His name was Alex Parker, and it had been two weeks since his father, Peter Parker, or the titular Spider-Man had dissappared without a trace along with countless other villains and here's. Initially,he had struggled to cope with the fact that both his Dad and his Mum had gone missing, vanished, but soon, his British sensibilities set in, and he rebuilt. He stared into a mirror. He was only 18, but he had aged considerably recently. He had been training, preparing to take over his fathers mantle. But soon he realised he could never be Spider-Man without help.
So he turned to Venom, one of his fathers worst enemies, and a thorn in the side of his mother, Natasha Romanov, or the Black Widow. And now, he stood on the edge of the Empire State Building, the symbiote rippling over his skin. He watched the blue lights descend, cool, dangerous, beatiful, and intense. He watched the chaos they brought, the danger they posed and the destruction the strange machines they produced wrought.
"It's time, Alex" whispered the symbiote, his other half. And Alex nodded, and morphed into his costume, a complete colour reversal of the black spider man outfit, so the primary colour was white and the spider symbol was black. He then created a black leather jacket with a white spider symbol on the back, but left it unbuttoned so his front symbol was not obscured. He grinned under his organic mask, and jumped into action, swinging into action near a red and gold armoured person, blasting the machines with blue bolts. He immediately began to help, battering the machines with his shape shifting whiplike arms, complete with barbs on the end, and shouted "don't shoot, I'm here to help!". He grinned. Spider-Man was back. And he was goddamn badass.
In times of financial panic, like when you realize your credit card payment is overdue, the Pageonce mobile app (free) proves its worth. The free app, available for Android (the focus of this review), iPhone, Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry, lets you see a snapshot of all your account balances and upcoming bills, with bill-payment functionality included, too. You can manage payments to credit card companies, utility providers, lenders, and even small proprietors, such as your landlord.
Don't mistake Pageonce for a complete financial management tool, though. You won't find in it budgeting tools or detailed information about your spending habits, something Editors' Choice Mint.com (free, 5 stars) provides through a fully automated site and mobile app. If your goal is to get a handle on your money, I highly recommend dedicating yourself to Mint. Pageonce is more for checking in on your financial situation and making quick corrections when you need to pay bills. It has one or two other miscellaneous features thrown in, such as the ability to see at a glance many of your travel reward program balances, but the core Pageonce experience on Android is to answer the question, "Do I have enough money in the right places right now?"
Fully Free It may be worth pointing out that Pageonce formerly locked some features behind a paid Gold membership, but the company has done away with this premium tier. All Pageonce's features and functionality are now totally free.
You can set up a Pageonce account either right on your Android device or from the full Pageonce.com website?and while we're on that subject, I should note that in my review of Pageonce, I point out that the mobile apps meet a need more than the website does. For setting up your accounts, it helps to have a full screen, keyboard, mouse, and additional browser tabs at the ready. But in actually getting use out of Pageonce, I wholly prefer the mobile app over the site. I think the former meets a consumer need better than the latter.
App Features Inside the Android app, a plus sign at the top of the screen is your key to adding more accounts. Connect any kind of financial account?savings, checking, investment, retirement, loan?and the balance will be counted toward your Pageonce net worth (updated once daily, with a manual refresh option included). As mentioned, you can also connect to online accounts for bills, be they for insurance policies, Internet service, gas and electricity, or phone service. Whenever one of these bills or your credit card bill is near due, Pageonce will let you know via an alert, shown at the bottom of the screen.
The app's main dashboard shows totals for available cash, bills owed and minimum payment due, investment balances, credit card debt, offers (essentially, advertisements for financial services), and Credit Guard (an offer for a credit report and protection service). These six items appear as easy-to-access tiles on the main dashboard.
Other buttons at the top let you manage existing connected accounts, view reports, access your settings, and add new accounts.
The reporting section contains a few interesting bits of information, such as a "file cabinet" that houses previous bill statements, although in testing the app, only two of my connected accounts put any information here, even though I had at least two more accounts that generate a monthly statement.
Another sub-section to the Reports page shows "all your account transactions." This area proves useful when you need to quickly check to see what changed recently in an account if the balance seems off from what you expected it to be. Also under the Reports page is payment history, although it doesn't contain any information prior to the date you connected your financial accounts to Pageonce. And finally, there's "Where your money's going," the place you can actually find real reports. Pie charts and tables detail your expenditures into five simple categories: bills and utilities; insurance; credit cards; loans; and other. In my testing, I found the report just didn't accurately capture what I truly wanted to know about my spending habits, like if I spend much more than I realize eating out, and whether I might be able to cut back on that kind of unnecessary expense to fund something else I need or want. Mint not only has those features, but it does most of the work for me in terms of identifying different kinds of credit card charges.
Bill Pay The bill pay function is what makes Pageonce worthwhile for some people, namely, those who forget to pay their bills until the day before they're due (or later). ?
You can pay a bill, right from within the app, but the very first time you do so, it isn't exactly a one-two-three process (it does become more streamlined afterward, though). Let's say you want to pay your upcoming credit card bill. First, you have to enter the full credit card account number, even if that card is already connected to Pageonce. Second, you have to enter the complete information, meaning account and routing numbers, from the checking account you want to use to pay. Also, it can take up to two business days for a payment to process. That's typically of any online payment you initiate, however, so it's the same results you'd see from making an online payment right from your service provider's website.
One minor problem: In my account, I had one bill payment already scheduled (which I did outside Pageonce), but Pageonce had no knowledge of it, so had I not been careful, I might have tried to pay the same bill twice and double-taxed my own checking account. One thing I've always appreciated about one particular credit card company's online user account experience is that it pops up a warning if I try to schedule a payment within three days of an existing scheduled payment. You wouldn't believe how often I try to pay my bills more than once.
Security Pageonce has good security measures in place to keep your financial information safe. You can't transfer money using Pageonce, so no one else can move your money through this service either. All your account info is kept under lock and key. Similar to Mint.com, Pageonce doesn't store any information on the phone itself, and uses bank-level encryption.
The app has a four-digit PIN, which you enter every time you exit the app or your phone goes on standby. Furthermore, Pageonce is VeriSign Secured (i.e., tested and approved by Norton) and TrustE approved.
Pageonce in a Pinch The Pageonce Android app delivers on its promise to quickly show you your account balances as well as set up a bill to be paid on the fly when you forget to do it ahead of time. If you're the kind of person always getting hit by late charges, give Pageonce a try. But if you're looking for real guidance about how to manage your money and debts, put yourself in the hands of Editors' Choice Mint.com.
Things got a tad hairy for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Blue Waters supercomputer when IBM halted work on it in 2011, but with funding from the National Science Foundation, the one-petaflop system is now crunching numbers 24/7. The behemoth resides within the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and is composed of 237 Cray XE6 cabinets and 32 of the XK7 variety. NVIDIA GK110 Kepler GPU accelerators line the inside of the machine and are flanked by 22,640 compute nodes, which each pack two AMD 6276 Interlagos processors clocked at 2.3 GHz or higher. At its peak performance, the rig can churn out 11.61 quadrillion calculations per second. According to the NCSA, all that horsepower earns Blue Waters the title of the most powerful supercomputer on a university campus. Now that it's cranking away around-the-clock, it'll be used in projects investigating everything from how viruses infect cells to weather predictions.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? Nelson Mandela was back in the hospital for the third time in four months Thursday, and the 94-year-old former South African president was reported to be responding well to treatment for a chronic lung infection.
South Africa's presidency said that doctors were acting with extreme caution because of the advanced age of the anti-apartheid leader, who has become increasingly frail in recent years.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was admitted just before midnight to a hospital in Pretoria, the South African capital. He has been particularly vulnerable to respiratory problems since contracting tuberculosis during his 27-year imprisonment for fighting white racist rule in his country.
"The doctors advise that former President Nelson Mandela is responding positively to the treatment he is undergoing for a recurring lung infection," the presidency said in a statement. "He remains under treatment and observation in hospital."
Mandela, who became South Africa's first black president in 1994, is a revered figure in his homeland, which has named buildings and other places after him and uses his image on national bank notes.
"I'm so sorry. I'm sad," Obed Mokwana, a Johannesburg resident, said after hearing that Mandela was back in the hospital. "I just try to pray all the time. He must come very strong again."
In December, Mandela spent three weeks in a hospital in Pretoria, where he was treated for a lung infection and had a procedure to remove gallstones.
Earlier this month, he was hospitalized overnight for what authorities said was a successful scheduled medical test.
Presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj, referring to Mandela by his clan name "Madiba," said the latest stay was not for previously planned treatment.
"No, this wasn't scheduled. As you will appreciate the doctors do work with a great sense of caution when they are treating Madiba and take into account his age," he said. "And so when they found that this lung infection had reoccurred, they decided to have him immediately hospitalized so that he can receive the best treatment."
He said there had been a global outpouring of messages expressing concern for Mandela's health.
President Jacob Zuma wished Mandela a speedy recovery.
"We appeal to the people of South Africa and the world to pray for our beloved Madiba and his family and to keep them in their thoughts. We have full confidence in the medical team and know that they will do everything possible to ensure recovery," his office quoted him as saying.
In February 2012, Mandela spent a night in a hospital for minor diagnostic surgery to determine the cause of an abdominal complaint. In January 2011, he was admitted to a Johannesburg hospital for what officials initially described as tests but turned out to be an acute respiratory infection. He was discharged days later.
He also had surgery for an enlarged prostate gland in 1985.
The apartheid government released Mandela in 1990. Four years later, he became the nation's first democratically elected president under the banner of the African National Congress, helping to negotiate a relatively peaceful end to apartheid despite fears of much greater bloodshed. He served one five-year term as president before retiring.
Perceived successes during Mandela's tenure include the introduction of a constitution with robust protections for individual rights and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a panel that heard testimony about apartheid-era violations of human rights as a kind of national therapy session.
Mandela last made a public appearance on a major stage when South Africa hosted the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament.
Until his latest string of health problems, Mandela had spent more time in the rural village of Qunu in Eastern Cape province, where he grew up. He was visited there in August by then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Doctors said in December that he should remain at his home in Johannesburg to be close to medical facilities that can provide the care he needs.
___
AP Senior Producer Ed Brown contributed to this report from Durban, South Africa.
The first step is to perfect your world-changing widget. Computer-aided design (CAD) software used to be pricey and hard to use, but new tools such as Autodesk 123D Design, Blender, Google SketchUp, and Tinkercad make designing virtual 3D objects easy. Or build your widget by hand, and use Autodesk's 123D Catch to convert digital images of it into a CAD file.
Mar. 24, 2013 ? Semiconducting polymers are an unruly bunch, but University of Michigan engineers have developed a new method for getting them in line that could pave the way for cheaper, greener, "paint-on" plastic electronics.
"This is for the first time a thin-layer, conducting, highly aligned film for high-performance, paintable, directly writeable plastic electronics," said Jinsang Kim, U-M professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research published in Nature Materials.
Semiconductors are the key ingredient for computer processors, solar cells and LED displays, but they are expensive. Inorganic semiconductors like silicon require high temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and costly vacuum systems for processing into electronics, but organic and plastic semiconductors can be prepared on a basic lab bench.
The trouble is that charge carriers, like electrons, can't move through plastics nearly as easily as they can move through inorganic semiconductors, Kim said. Part of the reason for this is because each semiconducting polymer molecule is like a short wire, and these wires are randomly arranged.
"Charge mobility along the polymer chains is much faster than between the polymers," Kim said.
To take advantage of the good conduction along the polymers, research groups have been trying to align them into a charge-carrying freeway, but it's a bit like trying to arrange nanoscopic linguine.
Kim's group approached the problem by making smarter semiconducting polymers. They wanted a liquid polymer solution they could brush over a surface, and the molecules would automatically align with one another in the direction of the stroke, assembling into high-performance semiconducting thin-layer films.
First, they designed the polymers to be slippery -- ordinary polymers glom together like flat noodles left in the fridge, Kim said. By choosing polymers with a natural twist, the team kept them from sticking to one another in the solution. But in order to align during the brushstroke, the polymers needed to subtly attract one another. Flat surfaces would do that, so the team designed their polymer to untwist as the solvent dried up.
They stopped the unaligned polymers from forming large chunks by adding flexible arms that extended off to the sides of the flat, wire-like polymer. These arms prevented too much close contact among the polymers while the bulkiness of the arms kept them from snagging on one another. Polymers with these properties will line up in the direction of an applied force, such as the tug of a paintbrush.
"It's a big breakthrough," Kim said. "We established a complete molecular design principle of semiconducting polymers with directed alignment capability."
And it works. The team made molecules that matched their design and built a device for spreading the polymer solution over surfaces such as glass or a flexible plastic film. The force from the silicon blade, moving at a constant speed across the liquid polymer, was enough to align the molecules.
The team then built the semiconducting film into a simple transistor, a version of the electronic components that make up computer processors. The device demonstrated the importance of the polymer alignment by showing that charge carriers moved 1,000 times faster in the direction parallel to the silicon blade's brushstroke than they did when crossing the direction of the stroke.
"By combining the established molecular design principle with a polymer that has a very good intrinsic charge carrier mobility, we believe it will make a huge difference in organic electronics," he said. "We are currently developing a versatile fabrication method in order to realize high-performance and paintable plastic electronics in various length scales from nanometers to meters."
Kim believes that the technique will work equally well with atomic-scale pen nibs or large trowel-like applicators for making electronics of all sizes such as LED displays or light-absorbing coatings for solar cells.
The paper is titled "A molecular design principle of lyotropic liquid-crystalline conjugated polymers with directed alignment capability for plastic electronics."
The work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Two authors of the paper were partly supported by National Science Foundation and WCU program of National Research Foundation of Korea. The university is pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Michigan, via Newswise.
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Journal Reference:
Bong-Gi Kim, Eun Jeong Jeong, Jong Won Chung, Sungbaek Seo, Bonwon Koo, Jinsang Kim. A molecular design principle of lyotropic liquid-crystalline conjugated polymers with directed alignment capability for plastic electronics. Nature Materials, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nmat3595
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Karl Rove, Fox News contributor and former deputy chief of staff for President George W. Bush, says of comedian-satirist Stephen Colbert's interactions with Rove's bespectacled canned-ham likeness, "Ham Rove," "He's an entertainer so he gets to be funny and exaggerate things and so forth. Though I have to admit, when he took out the knife and started stabbing it, I think he might need a little bit of professional counseling on his anger management issues."
Rove joked "I don't know whether that was working out his inner feelings, or encouraging maybe someone to maybe mimic him or just sort of being funny. But there was a little bit of anxiety in his stabs there."
Before joining the "This Week" roundtable, Rove sat down with ABC News' Benjamin Bell, answering a variety of viewer questions from Facebook, including the lighthearted about "Ham Rove" and George W. Bush's paintings, his career and his thoughts on the Iraq War 10 years later.
Read More Below:
Q: What do you think of President Bush's paintings?
A: "I have one. I have one of the original, first forty-threes. He painted my wife and our dogs. And he's pretty good. Particularly, I called him when Barney died. And he'd painted a picture of Barney, which I thought was really, you know, clearly from the heart."
Q: In your opinion, what was the greatest accomplishment of the Bush administration?
A: "Well, if you had to pick one, it would obviously be in the aftermath of 9/11, keeping America safe and foiling efforts to follow on the attack of 9/11 with others."
Q: When you think about the Iraq War, 10 years after the invasion, do you have any regrets?
A: "Sure, of course. Looking at the end of any conflict, I bet people look back and clearly have regret about the loss of life. And clearly, everything in hindsight, you know, becomes clear as to what you should have done or shouldn't have done. Every conflict is like that.
"But the world is a safer place with Saddam Hussein gone. If he were not removed from power, can you imagine what the Middle East would look like today with Saddam Hussein, who was successfully undermining the United Nations by ignoring the agreements he made in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, undermining the oil for sanctions regime, had every confidence that he could ultimately be free of them, and he would be emboldened with, you know, a fifth of the world's oil supplies and the capacity to reinstitute his dangerous weapons programs. And if he were not alive, the country would be run by one of his sadistic sons, Uday or Qusay. And can you imagine how difficult that would make that part of the world? In retrospect, sure, lots of regrets. Lots of things you would like to have done differently. But the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone."
Q: Do you consider Chief Justice Roberts to be a disappointment?
A: "Well, in one sense, yeah, you wish he had gone on the other side and been 5-4 declaring [President Obama's health care law] unconstitutional. On the other hand, when you appoint someone, you appoint somebody because of their character, their convictions, their abilities. And not because you have a belief, a confidence, in a foreordained outcome in any given decision.
"You appoint them for their leadership and their legal acumen. And you have to look at the long. .. narrative of his record on the court, which is only now beginning. Had I wish he had acted differently in it? Yes, but on the other hand, he's been a strong leader who has restored public confidence in the court and has led the court to make some important decisions."
Lightning Round:
Q: iPhone or Blackberry?
A: "iPhone, of course."
Q: Favorite movie of the year?
A: "It's a tie, 'Skyfall' and 'Lincoln.' I enjoyed both of them immensely. Best Bond movie ever. And a really fine movie on 'Lincoln.'"
Q: Comfort food?
A: "Fried chicken."
Like "This Week" on Facebook here. You can also follow the show on Twitter here.
Remember the Xperia ZL? While it lingered in the shadow of the waterproof Xperia Z back at CES, the phone does still exist and has now gone on preorder at Sony's own webstore. Withc the same 5-inch 1080p display, 13-megapixel camera and Snapdragon S4 Pro of the omnibalanced Z model, the Xperia ZL packs it into a smaller footprint and adds the courtesy of a physical camera button. Sony's NFC skills remain onboard and that lead camera is capable of HDR video capture, alongside recent improvements to the Xperia range's automatic shooting mode. While its own retail site is currently down (and there's no concrete date for when you'll get your hands on the phone), Sony says that it will be available from other online stores soon, pricing the Xperia ZL, contract- and carrier-less, at a hefty $720 on HSPA, or $760 for the 4G variant. That pricier option includes LTE Bands 2, 4 5, and 17, which means it should connect with AT&T's 4G network -- with or without any carrier branding.
Paul A. Eisenstein , The Detroit Bureau? ? ?9 hrs.
If the name Hyundai evokes an image of low-cost econoboxes, you may want to check out the Korean carmaker?s nearest showroom. Prepare to be surprised.
At next week?s New York Auto Show, Hyundai will spotlight the 2014 Equus, the mid-cycle update of its premium-luxury sedan. The sedan will compete with high-end makes, such as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class and BMW 7-Series.
Although you can buy a basic Hyundai Accent for $15,000, a fully-equipped Equus will nudge you over the $70,000 mark.
Don?t expect much of a discount at the dealer. The average Hyundai went out the door with givebacks around $1,420, according to data gathered by TrueCar.com, a lower figure than any other major manufacturer but Honda.
The good news for Hyundai is that it broke its all-time sales record last year, and did it again in January and February. The bad news is that it is losing market share because it can?t keep up with the pace of the U.S. automotive recovery.
?We just can?t build anymore,? Hyundai Motor America CEO John Krafcik said in San Diego, where he was presiding over the first media drive of the new 3-row 2014 Hyundai Santa Fe crossover-utility vehicle. ?We?re just out of production capacity.?
In recent months, Hyundai dealers have had to get by with about half the 60- to 65-days of inventory considered normal in the automotive business.
(?A tough problem to have,? smirks analyst Joe Phillippi of AutoTrends Consulting.)
This has allowed Hyundai to trim its incentives and allowed dealers to prey on a ?scarcity value? to fend off the bargain shoppers of Hyundai?s past. The average transaction price ? the actual figure the typical customer paid after working in discounts and options ? jumped by 5 percent, year-over-year, to $22,549 in February, according to TrueCar.
Phillippi and other analysts say they?re surprised by Hyundai?s success. It?s been just four months since the maker ? and its Korean sibling Kia -- acknowledged the two brands fudged test results and would have to restate the fuel economy numbers on 13 different models, some by six miles per gallon.
Since then, the Korean makers have settled a lawsuit and agreed to provide substantial reimbursement to the 900,000 owners affected.
Hyundai?s transition from a fire sale brand has required a shift in focus that began by targeting once-endemic quality problems and backing that up with an industry-leading, 10-year warranty program. The maker has steadily gained ground in a variety of third-party measures, notably the quality and customer service surveys by J.D. Power and Associates. The current version of the Equus outscored Lexus, the overall top brand in Power?s latest Customer Service Index.
That has Hyundai management confident they can continue to expand their presence in the luxury market. The maker will show off what it describes as a ?luxury sports coupe concept,? the HND-9, at the Seoul Motor Show next week. While the unusual ?butterfly doors? are likely a show gimmick, industry observers expect the HND-9 is a clear hint of new products to come.
That gets back to the question of where to build the cars. Hyundai has added a third shift at its Alabama factory Alabama and it has crossovers rolling out of the Kia plant in Georgia.
While Krafcik says there are ?no plans, yet,? for adding more capacity in the U.S., analysts like Phillippi stress that could change quickly. The Koreans appear to be using the moment as an opportunity to decide whether to expand, and few would be surprised if an announcement didn?t come sometime this year.
But Hyundai has learned from watching competitors? mistakes, especially when it comes to overstocking. The goal, Krafcik says, is to follow the strategy of the most successful luxury brands, and ?always be one car short of demand.?
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The seasonal rains called monsoons matter enormously to human affairs, from the Indian subcontinent to the American Southwest. Getting a better understanding of the forces that will shape these features of the climate system in coming decades is a big research priority, but also a very tough challenge given the many factors in play.
In a study published in this week?s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers analyzing monsoon patterns around the Northern Hemisphere since the 1970s conclude that there has been a substantial intensification of summer monsoon rainfall and circulation. The researchers say natural variations in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans appear to be the main force behind the shift. Climate models have tended to project a different result.
I asked a variety of scientists working on these questions to evaluate the paper and related materials in an e-mail discussion including one of the authors, Peter Webster, a Georgia Institute of Technology climate scientist.
I distributed the abstract and a news release from the University of Hawaii, where the lead author, Bin Wang, is chairman of the department of meteorology.
Here?s an excerpt from the release:
Current theory predicts that the Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon circulation should weaken under anthropogenic global warming.
Wang and his colleagues, however, found that over the past 30 years, the summer monsoon circulation, as well as the Hadley and Walker circulations, have all substantially intensified. [Explore this Real Climate post to see how much this finding conflicts with what had been conventional wisdom.]
This intensification has resulted in significantly greater global summer monsoon rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere than predicted from greenhouse-gas-induced warming alone: namely a 9.5% increase, compared to the anthropogenic predicted contribution of 2.6% per degree of global warming.
Most of the recent intensification is attributable to a cooling of the eastern Pacific that began in 1998. This cooling is the result of natural long-term swings in ocean surface temperatures, particularly swings in the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation or mega-El Ni?o-Southern Oscillation, which has lately been in a mega-La Ni?a or cool phase. Another natural climate swing, called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, also contributes to the intensification of monsoon rainfall.
Here?s a link to the paper and the abstract, followed by the discussion so far:
?Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon intensi?ed by mega-El Ni?o/southern oscillation and Atlantic multidecadal oscillation?
Bin Wang, Jian Liu, Hyung-Jin Kim, Peter J. Webster, So-Young Yim, and Baoqiang Xiang
Prediction of monsoon changes in the coming decades is important for infrastructure planning and sustainable economic development. The decadal prediction involves both natural decadal variability and anthropogenic forcing. Hitherto, the causes of the decadal variability of Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon (NHSM) are largely unknown because the monsoons over Asia, West Africa, and North America have been studied primarily on a regional basis, which is unable to identify coherent decadal changes and the overriding controls on planetary scales. Here, we show that, during the recent global warming of about 0.4?C since the late 1970s, a coherent decadal change of precipitation and circulation emerges in the entirety of the NHSM system. Surprisingly, the NHSM as well as the Hadley and Walker circulations have all shown substantial intensi?cation, with a striking increase of NHSM rainfall by 9.5% per degree of global warming. This is unexpected from recent theoretical prediction and model projections of the 21st century. The intensi?cation is primarily attributed to a mega-El Ni?o/Southern Oscillation (a leading mode of interannual-to-interdecadal variation of global sea surface temperature) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and further in?uenced by hemispherical asymmetric global warming.
These factors driving the present changes of the NHSM system are instrumental for understanding and predicting future decadal changes and determining the proportions of climate change that are attributable to anthropogenic effects and long-term internal variability in the complex climate system.
In my query to climate scientists, I noted that the work appeared to raise significant questions about the limits of climate models and pose a challenge for anyone arguing that recent shifts in monsoons are due to human-driven climate change. Here?s the discussion (I cleaned up some e-mail shorthand but the rest is as written; it is technical in spots):
Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research:
I do not find this result at all surprising, but some of the material is a bit misleading. I have not read the paper, however there continues to be confusion about changes in monsoons (in this case), or ENSO [the El Ni?o-Southern Oscillation], etc. and the effects of those changes in terms of precipitation and other effects. So the terminology makes a difference.
For instance please see Trenberth, K. E., 2011: ?Changes in precipitation with climate change.? Climate Research, 47, 123-138, doi:10.3354/cr00953
So while the monsoon winds might weaken the precipitation nonetheless increases (more bang for the buck) as a weaker circulation carries more water vapor (and latent energy). ENSO might weaken by some definitions but droughts and floods increase in magnitude. The way one frames the questions about the role of climate change matters. Decadal variability has been acknowledged in many other recent publications such as?
Dai, A., 2013: ?The influence of the Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation on U.S. precipitation during 1923-2010.? Climate Dynamics, doi:10.1007/s00382-012-1446-5, in press.
?and extensively in climate models in the work of Clara Deser, see the paper in Nature Climate Change recently and articles such as this?
Deser, C., A. S. Phillips, V. Bourdette, and H. Teng, 2012: ?Uncertainty in climate change projections: The role of internal variability.? Climate Dyn., 38, 527-546, DOI 10.1007/s00382-010-0977-x.
Indeed regionally, interannual and decadal variability is still dominant in the climate record and will be for a long time. The whole idea of regional climate prediction that has come to the fore mainly because of need/demand is not based on sound science owing to fundamental predictability issues. How one does attribution is indeed an issue.
Andrew Turner, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in England (interviewed by Vikas Bajaj for the Green blog last year):
The paper?offers a useful framework for which decadal variations in the global (or northern hemisphere) may be explained via large scale modes of oceanic variability. This potentially could lead to added predictability for a certain proportion of monsoon rainfall variability.
However, this decadal predictability, ?necessary for infrastructure planning, energy policy, business development, and issues related to sustainability? (to quote the PNAS paper) is only useful to end-users (people on the ground) if rainfall in local regions can be better predicted. Basing local planning decisions on hemisphere-scale signals may be misguided, and so probably if any decadal predictions can be made for these hemisphere-scale portions of the monsoon then they need to be supplemented by information from other sources of predictability in order to target the local level. Whether this can be done is another matter.
A certain amount of care is needed in interpreting the results of this paper at a local or even regional monsoon level. For example the increasing trend in the coherent NHSM decadal precipitation shown in the paper (Figure S3B: the spatial pattern and associated principal component time series of the EOF) in fact suggest a weakening over recent decades in much of India and East Asia. This is in stark contrast to the headline result.
Correspondingly, in those regions I mention (which, by population, represent the most important regions of the global monsoon) much of the increasing precipitation signal is coming from oceanic regions: the eastern Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South and East China Seas and Bay of Bengal. The declining signal over India shown by the GPCP decadal mode is broadly consistent with gauge measurements since the 1950s ? that several research groups including my own are trying to understand, perhaps relating to emissions of anthropogenic aerosol ? although there are discrepancies between these gauge-based data sets themselves (see our recent review in Nature Climate Change, for example).
We already know that (regional) monsoon variability on the scales for sub-seasonal to interannual are higher than the projected model trends of future mean monsoon rainfall (I?ve just seen that Kevin has mentioned this also). In some models, the decadal variability for monsoons such as the South Asian monsoon also outweighs the magnitude of the future trends, and in others it does not (the review above is one example showing this). We need to better characterise the decadal variability in the regional monsoons and understand why models show such different behavior.
Reacting to Trenberth, Peter J. Webster, an author of the new paper and climate scientist at Georgia Tech, wrote this, directed to Kevin Trenberth:
Kevin,
Thanks for your insight. But perhaps you might read the paper first before directing (misdirecting) the attention away from Andy?s questions. To me, the issue is that there is a trend when one considers the global monsoon (and yes, Kevin has written about the global monsoon, too). I think that one of the problems that we have had in monsoon stuff is to consider the monsoons bit by bit. We received reviewer criticism from (I guess) Indian scientists who have spoken of a diminishing monsoon. Yet, India is a small place and their statistics are based on the average annual rainfall over India that doesn?t include rainfall from Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh or any countries in East Asia. I think that one has to be careful in drawing global conclusions from local or even regional trends or events (read Sandy!) What this paper does is show that if one carefully considers the larger scale aspects of the monsoon including the oceanic monsoon (see some of the papers by Winston Chao a decade or so ago: thoroughly recommend) then one can start to see trends on a global basis. I think that some times we get caught up in minitua or filligree of climate. So if we make a contribution in this paper it is that viewed holistically that the monsoons are changing and there is a supporting physical basis for this.
Webster added this note, directed to Andrew Turner (and me):
Dear Andys (two),
Andy T?s point is well taken but please read the previous note. We start by making the point that there is a trend in the global monsoon as we describe it. Yes, there are changes in the Indian monsoon but note that this a regional perspective. Let us say that we start at looking at the rainfall over India and then extrapolate that to the globe. One gets an opposite global trend that is completely misleading. And one is left trying to understand regional changes without a global context. But if one finds a global monsoon trend and if it turns out to be robust, then one has a handle to help understand local or regional changes. To me, the most important thing is finding large scale physics that help make sense regional changes.
Andy T is correct that the largest changes in the South Asian monsoon rainfall is occurring in the Bay of Bengal which, by the way, is the regional maximum in precipitation and has been for a long time. And, I believe that the Indian Ocean is the ocean of fastest sea-surface temperature increase. So I am hopeful that we can increase interdecadal prediction by understanding the links between global physics and regional response.
Years ago, Tim Palmer and I had a discussion about the impact of global forcing (e.g., CO2) on circulation patterns. It seemed to us that the impact would be on the ?normal modes? of natural variability. That is, one would expect impacts to be on the gross features of the climate system (PDO, AMO, ENSO?.). Whereas the magnitude and frequency of these phenomena may be forced to change, it is less likely that we would get new phenomena. We may even have written this up 20 years ago in some obscure journal. But I think that this point is pertinent to our paper.
I?ll add more as responses come in. If you have questions, post them and I?ll alert the group I?ve queried.
It?s important not to rely too much on a single study, of course. Here?s recent research, also from the University of Hawaii, that has a closer focus on southern Asia and draws different conclusions: ?Global Warming Shifts The Monsoon Circulation, Drying South Asia?. And looking further in the future, other researchers see greenhouse-driven warming becoming a big and harmful influence in that populous region: ?A statistically predictive model for future monsoon failure in India.?
George Lowe dies: George Lowe and? Edmund Hillary were the only New Zealanders on the famous 1953 British-led ascent of Everest. George Lowe was a lead climber in the expedition. His book, "Letters From Everest," is due out later this year.
By Jill Lawless,?Associated Press / March 23, 2013
In this Aug. 8, 1953 file photo, Sir Edmund Hillary, left, and his fellow New Zealander George Lowe, are welcomed home to New Zealand following their arrival by air at Auckland. George Lowe, the last surviving climber from the team that made the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, died Wednesday, March 20, 2013.
AP/File
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George Lowe, the last surviving climber from the team that made the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, has died at age 89.
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Mary Lowe said Thursday her husband died a day earlier at a nursing home in Ripley, central England, after an illness.
Lowe and his friend Edmund Hillary were the only New Zealanders on the 1953 British-led attempt to climb the world's highest peak.
Lowe was part of a small group that established the final camp 1,000 feet (300 meters) below the mountain's summit on May 28, 1953. The next day, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal reached the 29,035 foot (8,850 meter) peak.
As Hillary descended the next day, he met Lowe, walking toward him with soup and emergency oxygen. "Well, George," Hillary recalled saying, "we knocked the bastard off."
"He and Hillary climbed together through life, really," said travel writer Jan Morris, who was part of the Everest expedition as a journalist for The Times newspaper.
"And when it came to the point near the summit, George had to play a subsidiary role. He climbed very high, he climbed to top camp and said goodbye to Hillary then helped him come down. He played a very important role."
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said Lowe and Hillary made New Zealand a household name when they conquered Everest 60 years ago.
"I was sad to hear of his death but remain very proud of these men's achievements," Key said in a statement.
Almost 4,000 people have now successfully climbed Everest, according to the Nepal Mountaineering Association, but that 1953 expedition remains one of the iconic moments of 20th-century adventure.
Morris said she was now the only survivor of the 1953 group.
She said Lowe was "a gentleman in the old sense ? very kind, very forceful, thoughtful and also a true adventurer, an unusual combination."
Hillary, who died in 2008, inevitably got much of the media attention ? and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. Mary Lowe said her husband "didn't mind a bit."
"He had a wonderful life," she said. "He did a lot of things, but he was a very modest man and he kept quiet about it.
"He never sought the limelight. Ed Hillary didn't seek the limelight either ? but he had it thrust upon him."
Born in Hastings, New Zealand, in 1924 and a teacher by training, Lowe began climbing in the country's Southern Alps and met Hillary, another ambitious young climber with whom he forged a lifelong bond.
In 1951, he was part of a New Zealand expedition to the Himalayas, and in 1953 he and Hillary joined the British Everest expedition led by John Hunt.
Kari Herbert of Polarworld, which is due to publish Lowe's book "Letters From Everest" later this year, said Lowe's efforts had been crucial to the expedition's success.
"He was one of the lead climbers, forging the route up Everest's Lhotse Face without oxygen and later cutting steps for his partners up the summit ridge," she said.
Lowe directed a film of the expedition, "The Conquest of Everest," which received an Academy Award nomination in 1954 for best documentary feature.
He also made "Antarctic Crossing" after participating in the 1955-58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the first successful overland crossing of the continent. It, too, was Oscar-nominated.
Lowe later made expeditions to Greenland, Greece and Ethiopia, taught school in Britain and Chile, lectured on his expeditions and became Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools for England.
He was a founder of the Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan Trust U.K., a charity set up to support the mountain residents of Nepal.
Lowe is survived by Mary and by three sons from his first marriage to John Hunt's daughter Susan: Gavin, Bruce and Matthew.
Mary Lowe said a memorial service would be held next month.
___
Associated Press writers Gregory Katz in London and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) ? A 61-year-old French man was arrested at Philadelphia International Airport and charged with impersonating a pilot after airline officials found him in the cockpit of a plane scheduled for takeoff, police said Friday.
The crew of a US Airways flight bound for West Palm Beach, Fla., found Philippe Jernnard of La Rochelle, France, in the jump seat behind the pilot on Wednesday evening and removed him after he became argumentative, police said.
Jernnard, who was a ticketed passenger, was wearing a white shirt with an Air France logo and had a black jacket with epaulets on the shoulders, police said. Officer Christine O'Brien said police also found him in possession of a counterfeit Air France crew member ID card.
It's not clear how Jernnard got into the cockpit, but police said there's no indication he meant any harm. A US Airways spokeswoman referred questions to the FBI, which confirmed it is investigating but declined to comment Friday.
O'Brien said Jernnard initially became upset at the gate when he asked to be upgraded to business class.
"The (US Airways) employee gate agent told the male there was no space left in business class. He became irate," then boarded the plane, O'Brien said.
Jernnard was charged with criminal trespass, forgery, records tampering, false impersonation of a person privately employed, and providing false identification to law enforcement. He remained behind bars pending a preliminary hearing scheduled for April 5. Federal charges are also expected.
Jernnard is represented by the Philadelphia public defender's office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In France, police in La Rochelle as well as the national police declined to comment, saying they are not allowed to disclose information about individuals.
Many people cringe when they think of needles, but there are many individuals who swear by the ancient medical practice of acupuncture. Proponents of this form of treatment say that it can help with a wide variety of issues, from stress to chronic pain. Some acupuncturists even claim that treatments can reduce the signs of aging, according to Austin, Texas-based Your News Now.
Acupuncturists at Whole Body Health in Austin call the acupuncture treatments aimed at reducing wrinkles and other age-related issues "Acu-lifts." During each session, an acupuncturist will put 30 to 60 needles in a patient's face, which they say can help produce the production of collagen, thus creating a more youthful appearance. Results are visible after 10 sessions. The benefits don't end there, either, they say.
"Some women actually lose weight because we're doing a lot of points on the stomach channel and large intestine," Moira McCarthy, who works for Whole Body Health, told the media outlet. "They feel better. It lowers their blood pressure, reduces stress - there's just a lot of underlying health benefits to doing it."
Does it work? While you'll find many people who say acupuncture can work wonders, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine notes that there has been much controversy over this form of medicine. Some people say that the small metal needles used in acupuncture simply work as a placebo.
Those who are skeptical of these so-called "Acu-lifts" may want to turn to more tried and true methods of improving the aesthetics of the face. Facelift surgery, Botox injections and other skin procedures can produce long-lasting results and have been proven to reduce or eliminate lines on the face.
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LOS ANGELES (AP) ? For a moment, Lily Tomlin was 73 going on 40.
In the comedy "Admission," starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, Tomlin plays the young-at-heart seventy-something feminist mother of Fey's university admissions officer.
"When we first sat down, I think I'm their age," Tomlin recalled. "They started asking me about 'Nine to Five' and '(The Incredible) Shrinking Woman.' Ha ... they were like 10, 12 years old (when I did those things)."
Like "Admission," which opens Friday, Tomlin's story is very much that of a daughter and mother. Born Mary Jean Tomlin, the comic and actress has been paying homage to her mom since the start of her career, when she adopted "Lily" as a stage name.
"(She) lived to be 91 and was somewhat infirmed by the time she was in her late 80s," Tomlin said. "But she still was funny and wonderful and sweet, so I doubt she felt that old, either."
On her current ABC sitcom "Malibu Country," Tomlin plays the swingin' mother of a newly single daughter (played by Reba McEntire). Tomlin said she asked that her character be renamed Lillie Mae. "I wanted to play someone that age who was just full of life."
Much of Tomlin's life has been spent with writer and life partner Jane Wagner.
Contrary to recent reports, talk-show legend Johnny Carson "didn't out me or try to out me," Tomlin clarified. "He was just being a host and saying conventional stuff. You know: 'You're not married. Don't you want to have children?' ... (These were things) they would ask a female in the early '70s."
Being out, at least within showbiz circles, certainly hasn't hurt Tomlin's career, which includes five Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, a Grammy Award, two Peabody Awards and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
"I was speaking at (the late Texas governor) Ann Richards' school in Austin," Tomlin remembered, noting that the youngsters only knew her as the voice of the inspirational Ms. Frizzle on the 1990s kids cartoon show "The Magic School Bus."
"One little girl stands up, she had to be 9 years old, and she said, 'Well, what do you think you've contributed to the world with your work?' And I was just stopped dead cold. And I finally said to her, 'I hope that I've made people feel connected to one another.'
"And I'd so hoped that she'd had more knowledge of my career so she could say, 'Well, frankly, here's what I think,'" Tomlin added, with a laugh.
____
Follow Michael Cidoni Lennox on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MikeCLennox
Scientists create new tools for battling secondhand smokePublic release date: 21-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: John Cramer John.D.Cramer@dartmouth.edu 603-646-9130 Dartmouth College
Dartmouth researchers have taken an important step in the ongoing battle against secondhand tobacco smoke. They have pioneered the development of a breakthrough device that can immediately detect the presence of secondhand smoke and even third-hand smoke.
Smaller and lighter than a cellphone and about the size of a Matchbox car, the device uses polymer films to collect and measure nicotine in the air. A sensor chip then records the data on an SD memory card. The technology is described in a new study appearing in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
"We have developed the first ever tobacco smoke sensor that is sufficiently sensitive to measure secondhand smoke and record its presence in real time," says Professor of Chemistry Joseph BelBruno, whose Dartmouth lab conducted the research. "This is a leap forward in secondhand smoke exposure detection technology and can be considered the first step in reducing the risk of health effects."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says children are especially vulnerable to environmental tobacco smoke. Its effects on the young can include an increased risk of pneumonia, bronchitis, asthma, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. While many parents try not to smoke around their children, going to a different room or smoking out on the porch may not be going far enough. Now, for the first time, there is a prototype sensor that will let the parent see whether or not their precautions make a difference.
"The intent of the project isn't to make them stop smoking, but it is to make them stop exposing their children to smoke. On the other hand, if they are worried about their children, demonstrating these exposures may be an incentive for them to stop," BelBruno says.
Secondhand smoke comes from the burning end of a cigarette or from smoke exhaled by the smoker. Third-hand smoke, also a potential health hazard, according to the Mayo Clinic, is nicotine residue that remains on clothing, furniture, car seats, and other material after the air has cleared.
While the current device is a patent-pending prototype, BelBruno foresees the eventual availability of an affordable consumer version that will incorporate a computer processor, reusable polymer films, and a rechargeable battery. It may even incorporate an LED panel to provide instantaneous readouts.
In addition to its uses in safeguarding childhood health, there are commercial applications for these unique detectors. Installed in rental cars, hotel rooms, and restaurants, this device could help enforce owner and operator smoking bans through an alert system, much like existing, ceiling-mounted smoke detectors.
Before the secondhand smoke project, BelBruno's lab had been working on sensor development for problem molecules such as heavy metals and other toxins in the water and the air. BelBruno says that David Kotz, the Champion International Professor of Computer Science, was the catalyst for the secondhand smoke project.
"He knew that people at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth were interested in doing a study to try to reduce children's exposure to secondhand smoke, and he knew that we were working on sensors. He got us together, we talked, and this project came out of it."
Given the hundreds of compounds in cigarette smoke, BelBruno's group began with a plan for a multi-component sensor but found this approach unnecessarily complex. The sensor they came up with detects cigarette smoke alone, simply and efficiently.
The research team included Dartmouth chemistry graduate students Yuan Liu and Sadik Antwi-Boampong, and from the Geisel School of Medicine, Mardi Crane-Godreau (Department of Microbiology and Immunology) and Susanne Tanski (Department of Pediatrics and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center). Crane tested the device in a laboratory smoking chamber and Tanski plans to start clinical studies this summer.
###
This research was supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics Julius B. Richmond Center of Excellence, funded through the Flight Attendants Medical Research Institute, and by the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
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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.
Scientists create new tools for battling secondhand smokePublic release date: 21-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: John Cramer John.D.Cramer@dartmouth.edu 603-646-9130 Dartmouth College
Dartmouth researchers have taken an important step in the ongoing battle against secondhand tobacco smoke. They have pioneered the development of a breakthrough device that can immediately detect the presence of secondhand smoke and even third-hand smoke.
Smaller and lighter than a cellphone and about the size of a Matchbox car, the device uses polymer films to collect and measure nicotine in the air. A sensor chip then records the data on an SD memory card. The technology is described in a new study appearing in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
"We have developed the first ever tobacco smoke sensor that is sufficiently sensitive to measure secondhand smoke and record its presence in real time," says Professor of Chemistry Joseph BelBruno, whose Dartmouth lab conducted the research. "This is a leap forward in secondhand smoke exposure detection technology and can be considered the first step in reducing the risk of health effects."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says children are especially vulnerable to environmental tobacco smoke. Its effects on the young can include an increased risk of pneumonia, bronchitis, asthma, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. While many parents try not to smoke around their children, going to a different room or smoking out on the porch may not be going far enough. Now, for the first time, there is a prototype sensor that will let the parent see whether or not their precautions make a difference.
"The intent of the project isn't to make them stop smoking, but it is to make them stop exposing their children to smoke. On the other hand, if they are worried about their children, demonstrating these exposures may be an incentive for them to stop," BelBruno says.
Secondhand smoke comes from the burning end of a cigarette or from smoke exhaled by the smoker. Third-hand smoke, also a potential health hazard, according to the Mayo Clinic, is nicotine residue that remains on clothing, furniture, car seats, and other material after the air has cleared.
While the current device is a patent-pending prototype, BelBruno foresees the eventual availability of an affordable consumer version that will incorporate a computer processor, reusable polymer films, and a rechargeable battery. It may even incorporate an LED panel to provide instantaneous readouts.
In addition to its uses in safeguarding childhood health, there are commercial applications for these unique detectors. Installed in rental cars, hotel rooms, and restaurants, this device could help enforce owner and operator smoking bans through an alert system, much like existing, ceiling-mounted smoke detectors.
Before the secondhand smoke project, BelBruno's lab had been working on sensor development for problem molecules such as heavy metals and other toxins in the water and the air. BelBruno says that David Kotz, the Champion International Professor of Computer Science, was the catalyst for the secondhand smoke project.
"He knew that people at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth were interested in doing a study to try to reduce children's exposure to secondhand smoke, and he knew that we were working on sensors. He got us together, we talked, and this project came out of it."
Given the hundreds of compounds in cigarette smoke, BelBruno's group began with a plan for a multi-component sensor but found this approach unnecessarily complex. The sensor they came up with detects cigarette smoke alone, simply and efficiently.
The research team included Dartmouth chemistry graduate students Yuan Liu and Sadik Antwi-Boampong, and from the Geisel School of Medicine, Mardi Crane-Godreau (Department of Microbiology and Immunology) and Susanne Tanski (Department of Pediatrics and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center). Crane tested the device in a laboratory smoking chamber and Tanski plans to start clinical studies this summer.
###
This research was supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics Julius B. Richmond Center of Excellence, funded through the Flight Attendants Medical Research Institute, and by the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
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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.
By Gordon Tokumatsu and Samantha Tata, NBCLosAngeles.com
A 14-year-old honor student from Northridge, Los Angeles, died this week after inhaling computer keyboard cleaner, a growing trend among students as young as eighth grade.
"I'm positive my daughter didn't realize it had the potential to kill her," Carolyn Doherty said.
Aria Doherty, a straight-A student at Nobel Middle School, died Monday. She?d been home alone for a couple of hours when she inhaled the duster.
Her parents believe it was her first time huffing -- also known as bagging or dusting.
Her older sister found Aria in bed with a can of compressed air still attached to her mouth, her nostrils taped shut. A plastic bag was found nearby.
"I would give anything to have her back," said Richard Doherty, Aria?s father. "It just took her, like that."
"I just miss her. I wish she was here. It doesn't seem real," he said through tears.
'Death can happen very quickly' The Dohertys kept no dangerous weapons in their Porter Ranch home, stored prescription drugs under lock and key, and recently purged their home of all alcohol. They talked to their teen daughters about the dangers of substance abuse.
But authorities said the practice of huffing does not involve the typical chemical culprits. Inhaling household cleaners, paint or glue offers a quick high and they?re accessible.
"Death can happen very quickly. It can happen the first time," said Kezia Miller, a counselor with the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Read more from NBCLosAngeles.com
Counselors are available at Nobel Middle School and are planning an inhalant education program for Aria's peers.
"These are substances that are poison," Miller said. "They're toxic and they're being ingested."
Long-term effects of inhalants include damage to the kidneys, liver and brain. Short-term dangers include heart problems.
"When you mess with the cardiac system, the electrical system of the heart, you can have a lot of issues, like arrhythmia," said Dr. Michael Lewis, with Northridge Hospital Medical Center.
It?s possible the computer cleaner caused cardiac arrest or the teen asphyxiated. An autopsy is pending.
The Dohertys said they want their daughter?s death to be a message to other parents to be aware of this developing threat.
"We didn?t know," Carolyn said. "But clearly, the kids do know."
Related:
Oregon teenager dies after inhaling helium at party
So this weekend was action packed. I and my youngest modeled for a bridal expo, and my fantastic partner took my eldest to two different 2hr away venues to play volleyball. All while his children awaited my return home to be fed and to go shopping. What is funny is in our years together there has never previously been a time where we solely "flipped" our children, leaving responsibility on the "step parent" for the complete well-being and needs assessments, structure, etc. He was responsible for my child all day both days with minimal contact with me, and I responsible for his kids (and my little one) for a good chunk of the weekend.
Back in December, I had asked him if i should commit to the bridal expo as this was my 7th year doing it and I do enjoy it, but?I knew it fell on a tournament day for my child in a national volleyball league, for which we are newbies and are learning the process. He said I think?I can handle it for a weekend. We were told that the games would be in and around Chicago, IL approx 1hr or so from our house. Funny, this weekend they were about 2 hours away, way west of Chi-town and way south of Chi-town. Needless to say with a game time of 8am they left the house shortly after 5am sat morning. Both crabby, tired, and irritated. But they did it. And they did it again the next day with a bit later departure time. What was significant is they fact that Shane prepared, made sure he know where he was going, he sacrificed his time and sleep, not for his child, but for mine. We jointly, sacrifice a lot for my kids, mostly for the overcommited Jolie, but still. We both were aware what we signed up for when getting involved with one another-but knowing about it and living it are two different things. I have in the past asked their actual father to take them or pick them up from things, once in a while I get a yes, if it is in town, but most of the time it is a list of: oh?I have plans, dinner plans, or "school." And i understand that i am the one responsible for them, by the court of law, and by my own doings that allow them to participate in the multitude of things they do. But there are two of them and one of me and a million things they want to do, and they did not ask to be here-my decisions put them here-and so I do everything I can to allow them to live full lives.
But with all of this said, we live in a situation that blurs the lines of "family." Shane and I brought in to our relationship two independent and fully functional families, complete with rules, expectations, commitments, etc. The only part missing was the other adult partner, role model, and support beam of the home. And this is just the internal dynamic of the home/home life it does not account for the extended families and friends who now were being asked to include someone(ones) new. A huge key to know if/when the timing is right or will work at all to combine families is simple-is everyone facing the same rules and "path." Simply put- if you and your partner do not have similar goals for yourselves you won't have them for your kids- and if it is not uniform-angst and competition brews. Shane and I knew this, but we also have very different parenting styles. This being said i took a good long observation of his parenting techniques, and he mine. We sat down and went over our own individual household rules and we set the stage for what we wanted as a whole, what parts he felt were important that he wanted to keep of his, what parts were important to me i wanted to keep and we sat the kids down. All children follow all the household rules/chores. My kids follow additional/separate rules/expectations of my choosing, and his, his over and above uniform. But they all know the rules, and each others rules, and the reason why it is what it is. This structure and consistency helps keep things solid. We put a lot of time and conversation in to the preplanning section of our commitment and relationship-and because we do not have any children "together," we are/were the bond it was important that we provided to them a structurally sound foundation. Now don't get me wrong- there are fights, there are tears, whines, and power struggles, attitudes and the like-but given we have 5 kids ages 8.5 to nearly 18-4 of them girls-we definitely have a handle on things and nothing is ever that bad. One we can't get out of the house, and two we cannot keep home...they are all polite, and for the most part mild-mannered and considerate.
One of the issues I personally have, is I feel guilty for bringing my children in to a less than perfect, unplanned for their arrival, environment. Because of this, I strive, for the 18 years they are under my guidance and protection, for there lives to be honorable, committed, upstanding, responsible, and all round, strong, good, and considerate children, who will act upon the benefits granted to them and know how lucky they are. It baffles me when parents are selfish, won't drive 8 extra min. a morning to keep their kid at their school when a move occurs mid year, wont send their kid to a school because the govt doesn't pay for it, or can't look past religious affiliation, when it is one of the best local private schools and would get the child out of the less than stellar local public school environment-regardless of "how much better it has gotten." Old hard dog shit is still dog shit regardless if it is past the point of stench.
I also choose the environments I do for myself and my children in order to remove us to a tier of people we want to be like, associate with, and learn from. I lived in moderate wealth as a child, made some decisions that rendered my broke, poor, and slum bound, and pulled myself up to where i am now. One main lesson i learned: You are with whom the company you keep. Regardless if it is right or wrong-that is how it works. This being said- Shane and I both got to each other at a very opportune moment in both of our lives. Both of us were facing an uphill forward, climbing an educational hill, and digging ourselves out of a shot-gun life that seemed like a good idea at the time. Over the course of our friendship that later turned to relationship, we were able to avoid a learning curve and to keep our eyes set on our own educational "prizes" that really were one in the same for each other and ourself. To this day the substance of our relationship-the glue that holds our two autonomous families in one house together is the fact that we both live by the examples we want our kids to follow. Mainly, if you make a mistake in your life (which we all will and do), what you do after, (i.e take responsibility or blame another) shows who you are and what you can become. We both made mistakes. We are not shy about them or in explaining them to our kids when they inquire. But the difference is we learned. We know we made our bed, we laid in it- decided that the first step to change is looking at oneself, cold and hard, actions/inactions and we took responsibly instead of victimhood, and we took the steps to change for the better.
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Public release date: 21-Mar-2013
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