The percentage of U.S. kids with autism continues to rise, with the latest estimate showing the highest numbers yet.
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About 1 in 50 U.S. children (2 percent) ages 6 to 17 have an autism spectrum disorder, according to a new report based on a national survey of parents in 2011 and 2012. That's up from about 1 in 86 children (1.16 percent) reported to have autism in the 2007 survey.
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Most of the rise is attributed to new autism cases diagnosed after 2008, the researchers said. In particular, there was an increase in cases of older children (ages 10 to 17) diagnosed with mild forms of autism.?
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The reason for the rise is not known, and cannot be determined from the report. But the findings suggest that doctors and other healthcare professionals are getting better at identifying and diagnosing mild forms of autism, said study researcher Stephen Blumberg, of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics, the organization the released the report.
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Because the findings are based on parents' reports, and were not confirmed by a doctor or the patient's medical records, they might not be entirely accurate. However, previous estimates based on parental reports have generally matched those based on medical records, the researchers said.
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The new findings are not directly comparable to a report released last year, which found that 1in 88 children U.S. children has autism. That report was based on information collected in 2008 from 8-year old children living in 14 areas in the United States.
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The new study is based on phone surveys of 96,000 parents in 2011 and 2012. Parents were asked if a doctor or health care professional had ever diagnosed their child with an autism spectrum disorder.
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One of the interesting findings of the new report is the large percentage of children that were diagnosed at age 7 or later, said Michael Rosanoff, associate director of Public Health Research & Scientific Review at Autism Speaks, an autism advocacy organization. About 30 percent of children ages 10 to 13, and 14 percent of children ages 14 to 17 were first diagnosed when they were 7 or older. The condition can reliably be diagnosed starting at age 3.
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These children may have flown under the radar because they were mildly affected, Rosanoff said. But "even mildly affected children who are in general education settings can struggle without, and benefit from, appropriate ASD services," Rosanoff said, referring to autism spectrum disorder.
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More rigorous studies are needed to determine the true rate of autism, which Rosanoff said he suspects is even higher.
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Pass it on: About 1 in 50 children has autism, according to results from a national survey of parents.
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Related on MyHealthNewsDaily and MNN:
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This story was originally written for MyHealthNewsDaily and is republished with permission here. Copyright 2013 MyHealthNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company.
Right after it launched the iPad mini, Apple filed a trademark application for the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As Patently Apple noticed earlier today, however, the USPTO will likely refuse Apple’s trademark filing because, the reviewer argues, “the applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant?s goods.” The letter?was mailed to Apple on January 24, but only made public in the last few days. Apple can still respond to this notice and correct its application, though it’s hard to see how Apple could argue against the USPTO’s argument that ‘mini’ is ‘merely descriptive.’ “The applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant?s goods.” The word ‘mini,’ the reviewer argues, just describes that the iPad mini is indeed “a small sized handheld tablet computer” and just describes the mini’s features. It is not, the reviewing attorney says, “a unitary mark with a unique, incongruous, or otherwise nondescriptive meaning in relation to the goods and/or services.” The USPTO would only grant apple the trademark to the full iPad mini name if the company coulhow that the word ‘mini’ has now acquired a “distinctiveness.” In addition, Patently Apple also notes, the reviewer also denied the application for now because Apple should have provided the USPTO with a specimen other than its own product website, even though Apple always uses these for its trademark applications and this was never a reason for a denial before. The reviewer also believes that there is a “likelihood of confusion” between Apple’s existing iPad trademarks and this new iPad? mini application, which, to be honest, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Here is the letter the USPTO sent to Apple in January: USPTO Refuses Apple’s iPad mini Trademark Application
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) ? Louisville coach Rick Pitino is baffled by Russ Smith.
Not by the star guard himself, who is managing to outdo himself each time he steps on the court. No, Pitino doesn't understand why the rest of the country isn't as impressed with Smith as he ? and every opponent who's faced him ? is.
"I look at (player of the year) lists, and I don't see Russ Smith. I don't see him on the All-America teams," Pitino said. "I'm baffled, just baffled, because it wasn't like he was a Johnny-come-lately. He carried us on his back to a Final Four last year."
And he's one game from doing it again.
With Louisville having a rare off night, Smith lifted the Cardinals to a 77-69 victory over Oregon on Friday that put them in the Midwest Region finals. He matched his career high of 31 points, including seven during what would wind up being the game's decisive run.
Smith is averaging 27 points through the first three games of the tournament.
"Russ Smith is a talented young man," Oregon coach Dana Altman said. "When he got going, we didn't have an answer."
Louisville (32-5) plays Duke on Sunday, the first time Pitino and Mike Krzyzewski have met in a regional final since Christian Laettner's shot in 1992.
The 12th-seeded Ducks managed to make a game of it, though, which is more than most of Louisville's recent opponents can say.
After Louisville went up 66-48 with 9:01 left, Oregon made six straight field goals to close to 70-64. But Kevin Ware scored on a layup and Chane Behanan threw down a monstrous dunk to put the game out of reach.
Ware finished with 11, topping his previous career best by one, and Gorgui Dieng had 10 points, nine rebounds and four blocked shots.
E.J. Singler's 15 points led five Ducks in double figures. But Damyean Dotson had an off night, held without a field goal until five minutes were gone in the second half, and Oregon could never recover from its poor start.
Early foul trouble didn't help, with Johnathan Loyd picking up his third before halftime and Dominic Artis and Carlos Emory playing the last six minutes of the half with two.
"If it wasn't for the beginning, it would have been a completely different game," Loyd said. "We just came out, we weren't ready and we got smacked. If we were playing the way were playing in the second half the whole game, it's a completely different story."
The Cardinals were barely tested in either of their first two games in the NCAA tournament, beating North Carolina A&T by 31 and Colorado State by 26. They set an NCAA tournament record with 20 steals against A&T, outrebounded one of the country's best rebounding teams in Colorado State and left both teams with ugly shooting lines.
But a hacking cough that Smith has had the last few days is making its way around the Louisville team, and it was clear from the start this wasn't going to be another juggernaut performance by the Cardinals.
Peyton Siva spent the last 15:19 of the first half on the bench after picking up his second foul, and Louisville wasn't nearly as stingy on defense as it's been. The Cardinals (13) actually had more turnovers than the Ducks (12), and Oregon is only the third team to shoot 44 percent or better during Louisville's winning streak.
Thanks to Smith, however, the Cardinals finished like they always do lately: with a win.
After Siva went out, Smith hit a 3 to spark a 14-3 run that put Louisville up 24-8. When he capped the spurt with a layup, it was Russ Smith 9, Oregon 8.
"We really dug ourselves a big hole," Singler said. "We tried to figure back as much as possible, but Louisville's a really, really good team. They just played better than us today."
But the Ducks aren't a team that gives in.
After losing six of their last 11 regular-season games, the Ducks have been on a tear. They won the Pac-12 tournament, then upset Oklahoma State and Saint Louis last weekend.
They went on a 16-4 run that cut Louisville's lead to six points, the smallest it had been since the opening minutes of the game.
"We watched film and seen how they run, and we kind of figured out that would happen," Chane Behanan said.
Instead of panicking, the Cardinals regrouped and regained control. After Ware and Behanan's baskets, Smith shot 3-of-4 from the line to seal the win.
"Coach has been telling me to fight through (his cold), fight through it, dig in. My teammates as well," Smith said. "We're fighting through it and just doing whatever we can to get a win."
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) ? A Confederate battle flag hung inside the old North Carolina State Capitol last week to mark the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is being taken down after civil rights leaders raised concerns.
The decision was announced Friday evening, hours after the Associated Press published a story about the flag, which officials said was part of an historical display intended to replicate how the antebellum building appeared in 1863. The flag had been planned to hang in the House chamber until April 2015, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of federal troops in Raleigh.
"This is a temporary exhibit in an historic site, but I've learned the governor's administration is going to use the old House chamber as working space," Cultural Resources Secretary Susan Kluttz said Friday night. "Given that information, this display will end this weekend rather than April of 2015."
Kim Genardo, the spokeswoman for Gov. Pat McCrory, said the exhibit that includes the Confederate battle flag will be relocated, possibly across the street to the N.C. Museum of History.
The decision was a quick about-face for the McCrory administration, which initially defended the display. Many people see the flag as a potent reminder of racial discrimination and bigotry.
State Historic Sites Director Keith Hardison had said Thursday the flag should be viewed in what he called the proper historical context.
"Our goal is not to create issues," said Hardison, a Civil War re-enactor and history buff. "Our goal is to help people understand issues of the past. ... If you refuse to put something that someone might object to or have a concern with in the exhibit, then you are basically censoring history."
North Carolina NAACP president Rev. William Barber was shocked Friday when he was shown a photo of the flag by the AP.
"He is right that it has a historical context," Barber said. "But what is that history? The history of racism. The history of lynchings. The history of death. The history of slavery. If you say that shouldn't be offensive, then either you don't know the history, or you are denying the history."
Barber couldn't immediately be reached Friday night, after the decision to take down the flag.
Sessions of the General Assembly moved to a newer building a half-century ago, but the old Capitol building is still routinely used as a venue for official state government events. McCrory's office is on the first floor, as are the offices of his chief of staff and communications staff.
The Republican governor was in the House chamber where the Confederate flag hangs as recently as Thursday, when he presided over the swearing-in ceremony of his new Highway Patrol commander.
The presentation of the Confederate battle flag at state government buildings has long been an issue of debate throughout the South. For more than a decade, the NAACP has urged its members to boycott South Carolina because of that state's display of the flag on the State House grounds.
Prior to taking his current job in North Carolina in 2006, Hardison worked as director at the Mississippi home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, which is operated as a museum and library owned by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The group has led the fight in the South for the proud display of the Confederate flag, which it contends is a symbol of heritage, not hate.
Hardison said the battle flag was displayed with other flags described in the diary of a North Carolina woman who visited the Capitol in 1863. A large U.S. flag displayed in the Senate chamber is reminiscent of a trophy of war captured from Union troops at the Battle of Plymouth.
"I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful to recreate this?" Hardison said. "I think we were all thinking along the same vein. ... The Capitol is both a working seat of government, in that the governor and his staff has his office there. But it is also a museum."
Hardison pointed out that the national flag used by the Confederate government, with its circle of white stars and red and white stripes, is still flown over the State Capitol dome each year on Confederate Memorial Day. The more familiar blood-red battle flag, featuring a blue "X'' studded with white stars, was used by the rebel military.
David Goldfield, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of the book "Still Fighting the Civil War," said the battle flag can hold starkly different meanings depending on a person's social perspective.
"The history of the Confederate battle flag, how it was designed and formulated, how it has been used through the years, clearly states that it is a flag of white supremacy," Goldfield said. "I know current Sons of Confederate Veterans would dispute that, saying 'Hey, I'm not a racist.' But the fact remains that the battle flag was used by a country that had as its foundation the protection and extension of human bondage."
Friends Sal Paradise (Sam Riley, left) and Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) travel the country in "On the Road," director Walter Salles' adaptation of Jack Kerouac's classic novel. Gregory Smith | IFC Films/Sundance Selects
Those who treat Jack Kerouac?s quasi-autobiographical novel On the Road like Holy Scripture will be mostly delighted and slightly aggravated by director Walter Salles? movie adaptation ? while the rest of us will have those feelings in reverse.
Mostly, Kerouac fans will enjoy how Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera (reteamed from "The Motorcycle Diaries") capture the disillusionment of its narrator and Kerouac stand-in, Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), and the magnetic charm of his handsome and omnisexual pal Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) as the two wander around the country sharing drinks, drugs and sometimes Dean?s teen wife, Marylou (Kristen Stewart).
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?On the Road?
Opens Friday, March 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; rated R for strong sexual content, drug use and language; 123 minutes.
Fans may note a few of the book?s characters have been omitted, to keep the movie around two hours. Nonfans may find Riley?s Sal an emotional zero, while Hedlund?s Dean comes off as a selfish loser.
Also, both actors are left in the dust by a fine array of supporting players, including Viggo Mortensen (playing Old Bull Lee, Kerouac?s version of William Burroughs), Amy Adams (as Bull?s unstable wife), Kirsten Dunst and Elisabeth Moss. Even Stewart, exuding more passion than in all five "Twilight" movies, registers more fully than the preening leads.
movies@sltrib.com; www.sltrib.com/entertainment
Copyright 2013 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Parkinson's disease protein gums up garbage disposal system in cellsPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Karen Kreeger karen.kreeger@uphs.upenn.edu 215-349-5658 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
PHILADELPHIA Clumps of ?-synuclein protein in nerve cells are hallmarks of many degenerative brain diseases, most notably Parkinson's disease.
"No one has been able to determine if Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites, hallmark pathologies in Parkinson's disease can be degraded," says Virginia Lee, PhD, director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
"With the new neuron model system of Parkinson's disease pathologies our lab has developed recently, we demonstrated that these aberrant clumps in cells resist degradation as well as impair the function of the macroautophagy system, one of the major garbage disposal systems within the cell."
Macroautophagy, literally self eating, is the degradation of unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular bits and pieces by a compartment in the cell called the lysosome.
Lee, also a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and colleagues published their results in the early online edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry this week.
Alpha-synuclein (?-syn ) diseases all have clumps of the protein and include Parkinson's disease (PD), and array of related disorders: PD with dementia , dementia with Lewy bodies, and multiple system atrophy. In most of these, ?-syn forms insoluble aggregates of stringy fibrils that accumulate in the cell body and extensions of neurons.
These unwanted ?-syn clumps are modified by abnormal attachments of many phosphate chemical groups as well as by the protein ubiquitin, a molecular tag for degradation. They are widely distributed in the central nervous system, where they are associated with neuron loss.
Using cell models in which intracellular ?-syn clumps accumulate after taking up synthetic ?-syn fibrils, the team showed that ?-syn inclusions cannot be degraded, even though they are located near the lysosome and the proteasome, another type of garbage disposal in the cell.
The ?-syn aggregates persist even after soluble ?-syn levels within the cell are substantially reduced, suggesting that once formed, the ?-syn inclusions are resistant to being cleared. What's more, they found that ?-syn aggregates impair the overall autophagy degradative process by delaying the maturation of autophagy machines known as autophagosomes, which may contribute to the increased cell death seen in clump-filled nerve cells. Understanding the impact of ?-syn aggregates on autophagy may help elucidate therapies for ?-syn-related neurodegeneration.
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Co-authors are Selcuk A. Tanik, Christine E. Schultheiss, Laura A. Volpicelli-Daley, and Kurt R. Brunden, all from Penn.
This research was funded by the National Institutes of Neurological Diseases (NS053488), the JPB Foundation, and the Jeff and Anne Keefer Fund.
Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.
The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 16 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $398 million awarded in the 2012 fiscal year.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Penn Medicine also includes additional patient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region.
Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2012, Penn Medicine provided $827 million to benefit our community.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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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.
Parkinson's disease protein gums up garbage disposal system in cellsPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Karen Kreeger karen.kreeger@uphs.upenn.edu 215-349-5658 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
PHILADELPHIA Clumps of ?-synuclein protein in nerve cells are hallmarks of many degenerative brain diseases, most notably Parkinson's disease.
"No one has been able to determine if Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites, hallmark pathologies in Parkinson's disease can be degraded," says Virginia Lee, PhD, director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
"With the new neuron model system of Parkinson's disease pathologies our lab has developed recently, we demonstrated that these aberrant clumps in cells resist degradation as well as impair the function of the macroautophagy system, one of the major garbage disposal systems within the cell."
Macroautophagy, literally self eating, is the degradation of unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular bits and pieces by a compartment in the cell called the lysosome.
Lee, also a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and colleagues published their results in the early online edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry this week.
Alpha-synuclein (?-syn ) diseases all have clumps of the protein and include Parkinson's disease (PD), and array of related disorders: PD with dementia , dementia with Lewy bodies, and multiple system atrophy. In most of these, ?-syn forms insoluble aggregates of stringy fibrils that accumulate in the cell body and extensions of neurons.
These unwanted ?-syn clumps are modified by abnormal attachments of many phosphate chemical groups as well as by the protein ubiquitin, a molecular tag for degradation. They are widely distributed in the central nervous system, where they are associated with neuron loss.
Using cell models in which intracellular ?-syn clumps accumulate after taking up synthetic ?-syn fibrils, the team showed that ?-syn inclusions cannot be degraded, even though they are located near the lysosome and the proteasome, another type of garbage disposal in the cell.
The ?-syn aggregates persist even after soluble ?-syn levels within the cell are substantially reduced, suggesting that once formed, the ?-syn inclusions are resistant to being cleared. What's more, they found that ?-syn aggregates impair the overall autophagy degradative process by delaying the maturation of autophagy machines known as autophagosomes, which may contribute to the increased cell death seen in clump-filled nerve cells. Understanding the impact of ?-syn aggregates on autophagy may help elucidate therapies for ?-syn-related neurodegeneration.
###
Co-authors are Selcuk A. Tanik, Christine E. Schultheiss, Laura A. Volpicelli-Daley, and Kurt R. Brunden, all from Penn.
This research was funded by the National Institutes of Neurological Diseases (NS053488), the JPB Foundation, and the Jeff and Anne Keefer Fund.
Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.
The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 16 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $398 million awarded in the 2012 fiscal year.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Penn Medicine also includes additional patient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region.
Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2012, Penn Medicine provided $827 million to benefit our community.
[ | E-mail | 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.
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard are new parents of a baby girl.
The engaged actors took to Twitter Thursday to announce the arrival of their daughter, Lincoln Bell Shepard.
Bell, who stars on Showtime's "House of Lies," tweeted that her "new roommate poops her pants and doesn't pay rent." She closed with, "welcome baby Lincoln."
Shepard is a star of NBC's "Parenthood." He posted that his new daughter "has mom's beauty and dad's obsession with breasts."
Bell is 32 and Shepard is 38. The couple have been engaged since 2009.
Y Combinator?Demo Day, where 47 startups are taking the stage to pitch investors and press, continues to roll along. Here are short descriptions of the second group of presenting companies (the descriptions in the headlines come from the companies themselves). As we mentioned earlier, it's a smaller batch of startups this time around, and since many of them are presenting on an off-the-record basis, this is the last group that we'll be able to write about today.
Duke's Mason Plumlee (5) dunks the ball past Albany's Luke Devlin (11), Sam Rowley (14) and Jacob Iati (0) during the second half of a second-round game of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Friday, March 22, 2013, in Philadelphia. Duke won 73-61. (AP Photo/Michael Perez)
Duke's Mason Plumlee (5) dunks the ball past Albany's Luke Devlin (11), Sam Rowley (14) and Jacob Iati (0) during the second half of a second-round game of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Friday, March 22, 2013, in Philadelphia. Duke won 73-61. (AP Photo/Michael Perez)
Ohio State head coach Thad Matta calls a play against Iowa State in the first half of a third-round game of the NCAA college basketball tournament Sunday March 24, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. (AP Photo/Al Behrman)
Welcome back to BracketRacket, the one-stop shopping place for all your NCAA needs.
Today's edition includes the mad rush at Florida Gulf Coast's bookstore, a Plumlee family reunion and Nate Silver's reconfigured odds for the 16 teams left in the field. And, for your viewing pleasure, a little dance move we've called the (Gregg) Marshall Mamba.
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BOOKSTORE RUSH
The surprising run to the Sweet 16 has made Florida Gulf Coast University a favorite bandwagon team, with fans from all over the nation jumping onboard.
On campus, it's created quite a stir, particularly at the university bookstore.
After the guys from Dunk City became the first No. 15 seed to reach the Sweet 16, the school bookstore was bombarded with hundreds people hoping to pick up FGCU gear. The bookstore website had Sweet 16 shirts available Monday morning and the line outside the store snaked around more than 100 long. Customers stood shoulder to shoulder inside ? a somewhat blurry look here: http://bit.ly/10cKHAY ? and the checkout lines took up to an hour to get through.
According to information provided by Susan Evans, FGCU's vice president and chief of staff, sales of hats and apparel for the men's team at the bookstore from March 1-25 were just under $115,000, over $100,000 more than a year ago. The women's team has gotten a nice boost in popularity as well, sales of their team's gear at over $34,000 after hitting just over $5,000 last year.
The school's websites also have seen a huge uptick in traffic during the Eagles' run.
The daily unique visitors to www.fgcu.edu barely eclipsed 50,000 even after FGCU made it into the NCAA tournament, but was over 230,000 on Monday. The athletics website, www.fgcuathletics.com, had a dramatic jump as well, climbing over 117,000 unique visitors after hovering under 10,000 before the weekend.
Oh, and the Eagles seem to have some strong support in Alaska, at least to an ESPN SportsNation poll: http://bit.ly/15SgVEP
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FAMILY REUNION
Miles Plumlee spent most of his rookie season bouncing from the NBA's Indiana Pacers to the D-League's Fort Wayne Mad Ants and back.
Now he's hitting the road again ? at the wrong time for an impromptu family reunion.
His two younger brothers, Mason and Marshall, will be in town for Thursday night's NCAA Midwest Regional, playing for second-seeded Duke against No. 3 Michigan State at Lucas Oil Stadium.
"I'm excited for them, but I'm a little upset we're not playing any home games this week," Miles told AP Sports Writer Michael Marot after Tuesday's Pacers practice.
About an hour after practice, Miles left with the team headed to Houston for its first stop on a four-game road trip that runs through the rest of the regional round.
The rest of the Plumlees will likely converge on his hometown while the oldest brother is gone.
"I have no idea who's coming, but a lot of the family is coming. We still have a lot of family here," Miles said. "I'm so proud of him (Mason). He's put in a lot of work since his freshman year and now you can see how he's grown."
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SILVER'S ODDS
Statistical guru Nate Silver has recalculated the odds for the final 16 teams in the NCAA tournament.
Why do you care what he thinks? Well, the man from the FiveThirtyEight blog had his statistics dialed in the past two presidential elections, nailing all 50 states in the most recent one while calling nearly every Senate race.
He's turned his critical eye toward the NCAA bracket and came up with new odds now that the field has pared down.
Louisville is still the favorite, its odds up to 32.4 percent from 23.8 percent. Next in line is Florida, which jumped eight points to 21.3 percent and leapfrogged Indiana, which dropped nearly eight points from 18.4.
Florida Gulf Coast has better odds of winning now that the No. 15 seed has reached the Sweet 16, but not much ? the Eagles are up to 0.02 percent after starting at 0.001.
See Silver's analysis here: http://nyti.ms/10F5Irz
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MARSHALL MAMBA
Yesterday, we showed you Miami coach Jim Larranaga's version of the Muhammad Ali Shuffle.
Today, we give you the celebration dance of Wichita State coach Gregg Marshall. The Marshall Mamba? Via Yahoo! Sports and CBS/Turner: http://yhoo.it/105XzJ7
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WHAT DOES A GUY GOTTA DO?
Used to be that getting to the NCAA tournament was a huge goal for a basketball program.
These days, it's not always good enough.
On Monday, UCLA's Ben Howland and Minnesota's Tubby Smith were fired after leading their teams to the field of 68.
Howland had a 10-year run in Westwood, going 233-107 while making three consecutive Final Four appearances and winning four Pac-12 titles. The Bruins were the regular-season champions this season and went 25-10, but lost to Minnesota by 20 in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
Smith, who won a national championship with Kentucky in 1998, was fired Monday after the Gophers lost to Florida in the NCAA's third round. He went 124-81 in six seasons at Minnesota, helping to bring the program back to respectability after it was hit hard by an academic cheating scandal.
Now both coaches are looking for jobs.
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STAT OF THE DAY
Ratings for the first week of the NCAA tournament were the highest in 15 years.
Turns out, you're watching online, too.
NCAA March Madness Live, managed by Turner Sports, set all-time marks by getting 36.6 million live video streams and more than 10 million hours of live video across online and mobile platforms during the opening weekend on the NCAA tournament.
The live video streams doubled from last year and the live video time is up 198 percent.
That's a lot of tablets and smartphones tuned in to the tournament.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
"He is an avid physical fitness freak. That's probably a reason why his back situation is what it is today. He would run 20 miles at a time. The physical condition that he is in is amazing to this day. I would've been the opposite, I would've been doing whatever I'm supposed to do other than that. In a funny way, that combination made us get along so well." ? Arizona Sean Miller on Ohio State coach Thad Matta, whom he calls one of his closest friends in coaching.
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Follow John Marshall on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johnmarshallap
NEW YORK (AP) ? Apple has bought WiFiSLAM, a startup that has been developing a way to use WiFi hotspots to help smartphones navigate large indoor spaces, like stores, airports and conference centers.
The purchase is part of Apple's efforts to bolster its own mapping and location capabilities, after breaking up with Google Inc. last year.
The purchase was reported over the weekend by The Wall Street Journal, which said Apple Inc. paid $20 million for the Silicon Valley company. Apple confirmed the purchase Monday but did not say how much it paid or why it wanted WiFiSLAM.
WiFiSLAM has shut down its website and closed its YouTube account.
Traditional methods of locating cellphones include GPS and sensing of nearby cell towers. Neither of these approaches work well indoors. Retail chains are interested in helping shoppers find things in their stores, and apps that could help them navigate the aisles could be valuable. ABI Research estimates that the market for "indoor retail location" aids will be worth $5 billion in 2018.
Apple initially relied on Google to supply the default mapping and location application for the iPhone, but launched its own "Maps" app last year. The features of Google's iPhone app had been lagging those in the company's app for its own Android operating system. Among other things, the Android app included indoor navigation for some malls and airports.
Contact: Kevin Krajick kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu 212-854-9729 The Earth Institute at Columbia University
2011 Oklahoma temblor came amid increased manmade seismicity
A new study in the journal Geology is the latest to tie a string of unusual earthquakes, in this case, in central Oklahoma, to the injection of wastewater deep underground. Researchers now say that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake near Prague, Okla., on Nov. 6, 2011, may also be the largest ever linked to wastewater injection. Felt as far off as Milwaukee, more than 800 miles away, the quakethe biggest ever recorded in Oklahoma--destroyed 14 homes, buckled a federal highway and left two people injured. Small earthquakes continue to be recorded in the area. The study appeared today in the journal's early online edition.
The recent boom in U.S. energy production has produced massive amounts of wastewater. The water is used both in hydrofracking, which cracks open rocks to release natural gas, and in coaxing petroleum out of conventional oil wells. In both cases, the brine and chemical-laced water has to be disposed of, often by injecting it back underground elsewhere, where it has the potential to trigger earthquakes. The water linked to the Prague quakes was a byproduct of oil extraction at one set of oil wells, and was pumped into another set of depleted oil wells targeted for waste storage.
Scientists have linked a rising number of quakes in normally calm parts of Arkansas, Texas, Ohio and Colorado to below-ground injection. In the last four years, the number of quakes in the middle of the United States jumped 11-fold from the three decades prior, the authors of the Geology study estimate. Last year, a group at the U.S. Geological Survey also attributed a remarkable rise in small- to mid-size quakes in the region to humans. The risk is serious enough that the National Academy of Sciences, in a report last year called for further research to "understand, limit and respond" to induced seismic events. Despite these studies, wastewater injection continues near the Oklahoma earthquakes.
The magnitude 5.7 quake near Prague was preceded by a 5.0 shock and followed by thousands of aftershocks. What made the swarm unusual is that wastewater had been pumped into abandoned oil wells nearby for 17 years without incident. In the study, researchers hypothesize that as wastewater replenished compartments once filled with oil, the pressure to keep the fluid going down had to be ratcheted up. As pressure built up, a known faultknown to geologists as the Wilzetta fault--jumped. "When you overpressure the fault, you reduce the stress that's pinning the fault into place and that's when earthquakes happen," said study coauthor Heather Savage, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
The amount of wastewater injected into the well was relatively small, yet it triggered a cascading series of tremors that led to the main shock, said study co-author Geoffrey Abers, also a seismologist at Lamont-Doherty. "There's something important about getting unexpectedly large earthquakes out of small systems that we have discovered here," he said. The observations mean that "the risk of humans inducing large earthquakes from even small injection activities is probably higher" than previously thought, he said.
Hours after the first magnitude 5.0 quake on Nov. 5, 2011, University of Oklahoma seismologist Katie Keranen rushed to install the first three of several dozen seismographs to record aftershocks. That night, on Nov. 6, the magnitude 5.7 main shock hit and Keranen watched as her house began to shake for what she said felt like 20 seconds. "It was clearly a significant event," said Keranen, the Geology study's lead author. "I gathered more equipment, more students, and headed to the field the next morning to deploy more stations."
Keranen's recordings of the magnitude 5.7 quake, and the aftershocks that followed, showed that the first Wilzetta fault rupture was no more than 650 feet from active injection wells and perhaps much closer, in the same sedimentary rocks, the study says. Further, wellhead records showed that after 13 years of pumping at zero to low pressure, injection pressure rose more than 10-fold from 2001 to 2006, the study says.
The Oklahoma Geological Survey has yet to issue an official account of the sequence, and wastewater injection at the site continues. In a statement responding to the paper, Survey seismologist Austin Holland said the study showed the earthquake sequence could have been triggered by the injections. But, he said, "it is still the opinion of those at the Oklahoma Geological Survey that these earthquakes could be naturally occurring. There remain many open questions, and more scientific investigations are underway on this sequence of earthquakes and many others within the state of Oklahoma."
The risk of setting off earthquakes by injecting fluid underground has been known since at least the 1960s, when injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver was suspended after a quake estimated at magnitude 4.8 or greater struck nearbythe largest tied to wastewater disposal until the one near Prague, Okla. A series of similar incidents have emerged recently. University of Memphis seismologist Stephen Horton in a study last year linked a rise in earthquakes in north-central Arkansas to nearby injection wells. University of Texas, Austin, seismologist Cliff Frohlich in a 2011 study tied earthquake swarms at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to a brine disposal well a third of a mile away. In Ohio, Lamont-Doherty seismologists Won-Young Kim and John Armbruster traced a series of 2011 earthquakes near Youngstown to a nearby disposal well. That well has since been shut down, and Ohio has tightened its waste-injection rules.
Wastewater injection is not the only way that people can touch off quakes. Evidence suggests that geothermal drilling, impoundment of water behind dams, enhanced oil recovery, solution salt mining and rock quarrying also can trigger seismic events. (Hydrofracking itself is not implicated in significant earthquakes; the amount of water used is usually not enough to produce substantial shaking.) The largest known earthquakes attributed to humans may be the two magnitude 7.0 events that shook the Gazli gas fields of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1976, followed by a third magnitude 7.0 quake eight years later. In a 1985 study in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Lamont-Doherty researchers David Simpson and William Leith hypothesized that the quakes were human-induced but noted that a lack of information prevented them from linking the events to gas production or other triggers. In 2009, a geothermal energy project in Basel, Switzerland, was canceled after development activities apparently led to a series of quakes of up to magnitude 3.4 that caused some $8 million in damage to surrounding properties.
In many of the wastewater injection cases documented so far, earthquakes followed within days or months of fluid injection starting. In contrast, the Oklahoma swarm happened years after injection began, similar to swarms at the Cogdell oil field in West Texas and the Fort St. John area of British Columbia.
The Wilzetta fault system remains under stress, the study's authors say, yet regulators continue to allow injection into nearby wells. Ideally, injection should be kept away from known faults and companies should be required to provide detailed records of how much fluid they are pumping underground and at what pressure, said Keranen. The study authors also recommend sub-surface monitoring of fluid pressure for earthquake warning signs. Further research is needed but at a minimum, "there should be careful monitoring in regions where you have injection wells and protocols for stopping pumping even when small earthquakes are detected," said Abers. In a recent op-ed in the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, Abers argued that New York should consider the risk of induced earthquakes from fluid injection in weighing whether to allow hydraulic fracturing to extract the state's shale gas reserves.
###
The study was also coauthored by Elizabeth Cochran of the U.S. Geological Survey.
More information: Kevin Krajick, Senior Science Writer, The Earth Institute
kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu 212-854-9729
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The Earth Institute, Columbia University mobilizes the sciences, education and public policy to achieve a sustainable earth. http://www.earth.columbia.edu
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory seeks fundamental knowledge about the origin, evolution and future of the natural world. Its scientists study the planet from its deepest interior to the outer reaches of its atmosphere, on every continent and in every ocean, providing a rational basis for the difficult choices facing humanity. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu
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Contact: Kevin Krajick kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu 212-854-9729 The Earth Institute at Columbia University
2011 Oklahoma temblor came amid increased manmade seismicity
A new study in the journal Geology is the latest to tie a string of unusual earthquakes, in this case, in central Oklahoma, to the injection of wastewater deep underground. Researchers now say that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake near Prague, Okla., on Nov. 6, 2011, may also be the largest ever linked to wastewater injection. Felt as far off as Milwaukee, more than 800 miles away, the quakethe biggest ever recorded in Oklahoma--destroyed 14 homes, buckled a federal highway and left two people injured. Small earthquakes continue to be recorded in the area. The study appeared today in the journal's early online edition.
The recent boom in U.S. energy production has produced massive amounts of wastewater. The water is used both in hydrofracking, which cracks open rocks to release natural gas, and in coaxing petroleum out of conventional oil wells. In both cases, the brine and chemical-laced water has to be disposed of, often by injecting it back underground elsewhere, where it has the potential to trigger earthquakes. The water linked to the Prague quakes was a byproduct of oil extraction at one set of oil wells, and was pumped into another set of depleted oil wells targeted for waste storage.
Scientists have linked a rising number of quakes in normally calm parts of Arkansas, Texas, Ohio and Colorado to below-ground injection. In the last four years, the number of quakes in the middle of the United States jumped 11-fold from the three decades prior, the authors of the Geology study estimate. Last year, a group at the U.S. Geological Survey also attributed a remarkable rise in small- to mid-size quakes in the region to humans. The risk is serious enough that the National Academy of Sciences, in a report last year called for further research to "understand, limit and respond" to induced seismic events. Despite these studies, wastewater injection continues near the Oklahoma earthquakes.
The magnitude 5.7 quake near Prague was preceded by a 5.0 shock and followed by thousands of aftershocks. What made the swarm unusual is that wastewater had been pumped into abandoned oil wells nearby for 17 years without incident. In the study, researchers hypothesize that as wastewater replenished compartments once filled with oil, the pressure to keep the fluid going down had to be ratcheted up. As pressure built up, a known faultknown to geologists as the Wilzetta fault--jumped. "When you overpressure the fault, you reduce the stress that's pinning the fault into place and that's when earthquakes happen," said study coauthor Heather Savage, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
The amount of wastewater injected into the well was relatively small, yet it triggered a cascading series of tremors that led to the main shock, said study co-author Geoffrey Abers, also a seismologist at Lamont-Doherty. "There's something important about getting unexpectedly large earthquakes out of small systems that we have discovered here," he said. The observations mean that "the risk of humans inducing large earthquakes from even small injection activities is probably higher" than previously thought, he said.
Hours after the first magnitude 5.0 quake on Nov. 5, 2011, University of Oklahoma seismologist Katie Keranen rushed to install the first three of several dozen seismographs to record aftershocks. That night, on Nov. 6, the magnitude 5.7 main shock hit and Keranen watched as her house began to shake for what she said felt like 20 seconds. "It was clearly a significant event," said Keranen, the Geology study's lead author. "I gathered more equipment, more students, and headed to the field the next morning to deploy more stations."
Keranen's recordings of the magnitude 5.7 quake, and the aftershocks that followed, showed that the first Wilzetta fault rupture was no more than 650 feet from active injection wells and perhaps much closer, in the same sedimentary rocks, the study says. Further, wellhead records showed that after 13 years of pumping at zero to low pressure, injection pressure rose more than 10-fold from 2001 to 2006, the study says.
The Oklahoma Geological Survey has yet to issue an official account of the sequence, and wastewater injection at the site continues. In a statement responding to the paper, Survey seismologist Austin Holland said the study showed the earthquake sequence could have been triggered by the injections. But, he said, "it is still the opinion of those at the Oklahoma Geological Survey that these earthquakes could be naturally occurring. There remain many open questions, and more scientific investigations are underway on this sequence of earthquakes and many others within the state of Oklahoma."
The risk of setting off earthquakes by injecting fluid underground has been known since at least the 1960s, when injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver was suspended after a quake estimated at magnitude 4.8 or greater struck nearbythe largest tied to wastewater disposal until the one near Prague, Okla. A series of similar incidents have emerged recently. University of Memphis seismologist Stephen Horton in a study last year linked a rise in earthquakes in north-central Arkansas to nearby injection wells. University of Texas, Austin, seismologist Cliff Frohlich in a 2011 study tied earthquake swarms at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to a brine disposal well a third of a mile away. In Ohio, Lamont-Doherty seismologists Won-Young Kim and John Armbruster traced a series of 2011 earthquakes near Youngstown to a nearby disposal well. That well has since been shut down, and Ohio has tightened its waste-injection rules.
Wastewater injection is not the only way that people can touch off quakes. Evidence suggests that geothermal drilling, impoundment of water behind dams, enhanced oil recovery, solution salt mining and rock quarrying also can trigger seismic events. (Hydrofracking itself is not implicated in significant earthquakes; the amount of water used is usually not enough to produce substantial shaking.) The largest known earthquakes attributed to humans may be the two magnitude 7.0 events that shook the Gazli gas fields of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1976, followed by a third magnitude 7.0 quake eight years later. In a 1985 study in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Lamont-Doherty researchers David Simpson and William Leith hypothesized that the quakes were human-induced but noted that a lack of information prevented them from linking the events to gas production or other triggers. In 2009, a geothermal energy project in Basel, Switzerland, was canceled after development activities apparently led to a series of quakes of up to magnitude 3.4 that caused some $8 million in damage to surrounding properties.
In many of the wastewater injection cases documented so far, earthquakes followed within days or months of fluid injection starting. In contrast, the Oklahoma swarm happened years after injection began, similar to swarms at the Cogdell oil field in West Texas and the Fort St. John area of British Columbia.
The Wilzetta fault system remains under stress, the study's authors say, yet regulators continue to allow injection into nearby wells. Ideally, injection should be kept away from known faults and companies should be required to provide detailed records of how much fluid they are pumping underground and at what pressure, said Keranen. The study authors also recommend sub-surface monitoring of fluid pressure for earthquake warning signs. Further research is needed but at a minimum, "there should be careful monitoring in regions where you have injection wells and protocols for stopping pumping even when small earthquakes are detected," said Abers. In a recent op-ed in the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, Abers argued that New York should consider the risk of induced earthquakes from fluid injection in weighing whether to allow hydraulic fracturing to extract the state's shale gas reserves.
###
The study was also coauthored by Elizabeth Cochran of the U.S. Geological Survey.
More information: Kevin Krajick, Senior Science Writer, The Earth Institute
kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu 212-854-9729
Receive our Press Releases via RSS Feed
Receive our State of the Planet blog via RSS
Follow us on Twitter
The Earth Institute, Columbia University mobilizes the sciences, education and public policy to achieve a sustainable earth. http://www.earth.columbia.edu
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory seeks fundamental knowledge about the origin, evolution and future of the natural world. Its scientists study the planet from its deepest interior to the outer reaches of its atmosphere, on every continent and in every ocean, providing a rational basis for the difficult choices facing humanity. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu
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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.
Right after it launched the iPad mini, Apple filed a trademark application for the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As Patently Apple noticed earlier today, however, the USPTO will likely refuse Apple’s trademark filing because, the reviewer argues, “the applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant?s goods.” The letter?was mailed to Apple on January 24, but only made public in the last few days. Apple can still respond to this notice and correct its application, though it’s hard to see how Apple could argue against the USPTO’s argument that ‘mini’ is ‘merely descriptive.’ “The applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant?s goods.” The word ‘mini,’ the reviewer argues, just describes that the iPad mini is indeed “a small sized handheld tablet computer” and just describes the mini’s features. It is not, the reviewing attorney says, “a unitary mark with a unique, incongruous, or otherwise nondescriptive meaning in relation to the goods and/or services.” The USPTO would only grant apple the trademark to the full iPad mini name if the company coulhow that the word ‘mini’ has now acquired a “distinctiveness.” In addition, Patently Apple also notes, the reviewer also denied the application for now because Apple should have provided the USPTO with a specimen other than its own product website, even though Apple always uses these for its trademark applications and this was never a reason for a denial before. The reviewer also believes that there is a “likelihood of confusion” between Apple’s existing iPad trademarks and this new iPad? mini application, which, to be honest, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Here is the letter the USPTO sent to Apple in January: USPTO Refuses Apple’s iPad mini Trademark Application
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