Humpback whales form friendships that last years
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By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News |
Humpback whales form lasting bonds, the first baleen whales known to do so.
Individual female humpbacks reunite each summer to feed and swim alongside one another in the Gulf of St Lawrence, off Canada, scientists have found.
Toothed whales, such as sperm whales, associate with one another, but larger baleen whales, which filter their food, have been thought less social.
The finding raises the possibility that commercial whaling may have broken apart social groups of whales.
Friends reunited
Details of the discovery are published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
Dr Christian Ramp and colleagues of the Mingan Island Cetacean Study group based in St Lambert, Canada have been studying whales in the Gulf of St Lawrence since 1997.
Together with researchers from Germany and Sweden, the scientists are recording the movements of baleen whales including blue, fin, minke and humpback whales, adding to a set of data that stretches back 30 years.
Baleen whales, which are the largest of all whales, possess huge baleen plates in their mouths, which they use to filter out small prey such as krill and plankton from the water.
Using photographic identification techniques, the researchers can spot which individual whales appear from one year to the next.
During this study, they have found that the same humpback whales reunite each year.
Having spent the rest of the year apart migrating and breeding, individual humpbacks somehow find each other again in the open ocean each summer, spending the season feeding together.
The longest recorded friendships lasted six years, and always occurred between similar-aged females, and never between females and males.
“I was very surprised by the prolonged duration,” Dr Ramp told the BBC.
“I was expecting stable associations within one season, not beyond. I was particularly surprised by the fact that only females form these bonds, especially females of similar age.”
Underwater enigma
The discovery has puzzled the researchers who made it.
“In toothed whales, you find strong bonds in killer whales, between entire families, and sperm whales between females and juveniles. They basically stay together all their life. There are also strong associations in bottlenose dolphins,” Dr Ramp adds.
But “as far as we know, baleen whales are regarded as less social than toothed whales.”
There is some evidence that humpbacks in Alaska form stable groups to feed on herring, and female right whales are thought to be more gregarious than males.
However, until now, baleen whales have not been known to reestablish bonds between individuals from one year to the next.
Forming such friendships clearly benefited the female humpbacks, as those that had the most stable and long-lasting associations gave birth to the most calves.
Dr Ramp and his colleagues suspect that the whales form bonds to improve their feeding efficiency each year.
“Staying together for a prolonged period of time requires a constant effort. That means that they feed together, but likely also rest together. So an individual is adapting its behaviour to another one.”
How the whales find each other each summer is also an enigma.
“It’s an excellent question and I would like to know the answer,” says Dr Ramp.
“Where do they meet, and how do they recognise each other?”
He suspects the whales use sound to find and recognise other individuals.
Whaling wipe out
So far, studies on blue and fin whales suggest that these species do not form such friendships.
But the discovery that humpbacks do might have further implications.
Dr Ramp speculates that humpback whales associating with one another may have made it easier for them to be caught in the past by commercial whalers.
As yet, there is no evidence to support this. But if that did occur, it would also mean that whaling may have removed social groups of humpbacks, and their preference to form friendships with other whales.
“Maybe the social traits are re-evolving due to rebounding populations, or they are completely different to the ones before, due to changes in the environment.”
Reference Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8722000/8722626.stm
Courtesy : BBC News
Roche's Avastin helps ovarian cancer: study
(Reuters) – Long-term use of Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG’s Avastin, in combination with chemotherapy, helped women with advanced ovarian cancer live longer without their cancer getting worse, according to results from a new study.
The trial, funded by the National Cancer Institute, found that women who received Avastin and chemotherapy, followed by “maintenance” use of Avastin, had a 39 percent improvement in the likelihood of living without the cancer worsening, compared with chemotherapy alone.
Women who continued treatment with Avastin lived for an average of 14.1 months without cancer growth, compared with 10.3 months for women on chemo alone.
Patients who did not stay on Avastin did not do significantly better in the trial — which enrolled 1,837 patients — than those treated only with chemotherapy.
Avastin, which starves tumors of blood supply, is already a key weapon in the fight against colon, lung, breast and other types of cancers, but it has stumbled at key hurdles this year, failing in late-stage stomach and prostate cancer studies.
Roche is in discussions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regarding the ovarian cancer data, said Sandra Horning, global head of clinical oncology development at the company’s Genentech unit.
Avastin is the first targeted therapy to show a benefit in ovarian cancer, one of the most deadly types of the disease.
“We do need to learn more about what is the effect of using this agent on overall survival,” said Dr. Robert Burger, director of the women’s cancer center at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Women treated with Avastin had higher rates of side effects, including high blood pressure, bleeding, and gastrointestinal problems, than patients getting chemotherapy alone.
Some 230,000 women worldwide are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year and nearly 70 percent of women with advanced disease die within five years, according to Roche.
The company, which announced in February that the ovarian cancer trial had succeeded, has estimated that use of Avastin in ovarian cancer could add another 1 billion Swiss francs ($865 million) to sales.
The world’s largest maker of cancer drugs is looking to expand the reach of Avastin, which had sales of 6.2 billion francs in 2009 and could become the world’s top selling drug by 2014 with sales of some $9 billion a year.
Initial treatment with Avastin for colorectal cancer costs about $48,000, with annual costs capped at $56,000 by Roche.
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6551HP20100606?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
Nigeria cleans "poisoned" villages, treats children
Villagers drink water from a hose in a polluted river in Dareta village, in the northern state of Zamfara, June 4, 2010. Lead poisoning caused by illegal gold mining has killed 163 Nigerians, most of them children, in remote villages in the past few months, a government official said on Friday.
KADUNA Nigeria (Reuters) – Health workers have set up emergency treatment centres in northern Nigeria for scores of children suffering from lead poisoning and are racing to contain contamination which has already killed more than 160 people.
High levels of lead have contaminated water supplies in at least five communities in Zamfara state, close to where residents were illegally mining for gold. More than 350 cases have been reported since the start of this year and 111 of the dead are children, many aged under five.
The government sought to assure its 140 million residents that authorities were on top of the crisis with no new cases reported in the last seven days.
“The outbreak is now under control. There is no need for the general public to panic,” said Minister of State for Health Suleiman Bello.
“The cases are receiving treatment and environmental remediation or decontamination is ongoing in the affected communities.”
Nigeria has asked for help from international agencies including the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and New York-based anti-pollution consultancy the Blacksmith Institute.
The Dutch arm of aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which works in northern Nigeria, has brought in special drugs to treat villagers found with high levels of lead in their blood.
Dr. Nasir Sani-Gwarzo, one of the officials co-ordinating the emergency response, said villages had been screened and patients were being taken to treatment centres away from the exposure zone where they would be kept for 28 days.
“They have been able to characterize the epidemic in terms of who is affected, where is the most affected and where is the source of the problem,” Sani-Gwarzo told Reuters.
He said aid agencies, Zamfara’s local government and the federal Ministry of Health were involved in a multi-pronged effort to treat patients, isolate the contamination, clean up homes and educate the local population before heavy rains next month, which risk spreading the pollution further.
NO NEW CASES
Zamfara state government said it had released more than 240 million naira ($1.6 million) to help with the operation.
“For the last week or so, we have had no new cases. The challenge now is to treat the people,” Dr Henry Akpan, Nigeria’s chief epidemiologist, told Reuters.
The villages affected, including Dareta and Giadanbuzu, are largely made of mud-brick buildings and lie in the poor, arid Sahel region on the southern fringe of the Sahara, where many people work as miners and subsistence farmers.
Many victims died after coming into contact with tools, soil and water contaminated with large concentrations of lead.
Too much lead can damage parts of the body including the nervous and reproductive systems and the kidneys. Lead is especially harmful to young children and pregnant women.
Villagers and health officials initially thought the high rates of infant mortality were caused by malaria.
Sani-Gwarzo said health workers were training local villagers to manage the clean-up themselves and were translating educational materials into the local Hausa language to try inform people and prevent a recurrence.
“What gets me a little worried is the fact that this is linked to human behavior that has economic benefits. We need to educate the population very well to be able to modify their behavior,” he said.
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6561TQ20100607?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
Eisai's breast cancer drug extends lives: study
(Reuters) – An experimental breast cancer drug made from sea sponges added months to the lives of breast cancer patients whose cancer had come back despite several rounds of chemotherapy, doctors reported Sunday.
Eisai’s eribulin added an average of two and a half months to the lives of patients dying of breast cancer, which is a big improvement in such seriously ill cancer patients, the international team of researchers said.
The results of the Phase III trial, presented to a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, have been anticipated after Eisai was given priority review June 1 for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug.
“This is potentially practice changing,” ASCO president Dr. Douglas Blayney said in a telephone interview.
Dr. Christopher Twelves of St. James Hospital in Leeds in Britain and an international team studied 762 breast cancer patients with different types of tumor.
All had cancer that had spread and been through at least two rounds of chemotherapy. Two-thirds got two doses of eribulin while getting standard treatment, usually with one other chemotherapy drug but occasionally with just supportive care to treat pain and other symptoms.
The other third got either a third round of chemotherapy or supportive care. “Once this treatment fails, the patient often died,” Blayney said.
The patients given eribulin did considerably better, the researchers told the meeting. The eribulin patients lived a median of 13 months, compared to just under 11 months for patients who did not get eribulin.
LONGER LIVES
Most cancer trials look for what is called progression-free survival, meaning the doctors are looking to see if the tumors start growing back, or sometimes just response rate, to see if the tumors shrink at all.
This one looked to see how long the patients actually lived.
“This study is the first to compare overall survival with this new chemotherapeutic agent to real-life choices in heavily pretreated patients with metastatic breast cancer,” Twelves and colleagues said in their written presentation.
The drug works on the same principle, but with a slightly different mechanism, as older cancer drugs called taxanes and is infused intravenously.
Other experts said eribulin could be one of the last new chemotherapy drugs, which typically target fast-growing cells that include tumors but also healthy cells.
“This is the era of targeted therapy. It’s not an era of chemotherapy,” said Dr. Eric Winer of Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who was not involved in the study.
“I don’t know that there are going to be many more chemotherapy agents approved for women with breast cancer. That said, this may be one of the last, and potentially provide women with an additional option and maybe an option to be used in combination with targeted therapies in the future.”
Three other studies presented to the meeting showed eribulin was effective and tolerated in a different group of patients with breast cancer, as well as colon cancer and urinary cancer patients.
Eisai has filed in Japan, the United States and Europe for approval of eribulin. The company hopes it will become a blockbuster, with global earnings of $1 billion a year.
“I think there is a reasonable chance that this drug will actually get approved,” Winer said. “There aren’t many drugs that show a survival advantage in this setting.”
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65518620100606?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
Restaurant tells diners to eat up or else
(Reuters Life!) – An Australian restaurateur fed up with the waste left by diners has ordered her customers to eat everything on their plates for their sake of the earth or pay a penalty and not return.
Chef Yukako Ichikawa has introduced a 30 percent discount for diners who eat all the food they have ordered at Wafu, her 30-seat restaurant in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, that describes itself as “guilty free Japanese cuisine.”
“To contribute toward creating a sustainable future we request a little more of our guests than most other restaurants,” she says in a list of her restaurant’s policies that is pinned on the door to the eatery.
This list includes finishing all dishes ordered which are organic and free of gluten, dairy, sugar and eggs and the chef and her staff tell people who don’t clear their plates to choose another restaurant next time.
“Finishing your meal requires that everything is eaten except lemon slices, gari (sushi ginger) and wasabi,” says the menu.
“Please also note that vegetables and salad on the side are NOT decorations; they are part of the meal too.”
Wafu’s strict policy has been welcomed by some but criticized as overbearing by some reviewers. Ichikawa is undeterred.
“Wafu is not just a restaurant; it is an extension of Yukako’s personal ethos toward nourishment and sustenance,” says a statement on the restaurant’s website.
“We are not only committed to serving meals that nurture and respect the body but are actively dedicated to the notion of waste prevention, and take seriously our responsibility toward the environment and sustainability for the future.”
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65352520100604?feedType=nl&feedName=usoddlyenough
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
£20m lottery fund to tackle 'lonely' elderly in Wales
Actress Margaret John said she is busier than ever at 83.
A £20m lottery package to reduce social isolation and loneliness of elderly people in Wales is being unveiled later.
Ruth Marks, older people’s commissioner for Wales, said AdvantAGE was a “step forward” in improving quality of life.
The Big Lottery Fund is looking for voluntary projects, which aim to run between three and five years.
Gavin and Stacey actress Margaret John, 83, will launch the scheme in Port Talbot.
Ms John, who also stars in the BBC Wales comedy High Hopes, said: “I’m probably busier now than I’ve ever been in my career and it’s been extraordinary these last few years.
“I’ve been lucky that my occupation has kept me busy and kept me going.
“Keeping busy is the only way to keep your brain going”
Margaret John Actress
“Retirement certainly isn’t a word that’s in my dictionary and I’d be bored to death if I didn’t have my work.”
The actress starred as colourful neighbour Doris in the Barry-based hit comedy Gavin and Stacey.
She will join a group of older people in Aberavon, who attend a regular lunch club organised by Age Concern Neath Port Talbot.
Ms John, due to appear on stage in Calendar Girls in Cardiff in July, will also see the work of the lottery-funded Promoting Independence Through Neighbourliness project.
“I meet new people and work on new projects all the time,” said Ms John.
“Keeping busy is the only way to keep your brain going and I’m a strong believer that a healthy mind makes a healthy body.”
Chair of the AdvantAGE programme committee Fran Targett, said isolation can result from life changing experiences, such as retirement, bereavement and long-term illness.
“Wales has a higher proportion of older people over 50 than any other country in the UK.
‘Fit for purpose’
“As we see in Margaret John, many older people view ageing as an opportunity and an exciting new life chapter.
“For others, however, older age brings challenges which, without support, can be daunting and lead to social isolation and loneliness.”
Meanwhile, Ruth Marks said she believed the programme could contribute to overcoming isolation.
“We have an ageing population, and it is vital that services are fit for purpose,” she said
Grants of between £200,000 and £1m will be available for projects, which either encourage befriending or social interaction, or represent the elderly and develop support services.
The closing date for applications is 29 October 2010.
Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/wales/south_west_wales/10190551.stm
Courtesy
BBC News
Remaining on the Diamond, Against the Grain
LITHONIA, Ga. — Football and basketball devoured Trey Griffin’s baseball team over two seasons. The players were 11 and 12 years old, playing out of Gresham Park in south DeKalb County, a predominantly African-American enclave of youth baseball in metropolitan Atlanta. The middle-school football teams lured the fastest and the strongest. The middle-school and summer-league basketball teams grabbed the tallest and the quickest.
Baseball was left in exile.
“The team just fell apart,” said Griffin, a senior at Martin Luther King High School, and the DeKalb County player of the year. “This guy is playing football, that guy is playing basketball. Out of the whole team, maybe there are three guys who played just baseball.
“The coaches and other kids tried to get me to play football, but when I brought home football equipment, my father took it back the next day.”
Griffin, a right fielder, challenges the trend of African-American athletes who migrate to football and basketball as they approach their teenage years. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida released a study April 29 that found that 9.1 percent of players on major league opening day rosters were black, down from 10.2 in 2008, but up slightly from 9 percent in 2009. Richard Lapchick, the institute director, said the number of blacks in baseball in the late 1970s and early 1980s peaked at about 26 percent.
Griffin will not be a high draft pick in the first-year player draft, which begins Monday, but Baseball America projects him to be drafted in the first 10 rounds. He is a muscular 6 feet 3 ½ inches and has a strong arm, attributes that would have served him well in football as a wide receiver or quarterback.
And yet for reasons that seem to range from personal preference to family support to a precedent set by an older brother, Griffin has stuck with baseball.
“When we would throw the football around, he makes one-handed catches, and he could throw it long,” said Mack Brown, Griffin’s classmate and a standout high school running back who signed with the University of Florida. “We had a good team last year, but we could have used another athlete like him.”
For the most part, Griffin’s parents, Ted Griffin and Sandra Drinks-Griffin, resisted pleas from coaches and other players to have their son play football. They also found their way around other barriers that could have detoured their son from baseball.
“A lot of parents here give up on children in baseball because they cannot afford it,” said Ted Griffin, an electrician. “They could not take the risk financially to see if their child had a future in the sport. Football and basketball coaches, on the other hand, find a way to get a kid what he needs.
“When they turn 12 or 13, they hand these kids a football and say run with it,” he added.
For their son, the Griffins found travel baseball teams in the mostly white, northern suburbs of Atlanta. The Griffins’ basement went unfinished, the dining room went without a chandelier and there were yard sales to raise money to pay for the exclusive teams that traveled and played 100 games in the summer. Still, Trey Griffin said the pressure was always on him and his friends to put on football pads.
“People always asked why I wasn’t playing football,” he said.
The Griffins shunned football not only because their son had talent for baseball, but also because his grades dropped in the ninth grade, the one season he did play that sport. They finally pulled him from the team.
“The coaches said we can make him a quarterback, we can make him a wide receiver, and I said not with these grades,” Drinks-Griffin said. “He was caught up in the sound of the crowd and spending too much time trying to learn plays.”
Ted Griffin’s oldest son by another marriage, Xavier Avery, was offered a football scholarship to the University of Georgia, but turned it down when he was picked in the second round of the 2008 draft by the Baltimore Orioles.
Ted Griffin said Xavier played 96 games one summer with a travel team to sharpen his skills in baseball.
The baseball coaches at Martin Luther King High have their own view on why baseball is not thriving among their students. Sean Brinkley, a co-head coach, said baseball did not come quite as easy as football or basketball for many kids and that some walked away.
“In this area, the football players have lost their interest in baseball because baseball is too hard,” Brinkley said. “The sport has been minimized because it takes so much work in the summer, the fall and during the season. They don’t understand you need to go to the cage every day and swing the bat 200 times. It’s rigorous.”
Carlos Howard, the other co-head coach, added: “We had a great athlete here, who played football and basketball, and he came out here and worked hard, and couldn’t hack it in baseball. Some of these kids don’t understand there is more money in baseball than the other sports and you can get paid quickly.”
The Griffins understand and invested as much money as they could, and even if the draft does not go as planned, their son will have something to fall back on — a baseball scholarship to Oklahoma State.
The cost of youth baseball, the abandoning of the sport by other African-Americans, did not discourage them.
“The talent level here is so high for football that we have a lot of guys go play college, so there is a lot of football hype,” Trey Griffin said. “But I love baseball.”
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/sports/baseball/07griffin.html
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
Bloomberg’s Man in Albany Is Young but Seasoned
ALBANY — Just when Micah C. Lasher thought it was safe to finally sleep one recent morning, three words appeared in his in-box: “It’s a sham.”
An article by Mr. Lasher in “The Spectator”, the Stuyvesant High School newspaper, dated Feb. 4, 1998.
Mr. Lasher had stayed up all night helping write a bill to increase the number of charter schools in New York, a cornerstone of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda. But amid the frenzy, a highly contentious provision had slipped by him: the State University of New York would lose its power to approve charter schools.
Charter advocates, including the one who had complained via e-mail, were seething. Mr. Lasher raced to the State Capitol, and in a feverish two hours of speed-dialing, helped to broker an agreement among lawmakers, the governor and the mayor to restore the university’s role.
An hour later, the Assembly passed the bill.
“The adrenaline was pumping,” Mr. Lasher said. “This needed to be nipped in the bud immediately.”
As Mr. Bloomberg’s chief negotiator, Mr. Lasher, 28, is the wrinkle-free face of City Hall, balancing the roles of bulldog, policy wonk and peacemaker for a mayor who is not shy about comparing lawmakers to lunatics.
“He can go to war with you on Monday and break bread with you on Tuesday,” Austin Shafran, a spokesman for the Senate Democrats, said of Mr. Lasher.
In an office near the State Capitol, Mr. Lasher and eight staff members scrutinize every significant piece of paper floating through the Legislature.
They assemble color-coded memos — yellow to support, pink to oppose — on topics like playground equipment and workplace harassment.
Then there is the politicking. On a recent day, just when Mr. Lasher thought that a long-shot effort to eliminate seniority protection for teachers was slowly picking up support, his BlackBerry hummed with news: two lawmakers were having second thoughts.
“Are you kidding me?” he repeated in disbelief, adding an expletive the second time, even though the bill’s chances of passing were slim.
While Mr. Lasher is praised as an honest dealmaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of policy, some lawmakers, particularly those critical of Mr. Bloomberg, say his intensity can be stifling.
“He can be a real nag,” said Kevin Sheekey, who, when he served as deputy mayor, had hired Mr. Lasher. “He’s constantly pushing. That’s very helpful in the job.”
Mr. Lasher, still plump-cheeked and bright-eyed, has yet to get a driver’s license. Despite his age, however, he has built an impressive résumé. He was a secret weapon to Manhattan politicians as a teenager, and in college he created a powerhouse consulting firm.
As a child growing up in the Upper West Side, he made a name for himself as a magician. He performed tricks like the Ambitious Coin, in which a half-dollar vanishes, on NBC’s “Today” show. And by age 14, he had published a 224-page book of tricks.
The youngest member of a neighborhood club of Democrats, he was responsible for cleaning out the clubhouse. Elected officials, taken aback by his zeal and shrewd mind, were soon approaching him for advice.
“He demonstrated to me more political acumen than people who spent a lifetime in this business,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president and a former assemblyman, who relied on Mr. Lasher as an informal adviser when he was 17.
The prodigy loved winning, and he became so emotionally attached to his candidates that after one of them, Deborah Glick, lost a race for Manhattan borough president in 1997, he retreated to a corner of a West Village restaurant and cried.
He developed his political muscles at Stuyvesant High School, where he warred with school administrators as editor of the student paper, The Spectator.
A long-simmering conflict escalated when he published an April Fool’s edition that mocked teachers and criticized seniority rules. The school promptly shut down the paper.
What followed was a classic Lasher crusade: an all-consuming campaign to restore free speech. Mr. Lasher and his allies flooded the school with fliers and petitions, forcing the administration to eventually give in.
Amid Stuyvesant’s overachievers, Mr. Lasher was no star student. He enrolled at New York University, where in the wee hours of the morning he built a political consulting firm.
The result was SKDKnickerbocker, now one of the city’s most prominent firms, which created fliers for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and counts among its clients 1199/S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East.
At Knickerbocker, he helped manage 76 campaigns — roughly three-quarters of them successful — and practiced a distinct brand of politics: cunning, idealistic and fiercely competitive. But his ardor has sometimes gotten him into trouble.
In 2001, when he was 19, Mr. Lasher helped design a now-infamous handout leaflet that contributed to the downfall of Mark Green, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor. The handout included a controversial New York Post cartoon that graphically depicted Mr. Green’s rival, Fernando Ferrer, kissing up to the Rev. Al Sharpton. Mr. Green won the nomination, but with the party not united behind him, he narrowly lost the election to Mr. Bloomberg.
In an interview, Mr. Lasher described the episode as “something that I deeply regret being a part of,” emphasizing his inexperience at the time.
Mr. Lasher likes to say he has picked candidates he believed in, and aside from Mr. Bloomberg, they were all Democrats.
He is a devout liberal who winced at the mayor’s effort to change term limits to allow himself to run for a third term, friends say.
But last year, when Mr. Sheekey invited him to join the mayor’s Department of Education and help make it more politically astute, Mr. Lasher accepted.
Last summer, he coordinated the successful effort to have the Legislature renew mayoral authority over the city’s public schools.
Mr. Lasher enjoyed working at the Department of Education so much that he three times turned down an offer to become director of state legislative affairs.
“He was really pushed into the job,” said Mr. Sheekey, who is an executive at Bloomberg L.P. “This is an office that is more important than any single city commissioner.”
In Albany, Mr. Lasher has become a master multitasker. His recent duties have included finding ways to entice television crews to film in New York and resolving a dispute between Apple and legislators over how it sells its iPad.
Mr. Lasher has worked hard to counterbalance his boss’s sharp tongue. When he learned in April that the mayor was planning to denounce a proposal to cut property taxes as “craziness,” Mr. Lasher was instantly on the phone with Senate Democrats, who had championed the idea, taking the heat.
“The mayor can be a little harsh,” said Assemblyman David I. Weprin, a Democrat who represents eastern Queens. “You really want someone in the position who can smooth things over.”
Mr. Lasher’s quick rise has fed rumors that he may be gearing up for a political race of his own. He had hoped to run for the City Council in 2009, but he abandoned his plans after term limits were extended.
Now, Mr. Lasher says he has made no definite decisions about his future, though he has not ruled out vying for a Council seat in 2013.
“Do I want to succeed and do interesting things and continue to take on more responsibility? Absolutely,” he said. “Do I have some grand plan for what that’s going to look like? Absolutely not.”
For now, Albany beckons. The budget is two months overdue, summer is approaching and the mayor is fuming. Whether a young political wizard can emerge as an effective ambassador for a city of eight million remains to be seen.
“The chick just hatched,” State Senator Bill Perkins of Harlem said. “Let’s see what happens when it becomes a real rooster.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 9, 2010
An article on Monday about Micah C. Lasher, the chief negotiator in Albany for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, referred imprecisely to the controversial use of a cartoon by the mayoral campaign of Mark Green in 2001. While the cartoon, depicting Fernando Ferrer and Al Sharpton, was reprinted in a handout leaflet that Mr. Lasher helped design, it was not part of an advertisement for television or for a print publication.
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/business/06novel.html?th&emc=th
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
Sun Shines on Solar Energy Future
The chances of producing solar power as a more commercially viable source of alternative energy seem brighter now with the positive research results pioneered by University of Illinois professors. The Department of Energy and National Science Foundation-funded team led by Professors John Rogers, and Xiuling Li, has been exploring ways to find more optimal ways to reduce the cost of semiconductors other than silicon.
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Superiority of semiconductor gallium:
The semiconductor gallium arsenide and other compound semiconductors are twice as efficient as the standard silicon semiconductor. But the prohibitively high production cost has been the stumbling block which has been circumvented by the innovative methods used by this group. To boot, their methods have been shown to be more advantageous cost-wise as well open a well of opportunities to utilize high-speed gallium or other semiconductors to make flexible thin-film electronics.
Multi-layer technique:
Instead of thin single-layer gallium arsenide deposited on small wafers, the Illinois group tried to create ‘pancake’-like stacks of 10 layers deposited at one go and peel the layers off individually, transfer them and lay them side by side. Giving all details of this procedure, Professor Rogers, the Lee J. Flory Founder Chair in Engineering Innovation & Professor of materials science and engineering and of chemistry said, “We’re creating bulk quantities of material, as opposed to just the thin single-layer manner in which it is typically grown…. “You really multiply the area coverage, and by a similar multiplier you reduce the cost, while at the same time eliminating the consumption of the wafer.”
Illinois team & research paper:
The Illinois team led by Professors John Rogers, and Xiuling Li, is planning to publish their research paper online on May 20, 2010, in the journal ‘Nature’. Along with the multi-layer technique and other details of their research, they will demonstrate three types of devices – light sensors, high-speed transistors and solar cells which will use gallium arsenide chips.
The team also includes University of Illinois post-doctoral researchers Jongseung Yoon, Sungjin Jo and Inhwa Jung; students Ik Su Chun and Hoon-Sik Kin; also Professor James Coleman of electrical and computer engineering, from Hanyang University in Seoul Ungyu Paik and Semprius Inc, scientists, Matthew Meitl and Etienne Menard.
Reference Link
http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/sun-shines-on-solar-energy-future/
Courtesy
AE News Network
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