Maryland

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Forget Everything You've Learned

Bill Thompson of the ASLA reports on a public space in Silver Spring, Maryland that upends everything landscape architects and planners think they know about what makes a successful public space. read more

multi-tenant stable strip center for sale - mgmt in place! (dc suburbs)

smaller strip center for sale in maryland suburbs of dc. comes with excess land - great play is to sell that land and bring up unlevered yield to 10%ish! For picture visit http://pushingdirt.com/maryland-shopping-center-for-sale/ Email me for more details.

Swap my DC-area home for yours in SF; Thanksgiving (Silver Spring, MD)

We have a lovely 4 bedroom house in Silver Spring, Maryland, less than 10 minute walk to the Metro into DC. Need apartment or house for week of Thanksgiving.

Random Robot Roundup

Pat Meier-Johnson let us know about VIA's press release on the use of their Pico-ITX boards in several robots demonstrated at the Taipei International Robot Show. On a more philosophical note, see the new Search Magazine interview with the always fascinating Daniel Dennett. He talks about consciousness, free will, and science vs religion. Another interesting read is crabfu's review of the Bioloid robot kit. Your remember crabfu, the guy makes the amazing steam-powered machines. The craziest link of the week has to be the one jlin sent us about a breadboard made of real bread. Speaking of jlin (aka RoboJenny); in case you didn't notice her recent blog post, she's been nominated as one of the hottest bloggers of the year. I can't imagine why no one nominated me but as long as we have at least one roboticist on the list, I'm happy. So help us out by voting for RoboJenny. The Swirling Brain reports that a man in Maryland threatened to shoot a police robot after it delivered burgers and soda to the hotel room where he and his girlfriend were having a stand off with the police. He also spotted a Computerworld article where an Intel rep claims robots will be as smart as humans by 2050. And our last swirling news article of the week is a LinuxDevices story on some new laser-guide French robots running Linux. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please.

Man threatens to shoot robot

Burglary suspect James Prevatt III, hunkered down for three days in a Maryland motel with his girlfriend, has threatened to shoot a robot that has kindly been bringing them burgers, pizza, soda, and cigarettes. The above headline screenshot is from CNN. Man threatens robot (CNN)...

Cloned Puppies: Sure, They're Cute, But at What Cost?

When skin cells from a dead pit bull named Booger gave rise to five healthy-looking puppies with a $50,000 price tag, it marked the formal beginning of a commercial dog-cloning industry. But for all the attention given to these and other clones, little was paid to the behind-the-scenes science. For every successfully cloned animal thrust into the spotlight, how many failures were quietly ushered out of sight? "What we're seeing with the clones they present are the ones that look good," said Jaydee Hanson, an animal-cloning analyst at the Center for Food Safety, a Washington, D.C.-based liberal nonprofit. In March, the U.S. Humane Society and American Anti-Vivisection Society released a report castigating pet cloning for "serious animal suffering and disreputable activities." Critics point to the general tendency of animal embryos to fail before they're born, and for survivors to develop debilitating diseases. And dogs, it's widely agreed, are among the hardest of all animals to clone. These are serious charges for a nascent industry comprising, for now, just two startup companies: the South Korea-based RNL Bio -- Booger's cloners -- and California-based BioArts International, who in July promised clones to four high bidders and a contest winner. RNL Bio's charge of $50,000 for Booger's clones was heavily discounted, and BioArts' bidders paid $150,000 apiece, but prices could drop if the procedure becomes popular. That could make cloning an option for many of the United States' 50 million dog owners, but disfigured and diseased outtakes would turn the joy derived from copying their canine into horror. Yet defenders of the industry say that it's wrong to apply analogies taken from other species' clones: Despite the difficulties, they insist, cloned dogs tend to be healthy, not least because scientists have spent the last decade figuring out how to do it. "Clone enough dogs, and occasionally you have offspring that aren't perfect," said Lou Hawthorne, CEO of both BioArts and the late Genetic Savings and Clone. "But it's comparable to what you have through conventional breeding." At cloning's root is a procedure called somatic cell nuclear transfer: Scientists scoop the nucleus out of a fertilized egg, then replace it with the nucleus of a cell taken from a pet. It's the same process used to generate genetically matched human embryonic stem cells for therapeutic purposes. But unlike those embryos, which are destroyed after a few days, the canine embryos are implanted in the hope of eventually becoming adults. The developmental process magnifies any flaws, the most fundamental of which involve epigenetic programming -- patterns of genetic activation and inactivation that are acquired rather than inherited. A sperm cell involved in traditional reproduction undergoes extensive changes during development, but the donor cells used in cloning come from so-called adult sources, such as skin. They underwent completely different programming. Though cloners try to reverse-engineer the original process, it often proves difficult, if not impossible. There's also a mismatch between the DNA of a cloned embryo's new nucleus and the DNA of its energy-regulating mitochondria, which come directly from the mother and are already present in the egg. For these reasons, getting a cloned embryo to survive to birth is tricky and often results in failure. Among livestock, where animal-cloning efforts have been concentrated, many surviving clones die shortly after birth; if they live to adulthood, they often suffer from organ malfunction, metabolic disorders and cancer. "Most of the animals die in utero," Hanson said. "Then another group dies within a few days right after birth. And of the ones that live 150 days, about half of those die." "The biological abnormalities inherent to the cloning procedure will always make cloning inferior to natural breeding," said Konrad Hochedlinger, a Harvard Medical School cloning expert. "I don't think we will ever be able to fix the biological problems. The process of fertilization is fundamentally different from sticking DNA into an egg and generating clones." Adding to the challenges, dogs are notoriously hard to clone. Females ovulate rarely and randomly, and their eggs are fully mature for just a couple hours out of a six- to 12-month cycle, making them difficult to collect. The eggs are also coated in opaque fats that make them tough to work with. The first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, was the end result of 1,095 implanted embryos, of which just three developed into pregnancies. One of these resulted in a miscarriage, and Snuppy's only brother died of pneumonia after three weeks. But according to Hawthorne, there's a silver lining to the complications of canine cloning: Flawed embryos are miscarried or fail to develop altogether. "The extreme sensitivity of the canine reproductive system means you have to have an absolutely perfect pregnancy," he said. "In other systems, you can just put a flawed embryo in, and get offspring out." Hawthorne also headed Genetic Savings and Clone, a pioneering company whose six-year run ended in 2006 after producing just three cats and no dogs. Researchers at that company -- who'd already started canine-cloning work three years before the company's founding -- produced just a single canine pregnancy, and it ended in a naturally caused stillbirth. "The idea that there's a holocaust of malformed offspring and all these miscarriages is false," said Hawthorne, who insisted that his researchers have learned from a decade of painstaking, often frustrated efforts. Overseeing BioArts' cloning efforts is Woo Suk Hwang, the former leader of a South Korean research team disgraced for its fraudulent human stem cell findings, but only after cloning Snuppy. Another member of that team was Lee Byeong-chun, who now directs science at RNL Bio. Hawthorne cited unpublished data showing that 90 percent of his company's cloned dogs are born healthy, a figure comparable to traditional dog breeders. The dogs are given full veterinary exams after birth and again at eight to 12 weeks of age; if they're free of defects that long, said Hawthorne, they should stay healthy. Carol Keefer, a University of Maryland animal-cloning expert, said that safe dog cloning should be scientifically possible, though she cautioned that conclusive studies haven't yet been conducted. "There are cases where something appears to go wrong later," she said. "You get that with natural breeding, too. The question is, what's the rate, the big picture? There haven't been that many clones made to get a true feel." Indeed, cloners have only produced about 40 dogs to date, and all since 2005. "It is still unknown how the surviving animals will do later in life," reads the Humane Society's report, "as no cloned cat or dog has lived long enough to assess."

Injured? Horsing Around With Stem Cells May Get You Back in the Saddle

Doctors might soon be able to regrow injured muscles, tendons and bones without invasive surgery, simply by injecting a person's own stem cells into the site of an injury. Veterinarians are already doing it with injured horses, and research into human applications is well under way. The National Institutes for Health seem to think regenerating human muscle and bone using a person's own adult stem cells is nearly ready for prime time. Last week, the NIH announced to its staff that it's creating a bone marrow-stem cell transplant center within the National Institute for Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. Researchers at the NIH labs in Bethesda, Maryland, are already growing human muscle, cartilage and spinal disks in vitro. The tissue isn't mechanically sound yet, says lead researcher Rocky Tuan, but that will come with further work. "I have a piece of tissue that looks like a spinal disc, a sand bag, tough as nails on the outside and like sand on the inside," says Tuan, a Ph.D. and the senior investigator in the Cartilage and Orthopedics branch of the NIAMS. "The mechanical properties are lousy, but it's a beginning." While the use of stem cells harvested from human embryos has been getting the most media attention, scientists and doctors have also been working with adult stem cells that also have the ability to become one with their environment and to replicate as cells of their adopted tissue. Using adult stem cells -- grown inside the body or in the lab -- has become accepted in the veterinary community, and horses have benefited greatly. Researchers are working to bring those same benefits to humans, but there are still hurdles left to clear. The NIH project comes in part from what veterinarians have learned from injecting adult stem cells into valuable horses who've suffered injuries. In many cases, those horses' careers were saved when the stem cells regrew damaged tendons and ligaments. Rodrigo Vazquez, a Southern California veterinarian, has been using adult stem cells to regrow damaged muscles in horses for several years. It's a fairly common procedure in the veterinary arena, and the results are impressive: One of Vazquez's patients is participating in this year's Olympics Dressage events; another is a prize-winning jumper. The procedure is simple and straightforward. Inside a surgical suite at his equine hospital, Vazquez removes blood full of adult stem cells from the sternum of the anesthetized horse. Then he rolls his stool to the other end of the horse, where ultrasound data has helped guide needles into the exact areas on the rear leg where the beautiful horse's ligaments are torn. He injects the stem cells into those spots. "A few years ago, these injuries were career-ending," Vazquez says. Not any more. "In a month, the torn tissue will be completely regrown and healed." Vazquez would like to put himself in his patients' place. He has had surgery several times for spinal injuries he incurred while lifting horses. Human medicine, unable to regrow or heal the injured spine, simply fuses the bone and tissue through a surgical procedure. At best, the surgery relieves some of the pain and restores some mobility. But it's not a true repair. "I wish I could have had a procedure like this," Vazquez says of the treatment he gives horses. "This will lead to human treatments, but they can't move as fast as we can." Tuan, who is using stem cells to cultivate experimental tendons and disks in his lab, thinks it's about time to look to treating humans. An emerging body of scientific studies from all over the world -- including a cardiac study under way in Miami and a pediatric ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) study at the Harvard-affiliated Children's Hospital of Boston -- is showing that using a patient's own stem cells can prompt the growth of new muscle, from the knee to the heart. And the precursor step, using platelet-rich plasma for injuries, is on the verge of becoming mainstream. Adult stem cells, particularly mesenchymal cells that come from muscle, bone and fat, are cells with a powerful ability to replicate and not a lot of personal identity. They easily take on the characteristics of surrounding cells and they tend to grow quickly once they get there. Ultrasounds of Vazquez's horses, for example, show regeneration of muscle in four to six weeks. The final product is this cartilage-like tissue grown around the scaffolding by NIH scientists. Tuan says the tissue resembles the human version, but may not be mechanically sound -- yet. Courtesy NIAMS Adult stem cells can be found all over the body, in bone and marrow. Tuan says they're also found in tonsils and in the placenta and umbilical cord, which suggest that the discarded body parts can be stored for later use. Because researchers are using autologous cells -- from the patient's own body -- the research is not controversial. No one has challenged the ethics or funding of adult stem cell research the way embryonic stem cell studies have been challenged. And because adult stem cells are native to the patient's own body, the chances of a patient rejecting them are slim to none. Tuan and his team have been able to coach adult stem cells to form muscle and disks using goo from the small intestine and a polymer scaffold to tell cells how to grow. But, he cautions, the primitive structures aren't ready to go into humans. "After a few weeks (of lab growth), it will turn into something that resembles a tendon, but it has to be the mechanical equivalent and we don't know that we're there," Tuan says. "Stem cells are very promising, but what they do for horses may not work so well for humans because humans are the hardest animal to rebuild." Once they're perfected, Tuan sees a day when the tendons will change the dreaded surgery for torn anterior cruciate ligaments that sideline up to a quarter-million people in the United States and Canada every year. "Often, that injury is a complete tear -- the ligament is snapped in two and the ends ball up and even if you untangle them and pull them together, they won't heal," he says. "So they take part of the patella tendon, which is short and tough, and stretch it and staple it to the bones. So not only is your ACL not working too well and you have to stretch it out, but your knee hurts like crazy." "If we can learn to grow a tendon that works right, or figure out how to make the ACL heal back together, we can save a lot of people a lot of pain," he says. In fact, doctors are already treating people with adult stem cells. Bone marrow transplants for cancer patients are basically stem cell therapy. But the marrow often comes from other people, and its primary purpose is to boost a weakened immune system, not to generate tissue. And treating with platelet-rich plasma -- a blood product made by spinning a patient's blood in a centrifuge to concentrate the platelets -- is already in limited use and is becoming more widely accepted as a safe therapy. PRP is routinely used in cardiac surgery, where applying it to a cut sternum before closing has been shown to cut the infection rate in half. The plasma has growth factors that also promote healing. "PRP helps recruit stem cells to the injury," says Dr. Allan Mishra, who has used PRP on its own and as part of surgery in sports injuries -- including treating tennis elbow and getting Stanford football player James McGillicuddy's patellar tendon to heal after his second surgery. "The body knows how to heal itself -- we're speeding up and concentrating the process." Last year, Mishra wrapped up a study where he used platelet-rich plasma to treat the 20 worst tennis-elbow injuries he'd culled from more than 100 volunteers. "Ninety-three percent got better with a single injection and stayed better for two years," Mishra says. The treatments are about one-tenth of the cost of surgery, or about $2,000 to $2,500, he says. The patient's blood is drawn, centrifuged by a specialist called a perfusionist, and injected, all in one visit. "I will guess that five years from now, insurance companies won't authorize surgery until the patient has tried and failed at PRP." The obvious next step is to isolate the stem cells and send them to work, both inside and outside the body, researchers say. "PRP is reparative. Stem cells are regenerative," says Angela Nava, a perfusionist who processes both animal and human blood for PRP, stem cell and other procedures. But getting from animals to humans is going to take a lot more research, according to Dr. Thomas Rando, an associate professor of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Rando studies the body's signaling systems that tell stem cells what to do. "We don't always know how stem cells, when injected into some tissues, work their magic," Rando said. "Veterinarians don't go back and study the horse's tendons to figure out what the stem cells did to promote healing." "There are all kinds of ways stem cells could work. If we could understand how they are actually promoting better function of the tissue, we might be able to further improve their therapeutic effects," he adds. Stem cell treatment is not without risks, researchers say. The worst-case scenario is that the stem cells could cause cancer -- or become cancerous themselves. "You're putting in cells that want to grow. That has to be under control," Rando says. "Or we can end up with cancer." Tuan also says that researchers don't entirely trust stem cells and their ability to adapt and grow. "There's a nagging feeling that there's a cancer stem cell, that when it's agitated by exposure to carcinogens or radiation or something, it goes nuts, and that we can't identify it from the other stem cells," he says. "How do you find this bad boy and pull him out? "And there's a nagging worry it's the same cell. We only know these cells by what they've done, and by the time they've become cancer, it's too late."

Maryland Mayor Asking For Federal Civil Rights Probe Into No Knock Warrants (AHN)

(AHN) - The mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD will ask for federal civil rights investigation into no knock warrants after his wife became the innocent victim of identity theft and police invaded their home on an illegal no knock warrant and killed the family dogs. - Thu, 7 Aug 2008 15:34:19 GMT

Police State Madness: Mayor's Dogs Gunned Down by Cops in Hyper-Agressive Drug Raid

Our federal government's zero-tolerance anti-drug crusade reached a new low in Prince George's County, Maryland.

* * * NEVADA CITY HOUSE $750 PER WEEK * * * (san jose west) $750 2bd

The house is located in a very quiet and private area, just one mile from downtown Nevada City. The rental fee is $750 per week. I would rather not rent for shorter periods, but will offer it for a three day minimum at $150 per day. There is a $200 refundable deposit, if left in original condition. It's a great place to get away from it all. There is no telephone or internet connection. There is cable TV. The house is 1000 sq.ft., with two bedooms, one with a queen bed and the other with two single beds. There is a Great Room that is living room, dining room and kitchen, all together. The interior of the house has recently been completely remodelled. The kitchen is eqipped with all kinds of appliances. The view looks out onto forested areas, in all directions. There is only one house nearby, and at present, it is vacant. The Nevada City/Grass Valley area is a great place to visit and vacation. Located in the foothills of the Sierras, they are both old mining towns. There is boating nearby on several lakes, the Yuba river is great for swimming and sunning, the Empire Mine is a wonderful outing, and there are a number of good restaurants. In additon, there is live theater, year round, and lots of activities at the Nevada County Fair Grounds. They have the best craft fair over Thanksgiving weekend that you have ever seen. Try your hand at gold panning. There is still gold in the hills, in fact, the Idaho-Maryland mine is being reopened. The house will be avaliable from October 1st. Book now for the Fall and Winter activities, such as Cornish Christmas, in Grass Valley, and Victorian Christmas, in Nevada City. email or call 408-656-0732 I can supply more pictures of the property and give more details when you call or write.