There were title problems, too, that had to be resolved.

The restoration began in November 2011 when workers put on a new roof and sealed the building to outsiders. The building was reinforced and a new electrical system installed. The idea is to make the building a cultural center to aid in the restoration of the entire area.

Ministerio de Gobernación. Policía y Seguridad Pública photo

Snowden stays a step ahead
of U.S. law enforcement net


U.S. officials say the former intelligence contractor accused of espionage has had his passport revoked.

Authorities say the passport revocation occurred before fugitive Edward Snowden left Hong Kong for Moscow early Sunday to avoid extradition to the United States. A U.S. statement late Sunday said the United States is advising governments in the Western Hemisphere that Snowden is "wanted on felony charges, and as such should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel."

Snowden went to Hong Kong earlier this month to disclose secret details of the U.S. government's broad surveillance of telephone and Internet activities at home and abroad. U.S. prosecutors Friday unsealed spy charges based on those disclosures, and on Sunday voiced dismay that Hong Kong did not detain the fugitive.

With pressure mounting on Hong Kong authorities, Snowden left the Chinese city and arrived Sunday in Moscow, en route to expected political asylum in Ecuador.  Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino confirmed the asylum request, but did not offer further details.

Snowden remained inside Moscow's airport after arriving Sunday. Russian news agencies said he is expected to leave Monday on a flight to Cuba, before continuing to his final destination.

The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said its legal advisors and unidentified diplomats accompanied Snowden as he fled to Moscow Sunday. It said the escorts will remain with Snowden as he travels to Ecuador, one of Latin America's strongest critics of U.S. foreign policy.

Ecuador has sheltered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its London embassy for the past year, to prevent his possible extradition to the United States, where he faces charges related to the group's publication of secret U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010.

Snowden leaked documents showing that U.S. intelligence services have gathered data for years about patterns of telephone and Internet use at home and abroad. He said he believes the programs violate the privacy rights of citizens.

Senior U.S. officials have said the surveillance programs do not monitor the content of phone conversations, but look for patterns in the metadata, including information on the time, date and numbers called.

U.S. authorities also have said the programs prevented at least 50 terrorist attacks worldwide since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.  They have accused Snowden of weakening their ability to foil future plots.


Chain of battery charger sites
planned for electric vehicles


Co-founder of the Internet financial service PayPal and owner of electric car maker Tesla Motors, billionaire Elon Musk, is pushing hard for enabling long distance travel in electric cars.
 
At an event in Tesla's design studio in Los Angeles, Musk unveiled a new battery swapping system that automatically replaces a discharged battery with a fully charged one in about the same time it takes to fill up a 50-liter gas tank, and for about the same price.
 
Recharging the batteries at Tesla's supercharging stations is free but it takes about 30 minutes. A fully charged battery gives the car a range of approximately 320 kilometers.
 
 
Purely electric cars are cheaper to run than gasoline but have been slow to catch on because of the cost, limited driving range, lack of infrastructure and the time it takes to recharge the batteries.
 
Tesla electric cars have been selling at a rate of about 20,000 per year. Investors are supporting the company's strategy and its shares have nearly tripled this year.


Electric fish give glimpse
into the brains of humans


Electric fish, which have electric receptors in their skin that serve as a kind of radar system to help them navigate, communicate and locate food and mates, could provide insight into how the human central nervous system works.  

Electric fish live mostly in fresh water in tropical rivers and are found primarily in only two parts of the world.

There are two main groups, one in South America, the Gymnotiform, and that’s about 200 species that are known," said Rudiger Krahe, associate biology professor at Canada’s McGill University. "And then there is a second group in Africa, the Mormyri fish, and there are also about 200 species.” 

These two groups evolved independently, yet share the same ability to generate and sense weak electric waves. Their electric fields can be recorded with simple devices that pick up the signals in the water. 

“We can observe electrically, observe the activity of these fish continuously because they produce these signals non-stop, day and night," Krahe said. "And so we can monitor what they do, what their signals look like, how they modulate them in different context such as communication and then we can play them back artificially to them in experiments.”

While humans never developed this electric sense, the nervous system processes signals from our environment in much the same way as these fish do.

“How information is transmitted, how different aspects of the sensory information are extracted, that’s extremely similar to what happens in the auditory systems, so, in our hearing, and also, in many ways, what happens in vision,” Krahe said.  

Fish don’t have brains nearly as complicated as humans, but many of the structures and pathways are quite similar. That link offers a new approach to understanding human physiology.  

“How we extract sensory information, how we use that to guide our behavior, how our nervous system accomplishes that and of course we do experiments with fish that we cannot do with humans," Krahe said. "And we’re trying to learn general principles of nervous system action, basically, and how behavior is controlled. ”

This research could be applied in studies on the impact of serotonin, a hormone in the central nervous system believed to influence mood and depression.


Crowdfunding may become
a source of stock investments


Crowdfunding Web sites have grown rapidly as a way to raise money for creative ventures, everything from movies to scientific research to clever inventions.  People with an idea for a project invite supporters to pool their money via online platforms with names such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo or Rockethub.

Using those same platforms to sell shares in a startup is illegal in the United States, but that might not be the case for long.

Here's a story of small business in the Internet Age.  Five years ago, Roberto Hoyos of Seattle founded a company to make what he describes as "geeky" pillows.

"The whole thing really kind of started to impress a girl," Hoyos said. "I actually made a gift of throw pillows that looked like computer icons."

Hoyos' grandmother, a Peruvian immigrant, was a seamstress who taught him to sew at a young age and he inherited her vintage 1954 sewing machine. On this particular day, he puts it to work in his living room, assembling colorful pillows in the shape of chat bubbles.

Now, Hoyos is ready to take his business, named Throwboy, to the next level. 

"Where we're able, you know, to get into stores and be on every couch," he said.

He wants to finance a production run in China, but this is where Hoyos bumps into a familiar hurdle for budding entrepreneurs. He has a promising product, but no collateral and no big investors to finance expansion.

"When the business types find out that behind the scenes it's really just one guy doing this, they stop taking it seriously," Hoyos said.

So he turned to the Internet, recording a video pitch to raise money from the public on the Kickstarter Web site.

"With your support," he said on the video, "I know Throwboy can grow into something bigger."

In the crowd-funding arena, supporters who pledge money are, technically speaking, backers not investors.  Hoyos promises to reward his backers with pillows.  If the business tanks, at least they’ve got a few pillows. If Throwboy becomes wildly successful, they’ve got...a few pillows.

"For my money, I'd like to get a piece of the upside if the company does well," said attorney Cyrus Habib, who advises startups and also serves in the Washington state legislature.

In April, he introduced a bill to expand crowdfunding by allowing local companies to offer equity in an enterprise to potential local shareholders. Just a couple of other U.S. states — Kansas and Georgia — and a few European countries, allow the practice now. What Habib envisions is entrepreneurs collecting small amounts of money, no more than $1,000 or $2,000 at a time, from a large number of people. 

He sees this as democratizing startup investment.

"You know we all wonder, 'Geez, I wish I could have gotten involved with Facebook when it was a start up.' Well, good luck with that," Habib said. "You've really got to be a multi-millionaire to have those kinds of opportunities. What this does is it just opens that sort of thing up to the average Joe."

The U.S. Congress has already directed federal regulators to legalize equity crowdfunding.  But rulemaking at the Securities and Exchange Commission has fallen way behind schedule. That's partly why Habib wants to proceed with a state exemption to the usual hoops and hurdles for selling shares.

Bill Beatty is all for moving ahead with caution. He's in charge of securities oversight at the state level at Washington's Department of Financial Institutions.

Beatty worries crooks could use online share offers to cheat people, pointing to some of the come-ons already crowding e-mail in-boxes.

He says the challenge is to strike the right balance between simplicity, oversight and sufficient disclosure of risks to protect investors.

"We want to keep it simple," Beatty said. "The entrepreneur probably doesn't have the resources to know how to write some kind of document that fairly puts the investor on notice about what the risks are. How do we accomplish that?"

Regulators in Sweden, Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom have allowed a handful of equity crowdfunding platforms to launch and solicit investors. Initial ventures to get funded include an online flea market, a distillery in London, and several renewable energy companies.

American entrepreneurs must wait to take advantage.  But, even when it's legal in the U.S., pillow company founder Hoyos says he's not sure he'd sell stock to raise money. He says he's happy to reward backers with pillows, but isn't sure he wants to answer to hundreds of small shareholders.


Brazilians continue protests
despite plea by president


A plea for calm by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has failed to deter protesters who again took to the streets on Saturday.

Thousands of demonstrators chanted and waved banners in Belo Horizonte. Smaller rallies took place on Saturday in several other cities.

At Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Beach, demonstrators placed hundreds of soccer balls in the sand.

Some of the protests have targeted the billions of dollars being spent for Brazil to host next year's World Cup, this month's Confederations Cup as well as the 2016 Olympic summer games.

Saturday's demonstrations erupted in spite of President Rousseff's call late Friday for an end to the unrest. In a nationally televised address, she said peaceful demonstrations are what make a strong democracy, but vowed that protest-related violence would not be tolerated.

Earlier Friday, she held an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the protests.

The emergency meeting came a day after at least one million demonstrators rallied in dozens of cities across Brazil, including Rio where police fired tear gas into crowds of protesters.

The wave of protests was originally triggered by an increase in bus and subway fares, but protesters have since focused on what they say is the government's neglect of public services, high taxes and rampant corruption.

President Rousseff has already called off a trip to Japan planned for next week to respond to the protests, the country's biggest in two decades.

Protesters have been undeterred by the news that Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have scrapped plans to increase public transportation fees.


Gene that controls rhythms
may also defeat aging process


Human sleeping and waking patterns are largely governed by an internal circadian clock that corresponds closely with the 24-hour cycle of light and darkness. This circadian clock also controls other body functions, such as metabolism and temperature regulation.

Studies in animals have found that when that rhythm gets thrown off, health problems including obesity and metabolic disorders such as diabetes can arise. Studies of people who work night shifts have also revealed an increased susceptibility to diabetes.

A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that a gene called SIRT1, previously shown to protect against diseases of aging, plays a key role in controlling these circadian rhythms. The researchers found that circadian function decays with aging in normal mice, and that boosting their SIRT1 levels in the brain could prevent this decay. Conversely, loss of SIRT1 function impairs circadian control in young mice, mimicking what happens in normal aging.

Since the SIRT1 protein itself was found to decline with aging in the normal mice, the findings suggest that drugs that enhance SIRT1 activity in humans could have widespread health benefits, says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at the university and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the June 20 issue of Cell.

“If we could keep SIRT1 as active as possible as we get older, then we’d be able to retard aging in the central clock in the brain, and health benefits would radiate from that,” Guarente says.

In humans and animals, circadian patterns follow a roughly 24-hour cycle, directed by the circadian control center of the brain, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, located in the hypothalamus.

“Just about everything that takes place physiologically is really staged along the circadian cycle,” Guarente says. “What’s now emerging is the idea that maintaining the circadian cycle is quite important in health maintenance, and if it gets broken, there’s a penalty to be paid in health and perhaps in aging.”

Last year, Guarente found that a robust circadian period correlated with longer lifespan in mice. That got him wondering what role SIRT1, which has been shown to prolong lifespan in many animals, might play in that phenomenon. SIRT1, which Guarente first linked with aging more than 15 years ago, is a master regulator of cell responses to stress, coordinating a variety of hormone networks, proteins and genes to help keep cells alive and healthy.

To investigate SIRT1’s role in circadian control, Guarente and his colleagues created genetically engineered mice that produce different amounts of SIRT1 in the brain. One group of mice had normal SIRT1 levels, another had no SIRT1, and two groups had extra SIRT1 — either twice or 10 times as much as normal.

Mice lacking SIRT1 had slightly longer circadian cycles (23.9 hours) than normal mice (23.6 hours), and mice with a 10-fold increase in SIRT1 had shorter cycles (23.1 hours).

In mice with normal SIRT1 levels, the researchers confirmed previous findings that when the 12-hour light/dark cycle is interrupted, younger mice readjust their circadian cycles much more easily than older ones. However, they showed for the first time that mice with extra SIRT1 do not suffer the same decline in circadian control as they age.

The researchers also found that SIRT1 exerts this control by regulating the genes BMAL and CLOCK, the two major keepers of the central circadian clock.

A growing body of evidence suggests that being able to respond to large or small disruptions of the light/dark cycle is important to maintaining healthy metabolic function, Guarente says.

“Essentially we experience a mini jet lag every day because the light cycle is constantly changing. The critical thing for us is to be able to adapt smoothly to these jolts,” Guarente says. “Many studies in mice say that while young mice do this perfectly well, it’s the old mice that have the problem. So that could well be true in humans.”

If so, it could be possible to treat or prevent diseases of aging by enhancing circadian function — either by delivering SIRT1 activators in the brain or developing drugs that enhance another part of the circadian control system, Guarente says.

“I think we should look at every aspect of the machinery of the circadian clock in the brain, and any intervention that can maintain that machinery with aging ought to be good,” he says. “One entry point would be SIRT1, because we’ve shown in mice that genetic maintenance of SIRT1 helps maintain circadian function.”

Some SIRT1 activators are now being tested against diabetes, inflammation and other diseases, but they are not designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and would likely not be able to reach the suprachiasmatic nucleus. However, Guarente believes it could be possible to design SIRT1 activators that can get into the brain.

Roman Kondratov, an associate professor of biology at Cleveland State University, says the study raises several exciting questions regarding the potential to delay or reverse age-related changes in the brain through rejuvenation of the circadian clock with SIRT1 enhancement.

“The importance of this study is that it has both basic and potentially translational applications, taking into account the fact that pharmacological modulators of SIRT1 are currently under active study,” Kondratov says.

Researchers in Guarente’s lab are now investigating the relationship between health, circadian function and diet. They suspect that high-fat diets might throw the circadian clock out of whack, which could be counteracted by increased SIRT1 activation.


U.N. says global warming
to have big impact on business


Extreme weather events, including rising temperatures linked to climate change, and growing competition for natural resources mean tough times may be ahead for the business sector, the United Nations said in a report published Friday. 

Nick Nuttall is from the United Nations Environmental Program.

“We are living in a world of more extreme weather events.  We are living in a world of rising water scarcity.  We are living in a world where things like natural resources are being gobbled up at an increasing rate.  By 2050, if we carry on this way, natural resource consumption will triple," said Nuttall.

The report is called "GEO-5 for Business: Impacts of a Changing Environment on the Corporate Sector."   It follows the U.N.’s Global Environment Outlook which made a comprehensive assessment of the state of the world's changing climate. 

According to that report, human pressures on the planet mean that several critical environmental thresholds are approaching or have already been surpassed.

Nuttall says that has widespread implications for global business.  The new report looks at how construction, chemicals, mining, food, and other industries will all be impacted.
 
Nuttall gives the example of South Africa, where pressure on natural resources will impact mining costs.

“Certainly in respect to their platinum mines, they could actually face water charges 10 times their current value by 2020, so that's in just seven years, because of water scarcity in South Africa," he said.

Rising temperatures will also impact the tourist industry, the report says.  For example, it says less than half of the ski resorts operating in the northeast of the United States will remain economically viable 30 years from now.

Nuttall says that meanwhile, the world's population is growing, especially in countries with developing economies.  Governments will have to make major investments for infrastructure needs such as transport and electricity. 

Nuttall says it’s important the future is built with the environment in mind.

“So there is a huge amount, trillions of dollars, being invested in the coming years in many developing countries.  And that is happening in a sense through the private sector.  The question is whether the governments involved can push that investment into the green, environmentally friendly space," said Nuttall.

According to the U.N. report, 80 percent of the capital needed to address climate change may come from the private sector.


Malaysia declares emergency
over smoke from Indonesia


Malaysia has declared a state of emergency in two parts of the southern state of Johor, as smoke from land-clearing fires in Indonesia pushed air pollution above safe levels.

The Malaysian natural resources and environment minister, G. Palnival, said Sunday that the edict was made after pollution levels in Malaysia reached their highest levels in 16 years.

Air quality in neighboring Singapore improved Sunday after reaching record pollution levels Friday for a third straight day.

Indonesia has deployed helicopters to help battle raging fires and to seed clouds in a desperate attempt to create rain to douse the flames.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said the haze that began afflicting the city-state Monday could persist until the end of the dry season on Indonesia's Sumatra Island in September or October.

Singapore's national environment agency chief, Andrew Tan, has called on Indonesia to take decisive action against companies suspected of burning forests on Sumatra as a cheap way of clearing land.

However, the Indonesian minister for people's welfare, Agung Laksono criticized Singapore's reaction to the haze, accusing the city-state of acting like a child.

Indonesia has defended its response, saying it is investigating companies suspected of setting the fires and trying to educate plantation owners about alternatives to traditional burning methods.

Accesibility Total S.A. photo