A*STAR scientists solve century-old mystery in yeast infections






SINGAPORE: Scientists from the Agency for Science Technology And Research (A*STAR) have solved a century-old mystery in yeast infections.

They constructed stable strains of Candida albicans, the most prevalent human fungal pathogen and a major cause of hospital acquired infection.

A*STAR said on Friday that their discovery will help pave the way to develop drugs that effectively target and treat such infections.

Currently, the choice of drugs for this pathogen is limited.

Drugs resistance has also emerged worldwide, posing a great challenge to medicine.

The A*STAR scientists have shown that Candida albicans, long thought of as always having two copies of each chromosome and no sexual reproduction in its life, can and does exist as a sexually reproducing cell carrying only one copy of its genome.

The discovery fills a long missing gap in the life cycle of the pathogen and greatly advances the understanding of how it generates genetic variations.

The tools developed will help speed up the analyses of gene function and might speed up efforts to cure Candida infections.

- CNA/fa



Read More..

Saibaba trust got Rs 275 crore donation in 2012

SHIRDI: The Saibaba Shirdi Sansthan Trust received a donation of Rs 274.71 crore from devotees last year, a senior trust official said.

Devotees also donated 36 kg of gold in various forms in 2012, estimated to be worth Rs 11 crore, Sansthan's executive officer Kishor More said yesterday.

However, the Sansthan received 373 kg of silver in the last calendar year, even as it received 440 kg of the metal in 2011, More said.

The Sansthan had recently melted the treasure's 37 kg gold and 513 kg silver for making coins while it still has about 300 kg gold and 4,000 kg silver with it, he said.

In 2011, the trust had received Rs 225.55 crore cash, while last year the cash donation increased by about 20 per cent, he said.

Out of the Rs 274.71 crore cash, Rs 57 crore was earned through the Sansthan's donation counters, Rs 180.74 crore through cash boxes and Rs 40 crore was received through cheques, online and money orders, More said.

Sansthan's fixed deposits with various nationalised banks in 2012 were worth Rs 803 crore, while deposits in 2011 were of Rs 580 crore.

Last year, there was also an increase in foreign exchange worth Rs 8.30 crore, while in 2011 it was Rs 6.28 crore, he added.

Read More..

Sinkhole Swallows Buildings in China

Photograph from AFP/Getty Images

The sinkhole that formed in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (pictured) is, unfortunately, not a new occurrence for the country.

Many areas of the world are susceptible to these sudden formations, including the U.S. Florida is especially prone, but Guatemala, Mexico, and the area surrounding the Dead Sea in the Middle East are also known for their impressive sinkholes. (See pictures of a sinkhole in Beijing that swallowed a truck.)

Published January 31, 2013

Read More..

SK Group head gets four-year jail sentence






SEOUL: The head of South Korea's third largest conglomerate, the SK Group, was sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday after being convicted of embezzling close to $50 million.

The custodial sentence was seen as relatively tough in a country where convicted business tycoons are often given suspended prison terms in recognition of their apparent contribution to the national economy.

The court ruled that Chey Tae-Won, 53, had embezzled 49.7 billion won ($45.6 million) from two affiliates and funnelled the money into a firm for investments in stock futures and options in 2008.

The SK Group boss had remained free since he was indicted a year ago.

The energy-to-telecom conglomerate, which includes top mobile carrier SK Telecom, said Chey would appeal the verdict.

It was not Chey's first conviction.

In 2003 he was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in a $1.3 billion accounting fraud. He was released after just seven months and, in 2008, was finally granted a full presidential pardon, wiping his record clean.

It is not unusual for senior executives with convictions for crimes including tax evasion and embezzlement to remain in charge of South Korea's family-dominated conglomerates.

The Seoul Central District Court said in its statement that Chey had betrayed the public trust in his group.

"He should be reproached for using subsidiaries as a tool for his crime," it said.

Chey's younger brother and group vice chairman Chey Jae-Won was acquitted on charges that he was a knowing accomplice to the embezzlement.

South Korea has a long history of pardoning powerful tycoons.

Hyundai Motor head Chung Mong-Koo, who had been convicted of embezzlement and other charges, was pardoned in 2008, and Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-Hee - convicted of tax evasion - was pardoned in 2009.

- AFP/de



Read More..

Six Congress MPs from Telangana firm on resignations

HYDERABAD: Six Congress MPs from Telangana on Thursday made it clear that they will not take back their resignations over the delay in formation of a separate state.

The MPs, who met here a day after reports of differences among them, claimed that resignations of seven MPs were Wednesday submitted to party president Sonia Gandhi's office.

However, Madhu Yaskhi Goud, later stated that there is no need for resignations as the party spokesperson has clarified that the party is not against Telangana state.

K. Rajagopal Reddy told reporters that Goud's views were his personal and that the remaining MPs stand by their resignations both from parliament and the party.

He said the resignations along with a letter addressed to Sonia Gandhi were sent to Delhi through Goud and another MP, Ponnam Prabhakar.

Reddy said they had requested Gandhi to accept their resignations if the party was unable to take a decision for formation of Telangana.

"We will continue to put pressure on the leadership till a favourable decision is taken," he added.

Senior leader K. Keshava Rao, at whose residence the meeting was held, said he would send his resignation from the party to Sonia Gandhi. He denied that there were any differences among the members.

Read More..

New Theory on How Homing Pigeons Find Home

Jane J. Lee


Homing pigeons (Columba livia) have been prized for their navigational abilities for thousands of years. They've served as messengers during war, as a means of long-distance communication, and as prized athletes in international races.

But there are places around the world that seem to confuse these birds—areas where they repeatedly vanish in the wrong direction or scatter on random headings rather than fly straight home, said Jon Hagstrum, a geophysicist who authored a study that may help researchers understand how homing pigeons navigate.

Hagstrum's paper, published online Wednesday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, proposes an intriguing theory for homing pigeon disorientation—that the birds are following ultralow frequency sounds back towards their lofts and that disruptions in their ability to "hear" home is what screws them up.

Called infrasound, these sound waves propagate at frequencies well below the range audible to people, but pigeons can pick them up, said Hagstrum, who works at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California.

"They're using sound to image the terrain [surrounding] their loft," he said. "It's like us visually recognizing our house using our eyes."

Homeward Bound?

For years, scientists have struggled to explain carrier pigeons' directional challenges in certain areas, known as release-site biases.

This "map" issue, or a pigeon's ability to tell where it is in relation to where it wants to go, is different from the bird's compass system, which tells it which direction it's headed in. (Learn about how other animals navigate.)

"We know a lot about pigeon compass systems, but what has been controversial, even to this day, has been their map [system]," said Cordula Mora, an animal behavior researcher at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who was not involved in the study.

Until now, the two main theories say that pigeons rely either on their sense of smell to find their way home or that they follow the Earth's magnetic field lines, she said.

If something screwed up their sense of smell or their ability to follow those fields, the thinking has been, that could explain why pigeons got lost in certain areas.

But neither explanation made sense to Hagstrum, a geologist who grew interested in pigeons after attending an undergraduate lecture by Cornell biologist William Keeton. Keeton, who studied homing pigeons' navigation abilities, described some release-site biases in his pigeons and Hagstrum was hooked.

"I was just stunned and amazed and fascinated," said Hagstrum. "I understand we don't get dark matter or quantum mechanics, but bird [navigation]?"

So Hagstrum decided to look at Keeton's pigeon release data from three sites in upstate New York. At Castor Hill and Jersey Hill, the birds would repeatedly fly in the wrong direction or head off randomly when trying to return to their loft at Cornell University, even though they had no problems at other locations. At a third site near the town of Weedsport, young pigeons would head off in a different direction from older birds.

There were also certain days when the Cornell pigeons could find their way back home from these areas without any problems.

At the same time, homing pigeons from other lofts released at Castor Hill, Jersey Hill, and near Weedsport, would fly home just fine.

Sound Shadows

Hagstrum knew that homing pigeons could hear sounds as low as 0.05 hertz, low enough to pick up infrasounds that were down around 0.1 or 0.2 hertz. So he decided to map out what these low-frequency sound waves would have looked like on an average day, and on the days when the pigeons could home correctly from Jersey Hill.

He found that due to atmospheric conditions and local terrain, Jersey Hill normally sits in a sound shadow in relation to the Cornell loft. Little to none of the infrasounds from the area around the loft reached Jersey Hill except on one day when changing wind patterns and temperature inversions permitted.

That happened to match a day when the Cornell pigeons had no problem returning home.

"I could see how the topography was affecting the sound and how the weather was affecting the sound [transmission]," Hagstrum said. "It started to explain all these mysteries."

The terrain between the loft and Jersey Hill, combined with normal atmospheric conditions, bounced infrasounds up and over these areas.

Some infrasound would still reach Castor Hill, but due to nearby hills and valleys, the sound waves approached from the west and southwest, even though the Cornell loft is situated south-southwest of Castor Hill.

Records show that younger, inexperienced pigeons released at Castor Hill would sometimes fly west while older birds headed southwest, presumably following infrasounds from their loft.

Hagstrum's model found that infrasound normally arrived at the Weedsport site from the south. But one day of abnormal weather conditions, combined with a local river valley, resulted in infrasound that arrived at Weedsport from the Cornell loft from the southeast.

Multiple Maps

"What [Hagstrum] has found for those areas are a possible explanation for the [pigeon] behavior at these sites," said Bowling Green State's Mora. But she cautions against extrapolating these results to all homing pigeons.

Some of Mora's work supports the theory that homing pigeons use magnetic field lines to find their way home.

What homing pigeons are using as their map probably depends on where they're raised, she said. "In some places it may be infrasound, and in other places [a sense of smell] may be the way to go."

Hagstrum's next steps are to figure out how large an area the pigeons are listening to. He's also talking to the Navy and Air Force, who are interested in his work. "Right now we use GPS to navigate," he said. But if those satellites were compromised, "we'd be out of luck." Pigeons navigate from point to point without any problems, he said.


Read More..

Union says Congress can save money by lowering amount paid for contractor salaries



Labor leaders, including those with the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), have long pushed Congress to lower payments for contractor salaries. The cap on Defense Department contractor pay now stands at $763,000, which is much more than President Obama makes.




AFGE said billions of dollars could be saved each year if the cap were set at $200,000, as the Obama administration has proposed. A cap would not prevent contractors from paying their employees more, but it would limit the amount the government provides for contractor salaries.

“Think about it,” said AFGE President J. David Cox. Billions of dollars could be cut “from federal spending over the next decade with no impact on government services, simply by subsidizing these almost unimaginably wealthy contractor employees at a slightly less generous level.”

Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, which represents contractors, said the cap was put in place for two reasons: to “ensure companies can attract top executive talent but also ensure the government is not subsidizing egregious executive salaries.”

Lowering the cap, he added, could “deny both the contractor and the government access to the talent it needs.”

The Obama administration also has pushed Congress to lower the amount paid to contractors. A year ago, a blog post from Leslie Field, acting administrator of the Office of Management and Budget’s office of federal procurement policy, said Obama wants “Congress to scrap an outdated law that requires taxpayers to foot the bill for excessive payments to CEOs and other senior executives of companies that contract with the Government.”

Because of that law, Field said taxpayers “have their hard-earned resources spent reimbursing contractor executives far in excess of what can be justified.”

In December, Congress considered, but did not approve a proposal to lower the cap. Instead, Congress told the Government Accountability Office to study the effect of reducing contractor compensation.

“Congress has had no problem freezing wages for one group of federal workers, yet many lawmakers have turned a blind eye to the outrageous salaries earned by another group,” Cox said. “Both workforces are paid for by American taxpayers. What’s the difference?”


Poll: Workers’ opinions

With the federal government going through an extended period of shrinking budgets, government managers will have to become better stewards of the workforce.

That’s the message from a Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) report issued Tuesday.

The report is based on a survey of more than 42,000 federal workers. Although done in 2010, the survey has lessons that are relevant today as supervisors increasingly try to figure out how to get the job done with fewer resources.

Having few resources, namely staffers, is the reason the report was issued so long after the survey was done, according to MSBP.

“If agencies find they can no longer ‘do more with less,’ they may need to make hard decisions about what they can do with the resources they have,” says the report on “Managing Public Employees in the Public Interest.”

Dealing with workers who are not getting the job done can be a difficult task for managers. Federal managers are not very good at that, according to the surveyed employees. The managers also don’t fare well, in the eyes of employees, when it comes to making hard decisions about using their diminished resources.

Less than a quarter of federal employees said their agencies deal with poor performers effectively. Only 29 percent said their organizations eliminate unnecessary functions and positions.

On the positive side, agencies rate better, although not great, on standards of conduct, training and guarding the public interest. Sixty-four percent of employees said their agencies hold employees to high standards of conduct. Sixty percent said they get the necessary training and their agencies put the public interest first.

“Employees are being asked to make personal and professional sacrifices and they need to feel confident that leaders are using limited resources wisely,” MSPB Chairwoman Susan Tsui Grundmann said in a news release. “That requires agency leaders to make tough choices about the programs, functions or positions that they can support.”

Previous columns by Joe Davidson are available at wapo.st/JoeDavidson.

Read More..

S'pore moves up to 2nd spot in trust survey






SINGAPORE: Singapore has moved up to the number two spot for the most trusting nation in the world, according to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer. It was third in 2012 and seventh in 2011.

Edelman, which measured levels of trust in institutions in 26 countries worldwide, said on Wednesday that Singapore's total trust score rose by nine points and is three points more than the global average increase.

Trust levels rose across three of the four institutions measured -- business (up 11 points), non-governmental organisations (up 11 points) and government (up 9 points).

At 82 per cent, trust in Singapore government recovered to approach the 2010 high of 84 per cent.

Trust levels in the media remained stable and high.

Edelman said while the government and business fared well in the latest trust survey, there remains scepticism about trust in their leadership.

Only 19 per cent of Singaporeans in the general population trust business leaders to tell the truth, no matter how complex or unpopular it is. While trust in government leaders is higher than in business leaders, there remains room for improvement.

Edelman said the lack of trust in leaders, compared with the institutions they lead, is a trend in all the markets where trust was measured. This, it said, points to a common need to increase transparency at the leadership level.

-CNA/ac



Read More..

Govt will be prompt in pursuing Verma panel recommendations on rape laws: PM

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said that the government will be prompt in pursuing the recommendations of J S Verma Committee to amend the law to deal effectively with cases of sexual assault against women.

In a letter to Justice Verma, former Chief Justice of India, Manmohan Singh thanked him and other two members of the committee--Justice (retd) Leila Seth and former Solicitor General Gopal Subramanian--for completing within a short period of 30 days the work of the panel, set up in the wake of the brutal gang rape and assault of a 23-year-old here on December 16 2012.

"That the committee submitted its report within a short period of 30 days is testimony to your commitment and concern for the public good...

"On behalf of our government, I assure you that we will be prompt in pursuing the recommendations of the committee," the Prime Minister said in the letter.

Singh also thanked the committee members for their "labour of love" in pursuing their job to recommend amendments to the law to deal effectively with cases of sexual assault of extreme nature against women.

The Verma Committee has recommended enhancing punishment to up to 20 years imprisonment for rape and murder and life term for gang rape but refrained from suggesting death penalty for the guilty.

In its 630-page report submitted to the government on January 23, the Committee suggested various amendments to the criminal laws to provide for higher punishment to rapists, including those belonging to police and public servants.

New offences have been created and stiffer punishment has been suggested for those committing such offence that left the victim in a vegetative state. The new offences include disrobing a woman, voyeurism, stalking and trafficking.

The present statute provides for punishment of imprisonment ranging from seven years to life for rapists. The panel was constituted in the wake of national outrage over the gang rape in a moving bus in south Delhi. The victim died in a Singapore hospital on December 29.

Read More..

Timbuktu’s vulnerable manuscripts are city’s "gold"


French and Malian troops surrounded Timbuktu on Monday and began combing the labyrinthine city for Islamist fighters. Witnesses, however, said the Islamists, who claim an affiliation to al Qaeda and had imposed a Taliban-style rule in the northern Malian city over the last ten months, slipped into the desert a few days earlier.

But before fleeing, the militants reportedly set fire to several buildings and many rare manuscripts. There are conflicting reports as to how many manuscripts were actually destroyed. (Video: Roots of the Mali Crisis.)

On Monday, Sky News posted an interview with a man identifying himself as an employee of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run repository for rare books and manuscripts, the oldest of which date back to the city's founding in the 12th century. The man said some 3,000 of the institute's 20,000 manuscripts had been destroyed or looted by the Islamists.

Video showed what appeared to be a large pile of charred manuscripts and the special boxes made to preserve them in front of one of the institute's buildings.

However, a member of the University of Cape Town Timbuktu Manuscript Project told eNews Channel Africa on Tuesday that he had spoken with the director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, Mahmoud Zouber, who said that nearly all of its manuscripts had been removed from the buildings and taken to secure locations months earlier. (Read "The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu" in National Geographic magazine.)

A Written Legacy

The written word is deeply rooted in Timbuktu's rich history. The city emerged as a wealthy center of trade, Islam, and learning during the 13th century, attracting a number of Sufi religious scholars. They in turn took on students, forming schools affiliated with's Timbuktu's three main mosques.

The scholars imported parchment and vellum manuscripts via the caravan system that connected northern Africa with the Mediterranean and Arabia. Wealthy families had the documents copied and illuminated by local scribes, building extensive libraries containing works of religion, art, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, history, geography, and culture.

"The manuscripts are the city's real gold," said Mohammed Aghali, a tour guide from Timbuktu. "The manuscripts, our mosques, and our history—these are our treasures. Without them, what is Timbuktu?"

This isn't the first time that an occupying army has threatened Timbuktu's cultural heritage. The Moroccan army invaded the city in 1591 to take control of the gold trade. In the process of securing the city, they killed or deported most of Timbuktu's scholars, including the city's most famous teacher, Ahmed Baba al Massufi, who was held in exile in Marrakesh for many years and forced to teach in a pasha's court. He finally returned to Timbuktu in 1611, and it is for him that the Ahmed Baba Institute was named.

Hiding the Texts

In addition to the Ahmed Baba Institute, Timbuktu is home to more than 60 private libraries, some with collections containing several thousand manuscripts and others with only a precious handful. (Read about the fall of Timbuktu.)

Sidi Ahmed, a reporter based in Timbuktu who recently fled to the Malian capital Bamako, said Monday that nearly all the libraries, including the world-renowned Mamma Haidara and the Fondo Kati libraries, had secreted their collections before the Islamist forces had taken the city.

"The people here have long memories," he said. "They are used to hiding their manuscripts. They go into the desert and bury them until it is safe."

Though it appears most of the manuscripts are safe, the Islamists' occupation took a heavy toll on Timbuktu.

Women were flogged for not covering their hair or wearing bright colors. Girls were forbidden from attending school, and boys were recruited into the fighters' ranks.

Music was banned. Local imams who dared speak out against the occupiers were barred from speaking in their mosques. In a move reminiscent of the Taliban's destruction of Afghanistan's famous Bamiyan Buddha sculptures, Islamist fighters bulldozed 14 ancient mud-brick mausoleums and cemeteries that held the remains of revered Sufi saints.

A spokesman for the Islamists said it was "un-Islamic" for locals to "worship idols."


Read More..