Chris Leben hasn't fought in more than a year. After losing to Mark Munoz in November of 2011, he tested positive for a banned painkiller and was suspended for a year. On Saturday, he'll try to get his career back on track against Derek Brunson, a Strikeforce fighter making his UFC debut.
For Leben's return, Affliction designed a shirt featuring graphics from his tattoos.
It has more meaning than your average Affliction design. Unfortunately, the design comes with a high price. Buy it here for $57.99.
Still from Nashville Season 1, Episode 2 with Connie Britton and Charles Esten.
NBC, Oct. 17, 10:50 p.m. ET
In the closing minutes of the second episode of Nashville, fortysomething country star Rayna James and her bandleader/ex-boyfriend Deacon Claybourne perform a quiet duet. ?No One Will Ever Love You? is a song they wrote together two decades back, young and in love. Romantic sparks still clearly crackle between them. But these days Rayna's married to another dude and raising two daughters. Meanwhile, Deacon (whose demons drove Rayna off all those years ago) works hard to stay sober?and even harder to keep his feelings for Rayna under wraps.
The song itself is downright mean. "Don't you try to tell me that you're wanted,"singsRayna,"that you're needed. 'Cause it's not true." She sits close to Deacon on the stage of the cozy Bluebird Cafe, staring into his eyes as he strums his guitar. When she reaches the chorus, it seems almost impossibly cruel?until a redeeming twist of a kicker. "I know why you're lonely. It's time you knew it, too. No one will ever love you. No one will ever love you. No one will ever love you ... like I do."
When it's over, an overcome Rayna tells Deacon she wishes they'd never played it. She runs home to assure her husband that she loves him. But she seems not quite able to convince herself.
I confess I swooned a little, watching from my couch. For one thing, this tune is gorgeous. Written by Steve McEwan and John Paul White, it's proof that TV musicals needn't fall back on stale covers and cheesy staging. (I'm reluctantly peeking at you through my fingers, Glee and Smash.) Here we have a boutique-quality original track, performed in a wholly believable context, that manages to advance the emotional arc of the show.
Most of all, though, I love that these are grown-ups dealing with grown-up shizz. Nashville's far from perfect?its politics plot is a dud and the travails of its younger characters are a mixed bag. But every time I get frustrated with it, Rayna and Deacon reappear with one of these soul-aching moments. Worn denim, weathered faces, paths not taken. Connie Britton with that faraway gaze and that wistful smile. Set it all to song and I'm done. I'm ready to book the next flight, buy a front-yoke shirt with snaps, and belly up to the bar at the Bluebird.
The Great Firewall of China might start requiring ID for admittance. On Monday, China's National People's Congress began discussing a draft decision that would force Internet users to use their real names in order to register for services. The draft decision is, depending on your perspective, a way to protect personal information online, or yet another move by China to restrict freedom of information.
Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth may be celebrating more than Christmas this December! The young couple, who have been engaged for six months, posted holiday photos of themselves sporting adorable Santa hats... and some new rings that look suspiciously like wedding bands. Have Liam and Miley secretly tied the knot?
They called him ?Diogenes the Cynic,? because ?cynic? meant ?dog-like,? and he had a habit of basking naked on the lawn while his fellow philosophers talked on the porch. While they debated the mysteries of the cosmos, Diogenes preferred to soak up some rays ? some have called him the Jimmy Buffett of ancient Greece.
Anyway, one morning, the great philosopher Plato had a stroke of insight. He caught everyone?s attention, gathered a crowd around him, and announced his deduction: ?Man is defined as a hairless, featherless, two-legged animal!? Whereupon Diogenes abruptly leaped up from the lawn, dashed off to the marketplace, and burst back onto the porch carrying a plucked chicken ? which he held aloft and shouted, ?Behold: I give you? Man!?
I?m sure Plato was less than thrilled at this stunt, but the story reminds us that these early philosophers were still hammering out the most basic tenets of the science we now know as taxonomy: The grouping of objects from the world into abstract categories. This technique of chopping up reality wasn?t invented in ancient Greece, though. In fact, as a recent study shows, it?s fundamental to the way our brains work.
Chunks of reality
At the most basic level, we don?t really perceive separate objects at all ? we perceive our nervous systems? responses to a boundless flow of electromagnetic waves and biochemical reactions. Our brains slot certain neural response patterns into sensory pathways we call ?sight,? ?smell? and so on ? but abilities like synesthesia and echolocation show that even the boundaries between our senses can be blurry.
Semantic Space. Image: Gallant lab, UC Berkeley
Still, our brains are talented at picking out certain chunks of sensory experience and associating those chunks with other stimuli. For instance, if you hear purring and feel fur rubbing against your leg, your brain knows to associate that sound and feeling with the fluffy four-legged object you see at your feet ? and to group that whole multisensory chunk under the heading of ?cat.?
What?s more, years of cat experience have taught you that it makes no sense to think of a cat as if it were a piece of furniture, or a truck, or a weather balloon. In other words, an encounter with a cat carries a particular set of meanings for you ? and those meanings determine which areas of your brain will perk up in the presence of a feline.
But where?s the category ?cat? in the brain? And where?s it situated in relation to, say, ?dog? or ?giraffe? ?or just ?mammal?? A team of neuroscientists led by Alexander Huth at UC Berkeley?s Gallant lab decided they?d answer these questions in the most thorough way possible: By capturing brain responses to every kind of object they could dig up.
Chunks in the brain
Those Gallant lab folks are no slouches ? you might remember them as the lab that constructed ?mind videos? of entire scenes?from neural activity in the visual cortex. This time, though, the lab?s ambitions were even broader.
Semantic Map. Image: Gallant lab, UC Berkeley
A research team led by Alex Huth showed volunteers hours of video footage of thousands of everyday objects and scenes ? from cats and birds to cars and thunderstorms ? as the subjects sat in an fMRI scanner. Then the researchers matched up the volunteers? brain activity not only to each object they saw, but also to a whole tree of nested object categories: A taxonomy of the brain?s taxonomy. A vision of a ?continuous semantic space,? where thousands of objects and actions are represented in terms of others.
Huth?s team collected volunteers? reactions to more than 1,300 objects and categories, and arranged these brain responses not only into a tree of object and action categories, but into a map of response gradients across the whole surface of the brain.
And as you can see from the color gradients in that tree diagram to the right (which is also available as an interactive online app), the relationships among our brains? categories are multidimensional. Objects may be more or less ?animal-like,? more or less ?man-made,? and so on ? and in fact, the researchers say they expect to find more subtle response dimensions that gauge an object?s size and speed.
Association and meaning
All this talk of ?dimensions of association? points back to a far more profound idea about how our brains work: We understand the meaning of an object in terms of the meanings of other objects ? other chunks of reality to which our brains have assigned certain characteristics. In the brain?s taxonomy, there are no discrete entries or ?files? ? just associations that are more strongly or more weakly correlated with other associations.
And that idea itself raises deeper quandaries: If associations define what an object or action ?is,? as some neuroscientists have argued, then why does the concept of meaning ? semantic representation ? need to enter the picture at all? Instead of being a special type of mental function, might ?meaning? itself simply be another word for ?association??
The answer to that question won?t be a simple one to find, at least for the foreseeable future. ?I don?t think it?s possible to make a conclusive claim about that from fMRI data,? says Jack Gallant, the lab?s director; ?and anyone who tells you otherwise is mistaken.?
A single three-dimensional pixel ? an fMRI voxel ? represents the activity of around one million neurons, Gallant explains; and at that resolution, it?s impossible to say what exactly the neural activity is encoding. Meaning could depend on association, association might depend on semantic coding, or the relationship between the two might be more nuanced than we can conceive right now.
Whatever that relationship turns out to be, the implication remains: In our brains, meaning and association go hand-in-hand. In the brain, even our most abstract concepts depend on our own ?real-world experiences. That?s an idea that?s infuriated Plato and his followers far more than Diogenes? plucked chicken ? but as Diogenes demonstrated on that long-ago morning, real-world evidence trumps speculation in the end.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) ? More than 200 Utah teachers are expected to pack a convention hall on Thursday for six hours of concealed-weapons training as organizers seek to arm more educators in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting.
The Utah Shooting Sports Council said it normally gathers a dozen teachers every year for instruction that's required to legally carry a concealed weapon in public places. The state's leading gun lobby decided to offer teachers the training at no charge to encourage turnout, and it worked.
Organizers who initially capped attendance at 200 were exceeding that number by Wednesday and scrambling to accommodate an overflow crowd.
"Schools are some of the safest places in the world, but I think teachers understand that something has changed ? the sanctity of schools has changed," Clark Aposhian, one of Utah's leading gun instructors, said Wednesday. "Mass shootings may still be rare, but that doesn't help you when the monster comes in."
Gun-rights advocates say teachers can act more quickly than law enforcement in the critical first few minutes to protect children from the kind of shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. In Arizona, Attorney General Tom Horne has proposed amending state law to allow one educator in each school to carry a gun.
Educators say Utah legislators left them with no choice but to accept some guns in schools. State law forbids schools, districts or college campuses from trying to impose their own gun restrictions.
"We're not suggesting that teachers roam the halls for a monster," said Aposhian, chairman of the Utah Shooting Sports Council. "They should lock down the classroom. But a gun is one more option if the shooter comes in."
A major emphasis of the required safety training is that people facing deadly threats should announce they have a gun and retreat or take cover before trying to shoot, he said.
Utah is among few states that let people carry licensed concealed weapons into public schools without exception, the National Conference of State Legislatures says in a 2012 compendium of state gun laws.
Utah educators say they would ban guns if they could and have no way of knowing how many teachers are armed.
"It's a terrible idea," said Carol Lear, a chief lawyer for the Utah Office of Education, who argues teachers could be overpowered for their guns or misfire or cause an accidental shooting. "It's a horrible, terrible, no-good, rotten idea."
___
Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com
Drug shortage linked to greater risk of relapse in young Hodgkin lymphoma patientsPublic release date: 26-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Robert Dicks rdicks@lpch.org 650-497-8364 Stanford University Medical Center
STANFORD, Calif. A national drug shortage has been linked to a higher rate of relapse among children, teenagers and young adults with Hodgkin lymphoma enrolled in a national clinical trial, according to research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Estimated two-year cancer-free survival for patients enrolled in the study fell from 88 to 75 percent after the drug cyclophosphamide was substituted for mechlorethamine for treatment of patients with intermediate- or high-risk Hodgkin lymphoma. The study was launched before the drug shortages began. The change occurred after a mechlorethamine shortage began in 2009. No study patients have died, but those who relapsed received additional intensive therapy that is associated with higher odds for infertility and other health problems later.
An analysis comparing how patients in each group were faring two years after their cancer diagnoses will appear in the Dec. 27 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The report provides the first evidence of a drug shortage adversely impacting treatment outcomes in specific patients. St. Jude led the study for a national group that includes the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children's Hospital; Massachusetts General Hospital; and Maine Medical Center.
In recent years, many patients and caregivers have had their medical care complicated by drug shortages, primarily of generic injectable drugs like mechlorethamine. Mechlorethamine, which has been used in cancer treatment since the 1960s, has only recently become available again.
Cyclophosphamide has been widely used in treatment of both adults and children with Hodgkin lymphoma. Based on earlier studies, the drug was considered a safe and effective alternative to mechlorethamine.
"This is a devastating example of how drug shortages affect patients and why these shortages must be prevented," said Monika Metzger, MD, an associate member of the St. Jude Department of Oncology and the study's principal investigator. "Our results demonstrate that, for many chemotherapy drugs, there are no adequate substitute drugs available."
Past shortages have been resolved in a variety of ways and always before a drug substitution became necessary, said Michael Link, MD, the senior author of the new report. Link is a professor of pediatrics in hematology-oncology at Stanford and a member of the pediatric hematology-oncology service at Packard Children's Hospital. He is also immediate past president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
"This puts a face on the problem of drug shortages and shows that the problem is real, not theoretical. This is about a curative therapy that we were unable to administer because the drug we needed was not available," Link said. "Despite heroic efforts by the drug shortage office of the Food and Drug Administration to solve the shortages of a number of medically necessary drugs, it is clear that patients are still suffering from the unavailability of life-saving drugs. A more systematic solution to the problem is needed."
Amy Billett, MD, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, is the paper's other author.
Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer of the lymph system and accounts for about 6 percent of childhood cancers. In the United States, about 90 percent of patients will become long-term survivors. Working as the Pediatric Hodgkin Consortium, in 2002 the five institutions involved in this study adopted a seven-drug chemotherapy regimen that included mechlorethamine for the treatment of high-risk pediatric patients. The goal was to preserve high cure rates, but to reduce the risk of second cancers, infertility and other problems associated with the earlier treatments. In 2006, a parallel study was opened for patients with intermediate-risk disease. The risk categories reflect the extent to which cancer has spread, particularly the number and location of lymph nodes involved, plus the presence of unfavorable symptoms of fever, night sweats and unexplained weight loss.
The strategy involved 12 weeks of the seven-drug chemotherapy regimen. Patients also received radiotherapy with the dose based on their response to chemotherapy. When mechlorethamine became unavailable, the protocol was revised to allow the cyclophosphamide substitution.
Outcomes for cancer patients are often measured in terms of cancer-free survival, which is the number of years patients remain free of the disease. When researchers assessed the substitution's impact, they found that estimated disease-free survival was 88 percent for the 181 patients whose treatment included mechlorethamine. It was 75 percent for the 40 patients who received cyclophosphamide instead. The difference led researchers to stop enrolling new patients in the trials.
"We can think of no credible explanation for this dramatic difference in event-free survival other than the drug substitution," the researchers noted. The analysis found that, as a group, patients who received cyclophosphamide had fewer unfavorable symptoms and were more likely to have intermediate-risk, rather than high-risk Hodgkin lymphoma. The patients ranged in age from 3 to 21. Half were age 14 or younger.
Patients who relapsed received additional therapy. Researchers said it is too soon to know if these patients will have the same long-term survival rates as those whose did not relapse. The additional treatment included intensive chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant using the patient's own blood-producing stem cells.
###
The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation's top medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://mednews.stanford.edu. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. For information about all three, please visit http://stanfordmedicine.org/about/news.html.
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford is an internationally recognized 311-bed hospital, research center and leading regional medical network providing the full complement of services for the health of children and expectant mothers. In partnership with the Stanford University School of Medicine, our world-class doctors and nurses deliver innovative, family-centered care in every pediatric and obstetric specialty, tailored to every patient. Packard Children's is annually ranked as one of the nation's best pediatric hospitals by U.S. News & World Report and is the only Northern California children's hospital with specialty programs ranked in the U.S. News Top 10. Learn more about us at www.lpch.org and about our continuing growth at growing.lpch.org. Friend us on Facebook, watch us on YouTube and follow us on Twitter.
Since opening 50 years ago, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has played a pivotal role in pushing overall U.S. pediatric cancer survival rates from 20 to 80 percent. Founded by the late entertainer Danny Thomas, St. Jude is the first and only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center devoted solely to children. St. Jude is also a leader in research and treatment of life-threatening blood disorders and infectious diseases in children. No family ever pays St. Jude for the care their child receives. To learn more, visit www.stjude.org. Follow us on Twitter @StJudeResearch
Since 1947, Boston Children's Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have provided comprehensive care for children and adolescents with cancer through Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Center. The two Harvard Medical School affiliates share a clinical staff that delivers inpatient care at Boston Children's and outpatient therapies at Dana-Farber's Jimmy Fund Clinic. The Boston Children's inpatient pediatric cancer service has 33 beds, including 13 designated for stem cell transplant patients.
STANFORD/PACKARD MEDIA CONTACTS: On-call media representative, (650) 723-8222 pager ID #25314; Robert Dicks, (650) 497-8364 or rdicks@lpch.org
ST. JUDE MEDIA CONTACTS: Summer Freeman (901) 595-3061 or summer.freeman@stjude.org; Carrie Strehlau, (901) 595-2295 or carrie.strehlau@st.judge.org
DANA FARBER CONTACT: Bill Schaller at (617) 632-5357 or william_schaller@dfci.harvard.edu
[ | 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.
Drug shortage linked to greater risk of relapse in young Hodgkin lymphoma patientsPublic release date: 26-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Robert Dicks rdicks@lpch.org 650-497-8364 Stanford University Medical Center
STANFORD, Calif. A national drug shortage has been linked to a higher rate of relapse among children, teenagers and young adults with Hodgkin lymphoma enrolled in a national clinical trial, according to research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Estimated two-year cancer-free survival for patients enrolled in the study fell from 88 to 75 percent after the drug cyclophosphamide was substituted for mechlorethamine for treatment of patients with intermediate- or high-risk Hodgkin lymphoma. The study was launched before the drug shortages began. The change occurred after a mechlorethamine shortage began in 2009. No study patients have died, but those who relapsed received additional intensive therapy that is associated with higher odds for infertility and other health problems later.
An analysis comparing how patients in each group were faring two years after their cancer diagnoses will appear in the Dec. 27 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The report provides the first evidence of a drug shortage adversely impacting treatment outcomes in specific patients. St. Jude led the study for a national group that includes the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children's Hospital; Massachusetts General Hospital; and Maine Medical Center.
In recent years, many patients and caregivers have had their medical care complicated by drug shortages, primarily of generic injectable drugs like mechlorethamine. Mechlorethamine, which has been used in cancer treatment since the 1960s, has only recently become available again.
Cyclophosphamide has been widely used in treatment of both adults and children with Hodgkin lymphoma. Based on earlier studies, the drug was considered a safe and effective alternative to mechlorethamine.
"This is a devastating example of how drug shortages affect patients and why these shortages must be prevented," said Monika Metzger, MD, an associate member of the St. Jude Department of Oncology and the study's principal investigator. "Our results demonstrate that, for many chemotherapy drugs, there are no adequate substitute drugs available."
Past shortages have been resolved in a variety of ways and always before a drug substitution became necessary, said Michael Link, MD, the senior author of the new report. Link is a professor of pediatrics in hematology-oncology at Stanford and a member of the pediatric hematology-oncology service at Packard Children's Hospital. He is also immediate past president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
"This puts a face on the problem of drug shortages and shows that the problem is real, not theoretical. This is about a curative therapy that we were unable to administer because the drug we needed was not available," Link said. "Despite heroic efforts by the drug shortage office of the Food and Drug Administration to solve the shortages of a number of medically necessary drugs, it is clear that patients are still suffering from the unavailability of life-saving drugs. A more systematic solution to the problem is needed."
Amy Billett, MD, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, is the paper's other author.
Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer of the lymph system and accounts for about 6 percent of childhood cancers. In the United States, about 90 percent of patients will become long-term survivors. Working as the Pediatric Hodgkin Consortium, in 2002 the five institutions involved in this study adopted a seven-drug chemotherapy regimen that included mechlorethamine for the treatment of high-risk pediatric patients. The goal was to preserve high cure rates, but to reduce the risk of second cancers, infertility and other problems associated with the earlier treatments. In 2006, a parallel study was opened for patients with intermediate-risk disease. The risk categories reflect the extent to which cancer has spread, particularly the number and location of lymph nodes involved, plus the presence of unfavorable symptoms of fever, night sweats and unexplained weight loss.
The strategy involved 12 weeks of the seven-drug chemotherapy regimen. Patients also received radiotherapy with the dose based on their response to chemotherapy. When mechlorethamine became unavailable, the protocol was revised to allow the cyclophosphamide substitution.
Outcomes for cancer patients are often measured in terms of cancer-free survival, which is the number of years patients remain free of the disease. When researchers assessed the substitution's impact, they found that estimated disease-free survival was 88 percent for the 181 patients whose treatment included mechlorethamine. It was 75 percent for the 40 patients who received cyclophosphamide instead. The difference led researchers to stop enrolling new patients in the trials.
"We can think of no credible explanation for this dramatic difference in event-free survival other than the drug substitution," the researchers noted. The analysis found that, as a group, patients who received cyclophosphamide had fewer unfavorable symptoms and were more likely to have intermediate-risk, rather than high-risk Hodgkin lymphoma. The patients ranged in age from 3 to 21. Half were age 14 or younger.
Patients who relapsed received additional therapy. Researchers said it is too soon to know if these patients will have the same long-term survival rates as those whose did not relapse. The additional treatment included intensive chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant using the patient's own blood-producing stem cells.
###
The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation's top medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://mednews.stanford.edu. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. For information about all three, please visit http://stanfordmedicine.org/about/news.html.
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford is an internationally recognized 311-bed hospital, research center and leading regional medical network providing the full complement of services for the health of children and expectant mothers. In partnership with the Stanford University School of Medicine, our world-class doctors and nurses deliver innovative, family-centered care in every pediatric and obstetric specialty, tailored to every patient. Packard Children's is annually ranked as one of the nation's best pediatric hospitals by U.S. News & World Report and is the only Northern California children's hospital with specialty programs ranked in the U.S. News Top 10. Learn more about us at www.lpch.org and about our continuing growth at growing.lpch.org. Friend us on Facebook, watch us on YouTube and follow us on Twitter.
Since opening 50 years ago, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has played a pivotal role in pushing overall U.S. pediatric cancer survival rates from 20 to 80 percent. Founded by the late entertainer Danny Thomas, St. Jude is the first and only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center devoted solely to children. St. Jude is also a leader in research and treatment of life-threatening blood disorders and infectious diseases in children. No family ever pays St. Jude for the care their child receives. To learn more, visit www.stjude.org. Follow us on Twitter @StJudeResearch
Since 1947, Boston Children's Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have provided comprehensive care for children and adolescents with cancer through Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Center. The two Harvard Medical School affiliates share a clinical staff that delivers inpatient care at Boston Children's and outpatient therapies at Dana-Farber's Jimmy Fund Clinic. The Boston Children's inpatient pediatric cancer service has 33 beds, including 13 designated for stem cell transplant patients.
STANFORD/PACKARD MEDIA CONTACTS: On-call media representative, (650) 723-8222 pager ID #25314; Robert Dicks, (650) 497-8364 or rdicks@lpch.org
ST. JUDE MEDIA CONTACTS: Summer Freeman (901) 595-3061 or summer.freeman@stjude.org; Carrie Strehlau, (901) 595-2295 or carrie.strehlau@st.judge.org
DANA FARBER CONTACT: Bill Schaller at (617) 632-5357 or william_schaller@dfci.harvard.edu
[ | 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.