At least 6 dead in Texas tornado

GRANBURY, Texas (AP) ? Officials awaited daybreak to fully assess the scope of the destruction left in the wake of a deadly tornado in Granbury.

Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds said he hoped the death toll from the tornado would hold at six, with about 50 people injured and 250 people left homeless.

The twister was part of a swarm of tornadoes unleashed on North Texas, devastating two neighborhoods in southern Granbury and a neighborhood in nearby Cleburne.

"I've been assured by my deputies on the scene that they're pretty confident with the six that they found, but there was a report that two of these people that they found were not even near their homes. So we're going to have to search the area out there," he said.

About 50 people were taken to a Granbury hospital, where 14 were admitted for treatment of injuries and two were transferred to a hospital in Fort Worth, about 35 miles to the northeast, Deeds said.

About 50 people gathered in the Oak Wood Elementary School after nightfall Wednesday to have their injured children examined by paramedics. Five were taken away by ambulance.

As many as 100 people were injured, said Matt Zavadsky, spokesman for MedStar Mobile Healthcare. His company sent three ambulances and a medical bus from its Fort Worth base to Granbury.

Deeds said officials were trying to account for 14 people, but it was not clear if they were missing or were away from the area for other reasons.

Hardest hit were two neighborhoods, Rancho Brazos Estates and DeCordova Ranch, in the southern end of the town of about 8,000 residents about 65 miles southwest of Dallas.

Behind one house in the storm's path sits a detached garage stripped of much of its aluminum siding have with its garage door stove in and its roof torn off. Siding was scattered up to 50 yards away, and bits of fiberglass insulation draped on a fence. A tree behind the house was stripped of most of its branches, and a vacant doublewide mobile home on an adjoining lot was torn apart.

Deeds spoke of a county road operations supervisor who lives in the affected area.

"I've been told his home is destroyed but he was OK, so he was ready to go to work to help his neighbors. But he can't find his truck. The winds were strong enough out there that he still doesn't know where his truck is," Deeds said.

Ambulances from as far away as Fort Worth were being called to Granbury, said Tye Bell, Richland Hills police spokesman who was heading to Granbury on Wednesday night.

The same storm spawned another tornado that storm spotters told the National Weather Service was a mile wide. That twister tore through the southwestern quadrant of Cleburne, a courthouse city of about 30,000 about 25 miles southeast of Granbury.

There were no reports of deaths in that storm, Cleburne Mayor Scott Cain said, "but we do have the potential for some injuries." He had no estimates.

Cain had no estimate on the number of homes damaged, but he said he expected the number to soar into the dozens based on his inspection of damage ranging from roof damage to total destruction.

Another tornado hit the small town of Millsap, about 40 miles west of Fort Worth. Parker County Judge Mark Kelley said roof damage was reported to several houses and a barn was destroyed, but no injuries were reported.

Hail as large as grapefruit also pelted the area around Mineral Wells on Wednesday evening. A police dispatcher reported only minor damage.

___

Associated Press writers Terry Wallace and Jamie Stengle in Dallas and freelance photographer Mike Fuentes contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/least-6-confirmed-dead-texas-tornado-051752213.html

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Second court invalidates Obama recess appointment

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A second federal appeals court has found that President Barack Obama exceeded his power when he bypassed the Senate to install a member to the National Labor Relations Board.

The ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia came on the same day that a Senate panel considered a slate of five nominees for full terms on the labor board. Senate Republicans said Thursday they would oppose two of the nominees ? Sharon Block and Richard Griffin ? because they currently sit on the board as recess appointments.

In its 2-1 decision ruling, the appeals court said that under the Constitution recess appointments can be made only between sessions of the Senate, not any time the Senate is away on a break.

The court's action mirrors a far-reaching ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., earlier this year. The Obama administration has appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, arguing that such an interpretation would invalidate hundreds of recess appointments made by presidents over more than 100 years.

The latest ruling says Obama had no constitutional authority to install attorney Craig Becker to the labor board in 2010 while the Senate was adjourned for two weeks.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Both rulings have threatened to throw the labor board, the Consumer Financial Protection Board and other federal agencies with recess appointees into chaos. If they stand, hundreds of decisions by these agencies could be thrown out.

The narrow interpretation of a president's recess appointment power would also effectively make it impossible for the president to ever use that power, giving the Senate's ability to block administration nominees indefinitely.

Obama has made 32 recess appointments during his presidency, nearly all of which would be considered invalid under the interpretation of these courts. The rulings could also threaten the recess appointments of previous presidents. President George W. Bush made 141 such appointments in eight years.

On Capitol Hill, Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, senior Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he would not consider Block and Griffin because they refused to step down from the board after the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that they were unconstitutionally appointed. Block and Griffin said they wanted to abide by their oath to serve their country and argued that appeals courts have reached different conclusions about recess powers.

Democrats on the panel accused Republicans of obstructionism because the GOP and its allies in the business community have been unhappy with some of the union-friendly decisions issued by the board during Obama's administration. Unions warn that unless the nominees are confirmed soon, the board will be unable to function. It only has three members now, and the term of board chairman Mark Pearce expires in August.

In the 3rd Circuit case, the two-judge majority rejected the Obama administration's arguments that a Senate recess occurs any time lawmakers do not have a duty to attend, the Senate chamber is empty and the Senate cannot receive messages from the president.

"Defining recess in this way would eviscerate the divided-powers framework" of the Constitution, Judge D. Brooks Smith wrote in a 102-page decision. "If the Senate refused to confirm a president's nominees, then the president could circumvent the Senate's constitutional role simply by waiting until senators go home for the evening."

Smith, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, was joined in his opinion by Judge Franklin Stuart Van Antwerpen, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan.

A lengthy dissent came from Judge Joseph Greenaway Jr., who was appointed by Obama and joined the court in 2010. Greenaway said that under the majority's decision, the recess appointment power "is essentially neutered and the president's ability to make recess appointments would be eviscerated."

The case was brought by New Vista, a New Jersey nursing and rehabilitative care center that argued its nurses were supervisors who were not allowed to form a union. The labor board ruled in favor of the union and New Vista appealed. The company argued that the board did not have enough validly appointed members to reach a decision because Becker was not a valid appointee.

The labor board has five seats and needs at least three sitting members to conduct business. At the time of the New Vista ruling, it had the minimum of three, but one member was Becker, the recess appointee.

Becker is no longer on the NLRB, but the current board also has only three members, two of whom are Obama recess appointees. More than a hundred companies have appealed NLRB decisions this year arguing that the board does not have enough validly appointed members to conduct business.

___

Follow Sam Hananel on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SamHananelAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-05-16-Obama-Recess%20Appointments/id-bcd4d30b88264d588942c557c2668dd1

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Lawyers plead for mercy for Arias as trial resumes

PHOENIX (AP) ? An attorney for Jodi Arias on Thursday told the jury deciding the former waitress's fate to consider factors including her age, troubled upbringing and talent as an artist, and show her mercy for killing her boyfriend five years ago.

The defense and prosecution delivered opening statements to jurors on whether Arias should get a life sentence or be executed as the case's penalty phase opened in a Phoenix courtroom. The same jury convicted Arias of first-degree murder last week.

Defense lawyer Kirk Nurmi said Arias herself will testify as he listed several factors that the jury can consider in deciding to grant mercy, including her lack of criminal history before the killing and even her skills as a talented artist.

Prosecutor Juan Martinez went through each factor and sought to turn the attention to the gruesome killing, asking what her age, background and art skills have to do with what happened the day Travis Alexander was stabbed nearly 30 times.

Other witnesses in the penalty phase of the trial will include Arias' friends and an ex-boyfriend who lived with her for several years in California. Prosecutors will call family members of Alexander in arguing for a death sentence.

Arias' attorneys earlier asked to step down from the case, but a judge denied the request.

Details about the motion were sealed, but legal experts said Arias complicated efforts for her defense when she gave an interview to Fox affiliate KSAZ minutes after her conviction, saying she preferred death over life in prison.

"I believe death is the ultimate freedom, and I'd rather have my freedom as soon as I can get it," Arias said.

During a closed-door meeting with the judge on Tuesday, Nurmi and Jennifer Willmott sought permission to withdraw from the case, according to court minutes released Thursday.

Los Angeles-area criminal defense lawyer Mark Geragos said Arias' attorneys have a conflict of interest with their efforts to keep their client off death row and Arias' assertion that she'd rather die for her crime.

"It's not highly unusual," he said. "There are cases where defendants make decisions that they're better off on death row, but that puts the lawyer in a conflicted position. You've got a duty as a lawyer to bring the conflict of interest to the courts and disclose it."

Added Phoenix criminal defense lawyer Julio Laboy: "It would be something I would do in my major felony cases if I found that a client was actually working against me and not working with her defense."

Arias cannot choose the death penalty. It's up to the jury to determine a sentence.

On Wednesday, the panel took less than three hours to determine that Arias should be eligible for death in the killing of her one-time lover after prosecutors proved the murder was especially cruel.

Arias, 32, acknowledged killing Alexander at his suburban Phoenix home after a day of sex. She initially denied any involvement then later blamed the attack on masked intruders. Two years after her arrest, she settled on self-defense.

The victim suffered nearly 30 knife wounds in what prosecutors described as an attack fueled by jealous rage after Alexander wanted to end his affair with Arias and prepared to take a trip to Mexico with another woman.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lawyers-plead-mercy-arias-trial-resumes-183756151.html

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First direct proof of Hofstadter butterfly fractal observed in moir? superlattices

May 15, 2013 ? A team of researchers from Columbia University, City University of New York, the University of Central Florida (UCF), and Tohoku University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan, have directly observed a rare quantum effect that produces a repeating butterfly-shaped energy spectrum, confirming the longstanding prediction of this quantum fractal energy structure, called Hofstadter's butterfly.

The study, which focused on moir?-patterned graphene, is published in the May 15, 2013, Advance Online Publication (AOP) of Nature.

First predicted by American physicist Douglas Hofstadter in 1976, the Hofstadter butterfly emerges when electrons are confined to a two-dimensional sheet, and subjected to both a periodic potential energy (akin to a marble rolling on a sheet the shape of an egg carton) and a strong magnetic field. The Hofstadter butterfly is a fractal pattern -- it contains shapes that repeat on smaller and smaller size scales. Fractals are common in classical systems such as fluid mechanics, but rare in the quantum mechanical world. In fact, the Hofstadter butterfly is one of the first quantum fractals theoretically discovered in physics but, until now, there has been no direct experimental proof of this spectrum.

Previous efforts to study the Hofstadter butterfly, which has become a standard "textbook" theoretical result, attempted to use artificially created structures to achieve the required periodic potential energy. These studies produced strong evidence for the Hofstadter spectrum but were significantly hampered by the difficulty in creating structures that were both small and perfect enough to allow detailed study.

In order to create a periodic potential with a near-ideal length scale and also with a low degree of disorder, the team used an effect called a moir? pattern that arises naturally when atomically thin graphene is placed on an atomically flat boron nitride (BN) substrate, which has the same honeycomb atomic lattice structure as graphene but with a slightly longer atomic bond length. This work builds on years of experience with both graphene and BN at Columbia. The techniques for fabricating these structures were developed by the Columbia team in 2010 to create higher-performing transistors, and have also proven to be invaluable in opening up new areas of basic physics such as this study.

To map the graphene energy spectrum, the team then measured the electronic conductivity of the samples at very low temperatures in extremely strong magnetic fields up to 35 Tesla (consuming 35 megawatts of power) at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. The measurements show the predicted self-similar patterns, providing the best evidence to date for the Hofstadter butterfly, and providing the first direct evidence for its fractal nature.

"Now we see that our study of moir?-patterned graphene provides a new model system to explore the role of fractal structure in quantum systems," says Cory Dean, the first author of the paper who is now an assistant professor at The City College of New York. "This is a huge leap forward -- our observation that interplays between competing length scales result in emergent complexity provides the framework for a new direction in materials design. And such understanding will help us develop novel electronic devices employing quantum engineered nanostructures."

"The opportunity to confirm a 40-year-old prediction in physics that lies at the core of most of our understanding of low-dimensional material systems is rare, and tremendously exciting," adds Dean. "Our confirmation of this fractal structure opens the door for new studies of the interplay between complexity at the atomic level in physical systems and the emergence of new phenomenon arising from complexity."

The work from Columbia University resulted from collaborations across several disciplines including experimental groups in the departments of physics (Philip Kim), mechanical engineering (James Hone), and electrical engineering (Kenneth Shepard) in the new Northwest Corner building, using the facilities in the CEPSR (Columbia's Schapiro Center for Engineering and Physical Science Research) microfabrication center. Similar results are concurrently being reported from groups led by Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim at the University of Manchester, and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Raymond Ashoori at MIT.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/W8rieeisaFg/130515131554.htm

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Making frequency-hopping radios practical

May 15, 2013 ? New hardware could lead to wireless devices that identify and exploit unused transmission frequencies, using radio spectrum much more efficiently.

The way in which radio spectrum is currently allocated to different wireless technologies can lead to gross inefficiencies. In some regions, for instance, the frequencies used by cellphones can be desperately congested, while large swaths of the broadcast-television spectrum stand idle.

One solution to that problem is the 15-year-old idea of "cognitive radio," in which wireless devices would scan their environments for vacant frequencies and use these for transmissions. Different proposals for cognitive radio place different emphases on hardware and software, but the chief component of many hardware approaches is a bank of filters that can isolate any frequency in a wide band.

Researchers at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL) have developed a new method for manufacturing such filters that should improve their performance while enabling 14 times as many of them to be crammed on a single chip. That's a vital consideration in handheld devices where space is tight. But just as important, the new method uses techniques already common in the production of signal-processing chips, so it should be easy for manufacturers to adopt.

There are two main approaches to hardware-based radio-signal filtration: one is to perform the filtration electronically; the other is to convert the radio signal to an acoustic signal -- a physical vibration -- and then convert it back to an electrical signal. In work to be presented in June at the International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems, Dana Weinstein, the Steve and Renee Finn Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Laura Popa, a graduate student in physics, adopted the second approach.

Resonant ideas

Both types of filtration use devices called resonators, and acoustic resonators have a couple of clear advantages over electronic ones. One is that their filtration is more precise.

"If I pluck a guitar string -- that's the easiest resonator to think of -- it's going to resonate at some frequency, and it's going to die down due to losses," Weinstein explains. "That loss is related to, basically, energy leaked away from that resonance mode into all other frequencies. Less loss means better frequency selectivity, and mechanical acoustic resonators have less loss than electrical resonators."

Acoustic resonators' other advantage is that, in principle, they can be packed more densely than electrical-filtration circuits. "Acoustic wavelengths are much smaller than electromagnetic wavelengths," Weinstein says. "So for a given frequency, my mechanical resonator is going to be much smaller."

But in practice, the number of acoustic resonators in a filtration bank has been limited. The heart of any device that converts electrical signals to mechanical vibrations, or vice versa, is a capacitor, which can be thought of as two parallel metal plates separated by a small distance.

"The capacitors change the impedance" -- a measure of the ease with which a wave propagates -- "that the antenna sees, so you may have unwanted reflections back into the antenna," Weinstein says. "Each capacitor from each filter is going to affect the antenna, and that's no good. It means I can only have so many filters, and therefore so many frequencies that I can separate my signal into."

Another problem with acoustic resonators is that turning them on or off -- a necessary step in the isolation of a particular transmission frequency -- requires giving each resonator its own electrical switch. Traditionally, an incoming radio-frequency signal has had to pass through that switch before reaching the resonator, suffering some loss of quality in the process.

Switching channels

Weinstein and Popa solve both these problems at a stroke. Moreover, they do it by adapting a technology already common in wireless devices: a gallium nitride transistor.

Almost all commercial transistors use semiconductors: materials, like gallium nitride, that can be switched between a conductive and a nonconductive state by the application of a voltage. In Weinstein and Popa's new resonator, the lower "plate" of the capacitor is in fact a gallium nitride channel in its conductive state.

Switching that channel to its nonconductive state is like removing the lower plate of the capacitor, which drastically reduces the capacitors' effect on the quality of the radio signal. In experiments, the MTL researchers found that their resonators had only one-fourteenth the "capacitive load" of conventional resonators. "The radio can now afford to have 14 times as many filters attached to the antenna," Weinstein says, "so we can span more frequencies."

Switching the channel to its nonconductive state also turns the resonator off, so the researchers' new design requires no additional switch in the path of the incoming signal, improving signal quality.

Finally, the new resonator uses only materials already found in the gallium arsenide transistors common in wireless devices, so mass-producing it should require no major modifications of existing manufacturing processes.

Commercial adoption of cognitive radio has been slow for a number of reasons. "Part of it is being able to get the frequency-agile components and do it in a cost-effective manner," says Thomas Kazior, a principal engineering fellow at Raytheon. "Plus the size constraint: Filters tend to be big to begin with, and banks of tunable filters just make things even bigger."

The MTL researchers' work could help with both problems, Kazior says. "We're talking about making filters that are directly integrated onto, say, a receiver chip, because the little resonator devices are literally the size of a transistor," he says. "These are all on a tiny scale."

"They can help with the cost problem because these resonator-type structures almost come for free," Kazior adds. "Building them is part of the semiconductor fabrication process, using pretty much the existing fabrication steps that you're using to build the transistor and the rest of the circuits. You just may need to add one, or two at the most, additional steps -- out of 100 or more steps."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/technology/~3/MGM2ZhYQt0Y/130515113914.htm

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Human disease leptospirosis identified in new species, the banded mongoose, in Africa

May 14, 2013 ? The newest public health threat in Africa, scientists have found, is coming from a previously unknown source: the banded mongoose.

Leptospirosis, the disease is called. And the banded mongoose carries it.

Leptospirosis is the world's most common illness transmitted to humans by animals. It's a two-phase disease that begins with flu-like symptoms. If untreated, it can cause meningitis, liver damage, pulmonary hemorrhage, renal failure and death.

"The problem in Botswana and much of Africa is that leptospirosis may remain unidentified in animal populations but contribute to human disease, possibly misdiagnosed as other diseases such as malaria," said disease ecologist Kathleen Alexander of Virginia Tech.

With a grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Coupled Natural and Human Systems Program, Alexander and colleagues found that the banded mongoose in Botswana is infected with Leptospira interrogans, the pathogen that causes leptospirosis.

Coupled Natural and Human Systems is part of NSF's Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability investment and is supported by NSF's Directorates for Biological Sciences; Geosciences; and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.

"The transmission of infectious diseases from wildlife to humans represents a serious and growing public health risk due to increasing contact between humans and animals," said Alan Tessier, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology. "This study identified an important new avenue for the spread of leptospirosis."

The results are published today in a paper in the journal Zoonoses and Public Health. The paper was co-authored by Alexander, Sarah Jobbins and Claire Sanderson of Virginia Tech.

The banded mongoose, although wild, lives in close proximity to humans, sharing scarce water resources and scavenging in human waste.

The disease-causing pathogen it carries can pass to humans through soil or water contaminated with infected urine.

Mongoose and other species are consumed as bushmeat, which may also contribute to leptospirosis exposure and infection in humans.

"I was convinced that we were going to find Leptospira interrogans in some species in the ecosystem," said Alexander.

"The pathogen had not been reported previously in Botswana, with the exception of one cow more than a quarter of a century ago.

"We looked at public health records dating back to 1974 and there were no records of any human cases of leptospirosis. Doctors said they were not expecting to see the disease in patients. They were not aware that the pathogen occurred in the country."

Alexander conducted a long-term study of human, wildlife and environmental health in the Chobe District of Northern Botswana, an area that includes the Chobe National Park, forest reserves and surrounding villages.

"This pathogen can infect many animals, both wild and domestic, including dogs," said Jobbins. "Banded mongoose is likely not the only species infected."

The researchers worked to understand how people, animals and the environment are connected, including the potential for diseases to move between humans and wildlife.

"Diseases such as leptospirosis that have been around for a very long time are often overlooked amid the hunt for the next newly emerging disease," Alexander said.

Leptospirosis was first described in 1886, said Jobbins, "but we still know little about its occurrence in Africa."

With the new identification of leptospirosis in Botswana, Alexander is concerned about the public health threat it may pose to the immunocompromised population there. Some 25 percent of 15- to 49-year-olds are HIV positive.

"In much of Africa, people die without a cause being determined," she said.

"Leptospirosis is likely affecting human populations in this region. But without knowledge that the organism is present in the environment, overburdened public health officials are unlikely to identify clinical cases in humans, particularly if the supporting diagnostics are not easily accessible."

The researchers looked for Leptospira interrogans in archived kidneys collected from banded mongoose that had been found dead from a variety of causes. Of the sampled mongoose, 43 percent tested positive for the pathogen.

"Given this high prevalence in the mongoose, we believe that Botswana possesses an as-yet-unidentified burden of human leptospirosis," said Jobbins.

"There is an urgent need to look for this disease in people who have clinical signs consistent with infection."

Because banded mongoose have an extended range across sub-Saharan Africa, the results have important implications for public health beyond Botswana.

"Investigating exposure in other wildlife, and assessing what species act as carriers, is essential for improving our understanding of human, wildlife, and domestic animal risk ofleptospirosisin this ecosystem," the scientists write in their paper.

The paper also cites predictions that the region will become more arid, concentrating humans and animals around limited water supplies and increasing the potential for disease transmission.

"Infectious diseases, particularly those that can be transmitted from animals, often occur where people are more vulnerable to environmental change and have less access to public health services," said Alexander.

"That's particularly true in Africa. While we're concerned about emerging diseases that might threaten public health--the next new pandemic--we need to be careful that we don't drop the ball and stop pursuing important diseases like leptospirosis."

Alexander is working to identify immediate research and management actions--in particular, alerting frontline medical practitioners and public health officials to the potential for leptospirosis in humans.

The research was also funded by the WildiZe Foundation. Jobbins and Sanderson were supported in part by Virginia Tech's Fralin Life Science Institute.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/2ttrkO4e9ww/130514122756.htm

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Video: IRS: No High Level Officials New of Practice

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Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/video/cnbc/51884843/

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