Bangladesh Newspaper: 2014

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Marcia new US ambassador to Bangladesh

Marcia Stephens Bloom Bernicat, currently deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Human Resources at the Department of State, will be the next US ambassador to Bangladesh.
Marcia will succeed incumbent ambassador Dan W Mozena who has been serving in Bangladesh since May 2011, UNB reported.
US president Barak Obama on Thursday announced his intent to nominate Marcia Stephens Bloom Bernicat as a new ambassador to Bangladesh, said a White House a statement.
Ambassador Marcia Stephens Bloom Bernicat, a career member of the Foreign Service, Class of Minister-Counselor, is currently deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Human Resources at the Department of State, a position she has held since 2012.
She was previously ambassador to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau from 2008 to 2011. She served in the Department of State as office director for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bhutan in the Bureau of South Asian Affairs from 2006 to 2008.
From 2004 to 2006, she was the senior-level director and career development officer in the Bureau of Human Resources at the State Department.
Ambassador Bernicat also served as deputy chief of Mission at the US embassy in Bridgetown, Barbados from 2001 to 2004, and as deputy chief of Mission at the US embassy in Lilongwe, Malawi from 1998 to 2001.
She was principal officer at the US consulate in Casablanca, Morocco from 1995 to 1998, deputy political counselor at the US embassy in New Delhi, India from 1992 to 1995, and desk officer for Nepal and India in the Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs from 1988 to 1990.
Earlier in her career, she was special assistant to deputy secretary of State John Whitehead, consular officer in Marseille, France, and political/consular officer at the US embassy in Bamako, Mali.
Ambassador Bernicat received a BA from Lafayette College and an MS from Georgetown University. - See more at: http://newagebd.net/14137/marcia-new-us-ambassador-to-bangladesh/#sthash.R73WEUjI.dpuf

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Mobile phone data can help combat malaria: Study

An estimated 62,700 people died of malaria in 2012 as per the World Health Organisation (WHO).

“Understanding the movement of people is crucial in eliminating malaria,” said Andy Tatem, a geographer at University of Southampton in Britain.

“The study demonstrates that the rapid global proliferation of mobile phones now provides us with an opportunity to study the movement of people, using sample sizes running into millions,” Tatem added.

This data, combined with disease case based mapping, can help us plan where and how to intervene, he explained.

The study used anonymised mobile records to measure population movements within Namibia in Africa over the period of a year (2010-11).

By combining this data with information about diagnosed cases of malaria, topography and climate, the researchers were able to identify geographical ‘hotspots’ of the disease and design targeted plans for its elimination.

Twelve months of anonymised Call Data Records (CDRs) were provided by service provider Mobile Telecommunications Limited (MTC) to the researchers - representing nine billion communications from 1.19 million unique subscribers, around 52 percent of the population of Namibia.

Aggregated movements of mobile users between urban areas and urban and rural areas were analysed in conjunction with data based on rapid diagnostic testing (RDT) of malaria and information on the climate, environment and topography of the country.

The findings of the study helped the National Vector-borne Diseases Control Programme (NVDCP) in Namibia improve their targeting of malaria interventions to communities most at risk.

Specifically they helped with the targeting of insecticide-treated bed net distributions in the Omusati, Kavango and Zambezi regions in 2013.

The data would be useful for NVDCP to prepare for a large-scale net distribution in 2014 and deployment of community health workers, the researchers said.

“The use of mobile phone data is one example of how new technologies are overcoming past problems of quantifying and gaining a better understanding of human movement patterns in relation to disease control,” Tatem said in the study that appeared in Malaria Journal.

Intensive exercise may weaken your heart: Study

For the study, researchers tracked the frequency and intensity of physical activity and the survival of more than 1,000 people with stable coronary artery heart disease for 10 years.
All the participants, most of whom were in their 60s, had attended a cardiac rehabilitation programme to help them exercise regularly and ward off a further heart attack or stroke.

Workouts boost function of insulin-making cells

The most physically inactive were around twice as likely to have a heart attack/stroke as those who were regularly physically active and they were around four times as likely to die of cardiovascular and all other causes.But somewhat surprisingly, those who did the most strenuous daily exercise were also more than twice as likely to die of a heart attack/stroke, the findings showed.
Another study found that young men undertaking endurance exercise for more than five hours a week may increase their risk of developing an irregular heart rhythm in later life.
While it seems "counterintuitive" to think that physical activity could aggravate heart disease, other smaller studies have also suggested this possibility, experts added, with endurance training in particular, linked to an acute (reversible) pro-inflammatory state.
The findings appeared in the journal Heart.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

East Ukraine referendum raises fears of dismemberment

Clashes broke out around a television tower on the outskirts of the rebel stronghold of Slaviansk shortly before voters made their way to polling stations through streets blocked by barricades of felled trees, tyres and rusty machinery.

"I wanted to come as early as I could," said Zhenya Denyesh, a 20-year-old student, second to vote at a concrete three-storey university building. "We all want to live in our own country."

Asked what he thought would follow the vote, organised in a matter of weeks by rebels, he replied: "It will still be war."

In nearby Mariupol, scene of fierce fighting last week, officials said there were only eight polling centres for half a million people. Queues grew to hundreds of metres and at one centre voting urns were set out on the pavement against a wall.

Western leaders threatened more sanctions against Russia in the key areas of energy, financial services and engineering if it continued what they regard as efforts to destabilise Ukraine.

Moscow denies any role in the fighting or any ambitions to absorb the mainly Russian-speaking east, an industrial hub, into the Russian Federation following its annexation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea after a referendum in March.

Ukraine's Interior Ministry called the referendum a criminal farce, its ballot papers "soaked in blood". One official said that two thirds of the territory had declined to participate.

For a vote on which so much hangs, the referendum in the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, which has declared itself a "People's Republic", seemed a decidedly ad hoc affair. Ballot papers were printed without security provision, polling stations were limited in many areas, voter registration was patchy and there was confusion on quite what people were asked to endorse.

Engineer Sergei, 33, voting in the industrial centre of Mariupol, said he would answer "Yes" to the question on the ballot paper, printed in Russian and Ukrainian: "Do you support the act of state self-rule of the Donetsk People's Republic?"

"We're all for the independence of the Donetsk republic," he said. "It means leaving behind that fascist, pro-American government (in Kiev), which brought no one any good.

NASA scientists .

Stellar dust is very special stuff as it forms the building blocks for planets.

"The harsh conditions of space are extremely difficult to reproduce in the laboratory, and have long hindered efforts to interpret and analyse observations from space," Farid Salama, space science researcher at NASA's Ames Research Centre in California, was quoted as saying.

Using the Cosmic Simulation Chamber (COSmIC), scientists have been able to create the same dust that is ejected into the interstellar medium as a star approaches the end of its life.

Until now, the production mechanisms behind these small dust grains have been a mystery and impossible to recreate in a laboratory setting.

"Using the COSmIC simulator, we can now discover clues to questions about the composition and the evolution of the universe, both major objectives of NASA's space research programme," Salama said.

The key to COSmIC is its extreme low pressure chamber at its heart.

Able to simulate the stellar environment down to densities billions of times less than that of earth's atmosphere, jets of cold argon gas seeded with hydrocarbons are sprayed into the vacuum.

The extreme cold, high radiation environment can then be simulated, blasting the whole system with an electrical discharge.

After the gas mixture was exposed to the mini space environment analogue, the researchers detected the production of tiny grains of dust that carry similar characteristics as the dust generated by dying stars.

Using an electron scanning microscope, these primordial dust grains were studied.

"Today, we are celebrating a major milestone in our understanding of the formation and the nature of cosmic dust grains that bears important implications in this new era of exoplanets discoveries," Salama added.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Life Style

In a study on 15,263 women participants, researchers found that women who slept five or fewer hours either in midlife or later life had worse memory than those sleeping seven hours per day.

“Women whose sleep duration changed by greater than two hours per day over time had worse memory than women with no change in sleep duration,” said Elizabeth Devore, an instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in the US.

Participants were female nurses and were free of stroke and depression at the initial cognitive assessment.

“Given the importance of preserving memory into later life, it is critical to identify modifiable factors, such as sleeping habits, that may help achieve this goal," Devore stated.

Getting an 'average' amount of sleep, seven hours per day, may help maintain memory in later life.

Greater changes in sleep duration appear to negatively influence memory in older adults, the study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, noted.
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