May 7, 2013 ? Some memory problems common to older adults may stem from an inability to segment daily life into discrete experiences, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The study suggests that problems processing everyday events may be the result of age-related atrophy to a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe (MTL).
"When you think back on what you did yesterday, you don't just press 'play' and watch a continuous stream of 24 hours," says psychological scientist Heather Bailey of Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study. "Your brain naturally chunks the events in your day into discrete parts."
Bailey and her colleagues hypothesized that older adults may have difficulty with memory for everyday events because they don't segment them in the same way as they're happening.
In the study, older adults -- some of whom had Alzheimer's type dementia -- watched short movies of people doing everyday tasks, such as a woman making breakfast or a man building a Lego ship. They were told to separate the movie into chunks by pressing a button whenever they thought one part of the activity in the movie was ending and a new part was beginning.
Afterward, the researchers asked the older adults to recall what happened in the movie. They also measured the size of the older adults' MTL using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
"The older adults who showed atrophy in the MTL weren't as good at remembering the everyday activities, and they weren't as good at segmenting and chunking the events as they were happening," says Bailey. "MTL size accounted for a huge portion of the relationship that we saw between participants' ability to segment and their memory for the events."
These findings suggest that the characteristic forgetfulness of the aging mind isn't just a problem with recalling memories later, but also with how we view and chunk events as they unfold, a process that depends on MTL functioning.
In light of this, focusing on how to better form new memories may be one way to improve older adults' memory for everyday events, even for those adults who have clinical diagnoses like Alzheimer's.
"Alzheimer's disease attacks the MTL in the early stages of the disease," says Bailey. "But even with MTL atrophy you may be able to train people to chunk better, which might help them to remember their everyday activities better, too."
As part of their future research, Bailey and colleagues hope to further investigate the link between event perception and memory to see if they can combat memory impairments in older adults.
Co-authors on the research include Jeffrey M. Zacks and Denise Head of Washington University in St. Louis; David Z. Hambrick and Rose T. Zacks of Michigan State University; Christopher A. Kurby and Jesse Q. Sargent of Francis Marion University.
This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants R01 AG031150 and F32 AG039162; and National Institute on Aging Grants P50 AG05681, P01 AG03991, and P01 AG26276.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
The idea that women are hard-wired to respond to babies is supported in a small new brain scan study from Italy.
Women in the study who listened to the sounds of a baby crying in hunger showed a change in activity in certain brain regions, but men showed no change.
The study included nine men and nine women, some of whom were parents. Most participants were in their 30s. Researchers at the University of Trento asked participants to let their minds wander, and then played a recording of about 15 minutes of white noise, interrupted with periods of silence and the sounds of a hungry infant crying.
In women's brains, there was a decrease in activity in two areas known to be active during mind wandering ? the dorsal medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate areas. By contrast, these regions in men's brains remained active when they heard the baby's cries, according the study.
The study shows that "women interrupt mind wandering when exposed to the sounds of infant hunger cries, whereas men carry on without interruption," the researchers wrote.
The brain patterns were not different between parents and nonparents in the study, the researchers said. This suggests that women may be predisposed to care for infants other than their own, the researchers said, though more study is needed to see whether this idea is held up.
Previous studies have shown that women are more likely than men to say that hearing an infant cry evokes feelings of sympathy and caregiving, while men are more likely to say that crying evokes irritation and anger.
Other work has shown that mothers' suffering from postpartum depression have muted brain activity patterns when they hear their baby cry, compared with nondepressed women.
The study was published in the February issue of the journal Neuroreport.
Pass it on: Hungry baby's cry affects the mother's brain, and evokes sympathy and caring.
Follow Karen Rowan?@karenjrowan. Follow MyHealthNewsDaily?@MyHealth_MHND, Facebook?&?Google+. Originally published on MyHealthNewsDaily.
Copyright 2013 MyHealthNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
We’ve all been there… We spend all of our “fun” money on a shiny new phone and then realize we don’t have enough money left to buy a case to keep it looking shiny and new. The SUPCASE Unicorn Beetle Series Premium Hybrid Protective Case may have a crazy name, but it doesn’t have a [...]
One of the most impressive things we happened upon at CES this year was the Tactus keyboard, a special fluid-filled layer that could be baked into a tablet or smartphone to provide users with a physical keyboard that could recede back into the screen when it wasn?t needed. Since then the company has been flying under the radar, but it turns out Tactus has been hard at work on a prototype device with help from a prominent player in the touch interaction space. Tactus confirmed to TechCrunch that it has partnered with touch panel experts at Synaptics to create a reference device ? a 7-inch Android-powered tablet ? that it will begin shopping around to OEMs and carriers at the end of June.
BERLIN (AP) ? Insurgents in northern Afghanistan have killed a German special forces soldier and wounded a second, the German defense minister said Sunday. The fatality marks the first death in combat of a member of Germany's special forces in Afghanistan.
The soldiers were accompanying an Afghan-led military operation on Saturday when insurgents opened fire at a river crossing in Baghlan province, using fire arms and rocket-propelled grenades.
The troops called in air support but the special forces soldier was fatally shot later when exploring the airstrike's damage, Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere said. The wounded special forces soldier's condition was not life-threatening, he added.
The 1,000-strong special forces are considered to be the German military's elite force, similar to U.S. Navy SEALs.
Several insurgents are believed to have been killed in the fighting some 26 kilometers (16 miles) north of the German base near the city of Baghlan, the military said. There was no immediate information on casualties among the Afghan troops, it added.
The NATO-led coalition forces in Kabul said late Saturday that one international service member had been killed in the north but provided no details.
Germany's 4,000-odd troops in Afghanistan are in charge of much of the country's north, which tends to be relatively calm compared to the more volatile southern or eastern areas.
Also Saturday, seven U.S. soldiers were killed in various attacks. Five U.S. troops were killed by a roadside bomb in the south, while two others died as a soldier with the Afghan National Army turned his weapon on coalition troops in the west.
"This was a bitter, a bloody day in Afghanistan and we won't forget it," de Maiziere told journalists in Berlin.
Germany is the third-largest international troop contributor in Afghanistan, where a total of 35 German soldiers have been killed in attacks or combat since 2002. The mission is generally unpopular in Germany but is supported by most political parties.
May 5, 2013 ? Thermoelectric materials can be used to turn waste heat into electricity or to provide refrigeration without any liquid coolants, and a research team from the University of Michigan has found a way to nearly double the efficiency of a particular class of them that's made with organic semiconductors.
Organic semiconductors are carbon-rich compounds that are relatively cheap, abundant, lightweight and tough. But they haven't traditionally been considered candidate thermoelectric materials because they have been inefficient in carrying out the essential heat-to-electricity conversion process.
Today's most efficient thermoelectric materials are made of relatively rare inorganic semiconductors such as bismuth, tellurium and selenium that are expensive, brittle and often toxic. Still, they manage to convert heat into electricity more than four times as efficiently as the organic semiconductors created to date.
This greater efficiency is reflected in a metric known by researchers as the thermoelectric "figure of merit." This metric is approximately 1 near room temperature for state-of-the-art inorganic thermoelectric materials, but only 0.25 for organic semiconductors.
U-M researchers improved upon the state-of-the-art in organic semiconductors by nearly 70 percent, achieving a figure-of-merit of 0.42 in a compound known as PEDOT:PSS.
"That's about half as efficient as current inorganic semiconductors," said project leader Kevin Pipe, an associate professor of mechanical engineering as well as electrical engineering and computer science. Pipe is a co-author of a paper on the research published in Nature Materials on May 5, 2013.
PEDOT:PSS is a mixture of two polymers: the conjugated polymer PEDOT and the polyelectrolyte PSS. It has previously been used as a transparent electrode for devices such as organic LEDs and solar cells, as well as an antistatic agent for materials such as photographic films.
One of the ways scientists and engineers increase a material's capacity for conducting electricity is to add impurities to it in a process known as doping. When these added ingredients, called dopants, bond to the host material, they give it an electrical carrier. Each of these additional carriers enhances the material's electrical conductivity.
In PEDOT doped by PSS, however, only small fraction of the PSS molecules actually bond to the host PEDOT; the rest of the PSS molecules do not become ionized and are inactive. The researchers found that these excess PSS molecules dramatically inhibit both the electrical conductivity and thermoelectric performance of the material.
"The trouble is that the inactive PSS molecules push the PEDOT molecules further apart, making it harder for electrons to jump between PEDOT molecules," Pipe said. "While ionized PSS molecules improve electrical conductivity, non-ionized PSS molecules reduce it."
To improve its thermoelectric efficiency, the researchers restructured the material at the nanoscale. Pipe and his team figured out how to use certain solvents to remove some of these non-ionized PSS dopant molecules from the mixture, leading to large increases in both the electrical conductivity and the thermoelectric energy conversion efficiency.
This particular organic thermoelectric material would be effective at temperatures up to about 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Eventually this technology could allow us to create a flexible sheet -- think of Saran Wrap -- that can be rolled out or wrapped around a hot object to generate electricity or provide cooling," Pipe said.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Assembly of a protein degradation machine could lead to treatments in cancer, neurological diseasesPublic release date: 5-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jeroen Roelofs jroelofs@k-state.edu 785-532-3969 Kansas State University
MANHATTAN, Kan. -- Kansas State University scientists helped discover new details about an intricate process in cells. Their finding may advance treatments for cancer and neurological diseases.
Kansas State University researchers Jeroen Roelofs, assistant professor, and Chingakham Ranjit Singh, research assistant professor -- both in the Division of Biology -- led part of the study. Both also are research affiliates with the university's Johnson Cancer Research Center. They worked with colleagues at Harvard Medical School, the University of California-San Francisco and the University of Kansas. The scientific journal Nature recently published the team's observations, titled "Reconfiguration of the proteasome during chaperone-mediated assembly."
The research focused on proteasomes, protein complexes inside the cells of humans and other organisms that help keep the cells healthy.
"The proteasome is a large, molecular machine in the cell that degrades other proteins," Roelofs said. "It's important for protein quality control as well as for the cell's ability quickly remove specific proteins, thereby ensuring the cell's health and proper function."
The goal was to better understand how the various particles inside proteasomes work together to make the proteasomes function -- think the gears and components needed, and in what order, to build a working machine. Scientists believe that disruption of two key particles -- and consequently a proteasome's ability to work correctly -- has implications for cancers as well as various neurological degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.
The Nature study built on research that Roelofs made as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School in 2009. He found that proteins called chaperones play a key role in the assembly process of two particles that when connected, gives proteasomes the ability to scrub unwanted proteins from cells. Chaperones act as a foreman for the two particles.
One of the findings in the new study is that in addition to acting as a molecular foreman for the two particles, chaperones also control when those two particles come together. Similarly, the scientists found more about the two particles.
The core particle has seven pockets while the regulatory particle has six tails that tuck into those pockets. When docked together, they turn on the proteasome's functionality.
"In the assembly process there is only one tail that actually determines how the core particle and regulatory particle bind together," Roelofs said. "That's surprising because there are six tails, but only one is needed to give specificity, and the docking into the pocket is controlled by the chaperone."
Roelofs believes that the findings may reveal new targets for anticancer drugs, as a chaperone in the human genes is involved in liver cancer. The proteasome inhibitor Bortezomib is used in the treatment of current cancers. Additionally, the information may advance cancer and neurological research by giving scientists new pathways to study and manipulate.
"This is pretty basic research," Roelofs said. "Understanding the basic mechanics can often lead to new pathways for improvement, which is essential when it comes to human health."
Scientists made the findings through a combination of techniques, including Cryo-electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography, yeast genetics, biochemical reconstitution assays and proteasome activity measurements. These techniques helped researchers observe the submicroscopic tails and complex tail-to-pocket binding process, as well as study the role of the chaperones in the core and regulatory particle process.
###
The study was largely funded by the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence Protein Structure and Function, or COBRE-psf, support center at the University of Kansas -- a multidisciplinary, biomedical research program funded by the National Institute of Health; the Johnson Cancer Research Center at Kansas State University; and the Kansas IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, or K-INBRE.
[ | 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.
Assembly of a protein degradation machine could lead to treatments in cancer, neurological diseasesPublic release date: 5-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jeroen Roelofs jroelofs@k-state.edu 785-532-3969 Kansas State University
MANHATTAN, Kan. -- Kansas State University scientists helped discover new details about an intricate process in cells. Their finding may advance treatments for cancer and neurological diseases.
Kansas State University researchers Jeroen Roelofs, assistant professor, and Chingakham Ranjit Singh, research assistant professor -- both in the Division of Biology -- led part of the study. Both also are research affiliates with the university's Johnson Cancer Research Center. They worked with colleagues at Harvard Medical School, the University of California-San Francisco and the University of Kansas. The scientific journal Nature recently published the team's observations, titled "Reconfiguration of the proteasome during chaperone-mediated assembly."
The research focused on proteasomes, protein complexes inside the cells of humans and other organisms that help keep the cells healthy.
"The proteasome is a large, molecular machine in the cell that degrades other proteins," Roelofs said. "It's important for protein quality control as well as for the cell's ability quickly remove specific proteins, thereby ensuring the cell's health and proper function."
The goal was to better understand how the various particles inside proteasomes work together to make the proteasomes function -- think the gears and components needed, and in what order, to build a working machine. Scientists believe that disruption of two key particles -- and consequently a proteasome's ability to work correctly -- has implications for cancers as well as various neurological degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.
The Nature study built on research that Roelofs made as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School in 2009. He found that proteins called chaperones play a key role in the assembly process of two particles that when connected, gives proteasomes the ability to scrub unwanted proteins from cells. Chaperones act as a foreman for the two particles.
One of the findings in the new study is that in addition to acting as a molecular foreman for the two particles, chaperones also control when those two particles come together. Similarly, the scientists found more about the two particles.
The core particle has seven pockets while the regulatory particle has six tails that tuck into those pockets. When docked together, they turn on the proteasome's functionality.
"In the assembly process there is only one tail that actually determines how the core particle and regulatory particle bind together," Roelofs said. "That's surprising because there are six tails, but only one is needed to give specificity, and the docking into the pocket is controlled by the chaperone."
Roelofs believes that the findings may reveal new targets for anticancer drugs, as a chaperone in the human genes is involved in liver cancer. The proteasome inhibitor Bortezomib is used in the treatment of current cancers. Additionally, the information may advance cancer and neurological research by giving scientists new pathways to study and manipulate.
"This is pretty basic research," Roelofs said. "Understanding the basic mechanics can often lead to new pathways for improvement, which is essential when it comes to human health."
Scientists made the findings through a combination of techniques, including Cryo-electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography, yeast genetics, biochemical reconstitution assays and proteasome activity measurements. These techniques helped researchers observe the submicroscopic tails and complex tail-to-pocket binding process, as well as study the role of the chaperones in the core and regulatory particle process.
###
The study was largely funded by the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence Protein Structure and Function, or COBRE-psf, support center at the University of Kansas -- a multidisciplinary, biomedical research program funded by the National Institute of Health; the Johnson Cancer Research Center at Kansas State University; and the Kansas IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, or K-INBRE.
[ | 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.
May 6, 2013 ? A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound that scientists suspect preserves evidence of a massive lake might actually have formed as a result of the Red Planet's famously dusty atmosphere, an analysis of the mound's features suggests. If correct, the research could dilute expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water, which would have important implications for understanding Mars' past habitability.
Researchers based at Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology suggest that the mound, known as Mount Sharp, most likely emerged as strong winds carried dust and sand into the 96-mile-wide crater in which the mound sits. They report in the journal Geology that air likely rises out of the massive Gale Crater when the Martian surface warms during the day, then sweeps back down its steep walls at night. Though strong along the Gale Crater walls, these "slope winds" would have died down at the crater's center where the fine dust in the air settled and accumulated to eventually form Mount Sharp, which is close in size to Alaska's Mt. McKinley.
This dynamic counters the prevailing theory that Mount Sharp formed from layers of lakebed silt -- and could mean that the mound contains less evidence of a past, Earth-like Martian climate than most scientists currently expect. Evidence that Gale Crater once contained a lake in part determined the landing site for the NASA Mars rover Curiosity. The rover touched down near Mount Sharp in August with the purpose of uncovering evidence of a habitable environment, and in December Curiosity found traces of clay, water molecules and organic compounds. Determining the origin of these elements and how they relate to Mount Sharp will be a focus for Curiosity in the coming months.
But the mound itself was likely never under water, though a body of water could have existed in the moat around the base of Mount Sharp, said study co-author Kevin Lewis, a Princeton associate research scholar in geosciences and a participating scientist on the Curiosity rover mission, Mars Science Laboratory. The quest to determine whether Mars could have at one time supported life might be better directed elsewhere, he said.
"Our work doesn't preclude the existence of lakes in Gale Crater, but suggests that the bulk of the material in Mount Sharp was deposited largely by the wind," said Lewis, who worked with first author Edwin Kite, a planetary science postdoctoral scholar at Caltech; Michael Lamb, an assistant professor of geology at Caltech; and Claire Newman and Mark Richardson of California-based research company Ashima Research.
"Every day and night you have these strong winds that flow up and down the steep topographic slopes. It turns out that a mound like this would be a natural thing to form in a crater like Gale," Lewis said. "Contrary to our expectations, Mount Sharp could have essentially formed as a free-standing pile of sediment that never filled the crater."
Even if Mount Sharp were born of wind, it and similar mounds likely overflow with a valuable geological -- if not biological -- history of Mars that can help unravel the climate history of Mars and guide future missions, Lewis said.
"These sedimentary mounds could still record millions of years of Martian climate history," Lewis said. "This is how we learn about Earth's history, by finding the most complete sedimentary records we can and going through layer by layer. One way or another, we're going to get an incredible history book of all the events going on while that sediment was being deposited. I think Mount Sharp will still provide an incredible story to read. It just might not have been a lake."
Dawn Sumner, a geology professor at the University of California-Davis and a Mars Science Laboratory team member, said that the specificity of the researchers' model makes it a valuable attempt to explain Mount Sharp's origin. While the work alone is not yet enough to rethink the distribution of water on Mars, it does propose a unique wind dynamic for Gale Crater then models it in enough detail for the hypothesis to actually be tested as more samples are analyzed on Mars, Sumner said.
"To my knowledge, their model is novel both in terms of invoking katabatic [cool, downward-moving] winds to form Mount Sharp and in quantitatively modeling how the winds would do this," said Sumner, who is familiar with the work but had no role in it.
"The big contribution here is that they provide new ideas that are specific enough that we can start to test them," she said. "This paper provides a new model for Mount Sharp that makes specific predictions about the characteristics of the rocks within the mountain. Observations by Curiosity at the base of Mount Sharp can test the model by looking for evidence of wind deposition of sediment."
The researchers used pairs of satellite images of Gale Crater taken in preparation for the rover landing by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite managed by Caltech for NASA. Software tools extracted the topographical details of Mount Sharp and the surrounding terrain. The researchers found that the various layers in the mound did not form more-or-less flat-lying stacks as sediments deposited from a lake would. Instead, the layers fanned outward from the mound's center in an unusual radial pattern, Lewis said.
Kite developed a computer model to test how wind circulation patterns would affect the deposition and erosion of wind-blown sediment within a crater like Gale. The researchers found that slope winds that constantly exited and reentered Gale Crater could limit the deposition of sediments near the crater rim, while building up a mound in the center of the crater, even if the ground were bare from the start, Lewis said.
The researchers' results provide evidence for recent questions about Mount Sharp's watery origins, Lewis said. Satellite observations had previously detected water-related mineral signatures within the lower portion of Mount Sharp. While this suggested that the lower portion might have been series of lakebeds, portions of the upper mound were more ambiguous, Lewis said. First of all, the upper layers of the mound are higher than the crater walls in several places. Also, Gale Crater sits on the edge of Mars' northern lowlands. If it had been filled with water to near the height of Mount Sharp then the entire northern hemisphere would have been flooded.
Soil analyses carried out by Curiosity -- the rover's primary mission is two years, but could be extended -- will help determine the nature of Mount Sharp and the Martian climate in general, Lewis said. Wind erosion relies on specific factors such as the size of individual soil grains, so such information gleaned from the Curiosity mission will help determine Martian characteristics such as wind speed. On Earth, sediments need some amount of moisture to become cemented into rock. It will be interesting to know, Lewis said, how the rock layers of Mount Sharp are held together and how water might be involved.
"If the mechanism we describe is correct, it would tell us a lot about Mars and how it operates because Mount Sharp is only one of a class of enigmatic sedimentary mounds observed on Mars," Lewis said.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) ? The president of the World Jewish Congress says he wants Hungary's government to speak out more forcefully against anti-Semitism.
American businessman Ronald Lauder, whose maternal grandparents were born in Hungary, told The Associated Press on Monday that Hungary "could blossom" if it had less anti-Semitism.
Lauder, who has numerous investments and charitable works the country, said a firmer stance from Prime Minister Viktor Orban against anti-Semitism would help convince Jews who were thinking about leaving Hungary to stay.
Lauder said that while there was "much more Jewish life in Hungary, there is also more hatred."
Some 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust and around 100,000 live there now, the largest Jewish community in the region.
By Agence France-Presse Sunday, May 5, 2013 16:45 EDT
?
AFP ? US billionaire Warren Buffet said the US economy is moving in the right direction and praised the policies of both president George W. Bush and Barack Obama as ?the right things,? in an interview that aired Sunday.
US stocks soared to new closing records Friday after a strong US jobs report, which had unemployment fall to 7.5 percent, revived confidence in the economic recovery.
The 82-year-old investor, who is known as the ?Sage of Omaha,? said he was optimistic stock prices would continue to rise.
?They don?t look overpriced. They certainly look more attractive than fixed-income investments to me,? he said in the interview that aired on ABC?s ?This Week? talk show.
He said the economy has been improving gradually over the last four years, and it will take time before the US experiences more rapid growth.
But he said the monetary and fiscal stimulus enacted under Bush and Obama were the right moves to counter the economic crisis of 2008.
?Nothing is perfect, but we had some huge problems in 2008. And our country is doing reasonably well coming out of that,? Buffet said.
?It?s a lot slower than people would like, but it was a lot bigger problem than any of us had ever seen.?
?I generally approve of what the latter stages of it hit, what the Bush administration did. I approve of what the Obama administration has done,? he added.
But he said ?it?s tough to watch what happens in Washington,? as the discourse has ?gotten more and more partisan.?
?So many elections are determined by the primaries and not the November elections, that it does tend to push both sides to the extremes and to cause them to dig in and feel that they can?t bend from positions.?
The chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company with 76 businesses, also spoke in favor of immigration reform that would offer foreign students the chance to become citizens and reiterated comments that the US would benefit by making structural changes to ensure women are not relegated to a small sector of the economy.
A US Labor Department report on Friday showed the US economy added 165,000 jobs in April, well above market expectations, and also revised upward estimates from the previous two months.
The gains came even as taxes rose and government spending tightened under the sharp ?sequester? cuts, which still threaten to hold economic growth back this year.
Millions of people live without access to electricity or modern fuel for cooking and heating, but the problem can seem too daunting to tackle. How much would it cost to bring rural communities or countries with limited infrastructure onto the grid?
President Barack Obama and Costa Rica's President Laura Chinchilla shake hands at the end of their joint press conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, Friday, May 3, 2013. Obama's three-day visit to Mexico and Costa Rica is his first to Latin America since winning a second presidential term. Obama on Friday cast Mexico as a nation ready to take "its rightful place in the world" and move past the drug battles and violence that have defined its relationship with the United States. He then headed to Costa Rica to prod Central American leaders to tackle those same issues more aggressively. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
President Barack Obama and Costa Rica's President Laura Chinchilla shake hands at the end of their joint press conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, Friday, May 3, 2013. Obama's three-day visit to Mexico and Costa Rica is his first to Latin America since winning a second presidential term. Obama on Friday cast Mexico as a nation ready to take "its rightful place in the world" and move past the drug battles and violence that have defined its relationship with the United States. He then headed to Costa Rica to prod Central American leaders to tackle those same issues more aggressively. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) ? President Barack Obama says he supports recognizing gay unions in a broad immigration bill pending in Congress but won't say whether he would sign legislation that fails to do so.
Obama says that recognizing same-sex relationships in the bill is "the right thing to do." But he says it would be premature to telegraph what he will or won't do before lawmakers send him a bill.
Gay rights supporters are pushing for an amendment to the bill to allow gays to sponsor their partners to come to the U.S.
But Republicans, including some who helped draft the bill, have made it clear that amending the legislation in that fashion would cost their support.
Obama commented at a news conference Friday evening in San Jose, Costa Rica, with President Laura Chinchilla.
You don’t have a smart TV, but you have a lot of videos on your hard disk or videos online that you’d like to watch on a bigger screen. ?If you plug a PLAiR dongle into an HDMI port on your TV, you’ll be able to beam content wirelessly to your TV. ?You’ll need to [...]
ROME (Reuters) - Italy's new prime minister Enrico Letta won French backing on Wednesday for calls to spur economic growth alongside budget rigor, but problems lay closer to home with coalition partners demanding tax cuts that would blow a hole in the budget.
Letta, who took his message to Berlin on Tuesday, met French President Francois Hollande and said he was "100 percent satisfied" with the meeting and Hollande's response to his calls for Europe to start focusing on growth as well as consolidation.
Hollande said after the meeting: "Europe has to do the maximum it can for growth."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck a conciliatory tone in Berlin but gave no sign that she was willing to change her government's tough approach to the heavily-indebted countries of southern Europe, insisting there was no contradiction between growth and fiscal consolidation.
Letta has held back from calling publicly for a relaxation of deficit targets Italy has vowed to meet this year, although several ministers and prominent politicians including his coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi are pushing him to do so.
"Our government's choice is to maintain the commitments we have made towards the European Union and, within those commitments, to make the choices which we think are needed for our country to have more room for growth and lower taxes," he said after the meeting with Hollande.
Letta, who goes to Brussels later on Wednesday, said he would not be discussing concrete tax measures with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso until the government had held further discussions with parliament.
However, the gap between his anti-austerity rhetoric and the hard choices his potentially unstable left-right coalition faces have already become apparent in a battle over the hated IMU housing tax introduced by former prime minister Mario Monti.
The tax, among the most unpopular steps Monti took last year to calm market panic over Rome's huge public debt, has become a symbol of what many in Italy see as austerity imposed by Brussels after the fall of Berlusconi's last government in 2011.
Berlusconi, who could bring down Letta's coalition of the main center-right and center-left parties at any time, repeated on Tuesday that abolishing the tax and repaying contributions paid in 2012 was a condition for his continued support.
Letta has promised to suspend contributions due in June, pending a wider review of property taxes but he has held back from meeting Berlusconi's demands, which would cost an estimated 8 billion euros.
Even so, he has not explained where he will find around 2 billion euros to cover freezing the tax in June, with local governments, the main beneficiaries of the levy, waiting anxiously to see whether they have to seek savings elsewhere.
"TWO AND TWO DON'T MAKE EIGHT"
"I don't think political parties can ask for arithmetic to be different from what we learned at school," Flavio Zanonato, Letta's Industry Minister who is still also serving as mayor of the northern city of Padua, told the daily Corriere della Sera.
"Two and two don't make eight and if we abolish IMU on primary residences we'll have to close down the town halls."
Ratings agency Fitch welcomed the formation of the new government but noted that it had little room for maneuver on public finances and may not last long enough to deliver the structural economic reforms needed to increase growth.
"Letta's first outline of his government's program, in a speech to parliament on Monday, lacked important detail on how major tax reductions will be funded," it added.
Italy has committed to maintaining a budget deficit of 2.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2013, just under the European Union's 3 percent ceiling and expects to emerge in May from the so-called excessive deficit procedure it has been under for breaking the limit in previous years.
That has left the government squeezed between keeping its promises to European partners and maintaining the delicate balance within the coalition while confronting an economic crisis that has put a severe strain on Italian society.
While Berlusconi's center-right People of Freedom (PDL) party is insisting on scrapping the housing tax, many in Letta's own center-left Democratic Party (PD) want to put the focus on stopping a planned one percentage point rise in sales tax due to come into effect in July.
Some ministers, including Zanonato, have floated the idea of excluding spending on investment from EU budget deficit calculations, but that idea has got nowhere in the past and there has been no sign from Brussels of readiness to reconsider.
More detail is expected next week but the dispute over tax is just one problem facing Letta, who has also promised to beef up Italy's inadequate welfare system and cut taxes on companies hiring young workers.
In the longer term, he has spoken little of the kind of structural reforms to the economy that might improve Italy's chronic lack of competitiveness and pull it out of a recession set to match the longest since World War Two.
Improving the much criticized labor law introduced by Monti's government last year or opening up closed professions could provide a longer term boost to growth and ease the pressure on squeezed public finances.
But any prospect of that will require him to negotiate the tensions already testing his government.
Chris Kelly of Kris Kross performs in February 2013.
By Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, NBC News
Kris Kross rapper Chris Kelly's death is being investigated as a possible drug overdose, Cpl. Kay Lester, a spokeswoman for Atlanta's Fulton County police, told NBCNews.com.
Information obtained from family members and others at the scene helped lead the investigation in that direction, but more information won't be known until toxicology results are back from Kelly's autopsy, Lester said.
That autopsy, completed Thursday morning in Atlanta, showed no signs of foul play or trauma, the Fulton County medical examiner's office told NBCNews.com. Toxicology results will be available in approximately three weeks, a spokeswoman said.
Kelly, 34, was discovered unresponsive in his Atlanta home Wednesday and pronounced dead early that evening. Kelly and childhood friend Chris Smith traveled the world as 1990s rap group Kris Kross when they were just 13, and their hit song "Jump" was certified double platinum.
On Thursday, both Chris Smith and Kelly's family issued statements mourning Kelly.
"His legacy will live on through his music, and we will forever love him," said the statement from Kelly's mother,?Donna Kelly Pratte, and his record label So So Def.
In his statement, Kelly's musical partner Smith said, "Our friendship began as little boys in first grade. We grew up together. It was a blessing to achieve the success, travel the world and entertain Kris Kross fans all around the world with my best friend."
One of the most impressive things we happened upon at CES this year was the ![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 5-May-2013
Share ] 
