Some gave short shrift to Windows Phone App Studio beta when it launched in August, but its web based development tool is proving to be popular -- developers have already built 65,000 apps. Microsoft hopes to keep that momentum going with a slew of App Studio upgrades that should make these ...This story first appeared in the Nov. 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Huddled together just before the first of this year's awards-season roundtables got underway at the historic Mack Sennett Studios in Silver Lake, the six invited actors were eager to discuss one thing: Christopher Nolan. "Is he a big guy?" one of the participants asked Matthew McConaughey, who was taking a break from shooting the director's Interstellar on the Sony lot. Queried another, "Does he talk a lot?" McConaughey, 43, demurred as he joked with his Dallas Buyers Club co-star Jared Leto, 41, who had flown in the night before from Michigan, where he performed with his band 30 Seconds to Mars. The duo joined Josh Brolin, 45, Jake Gyllenhaal, 32, Michael B. Jordan, 26, and Forest Whitaker, 52, in a candid discussion about everything from flubbed auditions to Brazilian waxing.
PHOTOS: Awards Roundtable: 6 Actors on Mistakes, Sacrifices, and Strange Auditions
Let's start with a question about reinvention. How do you not get stale?
JARED LETO: Panic. Desperation.
JAKE GYLLENHAAL: Bills.
JOSH BROLIN: Fear -- there's always fear. You re-create yourself in every movie, don't you?
FOREST WHITAKER: There's a good fear, and there's a negative fear. There's a thing you confront when you're going into something new and you come to this sort of abyss, and then you push yourself. It makes you try different things.
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: You mentioned two types of fear, and the one that's good is when you're scared. You don't know what's on the other side, but you're like: "I'm gonna dive in. I know there's something there; I don't know how to define it yet. I don't know the equation, but I'm gonna come up and I'll understand it." It takes you to the cliff, and you should be scared because the cliff drops, and you don't have a net.
BROLIN: I've never had that feeling in any movie where I actually feel like I'm nailing it.
WHITAKER: You don't feel the magic of it once in a while?
BROLIN: Never ever.
LETO: I get a terminal dissatisfaction on films. If I was bad in one scene, it's impossible to let go. And it can make or break my day. If I drank, I would probably drink a lot.
Q&A: Forest Whitaker on Evading Oscar's Curse, Rediscovering the Magic on 'The Butler'
Have you ever said no to something because you're afraid?
LETO: Oh yeah. I've talked myself out of auditions a hundred times. I auditioned for [Robert] De Niro seven times, years and years ago. I remember auditioning for Terrence Malick, and the casting director upended a couch, and we were supposed to hide behind it and shoot imaginary guns! [Laughter.] In that audition, I literally stood up, took a few imaginary bullets and shoved [the casting director]. I said: "I can't do this. This is like a bad high school play," and I walked out. And then Terrence called me -- you guys I'm sure have met him; he's the most gentle and amazing guy in the world -- and he's like: "Uh, Jared? I'd love you to be in my film."
Have you ever thought of quitting?
LETO: I did for six years, almost.
BROLIN: Six years you didn't work? Wow.
GYLLENHAAL: [Smiles.] It's only appropriate as an indulgent actor to think about quitting 'cause it's such an intense job.
WHITAKER: It takes a lot from you.
LETO: I was focusing on other passions, and time kind of flew by. But it can be heartbreaking. You make these little movies -- most of the time they don't work.
BROLIN: That goes back to what we were saying about feeling like you're [not] really nailing something. I remember [1996's] Flirting With Disaster -- I did the movie and never felt like we were nailing it at all. And then I saw the movie …
GYLLENHAAL: You killed that movie!
MICHAEL B. JORDAN: Exactly. Exactly.
STORY: Matthew McConaughey: Why I Rejected a $15 Million Paycheck
Matthew, what went into your reinvention? I think you turned down $15 million for a Magnum, P.I. movie.
MCCONAUGHEY: I heard that number. I don't think I ever saw that in the offer.
BROLIN: Makes for a better story.
MCCONAUGHEY: Let me just throw this at you: That same script with that number really is a whole lot funnier than [when they gave it to] me.
So not quite true?
MCCONAUGHEY No, it may be true. [Smiles.]
Sony has built a reputation of releasing numerous updates to its PlayStation platform, and apparently that has carried over to PS4 news ahead of launch. If last week's updates weren't enough, the company posted a massive FAQ (yes, we read all 30 pages, including the list of launch titles) to the ...
There's no shortage of choices when it comes to alternative calendar apps for iPhone. In fact, there's so many that it can sometimes be overwhelming to find the perfect one for you. Since the App Store is always changing, it's only fair that our recommendations and favorites change with it. And we've updated that list again:
We recently took a look at the best alternative calendar apps for folks who disliked the new default Calendar app in iOS 7. Now with the release of Fantastical 2, I felt it was only right to revisit our list and add it in.
Whether it's your first time viewing our best calendar apps list or not, make sure you check out the updated version via the link below and see how Fantastical 2 stacks up against the competition.
Then let us know in the comments which Calendar app you're using!
See also:
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A U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan.
A U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan.
While human rights groups and other watchdogs have put the civilian death toll in the hundreds, Pakistan's Ministry of Defense announced Wednesday that just 3 percent of the deaths from U.S. drone strikes since 2008 were noncombatants.
The ministry says 317 drone strikes have killed 2,160 Islamic militants and 67 civilians in the last five years.
According to Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, the ministry also says there hasn't been a single civilian death from a U.S. drone since January 2012 — a time period that saw 300 such strikes carried out in Pakistani territory.
Dawn says:
"[This] year has witnessed the lowest number of drone strikes which are 14 as compared to 2010 when the US hit Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas 115 times through drone attacks."
Even so, the strikes have been publicly condemned by Islamabad and were reportedly the subject of discussions last week between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and President Obama during the Pakistani leader's visit to Washington.
The Pakistan Defense Ministry's conclusion is similar to one reached by the U.S. Army War College in a report that we wrote about last month. The War College report said 26 militants were killed for every confirmed civilian death, a ratio that comes out to just under 4 percent.
A United Nations expert said earlier this month, however, that at least 400 civilians had been killed since 2004, or about 18 percent of the total 2,200 drone strike deaths.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
“Here’s my letter,” said Rep. Cory Gardner. The central Colorado congressman, who looks like an eager Batman sidekick grown up and made good, waved “the letter that my family got canceling our insurance.” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius looked on, framed by TV and still cameras capturing every flutter of the paper.
“We chose to have our own private policy back in Colorado so we could be in the same boat as our constituents,” said the congressman. “And yet my insurance policy has been canceled. The White House website says, if you like the plan you have, you can keep it. Did I hear it wrong?”
Sebelius, who had sweated through three hours of questions (almost half of them, to be fair, from friendly Democrats), talked to Gardner as if trying to troubleshoot for him. “I don’t know how long you’ve had your plan,” she said.
“Why aren’t you losing your health insurance?” asked Garner.
From there, the discussion turned into a familiar shaming exercise about why administration officials or liberal congressmen won’t sign onto the health care exchanges. Democrats find that easy to dismiss; Rep. Henry Waxman, the snappy ranking member of the committee, asked Sebelius if she could follow Gardner’s advice and secure a health plan that “would be able to protect you from cheap shots?”
Now that Obamacare is being implemented, the rest of the GOP is going to feel the pain of the middle class.
But after the hearing, Gardner kept on fulminating about the broken “you can keep it” promise. In a TV statement, and in a short conversation with reporters, Gardner repeated the president’s phrase like a mantra. An insurer had informed Gardner and his family that their old plan was unavailable, replaced by something with a “significantly higher” cost. They were among the 15 million people who bought insurance on the individual market, and now among the 7 to 12 million whose plans would be ended by Affordable Care Act regulations.
“We’re like millions of Americans who lost our plan after the president said if we liked it we could keep it,” he said. “We called them up, and I said, ‘Is this due to Obamacare?’ They said, ‘Yeah.’ ”
To Republicans, this is the latest in an ongoing series of Obamacare “smoking guns,” proof that the law never should have passed. And it’s more than that. It’s a shift away from the fruitless, theoretical, absolutist attacks of the past few months. Let Sen. Ted Cruz go on about liberty and tyranny and the evils of the living Constitution. Now that Obamacare is being implemented, the rest of the party is going to feel the pain of the middle class.
That pain is most acutely felt, right now, by the 5 percent of Americans who shop on the individual insurance market. For more than three years, health care reporters had been warning that these plans would be altered or scrapped as they comported with new regulations, and for at least the last month conservatives had been circulating the letters from companies warning of the change. Gardner actually released his one month ago, the sort of dramatic gesture that might have gotten more attention had congressional conservatives not been betting all their chips on a government shutdown.
Since the shutdown ended, some of the conservatives most identified with Manichean calls to shrink the government are calling for something new. Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, won a new national following with a book (The Battle) about how each new government program put a brick on the “road to serfdom.” Yet in an Oct. 18 speech, he warned conservatives against “insane” attacks on “the government social safety net for the truly indigent.”
“We somehow want to zero out food stamps or something,” said Brooks. “It’s nuts to want to be doing something like that. We have to declare peace on the safety net.”
This week, in a speech at D.C.’s other conservative mega–think tank, Utah Sen. Mike Lee did a similar reshuffle of conservative talking points. It was worth building a federal system that rewarded good behavior and lifted up the poor, even if that meant—clutch your handkerchief—some redistribution of wealth. “Many middle-class parents may pay no income taxes—but they do pay taxes,” said Lee. “Working parents are not free riders.”
What Brooks, Lee, and Gardner all realized was that conservative Republicans needed to acknowledge what government looked like in 2013. The “if you like it, you can keep it” story, which they should have glommed on to earlier, inverts the health care narrative that had always made Democrats sound like Samaritans and Republicans sound like misers. Before, the “exemplar” story of health care was of the sick person (preferably young, preferably cherubic) being denied coverage because of villainous HMOs. Now, the networks were full of exemplars whose insurers had been held down and smothered by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ invisible army of regulators.
This has Democrats spooked, for the moment. On Wednesday, as Republicans got ready to roll out a bill literally named “The If You Like Your Health Care Plan You Can Keep It Act of 2013,” Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu promised her own version. “The promise was made and it should be kept,” said the Democrat, who’s up for re-election in 13 months. “It was our understanding when we voted for that, that people when they have insurance could keep what they had.”
So the sad insurance company letters will roll in, and Republicans will keep making them famous. As the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn puts it, this tact gets Republicans out of a jam on their own health spending plans. Almost every member of the party is on record for Medicaid reforms that would end the program for millions of people, hypothetically more than are getting the bad news about private insurance plans now. Democrats, for now, are set to be the party of pain and suffering. That’s surely why Republicans at the hearing didn’t actually call for Sebelius to quit her job, or for the president to fire her.
“If this were the private sector, heads would roll,” said an eager reporter to committee chairman Rep. Fred Upton, after the hearings.
“I had the opportunity to work at the White House myself, as a political appointee,” said Upton. “I served, every day, at the pleasure of the president. I knew that if I didn’t do my job, I probably wasn’t going to be there. Because she is there, she is serving with his pleasure, and, uh …”
He trailed off, but the point was clear. Republicans have a better target than Sebelius.
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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 30-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Jessica Studeny
Jessica.studeny@case.edu
216-368-4692
Case Western Reserve University
A discovery from Case Western Reserve and Cleveland Clinic researchers could provide epilepsy patients invaluable advance guidance about their chances to improve symptoms through surgery.
Assistant Professor of Neurosciences Roberto Fernndez Galn, PhD, and his collaborators have identified a new, far more accurate way to determine precisely what portions of the brain suffer from the disease. This information can give patients and physicians better information regarding whether temporal lobe surgery will provide the results they seek.
"Our analysis of neuronal activity in the temporal lobe allows us to determine whether it is diseased, and therefore, whether removing it with surgery will be beneficial for the patient," Galn said, the paper's senior author. "In terms of accuracy and efficiency, our analysis method is a significant improvement relative to current approaches."
The findings appear in research published October 30 in the open access journal PLOS ONE.
About one-third of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy do not respond to medical treatment and opt to do lobectomies to alleviate their symptoms. Yet the surgery's success rate is only 60 to 70 percent because of the difficulties in identifying the diseased brain tissue prior to the procedures.
Galn and investigators from Cleveland Clinic determined that using intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) to measure patients' functional neural connectivity that is, the communication from one brain region to another - identified the epileptic lobe with 87 percent accuracy. An iEEG records electrical activity with electrodes implanted in the brain. Key indicators of a diseased lobe are weak and similar connections.
In the retrospective study, Galn and Arun Antony, MD, formerly a senior clinical fellow in the Epilepsy Center at Cleveland Clinic and now an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined data from 23 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who had all or part of their temporal lobes removed after iEEG evaluations performed at Cleveland Clinic. The researchers examined the results of patients' preoperative iEEG to determine the degree of functional connectivity that was associated with successful surgical outcomes.
"The concept of functional connectivity has been extensively studied by basic science researchers, but has not found a way into the realm of clinical epilepsy treatment yet," Antony said, the paper's first author. "Our discovery is another step towards the use of measures of functional connectivity in making clinical decisions in the treatment of epilepsy."
As a standard preoperative test for lobectomy surgery, physicians analyze iEEG traces looking for simultaneous discharges of neurons that appear as spikes in the recordings, which indicate epileptic activity. This PLOS ONE discovery evaluates the data differently by examining normal brain activity in the absence of spikes and inferring connectivity.
###
Other Cleveland Clinic collaborators on this research included Andreas V. Alexopoulos, MD, MPH, Jorge A. Gonzlez-Martnez, MD, PhD, John C. Mosher, PhD, Lara Jehi, MD, Richard C. Burgess, MD, PhD, and Norman K. So, MD.
Dr. Galn is a scholar of The Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation and former fellow of The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
About Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Founded in 1843, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine is the largest medical research institution in Ohio and is among the nation's top medical schools for research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The School of Medicine is recognized throughout the international medical community for outstanding achievements in teaching. The School's innovative and pioneering Western Reserve2 curriculum interweaves four themes--research and scholarship, clinical mastery, leadership, and civic professionalism--to prepare students for the practice of evidence-based medicine in the rapidly changing health care environment of the 21st century. Nine Nobel Laureates have been affiliated with the School of Medicine.
Annually, the School of Medicine trains more than 800 MD and MD/PhD students and ranks in the top 25 among U.S. research-oriented medical schools as designated by U.S. News & World Report's "Guide to Graduate Education."
The School of Medicine's primary affiliate is University Hospitals Case Medical Center and is additionally affiliated with MetroHealth Medical Center, the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and the Cleveland Clinic, with which it established the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University in 2002. http://casemed.case.edu
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 30-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Jessica Studeny
Jessica.studeny@case.edu
216-368-4692
Case Western Reserve University
A discovery from Case Western Reserve and Cleveland Clinic researchers could provide epilepsy patients invaluable advance guidance about their chances to improve symptoms through surgery.
Assistant Professor of Neurosciences Roberto Fernndez Galn, PhD, and his collaborators have identified a new, far more accurate way to determine precisely what portions of the brain suffer from the disease. This information can give patients and physicians better information regarding whether temporal lobe surgery will provide the results they seek.
"Our analysis of neuronal activity in the temporal lobe allows us to determine whether it is diseased, and therefore, whether removing it with surgery will be beneficial for the patient," Galn said, the paper's senior author. "In terms of accuracy and efficiency, our analysis method is a significant improvement relative to current approaches."
The findings appear in research published October 30 in the open access journal PLOS ONE.
About one-third of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy do not respond to medical treatment and opt to do lobectomies to alleviate their symptoms. Yet the surgery's success rate is only 60 to 70 percent because of the difficulties in identifying the diseased brain tissue prior to the procedures.
Galn and investigators from Cleveland Clinic determined that using intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) to measure patients' functional neural connectivity that is, the communication from one brain region to another - identified the epileptic lobe with 87 percent accuracy. An iEEG records electrical activity with electrodes implanted in the brain. Key indicators of a diseased lobe are weak and similar connections.
In the retrospective study, Galn and Arun Antony, MD, formerly a senior clinical fellow in the Epilepsy Center at Cleveland Clinic and now an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined data from 23 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who had all or part of their temporal lobes removed after iEEG evaluations performed at Cleveland Clinic. The researchers examined the results of patients' preoperative iEEG to determine the degree of functional connectivity that was associated with successful surgical outcomes.
"The concept of functional connectivity has been extensively studied by basic science researchers, but has not found a way into the realm of clinical epilepsy treatment yet," Antony said, the paper's first author. "Our discovery is another step towards the use of measures of functional connectivity in making clinical decisions in the treatment of epilepsy."
As a standard preoperative test for lobectomy surgery, physicians analyze iEEG traces looking for simultaneous discharges of neurons that appear as spikes in the recordings, which indicate epileptic activity. This PLOS ONE discovery evaluates the data differently by examining normal brain activity in the absence of spikes and inferring connectivity.
###
Other Cleveland Clinic collaborators on this research included Andreas V. Alexopoulos, MD, MPH, Jorge A. Gonzlez-Martnez, MD, PhD, John C. Mosher, PhD, Lara Jehi, MD, Richard C. Burgess, MD, PhD, and Norman K. So, MD.
Dr. Galn is a scholar of The Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation and former fellow of The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
About Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Founded in 1843, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine is the largest medical research institution in Ohio and is among the nation's top medical schools for research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The School of Medicine is recognized throughout the international medical community for outstanding achievements in teaching. The School's innovative and pioneering Western Reserve2 curriculum interweaves four themes--research and scholarship, clinical mastery, leadership, and civic professionalism--to prepare students for the practice of evidence-based medicine in the rapidly changing health care environment of the 21st century. Nine Nobel Laureates have been affiliated with the School of Medicine.
Annually, the School of Medicine trains more than 800 MD and MD/PhD students and ranks in the top 25 among U.S. research-oriented medical schools as designated by U.S. News & World Report's "Guide to Graduate Education."
The School of Medicine's primary affiliate is University Hospitals Case Medical Center and is additionally affiliated with MetroHealth Medical Center, the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and the Cleveland Clinic, with which it established the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University in 2002. http://casemed.case.edu
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 30-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Irene Perovsek
irene.perovsek@isb-sib.ch
41-216-924-054
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Switzerland's State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation, Dr Mauro Dell'Ambrogio, has signed the ELIXIR Consortium Agreement for the establishment of ELIXIR, the European Life science Infrastructure for Biological Information. This brings closer the time when five Member States will have signed, and the Consortium Agreement will enter into force. The Swiss government has committed to investing 35 million over the four-year period from 2013 to 2016. This monetary contribution is mainly provided through financial support to SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics the Swiss ELIXIR Node. However, the experience and expertise of SIB are also an important part of Switzerland's participation. Access to SIB's bioinformatics core resources and many other high-quality services, as well as the benefit of its solid experience in bioinformatics training will be major assets in the launch and success of ELIXIR.
The deluge of data produced by life science researchers thanks to new-generation technologies is a very positive development, given the wealth of information hidden in this data. Our society is constantly being challenged by crucial questions related to food, energy, the environment and, of course, health. Such data is a windfall for researchers provided that both the information and the bioinformatics resources for its analysis are accessible over the long term. ELIXIR is the European consortium, whose aim is to set up and operate a sustainable European infrastructure for biological information to support life science research and its translation to medicine, the environment, the bio-industries and society. This requires international coordination and the assurance of long-term funding.
The International Consortium Agreement signed by Switzerland today is key for the set-up of ELIXIR. Niklas Blomberg, Director of ELIXIR, is "very pleased that Switzerland, a pioneer and one of the world leaders in bioinformatics, is one of the first Member States to ratify the Agreement". Switzerland, which had already signed the Memorandum of Understanding in 2011, has thus confirmed its participation in the project. Research, life sciences and bioinformatics have been strongly supported by the Swiss government for many years, which is one of the reasons why Switzerland currently has a robust bioinformatics infrastructure.
SIB, the Swiss node of ELIXIR, is pleased to lend its support to ELIXIR
Since its inception, SIB, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, has positioned itself as a major contributor to the life sciences. UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, neXtProt, STRING, SWISS-MODEL are only a few of the core resources that have been created by SIB and are available to the life science research community worldwide. In total, more than 130 resources are accessible through SIB's web portal ExPASy (http://www.expasy.org). SIB, whose infrastructure and research groups are located in the major Swiss Universities and Federal Institutes of Technology, has a long experience in interinstitutional, intercantonal and international collaboration. Training the next generation of bioinformaticians is another of the Institute's roles, and demonstrates how SIB's missions are in tune with those of ELIXIR. According to Ron Appel, Executive Director of SIB, "ELIXIR will give a new dimension to European collaboration and open the door to the future of science".
###
About SIB
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation recognized of public utility. It federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. Its two-fold mission is to provide world-class core bioinformatics resources to the national and international life science research community in key fields such as genomics, proteomics and systems biology, as well as to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. It has a long-standing tradition of producing state-of-the-art software for the life science research community, as well as carefully annotated databases. SIB includes 46 world-class research and service groups, a total of more than 650 scientists, in the fields of proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics, systems biology, structural bioinformatics, evolutionary bioinformatics, modelling, imaging, biophysics, and population genetics in Basel, Bern, Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano and Zurich. SIB expertise is widely appreciated and its services are used by life sciences researchers worldwide.
Contacts:
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Ron Appel, Executive Director
Quartier Sorge - Btiment Gnopode
1015 Lausanne
+41 (0)21 692 40 50
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 30-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Irene Perovsek
irene.perovsek@isb-sib.ch
41-216-924-054
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Switzerland's State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation, Dr Mauro Dell'Ambrogio, has signed the ELIXIR Consortium Agreement for the establishment of ELIXIR, the European Life science Infrastructure for Biological Information. This brings closer the time when five Member States will have signed, and the Consortium Agreement will enter into force. The Swiss government has committed to investing 35 million over the four-year period from 2013 to 2016. This monetary contribution is mainly provided through financial support to SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics the Swiss ELIXIR Node. However, the experience and expertise of SIB are also an important part of Switzerland's participation. Access to SIB's bioinformatics core resources and many other high-quality services, as well as the benefit of its solid experience in bioinformatics training will be major assets in the launch and success of ELIXIR.
The deluge of data produced by life science researchers thanks to new-generation technologies is a very positive development, given the wealth of information hidden in this data. Our society is constantly being challenged by crucial questions related to food, energy, the environment and, of course, health. Such data is a windfall for researchers provided that both the information and the bioinformatics resources for its analysis are accessible over the long term. ELIXIR is the European consortium, whose aim is to set up and operate a sustainable European infrastructure for biological information to support life science research and its translation to medicine, the environment, the bio-industries and society. This requires international coordination and the assurance of long-term funding.
The International Consortium Agreement signed by Switzerland today is key for the set-up of ELIXIR. Niklas Blomberg, Director of ELIXIR, is "very pleased that Switzerland, a pioneer and one of the world leaders in bioinformatics, is one of the first Member States to ratify the Agreement". Switzerland, which had already signed the Memorandum of Understanding in 2011, has thus confirmed its participation in the project. Research, life sciences and bioinformatics have been strongly supported by the Swiss government for many years, which is one of the reasons why Switzerland currently has a robust bioinformatics infrastructure.
SIB, the Swiss node of ELIXIR, is pleased to lend its support to ELIXIR
Since its inception, SIB, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, has positioned itself as a major contributor to the life sciences. UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, neXtProt, STRING, SWISS-MODEL are only a few of the core resources that have been created by SIB and are available to the life science research community worldwide. In total, more than 130 resources are accessible through SIB's web portal ExPASy (http://www.expasy.org). SIB, whose infrastructure and research groups are located in the major Swiss Universities and Federal Institutes of Technology, has a long experience in interinstitutional, intercantonal and international collaboration. Training the next generation of bioinformaticians is another of the Institute's roles, and demonstrates how SIB's missions are in tune with those of ELIXIR. According to Ron Appel, Executive Director of SIB, "ELIXIR will give a new dimension to European collaboration and open the door to the future of science".
###
About SIB
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation recognized of public utility. It federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. Its two-fold mission is to provide world-class core bioinformatics resources to the national and international life science research community in key fields such as genomics, proteomics and systems biology, as well as to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. It has a long-standing tradition of producing state-of-the-art software for the life science research community, as well as carefully annotated databases. SIB includes 46 world-class research and service groups, a total of more than 650 scientists, in the fields of proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics, systems biology, structural bioinformatics, evolutionary bioinformatics, modelling, imaging, biophysics, and population genetics in Basel, Bern, Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano and Zurich. SIB expertise is widely appreciated and its services are used by life sciences researchers worldwide.
Contacts:
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Ron Appel, Executive Director
Quartier Sorge - Btiment Gnopode
1015 Lausanne
+41 (0)21 692 40 50
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 30-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Mayland Chang
mchang@nd.edu
574-631-2965
University of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame researchers have, for the first time, identified the enzymes that are detrimental to diabetic wound healing and those that are beneficial to repair the wound.
There are currently no therapeutics for diabetic wound healing. The current standard of care is palliative to keep the wound clean and free of infection. In the United States, 66,000 diabetic individuals each year undergo lower-limb amputations due to wounds that failed to heal.
A team of researchers from Notre Dame's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, led by Mark Suckow, Shahriar Mobashery and Mayland Chang, searched for metalloproteinases (MMPs) in the wounds of healthy and diabetic mice.
Gelatinases, a class of enzymes, have been implicated in a host of human diseases from cancer to cardiovascular conditions. Chang has been researching activation of MMPs, particularly gelatinase B or MMP-9.
The MMPs remodel the extracellular matrix in tissue during wound healing.
"We show that MMP-9 is detrimental to wound healing, while MMP-8 is beneficial," Chang said. "Our studies provide a strategy for diabetic wound healing by using selective MMP-9 inhibitors."
The team treated diabetic mice with an inhibitor of MMP-9 and discovered that wounds were healed 92 percent after 14 days, as compared to 74 percent healing in untreated mice.
The identification of the enzyme that interferes with diabetic wound healing and that which repairs the wound opens the door to new, novel treatment strategies.
"Currently, advanced wound dressings containing collagen are used for diabetic wound healing," Chang said. "The collagen provides a substrate so that the unregulated MMP-9 chews on the collagen in the dressing, rather than on the wound. It would be better to treat the diabetic wounds with a selective MMP-9 inhibitor to inhibit the culprit enzyme that is impeding wound healing while leaving the beneficial MMP-8 uninhibited to help repair the wound."
The study appeared in the American Chemical Society's journal ACS Chemical Biology.
###
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 30-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Mayland Chang
mchang@nd.edu
574-631-2965
University of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame researchers have, for the first time, identified the enzymes that are detrimental to diabetic wound healing and those that are beneficial to repair the wound.
There are currently no therapeutics for diabetic wound healing. The current standard of care is palliative to keep the wound clean and free of infection. In the United States, 66,000 diabetic individuals each year undergo lower-limb amputations due to wounds that failed to heal.
A team of researchers from Notre Dame's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, led by Mark Suckow, Shahriar Mobashery and Mayland Chang, searched for metalloproteinases (MMPs) in the wounds of healthy and diabetic mice.
Gelatinases, a class of enzymes, have been implicated in a host of human diseases from cancer to cardiovascular conditions. Chang has been researching activation of MMPs, particularly gelatinase B or MMP-9.
The MMPs remodel the extracellular matrix in tissue during wound healing.
"We show that MMP-9 is detrimental to wound healing, while MMP-8 is beneficial," Chang said. "Our studies provide a strategy for diabetic wound healing by using selective MMP-9 inhibitors."
The team treated diabetic mice with an inhibitor of MMP-9 and discovered that wounds were healed 92 percent after 14 days, as compared to 74 percent healing in untreated mice.
The identification of the enzyme that interferes with diabetic wound healing and that which repairs the wound opens the door to new, novel treatment strategies.
"Currently, advanced wound dressings containing collagen are used for diabetic wound healing," Chang said. "The collagen provides a substrate so that the unregulated MMP-9 chews on the collagen in the dressing, rather than on the wound. It would be better to treat the diabetic wounds with a selective MMP-9 inhibitor to inhibit the culprit enzyme that is impeding wound healing while leaving the beneficial MMP-8 uninhibited to help repair the wound."
The study appeared in the American Chemical Society's journal ACS Chemical Biology.
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