Jolla's heavily teased launch day in Finland has already spilled some major news: pricing and specs for the first Sailfish OS handset. The phone seems to be called "The Other Half" -- or at least that's the working title for now -- and judging from Jolla's Facebook page it consists of a colorful plastic case, available in various shades including orange or green, which hooks onto the main chassis containing a 4.5-inch display (of unknown resolution), dual-core processor, microSD expansion with 16GB onboard, a "4G" modem, user replaceable battery and an 8MP rear camera. The chassis recognizes which case is attached and adapts the visual theme of the OS to match, creating "your other half, exactly as you want it to be."
Perhaps more usefully, the Sailfish operating system will also be Android app compliant out of the box, and we're currently on the ground in Helsinki trying to discover exactly how developers and users will be able to put that feature to work (while also chasing down the rest of the specs). Meanwhile, there's an emphatic video message from Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon after the break, seeking the world's assistance in taking the heritage of MeeGo into a new era.
Update: We now hear that the phone will simply be called the "Jolla."
Update #2: Jolla has just clarified that 4G means LTE. The display resolution has been vaguely described as "HD," which to our minds suggests 720p. Furthermore, it sounds like the way the "other half" interfaces with the main body of the device allows for much deeper functionality beyond just personalization. We've just added our own video tour with more information.
After what has literally been years of waiting, the trailer for Alfonso Cuaron's "Gravity" has arrived. The film, which stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, is a terrifying sci-fi epic that Guillermo del Toro has promised will blow our minds, and now we can see why. The trailer for "Gravity" goes light on the plot [...]
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's dominant mineworkers union will launch a youth wing on Thursday in a bid to shore up its numbers after it lost tens of thousands of members to a militant rival last year on the country's platinum belt.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which says it has around 300,000 members or about 60 percent of the mine workforce in the world's top platinum producer, is a key political ally of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
Its massive loss of members to the radical Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) last year in the platinum shafts during a bloody turf war was rooted in rank and file perceptions that its leaders had lost touch with ordinary workers and become too close to management and the ANC.
NUM spokesman Lesiba Seshoka said research showed the union's membership was getting younger and that most of the members it lost to AMCU last year were in their 20s or 30s.
"We need young guys. The old guys are more loyal to the NUM because they came up with us through the struggle against apartheid," Seshoka told Reuters.
"The young guys are more militant and we have to look at the interests of young members," he said.
The new entity will be called the "NUM Youth Forum" and will be modeled on the lines of the ANC Youth League. It will elect its leaders at meetings in Midrand north of Johannesburg, on Thursday and Friday, Seshoka said.
The creation of a youth wing also comes ahead of wage negotiations in the mining sector which will be among the toughest ever, given inflation, worker militancy and shrinking company margins.
"The young guys are likely going to be very hard on wage talks," Seshoka said.
The move signals NUM is preparing to literally fight back against AMCU, seeking younger men to beef up its ranks, after the rivalry between the two triggered violence last year that killed over 50 people and sparked a wave of wildcat strikes that hammered production.
May 9, 2013 ? Different brain areas are activated when we choose to suppress an emotion, compared to when we are instructed to inhibit an emotion, according a new study from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Ghent University.
In this study, published in Brain Structure and Function, the researchers scanned the brains of healthy participants and found that key brain systems were activated when choosing for oneself to suppress an emotion. They had previously linked this brain area to deciding to inhibit movement.
"This result shows that emotional self-control involves a quite different brain system from simply being told how to respond emotionally," said lead author Dr Simone Kuhn (Ghent University).
In most previous studies, participants were instructed to feel or inhibit an emotional response. However, in everyday life we are rarely told to suppress our emotions, and usually have to decide ourselves whether to feel or control our emotions.
In this new study the researchers showed fifteen healthy women unpleasant or frightening pictures. The participants were given a choice to feel the emotion elicited by the image, or alternatively to inhibit the emotion, by distancing themselves through an act of self-control.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of the participants. They compared this brain activity to another experiment where the participants were instructed to feel or inhibit their emotions, rather than choose for themselves.
Different parts of the brain were activated in the two situations. When participants decided for themselves to inhibit negative emotions, the scientists found activation in the dorso-medial prefrontal area of the brain. They had previously linked this brain area to deciding to inhibit movement.
In contrast, when participants were instructed by the experimenter to inhibit the emotion, a second, more lateral area was activated.
"We think controlling one's emotions and controlling one's behaviour involve overlapping mechanisms," said Dr Kuhn.
"We should distinguish between voluntary and instructed control of emotions, in the same way as we can distinguish between making up our own mind about what do, versus following instructions."
Regulating emotions is part of our daily life, and is important for our mental health. For example, many people have to conquer fear of speaking in public, while some professionals such as health-care workers and firemen have to maintain an emotional distance from unpleasant or distressing scenes that occur in their jobs.
Professor Patrick Haggard (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) co-author of the paper said the brain mechanism identified in this study could be a potential target for therapies.
"The ability to manage one's own emotions is affected in many mental health conditions, so identifying this mechanism opens interesting possibilities for future research.
"Most studies of emotion processing in the brain simply assume that people passively receive emotional stimuli, and automatically feel the corresponding emotion. In contrast, the area we have identified may contribute to some individuals' ability to rise above particular emotional situations.
"This kind of self-control mechanism may have positive aspects, for example making people less vulnerable to excessive emotion. But altered function of this brain area could also potentially lead to difficulties in responding appropriately to emotional situations."
TACOMA, Washington (Reuters) - A survivor of a shooting spree that killed five U.S. servicemen at a combat stress clinic in Iraq testified on Tuesday that he remembered the gunman, a fellow soldier, chuckling after he shot an unarmed man who had been trying to hide.
U.S. Army Sergeant John Russell pleaded guilty last month to killing two medical staff officers and three soldiers at Camp Liberty, adjacent to the Baghdad airport, in a 2009 shooting the military has said could have been triggered by combat stress.
He is facing a streamlined court martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state to determine the level of his guilt, a question that will hinge largely on whether the military judge finds he acted with premeditation, as prosecutors say, or on impulse, as the defense argues.
Army sergeant Dominic Morales, working at the clinic at the time of the attack, recalled that he hid under a desk beside another soldier and heard shots ring out and said he could smell gun powder.
Morales testified that Russell shot a soldier hiding near a filing shelf one time and chuckled as he moaned "Oh God, oh God..." and then shot him again.
"I heard Sergeant Russell chuckle ... an evil chuckle," Morales said. "To me, a frightening chuckle."
Russell then approached his hiding place and shot the soldier next to him, specialist Jacob Barton, whose dead body fell onto him.
Seconds later, with Russell out of sight, Morales sprinted out of hiding but the soldier fired at least two bullets at him.
The testimony came on the second day of a court martial that is expected to focus largely on Russell's state of mind at the time of the shooting, which marked one of the worst episodes of soldier-on-soldier violence in the Iraq war.
Defense attorney James Culp later established through questioning Morales that nightmares jogged his memory of Russell's laugh.
CALM DEMEANOR
Military prosecutors have focused this week on the more than 40 minutes Russell had to consider his actions as he drove back to the clinic with a stolen SUV and rifle and on his calm, stone-faced demeanor as he carried that rifle in a combat-ready position as he slipped into the clinic through a rear entrance.
Russell, who agreed to plead guilty in a deal that will spare him the death penalty, faces up to life in confinement without the possibility of parole, forfeiture of pay and a dishonorable discharge.
Defense lawyers, who had not yet made an opening statement, have said Russell suffered a host of mental ailments after several combat tours and was suicidal before the attack. With his mind damaged and unable to get the help he needed, they say, he cracked.
An independent forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Sadoff of the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that Russell suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis at the time of the shootings.
Sadoff suggested Russell, who was attached to the 54th Engineer Battalion based in Bamberg, Germany, was provoked to violence by maltreatment at the hands of mental health personnel at Camp Liberty.
The presiding judge, Army Colonel David Conn, ruled on Monday that when Sadoff testifies he can draw upon another doctor's findings that the soldier had "brain abnormalities" in areas that govern behavior and emotion. Sadoff used that analysis in his own broader psychiatric evaluation.
Prosecutors also asked staff sergeant Derrick Flowers, who jumped out of a window to escape the attack, whether Russell's gun shots were "erratic or controlled."
In a long and dramatic trial, an Arizona woman, Jodi Arias, was convicted of murdering her ex-boyfriend by a jury on Wednesday. The sentencing trial will begin on Thursday and will determine whether Arias will face the death penalty. ?
By Tim Gaynor,?Reuters / May 8, 2013
Jodi Arias reacts after she was found of guilty of first degree murder in the killing of her one-time boyfriend, Travis Alexander, in their suburban Phoenix home, Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Phoenix.
AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, Rob Schumacher, Pool
Enlarge
An?Arizona?jury found Jodi Arias?guilty on Wednesday of first-degree murder in the death of her ex-boyfriend in a capital trial that riveted?America?for months with graphic sexual evidence and bizarre testimony.
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Arias, who could face the death penalty as her case goes into the penalty phase of the trial on Thursday, has admitted to shooting 30-year-old?Travis Alexander, whose body was found in the shower of his?Phoenix?valley home in June 2008. He had been shot in the face, stabbed 27 times and his throat had been slashed.
Arias, 32, had tried unsuccessfully to convince the jury that she acted in self-defense after Alexander attacked her because she had dropped his camera while taking photos of him in the shower.
She teared up as the jury's decision was read, while a crowd of hundreds erupted into cheers outside the court. Jurors could have convicted Arias?of a lesser crime such as second-degree murder or manslaughter, but instead found her guilty of the most serious charge possible.
"Five long years ... of lying, manipulating. Now the citizens of?Arizona?have spoken,"?Dave Hall, a friend of Alexander, told reporters as he left the court. He said a death sentence would be appropriate.
"If what she did to Travis does not justify the death penalty in?America?today, then what do we have one for?"
The trial, which was punctuated by graphic testimony and evidence including a sex tape, captivated a nation enthralled by the story of an attractive and soft-spoken young woman charged with such a brutal crime.
The case, which began in early January and was streamed live on the Internet, drew parallels with the similarly high-profile?Florida?murder trial of?Casey Anthony, another young woman charged with an unthinkable crime. She was ultimately acquitted in 2011 in the death of her toddler daughter,?Caylee.
In the?Arizona?case, jurors heard how the petite, dark-haired Arias?met and began dating Alexander, a businessman and motivational speaker, in 2006. During 18 days of often salacious testimony, Arias?said she and Alexander continued to have sex despite their break-up from a relationship marked by emotional and physical abuse.
Arias said Alexander had made her feel "like a prostitute" and that he kicked and attempted to choke her, although she admitted never reporting the alleged abuse to the police, seeking medical treatment or documenting it in her journal.
May 7, 2013 ? From Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years, according to a new study of the DNA of people from across the continent.
The study, co-authored by Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, will be published May 7 in the journal PLoS Biology.
"What's remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other. On a genealogical level, everyone in Europe traces back to nearly the same set of ancestors only a thousand years ago," Coop said.
"This was predicted in theory over a decade ago, and we now have concrete evidence from DNA data," Coop said, adding that such close kinship likely exists in other parts of the world as well.
Coop and co-author Peter Ralph, now a professor at the University of Southern California, set out to study relatedness among Europeans in recent history, up to about 3,000 years ago. Drawing on the Population Reference Sample (POPRES) database, a resource for population and genetics research, they compared genetic sequences from more than 2,000 individuals.
As expected, Coop and Ralph found that the degree of genetic relatedness between two people tends to be smaller the farther apart they live. But even a pair of individuals who live as far apart as the United Kingdom and Turkey -- a distance of some 2,000 miles -- likely are related to all of one another's ancestors from a thousand years ago.
Subtle local differences, which likely mark demographic shifts and historic migrations, exist on top of this underlying kinship, Ralph said. Barriers like mountain ranges and linguistic differences have also slightly reduced relatedness among regions.
Coop noted, however, that these are all relatively small differences.
"The overall picture is that everybody is related, and we are looking at only subtle differences between regions," he said.
To learn about these patterns, Ralph and Coop used ideas about the expected amount of genome shared between relatives of varying degrees of relatedness. For example, first cousins have grandparents in common and share long stretches of DNA.
Ralph and Coop looked for shorter blocks of DNA that were shared between cousins separated by many more generations.
Because the number of ancestors doubles with every generation, the chance of having identical DNA in common with more distant relatives quickly drops. But in large samples, rare cases of distant sharing could be detected. With their analysis, Coop and Ralph were able to detect these shared blocks of DNA in individuals spread across Europe, and calculate how long ago they shared an ancestor.
Coop and Ralph hope to continue the work with larger and more detailed databases, including much finer-resolution data on where individuals lived within a country.
However, Coop noted that while studies of genetic ancestry can shed light on history, they do not tell the whole story. Archaeology and linguistics also provide important information about how cultures and societies move and change.
"These studies need to proceed hand in hand, to form a much fuller picture of history," Coop said.
May 6, 2013 ? Nearly one in five children and teens found to be at risk for suicide report that there are guns in their homes, and 15 percent of those at risk for suicide with guns in the home know how to access both the guns and the bullets, according to a study to be presented Monday, May 6, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, DC.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people ages 10 to 24 years in the United States, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Nearly half of youths who die by suicide use a firearm.
Researchers conducted a study to create a suicide risk screening tool that health care professionals in emergency departments (EDs) could use to figure out which youths need further mental health evaluation to keep them from harming themselves. As part of that study, researchers asked youths about access to guns in or around their home and about gun/bullet storage.
"For more than 1.5 million adolescents, the ED is their primary point of contact with the health care system, which makes the ED an important place for identifying youth at risk for suicide," said Stephen J. Teach, MD, MPH, FAAP, associate chief in the Division of Emergency Medicine at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC, and co-author who will be presenting the study at the PAS meeting.
Many clinicians and parents do not know how to ask youth about suicide, so they require screening tools to assist in detection, added study senior author Lisa M. Horowitz, PhD, MPH, staff scientist/pediatric psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. "According to our data, when asked their opinion, nearly all of the kids in our study were in favor of suicide screening in the ED. Our study shows that if you ask kids directly about suicide, they will tell you what they are thinking."
Study participants included 524 patients ages 10 to 21 who were seen for medical/surgical or psychiatric complaints at one of three pediatric EDs. They were asked to fill out a 17-item questionnaire that the researchers used to develop the Ask Suicide-Screening Questions (ASQ), a four-question screening tool that can be used for all pediatric patients visiting the ED. The ASQ has been validated against a longer more in-depth suicide assessment tool.
"While many youths who kill themselves have mental health disorders, up to 40 percent of youths who kill themselves have no known mental illness," said co-author and youth suicide expert Jeffrey A. Bridge, PhD, principal investigator at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics at The Ohio State University. "Therefore, it is important to screen all children and adolescents for suicide, regardless of the reason they are visiting the ED."
Of the patients who completed the screening tools, 151 (29 percent) were found to be at risk for suicide, and 17 percent of them reported guns in or around the home. Of those at risk for suicide and reporting guns in the home, 31 percent knew how to access the guns, 31 percent knew how to access the bullets, and 15 percent knew how to access both the guns and the bullets.
"This study highlights the importance of parents understanding the risks of having guns in their homes," said Dr. Bridge. "Being at risk for suicide and having access to firearms is a volatile mix. These conversations need to take place in the ED with families of children at risk for suicide."
May 6, 2013 ? A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows delicate wisps of gas that make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short.
The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago. There are several types of supernovae, but for SNR 0519 the star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star -- a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.
SNR 0519 is located over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Because of this, this region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects.
The LMC orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies, the Local Group. SNR 0519 is not alone in the LMC; the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also came across a similar bauble a few years ago in SNR B0509-67.5, a supernova of the same type as SNR 0519 with a strikingly similar appearance.
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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) ? It was among the first states to legalize gay marriage and served as the 2008 campaign liftoff site for the first black president, but in other arenas Iowa isn't quite so progressive ? it's also one of just two states to never elect a woman governor or member of Congress.
The other is Mississippi, a fact that causes a certain amount of handwringing among Iowa's political classes.
With Senate and House seats open in 2014 in the wake of Sen. Tom Harkin's decision to retire, many think this could be the time for a woman to finally break through. But after several high-profile possibilities have taken themselves out of consideration ? most recently Republican Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds opting out of a Senate run ? the prospects are unclear.
"I'm frustrated. I'm disappointed. I'm irritated. I was certainly hoping we would have female candidates for top offices. It appears to me that it is not going to happen," said Roxanne Conlin, a Democrat who was the state's first woman candidate for governor in 1982 and ran again for U.S. Senate in 2010.
Just why Iowa lags behind is a bit of a head-scratcher.
"In some ways it is baffling because it's not that it's not an open-minded state," said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. "It's a state with an active women's political community."
Iowa's neighboring states have women in top political positions. Wisconsin just elected Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Nebraska voted in Sen. Deb Fischer. Sen. Amy Klobuchar represents Minnesota and Sen. Claire McCaskill is in Missouri. And Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, South Dakota and Missouri all have women in the U.S. House.
"I just don't know that there's a magic answer because if there was, we would have found it," said Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Tyler Olson, a state representative from Cedar Rapids. "It's embarrassing, it really is."
Experts cite many possible reasons that Iowa politics remains a boys club. There's the lack of term limits for the governor's office and the low turnover of the state's congressional seats, meaning there are rarely open seats for women to pursue. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad is on his second stint in the governor's office, after a 16-year run that ended in January 1999. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley has served 32 years and Harkin, a Democrat, for 28.
Academic research has also shown that, nationally, women are less likely to consider running for office because of family responsibilities or a perception that they are not qualified. And veteran women politicians also say that many Iowa voters hold traditional views about gender roles, perhaps a legacy of the state's small-town farming roots.
"Part of it is historic feeling that politics is a male's job," said Maggie Tinsman, a former Republican state senator who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 1996 and is co-founder of a group geared at electing women called "50/50 in 2020." ''We're doing a lot to try and change that. "
Still, other rural states with even more conservative leanings have elected women to powerful jobs. In the 2010 governor's race in Oklahoma, both candidates were women. Kansas, Texas, Louisiana and Nebraska have all had women governors. Women senators are representing Nebraska, North Dakota and Louisiana.
Nationally, the number of women in top elected positions is mostly growing. There are 98 women in the current Congress ? 20 in the Senate. That's about 18 percent of the total 535 seats in Congress. Twenty years ago there were 54 women in Congress.
The interest from advocacy groups and the political classes in changing the gender divide in Iowa politics means that viable women candidates hear a lot of sweet-talk, according to Democratic state Sen. Liz Mathis.
A well-known former news anchor from the Cedar Rapids area who was first elected in 2011, Mathis was seen as a top option to run in the state's 1st Congressional District after U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley announced he'd seek Harkin's Senate seat. Mathis said she was showered with attention from lawmakers and advocates who told her she would be making history if she won.
"I was really conflicted," she said. "Everyone put the expectation on me."
But Mathis, who has a daughter in high school, decided she didn't want to leave her family or her relatively new role in the state Senate. She said she knows she may not get another such opportunity.
"I guess it just depends on what you think success is," Mathis said.
Reynolds ? viewed as a rising star in the Iowa GOP ? also said she made her decision based on her personal interests.
"Nobody else gets to decide what the right time is for me. I get to decide that," said Reynolds, whom Branstad seems to be grooming for an eventual run for governor.
There are some women still pondering entering the open Senate and congressional races in Iowa, though no definite candidates have emerged.
Dianne Bystrom, director of the Center for Women in Politics at Iowa State University, said women need to be prepared to run when there are open seats, noting that studies show women need more persuasion but are just as successful as men when they don't face an incumbent.
"Women need to be more strategic," Bystrom said. "I'm working with several women's organizations across the state to develop benches of women that are ready to run."
----
Associated Press reporter Thomas Beaumont contributed to this report.
More hurricanes for Hawaii?Public release date: 5-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Gisela Speidel gspeidel@hawaii.edu 808-956-9252 University of Hawaii ? SOEST
News of a hurricane threat sends our hearts racing, glues us to the Internet for updates, and makes us rush to the store to stock up on staples. Hawaii, fortunately, has been largely free from these violent storms in the recent past, only two having made landfall in more than 30 years.
Now a study headed by a team of scientists at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, shows that Hawaii could see a two-to-three-fold increase in tropical cyclones by the last quarter of this century. The study, which appears in the May 5, 2013, online issue of Nature Climate Change, though, leaves open the question, how worried Island residents should get.
"Computer models run with global warming scenarios generally project a decrease in tropical cyclones worldwide. This, though, may not be what will happen with local communities," says lead author Hiroyuki Murakami.
To determine whether tropical cyclones will become more frequent in Hawaii with climate change, Murakami and climate expert Bin Wang at the Meteorology Department, University of Hawaii at Manoa, joined forces with Akio Kitoh at the Meteorological Research Institute and the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The scientists compared in a state-of-the-art, high-resolution global climate model the recent history of tropical cyclones in the North Pacific with a future (20752099) scenario, under which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, resulting in temperatures about 2C higher than today.
"In our study, we looked at all tropical cyclones, which range in intensity from tropical storms to full-blown category 5 hurricanes. From 1979 to 2003, both observational records and our model document that only every four years on average did a tropical cyclone come near Hawaii. Our projections for the end of this century show a two-to-three-fold increase for this region," explains Murakami.
The main factors responsible for the increase are changes in the large-scale moisture conditions, the flow patterns in the wind, and in surface temperature patterns stemming from global warming.
Most hurricanes that might threaten Hawaii now are born in the eastern Pacific, south of the Baja California Peninsula. From June through November the ingredients there are just right for tropical cyclone formation, with warm ocean temperatures, lots of moisture, and weak vertical wind shear. But during the storms' long journey across the 3000 miles to Hawaii, they usually fizzle out due to dry conditions over the subtropical central Pacific and the wind shear from the westerly subtropical jet.
Surprisingly, even though fewer tropical cyclones will form in the eastern Pacific in Murakami's future scenario, we can expect more of them to make their way to Hawaii.
The upper-level westerly subtropical jet will move poleward so that the mean steering flow becomes easterly. Thus, storms from Baja California are much more likely to make it to Hawaii. Furthermore, since the climate models also project that the equatorial central Pacific will heat up, conditions may become more favorable for hurricane formation in the open ocean to the south or southeast of Hawaii.
"Our finding that more tropical cyclones will approach Hawaii as Earth continues to warm is fairly robust because we ran our experiments with different model versions and under varying conditions. The yearly number we project, however, still remains very low," reassures study co-author Wang.
###
Citation:
Hiroyuki Murakami, Bin Wang, Tim Li, and Akio Kitoh: Projected increase in tropical cyclones near Hawaii. Nature Climate Change, May 5, 2013, on line publication: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE1890
Funding:
This work--completed at the International Pacific Research Center, which is supported by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), NASA and NOAA--was conducted under the framework of the 'Projection of the Change in Future Weather Extremes Using Super-High-Resolution Atmospheric Models' supported by the KAKUSHIN and SOUSEI programmes of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. H.M. was supported by the 'Research on Prediction of Climate and Environmental Change to Contribute to Mitigation Plan Decision Against Climate Change' of the MRI of Japan. B.W. acknowledges the support from the Global Research Laboratory (GRL) Program of the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST, 2011-0021927). Calculations were performed on the Earth Simulator.
Author Contacts:
Hiroyuki Murakami, Postdoctoral Fellow: Phone: 808-956-3305; email: hmura@hawaii.edu,
International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.
Bin Wang, Chair and Professor of Meteorology: Phone: 808-956-2563, email: wangbin@hawaii.edu, International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.
International Pacific Research Center Media Contact: Gisela E. Speidel, International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.
The International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa is a climate research center founded to gain greater understanding of the climate system and the nature and causes of climate variation in the Asia-Pacific region and how global climate changes may affect the region. Established under the "U.S.-Japan Common Agenda for Cooperation in Global Perspective" in October 1997, the IPRC is a collaborative effort between agencies in Japan and the United States.
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More hurricanes for Hawaii?Public release date: 5-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Gisela Speidel gspeidel@hawaii.edu 808-956-9252 University of Hawaii ? SOEST
News of a hurricane threat sends our hearts racing, glues us to the Internet for updates, and makes us rush to the store to stock up on staples. Hawaii, fortunately, has been largely free from these violent storms in the recent past, only two having made landfall in more than 30 years.
Now a study headed by a team of scientists at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, shows that Hawaii could see a two-to-three-fold increase in tropical cyclones by the last quarter of this century. The study, which appears in the May 5, 2013, online issue of Nature Climate Change, though, leaves open the question, how worried Island residents should get.
"Computer models run with global warming scenarios generally project a decrease in tropical cyclones worldwide. This, though, may not be what will happen with local communities," says lead author Hiroyuki Murakami.
To determine whether tropical cyclones will become more frequent in Hawaii with climate change, Murakami and climate expert Bin Wang at the Meteorology Department, University of Hawaii at Manoa, joined forces with Akio Kitoh at the Meteorological Research Institute and the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The scientists compared in a state-of-the-art, high-resolution global climate model the recent history of tropical cyclones in the North Pacific with a future (20752099) scenario, under which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, resulting in temperatures about 2C higher than today.
"In our study, we looked at all tropical cyclones, which range in intensity from tropical storms to full-blown category 5 hurricanes. From 1979 to 2003, both observational records and our model document that only every four years on average did a tropical cyclone come near Hawaii. Our projections for the end of this century show a two-to-three-fold increase for this region," explains Murakami.
The main factors responsible for the increase are changes in the large-scale moisture conditions, the flow patterns in the wind, and in surface temperature patterns stemming from global warming.
Most hurricanes that might threaten Hawaii now are born in the eastern Pacific, south of the Baja California Peninsula. From June through November the ingredients there are just right for tropical cyclone formation, with warm ocean temperatures, lots of moisture, and weak vertical wind shear. But during the storms' long journey across the 3000 miles to Hawaii, they usually fizzle out due to dry conditions over the subtropical central Pacific and the wind shear from the westerly subtropical jet.
Surprisingly, even though fewer tropical cyclones will form in the eastern Pacific in Murakami's future scenario, we can expect more of them to make their way to Hawaii.
The upper-level westerly subtropical jet will move poleward so that the mean steering flow becomes easterly. Thus, storms from Baja California are much more likely to make it to Hawaii. Furthermore, since the climate models also project that the equatorial central Pacific will heat up, conditions may become more favorable for hurricane formation in the open ocean to the south or southeast of Hawaii.
"Our finding that more tropical cyclones will approach Hawaii as Earth continues to warm is fairly robust because we ran our experiments with different model versions and under varying conditions. The yearly number we project, however, still remains very low," reassures study co-author Wang.
###
Citation:
Hiroyuki Murakami, Bin Wang, Tim Li, and Akio Kitoh: Projected increase in tropical cyclones near Hawaii. Nature Climate Change, May 5, 2013, on line publication: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE1890
Funding:
This work--completed at the International Pacific Research Center, which is supported by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), NASA and NOAA--was conducted under the framework of the 'Projection of the Change in Future Weather Extremes Using Super-High-Resolution Atmospheric Models' supported by the KAKUSHIN and SOUSEI programmes of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. H.M. was supported by the 'Research on Prediction of Climate and Environmental Change to Contribute to Mitigation Plan Decision Against Climate Change' of the MRI of Japan. B.W. acknowledges the support from the Global Research Laboratory (GRL) Program of the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST, 2011-0021927). Calculations were performed on the Earth Simulator.
Author Contacts:
Hiroyuki Murakami, Postdoctoral Fellow: Phone: 808-956-3305; email: hmura@hawaii.edu,
International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.
Bin Wang, Chair and Professor of Meteorology: Phone: 808-956-2563, email: wangbin@hawaii.edu, International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.
International Pacific Research Center Media Contact: Gisela E. Speidel, International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.
The International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa is a climate research center founded to gain greater understanding of the climate system and the nature and causes of climate variation in the Asia-Pacific region and how global climate changes may affect the region. Established under the "U.S.-Japan Common Agenda for Cooperation in Global Perspective" in October 1997, the IPRC is a collaborative effort between agencies in Japan and the United States.
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A new cost-effective genome assembly processPublic release date: 5-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Gilbert degilbert@lbl.gov 925-296-5643 DOE/Joint Genome Institute
The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) is among the world leaders in sequencing the genomes of microbes, focusing on their potential applications in the fields of bioenergy and environment. As a national user facility, the DOE JGI is also focused on developing tools that more cost-effectively enable the assembly and analysis of the sequence that it, as well as other genome centers, generates.
Despite tremendous advances in cost reduction and throughput of DNA sequencing, significant challenges remain in the process of efficiently reconstructing genomes. Existing technologies are good at cranking out short fragments (reads) of DNA letters that are computationally stitched back together (assembled) into longer pieces, so that the order of those letters can be determined and the function of the target sequence discerned. However, genome assembly, the equivalent of trying to put together a multi-million piece jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture on the cover of the box is, remains challenging due to the very large number of very small pieces, which must be assembled using current approaches.
As reported May 5 online in the journal Nature Methods, a collaboration between the DOE JGI, Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) and the University of Washington has resulted in an improved workflow for genome assembly that the team describes as a fully automated process from DNA sample preparation to the determination of the finished genome.
The technique, known as HGAP (Hierarchical Genome Assembly Process), uses PacBios single molecule, real-time DNA sequencing platform, which generates reads that can be up to tens of thousands of nucleotides long, even longer than those provided by the workhorse technology of the Human Genome Project era, the Sanger sequencing technology, which produced reads of about 700 nucleotides. The Sanger process involved creating multiple DNA libraries, conducting multiple runs, and combining the data, so that gaps in the code were covered and accuracies of a DNA base assignment were very high. Post-Sanger methods still typically require multiple libraries and often a mix of technologies to produce optimal results. Instead, with HGAP, only a single, long-insert shotgun DNA library is prepared and subjected to automated continuous long-read SMRT sequencing, and the assembly is performed without the need for circular consensus sequencing, the team reported.
This de novo assembly method was tested using three microbes previously sequenced by the DOE JGI. The data collected were compared against the reference sequences for these microbes and the team found that the HGAP method produced final assemblies with >99.999% accuracy.
We are always on the lookout for new approaches that will improve upon the efficient delivery of high-quality data to our growing community of researchers, said Len Pennacchio, DOE JGIs Deputy Director of Genomic Technologies. This technique is one of many improvements that we are pursuing in parallel to achieve additional economies of scale.
The DOE JGIs sequencing efforts account for more than 20% of the more than 20,000 worldwide genome projects (microbes, plants, fungi, algae, and communities of microbes) completed or currently in the queue, and most of those are focused on the biology of environmental, energy, and carbon processing.
We enjoyed a very productive collaboration with JGI on this project and benefitted tremendously from the expertise of JGIs scientists in both the fields of microbiology and microbial genome assembly and annotation, said Jonas Korlach, Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Biosciences. This expertise provided us with the ability to adapt our single molecule sequencing assembly methods to produce a higher level of finished quality than was previously possible using a gold-standard Sanger finishing approach, and at a speed and price point competitive with alternative next generation sequencing and assembly methods. We look forward to seeing what scientific advances will be enabled by this method as JGIs User Community assesses JGIs capabilities to assemble their microbial genomes using this new approach.
The team will now seek to extend the utility of this new assembly method beyond microbes to the genomes of more complex organisms.
###
The authors of the paper include Alex Copeland and Alicia Clum from the DOE JGI, Chen-Shan Chin, David Alexander, Patrick Marks, Aaron Klammer, James Drake, Cheryl Heiner, Stephen Turner, and Jonas Korlach from Pacific Biosciences, and John Huddleston and Evan Eichler from the University of Washington.
The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, supported by the DOE Office of Science, is committed to advancing genomics in support of DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup. DOE JGI, headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif., provides integrated high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges. Follow @doe_jgi on Twitter.
DOEs Office of Science is the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
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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.
A new cost-effective genome assembly processPublic release date: 5-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Gilbert degilbert@lbl.gov 925-296-5643 DOE/Joint Genome Institute
The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) is among the world leaders in sequencing the genomes of microbes, focusing on their potential applications in the fields of bioenergy and environment. As a national user facility, the DOE JGI is also focused on developing tools that more cost-effectively enable the assembly and analysis of the sequence that it, as well as other genome centers, generates.
Despite tremendous advances in cost reduction and throughput of DNA sequencing, significant challenges remain in the process of efficiently reconstructing genomes. Existing technologies are good at cranking out short fragments (reads) of DNA letters that are computationally stitched back together (assembled) into longer pieces, so that the order of those letters can be determined and the function of the target sequence discerned. However, genome assembly, the equivalent of trying to put together a multi-million piece jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture on the cover of the box is, remains challenging due to the very large number of very small pieces, which must be assembled using current approaches.
As reported May 5 online in the journal Nature Methods, a collaboration between the DOE JGI, Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) and the University of Washington has resulted in an improved workflow for genome assembly that the team describes as a fully automated process from DNA sample preparation to the determination of the finished genome.
The technique, known as HGAP (Hierarchical Genome Assembly Process), uses PacBios single molecule, real-time DNA sequencing platform, which generates reads that can be up to tens of thousands of nucleotides long, even longer than those provided by the workhorse technology of the Human Genome Project era, the Sanger sequencing technology, which produced reads of about 700 nucleotides. The Sanger process involved creating multiple DNA libraries, conducting multiple runs, and combining the data, so that gaps in the code were covered and accuracies of a DNA base assignment were very high. Post-Sanger methods still typically require multiple libraries and often a mix of technologies to produce optimal results. Instead, with HGAP, only a single, long-insert shotgun DNA library is prepared and subjected to automated continuous long-read SMRT sequencing, and the assembly is performed without the need for circular consensus sequencing, the team reported.
This de novo assembly method was tested using three microbes previously sequenced by the DOE JGI. The data collected were compared against the reference sequences for these microbes and the team found that the HGAP method produced final assemblies with >99.999% accuracy.
We are always on the lookout for new approaches that will improve upon the efficient delivery of high-quality data to our growing community of researchers, said Len Pennacchio, DOE JGIs Deputy Director of Genomic Technologies. This technique is one of many improvements that we are pursuing in parallel to achieve additional economies of scale.
The DOE JGIs sequencing efforts account for more than 20% of the more than 20,000 worldwide genome projects (microbes, plants, fungi, algae, and communities of microbes) completed or currently in the queue, and most of those are focused on the biology of environmental, energy, and carbon processing.
We enjoyed a very productive collaboration with JGI on this project and benefitted tremendously from the expertise of JGIs scientists in both the fields of microbiology and microbial genome assembly and annotation, said Jonas Korlach, Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Biosciences. This expertise provided us with the ability to adapt our single molecule sequencing assembly methods to produce a higher level of finished quality than was previously possible using a gold-standard Sanger finishing approach, and at a speed and price point competitive with alternative next generation sequencing and assembly methods. We look forward to seeing what scientific advances will be enabled by this method as JGIs User Community assesses JGIs capabilities to assemble their microbial genomes using this new approach.
The team will now seek to extend the utility of this new assembly method beyond microbes to the genomes of more complex organisms.
###
The authors of the paper include Alex Copeland and Alicia Clum from the DOE JGI, Chen-Shan Chin, David Alexander, Patrick Marks, Aaron Klammer, James Drake, Cheryl Heiner, Stephen Turner, and Jonas Korlach from Pacific Biosciences, and John Huddleston and Evan Eichler from the University of Washington.
The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, supported by the DOE Office of Science, is committed to advancing genomics in support of DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup. DOE JGI, headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif., provides integrated high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges. Follow @doe_jgi on Twitter.
DOEs Office of Science is the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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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.
(Reuters) - Israel has carried out an air strike targeting a consignment of missiles in Syria bound for Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, an Israeli official said on Saturday.
The Jewish state had long made clear it is prepared to use force to prevent advanced weapons reaching Lebanon's powerful Shi'ite Muslim guerrillas from Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah are allied to Iran, Israel's arch-enemy.
With Assad battling a more than two-year-old Syrian insurgency, the Israelis also worry that the Sunni Islamist rebels could loot his arsenals and eventually hit the Jewish state, ending four decades of relative cross-border calm.
Lacking a side to support in its northern neighbor's civil war, and worried about inadvertently fuelling escalation, Israel has exercised restraint. Its government did not formally confirm Friday's air strike, which was disclosed to Reuters by an Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"There was an air strike. The target was not a chemical weapons facility. It was missiles intended for Hezbollah," the official told Reuters.
U.S. President Barack Obama said Israel has the right to guard against the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah.
The attack - the second reported Israeli air strike on a target in Syria in four months - took place after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet approved it in a secret meeting on Thursday night, a regional security source said.
A U.S. official told Reuters the target was apparently a building. The New York Times cited unnamed American officials as saying the weapons were advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran and they were being stored in a warehouse at Damascus International Airport.
The Israeli air force possesses so-called "standoff" bombs that coast dozens of kilometers (miles) across ground to their targets once fired. That could, in theory, allow Israel to attack Syria from its own turf or from adjacent Lebanon.
CNN quoted unnamed U.S. officials as saying Israel most likely conducted the strike "in the Thursday-Friday time frame" and its jets did not enter Syrian air space.
Lebanese authorities reported unusual intensive Israeli air force activity over their territory on Thursday and Friday.
Syrian government sources denied having information about a strike. Bashar Ja'afari, the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, told Reuters: "I'm not aware of any attack right now."
CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Israel believes that Hezbollah has built up an arsenal of about 60,000 missiles and rockets. The guerrilla group fired 4,000 missiles into Israel during a 2006 war.
However, Israeli Defence Ministry strategist Amos Gilad said Hezbollah was not seeking to add any of Syria's reputed stocks of chemical weapons and Assad retained control of them.
Israel and the United States last month published findings indicating that pro-Assad forces had used chemical weapons during Syria's insurgency.
In January this year, Israel bombed a convoy in Syria, apparently hitting weapons destined for Hezbollah, according to diplomats, Syrian rebels and security sources in the region.
Israel has not formally confirmed carrying out that strike.
Lebanese acting foreign minister Adnan Mansour was critical. "Attacks such as these will result in more tension and blow up the situation which it promoted," he said.
"This will not give Israel the peace or security that it wants, in its own way, rather it will push the region into an inflamed struggle and into the unknown."
Giora Eiland, a former Israeli army general and national security adviser, said the apparent deadlock in Syria's civil war, now in its third year, meant the Netanyahu government had to be prudent in any military intervention.
"I don't anticipate far-reaching consequences in Lebanon or Syria (from Israel's actions)," Eiland told Israel Radio.
Israel captured Syria's Golan in the 1967 Middle East war, built settlements and annexed the land. Their 1974 ceasefire has largely held, despite occasional firing across the Golan.
But Israeli security concerns have risen since Islamist fighters linked to al-Qaeda assumed a prominent role in the insurrection against Assad.
Israel fought an inconclusive 2006 war with Hezbollah and regards the Lebanese guerrilla groups as a potent threat. Yet Gilad, the Israeli defence ministry official, saw little risk of Hezbollah seeking to outfit itself with Syrian chemical weapons.
"Chemical weapons kill those who use them," Gilad said in a speech.
(Additional reporting by Erika Solomon in Beirut; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Tom Pfeiffer)
Researchers at the Epigenetics and Cancer Biology Program at IDIBELL led by Manel Esteller, ICREA researcher and professor of genetics at the University of Barcelona, have described alterations in noncoding long chain RNA sequences (lncRNA) in Rett syndrome.
These molecules act as supervisor agents responsible of 'switch on' or 'switch off' other genes in our genome that regulate the activity of neurons. The work has been published in the last issue of the journalRNA Biology.
Dark genome
Only 5% of our genetic material are genes that encode proteins. The remaining 95% is known as dark genome or non-coding DNA and its function is still unknown. Part of this DNA produces RNA molecules called noncoding long chain RNA (lncRNAs).
Rett Syndrome
Rett syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disease and it is the second most common cause of mental retardation in females after Down syndrome. Clinical symptoms occur between 6 and 18 months after birth and consist of a loss of cognitive, social and motor capacities accompanied by autistic behaviors, eg, stereotypic hand movements.
Today there is no effective treatment of the disease but the control of their symptoms. The syndrome is usually due to the presence of a mutation in MeCP2 epigenetic gene that, as a magnet, regulates the expression of many other genes of the cell.
Esteller's team works with a mouse model that faithfully reproduces the characteristics of the human Rett syndrome. In this study, researchers compared the expression of long chains of RNA in healthy and diseased animals and found that the presence of mutations in the Mecp2 gene causes alterations in the activity of lncRNA.
One such altered lncARN regulates the function of a key neurotransmitter in the nervous system in all vertebrates brain (GABA receptor). "Its alteration", says Esteller, "could explain the defects of communication between neurons in girls affected by Rett Syndrome."
According to Manel Esteller "this finding, in addition to increasing knowledge about the causes of the disease, could open the door to new therapeutic strategies that target lncRNA molecules or GABA receptor."
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IDIBELL-Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute: http://www.idibell.cat
Thanks to IDIBELL-Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
Medical researchers have manipulated human stem cells into producing types of brain cells known to play important roles in neurodevelopmental disorders such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and autism. The new model cell system allows neuroscientists to investigate normal brain development, as well as to identify specific disruptions in biological signals that may contribute to neuropsychiatric diseases.
Scientists from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research led a study team that described their research in the journalCell Stem Cell, published online today.
The research harnesses human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), which differentiate into a broad range of different cell types. In the current study, the scientists directed the stem cells into becoming cortical interneurons?a class of brain cells that, by releasing the neurotransmitter GABA, controls electrical firing in brain circuits.
"Interneurons act like an orchestra conductor, directing other excitatory brain cells to fire in synchrony," said study co-leader Stewart A. Anderson, M.D., a research psychiatrist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "However, when interneurons malfunction, the synchrony is disrupted, and seizures or mental disorders can result."
Anderson and study co-leader Lorenz Studer, M.D., of the Center for Stem Cell Biology at Sloan-Kettering, derived interneurons in a laboratory model that simulates how neurons normally develop in the human forebrain.
"Unlike, say, liver diseases, in which researchers can biopsy a section of a patient's liver, neuroscientists cannot biopsy a living patient's brain tissue," said Anderson. Hence it is important to produce a cell culture model of brain tissue for studying neurological diseases. Significantly, the human-derived cells in the current study also "wire up" in circuits with other types of brain cells taken from mice, when cultured together. Those interactions, Anderson added, allowed the study team to observe cell-to-cell signaling that occurs during forebrain development.
In ongoing studies, Anderson explained, he and colleagues are using their cell model to better define molecular events that occur during brain development. By selectively manipulating genes in the interneurons, the researchers seek to better understand how gene abnormalities may disrupt brain circuitry and give rise to particular diseases. Ultimately, those studies could help inform drug development by identifying molecules that could offer therapeutic targets for more effective treatments of neuropsychiatric diseases.
In addition, Anderson's laboratory is studying interneurons derived from stem cells made from skin samples of patients with chromosome 22q.11.2 deletion syndrome, a genetic disease which has long been studied at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. In this multisystem disorder, about one third of patients have autistic spectrum disorders, and a partially overlapping third of patients develop schizophrenia. Investigating the roles of genes and signaling pathways in their model cells may reveal specific genes that are crucial in those patients with this syndrome who have neurodevelopmental problems.
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Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: http://www.chop.edu
Thanks to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
This image released by ABC news shows co-host George Stephanopoulos, left, interviewing actress Reese Witherspoon on "Good Morning America," Thursday, May 2, 2013 in New York. During the interview, Witherspoon repeatedly apologized for her behavior during an April 19 traffic stop in Georgia. Witherspoon, 37, was arrested after the trooper said she wouldn't stay in the car while her husband, Hollywood agent Jim Toth, was given a field sobriety test. Toth was charged with drunken driving and is due in court May 23. Witherspoon faces a May 22 court hearing on the disorderly conduct charge. (AP Photo/ABC, Ida Mae Astute)
This image released by ABC news shows co-host George Stephanopoulos, left, interviewing actress Reese Witherspoon on "Good Morning America," Thursday, May 2, 2013 in New York. During the interview, Witherspoon repeatedly apologized for her behavior during an April 19 traffic stop in Georgia. Witherspoon, 37, was arrested after the trooper said she wouldn't stay in the car while her husband, Hollywood agent Jim Toth, was given a field sobriety test. Toth was charged with drunken driving and is due in court May 23. Witherspoon faces a May 22 court hearing on the disorderly conduct charge. (AP Photo/ABC, Ida Mae Astute)
This image released by ABC news shows co-host George Stephanopoulos, left, interviewing actress Reese Witherspoon on "Good Morning America," Thursday, May 2, 2013 in New York. During the interview, Witherspoon repeatedly apologized for her behavior during an April 19 traffic stop in Georgia. Witherspoon, 37, was arrested after the trooper said she wouldn't stay in the car while her husband, Hollywood agent Jim Toth, was given a field sobriety test. Toth was charged with drunken driving and is due in court May 23. Witherspoon faces a May 22 court hearing on the disorderly conduct charge. (AP Photo/ABC, Ida Mae Astute)
FILE - In this April 21, 2013 file photo, Actress Reese Witherspoon attends the premiere of "Mud" hosted by The Cinema Society?with FIJI Water & Levi's at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Witherspoon recalls that she panicked and said "crazy things" the night she was arrested in Atlanta on a disorderly conduct charge. During an interview on Good Morning America, Thursday, May 2, 2013, Witherspoon repeatedly apologized for her behavior during the April 19 traffic stop. (Photo by Evan Agostini/InvisionAP)
ATLANTA (AP) ? Reese Witherspoon recalled that she panicked, said some "crazy things" and even claimed to be pregnant the night she was arrested in Atlanta on a disorderly conduct charge.
During an interview Thursday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Witherspoon repeatedly apologized for her behavior during the April 19 traffic stop. A police report states that Witherspoon asked a Georgia state trooper, "Do you know my name?" and added, "You're about to find out who I am."
In her first sit-down interview about the arrest, the Oscar-winning actress told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that she had "one too many" glasses of wine, and panicked after she and her husband were pulled over.
"I have no idea what I was saying that night," she said. "I literally panicked. I said all kinds of crazy things. I told them I was pregnant. I'm not pregnant."
Witherspoon, 37, was arrested after the trooper said she wouldn't stay in the car while her husband, Hollywood agent Jim Toth, was given a field sobriety test. Toth was charged with drunken driving and is due in court May 23. Witherspoon faces a May 22 court hearing on the disorderly conduct charge.
Two lawyers for Witherspoon, one in Los Angeles and one in Atlanta, did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press seeking comment Thursday.
"There are so many lessons learned," she said.
"When a police officer tells you to stay in the car, you stay in the car," she said. "I learned that for sure. I learned a lot."
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Public release date: 5-May-2013
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