­by the University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Michigan.—At the scale of the very small, physics can get peculiar. A University of Michigan biomedical engineering professor has discovered a new instance of such a nanoscale phenomenon — one that could lead to faster, less expensive portable diagnostic devices and push back frontiers in building micro-mechanical and “lab on a chip” devices.

In our macroscale world, materials called conductors effectively transmit electricity and materials called insulators or dielectrics don’t, unless they are jolted with an extremely high voltage. Under such “dielectric breakdown” circumstances, as when a bolt of lightening hits a rooftop, the dielectric (the rooftop in this example) suffers irreversible damage.

This isn’t the case at the nanoscale, according to a new discovery by Alan Hunt, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Hunt and his research team were able to get an electric current to pass nondestructively through a sliver of glass, which isn’t usually a conductor.

A paper on the research is newly published online in Nature Nanotechnology.

“This is a new, truly nanoscale physical phenomenon,” Hunt said. “At larger scales, it doesn’t work. You get extreme heating and damage.

“What matters is how steep the voltage drop is across the distance of the dielectric. When you get down to the nanoscale and you make your dielectric exceedingly thin, you can achieve the breakdown with modest voltages that batteries can provide. You don’t get the damage because you’re at such a small scale that heat dissipates extraordinarily quickly.”

These conducting nanoscale dielectric slivers are what Hunt calls liquid glass electrodes, fabricated at the U-M Center for Ultrafast Optical Science with a femtosecond laser, which emits light pulses that are only quadrillionths of a second long.

The glass electrodes are ideal for use in lab-on-a-chip devices that integrate multiple laboratory functions onto one chip just millimeters or centimeters in size. The devices could lead to instant home tests for illnesses, food contaminants and toxic gases. But most of them need a power source to operate, and right now they rely on wires to route this power. It’s often difficult for engineers to insert these wires into the tiny machines, Hunt said.

“The design of microfluidic devices is constrained because of the power problem,” Hunt said. “But we can machine electrodes right into the device.”

Instead of using wires to route electricity, Hunt’s team etches channels through which ionic fluid can transmit electricity. These channels, ten thousand times thinner than the dot of this “i,” physically dead end at their intersections with the microfluidic or nanofluidic channels in which analysis is being conducted on the lab-on a-chip. (This is important to avoid contamination.) But the electricity in the ionic channels can zip through the thin glass dead end without harming the device in the process.

This discovery is the result of an accident. Two channels in an experimental nanofludic device didn’t line up properly, Hunt said, but the researchers found that electricity did pass through the device.

“We were surprised by this, as it runs counter to accepted thinking about the behavior of non-conductive materials,” Hunt said. “Upon further study we were able to understand why this could happen, but only at the nanometer scale.”

As for electronics applications, Hunt said that the wiring necessary in integrated circuits fundamentally limits their size.

“If you could utilize reversible dielectric breakdown to work for you instead of against you, that might significantly change things,” Hunt said.

The paper is called “Liquid glass electrodes for nanofluidics.” This research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The university is pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property, and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.

­by the El Reportero’s news services

Raúl Castro

President Raúl Castro has made food sovereignty his top priority since taking office two years ago. His government has concentrated most of its liberalization efforts on the domestic agricultural sector.

To date, the results have been mixed at best, at a time when the need is urgent. In April, following disappointing first quarter results, a fresh round of ministerial shakeups was followed in short order by a new five year plan that will assign the sector more autonomy, provide production incentives and boost competition. In short, market reforms.

EU-Latam summit sidetracked by migrants

On May 18 the VI European Union-Latin America and the Caribbean Summit concluded. Somewhat surprisingly, President Cristina Fernández de Kircher from Argentina set the tone for the final day with a heartfelt plea to European governments that they should look after Latin American migrants during the current economic downturn.

Spain’s Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, immediately responded saying that the message had been received and understood.

Latin America Remembers 115 Anniversary of José Martí”s death The legacy of the Cuban Apostle José Martí, was remembered at the School Republic of Cuba, in Asuncion, with the attendance of students, teachers and members of the Paraguayan Coordinator of Solidarity with the Island.

The Adviser Minister of the Cuban Embassy in Asuncion, Ricardo Tur Novo, evoked facets of the national hero, his insurgent struggle that bega whe e was just 17 years old, his sentence to prison been a teenager, his deportation and return to his beloved island to resume the struggle.

His thougths’ dimension are and will be the guide for the new generations of Cubans, Tur Novo said.

The Cuban ambassador in Paraguay, Rolando Gomez, and Marcia Gamarra, one of the four directors of the school, placed a wreath before Jose Marti’s bust, at the entrance of the school.

In Quito, Ecuador, with a simple but moving tribute, pupils and teachers of the Fiscal Experimental Institute José Martí today paid tribute to the Apostle of the Independence of Cuba.

Similar events took place in other Latin American countries like Venezuela and Dominican Republic.

President of Ecuador Criticizes European Migration Policies

The President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, regarded here as terrible the migration policies applied by the 27 member countries of the European Union (EU) with the Latin American emigrants in his Wednesday intervention at the EU-Latin American and Caribbean Summit.

“I find it a historical ingratitude,” Correa expressed, and wondered what effect it had caused in Europe if Latin America had used the same policies when this part of the world received the great migratory wave during the Spanish Civil War.

I don’t know how the EU will explain the future generations, at least from an ethical point of view, that while it was enabling a global world and a bigger flow of capitals and goods, criminalized the most principal of the movements, the human one, underlined the Ecuadorian leader.

He said that the policies of the Old Continent penalize the immigration more and more, something he evaluated like a monstrous inconsistency.

­by Rosalba Ruíz

Police officials from four states said that Arizona’s new immigration law, which empowers police to question the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being “unlawfully present” in the country, is a bad idea.

Members of the Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative (LEEI), an organization of police leaders advocating for immigration reform, said they would oppose similar legislation if it were proposed in their own states.

“I think this bill will have catastrophic impact on policing,” said George Gascon, San Francisco’s top cop, during a LEEI teleconference involving Hispanic Link News Service just hours before Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the state legislation.

Law enforcement officials listed the high risk for racial profiling, a negative impact on community trust toward police and additional pressure on local police who already have limited resources as primary among reasons they oppose the law.

“(The law) does have some national ramifications,” said Richard Myers, Chief of Police in Colorado Springs, Colo., and member of LEEI. “The legislation poses yet another unfunded mission to the police that we just cannot sustain …It expects local police to engage in what is the primary mission of federal authorities.”

Myers said that one of his concerns is that other states would follow the lead.

Civil rights advocates have decried the law, citing the potential for racial profiling.

Before passage of the law, the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police voiced its position against the bill, but the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, a police officers union, asked for the governor’s support of the bill, saying the legislation would be another tool that would assist officers “in keeping our neighborhoods safe.”

Raleigh, N. C. chief Harry Dolan, a member of LEEI, stated that while preventing crime is the role of police, solving the immigration issue is the federal government’s responsibility: “I don’t want to give a position on it. I just want to say, federal government, please step up.” Hispanic Link.

IN OTHER IMMIGRATION NEWS:

Conservative Latinos now say they support immigration legislation

by Luis Carlos López

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Just as President Obama was about to reveal his intention to scuttle pursuing immigration reform this year, several conservative Latino political activists and faith-based leaders used an April 29 telephonic news conference coordinated by author/activist Juan Hernández to spread the word that there’s plenty of support among Hispanic Republicans for a comprehensive bill to be floated in Congress this session.

While former President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutiérrez participated as he was waiting at an airport, ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was a last-minute no-show. Hernández vaguely blamed his absence on a late “schedule change.”

Hernández read a statement by the former governor given to POLITICO the day before in which he stated that Arizona’s SB1070, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer April 23, “creates unintended consequences.” He added, “I don’t think this is a proper approach.”

Ironically, participants in the news teleconference stressed that for a reform bill to have any chance for success, President Obama must assume a much more forceful leadership role.

Stating that together they represent several hundred congregations, the half-dozen evangelical leaders were unanimous in denouncing the Arizona legislation.

Meanwhile, with the 90-day countdown beginning for Arizona’s SB1070 law to take effect, Latinos aligned with both political parties continue to call for rallies, marches, boycotts and non-violent protests nationwide on May 1 and beyond.

The law signed by Governor Brewer has already prompted two lawsuits, one coming from the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, which filed a complaint April 29 citing that the legislation was illegal because it undermined federal authority. Hispanic Link.

Members of the Azteca Dance group offer a ceremony during Obama’s visit in San Francisco.­ ­(PHOTOS BY LEYNER PARRA)

­­­The visit of President Obama to the San Francisco Bay Area sent hundreds of people to protest his failure to pass the so longed migratory reform. It was one of his electoral campaign promises.

For many of the participants the President Obama not only has not kept his campaign promises, but on the contrary it has increased racism, discrimination in our communities, as the one happening in Arizona.

The people asked for help to save their homes from the bank looting and a stop to the persecution of ICE, which has been causing painful family divisions.

Some of them suggest that the Obama plan is to recruit the undocumented people and enlist them into his civil militias that he is creating and use them against the civil population when protests start exploiting for the economic crisis.

by the University of Michigan

­ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Men die at higher rates than women across the lifespan. A new study shows that this excess mortality is the price of reproductive competition.

Researchers have long known that women outlive men on average, and more recently have discovered that men have higher mortality risks across the entire lifespan. University of Michigan researcher Daniel Kruger finally explains why: It is all about sex.

Women invest more physiologically in reproduction than men, thus men compete with other men for mating partners and try to make themselves attractive to women. This competition leads to strategies that are riskier for men both behaviorally and physiologically, and these result in higher levels of mortality.

“If mating competition is responsible for excess male mortality, then the more mating competition there is, the higher excess male mortality will be,” said Kruger, an assistant professor in the U-M School of Public Health. In the current study, Kruger shows that two factors related to the level of male reproductive competition contribute to higher rates of risk-taking and mortality.

The first factor is polygyny, the social situation in which one man maintains sexual relations with many women (the opposite is polyandry—one women and many men). Several species of primates show high levels of polygyny, where one dominant male mates with most of the females in the group, and other males are left out. Human cultures have varying degrees of polygyny, and Kruger found that the more prevalent the practice, the higher the rate of male mortality.

In a polygynous culture, men receive enormous evolutionary benefits from becoming dominant. Those guys get all the gals, almost literally. Non-dominant men are left with few, or none, to choose from. In a polygynous group, winning males reap huge rewards; everyone else gets next to nothing.

The second factor: the degree of economic inequality. In mate selection, men are valued for the resource investment that they can provide, bringing benefits their offspring. The wider the gap between rich and poor, the more likely men are to die young.In less egalitarian societies, a man with what scientists call “resource control”—money, property and economic security—is more likely to find sexual partners.

In both of these cases, there’s a yawning gap between climbing to the top of the heap–either as the dominant male or the wealthiest—and falling short. To lose position in polygynous or economically extreme societies is to lose almost any chance at finding a sexual partner.

What’s more, Kruger says, these two factors are related, because getting the lion’s share of economic wealth is often virtually the same thing as becoming dominant male.

And so the battle to be “king of the hill” turns deadly. When winners take all, men have very little to lose—and a whole lot to gain—by risking everything to get to the top.

Kruger is an expert in the field of evolutionary psychology, the study of how present-day human thinking and behavior has been shaped by past evolutionary adaptations. It turns out that some other primates display such winner-take-all behavior, and there’s a strong evolutionary reason behind it. By dominating most or all of the sexual encounters in a group, males who are higher on the social and economic ladder are more likely to pass their genes onto the next generation.

The opposite case, Kruger found, also holds true: The more egalitarian a society, and the more devoted to monogamy, the less extreme the risk taking. But no human culture, Kruger concluded, is perfectly free of such competition.

­­­by the El Reportero’s news service

Guillermo Fariña

­In May 23 a hunger striking journalist, Guillermo Fariñas, told several international news organizations that the Cuban government had agreed with the Roman Catholic (RC) Church a stepped process to deal with the island’s imprisoned dissidents whereby authorities would begin today (May 24) to transfer sick prisoners to hospitals and gradually re-locate others to facilities in their home provinces.

It suits the embattled Havana government to utilize the RC church to diffuse some of the internal tension on the island and deflect U.S.- and European Union-led pressure.

The question is whether President Raúl Castro views this as anything other than a one-time ‘gesture’. Certainly, the established dissident community, led by the likes of Marta Beatriz Roque and Elizardo Sánchez, remains fairly sceptical about his motives. The government may calculate that it can split the small dissident community by meeting some politically risk-free demands, like making a gesture on the issue of the prisoners.

Peru resumes oil auctions two years after corruption scandal

Peru reopened oil auctions this week, two years after the government was rocked by serious corruption allegations in the bidding process.

(Latin News, Pravda, and M&C news contributed to this report.)

by Luis Carlos López

Governor Jan Brewer stirred already troubled waters May 11 when she approved a bill that targets for elimination ethnic studies programs in the state’s public schools.

The measure comes less than a month after Brewer signed off on the toughest immigration law in the country.

Its framer, state school superintendent To­m Horne, contends that the measure in no way singles out Latinos, but rather promotes social and ethnic integration. In a May 14 interview with Weekly Report, Horne said he has worked tirelessly to distance the bill from SB1070, which is being challenged in court as anti-immigrant and unconstitutional by Hispanic and civil rights groups.

“I’m trying to get schools to treat students as individuals,” Horne said. “I don’t think it’s right to divide kids according to each race… School is a place to expand your horizons, not to narrow them.”

Also contacted by Weekly Report, Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, chair of Arizona State University’s Transborder Chicano/a Latino/a Studies, labeled the new law as an “antiintellectual” move to erase the state’s historical memory of its sometimes discriminatory actions. “We were not even in history books before the Chicano movement,” he said.

The legislation prohibits classes designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group or such that advocate ethnic solidarity instead of equality as individuals. It does not “prohibit the instruction of the Holocast, any other instance of genocide or the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, race or color.”

If a district or charter school is found in New Battlelines Are Forming in Arizona over Hispanic Ethnic Studiesviolation, consequences include withholding up to 10% of the monthly apportionment of state aid.

State Representative Steve Montenegro (R) claimed to Weekly Report that the bill does not ban ethnic studies entirely, but seeks to eliminate those which promote “sedition and racial prejudice.”

“The intent of this legislation is to ensure that pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals,” Montenegrosaid. “Ethnic studies will continue and this bill does not prohibit schools from discussing controversial aspects of history, including instances of historical oppression toward a race or class of people.”

Horne emphasized his approach to integrateall students by saying, “Students will learn about their culture at home.”

He began his campaign to terminate ethnic studies that promoted extreme “separatist” ideology in June 2007 with a five-page “Open Letter” addressed to residents of the  Tucson Unified School District. The letter attacked textbooks filled with “destructive  ethnic chauvinism,” use of the offensive term “Raza,” charter verbiage of the student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán  (MEChA), which promotes cultural solidarity and “an almost totalitarian climate of fear” that keeps TUSD employees from speaking out against ethnic studies.

Horne described an incident that he says he witnessed during a visit to Tucson Magnet High School by Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers co-founder with César Chávez: “My Deputy, Margaret García Dugan, a Hispanic Republican, came to refute the allegation made earlier to the student body that ‘Republicans hate Latinos.’ Her speech was non-partisan and professional, urging students to think for themselves and avoid stereotypes. Yet a small group of La Raza Studies students treated her rudely, and when the principal asked them to sit down and listen, they defiantly walked out.

“By contrast, teenage Republicans listened politely when Dolores Huerta told the entire student body that ‘Republicans hate Latinos.”

Horne observed, “I believe the students did not learn this rudeness at home, but from their Raza teachers…”

Such actions prompted Horne to push for state legislation that would ban such studies to be taught in public schools, he said. Vélez-Ibáñez retorted, “If it hadn’t been for the fact of the persons who insisted in writing the history of groups in this country, we would still be erased. What they are trying to do is to erase historical memory from high school kids.”

He concluded, “Whether the instruction was done well or badly, that is another question, but to attack the notion that somehow this is a land of only American individuals…is anti-intellectual.”