NEW YORK (AP) ? Hopes that the U.S. housing market is starting to recover and the economy is on the mend sent stocks higher on Wall Street.
But the gains are being constricted from continuing worries that Greece's political deadlock could fracture the European Union and roil global markets.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 75 points Wednesday to 12,707. The Standard & Poor's 500 added nine points to 1,340. The Nasdaq composite rose 15 points to 2,908.
Home builder stocks rose after the Commerce Department said builders started work on new homes at an annual pace of 717,000 last month, 2.6 percent more than in March. It was a heartening sign for the beleaguered housing market, which seems to be forming a bottom and starting to recover. Construction rose for both single-family homes and apartments.
Target Corp. rose after a strong earnings report. Target said revenue at stores opened at least a year rose 5.3 percent, the strongest performance in six years for that period. Target's results illustrate that Americans are beginning to spend cautiously as economic uncertainty persists. Though the job market is still shaky, falling gas prices have given shoppers hope.
As signs of a global economic slowdown persist, prices of commodities have come off highs. Oil prices continued their march downwards from $105 in the beginning of the month to $93. Crude oil prices were down $1 on Wednesday. Gold prices fell $18 to $1539, the lowest level since December.
In Europe, a potentially chaotic situation was developing in Greece, where power-sharing talks collapsed Tuesday and new elections were called for next month. There is already concern in other European countries about how a possible Greek exit from the euro would affect the rest of the continent.
On Wednesday, Spain's prime minister warned that the country, which is trembling under a 24.4 percent unemployment rate, could be locked out of international markets due to problems in the EU.
"Right now there is a serious risk that (investors) will not lend us money or they will do so at an astronomical rate," Mariano Rajoy told Spanish lawmakers.
Financial pressures extend well beyond Europe too. The Indian rupee hit a new all-time low against the dollar with investors increasingly seeking a safe place to put their money. The rupee sank to 54.44 against the dollar Wednesday, surpassing the prior low of 54.39 on December 15.
Among other stocks making big moves:
? JC Penney plunged 14 percent, the most in the S&P 500 index, after the retailer reported a bigger-than-expected first-quarter loss. Sales plummeted as shoppers are rejecting their new pricing plan.
? Abercrombie & Fitch fell 11 percent after reporting that its first-quarter net income shrank 88 percent because of higher costs and declining sales in established stores and in Europe.
? General Electric rose 3.6 percent, the most of the 30 stocks in the Dow, after the company said its finance unit will pay a special dividend of $4.5 billion to the parent company this year. It had suspended the payments in 2009 during a freeze in credit markets.
Biologists produce potential malarial vaccine from algaePublic release date: 16-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Kim McDonald kmcdonald@ucsd.edu 858-534-7572 University of California - San Diego
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have succeeded in engineering algae to produce potential candidates for a vaccine that would prevent transmission of the parasite that causes malaria, an achievement that could pave the way for the development of an inexpensive way to protect billions of people from one of the world's most prevalent and debilitating diseases. Initial proof-of-principle experiments suggest that such a vaccine could prevent malaria transmission.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by infection with protozoan parasites from the genus Plasmodium. It affects more than 225 million people worldwide in tropical and subtropical regions, resulting in fever, headaches and in severe cases coma and death. While a variety of often costly antimalarial medications are available to travelers in those regions to protect against infections, a vaccine offering a high level of protection from the disease does not yet exist.
The use of algae to produce malaria proteins that elicited antibodies against Plasmodium falciparum in laboratory mice and prevented malaria transmission was published today in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE. The development resulted from an unusual interdisciplinary collaboration between two groups of biologists at UC San Diegoone from the Division of Biological Sciences and San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, which had been engineering algae to produce bio-products and biofuels, and another from the Center for Tropical Medicine and Emerging Infectious Diseases in the School of Medicine that is working to develop ways to diagnose, prevent and treat malaria.
Part of the difficulty in creating a vaccine against malaria is that it requires a system that can produce complex, three-dimensional proteins that resemble those made by the parasite, thus eliciting antibodies that disrupt malaria transmission. Most vaccines created by engineered bacteria are relatively simple proteins that stimulate the body's immune system to produce antibodies against bacterial invaders. More complex proteins can be produced, but this requires an expensive process using mammalian cell cultures, and the proteins those cells produce are coated with sugars due to a chemical process called glycosylation.
"Malaria is caused by a parasite that makes complex proteins, but for whatever reason this parasite doesn't put sugars on those proteins," said Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research effort. "If you have a protein covered with sugars and you inject it into somebody as a vaccine, the tendency is to make antibodies against the sugars, not the amino acid backbone of the protein from the invading organism you want to inhibit. Researchers have made vaccines without these sugars in bacteria and then tried to refold them into the correct three-dimensional configuration, but that's an expensive proposition and it doesn't work very well."
Instead, the biologists looked to produce their proteins with the help of an edible green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, used widely in research laboratories as a genetic model organism, much like the fruit fly Drosophila and the bacterium E. coli. Two years ago, a UC San Diego team of biologists headed by Mayfield, who is also the director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, a research consortium seeking to develop transportation fuels from algae, published a landmark study demonstrating that many complex human therapeutic proteins, such as monoclonal antibodies and growth hormones, could be produced by Chlamydomonas.
That got James Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher in Mayfield's laboratory, wondering if a complex protein to protect against the malarial parasite could also be produced by Chlamydomonas. Two billion people live in regions where malaria is present, making the delivery of a malarial vaccine a costly and logistically difficult proposition, especially when that vaccine is expensive to produce. So the UC San Diego biologists set out to determine if this alga, an organism that can produce complex proteins very cheaply, could produce malaria proteins that would inhibit infections from malaria.
"It's too costly to vaccinate two billion people using current technologies," explained Mayfield. "Realistically, the only way a malaria vaccine will ever be used is if it can be produced at a fraction of the cost of current vaccines. Algae have this potential because you can grow algae any place on the planet in ponds or even in bathtubs."
Collaborating with Joseph Vinetz, a professor of medicine at UC San Diego and a leading expert in tropical diseases who has been working on developing vaccines against malaria, the researchers showed that the proteins produced by the algae, when injected into laboratory mice, made antibodies that blocked malaria transmission from mosquitoes.
"It's hard to say if these proteins are perfect, but the antibodies to our algae-produced protein recognize the native proteins in malaria and, inside the mosquito, block the development of the malaria parasite so that the mosquito can't transmit the disease," said Gregory.
"This paper tells us two things: The proteins that we made here are viable vaccine candidates and that we at least have the opportunity to produce enough of this vaccine that we can think about inoculating two billion people," said Mayfield. "In no other system could you even begin to think about that."
The scientists, who filed a patent application on their discovery, said the next steps are to see if these algae proteins work to protect humans from malaria and then to determine if they can modifiy the proteins to elicit the same antibody response when the algae are eaten rather than injected.
###
Other UC San Diego scientists involved in the discovery were Fengwu Li from Vinetz's laboratory and biologists Lauren Tomosada, Chesa Cox and Aaron Topol from Mayfield's group. The basic technology that led to the development was supported by the Skaggs family. The research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the San Diego Foundation and the California Energy Commission.
The PLoS ONE article can be accessed at: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0037179
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Biologists produce potential malarial vaccine from algaePublic release date: 16-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Kim McDonald kmcdonald@ucsd.edu 858-534-7572 University of California - San Diego
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have succeeded in engineering algae to produce potential candidates for a vaccine that would prevent transmission of the parasite that causes malaria, an achievement that could pave the way for the development of an inexpensive way to protect billions of people from one of the world's most prevalent and debilitating diseases. Initial proof-of-principle experiments suggest that such a vaccine could prevent malaria transmission.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by infection with protozoan parasites from the genus Plasmodium. It affects more than 225 million people worldwide in tropical and subtropical regions, resulting in fever, headaches and in severe cases coma and death. While a variety of often costly antimalarial medications are available to travelers in those regions to protect against infections, a vaccine offering a high level of protection from the disease does not yet exist.
The use of algae to produce malaria proteins that elicited antibodies against Plasmodium falciparum in laboratory mice and prevented malaria transmission was published today in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE. The development resulted from an unusual interdisciplinary collaboration between two groups of biologists at UC San Diegoone from the Division of Biological Sciences and San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, which had been engineering algae to produce bio-products and biofuels, and another from the Center for Tropical Medicine and Emerging Infectious Diseases in the School of Medicine that is working to develop ways to diagnose, prevent and treat malaria.
Part of the difficulty in creating a vaccine against malaria is that it requires a system that can produce complex, three-dimensional proteins that resemble those made by the parasite, thus eliciting antibodies that disrupt malaria transmission. Most vaccines created by engineered bacteria are relatively simple proteins that stimulate the body's immune system to produce antibodies against bacterial invaders. More complex proteins can be produced, but this requires an expensive process using mammalian cell cultures, and the proteins those cells produce are coated with sugars due to a chemical process called glycosylation.
"Malaria is caused by a parasite that makes complex proteins, but for whatever reason this parasite doesn't put sugars on those proteins," said Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research effort. "If you have a protein covered with sugars and you inject it into somebody as a vaccine, the tendency is to make antibodies against the sugars, not the amino acid backbone of the protein from the invading organism you want to inhibit. Researchers have made vaccines without these sugars in bacteria and then tried to refold them into the correct three-dimensional configuration, but that's an expensive proposition and it doesn't work very well."
Instead, the biologists looked to produce their proteins with the help of an edible green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, used widely in research laboratories as a genetic model organism, much like the fruit fly Drosophila and the bacterium E. coli. Two years ago, a UC San Diego team of biologists headed by Mayfield, who is also the director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, a research consortium seeking to develop transportation fuels from algae, published a landmark study demonstrating that many complex human therapeutic proteins, such as monoclonal antibodies and growth hormones, could be produced by Chlamydomonas.
That got James Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher in Mayfield's laboratory, wondering if a complex protein to protect against the malarial parasite could also be produced by Chlamydomonas. Two billion people live in regions where malaria is present, making the delivery of a malarial vaccine a costly and logistically difficult proposition, especially when that vaccine is expensive to produce. So the UC San Diego biologists set out to determine if this alga, an organism that can produce complex proteins very cheaply, could produce malaria proteins that would inhibit infections from malaria.
"It's too costly to vaccinate two billion people using current technologies," explained Mayfield. "Realistically, the only way a malaria vaccine will ever be used is if it can be produced at a fraction of the cost of current vaccines. Algae have this potential because you can grow algae any place on the planet in ponds or even in bathtubs."
Collaborating with Joseph Vinetz, a professor of medicine at UC San Diego and a leading expert in tropical diseases who has been working on developing vaccines against malaria, the researchers showed that the proteins produced by the algae, when injected into laboratory mice, made antibodies that blocked malaria transmission from mosquitoes.
"It's hard to say if these proteins are perfect, but the antibodies to our algae-produced protein recognize the native proteins in malaria and, inside the mosquito, block the development of the malaria parasite so that the mosquito can't transmit the disease," said Gregory.
"This paper tells us two things: The proteins that we made here are viable vaccine candidates and that we at least have the opportunity to produce enough of this vaccine that we can think about inoculating two billion people," said Mayfield. "In no other system could you even begin to think about that."
The scientists, who filed a patent application on their discovery, said the next steps are to see if these algae proteins work to protect humans from malaria and then to determine if they can modifiy the proteins to elicit the same antibody response when the algae are eaten rather than injected.
###
Other UC San Diego scientists involved in the discovery were Fengwu Li from Vinetz's laboratory and biologists Lauren Tomosada, Chesa Cox and Aaron Topol from Mayfield's group. The basic technology that led to the development was supported by the Skaggs family. The research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the San Diego Foundation and the California Energy Commission.
The PLoS ONE article can be accessed at: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0037179
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Consider the Fat Burning Furnace review to help you out of a weight loss rut. Maybe you are getting bored with your diet and fitness routine; or maybe you are having a hard time facing down the challenges that you encounter such as party temptation, or eating too much when you are feeling down. Maybe you are truly hungry too often. Or maybe you have hit a weight loss plateau and the scale just won?t budge.
It could be time for you to try a new technique. It could be all you need to break free from that rut and get the wheels turning once again. A fresh approach can get you out of the doldrums and back on the path to your goals.
If the litmus test for a compromise is it makes no one happy, then it?s mission accomplished for a bill to restructure Maine?s workers? compensation laws recently signed by Gov. Paul LePage.
Labor advocates don?t like it, arguing the bill will hurt injured workers and only benefit insurance companies. And many in the business community don?t like it because the measures do not go far enough.
The new law does several things, most notably setting a 10-year cap on benefits for partially injured, permanently impaired workers. Previously, the threshold was established by a two-year review of cases that allowed 25 percent of all partial injury claims to be guaranteed lifetime benefits, while the remaining 75 percent were subject to a 10-year cap.
Paul Sighinolfi, executive director of the Maine Workers? Compensation Board, says the previous system created too much uncertainty for businesses, since in some years injured workers would be eligible for lifetime benefits, even though they might not need them.
?In some years, 25 percent may not need lifetime benefits, but they would be entitled to them nonetheless. In other years, maybe there?s greater than 25 percent who need lifetime benefits given the severity of the injuries,? says Sighinolfi, who drafted LD 1913. ?So, this arbitrary cap did not make sense to me.?
The new law establishes a process where injured workers with 18 percent impairment can continue to receive benefits beyond the 10-year period, provided they can only earn less than 65 percent of their pre-injury wages in 12 months of the preceding two years of losing benefits. Also, the employee?s actual earnings must be in line with that employee?s earning potential, as determined by an independent medical examiner ? a rule that Sighinolfi says encourages people to re-enter the work force and encourages vocational rehabilitation.
?Under the old Section 213, there was no incentive to return to work,? he says. ?We have incentivized returning to work ? That?s a significant change, quite frankly. I think it?s good for injured workers to get back into the work force,? he says.
But Karen Bilodeau, a workers? comp lawyer at Topsham-based McTeague Higbee who represents injured workers, says the new rules will further hurt injured workers.
?At this point, I think it?s going to have a very negative effect? on injured workers, she says. ?The major impact is going to be on individuals who have suffered significant injuries but may not qualify for lifetime benefits, and their benefits will be capped essentially at 10 years.?
While benefits may be extended under certain circumstances, Bilodeau says provisions that require an independent determination about an employee?s earning potential will be difficult to ascertain. Some back injuries, for example, may only be considered a 5 percent or 10 percent impairment, she says, but can significantly affect a person?s ability to work.
Bilodeau says she expects the law will only increase litigation since it re-establishes the Appellate Division of the workers? comp board, giving injured workers an appeal-by-right rather than making appeals through the state Law Court. Sighinolfi says the Law Court only hears about 5 percent of all workers? comp appeals.
Bilodeau says the law is ?a one-sided change for the insurance companies? benefit.? An employer?s attorney fees are paid by insurers, who will likely appeal any ruling in the worker?s favor, she says, noting that employees must pay for their own lawyers. The new law also allows insurance companies to discontinue benefits during an appeal process.
?That?s going to have a devastating effect financially on injured workers who are already suffering,? says Bilodeau. ?I think it?s definitely going to increase the costs for businesses.?
Peter Gore, vice president of government relations for the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, says that is not true. However, Gore stopped short of celebrating the law, saying business leaders are disappointed, but for different reasons.
The original bill had a higher threshold for an injured worker to be eligible for continued benefits after 10 years, as well as a lower percentage for the pre-injury wage. Gore says legislators changed the injury threshold from 25 percent of bodily impairment to 18 percent, and increased the income threshold from 50 percent of pre-injury salary to 65 percent in order to pass the bill.
?While it does make some changes to the law, I think there?s a disappointment on behalf of the business community that what the Legislature ultimately passed didn?t really go as far as we hoped,? says Gore, who was part of a stakeholder group that examined this issue over the fall and winter. ?It was frustrating ? an opportunity lost.?
The bill also increases the maximum benefit from 90 percent to 100 percent of the state?s average weekly wage, which varies, or $441 ? whichever is higher ? for injuries that occur after Jan. 1, 2013. It also changes the benefit calculation for total incapacity from 80 percent of an employee?s net earnings to two-thirds of an employee?s gross wages, provided it doesn?t exceed the maximum benefit. The law also reduces the amount of time an employee has to report a workplace injury from 90 days to 30 days. It also sets a two-year statute of limitations from the date of the injury.
Gore, however, does credit the law for creating more certainty for businesses and making Maine less of an outlier in terms of workers? comp. Before the law passed, Maine was the only state that doled out lifetime benefits based on an arbitrary 25 percent threshold, he says.
Gore says it?s unclear what impact the bill, which takes effect on Jan. 1, 2013, will have on business costs. Sighinolfi says the bill is cost neutral, but Bilodeau says it will actually increase costs.
Laura Backus Hall, the northeast state relations executive for the National Council on Compensation Insurance, which manages the largest database of workers? compensation information and recommends rates, says NCCI is reviewing the new law and will present its 2013 rate recommendation on Oct. 26 at the Portland Club in Falmouth.
Randy Billings, Mainebiz senior writer, can be reached at rbillings@mainebiz.biz.
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Public release date: 16-May-2012
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At Quality Home Improvements, we offer a wide assortment of products and services, ranging from replacement doors and vinyl windows to roofing and siding. We care about the quality of our products and of our work, and we take a personal interested when you need our help. As your seasoned Durham home improvement specialist, we offer warranties and financing to ensure that you get the services you need when you need them. Don?t wait another day, get in touch with us today and let us help you with your home improvement needs.