Federer's conqueror loses in 3rd-round letdown

Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine plays a return to Jurgen Melzer of Austria during their Men's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine plays a return to Jurgen Melzer of Austria during their Men's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

Andy Murray of Britain returns to Tommy Robredo of Spain during their Men's singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

Andy Murray of Britain reacts after defeating Tommy Robredo of Spain during their Men's singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

Kaia Kanepi of Estonia reacts as she defeats Angelique Kerber of Germany in a Women's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Angelique Kerber of Germany fails to play a return to Kaia Kanepi of Estonia in their Women's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

LONDON (AP) ? The player who stunned Roger Federer in one of Wimbledon's greatest upsets didn't stick around very long.

Two days after eliminating the seven-time champion on Centre Court, Sergiy Stakhovsky fell to Jurgen Melzer in four sets Friday in the third round at the All England Club.

The 116th-ranked Ukrainian couldn't replicate the serve-and-volley magic that stifled Federer, losing 6-2, 2-6, 7-5, 6-3 to the left-handed Austrian. While Federer struggled with Stakhovsky's serve, Melzer broke him six times.

"I'm just a little disappointed that I got so blinded by the game I produced with Roger that I kept going with the same game I played against Jurgen, which was just not right," Stakhovsky said.

Stakhovsky, who called for the trainer and had his right ankle taped in the first set, kept coming to the net even though Melzer was zeroing in on his serve.

"I think I just played stupid," the Ukrainian said.

Doing everything right so far has been second-seeded Andy Murray, who trounced Tommy Robredo 6-2, 6-4, 7-5 under the Centre Court roof to cruise into the fourth round. The U.S. Open champion hasn't dropped a set this week in his bid to become the first British player to win the men's trophy in 77 years.

"I played my best match of the tournament so far," said Murray, who no longer has Federer or Rafael Nadal in his half of the draw and remains on course to meet No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the final.

Advancing to the third round were fourth-seeded David Ferrer and No. 13 Tommy Haas. No. 15 Nicolas Almagro was knocked out by Poland's Jerzy Janowicz in a third-round match.

Among the women, No. 7 Angelique Kerber was ousted in three sets in second-round play by Estonia's Kaia Kanepi. Kerber became the sixth player among the top-10 seeded women to go out.

With four of the top 10 men also gone after the second round, it equals the worst performance by the top 10 at any Grand Slam in the 45-year history of the Open era.

For the second straight day, play was disrupted by rain and the sliding roof was closed over Centre Court. Four men's singles matches didn't start and were rescheduled for Saturday, while three women's singles matches were suspended by darkness.

Among the uncompleted matches, 2011 champion and eighth-seeded Petra Kvitova was down a break in the third set to Ekaterina Makarova, 3-6, 6-2, 2-1.

In a tournament jolted by a rash of injuries and upsets, the player who caused the biggest surprise of them all came crashing back to earth.

Stakhovsky had snapped Federer's streak of reaching 36 Grand Slam quarterfinals on Wednesday, beating perhaps the game's greatest all-time player on the biggest stage in the sport.

On Friday, he was out on Court 3 and couldn't maintain his level of play against Melzer, a 32-year-old all-court player who has reached at least the fourth round of every Grand Slam.

Still, Stakhovsky will always have that momentous victory to hold onto.

"Nobody is going to take it away from me," he said. "If someone would ask me, 'Would you rather beat Roger and lose in next round?' I would always take it, obviously."

Stakhovsky said he struggled to cope with all the distractions and media interviews that came his way after the Federer match.

"It was quite hard for me because yesterday was a busy day," he said. "Everybody wanted to chat. Everybody wanted a piece. It just takes some time and energy off."

Melzer said he didn't care about the pressures on Stakhovsky and just came into the match ready to beat him with his serve returns.

"You go out there and show him that I'm not Roger Federer and I can return his serve and make him play tough volleys," he said. "That was my goal today."

Murray was dominant in beating the 29th-ranked Robredo. It was Murray's 14th straight match win on grass, a run that goes back to last year's London Olympics, where he beat Federer for the gold medal.

Murray lost serve only once and finished with 40 winners against 14 errors.

"I struck the ball very well from the start of the match," he said. "I had a lot of winners tonight and that was probably the most pleasing part because I did not serve very well on the first couple of matches. I hope I can keep playing better."

Murray will next face either No. 20 Mikhail Youzhny or Viktor Troicki.

In other men's play, Ferrer won an all-Spanish encounter against Roberto Bautista Agut to reach the third round for a sixth consecutive year.

Ferrer advanced with a scrappy 6-3, 3-6, 7-6 (4), 7-5 win in a match originally scheduled for Thursday but pushed back because of rain. He will next face No. 26 Alexandr Dolgopolov.

Melzer will face Janowicz, who served 30 aces and beat Almagro 7-6 (6), 6-3, 6-4 on Centre Court to reach the fourth round at a Grand Slam for the first time.

Only six men and four women ? 10 total ? among the top 10 seeds reached the third round ? tying the performance at Wimbledon in 1996 (four men, six women) and the French Open in 1998 (two men, eight women).

It's the worst performance by the top 10 women's seeds at any Slam in the Open era. The previous low was five at the 2001 French Open.

In another twist, this tournament has produced the fewest five-set matches (12) over the first two rounds at Wimbledon in the Open era. The previous record was 13 in 1981.

Britain's Laura Robson beat 117th-ranked Colombian qualifier Mariana Duque-Marino 6-4, 6-1 under the Centre Court roof to reach Wimbledon's third round for the first time.

Robson, who won the Wimbledon girls' title in 2008, has steadily climbed the rankings and has a good chance of getting into the second week.

"It's a big win for me," Robson said. "Any match on Centre Court is a big one. It was a great atmosphere out there today, and the roof being closed just makes it louder."

Among the early casualties in the men's draw was Grigor Dimitrov, one of the rising stars in tennis. He was eliminated in the second round in a five-set, rain-delayed match that lasted more than four hours over two days.

With girlfriend Maria Sharapova cheering him from the stands on Court 3, the 29th-seeded Bulgarian fell to 55th-ranked Slovenian Grega Zemlja 3-6, 7-6 (4), 3-6, 6-4, 11-9.

Zemlja hit a forehand passing shot on his sixth match point to become the first Slovenian to reach the third round at the All England Club.

Dimitrov is known as "Baby Fed" for a playing style, especially his one-handed backhand in the manner of Roger Federer's. But like Federer, Dimitrov failed to get to Round 3.

"Things happen I guess for a reason," Dimitrov said. "But it's a good learning curve for me. I'm going to step out strong for the upcoming weeks."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-06-28-TEN-Wimbledon/id-be3a063e220748989c010dee37b75723

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NYC Council passes plans for new police oversight

NEW YORK (AP) ? The most expansive plans in years to impose new oversight on the New York Police Department passed the City Council early Thursday, as lawmakers voted to create an outside watchdog and make it easier to bring racial profiling claims against the nation's largest police force.

Both passed with enough votes to override expected vetoes, marking an inflection point in the public debate and power dynamics that have set the balance between prioritizing safety and protecting civil liberties here.

Proponents see the legislation as a check on a police department that has come under scrutiny for its heavy use of a tactic known as stop and frisk and its extensive surveillance of Muslims, as disclosed in a series of stories by The Associated Press.

"New Yorkers know that we can keep our city safe from crime and terrorism without profiling our neighbors," Councilman Brad Lander, who spearheaded the measures with Councilman Jumaane Williams, said at a packed and emotional City Council meeting that began shortly before midnight and stretched into the early morning. In a sign of the national profile the measures has gained, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous was in the audience, while hip hop impresario Russell Simmons tweeted to urge the measures' passage.

Critics say the measures would impinge on techniques that have wrestled crime down dramatically and would leave the NYPD "pointlessly hampered by outside intrusion and recklessly threatened by second-guessing from the courts," in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's words. He vowed in a statement minutes after the vote to veto the measures and continue urging lawmakers to take his side.

But while it's too soon to settle how the initiatives may play out in practice if they survive the expected veto, they already have shaped politics and perception.

Besides giving ground to complaints that the NYPD hasn't been sensitive enough to civil rights and racial fairness, the legislation has put the three-term mayor and his popular police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, in the uncommon position of possibly losing a high-profile fight on public safety. They have gone to lengths to make their criticisms heard, most recently in a Monday news conference at which Bloomberg envisioned gang members lodging discriminatory-policing complaints and Kelly invoked "al-Qaeda wannabes."

Yet on Wednesday, council members rebuffed those concerns and approved the measures by a wide margin.

"It just became so polarized," said Eugene O'Donnell, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor who follows issues related to the NYPD. "(The mayor and commissioner) just dug in their heels, for whatever reason, and they ended up with the City Council coalescing around a pretty dramatic set of steps."

The measures follow on decades of efforts to empower outside input on the NYPD, or at least facets of it. Then-Mayor John Lindsay's efforts to establish an independent civilian complaint board in the 1960s spurred a bitter clash with a police union, which said the panel would hinder policing and mobilized a referendum on it. Voters defeated it.

More than two decades later, private citizens were appointed to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which handles mainly misconduct claims against individual officers. A 1990s police corruption scandal spurred a recommendation for an independent board to investigate corruption; a Commission to Combat Police Corruption was established in 1995, but it lacks subpoena power.

Courts also have exercised some oversight, including through a 1985 federal court settlement that set guidelines for the NYPD's intelligence-gathering. And the City Council has weighed in before, including with a 2004 law that barred racial or religious profiling as "the determinative factor" in police actions, a measure Bloomberg signed.

The new measures are further-reaching than any of that, proponents and critics agree.

One would establish an inspector general with subpoena power to explore and recommend, but not force, changes to the NYPD's policies and practices. Various law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department, have inspectors general.

The other would give people more latitude if they felt they were stopped because of bias based on race, sexual orientation or certain other factors.

Plaintiffs wouldn't necessarily have to prove that a police officer intended to discriminate. Instead, they could offer evidence that a practice such as stop and frisk affects some groups disproportionately, though police could counter that the disparity was justified to accomplish a substantial law enforcement end. The suits couldn't seek money, just court orders to change police practices.

The proposals were impelled partly by concern about the roughly 5 million stop and frisks the NYPD has conducted in the last decade, with more than 80 percent of those stopped being black or Hispanic and arrests resulting less than 15 percent of the time. But proponents also point to the department's spying on Muslims, which has included infiltrating Muslim student groups and putting informants in mosques, as the AP series showed.

The poor, mostly Muslim members of a South Asian advocacy group called Desis Rising Up and Moving "feel the impact of both issues ? surveillance, as Muslims ? and stop and frisk," which is prevalent in a Queens neighborhood where many members live, said Fahd Ahmed, the group's legal director.

Stop and frisk is already the subject of a federal lawsuit brought by four men who claim they were stopped solely because of their race, along with hundreds of thousands of others stopped in the last decade. A judge is considering whether to order reforms to the police policy. City attorneys argued the stops were lawful and not based on race alone.

"(The legislation) can have a tangible effect by virtue of the policy work that will come out of an inspector general's office and by virtue of the accountability that will come out of the profiling bill," said proponent Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "But, also, they will be a statement to the people of New York that we care about fair and just policing."

The NYPD has defended the surveillance and stop and frisks as legal, and critics of the new legislation point to another set of statistics: Killings and other serious offenses have fallen 34 percent since 2001, while the number of city residents in jails and prisons has fallen 31 percent.

"These dangerous pieces of legislation will only hurt our police officers' ability to protect New Yorkers and sustain this tremendous record of accomplishment," Bloomberg said in his statement Thursday.

They could tie the department up in lawsuits and complaints, inject courts and an inspector general into tactical decisions and make "proactive policing by police officers extinct in our city," he said.

If the measures ultimately survive, Bloomberg won't be in City Hall to see much of the outcome. The term-limited mayor leaves office this year.

Democratic mayoral candidates have generally said the practice needs changing. Some Republicans, meanwhile, have embraced the NYPD's view.

___

Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nyc-council-passes-plans-police-oversight-063043528.html

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Obama has short list of potential Bernanke successors: source

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House has assembled a short list of candidates to succeed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a source familiar with the process said on Thursday, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is running the search.

Bernanke is expected to leave when his second term as head of the central bank ends on January 31, after an eventful eight years in helping the U.S. economy recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression.

President Barack Obama hinted in a television interview this month that Bernanke would step down, comparing him to longtime FBI Director Robert Mueller, who agreed to stay two years longer in the job than he had planned, and is now to leave.

Lew has assembled a short list with help from several senior White House officials, the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

There was no information on who is on the list, although Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen, former Obama adviser Lawrence Summers and former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are considered to be likely leading choices.

"We decline to comment on speculation on any personnel matters until the president has made his decisions and is ready to announce them," said Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman.

"The president believes that Chairman Bernanke is a vital and excellent partner in promoting our economic recovery and he continues to serve admirably and with distinction during this important time for our country," she said.

BERNANKE SILENT; YELLEN SEEN IN THE LEAD

Bernanke has yet to say whether he would like to serve another four years at the helm of the central bank, but has done little to dampen speculation he is ready to leave.

The likely succession could come at a delicate juncture for U.S. monetary policy.

Bernanke said last week that the central bank expected to lighten up later this year on the amount of money it is pumping into the economy each month through a bond-buying program.

He said the Fed would likely draw that program to a full close around the middle of next year, when policymakers at the central bank expect the jobless rate will have fallen to around 7 percent from its current 7.6 percent.

Those comments spurred a big selloff in stock markets around the globe and sent the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note soaring. It reached a 22-month high of 2.67 percent on Monday.

Fed officials have mounted a concerted effort to convince markets they overreacted to the chairman's remarks, and they have underscored the central bank's commitment to keep overnight interest rate near zero until unemployment drops to at least 6.5 percent. Stock markets have since stabilized and bond yields have fallen back.

The market volatility, however, underscored the tricky task the Fed faces in stepping away from the controversial and unprecedented easing of monetary policy Bernanke led.

To combat the deep recession and heal the scars from the financial crisis that followed the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble, the Fed pressed overnight rates to near zero, where they have been since December 2008. It also more than tripled its balance sheet to $3.4 trillion through a series of bond purchases.

The next chairman of the central bank will likely face the task of unwinding that monetary largesse.

In a Reuters poll of economists earlier this month, the vast majority said Obama was likely to tap Yellen to take over.

Yellen, who has served as Fed vice chair since October 2010, is considered a forceful advocate of aggressive action to lift unemployment. If nominated and confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first woman to lead the central bank.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Douwe Miedema and Tim Ahmann; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-shortlist-succeed-federal-chairman-bernanke-003944227.html

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Hedge fund alternative investors love ? Bankrate, Inc.

Institutional investors are increasingly turning to mutual funds over hedge funds for strategy diversification. Just over a quarter, 26 percent, of institutions use hedge funds for exposure to long-short strategies this year, compared to 61 percent in 2010, according to a survey released this week by Morningstar and Barron's.

Long-short mutual funds take mostly long positions, buying investments they believe will go up, while hedging their bets with a smaller amount of short positions, or investments they think will go down. There are other types of alternative strategies --?for instance, market neutral strategies that take long and short positions but avoid stocks to lessen volatility. In general, alternative investment strategy funds "provide a smoother ride over time," says Nadia Papagiannis, CFA, director of alternative fund research at Morningstar.

During the events of 2008, institutional investors found themselves stuck in illiquid, highly leveraged hedge funds that only a year or two before had returned outsized returns.

"In 2008, hedge funds delivered high losses. Investors were stuck with illiquid investments they had to pay management fees on but couldn't get out of," says Papagiannis.

Mutual funds offer liquidity and transparency, plus lower fees for similar strategies. "When you are getting double-digit returns, it's?OK to pay 2 percent management fees and a 20 percent performance fee. But with mediocre returns, that eats away at benefits. Plus, if you can find something with lower costs, that is something that as a fiduciary, you have look at," she says.

The average expense ratio of the long/short equity fund category on the Morningstar website is 1.96 percent.

Advisers to small investors are also interested in the risk-management benefits of alternative strategies. For investors, allocating a portion of their portfolio to an alternative strategy fund helps cushion the downside when big stock market drops happen. That downside cushion means less return on the upside as well.

"In order to build wealth over time, you need to have a little bit of a smaller upside and a lot smaller downside. That way, you can build wealth more effectively over time rather than having a couple good up years and then big down years," says Papagiannis.

Investors scared of living through another stock market drop like the one in 2008 and 2009 may want to consider incorporating some strategies that behave differently than the rest of their investments.

Follow me on Twitter: @SheynaSteiner.

***
Senior investing reporter Sheyna Steiner is a co-author of "Future Millionaires' Guidebook," an e-book written by Bankrate editors and reporters. It's available at all the major e-book retailers.

Source: http://www.bankrate.com/financing/investing/hedge-fund-alternative-investors-love/

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Scientist working to break vicious cycle causing vision loss in diabetes

Public release date: 27-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Toni Baker
tbaker@gru.edu
706-721-4421
Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University

AUGUSTA, Ga. it's a vicious cycle that robs people with diabetes of their vision.

The hallmark high glucose of the disease causes inflammation that produces free radicals that cause inflammation that produces more free radicals, explains Dr. Manuela Bartoli, vision scientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.

If that's not bad enough, the body's endogenous system for dealing with free radicals also is dramatically impacted by diabetes, said Bartoli, who recently received a $1.8 million grant from the National Eye Institute to try to bolster that system and interrupt the destructive cycle.

Nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population has diabetes, according to the National Diabetes Foundation, and nearly half those individuals will develop diabetic retinopathy, according to the National Eye Institute.

Culprit free radicals are actually normal byproducts of the body's constant use of oxygen and, despite their derivative status, also are important signaling molecules in the body. Problems result when there are too many, like in diabetes, and their natural tendency to bond starts wreaking havoc on cells and DNA. In fact, excessive levels are thought to be a major contributor to a wide variety of diseases as well as aging.

The thioredoxin system typically works to maintain a healthy level of free radicals by neutralizing excess but, like many body systems, the thioredoxin system slows with age and diabetes hastens the process.

"This increase in free radicals results in an inability to put them to good use," Bartoli said. "Instead, we accumulate the damage they induce." In the case of the eyes and diabetes, over time the overwhelmed system destroys blood vessels that deliver blood and nutrition. In another biological irony, the starving eyes grow new blood vessels but they are fragile, leaky and often misplaced so ultimately they destroy vision.

Bartoli believes a selenium supplement could give the thioredoxin system the shot in the arm needed to stay efficient and effective. Selenium is a byproduct itself, resulting from copper-refining and used to make glass, alloys and more. It is also found in fish, nuts and grains.

Thioredoxin reductase, a protein essential to the recycling of the system, is dependent on selenium and Bartoli has found that protein's activity is reduced in an animal model of diabetic retinopathy and in retinas of human diabetic donors. Bartoli believes the cascade of cellular change resulting from high glucose levels impairs thioredoxin reductase. So she wants to better understand how the system works, exactly what happens to thioredoxin reductase and whether supplements of selenium can help the natural antioxidant system work better in diabetes.

In a related study, funded by the International Retinal Research Foundation, she is looking for an early sign of eye damage and possibly another window of intervention.

Currently, swelling of the macula the central part of the retina responsible for central vision is the first sign of treatable trouble. Anti-inflammatories injected into the eyes can help.

However increased blood levels of uric acid, a part of the inflammatory process that leads to swelling, may be an earlier indicator, Bartoli said. Uric acid is a byproduct of purine metabolism and is typically eliminated in the urine. High uric acid levels are associated with cardiovascular disease and gout as well as diabetes but it hasn't been well studied in the eye.

"We want to validate hyperuricemia as a risk factor for progression of diabetic retinopathy," she said. So she and her colleagues are measuring levels in the blood and eye fluid to see if they correlate with each other and with progressive eye damage. They also are reducing uric acid levels by giving two drugs already on the market, one that blocks formation and another that enhances excretion. Thinking that uric acid levels also may be a biomarker, she eventually wants to see how uric acid levels correlate with disease progression in humans.

"As the ancients said: 'The eyes are the mirror of the soul.' We also know that whatever happens in the eye is an expression of what is happening in the rest of the body," Bartoli said. "We want to better understand the causes of inflammation in the eye in diabetes and find better ways to manage it as well as byproducts such as uric acid. Ultimately, of course, we hope to protect sight."

A National Eye Institute fellowship to GRU Graduate Student Folami Lamoke also is supporting the thioredoxin sudies. Bartoli is a faculty member in the MCG Department of Ophthalmology and the GRU James and Jean Culver Vision Discovery Institute.

###

Media Contact:

Toni Baker
Communications Director
Medical College of Georgia
Georgia Regents University
706-721-4421 Office
706-825-6473 Cell
tbaker@gru.edu

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

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.

Public release date: 27-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Toni Baker
tbaker@gru.edu
706-721-4421
Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University

AUGUSTA, Ga. it's a vicious cycle that robs people with diabetes of their vision.

The hallmark high glucose of the disease causes inflammation that produces free radicals that cause inflammation that produces more free radicals, explains Dr. Manuela Bartoli, vision scientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.

If that's not bad enough, the body's endogenous system for dealing with free radicals also is dramatically impacted by diabetes, said Bartoli, who recently received a $1.8 million grant from the National Eye Institute to try to bolster that system and interrupt the destructive cycle.

Nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population has diabetes, according to the National Diabetes Foundation, and nearly half those individuals will develop diabetic retinopathy, according to the National Eye Institute.

Culprit free radicals are actually normal byproducts of the body's constant use of oxygen and, despite their derivative status, also are important signaling molecules in the body. Problems result when there are too many, like in diabetes, and their natural tendency to bond starts wreaking havoc on cells and DNA. In fact, excessive levels are thought to be a major contributor to a wide variety of diseases as well as aging.

The thioredoxin system typically works to maintain a healthy level of free radicals by neutralizing excess but, like many body systems, the thioredoxin system slows with age and diabetes hastens the process.

"This increase in free radicals results in an inability to put them to good use," Bartoli said. "Instead, we accumulate the damage they induce." In the case of the eyes and diabetes, over time the overwhelmed system destroys blood vessels that deliver blood and nutrition. In another biological irony, the starving eyes grow new blood vessels but they are fragile, leaky and often misplaced so ultimately they destroy vision.

Bartoli believes a selenium supplement could give the thioredoxin system the shot in the arm needed to stay efficient and effective. Selenium is a byproduct itself, resulting from copper-refining and used to make glass, alloys and more. It is also found in fish, nuts and grains.

Thioredoxin reductase, a protein essential to the recycling of the system, is dependent on selenium and Bartoli has found that protein's activity is reduced in an animal model of diabetic retinopathy and in retinas of human diabetic donors. Bartoli believes the cascade of cellular change resulting from high glucose levels impairs thioredoxin reductase. So she wants to better understand how the system works, exactly what happens to thioredoxin reductase and whether supplements of selenium can help the natural antioxidant system work better in diabetes.

In a related study, funded by the International Retinal Research Foundation, she is looking for an early sign of eye damage and possibly another window of intervention.

Currently, swelling of the macula the central part of the retina responsible for central vision is the first sign of treatable trouble. Anti-inflammatories injected into the eyes can help.

However increased blood levels of uric acid, a part of the inflammatory process that leads to swelling, may be an earlier indicator, Bartoli said. Uric acid is a byproduct of purine metabolism and is typically eliminated in the urine. High uric acid levels are associated with cardiovascular disease and gout as well as diabetes but it hasn't been well studied in the eye.

"We want to validate hyperuricemia as a risk factor for progression of diabetic retinopathy," she said. So she and her colleagues are measuring levels in the blood and eye fluid to see if they correlate with each other and with progressive eye damage. They also are reducing uric acid levels by giving two drugs already on the market, one that blocks formation and another that enhances excretion. Thinking that uric acid levels also may be a biomarker, she eventually wants to see how uric acid levels correlate with disease progression in humans.

"As the ancients said: 'The eyes are the mirror of the soul.' We also know that whatever happens in the eye is an expression of what is happening in the rest of the body," Bartoli said. "We want to better understand the causes of inflammation in the eye in diabetes and find better ways to manage it as well as byproducts such as uric acid. Ultimately, of course, we hope to protect sight."

A National Eye Institute fellowship to GRU Graduate Student Folami Lamoke also is supporting the thioredoxin sudies. Bartoli is a faculty member in the MCG Department of Ophthalmology and the GRU James and Jean Culver Vision Discovery Institute.

###

Media Contact:

Toni Baker
Communications Director
Medical College of Georgia
Georgia Regents University
706-721-4421 Office
706-825-6473 Cell
tbaker@gru.edu

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

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.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/mcog-swt062713.php

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Spiral galaxies like Milky Way bigger than thought

June 27, 2013 ? Let's all fist bump: Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way appear to be much larger and more massive than previously believed, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope.

CU-Boulder Professor John Stocke, study leader, said new observations with Hubble's $70 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, designed by CU-Boulder show that normal spiral galaxies are surrounded by halos of gas that can extend to over 1 million light-years in diameter. The current estimated diameter of the Milky Way, for example, is about 100,000 light-years. One light-year is roughly 6 trillion miles.

The material for galaxy halos detected by the CU-Boulder team originally was ejected from galaxies by exploding stars known as supernovae, a product of the star formation process, said Stocke of CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department. "This gas is stored and then recycled through an extended galaxy halo, falling back onto the galaxies to reinvigorate a new generation of star formation," he said. "In many ways this is the 'missing link' in galaxy evolution that we need to understand in detail in order to have a complete picture of the process."

Stocke gave a presentation on the research June 27 at the University of Edinburgh's Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics in Scotland at a conference titled "Intergalactic Interactions." The CU-Boulder research team also included professors Michael Shull and James Green and research associates Brian Keeney, Charles Danforth, David Syphers and Cynthia Froning, as well as University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Blair Savage.

Building on earlier studies identifying oxygen-rich gas clouds around spiral galaxies by scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College and the University of California, Santa Cruz, Stocke and his colleagues determined that such clouds contain almost as much mass as all the stars in their respective galaxies. "This was a big surprise," said Stocke. "The new findings have significant consequences for how spiral galaxies change over time."

In addition, the CU-Boulder team discovered giant reservoirs of gas estimated to be millions of degrees Fahrenheit that were enshrouding the spiral galaxies and halos under study. The halos of the spiral galaxies were relatively cool by comparison -- just tens of thousands of degrees -- said Stocke, also a member of CU-Boulder's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, or CASA.

Shull, a professor in CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department and a member of CASA, emphasized that the study of such "circumgalactic" gas is in its infancy. "But given the expected lifetime of COS on Hubble, perhaps another five years, it should be possible to confirm these early detections, elaborate on the results and scan other spiral galaxies in the universe," he said.

Prior to the installation of COS on Hubble during NASA's final servicing mission in May 2009, theoretical studies showed that spiral galaxies should possess about five times more gas than was being detected by astronomers. The new observations with the extremely sensitive COS are now much more in line with the theories, said Stocke.

The CU-Boulder team used distant quasars -- the swirling centers of supermassive black holes -- as "flashlights" to track ultraviolet light as it passed through the extended gas haloes of foreground galaxies, said Stocke. The light absorbed by the gas was broken down by the spectrograph, much like a prism does, into characteristic color "fingerprints" that revealed temperatures, densities, velocities, distances and chemical compositions of the gas clouds.

"This gas is way too diffuse to allow its detection by direct imaging, so spectroscopy is the way to go," said Stocke. CU-Boulder's Green led the design team for COS, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder for NASA.

While astronomers hope the Hubble Space Telescope keeps on chugging for years to come, there will be no more servicing missions. And the James Webb Space Telescope, touted to be Hubble's successor beginning in late 2018, has no UV light-gathering capabilities, which will prevent astronomers from undertaking studies like those done with COS, said Green.

"Once Hubble ceases to function, we will lose the capability to study galaxy halos for perhaps a full generation of astronomers," said Stocke. "But for now, we are fortunate to have both Hubble and its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to help us answer some of the most pressing issues in cosmology."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/JOkGclMu0Qg/130627102625.htm

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