Activists converge on Wisconsin for historic recall vote

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Facebook still down for some

22 hrs.

Suzanne Choney

Some Facebook users were still having trouble accessing the social network Friday?morning, with the site either not loading or loading slowly.?

On Thursday night, when users experienced loading issues for at least two hours, hacking group Anonymous commented via its Twitter account about the slowdown. It wasn't clear from the posts whether the hacktivists had anything to do with the problems or were just celebrating them.

"Looks like good old Facebook is having packet problems" and "Oh yeah ... RIP Facebook a new sound of tango down, b------," were among the tweets posted by @YourAnonNews on Twitter.

But on Friday, Anonymous took a different tone on Twitter:

And, at about 7:30 pm ET Friday,?a PR rep for Facebook wanted to make sure msnbc.com also saw this tweet, from what appears to be an Anonymous member in Sweden:

Another Facebook spokesperson would not address the Anonymous posts from Thursday night, only giving msnbc.com the following statement then:?

"Earlier today, some users briefly experienced issues loading the site.?The issues have since been resolved and everyone should now have access?to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience."

At approximately 9 a.m. ET Friday morning, the website?DownForEveryoneOrJustMe?showed that Facebook continued to suffer intermittent outages for some of the social network's nearly 1 billion users. Msnbc.com has again contacted Facebook for an update and will update this story when we hear back.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said the company is not sure what's behind the problems, "but I would note that in the past Facebook downtime or inaccessibility have not been for malicious reasons.

"My guess is that it's more likely that there were more down-to-earth internal reasons for the downtime rather than an attack," he told msnbc.com.

Some are criticizing Facebook for saying so very?little about the problems. Wrote?CNET's Dan Farber, in a commentary:

When Facebook goes down or has performance hiccups, as it did Thursday afternoon, many of the 900 million-plus inhabitants of its virtual world feel the pain. So do those who are depending on the social network to ring their cash registers and drive their marketing efforts. It appears that Facebook isn't keen on sharing the details with it constituents regarding what brought the site to its knees yesterday.?

?Apica,?a website?load testing and performance monitoring provider, confirmed Facebook's "performance issues, and?said Friday that the company checks?Facebook?s homepage "every 5 minutes for uptime and 30 minutes for response time from its East Coast Cloud Monitoring locations."?

The firm "recorded high response times and sporadic unavailability between the hours of 5:28 p.m. and 7:29 p.m. PST (Thursday), and between midnight and 3 a.m. PST (Friday). The site was unavailable at Apica?s checks at 5:28 p.m., 5:33 p.m., 7:19 p.m., and 7:29 p.m. (all times PST), and again at 6:47 a.m. PST. Apica?s monitoring also shows high spikes in response times???upwards of 30 seconds at some checks and even as high as 74 seconds???during these periods."

Update,?Friday PM ET: Apica said?performance checks of Facebook.com show that the site has "normalized since this morning. It recorded no additional fatal website attempts since 6:47 a.m. PST."

Check out Technolog, Gadgetbox, Digital Life and In-Game on?Facebook,?and on?Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

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San Diego teen wins National Spelling Bee

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Cancer Drugs: Better, Cheaper | www.ucsf.edu

June 1, 2012

Cancer drug development is known to be too slow, costly and fraught with failure. Now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is issuing recommendations for breast cancer trials that would substantially accelerate patient access to new medications while lowering the time and cost of drug development. The new regulatory guidelines are based in part on groundbreaking, national breast cancer research led by UCSF.

Laura Esserman, MD, MBA

The FDA ?draft guidance,?? issued last week, is aimed at helping medical researchers gain swifter approval for promising drugs in the early stages of development for breast cancer. The guidance represents the federal agency?s ?current thinking on this topic,?? according to the draft.

The guidelines are discussed in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The FDA?s new approach is based on a trial design being tested in a clinical study known as I-SPY 2, launched by UCSF in conjunction with a private-public partnership that includes the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical companies and academic medical centers.

I-SPY 2 combines personalized medicine with a novel investigational design to identify women at high risk of early breast cancer recurrence. It is underway at 19 major cancer research centers around the country.?

?Better options for patients with high-risk breast cancer are urgently needed,?? said Janet Woodcock, MD, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA. ?The FDA guidance explains how a promising drug identified in trials such as I-SPY 2 could be evaluated for FDA approval, so patients could have rapid access if the drug proved better than current treatments.??

Traditionally, patients with early-stage breast cancer must wait years to receive new cancer drugs, which are generally tested first in patients with later stage metastatic disease and approved for use in more curable, early stage cancer only after additional clinical trials.

It can take more than a decade to bring a new cancer drug to the market and cost more than $1 billion.

The need for new regulatory approaches was discussed in a December 2011 commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) co-authored by Woodcock and Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

?The major losers in this inefficient approach are the patients who would benefit from new treatments,?? wrote Esserman and Woodcock in their JAMA article.

But combining novel trial designs with new approaches for accelerated approval would hasten the pace through the research pipeline to bring medications to patients at far lower costs, the authors wrote.

The new FDA recommendations would speed up approval of drugs tested prior to surgical removal of tumors in certain types of high-risk patients with localized, early stage disease. The guidance centers on neoadjuvant therapy for breast cancer ? the administration of therapeutic agents prior to surgery. The FDA said it may now grant approval to medications that have shown clinical benefit, based on data from patients receiving this type of neoadjuvant treatment whose invasive cancers have disappeared by the time of surgery, termed ?pathologic complete response.??

In I-SPY 2, a patient?s cancerous tumors are left in place for approximately six months, rather than being immediately removed surgically. Several new agents are tested in combination with standard chemotherapy in an effort to improve the chance of the tumor shrinking and completely disappearing ? before surgery ? in women with high risk breast cancer. The trial is designed to learn which patients will have the most benefit from new targeted therapies, which will help to speed access under the FDA?s new guidelines.

I-SPY 2 can test new treatments in half the traditional time, and with significantly fewer participants which will dramatically lower costs.

?We are truly excited to see that the FDA is supportive of trials like I-SPY 2,?? said Esserman, the co-principal investigator of I-SPY 2. ?This really moves us much closer to getting the right drugs to the right patients at a time when they can be cured.???

The FDA is accepting comment on the new recommendations through July.

?This guidance represents the work of literally hundreds of individuals who are dedicated to harnessing the best of science and medicine to achieve real progress against cancer,?? said Anna D. Barker, PhD, professor and director of Transformative Healthcare Networks and co-director of the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative at Arizona State University. She is the former deputy director of the National Cancer Institute.

Scientists from the National Cancer Institute, FDA, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as breast cancer patient advocates also contributed to the design of I-SPY 2, which is managed by FNIH and Quantum Leap Healthcare Collaborative with support from Quintiles, a global biopharmaceuticals service provider. Funding for I-SPY 2 is provided by non-profit foundations including The Safeway Foundation, several pharmaceutical companies, and other private sector and philanthropic donors.

Related Links:

I-SPY 2

Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center

US Launches Novel Clinical Trial to Rapidly Screen Promising Drugs for Breast Cancer Patients

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Pusha T's Making 'Superhero' Music, The-Dream Teases

'We just need him to be this guy for us right now, because I need that music in my car,' Dream tells MTV News of Push's album.
By Nadeska Alexis with reporting by Rahman Dukes

The-Dream and Pusha T
Photo: MTV News

Pusha T is still surprised that his opportunity to drop a solo album came around so quickly. But since he has the chance, the Clipse rapper and G.O.O.D. Music signee has immersed himself in a new learning experience with Kanye West and The-Dream, one he's confident will result in a classic LP.

Between the mad genius that is Kanye and the R&B storyteller that is The-Dream, Pusha might've just hit the production jackpot.

"I've learned so much about song structure from Dream and I've learned so much from 'Ye about finding the most colorful parts of your rhymes, editing it down and making sure, like, all the best parts of the rhyme are right in your face," he told MTV News during a studio session with Mr. Terius Nash in Atlanta. "I've just totally taken this [attitude of] sitting back and absorbing everything they say."

After just a few sessions with Dream, Pusha said he has learned to accept the creative criticism as a tool to push further. "Sometimes [a track is] wrong. Sometimes it's over-rapped and [The-Dream] will tell you, 'Nah, stay right here. Stay within these lines, in these perimeters right here.' This sh-- is school, man; it's real live school to me."

What might be school for Pusha, however, is just another spiritual experience for The-Dream, who's infamous for crafting engrossing narrative across his projects.

"It's [being] spiritual about it and I think it's just a timing thing," The-Dream explained of how he builds the perfect songs. "It has a lot to do with what we want to hear, so it wasn't [like I wouldn't] allow Pusha to get off on rapping. We just need [him] to be this guy for us right now, because I need that music in my car. I'm R&B, but I grew up on Bankhead and I was riding around with UGK in my car, so I know what that real sh-- is. I know how it makes you feel like a superhero."

"I want to feel like I'm literally beating my chest out the car," he added. "You look over in my car — I'm mean-mugging you, you mean-mugging me, and I got Pusha in my deck. That's how I want to feel. And so I was just providing that feeling, I just wanted to capture it in each song. We need [him] to say this because [he's] talented enough to do it."

Thus far, we know that a few titles on the album will tentatively include "40 Acres" and "Automatic." But Pusha, who recently dropped the fiery "Exodus 23:1," is sure that the entire project will be cohesive and, of course, classic. "At the end of the day, we're trying to make classic material," he said. "Everybody who's here is tuned into this project — period. It's about being cohesive, and cohesive musicality is just not happening right now."

Since Pusha and The-Dream are hitting it off so well on this album, we asked if we might expect any future collaborations? "Man, I called him about the next album, already," Pusha said without hesitation.

And to that, The-Dream said with a laugh, "We will grow old together."

Are you excited for Pusha's solo album? Tell us in the comments!

Related Artists

• Pusha T
• The-Dream

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DNA-wrangling robot performs 200,000 experiments a week

1 hr.

Devin Coldewey

When you think of robots in agriculture, you likely?think of automatic threshers, fruit picking machines and corn huskers. But a recent addition at an agricultural research center is doing fiddly lab work all day long -- at 100 times the rate of a full-time researcher.

There is much in science that requires a human touch: designing experiments, collecting field samples, and assessing the health of creatures in a study, for instance. But there are also many tedious portions, like running the same experiment on 50 different dishes of bacteria, and of course the inevitable sterilizing of lab equipment.

These tasks, more manual than intellectual labor (though no less critical to the end product), are beginning to be handed off to more capable, less error-prone hands. Hands that will work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no less.

What the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is looking into is how certain plants, like wheat and rice, activate different genes encoded into their DNA. If they can learn how a?plant, say, responds to cold weather?by flowering early, they can use that information to help produce?an improved plant with a shorter growth period. Dr. Todd Mockler's lab is working on improving biofuel plants like switchgrass, which may be critical to green energy in coming decades.

The experiment being performed is one that has a long history in biology, but has always been performed manually. It's called Yeast 1 hybridizing, and it consists of essentially copying and pasting short strands of plant DNA into yeast's well-known genetic code, and letting the yeast multiply. They can then test the effects of certain molecules?on just those bits of DNA.

It's a well-known technique, but not without its weaknesses. The main problem is that if you have a lot of material to check, you're looking at thousands upon thousands of experiments as you exhaust every possible combination of DNA snippet and activating molecule. This means months of mind-numbing work as lab technicians pipette substances from one test tube to another. On the other hand, as Dr. Mockler told me,?it's very valuable when you get results, because they're not simulated; it's real DNA reacting as it would in the wild.

A perfect match for a tireless machine, then. A human researcher working 40 hours a week can perform the monotonous testing at a rate of about 2000 per week. But in April, they installed a robot arm and a number of other automated machines, which work together to perform 200,000 such tests weekly. Dr. Mockler said he hoped to bring about desired changes in plants, such as improved yield per plant or better resistance to drought, within a few years rather than a decade or two.

But although the robot is powerful and never sleeps, it's still just a robot. Even this highly sophisticated machine can only do what it's told. Dr. Mockler explains:

There?s always going to be a place for the tinkering scientist inventing something new, doing something on a small scale to develop the technology to the point where you can automate it. But the automation will definitely lead to faster discoveries.?

In other words, it'll be a long time before our robots are doing the brain work, not just the tedious parts after we've all gone to bed. In the meantime, Lewis and Clark (as the robot and its smaller helper bot have been named) will free up hands and brains to do more valuable human-type work.

Watch a video of the robot in action below. The Donald Danforth Plant center has more information about their research and the robots?here at their infographics page, and posts frequent updates to its?Facebook page.

And for those uneasy about the prospect of this type of?high-speed modification, it's worth noting that what the lab is doing isn't exactly modifying the plant, but learning how it works through careful experimentation and then selecting for certain traits. Gregor Mendel, grandfather of modern genetic science, did the same thing -- albeit at a slightly slower pace.

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

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Waitress gets half-million dollar tax refund

Virginia Hopkins is a great waitress and she's used to getting great tips. But the one she got from her Uncle Sam on Tuesday nearly knocked her to the floor.

Virginia is owed a tax refund of $754, for which she has been waiting eagerly. But the check she opened was for more. A lot more: $434,712.

"I think I would have to work most of my life to earn that much money," she says. "Even with undeclared tips," she adds with a laugh.

Virginia's tips aside, she is clearly one of the most honest waitresses in the country. She didn't consider keeping the money even for a moment.

The problem is she didn't quite know how to go about returning half a million dollars to the U.S. government.

Virginia was on her way to work anyway, so she took the check with her. Virginia has been waiting tables at Johnny's Downtown Restaurant, a Cleveland institution, since it opened 19 years ago.

"I tell people I used to be a tall, slim brunette," she jokes. "Now I stand four-feet-eight with white hair. This is what happens after 20 years of waitressing."

She may not be tall or brunette any more, but she hasn't lost any of the personality that makes her one of the restaurant's favorite employees.

"She was laughing" when she brought the check in, says fellow employee Mary Lou Adams, who's been a bookkeeper at Johnny's for as long as Virginia has been a waitress. "She said, you'll never believe what I got in the mail."

Both workers and diners at the restaurant joined in the discussion of what Virginia should do.

"You have a million new best friends," Virginia says. "My grandchildren especially. They're teenagers." Her grandchildren thought half a million dollars just might get them into the sold-out Cleveland concert of the boy band One Direction.

It was not to be.

It was decided the best plan was for Virginia to hand carry the check into Cleveland's IRS office the next day.

"Would you believe I had to give them a photo id to prove it was me before I could give it back?" she says. "Otherwise they wouldn't even talk to me."

Once she'd convinced them she wasn't trying to scam the U.S. government by bringing in a large check, she says the IRS people were very polite. They took the check and promised to thoroughly investigate the error.

But Virginia will never learn why she was rich for a day. For privacy reasons, she says, the IRS will not reveal the results of their investigation.

Today is Virginia's day off. She says she's spending it "readjusting."

"It's not easy being poor after you've been rich," she jokes. But she did get something out of the experience.

A local television reporter happened to be eating at the restaurant when she came in with her riches, so now Virginia is a Cleveland celebrity.

Is she getting better tips?

"Last night was a good night," she admits. "Please tell me fortune goes with fame."

Virginia is still waiting for her $754 refund.

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