California’s labor market slowed last month as employers shed 17,500 jobs in December and the unemployment rate remained unchanged.
The state’s jobless rate, which fell below 10% in November for the first time in nearly four years, stands at 9.8%, according to data released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In addition, job figures for November were revised upward to show a net gain of 6,100 jobs that month.
The last survey of employers in 2012 showed job losses in several industries.
The steepest losses were notched in the trade, transportation and utilities sector, which shed 11,200 jobs. Professional and business services, which include white-collar jobs such as accountants and lawyers, lost 8,800 jobs.
Two sectors expanded payrolls last month. The construction industry, seeing new demand in multi-unit residential housing, added 4,100 jobs. Education and health services added 9,200 jobs.
California continues to have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Only two states have higher jobless rates: Nevada and Rhode Island. Both recorded an unemployment rate of 10.2% last month.
For most of last year California had been steadily adding jobs at nearly twice the rate of the U.S. Last month, however, yearly growth slowed from almost 2% to 1.6%. Still, California has added 225,900 net jobs since December 2011.
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Leprosy has plagued humans for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean it has revealed all of its secrets. A new study in mice suggests the disfiguring disease employs a bit of biological trickery to do its damage: It reprograms certain nerve cells to become like stem cells and uses them to infiltrate the body’s muscle and nervous systems. This is the first time that scientists have seen bacteria reprogram cells in this way, and experts say the find could lead to the development of new treatments for leprosy and other neurodegenerative diseases.
More than 200,000 people worldwide are diagnosed with leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease) each year. Despite its ancient origins and almost mythic status, however, leprosy remains mysterious. Researchers know that it’s caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, and that it leaves sufferers with deforming lesions and a debilitating loss of sensation in their hands and feet. But they don’t know how the infection spreads throughout the body or why it damages nerves so extensively. In part, that’s because it’s hard to investigate: the bacterium that causes leprosy can’t be grown in a lab, so it can only be studied in infected humans, armadillos, and genetically engineered mice.
To answer some of those lingering questions, biologist Anura Rambukkana of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom and his colleagues seized on another known detail of the disease: its predilection for infecting Schwann cells, specialized cells that sheathe the nerves and help transmit nervous system signals. The researchers isolated Schwann cells from mice and infected them with M. leprae—and were soon surprised by what they saw.
The bacteria transformed the cells, turning off genes that were expressed in mature Schwann cells and turning on genes associated with earlier stages of cell development. The cells became immature and, like certain kinds of stem cells found in bone marrow and other tissues, could now turn into bone and muscle cells. “We thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is a vehicle for going anywhere in the body,’ ” Rambukkana recalls.
When the team reintroduced the altered cells into the mice, some of the cells migrated to muscle tissues and spread the bacteria wherever they went. The results suggest that M. leprae hijacks Schwann cells, destroying their ability to insulate and support the nervous system, so it can use them to infiltrate other tissues in the body, the team reports online today in Cell.
Rambukkana hopes that future studies will shed more light on how the leprosy bacterium transforms Schwann cells. Understanding the process could help doctors diagnose leprosy at earlier stages and possibly stop it in its tracks, he says. “It can also help us find new ways to generate stem cells for therapeutic approaches, so we can treat other neurodegenerative diseases,” such as multiple sclerosis.
There’s one caveat, says developmental neurobiologist Michael Wegner of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany who was not involved in the study. The study doesn’t prove that M. leprae co-opts human Schwann cells in the same way, he notes. But it does offer a plausible mechanism in “a fascinating study that uses state-of-the-art methodology.”
Dermatologist and leprosy researcher Robert Modlin of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees. “I was amazed—this is a really creative, out-of-the-box study,” Modlin says. “It raises mind-provoking questions about how it could relate to humans. It has real potential.”
This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – “Breaking Bad” star Betsy Brandt has been cast as Michael J. Fox’s TV wife.
NBC is eyeing the series, which has already been ordered for a full season, for fall. Brandt will play the wife of Fox’s character, a New York news anchor coping – like Fox – with Parkinson’s disease. He’ll also have the usual sitcom troubles, like juggling family and his career.
Brandt’s “Breaking Bad” husband, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) also struggled with health problems: Brandt’s character nursed him back to health after he was shot and had to re-learn to walk.
She joins a cast that also includes Connor Romero and Jack Gore as the couple’s children, Katie Finneran as the sister of Fox’s character, and “The Wire” star Wendell Pierce as his boss.
The second half of the fifth and final season of “Breaking Bad” will air this summer. Both “Breaking Bad” and the Fox show come from Sony Pictures Television.
The as-yet-untitled series, is written by “Cougar Town” scribe Sam Laybourne and helmed by “Easy A” director Will Gluck.
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In this week’s Well column, “How to Go Vegan,”, we asked you to send in your favorite tips and tricks for adopting a solely plant-based diet on Twitter. We received a range of responses, from quirky ingredient combinations that replicate a nonvegan dish to simple mantras to get you in a vegan frame of mind. Here are some of our favorites. To see the entire list of submissions, visit the hashtag, #vegantips.
Let’s start with some simple recipes that may satisfy your vegan craving:
Add some of your favorite ingredients:
Don’t forget to love your legumes:
And what about some tips to keep you on the vegan path?
And don’t forget to serve a healthy side of humor with that vegan dish:
On Friday the Federal Reserve released the transcripts of its discussions in 2007, the year the housing market, the financial markets, and the broader economy began to unravel. Reporters from The Times are sharing their findings on what the transcripts reveal in the blog entries and tweets below.
CAIRO -- The Algerian military on Thursday launched a raid to retake a natural gas complex from Islamic militants who seized the compound a day earlier and took scores of hostages, including Americans, Britons and Japanese.
Conflicting reports of casualties emerged. The Algerian news agency reported that as many as 45 hostages, including Americans, escaped the site in the Sahara Desert near the Algerian-Libyan border. Algeria media reports later in the day said that only between four and six foreign hostages were freed and that were a number of "victims."
A Mauritanian news organization quoting an extremist spokesman suggested that gunfire from Algerian military helicopters at two vehicles attempting to flee the compound killed 35 foreigners and 15 kidnappers, including the militant group’s leader.
The militant assault on the Western-run gas compound reportedly was carried out as retaliation for French military strikes against Islamist rebels seeking to overthrow the government in neighboring Mali. The Al Qaeda-linked militants, who belonged to a group called the Signed-in-Blood Battalion, reportedly threatened to blow up the site if Algerian commandos attempted to free the hostages.
Hundreds of Algerian soldiers ringed the remote compound and helicopters skimmed above, reports said. Algerian officials had earlier said they would not negotiate with the extremists, who reportedly had asked for safe passage into neighboring Libya.
"The authorities do not negotiate, no negotiations," Algerian Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia said on state television. "We have received their demands, but we didn't respond to them."
The Algerian military's raid on the complex marked a stunning twist in a drama that had raised fears of a long siege and highlighted the dangerous Islamist extremism stretching from Mali across the mountains and lawless deserts of North Africa.
The Algerian government was under pressure from the United States, Britain and other countries whose nationals were taken hostage to end the ordeal.
But the military raid appeared to have caught some by surprise. British Prime Minister David Cameron's office said that he would have preferred to have been told in advance of the operation.
In a phone interview with Al Jazeera, two European hostages urged the Algerian army to pull back from the site.
"We are receiving care and good treatment from the kidnappers. The [Algerian] army did not withdraw and they are firing at the camp," said one of the hostages. "There are around 150 Algerian hostages. We say to everybody that negotiations is a sign of strength and will spare many any loss of life."
The natural gas field complex at In Amenas, which supplies Europe and Turkey, is a joint venture operated by BP, the Norwegian firm Statoil and Sonatrach, the Algerian national oil company.
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Times staff writer Henry Chu in London contributed to this report.
Poachers are slaughtering elephants across Africa at an unprecedented pace. But scientists tracking the animals’ carcasses—their faces and ivory hacked away—are seldom able to explain in detail what these deaths mean to the pachyderms’ populations and social structure. Now, a 14-year study of elephants in northern Kenya concludes that the adult behemoths are more likely to die at the hands of humans than from natural causes. At the same time, the elephants have responded to the heavy poaching with a baby boom, providing the researchers some hope for the jumbos’ survival.
“Clearly it is the most detailed and comprehensive demographic analysis undertaken for any elephant population, and perhaps any wildlife population, at least in Africa,” says Norman Owen-Smith, an ecologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. It provides a base “for modeling the potential impacts of increased poaching” on other African elephant populations, which are also suffering from illegal killing.
In 1997, the scientists began a study on elephant behavior in two adjacent national reserves, Samburu and Buffalo Springs, which together measure 220 square kilometers. The parks’ elephants were accustomed to vehicles and easy to study; they had also recovered from heavy poaching in the 1970s. At the beginning of the study, illegal killing was rare. “We might lose one big male a year,” says George Wittemyer, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and the study’s lead author. “We thought the population was stable.” That changed in 2009 as poachers began shooting elephants en masse. The scientists then shifted their study to look at the effects the poaching was having on the elephants they knew.
At the study’s outset, the researchers focused on 934 individuals (509 females and 425 males). The team used a standard method for identifying each elephant, noting each animal’s unique markings on its ears and face, as well as the shape of its tusks. Then each week, from 1997 to 2011, the researchers drove along five, 20-kilometer routes inside the reserves and recorded the presence or absence of the study elephants. They considered any animals that they didn’t spot for more than 3 years to be dead. The scientists seldom found the carcasses of these animals, but they investigated any dead elephants reported by tourists or rangers that were inside the parks or within 10 kilometers of the reserves’ boundaries.
Although the elephant population was increasing when the study began, it began to decline as poachers targeted the animals. The older elephants, which have larger tusks, were especially hard hit. In 2000, there were 38 males over 30 years old in the study population. By 2011, their number had dropped to 12—and of those, seven had matured into this age class. Older females also suffered huge losses, with almost half of those 30 years old dying between 2006 and 2011. By 2011, 56% of the elephants that were found dead had been poached, the team reports online today in PLOS ONE.
The poaching spree has also altered the elephants’ social organization, the study shows. When the work began, males made up 42% of the population; by 2011, they had been cut down to only 32%. And 10 of the 50 elephant family groups that the scientists were studying were effectively wiped out. “They no longer have any breeding females,” Wittemyer explains. “And so, the family group has disappeared, leaving surviving juveniles on their own.” These youngsters may join other families, or, without a leader to guide them, try to survive in sibling groups typically led by the oldest sister.
“Some elephants died from a bad drought that hit the region between 2009 and 2010,” Wittemyer adds. “But at least half of these deaths were due to poaching.” The poaching took place outside the reserves on lands that are largely unpatrolled. In addition to the reserve, the elephants roam over a vast area of more than 3500 square kilometers.
As grim as the data are, Wittemyer says they are “more representative of elephant populations across the continent today” than data collected in areas such as Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, where scientists have studied elephants since 1972. The Amboseli elephants are better protected than those in Samburu, although, they, too, have suffered significant losses from poachers. Long-term studies of elephants in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, where elephants have been culled but not poached, have focused more on the animals’ population dynamics than on individuals. The new Samburu study provides “a good comparison” with these studies, Wittemyer says, and is particularly useful these days because nearly all elephant populations are facing similarly high rates of poaching.
Wittemyer and his colleagues also suggest that their data show that the Samburu elephants have responded to the pressure from poaching with a baby boom. “There was a big jump in births in 2012,” Wittemyer says, “and a hiatus for a few months in the killings. So it looked like we were on the up-and-up.”
“Any evidence that contributes to understanding how or if elephant populations will be able to recover from these extreme mortality events is highly significant—and this paper does that,” says Phyllis Lee, an animal behaviorist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom.
But, Owen-Smith says, the Samburu elephants’ super reproductive performance is likely nothing more than a sign that their population is “well below the carrying capacity limits” of the region—meaning that a landscape that was once dense with elephants is now largely empty. And the killing has started again: Poachers shot 20 elephants in recent weeks in the Samburu region. As Joyce Poole, an ethologist and expert on elephant behavior in Nairobi, who directs the conservation organization ElephantVoices, puts it: “The study’s interesting population dynamics are overshadowed by a gruesome reality.”
This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
LONDON (Reuters) – British pop star Elton John announced on Wednesday he had become a father for the second time after the birth via a surrogate mother of Elijah Joseph Daniel Furnish-John.
The “Rocket Man” and “Candle in the Wind” singer and his partner David Furnish confirmed the news in a short statement on John‘s official website, which also provided a link to an article in Hello! magazine.
“Both of us have longed to have children, but the reality that we now have two sons is almost unbelievable,” said the couple, who entered a civil partnership in 2005.
“The birth of our second son completes our family in a most precious and perfect way,” they told Hello!.
John, 65, and Furnish, 50, are already parents to Zachary, who is two. Elijah was born in Los Angeles on January 11.
“I know when he goes to school there’s going to be an awful lot of pressure, and I know he’s going to have people saying, ‘You don’t have a mummy,’” John said of his decision to have another baby.
“It’s going to happen. We talked about it before we had him. I want someone to be at his side and back him up. We shall see.”
(This story has been corrected to change magazine to Hello! from People in paragraph two)
(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
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One of the problems with office work is that many of us are using chairs that don’t fit our bodies very well or give adequate support to the back, said Jack Dennerlein, a professor at Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences in Boston who specializes in ergonomics and safety. If you are experiencing back pain, you may be able to adjust your chair to increase its lumbar support. A good office chair will have an adjustable seat pan that you can slide back and forth as well as adjustable back and height features. First, sit in the chair so the lumbar region of your back, your lower back, is resting on the back support. At the same time, your feet should be resting comfortably on the ground and the back of your knees should be about three-finger widths from the edge of the chair, said Dr. Dennerlein.
Some high-end chair brands have adjustable seat pans, including the Steelcase Leap chair, which retails for between $800 and $900 and offers an adjustable seat and plenty of lumbar support.
The Steelcase Criterion chair sells anywhere from $350 to $850 online, depending on the model, and boasts seven different adjustments “to offer support through the full range of dynamic seating postures.”
The HumanScale Freedom chair is the winner of several design awards and also has an adjustable seat pan as well as “weight-sensitive recline, synchronously adjustable armrests, and dynamically positioned headrest.” ($400 to $1,400)
The Herman Miller Aeron chair is also popular because it comes in small, medium and large sizes and claims a PostureFit design that “supports the way your pelvis tilts naturally forward, so that your spine stays aligned and you avoid back pain.” ($680 to $850)
If all that sounds really wonderful and really too expensive, there may be a simpler solution to ease your back pain at work. Invest $15 to $30 in a lumbar chair pillow to make sure your back is getting the support it needs even when you are not sitting in a $900 chair.
Three Democratic lawmakers on Thursday sent letters to 14 marketers of high-caffeinated energy drinks requesting data about the products’ ingredients and any company studies showing their risks and benefits to children and young people.
In recent months, the Food and Drug Administration has begun examining the safety of energy drinks following reports of several deaths and numerous injuries potentially associated with the products. The number of annual hospital emergency visits involving the drinks doubled from 2007 to 2011, according to a federal report released last week.
In addition, claims by drink producers that their proprietary “energy” formulations provide consumers with a physical and mental edge are coming under scrutiny. There is little scientific evidence, researchers say, that the drinks provide anything more than a high dose of caffeine similar to that found in a cup of strong coffee.
The letters were sent by Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to companies including Monster Beverage, Rockstar, Red Bull and Living Essentials, the distributor of 5-Hour Energy, a small, concentrated energy “shot” drink. Letters were also sent to PepsiCo, which sells Amp; Coca-Cola, which sells NOS; and Dr Pepper Snapple, which sells Venom Energy.
Among other questions in the letter, the lawmakers asked the companies to specify the total amount of caffeine in the energy beverages. Products like 5-Hour Energy that are marketed as supplements do not list the amount of caffeine used and producers use caffeine from a variety of sources such as synthetic caffeine, the guarana plant and tea extracts.
They also asked why the companies chose to market their energy product as either a beverage or a dietary supplement. The two regulatory categories have separate rules about ingredient disclosures and reporting of potential health risks.
The lawmakers also asked the companies to provide any studies that they have run or underwritten that examine the effect of energy drink use in children or young adults.
The few studies cited by energy drink companies to back their marketing claims have taken place among adults and have compared the effect of an energy drink to that of a placebo like flavored water.
Other public officials are looking into marketing claims of energy drink makers, including the attorney general of New York State and the city attorney for San Francisco.
More than 200,000 people worldwide are diagnosed with leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease) each year. Despite its ancient origins and almost mythic status, however, leprosy remains mysterious. Researchers know that it’s caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, and that it leaves sufferers with deforming lesions and a debilitating loss of sensation in their hands and feet. But they don’t know how the infection spreads throughout the body or why it damages nerves so extensively. In part, that’s because it’s hard to investigate: the bacterium that causes leprosy can’t be grown in a lab, so it can only be studied in infected humans, armadillos, and genetically engineered mice.
