>Suicide Victim May Have Harbored a Secret

>

He seemed, in many ways, like a man from another time, a Gatsbyesque figure who glided through a world of old money, private clubs and pedigree horses, his family name emblazoned on Ivy League halls.

Then, in an instant, he was gone — his privileged life ended, by his own hand, with a single gunshot to the head.

No one can know exactly what Finn M. W. Caspersen, a prominent philanthropist and the heir to the Beneficial Corporation fortune, was thinking when he decided to take his life on Labor Day. Although Mr. Caspersen, 67, was battling kidney cancer, his suicide shocked his family and friends.

But Mr. Caspersen, a patron of Harvard and Princeton who gave away tens of millions of dollars to charity, apparently harbored a secret: He was suspected of dodging many millions in federal taxes. The authorities, it seemed, were closing in.

At the time of his death, investigators were building a case against Mr. Caspersen on suspicion of using secret offshore bank accounts to evade taxes.

The authorities had asserted he might have owed as much as $100 million in back taxes and fines or, possibly, even have faced prison, according to a person briefed on the investigation, who was granted anonymity because of the delicacy of the case and the events surrounding Mr. Caspersen’s death.

Whispers of some sort of tax trouble went through the crowd at Mr. Caspersen’s funeral on Tuesday. About 800 people attended the service in Morristown, N.J.

“He made everything right for so many people, and that is why this is such a tragedy,” Susan Wachter, a friend and former Beneficial board member, said of Mr. Caspersen’s death.

via Suicide Victim May Have Harbored a Secret – NYTimes.com.

>Justice Department urges court to reject Google book deal

>

Government lawyers urged a federal court judge late Friday to reject a proposed settlement which would allow Google to digitally scan massive libraries of books and place them online.

In a highly anticipated announcement, Justice Department attorneys cited “class action, copyright, and antitrust” concerns in asking U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin in New York to reject the currently constructed class action settlement between Google and the Authors Guild, which had sued them.

Despite the perceived problems, the federal government in its first public comments in the case, said it believes the necessary changes could be made, and urged continued negotiations.

“Because a properly structured settlement agreement in this case offers the potential for important societal benefits, the United States does not want the opportunity or momentum to be lost,” the government said.

The decision was promptly hailed by authors and scholars opposed to the proposed deal.

“The current settlement proposal would stifle innovation and competition in favor of a monopoly over the access, distribution and pricing of the largest collection of digital books in the world, and would reinforce an already dominant position in search and search advertising,” said the Open Book Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon, three of Google’s biggest rivals.

Both proponents and opponents agree the process of digitizing books holds great promise for consumers, libraries, scholars and students.

via Justice Department urges court to reject Google book deal – CNN.com.

>Nanosatellite to Test Life’s Handedness in Space

>

Molecules vital to life have been detected in outer space and isolated in meteorites and comets. Some of this material that rained down on Earth may have jump-started biology. If so, these space seeds also may have planted a particular molecular orientation, or “handedness,” that spread to the world’s first creatures. New research is studying how this handedness could arise in space.

Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, exist in two so-called “chiral” forms that are mirror reflections of each other, like a left and right hand. For some unknown reason, organisms use left-handed amino acids almost exclusively in making proteins (the other mirror image, while rare, is sometimes used in other processes).

“Outside of biology the ratio of these chiral forms is 50-50, so we want to understand the starting point of life’s preference for left-handed amino acids,” says Orlando Santos of NASA Ames Research Center.

Santos and his colleagues are designing a small satellite that would carry up biologically relevant molecules to see what effects space has on a sample’s handedness, and whether this could explain the origins of homochirality.

“Other researchers in this field have tried to reproduce space conditions in a lab,” Santos says. “But artificial systems are just that. We want to test the theories in a natural environment.”

The project is part of the Astrobiology Science and Technology Instrument Development and Mission Concept Studies. In a follow-up story, Astrobiology Magazine will profile another NASA-supported experiment that hopes to address how handedness in space might be delivered to the ground.

via SPACE.com — Nanosatellite to Test Life’s Handedness in Space.

>Man’s lung ailment caused by fragment of fast food spoon

>

“I know I didn’t chow down on a spoon!” declared John Manley, who recently discovered that an eating utensil was the source of his two years of ill health, coughing, vomiting and pain. The Wilmington, North Carolina, resident had surgery last week to remove part of a plastic spoon from his lung. And it wasn’t just any old plastic spoon; it came from the fast-food chain Wendy’s, with the restaurant logo clearly visible on the handle.

“It must have been in the food or drink,” Manley told CNN affiliate WECT. His doctor found the spoon after looking into his lungs with an endoscope, a medical instrument with a long, thin tube containing a light and a video camera. “He explained that there was an object down there, and it had writing on it,” Manley said. “It spelled out ‘Wendy’s’ on one side and ‘hamburgers’ on the other, and I was a little floored.”

So were his relatives, who, when they were telephoned with the news, were eating … Wendy’s.

via Man’s lung ailment caused by fragment of fast food spoon – CNN.com.

The x-ray of a spoon above is from the following story at uphaa:

A young Australian woman, 26, accidentally swallowed a teaspoon in a laughing fit while eating spaghetti during a dinner conversation. She laughed so hard that the 15-centimeter spoon lodged in her throat at the top of her stomach.
The Sunday Telegraph newspaper reports that the doctors at Canterbury Hospital had sedated the woman and taken out the spoon “with great difficulty” during the 90-minute operation.

Here is another one:

A 50-year-old man presented to the emergency department with marked dysphagia, dyspnea, and paroxysmal cough. He had swallowed a spoon while trying to extract a fish bone that was stuck in his throat. The presence and position of the spoon were verified in two radiographs (Panels A and B). With the patient under general anesthesia and with the aid of a laryngoscope, the end of the tablespoon was grabbed with forceps and safely extracted. No fish bone was detected on evaluation with esophagogastroduodenoscopy. The spoon was 19 cm in overall length, and the bowl of the spoon was 6.5 cm by 4 cm by 0.5 cm in its largest dimensions.

Source

Here is a reminder of how the something like  a fork could get into your lungs…. but I have a very hard time understanding how a person could not be aware of the event. Sleep eating?

>New rabies vaccine may require only a single shot… not 6

>

A person, usually a child, dies of rabies every 20 minutes. However, only one inoculation may be all it takes for rabies vaccination, according to new research published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases by researchers at the Jefferson Vaccine Center.

A replication-deficient rabies virus vaccine that lacks a key gene called the matrix (M) gene induced a rapid and efficient anti-rabies immune response in mice and non-human primates, according to James McGettigan, Ph.D., assistant professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University.

“The M gene is one of the central genes of the rabies virus, and its absence inhibits the virus from completing its life cycle,” Dr. McGettigan said. “The virus in the vaccine infects cells and induces an immune response, but the virus is deficient in spreading.”

The immune response induced with this process is so substantial that only one inoculation may be sufficient enough, according to Dr. McGettigan. In addition, the vaccine appears to be efficient in both pre-exposure and post-exposure settings.

Currently, the World Health Organization standard for rabies infection is post-exposure prophylaxis. The complex regimen in the United States requires six different shots over 28 days: five of the rabies vaccine and one of rabies immunoglobulin.

The current standard vaccine is made from inactivated rabies virus, whereas the experimental vaccine is made from a live rabies virus. The virus is modified by removing the M gene, thus inhibiting its spread within the vaccine recipient.

Worldwide, the annual number of rabies-related deaths is estimated to be 40,000 to 70,000. The disease is endemic in developing areas, where the six-shot post-exposure regimen is not feasible for many people due to cost and availability. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 10 million people worldwide receive the post-exposure regimen, which presents a financial burden to both industrialized and developing countries.

“Developing countries do not have the resources to vaccinate people six times after exposure, so many of these 10 million do not receive the full regimen,” Dr. McGettigan said. “Therefore, simpler and less expensive vaccine regimens are needed. The alternative may also be to treat people pre-exposure, as they are with many of the current vaccines used. Although our vaccine was tested primarily to be a post-exposure vaccine, the data we collected show it would be effective as a pre-exposure vaccine as well.”

Dr. McGettigan recently was awarded a four-year $1.5 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue his research on novel rabies vaccine approaches.

via New rabies vaccine may require only a single shot… not 6.