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It’s Thursday! Take a minute to click through today’s links: All the details of Prince George‘s royal christening — PEOPLE.com Breastmilk bought online may be contaminated — USA TODAY VIDEO: Children’s hospital performs Katy Perry‘s “Roar” — HuffPost Good News 9 luxe christening gifts worthy of the royals — POPSUGAR Moms Autumn Reeser: How I’m feathering […]Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/CnV2y4Y11GQ/
Tags: Jeff Soffer Under the Dome apple event cbs sports food network star
Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/CnV2y4Y11GQ/Tags: Jeff Soffer Under the Dome apple event cbs sports food network star
Coral chemicals protect against warming oceans
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Australian marine scientists have found the first evidence that coral itself may play an important role in regulating local climate.They have discovered that the coral animal--not just its algal symbiont--makes an important sulphur-based molecule with properties to assist it in many ways, ranging from cellular protection in times of heat stress to local climate cooling by encouraging clouds to form.Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/sip-ccp102313.php
Category: clemson Robinson Cano Derek Medina
Category: clemson Robinson Cano Derek Medina
Disaster Breeds Disaster
Photo courtesy of Gene Page/AMC
In the TV series The Walking Dead, the characters inhabit a world overrun by zombies—specifically, zombies caused by a mysterious virus that has apparently infected everyone in the population. The living keep the virus in check by unknown means. But when someone dies—whether quickly after being bitten by a “walker” or felled by a human nemesis or more slowly due to natural causes—the result is the same: After death, everyone is reanimated as a bloodthirsty zombie. The pandemic survivors come to realize that the zombies aren’t their only enemies: The living can be even more dangerous than the undead. The group of main characters has spent several seasons searching for a safe haven against both walkers and unsavory living people. The beginning of Season 4 finds them ensconced in a prison, the series regulars merged with new characters from the nearby town of Woodbury.
The premise that all living people are already infected with the zombie virus was introduced in Season 1, during a foray to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where the lone remaining CDC scientist—Edwin Jenner—informed Rick, the de facto leader of the survivors, of this fact. (However, Rick didn’t tell the rest of the group—and thus the audience—this particular tidbit of information until the end of Season 2.) To date, this revelation has been the central plot point, in terms of public health. Unlike the movie version of World War Z, there has been little attention paid to how this zombie pandemic began or how to end it—the focus is on daily survival. Understanding the virus probably wouldn’t matter much at this point in any case—mathematical modeling has shown that, unless you hit hard and hit early, there’s pretty much no stopping a zombie pandemic once it starts. Add on the fact that, based on the survivors’ CDC experience, all research into the cause (and therefore any cure, treatment, or prevention) has stopped … well, the ragtag group appears to be on its own.
It might not seem like things could get any worse, but as the group found out in this week’s episode, “Infected,” the zombie pandemic virus isn’t the only killer pathogen out there. We know from all-too-real examples that one disaster often breeds another. In the real world, an ongoing cholera outbreak is plaguing Haiti. After the 2010 earthquake, United Nations troops inadvertently introduced the pathogen, and the country lost much of its health infrastructure during the earthquake. The HIV pandemic has exacerbated other infectious diseases, such as multidrug resistant tuberculosis, particularly in Africa. Wars and their resulting refugee camps are breeding grounds for a multitude of infectious diseases, including deadly respiratory and diarrheal infections. As routine vaccination programs lapse in disaster areas, killers such as measles, tetanus, and polio can make a resurgence.
The principle that disaster breeds disaster is what our long-suffering group discovered on Sunday’s episode. In the midst of the infectious zombie pandemic, another killer germ arose, quickly leading to the death of new character Patrick in a rather gruesome manner. The new virus seems to be influenza (and probably swine influenza). Hershel, a veterinarian, notes that influenza can be transmitted to humans from pigs and birds—it’s a zoonotic infection. Rick adds that he saw a sick boar during a prior excursion in the woods and that he saw other zombies along the fence outside their prison home that resembled the recently reanimated Patrick: trailing blood from their eyes, nose, and lips. Another character, Dr. Subramanian, explains that this is due to pressure building up in the lungs from the infection, and then it’s “like you shake a soda can and pop the top, only your eyes, ears, nose, and throat are the top.”
Could such a diagnosis be made in the middle of an apocalypse?
In our world, swine flu usually isn’t fatal, nor is it highly contagious among humans. Clinical manifestations like those that affected Patrick would be exceedingly rare, though some have been seen from the novel H1N1 virus, which originated in swine and caused a 2009 pandemic, and also from the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, which was of avian origin. (And, breaking out at the end of World War I, the 1918 pandemic is a prime example of an epidemiological disaster facilitated by the disaster of war.) The coughing symptoms some of the survivors are showing would also be consistent with influenza infections, but that’s hardly diagnostic—many respiratory germs cause coughing.
Hershel, as a veterinarian, should also be considering other pathogens that could sicken both people and pigs. One that immediately comes to mind is called Streptococcus suis, a bacterium that causes flu-like symptoms and can jump between swine and humans. It can also cause hemorrhagic (bleeding) manifestations, as noted in an outbreak in China in 2005. The big difference between S. suis and flu is that the former is not known to be transmitted among humans—people who get sick with it are usually in direct contact with pigs, so Rick and his son Carl, who had been raising pigs on a farm within the fenced prison grounds, would be at the highest risk for infection.
Photo courtesy of Gene Page/AMC
Why is a diagnosis important? The group decides in this episode to isolate people who are showing symptoms of the disease. (The next episode, in fact, is called “Isolation.”) If the pathogen is indeed swine influenza, and if it was already spreading among the humans in the prison, Rick’s step of sacrificing the piglets to the zombie horde would do little to nothing to stop the illness. If, however, it was S. suis, isolation probably wouldn’t even be necessary—keeping people away from the pigs should do the trick and end the epidemic.
Could such a diagnosis be made in the middle of an apocalypse? Definitively, probably not—but the group has both a veterinarian and a physician within the prison. It wouldn’t take much to do a crude epidemiological analysis, asking those who are coughing if they’d been exposed to pigs or how much time they’d spent around other (possibly sick) people. If all the sick people cluster together and haven’t been around the pigs at all, flu is a more logical choice, which may have originated in the pigs or the people. (An overcrowded prison, with people mixing from two recently assimilated communities, is certainly a great place for infectious diseases to spread.) To complicate matters, Rick correctly mentions to Carl at the end of the episode that the pigs could have made people sick or people could have sickened the pigs—many germs don’t care about species boundaries. There’s also the mysterious rat-feeder introduced in Sunday’s episode: Someone within the prison is catching live rats and feeding them to the zombie horde lingering outside the prison gates. Rats are notorious vectors of disease. Do they play a role in this new outbreak?
More answers may come in the next episodes. Perhaps the zombie virus itself will jump species, as it does in Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin series (zombie boars) or Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy (zombie bears). Animals may have more to fear from a zombie pandemic than was previously thought.
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/10/the_walking_dead_virus_the_epidemiology_and_science_of_zombies.html
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Caterpillar leads Dow lower as a stock rally fades
NEW YORK (AP) — A four-day streak of record closes is ending for the Standard & Poor's 500 index after Caterpillar reported weak earnings and falling oil prices hurt energy stocks.
Caterpillar, which makes mining and construction equipment, led the Dow Jones industrial average lower after reporting a plunge in third-quarter earnings. That discouraged investors and stalled a two-week surge in the stock market.
Energy stocks dropped as the price of oil fell to its lowest in almost four months.
The S&P 500 fell eight points, or 0.5 percent, to 1,746. The Dow gave up 54 points to close at 15,413 and the Nasdaq composite fell 22 points, or 0.6 percent, to 3,907.
More stocks fell than rose on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was heavier than usual at 3.7 billion shares.
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Netflix Could Be the Next Big TV Network | Daily ... - Yahoo Finance
Wall Street is betting heavily that Netflix (NFLX) will soon be the next big TV network – and maybe already is.
In the past few months, the streaming-video service surpassed Time Warner Inc.’s (TWX) HBO in paid U.S. subscribers, with 31 million viewers agreeing to pay Netflix $7.99 a month for unlimited access to movies and TV series – including its own hit original programs “Orange Is the New Black” and “House of Cards.” The latter, of course, became the first series to win an Emmy without ever having aired on broadcast or cable TV.
Related: Worried About Netflix's Sky High Stock Price? So Is Reed Hastings
In reporting a quadrupling of profits late Monday, Netflix said its users streamed five billion hours of programming in the third quarter, up 25% from the first three months of the year. Only the Big Four broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – serve up more program hours than Netflix.
Through its sophisticated personalization software, Netflix serves up suggested shows and movies that it anticipates a user might like, increasing its share of their entertainment-consumption time. The company is now trying to become a feature on cable and satellite systems’ set-top boxes alongside traditional networks, further blurring the line between direct-subscription serves and “bundled” monthly programming plans.
The company, which began as a DVD-rental-by-mail novelty service, is now among the largest buyers and developers of films and TV shows in media. It spends some $2 billion a year on video content. While most of it is created and released by other media outlets – such as full seasons of “Scandal” and “Breaking Bad” - Netflix is aggressively increasing its commitment to producing its own exclusive series. It will soon introduce second seasons of “House of Cards” and “Lilyhammer,” as well as “Derek” and “Hemlock Grove.” The company says it will double its spending on original programming in the next year.
Related: Netflix Owns Nothing, Is Poised for Short-Term Drop: Pachter
Excitement over Netflix’s potential to grow into a near-universal, all-you-can-view service has dazzled investors and made Netflix shares among the hottest in the market.
It’s hard to dispute, in fact, that Netflix shares are expensive. The more interesting questions are whether the shares are wildly overvalued by a herd of deluded momentum investors, or properly pricey to account for the company’s stellar growth record and vast opportunities to grab an enormous share of the paid media economy.
And what, if anything, should Netflix and CEO Reed Hastings consider doing to take advantage of its towering valuation?
With a $23 billion market value after the stock’s 300% surge this year to $381 following strong quarterly results, the streaming-video leader is valued at $550 per subscriber, six-times this year’s revenue and more than 100-times next year’s forecast earnings – all many times the multiples of peer companies and the broad market. Even Hastings granted that the stock’s rocking performance seems driven in part by investor “euphoria.”
The Daily Ticker's Henry Blodget is inclined to give the company, and the stock, the benefit of the doubt. “You don’t know whether it’s overvalued – nobody does,” he said in the above video. "Most of the people who are ridiculing it right here at $400 a share were ridiculing it at $70."
Related: How Amazon's Mayday Could Change Your World and Disrupt Apple
“What they have done is replicate the HBO strategy of, replicate other people’s stuff, add on the cream of your own stuff. They are the future. TV is going to route on all these different ways” – any place, any time, on any device, says Blodget.
Netflix is ingeniously piggybacking on the expensive high-speed broadband infrastructure built by cable and telecom giants in recent years. By one Barclays Capital estimate, Netflix is responsible for about a third of all “downstream” Internet traffic.
The company is investing heavily to acquire and create content and to market the brand worldwide, sacrificing near-term profits to establish itself as the global leader in one-stop entertainment.
Blodget compares Netflix to Amazon.com (AMZN), which has always forgone the chance to earn lush profits in order to plow money back into expanding the brand into new products and platforms. Wall Street has rewarded Amazon nicely for this strategy, recognizing perhaps that it has a huge opportunity to become ever-more indispensable to consumers and could choose to reap higher earnings any time it so chooses in the future.
This may be true, but at some price a stock’s valuation and the expectations of Wall Street will be too high, and any slight stumble in subscriber growth or a dud original series could trigger a nasty reversal in the stock.
At some point, Netflix might find that its appetite for rapid growth and ever-more-compelling programming makes acquiring a big content producer important to ensure access to exclusive, original shows and films. As such networks like HBO and AMC Networks (AMCX) have shown, the continuing loyalty of viewers requires a steady succession of addictive, resonant hit series such as “Game of Thrones” and “Mad Men.”
Such a company as Lions Gate Entertainment (LGF), as an example, is a scrappy maker of series and movies with a knack for buzz-worthy hits. With a market value of about one-quarter that of Netflix, such a hypothetical deal would certainly seem doable.
Then again, Netflix might be fine shopping for great entertainment on the open market for a long time to come. This still leaves open the question of whether Netflix ought to take advantage of its high stock price by issuing more shares to a voracious, enraptured investing crowd. Some on Wall Street are suggesting just that, selling a couple of billion dollars worth of stock to build its cash war chest, to be used in building up its content library and marketing campaigns to quicken subscriber growth.
Netflix executives were asked on the earnings conference call whether the company might look to raise more capital given how high the stock is and how cheap it is to sell debt currently. CFO David Wells said, “we don't feel capital-constrained right now in terms of our pace of expansion. If we did, we would go out and tap the market.”
Of course, it might be tricky for a CEO to get on the road to sell his company’s shares to the public after he suggested the stock has been levitated, in part, by “euphoria.”
Related: The Business of "Breaking Bad" is Good; Netflix Not So Bad Either
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Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/netflix-could-next-big-network-150927256.html
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Lester, Red Sox rout sloppy Cards in Series opener
BOSTON (AP) — An easy toss on a sure out that skittered away. A routine popup that somehow dropped between Gold Glovers. And something even more startling — umpires reversing a key call.
Most everything fell into place for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series opener.
Mike Napoli hit a three-run double right after a game-changing decision in the very first inning, Jon Lester made the early lead stand up and the Red Sox romped past the sloppy St. Louis Cardinals 8-1 Wednesday night for their ninth straight Series win.
A season before Major League Baseball is expected to expand instant replay, fans got to see a preview. The entire six-man crew huddled and flipped a ruling on a forceout at second base — without looking at any video.
"I think based on their group conversation, surprisingly, to a certain extent, they overturned it and I think got the call right," Boston manager John Farrell said.
David Ortiz was robbed of a grand slam by Carlos Beltran — a catch that sent the star right fielder to a hospital with bruised ribs — but Big Papi later hit a two-run homer following third baseman David Freese's bad throw.
The Red Sox also capitalized on two errors by shortstop Pete Kozma to extend a Series winning streak that began when they swept St. Louis in 2004. Boston never trailed at any point in those four games and coasted on this rollicking night at Fenway Park, thanks to a hideous display by the Cardinals,
It got so bad for St. Louis that the sellout crowd literally laughed when pitcher Adam Wainwright and catcher Yadier Molina, who've combined to win six Gold Gloves, let an easy popup drop untouched between them.
Serious-minded St. Louis manager Mike Matheny didn't find anything funny, especially when the umpires changed a call by Dana DeMuth at second base.
"Basically, the explanation is that's not a play I've ever seen before. And I'm pretty sure there were six umpires on the field that had never seen that play before, either," Matheny said.
"It's a pretty tough time to debut that overruled call in the World Series. Now, I get that they're trying to get the right call, I get that. Tough one to swallow," he said.
DeMuth said he never actually saw Kozma drop the ball.
"My vision was on the foot. And when I was coming up, all I could see was a hand coming out and the ball on the ground. All right? So I was assuming," DeMuth told a pool reporter.
There was no dispute, however, that the umpires properly ruled Kozma had not caught a soft toss from second baseman Matt Carpenter on a potential forceout. That's what crew chief John Hirschbeck told Matheny.
"I just explained to him ... that five of us were 100 percent sure," Hirschbeck said. "Our job is to get the play right. And that's what we did."
"I said, 'I know you are not happy with it, that it went against you, but you have to understand that the play is correct,'" he said.
The normally slick-fielding Cardinals looked sloppy at every turn. Wainwright bounced a pickoff throw, Molina let a pitch trickle off his mitt, center fielder Shane Robinson bobbled the carom on Napoli's double and there was a wild pitch.
The Cardinal Way? More like, no way.
"We had a wakeup call. That is not the kind of team that we've been all season," Matheny said. "And they're frustrated. I'm sure embarrassed to a point."
Game 2 is Thursday night, with 22-year-old rookie sensation Michael Wacha starting for St. Louis against John Lackey. Wacha is 3-0 with a 0.43 ERA this postseason.
Beltran is day to day after X-rays were negative.
Lester blanked the Cardinals on five hits over 7 2-3 innings and struck out eight for his third win this postseason.
"We wanted to set the tone and get them swinging," he said.
Ryan Dempster gave up Matt Holliday's leadoff home run in the ninth.
Boston brought the beards and made it a most hairy night for St. Louis. The Cardinals wrecked themselves with just their second three-error game of the season.
The umpires made a mistake, too, but at least they got to fix it in a hurry.
After the control-conscious Wainwright walked leadoff man Jacoby Ellsbury, Dustin Pedroia singled him to second with one out.
Ortiz then hit a slow grounder to Carpenter, and it didn't appear the Cardinals could turn a double play. Hurrying, Kozma let the backhanded flip glance off his glove.
DeMuth instantly called Pedroia out, indicating that Kozma dropped the ball while trying to transfer it to his throwing hand. Farrell quickly popped out of the dugout to argue while Pedroia went to the bench.
Farrell argued with every umpire he could and must've made a persuasive case. As the fans hollered louder and louder as they studied TV replays, all the umpires gathered on the dirt near shortstop and conferred and decided there was no catch at all.
"You rarely see that, especially on a stage like this," Napoli said. "But I think that was good for the game."
Pedroia came bounding from the dugout and suddenly, the bases were loaded in the first. Napoli unloaded them with a double that rolled to the Green Monster in left-center.
Napoli, with maybe the bushiest beard of all, certainly picked up where he left off the last time he saw the Cardinals in October. In the 2011 Series, he hit .350 with two home runs and 10 RBIs as Texas lost in seven games to St. Louis.
The Red Sox added to their 3-0 lead with two more runs in the second. A fielding error by Kozma set up Pedroia's RBI single.
The whole inning got going when Stephen Drew's popup in front of the mound landed at Wainwright's feet, a step or two from Molina. The ace pitcher and the star catcher both hung their heads.
"I called it. I waited for someone else to take charge. That's not the way to play baseball. It was totally my error," Wainwright said.
Ortiz, who hit a tying grand slam at Fenway in the AL championship series win over Detroit, sent a long drive to right-center. Beltran, playing in his first World Series, braced himself with one hand on the low wall in front of the bullpen and reached over with his glove to make the catch.
"At least I got an RBI and we were up four and got the momentum," Ortiz said.
Beltran hurt himself on the play and left in the third inning.
Ortiz homered in the seventh and the Red Sox got another run in the eighth on a sacrifice fly by 21-year-old rookie Xander Bogaerts.
The Red Sox almost made a terrific play to finish the game. With two outs in the ninth, Freese hit a sharp single and right fielder Shane Victorino nearly threw him out at first base.
NOTES: Lester has pitched 13 1-3 scoreless innings in two Series starts. He closed out a 2007 sweep over Colorado. ... The Red Sox won their fifth straight World Series opener since losing Game 1 to St. Louis in 1967. ... Red Sox Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski threw out the first ball. ... The team that won the Series opener has taken the title in 14 of the past 16 years.
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- Mike Napoli
- Adam Wainwright
- David Ortiz
- Carlos Beltran
- Jon Lester
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