A Dissenting View of the Great South Carolina Gingrich Landslide (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | After Newt Gingrich's convincing win in South Carolina, the meme du jour is "debates do matter." Flip on any television news show and you're destined to hear this all-purpose story line about the GOP primary in South Carolina.

Gingrich is an able orator but not everyone is convinced that grand oratory did the trick for Gingrich in South Carolina. The Ticket underscored the demographic rift in Republican politics that Democrats are striving to broaden.

Gingrich won 45 percent of South Carolina primary voters who "identified themselves very conservative," with Mitt Romney at 20 percent. Among those identifying themselves as evangelical, Romney only got half the votes Gingrich did.

The Ticket article mentions Gingrich's characterization of Romney as a "wealthy corporate raider." Both hypocritical and antithetical, the tactic worked, rubbing salt into the wounds of South Carolinians plagued by joblessness and a stagnant economy.

In a seeming replay of 1960s movie Elmer Gantry, with its skirt-chasing evangelist protagonist, Gingrich points his finger at Romney: "There's your culprit," Gingrich accuses.

There were other factors, too. The degree to which anti-Mormonism among Evangelicals played a part was addressed in the Tampa Bay Times before the election. South Carolina is an open primary state, another factor that played to Gingrich's advantage.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum is the obvious cultural conservative without the baggage of three marriages, a 1997 ethics investigation and of having earned $1.6 million lobbying for Freddie Mac.

As a defense hawk and a straight-up family man, Santorum finished a distant third in South Carolina. Logic dictates a conclusion other than Gingrich being either Lincoln or Douglas.

Santorum wasn't impressed with the Gingrich win when he appeared on ABC News, calling Gingrich a "high-risk candidate" just one day after the primary.

There are other risks with Gingrich. Republicans criticizing President Barack Obama for playing the blame game should note Gingrich's adroitness at it.

CNN's Political Ticker relates how Gingrich blamed his lawyers for a $300,000 fine resulting from ethics investigation.

Gingrich sophistry effectively manipulated the state's "value voters" into a political "little-ease." Should the South Carolina primary race be made into a movie, the producers might want to borrow a title from the Kubrick film, "Dr. Strangelove."

Instead of the actual "Strangelove" subtitle, you might have "How the South Carolina GOP Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Moral Relativism."

Anthony Ventre is a freelance writer who has written for weekly and daily newspapers and several online publications. He is a frequent Yahoo contributor, concentrating in news and financial writing.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20120122/pl_ac/10869393_a_dissenting_view_of_the_great_south_carolina_gingrich_landslide

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42-Foot Car-Chopping Axe Is the Nuclear Option of Prank Wars [Video]

There are two hard and fast rules in this world: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line" and "Never get involved in a prank war in Australia." Or else very bad things will happen to your Holden. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/PoK0quH_iG0/42+foot-car+chopping-axe-is-the-nuclear-option-of-prank-wars

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LOIC: The Tool Anonymous Is Using to Essentially Turn You Into a Botnet [Hackers]

Gawker's uncovered a pretty devious plan of Anonymous to wage war in its Megaupload retaliation—tricking Twitter users into firing the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. But what the hell is that? Giz explains. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/hBXSE4huNxE/heres-the-tool-anonymous-is-tricking-the-internet-into-using

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Karzai says he's met with Afghan insurgent faction

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, delivers a speech at the opening of the second year of the Afghanistan parliament in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012. Karzai announced to parliament on Saturday that he has taken the lead in peace negotiations with the Hizb-i-Islami insurgent faction, meeting personally with radical Islamist militia representatives to push ahead with the peace process.(AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, delivers a speech at the opening of the second year of the Afghanistan parliament in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012. Karzai announced to parliament on Saturday that he has taken the lead in peace negotiations with the Hizb-i-Islami insurgent faction, meeting personally with radical Islamist militia representatives to push ahead with the peace process.(AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai listens to Afghan national anthem ahead of inspecting the guards of honor during the opening ceremony of the second year of the Afghanistan parliament in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012. Karzai announced to parliament on Saturday that he has taken the lead in peace negotiations with the Hizb-i-Islami insurgent faction, meeting personally with radical Islamist militia representatives to push ahead with the peace process. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, salutes to Afghan parliament members, as he walks out of parliament after delivering his speech at the opening ceremony of the second year of the Afghanistan parliament in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012. Karzai announced to parliament on Saturday that he has taken the lead in peace negotiations with the Hizb-i-Islami insurgent faction, meeting personally with radical Islamist militia representatives to push ahead with the peace process. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he personally held peace talks recently with the insurgent faction Hizb-i-Islami, appearing to assert his own role in a U.S.-led bid for negotiations to end the country's decade-long war.

Karzai made the announcement hours before he met with American special representative Marc Grossman to discuss progress and plans for bringing the Taliban insurgency into formal talks for the first time.

"Recently, we met with a delegation from Hizb-i-Islami ... and had negotiations," Karzai told a meeting of the Afghan parliament. "We are hopeful that these negotiations for peace continue and we will have good results," he added.

Karzai's statement was a reminder that any negotiations to end Afghanistan's war will be more complex than just talking to the Taliban's Pakistan-based leadership, headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar. The two other main insurgent factions in the country have their own leaders and agendas.

Hizb-i-Islami is a radical Islamist militia that controls territory in Afghanistan's northeast and launches attacks against U.S. forces from Pakistan. Its leader, powerful warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a former U.S. ally now listed as a terrorist by Washington.

Based over the Pakistan border, Hekmatyar has ties to al-Qaida and has launched deadly attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Fighters loyal to Hekmatyar also have strongholds in Baghlan, Kunduz and Kunar provinces in the north and northeast Afghanistan.

The other main insurgent group is the feared Haqqani network, which maintains close ties to both al-Qaida and the Taliban and commands the loyalties of an estimated 10,000 fighters. The Haqqanis have been blamed for a series of spectacular attacks, including suicide bombings inside Kabul.

By showing he can bring at least one major faction to the negotiating table, Karzai may hope to boost his standing in a tentative peace process that has recently been dominated by Washington. The president has met before with representatives of Hekmatyar, whose political allies hold seats in the Afghan parliament and Cabinet, but Saturday's public announcement seemed intended to bolster Karzai's insistence on inclusion in the U.S.-led peace process.

"It should be mentioned that the Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and negotiations," Karzai said. "No foreign country or organization can prevent (Afghans) from exercising this right."

The U.S. has repeatedly said that formal negotiations must be Afghan-led, but Karzai is reportedly uneasy with his government not being directly involved in recent preliminary talks with Taliban representatives.

U.S. representative Grossman was meeting with Karzai on Sunday, the U.S. Embassy said. Grossman stressed that any future negotiations would include Afghanistan's government, and said he would meet Karzai on Saturday.

"After our meeting with President Karzai, we will decide what to do next because we take his guidance and advice in an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process," Grossman said Friday during a stop in India.

French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet also arrived in Kabul on Saturday for talks with Afghan officials after Paris suspended training missions following the killing of four French troops by an Afghan soldier, the latest in a rising number of assaults in which Afghan security forces or infiltrators have turned their guns on coalition forces.

Longuet said on arrival that there is "no possible partnership" in Afghanistan without "trust."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan early over the deaths, a potential setback for the U.S.-led coalition's efforts to build a national army and allow foreign troops to go home.

On Saturday, insurgents killed a NATO service member in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said. The statement gave no other details, nor the nationality of the casualty.

The attack comes a day after an Afghan soldier opened fire on French troops during a training exercise, killing four of them and prompting France to suspend its training programs.

Insurgents clashed Saturday with government forces in the town of Barmal in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, said Maj. Abdul Rahman, who coordinates coalition and Afghan operations in the area.

The Paktika governor's office said four attackers were trying to enter the town's main bazaar and then move toward government offices and military bases nearby. Before they could, Afghan security forces engaged them in a one-hour gun battle and all four attackers were killed, it said.

Separately, a roadside bomb killed four Afghan civilians Saturday morning in Helmand province in the south, the Interior Ministry said.

On Friday, insurgents killed five border police in the Gulran district of Herat province near the Iranian border in western Afghanistan, said Sulaiman Khan, commander of a border police rapid reaction unit in the area.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-01-21-AS-Afghanistan/id-5faf82dc96124734aac82af92af39197

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Genetically Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed into Ethanol

News | Energy & Sustainability

A genetically modified strain of common gut bacteria may lead to a new technology for making biofuels that does not compete with food crops for arable acreage

By David Biello ?| January 19, 2012?|

SEAWEED TO BIOFUEL: Brown seaweed grows fast, is chock full of sugars to turn into biofuel and doesn't compete for land with food crops. Image: Courtesy of BioArchitecture Lab

Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin?a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel.

Researchers at Bio Architecture Lab, Inc., (BAL) and the University of Washington in Seattle have now taken the first step to exploit the natural advantages of seaweed. They have built a microbe capable of digesting it and converting it into ethanol or other fuels or chemicals. Synthetic biologist Yasuo Yoshikuni, a co-founder of BAL, and his colleagues took Escherichia coli, a gut bacterium most famous as a food contaminant, and made some genetic modifications that give it the ability to turn the sugars in an edible kelp called kombu into fuel. They report their findings in the January 20 issue of the journal Science.

To get his E. coli to digest kombu, Yoshikuni turned to nature?specifically, he looked into the genetics of natural microbes that can break down alginate, the predominant sugar molecule in the brown seaweed. "The form of the sugar inside the seaweed is very exotic," Yoshikuni told Scientific American. "There is no industrial microbe to break down alginate and convert it into fuels and chemical compounds."

Once he and his colleagues had isolated the genes that would confer the required traits, they used a fosmid?a carrier for a small chunk of genetic code?to place the DNA into the E. coli cells, where it took its place in the microbe's own genetic instruction set. To test the new genetically engineered bacterium, the researchers ground up some kombu, mixed it with water and added the altered E. coli. Before two days had gone by the solution contained about 5 percent ethanol and water. It also did this at (relatively) low temperatures between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius, both of which mean that the engineered microbe can turn seaweed to fuel without requiring the use of additional energy for the process.

An analysis from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (pdf) suggests that the U.S. could supply 1 percent of its annual gasoline needs by growing such seaweed for harvest in slightly less than 1 percent of the nation's territorial waters. Humans already grow and harvest some 15 million metric tons of kombu and other seaweeds to eat. And there's no reason to fear the newly engineered E. coli escaping into the wild and consuming the seaweed already out there, Yoshikuni argues. "E. coli loves the human gut, it doesn't like the ocean environment," he says. "I can hardly imagine it would do something. It would just be dead."

The microbe could turn out to be useful for making molecules other than ethanol, such as isobutanol or even the precursors of plastics, Yoshikuni says. "Consider the microbe as the chassis with engineered functional modules," or pathways to produce a specific molecule, Yoshikuni says. "If we integrate other pathways instead of the ethanol pathway, this microbe can be a platform for converting sugar into a variety of molecules."

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=566d7e52295686bc7beeee1bf04e5921

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2-timing and hybrids: RUB researchers look back on 100 million years of evolution

2-timing and hybrids: RUB researchers look back on 100 million years of evolution

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Two-timing is nothing out of the ordinary for them: for about 100 million years, grass smut fungi have been breeding in a three-gender system. This was discovered by Dr. Ronny Kellner and Prof. Dr. Dominik Begerow of the RUB Geobotany Laboratory in cooperation with colleagues from the Heinrich Heine Universit?t in D?sseldorf. Using genetic analysis, they showed that the structure of the responsible regions in the genome has hardly changed since then. In the journal PLoS Genetics, the team also reports that the fungi in the experiment not only mate within their own species, but also form hybrids with other species ? and that after millions of years of separate evolution. "If you look at the time periods, it is almost as if mice could mate with humans" Begerow illustrates.

Gathering and genetically analysing fungi

Grass smut fungi live as parasites on plants such as corn, wheat, and grasses and cause various plant diseases. For the study, the researchers tested 100 species, which they partly gathered themselves in Ecuador, Mexico, or Germany. For all the species they decoded the area of the genome that contains the genes for pheromone receptors. These make it possible to distinguish one's own species from others. "What makes the work special is the successful synthesis of biodiversity research and functional genetics, which was made possible by the collaboration with Prof. Michael Feldbr?gge and with Dr. Evelyn Vollmeister of the University in D?sseldorf" says Kellner.

How genes change over 100 million years

The researchers analysed ten species especially thoroughly using complex sequencing technologies. Instead of the usual 1,000 DNA building blocks (base pairs), they sequenced 20,000 base pairs. "In this way, we were able to gain entirely new insights" explained Begerow. "Although the actual gene structure has changed little in the last 100 million years, within the structure, the genetic information has changed dramatically. That should really mean that different species can no longer mate with each other".

Mixing with other species

Nevertheless, in the experiment the team proved that grass smut fungi of different species can mate. Now they want to investigate whether this phenomenon also occurs in nature. "This is a fascinating discovery", says Kellner. "The hybrid formation would have far-reaching ecological consequences." A new species of fungus could, for example, be more harmful than its two predecessor species because it infests several different host plants. Leaps to new hosts would also be conceivable. "It's like in the current debate surrounding the bird flu virus, which could combine with another strain of the virus" explained Begerow. "Here, new 'super parasites' could emerge whose properties are completely unpredictable. If different species of fungi did actually mate, that would speed up evolution enormously."

###

Ruhr-University Bochum: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Thanks to Ruhr-University Bochum for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116754/__timing_and_hybrids__RUB_researchers_look_back_on_____million_years_of_evolution

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Justin Bieber Debuts Darker Locks

Teen superstar was spotted with new hairstyle in Los Angeles over the weekend.
By Jocelyn Vena

Justin Bieber
Photo: Getty Images

<P>About a year ago, <a href="http://www.mtv.com/music/artist/bieber_justin/artist.jhtml">Justin Bieber</a> made headlines when he <a href="/news/articles/1658412/justin-bieber-haircut.jhtml">lopped off his famous locks</a> in favor of a shorter do. Now, almost 12 months later, he's once again making some hair-related headlines. </p><div class="player-placeholder right" id="vid:667806" width="240" height="211"></div><p> So, what has Bieber done now that has everyone <i>buzz</i>ing? Well, over the weekend, the Biebs was <a href="http://www.eonline.com/news/justin_biebers_hair_goes_dark_side/286863" target="_blank">spotted in Los Angeles</a> donning much darker hair than his trademark sandy blond. When Bieber cut off his hair last year, MTV News spoke to his <a href="/news/articles/1659195/justin-bieber-haircut.jhtml">hairstylist, Vanessa Price</a>, who told us about his new look, noting that it had a lot to do with Bieber's growing pains. "We knew it was going to be a big deal," Price explained. "We knew it was going to shock fans, but we also knew it was going to be a change in terms of growing up. I think that's something that people adjust to. "We'd been talking about it for a while and shared some ideas, but literally the day of he was adamant about the haircut. He amped himself up for it," Price continued, before describing his momentary hesitation. "The minute we started cutting, he was like, 'Wait, wait, wait.' He loves it. He's enjoying it." The new hair color coincides with his girlfriend Selena Gomez's hairstyle changes. She recently <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/selenagomez/status/157224232835760130" target="_blank">tweeted</a> a photo of herself sporting multi-colored highlights in her hair. Bieber's new look may be part of a makeover for his upcoming album, <i>Believe,</i> slated for release later this year. He confirmed last week that <a href="/news/articles/1677263/justin-bieber-will-i-am-believe.jhtml">Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am</a> will appear on the album. Not only does Bieber want to <a href="/news/articles/1675015/justin-bieber-new-album.jhtml">grow up</a> when it comes to his look but also when it comes to his music. "The only conversation we've had about Justin's album that we're about to do is it's really important that it's the proper transition, because we've seen him [with] 'Baby,' now we're watching him grow up," Bieber's longtime vocal producer Kuk Harrell told MTV News in November. "And we can't just throw him into the adult game right away. It has to be the proper transition."</p>

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Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1677381/justin-bieber-dark-hair.jhtml

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