Carl Lewis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Lewis

Frederick Carlton "Carl" Lewis (born July 1, 1961) is an American former track and field athlete and United NationsGoodwill Ambassador, who won 10 Olympic medals, including nine gold, and 10 World Championships medals, including eight gold. His career spanned from 1979 when he first achieved a world ranking to 1996 when he last won an Olympic title and subsequently retired. Lewis became an actor and has appeared in a number of films.Lewis is a vegan and attributes his best performances in 1991 to his switching to a vegan diet.

Lewis was a dominant sprinter and long jumper who topped the world rankings in the 100 m, 200 m and long jumpevents frequently from 1981 to the early 1990s, was named Athlete of the Year by Track & Field News in 1982, 1983, and 1984, and set world records in the 100 m, 4 × 100 m and 4 × 200 m relays.

His world record in the indoor long jump has stood since 1984 and his 65 consecutive victories in the long jump achieved over a span of 10 years is one of the sport’s longest undefeated streaks. Over the course of his athletics career, Lewis broke ten seconds for the 100 metres 15 times and 20 seconds for the 200 metres 10 times.

His accomplishments have led to numerous accolades, including being voted "Sportsman of the Century" by the International Olympic Committee and being named "Olympian of the Century" by the American sports magazine Sports Illustrated.

He also helped transform track and field from its nominal amateur status to its current professional status, enabling athletes to have more lucrative and longer-lasting careers. In 2011 he attempted to run for a seat as a Democrat in the New Jersey Senate, but was removed from the ballot due to the state's residency requirement.Lewis owns a marketing and branding company named C.L.E.G., which markets and brands products and services including his own.

A famous Sergei Bubka Quote.

Sergei Bubka

Sergey Bubka.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Bubka

Serhiy Nazarovych Bubka (born 4 December 1963) is a Ukrainian former pole vaulter. He represented the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, was twice named Athlete of the Year by Track & Field News, and in 2012 was one of 24 athletes inducted as inaugural members of the International Association of Athletics Federations Hall of Fame.

Sergey Bubka broke the world record for men's pole vaulting 35 times (17 outdoor and 18 indoor records).

Bubka won six consecutive IAAF World Championships, an Olympics gold . He was the first pole vaulter to clear 6.0 metres and 6.10 metres. 

He held the world record of 6.15 meters, set on 21 February 1993 in Donetsk, Ukraine for almost 21 years until France's Renaud Lavillenie cleared 6.16 metres on 15 February 2014 at the same meet in the same arena.

Sergey Bubka

                                                               Sergey Bubka statue,Donetsk

Would You Pay $84,000 for a New Liver?

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-29/would-you-pay-84-000-for-a-new-liver

There’s a new drug called Sovaldi, manufactured by Gilead Sciences Inc., that can cure hepatitis C. Not every case of it, mind you, but most. 
Up until recently, treatments for hepatitis C were modestly effective. Patients were given a cocktail of drugs plus injections of interferon for 24 - 48 weeks and cure rates range from 40 - 80%, depending on the severity of the disease. However, these drugs are poorly tolerated, particularly the interferon component which causes flu-like symptoms in patients. As a result, many with hepatitis C often eschew treatment.
However, there is new hope for hepatitis C patients. A breakthrough drug from Gilead, Sovaldi, is a pill that cures hepatitis C in more than 90% of patients in just 12 weeks.

This is exciting news, because 3.2 million people in the U.S. have a chronic hepatitis infection, and statistics suggest that 5 to 20 percent of them will end up with cirrhosis of the liver, and 4 percent will develop liver cancer. Those are big numbers, which makes Sovaldi a big deal.

The catch is that Sovaldi is priced at $84,000 for a full course of treatment. Medicaid programs and prisons are dithering about whether to pay for it, and insurers aren’t so happy, either. The implication is that Sovaldi should cost a lot less so that insurers and the government don’t have to pay so much for it.

As always in the development of pharmaceuticals, we have once again washed up on the shoals of marginal versus average cost pricing. Drug development has a very high fixed cost, thanks to all the research needed to find drugs and bring them to market. The cost of actually making the pills, on the other hand, is trivial. So the optimal pricing strategy -- for everyone, not just pharmaceutical companies -- is to charge rich countries a lot and sell the drug at near-marginal cost in poor countries. If the rich countries insist that they should also get the drug near-marginal cost, then they benefit in the short term. But over the long run, the company loses money on its products, and then we don’t get any new drugs.

Here’s a drug that likely cost hundreds of millions to develop and bring to market. It has a 10-year patent life to recoup its costs and make some money for the developers. 

Instead of complaining that Sovaldi is expensive, we should be discussing trade-offs. Do we want to cure hundreds of thousands of cases of cirrhosis, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars? Are we willing to risk reducing the return on pharmaceutical research to so low that we lose a lot of valuable new drugs?

That’s a debate worth having. “Should people in the helping professions make a decent income” probably isn’t.

Singapore Home Prices May Fall More: Standard Chartered.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-29/singapore-home-prices-may-drop-further-standard-chartered-says.html

Singapore’s home prices will probably fall further before the housing curbs introduced in the past five years are scaled back, Standard Chartered Plc (STAN)’s Southeast Asia head said.

“You would start to take away some of these measures if price growth reaches a certain level of equilibrium,” Lim Cheng Teck, chief executive officer for Asean or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said in an interview in Singapore yesterday. “I don’t think we are at an equilibrium yet.”

The city’s private home prices dropped by the most in almost five years following a campaign that started in 2009 to curb property market speculation, with government curbs ranging from taxes on property sales, additional levies on foreign buyers and mortgage limits.

Some developers that have cut prices by 10 percent to 15 percent are drawing buyers, he said.

The curbs “really prevented the bubble from forming,”Standard Chartered’s Lim said. “This downward adjustment in prices is not a very drastic and sharp drop. That would add to the stability of the market.”

Private yachts are berthed outside luxury homes and condominium apartments at Sentosa Cove in Singapore.

Scary Statistic: China May Have 1 Billion Drivers.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-30/scary-statistic-china-may-have-1-billion-drivers.html

If Beijing’s bumper-to-bumper traffic looks scary now, imagine this: one billion Chinese drivers.

That’s the number of people that Shi Jianhua, deputy secretary-general of the state-backedChina Association of Automobile Manufacturers, forecasts could have driving licenses in the country in the next 10 to 15 years. There were about 280 million last year, according to the Ministry of Public Security.

While having a license doesn’t necessarily lead to owning a car, the estimate is a reminder of the magnitude of the challenges Chinese policy makers face in battling air pollution and traffic congestion. 

China currently has enough roads and related infrastructure to accommodate at most 300 million vehicles, Shi said at a forum in Beijing today. The number of civilian vehicles will rise to 200 million units in 2020 in China, from 127 million last year, according to CAAM.

Cars sit in traffic in the Futian district of Shenzhen, China.

                                              Traffic moves along a road at dusk in Beijing.

Immune Therapy’s Cancer Promise Creates Research Rush.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-29/immune-therapy-s-cancer-promise-creates-research-rush.html

A new class of medicines that help the body’s own immune cells fight tumors could target a wide set of cancers, opening a $35 billion market for Merck (MRK) & Co.,Bristol-Myers (BMY) Squibb Co., AstraZeneca Plc and Roche Holding AG.

The drugmakers will use the world’s largest meeting of cancer doctors, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, to stake their claim on the new technology, which aims to interrupt cancer’s ability to switch off immune system cells that might otherwise attack it.

For years, the idea was only seen as useable against a handful of uncommon tumors. Now, new evidence the drugs may work in a wider range of malignancies, advanced in just the last two years, has spurred Merck, Bristol-Myers, AstraZeneca and Roche to begin at least 78 clinical trials. While the research, with more than 19,000 patients, could cost the four companies as much as $1.3 billion, the payoff would be the creation of a new market that Citigroup Inc. (C) analysts have predicted could reach $35 billion a year.

One reason for the excitement is that the body’s response to immune therapy tends be long lasting, said Jill O’Donnell-Tormey, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Cancer Research Institute in New York. The belief is that once the immune system is properly activated against an invading cancer, it will remember what a tumor cell looks like, she said.

The idea that cancer can be tamed without brutal chemotherapy or heavy-duty radiation is enticing.

Off Switch

The theory behind the therapies is fairly simple. Under normal circumstances, a protein called PD-1 acts as a switch to shut off the action of attack cells within the immune system that respond when the body is attacked by a foreign invader. It turns out that some cancer cells get around that with a unique ability to flick the off switch.

The drugs being developed work by either binding to the PD-1 protein to protect it from manipulation by tumor cells, or by hitting a related protein called PD-L1 that some tumor cells deploy to trigger the PD-1 switch.

The cost of early-phase testing in cancer generally ranges from $25,000 to $40,000 per patient, with mid-stage trials running $60,000 to $80,000, said Greg Dombal, chief operating officer for Boston-based Halloran Consulting Group. A final-phase trial can cost at least $100,000 a patient for recruitment, genetic tests, establishing new databases and monitoring progress with scanning equipment.

Obese or Overweight People Top 2.1 Billion Worldwide

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-28/obese-or-overweight-people-top-2-1-billion-worldwide.html

About 2.1 billion people, or almost one-third of the world’s population, were obese or overweight last year, researchers estimated after examining data from 183 countries.

The estimated number of overweight or obese people almost tripled from 857 million in 1980, according to the analysis published today in The Lancet. The heaviest country was the U.S., accounting for about 13 percent of the world’s obese people, followed by China and India, which together represent 15 percent, according to the study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Obesity can raise the risk of diabetes, osteoarthritis, heart disease and cancer, among other health-threatening conditions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Being overweight was estimated to have caused 3.4 million deaths worldwide, said Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.

BMI Measure

The researchers analyzed data from international surveys on obesity that included height and weight as well as national reports and medical research. They based their analysis on body mass index, a measure of weight and height.

A woman 5 feet, 4 inches tall weighing 175 pounds would have a BMI of 30. A BMI of 30 or more is considered obese, while a BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

More than half of the world’s 671 million obese people live in the U.S., China, India, Russia, Brazil,Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan and Indonesia. 

Heterotrophic Organisms.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/178597/ecosystem

Heterotrophs are the consumers of the ecosystem; they cannot make their own food. They use, rearrange, and ultimately decompose the complex organic materials built up by the autotrophs. All animals(Human Beings) and fungi are heterotrophs, as are most bacteria and many other microorganisms.
Organic matter generated by autotrophs directly or indirectly sustains heterotrophic organisms. 

The fundamental source of energy in almost all ecosystems is radiant energy from the sun. The energy of sunlight is used by the ecosystem’s autotrophic, or self-sustaining, organisms. Consisting largely of green vegetation, these organisms are capable of photosynthesis—i.e., they can use the energy of sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into simple, energy-rich carbohydrates. The autotrophs use the energy stored within the simple carbohydrates to produce the more complex organic compounds, such as proteins, lipids, and starches, that maintain the organisms’ lifeprocesses. The autotrophic segment of the ecosystem is commonly referred to as the producer level.

Together, the autotrophs and heterotrophs form various trophic (feeding) levels in the ecosystem: the producer level, composed of those organisms that make their own food; the primary consumerlevel, composed of those organisms that feed on producers; the secondary consumer level, composed of those organisms that feed on primary consumers; and so on. The movement of organic matter and energy from the producer level through various consumer levels makes up a food chain. For example, a typical food chain in a grassland might be grass (producer) → mouse (primary consumer) → snake (secondary consumer) → hawk (tertiary consumer). Actually, in many cases the food chains of the ecosystem overlap and interconnect, forming what ecologists call a food web. The final link in all food chains is made up of decomposers, those heterotrophs that break down dead organisms and organic wastes. A food chain in which the primary consumer feeds on living plants is called a grazing pathway; that in which the primary consumer feeds on dead plant matter is known as a detritus pathway. Both pathways are important in accounting for the energy budget of the ecosystem.

Ecosystem.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/178597/ecosystem

• ecosystem, the complex of living organisms, their physical environment, and all their interrelationships in a particular unit of space.
• A brief treatment of ecosystems follows. 
• An ecosystem can be categorized into its abiotic constituents, including minerals, climate, soil, water, sunlight, and all other nonliving elements, and its biotic constituents, consisting of all its living members. Linking these constituents together are two major forces: the flow of energy through the ecosystem, and the cycling of nutrients within the ecosystem.

 A food chain in the ocean begins with tiny one-celled organisms called diatoms. They make their own food from sunlight. Shrimplike creatures eat the diatoms. Small fish eat the shrimplike creatures, and bigger fish eat the small fish.

Figure 2: Transfer of energy through an ecosystem. At each trophic level only a small proportion of energy (approximately 10 percent) is transferred to the next level.

Anabolic Steroids.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabolic_steroid

Anabolic steroids, technically known as anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), are drugs that are structurally related to the cyclic steroid ring system and have similar effects to testosterone in the body. They increase protein within cells, especially in skeletal muscles. Anabolic steroids also have androgenic and virilizing properties, including the development and maintenance of masculine characteristics such as the growth of the vocal cords, testicles (primary sexual characteristics) and body hair (secondary sexual characteristics). The word anabolic comes from the Greek ἀναβολή anabole, "that which is thrown up, mound", and the word androgenic from the Greek ἀνδρός andros, "of a man" + -γενής -genes, "born".

Anabolic steroids were first made in the 1930s, and are now used therapeutically in medicine to stimulate muscle growth and appetite, induce male puberty and treat chronic wasting conditions, such as cancer and AIDS. The American College of Sports Medicine acknowledges that AAS, in the presence of adequate diet, can contribute to increases in body weight, often as lean mass increases and that the gains in muscular strength achieved through high-intensity exercise and proper diet can be additionally increased by the use of AAS in some individuals.

Health risks can be produced by long-term use or excessive doses of anabolic steroids.These effects include harmful changes in cholesterol levels (increased low-density lipoprotein and decreased high-density lipoprotein), acne, high blood pressure, liver damage (mainly with oral steroids), and dangerous changes in the structure of the left ventricle of the heart.Conditions pertaining to hormonal imbalances such as gynecomastia and testicular atrophy may also be caused by anabolic steroids.

Ergogenic uses for anabolic steroids in sports, racing, and bodybuilding as performance-enhancing drugs are controversial because of their adverse effects and the potential to gain unfair advantage is considered cheating. Their use is referred to as doping and banned by all major sporting bodies. For many years, AAS have been by far the most detected doping substances in IOC-accredited laboratories. In countries where AAS are controlled substances, there is often a black market in which smuggled, clandestinely manufactured or even counterfeit drugs are sold to users.

Chemical structure of the natural anabolic hormone testosterone, 17β-hydroxy-4-androsten-3-one

Chemical structure of the synthetic steroid methandrostenolone(Dianabol). 17α-Methylation (upper-right corner) enhances oral bioavailability.

Anabolism.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/22204/anabolism

Anabolism, also called biosynthesis,  the sequences of enzyme-catalyzed reactions by which relatively complex molecules are formed in living cells from nutrients with relatively simple structures. Anabolic processes, which include the synthesis of such cell components as carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, require energy in the form of energy-rich compounds (e.g.,adenosine triphosphate) that are produced during breakdown processes (see catabolism). In growing cells, anabolic processes dominate over catabolic ones; in nongrowing cells, a balance exists between the two.

Catabolism.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/98989/catabolism

catabolism,  the sequences of enzyme-catalyzed reactions by which relatively large molecules in living cells are broken down, or degraded. Part of the chemical energy released during catabolic processes is conserved in the form of energy-rich compounds (e.g., adenosine triphosphate [ATP]).

Energy is released in three phases. In the first, such large molecules as those of proteins, polysaccharides, and lipids are broken down; small amounts of energy are released in the form ofheat in these processes. In the second phase, the small molecules are oxidized, liberating chemical energy to form ATP as well as heat energy, to form one of the three compounds: acetate, oxaloacetate, or α-oxoglutarate. These are oxidized to carbon dioxide during the third phase, a cyclic reaction sequence called the tricarboxylic acid (or Krebs) cycle. Hydrogen atoms or electrons from the intermediate compounds formed during the cycle are transferred (through a succession of carrier molecules) ultimately to oxygen, forming water. These events, the most important means for generating ATP in cells, are known as terminal respiration and oxidative phosphorylation.

                     acetyl coenzyme A: biological energy carriers

Figure 1: Biological energy carriers.

anabolism: anabolism and catabolism of glucose and glycogen

Figure 9: Catabolism and biosynthesis of glucose and glycogen. At left, reactions peculiar to catabolism. At right, reactions peculiar to anabolism. Numbers in brackets refer to reactions explained in text.

                                              catabolism: pathways of E. coli

Figure 2: Pathways for the catabolism of nutrients by Escherichia coli.