Pistorius Case: Agent Cancels All Future Races

Oscar Pistorius won't run in any of the future races that the athlete was contracted to compete in, but the Paraylmpic gold medalist's sponsors are still supportive as he faces a murder charge, his agent said today.

The decision to cancel Pistorius' scheduled appearances was made to "allow Oscar to concentrate on the upcoming legal proceedings and to help and support all those involved as they try to come to terms with this very difficult and distressing situation," Peet Van Zyl of In Site Athlete Management said in a statement.

"I have decided that following these tragic events that we have no option but to cancel all future races that Oscar Pistorius had been contracted to compete in," Van Zyl said.

Pistorius was slated to compete in races in Australia and Brazil, as well as at the Drake Relays in Iowa and the Manchester City Games in the U.K.

Van Zyl also said that Pistorius' sponsors and partners are supportive.

"I can confirm that at this point in time, all parties are supportive and their contractual commitments are maintained. They have said they are happy to let the legal process takes its course before making any change in their position," Van Zyl said in the statement.

However, M-Net movies, a subscription-funded South African television channel has pulled their ad campaign featuring Pistorius, tweeting, "Out of respect & sympathy to the bereaved, M-Net will be pulling its entire Oscar campaign featuring Oscar Pistorius with immediate effect."

The agent's announcement comes as family and friends rallied to Pistorius' defense -- saying they believe the Paralympic gold medalist's story that he shot his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp by accident after he mistook her for an intruder.

Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images; Mike Holmes/The Herald/Gallo Images/Getty Images

'Blade Runner' Murder Mystery: Family Speaks Out Watch Video

'Blade Runner' on Suicide Watch After Charged With Girlfriend's Murder Watch Video

Oscar Pistorius Charged in Shooting Death of Girlfriend Watch Video

"When you are a sportsman, you act even more on instinct ... it's instinct -- things happen and that's what you do," Pistorius' father Henke Pistorius, 59, told The Telegraph.

The 26-year-old athlete, known as the "Blade Runner" because of the carbon-fiber blades he runs on, was charged Friday with premeditated murder.

PHOTOS: Paralympic Champion Charged With Murder

If convicted, Pistorius could face at least 25 years in jail.

"All of us saw at firsthand how close [Steenkamp] had become to Oscar during that time and how happy they were. They had plans together and Oscar was happier in his private life than he had been for a long time," Pistorius' uncle Arnold Pistorius said on Saturday.

According to South African newspaper Beeld, Steenkamp was killed nearly two hours after police were called to Pistorius' home to respond to reports of an argument at the complex.

Police said they have responded to disputes at the sprinter's residence before, but did not say whether Steenkamp was involved.

The athlete's best friend said Pistorius called him after the shooting to say "there has been a terrible accident, I shot Reeva," Justin Divaris told the Sunday People.

While his family insists he is not a murderer, prosecutors disagree.

Police sources told local media that Steenkamp was shot through the bathroom door where she may have been trying to hide to save herself.

Reeva Steenkamp

A memorial service for Steenkamp will be held in Port Elizabeth on Tuesday evening, SABC reported. Her body will be flown back for the service before being cremated, her family said.

"Her future has been cut short ... I dare say she's with the angels," said Mike Steenkamp, Reeva Steenkamp's uncle.

The South African reality show Steenkamp competed in premiered Saturday night on SABC as planned and included a special tribute to the slain law school graduate whose modeling career was starting to take off.

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False memories prime immune system for future attacks

IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.

When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.

Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.

The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.

The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."

So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.

To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).

The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.

"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"

This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

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"Argo", "Lincoln" vie for Oscars crown in open race

LOS ANGELES - Steven Spielberg goes into next weekend's Oscars with the most nominations for his presidential "Lincoln" but the momentum is all with Ben Affleck's thriller "Argo" in the Academy Awards home straight.

And while the Hollywood veteran and the young pretender vie for the Oscars best picture crown, several other frontrunners remain hard on their heels, in one of the least predictable Oscar races in recent memory.

Taiwan-born Lee Ang's 3D spectacular "Life of Pi," Osama bin Laden manhunt movie "Zero Dark Thirty" and romcom "Silver Linings Playbook" could all be in with a chance at the Oscars, the climax of Tinseltown's annual awards season.

Spielberg and Lee are frontrunners for best director, while "Lincoln" star Daniel Day-Lewis is widely seen as a shoo-in for best actor. For best actress the hot money is on Jessica Chastain for her part in "Zero Dark Thirty" or "Hunger Games" star Jennifer Lawrence.

But Affleck's Iran hostage drama, despite only winning seven nominations -- against 12 for "Lincoln," 11 for "Life of Pi" and eight each for "Silver Linings Playbook" and "Les Miserables" -- has a clear edge for best picture.

It has swept up top prizes at a string of key awards shows, including the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Producers Guild of America (PGA), the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and Britain's BAFTA last weekend.

Affleck has gotten used to making acceptance speeches over the last two months -- but he has been tightlipped on his prospects for the all-important 85th Academy Awards, to be held at Hollywood's Dolby Theatre next Sunday.

"I just feel so incredibly honoured to be nominated as a producer for this movie. To be here at the big party," he said at the Oscar Nominees Luncheon, the annual gathering of those in the race, held in Beverly Hills on February 4.

Indeed, his best picture nomination is as a co-producer of the film -- along with George Clooney and Grant Heslov -- rather than as a director, a category in which he was not nominated, in a perceived snub.

Snub or no snub, he will be among presenters at the show, along with a Who's Who of A-listers including Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Downey Jr, Samuel L Jackson, and Meryl Streep.

"Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane will be hosting, a move organizers hope will attract younger viewers among the hundreds of millions watching live around the world.

Other nominees presenting include Chastain -- best actress frontrunner for playing a relentless CIA agent on the hunt for Osama, in Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow's controversial "Zero Dark Thirty".

But Lawrence, star of the "Hunger Games" blockbuster franchise, could also win the category for her portrayal of mixed-up Tiffany to Bradley Cooper's bipolar ex-teacher in "Silver Linings Playbook".

Cooper is up for best actor, along with Hugh Jackman for "Les Miserables", Joaquin Phoenix for "The Master" and Denzel Washington for "Flight" -- but Day-Lewis is widely forecast for a record third Oscar for his "Lincoln" turn.

For best director, 66-year-old Spielberg will be hoping for his first Oscar since "Saving Private Ryan" in 1999.

But he is up against Lee -- whose "Brokeback Mountain" won best picture in 2006 -- as well as Michael Haneke for his Cannes-winning "Amour", David O Russell for "Silver Linings Playbook" and Benh Zeitlin for "Beasts of the Southern Wild".

Best supporting actor nominees are Alan Arkin for "Argo", Robert De Niro for "Silver Linings Playbook", Philip Seymour Hoffman for "The Master", Tommy Lee Jones for "Lincoln" and Christoph Waltz for "Django Unchained".

For supporting actress Anne Hathaway is tipped to win for performance in "Les Miserables" -- including her heart-wrenching close-up rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" -- against Amy Adams for "The Master", Sally Field in "Lincoln", Helen Hunt in "The Sessions" and Jacki Weaver in "Silver Linings Playbook".

The Oscars have a musical theme this year, including a performance by Britain's Adele singing the Oscar-nominated 007 theme tune "Skyfall" as well as by Shirley Bassey and Norah Jones, and Barbra Streisand, in her first Oscars turn since 1977.

- AFP/ir

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Russian meteorite: The conspiracy theories

A strange time for a military attack?

(Credit:
CNN; screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

A good hearty conspiracy theory can shine a sharp light on two of humanity's most enduring traits.

One, of course, is humanity's boundless imagination. The other is humanity's essential suspicion of humanity.

So while you might be deeply immersed in Bill Nye's explanation of the Russian meteorite, those with darker sensibilities have filled the Web with their fears and hauntings about the phenomenon.

There are few nations with greater awareness of dark sensibilities than Russia. The fact that there seems to be little evidence of meteorite fragments on the ground has encouraged some Russians to offer their own suspicions.

As the Toronto Globe and Mail reports, nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky hasn't been slow to offer something of a Hot War perspective.

"It's not meteors falling. It's a new weapon being tested by the Americans," he was quoted as saying.

We know from our recent experience of North Korea that weapons testing is an imprecise science.

But if you were an American in the mood to test a weapon, would Chelyabinsk, Russia, be your very first choice of place for the experiment?

Perhaps Tallahassee; Area 51; and Bialystok, Poland, were all unavailable due to prior commitments. Or perhaps it wasn't the Americans, but, say, the North Koreans, who mistook Chelyabinsk for, say, Chelsea.

Zhirinovsky's rather emotionally manipulative offering was countered by Russia's Emergency Ministry, which dedicated itself to an extensive rebuttal of his belief (and that of others) that this was some sort of military thing. The rebuttal? "Rubbish."

But that wasn't going to put off the local media, was it? Not only do they have papers to sell, they also have theories to expound to a troubled nation and world.

So, as The Atlantic reports, the local Znak newspaper accepted that this was a meteorite but insisted the explosion was caused by military defense blowing it up.

More Technically Incorrect

Yes, of course it has a source in the military. You thought it didn't?

Though I've watched a few movies in which exciting things happen, I don't find it easy to imagine that some sort of terrestrially created missile-laden aircraft could really explode a meteorite in such a manner.

It is easier to imagine, though, that politicians like Zhirinovsky might take the opportunity to foment a little rage.

Indeed, Alex Jones' infamously well-guarded Infowars site offered that Zhirinovsky insisted that America -- in the person of Secretary of State John Kerry -- had tried to give Russia advance notice of its "attack."

The Drudge Report led me to a piece at Foreign Policy that explained that Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, simply hadn't called Kerry back.

Which all suggests that Russia isn't, after all, living in fear of an attack from the U.S. Especially one over Chelyabinsk.

On balance, I prefer to currently believe Nye. He is the science guy, after all. And science guys know scientific events when they see them.

I hope.

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Picture Archive: Making Mount Rushmore, 1935-1941

Photograph from Rapid City Chamber of Commerce/National Geographic

There's no such thing as Presidents' Day.

According to United States federal government code, the holiday is named Washington's Birthday, and has been since it went nationwide in 1885.

But common practice is more inclusive. The holiday expanded to add in other U.S. presidents in the 1960s, and the moniker Presidents' Day became popular in the 1980s and stuck. It may be that George Washington (b. February 22, 1732) andAbraham Lincoln (b. February 12, 1809) still get the lion's share of attention—and appear in all the retail sale ads—on the third Monday in February, but the popular idea is that all 44 presidents get feted.

Mount Rushmore is a lot like that one day a year writ large—and in granite. It's carved 60 feet (18 meters) tall and 185 feet (56 meters) wide, from Washington's right ear to Lincoln's left.

The monument's sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, grew up in Idaho, a first-generation American born to Danish parents. He studied art in France and became good friends with Auguste Rodin. Borglum mostly worked in bronze, but in the early 1910s he was hired to carve the likenesses of Confederate leaders into Stone Mountain in Georgia.

He was about to be fired from that job for creative differences about the same time that a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson had an idea. Robinson wanted to have a monument carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, maybe Western historical figures like Chief Red Cloud and Lewis and Clark, each on their own granite spire. (Plan a road trip in the Black Hills.)

Robinson hired Borglum and gave him carte blanche. Borglum was looking for something with national appeal, so he chose to depict four presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

Borglum wanted to represent the first 150 years of the nation's history, choosing four presidents as symbols of their respective time periods. He took a tour of western South Dakota, searching for an ideal canvas.

The sculptor was looking for three things: a surface strong enough to sculpt, a mountain big enough to hold several figures, and a mountain face that received morning sunlight. Mount Rushmore fit the bill and was already part of a national forest, so it was easy to set aside as a national memorial.

Work started in 1927. Calvin Coolidge attended the dedication ceremony. It took 14 years to finish the carving, conducted mostly in summertime because of the area's harsh winters.

There were approximately 30 workers on the mountain at any give time. In total about 400 had worked on it by the time the monument was finished. Though the project involved thousands of pounds of dynamite and perilous climbs, not a single person died during the work.

Borglum himself died of natural causes in 1941, though, just six months before the project was declared "closed as is" by Congress that Halloween. His son Lincoln—named for his father's favorite president—took over.

In the photo above, a worker refines the details of Washington's left nostril.

About 90 percent of the mountain was carved using dynamite, which could get within 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 centimeters) of the final facial features. For those last few inches, workers used what was known as the honeycomb method: Jackhammer workers pounded a series of three-inch-deep holes followed up by chiselers who knocked off the honeycomb pieces to get the final shape. Then carvers smoothed the "skin's" surface.

—Johnna Rizzo

February 16, 2013

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Meteor Blast 'Something We Only Saw in Movies'

A day after a massive meteor exploded over this city in central Russia, a monumental cleanup effort is under way.

Authorities have deployed around 24,000 troops and emergencies responders to help in the effort.

Officials say more than a million square feet of windows -- the size of about 20 football fields -- were shattered by the shockwave from the meteor's blast. Around 4,000 buildings in the area were damaged.

The injury toll climbed steadily on Friday. Authorities said today it now stands at more than 1,200. Most of those injuries were from broken glass, and only a few hundred required hospitalization.

According to NASA, this was the biggest meteor to hit Earth in more than a century. Preliminary figures suggest it was 50 feet wide and weighed more than the Eiffel Tower.

SEE PHOTOS: Meteorite Crashes in Russia

NASA scientists have also estimated the force of the blast that occurred when the meteor fractured upon entering Earth's atmosphere was approximately 470 kilotons -- the equivalent of about 30 Hiroshima bombs.

Residents said today they still can't believe it happened here.

"It was something we only saw in the movies," one university student said. "We never thought we would see it ourselves."

Throughout the city, the streets are littered with broken glass. Local officials have announced an ambitious pledge to replace all the broken windows within a week. In the early morning hours, however, workers could still be heard drilling new windows into place.

Authorities have sent divers into a frozen lake outside the city, where a large chunk of the meteor is believed to have landed, creating a large hole in the ice. By the end of the day they had not found anything.

They are not the only ones looking for it.

Meteor hunters from around the world are salivating at what some are calling the opportunity of a lifetime. A small piece of the meteor could fetch thousands of dollars and larger chunks could bring in even hundreds of thousands.

Read More..

False memories prime immune system for future attacks

IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.

When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.

Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.

The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.

The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."

So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.

To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).

The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.

"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"

This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

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Alleged cop killer died from single shot to head

LOS ANGELES: Alleged US cop killer Christopher Dorner died from a single gunshot wound to the head that appeared to be self-inflicted, a coroner said.

The doctor who examined the body concluded that "the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head," said San Bernardino County coroner Kevin Lacy, giving details from the results of a six-hour autopsy.

"We are not yet able to speak about the manner of death and tell you whether or not it was the result of a self-inflicted wound or another round," he told a press conference.

But he said, "while we are still assembling the reports and putting it together, the implication seems to be that the wound that took Christopher Dorner's life was self-inflicted."

The ex-Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) cop went on the run last week after allegedly killing a couple and a policeman, and wounding three people. Another officer was killed and one wounded before the cabin in which Dorner was holed up burned in a fire.

Dorner had posted online a chilling manifesto in which he threatened to kill policemen and their families, and blamed the LAPD for treating him unfairly in his sacking in 2008.

The manhunt came to a climax Tuesday in a cabin near a snow-covered ski resort, after Dorner was spotted in a stolen vehicle and then fled on foot after crashing one vehicle and carjacking another.

San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon said that there was a prolonged firefight with the 33-year-old, who barricaded himself in the cabin after a six-day manhunt.

When they had exhausted other means, SWAT officers used a tractor-type device to open up the windows and walls of the cabin, and inserted a pyrotechnic chemical, to try to force Dorner to surrender.

A blaze erupted, starting at one corner of the cabin. As the flames took hold, after a period of no firing, "We heard a distinct single gunshot coming from inside the house," said McMahon.

The sound of it "indicated to me (that) a different kind of weapon had been fired," he added.

- AFP/ck

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Crave Ep. 109: The greatest drinking game ever

The greatest drinking game ever, Ep: 109

Subscribe to Crave:

iTunes (HD) | iTunes (SD) | iTunes (HQ)

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This week on Crave, William Shatner has some choice words for J.J. Abrams, and we toss one back in the greatest drinking game ever invented. Cheers! Plus, we dodge a bullet the size of a football field as an asteroid nearly collides with Earth. Phew.

Crave stories:

- Shatner: J.J. Abrams a 'pig' for taking on 'Star Wars'

- Another close asteroid encounter for Earth coming Friday

- Injury count rises for Russian meteorite

- Sonic Wallets scream, moo, hurl insults when opened

- $11 million sought to build X-wing, counter Kickstarter Death Star

- Beercade: Fighting-game winner gets a frosty brew

- Crave giveaway: Aperion Audio Verus Forte speakers

Social networking:

- Stephen on Twitter

- Stephen on Google+

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Severe Weather More Likely Thanks to Climate Change

Jane J. Lee

BOSTON—Wildfires. Droughts. Super storms.

As opposed to representing the unfortunate severe weather headlines of the last year, scientists said Friday that climate change has increased the likelihood of such events moving forward.

And though the misery is shared from one U.S. coast to another, scientists speaking at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston said, the type of extreme event may vary significantly from region to region. (Related: "6 Ways Climate Change Will Affect You.")

Heat waves have become more frequent across the United States, with western regions setting records for the number of such events in the 2000s, said Donald Wuebbles, a geoscientist with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But the Midwest and Northeast have experienced a 45 percent and 74 percent increase, respectively, in the heaviest rainfalls those regions have seen since 1950.

The extreme drought that plagued Texas in 2011 has spread to New Mexico, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and northern Mexico, said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas State's climatologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.

"The science is clear and convincing that climate change is happening and it's happening rapidly. There's no debate within the science community ... about the changes occurring in the Earth's climate and the fact that these changes are occurring in response to human activities," said Wuebbles.

In 2011 and 2012, major droughts, heat waves, severe storms, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires caused about $60 billion in damages each year, for a total of about $120 billion.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climactic Data Center, these were some of the costliest weather events in the country's history, said Wuebbles.

President Obama argued in his State of the Union address this week that the time is ripe to address climate change, saying he would skirt Congress to make such changes, if necessary.

His proposals included a system similar to the cap-and-trade proposal killed in Congress during his first term, new regulations for coal-burning power plants, and a promise to promote energy efficiency and R&D efforts into cleaner technologies. (Related: "Obama Pledges U.S. Action on Climate, With or Without Congress.")

The researchers said they are glad to see that addressing climate change is on the President's agenda. But they stressed that they wanted the public to have access to accurate, scientifically sound information, not just simplified talking points.

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