Last US troops to leave Iraq cross Kuwait border

The last convoy of US troops to leave Iraq has entered Kuwait, nearly nine years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The final column of about 100 armoured vehicles carrying 500 soldiers crossed the southern Iraqi desert overnight.

At the peak of the operation there were 170,000 US troops and more than 500 bases in Iraq.

Nearly 4,500 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the US-led campaign began in 2003.

The operation has cost Washington nearly $1 trillion (£643bn).

US forces ended combat missions in Iraq in 2010 and had already handed over much of their security role.

“(It’s) a good feeling… knowing this is going to be the last mission out of here,” said Private First Class Martin Lamb, part of the final “tactical road march” out of Iraq.

“Part of history, you know – we’re the last ones out.”

As the last of the armoured vehicles crossed the border, a gate was closed behind them and US and Kuwaiti soldiers gathered there to shake hands and pose for pictures.

The only US military presence left in Iraq now is 157 soldiers responsible for training at the US embassy, as well as a small contingent of marines protecting the diplomatic mission.

The low-key US exit was in stark contact to the blaze of aerial bombardment Washington unleashed against Saddam Hussein in 2003. …

via BBC News – Last US troops to leave Iraq cross Kuwait border.

Wow, really? Great! (As long as those troops aren’t going to now be used to detain American citizens without trial a Obama’s new law permits…) I heard the cost is closer to $4 trillion which we now owe from this war… and that Obama is leaving a huge contingent from the State Department along with 3,500 to 5,500 armed private contractors?

Self-cleaning cotton nanoparticle coating invented

Efforts to create self-cleaning cotton fabrics are bearing fruit in China.

Engineers have created a chemical coating that causes cotton materials to clean themselves of stains and remove odours when exposed to sunlight.

The researchers say the treatment is cheap, non-toxic and ecologically friendly.

Retail experts say the innovation could prove a hit with retailers thanks to a growing demand for “functional clothing”.

The research was carried out by engineers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Hubei University for Nationalities, and is published in the latest issue of the Applied Materials and Interfaces journal.

The study focuses on titanium dioxide – a chemical known to be an “excellent catalyst in the degradation of organic pollutants”.

The substance is already used in self-cleaning windows, odour-free socks and stay-clean kitchen and bathroom tiles. …

The team’s breakthrough was to create a nanoparticle alcohol-based compound made up of titanium dioxide and nitrogen.

The mixture was added to triethylamine, an acid neutraliser commonly used in dyes. After being stirred for a 12 hours at room temperature, the liquid was heated at 100C (212F) for a further six hours.

The cotton fabrics were then immersed in the mixture before being squeezed dry, heated and immersed in hot clean water.

Finally the coated materials were treated with silver iodide particles, which aid light-based reactions.

To test the effectiveness of their invention, the engineers marked the fabrics with an orange dye stain and exposed them to the sun. After two hours in the light, the team said 71% of the stain had been removed – a “dramatic” improvement over previously trialled techniques. …

via BBC News – Self-cleaning cotton nanoparticle coating invented.

Sun stops chickenpox from spreading

Exposure to sunlight may help impede the spread of chickenpox, claim researchers.

The University of London team found chickenpox less common in regions with high UV levels, reports the journal Virology.

Sunlight may inactivate viruses on the skin, making it harder to pass on.

However, other experts say that other factors, including temperature, humidity, and even living conditions are equally likely to play a role.

The varicella-zoster virus is highly contagious, while it can be spread through the coughs and sneezes in the early stages of the infection, the main source is contact with the trademark rash of blisters and spots.

UV light has long been known to inactivate viruses, and Dr Phil Rice, from St George’s, University of London, who led the research, believes that this holds the key why chickenpox is less common and less easily passed from person to person in tropical countries.

It could also help explain why chickenpox is more common in the colder seasons in temperate countries such as the UK – as people have less exposure to sunlight, he said.

via BBC News – Sun ‘stops chickenpox spreading’.

Twitter sells $300m “strategic stake” to Saudi prince

Twitter has secured $300m in funding from Saudi investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, with the well-known tech backer – who counts Apple shares among other firms in his portfolio – grabbing a “strategic stake” in the microblogging platform. “Several months of negotiations” culminated in the deal, which values Twitter at around $8bn overall Businessweek reports, and comes on the heels of a comprehensive redesign unveiled last week.

via Twitter sells $300m “strategic stake” to Saudi prince – SlashGear.

DNA death predictors: What do they really tell you?

… gene-sequencing companies such as 23andme, deCodeMe and Navigenics can do a quick scan of your risk of developing everything from lung cancer to multiple sclerosis. Now two new firms are offering to tell us how well we are ageing, based on an analysis of structures at the ends of our chromosomes called telomeres.

If these developments continue, a person’s lifespan could become as quantifiable as the shelf life of a carton of milk. So instead of parading around blissfully unaware of how long we have left, we could find out our own use-by dates. For some, this knowledge would be a burden, while others may be glad of the chance to plan their future. But whether you find the prospect of being able to foretell your own death terrifying or enticing, how realistic is it? Are these new tests really a game changer? After all, we have long been able to test for life-threatening factors such as high cholesterol and blood pressure. … According to Timothy Caulfield, a bioethicist and lawyer at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who has been looking into how people react to tests like these … “People don’t seem to do much with this risk information,” he says. “They don’t freak out. And they don’t start exercising more, eating better or getting more screening.” This should not surprise us, he adds, since we have never responded much to other more traditional predictive information, such as weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. …

At 23andme, I was tested for a “longevity trait” identified by the company. Apparently I don’t possess it and have merely typical odds of living to age 95 or 100. … At best, the particular genes you carry will only ever explain about 25 per cent of your propensity to live a long life, says Slagboom. So can the new telomere-based tests do any better?

Like the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces, telomeres keep your chromosomes from fraying and getting tangled up with one another. Every time chromosomes replicate during cell division the telomeres get a bit shorter. This process starts even before you are born and about a third of their length is lost in the first 20 years of life, says Calvin Harley, president and chief scientific officer of Telome Health, based in Menlo Park, California. As we age, the shortening continues – by about 9 per cent each decade, on average. It is not clear whether some people have a higher natural rate of loss but we do know that telomeres respond to lifestyle, and that smoking, heavy drinking, obesity and stress can all shorten them a little more quickly. That is bad news because short telomeres are associated with earlier death. One study by Richard Cawthon at the University of Utah, for instance, looked at their lengths in adults over 60. People whose telomeres were shorter than average for their age cohort were 3.18 times more likely to die of heart problems and 8.54 times more likely to die from infectious disease, than those who had longer than average telomeres for their age (The Lancet, vol 361, p 393).

It is easy to see why people trying to divine their own personal expiration date would be interested in knowing how long their telomeres are, and how they compare with other people of the same age. This is exactly the information offered by a Spanish company called Life Length, based in Madrid, which began selling its €500 test a year ago. Telome Health had also planned to offer a telomere test. Back in May, co-founder Elizabeth Blackburn – a Nobel laureate for her discovery of telomerase, the enzyme that stimulates telomere elongation – told New Scientist its test would be available for under $200 by the end of the year. However, Harley now says it will only be used for research purposes for the foreseeable future. …

Carol Greider at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who shared the Nobel prize with Blackburn, points out that there is no consensus yet on the best technique for measuring telomeres. In fact, her work on mice found no correlation between telomere length and lifespan (Nucleic Acids Research, vol 28, p 4474) and she argues that little is known about how telomere length affects health and longevity in humans. “There’s a very wide distribution of telomere lengths,” she says, and they can vary a lot for any given age. If you fall below the first percentile, you are clearly at risk for age-related diseases, she adds, but the science hasn’t really established much beyond that. Greider concludes that telomere testing for the general public is premature. …

via DNA death predictors: What do they really tell you? – health – 15 December 2011 – New Scientist.

Katehi, legislators agree: Unrest tied to funding shortfall

Assemblyman Marty Block called it the “elephant in the room.” But he, other lawmakers and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi had no trouble talking about that elephant during a joint legislative hearing earlier this week on student unrest.

“The root to all of this, frankly, is the underfunding of higher education,” said Block, D-San Diego, chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee, which joined with the Senate Education Committee in holding the Dec. 14 hearing.

“Budget cuts have been horrible, and, frankly, we are only dealing with the resources that the taxpayers of California give us,” Block said. “Higher education has absorbed the brunt of the burden already.”

The lawmakers — addressing the response by campus police to recent protests at UC Davis, UC Berkeley and California State University Long Beach — took testimony from experts in policing, a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, students, and UC and California State University administrators, including Katehi and UC President Mark G. Yudof.

In her prepared remarls, Katehi emphasized the issues that underlie the protests.

“Our students are increasingly frustrated and angry about reductions in state support for higher education,” the chancellor said. “They are frustrated and angry about repeated tuition increases. They are worried about how they will repay their loans and find jobs when they graduate.”

Assemblywoman Mariko Yamada, D-Davis, a member of the Higher Education Committee, issued a news release in which she said the protests “were born out of outrage and hopelessness that many feel are due to the increasing disinvestment in higher education.”

$100 million ‘trigger’ cut

The hearing came the day after Gov. Jerry Brown announced a “trigger” cut of $100 million in UC funding, on top of the $650 million that the state already sliced from UC’s budget for 2011-12. See box for UC’s response.

A shortfall in state revenue triggered the new cut, as required in the budget deal that Brown and the Legislature crafted earlier this year.

Voicing optimism for a better deal for 2012-13, Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, told the legislative hearing Dec. 14: “Higher education should be a higher priority of the California Legislature.”

Katehi has committed to redoubling her advocacy at the Capitol, telling the lawmakers: “We all need to work together to make higher education more affordable and accessible, or there will be continued frustration from students, both from those who protest, and from those who only want to go to class without distraction.

“They are justifiably frustrated, and so am I.”

UC Davis’ latest round of protests began Nov. 15 with rallies and marches that led to an “occupy”-style encampment on the Quad, in violation of campus policy. Police went in Nov. 18 to remove the equipment, resulting in the arrest of 10 protesters — nine of them students — and the pepper-spraying of 11 people.

“Did I direct the police to use pepper spray? The answer is no,” Katehi told the lawmakers. “Did I direct police to use force? The answer is no.”

Block asked her what she would have done differently Nov. 18, drawing this response: “If I knew the police could not remove the tents peacefully, we would not have removed them.”

As she has done previously in a number of talks with faculty, students and staff, the chancellor accepted responsibility and vowed to make reforms to ensure there students can safely engage in peaceful civil disobedience.

She noted the five investigations that are under way to determine what happened on Nov. 18 and why.

Among them is UC’s review of police policies and procedures on all the campuses. UC President Mark G. Yudof told lawmakers his intent is not to micromanage chancellors or campus police.

“Nonetheless, the recent incidents make clear that the time has come to take strong action to recommit to the ideal of peaceful protest.”

Assemblywoman Yamada agreed: “Something positive will come out of this.” …

via UC Davis News & Information :: Dateline :: Katehi, legislators agree: Unrest tied to funding shortfall.

Funding shortfall. Yes… keep going. Why? California is broke. Yes… keep going. Why? Irresponsible borrowing over the years. Yes… keep going. What were we borrowing money for? … uh …. uh …. War.

Bingo. Until you talk about the war, no, you have not yet talked about the elephant in the room. (See my past entries showing how California pays more than its share, more billions of dollars than have been so far cut for education, for the wars we are fighting. )

Satellite spots China’s first aircraft carrier at sea

Alan Boyle – A commercial satellite operator says it has captured a rare image of China’s first aircraft carrier as it sailed through the Yellow Sea, after going through an exercise that’s the 21st-century equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.

DigitalGlobe said the aircraft carrier showed up on a cloud-filled picture snapped on Dec. 8 by its polar-orbiting QuickBird satellite from a height of 280 miles (450 kilometers). An analyst spotted the ship while checking the image on Tuesday, said Stephen Wood, the director of the company’s analysis center.

… DigitalGlobe said this picture was taken during the carrier’s second sea trial, approximately 62 miles (100 kilometers) south-southeast of the port of Dalian. Wood said the picture indicates that the ship is “moving at a decent rate of speed, which would be expected in the middle of the ocean.” The U.S. military could no doubt glean more information about the Shi Lang’s status, from QuickBird’s pictures as well as from classified, higher-resolution imagery.

via PhotoBlog – Satellite spots China’s first aircraft carrier at sea.

Canada Begins Hearings on Salmon Virus

The fate of wild salmon is a sensitive topic in the Pacific Northwest and arguments often end up in court in the United States, whether over threats to endangered fish by hydroelectric dams or sea lions swallowing them along their migration routes.

But on Thursday, a new and particularly bitter dispute began playing out in a very different kind of judicial venue across the Canadian border: a provincial Supreme Court justice held a hearing into questions of whether a potentially lethal virus had been detected in wild Pacific salmon — and whether the Canadian government was responding adequately.

The virus, infectious salmon anemia, has devastated farmed Atlantic salmon stocks in Chile and elsewhere. Some conservationists and scientists have long worried that the virus would spread from farmed fish to wild ones. Those fears escalated in October, when opponents of British Columbia’s ambitious farmed Atlantic salmon program, which is heavily promoted by the government, presented lab results they said showed an asymptomatic form of the virus in wild Pacific salmon.

Several more reports of the virus have emerged in the past two months, including a draft paper suggesting that the virus was detected as early as 2002 but not revealed by the government, further angering farming opponents.

The developments have prompted passionate debate on both sides of the border, with reaction veering from accusations that the Canadian government is covering up evidence of the disease to claims by Canadian officials that the reports are based on poor science.

Some scientists have suggested that a strain of the virus may have been present in wild Pacific salmon for many years as a “host pathogen,” without causing a disease outbreak, and that it may never pose a risk. …

via Canada Begins Hearings on Salmon Virus – NYTimes.com.

Experiments explain why almost all multicellular organisms begin life as a single cell

Dicty: An amoeba that must succeed at both single-celled and multicellular living to pass on its genes.

Any multicellular animal, from a blue whale to a human being, poses a special difficulty for the theory of evolution. Most of the cells in its body will die without reproducing, and only a privileged few will pass their genes to the next generation.

How could the extreme degree of cooperation multicellular existence requires ever evolve? Why aren’t all creatures unicellular individualists determined to pass on their own genes?

Joan Strassmann, PhD, and David Queller, PhD, a husband and wife team of evolutionary biologists at Washington University in St. Louis, provide an answer in the Dec. 16 issue of the journal Science. Experiments with amoebae that usually live as individuals but must also join with others to form multicellular bodies to complete their life cycles showed that cooperation depends on kinship.

If amoebae occur in well-mixed cosmopolitan groups, then cheaters will always be able to thrive by freeloading on their cooperative neighbors. But if groups derive from a single cell, cheaters will usually occur in all-cheater groups and will have no cooperators to exploit.

The only exceptions are brand new cheater mutants in all-cooperator groups, and these could pose a problem if the mutation rate is high enough and there are many cells in the group to mutate. In fact, the scientists calculated just how many times amoebae that arose from a single cell can safely divide before cooperation degenerates into a free-for-all.

The answer turns out to be 100 generations or more.

So population bottlenecks that kill off diversity and restart the population from a single cell are powerful stabilizers of cellular cooperation, the scientists conclude.

In other words our liver, blood and bone cells help our eggs and sperm pass on their genes because we passed through a single-cell bottleneck at the moment of conception. …

via Experiments explain why almost all multicellular organisms begin life as a single cell.

U.S. Suspends Use of Chimps in New Research

The National Institutes of Health on Thursday suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimpanzees and accepted the first uniform criteria for assessing the necessity of such research. Those guidelines require that the research be necessary for human health, and that there be no other way to accomplish it.

In making the announcement, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the N.I.H., said that chimps, as the closest human relatives, deserve “special consideration and respect” and that the agency was accepting the recommendations released earlier in the day by an expert committee of the Institute of Medicine, which concluded that most research on chimpanzees was unnecessary.

The report and the quick response by the N.I.H. do not put an end to research on chimps, but they were claimed as victories by animal welfare groups that have long been fighting for a ban on such research, arguing that chimps should not be subjected to experimental use. They said that the move was a step toward eventually ending chimp research, already a tiny segment of federal research.

Jeffrey Kahn, chairman of the Institute of Medicine committee that produced the report and a professor of bioethics and public policy at Johns Hopkins University, said the group’s recommendations would make it harder to use chimps in research.

“What we did was establish a set of rigorous criteria that set the bar quite high for use of chimpanzees in biomedical or behavioral research,” he said. He also said that, in effect, the writing was on the wall: “One of the important themes in the committee report is that there is a trajectory toward decreasing necessity for the use of chimps in biomedical and behavioral research.”

Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, which is strongly opposed to any experimentation on chimpanzees, said, “We’re tremendously encouraged.” He said the report’s “overarching conclusion was that chimps are largely unnecessary” for research, and that the report and N.I.H. action could influence two other continuing efforts to stop research on chimps.

One is the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act of 2011, now before both houses of Congress. Another is a petition before the federal Fish and Wildlife Service to declare captive chimpanzees endangered, as wild chimpanzees are. The exemption has allowed research to continue and permits the use of chimpanzees in entertainment and as pets.

“ ‘Endangered’ stops all those uses,” Mr. Pacelle said, and the report’s skeptical assessment of the value of chimps in research would provide support for the Fish and Wildlife Service to categorize all chimps as endangered. …

via U.S. Suspends Use of Chimps in New Research – NYTimes.com.