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Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Spain has eyes set on going down as greatest team

By PAUL LOGOTHETIS

AP Sports Writer

Associated Press Sports

updated 3:41 p.m. ET July 2, 2012

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -Spain has taken its place among football's all-time great sides by becoming the first team to defend its European Championship after winning the World Cup. The task, now, is to be remembered as the greatest.

The team will now look ahead to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil to retain its title from two years ago in South Africa. If the Spaniards can do that, it will be virtually impossible to deny them the moniker of best team ever.

On Sunday, Spain thumped Italy 4-0 in the Euro 2012 final to secure an unprecedented third straight major title for a European team. The riveting display was the most lopsided scoreline produced by any winner of a European or World Cup final.

"The bar has been set very high," midfielder Xavi Hernandez said. "The expectations are high. Now everyone will expect us to always triumph, and it's better that way. Before it was more difficult."

The Spaniards improved with every game of a monthlong tournament in which they were at times criticized for being boring for playing possession-based football and starting some matches with six midfielders instead of a recognized striker.

Spain certainly has done an impressive job of winning since Luis Aragones' side won Euro 2008 with flair, and his replacement Vicente del Bosque has stayed true to Spain's "tiki taka" - or quick-touch and free-flowing - style.

Del Bosque became just the second coach after West Germany's Helmut Schoen to win European and world titles. He has tinkered some and although the Spaniards didn't always roll in the goals in Poland and Ukraine, they have showed the maturity, patience and confidence of veteran champions.

The former Real Madrid coach was criticized for playing without a traditional striker and relying on attacking midfielders like Xavi, Andres Iniesta, David Silva and Cesc Fabregas to carry the attack. All four players were involved in nearly each of the four goals Sunday.

Spain effectively neutralized opponents through possession, with its heavy passing game tiring them and creating the chances they needed to break through. And the defense has been as reliable, too.

"What we do is difficult but we make it look easy. It wasn't a walk in the park," said goalkeeper and captain Iker Casillas, who hasn't conceded a goal in the elimination stages of a tournament since the 2006 World Cup, a run of 10 games. "We won being true to our playing style, and by moving the ball, the we way we moved it we knew how to take charge of the match."

Since that European Championship triumph in Vienna four years ago, Spain became the first team to win 15 straight competitive fixtures and matched Brazil's record 35-game unbeaten run from the 1990s. Spain finished qualifying for the last two major tournaments perfect and are currently unbeaten in 20 straight official games.

West Germany and France are the previous World Cup champions who failed to win that coveted third straight trophy, while winning three straight titles that included a World Cup has also eluded Brazil.

Spain's next task will certainly be its biggest test as it will have to win in 2014 in Brazil, a nation that has won five World Cups and produced arguably the greatest national team ever.

"Our performance was complete," Iniesta said. "(Still) I never could have imagined this."

---

Paul Logothetis can be reached at: www.twitter.com/PaulLogoAP

More news

Spain fetes its champions

Swathed in the red-and-yellow colors of Spain, hundreds of thousands packed central Madrid to give a hero's welcome Monday to "La Roja'' - the national soccer team that erased the country's gloomy mood by winning the Euro 2012 Championship with such flair.

Spain has eyes set on going down as greatest team

Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/47396939/ns/sports-soccer/

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Monday, July 2, 2012

Lymph node roundabout

Monday, July 2, 2012

\An organism's ability to make new antibodies and use them to optimize its own immune defenses is of central importance in the fight against pathogens. In the case of severe infections, the overall relative speed with which an immune response proceeds could mean the difference between life and death. An international team of scientists, among them systems immunologist Prof. Michael Meyer-Hermann of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) of Braunschweig, Germany, has now found that asymmetric division of antibody-producing B cells speeds up the body's immune defenses. Early on, one daughter cell starts making antibodies while the other works at refining its own antibodies. The researchers' findings are due to be published in the upcoming issue of the scientific journal, Cell Reports.

Our immune system produces antibodies as effective long-term weapons against viral or bacterial infections or following vaccination. Antibodies are made in lymph nodes by specialized cells called B lymphocytes. In certain areas within a lymph node - called germinal centers - these B cells first undergo a process of selection.

B cells proliferate, mutate, and thereby change their antibodies. The immune system then checks to make sure whether or not these mutations translate into an improved immune response. If so, the cells in question are selected. The final outcome is the production of optimized antibodies capable of efficiently attaching to a particular pathogen and thereby inactivating it or labeling it for subsequent destruction by phagocytic scavenger cells. "As part of this evolutionary process, the immune system takes turns between chance mutations and best-candidate-selection," explains Michael Meyer-Hermann, Director of the HZI's Department of Systems Immunology and professor of systems biology at the Technische Universit?t Braunschweig. "We are calling it the 'recycling hypothesis'." All of this allows the immune system to make sure that any antibody it produces is maximally effective against the particular pathogen it is looking to fight.

A year and a half ago, an international team of New York-based and HZI researchers described this process of antibody optimization experimentally in great detail. However, up until now, the nature of the trade-off relationship between mutation and selection was unclear. "There has been a lot of debate about whether or not one should picture this process as a one-way street or as a roundabout," says Meyer-Hermann. As the study's first author, Meyer-Hermann has analyzed his colleagues' experimental results mathematically and determined that the earlier measurements are only compatible with the idea of a roundabout.

At the beginning of the year, a team of British researchers from London showed that B cell division is asymmetric, resulting in production of unequal daughter cells. At first, the purpose of this kind of asymmetric cellular division seemed uncertain. Meyer-Hermann's analyses suggest that one of the two daughter cells leaves the germinal center and starts producing antibodies while the other stays behind and undergoes another round of mutation and selection inside the germinal center. The mathematical model illustrates the advantage of this type of set-up. While one fairly specialized daughter cell is already making antibodies, its clone, which can be further optimized in the next round, stays behind. Compared with symmetric division, in asymmetric division there is a tenfold increase in the number of antibodies produced. In addition, the cell that stays behind in the germinal center stores information regarding a successful antibody it has produced, and the optimization process thus concludes more quickly. "This kind of time-saving in antibody production can be a real life-saver in the case of a dangerous infection," explains Michael Meyer-Hermann.

###

Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research: http://www.helmholtz-hzi.de/en

Thanks to Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 14 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/121372/Lymph_node_roundabout

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Ruling ups support for Obama health care

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ruling-ups-support-obama-healthcare-still-unpopular-040755810.html

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5 Fantastic Fireworks Facts

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/5-fantastic-fireworks-facts-113522289.html

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Sunday, July 1, 2012

Warnings after 7 die amid searing heat, storms

Violent storms that hit the D.C. area late Friday were blamed for the deaths of two people while it emerged that five people, including three young children, may have died due to the severe heat affecting much of the country.

Forecasters warned of more dangerously high temperatures Saturday -- in excess of 100 degrees -- across a vast swath of the United States and said there was a chance of severe thunderstorms.

The storms wiped out power to more than 2 million people across the eastern United States. Widespread power outages were reported from Indiana to New Jersey, with the bulk of the service interruptions concentrated on Washington, D.C., and the surrounding areas.

Fallen trees were blamed for two deaths in Springfield, Va. ? a 90-year-old woman in her home and a man driving a car, Fairfax County police spokeswoman Mary Ann Jennings said early Saturday.

In addition, a park police officer was injured by an uprooted tree in the northern Virginia county, and an 18-year-old man was struck by a power line, Jennings said. He was in stable condition after receiving CPR, Jennings said.

Amtrak said on Twitter that services from Wahsington to Philadelphia was suspended until 9 a.m. ET due to severe weather-related problems. Repairs underway. Amtrak apologizes for any inconvenience.

On Friday, the nation's capital reached 104 degrees ? topping a record of 101 set in 1934.

'Everything good is down': Storm knocks out Netflix, Instagram

Heat is suspected to have been the cause of the deaths of two young brothers in eastern Tennessee, Reuters reported. The boys, aged 3 and 5, had been playing outside Thursday. The younger boy died Thursday, and the older boy on Friday afternoon, according to Eric Blach, administrator for the Bradley County Medical Examiner's Office.

Video: How hot will it get this weekend? (on this page)

In Kansas City, Missouri, city health officials said Friday they were investigating the deaths of three area residents, including a baby boy, to determine if they were heat-related, according to Reuters.

Early Saturday, the National Weather Service issued excessive heat warnings for parts of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, D.C., Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee and Arizona.

It said the temperatures could get "dangerously hot."

Weather.com published a map of the U.S. showing areas at risk of severe thunderstorms Saturday, with an area from Iowa to the Mid-Atlantic at risk.

"Another round of widespread damaging winds may materialize in these hard-hit areas," it warned. "A second area of severe weather is possible for the central and northern Plains, but those storms may be more isolated in nature."

Story: Heat hub for US is Kansas farm town -- not Death Valley

It said severe thunderstorm would typically form at the northern edge of areas of excessive heat.

"A powerful derecho developed Friday over Indiana and marched eastward across Ohio, the Virginias and into Maryland and Delaware, causing widespread wind damage with gusts over 90 miles per hour in some cases," it added.

Slideshow: Summertime living (on this page)

West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency after more than 500,000 customers in 27 counties were left without electricity because of the storm.

More than 20 elderly residents at an apartment home in Indianapolis were displaced when the facility lost power due to a downed tree.

Most were bused to a Red Cross facility to spend the night, and others who depend on oxygen assistance were given other accommodations, the fire department said.

The storms, sometimes packing 70 mph winds, toppled three tractor trailers on Interstate 75 near Findlay, Ohio.

At least four utility poles fell on a road in Columbus, Ohio, making it too dangerous for people in four cars to get out, police said. One person was taken to a hospital.

Pepco reported hundreds of thousands of outages in the District of Columbia and Montgomery and Prince George's counties, Md.

"We have more than half our system down," said Pepco spokeswoman Myra Oppel. "This is definitely going to be a multi-day outage."

In the Washington, D.C., area, the Metrorail subway trains were returned to their endpoints due to the storms and related damage, officials said.

"It has had a widespread effect on the region," Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said early Saturday.

He said about 17 train stations were operating on backup power due to local power outages, but that he didn't anticipate service being disrupted on Saturday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48024138/ns/weather/

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Preparing for Interviews: 6 Tips for Easing Interview Anxiety

If you?re not used to doing interviews, chances are the prospect makes you nervous. Even experienced speakers may freeze up in anticipation of unknown questions and uncertainty over how to answer.

Fortunately there are some steps you can take to reduce interview anxiety. Here are some tips on how to get ready before your interview to improve your performance and ease your stress.

1. Plan an Offer

Start by focusing on the goal of your interview. Knowing where you?re heading will help distract you from anxiety and navigate towards the results you want.

If you?re promoting a product or service, usually the goal is to get the audience to follow up with some action. The action may be visiting a website, calling a phone number, or buying a book, for example.

Decide what action you want your audience to take ahead of time, and plan your interview accordingly. Use the desired action to rehearse how you will respond to answers, and look for opportunities during the interview to invite your audience to take follow-up action.

You should also coordinate your follow-up action with any promotional partners you have. For instance, if you are selling a book, you might make arrangements with local bookstores ahead of time in order to set up a special offer you can mention during the interview.

2. Prepare Index Cards

To help your host promote you, you should prepare a set of three index cards before your interview: one for the producer, one for the host, and one for the station?s phone operator. The index cards should contain key information to facilitate your desired follow-up action, such as your name, the name of the product or service or event you?re promoting, the price, and instructions with a toll-free phone number or website link audience members can use to contact you.

3. Prepare a List of Questions and Answers

Preparing questions and answers ahead of time in written form helps both you and your host. It helps you plan what to say, and it saves your host research time. Of course your host will have their own questions as well, and there is no guarantee they will follow your script, but suggesting some questions and answers will help them in developing good questions that will work towards your benefit.

Typical questions involve topics such as how you got started, what you?re currently doing, your future plans, and tips for your audience. Think of questions that give you an opportunity to invite your audience to your desired follow-up action. However, remember that the purpose of your interview is to serve your audience?s needs, and beware of turning the whole interview into a self-serving plug. Find the common ground between you and your audience that meets their needs with what you have to offer.

4. Practice Relaxing

Interview anxiety tenses you up physiologically, affecting your muscular tension, breathing, and concentration. You can alleviate these effects by practicing relaxation techniques regularly and before your interview. Good posture, deep breathing, and mental calming exercises will help you relax and focus during your interview.

5. Practice Annunciating

Interview anxiety tends to make you breathe shallower and faster, which can make your speech harder to understand. This can aggravate any habitual speaking problems you may already have.

Counter this tendency by practicing your annunciation. A good way to do this is to practice breathing slowly and projecting your voice while reading aloud or carrying on conversations. You can practice with your interview questions and answers as well as with other material.

6. Rehearse

One of the best antidotes to interview anxiety is rehearsal. Even running through your questions and answers aloud once will help you feel more prepared. I find that rehearsing once the night before and once an hour ahead of an interview helps tremendously.

For extra practice, get a friend to play interview host. Ideally your actual host will run you through a mini-rehearsal before your interview. This is not always possible, but if you know the host or have enough time you might arrange it.

You can also think of each interview as a rehearsal for the next one. Hosts will often repeat the same questions, and the more interviews you do, the more naturally the answers will come to you. As time goes on, you?ll find interview anxiety becomes less and less and you feel more and more comfortable giving interviews.

Roy Rasmussen is a freelance writer and marketing consultant who helps create promotional material for small businesses, professionals, and entrepreneurs. He is the author of the print book Publishing for Publicity (with Marian Hartsough) and the Kindle book Learn How to Write Fast, both available on Amazon.

Source: http://toddsblogs.com/writingandspeaking/2012/06/30/preparing-for-interviews-6-tips-for-easing-interview-anxiety/

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Senator Robert Menendez: 'What It Means To Be American' (VIDEO)

In honor of Independence Day, LatinoVoices and Define American bring you personal stories from all walks of life on what it means to be American.

Senator Bob Menendez is a product of the 50s, born in New York City to Cuban immigrant parents. He entered the public service at the age of 19 as a college student and rose through the ranks to become the third-highest ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives-- representing New Jersey's 13th congressional district -- to Senator of the Unites States since 2006.

From his days as Mayor of Union City (1986?1992), Menendez has fought to make health care more affordable, campaigned to improve the education system for generations to come and has led the fight to stop the privatization of Social Security.

So, what does Sen. Menendez think defines an American?

"It is about living and contributing to the ideals that makes America," he said in the video for Define American. "It's about opportunity, it's about freedom, it is about contributing with ones sweat, sacrifice and intellect and creativity and ingenuity to make a great contribution to be part of a great country."

Menendez, son of political refugees, is the first member of his family to go to college.

"This is the promise that America fulfills," he says in the video. "that is in part what it means to be an American. Fulfilling the promise, contributing to that promise that is America and the greatest enterprise on the history of mankind. We have brought people from all walks of life, from all parts of the globe to make a very unique and special place called America."

Share Your Story With Us: What is it about being American that we value most? What does 'American' mean to you?

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/01/senator-robert-menendez-what-it-means-to-be-american_n_1634611.html

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