from fossil fragments, the anatomy of its upper arm bone and hips have features that are unique to dinosaurs, making us confident that we're dealing with an animal very close to dinosaur origin," said Barrett.

The researchers believe Nyasasaurus probably stood upright, was a meter tall at the hip, 2-3 meters long from head to tail, and weighed 20-60 kg.

When it was alive, the world's continents were joined in a vast landmass called Pangaea, and the area of Tanzania where the fossils were found would have been part of the southern Pangaea that included Africa, South America, Antarctica and Australia.

Theorists have long argued there should have been dinosaurs walking the Earth in the Middle Triassic period, which ended about 237 million years ago, but until now the evidence has been ambiguous, said Sterling Nesbitt at the University of Washington in Seattle who led the study, published in the journal Biology Letters.

"If the newly named Nyasasaurus parringtoni is not the earliest dinosaur, then it is the closest relative found so far," said Nesbitt.

"What's really neat about this specimen is that it has a lot of history. Found in the '30s, first described in the 1950s ... Now 80 years later, we're putting it all together."

The researchers plan further field work in Tanzania to find more fossils and build a better picture of the animal's anatomy.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/earliest-known-dinosaur-discovered-000536001.html

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Webcams offer a low-cost way to tune lasers for serious science

ScienceDaily (Dec. 4, 2012) ? Every photon in a laser beam marches in lockstep, at an identical wavelength that depends on what the laser is used for -- for example, infrared lasers that drive the optic fiber internet. For many applications, lasers need to be precisely tuned to those wavelengths, and the wavelength-measuring instruments can be more expensive than the lasers themselves.

Now, using a handful of inexpensive components -- including an off-the-shelf computer webcam and a small diffraction grating, a device for splitting and diffracting light into several beams -- researchers have built a diffraction spectrometer that can tune lasers with better than one part-per-million accuracy.

"The accessibility, simplicity, and cost make it feasible to provide such precision measurements for every single laser in a laboratory," says physicist and study co-author Robert E. Scholten of the University of Melbourne. Indeed, Scholten says, the instrument, which is described in the AIP's journal Review of Scientific Advances, is simple enough to be constructed in undergraduate physics labs -- "and could easily be a high-school project," he adds.

"It would provide excellent training in optics and the wave nature of light, and once constructed, the device can be used to elucidate the quantum mechanical structure of matter, for example by measuring the fine-structure splitting or even the hyperfine structure of atoms such as sodium."

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Journal Reference:

1. James D. White, Robert E. Scholten. Compact diffraction grating laser wavemeter with sub-picometer accuracy and picowatt sensitivity using a webcam imaging sensor. Review of Scientific Instruments, 2012; 83 (11): 113104 DOI: 10.1063/1.4765744

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/physics/~3/Xl8ZZKjhCTg/121204111917.htm

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Improving chemotherapy effectiveness by acting on the immune system

Public release date: 4-Dec-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Inserm press office
presse@inserm.fr
INSERM (Institut national de la sant et de la recherche mdicale)

This press release is available in French.

These results reveal how the immune system can then limit the effectiveness of some cancer chemotherapies. The researchers now intend to block the molecules responsible for negative immune system activation to increase the efficiency of chemotherapy. A clinical trial to test this hypothesis should begin very soon.

Chemotherapy is one of the most frequently used treatments to eliminate cancerous cells. These drugs kill all cells that are multiplying, or block their proliferation (for example, cells responsible for hair growth, explaining the hair loss of treated patients). In addition to their direct toxic effects, the chemotherapeutic agents also seem to act on the immune system and could make it possible for the body to trigger a direct antitumor immune response in a second phase. However, this last point is still the subject of hot debate, since some studies suggest, conversely, that chemotherapy eliminates all immune defences.

What now?

The Inserm team directed by Professor Franois Ghiringhelli (Inserm unit 866 "Lipids, nutrition and cancer") from the Georges Franois Leclerc Cancer Research Centre in Dijon observed that two chemotherapeutic agents, 5-fluorouracile and gemcitabine, used to treat colon, breast and pancreas cancers activate a protein complex "inflammasome NLRP3" within some cells in the immune system.

To be more specific, this activation leads to releasing proinflammatory cytokine (interleukin IL-1beta) through these cells. This cytokine "distorts" the immune response related to lymphocytes T and causes the production of another cytokine (cytokine IL-17), which has protumoral properties by encouraging tumour angiogenesis, i.e. vascular irrigation of tumours.

"Our results have made it possible to ascertain that the activation of inflammasome limits the effectiveness of chemotherapy. The challenge was then to see whether we could prevent the activation of inflammasome" explains Franois Ghiringhelli. The researchers then tested two different strategies:

The first was to test the two drugs on inflammasome NLRP3- or cytokine IL-17-deficient mice. In these cases, the researchers showed that antitumor activity was not only present, but it actually increased, demonstrating that these two elements (NLRP3 and IL-17) slow down the chemotherapy action.

The second strategy was to treat the mice using an IL-1beta inhibitor. Here again, the effectiveness of chemotherapy was again increased.

These results suggest that targeting the inflammasome and IL-1beta channels, combined with the use of these two chemotherapy agents, can improve the effectiveness of the latter. These tumour cells are eliminated and, in parallel, the damaging immune responses are deleted.

A therapeutic trial combining 5-fluorouracil and IL-1 beta is currently being prepared and should begin soon at the Georges Franois Leclerc Cancer Research in Dijon.

###

---

[ | 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.

Public release date: 4-Dec-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Inserm press office
presse@inserm.fr
INSERM (Institut national de la sant et de la recherche mdicale)

This press release is available in French.

These results reveal how the immune system can then limit the effectiveness of some cancer chemotherapies. The researchers now intend to block the molecules responsible for negative immune system activation to increase the efficiency of chemotherapy. A clinical trial to test this hypothesis should begin very soon.

Chemotherapy is one of the most frequently used treatments to eliminate cancerous cells. These drugs kill all cells that are multiplying, or block their proliferation (for example, cells responsible for hair growth, explaining the hair loss of treated patients). In addition to their direct toxic effects, the chemotherapeutic agents also seem to act on the immune system and could make it possible for the body to trigger a direct antitumor immune response in a second phase. However, this last point is still the subject of hot debate, since some studies suggest, conversely, that chemotherapy eliminates all immune defences.

What now?

The Inserm team directed by Professor Franois Ghiringhelli (Inserm unit 866 "Lipids, nutrition and cancer") from the Georges Franois Leclerc Cancer Research Centre in Dijon observed that two chemotherapeutic agents, 5-fluorouracile and gemcitabine, used to treat colon, breast and pancreas cancers activate a protein complex "inflammasome NLRP3" within some cells in the immune system.

To be more specific, this activation leads to releasing proinflammatory cytokine (interleukin IL-1beta) through these cells. This cytokine "distorts" the immune response related to lymphocytes T and causes the production of another cytokine (cytokine IL-17), which has protumoral properties by encouraging tumour angiogenesis, i.e. vascular irrigation of tumours.

"Our results have made it possible to ascertain that the activation of inflammasome limits the effectiveness of chemotherapy. The challenge was then to see whether we could prevent the activation of inflammasome" explains Franois Ghiringhelli. The researchers then tested two different strategies:

The first was to test the two drugs on inflammasome NLRP3- or cytokine IL-17-deficient mice. In these cases, the researchers showed that antitumor activity was not only present, but it actually increased, demonstrating that these two elements (NLRP3 and IL-17) slow down the chemotherapy action.

The second strategy was to treat the mice using an IL-1beta inhibitor. Here again, the effectiveness of chemotherapy was again increased.

These results suggest that targeting the inflammasome and IL-1beta channels, combined with the use of these two chemotherapy agents, can improve the effectiveness of the latter. These tumour cells are eliminated and, in parallel, the damaging immune responses are deleted.

A therapeutic trial combining 5-fluorouracil and IL-1 beta is currently being prepared and should begin soon at the Georges Franois Leclerc Cancer Research in Dijon.

###

---

[ | 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.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/ind-ice120412.php

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