ISTANBUL (AP) ? Turkish media say a car bomb has exploded near a crossing point along Syria's border, killing at least five people.
State-run Anadolu news agency says the explosion happened Monday on Turkish soil, about 40 meters from a border gate in the Reyhanli district of Hatay province. Anadolu says five people were killed.
The border area between the two countries has been the scene of often fierce fighting between rebels and President Bashar Assad's forces during the nearly two-year-old Syrian conflict.
The cost of having health insurance is still rising faster than inflation, with private health premiums growing 5.3 per cent in 2012.
The silver lining for cash-strapped households was that health insurance payouts kept pace with the percentage rise in premiums, after a period when premiums rose much faster than payouts.
Industry body the Health Funds Association says health insurers paid $876 million in claims in the year to December 2012, up $44m on 2011.
In return, people paid premiums totalling $1.09 billion, up 5.2 per cent or $55 million from 2011.
In the year ending October, premium hikes outstripped the annual rise in payouts - rising 6.2 per cent to claims? 4.8 per cent - which the industry blamed on having to play catch-up with spiralling claims costs.
Association chief executive Roger Styles said actuaries had for years underestimated how much claims would cost. But recent forecasts had been more accurate.
??In the last 5-6 years they were consistently underestimating so I think you had premium catch-up where premiums had to rise ahead of claims inflation,?? he said.
He stressed he was not criticising actuaries, whom he said could not have been expected to predict such cost-hiking changes as the shift in ACC?s policy on elective surgery for ??wear and tear??.
The change pushed more claims into private insurers, he said.
New technology has helped contribute to soaring medical inflation in the past two decades.
Styles said the rise in the cost of medical treatment had slowed last year after going up on average by about nine per cent a year since 2005.
At the same time a recovering economy and growing uncertainty about public health cover helped stem the loss of health insurance customers, he said.
The number of people with health insurance dropped just 0.1 per cent for the December 2012 quarter, although it was down 0.8 per cent for the year.
FILE - This undated file family photo provided by Damon Stewart shows 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton of Chicago who was was shot Jan. 29, 2013 while she talked with friends in a park about a mile from President Barack Obama?s Chicago home. First Lady Michelle Obama will join some of Illinois? most recognizable politicians and clergy to mourn the 15-year-old honor student whose death has drawn attention to staggering gun violence in the nation?s third-largest city. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Damon Stewart, File)
FILE - This undated file family photo provided by Damon Stewart shows 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton of Chicago who was was shot Jan. 29, 2013 while she talked with friends in a park about a mile from President Barack Obama?s Chicago home. First Lady Michelle Obama will join some of Illinois? most recognizable politicians and clergy to mourn the 15-year-old honor student whose death has drawn attention to staggering gun violence in the nation?s third-largest city. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Damon Stewart, File)
A Chicago police officer guard as the remains of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton arrive at the Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist Church for funeral services Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, in Chicago. The shooting death of the 15-year-old honor student has drawn attention to the staggering gun violence in the nation's third-largest city. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
First lady Michelle Obama, left and White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett arrive for the funeral for Hadiya Pendleton at the Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist Church Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, in Chicago. The shooting death of the 15-year-old honor student has drawn attention to the staggering gun violence in the nation's third-largest city. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Father Nathaniel Pendleton, left, his son Nathaniel Jr. and mother Cleopatra Pendleton, right, arrive for the funeral of their daughter and sister Hadiya Pendleton at the Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist Church Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, in Chicago. The shooting death of the 15-year-old honor student has drawn attention to the staggering gun violence in the nation's third-largest city. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Mourners wait outside the Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist Church for the funeral service of Hadiya Pendleton Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013, in Chicago. The shooting death of the 15-year-old honor student has drawn attention to the staggering gun violence in the nation's third-largest city. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
CHICAGO (AP) ? A prominent Chicago pastor is remembering a slain 15-year-old girl as the face of an "epidemic of violence causing funeral processions around the country."
Father Michael Pfleger spoke at Hadiya (hi-DEE'-uh) Pendleton's funeral Saturday, telling a packed South Side church that "we must become the interrupters of funeral processions."
Pendleton was a band majorette and honor student who was shot and killed on Jan. 29, just a few days after performing for events surrounding President Barack Obama's inauguration.
Police say Pendleton was an innocent victim in a gang-related shooting.
First lady Michelle Obama, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel were among dignitaries attending the funeral.
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) ? Dr. Watson is accepting new patients.
The Watson supercomputer is graduating from its medical residency and is being offered commercially to doctors and health insurance companies, IBM said Friday.
IBM Corp., the health insurer WellPoint Inc. and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced two Watson-based applications ? one to help assess treatments for lung cancer and one to help manage health insurance decisions and claims.
Both applications take advantage of the speed, huge database and language skill the computer demonstrated in defeating the best human "Jeopardy!" players on television two years ago.
Armonk-based IBM said Watson has improved its performance by 240 percent since the "Jeopardy!" win.
In both applications, doctors or insurance company workers will access Watson through a tablet or computer. Watson will quickly compare a patient's medical records to what it has learned and make several recommendations in decreasing order of confidence.
In the cancer program, the computer will be considering what treatment is most likely to succeed. In the insurance program, it will consider what treatment should be authorized for payment.
Watson ? actually named for IBM founder Thomas Watson and not Sherlock Holmes' friend ? has been trained in medicine through pilot programs at Indianapolis-based WellPoint and at Sloan-Kettering in New York.
Manoj Saxena, an IBM general manager, said the supercomputer has ingested 1,500 lung cancer cases from Sloan-Kettering records, plus 2 million pages of text from journals, textbooks and treatment guidelines.
It also learned "like a medical student," by being corrected when it was questioned by doctors and came up with wrong answers, Saxena said in an interview.
"Watson is not making the decisions" on treatment or authorization, Saxena said. "It is essentially reducing the effort for doctors and nurses by going through thousands of pages of information for each case."
The lung cancer program is being adopted by two medical groups, the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and WestMed in New York's Westchester County. Saxena said it should be running at both groups by next month.
WellPoint itself is already using the insurance application in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Wisconsin. It will be selling both applications ? at prices still to be negotiated ? and will compensate IBM under a contract between the two companies, an IBM spokeswoman said.
WellPoint said using Watson should not increase insurance premiums because of savings from waste and errors
SUNNYVALE, California (Reuters) - Chipmaker Applied Micro Circuits Corp believes selling low-power processors for cloud data centers run by the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon.com Inc could account for half of its business within three years.
AppliedMicro is one of a handful of chipmakers betting that energy-efficient microservers will become widely used in data centers and it appears to have an early advantage among rivals keen to challenge Intel.
Chief Financial Officer Robert Gargus told Reuters in an interview on Thursday he has been increasingly impressed this month with performance test results on new chips that include 64-bit features widely used in servers, a first among its competitors relying on technology licensed from Britain's ARM Holdings.
ARM chips lack horsepower but data centers that combine many of them instead of just a few heavy-duty Intel processors may provide more computing power using less electricity.
Gargus said AppliedMicro, whose stock has surged almost 80 percent since September, is on track to see revenue from microserver chips next year.
Those chips could account for as much as half the company's business within three years as leading-edge Internet companies like Facebook seek ways to reduce energy bills, followed by more traditional companies like big banks, Gargus said.
"The question isn't if but when. It comes down to, what's the adoption curve?" he said. "We're hoping that the (total cost of ownership) equation for this is compelling enough that people move fairly rapidly, but it's hard to predict."
AppliedMicro already sells chips for wifi routers, cellphone base stations and other networking and storage devices. Analysts on average expect it to have $195 million revenue for the fiscal year ending in March, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
CHEAPER POWER BILLS
As the proliferation of smartphones and other connected devices drives demand for more data processed in remote "cloud" data centers, major Internet companies are seeking ways to cut energy bills, which Gargus said can easily account for half a data center's operating costs.
ARM Holdings' energy-efficient chip technology has become ubiquitous in smartphones and tablets. Now the UK company and some of its partners are taking aim at the server market, long dominated by Intel.
Microservers accounted just 0.2 percent of total server shipments in 2011, but they are expected to grow to more than 10 percent of the market by 2016, according to IHS iSuppli.
AppliedMicro is working on two generations of chips: one built at 40 nanometers, which still needs to be tested by customers, and another more advanced processor at 28 nm.
Anxious to maintain its domination of the server market, Intel in December launched its own low-power data center chip, saying they have been selected for over 20 upcoming products focused on microservers, storage and communications.
PC chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices and Austin, Texas-based startup Calxeda are also developing microserver chips but neither are as far along as AppliedMicro on 64-bit technology typically used in data centers.
Larger competitors Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics, which both use ARM's technology to make chips for mobile gadgets, could also move into the microserver market and create a formidable challenge for AppliedMicro, analysts say.
(Reporting By Noel Randewich; Editing by David Gregorio)
Contact: Phyllis Edelman pedelman@genetics-gsa.org 301-634-7302 Genetics Society of America
Research published in the journal Genetics shows that marrying genome-wide and proteome-wide screening helps determine susceptibility in a wide variety of diseases
BETHESDA, MD February 8, 2013 For the first time, scientists have combined genomic and proteomic analysis of blood plasma to enhance identification of genetically regulated protein traits. This could be applied to any large association study of civilization diseases where blood plasma has been collected, vastly improving a clinician's ability to identify disease susceptibility in individuals and populations. This advance is published in the February 2013 issue of the journal Genetics.
"We hope that combining genome-wide with proteome-wide screening of blood plasma will aid in the identification of molecular disease mechanisms," said Daniel Teupser, M.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Institute of Laboratory Medicine at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, in Munich, Germany. "The methodology is applicable to many frequent diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease or cancer and might accelerate identification of novel diagnostic and therapeutic targets."
To make this advance, Teupser and colleagues analyzed 455 plasma samples from the offspring of two different inbred mouse strains using mass spectrometry. This allows researchers to distinguish proteins based on differences in their molecular weight. The resulting protein phenotypes of all 455 F2 mice were associated with 177 genetic markers evenly distributed over the mouse genome. This led to the identification of genetically regulated plasma proteins. The strongest two associations were with the genes encoding hemoglobin and apolipoprotein 2. The responsible genetic variants were identified in additional functional experiments.
Mass spectrometry has already been adapted for clinical applications, and plasma is often the target because of it easy accessibility. Since plasma comes in contact with most tissues, it often mirrors metabolism and disease. This study pioneers a promising approach to identify novel disease-associated proteins, which could provide novel diagnostic or therapeutic targets of disease.
"Gene variants are now easy to identify, so what's become limiting is the traits the phenotype to link to those variants. This study goes a long way to opening up that bottleneck. The high-throughput screening the authors describe holds tremendous promise for finding diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets of disease," said Mark Johnston, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genetics.
###
CITATION: Holdt, Lesca M., Annette von Delft, Alexandros Nicolaou, Sven Baumann, Markus Kostrzewa, Joachim Thiery, and Daniel Teupser
Quantitative Trait Loci Mapping of the Mouse Plasma Proteome (pQTL)
Genetics February 2013 193:601-608.
FUNDING: This work was supported in part by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, TE 342/7-1) to Dr. Daniel Teupser.
ABOUT GENETICS: Since 1916, Genetics has covered high quality, original research on a range of topics bearing on inheritance, including population and evolutionary genetics, complex traits, developmental and behavioral genetics, cellular genetics, gene expression, genome integrity and transmission, and genome and systems biology. Genetics, a peer-reviewed, peer-edited journal of the Genetics Society of America is one of the world's most cited journals in genetics and heredity.
ABOUT GSA: Founded in 1931, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) is the professional membership organization for scientific researchers, educators, bioengineers, bioinformaticians and others interested in the field of genetics. Its nearly 5,000 members work to advance knowledge in the basic mechanisms of inheritance, from the molecular to the population level. The GSA is dedicated to promoting research in genetics and to facilitating communication among geneticists worldwide through its conferences, including the biennial conference on Model Organisms to Human Biology, an interdisciplinary meeting on current and cutting edge topics in genetics research, as well as annual and biennial meetings that focus on the genetics of particular organisms, including C. elegans, Drosophila, fungi, mice, yeast, and zebrafish. GSA publishes Genetics, a leading journal in the field and an online, open-access journal, G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics. For more information about GSA, please visit www.genetics-gsa.org. Also follow GSA on Facebook at facebook.com/GeneticsGSA and on Twitter @GeneticsGSA.
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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.
Contact: Phyllis Edelman pedelman@genetics-gsa.org 301-634-7302 Genetics Society of America
Research published in the journal Genetics shows that marrying genome-wide and proteome-wide screening helps determine susceptibility in a wide variety of diseases
BETHESDA, MD February 8, 2013 For the first time, scientists have combined genomic and proteomic analysis of blood plasma to enhance identification of genetically regulated protein traits. This could be applied to any large association study of civilization diseases where blood plasma has been collected, vastly improving a clinician's ability to identify disease susceptibility in individuals and populations. This advance is published in the February 2013 issue of the journal Genetics.
"We hope that combining genome-wide with proteome-wide screening of blood plasma will aid in the identification of molecular disease mechanisms," said Daniel Teupser, M.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Institute of Laboratory Medicine at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, in Munich, Germany. "The methodology is applicable to many frequent diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease or cancer and might accelerate identification of novel diagnostic and therapeutic targets."
To make this advance, Teupser and colleagues analyzed 455 plasma samples from the offspring of two different inbred mouse strains using mass spectrometry. This allows researchers to distinguish proteins based on differences in their molecular weight. The resulting protein phenotypes of all 455 F2 mice were associated with 177 genetic markers evenly distributed over the mouse genome. This led to the identification of genetically regulated plasma proteins. The strongest two associations were with the genes encoding hemoglobin and apolipoprotein 2. The responsible genetic variants were identified in additional functional experiments.
Mass spectrometry has already been adapted for clinical applications, and plasma is often the target because of it easy accessibility. Since plasma comes in contact with most tissues, it often mirrors metabolism and disease. This study pioneers a promising approach to identify novel disease-associated proteins, which could provide novel diagnostic or therapeutic targets of disease.
"Gene variants are now easy to identify, so what's become limiting is the traits the phenotype to link to those variants. This study goes a long way to opening up that bottleneck. The high-throughput screening the authors describe holds tremendous promise for finding diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets of disease," said Mark Johnston, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genetics.
###
CITATION: Holdt, Lesca M., Annette von Delft, Alexandros Nicolaou, Sven Baumann, Markus Kostrzewa, Joachim Thiery, and Daniel Teupser
Quantitative Trait Loci Mapping of the Mouse Plasma Proteome (pQTL)
Genetics February 2013 193:601-608.
FUNDING: This work was supported in part by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, TE 342/7-1) to Dr. Daniel Teupser.
ABOUT GENETICS: Since 1916, Genetics has covered high quality, original research on a range of topics bearing on inheritance, including population and evolutionary genetics, complex traits, developmental and behavioral genetics, cellular genetics, gene expression, genome integrity and transmission, and genome and systems biology. Genetics, a peer-reviewed, peer-edited journal of the Genetics Society of America is one of the world's most cited journals in genetics and heredity.
ABOUT GSA: Founded in 1931, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) is the professional membership organization for scientific researchers, educators, bioengineers, bioinformaticians and others interested in the field of genetics. Its nearly 5,000 members work to advance knowledge in the basic mechanisms of inheritance, from the molecular to the population level. The GSA is dedicated to promoting research in genetics and to facilitating communication among geneticists worldwide through its conferences, including the biennial conference on Model Organisms to Human Biology, an interdisciplinary meeting on current and cutting edge topics in genetics research, as well as annual and biennial meetings that focus on the genetics of particular organisms, including C. elegans, Drosophila, fungi, mice, yeast, and zebrafish. GSA publishes Genetics, a leading journal in the field and an online, open-access journal, G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics. For more information about GSA, please visit www.genetics-gsa.org. Also follow GSA on Facebook at facebook.com/GeneticsGSA and on Twitter @GeneticsGSA.
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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.
In a reversal, President Barack Obama will allow lawmakers access to secret documents outlining the legal justification for drone strikes that kill US citizens abroad who conspire with Al-Qaeda.
An administration official disclosed the move Wednesday on the eve of a Senate hearing on Obama's nomination of his top White House anti-terror adviser John Brennan to lead the Central Intelligence Agency in his second term.
Some senators had warned they would use Brennan's confirmation as leverage to force the administration to share more information on the legal and constitutional grounds for the US government killing its own citizens.
The disclosure also comes after NBC News published an unclassified Justice Department white paper covering similar ground, reigniting the debate about the killing of estranged Americans who switched sides in the "War on Terror."
"Today, as part of the president's ongoing commitment to consult with Congress on national security matters, the president directed the Department of Justice to provide the congressional intelligence committees access to classified Office of Legal Counsel advice related to the subject of the Department of Justice white paper," the official said.
Obama aides insist killing Al-Qaeda suspects, including occasionally US citizens, in hotspots like Yemen complies with US law and the Constitution, even when no intelligence links the targets to specific attack plots.
"We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, to prevent future attacks and, again, save American lives," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday.
"These strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise."
Among the most controversial of the attacks were the September 2011 killings in Yemen of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, which stoked concern because the pair were both US citizens who had never been charged with a crime.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has been among the most vocal of lawmakers demanding to know details of how the administration interprets its power to take out US citizens who are waging war against their own nation.
He said lawmakers needed to see the information to ensure that such power was subject to the appropriate safeguards and limitations.
"Every American has the right to know when their government believes that it is allowed to kill them," Wyden said Tuesday.
"I will continue to press the administration to provide Congress with any and all legal opinions that outline the president's authority to use lethal force against Americans.
"I will not be satisfied until I have received them."
The white paper published by NBC News offers a more expansive definition of when a drone strike against a US citizen can be justified than has been available in the past.
Extracted from the secret documents that will now be made available to congressional committees with jurisdiction over the war on terror, the memo expands on the concept of self-defense used to justify an attack.
It also states that an attack against the United States or its interests by a targeted person does not need to be deemed as "imminent" for a strike to take place.
"The condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future," the memo says.
Instead, an "informed, high-level" official could decide that the target posed "an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States" if he had "recently" engaged in such activities, and there was no evidence he had renounced or abandoned them.
The 16-page memo also says the individual's capture must be unfeasible, which includes situations where capture would pose an "undue risk" to US personnel.
Some civil liberties groups were dismayed by the memo, arguing that the president was assuming powers to kill US citizens without presenting evidence to a judge or even letting the courts know about an attack after the fact.
"While we commend the administration for providing documents requested by Congress, secret disclosure of the administration's justification to the Senate intelligence committee is insufficient," said Human Rights First's Dixon Osburn.
"Only complete public disclosure of the legal justifications behind the US targeted killing program can assure Americans that the United States is complying with the law and established rules. The United States targeted killing program is setting a precedent for the rest of the world. We have to get this right."
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Public release date: 8-Feb-2013
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