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Remember Android One? It's Google's program to get manufacturers to develop high-quality, low-cost (less than $100) smartphones running stock versions of Android for developing countries. These devices, which will be regularly updated just like the Nexus line, now look like they're round the corner.
Every day dozens and dozens of new and updated apps and games hit the iOS and Mac App Stores. It's impossible to keep up with them all, but it's not impossible to pick out the very best. Here they are! Today we have updates to a calendar app, a news reader, a text editor, and more.
If you try any of the apps or updates, let me know how they work for you. If you got any new or updated apps today that you loved, but don't see here, let us know about them!
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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2013, before the Senate Finance Committee hearing on the difficulties plaguing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act,. The massive failure at healthcare.gov website is getting new criticism for lack of proper cybersecurity protections. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2013, before the Senate Finance Committee hearing on the difficulties plaguing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act,. The massive failure at healthcare.gov website is getting new criticism for lack of proper cybersecurity protections. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Add simmering Democratic discontent to the problems plaguing "Obamacare," now that first-month enrollment figures are out.
The White House is rushing to come up with an unspecified fix as early as this week to counter the millions of health coverage cancellations going to consumers, at the same time it promises improvements in a federal website so balky that enrollments totaled fewer than 27,000 in 36 states combined.
The White House also is taking a more open approach to changes in the law itself. "We welcome sincere efforts," presidential press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday at the White House as Democratic impatience grew over a program likely to be at the center of next year's midterm elections for control of Congress.
After weeks of highly publicized technical woes, the administration had said in advance the enrollment numbers would fall far short of initial expectations.
They did, easily.
A paltry 26,794 people enrolled for health insurance during the first, flawed month of operations for the federal "Obamacare" website.
Adding in enrollment of more than 79,000 in the 14 states with their own websites, the nationwide number of 106,000 October sign-ups was barely one-fifth of what officials had projected — and a small fraction of the millions who have received private coverage cancellations as a result of the federal law.
The administration said an additional 1 million people have been found eligible to buy coverage in the markets, with about one-third qualifying for tax credits to reduce their premiums. Another 396,000 have been found eligible for Medicaid, which covers low-income people.
Republicans were unmoved.
"Even with the administration's Enron-like accounting, fewer people have signed up for Obamacare nationwide than the 280,000 who've already lost their plan in Kentucky as a result of Obamacare mandates," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said.
Administration officials and senior congressional Democrats expressed confidence in the program's future. "We expect enrollment will grow substantially throughout the next five months," said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is in overall charge.
"Even with the issues we've had, the marketplace is working and people are enrolling," she added.
Despite the expressions, the White House raced to reassure anxious Democrats who are worried about the controversial program, which they voted into existence three years ago over Republican opposition as strong now as it was then.
Senate Democrats arranged a closed-door meeting for midday Thursday in the Capitol with White House officials, who held a similar session Wednesday with the House rank and file.
So far, five Senate Democrats are on record in support of legislation by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., to make sure everyone can keep their present coverage if they want to. The bill would require insurance companies to continue offering existing policies, even if they fall short of minimum coverage requirements in the law.
The measure has little apparent chance at passage, given that it imposes a new mandate on the insurance industry that Republicans will be reluctant to accept.
At the same time, a vote would at least permit Democrats to say they have voted to repair some of the problems associated with the Affordable Care Act, as many appear eager to do.
In a statement, Landrieu said Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Pryor of Arkansas were now supporting the legislation, as is Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. All but Feinstein are on the ballot next year.
Across the Capitol, majority Republicans in the House set a vote for Friday on legislation to permit insurance companies to continue selling existing policies that have been ordered scrapped because they fall short of coverage standards in the law.
While House passage of the measure is assured, each Democrat will be forced to cast a vote on the future of a program that Republicans have vowed to place at the center of next year's campaign.
Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania, who voted for the initial Obama health care bill, said Thursday that members of his caucus want an opportunity to go on the record in support of allowing people to keep the insurance they had.
Doyle told MSNBC in an interview that at a White House meeting Wednesday, House Democrats told Obama about "the frustration level that many of us have" with the health care roll-out.
Doyle said Democrats warned Obama that "if you don't give us something by Friday" to fix the insurance cancellation problem, then many Democrats are likely to vote for the pending House bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, which would accomplish that goal.
The promise of keeping coverage was Obama's oft-stated pledge when the legislation was under consideration, a calling card since shredded by the millions of cancellations mailed out by insurers.
Obama apologized last week for the broken promise, but aides said at the time the White House was only considering administration changes, rather than new legislation.
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Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Julie Pace contributed to this report.
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Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-11-14-AP-AP-10-Things-To-See/id-a0b6235c7e254ba5a539048e75f87d7aPUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 11-Nov-2013
Contact: Katherine Unger Baillie
kbaillie@upenn.edu
215-898-9194
University of Pennsylvania
It's no coincidence that the expression "to leave a bitter taste in one's mouth" has a double meaning; people often have strong negative reactions to bitter substances, which, though found in healthful foods like vegetables, can also signify toxicity. For this reason, the ability to sense bitterness likely played an important role in human evolution.
A new study by University of Pennsylvania scientists provides new evidence underlining the significance of bitter taste perception. Their work suggests that a genetic mutation that makes certain people sensitive to the taste of a bitter compound appears to have been advantageous for certain human populations in Africa. Yet the reason why this trait was selected may not have to do with just taste. Instead, the molecular receptor under study may also play important roles in immune response or metabolism.
"We're starting to understand that these taste receptors are involved in so many functions other than just oral sensory perception," said Michael Campbell, lead author on the study and a postdoctoral fellow in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine's Department of Genetics.
The study, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, represents the first time that this bitter-taste sensing gene, TAS2R16, was studied in a large set of ethnically and culturally diverse African populations.
"Because Africa is the site of origin of all modern humans," said Sarah Tishkoff, the study's senior author and a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with appointments in the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology and Penn Medicine's Department of Genetics. "Africans are going to have a large amount of diversity and non-Africans are going to have a subset of that diversity. In Africa, you get an opportunity to observe how these genetic variants are influencing phenotypes that you wouldn't have if you were only studying non-Africans."
Campbell, Tishkoff and other Penn researchers collaborated with Paul Breslin of Rutgers University and Monell Chemical Senses Center, as well as scientists from Addis Ababa University, France's Muse de L'Homme, Integral Molecular Inc., the Kenya Medical Research Institutes, Cameroon's Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation, Tanzania's Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences and the National institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
The work builds on a previous study by the group, which explored the evolutionary history of a gene called TAS2R38, responsible for the ability to perceive the bitter tasting compound PTC. In that research, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2011, the geneticists discovered that something other than taste perception must have driven the selection of that gene.
The current work examines the related gene TAS2R16, which codes for a molecular receptor that binds salicin. Salicin is a chemical found naturally in willow bark, the source of aspirin. It acts as an anti-inflammatory but in large doses can be toxic. It is also found in many nuts, fruits and vegetables.
To understand the patterns of variation at TAS2R16 in humans globally, the researchers collected DNA from 595 people in 74 populations across Africa with diverse lifestyles, such as pastoralism, hunting-gathering and agriculture. They sequenced the stretch of DNA encompassing the TAS2R16 gene in all of these individuals and also examined previously collected DNA from 94 non-Africans from the Middle East, Europe, East Asia and the Americas and found 15 variants total, most of which were only found in Africa.
In addition, the researchers asked 296 of the Africans sampled to perform "taste tests" of progressively more concentrated solutions of salicin and report when they could detect a bitter taste. The team also performed a cellular analysis, led by Integral Molecular scientists, to see the molecular effects of different TAS2R16 mutations.
The taste testing shows that the mutations in TAS2R16 had functional significance for the bitter taste perception system," Breslin said. "In this case, the mutation caused a gain of taste function.
When the researchers "mapped" individuals' genetic profiles onto their tasting ability, they found a strong correlation between one of the 15 variants and an increased sensitivity to salicin. The cell-based analysis offered an explanation for this sensitivity: cells with this genetic mutation had nearly twice as many receptors for salicin on their membranes as did cells with other forms of the TAS2R16 gene.
On a population level, the researchers found that the "high-sensitivity" variant for salicin was more prevalent in individuals from East Africa than in those from West Central or Central Africa, and non-Africans possessed only the "high-sensitivity" version of the gene. What's more, in East Africans this high-sensitivity variant, which arose roughly 1.1 million years ago, showed signs of being under a force of natural selection in humans, suggesting it conferred an evolutionary advantage at some point during our past.
"That's another sign that this variant must be tremendously important for human survival because it evolved in our human ancestors so long ago and carried over to us," Campbell said.
The geographic structure of TAS2R16 variants contrasts with the previous work on TAS2R38, variants of which did not appear to fall into any clear geographic pattern. These differences between two genes that both relate to bitter taste perception offer more support to the idea that taste was not the only force driving the evolution of this gene.
"The types of populations we're studying are diverse and they have diverse diets," Tishkoff said, "suggesting that there is likely something else going on here. By getting a handle on how much variation is in these populations, where it is located and what are the particular signatures of selection, it might start giving us clues as to what we should be looking at in terms of the biomedical or physiological significance of these genes."
###
Additional members of the team from Penn included Alessia Ranciaro, Daniel Zinshteyn, Renata Rawlings-Goss, Jibril Hirbo, Simon Thompson and Dawit Woldemeskel. Other collaborators included Alain Froment, Joseph B. Rucker, Sabah Omar, Jean-Marie Bodo, Thomas Nyambo, Gurja Belay and Dennis Drayna.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 11-Nov-2013
Contact: Katherine Unger Baillie
kbaillie@upenn.edu
215-898-9194
University of Pennsylvania
It's no coincidence that the expression "to leave a bitter taste in one's mouth" has a double meaning; people often have strong negative reactions to bitter substances, which, though found in healthful foods like vegetables, can also signify toxicity. For this reason, the ability to sense bitterness likely played an important role in human evolution.
A new study by University of Pennsylvania scientists provides new evidence underlining the significance of bitter taste perception. Their work suggests that a genetic mutation that makes certain people sensitive to the taste of a bitter compound appears to have been advantageous for certain human populations in Africa. Yet the reason why this trait was selected may not have to do with just taste. Instead, the molecular receptor under study may also play important roles in immune response or metabolism.
"We're starting to understand that these taste receptors are involved in so many functions other than just oral sensory perception," said Michael Campbell, lead author on the study and a postdoctoral fellow in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine's Department of Genetics.
The study, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, represents the first time that this bitter-taste sensing gene, TAS2R16, was studied in a large set of ethnically and culturally diverse African populations.
"Because Africa is the site of origin of all modern humans," said Sarah Tishkoff, the study's senior author and a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with appointments in the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology and Penn Medicine's Department of Genetics. "Africans are going to have a large amount of diversity and non-Africans are going to have a subset of that diversity. In Africa, you get an opportunity to observe how these genetic variants are influencing phenotypes that you wouldn't have if you were only studying non-Africans."
Campbell, Tishkoff and other Penn researchers collaborated with Paul Breslin of Rutgers University and Monell Chemical Senses Center, as well as scientists from Addis Ababa University, France's Muse de L'Homme, Integral Molecular Inc., the Kenya Medical Research Institutes, Cameroon's Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation, Tanzania's Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences and the National institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
The work builds on a previous study by the group, which explored the evolutionary history of a gene called TAS2R38, responsible for the ability to perceive the bitter tasting compound PTC. In that research, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2011, the geneticists discovered that something other than taste perception must have driven the selection of that gene.
The current work examines the related gene TAS2R16, which codes for a molecular receptor that binds salicin. Salicin is a chemical found naturally in willow bark, the source of aspirin. It acts as an anti-inflammatory but in large doses can be toxic. It is also found in many nuts, fruits and vegetables.
To understand the patterns of variation at TAS2R16 in humans globally, the researchers collected DNA from 595 people in 74 populations across Africa with diverse lifestyles, such as pastoralism, hunting-gathering and agriculture. They sequenced the stretch of DNA encompassing the TAS2R16 gene in all of these individuals and also examined previously collected DNA from 94 non-Africans from the Middle East, Europe, East Asia and the Americas and found 15 variants total, most of which were only found in Africa.
In addition, the researchers asked 296 of the Africans sampled to perform "taste tests" of progressively more concentrated solutions of salicin and report when they could detect a bitter taste. The team also performed a cellular analysis, led by Integral Molecular scientists, to see the molecular effects of different TAS2R16 mutations.
The taste testing shows that the mutations in TAS2R16 had functional significance for the bitter taste perception system," Breslin said. "In this case, the mutation caused a gain of taste function.
When the researchers "mapped" individuals' genetic profiles onto their tasting ability, they found a strong correlation between one of the 15 variants and an increased sensitivity to salicin. The cell-based analysis offered an explanation for this sensitivity: cells with this genetic mutation had nearly twice as many receptors for salicin on their membranes as did cells with other forms of the TAS2R16 gene.
On a population level, the researchers found that the "high-sensitivity" variant for salicin was more prevalent in individuals from East Africa than in those from West Central or Central Africa, and non-Africans possessed only the "high-sensitivity" version of the gene. What's more, in East Africans this high-sensitivity variant, which arose roughly 1.1 million years ago, showed signs of being under a force of natural selection in humans, suggesting it conferred an evolutionary advantage at some point during our past.
"That's another sign that this variant must be tremendously important for human survival because it evolved in our human ancestors so long ago and carried over to us," Campbell said.
The geographic structure of TAS2R16 variants contrasts with the previous work on TAS2R38, variants of which did not appear to fall into any clear geographic pattern. These differences between two genes that both relate to bitter taste perception offer more support to the idea that taste was not the only force driving the evolution of this gene.
"The types of populations we're studying are diverse and they have diverse diets," Tishkoff said, "suggesting that there is likely something else going on here. By getting a handle on how much variation is in these populations, where it is located and what are the particular signatures of selection, it might start giving us clues as to what we should be looking at in terms of the biomedical or physiological significance of these genes."
###
Additional members of the team from Penn included Alessia Ranciaro, Daniel Zinshteyn, Renata Rawlings-Goss, Jibril Hirbo, Simon Thompson and Dawit Woldemeskel. Other collaborators included Alain Froment, Joseph B. Rucker, Sabah Omar, Jean-Marie Bodo, Thomas Nyambo, Gurja Belay and Dennis Drayna.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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