TOKYO (AP) ? Japanese voters are chosing lawmakers for the upper house of parliament in an election expected to give Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition a strong mandate.
A victory Sunday would give Abe's Liberal Democratic Party and partner New Komeito control of both chambers of parliament ? an elusive goal for the government in recent years.
That would make it easier for Abe to deliver on reforms needed to cope with a rapidly graying population and bulging national debt. It also might give him the power to push through his party's nationalist agenda.
Abe says his first priority is sustaining a nascent economic recovery. Since taking office after the Liberal Democrats won a lower house election in December, the ailing economy has improved under aggressive monetary and fiscal stimulus.
The freemium debate continues to rage on. Some say it’s the future of how business will be run, while others say it’s synonymous with casual games (read: not for hardcore gamers). Now the tide appears to be changing for the latter group, spurred by the success of companies like Supercell?(Clash of Clans’ maker) and King?(which makes Candy Crush), that have inverted the model for free and picked up huge, dedicated gaming audiences in their wake. Rajeev Chand, managing director and head of research for Rutberg & Company, said that one of the biggest drivers moving everyone to freemium is simply that in-app purchases are generating a whopping 70 percent of game revenues today. Moreover, venture capital investment in mobile gaming was $224 million in the first half of 2013, as compared to $107 million over the same period in 2012, he said. He noted that this year’s investment has been buoyed mostly by Supercell’s $130 million?round. To look at it over the years, venture investment in mobile gaming was $185 million in 2012, $228 million in 2011, $118 million in 2010, $59 million in 2009, $35 million in 2008, and $14 million in 2007. He explained: “The takeaway is that mobile gaming has seen a significant increase in venture investment over the 2010-2013 time period as compared to 2007-2009 because of the high profile successes and exits such as Rovio, Supercell, Ngmoco and Omgpop.” Rovio makes the Angry Birds franchise, Ngmoco was acquired for $400 million in 2010, and Omgpop got acquired by Zynga for $200 million after its smash-hit, Draw Something (although Omgpop has since been shut down). Chand said: “Freemium is here to stay… Gamers hate in-app purchases, but they are still playing and buying.” Hopping on the freemium bandwagon The trend seems to have resonated with several game companies, which are moving over to freemium models, in spite of having enjoyed success with traditional monetization models. Boomzap Entertainment is an eight-year-old studio that has had many of its titles published by big names such as Big Fish Games and Reflexive Entertainment. The company has survived, maintaining its full-time employee base of 85 on its stable of paid games that are generally priced at the $14 mark. Its co-founder, Allan Simonsen, is vocal about “abhorring” the freemium model. And yet the company is breaking away from its tried-and-tested base to get on the freemium bandwagon. Simonsen said the
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Senate's deal to avert a showdown over its internal rules and confirm several long-stalled Obama administration nominees could upend a major case at the Supreme Court, one that would test the president's power to use recess appointments to fill high-level posts.
The case is shaping up as a major clash between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans over the power granted the president in the Constitution to make temporary appointments to fill positions that otherwise require confirmation by the Senate, but only when the Senate is in recess.
Obama had sought to overcome Senate Republicans' refusal to allow votes for nominees to the National Labor Relations Board and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by making recess appointments. Two federal appeals courts have said Obama overstepped his authority because the Senate was not in recess when he acted. Those courts invalidated actions of the NLRB as a result.
The Supreme Court is set to consider one of those cases around the end of the year, involving a dispute between a Washington state bottling company and a local Teamsters union in which the NLRB sided with the union. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned the board's ruling.
But now that the Senate is on the verge of breaking the logjam that led Obama to make the recess appointments in the first place, his administration may find its appetite diminished for a major high court case. That may be especially so because the justices have been more skeptical of Obama's Justice Department than its predecessors and the court's conservative majority has been hostile to union interests.
The administration would have to ask the court to dismiss the case, although that almost certainly would leave the appeals court decision in place. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The justices also might now see less urgency to decide the questions at issue ? what is a recess, when must vacancies occur to be filled through recess appointments and can the president override Congress' own view of what constitutes a recess.
In some instances, the new NLRB appointees contemplated in the Senate agreement could re-enact some of the earlier decisions, removing any potential taint. The NLRB did just that following a Supreme Court decision in 2010 that invalidated actions taken by only two members of the five-person board. One significant limitation is that the NLRB would have to get judges to relinquish cases currently in the courts.
"One key aspect of constitutional law is the notion of not deciding unnecessary questions, and it may be that the agreement today provides an avenue for the CFPB and NLRB to revisit their decisions and sidestep the constitutional questions at issue in the Supreme Court's recess appointment case," said Neal Katyal, former acting Solicitor General under Obama.
The case stems from Obama's decision to fill the three NLRB vacancies on Jan. 4, 2012, with Congress on an extended holiday break. At the same time, however, the Senate held brief, pro forma sessions every few days as part of the Republicans' explicit strategy of keeping Obama from filling vacancies through recess appointments.
If the justices ratify the lower court ruling, it would make it nearly impossible for a president to use the recess power, giving the opposition party in Congress the ability to block administration nominees indefinitely. And more than 1,600 NLRB decisions could fall in the process.
Rachel Brand, a senior lawyer with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said she hopes the court decides the case in favor of the bottling company. With hundreds of other legal challenges pending to NLRB decisions, Brand said it "would be a mess to re-litigate" those cases if the justices were to punt on the case before them.
The head of a think tank that is opposed to the chamber on the recess appointments issue said he also wants the high court to remain in the case and overturn what he sees as a damaging appeals court ruling. "The fact that Congress has now cleared the way for the board to be fully staffed with Senate-confirmed members in no way changes that calculus," said Douglas Kendall, president of the Congressional Accountability Center.
In addition to the two rulings against Obama recess appointees, three federal appeals courts have upheld recess appointments in previous administrations.
For all the Democratic complaints about Republican obstruction of the president and GOP anger over Obama recess appointments, the subject is acutely susceptible to changing political fortunes.
The parties' roles were reversed when a Republican president, George W. Bush, was in the White House and Democrats controlled the Senate in the final two years of his presidency. Then, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid employed the same tactic of convening the Senate every few days to keep Bush from filling vacancies through recess appointments. Unlike Obama, Bush did not press the issue.
If the Supreme Court doesn't settle it now, the issue could arise again while Obama still is in office. Or the court could await a future president of either party facing a determined Senate opposition.
Never one to let a tragedy go unexploited, head Westboro nutbag Shirley Phelps-Roper announced via Twitter that the WBC will be picketing the funeral of 31-year-old Glee star Cory Monteith, who died on Saturday.
Apparently there were no puppies for Shirley to run over, and she was looking for something to do.
Phelps-Roper posted on the Westboro Baptist Church twitter account that Monteith was a ?fag enabler? who was ?struck down by raging mad God..? She took the effort to tweet Lea Michele personally and ?praise God for killing Cory Monteith? and wonder if Lea would also commit suicide.
Hopefully Monteith?s funeral will be in Vancouver?the Westboro clan has been banned from Canada since trying to protest the funeral of a murder victim in 2008.
New way to target an old foe: MalariaPublic release date: 17-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah McDonnell s_mcd@mit.edu 617-253-8923 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Engineered liver tissue developed at MIT could help scientists test new drugs and vaccines
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Although malaria has been eradicated in many countries, including the United States, it still infects more than 200 million people worldwide, killing nearly a million every year. In regions where malaria is endemic, people rely on preventive measures such as mosquito netting and insecticides. Existing drugs can help, but the malaria parasite is becoming resistant to many of them.
Scientists working to develop new drugs and vaccines hope to target the parasite in the earliest stages of an infection, when it quietly reproduces itself in the human liver.
In a major step toward that goal, a team led by MIT researchers has now developed a way to grow liver tissue that can support the liver stage of the life cycle of the two most common species of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax. This system could be used to test drugs and vaccines against both species, says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
Bhatia is the senior author of a paper describing the liver-tissue system in the July 17 issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe. The paper's lead author is Sandra March, a research scientist in Bhatia's lab, and scientists from the Broad Institute, Sanaria Inc. and the University of Lisbon also contributed to the research.
Reproducing infection
The malaria life cycle has several stages. Once the parasite infects a human victim, through a mosquito bite, it takes up residence in the liver. The parasite spends about a week in the liver, producing tens of thousands of copies that eventually burst free to infect blood cells. After this initial infection, P. vivax can lurk for weeks, months or even years, reactivating to cause another malaria bout.
So far, researchers have been able to grow P. falciparum in human blood and, to a certain extent, in its liver stages, but they have not been able to reliably grow P. vivax in either stage. P. falciparum has the highest malaria mortality rate, but P. vivax can cause debilitating, long-term infections. To eradicate malaria, drugs and vaccines that target both species will probably be needed, Bhatia says.
Bhatia who is also a senior associate member of the Broad Institute and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science has previously created micropatterned surfaces on which liver tissue can be grown, surrounded by supportive cells. These engineered cells survive for up to six weeks and mimic most of the functions of liver cells in the body, including drug metabolism and production of liver proteins.
Using unique, frozen samples of P. falciparum obtained in collaboration with Stephen L. Hoffman and his team at Sanaria, the researchers infected healthy liver cells and observed the development of liver-stage parasites using an automated imaging system designed in collaboration with Anne Carpenter's group at the Broad Institute. This system allows them to quickly evaluate not only how much infection has occurred, but also the effects of potential drugs. They can also measure how weakened forms of the parasites, which could be used as vaccines, perform in the liver.
To test the system's usefulness, the researchers studied a P. falciparum vaccine that is now in clinical trials. For a weakened, or attenuated, parasite to succeed as a vaccine, it must infect the liver and progress enough to raise an immune response, but then arrest and not reach the blood stage. The researchers showed that the vaccine now in trials does follow that trajectory.
The new system could also be used for larger-scale drug studies than previously possible, Bhatia says. Researchers now use liver cancer cells grown in the lab to study P. falciparum infection, but those cells have deficient drug metabolism and keep growing instead of providing a quiet home for the parasite to persist.
Seeking P. vivax
Obtaining enough P. vivax samples to test the system took several years, but the team eventually acquired samples, flown in from Thailand, India and South America. Using these samples, they were able to grow P. vivax in liver tissue and show that it produces small persistent parasites that appear to be dormant forms called hypnozoites.
"We don't want to call them hypnozoites yet, because nobody has a gold-standard marker for them, but we have persistent small forms that live for three weeks. So we are optimistic and doing more to wake them up again. Reactivation would be the ultimate confirmation," Bhatia says.
The researchers are now working on confirming that the P. vivax they grew in the liver tissue really did create hypnozoites. Once this is confirmed, they plan to start testing some candidate drugs, now in development, against P. vivax.
###
The research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Medicines for Malaria Venture, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
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.
New way to target an old foe: MalariaPublic release date: 17-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah McDonnell s_mcd@mit.edu 617-253-8923 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Engineered liver tissue developed at MIT could help scientists test new drugs and vaccines
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Although malaria has been eradicated in many countries, including the United States, it still infects more than 200 million people worldwide, killing nearly a million every year. In regions where malaria is endemic, people rely on preventive measures such as mosquito netting and insecticides. Existing drugs can help, but the malaria parasite is becoming resistant to many of them.
Scientists working to develop new drugs and vaccines hope to target the parasite in the earliest stages of an infection, when it quietly reproduces itself in the human liver.
In a major step toward that goal, a team led by MIT researchers has now developed a way to grow liver tissue that can support the liver stage of the life cycle of the two most common species of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax. This system could be used to test drugs and vaccines against both species, says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
Bhatia is the senior author of a paper describing the liver-tissue system in the July 17 issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe. The paper's lead author is Sandra March, a research scientist in Bhatia's lab, and scientists from the Broad Institute, Sanaria Inc. and the University of Lisbon also contributed to the research.
Reproducing infection
The malaria life cycle has several stages. Once the parasite infects a human victim, through a mosquito bite, it takes up residence in the liver. The parasite spends about a week in the liver, producing tens of thousands of copies that eventually burst free to infect blood cells. After this initial infection, P. vivax can lurk for weeks, months or even years, reactivating to cause another malaria bout.
So far, researchers have been able to grow P. falciparum in human blood and, to a certain extent, in its liver stages, but they have not been able to reliably grow P. vivax in either stage. P. falciparum has the highest malaria mortality rate, but P. vivax can cause debilitating, long-term infections. To eradicate malaria, drugs and vaccines that target both species will probably be needed, Bhatia says.
Bhatia who is also a senior associate member of the Broad Institute and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science has previously created micropatterned surfaces on which liver tissue can be grown, surrounded by supportive cells. These engineered cells survive for up to six weeks and mimic most of the functions of liver cells in the body, including drug metabolism and production of liver proteins.
Using unique, frozen samples of P. falciparum obtained in collaboration with Stephen L. Hoffman and his team at Sanaria, the researchers infected healthy liver cells and observed the development of liver-stage parasites using an automated imaging system designed in collaboration with Anne Carpenter's group at the Broad Institute. This system allows them to quickly evaluate not only how much infection has occurred, but also the effects of potential drugs. They can also measure how weakened forms of the parasites, which could be used as vaccines, perform in the liver.
To test the system's usefulness, the researchers studied a P. falciparum vaccine that is now in clinical trials. For a weakened, or attenuated, parasite to succeed as a vaccine, it must infect the liver and progress enough to raise an immune response, but then arrest and not reach the blood stage. The researchers showed that the vaccine now in trials does follow that trajectory.
The new system could also be used for larger-scale drug studies than previously possible, Bhatia says. Researchers now use liver cancer cells grown in the lab to study P. falciparum infection, but those cells have deficient drug metabolism and keep growing instead of providing a quiet home for the parasite to persist.
Seeking P. vivax
Obtaining enough P. vivax samples to test the system took several years, but the team eventually acquired samples, flown in from Thailand, India and South America. Using these samples, they were able to grow P. vivax in liver tissue and show that it produces small persistent parasites that appear to be dormant forms called hypnozoites.
"We don't want to call them hypnozoites yet, because nobody has a gold-standard marker for them, but we have persistent small forms that live for three weeks. So we are optimistic and doing more to wake them up again. Reactivation would be the ultimate confirmation," Bhatia says.
The researchers are now working on confirming that the P. vivax they grew in the liver tissue really did create hypnozoites. Once this is confirmed, they plan to start testing some candidate drugs, now in development, against P. vivax.
###
The research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Medicines for Malaria Venture, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
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.
The freemium debate continues to rage on. Some say it’s the future of how business will be run, while others say it’s synonymous with casual games (read: not for hardcore gamers). Now the tide appears to be changing for the latter group, spurred by the success of companies like Supercell?(Clash of Clans’ maker) and King?(which makes Candy Crush), that have inverted the model for free and picked up huge, dedicated gaming audiences in their wake. Rajeev Chand, managing director and head of research for Rutberg & Company, said that one of the biggest drivers moving everyone to freemium is simply that in-app purchases are generating a whopping 70 percent of game revenues today. Moreover, venture capital investment in mobile gaming was $224 million in the first half of 2013, as compared to $107 million over the same period in 2012, he said. He noted that this year’s investment has been buoyed mostly by Supercell’s $130 million?round. To look at it over the years, venture investment in mobile gaming was $185 million in 2012, $228 million in 2011, $118 million in 2010, $59 million in 2009, $35 million in 2008, and $14 million in 2007. He explained: “The takeaway is that mobile gaming has seen a significant increase in venture investment over the 2010-2013 time period as compared to 2007-2009 because of the high profile successes and exits such as Rovio, Supercell, Ngmoco and Omgpop.” Rovio makes the Angry Birds franchise, Ngmoco was acquired for $400 million in 2010, and Omgpop got acquired by Zynga for $200 million after its smash-hit, Draw Something (although Omgpop has since been shut down). Chand said: “Freemium is here to stay… Gamers hate in-app purchases, but they are still playing and buying.” Hopping on the freemium bandwagon The trend seems to have resonated with several game companies, which are moving over to freemium models, in spite of having enjoyed success with traditional monetization models. Boomzap Entertainment is an eight-year-old studio that has had many of its titles published by big names such as Big Fish Games and Reflexive Entertainment. The company has survived, maintaining its full-time employee base of 85 on its stable of paid games that are generally priced at the $14 mark. Its co-founder, Allan Simonsen, is vocal about “abhorring” the freemium model. And yet the company is breaking away from its tried-and-tested base to get on the freemium bandwagon. Simonsen said the
Apparently there were no puppies for Shirley to run over, and she was looking for something to do.![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 17-Jul-2013
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