AN American woman is stumped as to why she's become a hit among cricket fans worldwide
AN American woman is stumped as to why she's become a hit among cricket fans worldwide - thanks to Twitter and the opening Ashes Test.
It's just not cricket, says American Ashes tweeter
Cricket fans across England and Australia have turned to Twitter to share their thoughts on the Test series and have found @theashes on the social networking service.
The woman, from Westfield, Massachusetts, writes mostly about knitting and her toddler, but it hasn't stopped hundreds of people from sending her messages and asking for score updates.
At first she was amused by the sudden attention, but it quickly lost its novelty.
"I am not a cricket match. Stop mentioning me and check profiles before you send messages. It's really annoying," she wrote.
But her irritation only prompted others to re-tweet her comments to hundreds more.
The teasing spread fast with Twitter users encouraging others to follower her to get the latest Ashes updates.
She now has more than 4100 followers - up from a few hundred people before the Ashes series began - and her frustration is clearly evident: "I AM NOT A FREAKING CRICKET MATCH!!!"
Cricket tweeters, however, are urging the woman to accept her fate as a new icon.
"It seems to have caught on! Your chance to influence thousands of people," one wrote.
"You're very popular, m'dear!" wrote another.
At the very least, the Twitter trend is a chance to teach Americans a thing or two about cricket.
One of her latest posts shows she now has a few questions about the game.
"What the hell is a wicket?" she pondered.
Telomerase reverses aging process
Telomerase reverses aging process
Dramatic rejuvenation of prematurely aged mice hints at potential therapy.
By Ewen Callaway
Premature aging can be reversed by reactivating an enzyme that protects the tips of chromosomes, a study in mice suggests.
Mice engineered to lack the enzyme, called telomerase, become prematurely decrepit. But they bounced back to health when the enzyme was replaced. The finding, published online November 28 in Nature, hints that some disorders characterized by early aging could be treated by boosting telomerase activity. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
It also offers the possibility that normal human aging could be slowed by reawakening the enzyme in cells where it has stopped working, says Ronald DePinho, a cancer geneticist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the new study. "This has implications for thinking about telomerase as a serious anti-aging intervention."
Other scientists, however, point out that mice lacking telomerase are a poor stand-in for the normal aging process. Moreover, ramping up telomerase in humans could potentially encourage the growth of tumors.
Eternal youth
After its discovery in the 1980s, telomerase gained a reputation as a fountain of youth. Chromosomes have caps of repetitive DNA called telomeres at their ends. Every time cells divide, their telomeres shorten, which eventually prompts them to stop dividing and die. Telomerase prevents this decline in some kinds of cells, including stem cells, by lengthening telomeres, and the hope was that activating the enzyme could slow cellular aging.
Two decades on, researchers are realizing that telomerase's role in aging is far more nuanced than first thought. Some studies have uncovered an association between short telomeres and early death, whereas others have failed to back up this link. People with rare diseases characterized by shortened telomeres or telomerase mutations seem to age prematurely, although some tissues are more affected than others.
When mice are engineered to lack telomerase completely, their telomeres progressively shorten over several generations. These animals age much faster than normal mice--they are barely fertile and suffer from age-related conditions such as osteoporosis, diabetes and neurodegeneration. They also die young. "If you look at all those data together, you walk away with the idea that the loss of telomerase could be a very important instigator of the aging process," says DePinho.
To find out if these dramatic effects are reversible, DePinho's team engineered mice such that the inactivated telomerase could be switched back on by feeding the mice a chemical called 4-OHT. The researchers allowed the mice to grow to adulthood without the enzyme, then reactivated it for a month. They assessed the health of the mice another month later.
"What really caught us by surprise was the dramatic reversal of the effects we saw in these animals," says DePinho. He describes the outcome as "a near 'Ponce de Leon' effect" -- a reference to the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, who went in search of the mythical Fountain of Youth. Shriveled testes grew back to normal and the animals regained their fertility. Other organs, such as the spleen, liver and intestines, recuperated from their degenerated state.
The one-month pulse of telomerase also reversed effects of aging in the brain. Mice with restored telomerase activity had noticeably larger brains than animals still lacking the enzyme, and neural progenitor cells, which produce new neurons and supporting brain cells, started working again.
"It gives us a sense that there's a point of return for age-associated disorders," says DePinho. Drugs that ramp up telomerase activity are worth pursuing as a potential treatment for rare disorders characterized by premature aging, he says, and perhaps even for more common age-related conditions.
Cancer link
The downside is that telomerase is often mutated in human cancers, and seems to help existing tumors grow faster. But DePinho argues that telomerase should prevent healthy cells from becoming cancerous in the first place by preventing DNA damage.
David Sinclair, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, agrees there is evidence that activating telomerase might prevent tumors. If the treatment can be made safe, he adds, "it could lead to breakthroughs in restoring organ function in the elderly and treating a variety of diseases of aging."
Other researchers are less confident that telomerase can be safely harnessed. "Telomere rejuvenation is potentially very dangerous unless you make sure that it does not stimulate cancer," says David Harrison, who researches aging at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Harrison also questions whether mice lacking telomerase are a good model for human aging. "They are not studying normal aging, but aging in mice made grossly abnormal," he says. Tom Kirkwood, who directs the Institute for Ageing and Health at Newcastle University, UK, agrees, pointing out that telomere erosion "is surely not the only, or even dominant, cause" of aging in humans.
DePinho says he recognizes that there is more to aging than shortened telomeres, particularly late in life, but argues that telomerase therapy could one day be combined with other therapies that target the biochemical pathways of aging. "This may be one of several things you need to do in order to extend lifespan and extend healthy living," he says.
Police: 18-year-old commissions 8-year-old to help steal from Walmart
Police: 18-year-old commissions 8-year-old to help steal from Walmart
Daily Record/Sunday News
An 18-year-old Lower Windsor Township man commissioned an 8-year-old to help him steal from Walmart last month, police said, then left her behind as he fled.
Christopher Steven Ritz Jr., of the 500 block of Bull Run Road, was arraigned Saturday night in Central Booking on charges of retail theft, conspiracy to commit retail theft and corruption of minors. A warrant for his arrest had been issued, and he was found this weekend, officials said.
According to court documents, Ritz and a third person, a woman who is not fully identified in court documents, picked up $203.88 worth of merchandise from the West Manchester Township Walmart on Oct. 23. He and the woman had the 8-year-old try to carry
some of the merchandise out in her backpack, police said.
A store employee attempted to stop the trio, and Ritz and the woman ran toward Carlisle Road, police said, leaving the youth behind. Store management looked after the girl until police arrived, and the woman returned a few minutes later.
Ritz -- who was also is wanted on a bench warrant on simple assault charges out of Mercer County and has charges of robbery and indecent assault pending in York County court, according to UJSPortal, an online court document system -- was taken to York County Prison in lieu of $1,500 bail.
khoran@ydr.com; 771-2029
York man gets prison time for shooting despite no witnesses seeing him with gun
No witnesses to the shootout could put a gun in Calhoun's hands - not even the victim.
Judge Gregory M. Snyder dismissed charges of prohibited possession of a firearm and possessing a firearm without a license.
York man gets prison time for shooting despite no witnesses seeing him with gun
The latest: Todd V. Calhoun was sentenced last week in York County court to 5¤½ to 11 years in state prison for the July 26, 2009, shooting of Shawn Bailey.
A jury convicted Calhoun, 25, of the 300 block of East Cottage Place, in August of aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. However, Judge Gregory M. Snyder dismissed charges of prohibited possession of a firearm and possessing a firearm without a license.
The background: No witnesses to the shootout could put a gun in Calhoun's hands - not even the victim.
According to testimony during the August trial, Calhoun called Bailey out in the 300 block of Smyser Street, where Bailey lived. Bailey, 25, already was on the
street. Bailey testified he had a .40-caliber handgun tucked in the back of his waistband when he went to confront Calhoun.
Bailey said the first shot in his direction came from his right, not where Calhoun was standing. He said he had spotted two other men behind Calhoun on opposite sides of the street. He said he shot back, first at the two men behind Calhoun.
Bailey said Calhoun then ran down the street away from him.
Bailey was wounded in the shoulder, leg and groin. He testified he remains on blood thinners because of blood clots.
Two other defendants pleaded guilty to lesser charges related to the shooting in July.
At trial, Calhoun showed exasperation when the jury then convicted him of the felony assault charge.
Guatemalan pro football player found chopped up
GUATEMALA CITY—Police in Guatemala have found the body of a professional football player chopped up and left in five plastic bags in a rural area.
National Civil Police spokesman Donald Gonzalez says the remains were found Sunday with a message saying the player was killed for "messing with other women."
The spokesman says investigators are trying to determine whether that was the real reason for the slaying of Carlos Mercedes Vasquez, who played for Malacateco in Guatemala's first-division football league.
Gonzalez says the body was found in the rural community of Malcatan a day after the 27-yeard-old Mercedes Vasquez was kidnapped while driving with two friends.
Guatemalan pro football player found chopped up
GUATEMALA CITY—Police in Guatemala have found the body of a professional football player chopped up and left in five plastic bags in a rural area.National Civil Police spokesman Donald Gonzalez says the remains were found Sunday with a message saying the player was killed for "messing with other women."
The spokesman says investigators are trying to determine whether that was the real reason for the slaying of Carlos Mercedes Vasquez, who played for Malacateco in Guatemala's first-division football league.
Gonzalez says the body was found in the rural community of Malcatan a day after the 27-yeard-old Mercedes Vasquez was kidnapped while driving with two friends.
DesafÃos para nuestra misión hoy La Mision de los jesuitas en sus propias palabras:
Desafíos para nuestra misión hoy
Enviados a las fronteras
En este nuevo mundo de comunicación inmediata y de tecnología digital, de mercados globales, y de aspiraciones universales de paz y bienestar, nos enfrentamos a tensiones y paradojas crecientes vivimos en una cultura que privilegia la autonomía y el presente y sin embargo el mundo tiene una gran necesidad de construir un futuro en solidaridad;
contamos con mejores medios de comunicación pero experimentamos a menudo la soledad y la exclusión; algunos se benefician enormemente, mientras otros son marginados y excluidos; nuestro mundo es cada vez más transnacional, sin embargo necesita afirmar y proteger sus identidades locales y particulares;
conocimiento científico se acerca a los más profundos misterios de la vida, y sin embargo la propia dignidad de la vida y el mismo mundo en que vivimos continúan amenazadas.
En este mundo global, marcado por tan profundos cambios queremos profundizar ahora nuestra comprensión de la llamada a servir la fe, promover la justicia y dialogar con la cultura y otras religiones a la luz del mandato apostólico de establecer relaciones justas con Dios, con los demás, y con la creación
[ Congregación General 35 de la Compañía de Jesús, 2008, Decreto 3]
Jesús: un fuego que enciende otros fuegos
Fuente
El Padre General en America Latina
El Padre General en America Latina
Haga clic para ver el diaporama del viaje.
Fuente
Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Will Crank Up Christmas Music For His 8,000 Inmates
Sheriff Joe Arpaio Will Crank Up Christmas Music For His 8,000 Inmates
The 8,000 inmates also will hear, among others, "A Christmas Kwanzaa Solstice," "Over the Skies of Israel," "Ramadan," "Llego a La Ciudad," "Let it Snow" and "Rodolpho El Reno de la Nariz Rojita."
"Maybe the holiday music can help lift the spirits of the men and women who are away from friends and family during the holidays, not just the inmates, but the dedicated men and women who work in the Maricopa County Jails," the sheriff said in an announcement Sunday.
The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has played the holiday songs all day, every day, during previous seasons. Sheriff Arpaio has long expressed his fondness for Christmas music, especially "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and anything by Alvin and the Chipmunks
Inmates have sued six times claiming that being forced to listen to the Christmas songs 12 hours a day was in violation of their civil and religious rights and a cruel and unusual punishment, but U.S. District Judge Roz Silver disagreed, dismissing the case and denying claims for $250,000 in damages.
He told The Washington Times that in addition to tunes by Alvin and the Chipmunks, the music included the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Bing Crosby and Doctor Demento.