Source: http://www.bbc.com/portuguese/vert-fut-37952429

Vocabulary:
ansiosamente
quadros
enxame de abelhas -> swarm of bees
colmeia
resfriar
pombo
reconhecer -> recognise
materia cinza -> grey matter

Text: Será que o homem é mesmo o animal mais inteligente do planeta?
Is the man the most intelligent animal of the planet?

Em uma galeria de arte da cidade australiana de Brisbane, um curioso grupo espera ansiosamente sua vez de apreciar quadros de Picasso ou Monet - trata-se de um enxame de abelhas.
Não que elas consigam distinguir os traços cubistas ou paisagens ligeiramente desfocadas. Afinal, são criaturas cujos cérebros são menores do que uma cabeça de alfinete. Mas, devidamente treinadas, elas podem distinguir entre os dois artistas através de diferentes misturas açucaradas que pesquisadores colocaram por trás dos quadros.
Essa capacidade de "reconhecer" um estilo artístico é apenas uma em uma longa lista de feitos incríveis desses insetos. Abelhas podem contar até quatro, são capazes de "ler" sinais complexos, aprendem pela observação e conversam entre si usando um código secreto (a "dança das abelhas").
In an Australian art gallery  of Brisbane, one curious group waits anxiously its turn to appreciate Picasso or Monet paintings - it is about one swarm of bees
Not that they are able to distinguish the cubists' forms or landscapes slightly blurred. After all, they are creatures whose brain are smaller than one pin head. However, properly trained, they can distinguish between the two artists through different mixed sugary that researchers put behind the paintings.
This capability of to recognise one artistic style is just one in one long list of unbelievable achievements of these insects. Bees can count until four, are capable of reading complex signals, they learn by the observation and talk to each other using one secret code (the bee dance).

Quando buscam por alimentos, as abelhas conseguem medir a distância até diferentes flores e planejam suas rotas para colher o máximo possível de néctar com o mínimo esforço.
Dentro da colmeia, são responsáveis por tarefas como limpar, cuidar dos mortos e até resfriar o ar, já que coletam água para refrescar o local nos dias de calor.
O cérebro humano tem quase 100 mil vezes mais neurônios do que o das abelhas. Mas a base de muitos de nossos comportamentos mais valorizados pode ser observada nas atividades conjuntas de uma colmeia.
Por que, então, temos tanta massa cinzenta em nosso crânio? No que isso nos diferencia dos outros animais?
Memória e empatia
When the search for food, the bees can measure the distance until different flowers and they plan its routes to collect the nectar as much as they can with the minimum effort. Inside the hive, they are responsible for tasks such as cleaning, taking care for the dead and until cool the air, as they collect water to refresh the local in the hot days.
The human brain has almost 100 thousand times more neurons than the bees' brain. However, the base of many of our behaviours are more valued can be observed in the group activities of a hive.
So, why, we have so much grey matter in our cranium? What this differs us from the other animals?
Memory and empathy

Cerca de 20% de tudo o que comemos é usado para fornecer energia para as trocas elétricas entre as 100 bilhões de células cinzentas que temos no organismo. Se um cérebro grande não nos trouxesse vantagens, seria um enorme desperdício.
E há alguns benefícios evidentes. O primeiro deles é o fato de nos tornar mais eficientes nas atividades que garantem nossa sobrevivência.
Enquanto as abelhas precisam considerar cada objeto isoladamente, para medir as distâncias, outros animais têm a capacidade cerebral de processar tudo de uma só vez. Ou seja, podemos realizar várias tarefas ao mesmo tempo.
In about 20% of everything that we eat is used to provide energy to electrical changes between the 100 billion of grey cells that we have in our organism. If a big brain does not bring advantages, it would be an enormous waste.
And there are some evident benefits. The first of them is the fact that make us more efficient in the activities that guarantee our survive.
While the bees need to consider each object lonely, to measure the distances, other animals have the brain capability of processing everything in once. In other words, we can realise several tasks at the same time.

Um cérebro maior também aumenta a quantidade de informações que podemos memorizar. Uma abelha só consegue fazer um punhado de associações indicando a presença de alimento, enquanto um pombo pode aprender a reconhecer mais de 1,8 mil imagens - e isso não é nada se comparado ao conhecimento humano.
E, claro, se olharmos tudo o que a civilização humana já conquistou ao longo de sua história, podemos concluir que temos alguma habilidade particularmente especial que falta em outros animais.
Cultura, tecnologia, altruísmo e muitas outras qualidades já foram apontadas como sinais da grandiosidade humana. Mas quanto mais observarmos, mais curta fica essa lista.
Os macacos, por exemplo, são capazes de usar pedras para quebrar a casca de nozes, enquanto corvos podem "fabricar" um gancho a partir de um graveto para apanhar comida.
One bigger brain also increases the quantity of information that we can memorise. One bee just can do one bunch of associations indicating the presence of food, while one pigeon can learn to recognize more than 1,8 thousand of images - and this is nothing if compared to the human knowledge.
And, unquestionably, if we look everything that the human civilisation has already conquered during its history, we can conclude that we have some skil particularly special that is in lack in other animals.
Culture ,technology, altruism and several other qualitites were already pointed as the signal of human grandiosity. However, how much more we observe, more smaller this list becomes.
The monkeys, for instance, are capable to use the rocks to break the walnul shell, while the crows can manufacture one breanch from a brench to take food.

Time chapecoense sofre acidente de avião e apenas 5 sobrevivem

Source: http://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-38141370

New vocabulary:
acidente com avião

Acidente com avião que levava Chapecoense para final da Copa Sul-Americana deixa 76 mortos; 5 sobrevivem
A plane crash that was bringing Chapecoence to the final of South American Cup left 76 dead people; 5 survived.

Um avião que transportava o time de futebol da Chapecoense caiu na madrugada desta terça-feira na Colômbia, para onde a equipe viajava para disputar a final da Copa Sul-Americana contra o Atlético Nacional de Medellín.
Oitenta e uma pessoas estavam a bordo, entre jogadores, jornalistas e tripulantes.
A Polícia do Departamento (Estado) de Antióquia, informou à agência de notícias Reuters que 76 pessoas morreram e cinco sobreviveram.
One plane which was transporting the soccer team of Chapecoence fell in the dawn of this Tuesday in Colombia, to where the team was travelling to dispute the final of South-American Cup against the Nacional Atletico of Medellin.
Eight one people were boarding, among the players, journalists and crew.
The Police of Department (state) of Antioquia, reported to the agency of news Reuters that 76 people died and five survived.

Destroços do avião
Entre os sobreviventes confirmados estariam o goleiro Follmann, o lateral esquerdo Alan Ruschel, o zagueiro Neto e o jornalista Rafael Henzel, assim como uma aeromoça, identificada como Ximena Suarez.
A Cruz Vermelha colombiana e a imprensa local confirmaram que o goleiro Marcos Danilo Padilha, conhecido como Danilo, não sobreviveu aos ferimentos. Ele havia sido resgatado com vida e seu nome ainda estaria na lista de sobreviventes divulgada pelas autoridades de aviação civil colombiana.
O zagueiro Neto foi encontrado pelos bombeiros colombianos no começo da manhã, em meio aos destroços do avião. Ele teria sofrido traumatismo craniano.
Airplane wrecks
Among the confirmed survivors would be the goal keeper Follman, left lateral Alan Rushel, the defender Neto and journalist Rafael, like one steward, identified as Ximena.
The Colombian red Cross and the local press confirmed the goal keeper Padilha, known as Daniel, did not survived to the wounds. He was rescued alive and his name would still be in the list of survivors disclosed by the authorities of Colombian civil aviation. The defender Neto was found by the Colombian firemen in the beggining of the morning, among the plane wrecks. He would suffered cranium traumatism.


Mau tempo dificulta resgate
O mau tempo na região torna mais difícil o trabalho de resgate, que chegou a ser suspenso por causa da forte chuva.
O avião partiu-se em três pedaços. O local da queda, a cerca de 50 quilômetros da cidade de Medellín, no Departamento (Estado) de Antióquia, é montanhoso e de difícil acesso.
Bad conditions make the recue harder.
The bad weather in the region turns harder the rescue work, that reached to be suspended because of the hard rain.
The plane was destroyed in three spices. The local of fall, from nearly 50 kilometers of city of Medelin, in the department (state) of Antiquo, is mountainous and hard access.


Mais cedo, o prefeito da cidade de Medellín, Federico Gutierrez, informara à agência de notícias France Presse que 25 pessoas tiveram a morte confirmada e que ao menos cinco pessoas haviam sido resgatadas com vida.
Piloto comunicou emergência
O avião, um RJ85 da companhia boliviana Lamia, com 17 anos de uso, havia feito uma escala em Santa Cruz de La Sierra, na Bolívia, e seguia para Medellín.
Segundo um comunicado do Aeroporto José María Córdoba, de Medellín, a tripulação comunicou uma emergência por "falhas elétricas" por volta das 22h15 locais (1h15 de Brasília).
Earlier, the mayor of city of Medelin, Federico, informed to the agency of news that 25 people had the death confirmed and that at least five people were rescued with life.
Pilot communicated emergency
The plane, one RJ85 of Bolivian company Lamia, with 17 years of using, made one scale in Santa Cruz, in Bolivia and was going to Medellin.
According to one communicate of airport Jose, of Medellin, the tripulation communicated one emergency by electrical faults in around 22h15 local (1h15 in Brasilia).


Local do acidente
A Confederação Sul-Americana de Futebol anunciou a suspensão da competição e de todas as suas atividades esportivas.
A Confederação Brasileira de Futebol (CBF) anunciou o adiamento da final da Copa do Brasil, entre Grêmio e Atlético Mineiro, que estava prevista para amanhã, em Porto Alegre.
"Definições a respeito deste jogo serão informadas ao longo do dia", informou a CBF, que está enviando uma delegação à Colômbia para ajudar na liberação dos corpos.
Dois jogadores hospitalizados
O zagueiro Hélio Neto, de 32 anos, foi localizado com vida pelos bombeiros às 5h04 locais (8h04 de Brasília) e levado para o hospital San Juan de Dios, na cidade de La Ceja, na Colômbia.
Local of accident
The confederation South-American of Soccer announced the suspension of the competition and of its all sport activities.
The Brazilian Confederal of Soccer (CBF) announced the postpone of the final of Brazil cup, between Gremio and Atletico, that was predicted to the morning, in Porto Alegre.
Definitions regarding this game will be informed during the day, informed to CBF, that is sending one delegation to Colombia to support the release of bodies.
Two hospitalised players
The defender Helio, 32 years, was located alive by the firemen at 5h04 local (8:04 of Brasilia) and left to the hospital San Juan, at the city of La Ceja, in Colombia.

A emissora colombiana Telemedellín mostrou imagens do que seria a chegada da ambulância com Neto ao hospital.
Também estava internado no hospital San Juan de Dios o lateral-esquerdo Alan Ruschel, de 27 anos. O estado dele é "estável", mas ele seria transferido porque sofreu várias fraturas nas pernas e na coluna, e deverá ser operado, segundo o hospital.
A mulher do jogador, Amanda, falou sobre o estado de Ruschel no Instagram.
The Colombia press Telemedellin showed images of what would be the arrival of the ambulance with Neto to the hospital.
Also was interned at the hospital San Juas the left defender Alan, 27 years. His state is stable, but he would be transferred because he suffered several fractures in the legs and column, and he will be operated, according to the hospital.
The woman of players, Amanda, talked about the state of Rushcel on Instagram.


"Graças a Deus o Alan está no hospital, estado estável. Estamos orando por todos que ainda não foram socorridos, e força para todos os familiares. Situação complicada, difícil. Só Deus para dar força mesmo", escreveu.
Uma equipe da agência de notícias EFE acompanhou a chegada dele ao hospital em La Ceja. O jogador perguntava insistentemente sobre a família e pedia que guardassem sua aliança de casamento.
Chapecoense de luto
Thanks to God the Alan is in hospital, stable state. We are praying for everybody that was not rescued, and strength to every familliars. Complicated situation, hard. Only god to give strength, she wrote.
One team of agency of news EFE followed his arrival to the hospital La Ceja. The players was asking insistingly about the family and he was asking people keep his wedding ring.
Chapoece is mourning

IELTS Text about titanic

Source: http://www.ielts-exam.net/preparing/Sample_reading_text/222/

Vocabulary:
communication facilities
eleven storey building
hull was divided


Text:
 From the comfort of our modern lives we tend to look back at the turn of the twentieth century as a dangerous time for sea travellers. With limited communication facilities, and shipping technology still in its infancy in the early nineteen hundreds, we consider ocean travel to have been a risky business. But to the people of the time it was one of the safest forms of transport. At the time of the Titanic’s maiden voyage in 1912, there had only been four lives lost in the previous forty years on passenger ships on the North Atlantic crossing. And the Titanic was confidently proclaimed to be unsinkable. She represented the pinnacle of technological advance at the time. Her builders, crew and passengers had no doubt that she was the finest ship ever built. But still she did sink on April 14, 1912, taking 1,517 of her passengers and crew with her.

B The RMS Titanic left Southampton for New York on April 10, 1912. On board were some of the richest and most famous people of the time who had paid large sums of money to sail on the first voyage of the most luxurious ship in the world. Imagine her placed on her end: she was larger at 269 metres than many of the tallest buildings of the day. And with nine decks, she was as high as an eleven storey building (=andares). The Titanic carried 329 first class, 285 second class and 710 third class passengers with 899 crew members, under the care of the very experienced Captain Edward J. Smith. She also carried enough food to feed a small town, including 40,000 fresh eggs, 36,000 apples, 111,000 lbs of fresh meat and 2,200 lbs of coffee for the five day journey.

C RMS Titanic was believed to be unsinkable because the hull(=casco) was divided into sixteen watertight compartments. Even if two of these compartments flooded, the ship could still float. The ship’s owners could not imagine that, in the case of an accident, the Titanic would not be able to float until she was rescued. It was largely as a result of this confidence in the ship and in the safety of ocean travel that the disaster could claim such a great loss of life.

D In the ten hours prior to the Titanic’s fatal collision with an iceberg at 11.40pm, six warnings of icebergs in her path were received by the Titanic's wireless operators. Only one of these messages was formally posted on the bridge; the others were in various locations across the ship. If the combined information in these messages of iceberg positions had been plotted, the ice field which lay across the Titanic’s path would have been apparent. Instead, the lack of formal procedures for dealing with information from a relatively new piece of technology, the wireless, meant that the danger was not known until too late. This was not the fault of the Titanic crew. Procedures for dealing with warnings received through the wireless had not been formalised across the shipping industry at the time. The fact that the wireless operators were not even Titanic crew, but rather contracted workers from a wireless company, made their role in the ship’s operation quite unclear.

E Captain Smith’s seemingly casual attitude in increasing the speed on this day to a dangerous 22 knots or 41 kilometres per hour, can then be partly explained by his ignorance of what lay ahead. But this only partly accounts for his actions, since the spring weather in Greenland was known to cause huge chunks of ice to break off from the glaciers. Captain Smith knew that these icebergs would float southward and had already acknowledged this danger by taking a more southerly route than at other times of the year. So why was the Titanic travelling at high speed when he knew, if not of the specific risk, at least of the general risk of icebergs in her path? As with the lack of coordination of the wireless messages, it was simply standard operating procedure at the time. Captain Smith was following the practices accepted on the North Atlantic, practices which had coincided with forty years of safe travel. He believed, wrongly as we now know, that the ship could turn or stop in time if an iceberg was sighted by the lookouts.

F There were around two and a half hours between the time the Titanic rammed into the iceberg and its final submersion. In this time 705 people were loaded into the twenty lifeboats. There were 473 empty seats available on lifeboats while over 1,500 people drowned. These figures raise two important issues. Firstly, why there were not enough lifeboats to seat every passenger and crew member on board. And secondly, why the lifeboats were not full.

G The Titanic had sixteen lifeboats and four collapsible boats which could carry just over half the number of people on board her maiden voyage and only a third of the Titanic’s total capacity. Regulations for the number of lifeboats required were based on outdated British Board of Trade regulations written in 1894 for ships a quarter of the Titanic’s size, and had never been revised. Under these requirements, the Titanic was only obliged to carry enough lifeboats to seat 962 people. At design meetings in 1910, the shipyard’s managing director, Alexander Carlisle, had proposed that forty eight lifeboats be installed on the Titanic, but the idea had been quickly rejected as too expensive. Discussion then turned to the ship’s décor, and as Carlisle later described the incident … ’we spent two hours discussing carpet for the first class cabins and fifteen minutes discussing lifeboats’.

H The belief that the Titanic was unsinkable was so strong that passengers and crew alike clung to the belief even as she was actually sinking. This attitude was not helped by Captain Smith, who had not acquainted his senior officers with the full situation. For the first hour after the collision, the majority of people aboard the Titanic, including senior crew, were not aware that she would sink, that there were insufficient lifeboats or that the nearest ship responding to the Titanic’s distress calls would arrive two hours after she was on the bottom of the ocean. As a result, the officers in charge of loading the boats received a very halfhearted response to their early calls for women and children to board the lifeboats. People felt that they would be safer, and certainly warmer, aboard the Titanic than perched in a little boat in the North Atlantic Ocean. Not realising the magnitude of the impending disaster themselves, the officers allowed several boats to be lowered only half full.

I Procedures again were at fault, as an additional reason for the officers’ reluctance to lower the lifeboats at full capacity was that they feared the lifeboats would buckle under the weight of 65 people. They had not been informed that the lifeboats had been fully tested prior to departure. Such procedures as assigning passengers and crew to lifeboats and lifeboat loading drills were simply not part of the standard operation of ships nor were they included in crew training at this time.

J As the Titanic sank, another ship, believed to have been the Californian, was seen motionless less than twenty miles away. The ship failed to respond to the Titanic’s eight distress rockets. Although the officers of the Californian tried to signal the Titanic with their flashing Morse lamp, they did not wake up their radio operator to listen for a distress call. At this time, communication at sea through wireless was new and the benefits not well appreciated, so the wireless on ships was often not operated around the clock. In the case of the Californian, the wireless operator slept unaware while 1,500 Titanic passengers and crew drowned only a few miles away.

K After the Titanic sank, investigations were held in both Washington and London. In the end, both inquiries decided that no one could be blamed for the sinking. However, they did address the fundamental safety issues which had contributed to the enormous loss of life. As a result, international agreements were drawn up to improve safety procedures at sea. The new regulations covered 24 hour wireless operation, crew training, proper lifeboat drills, lifeboat capacity for all on board and the creation of an international ice patrol.

Investors shaved off the investments in Samsung

Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fatal-mistake-that-doomed-samsungs-galaxy-note-1477248978

Vocabulary:
salvage the company’s
investors have shaved off roughly $20 billion
moving swiftly
lavish event
it would shift production


Text: The X-ray and CT scans showed a pronounced bulge.

After reports of Galaxy Note 7 smartphones catching fire spread in early September, Samsung Electronics Co. executives debated how to respond. Some were skeptical the incidents amounted to much, according to people familiar with the meetings, but others thought the company needed to act decisively.

A laboratory report said scans of some faulty devices showed a protrusion in Note 7 batteries supplied by Samsung SDI Co., a company affiliate, while phones with batteries from another supplier didn’t.

It wasn’t a definitive answer, and there was no explanation for the bulges. But with consumers complaining and telecom operators demanding answers, newly appointed mobile chief D.J. Koh felt the company knew enough to recall 2.5 million phones. His suggestion was backed by Samsung’s third-generation heir apparent, Lee Jae-yong, who has advocated for more openness at one of the world’s most opaque conglomerates.

That decision in early September—to push a sweeping recall based on what turned out to be incomplete evidence—is now coming back to haunt the company.

Two weeks after Samsung began handing out millions of new phones, with batteries from the other supplier, the company was forced to all but acknowledge that its initial diagnosis was incorrect, following a spate of new incidents, some involving supposedly safe replacement devices. With regulators raising fresh questions, Messrs. Lee and Koh decided to take the drastic step of killing the phone outright.

The Galaxy Note series helped make Samsung a smartphone leader, and the Note 7, its most advanced phone ever, had all the makings of a hit. For a moment, it looked like the Galaxy Note could win over users of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and cement Samsung as one of the world’s most dominant technology companies.

Instead, as a result of the flammable phones and the botched recall Samsung’s leaders are now struggling to salvage the company’s credibility. At risk is the expected February launch of its next flagship smartphone, likely to be called the Galaxy S8.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which oversees product recalls in Samsung’s biggest smartphone market, is expected to investigate whether Samsung notified the agency soon enough of dangers posed by the device. Samsung’s decision to launch its own recall, bypassing the CPSC’s formal process for a time, may have prevented regulators from figuring out more about the root cause, some U.S. lawmakers suspect.

Samsung still doesn’t have a conclusive answer for what’s causing some Note 7s to catch fire.

A Samsung spokeswoman said the company worked quickly with regulators and took immediate action when problems arose with the phone. “We recognized that we did not correctly identify the issue the first time and remain committed to finding the root cause,” she said. “Our top priority remains the safety of our customers and retrieving 100% of the Galaxy Note 7 devices in the market.”

Outside experts have pointed to a range of possible culprits, from the software that manages how the battery interacts with other smartphone components to the design of the entire circuit.

Engineers are also looking into the possibility that the battery case may have been too small to house a battery of that capacity, according to one Samsung mobile executive.

Big product recalls are never easy. Consumers, however, are often willing to forgive mistakes if they believe the company is looking out for them and moving swiftly(=rapidamente) to address problems.

“What Samsung should have done, very early on, was to share even its preliminary findings or thoughts” with U.S. regulators rather than pushing its own recall, said Stuart Statler, a former CPSC commissioner and independent product safety consultant in Mooresville, N.C.

Samsung executives have delayed the development of the Galaxy S8 device by two weeks as engineers work to get to the bottom of the Note 7’s overheating problem, according to a member of the Galaxy S8 development team.

Meanwhile, investors have shaved off (=reduced to an amout) roughly $20 billion in Samsung’s market value. The company has said the recall would cost it $5 billion or more, including lost sales.

Introduced in 2011, the Galaxy Note series has served as a point of pride for the South Korean company, which was long derided for following—and sued for allegedly copying—the iPhone.

The bigger-screen phone was in tune with consumer tastes. When iPhones were shrinking in size, the Galaxy Note anticipated the shift to bigger handsets, which earned it the nickname “phablet,” a mashup of phone and tablet.

By the time Samsung released its third iteration in September 2013, the Galaxy Note was a certified hit, selling 10 million units in two months. The next year, Apple released its first Galaxy Note-sized iPhone.

As word reached Samsung executives that only incremental changes were likely for Apple’s iPhone 7 this year, Mr. Koh and other top executives grew confident about their prospects for a head-to-head fall release of the next version. The company decided to skip the number 6 and jump straight to 7, a name change that would invite direct comparisons with Apple’s model.

Samsung’s engineers packed new features, including an iris scanner, water resistance, an improved stylus and about 16% more battery life than its previous Note device. Presales for the Note 7 started strong after Mr. Koh introduced the device at a lavish (=elegante) event at a theater in Midtown Manhattan on Aug. 2. Analysts boosted their projections for Samsung’s earnings, while investors pushed the stock to record highs.

As user reports of overheating began to trickle in days later, company executives were at first unruffled. Some suspected that many of the alleged incidents had been faked, and argued that even a small number of genuine cases shouldn’t overshadow the fact that millions of smartphones were working fine, according to people familiar with their thinking.

Gathering at Mr. Koh’s office at R5, the 27-story office tower overlooking Samsung’s sprawling Digital City campus south of Seoul, he and other mobile executives, including his predecessor, J.K. Shin, and longtime Samsung top lieutenant G.S. Choi, examined the X-ray and CT scan reports of the phone, which appeared to show heat damage to the internal structure of the battery, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Messrs. Lee and Koh believed they had all the evidence they needed to conclude the problem lay with Samsung SDI’s batteries, these people said. They argued it was more important for Samsung to do “the right thing” and act, in the words of one of the people familiar with the matter, rather than wait for more information. Doing so would have left customers in the dark longer and potentially allowed the crisis to get worse.

On Sept. 2, Mr. Koh entered a news conference room in downtown Seoul to address reporters. Without providing names, he said the company had identified a problem with one of its suppliers and it would shift(=transferir) production to another supplier it believed hadn’t caused the problems.

People familiar with the matter say that the supplier Samsung planned to rely on was Amperex Technology Ltd., a unit of Japanese electronic parts maker TDK Corp.

In Washington, Mr. Koh’s announcement came as a surprise to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Typically, companies work jointly with the CPSC to study a problem and plan a recall together.

Samsung didn’t notify the CPSC of the problems until later that day, according to people familiar with the matter—about two weeks after the first reported Note 7 incident.

CPSC regulations require companies to report potential product hazards within 24 hours, though the commission allows companies that are “truly uncertain” about an issue to spend a “reasonable time” investigating the situation.

Samsung also took the little-noticed decision to pursue what’s known as fast-track resolution with the CPSC. The program allows a company to shorten the agency’s sometimes-lengthy investigation of a product problem, while avoiding a formal finding by the CPSC of a defect—a maneuver that can insulate manufacturers from product-liability litigation.

The CPSC warns that some companies might not want a fast-track resolution in situations where “complex technical issues…require more time to resolve.”

At first, Samsung’s recall solution seemed to work. Consumers were turning in their phones and asking for new Note 7 phones in about 90% of the cases, Samsung said. The company’s executives basked in praise, particularly from the South Korean press that Samsung executives read obsessively, who credited Samsung with acting swiftly.

The CPSC, though, appeared unhappy with some of the company’s maneuvers. A week after Mr. Koh’s recall announcement, on Sept. 9, the agency took the unusual step of warning consumers not to use the phones while it did more research, and said it would work to determine whether Samsung’s plan to issue replacement phones was “an acceptable remedy.”

A few days later, Samsung and the CPSC finally agreed to a formal joint recall.

Meanwhile, complaints about overheating replacement phones, and of isolated cases of battery failures, began emerging. A Samsung spokesman said initially there was no safety concern.

In China, where the company used only Amperex-supplied batteries in its Note 7s, the company dismissed reported smartphone fires as fabrications, arguing it was impossible for those batteries to have caused problems.

As it became clear the reported problems were multiplying, employees describe a kind of gallows humor setting in. One mobile division executive described the Galaxy Note 7 as a “radioactive” topic, with staffers afraid of even discussing it in the company canteen.

A local television news crew camped outside the offices at 6 a.m. to film a report about how many lights were on at the company, to illustrate the depth of the company’s crisis.

Then came the evacuation of a Southwest Airlines Co. flight in early October because of a smoking Samsung smartphone.

Top executives from major telecoms operators, including Verizon Communications Inc.’s Lowell McAdam, urged Mr. Lee to quickly kill the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, according to people familiar with the matter. The executives told Mr. Lee the smartphone was becoming increasingly unsalable.

On Oct. 11, Mr. Lee called Mr. Koh and ordered him to discontinue the smartphone. Later that day, Mr. Koh wrote a letter to the company’s mobile division, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, calling the crisis “one of the toughest challenges we have ever faced.”

While the decision to abort the Note 7 has halted the damage for now, analysts have raised questions about the future of the Galaxy Note series, arguing that the brand has become too tarnished by the crisis and that the company should retire it altogether.

At least two U.S. senators, Bill Nelson of Florida and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, have asked for more details about Samsung communication with the CPSC and its handling of the phone crisis. Mr. Blumenthal noted in a letter to Samsung released publicly that so far in the current fiasco, Samsung has reported 96 incidents of batteries overheating in the U.S., including 13 burns and 47 cases of property damage.

Last week, at the urging of CPSC Chairman Elliot Kaye, the agency approved a proposal for a wide-ranging inquiry into lithium ion and related batteries in coming months.

“There are few things in life I’m reasonably confident of predicting; one of those is….we’re going to have yet another issue of lithium ion batteries catching fire” from a range of devices, said CPSC commissioner Robert Adler. “This is just a massive problem.”

—Eun-Young Jeong in Seoul, Ryan Knutson in New York and Takashi Mochizuki in Tokyo contributed to this article.

Write to Jonathan Cheng at jonathan.cheng@wsj.com and John D. McKinnon at john.mckinnon@wsj.com

Cunha preso e ja elvis

Source: Futebol, chinelada e isolamento: os dias discretos de Cunha antes da prisão

Text:
Na última vez em que apareceu em público desde a cassação de seu mandato de deputado federal, Eduardo Cunha foi alvo de chineladas de uma senhora que tentou agredi-lo no aeroporto Santos Dumont, no Rio de Janeiro, aos gritos de "safado" e "bandido".
O episódio, registrado em vídeo na semana passada, viralizou nas redes sociais - e não foi um caso isolado.
Last time that appeared in public since the nullification of his mandate of federal deputy, Cunha was target of a lady's hits who tried to injure him in the aeroport of Santos, in Rio de Janior, by shouting him as "dishonest" and "thief".
The episode, registered in a footage last week, viralyzed in the social networkings - and it was not an isolated case.


Outras cenas de Cunha recebendo xingamentos - e elogios, incluindo selfies - em saguões em São Paulo e Brasília circularam por timelines afora no último mês. "Não vão me constranger", respondeu, atribuindo os ataques a "petistas".
Desde a interrupção da vida pública, entretanto, o ex-deputado preso nesta quarta-feira pela Polícia Federal preferia falar de futebol.
Other Cunha's scenes receiving and praises, including selfies - in lobbies in Sao Paulo and Braizlia circulated by timelines outside last month. They will not embarass me, he answered, atributing it to the petist attacks.
Since the interruption of public life, however, the ex-deputy was arrested on this Thursday by Federal Police would prefere talk about soccer.

"E o Mengao, (sic) ontem jogou fora uma chance de ouro. Agora depende dos tropeços do Palmeiras", escreveu, frustrado, em uma longa série de tuítes sobre o empate sem gols entre seu time e o São Paulo, em 1º de outubro.
Futebol é uma das paixões de Cunha - ao lado de religião e política. No mesmo dia, ele pediu votos a seu candidato a vereador no Rio de Janeiro, o também peemedebista Chiquinho Brazão, conhecido por investigações que ligam sua família a milícias fluminenses.
Talvez tenha sido esta sua última vitória política: Brazão foi eleito com quase 24 mil votos para seu quarto mandato na Câmara Municipal.
And what about Flamengo, yesterday threw off one gold chance. Now it depends on the Palmeiras' mistakes, he wrote, frustrated, in a long series of twitts about the draw without goals between his team and Sao Paulo, on first of October.
Soccer is one of the Cunha's passions - near to the religion and politics. At the same day, he asked votes to his candidate to councillor in Rio de Janeiro, the peemedbist too, known by ivnestigations that connect his family to fluminense militias.
Perhaps it had been his last political victory: Brazao was elected with almost 24 thousand votes to his fourth mandate in the Municipal Camara.

Isolamento
Habituado à bajulação de políticos, o ex-todo poderoso da Câmara dos Deputados teve que se acostumar com o isolamento desde que perdeu o foro privilegiado em ações penais, com a cassação do mandato em 12 de setembro.
Após uma comemoração que reuniu ministros e governadores, no ano passado, ele festejou seu aniversário de 58 anos no último dia 29 de forma discreta, apenas com a família.
Há pouco mais de um mês, o Congresso decidiu pela cassação de seu mandato e a suspensão de seus direitos políticos por um placar arrebatador: 450 votos a favor, 10 contra e 9 abstenções.
Isolament
Habituated to politician's flattery, the ex-all powerful of Camara of Deputies who have to be accustomed to the isoletion since he had lost the privileged foro in penal actions, with the cassation of mandate in 12th of September.
After one celebration that gathered ministers and governos, last year, he celebrated his anniversary of 58 years on the last day 29th of discret form, just with the family.
From more than one month, the Congress decided by the cassation of his mandate and the suspentino of his political rights for a ravishing score: 450 votes in favor, 10 against and 9 abstentions.

Trump se negou a aceitar a possível derrota

Source: Unable to control himself, Trump confirms everyone’s worst fears

Vocabulary:
 she pressed Trump sharply
 loses is “rigged” against him
Trump drew from his own arsenal of
strongly endorsed Roe
Oddly for a campaign
overwhelmed

Text: It was a two-track debate. At times, it was the setting for a detailed argument over serious issues in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offered voters a relatively straightforward clash of progressive and conservative perspectives.

But this is 2016, and eventually the third and final debate on Wednesday reached the fundamental issue of the campaign: whether Trump is fit to be president. Despite her substantial lead in the polls, Clinton did not hang back, as many predicted she would. Instead, she pressed Trump sharply(=acentuado) on the entire catalog of his shortcomings, accusing him of being a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin and denouncing his treatment of women, his mocking a disabled reporter and his habit of saying that any contest he loses is “rigged”(=armado) against him.

And she clearly signaled one of the closing themes of her campaign when she declared that Trump had shown “a pattern of divisiveness, of a very dark and . . . the dangerous vision for our country.” The election, she said, was about “what kind of country are we going to be.”

Trump drew(=tirou) from his own arsenal of favored attacks on Clinton, from the work of the Clinton Foundation to her use of a private email server and her role in the Obama administration’s foreign policy. “She been proven to be a liar,” Trump said.

Had the exchanges come down to an ideological fight and simple tit-for-tat, fire and counterfire, it might have constituted a kind of victory for Trump, given his polling deficit and his gaffes and lies in his earlier debate performances. But as the debate wore on, Trump once again left behind moments that will only reinforce the doubts many voters already have about him.

Repeatedly, he refused to disown Putin, and he once again praised him relative to both Clinton and President Obama. “She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way,” he said.

He did himself no good when he accused the nine women who have said he groped and accosted him of being liars, motivated by a desire for fame.

And again and again, when Clinton repeated things that Trump had actually said, he simply denied saying them, providing fact-checkers with another rich Trumpian trove.

From the start, Chris Wallace, the moderator in Las Vegas, tried to press Clinton and Trump on a series of specific issues — what sort of justices they would nominate, how they viewed the Constitution, where they stood on abortion rights and gun control. In each case, they stressed themes congenial to their core constituencies.

Clinton strongly(=to make a public statement of your approval or support for something or someone) endorsed Roe v. Wade, sharply attacked the Citizens United decision that undercut campaign finance restrictions and stressed that she wanted justices who would stand with ordinary citizens against the wealthy and the powerful.

Trump began with his commitment to the Second Amendment and gun rights and kept coming back to the issue. Although Wallace pressed him repeatedly, Trump refused to say if he wanted Roe overturned, though he predicted that because his Supreme Court appointees would be “pro-life,” Roe would fall. Although Trump no doubt pleased opponents of abortion, Clinton showed passion in the exchange, while Trump seemed to be answering by rote.

Oddly(=estranhamente) for a campaign in which immigration is a central issue, the third debate was the first in which voters were exposed to an extended look at their sharply different approaches.

But since nothing in this campaign is ever destined to look like the Oxford Union or any other stately discussion of public problems, the first track was overwhelmed by the second. Trump’s obvious purpose was to shake voters away from Clinton. And if Clinton was trying to drive up turnout — her fervor on abortion rights and gun control no doubt helped her with women and liberals — Trump may have been attempting to drive it down, figuring that in a smaller electorate, his committed voters would give him a better chance of prevailing.

Yet Trump suffered from what he always suffers from an inability to control his anger or stop himself from interrupting, which only reinforced undecided voters’ worst perceptions of him.

The most important moment of the evening was Trump’s refusal to say that if he lost, he would accept the outcome: “I will look at it at the time,” he said. “I will keep you in suspense.”

Never has a candidate for president challenged the legitimacy of the entire electoral enterprise in which he was engaged. Clinton’s core claim is that Trump is a dangerous man who lacks respect for American institutions and American democracy. On this central issue, Trump chose to prove Clinton right.

Proximo debate será sobre meio ambiente

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clinton-and-trump-should-address-climate-in-final-debate/

Vocabulary:
remains stalled in the courts
come up with a breakthrough


Text: Clinton and Trump Should Address Climate in Final Debate
Energy Secretary Moniz says candidates should state their positions on climate solutions

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said he wants tonight’s presidential debate moderator to ask about climate change.
But, he said, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump should be asked more than whether they believe in the science behind man-made warming.
“I think it should be very simple: Basically, state a position on climate solutions,” Moniz offered as a sample debate question last night during a lecture at American University in Washington, D.C.

Climate change was largely absent from the past two presidential debates, as well as the one debate between the major parties’ vice presidential nominees, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine (D) and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R). The omission has frustrated environmental activists and some energy analysts.
Moniz added that debates that begin without stipulating that climate change is occurring and that humans are the dominant cause are nonstarters.

“One of the statements I made in my confirmation hearing ... was that ‘I didn’t come to D.C. to debate what’s not debatable.’ Let’s debate the real stuff, like how are we going to respond [to climate change], how much, how fast, where, etc. I think that’s where the question should go,” he said.
The Obama administration is wrestling with these questions while the president’a signature domestic climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, remains stalled (=If an engine stalls, or if you stall it, it stops working suddenly and without you intending it to happen) in the courts.

Moniz touted (=to advertise, talk about, or praise something or someone repeatedly, especially as a way of encouraging people to like, accept, or buy something) significant progress in the international arena, with the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change last year and an amendment to the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances cemented over the weekend in Kigali, Rwanda (ClimateWire, Oct. 17). Moniz said the amendment to cut emissions of heat-trapping hydrofluorocarbons would avert up to half a degree Celsius of warming.

Moniz also highlighted Mission Innovation and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition as major accomplishments for the administration. Mission Innovation is an agreement among 20 countries to double their investment in clean energy research and development by 2020. The Breakthrough Energy Coalition is a parallel consortium of private investors pledging to advance clean energy technologies into the real world.

However, a cash injection doesn’t guarantee that the world will come up (=aparecer) with a breakthrough energy miracle to meet the world’s demands for power without harming the planet, Moniz said. “One more question we should ask is, do we have in the United States the capacity to effectively absorb that increased funding?” he said.
He argued that the success of programs like the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which invests in early-stage energy projects, shows that the United States is ready to put more research dollars to good use.

“We’ve got a lot of capacity left to take advantage of innovation,” he said.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who introduced Moniz at the lecture, reiterated his suggestion from a column in April that called on the next president to persuade Moniz to keep his job in order to maintain momentum in clean energy and fighting climate change.
Moniz did not answer a direct question about whether he would continue in the next administration.
Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net. Click here for the original story.

Obama promete ida a Marte até 2030

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/blue-planet-red-planet-politics-obama-s-giant-leap-for-legacy/

Text:
for any full-throttle interest
in the realm beyond Earth.

to withstand an influx

reiterated interest in Earth’

international affairs
stepping out globally


Blue Planet/Red Planet Politics: Obama's Giant Leap for Legacy

In the waning days of his administration, the president has been paying unusual attention to space, recently highlighting his accomplishments and further goals for exploration of the solar system

Space has been back on the radar lately for the White House—an uncharacteristic situation in an administration that has not been known for any full-throttle(=if a person or a machine is at full throttle, they are doing something as well and with as much energy as they can) interest in the realm beyond Earth.
In an October 11 CNN opinion piece, Pres. Barack Obama underscored his belief that the U.S. will take the giant leap to Mars. “We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America’s story in space,” Obama wrote, “sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time.”

The plan was not new—Obama first announced his intention to explore the Red Planet in 2010, and NASA has been pursuing the necessary technology ever since. But the opinion piece suggests the president is thinking about his legacy in space—particularly at a time when private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX are pursuing Mars exploration plans of their own.

The CNN editorial popped up the same day as a White House space update, “Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality,” came out from John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, along with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. It announced two new NASA initiatives that build on the president’s vision to enable humans to sustainably live and work in space. One has several select companies developing habitation systems able to sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration, deep-space missions such as a trip to Mars. The other new plan would begin to allow companies to add their own modules and other capabilities to the International Space Station.

Then there was Obama’s guest editing of Wired magazine’s November issue, in which he said his favorite movie last year was The Martian. He added that he is “predisposed” to admire any movie where Americans dare the odds and motivate the world. “But what really grabbed me about the film is that it shows how humans—through our ingenuity, our commitment to fact and reason, and ultimately our faith in each other—can science the heck out of just about any problem,” Obama wrote in an introduction to the issue.

And on October 13 Obama signed an executive order—“Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events”—to make sure power grids, satellites and other vital national interests are equipped to withstand (=resistir) an influx of charged particles sent our way by periodic flare-ups on the sun.
All of this was prelude to Obama’s own voyage that same day to Carnegie Mellon University for The White House Frontiers Conference. Among the science and technology themes on the agenda were interplanetary space exploration and the thriving U.S. space industry. Up for discussion: How will American investments in science and technology help us settle “the final frontier”—space?

Forget-Me-Not
The president’s reiterated(=repetiu) interest in Earth’s planetary neighbor is marvelous rocket rumble to the ears of Chris Carberry, CEO of Explore Mars, a humans-on-Mars advocacy group. He sees Obama’s initiative as a way to assure the public that Red Planet exploration is firmly in NASA’s sights—there is a caveat, however. “The next administration and Congress will need to make a lot of important decisions,” Carberry says, “with regards to mission architecture options, precursor missions and budget in the next couple of years,” if landing humans on Mars is to become reality anytime soon.

Obama and Mars are not strangers. In 2010 he called on NASA to head for the Red Planet, have astronauts orbit that world by the mid-2030s and return them safely to Earth. “And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it,” he said in a 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center. So why the announcement now? “It is a reminder that six years ago he set NASA on the journey to Mars…and that they are still going. He hasn’t changed his mind,” says John Logsdon, professor emeritus of political science and international affairs(=assuntos) at George Washington University. “As his administration draws to a close, it is his summing up of what he believes his record has been.”

Yet whether Mars will truly be part of the president’s space legacy remains to be seen, says Marcia Smith, founder and editor of SpacePolicyOnline.com. “I think Obama’s civil space legacy will be his embrace of commercial partnerships, not humans to Mars,” she says. Ultimately Obama’s legacy depends in large part on what the next administration does, Smith says. If it continues the Mars exploration program he set up, Obama will likely receive kudos, whether or not it is deserved, she says. NASA’s big and yet-to-fly booster, the Space Launch System and the Orion piloted spacecraft—key elements of NASA’s journey to Mars—exist today because of Congress, not the president. “But he did extend the International Space Station to 2024,” she says, “providing more years to study human reaction to spaceflight.” On the other hand, if the next president cancels the drive for Mars—the way Obama canceled “The Vision for Space Exploration,” which targeted further human exploration of the moon, as blueprinted in 2004 by Pres. George W. Bush—“it will be just another footnote in history.”

Uncertainties
Although the overall Obama space scorecard is checkered, the area of commercial partnerships is where his administration shines, Smith says. During the past eight years NASA has pursued unprecedented private partnerships that should have commercial companies flying NASA astronauts to and from the space station in the near future. The ultimate fate of this program and the broad range of other public-private partnerships initiated under the administration is still unfolding, but it is clear that “a new paradigm” has emerged during Obama’s years in the Oval Office. Whether it is sustained by the next president “will be interesting to watch,” she concludes.

Space policy expert Logsdon senses “uncertainties” surrounding the next administration’s handling of the nation’s space agenda. “Whether to put the moon back in is the biggest one,” says Logsdon, pointing to the Bush administration’s canceled plans. Such a goal is something that European Space Agency Director General Johann-Dietrich Wörner has been campaigning for what has been tagged as an international “moon village.” “My biggest disappointment with Obama,” Logsdon continues, “is lack of international leadership, not reaching out as the U.S. president to the international community and saying ‘let’s do this together”—stepping out globally beyond low Earth orbit.

Another transition issue, according to Logsdon, is whether the next U.S. chief executive makes explicit an invitation to other countries to join America in planning exploration in general, and whether China is included in that goal. Doing so could make the difference in ultimately reaching the Red Planet or not. In the past 40 years the U.S. space program has received less than 1 percent of the federal spending budget, Logsdon says. “And I see nothing that will change that on the horizon.”
Bottom line to all this boosterism: If NASA truly wants to make it to Mars, it will probably need to enlist international technology, expertise and funding.

Alzheimer new experiments

Source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/a-new-tack-to-stave-off-alzheimer-s-years-before-the-first-symptom/

Vocabulary:
the moment at which something unpleasant begins:
goes awry
intended to address other manifestations
cellular mechanisms
accelerates many
mice genetically engineered

Text: A New Tack to Stave Off Alzheimer's Years before the First Symptom
Researchers try to prevent onset(=the moment at which something unpleasant begins) of the disease by correcting a brain cell process that goes awry

The new mantra for researchers fighting Alzheimer’s disease is “go early,” before memory loss or other pathology appears. The rationale for this approach holds that by the time dementia sets in the disease may already be destroying brain cells, placing severe limits on treatment options.

Some large clinical trials are now testing drugs intended to clear up the brain’s cellular detritus—the aggregations of amyloid and tau proteins that may ultimately destroy brain cells. So far this approach has had decidedly mixed results.
Some researchers are choosing a different direction. They have begun to ask what happens in the brain before the plaques and tangles of amyloid and tau appear—and to look at interventions that might work at this incipient disease stage.

The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation has focused in recent years on funding new agents that do not target amyloid but are intended to address (=abordar) other manifestations of the disease, such as inflammation and the energy metabolism of neurons.
At a foundation meeting last month in Jersey City, N.J., neuroscientist Grace Stutzmann of the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science presented her work on restoring a basic cellular process—called calcium signaling—that goes off track in

Alzheimer’s. Scientific American asked her recently about her work.
[An edited transcript of the conversation follows.]
Scientific American: Can you explain in a simple manner for our readers what calcium signaling is in the brain and what can go wrong in Alzheimer's?

While many people are aware of calcium as a component of strong bones, calcium is also a very important feature of cellular function. Calcium ions within brain cells play fundamental roles in activating genes to make proteins in energy metabolism, in signaling inside cells and even in cell death. Perhaps most relevant to Alzheimer’s disease though is its central role in neuronal transmission and communication between synapses (junctions between neurons). These are the cellular mechanisms by which memories are formed and maintained. In Alzheimer’s disease, too much calcium is being released within the neuron, and this initiates or accelerates many of the pathological processes seen in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), especially the events that lead to memory loss.

Is stopping the process of aberrant calcium signaling a good place to intervene? Is that because of the particular stage at which calcium becomes a problem in the course of the disease?

The dysregulated calcium signaling is thought to occur early in the disease process, which suggests it is part of the “cause” rather than a later-stage “effect.” Mechanistically, this supports targeting calcium abnormalities as a good therapeutic strategy. Importantly, we feel that our laboratory has identified the particular channel underlying the excess calcium release (the ryanodine receptor), which provides a specific target when trying to prevent the calcium dysregulation.

Can you explain specifically what you’ve done?
We first confirmed the role of the specific calcium channel in AD by examining its effects in several experimental models of AD, and we also confirmed abnormalities in human brains from AD patients. We then moved back to the models (including mice genetically engineered to exhibit AD pathology) and tested existing drugs known to inhibit the calcium channel, which generated incredibly encouraging results. Not only did one of these drugs reverse the excess amounts of calcium but it also altered many of the other aspects of AD, such as the accumulation of amyloid and tau, loss of synapses, and impaired synaptic plasticity. These findings set the stage for the development of our own compounds that are designed for better targeting of the receptors and gaining better access to the brain. We soon partnered with a medicinal chemistry group to help design and synthesize a series of new compounds to test in these models systems of AD.

How will you test people without symptoms to know whether they're at risk?
Ah, there is the rub. Numerous groups, ours included, are looking for biomarkers to indicate amount of risk or likelihood of developing AD. And there is also brain imaging of plaques (and more recently tau pathology) that many are using as an indicator of AD risk. But since there is little correlation between plaques and cognitive function, many of us are questioning this as a diagnostic or biomarker tool. So for now it's very hard to accurately assess risk in most people. Realistically, we are hoping to catch early-stage symptoms including the behavioral and memory disruptions, and then prevent further cognitive impairment.

Tell us about the company you've started and the drug you're developing.
Once we realized we had a valid and novel strategy to treat AD, a library of new compounds and powerful biological screening assays to test our compounds, we got to work trying to identify which of these compounds could prove to be effective in treating AD. To our great joy, the first generation of compounds produced several successful “hits,” which restored intracellular calcium signaling to its normal state in the AD models, and also reduced several of the related pathological features of AD.
Soon after, we partnered with SmartHealth, a North Chicago-based health care activator (an incubator for biotech startups), to create NeuroLucent to accelerate the process of developing, testing and optimizing our new compounds to hopefully move them into the clinic. Glenn Gottfried, an adviser with SmartHealth, is serving as president. I also brought in a medicinal chemist, Dr. John Buolamwini, and a molecular biologist, Dr. Robert Marr, both colleagues with me at Rosalind Franklin University.  We’re still a new startup, but we are in the process of raising funds and establishing partnerships to scale up and advance the complex process of moving a compound from the lab to the FDA.

Haven't there been previous attempts to try to correct calcium signaling? How is yours different?
That is correct. This is not the first calcium-channel strategy attempted for the treatment of AD. However, the previous approaches were targeting entirely different types of calcium channels, found on the outer membrane of the cell, that do not seem to be linked to AD pathology in any clear way. For example, there is a class of calcium channels on the surface of the cells that is activated by excitatory activity that opens the cell channel. Drugs that inhibit these calcium channels have been very effective for several conditions, such as high blood pressure, but did not improve cognition or reduce the symptoms of AD. We have also been studying these channels in our experimental models of AD, and they have always functioned normally. Since this series of calcium channels doesn’t seem to be defective or causative in AD, I can understand why these previous attempts weren’t successful in the clinic.

A major difference in our approach is that the calcium channel we are targeting is found inside the cell, and controls calcium signaling from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a cell component with a very high calcium concentration. In AD, the channel on the ER membrane releases too much calcium from its internal stores, and this triggers a host of pathological cascades. We are attempting to normalize the calcium signaling through ER channels and target this one specific source. This is mechanistically much different than the previous attempts. Plus, we know in experimental AD models and in human AD patients that this calcium source is functioning abnormally. Several research labs have demonstrated this across many different models. If it were only our lab obtaining these findings, I wouldn’t feel comfortable trusting our results in isolation.

Is it important to consider your approach given the poor track record with other Alzheimer's drugs?
I do feel very strongly about this, and it doesn’t have to be “my” approach per se—but anymechanistically valid approach that is distinct from the series of recent failed clinical trials. The majority of the compounds that disappointed were targeting a particular protein aggregate, beta-amyloid plaques. And, while the presence of plaques is integral to the diagnosis of AD, it is unclear what their role is in the disease process and how the accumulation of beta-amyloid actually links to memory loss. Actually, several of these drugs worked very well in that they were able to reduce the beta amyloid in the brain; however, they were not able to show any improvement in cognitive function.
In parallel, we know there is little relationship between the amount of amyloid in one’s brain and your memory function.  In fact, those “super-agers”—your 95-year-old great-great-aunt who finishes the crossword puzzle in 20 minutes, is president of the bridge club and has a better golf handicap than you—may have just as many amyloid plaques in her brain as AD patients. In the big picture, I think we need to take a few giant steps backwards and work on understanding the early mechanisms of AD as it relates to memory loss. That will then enable us to build therapeutic strategies based on these data. We feel enormous potential exists in addressing an early and central signaling pathway that affects amyloid production, tau pathology, neuroinflammation and memory loss, among other AD features, but there may be other targets besides calcium dysregulation that would be effective. I think the research community needs to increase our efforts in finding the common denominator driving the multifaceted disease processes in AD. Our lab is continuing to explore what is causing AD and now is using human neurons to validate our approach. But as a field, we research scientists need to better understand what it is we are fighting in order to formulate the best approach.

Robbie williams e a doença

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-lewy-body-dementia-gripped-robin-williams1/

Vocabulary:
besieged by paranoia
ambushed by
their spouses
he sought
bewildering 
rapid shifts

Text:
How Lewy Body Dementia Gripped Robin Williams
Hit by a vicious case, the actor said he wanted to “reboot” his brain

In the months before his death, Robin Williams was besieged by paranoia and so confused he couldn’t remember his lines while filming a movie, as his brain was ambushed (=emboscada) by what doctors later identified as an unusually severe case of Lewy body dementia.
“Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it. Can you imagine the pain he felt as he experienced himself disintegrating?” the actor’s widow, Susan Schneider Williams, wrote in a wrenching editorial published this week in the journal Neurology.

The title of her piece: “The terrorist inside my husband’s brain.”
Susan Williams addressed the editorial to neurologists, writing that she hoped husband’s story would “help you understand your patients along with their spouses (=cônjuges) and caregivers a little more.”

Susan Williams has previously blamed Lewy body dementia for her husband’s death by suicide in 2014. About 1.3 million Americans have the disease, which is caused by protein deposits in the brain. Williams was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few months before he died; the telltale signs of Lewy body dementia in his brain were not discovered until an autopsy.
The editorial chronicles Williams’s desperation as he sought(=procurou) to understand a bewildering array of symptoms that started with insomnia, constipation, and an impaired sense of smell and soon spiraled into extreme anxiety, tremors, and difficulty reasoning.

“My husband was trapped in the twisted architecture of his neurons and no matter what I did I could not pull him out,” Susan Williams wrote.
For nearly a year, in a painful odyssey that will be familiar to many patients, Williams tried to find out what was wrong with himself — and fix it. He underwent tests and scans, tried new medications, did physical therapy, worked out with a trainer, and sought out alternative treatments like self-hypnosis and yoga.

“He kept saying, ‘I just want to reboot my brain,’” his widow recounted.
Nothing worked.
Susan Williams traced the first signs of trouble to a celebration of their wedding anniversary, about 10 months before her husband died, when “gut discomfort” made him fearful and anxious. That set off months of escalating problems.

Williams struggled particularly while filming “Night at the Museum 3” in the spring of 2014. He had a panic attack and had trouble remembering “even one line” in his role as Teddy Roosevelt. By contrast, Susan Williams wrote, he had remembered hundreds of lines without error while performing on Broadway three years before.

Susan Williams movingly described her husband’s rapid shifts(=mudanças) in and out of clarity.
“I experienced my brilliant husband being lucid with clear reasoning 1 minute and then, 5 minutes later, blank, lost in confusion,” she wrote.

She added: “I was powerless in helping him see his own brilliance.”
After her husband’s death, Susan Williams wrote that she had many long conversations with doctors to retrace and understand what had happened to him. All four doctors who had reviewed his records, she said, “indicated his was one of the worst pathologies they had seen.”

Though she and her husband both craved a diagnosis during those bewildering months before his death, Susan Williams said in retrospect she is “not convinced that the knowledge would have done much more than prolong Robin’s agony” and turn him into “one of the most famous test subjects of new medicines and ongoing clinical trials.”

Williams has joined the board of the American Brain Foundation, a nonprofit that funds research on neurological illnesses.
“Hopefully from this sharing of our experience,” she wrote, addressing neurologists, “you will be inspired to turn Robin’s suffering into something meaningful through your work and wisdom.”
She added: “Do not give up.”

Materia preta no universo

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-techniques-could-target-more-exotic-dark-matter/

Vocabulary:

1. physicists
2. that comprises most of the cosmos
3. results came out
4. must further test future

Text:
New Techniques Could Target More Exotic Dark Matter
After decades of experiments have failed to find evidence for physicists’ favored dark matter candidate particles, scientists plan searches for alternatives

Where is the dark matter? Scientists who have hunted for decades for the stuff that comprises(=compreende) most of the cosmos’ mass are starting to worry that they are looking in the wrong places. After the latest null results came out this summer from the most sensitive search yet for the particles thought to make up dark matter, a limited theoretical range of masses and other characteristics remains viable for the particles. Now physicists have proposed two new methods to trawl this slim remaining territory, which has been out of reach to experiments so far.

Most of the universe’s mass is dark matter, around 80% of it. Although we cannot see or touch it, scientists know its gravity distorts images of distant objects and holds galaxies together. Since the 1980s, experiments buried deep in mountains and mines have waited patiently to see if a dark matter particle will pass through. Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) slams other particles together hoping to create some dark matter in the process. But so far, the elusive substance has failed to turn up at either the LHC or the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment in South Dakota.

Researchers are now facing growing hints that existing experiments may be targeting the wrong kinds of particles, and finding dark matter will require new techniques.
Dark matter searches to date have mostly searched for “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs), theoretical particles that would weigh between 1 giga-electron volt (GeV) and 1 tera-electron volt (TeV), or between one and 1,000 times the mass of a proton. Many physicists have long viewed them as the most promising dark matter candidates, because theory implies that WIMPs should contribute about as much mass to the universe as the amount of dark matter astronomers have measured, but the particles have so far failed to appear. These experiments tend to search for rare instances of WIMPs impacting atoms in some detecting material; in the case of LUX, the material is liquid xenon, but others have used solid germanium or other substances.

“The WIMP paradigm is under siege” after so many failures to find them have limited the number of places they could still be hiding, says Kathryn Zurek of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Zurek led two recent studies proposing new ways of searching for dark matter in the form of particles that would be lighter than WIMPs, such as so-called asymmetric dark matter. Such particles might interact with the normal particles we know of via some yet-undiscovered dark force. “The idea is that you can have this hidden sector where dark matter is really light … and can have individual particle interactions with [regular] particles,” Zurek says. “It’s not a paradigm people had been really thinking about until less than a decade ago.”

In place of traditional dark matter detector materials, Zurek’s team’s first method uses superconducting aluminum, a substance whose electrons are free to move without any resistance. Within the superconductor electrons bind themselves with partner electrons in so-called “Cooper pairs.” Energy from an incoming dark matter particle could break up one of these pairs and send vibrations through the superconductor, which hypersensitive heat detectors called transition edge sensors (TESs) would read out. The researchers published this method last January in Physical Review Letters.

The second method, published last month in Physical Review Letters, uses superfluid helium, a zero-viscosity liquid of ultra-cold helium atoms that can move around each other without any resistance. An incoming dark matter particle could interact with a helium nucleus, causing a chain reaction that sends a set of phonons, quantum sound waves, to TESs. Both methods require a much slighter knock from dark matter into the detecting material to generate a signal than existing experiments, and can therefore spot particles as light as 1 keV, a millionth the mass of a proton. Traditional experiments are sensitive only to particles as light as 10 MeV, ten thousand times heavier than a keV.

The current generation of dark matter experiments are getting upgrades; LUX is becoming the LUX-ZEPLIN (ZonEd Proportional scintillation in LIquid Noble gases) or LZ experiment, XENON100 in Italy is becoming XENON1T and the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS)  in Minnesota will move to a new Canadian site. But even the improved versions can only probe down to around 10 MeV at best. If they cannot find anything, scientists will likely look to proposals like Zurek’s to probe even lighter masses of potential particles. Yet such experiments will require research and development into what superconducting aluminum or superfluid helium detectors will actually look like, and where they should build such a detector. “These experiments will be technically challenging but not very expensive,” Zurek says.

“[This research] is the direction the field is moving partly because we haven't found the standard WIMPs,” says Dan Bauer, a scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and the SuperCDMS spokesperson. Although scientists are still holding out hope that higher mass WIMPs will appear, “we realized that we’ve always been looking under particular lampposts. There's a lot of territory available for lighter mass dark matter particles.”

And as experimentalists build detectors that can spot lighter particles, theoretical physicists are likely to come up with more ideas for types of dark matter candidate particles that could be found there. “Theorists are very creative,” says Bob Jacobsen, a University of California, Berkeley, physicist who works on LUX and LZ. “If there's a [mass] region that hasn't been explored, the theorists will say can they do something that's mathematically consistent. If they publish it, it's our job to rule it out.”

Superconductor and superfluid detector proof-of-concepts will ultimately require physicists to divide their time between current searches and research and development, says Chris Tully, a Princeton University physicist. “You have to build these technologies in parallel with running experiments” he says. He hopes to begin seeing mockups in five to 10 years’ time, depending on funding (though Zurek herself thought it would be closer to 10 years). Whereas the experiment Tully works on, the Princeton Tritium Observatory for Light, Early-Universe, Massive-Neutrino Yield (PTOLEMY) , and  SuperCDMS  have TESs already developed, scientists must further(=promover) test future detectors to ensure they can pick out dark matter particles from contaminating radiation that causes a similar signal in the detector. Current experiments are located deep underground or in mountains to shield against cosmic rays, high-energy particles from space that produce signals that can obscure dark matter.

Superfluid or superconductor experiments would instead need shielding from stray electromagnetic waves, such as those from cell phones, Zurek says. Bauer says that SuperCDMS’ Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Laboratory is building such shielding now. Ultimately, “It's amazing how little we know,” says Jacobsen. “We're looking for the first clue in the crime scene. If you don't have the first clue, you don't know where to look.”

Google está investimento na África do Sul

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-google-cares-about-wind-power-in-africa/

Vocabulary:
first cash outlay
powering roughly 80,000
reducing reliance

Text:
Why Google Cares about Wind Power in Africa

Millions of people are coming online, and that requires (renewable) energy

Google Inc.’s investment in Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Power Project is its largest on the African continent to date, but it almost certainly won’t be the last.

The California internet giant has shown a growing interest in sub-Saharan Africa since it made its first cash outlay(=desembolso) three years ago—a $12 million investment in the Jasper Solar Power Project in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province.
The 96-megawatt photovoltaic project, completed in 2014, was built by U.S.-based SolarReserve LLC and is capable of powering roughly 80,000 South African homes.

The Lake Turkana deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, calls for Google to acquire 12.5 percent of the nearly $700 million project from Vestas Wind Systems A/S of Denmark after the wind farm is completed next year.
“We are investing in clean energy projects like Lake Turkana because they make business sense and can help accelerate the deployment of renewable energy,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to E&E News.

She added that the company sees “a large opportunity in fast-growing markets with rich renewable energy resources, where both the need and the potential are great.”
The ownership group includes lead developers Aldwych International Ltd. of Great Britain and KP&P Africa BV of the Netherlands, with additional financial support from international development funds in Norway, Finland and Denmark.

As with Jasper in South Africa, Google said its wind power investment “will help bring much needed capacity and stability to Kenya’s energy supply, reducing reliance(=dependencia) on fossil fuels and emergency diesel generation while providing some of the most cost effective power in the country.”
In total, Google has committed more than $2.5 billion to 22 renewable energy projects around the world, mostly through power purchase agreements and direct ownership of wind and solar farms, officials said. Much of its purchased power goes to support massive Google data centers in the United States and Europe.
But the company sees a future in the developing world, where millions of new internet users are coming online annually.
PART OF AN AFRICAN INVESTMENT BOOM?

Experts have noted that sub-Saharan Africa is one of the largest untapped markets for advanced telecommunications and digital networks, and Google has already taken steps to build its presence across the continent, both physically and digitally.
For example, Google has invested millions of dollars to construct fiber optic networks in the capital cities of Kampala, Uganda, and Accra, Ghana, where internet speeds and wireless connectivity were previously limited by old or nonexistent infrastructure.

The effort, called Project Link, also created one of Africa’s most extensive high-speed Wi-Fi networks across Kampala, allowing mobile phone users to access the internet from 120 sites in the city.
By purchasing a multimillion-dollar stake in the Lake Turkana project, Google will become the first U.S. firm to invest in a major sub-Saharan wind energy project (General Electric Co. has committed to provide turbines to at least one other Kenyan wind farm still in the planning phases).
It will also establish Google in the vanguard among private investors in Africa’s fast-growing clean energy market, which experts believe could become one of the world’s strongest by the mid-21st century.

“lf you look at where Africa was five or 10 years ago, basically it was nowhere,” said Achim Steiner, former executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme and U.N. undersecretary-general, who now leads the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.
“Now we’re seeing billions of dollars of investment going in,” he added, in part thanks to firms like Google that have responded to “a very strong signal from African leaders” that the continent has both the capacity and the will to develop clean energy at scale.
Steiner noted that even before Google’s involvement, primary investors showed courage in moving ahead with Lake Turkana after the World Bank declined to provide loan guarantees to the project in 2012.

Instead, developers relied on backing from the European Investment Bank, the African Development Bank and the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp. (OPIC), which in 2014 committed $250 million in underwriting for Lake Turkana as part of its partnership with the Obama administration’s Power Africa initiative.

A spokeswoman for OPIC declined to comment on the project, saying in an email that the agency had not financially closed the deal.
Google also isn’t saying much about its aspirations for Lake Turkana, though the spokesperson made clear that the company intends to meet the terms of its purchase agreement with Vestas.

Google also noted that Lake Turkana serves as an anchor project for additional energy development in Kenya, including a more than 250-mile-long power transmission line that should link the wind farm to the Kenyan electricity grid and provide a conduit for another energy development in the Great Rift Valley, including thousands of megawatts of geothermal energy capacity.

Once it finalizes the purchase agreement next year, Google “will work collaboratively with our co-investors to ensure the success of the Lake Turkana project,” the spokesperson said. But she clarified that the company will have little involvement in the day-to-day operations of the wind farm and has not determined whether it will participate in broader decisions as part of an ownership group.

Google will earn a return on its investments through a share in profits earned from the sale of electricity to the national utility, Kenya Electricity Generating Co.
Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net. Click here for the original story.

Derretimento de geleiras

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/melting-ice-in-the-arctic-is-actually-a-nightmare-for-archaeologists/

Vocabulary:

1. storage pits
2. fairly short excavation season
3. projections are dire
4. that thaws during summer
5. not feasible to protect them

Text:
Melting Ice in the Arctic is Actually a Nightmare for Archaeologists

Alaskan archaeologist Anne Jensen explains why—and what’s at risk of being lost

Archaeologists who work in the Arctic are typically spoiled with pristinely preserved artifacts, but recently the blessing of ice has become a curse: the researchers are struggling to save the wealth of delicate material that is emerging from melting permafrost and eroding coastlines because of climate change. In northern Alaska there is only one full-time archaeologist: Anne Jensen, a senior scientist at Ukpeavik Iñupiat Corporation, one of the largest companies owned by Alaskan natives. Every summer Jensen excavates hard-to-access sites where Inuit people lived and hunted hundreds—even thousands—of years ago. This past summer Jensen and her colleagues returned to Walakpa, once the site of a coastal village that continues to reveal surprises because of erosion. They hope to save thousands of years' worth of cultural and environmental data from falling into the sea.

What did you find at Walakpa this time?
Walakpa could go back 4,500 years or more. So far houses, tent platforms and various storage pits have been found. Also, people threw trash down the hill, so you have these beautifully stratified middens, which are basically garbage piles. We spent a lot of time taking faunal samples for chemical analysis and radiocarbon dating.

What's the most challenging part of being an archaeologist on the North Slope?
Definitely the weather. You have a fairly (=razoavelmente) short excavation season—only between six weeks and two months long. The ground is frozen except for the upper layers, so after you remove the thawed materials, excavation goes more slowly.
Scientists have established that the Arctic is warming at a faster pace than the rest of the planet. How does that affect your job?

Everything has been so well preserved. Many organic remains—such as baleen strips, leather goods, ivory carvings, wood bows, bone fragments and even mummies—can be 1,000 years old or more, but they look like they were buried 10 years ago. That's because they froze quickly, which slows chemical and bacterial action, and then never unfroze.

But that's changing. Climate projections are dire(=medonho): some scientists say there will be no permafrost by the end of the century in locations such as Point Hope and Kivalina. Even at Point Barrow, the layer of soil that thaws(=descongela) during summer and freezes during winter is going to be close to six feet, which encompasses most archaeological material. That means everything is going to go through the freezing and thawing cycle every year, which is really destructive—and not just chemically. Ice crystals also mechanically deteriorate things. Plus, the sea level is rising. Plus, there's much higher risk of erosion for the coastal sites. Already across the northern coast of Alaska there are very few sites left, and many have been lost recently. Sites that people told me about 15 years ago are now gone.

What's at risk of being lost?
We may never be able to answer the question of how and why proto-Inuit people migrated from here to the eastern Arctic. And we're not only losing the cultural data. We basically look at the middens as frozen-tissue archives, which have a great deal of information about how ecosystems functioned at different points. Put that together with climate data and you can gradually piece together a much better understanding of ecodynamics. For example, you can figure out how walrus populations changed over time, which could inform today's hunting and conservation policies.

What could be done to protect and preserve these archaeological sites?
It's just not feasible (=factível) to protect them in the long term. Ukpeavik Iñupiat Corporation is going to great lengths to preserve Walakpa a little longer so we can excavate more of it. But not all village corporations have the resources we do. The only option at this point is to identify the sites we think have the best preservation and the highest potential to address a lot of scientific questions and figure out a way to salvage them. They can't be preserved.

Do you have a favorite artifact that you've discovered?
A little ivory toggle or fastener from a burial at Nuvuk, at the tip of Point Barrow (2). It's a really great little owl carving. The burial date is between A.D. 875 and 1080, so assuming the owl wasn't an even older family heirloom, it is about 1,000 years old.

Trump debate versus Hilary Clinton

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37610348

Vocabulary:

1. after remarks
2. led to outrage
3. Trump is sinking
4. have withdrawn their support
5. The two also sparred
6. would not advocate
7. who settled a sexual harassment
8. who claimed Mr Clinton

Text: US election: Top Republican Ryan 'won't defend Trump'

The most senior elected US Republican official has said he will not defend Donald Trump, after remarks (=observações) he made about groping women led to outrage (=ofensa).

House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan vowed to focus on defending seats in Congress, but did not end his endorsement of the party's nominee.

Earlier Democrat rival Hillary Clinton cast doubt on Mr Trump's apology for the remarks, made 11 years ago.
On Sunday, Mr Trump described his words as "locker-room talk".
In a bitter televised debate, a month before the US presidential election, Mr Trump denied he had groped anyone.
Mrs Clinton tweeted on Monday that, if he stood by this assertion, he was "clearly not sorry".

Meanwhile Mr Trump's running mate Mike Pence said he would stand by him despite an outcry over the remarks.
A 2005 video released on Friday revealed Mr Trump describing how he had sought to have sex with a married woman and making obscene comments about women.


Walking a fine line, by Anthony Zurcher, BBC News
Paul Ryan, the highest-ranking Republican officeholder, has officially given the signal. The SS Trump is sinking (=afundando), and it's time for members of his party to calmly, quietly head to the lifeboats.

Republican control of Congress must be maintained at all costs, the House speaker asserted in his call to congressional rank-and-file on Monday, lest Hillary Clinton have the ability to advance her party's legislative priorities and seat sympathetic Supreme Court justices without opposition.
It's notable that after reports he was mulling a full unendorsement of the Republican nominee, Mr Ryan is apparently trying to a walk a fine line between abandonment and loyalty to his putative standard-bearer. His decision evokes shades of 1996, when Republican nominee Bob Dole's doomed presidential campaign rolled along, oblivious to a party apparatus that was focusing exclusively on down-ballot races.

It's worth keeping in mind that while Mr Ryan is sounding the abandon-ship alarm, Donald Trump may not play the stoic captain watching from the bridge. He's shown no loyalty to a Republican establishment that never truly embraced him and may have no qualms with lashing out at erstwhile friend and foe alike in the campaign's final, turbulent days.

Asked about the video in the debate, Mr Trump turned his fire on Mrs Clinton's husband, ex-President Bill Clinton, whom he described as "abusive to women". She refused to address the comments.

At least 38 senior Republicans - including senators, members of Congress, and state governors - have withdrawn their support since the video surfaced on Friday.
'No blank cheque'
According to sources familiar with a conference call he held with congress members on Monday, Mr Ryan appeared to have accepted that Mrs Clinton would win the White House and wanted to make sure Republicans in Congress were strong enough to challenge her.

Mr Ryan said he would spend "his entire energy making sure that Hillary Clinton does not get a blank cheque with a Democrat-controlled Congress", the source said.
"You all need to do what's best for you in your district," he was quoted as telling colleagues.
Mike Pence at campaign stop in Ohio - 7 October

Mr Trump apologised for the remarks, and when pressed during the debate on whether he had engaged in sexual misconduct, he denied doing so.

But Mrs Clinton said his explanation that these were words not actions did not amount to an apology.
"If Trump stands by what he said about women as "locker room talk," he's clearly not sorry," she tweeted.
Meanwhile Mr Pence praised Mr Trump's honesty.
"I think last night he showed his heart to the American people. He said he apologised to his family, apologised to the American people, that he was embarrassed by it," he told CNN on Monday.

Earlier Mr Pence had described the remarks as indefensible.
The vice-presidential candidate said he was "honoured to stand with" Mr Trump and denied he had considered withdrawing from the race.

What were the main points of the debate?
When moderator Anderson Cooper asked about the video, Mr Trump denied ever sexually assaulting women, dismissing the remarks as "just words". Instead he focused on Bill Clinton's indiscretions.
Mrs Clinton said the explosive video "represents exactly who he is".
"With prior Republican nominees, I disagreed with them," she added, "but I never questioned their fitness to serve."

Mr Trump said if he won, he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Mrs Clinton and she would be in prison over her private email arrangements.

"Everything he just said is absolutely false but I'm not surprised," she responded. "It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country."
"Because you'd be in jail," he interrupted.
Mr Trump also said his Democratic rival "has tremendous hate in her heart" while criticising her for referring to his supporters as "deplorables".
Mrs Clinton said she apologised for the comment, adding: "My argument is not with his supporters, it's with him, about the hateful and divisive campaign he has run."

The two also sparred (=discutiram) on the conflict in Syria, Russian aggression, Trump's refusal to release his tax returns and his plan for the "extreme vetting" of immigrants arriving from countries with links to terrorism.

The evening concluded when an audience member asked the candidates to say one positive thing about each other.
Mrs Clinton said his children were a great reflection of him while Mr Trump called his opponent "a fighter" who never gives up.
An hour before the debate began, Mr Trump appeared at a news conference with women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct.
He joined three women who allege the former president sexually assaulted them and called the women "very courageous".

What else came up?
Mr Trump said he had not paid federal income tax in 18 years because he knew the tax code well
He constantly complained to the moderators that he was not getting fair treatment

On Syria, Mrs Clinton said she would not advocate (=to publicly support or suggest an idea, development, or way of doing something) the use of US ground forces
She promised that no-one making less than $250,000 would pay higher taxes but richer people would
Mr Trump also admitted he and running mate Mike Pence disagreed about use of force in Syria
But he refused to answer when moderator Martha Raddatz pressed him for a military strategy
Mrs Clinton also defended controversial remarks she made in a private speech that was made public in leaked emails on Saturday.

The transcript revealed she said a politician has a public and private position, but at the debate she said she had watched a film about Abraham Lincoln and was referring only to what he had done.
Clinton's Wall Street speeches leaked
So who are the women?
Mr Trump appeared with Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who settled (=estabeleceu) a sexual harassment suit against Mr Clinton for $850,000 in 1999 with no admission of guilt.
Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed Mr Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978, also appeared with Mr Trump.
Mr Clinton has denied the claim through his lawyer and no charges have ever been brought against him.
The third woman was Kathleen Willey, a former White House aide who said Mr Clinton groped her in his office in 1993, but had previously said it never happened.
Mr Clinton has also denied this claim.

Kathy Shelton, a fourth woman who spoke, encountered Mrs Clinton in a criminal case when she was 12 years old.
Early in Mrs Clinton's legal career, she was appointed to defend Ms Shelton's rapist, despite objections, and had his sentence reduced to a lesser charge.
Years later, an audio tape emerged of Mrs Clinton speaking with a reporter, in which she can be heard laughing about the case.
During one instance, she laughed after explaining that her client had passed a lie detector test, which convinced her to never trust them again.