Cassini makes simultaneous measurements of Saturn's nightside aurora and associated electric current system

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) ? Since the NASA / ESA Cassini-Huygens spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004, astronomers and space scientists have been able to study the ringed planet and its moons in great detail. Now, for the first time, a team of planetary scientists have made simultaneous measurements of Saturn's nightside aurora, magnetic field, and associated charged particles. Together the fields and particle data provide information on the electric currents flowing that produce the emissions.

Team leader Dr Emma Bunce of the University of Leicester will present the new work at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester on 27 March 2012.

Generally, images of the aurora (equivalent to the terrestrial 'northern lights') provide valuable information about the electromagnetic connection between the solar wind, the planet's magnetic field (magnetosphere) and its upper atmosphere. Variations in the aurora then provide information on changes in the associated magnetosphere. But viewing the aurora (best done at a large distance) at the same time as measuring the magnetic field and charged particles at high latitudes (where the aurora is found, best done close to the planet) is hard

In 2009, Cassini made a crossing of the magnetic field tubes that connect to the aurora on the night side of Saturn. Because of the position of the spacecraft, Dr Bunce and her team were able to obtain ultraviolet images of the aurora (which manifests itself as a complete oval around each pole of the planet) at the same time.

This is the first time it has been possible to make a direct comparison between Cassini images of the nightside aurora and the magnetic field and particle measurements made by the spacecraft. And because of the geometry of the orbit at Cassini, it took about 11 hours to pass through the high-latitude region or about the same time it takes Saturn to make one rotation.

This meant that the team were able to watch the auroral oval move as the planet turned. As Saturn and its magnetosphere rotated, the auroral oval was tilted back and forth across the spacecraft with a speed that is consistent with a planetary rotation effect:

Dr Bunce comments: "With these observations we can see the simultaneous motion of the electric current systems connecting the magnetosphere to the atmosphere, producing the aurora. Ultimately these observations bring us a step closer to understanding the complexities of Saturn's magnetosphere and its ever elusive rotation period."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), via AlphaGalileo.

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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120327093612.htm

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Source: http://www.cookyourlifemovie.com/self-improvement/life-coaching-motherhood-issues/

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Loss of appetite deciphered in brain cell circuit

ScienceDaily (Mar. 14, 2012) ? The meal is pushed way, untouched. Loss of appetite can be a fleeting queasiness or continue to the point of emaciation. While it's felt in the gut, more is going on inside the head.

New findings are emerging about brain and body messaging pathways that lead to loss of appetite, and the systems in place to avoid starvation.

Today, scientists report in Nature about a brain circuit that mediates the loss of appetite in mice. The researchers also discovered potential therapeutic targets within the pathway. Their experimental results may be valuable for developing new treatments for a variety of eating disorders. These include unrelenting nausea, food aversions, and anorexia nervosa, a condition in which a person no longer wants to eat enough to maintain a normal weight.

The senior author of the paper is Dr. Richard D. Palmiter, University of Washington professor of biochemistry and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His co-authors are Dr. Qi Wu, formerly of the UW and now at the Eagles Diabetes Research Center and Department of Pharmacology at Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa, and Dr. Michael S. Clark of the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Palmiter is known for co-developing the first transgenic mice in the 1980s with Dr. Ralph Brinster at the University of Pennsylvania. His more recent studies are of chemicals that nerve cells use to communicate with each other, their roles in mouse brain development and function, and their relation to behavior.

Palmiter and his colleagues concentrated on a part of the brain, a relay center called the parabrachial nucleus, because it is an important hub for integrating signals from several brain regions to modulate food intake. Nausea, as well as taste aversion or preferences, may originate from signals processed in the parabrachial nucleus.

In this most recent study, the researchers discovered the type and location of brain cells that send signals that agitate the parabrachial nucleus and thereby squelch the ability to eat. They also demonstrate how these signals can be blocked to restore normal appetite and to ward off starvation.

Earlier studies by Palmiter's team and by Dr. Michael Schwartz' team at UW Center for Excellence in Diabetes and Obesity Research showed that certain nerve cells in the brain's hypothalamus play a role in promoting feeding and weight gain. They do so by collating a variety of signals from the body. If these brain cells are destroyed, feeding stops. Meals will be refused and liquid food placed into the mouth will hardly be swallowed.

The researchers later learned that the ensuing starvation is due to the excessive activation of the brain's parabrachial nucleus. The researchers found that starvation could be prevented by improving receptor signaling for a substance called GABA and thereby calm the excited parabrachial nucleus. This intervention had to be done within a critical adaptation period to be successful. GABA is one of the most common neurotransmitters -- chemicals that ferry messages to and from nerve cells in the brain.

At first, the scientists were puzzled about the source of the command that turns on the parabrachial nucleus and makes it turn feeding off. Their research fingered two suspects and their locations in the brain. Their studies pointed out nerve cells involved with another neurotransmitter, glutamate, in the part of the brain called the nucleus tractus solitarus. Also contributing to the abnormal activation were cells involved in serotonin signaling. Both drive the hyper-excitability of nerve cells in the parabrachial nucleus that inhibit feeding.

The researchers went on to discover several ways to reinstate normal appetite by interfering with input signaling from these two cell types. They also tested how to censor "don't eat" signals coming from cells in the parabrachial nucleus.

Their studies revealed six interventions that prevented starvation when the cells that modulate food intake in the hypothalamus no longer function. These interventions acted upon various aspects of signaling to and from the parabrachial nucleus, in most cases by disabling or reducing signals or their receptors.

The researchers were able to prevent severe loss of appetite in their mouse model by administering bretazenil, a drug that promotes GABA signaling, or by administering ondansetron, a drug used to prevent nausea and vomiting during cancer chemotherapy. The Palmiter team also used specially constructed viruses to selectively reduce signaling by glutamate -- the major excitatory signal in the brain.

The researchers believe that additional progress in dissecting circuits that control feeding will be achieved by identifying genes that are active in specific populations of brain cells within the parabrachial nucleus. Finding such genes will allow investigators to selectively manipulate their activity in the mouse and thereby control feeding behaviors.

This study was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Washington. The original article was written by Leila Gray.

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Journal Reference:

1. Qi Wu, Michael S. Clark, Richard D. Palmiter. Deciphering a neuronal circuit that mediates appetite. Nature, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nature10899

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

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/weGvAKlYQ7E/120314170649.htm

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As Republican candidates pummel each other, Obama can only smile

As the Republican presidential candidates continue to battle and improvement in the US economy is seen, President Obama is getting better public reviews?? good news for his re-election bid.

With eight months to go before the presidential election ? can it really be that long? ? a lot could go wrong for President Obama.

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The US recovery could falter and unemployment inch back up ? perhaps as a result of European economic difficulties jumping the Atlantic. Gasoline prices could become even more burdensome on businesses and individual Americans. Disengaging from war in Afghanistan could prove more difficult than Pentagon planners figure. Obama may have to fulfill his very public pledge to ?cover Israel?s back? in response to Iran?s nuclear weapons capability.

And of course there are always what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to call ?unknown unknowns ? things we do not know we don't know.?

But for now, at least in terms of presidential election politics, there must be at least a few Cheshire cat grins around the White House.

None of the four remaining Republican contenders shows any signs of dropping out as they continue to pummel each other on the primary/caucus trail. If Newt Gingrich were to do badly in next Tuesday?s primaries in Mississippi and Alabama and call it quits, that would leave Rick Santorum to concentrate his fire on front-runner Mitt Romney ? who would have to respond, further delaying the point at which he can concentrate fulltime on Obama, return to his inherently moderate self, and hope to look presidential.

The Monitor's Weekly News Quiz for March 3-9, 2012

Meanwhile, as Fox News political analyst Juan Williams pointed out this week, ?The protracted political battle on the Republican side has already begun to do damage to the party?s brand.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/sbLGHwbEnbc/As-Republican-candidates-pummel-each-other-Obama-can-only-smile

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Ann Romney's Dual Roles: Character Witness and Political Messenger

If Republican voters were half as passionate about Mitt Romney as he seems to be about his wife of 40 years, he?d be feeling a lot more love. Romney set his heart on 16-year-old Ann Davies when he first spied her at a friend?s birthday party. Decades later, she?s the star of ?A Love Story,? a video testimonial to her husband as a family man and a leader.

?If you really want to know how a person will operate, look at how they?ve lived their life,? Ann Romney says in the three-and-a-half-minute video. ?It?s so important to understand the character of a person,? she adds later. ?To me that makes a huge difference. Maybe to some voters it doesn?t?but for me it makes a huge difference.?

The video captures her dual roles in the campaign: the classic one as warm spouse who humanizes her husband, and the less-trod ground of occasionally edgy political messenger.

Ann Romney was the one who declared late last month that there would be no more debates for the Romneys. (?If we're going to do another debate, he's going to sit in the audience and watch me,? she told a crowd in Troy, Mich. ?And that'll be it.?) And it was Ann who went before national television cameras on Super Tuesday and fiercely dismissed the roiling debates about contraception, abortion, and other social issues?areas that have never been her husband?s forte.

?Do you know what women care about?? she asked. ?Women care about jobs. Women care about the economy. They care about their children and they care about the debt. And they're angry and they're furious about the entitlement debt that we're leaving our children."

Those issues are, of course, in her husband?s wheelhouse.

Since the campaign?s early days, Ann been regaling audiences with tales of Mitt as the young, doting father who wanted nothing more than to horse around with his five boys after coming home from work; or Mitt as the devoted husband who said he wouldn?t mind eating peanut-butter sandwiches and cold cereal for the rest of his life after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic debilitating disease.

But she has also delivered tutorials on delegate allocation along with testimonials to her husband?s sterling qualities. And her very presence as a longstanding spouse draws an implicit contrast with thrice-married Newt Gingrich and his history of infidelity.

Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University, said Ann Romney was not a particularly active or high-profile first lady of Massachusetts when Mitt Romney was governor. ?She didn?t emulate someone like Michelle Obama or Rosalyn Carter or even Laura Bush,? Berry said. ?She?s certainly an asset, but a small asset because people don?t vote for prospective first ladies, they vote for the candidate.?

There are nevertheless dangers in having such an influential surrogate speaking for a presidential candidate?particularly when she goes off-message. Ann Romney had a moment like that recently on Fox News. ?I don't even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing,? she said in an interview when describing her battle with multiple sclerosis.

For a woman whose husband is given to making remarks that underscore his net worth of some $200 million and who recently said his wife drives two Cadillacs, it was an unfortunate addition to the canon of Romney-isms that paint the couple as out of touch. Few remembered the rest of what she said, which was this: "How I measure riches is by the friends I have and the loved ones I have and the people that I care about in my life, and that's where my values are and that's where my riches are.?

The young Mitt Romney was head over heels in love with Ann. As chronicled in The Real Romney, a biography written by two Boston Globe reporters, Romney planned clandestine weekend trips from Stanford University to see his high school sweetheart back in Michigan.

Once he drove straight from California to her doorstep in Bloomfield Hills, arrived drenched in sweat, and dove into her pool fully clothed. At one point Mitt?s father, George Romney, worried about his son?s studies, docked his allowance to discourage the frequent excursions. But Mitt held an auction to sell off all his clothes so he could buy a ticket home.?

Decades later, Romney isn?t jumping into pools or auctioning off his clothes, but he does still seem smitten. Introducing Ann at a campaign event in Snellville, Ga., just before Super Tuesday, he said he was happy to hear he had received endorsements that day from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. ?The person I'm most proud to have next to me, however,? he added, ?is this young lady, my sweetheart, Ann.?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ann-romneys-dual-roles-character-witness-political-messenger-071230606.html

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Disparity tourism in Sweden

'Upper-class safaris' in the suburbs of Stockholm take participants between neighborhoods to highlight widening economic disparities.

? A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.

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?In Sweden, a group of disaffected young people is challenging the country?s image as an egalitarian, equal-opportunity society. How? By organizing ?upper-class safaris,? which load class-conscious participants onto buses that take them from the center of Stockholm, the Swedish capital, to two of its eastern suburbs: Fisks?tra, a working-class neighborhood, and Solsidan, a wealthy one.

The journey between the two suburbs takes five minutes, but, says tour organizer Martin Fredriksson, they are ?worlds apart.?

The unconventional sightseeing trip is organized by Allt ?t Alla (Everything for Everyone), an association that abides by the Marxist credo ?from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.?

At the end of 2011, reports from Statistics Sweden and the Swedish Center for Business and Policy Studies highlighted widening economic disparities and showed that the correlation between family background and income has become more pronounced.

Allt ?t Alla insists that such disparities must be understood as a class issue and that the safari tours could spark a serious discussion through a fun initiative.

But well-to-do residents of Solsidan may not be willing. They have objected to the invasion of their privacy and to being likened to animals.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/XlesRRelEHA/Disparity-tourism-in-Sweden

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An Introduction to Invoice Finance for Small ... - Networked Politics

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Most small businesses will need business finance of some kind, but as most small businesses know it can be one of the most difficult aspects to secure. The most popular sources of finance for small business include personal ...

Source: http://www.networked-politics.info/?p=121238

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