深圳湾“春茧”附近即将诞生一座新地标，深圳腾讯公司未来新总部的所在地——腾讯滨海大厦。11月21日，腾讯新总部——腾讯滨海大厦在深圳市南山区科技园高新填海区举行了奠基仪式，广东省委常委、深圳市委书记王荣、市长许勤等出席奠基仪式。

王荣、许勤和腾讯公司首席执行官马化腾等为腾讯滨海大厦培土奠基。滨海大厦总投资约18亿元，包括一座248米高50层楼的南塔楼和一座194米高41层楼的北塔楼，建成后将成为腾讯在深圳的新总部大楼。许勤在致辞中说，腾讯是在深圳成长起来的全球著名互联网企业，为民族互联网企业发展和参与国际竞争作出了巨大贡献。在新的发展时期，深圳把互联网作为深圳战略性新兴产业，将为互联网企业发展创造更好的环境与支撑，希望腾讯把握新的机遇，再创新的辉煌，朝全球互联网行业最高峰迈进。

腾讯新总部大楼，腾讯滨海大厦，该项目位于南山区科技园内、后海大道与滨海大道的交汇处。项目总用地面积18650.95平方米，总建筑面积345,570平方米，包括一座248米高50层楼的南塔楼，一座194米高41层楼的北塔楼和三条连接两座塔楼并在内部设置共享配套设施的“连接层”。

据悉，建成后的腾讯滨海大厦的主概念是创造一座“互连”的塔楼。这座“互连大厦”象征性地代表着连接因特网的各个遥远角落的连通，并通过一个有形的建筑物以比传统的高层建筑更为有效的方式把腾讯员工联系在一起；同时作为一条都市互连带，是对外开放的深圳高科技园区的视觉门户。

截至2011年第三季度，腾讯QQ活跃用户数已达到7.117亿，也是全球唯一同时在线人数过亿的互联网产品。2011年前三季度腾讯总收入已达206亿元，截至目前，腾讯公司员工总数超过15000人。

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated that they are “passionate about providing all of our children with an education that will enable them to succeed in a globally competitive economy where knowledge and innovation are more important than ever,” in a press release found on ED.gov, the Education Department’s website.

Most of the activities listed for the week involved information sessions on international internships and education abroad programs. The University’s Honor Program held an event concerning the CUA Oxford Program on Thursday for honor students on campus who are considering the program.

Some events that were held on campus include an Education Abroad Social that took place on Wednesday by the CUA Global Ambassadors and the CUA Cultural Thanksgiving Potluck on Thursday hosted by Campus Activities, Campus Ministry and the Center for Global Education.

The number of University students who have decided to go abroad next spring has increased around 13.4% since last spring. The University “is sending 144 students to study overseas this coming spring,” said Tanith Fowler Corsi, Assistant Vice President for Global Education at the University.

There are also many international students who have enrolled in the University this year. “This fall, we have approximately 440 international students (both undergrad and grad), which represents an increase of approximately 4.5% in the past year,” said Fowler Corsi.

Fowler Corsi also said that, “the University’s participation in International Education Week showcases our efforts to promote programs that prepare American students for a global environment and attract future leaders from abroad to study and learn in the United States,” according to a University press release.

There wasn’t a large celebration when the rocket blasted off.

Instead, there was a sense of fulfillment in the lab and an acknowledgment that the work wasn’t over – the satellites would soon be deployed in space and need monitoring.

U-M put two satellites into space this morning – M-Cubed and RAX. They hitched a ride on a NASA rocket and satellite. U-M was one of three universities across the nation to send satellites into space on this rocket.

M-cubed, which about the size of a square tissue box, – 10 cm by 10 cm by 10 cm – is designed for taking pictures of Earth. But more importantly, it is also flying a prototype of a specialized computer that private industry is testing for future space flights. RAX, which is about three times the size of M-Cubed, will be conducting a variety of experiments and measurements of the atmosphere.

U-M has a long tradition of being involved in the space program. It currently has one satellite in orbit. It has funding for two more missions.

It’s taken four years to build M-Cubed. Ken Gmerek, now a senior and the project manager, joined the team the second week of his freshmen year.

“I’m excited and a little nervous,” he said about 5:40 a.m. this morning, eight minutes before the launch. “I’m also a little relieved to get to this point. It’s been a long time coming.”

Students Ken Gmerek, Jessica Schwartz and Jake Peyser await the launch of the satellites.

Much of the material to build the M-Cubed satellite came from materials purchased in local hardware stores, Gmerek said.

Having students build satellites that are actually launched into space is a great combination of teaching them how to do research, the engineering skills needed and also how to work with industry, said James Cutler, an aerospace engineering professor at U-M who has been guiding the students.

Many of the students that have been involved in the program and graduated have gone to work directly for a variety of space-related companies.

Some of those former students were in California near the launch site this morning to watch the launch and called the lab a couple of times to celebrate.

The satellites were expected to start broadcasting signals mid-morning. U-M has set up a couple of tracking stations on campus to get those signals.

Watch video of the rocket launch from NASA:

Researchers at CU’s Biofrontiers Institute have discovered three key fatty acids in python blood that, when reproduced, have the same positive effect on mammal heart growth as that observed in pythons.

A day after a Burmese python feeds, the mass of the snake’s heart increases by 40 per cent and the triglycerides in its bloodstream grow 50 times beyond normal levels. Since triglycerides are the main component in natural fats and oils, this results in massive amounts of fatty acids circulating through the python’s bloodstream.

“Fats in blood is usually associated with bad things in humans,” lead researcher Leslie Leinwand said. “We wanted to find out how the python manages to not have something toxic happen to it.”

The researchers discovered no evidence that the fats in the python’s blood deposited in the reptile’s heart. In fact, they found an increase in activity of a key enzyme that protects the heart from damage.

The research team was able to identify the three key fatty acids that could be used to mimic the chemical makeup of a python’s post-feeding blood.

They injected one sample of lab mice with blood plasma taken from recently fed pythons and injected a different sample with a “mimicking’’ mixture of the three fatty acids. In both cases, the mice showed increased heart growth, as well as other indicators of heart health.

“What is surprising about this study is that we were able to transfer that activity into a mammalian heart,” said Leinwand.

There is good heart growth and bad heart growth. Good human-heart growth can come from physical exercise. For example, elite athletes Michael Phelps and Lance Armstrong have huge hearts. Bad human-heart growth can come from chronic high blood pressure.

“Unfortunately, some people can’t exercise enough to achieve that good result,” Leinwand said.

The researchers’ next step is to test this fatty-acid combination in a mouse that has heart disease.

“The idea is that you could give it to a mouse before getting heart disease, while it might be developing it or after getting heart disease to see if it would prevent, slow down or decrease the disease,” said Leinwand, an expert in genetic heart diseases such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the leading cause of sudden death in young athletes.

Pythons are not typical lab animals, but Leinwand hopes these findings will open researchers’ minds for further study on more types of animals.

“My biggest caution is to take what we’ve found and think it can be applied to humans,” Leinwand said. “That’s a big leap. A lot more has to be done before we can say that.”

The study, which took 5 ½ years, appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. The research authors include a CU professor, two postdoctoral researchers, a graduate student and a CU undergraduate.

The administration’s move came after a challenge to the reform from 26 states and small businesses.

The justice department asked the Supreme Court to declare the law’s key provision, requiring everyone to buy health insurance, constitutional.

The legislation extended health coverage to an extra 32 million people.

Passed in 2010, the Affordable Care Act was a long-held dream of Democrats.

Challenge ‘will fail’

The White House’s move on Wednesday followed an August decision by the 11th Circuit appeals court, in Atlanta, that the individual insurance mandate exceeded Congress’ powers.

While the court said the remainder of the law was constitutional, it struck down its core requirement that Americans who can afford it must buy health insurance or pay a penalty from 2014.

The case was brought by 26 Republican attorneys general and governors, and small business owners, who oppose a provision forcing them to cover their employees’ healthcare at a level set by the government.

The justice department said in a statement on Wednesday: “Throughout history, there have been similar challenges to other landmark legislation such as the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and all of those challenges failed.

“We believe the challenges to the Affordable Care Act – like the one in the 11th Circuit – will also ultimately fail and that the Supreme Court will uphold the law.”

The healthcare law’s Republican opponents want to repeal it in the courts, contending that the government cannot force people to buy health insurance.

But a senior Obama adviser, Stephanie Cutter, argued that such a view was wrong because people who do not buy insurance force taxpayers to subsidise their care when they are taken to emergency rooms.

In a White House blog post, she added: “We don’t let people wait until after they’ve been in a car accident to apply for auto insurance and get reimbursed, and we don’t want to do that with healthcare.”

If the Supreme Court takes the case, as seems inevitable, a ruling would be expected next June, weeks before the nominating conventions in the run-up to November 2012′s presidential elections.

Correspondents say the case would thrust the law – derided by Republicans as “Obamacare” – to the forefront of the election campaign.

Aimed at strengthening its consulting services and management software businesses, HP has expanded two portfolios that support communications service providers (CSPs).

The new businesses include HP Solutions Consulting Services (HP SCS) and HP Operations Support Systems Transformation solutions for network and service management.

Telecom service providers can gain as these two portfolios offer expertise and tools for business transformation, including strategic and financial advisory, operational analysis, transformation management, and a full portfolio of operations support systems (OSS) software and integration services.

“CSPs can plan and execute transformation strategies with HP Solutions Consulting Services and HP OSS Transformation solutions,” said David Sliter, vice president and general manager, Communications and Media Solutions, HP Enterprise Services.

“To grow, CSPs need to enhance the customer experience, and that means fact-based transformation strategies, tight governance and automated solutions,” Sliter added.

With this, the IT major is adding new prepackaged solutions combining consultancy, software and a full services life cycle to its OSS Transformation portfolio.

The new assurance solutions are designed to improve the customer experience, reduce complexity and cost, and lay the groundwork for business growth. With pretested and prepackaged solutions, service providers can accelerate time-to-value.

The company expanded its HP SCS portfolio to include a benchmarking capability designed to help CSPs compare business and operational performance against peers, competitors and industry practices.

HP SCS Benchmarking is the foundation for the HP SCS Strategic and Financial Advisory, a new set of capabilities that enable telcos to complete business transformation strategies based on quantitative knowledge of current performance and alignment of business improvement initiatives to strategic objectives.

Earlier in March, HP announced that Bulgarian telecommunications provider VIVACOM would deploy HP’s next-generation intelligent network (NGIN), which is expected to help upwards of 600,000 pre-paid and virtual private network users reach optimized and tailored fixed and mobile services experiences.

As HIV treatment continues to improve, people with HIV are living much longer. Meanwhile, the CDC’s universal HIV screening program is bearing fruit, identifying more people who are infected with the AIDS virus.

The result is a widening gap between the number of Americans with HIV and the resources available to treat them.

“Our system is getting stretched,” IOM panel chair Paul D. Cleary, PhD, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, tells WebMD. “There is going to be a dramatic change in the number of people with HIV detected and cared for. When we start treating this many more people … we find there are barriers to getting them into available treatment facilities.”

Over 20% of the 1.1 million Americans with HIV don’t know they are infected. Learning they have HIV is good for the individual, as earlier treatment means better health. It’s also good for society, as people who know they carry HIV are less likely to infect others — and treatment actually makes a person less infectious.

“There is a moral imperative that if we do testing, we have to get people who test positive into care,” Michael Saag, MD, tells WebMD.

But there’s a raft of problems with actually providing this care, notes Saag, director of AIDS research at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and immediate past president of the HIV Medicine Association.

Saag’s state-of-the-art AIDS clinic is a prime example. In 2000, the clinic was caring for 750 patients. Now the same clinic, with pretty much the same funding and same staff level, is caring for 1,800 patients.

“We are at capacity now,” Saag says.

But more patients soon will be knocking at the door. Saag points to a graph in the IOM report showing that while U.S. funding for HIV care under the Ryan White Act has remained stable at about $200 million per year, the number of patients who qualify for benefits has increased from about 150,000 to 250,000.

That difference reflects the U.S. HIV treatment gap.

“We call it the triangle of misery,” Saag says. “But in this day and age of budget crisis in every state across the country, asking Congress for more money is not going to cut it.”

The IOM notes that states are slashing, not increasing, their HIV/AIDS programs. In 2009, states cut $170 million from these programs:

-22 states cut HIV care and treatment programs
-17 states cut their contributions to AIDS Drug Assistance Programs
-25 states cut HIV prevention programs
The cuts mean more red tape and more waiting lists for people who need HIV care. It sometimes means that people must interrupt their HIV treatment — an extremely dangerous situation, as such interruptions mean an increase in drug-resistant HIV.

Top PicksSlideshow: Top Myths About HIV and AIDS How to Stay Healthy With HIV Teen Sex: Help Your Teen Resist Peer Pressure Video: The Right Way to Use a Condom
Moreover, the old generation of health-care professionals caring for people with HIV is, well, getting older. And there’s only a trickle of young doctors in the pipeline.

One solution is “task shifting” — allowing trained nurse practitioners, physician assistants, psychologists, dentists, and others to perform tasks previously relegated only to doctors. Saag says this strategy has worked at his clinic, allowing it to double the number of patients treated.

But stretching current resources can only go so far. “It is worrisome. That is why the IOM report is so timely,” Saag says.

But Cleary says he and the other experts on the IOM committee are optimistic. He points to the National HIV/AIDS strategy as an important road map. And he says the committee was relieved at the passage of the Affordable Care Act, as an estimated 529,000 Americans with HIV are uninsured or underinsured.

A big step forward, Cleary says, would be coordination of state regulations to give health care providers flexibility in treating people with HIV. Also important is to find incentives for young doctors to choose primary care as a profession.

“We are a clever and caring nation. The amount of caring and concern on everyone’s part is just amazing,” he says. “HIV care providers aren’t in this for the money. But we should make it less of a burden on the providers and on the system to do this kind of work.”

According to an investigation by the CDC and New York city and state health officials, a kidney transplant recipient contracted the virus from a donor in an unnamed New York City hospital in 2009. The male donor acknowledged that he had engaged in unprotected sex with another man after he was screened for HIV, but before he donated the organ. The New York hospital tested the donor 79 days before transplant, when he showed no evidence of infection, but did not re-test him closer to the surgery that removed the organ.

The centers’ 1994 guidelines for organ-donor screening, which are being revised, did not address the timing of screening tests.

The CDC is also recommending the use of a test that detects the virus within eight to 10 days of infection.

Of the three major transplant centers serving the city, Mount Sinai Medical Center said the event did not occur there; a spokesman for another, New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said, “We don’t have any information about this.” New York University Langone Medical Center said that it would be “inappropriate” to comment.

Thanks to screening of organ donors for HIV, the chance of contracting the virus from a transplant is remote. The CDC estimates the risk of HIV transmission from deceased donors is about one in 25,000 donors, or about one every three years. “This may be happening more frequently than we recognize and we are likely missing cases,” said Matthew J. Kuehnert, director of the CDC’s Office of Blood, Organ, and other Tissue Safety.

The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, a public-private partnership that sets nationalpolicies for organ allocation and screening, and the United Network for Organ Sharing, which operates the system, are formulating a policy for living-donor screening that would keep patients safe without compromising organ availability, said Connie L. Davis, who chairs the panel working on the policy. “People don’t realize how complicated the scheduling and logistics can be for donors who are stepping forward out of the true goodness of their heart.” Dr. Davis said.

Sander Florman, director of the transplant program at Mount Sinai, said the hospital will test its donors as close to transplant as possible in accordance with the new recommendations, and educate donors “to be very careful about any risky behaviors and report them to us confidentially” before donating an organ.

The illness causes uncontrolled shaking, stiffness and slow movement as part of the brain dies.

The small study in The Lancet Neurology used a virus to add genes to brain cells, which resulted in reduced symptoms for half of patients.

Parkinson’s UK welcomed the study, but said further research was needed.

The disease affects 120,000 people in the UK, mostly in the over-50s.

There is no cure, although drugs and deep brain stimulation have been shown to reduce symptoms.

Gene treatment
Patients with Parkinson’s have reduced levels of a chemical – GABA – in part of the brain known as the subthalamic nucleus.

The researchers created a virus which “infects” cells with a gene to increase GABA production.

In the trial, 22 patients had the virus injected into their brains while 23 patients had “sham surgery”, to make them think they had the virus injected.

Their motor function was then scored over six months.

Patients who had gene therapy showed a 23.1% improvement in their motor score, those with sham surgery improved by 12.7%.

The report’s authors say this “offers a novel alternative to conventional pharmacological or surgical treatment” and that it “shows the promise of gene therapy for other neurological disorders.”

Professor Nicholas Mazarakis, who is a specialist in gene therapy at Imperial College London, told the BBC that the positive result was “very encouraging.”

He added: “This result should be taken with some caution though, as it constitutes a rather small mean improvement, only 10.4%, in the clinical rating scale motor scores between those patients receiving the gene therapy and the placebo group.”

In addition the absence of significant improvements in other secondary outcome measures such as dyskinesia and quality of life between the two groups, warrants further long-term evaluation of this treatment in more patients.”

There have been concerns about the safety of gene therapy. In 1999, Jesse Gelsinger died during a trial in the US and there were cases of leukaemia after treatment in France.

The authors say this procedure is safe.

Dr Michelle Gardner, research development manager at Parkinson’s UK, said: “This research shows the promise of gene therapy for neurological conditions like Parkinson’s, but further research is still needed.

“We still don’t know for how long the benefits of this treatment may last, or whether there may be long-term problems due to introducing viruses into the brain.

“In addition, any new treatment must be shown to be more effective than those currently available for Parkinson’s, which this treatment has not yet been shown to do.”

This week, scientists announced that if current extinction rates continue unabated, and vulnerable species disappear, Earth could lose three-quarters of its species as soon as three centuries from now.

“That’s a geological eyeblink,” said Nicholas Matzke, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and author of a paper describing the doom-and-gloom scenario. “Once you lose species, you don’t get them back. It takes millions of years to rebound from a mass extinction event.”

This means that not too far in the future, backyards might not be buzzing with bees, bombarded by seagulls or shaded by redwood trees. And while that might seem far off, species already are disappearing on a global scale. In recent history, we’ve lost the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon, the Javan tiger and the Japanese sea lion, and now, maybe the eastern cougar — declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday. Amphibians, mammals, plants, fish — none are immune to going the way of the dinosaurs, courtesy of the human impact on fragile ecosystems.

Such enormous losses have only occurred five times in the past half-billion years, during events known as “mass extinctions.” The best-known of these events occurred 65 million years ago — a “really bad day,” according to paleontologists — when an asteroid collided with Earth, sending fiery dust into the atmosphere and rapidly cooling the planet. These “Big Five” events set the extinction bar high: to reach mass-wipeout status, 75 percent of all species need to disappear within a geologically short time frame, meaning that Earth is currently on the brink of the sixth mass extinction.

To determine whether current losses could equal these mass extinction rates, scientists compared recent rates with species die-offs during the Big Five, taking into account presently endangered species. They also looked at the number of species lost in recent history and found that while rates are dramatically higher than expected, the percentage of vanishing species is not elevated — yet. We already are engaged in a seemingly inexorable march toward barren landscapes and empty seas, a procession fueled by human population growth, resource consumption and climate change, according to scientists.

“The good news is, we still have most of what we want to save,” Berkeley paleobiologist and lead study author Anthony Barnosky said. “But things are clearly going extinct too fast today.”

The paper, published in this week’s issue of Nature, resulted from a graduate seminar Barnosky organized in fall 2009. Together, he and students used fossils to compare extinction rates with more modern data, wanting to answer whether we really are seeing the sixth mass extinction. To make comparisons, scientists used information from well-preserved fossils and modern accounts of disappearing animals, focusing on our milk-bearing relatives: mammals.

Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, who was not involved in the study, said evidence of the sixth extinction is all around. For years, he studied the Bay Checkerspot butterfly on Stanford’s campus — but then, the butterfly disappeared from the campus, more than a decade ago. And, when Ehrlich journeyed to Morocco to sample a different Checkerspot species, he found no butterflies, just “sheep droppings and not one blade of grass.”

“Anywhere you go around the world,” Ehrlich said, “If you’re a field biologist, your sites and organisms are disappearing. ”

One particularly vulnerable group is marine mammals, according to study author and paleobiologist Charles Marshall, who said that while predictions are dire for our swimming relatives, they haven’t yet reached the point of no return.

“There really is time to reverse habitat destruction or massive overexploitation of resources,” Marshall said. “I love sushi, but I just don’t eat tuna anymore. I don’t want to be part of the decline of that group.”

Scientists say habitat destruction, global climate change, introducing invasive species, and population growth are contributing to losses.

“Those four things working in concert are kind of a perfect storm that’s setting up a recipe for disaster,” Barnosky said. “But people are the ones who are driving this extinction, so we can fix it.”

In addition to prioritizing species preservation, Ehrlich suggested starting with caps on human population growth and limiting resource consumption.

“We could do something about it, but I don’t see that we have the slightest inclination to,” he said.