Workers at Royal Mail vote against sell-off

By Neil Maidment

LONDON (Reuters) - Royal Mail workers backed union opposition to plans to privatise the state-owned postal group on Wednesday, a stark reminder for potential investors that there will be no warm welcome if and when the company changes hands.

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) sent consultative ballot papers to 112,000 Royal Mail postal workers. It said, from a 74 percent turnout, 96 percent opposed government plans to sell the firm this financial year in Britain's most significant privatisation in decades.

An initial public share offer (IPO), which could value the near 500-year old business at 2-3 billion pounds, is the preferred route, rather than a private equity sale, and banks have been appointed to run the listing. As part of government legislation, Royal Mail's 150,000-strong staff would have a 10 percent stake in the group.

The CWU believes that privatising the firm will lead to a worse deal for customers and staff, while Royal Mail argues it is vital to secure external capital for future investment.

"This ballot result is a damning rejection of the tired old government privatisation policy and the actions of the Royal Mail board in support of this," said Dave Ward, CWU deputy general secretary. He said industrial conflict was inevitable unless talks to find a different solution took place.

"Postal workers are not going to sacrifice their souls for a so-called 10 percent stake when they know their jobs, pensions and conditions are once again under threat."

Union members also voted on pay and workplace issues, and were 92 percent in favour of boycotting the delivery of competitors' privately sorted mail.

The CWU believes private sector rivals such as TNT Post, which wants to launch a full rival UK service in five years' time, could undermine its ability to maintain a universal nationwide service.

TNT Post, which stepped up its own delivery service recently, has been accused by the Royal Mail and CWU of targeting only the profitable parts of the mail bag and leaving Royal Mail to deliver the rest.

Postal regulator Ofcom has said it would intervene if direct competition threatened Royal Mail's universal service.

TUDOR HISTORY

A boycott could see 26 million items a day - including bills, statements, and business mail contracts won by companies including TNT and UK Mail - go undelivered, dealing a serious blow to Royal Mail's business.

The union said it had not decided how to take these issues forward but did give an undertaking in the High Court later on Wednesday to not take any strike action until June 28, when there will be a further court hearing.

Royal Mail had sought an injunction to prevent strike action, which it said would be unlawful.

Several attempts to sell off Royal Mail - Britain's dominant postal player with a history stretching back to 1516 and King Henry VIII - have foundered, with the previous government abandoning the last attempt in the stock market chaos of 2009.

Some people within the private equity industry have said that the politics attached to the company, together with not being able to own the firm outright, make it a less attractive proposition, although such investors remain government's plan B.

Speaking to Reuters in May, Royal Mail Chief Executive Moya Greene acknowledged union members would never drop opposition to privatisation but glossed over whether investors had expressed concern at such a response from the company's workforce.

Greene's focus has been on emphasising to pension and mutual funds Royal Mail's shift away from a structurally declining letters market towards a growing parcels business that now makes almost half its revenue and helped the firm more than double annual profit recently.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/royal-mail-workers-vote-against-sell-off-120953848.html

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Sennheiser HD 429s

Despite the relatively large number of headphones Sennheiser has out on the market at any given time, the German audio company manages to maintain an impressive standard of quality. The HD 429s, at $89.95 (direct), can be considered a budget headphone option in Sennheiser's deep lineup. Its volume control-free remote, dearth of accessories, and inability to fold down or collapse for easy storage and packing are not ideal, but it's easy to forget when these lightweight, comfortable headphones are playing your favorite music. Simply put, they sound excellent for this price range. The HD 429s is a pair that can afford to skimp on extras because it sounds so good for the price, bringing rich bass and clear highs to the sub-$100 range.

Design
The HD 429s's?design is reminiscent of the Sennheiser HD 558, with large earcups featuring a small Sennheiser logo in the center?and not much else. The material on the edge of the cups and the headband is matte black plastic, with padding that is comfortable despite not feeling very plush to the touch. There's a bit of flexibility to the angle of the earcups, too, that helps the comfort factor, but the primary reason for the comfort: The HD 429s is an extremely lightweight headphone pair.?

The thin black audio cable descends from the left earcup and ends around the upper chest where it can either be plugged into a player that is clipped onto or sitting in a pocket, or plugged into a longer cable that has a built-in microphone and remote. The compartment housing the remote also has a shirt clip on it, and all the cables terminate in 3.5mm?there's an adapter for Nokia-style headphone jacks.

Other than that, the HD 429s has no included accessories, which is a bit surprising even in the sub-$100 price category. There's no carrying pouch or case, nor do the headphones fold down flat, so stowing them for travel might prove to be a bit of a hassle.?

Call clarity through the inline mic is about what you should expect?your call partner will hear you just fine and understand you, but it will still sound like a low-fidelity cell phone call. The single-button remote controls playback and track navigation (depending on how many taps you give it), but there is, disappointingly, no volume control, which should be a given in this price range. Of course, the lack of volume control ensures compatibility with a wider range of phones, but you could always include multiple cables or options to buy different cables on the same headphone pair?none of which are options here.

Performance
On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," the HD 429s delivers serious deep bass without going overboard. At maximum, unwise listening levels, the HD 249s doesn't distort on tracks like this, although the earcups vibrate so much, it feels as though it's teetering on the edge. At normal listening levels, the headphones still produce plenty of low frequency rumble, but they do so without going overboard, and the balance with the highs is ideal.

A better insight to the HD 429s's sound signature is gained when listening to Bill Callahan's "Drover." Often, a headphone pair with deep bass response achieves it by boosting the lows too much, almost across the board, so that the sub-bass frequencies get boosted as much as, say, the low-mids in a male baritone voice. This is rarely a good thing, and the HD 429s avoids it?instead of delivering Callahan's vocals in an bass-heavy manner, with dulled edges, we get the crisp high-mid response that keeps his vocals in the forefront of the mix. There's plenty of depth to his baritone voice, but it doesn't overwhelm the mix, and the drums on this track sound natural, rather than bogged down with too much bass. There's low-end here, but there are crisp high-mids and highs to match it.

On Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild," the kick drum loop's attack gets the right amount of attention in the high-mids. Nothing is boosted so much that the attack sounds too sharp or harsh, but it has a nice crunch to it that's complimented by the low-end presence of the kick's sustain. The sub-bass synth hits that dance around the drum loop are delivered with a richness that does them justice?bass fiends will find them lacking, and purists may feel they're a bit boosted. For those of us who like a little bit of bass with our crisp highs?without everything turning to a lopsided, muddy mess?the HD 429s delivers.

Classical tracks, like John Adams' "The Chairman Dances," often seem to naturally cede the spotlight to the instruments in the high-mid to high frequency range, like higher register strings and brass, when played through pairs that are not bass-heavy and unbalanced. The HD 429s falls into this category?much of its bass presence serves the sub-bass realm, where many classical tracks have little content aside from some percussion hits and lower strings and brass at their lowest. The lower register instruments in this piece get a bit of added richness, but the focus is squarely on the mids-to-highs here. So, on classical tracks, the HD 429s feels fairly close to a flat response pair, whereas it packs a little more oomph on modern mixes that boost the bass. And that's probably the best way to think of it: These headphones give you the deep bass when it's in the mix, and don't invent it when it's not.

If big bass, a bit beyond what the HD 429s brings, is what you're after, consider the Skullcandy Navigator. For the price, it won't disappoint you and doesn't distort, but you sacrifice overall balance. If you have more room in your budget and like the idea of a balanced pair that can reproduce deep lows when called upon, both the Logitech UE 4000 and the Sennheiser HD 280 Pro are fine options. And if all of these are more expensive than what you're looking for, the Skullcandy Hesh 2 offers decent balance and solid bass response for far less money.

At $90, the Sennheiser HD 429s is a solid deal?it delivers excellent audio performance in a comfortable fit. It's lacking in the extras department, and the remote and un-foldable design aren't the most user-friendly decisions. But if you want a fantastic-sounding headphone pair and couldn't care less about the extras, the HD 429s will not disappoint.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/pwT_vg3BEUk/0,2817,2420570,00.asp

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To ease shortage of organs, grow them in a lab?

NEW YORK (AP) ? By the time 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan finally got a lung transplant last week, she'd been waiting for months, and her parents had sued to give her a better shot at surgery.

Her cystic fibrosis was threatening her life, and her case spurred a debate on how to allocate donor organs. Lungs and other organs for transplant are scarce.

But what if there were another way? What if you could grow a custom-made organ in a lab?

It sounds incredible. But just a three-hour drive from the Philadelphia hospital where Sarah got her transplant, another little girl is benefiting from just that sort of technology. Two years ago, Angela Irizarry of Lewisburg, Pa., needed a crucial blood vessel. Researchers built her one in a laboratory, using cells from her own bone marrow. Today the 5-year-old sings, dances and dreams of becoming a firefighter ? and a doctor.

Growing lungs and other organs for transplant is still in the future, but scientists are working toward that goal. In North Carolina, a 3-D printer builds prototype kidneys. In several labs, scientists study how to build on the internal scaffolding of hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys of people and pigs to make custom-made implants.

Here's the dream scenario: A patient donates cells, either from a biopsy or maybe just a blood draw. A lab uses them, or cells made from them, to seed onto a scaffold that's shaped like the organ he needs. Then, says Dr. Harald Ott of Massachusetts General Hospital, "we can regenerate an organ that will not be rejected (and can be) grown on demand and transplanted surgically, similar to a donor organ."

That won't happen anytime soon for solid organs like lungs or livers. But as Angela Irizarry's case shows, simpler body parts are already being put into patients as researchers explore the possibilities of the field.

Just a few weeks ago, a girl in Peoria, Ill., got an experimental windpipe that used a synthetic scaffold covered in stem cells from her own bone marrow. More than a dozen patients have had similar operations.

Dozens of people are thriving with experimental bladders made from their own cells, as are more than a dozen who have urethras made from their own bladder tissue. A Swedish girl who got a vein made with her marrow cells to bypass a liver vein blockage in 2011 is still doing well, her surgeon says.

In some cases the idea has even become standard practice. Surgeons can use a patient's own cells, processed in a lab, to repair cartilage in the knee. Burn victims are treated with lab-grown skin.

In 2011, it was Angela Irizarry's turn to wade into the field of tissue engineering.

Angela was born in 2007 with a heart that had only one functional pumping chamber, a potentially lethal condition that leaves the body short of oxygen. Standard treatment involves a series of operations, the last of which implants a blood vessel near the heart to connect a vein to an artery, which effectively rearranges the organ's plumbing.

Yale University surgeons told Angela's parents they could try to create that conduit with bone marrow cells. It had already worked for a series of patients in Japan, but Angela would be the first participant in an American study.

"There was a risk," recalled Angela's mother, Claudia Irizarry. But she and her husband liked the idea that the implant would grow along with Angela, so that it wouldn't have to be replaced later.

So, over 12 hours one day, doctors took bone marrow from Angela and extracted certain cells, seeded them onto a 5-inch-long biodegradable tube, incubated them for two hours, and then implanted the graft into Angela to grow into a blood vessel.

It's been almost two years and Angela is doing well, her mother says. Before the surgery she couldn't run or play without getting tired and turning blue from lack of oxygen, she said. Now, "she is able to have a normal play day."

This seed-and-scaffold approach to creating a body part is not as simple as seeding a lawn. In fact, the researchers in charge of Angela's study had been putting the lab-made blood vessels into people for nearly a decade in Japan before they realized that they were completely wrong in their understanding of what was happening inside the body.

"We'd always assumed we were making blood vessels from the cells we were seeding onto the graft," said Dr. Christopher Breuer, now at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. But then studies in mice showed that in fact, the building blocks were cells that migrated in from other blood vessels. The seeded cells actually died off quickly. "We in essence found out we had done the right thing for the wrong reasons," Breuer said.

Other kinds of implants have also shown that the seeded cells can act as beacons that summon cells from the recipient's body, said William Wagner, director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Sometimes that works out fine, but other times it can lead to scarring or inflammation instead, he said. Controlling what happens when an engineered implant interacts with the body is a key challenge, he said.

So far, the lab-grown parts implanted in people have involved fairly simple structures ? basically sheets, tubes and hollow containers, notes Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University whose lab also has made scaffolds for noses and ears. Solid internal organs like livers, hearts and kidneys are far more complex to make.

His pioneering lab at Wake Forest is using a 3-D printer to make miniature prototype kidneys, some as small as a half dollar, and other structures for research. Instead of depositing ink, the printer puts down a gel-like biodegradable scaffold plus a mixture of cells to build a kidney layer by layer. Atala expects it will take many years before printed organs find their way into patients.

Another organ-building strategy used by Atala and maybe half a dozen other labs starts with an organ, washes its cells off the inert scaffolding that holds cells together, and then plants that scaffolding with new cells.

"It's almost like taking an apartment building, moving everybody out ... and then really trying to repopulate that apartment building with different cells," says Dr. John LaMattina of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He's using the approach to build livers. It's the repopulating part that's the most challenging, he adds.

One goal of that process is humanizing pig organs for transplant, by replacing their cells with human ones.

"I believe the future is ... a pig matrix covered with your own cells," says Doris Taylor of the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. She reported creating a rudimentary beating rat heart in 2008 with the cell-replacement technique and is now applying it to a variety of organs.

Ott's lab and the Yale lab of Laura Niklason have used the cell-replacement process to make rat lungs that worked temporarily in those rodents. Now they're thinking bigger, working with pig and human lung scaffolds in the lab. A human lung scaffold, Niklason notes, feels like a handful of Jell-O.

Cell replacement has also worked for kidneys. Ott recently reported that lab-made kidneys in rats didn't perform as well as regular kidneys. But, he said, just a "good enough organ" could get somebody off dialysis. He has just started testing the approach with transplants in pigs.

Ott is also working to grow human cells on human and pig heart scaffolds for study in the laboratory.

There are plenty of challenges with this organ-building approach. One is getting the right cells to build the organ. Cells from the patient's own organ might not be available or usable. So Niklason and others are exploring genetic reprogramming so that, say, blood or skin cells could be turned into appropriate cells for organ-growing.

Others look to stem cells from bone marrow or body fat that could be nudged into becoming the right kinds of cells for particular organs. In the near term, organs might instead be built with donor cells stored in a lab, and the organ recipient would still need anti-rejection drugs.

How long until doctors start testing solid organs in people? Ott hopes to see human studies on some lab-grown organ in five to 10 years. Wagner calls that very optimistic and thinks 15 to 20 years is more realistic. Niklason also forecasts two decades for the first human study of a lung that will work long-term.

But LaMattina figures five to 10 years might be about right for human studies of his specialty, the liver.

"I'm an optimist," he adds. "You have to be an optimist in this job."

___

Michael Rubinkam in Lewisburg, Pa., and Allen Breed in Winston-Salem, N.C., contributed to this story.

___

Online:

Ott lab: http://ottlab.mgh.harvard.edu/

Atala lab: http://www.wakehealth.edu/WFIRM/

___

Malcolm Ritter can be followed at http://twitter.com/malcolmritter

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ease-shortage-organs-grow-them-lab-073556092.html

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Worried About Mass Surveillance? How to Practice Safer ...

With all the news coming out about possible mass surveillance and the relationship between an alphabet soup of federal agencies and the companies that hold huge swaths of your electronic life, it's easy to feel powerless. But you're not. Technology taketh away your privacy, but technology can giveth quite a bit of it back too.

Much of the news of the past week has been about government access to phone and internet "metadata," which is a part of communications that we almost never think about in the course of normal life.

Here's what you need to know to make your communications more private:

What is "Metadata" and Why Do You Care?

All communication is broken up into two parts ? metadata and message. Metadata is what's needed for your message to arrive at its intended destination. An address on an envelope is metadata, as is an email address, a phone number and a twitter handle. When you shout someone's name across a room to get their attention, that's metadata too.

The message is the letter inside the envelope. It's everything below the "to/from/subject" information in an email. Everything you say after you connect with someone, either by calling them or shouting at them, is the message.

If the distinction between metadata and message seems a bit arbitrary, that's because it is. In technology, what's metadata and what's message are designated by the programmer's design, rather than some great dividing line. This is a problem in American law, because message is usually protected by strong laws, but metadata isn't. Programmers, who are almost never also lawyers, put sensitive material in metadata all the time. And legislators, even fewer of whom are programmers, have never fixed the metadata loopholes in the law.

Given a couple decades of communication technology, you get a situation like the one revealed by the Verizon court order. The mobile phone companies track all cellphone locations and call data, and can uniquely identify every phone, SIM and user. This isn't because the mobile phone companies are cackling evilly as they put trackers on nearly everyone in America, it's because in order for cell phones to work, towers need to know where phones are. That's not surveillance, it's just how radio waves work. What's more, in order to build out capacity and maintain service, the telcos need to keep track of how people move around. It's all part of making their networks work. To the phone company, metadata about who you are and where you go is useful for running their network. Despite some of their ads, they aren't particularly interested in your personal life. On the other hand, to you, where you go and who you talk to is sensitive information. Right now, you can't do anything about keeping all of that a secret from your mobile phone company, except not having your phone with you.

The messages that come to and from your phone are another matter. There's a lot you can do about keeping those private and secure, and doing so helps you live in a safer world ? not just from government surveillance, but from anyone who wants to snoop on you for any reason.

On computers and smartphones (which are just smaller computers with hard-to-use keyboards) your main tool for protecting your information, both message and metadata, is cryptography. Cryptography (often also called "crypto") is a way of using math to rewrite information in a secret code. Since metadata is needed to get information across the network, some level of it is always exposed. For you, the question is where does your metadata end, and the message begin?

Making Crypto Work for You

A warning: Computer scientists are terrible at naming things, and trying to get them to explain how things they make work is a world of Lovecraftian horrors. Nowhere is this worse than in crypto, which is full of unintuitive names and nonsensical metaphors. Fortunately you don't really need to know how cryptography works to use it, though if you want to, there's a video series that explains the concepts in some detail for a general audience.

Communication crypto works by exchanging "keys," or long strings of numbers that each side of a conversation uses to encrypt and decrypt each other's messages. The various schemes for coming up with these shared numbers include symmetric-key exchange, Diffie?Hellman key exchange, and public-key cryptography ? but you definitely don't need to understand the details in order to use keys. All you need to know is that they all involve performing math functions that are easy for a computer to do, but extremely hard to undo. These methods are strong. There's evidence that even the NSA can have trouble circumventing well-done key exchange crypto, and cracking it en masse is probably still not practical. There are two basic ways to use crypto:

Talking to Bob

Let's say you're trying to talk to your friend Bob. Over the internet, you're generally going to pass your messages through a server. Let's say you're talking to Bob over a Google service (though most other services work similarly).

Obviously, Google can see all of this. But if someone steps into the stream they can see everything, too. This was the case with the cable splices detailed in the 2006 stories of warrantless wiretapping, and in last week's story about the Verizon order.

In an attempt to be witty, cryptographers always call the party stepping into the stream Eve. Because Google is good at security, they use something called SSL to hide your traffic from Eve as it passes through the wires (or over the air). You can tell you're using SSL, also called TLS for no good reason, when you visit a web address that starts with https instead of http. (Gee, thanks for making that so clear, computer scientists.) SSL is effective in blocking Eve, which is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation developed a browser plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere, which helps you put the majority of your web browsing inside SSL and out of view. You should use that. (Disclosure: I'm legally married to an EFF employee, and occasionally seek advice from their legal department.)

But if Eve has a special relationship with Google, you have another problem. With SSL, Google still has a copy of all your information, metadata and message. You can't avoid Google having your metadata ? the like cell phone towers, they need it to make the network work.

Encrypting Message Data

What now? There's a fix: You can encrypt your message with a deeper layer of public-key cryptography called "end-to-end encryption." Even the server that passes the message can't look at it. Google can still give Eve your metadata, but even Google can't see your messages, only encrypted gobbledegook. There's a catch: This kind of encryption isn't always easy to use. More on that in Part 2.

Even with end-to-end encryption, you have the same problem with metadata being visible to Google that you had before you encrypted anything. You've just made Eve go through one extra step ? talking to Google ? to get it. That might be all the protection you need, depending on your service provider legally resisting blanket requests from the government. If you don't trust them to do that, then you should use a different service.

But here is where most people, even cryptographers, make their big mistake. We encrypt our messages and feel safe. But without using SSL, even when using a provider that won't give information to Eve, the metadata is being transmitted unencrypted. You're not even making Eve take the extra step of asking your provider. Eve can just step into the stream and capture a copy of your metadata as it passes by.

So let's say you've moved to a new chat service. You trust it. It's run entirely by Swedish hacker teenagers on offshore servers who respond to legal queries with pictures of sarcastic lolcats, not to cooperate with Eve. This new service requires you to encrypt your messages.

But being teenagers, they've overlooked a few details, and are accidentally leaking your metadata back to Eve, which is just fine with Eve, since your message data was legally protected anyhow, and when Eve is the NSA, she's not supposed to keep it.

Oops. You were probably better off staying with your last service.

You abandon the Swedish teenagers then and turn to their somewhat more learned cousins, who have set up independent services around the world with an eye towards security being able to resist intrusion from outside actors. With services like Dukgo.com, and Riseup.net, you can have the best of both worlds: SSL and encrypted messages inside it.

Now you've got some privacy back.

Caveat: Who's Out to Get You?

This advice assumes you're trying to avoid mass surveillance, of the type that's been in the news over the last few days, raising constitutional and societal questions. In security we call this an "untargeted attack." If someone is investigating, surveilling or watching you personally, the rules and the advice change. You can no longer count on hiding in plain sight using SSL and encrypted messages. If you believe you need to resist targeted surveillance, things are more complex. Check out security in-A-box to start learning more.

End of Part 1

Coming soon, in Part 2: Let's Get Specific. Tools, Techniques, and Services.

Source: http://www.boiseweekly.com/boise/worried-about-mass-surveillance-how-to-practice-safer-communication/Content?oid=2882778

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Gene variants may predict who will benefit from breast cancer prevention drugs

June 13, 2013 ? In women at high risk for breast cancer, a long-term drug treatment can cut the risk of developing the disease in half. Researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health have now identified two gene variants that may predict which women are most likely to benefit from this therapy -- and which should avoid it.

The work represents a major step toward truly individualized breast cancer prevention in women at high risk for the disease based on their age, family history of breast cancer, and personal medical history.

"Our study reveals the first known genetic factors that can help predict which high-risk women should be offered breast cancer prevention treatment and which women should be spared any unnecessary expense and risk from taking these medications," said the study's lead scientist, James N. Ingle, M.D., professor of oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "We also discovered new information about how the drugs tamoxifen and raloxifene work to prevent breast cancer."

Ingle and Mayo-based colleagues in the NIH Pharmacogenomics Research Network (PGRN) conducted the study in collaboration with PGRN-affiliated researchers at the RIKEN Center for Genomic Medicine in Tokyo. Data and patient DNA came from the long-running National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP), supported by the National Cancer Institute.

"This innovative, PGRN-enabled international research partnership has produced the first gene-based method to identify which women are likely to benefit from a readily available preventive therapy," said PGRN director Rochelle Long, Ph.D., of the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "Because the disease affects so many women worldwide, this work will have a significant impact."

The research, which shows nearly a six-fold difference in disease risk depending on a woman's genetic makeup, appears in the June 13, 2013, issue of Cancer Discovery.

Women undergoing breast cancer preventive treatment take tamoxifen or raloxifene for five years. In rare cases, the drugs can cause dangerous side effects, including blood clots, strokes and endometrial cancer.

Many women never try the therapy because the chance of success seems small (about 50 women in the NSABP trials needed to be treated to prevent one case of breast cancer) compared to the perceived risk of side effects. More women might benefit from the potentially life-saving strategy if doctors could better predict whether the therapy was highly likely to work. That's what the current study begins to do.

The investigators leveraged data from past NSABP breast cancer prevention trials that involved a total of more than 33,000 high-risk women -- the largest sets of such data in the world. Women in the trials gave scientists permission to use their genomic and other information for research purposes.

The scientists analyzed the genomic data by focusing on more than 500,000 genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Each SNP represents a single variation in the DNA sequence at a particular location within the genome.

To determine whether any SNPs were associated with breast cancer risk, the researchers computationally searched for SNPs that occurred more commonly in women who developed breast cancer during the trial than in women who remained free of the disease. The analysis identified two such SNPs -- one in a gene called ZNF423 and the other near a gene called CTSO.

Neither ZNF423 nor CTSO -- nor any SNPs related to these genes -- had previously been associated with breast cancer or response to the preventive drugs. The scientists' work revealed that women with the beneficial version of the two SNPs were 5.71 times less likely to develop breast cancer while taking preventive drugs than were women with neither advantageous SNP.

Using a variety of biochemical studies, the scientists learned that ZNF423 and CTSO act by affecting the activity of BRCA1, a known breast cancer risk gene. Healthy versions of BRCA1 reduce disease by repairing a serious form of genetic damage. Harmful versions of BRCA1 dramatically increase a woman's chance of developing breast cancer.

"The results of our collaborative research bring us a major step toward the goal of truly individualized prevention of breast cancer," said Ingle. "Our findings also underscore the value of studying the influence of gene variations on drug responses."

NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences and National Cancer Institute funded this research through grants U19GM61388, P50CA116201, U10CA37377, U10CA69974, U24CA114732 and U01GM63173.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/TdmDhKPDJv0/130613104106.htm

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Sunlight Fight Continues Between Museum Tower, Nasher

DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) ? Developers of the Museum Tower that neighbors the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas claims they have a fix to the ongoing bruhaha over reflected sunlight in the Dallas Arts District.? But the Nasher says it?s not an answer.

Museum Tower developers publicly pitched their proposed fix to the building?s owners Thursday: the pension fund for Dallas police and firefighters which needs solid investments for its retirees.

The proposal is to reshape hundreds of circular openings called oculi on the Nasher?s roof. Those are the solar-tube-type structures designed to indirectly illuminate the Nasher with natural light.

?Basically the cones have been reshaped,? said Greg Greene, of Turtle Creek Holdings, the Tower?s co-developer. He proposed longer, modified oculi are supposed to negate direct sunlight reflecting off the Tower onto the Nasher?s exhibits.

?We?ve carved down the shape of the oculi here to make sure we let in the same amount of light as was originally the case with these oculi ,? Greene said, adding, ?so you get an elimination of the reflection and the view of the Museum Tower yet you get the same amount of illumination.?

Greene adds the developer says it has set aside millions of dollars for oculi repairs to the Nasher.

The pension fund has a lot at stake.

The Museum Tower is elegant, high-rise housing catering to Dallas? elite.? The suites are opulent; to call this a ?million dollar view? is really under-selling it.

?Our prices start at about a million, three hundred-fifty and the main range goes up to about 4-million dollars,? Turtle Creek Holdings VP of Marketing Steve Sanborg told CBS 11 News.

But the Nasher has a lot at stake, too.

Its building and exhibits are all a gift to the city from the late Raymond and Patsy Nasher.

Officials from the Nasher Sculpture Center wouldn?t go on camera, but their reaction in an e-mail is blunt.

?The glare from Museum Tower is a problem for the entire Arts District, not just the Nasher Sculpture Center. Recycling the same grossly inadequate and deeply flawed idea in another publicity stunt is not a way to address the problems Museum Tower is causing for the people of Dallas. The bottom line is that the owners of Museum Tower need to fix their building.?

(?2013 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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Iceland opposition poised to win general election

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) ? REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) - Five years after Iceland's economic collapse, early returns signaled that voters are favoring the return of a center-right, Eurosceptic government, widely blamed for the nation's financial woes.

Ousting the incumbent, liberal Social Democrat/Left Green coalition, Icelanders appear to be opting for the conservative Independence Party.

With 33% of the vote counted, the seats in Parliament, according to Icelandic television network RUV, the Independence Party would have 20 seats; the Progressive Party 19 seats; the Left-Greens 9 seats; the Social Democrats 9 seats; and Bright Future 6 seats.

"We are very happy, we are very grateful for the support that we see in the numbers," said Independence Party leader Bjarni Benediktsson.

"These are early numbers but we are most certainly very grateful for the support."

Voters "were introduced to a plan that would bring us quicker out of the crisis than has been the reality" at the 2009, said Benediktsson.

"People are now looking forward and asking themselves... what kind of a plan is the most likely one to bring more growth, more job creation, to close the budget deficit, and have Iceland grow into the future.

These are the issues that I think these elections are all about" he added.

The likely shift to the right following Saturday's parliamentary election would almost certainly shelve Iceland's plans to join the European Union, with which it has begun accession talks. Both Progressives and Independents oppose joining the 27-nation bloc.

Progressive Party chief Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson and Independence Party leader Bjarni Benediktsson were the two most likely candidates for prime minister under the system of proportional representation used for elections to Iceland's 63-seat parliament, the Althingi.

The two parties governed Iceland for several decades, often in coalition, overseeing economic liberalization that spurred a banking and business boom ? until Iceland's economy crashed spectacularly during the 2008 credit crisis.

A volcano-dotted North Atlantic nation with a population of just 320,000, Iceland went from economic wunderkind to financial basket case almost overnight when its main commercial banks collapsed within a week of one another.

The value of the country's currency plummeted, while inflation and unemployment soared. Iceland was forced to seek bailouts from Europe and the International Monetary Fund.

Despite being widely blamed for the meltdown, the Independents and Progressives say they are now best placed to lead the economic recovery.

The Progressives are promising to write off some mortgage debt, taking money from foreign creditors. Benediktsson's Independence Party is offering lower taxes and the lifting of capital controls that he says are hindering foreign investment.

"We believe we can do a lot for indebted households, but our plan is not to do only that" Benediktsson said after casting his vote in a Reykjavik suburb.

"I think the only way out of the economic difficulties we've had is growing the economy, and we need to create new jobs, start new investments and we have a very strong plan to start doing that tomorrow."

Whatever the outcome, 70-year-old outgoing Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir has said she will retire from politics after the election. Iceland's first female ? and first openly gay ? prime minister, she was elected as head of a center-left alliance in 2009 on a wave of public disgust at the previous administration.

Since then, Iceland has in many ways made a strong recovery. Unemployment has fallen and the economy is growing.

But inflation remains naggingly high, and many Icelanders still struggle to repay home and car loans they took out ? often in foreign currencies whose value soared after the crash ? in the years of easy credit.

Some accuse the government of caving in to international pressure to compensate Britain and the Netherlands for their citizens' lost deposits in the failed online bank Icesave. Icelanders have twice rejected repayment deals agreed to by Sigurdardottir's government.

"The government that many people thought was cleaning up the mess is getting severely punished for the last four years," said journalist and political analyst Egill Helgason. "I don't know whether they deserve it. In many ways I think not. But this is politics ? cruel."

Some voters say the outgoing government did as good a job as could be expected.

"We cannot forget that everything collapsed here and still health care, schools and society in general functions better than in most countries", said Jon Gunnar Bjornsson, an operations manager of one of Iceland's new, post-crisis banks.

"We still retain ownership of hospitals, the road system and the utility companies. I'm not sure we could have expected more.

"But still people are unhappy and want someone to take their debt away and shower them with golden fairy dust."

Polls close at 2200GMT (6 p.m. EDT), with full results expected early Sunday.

___

Lawless reported from London. Associated Press writer David Mac Dougall in Reykjavik contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iceland-opposition-poised-win-general-election-022017126.html

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