September 9, 2006, 5:51 PM CT

Nice looking Lemur software clone

If you're lusting after a JazzMutant Lemur controller, but don't have €2,000, here is a cheap alternative. Mono Touch Live runs on any PC with any touchscreen monitor, and it's set up to control Ableton Live. It's not the first, but it's (nearly) a real commercial product, and it certainly has the look.

It was developed by Argentinian DJ Pablo Martin (DJ Grobe), and should be available in October. Obviously it's single touch only (one of the a number of magic things about the real lemur is that you can control as a number of parameters as you have fingers, simultaneously). It's not user-programmable, and it doesn't come in a super-cute all-in-one controller, but until Behringer release the Marmoset MS1000 multi-touch controller for £99, it's the best we have.........

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September 9, 2006, 5:45 PM CT

Storm At Climate Meeting

Outraged scientists stormed out of a government-sponsored climate change conference dinner in Canberra last night, after female entertainers stripped down to their underwear as part of a burlesque show.

And one of the performers, who was covered in balloons, walked around the venue inviting scientists to burst parts of her costume.

Many of the women who attended the dinner at Old Parliament House left the room in horror or protested to the male conference organiser, who called a premature halt to the show when the extent of the offence taken became clear.........

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September 9, 2006, 5:41 PM CT

I Think Your Lower Intestine Is Ringing

recent undated X-Ray shows a cell phone in a Salvadoran prisoner's lower intestine
Four prisoners in an El Salvador jail hid cellphones, a phone charger and spare chips in their bowels so they could coordinate crimes from their cells, prison officials said on Wednesday.

The four men, all gang members, wrapped their phones and accessories in plastic and inserted them into their rectums "far enough to reach their intestines," Ramon Arevalo, director of the maximum security Zacatecoluca prison, said.........

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September 9, 2006, 12:09 AM CT

Scientists Take A Global View Of The Epigenome

A collaboration between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California at Los Angeles captured the genome-wide DNA methylation pattern of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana - the "laboratory rat" of the plant world - in one big sweep.

"In a single experiment we recapitulated 20 years worth of anecdotal findings and then some," says senior author Joseph Ecker, Ph.D., a professor in the Salk Institute's Plant Biology Laboratory. "Previously, only a hand full of plant genes were known to be regulated by methylation. In addition to those, we found hundreds of others".

These technological innovations, pioneered by Ecker's team and that of Steve Jacobsen, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCLA, should have broad impact on the analysis of the human genome, stem cell biology and therapeutic cloning. Their findings will appear in a forthcoming issue of Cell.

Our view of heredity has largely been written in the language of DNA, but recent discoveries in a field known as epigenetics - the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without changing the letters of the DNA alphabet - show that how a cell "reads" those letters is critical.

Methylation is chemical modification of one letter C (cytosine) of the four letters (A, G, C, and T) reiterated in our DNA. Adding a bulky methyl group to a C often blocks interaction with proteins required to activate gene expression, effectively silencing the methylated gene.........

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September 9, 2006, 12:03 AM CT

Traditional Healers Are Legitimate Resources

According to numerous studies, American Indian youth experience disproportionate rates of mental health and behavioral problems, including substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicidal thoughts.

To address this critical problem, an adolescent mental health expert at Washington University in St. Louis says that traditional healers in American Indian communities may be a valuable but under-recognized resource offering alternative and culturally relevant services that complement conventional medical treatment.

"Non-Western approaches like traditional healing need to be recognized as legitimate and complementary services in American Indian communities," says Arlene R. Stiffman, Ph.D., the Barbara A. Bailey Professor of Social Work at Washington University. "Traditional healers should be recognized for their important involvement in the mental health and behavioral care system in American Indian communities," she adds.

In a study recently published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, Stiffman examined traditional healers, their backgrounds, roles, services to youth, referral patterns and the characteristics and problems of the youth they serve. The study is titled "Traditional Healers as Service Providers to Southwestern American Indian Urban and Reservation Youth".........

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September 9, 2006, 11:14 AM CT

NeighborhoodsKey To Rebuilding New Orleans

The French Quarter, the Garden District, the Treme, the Lower Ninth Ward. Perhaps more than any other American city, New Orleans is a collection of individual neighborhoods - 72 in all - each with its own history and culture.

In many ways, these neighborhoods represent both the key and the key challenge to rebuilding the city, says John Hoal, Ph.D., associate professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Last week, Hoal's firm, H3 Studio Inc., was one of five selected to lead the Unified New Orleans Plan, which will coordinate rebuilding in the city's 13 planning districts. Another 10 firms, including St. Louis-based HOK, will generate plans at the neighborhood level.

"The challenge is to rebuild these very distinct neighborhoods in ways that recognize their very particular heritages," Hoal explains. "You can't just formulate a generic proposal.

"New Orleans has fabulous architecture, but New Orleans is really about a kind of spirit," Hoal continues. "The individual will to rebuild homes is simply amazing. Our challenge is to craft a plan that accommodates the character of each area while also recognizing the rebuilding people have already done".

Hoal spent most of the summer developing H3 Studio's proposal and made a formal community presentation Aug. 1. Final selections were announced Aug. 28, marking the one-year anniversary of Mayor Ray Nagin's mandatory evacuation order.........

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September 9, 2006, 10:34 AM CT

Restating Earnings Hurts The Company And Peers

No company wants to issue an accounting restatement; it's a guaranteed way for the share price to drop 10 percent, on average. Investors, analysts and journalists alike view restatements as an indication of a problem within the company. According to a professor at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, when a company announces a restatement of revenues or expenses, there is value in looking at its industry peer firms.

Based on an evaluation of more than 22,500 public companies, accounting professor Nicole Thorne Jenkins and her co-authors found that a company's restatement adversely affects not only its own stock price, but also that of similar firms.

"When a firm announces a restatement, there is a significantly negative market reaction," said Jenkins. "The information communicated by a restatement is transferred to similar firms. The market reacts to that information transfer similarly but to a lesser degree because there is some uncertainty that the same reporting problem exists in other companies".

Upon news of a company's accounting restatement, peer firms experience a cumulative average decrease of 1.82 percent in the 21 days following the initial restatement. The effect is even more pronounced for firms that have poor accounting quality or that have the same auditor as the restating firm.........

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September 9, 2006, 9:55 AM CT

Jobless Recovery Will Be A Repeat Phenomenon

The "jobless recovery" that befuddled observers after the recession in the early 2000s was no fluke. It's actually a pattern that we can expect to continue thanks to technology's uneven impact across sectors of the economy, as per research from a business professor at Washington University in St. Louis. What's more, this new trend in business cycles is as important in making policy decisions as it is about the stability of the country's economy.

"Technology doesn't just land like a giant asteroid and change everything," said Glenn MacDonald, the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Strategy at the Olin School of Business. "It used to be that new technology was broadly impactful. But newer innovations have less of that character, directly impacting some sectors more than others. The Internet, for example has had an incredible direct effect on sectors such as finance and insurance, or retail, but a much more incidental effect on others."

New technology brings economic change

With new technology comes the need for companies where the technology is important to retool and reorganize how their business is run. This typically involves reducing output and often cutting back on labor. This translates into that sector of the economy beginning to slow.........

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September 9, 2006, 9:52 AM CT

Modern Humans Odd Man Out

Could it be that in the great evolutionary "family tree," it is we Modern Humans, not the brow-ridged, large-nosed Neandertals, who are the odd uncle out?

New research published in the August, 2006 journal Current Anthropology by Neandertal and early modern human expert, Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that rather than the standard straight line from chimps to early humans to us with Neandertals off on a side graph, it's equally valid, perhaps more valid based on the fossil record, that the line should extend from the common ancestor to the Neandertals, and Modern Humans should be the branch off that.

Trinkaus has spent years examining the fossil record and began to realize that maybe researchers have been looking at our ancient ancestors the wrong way.

Trinkaus identified fossil traits which seemed to be genetic markers - those not greatly influenced by environment, life ways and wear and tear. He was careful to examine traits that appear to be largely independent of each other to avoid redundancy.

"I wanted to see to what extent Neandertals are derived, that is distinct, from the ancestral form. I also wanted to see the extent to which modern humans are derived relative to the ancestral form," Trinkaus says. "What I came up with is that modern humans have about twice as many uniquely derived traits than do the Neandertals.........

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September 9, 2006, 9:31 AM CT

Towards Rejection-free Limb Transplantation

Years ago, the idea of attaching a donor limb onto a patient's body would have been the stuff of science fiction. But to date about two-dozen people around the world have received hand transplants. Thomas Tung, M.D., conducts research within this relatively unorthodox realm of surgery, investigating therapies that could potentially allow the body to accept donor tissue without the use of immunosuppressive medication.

A Washington University plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Tung has reattached patients' own hands, but he has never performed a hand transplant - he feels the health risks of immunosuppressive drugs are too high to warrant the surgery. But with his research, he is working toward the day when reconstructive surgery can make use of donor tissues without the danger of complications from anti-rejection medicine or the risk of tissue rejection.

"Once we figure this out, it's going to open up a new whole field of reconstructive surgery," says Tung, assistant professor of surgery. "It will allow surgeons to replace not just injured hands, but lips, noses, ears, scalp and other specialized tissues anywhere on the body".

To reach this goal, Tung has been researching transplantation of hindlimbs to mice from unrelated donors - but here's the twist - without giving the mice immunosuppressive drugs. At this time, Tung is the only researcher in the United States investigating limb transplantation with this protocol, which uses proteins called costimulation-blocking antibodies.........

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