CEDAR CITY - Recently, Southwest Applied Technology College announced that its upcoming Nursing Assistant Certification Program starting July 8, along with all upcoming nursing assistant sessions, will no longer require a waiting list for applicants.
This is good news for potential students who previously had to wait six months to a year to apply for this popular program. It is one of the shorter courses offered at SWATC, only 10 weeks long with a short externship following the course work.
?Now, without a waiting list, we are able to offer enrollment immediately into an upcoming class session, as soon as a student has completed all of their required documentation and made their payment for the course,? Jayne Crabdree of SWATC Team Student Services said. ?We find this encourages students to be proactive in getting themselves prepared to enroll on their own time frame, complete the enrollment process in a timely fashion, to get in and get trained, get certified and then gain employment in this field. It?s a win-win situation for the college and the students that are well prepared and motivated to get started in this training.?
A nursing assistant works in many health care areas under the supervision of a registered nurse. The SWATC program prepares students with the knowledge and skills needed to assist ill patients and the elderly with tasks related to daily living such as assisting with meals, hygiene, getting out of bed and taking vital signs. Successful completion of this program qualifies the student to receive state certification as a Certified Nursing Assistant with the Utah Nursing Assistant Registry.
The next Nursing Assistant Certification Program at SWATC begins July 8. Although the waiting period has been waived, applicants do have some unique qualifications that must be met before acceptance into the program. All students must be age 17 or older on the first day of class and must have the following required immunizations: Hepatitis B series, one dose Tdap, proof of MMR and varicella immunity or vaccinations. In addition, applicants must be CPR certified and have two TB screenings.
Resources
Applications are being accepted at SWATC?s main campus at 510 West 800 South in Cedar City, or online. Students must be enrolled by July 3, as Student Services will be closed July 4 and 5 for Independence Day. The next nursing assistant session will start September 17. For more information, call 435-586-2899.
About SWATC
SWATC has been serving rural Utah as a competency-based training institution for nearly 20 years. Along with Dixie Applied Technology College in St. George, it is one of eight institutions statewide in the Utah College of Applied Technology, providing adult and high school students with technical job skills needed in the workforce.
Submitted by: Southwest Applied Technology College
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Submitted by: Southwest Applied Technology College
SPARTA, Ky. ? Danica Patrick doesn?t care that Kyle Petty thinks she?s better at getting attention than driving because she?s heard it all?before.
But if Petty?s going to attack her, the NASCAR Sprint Cup rookie believes he should at least get his facts?straight.
On Friday, Patrick responded to Petty?s comments a night earlier on Speed?s ?Race Hub? program, in which the former Sprint Cup driver called her a ?marketing machine? rather than a race car driver. Petty also doubted that Patrick would become a driver and insisted that she doesn?t race as??
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SPARTA, Ky. ? Danica Patrick doesn?t care that Kyle Petty thinks she?s better at getting attention than driving because she?s heard it all?before.
But if Petty?s going to attack her, the NASCAR Sprint Cup rookie believes he should at least get his facts?straight.
On Friday, Patrick responded to Petty?s comments a night earlier on Speed?s ?Race Hub? program, in which the former Sprint Cup driver called her a ?marketing machine? rather than a race car driver. Petty also doubted that Patrick would become a driver and insisted that she doesn?t race as well as she?qualifies.
Patrick?s statistics suggest otherwise. On average she?s finishing almost six spots higher (25.8) than she starts (32nd), which she noted by saying, ?those who watch know I can?t qualify for crap. The race goes much?better.?
That likely won?t stop Petty, the 53-year-old son of seven-time Cup champion Richard Petty and an eight-time race winner on NASCAR?s premier circuit, from criticizing?Patrick.
Now an analyst for TNT and Fox/Speed, Petty has periodically taken jabs at Patrick, a former IndyCar Series driver who now drives the No. 10 Chevy for Stewart-Haas Racing. The 31-year-old Patrick is 27th in points in her first full Cup season, which follows an open wheel career highlighted by a 2008 victory in?Japan.
While he understands the mass appeal of Patrick, who has been featured in racy TV ads for sponsor Go Daddy and was IndyCar?s most popular driver for several years, her driving skills don?t justify the hype in his?opinion.
? Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Twenty-two of President Barack Obama's top advisers make the top White House salary of $172,200 per year - but there is one official who earns 30 percent more.
It's not Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. Not Obama's senior adviser and close friend Valerie Jarrett. Not Cecilia Munoz, who is overseeing White House efforts on immigration reform, nor Lisa Monaco, who advises Obama on homeland security and counterterrorism.
The best-paid person of the 460 people who work at the White House is Seth Wheeler, a senior adviser at the National Economic Council, who is crafting Obama's strategy on housing finance.
One of the newest appointees, Wheeler earns $225,000, according to the annual White House report on its $37.9 million payroll released on Friday.
Wheeler has been detailed to the role from the Federal Reserve where the pay scale is higher, a White House official explained.
It also means he earns more than his boss, Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council, who earns the White House limit of $172,200.
At the Fed, Wheeler was chief of staff for the Office of Financial Stability Policy and Research.
He is an ex-Morgan Stanley banker who worked for former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson during the Bush Administration, and was a key architect with the Obama administration's mortgage modification program, helping craft the signature housing aid program known as the Home Affordable Modification Program.
"His pay reflects the anomaly of the Fed pay scale," said Phillip Swagel, who served in the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush.
"It is noteworthy that the NEC is pretty political so it's fascinating that they have a Fed employee in a political position," Swagel said.
Federal employees who work for banking regulators, including the Fed, have higher pay scales than employees of other federal departments, said Julia Gordon, director of housing finance and policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
"I'm sure if he went back to Morgan Stanley, he'd be making 10 times that," Gordon said.
Wheeler replaces Jim Parrott, who had been detailed to the White House from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and earned $144,385 last year. Parrott left the White House in January, and recently joined the Urban Institute.
Wheeler's salary approaches that of Vice President Joe Biden, who this year is poised to earn $230,700. Obama's salary is $400,000.
HOUSING SYSTEM 'IN SHAMBLES'
The housing advisor position has been held by four different people during the Obama administration, punctuated by lengthy vacancies between advisers, said Gordon, who hopes the White House now begins to takes a more active role on the issue.
"Our housing system is still in shambles," Gordon said.
"Just because people hear that prices are going back up doesn't mean we've fixed anything. A lot of the underlying problems are still there."
One of the key issues is reforms for mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were seized by the government in 2008 as the housing crisis threatened their solvency.
The companies own or guarantee half of all U.S. mortgages and have been propped up with $187.5 billion in taxpayer funds.
Democrats and Republicans want to reduce the government's role and put more of the risk of lending onto the private sector, but they disagree on how far to go.
The salary report can be found at - http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/annual-records/2013.
(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; editing by Jackie Frank)
A supporter of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden holds a poster outside Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow Friday, June 28, 2013. Russian and foreign journalists continued to monitor the Sheremetyevo international airport, where Snowden is believed to remain at the transit zone. The poster reads : Edward! Russia is your second Motherland! (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
A supporter of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden holds a poster outside Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow Friday, June 28, 2013. Russian and foreign journalists continued to monitor the Sheremetyevo international airport, where Snowden is believed to remain at the transit zone. The poster reads : Edward! Russia is your second Motherland! (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
A Snowden supporter holds a poster outside Sheremetyevo, airport in Moscow Friday, June 28, 2013. Russian and foreign journalists continued to monitor the Sheremetyevo international airport, where National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden is believed to remain at the transit zone. The poster reads: "Russia is for Snowden!" (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The father of NSA leaker Edward Snowden acknowledged Friday that his son broke the law but said he doesn't think he committed treason, as the Obama administration renewed its calls to Russia to expel Snowden so he can be tried under the Espionage Act.
Meanwhile, Ecuadorean officials say Russian authorities have stymied the country's efforts to approve a political asylum application from the former National Security Agency systems analyst, according to government officials with direct knowledge of the case. Their accounts further complicate the already murky understanding of his current status.
In conceding his son's guilt, Snowden's father, Lonnie Snowden, told NBC's "Today" show that his lawyer had informed Attorney General Eric Holder that he believes his son would voluntarily return to the United States if the Justice Department promises not to hold him before trial and not subject him to a gag order.
"If folks want to classify him as a traitor, in fact, he has betrayed his government. But I don't believe that he's betrayed the people of the United States," Lonnie Snowden said. The elder Snowden hasn't spoken to his son since April, but he said he believes he's being manipulated by people at WikiLeaks. The anti-secrecy group has been trying to help Edward Snowden gain asylum.
"I don't want to put him in peril, but I am concerned about those who surround him," Lonnie Snowden told NBC. "I think WikiLeaks, if you've looked at past history, you know, their focus isn't necessarily the Constitution of the United States. It's simply to release as much information as possible."
Lonnie Snowden declined to comment when The Associated Press reached him Friday.
U.S. officials said their outreach to Russia, Ecuador and other countries where Snowden might travel to or seek refuge is ongoing.
"We continue to be in touch, via diplomatic and law enforcement channels, with countries through which Mr. Snowden might transit or that could serve as a final destination, also in touch, clearly, with the Russian authorities," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters. "We're advising governments that Mr. Snowden is wanted on felony charges and should not be allowed to proceed any further, other than necessary to return to the United States. So we continue to make that active case through diplomatic and law enforcement channels."
Ventrell said the U.S. message to Russia has been consistent.
"We don't want this to negatively impact bilateral relations. It's understandable that there are some issues raised by this, but from our perspective, based on our cooperative history of law enforcement, and especially since the Boston bombings, that there's certainly a basis for expelling Mr. Snowden," he said, citing "the status of his travel documents and the pending charges against him."
The State Department revoked Snowden's visa last weekend.
Ecuadorean officials have said publicly they cannot start considering Snowden's asylum request until he arrives either in Ecuador or in an Ecuadorean embassy.
Two government officials with direct knowledge of the negotiations said Ecuador had been making detailed plans to receive and host Snowden.
One of the officials said those plans had been thwarted by Russia's refusal to let Snowden leave or be picked up by Ecuadorean officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the case by name.
Snowden intended to travel from Moscow with the intention of going on to the Ecuadorean capital of Quito but after he was held up in the Moscow airport, Ecuador asked Russia to let him take a commercial flight to meet Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino in Vietnam or Singapore, where Patino was on a pre-planned official trip, in order to be taken back to Quito by Patino, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak to the press.
The Russians rejected Ecuador's requests to let Snowden leave Moscow, or to let an Ecuadorean government plane pick him up there, the official said.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa told reporters on Thursday that Snowden was "in the hands of the authorities" in Russia.
But Russian authorities have said Snowden is outside Russian control in a transit area of the Moscow airport, which is technically not Russian territory.
Edward Snowden is charged with violating U.S. espionage laws for leaking information about NSA surveillance of Internet and telephone records to detect terrorist plots.
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ATLANTA (AP) ? Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter says religious leaders, including those in Christianity and Islam, share the blame for mistreatment of women and girls across the world.
The 88-year-old human rights activist said Friday that male religious leaders perpetuate misguided doctrines of male superiority, from the Catholic Church forbidding women from becoming priests to some African cultures mutilating the genitals of young girls.
Carter says the doctrines contribute to a political, social and economic structure where political leaders passively accept domestic violence against women, sexual trafficking, and inequality in the workplace and classroom.
The 39th president delivered his analysis during an international conference on women and religion. He's hosting representatives from 15 countries at The Carter Center, the human rights organization he launched in 1982 after leaving the White House.
Isabelle Grey is an?author and screen writer and?her new novel, The Bad Mother, is out now. Here's our review.??Isabelle has answered a few questions for our Novelicious readers.
Can you tell us a little about your average writing day??
I prefer to sit down at my desk and get started before my brain is fully awake. Maybe it?s to do with ?left brain/right brain?, but I find that if I pick up where I left off the day before without very much conscious thought about how or where I ?ought? to be going next, it all flows much better. On the same principle, if I get stuck, I go and do some ironing while listening to the radio, and it?s astonishing how often I hear some snippet that sparks just the idea I need! If I run out of steam then I do all the other stuff on my desk that needs attention, and eventually go and stir and chop in the kitchen.
When you are writing, do you use any celebrities or people you know as inspiration??
No, my characters have to be able to run free! However, I do take notes from newspaper and magazine articles or TV documentaries. And I listen in to the conversations of strangers on public transport. As a screenwriter I like to catch the rhythm and humour in how people speak, especially if I?m writing about a specific area of work, when I try to talk to someone who actually does the job. Work jokes are always revealing, especially in the more macabre professions!
What is your favourite Women?s Fiction book of all time and why?
Oh, impossible to answer! Jane Austen, of course. Pride and Prejudice and Emma are peerless, and I love the poignancy of Persuasion. I also love Edith Wharton, Edna O?Brien?s first novels, Daphne du Maurier, and a special, if rather sad, favourite, The Rector?s Daughter by F.M. Mayor.
What is your writing process? Do you plan first or dive in? How many drafts do you do?
I plan quite carefully, but then feel absolutely free to abandon the plan if it isn?t working or a better route presents itself. I stop and take stock about a third of the way in, re-shape the story if necessary, and then keep going. The third draft is usually pretty much there, and it?s my favourite bit of the process, when I begin to feel like I know what I?m dealing with.
What was your journey to being a published author?
I always wanted to write, and became a freelance journalist soon after leaving university. I also wrote several non-fiction books before starting to write television drama nearly thirty years ago. I?ve come to fiction relatively late.
What do you think is the biggest myth about being a novelist?
That it?s glamorous or exciting or necessarily well paid! Watching a novelist at work must be worse than watching paint dry.
What advice can you give to our readers who want to write a novel of their own?
Keep asking endless questions of your story and characters. Why is she like that? What does she want? Why? How is he going to get out of that? What does that signify? What does she really feel about him? Why? What happens now?
What are you working on at the moment?
A couple of TV projects, and also my third book for Quercus, a crime novel called Good Girls Don?t Die.
BEIRUT (AP) ? More than 100,000 people have been killed since the start of Syria's conflict over two years ago, an activist group said Wednesday.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has been tracking the death toll in the conflict through a network of activists in Syria, released its death toll at a time when hopes for a negotiated settlement to end the civil war fade.
It said it had tallied a total of 100,191 deaths over the 27 months of the conflict, but Observatory chief Rami Abdul-Rahman said he expected the real number was higher as neither side was totally forthcoming about its losses.
Of the dead, 36,661 are civilians, the group said.
On the government side, 25,407 are members of President Bashar Assad's armed forces, 17,311 are pro-government fighters and 169 are militants from Lebanon's Hezbollah, who have fought alongside army troops.
Deaths among Assad's opponents included 13,539 rebels, 2,015 army defectors and 2,518 foreign fighters battling against the regime.
Entry of the foreign media into Syria is severely restricted and few reports from the fighting can be independently verified.
Earlier this month, the U.N. put the number of those killed in the conflict at 93,000 between March 2011 when the crisis started and end of April this year.
The government has not released death tolls. The state media published the names of the government's dead in the first months of the crisis, but then stopped publishing its losses after the opposition became an armed insurgency.
Abdul-Rahman said that the group's tally of army casualties is based on information from military medical sources, records obtained by the group from state agencies and activists' own count of military funerals in government areas of the country. Another source for regime fatalities are activist videos showing dead soldiers killed in rebel-held areas who are later identified.
Abdul-Rahman believes the number of combatants killed on both sides is probably much higher as neither the government nor the rebels are fully transparent about battlefield casualties.
Syria's conflict began as peaceful protests against Assad's rule. It gradually became an armed conflict after the Assad's regime used the army to crackdown on dissent and some opposition supporters took up weapons to fight government troops.
Even the most modest international efforts to end the Syrian conflict have failed. U.N.'s special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, told reporters on Tuesday that an international peace conference proposed by Russia and the U.S. will not take place until later in the summer, partly because of opposition disarray.
The fighting has increasingly been taking sectarian overtones. Sunni Muslims dominate the rebel ranks while Assad's regime is dominated by Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam.
It has also spilled over Syria's borders, especially into Lebanon, where factions supporting opposing sides have clashed in the northern city of Tripoli and in the eastern Bekaa valley. Lebanese are divided over Syria's civil war with some supporting President Bashar Assad's regime and others backing the opposition. More than 550,000 Syrians have fled to neighboring Lebanon as a result of the war.
Earlier this week, sectarian tensions drew Lebanon's weak army into fighting. Eighteen soldiers were killed in a two-day battle between the army and supporters of a radical Sunni sheik in the southern city of Sidon. The army had earlier reported 17 deaths and said Wednesday that another soldier died of his wounds in a hospital.
The conflict reached the capital Beirut on Wednesday when masked men ambushed a bus and attacked the approximately 30 people aboard with knives, a Lebanese official said. He said 10 people were wounded in the attack in the eastern part of the city, including five Syrians, two Palestinians and three Lebanese, the officials said. He spoke anonymously in line with regulations.
Lebanon's state-run National News Agency said the bus was carrying Syrians headed to a TV studio in the eastern Sunday Market district to take part in a cultural program. It said there were eight attackers, who fled the area.
The conflict has also polarized the region. Several Gulf states including Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia, Washington's key ally and a foe of Iran, back the rebels. Tehran, a Shiite powerhouse, supports Assad.
Saudi Arabia is sending lethal aid to the rebels. The United States also said it will provide arms to the opposition despite the Obama administration's reluctance to send heavier weapons for fear they might end up in the hands of al-Qaida-affiliated groups. Russia, Assad's staunch supporter, has been providing his army with weapons.
In Damascus, Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi lashed out at Saudi Arabia, accusing the Gulf kingdom of backing "terrorists" after Riyadh condemned Damascus for enlisting fighters from its Lebanese ally in its struggle with rebels.
Damascus has previously blamed the Sunni Gulf states, who along with the United States and its European allies back the Syrian opposition, for the civil war.
The remarks by al-Zoubi were carried late Tuesday by the state agency SANA after Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal met with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Jiddah and condemned Assad for bolstering his army with fighters from Hezbollah. Prince Saud charged that Syria faces a "foreign invasion."
Al-Zoubi fired back, saying Saudi diplomats have blood on their hands and are "trembling in fear of the victories of the Syrian army."
The Syrian military with Hezbollah's help captured the central town of Qusair earlier this month and says it is building on the victory to attack rebel-held areas elsewhere.
___
Associated Press writer Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.
For years, one of Android's biggest problems has been Android skins that weigh down the best hardware the platform has to offer. But now the two best Android phones in the world?the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4?come in pure, stock Google Editions. And after spending some time with both, we can confirm that ditching the skins has made them better than ever.
Since you can buy them as of today, we've broken down how the two compare with each other, and with the skinned versions of themselves.
HTC One: Stock Android vs. Sense
The One with Sense enabled was already pretty much the snappiest phone we've ever used. With stock Android, it's even faster. Apps open just a little bit quicker and swiping around the UI is just a little bit smoother. The biggest difference you'll notice, though, is that it's just cleaner. Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) is a very minimal OS. Apps like the calendar, the clock, and even the apps drawer are more pared-back and easier to use. Desktop customization, for example, is much simpler.
You still get the same great phone on the hardware side. From a design standpoint it's still our favorite phone ever, and it's by far the most satisfying to hold. The screen is incredibly sharp and looks just as good as it did on the skinned version. The dual, front-facing speakers still sound incredible (best sounding phone ever), and when you have headphones in you have that same Beats by Dre EQ, which focuses on the bass a little more and sounds very good (the HTC One has a dedicated pre-amp to help with this). Unfortunately, it's not all good news.
The only significant drawback in the Google Edition unit we tested is that the camera doesn't work nearly as well anymore. You might recall how the HTC One's "ultrapixel" sensor took the win in our smartphone camera battle. Clearly, HTC's camera software had something to do with balancing that rather unique sensor, because the stock Android camera app doesn't do nearly as good of a job. Photos tend to be washed out, over-exposed, and under-saturated. Even in low light, it isn't as good.
The new camera app itself is very cleanly laid-out and easy to use, but you lose a lot of the advanced shooting features found in the Sense camera app (though many of these reappear in the editing menu in stock Android's Gallery app), in addition to the specialty modes, though you do gain Google's mega-panoramic PhotoSphere, which is fun but is ultimately a small consolation.
There's a chance, though, that the fault may lie in our unit. A Google spokesperson responded to our inquiries about it as follows:
"The camera hardware and underlying software (image processing, etc.) are the exact same between the Stock and Sense UX versions of HTC One, so there should not be any differences. Our camera tests show that the quality is consistent between the two."
That said, the Google engineers saw what we were talking about in our photos, and they are doing more testing, but they believe we have a faulty device. So who knows! Hopefully it's just a glitch with our One. We'll be getting a new one shortly and will update.
There are a few other quibbles, too, some small things you may have taken for granted with Sense that you don't get with stock. In HTC Sense's dialer app, you can start punching a friend's name into the number pad (using the superscript letters) and it will quickly pull up contacts. The stock dialer doesn't do this, so you have to scroll through your long list of contacts.
HTC Sense also offers built-in profiles?an easy way to switch between Normal, Vibrate, and Silent modes. Not so in stock. Also, the HTC One has a built-in IR blaster for using your phone as a remote control. Not only does the stock version not come with a preinstalled app that lets you use it, but as of right now there are no apps in the Play Store that can take advantage of it, either. We were told that capability would be coming in the next software build, though APIs will still have to be released, and someone will still have to make an app that uses them.
There's also the rather steep sticker price of $600, but that sounds like a bigger number than it actually is. For an unlocked, unsubsidized phone it's pretty standard. If you're used to paying $200 for a high-end phone and have your wireless carrier subsidize the rest (as a part of a two-year contract, typically) may experience some sticker-shock.
That might sound like it all adds up to a lot of negative, but it's really negligible, especially assuming we were dealing with an abnormal camera. And we haven't even mentioned the biggest advantage of a Google Edition phone yet: Updates. The stock version of the HTC One will all but certainly be upgraded to the newest version of Android right along with (or at least close to) the Nexus program. The One with Sense, by contrast, is still running Android version 4.1.2, which is now more than a year old. For people who want the latest and greatest coming out of Google HQ, this is huge. And trust us, you want the latest and greatest.
The stock HTC One runs on AT&T, T-Mobile, and other GSM carriers (i.e. not Verizon or Sprint), and yes, LTE works. We tested it on AT&T's network in NYC, and when we had four bars of LTE we averaged download speeds of over 20Mbps and upload speeds of over 12Mbps. We did have some problems with our radio, initially, but after talking with Google it appears that was unique to our particular test unit. And once we worked out the bug (it chose the wrong APN, for you geeks out there), it performed flawlessly. So, really, our only major gripe here is the camera. We've reached out to Google about it, and will update if we hear anything back.
Galaxy S4: Stock vs. TouchWiz
In our initial review of the Galaxy S4, almost all of our complaints about it were software-related. So you would think that replacing TouchWiz with stock Android would fix almost all of its problems, right?
Yep. That's pretty much true.
Samsung's TouchWiz is such a heavy skin that it slows things down despite the super-fast 1.9GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor in its belly. But while stock Android makes the HTC One a little faster, it's a serious change in the Galaxy S4. Scrolling through menus and across screens is faster and smoother. Apps generally open more quickly, and most importantly, there is now almost zero shutter lag on the camera, whereas the TouchWiz version can lag behind by as much as a second.
TouchWiz is also just a clusterfrak of settings and bells and whistles, most of which sit there unused, clogging up menus. Stock Android is starkly minimalist by comparison. The stock apps look better and are more intuitive to use almost without exception. Desktop customization is way simpler. We were also able to install and use Google Wallet on it (not so on the HTC One Google Edition), which is typically blocked by AT&T. Why it worked on the S4 and not the One despite using the same SIM card for both, we do not know.
On the hardware side, thankfully, photos the 13MP camera took look almost identical to those on the TouchWiz version. Again, the camera app is much simplified, and though you gain PhotoSphere and easier access to HDR, you do lose a lot of the fun camera modes that Samsung came up with, like Drama Shot (which superimposes several images of a subject in motion into a single shot) and animated GIFs. As you know, the Galaxy S4 features a micro SD card slot, and while you can read files off of it (photos, etc.) you can't take full advantage of it. For example, there is no native way to move apps over to your SD card, as there is in the skinned versions of Android.
There are, of course, things you lose that you will miss. Again, TouchWiz's dialer lets you punch in numbers to get to your contacts quickly, stock Android's dialer doesn't (please fix this, guys!), and you lose TouchWiz's profiles feature as well. TouchWiz has some handy shortcuts to settings within the notification screen and some people may miss those, but for our money, the way stock Android handles it is better, and keeps your notification panel looking cleaner and easier to read. Also, while the IR blaster is technically ready to be used, the API hasn't been released yet, and so there are no downloadable apps that can take advantage of it yet.
And as with the HTC One, the sticker price might be tough to swallow. At $650, it ain't exactly cheap, but again, that's not bad for a high-end, unlocked, unsubsidized phone. As we suspected, putting stock Android on the Galaxy S4 made one of the very best smartphones even better.
Stock Galaxy S4 vs. Stock HTC One
So, if you've decided you're going to go with one of these stock phones. Now that the software is essentially identical, here's how they compare.
Build
The HTC One is still arguably the best-designed phone we've ever used, and its build quality is unmatched. It was cut from a solid block of aluminum and it feels amazing. The Galaxy S4 is by no means bad, but with its slippery plastic back, there's no comparison. The One is slightly narrower and is a bit easier to handle, too.
Winner: HTC One
Screen
The screens are definitely two different looks, as you can see in the video above. They're both 1080p. The S4 is a full 5 inches which gives you a little more real estate, whereas the One's 4.7-inch screen means the pixel density is every so slightly higher, making it look very slightly sharper.
In the whites HTC One skew a bit on the rosy side, whereas the whites on the Galaxy S4 skew blueish-green. Which is "better" is more a matter of personal preference, though we slightly prefer the One.
In the blacks, there's no contest. The Galaxy S4 is like looking into the cold, black vacuum of space, even at full brightness. At full brightness, the HTC One's blacks are very slightly gray. It's still very good, but it's definitely not as good as the S4.
Winner: Tie
Camera
As you can see in the video above, the stock HTC One locks focus and snaps shots faster than stock Galaxy S4. But, as we mentioned above, the camera on the stock HTC One was under-performing compared to the original. As a result, the camera on the Galaxy S4 is much sharper, has better color, and better contrast. The One does, however, still stomp the S4 in low light. Hopefully we just got a bum HTC unit, but for now the Galaxy S4's camera is better. Click here for a gallery of comparison shots.
Winner: Galaxy S4 (pending)
Audio
The HTC One is the hands down winner here. It's not even close. The stereo front-facing speakers are loud and clear. The S4's external speaker (on the back) is quiet and terrible by comparison. Also, the pre-amp in the HTC One makes listening to music through headphones noticeably better.
Winner: HTC One
User Interface
Unlike full on Nexus phones, the One and the S4 both have hardware navigation buttons. The One has two capacitive buttons: One for Home, and one for Back. You double-tap home to bring up the task-switcher, and you long-press it to bring up Google Now.
The Galaxy S4 on the other hand has three navigation buttons: Back and Menu are both capitative and there's a home button in the center which is press-able. You press it once to go home, twice quickly for multitasking, and long press for Google Now.
The capacitive buttons on the HTC (for home and task switching) are simply faster and easier to use. Also, because there is no physical menu button, that puts the menu options on screen in apps, which we find to be more intuitive.
Winner: HTC One
Speed
Navigating around the OS, the HTC One is just a hair quicker. Considering it has the same software and the same processor but it's clocked 0.2 GHz slower than the S4, that shouldn't be the case. But it is. Go figure. We're talking about a very small difference, though. In benchmarks the S4 wins, but that doesn't really matter unless you're playing a very serious game, and even then, you're probably not going to see the difference.
Winner: HTC One
Battery Life
Too soon to tell. More testing required.
Winner: TBD
Options
You want expandable storage? The S4's got it, the HTC One doesn't. Want a removable battery? Ditto. If you like to tinker, you're going to get frustrated fast with the HTC One's lack of fungibility.
Similarly, while there are some accessories available for the One, Samsung has built itself a much more robust third-party ecosystem. If you want your phone with a side of stuff, the S4 is the way to go.
Winner: Galaxy S4
Price
Last but not least, the price. The HTC One is $600, and the Galaxy S4 is $650.
Winner: HTC One
Overall
Honestly, these are both terrific phones, and you'd be happy with either. If an SD card slot and removable battery are a big deal for you, go ahead and get the Galaxy S4. Otherwise, the HTC One is our favorite by a nose. Most of all, though, just be glad that you can finally get the best possible versions of the best possible phones on Android. It's about time.
US movie studios Disney and Sony are trying to cut down on piracy by streaming movies even while they're still in the theater.
The studios are streaming the movies over a new service, currently available only in South Korea,?The Verge's Matt Brian reports.
The service allows for people to choose if they'd rather pay for a traditional movie ticket, or instead pay to enjoy the flick from the comfort of their own homes.
Sony and Disney have made "Wreck-It Ralph," "Django Unchained," and "Brave" available to stream.
This isn't the first time Disney has tested the service.
Back in 2011, Disney briefly tested the same streaming program in Portugal, where they offered on-demand streaming of "Tangled."
While many consumers in the US would be interested in such an affordable option, don't hold your breathe.
A large reason that Sony and Disney chose South Korea as a test market is the nation's openness to such a program. The US has seen much more resistance from studios, as many are keen to keep the current system.
With $10.8 billion in domestic revenue last year, ticket sales might have to decrease significantly before a similar on-demand service is considered.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? The United States and Afghanistan are still waiting to hear from the Taliban about opening peace talks, but remain willing to go ahead with negotiations despite a stir the militant group caused in opening a new office in Qatar, the main American envoy trying to spearhead the process said Monday.
Following meetings with Qatari officials in Doha on Sunday and with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other officials in Kabul on Monday, James Dobbins said the Taliban appeared to have made a miscalculation when it opened the office last week under the flag and name they used when in power in Afghanistan.
The office's creation was intended as a step toward starting talks that Dobbins said would initially be between the Taliban and the Americans, then bring in Karzai's government. But the Taliban's flourish in opening it with a ceremony shown live on TV prompted quick condemnation from Karzai. He said the flag and calling the bureau an office of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" made it akin to an embassy and conferred legitimacy on the Taliban that they should not have.
Amid pressure from the U.S. and Afghans, the Qatari government moved quickly to have the offending sign and flag taken down.
"There was a combination of misunderstandings and a desire on the Taliban's part to score a propaganda advance, and they seem to have overplayed their hand and as a result probably lost rather than gained ground," Dobbins told a group of reporters.
In a statement illustrating the challenges ahead, however, the Taliban said Monday that reports that their office had agreed to remove the sign and flag were "baseless and fabricated" ? though both are down at the site.
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said the group's stance hadn't changed on the use of both. He did not say whether they planned on trying to put them back up.
After the Taliban office's opening, Karzai lashed out, saying that international assurances made to him had been broken. He suspended bilateral talks with the U.S. on what presence American and coalition forces would keep in Afghanistan after 2014.
After meeting with Karzai, Dobbins said the security agreement did not come up in their discussions together, but that their talks were "quite positive."
"We reviewed where we are on the reconciliation front ? basically waiting to see whether the Taliban want to talk. It was quite upbeat, no real issues of controversy emerged."
He noted that the U.S. had reacted to the Taliban's move even before Karzai had made his public statement.
"We were outraged ourselves, because it was inconsistent with the assurances we'd been given and the assurances we'd given and we didn't need any prompting to determine that," he said. "We thought the Afghan reaction was both entirely predictable, and entirely justified."
Karzai's office said in a statement that he had emphasized to Dobbins that Afghanistan still wants the peace process, and that it should be led by Afghans. Dobbins said the arrangement has always been that the U.S. and Taliban would meet and then "within a few days" the Afghan sides would begin meeting.
Dobbins said it was still not clear whether the Taliban was prepared to participate at all, but said the signals have been that they are.
"Clearly they were serious enough to get to the point that we are... so it doesn't seem like an entirely spurious effort on their part," he said. "But whether they're prepared to participate under what we thought were the agreed arrangements, we just don't know. We'll have to wait and see."
Despite setting up the peace office, the Taliban has not renounced violence, and the Afghan Ministry of Defense said fighting continued in several regions of the country.
Three Afghan soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb explosion in the southern Helmand province, the ministry said, while claiming to have killed 17 Taliban fighters in three separate operations around the country.
In Kabul, police fired on protesters who set fire to a vehicle while chanting "death to Karzai," and "death to the occupiers."
The protests centered on government plans to develop a subdivision in the capital on land long occupied by squatters. Demonstrators blocked two main roads out of the city, and said they would continue their protests until the government gave them somewhere else to live.
Police Gen. Mohammad Zahir said his forces were only deployed after Japanese experts working on the construction project called saying that "armed criminals" were threatening to kidnap them.
He said police came under fire and then shot back, and that two policemen and eight protesters were injured.
Greasy fingers are the bane of touchscreens, obscuring the display behind snail trails of oil and streaks of grime. Forget that mess. Leap Motion has promised hands-free PC navigation for months now, and after some hands-on time we can confirm that the future is here, and it's amazing.
As a brief refresher, the Leap Motion Controller tracks your hand and finger movements in three-dimensional space, allowing users to recreate multitouch input without actually touching anything. You just wave your hands and wiggle your fingers in the air over it and boom, your computer responds.
It will be available for Windows 7 and 8, as well as Mac OS X 10.6 and above, when the $80 device hits store shelves on July 29th (though if you pre-ordered, it's out on the 22nd). It won't be available for mobile to start but the company is looking into potentially integrating the technology with a number of OEMs.
With a few waves of your hands, both native applications?from web browsers to Google Earth?and system navigations respond instantly to your commands. The company is also developing Airspace, an online hub for LeapMotion-enabled applications.
"Everything you can do with a touch-based system, like Windows 8, can now be accomplished with LeapMotion technology. We want our users to have a magical experience, with easy and natural movements in the air leading to amazing interactions. This is the foundation for our approach to existing systems," David Holz, co-founder and CTO of LeapMotion, said in a press statement. "But this is only the beginning. The potential for our 3D interaction technology is really unleashed by applications built specifically for LeapMotion, helping drive the future of computing."
I had the opportunity to try out the Leap Motion last week, and great googly moogly this thing is amazeballs. It tracks both hands?their position, angle, rotation, orientation, everything?in real time, as well as the positions and movements of all three joints in all ten fingers. The controller registers everything within a roughly foot-tall, 18-inch-wide dome-shaped area surrounding the controller and is wildly accurate, picking up even miniscule finger twitches. During the demo, used Google Earth to fly around Lower Manhattan like I was the kid from Flight of the Navigator, I played a 3D variation of Brick Breaker using my index fingers as paddles to punch, poke, and prod the ball around the arena, and I navigated around both OS X and Windows 8 systems by swiping my hands through the air.
It was strange, initially, getting used to moving the cursor without grabbing a mouse or tapping the screen but it only takes a second to get the hang of the process. The controller can also be set to use either basic controls (taps, swipes, and other common input commands) or more advanced gestures, which helps ease you into it as well.
Granted, I played with this device for all of 15 minutes in a controlled environment (LeapMotion's SF office) but that was a glorious quarter hour; I felt like Tony Stark using the Jarvis UI. July 29th can't come soon enough.
JCI early table of contents for June 24, 2013Public release date: 24-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jillian Hurst press_releases@the-jci.org Journal of Clinical Investigation
A prenatal trigger for postnatal obesity
During pregnancy, the health of the mother and the intrauterine environment can have dramatic and lasting effects on the child. Intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP) is a liver disease that affects 0.5-2% of pregnant women and is characterized by increased bile acid levels in the maternal serum. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Catherine Williamson and colleagues at Imperial College London studied the long term impact of ICP in a cohort of Finnish families. They found that as teenagers, individuals born to women with ICP had altered metabolic profiles and increased BMI. To further understand this effect, Williams and colleagues developed a mouse model of ICP and found that offspring of ICP mothers were more susceptible to metabolic disease and diet-induced obesity. In the companion commentary, Susan Murphy of Duke University points out that the mouse model of ICP may also be useful in identifying other factors that predispose individuals to metabolic syndrome.
TITLE: Cholestatic pregnancy programmes metabolic disease in the offspring
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/68927?key=15f4f087e8569a468d83
ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY
TITLE: Prenatal sensitization of a postnatal trigger for metabolic disease
AUTHOR CONTACT: Susan Murphy
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA
Phone: 919 681-3423; Fax: 919 684-5336; E-mail: murph035@mc.duke.edu
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/69399?key=bb81f4707f101fecbcaa
Gene dysregulation underlies preeclampsia
Preeclampsia is a medical condition affecting 4-8% of pregnancies that is characterized by high maternal blood pressure, excess protein in maternal urine, and reduced fetal growth. If left untreated, it can develop into eclampsia, which causes life threatening seizures. Apart from delivery, there is no known cure. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Susan Fisher at the University of California, San Francisco, examined cytotrophoblast cells, which help to form the placenta, from women that developed preeclampsia and healthy controls. They found that the cytotrophoblasts from patients with preeclampsia exhibited changes in gene expression, particularly in the gene SEMA3B. Increased expression of SEMA3B in normal cytotrophoblasts recreated some of the features of the cytotrophoblasts from patients with preeclampsia. In the accompanying Attending Physician article, Roberto Romero of the National Institute of Child Health and Development discusses how these findings are our first insight into the pathogenesis of preeclampsia.
TITLE: Reversal of gene dysregulation in cultured cytotrophoblasts reveals possible causes of preeclampsia
AUTHOR CONTACT: Michael McMaster
University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Phone: 415-514-0172; E-mail: mcmaster@cgl.ucsf.edu
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/66966?key=21b97f984b68c6c0c8d7
ACCOMPANYING ATTENDING PHYSICIAN
TITLE: Preeclampsia: a link between trophoblast dysregulation and an anti-angiogenic state
AUTHOR CONTACT: ROBERTO ROMERO
PERINATOLOGY RESEARCH BRANCH, NICHD, NIH, DHHS, Detroit, MI, USA
Phone: 313-993-2700; Fax: 313-993-2694; E-mail: romeror@mail.nih.gov
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/70431?key=a945472a049b383326f4
The inflammatory consequences of chronic cannabis use
Chronic cannabis use has been associated with defects in the regions of the brain that regulate motor control, but how the active component of the drug, THC, mediates these defects is incompletely understood. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Andres Ozaita and colleagues at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona exposed mice to sub-chronic doses of THC and observed deficiencies in learning and coordination associated with brain inflammation and downregulation of the THC receptor CB1R. Furthermore, Ozaita and colleagues found that the defects in these animals could be prevented by treatment with an anti-inflammatory agent. This work suggests that brain inflammation resulting from decreased CB1R is directly related to the learning and motor coordination side effects associated with cannabis consumption. In the accompanying commentary, Nephi Stella at the Center for Human Development and Disability in Seattle points out that these findings raise questions about the safety of medicinal THC applications.
TITLE: Mechanisms underlying the cerebellar deficits produced by repeated cannabis exposure
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/70226?key=1251fa84d26041e7a671
Signal crossing in liver cancer
Many cancers rely on specific molecules, known as oncogenes, to mediate their initiation and growth; however, researcher have not identified oncogenes that drive hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). This lack of specific targets makes it difficult to select therapies for HCC patients. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, James Hsieh and colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center found that the protein MLL, which is associated with mixed lineage leukemia and developmental disorders, is linked to the HGF-MET cell signaling pathway, which mediates metastasis in HCC. Using transgenic mice and HCC cell lines, Hsieh and colleagues demonstrated that HGF-MET signaling stabilizes MLL so that it can trigger the expression of genes required for HCC metastasis. In a companion commentary, Snorri Thorgeirsson at the National Cancer Institute discusses how future research can build on these findings and aid in the development of therapeutic strategies for HCC.
TITLE: HGF-MET signals via the MLL-ETS2 in hepatocellular carcinoma
AUTHOR CONTACT: James Hsieh
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
Phone: 6468883263; E-mail: hsiehj@mskcc.org
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/65566?key=554e80f5f250a1961c9b
ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY
TITLE: Linking MLL and the HGF-MET signaling pathway in liver cancer
AUTHOR CONTACT: Snorri Thorgeirsson
Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA
Phone: 301-496-1935; Fax: 301-496-0734; E-mail: snorri_thorgeirsson@nih.gov
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/70235?key=2a211148658707001dbb
Kidneys strike a balance in body pH
The body's acid-base balance is modulated in part by the action of the kidney, where cells alter bodily pH by excreting acid or base into the urine in response to high levels of acid (acidosis) or base (alkaloidosis). It is unclear how these cells communicate with the rest of the kidney and participate in integrated physiological processes. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Dmitri Firsov and colleagues at the University of Lausanne found that a receptor known as OXGR1 in the kidney responds to levels of a metabolite, ?KG, to coordinate the kidney's response to acidosis and alkaloidosis. In the accompanying commentary, Jnos Peti-Peterdi of UCLA points out that further research will be necessary to fully understand the systemic role of ?KG .
TITLE: alpha-ketoglutarate regulates acid-base balance through an intra-renal paracrine mechanism
AUTHOR CONTACT: Dmitri Firsov
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Lausanne, CHE
Phone: ++41216925406; E-mail: dmitri.firsov@unil.ch
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/67562?key=408922b97f085ce40b13
ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY
TITLE: Mitochondrial TCA-cycle intermediates regulate body fluid and acid-base balance
AUTHOR CONTACT: Janos Peti-Peterdi
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Phone: 323-442-4337; E-mail: petipete@usc.edu
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/68095?key=c031dab289e762e8a011
Targeting melanoma with modified dendritic cells
In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Scott Pruitt at Duke University and Merck Research Laboratories report on a human clinical trial in which modified dendritic cells, a component of the immune system, were tested in patients with melanoma. All cells express a complex known as the proteasome, which acts as the garbage disposal for the cell. There are two types of proteasomes: constitutive proteasomes (cPs), which are found in normal tissues, and immunoproteasomes (iPs), which are found in stressed or damaged cells. In a damaged cell, the iP generates protein fragments that are displayed on the surface of the distressed cells, triggering recognition by dendritic cells and subsequent destruction by the immune system. Most cancers, including melanoma, exclusively express cPs, making it impossible for them to express the protein fragments that are recognized by the immune system. To make it easier for the immune system to find cancer cells, Pruitt and colleagues engineered a specific type of immune cell, known as a dendritic cell, that recognizes protein fragments of cancer specific antigens made by cPs. The engineered dendritic cells were then injected into patients that were in remission from melanoma. The trial consisted of 4 patients that were vaccinated with regular dendritic cells, 3 patients that received cells that underwent a control treatment, and 5 patients that received dendritic cells that recognized cancer-made protein fragments. Vaccination with all three types of dendritic cells elicited an immune response, which peaked after 3-4 vaccinations with dendritic cells. Patients that received the specially modified dendritic cells had a longer lasting immune response and fewer circulating melanoma cells. Of the two patients that had active disease, treatment with modified dendritic cells resulted in a partial clinical response in one and a complete clinical response in the other. These results suggest that modification of dendritic cells so that they recognize cP-produced tumor antigens enhances immune recognition of melanoma cells.
This study was funded by Duke Clinical Research Institute/Duke Translational Medicine Institute, Duke Melanoma Consortium, and Duke University Department of Surgery. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, etc.
TITLE: Melanoma immunotherapy using mature DCs expressing the constitutive proteasome
AUTHOR CONTACT: Scott Pruitt
Merck Research Laboratories, Rahway, NJ, USA
Phone: 919-632-6118; Fax: 732-594-5512; E-mail: scott.pruitt@merck.com
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/67544?key=ca11555dad2fe390851f
Researchers identify a protein that hinders the immune response to severe bacterial infections
Clearance of invading pathogens is essential to prevent overwhelming inflammation and sepsis that are symptomatic of bacterial peritonitis, an infection of the abdominal cavity. Macrophages are immune cells that participate in the immune response by engulfing and digesting pathogens, a process called phagocytosis. Oxidized phospholipids (OxPL) are molecules generated in response to infection that can prevent bacterial clearance by phagocytosis. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Sylvia Knapp and colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna investigated how OxPL block macrophage activity. Using a mouse model of bacterial peritonitis, Knapp and colleagues found that the protein WAVE1 mediates the effects of OxPL in macrophages. Mice lacking WAVE1 survived longer than normal mice after bacterial infection. Additionally, peritoneal fluid from human patients with end-stage renal failure contained OxPL and inhibited phagocytosis via WAVE1. These data identify WAVE1 as an important mediator of bacterial pathogenicity and suggest that it could serve as a therapeutic target in severe bacterial infections.
TITLE:WAVE1 mediates suppression of phagocytosis by phospholipid-derived DAMPs
AUTHOR CONTACT: Sylvia Knapp
Medical University Vienna, Vienna, AUT
Phone: +43-1-40400-5139; Fax: +43-1-40400-5167; E-mail: sylvia.knapp@meduniwien.ac.at
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/60681?key=ddf9c6d38d19cf06d764
Modified immune cells reduce flu severity in mice
Influenza A viruses cause significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. Current treatment strategies are limited to antiviral medications; however, many forms of the virus have become resistant to these medications. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Kanta Subbarao and colleagues at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease describe a method to modify immune cells, known as dendritic cells, to enhance the immune response to influenza in mice. The modified dendritic cells decreased the severity of the disease in influenza A-infected mice, indicated that such a strategy could potentially be used to treat viral infections.
TITLE: Antigen-activated dendritic cells ameliorate influenza A infections
AUTHOR CONTACT: Kanta Subbarao
NIAID, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA
Phone: (301) 451-3839; Fax: (301) 480-4749; E-mail: ksubbarao@niaid.nih.gov
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/67550?key=92d0e4138ef829b60710
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JCI early table of contents for June 24, 2013Public release date: 24-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jillian Hurst press_releases@the-jci.org Journal of Clinical Investigation
A prenatal trigger for postnatal obesity
During pregnancy, the health of the mother and the intrauterine environment can have dramatic and lasting effects on the child. Intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP) is a liver disease that affects 0.5-2% of pregnant women and is characterized by increased bile acid levels in the maternal serum. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Catherine Williamson and colleagues at Imperial College London studied the long term impact of ICP in a cohort of Finnish families. They found that as teenagers, individuals born to women with ICP had altered metabolic profiles and increased BMI. To further understand this effect, Williams and colleagues developed a mouse model of ICP and found that offspring of ICP mothers were more susceptible to metabolic disease and diet-induced obesity. In the companion commentary, Susan Murphy of Duke University points out that the mouse model of ICP may also be useful in identifying other factors that predispose individuals to metabolic syndrome.
TITLE: Cholestatic pregnancy programmes metabolic disease in the offspring
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/68927?key=15f4f087e8569a468d83
ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY
TITLE: Prenatal sensitization of a postnatal trigger for metabolic disease
AUTHOR CONTACT: Susan Murphy
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA
Phone: 919 681-3423; Fax: 919 684-5336; E-mail: murph035@mc.duke.edu
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/69399?key=bb81f4707f101fecbcaa
Gene dysregulation underlies preeclampsia
Preeclampsia is a medical condition affecting 4-8% of pregnancies that is characterized by high maternal blood pressure, excess protein in maternal urine, and reduced fetal growth. If left untreated, it can develop into eclampsia, which causes life threatening seizures. Apart from delivery, there is no known cure. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Susan Fisher at the University of California, San Francisco, examined cytotrophoblast cells, which help to form the placenta, from women that developed preeclampsia and healthy controls. They found that the cytotrophoblasts from patients with preeclampsia exhibited changes in gene expression, particularly in the gene SEMA3B. Increased expression of SEMA3B in normal cytotrophoblasts recreated some of the features of the cytotrophoblasts from patients with preeclampsia. In the accompanying Attending Physician article, Roberto Romero of the National Institute of Child Health and Development discusses how these findings are our first insight into the pathogenesis of preeclampsia.
TITLE: Reversal of gene dysregulation in cultured cytotrophoblasts reveals possible causes of preeclampsia
AUTHOR CONTACT: Michael McMaster
University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Phone: 415-514-0172; E-mail: mcmaster@cgl.ucsf.edu
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/66966?key=21b97f984b68c6c0c8d7
ACCOMPANYING ATTENDING PHYSICIAN
TITLE: Preeclampsia: a link between trophoblast dysregulation and an anti-angiogenic state
AUTHOR CONTACT: ROBERTO ROMERO
PERINATOLOGY RESEARCH BRANCH, NICHD, NIH, DHHS, Detroit, MI, USA
Phone: 313-993-2700; Fax: 313-993-2694; E-mail: romeror@mail.nih.gov
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/70431?key=a945472a049b383326f4
The inflammatory consequences of chronic cannabis use
Chronic cannabis use has been associated with defects in the regions of the brain that regulate motor control, but how the active component of the drug, THC, mediates these defects is incompletely understood. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Andres Ozaita and colleagues at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona exposed mice to sub-chronic doses of THC and observed deficiencies in learning and coordination associated with brain inflammation and downregulation of the THC receptor CB1R. Furthermore, Ozaita and colleagues found that the defects in these animals could be prevented by treatment with an anti-inflammatory agent. This work suggests that brain inflammation resulting from decreased CB1R is directly related to the learning and motor coordination side effects associated with cannabis consumption. In the accompanying commentary, Nephi Stella at the Center for Human Development and Disability in Seattle points out that these findings raise questions about the safety of medicinal THC applications.
TITLE: Mechanisms underlying the cerebellar deficits produced by repeated cannabis exposure
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/70226?key=1251fa84d26041e7a671
Signal crossing in liver cancer
Many cancers rely on specific molecules, known as oncogenes, to mediate their initiation and growth; however, researcher have not identified oncogenes that drive hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). This lack of specific targets makes it difficult to select therapies for HCC patients. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, James Hsieh and colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center found that the protein MLL, which is associated with mixed lineage leukemia and developmental disorders, is linked to the HGF-MET cell signaling pathway, which mediates metastasis in HCC. Using transgenic mice and HCC cell lines, Hsieh and colleagues demonstrated that HGF-MET signaling stabilizes MLL so that it can trigger the expression of genes required for HCC metastasis. In a companion commentary, Snorri Thorgeirsson at the National Cancer Institute discusses how future research can build on these findings and aid in the development of therapeutic strategies for HCC.
TITLE: HGF-MET signals via the MLL-ETS2 in hepatocellular carcinoma
AUTHOR CONTACT: James Hsieh
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
Phone: 6468883263; E-mail: hsiehj@mskcc.org
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/65566?key=554e80f5f250a1961c9b
ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY
TITLE: Linking MLL and the HGF-MET signaling pathway in liver cancer
AUTHOR CONTACT: Snorri Thorgeirsson
Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA
Phone: 301-496-1935; Fax: 301-496-0734; E-mail: snorri_thorgeirsson@nih.gov
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/70235?key=2a211148658707001dbb
Kidneys strike a balance in body pH
The body's acid-base balance is modulated in part by the action of the kidney, where cells alter bodily pH by excreting acid or base into the urine in response to high levels of acid (acidosis) or base (alkaloidosis). It is unclear how these cells communicate with the rest of the kidney and participate in integrated physiological processes. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Dmitri Firsov and colleagues at the University of Lausanne found that a receptor known as OXGR1 in the kidney responds to levels of a metabolite, ?KG, to coordinate the kidney's response to acidosis and alkaloidosis. In the accompanying commentary, Jnos Peti-Peterdi of UCLA points out that further research will be necessary to fully understand the systemic role of ?KG .
TITLE: alpha-ketoglutarate regulates acid-base balance through an intra-renal paracrine mechanism
AUTHOR CONTACT: Dmitri Firsov
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Lausanne, CHE
Phone: ++41216925406; E-mail: dmitri.firsov@unil.ch
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/67562?key=408922b97f085ce40b13
ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY
TITLE: Mitochondrial TCA-cycle intermediates regulate body fluid and acid-base balance
AUTHOR CONTACT: Janos Peti-Peterdi
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Phone: 323-442-4337; E-mail: petipete@usc.edu
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/68095?key=c031dab289e762e8a011
Targeting melanoma with modified dendritic cells
In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Scott Pruitt at Duke University and Merck Research Laboratories report on a human clinical trial in which modified dendritic cells, a component of the immune system, were tested in patients with melanoma. All cells express a complex known as the proteasome, which acts as the garbage disposal for the cell. There are two types of proteasomes: constitutive proteasomes (cPs), which are found in normal tissues, and immunoproteasomes (iPs), which are found in stressed or damaged cells. In a damaged cell, the iP generates protein fragments that are displayed on the surface of the distressed cells, triggering recognition by dendritic cells and subsequent destruction by the immune system. Most cancers, including melanoma, exclusively express cPs, making it impossible for them to express the protein fragments that are recognized by the immune system. To make it easier for the immune system to find cancer cells, Pruitt and colleagues engineered a specific type of immune cell, known as a dendritic cell, that recognizes protein fragments of cancer specific antigens made by cPs. The engineered dendritic cells were then injected into patients that were in remission from melanoma. The trial consisted of 4 patients that were vaccinated with regular dendritic cells, 3 patients that received cells that underwent a control treatment, and 5 patients that received dendritic cells that recognized cancer-made protein fragments. Vaccination with all three types of dendritic cells elicited an immune response, which peaked after 3-4 vaccinations with dendritic cells. Patients that received the specially modified dendritic cells had a longer lasting immune response and fewer circulating melanoma cells. Of the two patients that had active disease, treatment with modified dendritic cells resulted in a partial clinical response in one and a complete clinical response in the other. These results suggest that modification of dendritic cells so that they recognize cP-produced tumor antigens enhances immune recognition of melanoma cells.
This study was funded by Duke Clinical Research Institute/Duke Translational Medicine Institute, Duke Melanoma Consortium, and Duke University Department of Surgery. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, etc.
TITLE: Melanoma immunotherapy using mature DCs expressing the constitutive proteasome
AUTHOR CONTACT: Scott Pruitt
Merck Research Laboratories, Rahway, NJ, USA
Phone: 919-632-6118; Fax: 732-594-5512; E-mail: scott.pruitt@merck.com
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/67544?key=ca11555dad2fe390851f
Researchers identify a protein that hinders the immune response to severe bacterial infections
Clearance of invading pathogens is essential to prevent overwhelming inflammation and sepsis that are symptomatic of bacterial peritonitis, an infection of the abdominal cavity. Macrophages are immune cells that participate in the immune response by engulfing and digesting pathogens, a process called phagocytosis. Oxidized phospholipids (OxPL) are molecules generated in response to infection that can prevent bacterial clearance by phagocytosis. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Sylvia Knapp and colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna investigated how OxPL block macrophage activity. Using a mouse model of bacterial peritonitis, Knapp and colleagues found that the protein WAVE1 mediates the effects of OxPL in macrophages. Mice lacking WAVE1 survived longer than normal mice after bacterial infection. Additionally, peritoneal fluid from human patients with end-stage renal failure contained OxPL and inhibited phagocytosis via WAVE1. These data identify WAVE1 as an important mediator of bacterial pathogenicity and suggest that it could serve as a therapeutic target in severe bacterial infections.
TITLE:WAVE1 mediates suppression of phagocytosis by phospholipid-derived DAMPs
AUTHOR CONTACT: Sylvia Knapp
Medical University Vienna, Vienna, AUT
Phone: +43-1-40400-5139; Fax: +43-1-40400-5167; E-mail: sylvia.knapp@meduniwien.ac.at
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/60681?key=ddf9c6d38d19cf06d764
Modified immune cells reduce flu severity in mice
Influenza A viruses cause significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. Current treatment strategies are limited to antiviral medications; however, many forms of the virus have become resistant to these medications. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Kanta Subbarao and colleagues at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease describe a method to modify immune cells, known as dendritic cells, to enhance the immune response to influenza in mice. The modified dendritic cells decreased the severity of the disease in influenza A-infected mice, indicated that such a strategy could potentially be used to treat viral infections.
TITLE: Antigen-activated dendritic cells ameliorate influenza A infections
AUTHOR CONTACT: Kanta Subbarao
NIAID, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA
Phone: (301) 451-3839; Fax: (301) 480-4749; E-mail: ksubbarao@niaid.nih.gov
View this article at: http://www.jci.org/articles/view/67550?key=92d0e4138ef829b60710
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Public release date: 24-Jun-2013
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