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PITTSBURGH (AP) ? Hawks swoop in and gobble up songbirds. Raccoons feast on nests of eggs they never could have reached before. Salamanders and wildflowers fade away, crowded out by invasive plants that are altering the soil they need to thrive.

Like a once-quiet neighborhood cut up by an expressway and laced with off ramps, northeastern forests are changing because of the pipelines crisscrossing them amid the region's gas drilling boom, experts say.

Environmentalists have loudly worried that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, may threaten water and air, though the Obama administration and many state regulators say the practice is safe when done properly.

Threats to wildlife, though, have flown largely under the radar. But as studies detail plans for thousands of miles of new pipelines and related infrastructure, the dangers to biologically rich forests that have rebounded since vast clear-cutting in the 1800s are taking on new urgency.

"If you wanted to create a perfect storm for biological invasion, you would do what the energy companies are doing in north-central Pennsylvania," said Kevin Heatley, an ecologist with the national firm Biohabitats who works to restore areas that have been damaged by human activity. "You can only put so many bloody parking lots in the woods."

Energy companies, which say they are being responsible stewards of the land, have rushed to unlock the natural gas lying in the shale beneath Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. The gas has lowered energy costs, allowed the U.S. to lessen reliance on foreign energy and provided private landowners who sit atop well sites with a gold mine in royalties. New York, which also has large reserves, is trying to decide whether to allow fracking.

The new energy development is "almost a spider web coming down to the forest," said Nels Johnson of the Pennsylvania chapter of The Nature Conservancy, which estimates the state could see thousands of miles of new pipelines over the next two decades.

Even northeastern states that have put a hold on fracking aren't immune, because many import natural gas. The U.S. Energy Information Administration found that 245 miles of new pipelines were laid in the Northeast last year, and that figure is projected to grow.

Wind turbine development poses similar threats, too. The Nature Conservancy says Pennsylvania already has more than 600 of the giant blades, with the potential for thousands more in coming decades.

The total acreage taken up by the pipelines, wind projects and related development isn't that large, but the open spaces they create allow predators and invasive species to permeate a canopy of trees that once kept them at bay.

It's not hypothetical, scientists say. Studies and observations have documented invasions. And just as with humans, the uninvited guests change the neighborhood.

Forest fragmentation opens the door to invasive species such as the cowbird, a type of blackbird that normally prefers open land, said Bridget Stutchbury, a biologist at York University in Toronto who studies forest songbirds.

"The female cowbird sneaks around the forest, laying her egg in other species' nests," Stutchbury said. Forest birds such as thrushes and warblers don't realize the egg isn't theirs and expend energy raising chicks from another species in what she called a "nifty strategy for child-rearing."

The droppings that cowbirds and other invaders leave behind can also contain seeds from invasive plants that will sprout, spread and ultimately change the soil so much that some forest salamanders and wildflowers can't survive, experts note.

A report by the U.S. Geological Survey, released last week, found that in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna County, at the heart of the drilling boom, the number of patches or sections of forest increased by about 156 between 2001 and 2010, with Marcellus Shale drilling and related pipelines responsible for most of the change.

The energy industry said that it welcomes original research, but that it should be seen in context.

The Geological Survey report, said Patrick Creighton, a spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, found that oil and gas activity affected less than 1 percent of the forest area in Allegheny and Susquehanna counties.

That number may seem small, but experts say it's a cause for concern, nonetheless.

"As an ecologist, you can look at that and say, wow, there are going to be changes," said Terry Slonecker, the researcher who authored the USGS report, who said it's too early to know where fragmentation has gone too far.

There is concern even at the numbers the USGS found, Stutchbury said, noting that without serious reforestation efforts "we can anticipate really big impacts not just on birds, but all these forest critters."

Creighton, of the drilling coalition, said the companies are sensitive to the issue.

"Well sites and pipeline right of ways are temporary construction projects on mostly private land that will be reclaimed after work is complete," he said.

The company KinderMorgan is building a gas pipeline extension in northeastern Pennsylvania that has attracted protests from several environmental groups. Spokesman Richard Wheatley said that the company follows the guidance of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for all interstate pipeline projects and that other state and federal agencies can be involved, too.

"Once a project is placed in service, companies follow up with additional environmental and safety monitoring/inspection and remediation," Wheatley said in an email.

Heatley, the ecologist, said that "not one" of the energy companies drilling in the area has a long-term restoration plan for sensitive deep-forest environments, and that permits usually require only minimal restoration, such as planting grasses.

Still, the reality is that modern life demands resources and energy, and even the alternatives ? such as wind turbines ? can threaten forests, too.

The Nature Conservancy is examining potential effects from gas drilling and wind turbines on an eight-state region from New York to Tennessee. That report is due out later this year. The group notes that old and new energy sources have both promise and risk for society and nature, since natural gas and wind energy produce less pollution than coal.

Careful planning and reforestation efforts could reduce the effects of pipelines, wind turbines and other human activity, scientists said. For example, multiple pipelines could be placed on one right of way, or wind turbines might go on land that is already barren because of old coal mining.

Planting native shrubs in clear-cut areas, which need to remain treeless to avoid root damage to underground pipes and to give maintenance crews access, would be better than just grass, the Nature Conservancy noted.

Why should anyone care, Heatley asked, whether forest creatures get replaced by invasive plants and animals that can better tolerate human activity?

To see crows, opossums and squirrels, "you can go anywhere," he said, and in the Northeast it's easy to find trees, but large blocks of deep forest are rare. "It's a unique asset."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/northeast-drilling-boom-threatens-forest-wildlife-181903874.html

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Excerpted from The New Monogamy; Redefining Your relationship After Infidelity

Often, when we discover that a partner has been cheating, the first question is an anguished "Why?" This often-unanswerable question is what drives us to ruminate on what happened, and we may force our partners to talk about the details over and over again, hoping to find the answers we are searching for.

One of the first things you will need to do to heal from an affair is to explore this question of why it happened and to be open to hearing the real, honest truth. Most people want to blame the cheating partner. And the cheating partner does have to take responsibility for pursuing the outside relationship. But no affair happens in a vacuum.

Collusion in the Affair

Collusion means "secret cooperation." The dictionary says that collusion is "secret cooperation between two people in order to do something underhanded or undesirable." Many couples, if they are honest with themselves, may find that the partner who was cheated on colluded with the infidelity even if he or she didn't participate directly in the affair. That means that on some level, there was some type of cooperation, even if unconscious, to make the affair happen.

This secret cooperation may mean the betrayed partner is doing something in the relationship to collude with his or her partner's behavior, even if he or she doesn't realize it. To be unconsciously aware means that on some level, the betrayed partner had an idea that their spouse was cheating.

In a 1995 study, two groups of practicing therapists described extramarital affairs they treated or were themselves involved in. They reported that 89% of betrayed spouses in the study were consciously aware of the infidelity or, even if they did not acknowledge it, really did know about the affair. The majority of the betrayed spouses behaved as if they were in collusion with their cheating partners, even when they said they were opposed to the affairs.

Maria and Frank had been stuck in conflict over Maria's affair for over a year. Maria had cheated on Frank with a neighbor, Joe, someone they saw weekly for card games and occasional barbeques. When Frank found out that Maria had cheated with Joe, he became incensed and almost left her.

As time progressed and Maria and Frank discussed the affair, Maria shared her confusion with her husband: "I always felt that you approved of my relationship with Joe. You saw how he flirted with me, and you even encouraged me to go over there when his wife was out of town. You used to say that Joe was probably lonely and that maybe I should go over and have a drink with him. Now you are so mad at me! There's some kind of mixed message here."

Frank was furious with Maria for insinuating that he pushed her into the affair: "I never told you to cheat with him. Did I ever say, 'Go sleep with Joe; he and his wife aren't having any?"

As Frank's feelings calmed down, he tried to see things from Maria's point of view, to find some empathy for her experience: "I guess it makes sense that she would move toward Joe. Maybe I was hoping that they would cheat so I would have an excuse to leave."

Maria said, "This is not your fault. I definitely made the move to step over the line." Frank realized he had unconsciously colluded with her about the affair.

Affairs as Exits

An exit can be any behavior that a partner uses to avoid being truly present in the relationship, whether emotionally, psychologically, sexually, or even physically. Harville Hendrix, author of the best-selling self-help book Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, says smaller exits can include anything that helps you to avoid dealing with conflict or intimacy, including being on the computer, checking e-mails, texting, or staying late at work. Any behavior that is used to avoid ways to engage with your partner is considered an exit. Bigger exits include things like gambling, drinking, and taking drugs. An affair is considered one of the biggest exits and is what Hendrix called "an invisible divorce."

Affairs are only one way to exit from the relationship, but they can be a powerful and damaging way to avoid the intimacy of a monogamous partnership. However, whenever the person who is exiting traces his or her behavior back to the moment he or she exited, it often becomes clear that at that time, his or her partner was exiting as well. If the cheating partner can trace his or her behavior back to the point where the indiscretion began, it may become clear that the affair was an attempt to deal with the feelings of a partner who "exited" the relationship first.

Mike and Sheila came to therapy after Mike had an affair with a woman he met on the Internet. Every time he tried to talk to Sheila about his loneliness and feelings of disconnection, she would get defensive and accuse Mike of trying to shut down her needs professionally.

Mike said, "I never wanted her to stop working. I wanted her to be home with me. Eventually I started a relationship with this woman who advertised on adult websites. She never let me down, and whenever I was lonely, she was there for me."

Often, one or both partners may see an affair as a way to avoid conflict or intimacy, and eventually may see it as an exit from the relationship. In exploring why your partner pursued an affair, you may discover that he perceived that you exited the relationship first. This can be a difficult thing to accept, especially amid the fresh pain of a newly discovered affair.

Sometimes the "why" of an affair is not as important as what happens after, if you can create a new monogamy, together.

For more information on creating your new monogamy and a new relationship together, click here.

Dr. Tammy Nelson is a world renowned sex and relationship expert and the author of The New Monogamy and Getting the Sex You Want. She can be found at www.drtammynelson.com

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Follow Tammy Nelson, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drtammynelson

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tammy-nelson-phd/why-did-the-affair-happen_b_2981223.html

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LE BOURGET, France (AP) ? Because of her choice to wear a headscarf, Samia Kaddour, a Muslim, has all but abandoned trying to land a government job in France. Soon, some private sector jobs could be off limits, too.

French President Francois Hollande says he wants a new law that could extend restrictions on the wearing of prominent religious symbols in state jobs into the private sector. His new tack comes after a top French court ruled in March that a day care operator that gets some state funding unfairly fired a woman in a headscarf, sparking a political backlash.

As Christians celebrated Easter on Sunday, Kaddour attended the four-day Annual Meeting of Muslims of France in Le Bourget, north of Paris. The convention, which last year drew some 160,000 faithful and was expected to grow this year, is billed as the largest annual gathering of its kind in Europe. It is in its 30th year and ended Monday.

French law bars state employees from wearing prominent religious symbols such as Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps or large Christian crosses in public schools, welfare offices or other government facilities. Two years ago, France banned Muslim veils that cover faces, such as the niqab, which has a slit for the eyes, or the mesh-screen burqa, from being worn anywhere in public.

Meeting leaders say France has made progress in accepting Muslims and noted that, unlike 30 years ago, women wearing headscarves today rarely draw suspicion, scowls or curiosity. Still, many Muslims ? and even some Roman Catholics and Jews ? fear France's insistence on secular values first enshrined in the French Revolution more than two centuries ago is unfairly crimping their ability to express their religious beliefs freely.

They also worry that Hollande's Socialist government, like a conservative one before it, wants to score political points.

"Islam has become a political instrument," said Kaddour, 26, who is a community activist from the English Channel port city of Le Havre and one of 10 children of Algerian-born parents who moved to France for plentiful jobs during its economic boom times decades ago. "Islam is always brandished whenever there is internal political discord."

Most mainstream politicians insist Islam is not being targeted. But a backlash erupted after the Court of Cassation ruled in March that Baby Loup, a private-sector day care operator that gets some state funding, unfairly fired a woman who wore a headscarf to work. The far-right railed at the decision, and even Interior Minister Manuel Valls expressed regret over it.

Wading into the debate in a prime-time TV interview on Thursday, Hollande suggested new limits are needed on Muslim headscarves, saying that "when there is contact with children, in what we call public service of early childhood ... there should be a certain similarity to what exists in (public) school."

"I think the law should get involved," he added.

Many Muslims fear an encroaching Islamophobia, while proponents of such measures insist they counter extremism and act as a rampart to protect France's identity against inequality. Polls show that most French people support at least some restrictions on religious symbols.

France, with an estimated 5 million-6 million Muslims whose families mostly have origins in former French colonies in north Africa, is at the forefront of addressing the challenges that many European countries are facing about how to integrate their sizeable ethnic and religious minorities on a continent where white Christians have dominated the political landscape for centuries.

Bristling against stereotypes in many corners of the West that Muslims are closet radicals or even terrorists, leaders of the convention in Le Bourget preached peace and justice. And after prayers and praise of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, convention leaders led a song in Arabic in a vast meeting hall with thousands in the audience ? and some up on the dais waved French flags.

In another convention hall, vendors offered items such as headscarves, sweet pastries or T-shirts emblazoned with the saying 'Don't Panic, I'm Muslim,' while mothers pushing strollers and others wandered through the crowd. Several other stalls took up political issues such as support for Palestinians or war-weary Syrians. Nearby, men kneeled in rhythmic unison for afternoon prayers.

Kaddour said many Muslims regret that their faith is in the political crosscurrents again in France. But she said she's not discouraged enough yet to want to leave.

"Many others feel that way too: We are French and we have our place to claim and our future to establish in France," she said. "I'm not a foreigner. I'm French. I want to live in France, I love this country. Even if it has trouble liking us, we are going to do what's necessary to live serenely in France."

Kaddour says she plans to go back to school to get a higher degree, but has all but given up hopes for a state job. And in France, that matters: the European Union says more than half of France's gross domestic product comes from government spending ? potentially curbing the work options for headscarf-wearing Muslims such as Kaddour if the ban is broadened.

"A state job, unfortunately..." she said, her voice trailing off. "When I go into job interviews, I wear my headscarf. No results." She admits that she doesn't always know why ? it could just be her skill set isn't sufficient ? but suspects her religion plays a role, too.

Kaddour says her future career seems increasingly limited to independent, private practice work. She currently works for a small community group devoted to improving understanding of Islam, called Le Havre de Savoir, or The Haven of Knowledge.

At a time of double-digit unemployment rates in France, a nation of 65 million, such restrictions to job access hit headscarf-wearing women especially hard: Muslim men in France don't usually wear visible religious garb.

Ahmed Jaballah, the head of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, a major Muslim group that helped organize the conference, said the "rather morose ambiance" over France's sluggish economic growth recently hasn't helped Muslims' aspirations, suggesting that a search for scapegoats is politically appealing. He said he's concerned about the government's plans.

"Unfortunately, Muslims have the impression today that secularism is being shaped based on Muslim practices, and that's worrisome," he said in an interview. "Everybody always talks about secularism, how it's not just about Muslims. But in fact, Muslims are targeted. Nobody is fooled."

"Muslims wonder: Can we trust secularism?" he said. "Remember the French slogan: 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.' Today, we want this fraternity to be real."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/muslims-worry-broader-france-headscarf-ban-152910417.html

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Click here to read Okay, April Fool's 2013 Is Happening

YouTube and GoogleMaps are getting the ball rolling today. According to the release above, YouTube is not actually a video viewing and sharing site, but an 8-year contest to find the best video anyone can make. And GoogleMaps now has a treasure map layer. Nice, we see what you did there. [CNET] More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/3Z8-o85hsD4/okay-april-fools-2013-is-happening

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Sorting out the structure of a Parkinson's protein

Public release date: 1-Apr-2013
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Contact: Sarah McDonnell
s_mcd@mit.edu
617-253-8923
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Computer modeling may resolve conflicting results and offer hints for new drug-design strategies

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Clumps of proteins that accumulate in brain cells are a hallmark of neurological diseases such as dementia, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. Over the past several years, there has been much controversy over the structure of one of those proteins, known as alpha synuclein.

MIT computational scientists have now modeled the structure of that protein, most commonly associated with Parkinson's, and found that it can take on either of two proposed states floppy or rigid. The findings suggest that forcing the protein to switch to the rigid structure, which does not aggregate, could offer a new way to treat Parkinson's, says Collin Stultz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

"If alpha synuclein can really adopt this ordered structure that does not aggregate, you could imagine a drug-design strategy that stabilizes these ordered structures to prevent them from aggregating," says Stultz, who is the senior author of a paper describing the findings in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

For decades, scientists have believed that alpha synuclein, which forms clumps known as Lewy bodies in brain cells and other neurons, is inherently disordered and floppy. However, in 2011 Harvard University neurologist Dennis Selkoe and colleagues reported that after carefully extracting alpha synuclein from cells, they found it to have a very well-defined, folded structure.

That surprising finding set off a scientific controversy. Some tried and failed to replicate the finding, but scientists at Brandeis University, led by Thomas Pochapsky and Gregory Petsko, also found folded (or ordered) structures in the alpha synuclein protein.

Stultz and his group decided to jump into the fray, working with Pochapsky's lab, and developed a computer-modeling approach to predict what kind of structures the protein might take. Working with the structural data obtained by the Brandeis researchers, Stultz created a model that calculates the probabilities of many different possible structures, to determine what set of structures would best explain the experimental data.

The calculations suggest that the protein can rapidly switch among many different conformations. At any given time, about 70 percent of individual proteins will be in one of the many possible disordered states, which exist as single molecules of the alpha synuclein protein. When three or four of the proteins join together, they can assume a mix of possible rigid structures, including helices and beta strands (protein chains that can link together to form sheets).

"On the one hand, the people who say it's disordered are right, because a majority of the protein is disordered," Stultz says. "And the people who would say that it's ordered are not wrong; it's just a very small fraction of the protein that is ordered."

The MIT researchers also found that when alpha synuclein adopts an ordered structure, similar to that described by Selkoe and co-workers, the portions of the protein that tend to aggregate with other molecules are buried deep within the structure, explaining why those ordered forms do not clump together.

Stultz is now working to figure out what controls the protein's configuration. There is some evidence that other molecules in the cell can modify alpha synuclein, forcing it to assume one conformation or another.

"If this structure really does exist, we have a new way now of potentially designing drugs that will prevent aggregation of alpha synuclein," he says.

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Lead author of the paper is Thomas Gurry, an MIT graduate student in computational and systems biology. Other authors are Orly Ullman, an MIT graduate student in chemistry; Pochapsky, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Brandeis; Iva Perovic, a graduate student in Pochapsky's lab; and Charles Fisher, a Harvard graduate student in biophysics.

Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

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