ChupaGato Press

Greg Taylor was wrongfully convicted of killing a prostitute in 1991 in North Carolina. Taylor proclaimed his innocence, but the evidence against him seemed insurmountable: blood from the victim found on his SUV.

A report claims North Carolina's crime lab helped prosecutors win convictions.
The catch is that there was never any blood in the car. Taylor was convicted after crime lab technicians reported traces of blood on his SUV near the crime scene. Those same technicians buried the results of additional testing that showed there was never any blood.

Taylor wrongly served 17 years in prison until being released in February.

Blood Evidence Buried in Hundreds of Cases
Taylor might not be alone. A new report released by the FBI showed that North Carolina crime lab workers omitted, overstated or falsely reported blood evidence over a 16-year period.

North Carolina Crime Lab Buried Blood Evidence FBI Report Says Crime Lab Misrepresented Crucial Blood Evidence in Hundreds of Cases

noreply@blogger.com (chupagato) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:32:00 +0000

Mr. Shake Hands Man 2 - Bill Murray

noreply@blogger.com (chupagato) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:21:00 +0000

BANZAI - See how long Mr. Shake Hands Man 2 can shake celebrity Mr. Bill Murray's hand!!!

Banzai is a British comedy gambling gameshow spoofing Japanese gameshows and general television style. It was produced by Radar, part of RDF Media. Each segment of the show was a silly or bizarre contest. Members of the viewing audience were encouraged to bet with each other on the outcome of each segment.
The Japanese characters seen on screen during the programme are meaningless.
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Controversy

In 2001, two years before Fox aired its first episode of Banzai, USA Network aired clips of the Channel 4 edition of the show as part of their Banzai Movie Friday. Asian American groups objected to the clips.
When Fox picked up the show, the Media Action Network for Asian-Americans protested outside a presentation of the show in Hollywood. Group co-founder Guy Aoki told BBC News, "It's just all the backward images of Asian-American people. This is like an Asian minstrel show. Can you imagine the black version of Banzai?" [1]. When sponsors were alerted to the content of the show, many dropped their sponsorship, and as a result, Fox canceled Banzai.
The show also caused controversy in 2002 when they attempted to record a sketch during the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. The film crew were reportedly trying to measure the speed of the funeral procession with a speed gun to allow viewers to bet on the speed. The police however stopped this before the procession could pass.[4]

a better way to grow stem cells: "MIT chemical engineers, materials scientists and biologists have devised a synthetic surface that includes no foreign animal material and allows stem cells to stay alive and continue reproducing themselves for at least three months.

noreply@blogger.com (chupagato) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:03:00 +0000

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Human pluripotent stem cells, which can become any other kind of body cell, hold great potential to treat a wide range of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries. However, scientists who work with such cells have had trouble growing large enough quantities to perform experiments — in particular, to be used in human studies. Furthermore, most materials now used to grow human stem cells include cells or proteins that come from mice embryos, which help stimulate stem-cell growth but would likely cause an immune reaction if injected into a human patient.

To overcome those issues, MIT chemical engineers, materials scientists and biologists have devised a synthetic surface that includes no foreign animal material and allows stem cells to stay alive and continue reproducing themselves for at least three months. It’s also the first synthetic material that allows single cells to form colonies of identical cells, which is necessary to identify cells with desired traits and has been difficult to achieve with existing materials.

The research team, led by Professors Robert Langer, Rudolf Jaenisch and Daniel G. Anderson, describes the new material in the Aug. 22 issue of Nature Materials. First authors of the paper are postdoctoral associates Ying Mei and Krishanu Saha.

Human stem cells can come from two sources — embryonic cells or body cells that have been reprogrammed to an immature state. That state, known as pluripotency, allows the cells to develop into any kind of specialized body cells.

It also allows the possibility of treating nearly any kind of disease that involves injuries to cells. Scientists could grow new neurons for patients with spinal cord injuries, for example, or new insulin-producing cells for people with type 1 diabetes.

To engineer such treatments, scientists would need to be able to grow stem cells in the lab for an extended period of time, manipulate their genes, and grow colonies of identical cells after they have been genetically modified. Current growth surfaces, consisting of a plastic dish coated with a layer of gelatin and then a layer of mouse cells or proteins, are notoriously inefficient, says Saha, who works in Jaenisch’s lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

“For therapeutics, you need millions and millions of cells,” says Saha. “If we can make it easier for the cells to divide and grow, that will really help to get the number of cells you need to do all of the disease studies that people are excited about.”

Previous studies had suggested that several chemical and physical properties of surfaces — including roughness, stiffness and affinity for water — might play a role in stem-cell growth. The researchers created about 500 polymers (long chains of repeating molecules) that varied in those traits, grew stem cells on them and analyzed each polymer’s performance. After correlating surface characteristics with performance, they found that there was an optimal range of surface hydrophobicity (water-repelling behavior), but varying roughness and stiffness did not have much effect on cell growth.

They also adjusted the composition of the materials, including proteins embedded in the polymer. They found that the best polymers contained a high percentage of acrylates, a common ingredient in plastics, and were coated with a protein called vitronectin, which encourages cells to attach to surfaces.

Using their best-performing material, the researchers got stem cells (both embryonic and induced pluripotent) to continue growing and dividing for up to three months. They were also able to generate large quantities of cells — in the millions.

The MIT researchers hope to refine their knowledge to help them build materials suited to other types of cells, says Anderson, from the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “We want to better understand the interactions between the cell, the surface and the proteins, and define more clearly what it takes to get the cells to grow,” he says.

Other MIT authors of the paper are Said Bogatyrev, Z. Ilke Kalcioglu, Maisam Mitalipova, Neena Pyzocha, Fredrick Rojas and Krystyn Van Vliet. Jing Yang, Andrew Hook, Martyn Davies and Morgan Alexander of the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom) and Seung-Woo Cho of Yonsei University (Korea) are also authors of the paper.

Source: “Combinatorial development of biomaterials for clonal growth of human pluripotent stem cells” by Ying Mei, Krishanu Saha, Said R. Bogatyrev, Jing Yang, Andrew L. Hook, Z. Ilke Kalcioglu,
Seung-Woo Cho, Maisam Mitalipova, Neena Pyzocha, Fredrick Rojas, Krystyn J. Van Vliet, Martyn C. Davies, Morgan R. Alexander, Robert Langer, Rudolf Jaenisch and Daniel G. Anderson. Nature Materials, 22 August, 2010.

Man invents machine to convert plastic into oil (youtube.com)

noreply@blogger.com (chupagato) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:03:00 +0000

The Japanese company Blest has developed one of the smallest and safest oil-to-plastic conversion machines out on the market today. It's founder and CEO, Akinori Ito is passionate about using this machine to change the way people around the world think about their plastic trash. From solving our landfill and garbage disposal issues to reducing our oil dependancy on the Middle East, his machine may one day be in every household across Japan.
While holding up a bag of trash, he states, "It's a waste to throw away, isn't it? This is a treasure."
Category:
Science & Technology
plastics oil machine technology japan conversion sakura cherry blossoms

Wikileaks founder says Australian intelligence warned him on August 11 to expect personal attacks. (english.aljazeera.net)

noreply@blogger.com (chupagato) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 22:59:00 +0000

Assange claims 'smear campaign'

Wikileaks founder tells Al Jazeera that charges against him may be linked to an intelligence operation
Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, has said the now-dropped charge of rape levelled against him in Sweden was "a smear campaign".

Assange told Al Jazeera on Sunday that while he had been forewarned by Australian intelligence on August 11 to expect a campaign against him, it was unclear who was behind it.

"It is clearly a smear campaign ... the only question is who was involved.

"We can have some suspicions about who would benefit, but without direct evidence I would not be willing to make a direct allegation."

Assange said that the accusations were completely untrue and expected all charges to be dropped on Monday, adding that his lawyers were in the process of arranging a meeting with the prosecutors.

He also said that this was just one of many attempts to discredit him.

"This is the first sexual related we've had, but we have seen 14 fabricated
documents, for example, that have appeared in various places about this organisation which have been shown to be clear fakes," he said.

"So there are significant forces pushing to perceive things in a particular way".

'No mistake'

Swedish authorities had initially issued a warrant for Assange's arrest on Friday night, but dropped the warrant and the rape charge the next day.

Eva Finne, the country's chief prosecutor, reviewed the evidence and withdrew the warrant for his arrest,deciding there was "no longer reason to believe" Assange had committed rape, Karin Rosander, a spokeswoman for Finne, said.

"You can't call it a mistake because the prosecutor in question has to make a decision based on the information available at the moment of the decision," Rosander told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

Finne's office has not contacted Assange and is not searching for him and will make a decision whether to pursue the molestation charge later this week, Rosander said.

The charges against Assange, which come around a month after Wikileaks incensed the US government by releasing a trove of American military informationabout the war in Afghanistan, quickly spread around the internet.

New document leaks

After the Swedish tabloid Expressen first published reportsthat the arrest warrant had been issued for Assange, Wikileaks responded on Twitter:"We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks.' Now we have the first one.

Sweden's national prosecution office insists the issuing of a warrant was normal procedure
"No one here has been contacted by Swedish police. Needless to say this will prove hugely distracting."

Assange's organisation caused controversy in Julywhen it released 75,000 classified US military reports containing information about the Nato war effort in Afghanistan.

The US government condemned the release of the documents, saying the website had "blood on its hands" for naming people who had helped its military against groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and ordered Wikileaks to return the files.

Assange told Al Jazeera those claims were "an extraordinary thing to hear".

"The Pentagon so far says it not aware of any incident of people coming to harm by what we have released. At the time of the release we took aside 15,000 documents that we believed needed extra careful review and those are the documents we are reviewing and will be released."

According to Assange, the documents will be released within the next two to four weeks.

Two alleged victims

Two women in their twenties made the allegations against Assange, according to Al Jazeera's Paul Brennan, reporting from London.

One woman claimed Assange raped her last weekend in Stockholm, while another alleged he molested her on Tuesday in a separate town in Sweden, Brennan said.

"I think it's quite natural that these rumors happen in a very famous case like this, and I'm not surprised at all," Rosander, the prosecutor's spokeswoman, told Al Jazeera.

She said she could not give any details on the allegations.

Assange was in Sweden last week partly to apply for a publishing certificate to maintain the advantages it receives from the country's whistle-blowing protection laws. Wikileaks also has many of its servers in Sweden.