Colorado River water report released in Vegas

FILE - This March 5, 2008 file photo shows the Colorado River's Horseshoe Bend, in Page, Ariz. Rising demand and falling supply is spurring talk in the arid West of outside-the-box solutions like piping water from the nation's heartland and towing Arctic icebergs south to help thirsty U.S. cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix that are currently dependent on the Colorado River. Faced with ongoing drought, federal officials and water agency representatives from seven states and 40 million people that depend on the Colorado River have produced a report to be released at a three-day Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)

FILE - This March 5, 2008 file photo shows the Colorado River's Horseshoe Bend, in Page, Ariz. Rising demand and falling supply is spurring talk in the arid West of outside-the-box solutions like piping water from the nation's heartland and towing Arctic icebergs south to help thirsty U.S. cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix that are currently dependent on the Colorado River. Faced with ongoing drought, federal officials and water agency representatives from seven states and 40 million people that depend on the Colorado River have produced a report to be released at a three-day Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)

LAS VEGAS (AP) ? Rising demand and falling supply have water managers in the arid West projecting that the Colorado River won't be able to meet the demands over the next 50 years of a population of 40 million people and growing.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday issued what he termed "a call to action" along with a three-year study of the river, its flows and its ability to meet the future needs of city-dwellers, Native Americans, businesses, ranchers and farmers in seven Western states.

The study found the population in the West could double, while today's drought-stricken Colorado River is expected to only recover about 85 percent of its historic flows.

"We are in a troubling trajectory in the Colorado River basin, as well as the Rio Grande basin," Salazar told reporters on a conference call outlining the math in the findings of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study.

"There is no one solution that is going to meet the needs of this challenge," Salazar said. "We need to reduce our demand through conservation. We also need to augment supply with practical measures."

The government's top water official dismissed as politically and technically impractical some ideas in the study, including piping water from the nation's heartland and towing Arctic icebergs south to help such thirsty U.S. cities as Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

But Salazar and Bureau of Reclamation officials warned that the Colorado River's historical 15 million acre-feet per year flow has been reduced by 12 years of drought to about 12 million acre-feet. Officials say an acre-foot can meet the water needs of up two families per year.

The study projects that by 2060 the river flow could be 3.2 million to 8 million acre-feet short of regional needs.

Water interests and the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming together lay claim to all the water in the river and then some.

Mexico also has a stake in the river, and officials last month set new rules to share Colorado River water south of the border and let Mexico store water in Lake Mead near Las Vegas.

A "very believable estimate" using climate change scenarios projects the river flow increasing to just 13.7 million acre-feet per year by 2060, said Kay Brothers, a former Southern Nevada Water Authority executive in Las Vegas who co-managed the study.

"We're going to have problems in the future meeting the demands of the Colorado River basin," Brothers said. "We have to begin now starting to put measures in place to meet the imbalance and prepare for a drier future."

Even before the report was released, some advocates criticized it as a "fundamentally flawed," and based on inflated projections of the amount of water in the river and the number of people in the region.

"States cooked the books to show higher demand for water consumption to set up a federal bailout on expensive water projects," said Molly Mugglestone, director of the advocacy group Protect the Flows.

But Anne Castle, assistant Interior secretary for water and science, said the data came from the best experts, science information available. And Carly Jerla, a federal Bureau of Reclamation analyst, told reporters the range of future growth scenarios went from a small increase to doubling the regional population.

Another advocacy group, the Environmental Defense Fund, was measured in its assessment.

"The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the dry West," said Dan Grossman, an official with the Boulder, Colo.-based organization. "We can't keep bleeding the river dry. The basin study says loud and clear that it's time for a new approach that puts conservation first."

The report considered almost 160 suggestions, Brothers said.

Salazar bluntly dismissed proposals like a multi-billion dollar pipeline running some 670 miles from the Missouri River to Colorado.

But he left open the discussion about options ranging from eliminating thirsty invasive but prolific plants like tamarisk, capping reservoirs and irrigation canals to reduce evaporation, and desalting seawater.

Salazar noted that the federal government already operates a desalination plant near Yuma, Ariz., to treat saline agricultural irrigation water as it returns to the river.

The report also cites the possibility of entities increasing cooperation to swap water credits and "bank" the valuable resource.

Advocates on all sides seized on elements of the 163-page report to bolster their positions.

Boulder, Colo.-based Western Resource Advocates said the study should quickly spur states "to press the 'go' button" on conservation, reuse and efficiency measures.

Denver-area water chief Jim Lochhead issued a statement urging a go-slow approach.

"While this is a critical issue for Colorado, we have time to approach solutions thoughtfully," he said.

In Wyoming, the Family Farm Alliance pointed to the implications for food production in study estimates that irrigated acreage in the Colorado River basin will decrease by 2060.

"Policy makers and Colorado River stakeholders must understand the critical implications of taking 6 to 15 percent of existing irrigated agriculture out of production," alliance President Patrick O'Toole said.

Matt Niemerski, with the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group American Rivers, said climate change and population growth in the region make status-quo management of Colorado River water resources "untenable."

"This is the start of the conversation," Niemerski said, "about how the tens of millions of people who depend on the river for water are ultimately going to be able to live there."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-12-12-Western%20Water/id-10d278554c9443cfbe162e5338def8e4

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Biologists engineer algae to make complex anti-cancer 'designer' drug

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in genetically engineering algae to produce a complex and expensive human therapeutic drug used to treat cancer.

Their achievement, detailed in a paper in this week's early online issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, opens the door for making these and other "designer" proteins in larger quantities and much more cheaply than can now be made from mammalian cells.

"Because we can make the exact same drug in algae, we have the opportunity to drive down the price down dramatically," said Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology at UC San Diego and director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology or SD-CAB, a consortium of research institutions that is also working to develop new biofuels from algae. Their method could even be used to make novel complex designer drugs that can't be produced in any other systems--drugs that could be used to treat cancer or other human diseases in new ways.

"You can't make these drugs in bacteria, because bacteria are incapable of folding these proteins into these complex, three-dimensional shapes," said Mayfield. "And you can't make these proteins in mammalian cells because the toxin would kill them."

The advance is the culmination of seven years of work in Mayfield's laboratory to demonstrate that Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a green alga used widely in biology laboratories as a genetic model organism, can produce a wide range of human therapeutic proteins in greater quantity and more cheaply than bacteria or mammalian cells.

Mayfield and his colleagues achieved their first breakthrough five years ago when they demonstrated they could produce a mammalian serum amyloid protein in algae. The following year, they succeeded in getting algae to produce a human antibody protein. In 2010, they demonstrated that more complex proteins?human therapeutic drugs, such as human vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF, used to treat patients suffering from pulmonary emphysema?could be produced in algae. (http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/03-08TherapeuticProteins.asp)

Then in May of this year, Mayfield's group working with another team headed by Joseph Vinetz from UC San Diego's School of Medicine, engineered algae to produce an even more complex protein?a new kind of vaccine that, preliminary experiments suggest, could protect billions of people from malaria, one of the world's most prevalent and debilitating diseases. (http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressreleases/uc_san_diego_biologists_produce_potential_malarial_vaccine_from_algae/)

"What the development of the malarial vaccine showed us was that algae could produce proteins that were really complex structures, containing lots of disulfide bonds that would still fold into the correct three-dimensional structures," said Mayfield. "Antibodies were the first sophisticated proteins we made. But the malarial vaccine is complex, with disulfide bonds that are pretty unusual. So once we made that, we were convinced we could make just about anything in algae."

In their latest development, the scientists genetically engineered algae to produce a complex, three-dimensional protein with two "domains"?one of which contains an antibody, which can home in on and attach to a cancer cell and another domain that contains a toxin that kills the bound cancer cells. Such "fusion proteins" are presently created by pharmaceutical companies in a complex, two-step process by first developing the antibody domain in a Chinese hamster, or CHO, cell. The antibody is purified, then chemically attached to a toxin outside of the cell. Then the final protein is repurified.

"We have a two-fold advantage over that process," said Mayfield. "First, we make this as a single protein with the antibody and toxin domains fused together in a single gene, so we only have to purify it one time. And second, because we make this in algae rather than CHO cells, we get an enormous cost advantage on the production of the protein."

The fusion protein the researchers in his laboratory produced from algae is identical to one that is under development by pharmaceutical companies with a proposed cost of more than $100,000. This same protein could be produced in algae for a fraction of that price, they report in their paper. And the UCSD researchers?Miller Tran, Christina Van, Dan Barrera and Jack Bui at the UC San Diego Medical School?confirmed that the compound worked like the more expensive treatment: it homed in on cancer cells and inhibited the development of tumors in laboratory mice.

Mayfield said such a fusion protein could not have been produced in a mammalian CHO cell, because the toxin would have killed it. But because the protein was produced in the algae's chloroplasts?the part of algal and plant cells where photosynthesis takes place?it did not kill the algae.

"The protein was sequestered inside the chloroplast," Mayfield said. "And the chloroplast has different proteins from the rest of the cell, and these are not affected by the toxin. If the protein we made were to leak out of the chloroplast, it would have killed the cell. So it's amazing to think that not one molecule leaked out of the chloroplasts. There are literally thousands of copies of that protein inside the chloroplasts and not one of them leaked out."

Mayfield said producing this particular fusion protein was fairly straightforward because it involved fusing two domains?one to recognize and bind to cancer cells and another to kill them. But in the future, he suspects this same method could be used to engineer algae to produce more complex proteins with multiple domains.

"Can we string together four or five domains and produce a designer protein in algae with multiple functions that doesn't exist in nature? I think we can?" he added. "Suppose I want to couple a receptor protein with a series of activator proteins so that I could stimulate bone production or the production of neurons? At some point you can start thinking about medicine the same way we think about assembling a computer, combining different modules with specific purposes. We can produce a protein that has one domain that targets the kind of cell you want to impact, and another domain that specifies what you want the cell to do."

###

University of California - San Diego: http://www.ucsd.edu

Thanks to University of California - San Diego for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125856/Biologists_engineer_algae_to_make_complex_anti_cancer__designer__drug

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Corporate tax battle enters fiscal cliff fracas

12 hrs.

John W. Schoen , NBC News

If you?re enjoying the name-calling and political hair-pulling in the debate over raising the tax burden on wealthy individuals, you?re going to love the coming battle over reforming the corporate tax code.

?It's not going to be easy, it?s not going to be fun and it's going to be as bloody probably as the fiscal cliff charade,? Caterpillar CEO Douglas Oberhelman told CNBC. ?But it?has to be done.?

Business leaders this week stepped up pressure to include an overhaul of corporate taxes as part of the broad budget battle unfolding in Washington. On Wednesday, the Business Roundtable,?a non-partisan group of U.S. chief executives,?implored in a?full-page ad in national newspapers that "it's time to act." Agreeing to a broad package of increased revenues and entitlement reforms, the CEOs urged, would give them the confidence to "invest in new factories, equipment and employees." ??

NBC/WSJ poll: Public wants compromise to avoid fiscal cliff

American corporations have never been shy about asking Congress to make changes in the U.S. tax code. After decades of lobbying, they've?succeeded in larding the law with a thicket of exemptions, deductions, exclusions and other givebacks.?

It?s tempting to think that closing just some of?those loopholes would make a big dent in the federal budget deficit.?But even if fiscal cliff negotiators agreed to eliminate every dollar of corporate tax breaks, the amount ?saved? would cover about 15 cents of every deficit dollar.

?It?s negligible,? said Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, which supports deep cuts in corporate taxes. ?There?s about $1.1 trillion worth of so-called tax expenditures in the tax code and about $900 billion of?that is for individuals.?

The biggest obstacle to tax reform? You are

Still, American corporations love their tax breaks. Among the world?s advanced economies, the U.S. has the?highest tax rate on corporations?? the starting point in calculating how much they owe Uncle Sam?every year. But by the time American companies have subtracted a long list of deductions from their tax bill, the average effective tax rate is more like 27 percent.

In relation to the size of the U.S. economy, however,?American corporations pay the among the smallest tax burden in the developed world. And corporations have been paying a shrinking share of the total tax burden for decades. Corporate tax receipts are less than 2 percent of gross domestic product, down from a peak of 6 percent in 1950.

That shrunken share is, in part, an illusion. Beginning in the late 1980s, following a major overhaul of the tax code, many businesses changed their legal status to take advantage of individual tax rates.?

These so-called ?pass through? companies (so-called because they pass through their taxable income to owners or partners) now make up more than 90 percent of all business tax returns ? and as much as half of all business taxes?paid.

The average corporate tax?rate also masks a wide variation in what different companies pay. Some, for example, pay no tax at all, according to a study last year by Citizens for Tax Justice. That big disparity is one reason proponents of corporate tax overhaul think it?s time to blow up the existing code and start over again.

?In the negotiation to start this, you have to start from zero because everybody is going to have their pet deduction, their pet credit, whatever it is,? said Caterpillar's Oberhelman. ?But let's all agree we start from zero, whatever that tax rate is, and go from there.?

Though there are dozens of industry-specific provisions in the code, very little of the total cost of these tax breaks?? about 8 percent ? goes to specific industries. Tired of those giveaways to the oil and gas industry? Eliminating them would save just $2 billion, or about one-tenth of one percent of the $1.3 trillion deficit.

Some of those targeted tax breaks turn out to have unintended consequences. A tax break for manufacturers that make their products in the U.S. sounds like a good idea in theory. But in practice, it doesn?t always produce the incentives it was designed to create.

?If you?re McDonalds and grind hamburger for your own purposes, you can?t take the manufacturing deduction,? said Hodge. ?But if you?re some other company and you grind hamburger to sell to McDonald's, you can. It?s insane.?

Most corporate tax breaks???about two-thirds of the?total in dollar terms ? are available to all companies. One of the most popular allows companies to write off the cost of buying new equipment. It?s not likely to be cut or reduced, especially until the economy shows more convincing signs of strength.

?The locomotive that pulls our economy is investment in equipment and software,? said FedEx CEO Fred Smith. "It's our reduced level of capital investment that's produced our low GDP growth rates and our high unemployment."

Investment by business has rebounded since the end of the 2007 recession, in part because of a provision in the 2009 stimulus package that provided more generous tax breaks for purchases of new plants, equipment and software. But that capital investment is still some 13 percent below the peak in the second quarter of 2007. The expiration of those temporary tax breaks next year could slow the pace of investments, adding further drag on economic growth.

The goal of overhauling U.S. corporate taxes is to eliminate the thicket of tax breaks to lower the top tax rate for all companies, making them more competitive around the world. But proponents of deeper cuts argue that the burden of corporate taxes ultimately falls on American taxpayers and consumers.

?If the price of fuel goes up, companies generally don?t eat that cost,? said Hodge. ?It?s passed through to consumers through higher prices, or they have to lay off workers to afford those higher costs, or shareholders get less through dividends because profits are less. Same goes for taxes.?

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economywatch/corporate-tax-battle-enters-fiscal-cliff-fracas-1C7529989

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I Love The Smell Of Sepia Tone In The Morning

In three short weeks it will be 2013. Someone may want to send a fax to Flickr and Twitter to let them know. Over the past couple of days, both of these services have pulled a move straight out of 2010: they launched new versions of their mobile apps with ? get this ? filters. Filters! These guys have millions of dollars and thousands of employees at their disposal and this is the kind of innovation they?re dicking around with.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/8g3FjtHgCTA/

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California Suing (WSJ)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/270224960?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Charlie Sheen Donates $75000 To Girl With Cancer - Huffington Post

Charlie Sheen had a recent run-in with police in Los Angeles, but this time it had nothing to do with booze and drugs and everything to do with bringing some good to the world.

TMZ reports that in a conversation with a Hermosa Beach police officer, Sheen learned that another cop at the station has been struggling to take care of his daughter, who was recently diagnosed with cancer. The troubled star vowed to help and sent off a $75,000 check to the family?s fund.

"No parent should have to watch their kid go through that,? Sheen told the officer, according to TMZ.

Jasmine Faulk, 10, was diagnosed with Alveoler Rhabdomyosarcoma in September and will have to undergo aggressive medical treatment, including radiation and chemotherapy, according to her family?s blog. While the Faulks remain positive, and Jasmine has big dreams of becoming a nurse one day, she has suffered side effects from the treatments, including nausea, hair loss and fatigue, Jasmine?s aunt wrote.

Sheen's donation will likely go a very long way toward helping Jasmine, and the ?Two and a Half Men? actor?s generosity has already become contagious.

His stunt double, Eddie Braun, wrote a check for $25,000 for Jasmine, too, according to her fund?s Facebook page.

"Big news today for the Faulk family. Together, Eddie Braun and Charlie Sheen donated $100,000.00 to the [Hermosa Beach Police Officers Association] in support of Jasmine's fight against cancer,? Jasmine?s supporters wrote on her Facebook page. ?On behalf of the HBPOA, the Faulk family and those who support children fighting cancer, we thank you for your generous donation.?

Feeling inspired? Find out how you can get involved in Jasmine Faulk's fight against cancer here.

LOOK: Charlie Sheen's generous donation

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/11/charlie-sheen-jasmine-faulk_n_2277886.html

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Mandela doctors "satisfied" with his recovery

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Former South African President Nelson Mandela is recovering from a lung infection that has kept the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader in hospital for the last five days, the government said on Wednesday.

"Doctors attending to former President Mandela have reported that he has made progress during the past 24 hours and they are satisfied with the way he is responding to treatment," President Jacob Zuma's office said a statement.

South Africa's first black president, who came to power in historic all-race elections in 1994, remains a hero to many of its 52 million people.

Mandela, known locally by his clan name of 'Madiba', was admitted to Pretoria's '1 Military' Hospital on Saturday after being flown from his home village of Qunu in a remote, rural part of the Eastern Cape province.

The government only gave the first concrete details about his condition on Tuesday, saying he had suffered a recurrence of a lung infection.

When he was admitted, officials stressed there was no cause for concern although domestic media reports suggested senior members of the government and people close to him had been caught unawares.

Mandela, a global symbol of resistance to racism and injustice, spent 27 years in apartheid prisons, including 18 years on the windswept Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town.

He was released in 1990 and went on to use his unparalleled prestige to push for reconciliation between whites and blacks as the bedrock of the post-apartheid "Rainbow Nation".

He stepped down in 1999 after one term in office and has been largely removed from public life for the last decade.

Mandela spent time in a Johannesburg hospital in 2011 with a respiratory condition, and again in February this year because of abdominal pains. He was released the following day after a keyhole examination showed there was nothing serious.

He has since spent most of his time in Qunu.

His fragile health prevents him from making any public appearances in South Africa, although he has continued to receive high-profile domestic and international visitors, including former U.S. President Bill Clinton in July.

(Reporting by Ed Cropley; Editing by Pascal Fletcher)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mandela-responding-lung-infection-treatment-003224746.html

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