Kenyan parliament fights to retain lavish pay

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) ? Even before they begin their latest session in earnest, newly elected Kenyan parliamentarians are demanding a pay increase, and legislator Mithika Linturi petitioned parliament on Thursday to impeach members of a government commission that reduced their salaries.

Kenya adopted a new constitution in 2010 which removed the parliamentarians' powers to set their own pay, instead giving the power to a Salaries and Remuneration Commission to set pay for all public servants, including the president.

Earlier this year, the commission cut the president's annual pay from around $340,000 to $185,000. It also cut legislators' yearly salaries from around $126,000 to $78,500.

Members of the previous parliament were among the highest paid legislators in the world. The minimum wage in Nairobi is about $1,500 a year.

Linturi told The Associated Press on Thursday that his petition was not about the money, but about what he views the illegal way the salaries commission reduced parliament's pay. AP tried to contact a half dozen other legislators for comment on the pay issue, but none of them would answer questions.

The decision to reduce the pay for legislators came after a public outcry as legislators in the previous parliament attempted to raise their salaries to $175,000 annually and award themselves a $110,000 bonus at the end of their terms.

The public outrage culminated in a protest in January, when hundreds of demonstrators set fire to 221 coffins outside parliament's main entrance.

Many Kenyans see legislators as lazy and greedy in a country where hundreds of thousands live in slums. Legislators often argue that they need high salaries to give hand-outs to poor constituents for school fees and hospital bills.

Linturi claimed that the salaries commission violated sections of the constitution and infringed on the rights of the parliamentarians as individuals.

The salaries commission says the country can't afford the bill for government salaries, especially since the country elected 47 new governors and 67 new senators in March. The parliament expanded from 222 to 349 members.

Parliament was opened by new President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday, who told parliament that the bill for government salaries came to 12 percent of GDP, above the internationally accepted level of 7 percent. Kenyatta said 50 percent of revenue collected by government went to pay government salaries.

Late Thursday Kenyatta announced he had reduced the government ministries from 44 to 18.

Anti-Corruption Crusader Mwalimu Mati said parliamentarians should quit if they do not want the pay set by the commission.

"If they seek a confrontation with the Kenyan public on the first week of their tenure, I suspect they are going to lose," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kenyan-parliament-fights-retain-lavish-pay-145230782.html

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Apple confirms it keeps Siri data for up to two years

It's no secret that Apple hangs onto your Siri data for some length of time (as does other companies with search data and the like), but it hasn't been clear exactly how long it keeps that data sitting on its servers. Wired has now cleared that up somewhat, though, hearing from Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller that the company "may keep anonymized Siri data for up to two years." That word follows another report from Wired yesterday that raised concerns about the issue. As Muller notes, the data is immediately deleted if a user turns Siri off at any time, and it's anonymized from the start; neither your Apple ID or email address are stored with a data, but rather a randomly generated number that represents the user and becomes associated with the voice files. That number then gets disassociated from voice clips after six months, but Apple still hangs onto the files for another 18 months for what's described as testing and product improvement purposes.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple

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Source: Wired

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/19/apple-siri-data-two-years/

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Giant snail invasion forces Floridians to walk for their lives

The African giant land snail, a notorious invasive species, is attempting to establish itself in Florida, say officials. ?

By Eoin O'Carroll,?Staff / April 15, 2013

South Florida is fighting a growing infestation of one of the world's most destructive invasive species: the giant African land snail, which can grow as big as a rat and gnaw through stucco and plaster.

Florida Department of Agriculture Division of Plant Industry/Reuters/Handout/File

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As big as a rat and with a taste for building materials, the African giant land snail is proving to be?a slow-moving disaster for the Sunshine State.

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Originally from Kenya and Tanzania,?the gigantic gastropod is a notorious invasive species, having already established itself throughout Africa, China, India, many Pacific islands, the?Caribbean, and Hawaii. The first reported sighting came in September 2011, and since then, according to Reuters, officials in Miami-Dade?have caught some 117,000 snails, at a rate of about 1,000 per week.

That rate, which gives a new?definition to the term "snail's pace,"?is likely to increase in the coming weeks, as the state's rainy season begins and the snails emerge from underground hibernation. ?

In addition to dining on a wide range of plants ? more than 500 varieties, according to the?Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services ? the massive mollusks also gnaw through stucco, plaster, and even concrete, which contain calcium that the snails need to grow their shells.

The snails can also harbor a parasitic lungworm thought to be dangerous to humans, although no there have been no reported cases in the United States?of humans being infected by the snails.

This is not the first time the giant snails have attempted to establish themselves in Florida. As Reuters notes, in 1966 a boy returning from vacation in Hawaii brought three of them to Miami. The state spent 10 years and $1 million eradicating them.

How they arrived this time is anybody's guess. Officials are investigating the Miami Santeria group, which three years ago was found to be using the snails in their rituals. But they could have just as easily arrived unintentionally in freight or luggage from destinations where the snail is endemic.

So if you're in the mainland United States and you spot something that looks like a snail, only humongous, be sure to contact authorities.

And if they let you keep it, then you just might have found dinner. In 2009, the Guardian's Tim Hayward described how to cook them.?(Because of the lungworms, the University of Hawaii recommends heating snails to an internal temperature of 165 degrees before eating.)?

Hayward described his meal ? the ultimate slow food ? as "?totally new combination of flavour and texture."?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/9TnRnOWin6E/Giant-snail-invasion-forces-Floridians-to-walk-for-their-lives

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Snapchat Experiences Spammy Growing Pains After Passing 150M Snaps Sent Per Day

Picture-messaging sensation Snapchat seems to experiencing some growing pains. CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel said today that over 150 million pictures a day flow through the auto-destructing photo-sharing service, but as the service gets bigger and gains more attention, the worst parts of the Internet are sure to follow. According to a post on the company blog, some Snapchatters experienced a bit of a spam attack this morning from someone who appears to have created multiple accounts and spam to Snapchatters with accounts marked as public. According to Twitter, that spam seems to be nude-flavored.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/W0HlU0b-sxw/

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Prototype generators emit much less carbon monoxide

Apr. 17, 2013 ? Portable electric generators retrofitted with off-the-shelf hardware by the University of Alabama (UA) emitted significantly lower levels of carbon monoxide (CO) exhaust, according to the results of tests conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

Compared with standard portable generators, CO emissions from the prototype machines were reduced by 90 percent or more, depending on the specific hardware used and operating conditions.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), unintentional CO poisoning claims more than 400 lives a year. More than 20,000 people visit the emergency room and more than 4,000 are hospitalized due to exposure to toxic levels of the colorless, odorless gas. Fatality is highest among people 65 and older.

Many of these deaths and illnesses stem from unsafe use of portable generators, often in the aftermath of devastating storms and other causes of electric power outages. For the years 2005 to 2008, the CPSC reports that an estimated 37 to 47 percent of non-fire-related consumer product-related CO poisoning deaths were associated with generators.

The tests performed by NIST compared two commercially available gasoline-powered generators against two similar machines that UA retrofitted with closed-loop electronic fuel injection and a small catalyst. Tests were conducted at NIST's manufactured test home, with the generator operating in the attached garage so as to simulate some common scenarios that often result in deaths or injuries.

In one series of comparisons, generators operated three or more hours in the garage with the garage bay door open and the entry to the house closed. For the stock generator tested, CO levels in the garage peaked at 1,500 parts per million (ppm,which are equivalent to microliters per liter) and inside the house ranged between 150 and 200 ppm.

Clinical symptoms of CO poisoning, including headaches, nausea, and disordered thinking, begin appearing at exposure levels of 100 ppm after at least 90 minutes exposure. During the NIST tests, emissions from the prototype generators ranged from 20 to 30 ppm in the open garage and from 5 to 10 ppm in the house.

CPSC staff conducted health effects modeling using NIST's test results, as part of CPSC's technology demonstration program of the prototype generator, to show that its engine's reduced CO emission rate is expected to result in fewer deaths by significantly delaying the onset and rate of progression of CO poisoning symptoms compared to the stock generator.

On the basis of results of findings from NIST's two earlier studies, the CDC advises to never run a generator less than 20 feet from an open window, door, or vent where exhaust can vent into an enclosed area. Steven Emmerich, the lead NIST researcher, reminds that generators should always be operated outdoors, far from open windows. "Tragically, fatalities and injuries occur every year," he says. "We hope our research in support of CPSC's efforts to develop and demonstrate a low CO emission generator using existing emission control technology will contribute to practical safety improvements that will help to reduce this toll."

Annual sales of portable generators have been increasing in the United States and around the world, largely as insurance in the event of power failures. By 2014, U.S. sales of home generator units are predicted to reach $1.2 billion, according to a 2010 report by SBI Energy. The consultancy predicts that worldwide sales will grow to almost 13 million units in 2014.

In their study, NIST researchers also validated the use of their CONTAM computer model for studying the performance of prototype generators under a wider range of conditions than those tested. Results of simulations carried out with this publicly available software for studying building airflow and indoor air quality were checked against measurements of CO levels in actual tests. The predicted results were in good agreement with the CO measurements.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/rXiKI6A_oFg/130417185926.htm

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Strange new bursts of gamma rays point to a new way to destroy a star

Apr. 16, 2013 ? A team led by the University of Warwick has pinpointed a new type of exceptionally powerful and long-lived cosmic explosion, prompting a theory that they arise in the violent death throes of a supergiant star.

These explosions create powerful blasts of high energy gamma-rays, known as gamma-ray bursts, but while most bursts are over in about a minute, this new type can last for several hours.

The first example was found by astronomers on Christmas Day 2010, but it lacked a measurement of distance and so remained shrouded in mystery with two competing theories put forward for its origin.

The first model suggested it was down to an asteroid, shredded by the gravity of a dense neutron star in our own galaxy, the second that it was a supernova in a galaxy 3.5 billion light years away, or in the more common language of astronomers at a redshift of 0.33.

A new study by a team of scientists led by Dr Andrew Levan at the University of Warwick finds several more examples of these unusual cosmic explosions and shows that the Christmas Day burst took place in a galaxy much further away than the two theories suggested.

This research is to be presented at the GRB 2013 Symposium in Nashville, Tennessee on Tuesday 16 April.

Using data from the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii, the scientists calculated that this ultra-long gamma-ray burst had a redshift of 0.847. This gives it a location of approximately half-way to the edge of the observable universe, or 7 billion light years away.

Armed with its location, Dr Levan's team, which included scientists from an international collaboration, has developed a new theory to explain how it occurred.

They suggest this kind of burst is caused by a supergiant, a star 20 times more massive than the sun, which evolves to become among the biggest and brightest stars in the universe with a radius of up to 1 billion miles -- up to 1,000 times that of the sun.

They believe the ultra-long durations of the Christmas gamma-ray burst and two other similar bursts are simply down to the sheer size of the supergiants exploding in a supernova.

Most stars that create gamma-ray bursts are thought to be relatively small and dense, and the explosion that destroys them punches through the star in a matter of seconds. In the case of these new ultra-long bursts the explosion takes much longer to propagate through the star, and so the gamma-ray burst lasts for a much longer time..

Dr Levan said: "These events are amongst the biggest explosions in nature, yet we're only just beginning to find them.

"It really shows us that the Universe is a much more violent and varied place than we'd imagined.

"Previously we've found lots of gamma-ray events with short durations, but in the past couple of years we've started to see the full picture."

Nial Tanvir, a professor at the University of Leicester, and second author of the study added: "We believe that powering the explosion is a newly formed black hole in the heart of the star.

"Predicting the detailed behaviour of matter falling into a black hole in these circumstances turns out to be very difficult, and from a theoretical point of view we didn't initially expect explosions at all.

"The amazing thing is that nature seems to have found ways of blowing up a wide range of stars in the most dramatic and violent way."

The more common type of gamma-ray burst is thought to be caused when a Wolf-Rayet star in the final phase of its evolution collapses into a black hole at its own core.

Matter is drawn into the black hole, but some of its energy escapes and is focussed into a jet of material which blasts out in two directions forming copious gamma-rays in the process.

These jets are ejected extremely quickly (close to the speed of light), otherwise the material would fall into the black hole from which it can't escape. For this reason they last only a few seconds.

However, a gamma-ray burst in a bigger star the size of a supergiant needs to power through a larger reservoir of material, hence its longer duration.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/Ou5l0EfmiJI/130416144743.htm

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Skin cells turned directly into the cells that insulate neurons

Apr. 15, 2013 ? Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have succeeded in transforming skin cells directly into oligodendrocyte precursor cells, the cells that wrap nerve cells in the insulating myelin sheaths that help nerve signals propagate.

The current research was done in mice and rats. If the approach also works with human cells, it could eventually lead to cell therapies for diseases like inherited leukodystrophies -- disorders of the brain's white matter -- and multiple sclerosis, as well as spinal cord injuries. The study will be published online April 14 in Nature Biotechnology.

Without myelin to insulate neurons, signals sent down nerve cell axons quickly lose power. Diseases that attack myelin, such as multiple sclerosis, result in nerve signals that are not as efficient and cannot travel as far as they should. Myelin disorders can affect nerve signal transmission in the brain and spinal cord, leading to cognitive, motor and sensory problems.

Previous research in rodent disease models has shown that transplanted oligodendrocyte precursor cells derived from embryonic stem cells and from human fetal brain tissue can successfully create myelin sheaths around nerve cells, sometimes leading to dramatic improvements in symptoms. "Unfortunately, the availability of human fetal tissue is extremely limited, and the creation of OPCs from embryonic stem cells is slow and tedious," said the study's senior author, Marius Wernig, MD, assistant professor of pathology and a member of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. "It appeared we wouldn't be able to create enough human OPCs for widespread therapeutic use, so we began to wonder if we could create them directly from skin cells."

Nan Yang, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in the Wernig laboratory and lead author of the study, pointed out that there is another advantage to using this technique. "By using the patient's own skin cells, we should be able to generate transplantable OPCs that are genetically identical to the patient's natural OPCs," Yang said. "This allows us to avoid the problem of immune rejection, which is a major complication in transplantation medicine."

Last year, Wernig's team successfully created human nerve cells out of skin cells. Other researchers had successfully used a similar process to turn skin cells into embryonic-like cells called induced pluripotent stem cells, and then grow those iPS cells into nerve cells, but Wernig's lab was the first to convert skin cells directly into nerve cells without the intermediate iPS cell step.

The team's current research project also involved directly converting skin cells into OPCs without having to create iPS cells. The researchers showed that mouse and rat skin cells could be directly converted into OPCs, and that these cells would successfully myelinate nerve cells when transplanted into the brains of mice with a myelin disorder.

Next, the team plans to reproduce the research in human cells; if successful, the approach could lay the groundwork for therapies for a wide array of myelin disorders and spinal cord injury.

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Journal Reference:

1. Nan Yang, J Bradley Zuchero, Henrik Ahlenius, Samuele Marro, Yi Han Ng, Thomas Vierbuchen, John S Hawkins, Richard Geissler, Ben A Barres, Marius Wernig. Generation of oligodendroglial cells by direct lineage conversion. Nature Biotechnology, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nbt.2564

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

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/c6P1AiDhxCc/130415124807.htm

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