Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony

Elon Musk doesn’t just want to send a person to Mars — he wants to send 80,000. According to Space.com, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX spilled details about his hopes for a future Mars colony during a talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Nov. 16.

Earlier this year, SpaceX became the first private U.S. company to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. Musk has never been shy about his ambitions to take human colonists to another planet, mentioning in the past that he wants to provide flights to Mars for about $500,000 a person. But now he’s talking about building a small-city-sized settlement on the Red Planet, starting with a 10-person crew in the coming decades to begin establishing and building infrastructure.

That first flight would be expensive and risky but “once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars,” Musk told Space.com. ”Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case.” Musk added that he sees the future 80,000-person colony as a public-private enterprise costing roughly $36 billion.

Science-fiction inspired plans are one thing. Musk still has many challenges ahead of him before such a scheme could become reality, including figuring out exactly how to deal with radiation on the way to Mars, how to land humans on the planet’s surface, and how to keep them alive once there. Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson interviewed Musk in the November issue, where he outlines a few ways that could help us get there:

Chris Anderson: How were you drawn to space as your next venture?

Elon Musk: In 2002, once it became clear that PayPal was going to get sold, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, the entrepreneur Adeo Ressi, who was actually my college housemate. I’d been staying at his home for the weekend, and we were coming back on a rainy day, stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway. He was asking me what I would do after PayPal. And I said, well, I’d always been really interested in space, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do as an individual. But, I went on, it seemed clear that we would send people to Mars. Suddenly I began to wonder why it hadn’t happened already. Later I went to the NASA website so I could see the schedule of when we’re supposed to go. [Laughs.]

Anderson: And of course there was nothing.

Musk: At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing. It seemed crazy.

Anderson: NASA doesn’t have the budget for that anymore.

Musk: Since 1989, when a study estimated that a manned mission would cost $500 billion, the subject has been toxic. Politicians didn’t want a high-priced federal program like that to be used as a political weapon against them.

Anderson: Their opponents would call it a boondoggle.

Musk: But the United States is a nation of explorers. America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

Anderson: We all leaped into the unknown to get here.

Musk: So I started with a crazy idea to spur the national will. I called it the Mars Oasis missions. The idea was to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars, packed with dehydrated nutrient gel that could be hydrated on landing. You’d wind up with this great photograph of green plants and red background—the first life on Mars, as far as we know, and the farthest that life’s ever traveled. It would be a great money shot, plus you’d get a lot of engineering data about what it takes to maintain a little greenhouse and keep plants alive on Mars. If I could afford it, I figured it would be a worthy expenditure of money, with no expectation of financial return.

Read the rest of the interview.

Image: SpaceX

Source: Space.com

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Beyonce to direct documentary about herself for HBO

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Pop superstar Beyonce is stepping behind the camera to direct a behind-the-scenes documentary about her personal and professional life, U.S. cable channel HBO said on Monday.

The currently untitled film will debut on February 16 and show the Grammy-winning singer’s life in the recording studio, readying for live performances and running her own TV and music production company.

“Everybody knows Beyonce’s music, but few know Beyonce the person,” HBO Programming President Michael Lombardo said in a statement. “Along with electrifying footage of Beyonce on stage, this unique special looks beyond the glamour to reveal a vibrant, vulnerable, unforgettable woman.”

The documentary will also feature moments in the “Crazy in Love” singer’s family life and first-person footage Beyonce captured on her laptop.

Beyonce, 31, who is married to hip hop artist and mogul Jay-Z, will headline the Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans on February 3.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Andrew Hay)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Panel Lukewarm on Hepatitis C Screening for Baby Boomers

An influential advisory committee has given only lukewarm support to a government recommendation that all baby boomers be tested for hepatitis C.

In a draft opinion Monday, the United States Preventive Services Task Force said that clinicians may “consider offering” hepatitis C screening to adults born between 1945 and 1965.

That falls short of the recommendation made in August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all adults in that age group should get a one-time test to see if they are infected.

The task force is made up of outside experts appointed by the government, and its recommendations can in some cases carry more weight than those of the C.D.C. Had hepatitis C screening for baby boomers received a stronger recommendation from the task force, health plans would have been required to pay for it under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, with no charge to the patient.

Some advocates of wider screening said they feared the new opinion would be used by insurers to deny reimbursement for testing and would slow efforts to ferret out hidden cases of hepatitis C at a time when more effective and tolerable treatments are being developed.

The recommendation “could derail the hard work that the C.D.C. has put in in proving the case that it’s smart for baby boomers to get a one-time hepatitis C test,” said Martha B. Saly, director of the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, a coalition of more than 200 groups dedicated to eradicating hepatitis. Some drug companies, which would benefit from wider screening, are associate members of the round table.

Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, of the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the task force, said differences in the recommendations were merely a matter of degree. “I would say our findings are compatible,” she said.

The C.D.C. declined to comment, saying the opinion was still a draft.

About 3 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, but 45 percent to 85 percent of them do not know it, according to the C.D.C. The virus can cause scarring of the liver and liver cancer, though typically not until decades after the initial infection, and not in everyone. About 15,000 people a year die from hepatitis C.

The C.D.C. used to recommend screening only for people most likely to be infected: intravenous drug users or people who got blood transfusions before 1992 when testing of donated blood for the virus began.

But a lot of cases were missed because people did not remember risky behaviors from decades ago or did not tell their doctors.

So in August the C.D.C. recommended that all baby boomers be tested. Although only about 3 percent of this age group is infected, they account for about three quarters of all cases. Screening them would detect more than 800,000 infections, which could then potentially be treated, averting many cases of liver disease and about 120,000 deaths.

But the task force said there were no clinical trials or studies directly proving that screening asymptomatic adults would reduce liver disease or deaths.

It noted that the C.D.C. recommendation was based partly on computer models that might have overestimated how many people with hepatitis C would develop liver cirrhosis or die, and therefore overstated the number of cases or deaths that could be prevented.

The task force concluded that there would be at least a small benefit from screening baby boomers and gave the recommendation a grade of C, meaning “for most individuals without signs or symptoms there is likely to be only a small benefit from this service.”

The task force provoked controversy in the past with recommendations against screening for prostate cancer and against routine mammograms for women under 50.

In 2004, the task force recommended against hepatitis C screening of adults not considered at high risk.

The draft, posted on the task force Web site, will be open for comment until Dec. 24. The evidence behind the recommendation is being published in The Annals of Internal Medicine.

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Puerto Rico Races to Rescue Its Pension Fund

Puerto Rico is fighting to stay afloat in a rising sea of debt.

Its economy is sputtering. Its population is shrinking. Its recent election is disputed. Its public pension fund is perilously low on cash. The American territory has just been through a brutal five-year recession, something not experienced in the United States as a whole since the 1930s.

Desperate to raise cash, Puerto Rican officials have been selling off anything they can: two toll roads and the main airport so far.

To bring in tax revenue, they are trying to lure people out of the underground economy. Coffee shops, hairdressers, even outdoor market stalls are being required to issue printed receipts with every sale. The receipts carry a lottery number, with a chance to win cars or cash, as an incentive to get shoppers to pay the island’s 7 percent sales tax.

Though many of Puerto Rico’s problems are reminiscent of Greece’s — tax noncompliance, a stagnant economy, years of issuing long-term debt to cover short-term payments — investors have had a nearly insatiable appetite for its bonds.

But now their support is dwindling. Some big investors are pruning their holdings. That is beginning to widen the cost of borrowing for Puerto Rico relative to other states and municipalities, which are benefiting from a big decline in borrowing costs. The interest rate its 30-year bonds now pay is about 2.5 percentage points higher than other municipal borrowers’, up from a difference of just 1.5 percentage points at the beginning of 2012, according to Municipal Market Data.

The possibility of a credit downgrade also hangs in the air, something that could lead to more selling.

“There is no specific event looming on the horizon,” said Alan Schankel, a managing director at Janney Capital Markets in Philadelphia. “But it’s a problem of immense magnitude, and it’s very challenging to sit here and see how they work their way out of it.”

Puerto Rico needs to be able to issue bonds at attractive rates to cover its short-term financing needs. Perhaps more important, it has to figure out how to salvage its retirement funds. After shortchanging them for years, it now has the weakest major public pension system in America.

The main fund, which serves about 250,000 government workers, past and present, is only 6 percent funded — a small percentage of what is considered the minimum needed for a marginally healthy pension plan — and could run out of money as soon as 2014. Another fund, for about 80,000 teachers, which is 20 percent funded, will last just a few years longer if nothing is done. Police officers and teachers in Puerto Rico have opted out of Social Security and rely entirely on their pensions.

“For now, I’m not totally shaken about the possibility of the fund going broke,” said Jorge Ramón Román, a 78-year-old retired instructor for the island’s Civil Air Patrol. “But I do fear for the future, when I’ll be an even older person, more infirm and with less of a pension.”

Héctor M. Mayol Kauffman, the executive director of the pension system, said it would be impossible to cut the benefits of people who are already retired, citing court precedent.

Puerto Rican officials were racing this fall to put together a rescue plan for the pension fund. Voters, though, pushed out Gov. Luis Fortuño, who had tried austerity measures that included cutting tens of thousands of government workers along with a revamping of the fund.

They elected Alejandro García Padilla, who promised to create 50,000 new jobs in the next 18 months. But the margin was razor-thin and Mr. Fortuño has requested a recount. Mr. García Padilla’s party had dropped out of the retirement overhaul effort, but the governor-elect says he will deal with the looming pension crisis with “diligence and promptness” and has put together a task force of economists and financial advisers.

“We will not leave retired government workers stranded at a bus stop in their older years,” he said.

Since the election, yields on the island’s 30-year bonds have continued to widen.

“I don’t think that there’s a default that’s about to happen, but a default isn’t the only bad thing that can happen when you’ve got bonds,” Mr. Schankel said. Puerto Rico’s bonds are just a notch or two above junk status. If they fall to that level, at least some institutions would be forced to sell, potentially setting off a chain reaction. And individual investors could get a jolt if they saw the value of their holdings fall. Many people own Puerto Rican debt without knowing it, through their mutual funds.

“The concern is that Puerto Rico is a systemic risk to the municipal bond market because it’s so widely held,” said Robert Donahue, a managing director with Municipal Market Advisors.

Rafael Matos contributed reporting from San Juan, P.R.

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For two L.A. schools, sharing a campus is starting to chafe

Three years ago, Logan Street Elementary looked like the perfect spot for high-performing, growing Gabriella Charter School. Logan, a low-performing neighborhood school with declining enrollment, had room to spare.

But Logan has begun to rebound, opening up a language program with teaching in both Spanish and English and adding middle-school grades. And its test scores have risen.

Now the Echo Park campus is becoming too small for two burgeoning operations: an improving traditional school and an exemplary charter. Neither intends to surrender its hold on the campus.

The situation exemplifies issues that arise when schools must share campuses. Across the Los Angeles Unified School District, 58 charters operate alongside neighborhood schools. Charters have fit in comfortably on new campuses, such as Synergy Kinetic Academy at the Nava Learning Center in South Los Angeles. There are more logistical hurdles and resistance at older schools.

The California Charter Schools Assn. is battling L.A. Unified in court over access to campuses. For many charters, which are publicly funded and independently operated, locating and paying for real estate is a persistent challenge. Charters argue that the district should provide more classrooms, given that L.A. Unified has declining enrollment and about 1 in 8 of its students attend charters.

Under state law, charters have a right to district facilities that are "reasonably equivalent" to regular district schools'. But these arrangements cover only one year at a time; charters risk having to change locations frequently.

The Gabriella deal was an attempt to prevent such a disruption. L.A. Unified agreed to let Gabriella, which operated about two miles away near MacArthur Park, move to Logan starting in the 2009-10 school year. The district this month renewed Gabriella's charter for five years, which, under the deal, automatically included letting it stay at Logan. The renewal never was in doubt — Gabriella has some of the highest test scores in the state, with an enrollment that is 90% low-income, minority students.

L.A. Unified also spent $2 million in voter-approved construction bonds to convert a portion of a Logan classroom building into two fully outfitted dance studios that opened in 2010. The charter's most distinctive feature is a comprehensive, daily dance program for all students. After school, the studios are used by a community dance program, run by Gabriella's founders, that is offered for $7 a month.

The studios are emblematic of the uneasy coexistence. They are the major recent upgrade to the well-worn campus and off limits to Logan students during the school day. A handful take dance after school, but the program serves a broad area, and vacancies are filled by lottery.

Only Logan uses the cafeteria for meals. Gabriella students eat outside at tables — or in classrooms when it rains.

The asphalt playground is split by orange cones, which are shifted to allow each school rotating access to different play areas.

Logan's expansion through eighth grade has added complications. Given the smaller, divided playground, Logan doesn't let its middle-schoolers use the playground during their morning break and lunch. And one day a week, eighth-graders remain in classrooms for physical education because Gabriella has the entire playground at that time.

Gabriella forbids its students from using the playground before school, dissatisfied with the level of supervision.

The charter school, which also runs through eighth grade, has stretched beyond its original bungalows into two other buildings.

When needed classroom space wasn't forthcoming last year, Gabriella converted its office into a classroom and occupied the auditorium as an ad hoc office and storage space. L.A. Unified officials ordered them out — but quickly provided the needed classroom.

Logan's low point in enrollment was two years ago, when it had 475 students. It's now up to 550. Gabriella has 436. The campus is now as packed as it was in 2000, when Logan was considered overcrowded.

Logan supporters insist it's unfair for Gabriella students to crowd their campus when about two-thirds live outside the attendance area; Gabriella insists that about two-thirds come from "greater Echo Park." Anyone can apply; admission is by lottery when oversubscribed.

Some of the resistance to Gabriella is born of the area's traditionally liberal, pro-union roots; activists have opposed all charter schools in the neighborhood, at least partly because most are non-union.

There's also resentment over Gabriella providing smaller classes and more frequent maintenance.

The campus lacks science labs for the middle school students, not to mention a gym, a functioning library and a playground with green space.

"I think all the students at both schools are getting hurt," said Tad Yenawine, a parent on Logan's leadership council. "It's pretty clear a solution needs to be found. The only way this really works is that Gabriella moves."

Gabriella administrators said they intend to make do as things are.

"Being charter people, we're used to being creative with space," Principal Lisa Rooney said. "We can make it work with what we have."

Mollie Jones, a Gabriella parent, agreed.

"We have different buildings and entrances," she said. "The layout is a little random, but the focus here is on learning. The fact that we share the campus with another school is probably the least interesting thing about the school."

howard.blume@latimes.com

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Hybrid 3-D Printer Used to Create Cartilage Implants

Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine have pioneered an approach to replace damaged cartilage, combining two low-cost techniques.

That’s right. We have the ability to 3-D print human cartilage.

The research team’s breakthrough mixes electrospinning, a method of creating synthetic, polymer-based nanoscale-fibrous materials used for implants and wound dressing, with medical inkjet printing, also called bioprinting, currently used to create tissues and organs. Each method is a viable medical process, but with shortcomings: Electrospun materials typically don’t have the ability to promote cellular growth, nor do they have the flexibility needed for cartilage replacement. And inkjet printed materials lacks the structure and strength needed to support the loads that cartilage carries.

As detailed in the medical journal Biofabrication, the Wake Forest researchers theorized that merging the two systems together could solve these problems. Their hybrid approach alternates microscopic layers of electrospun fiber and printed, living cartilage cells cultivated from rabbit ears, generating an artificial cartilage pad that is suitable for implanting. An eight-week study in mice showed that the implanted pads developed cellular structure similar to natural cartilage, while separate mechanical strength tests demonstrated that it was equivalent to natural cartilage.

The development has a lot of potential for the medical field. Injured natural cartilage is slow and difficult to heal, and has almost no ability to regrow itself. Currently, surgeons treat cartilage damage caused from injury or disease with techniques that remove small pieces of torn tissue or create microscopic grafts (such as arthroscopic and microfracture surgeries), in hopes to minimize the pain and restriction. But as of yet, they have been unable to fully regenerate the cushioning, lubricating tissue that keeps joints moving freely and bones from wearing against each other. As a result, degenerative cartilage conditions can eventually result in joint replacement surgery.

This new procedure may effectively eradicate these invasive procedures and spell relief for countless people who suffer from cartilage conditions. The researchers even suggest the ability to use MRI scans as precise guides for printing implants tailored to the patient’s body.

Research is still in early stages, but if the initial results continue to be demonstrated, a faster, cheaper solution to joint injuries could be coming to human subjects soon.

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Grammy-winning bassist injured in Swiss bus crash

GENEVA (AP) — Grammy-winning jazz bassist Marcus Miller and several members of his band were injured when their bus overturned Sunday on a busy highway in Switzerland, killing the driver, police said.

The German-registered private bus tipped over as it drove into a bend on the A2 highway in central Switzerland and came to a rest on its side, police in the canton (state) of Uri said. The bus was carrying 13 people — two drivers and 11 members of the Marcus Miller Band, including Miller.

Over his career, the bassist has worked with jazz greats such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Wayne Shorter, according to his website. He won two Grammys, his first coming in 1991 for Best Rhythm & Blues Song (“Power of Love”) along with Luther Vandross and Teddy Vann, and the second came in 2001 for Best Contemporary Jazz Album (“M2″).

The band was on its way from Monte Carlo to the Dutch town of Hengelo, the next stop on the American band’s tour, where it was due to perform Monday.

The driver who was at the wheel at the time of the accident sustained fatal injuries. Police spokesman Karl Egli said the 12 passengers were injured and taken to hospitals, but none had life-threatening injuries.

Miller was discharged from the hospital later Sunday, as were fellow band members Alex Han and Kris Bowers, but some other band and crew members were being kept in hospitals overnight, according to a post on Miller’s official Facebook page.

The cause of the accident was not immediately clear. Police believe no other vehicles were involved.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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M.I.T. Lab Hatches Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. That’s not too far behind Thomas Edison, who had 1,093. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

Along the way, Dr. Langer and his lab, including about 60 postdoctoral and graduate students at a time, have found a way to navigate some slippery territory: the intersection of academic research and the commercial market.

Over the last 30 years, many universities — including M.I.T. — have set up licensing offices that oversee the transfer of scientific discoveries to companies. These offices have become a major pathway for universities seeking to put their research to practical use, not to mention add to their revenue streams.

In the sciences in particular, technology transfer has become a key way to bring drugs and other treatments to market. “The model of biomedical innovation relies on research coming out of universities, often funded by public money,” says Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

Just a few of the products that have emerged from the Langer Lab are a small wafer that delivers a dose of chemotherapy used to treat brain cancer; sugar-sequencing tools that can be used to create new drugs like safer and more effective blood thinners; and a miniaturized chip (a form of nanotechnology) that can test for diseases.

The chemotherapy wafer, called the Gliadel, is licensed by Eisai Inc. The company behind the sugar-sequencing tools, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, raised $28.4 million in an initial public offering in 2004. The miniaturized chip is made by T2Biosystems,  which completed a $23 million round of financing in the summer of 2011.

“It’s inconvenient to have to send things to a lab,” so the company is trying to develop more sophisticated methods, says Dr. Ralph Weissleder, a co-founder, with Dr. Langer and others, of T2Biosystems and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

FOR Dr. Langer, starting a company is not the same as it was, say, for Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. “Bob is not consumed with any one company,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who wrote a case study on the Langer Lab. “His mission is to create the idea.”

Dr. Bowen observes that there are many other academic laboratories, including highly productive ones, but that the Langer Lab’s combination of people, spun-out companies and publications sets it apart. He says Dr. Langer “walks into the great unknown and then makes these discoveries.”

Dr. Langer is well known for his mentoring abilities. He is “notorious for replying to e-mail in two minutes, whether it’s a lowly graduate school student or the president of the United States,” says Paulina Hill, who worked in his lab from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior associate at Polaris Venture Partners. (According to Dr. Langer, he has corresponded directly with President Obama about stem cell research and federal funds for the sciences.)

Dr. Langer says he looks at his students “as an extended family,” adding that “I really want them to do well.”

And they have, whether in business or in academia, or a combination of the two. One former student, Ram Sasisekharan, helped found Momenta and now runs his own lab at M.I.T. Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya is Momenta’s chief scientific officer and senior vice president for research.

Hongming Chen is vice president of research at Kala Pharmaceuticals. Howard Bernstein is chief scientific officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems, a blood-testing company. Still others have taken jobs in the law or in government.

Dr. Langer says he spends about eight hours a week working on companies that come out of his lab. Of the 25 that he helped start, he serves on the boards of 12 and is an informal adviser to 4. All of his entrepreneurial activity, which includes some equity stakes, has made him a millionaire. But he says he is mainly motivated by a desire to improve people’s health.

Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

The research in labs like Dr. Langer’s is eyed closely by pharmaceutical companies. While drug companies employ huge research and development teams, they may not be as freewheeling and nimble, Dr. Langer says. The basis for many long-range discoveries has “come out of academia, including gene therapy, gene sequencing and tissue engineering,” he says.

He has served as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. Their large size, he says, can end up being an impediment.

“Very often when you are going for real innovation,” he says, “you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it’s hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to tap into the talent at leading research universities. In 2008, for example, Washington University in St. Louis announced a $25 million pact with Pfizer to collaborate more closely on biomedical research.

But in some situations, the close — critics might say cozy — ties between business and academia have the potential to create conflicts of interest.

There was a controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center owned stock in Aveo Oncology, which had announced earlier that the university would be leading clinical trials of one of its cancer drugs.  Last month, the University of Texas announced that he would be allowed to keep his ties with three pharmaceutical companies, including Aveo Oncology; his holdings will be placed in a blind trust.

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Oprah Winfrey Seeks a Younger Audience to Bolster a Flagging Empire

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

Oprah Winfrey spoke last month at a convention held by O, The Oprah Magazine, in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — It’s not easy to find a fresh way to photograph Oprah Winfrey.

That’s why the editors of O, The Oprah Magazine, recently tried to create a shot that recalled the glory days of Ms. Winfrey’s syndicated talk show. They arranged to photograph her for its April 2013 issue as she stepped onstage to speak to 5,000 attendees at the magazine’s annual conference, a New Age slumber party of sorts for women held at the convention center here last month. When Ms. Winfrey confidently strode out dressed in a sea foam green V-neck dress and a pair of perilously tall ruby red stilettos, the audience collectively leapt to its feet and shrieked at the sight of her.

“I love you, Oprah,” some women shouted, while other fans brushed away tears. “I love you back,” she responded in her signature commanding voice. “It’s no small thing to get the dough to come here.”

Ms. Winfrey, who used to receive this kind of applause from fans five days a week, has had fewer such receptions since the talk show she hosted for 25 years ended 18 months ago. The cable network OWN, which she started with Discovery Communications, is emerging from low ratings and management shake-ups. And without a regular presence on daytime network television, she cannot steer traffic to her other products as easily as in the past. Her magazine, in particular, has experienced a decline in advertising revenue and newsstand sales since the talk show finished.

“She’s still Oprah. But she’s still struggling,” said Janice Peck, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado who wrote the 2008 book “The Age of Oprah.” “I think she’s scared, even though she’s very, very rich and she’s always going to be very, very rich. The possibility of failure, it’s quite scary.”

Ms. Winfrey, 58, has shown some signs of strain. She arrived at the conference with faint shadows under her eyes and announced to her best friend, Gayle King, and the audience simultaneously that she had a breast cancer scare the week before. (It was ultimately a false alarm.) When Ms. King grew visibly upset, one woman chided Ms. Winfrey for not telling her friend ahead of time and ordered her to apologize to Ms. King — all before an audience. Ms. Winfrey also did not hide her dissatisfaction with the criticism she had faced. She told the audience, “the press tried to cut me off at the knees” in its coverage of OWN, and bristled at questions about the challenges her magazine confronted.

“I don’t care what the form is,” Ms. Winfrey said with the conviction of a preacher. “I care about what the message is.”

With signs of progress at OWN, Ms. Winfrey now has more time to devote to other media platforms — her magazine, her radio channel on XM Satellite Radio, her Facebook page, which has 7.8 million subscribers, her Twitter account, which has nearly 15 million followers, and her latest content channel on The Huffington Post.

“It’s all an opportunity to speak to people,” Ms. Winfrey said as she sat for an interview during the conference, a pair of glittery gold stilettos slung in her hand and a couple of handlers in the corner quietly tapping away at smartphones. She pushed aside a bottle of sparkling water, a glass with a silver straw and a delicate orchid placed before her and spoke frankly about her plans.

“Ultimately, you have to make money because you are a business. I let other people worry about that. I worry about the message. I am always, always, always about holding true to the vision and the message, and when you are true to that, then people respond.”

When it comes to the magazine, Ms. Winfrey said her staff prepared her to expect a 25 percent decline in newsstand sales after the talk show ended. (It has been closer to 22 percent.) And while she acknowledged that she enjoyed “holding the magazine in my hand,” she was pragmatic about print’s future and said she would stop publishing a print magazine if it were not profitable.

“Obviously, the show was helping in ways that you know I hadn’t accounted for,” Ms. Winfrey said. “I’m not interested, you know, in bleeding money.”

Ms. Winfrey, who spoke in a conference room over the roars of an expectant crowd in the convention space below, said she knew that her brand’s strength stemmed from how she resonated with a breadth of viewers.

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Yasser Arafat's body to be exhumed as cause of death is sought

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian Authority announced Saturday that it would exhume the body of Yasser Arafat within days in a bid to determine the cause of his death eight years ago. Many Palestinians believe he was poisoned by Israel.

Arafat, 75, died in a French military hospital near Paris on Nov. 11, 2004, after his health deteriorated suddenly during an Israeli military siege of his Ramallah headquarters.

French hospital reports attributed his death to a massive brain hemorrhage, but gave no details on what caused a related blood condition called disseminated intravascular coagulation, fueling Palestinian suspicion of an Israeli role.

The body will be exhumed Tuesday in Ramallah, Palestinian officials told reporters. Swiss, French and Russian forensic experts will analyze tissue samples to see whether they match July tests by the Swiss Institute for Radiation Physics. Those tests found traces of radioactive polonium on Arafat's toothbrush, fur hat and other belongings he used in his final days.

Journalists will be kept away from the concrete-encased grave in Arafat's former Ramallah compound, which has been obscured by blue industrial sheeting since digging started in mid-November. The body will be immediately reburied at a depth of 12 feet.

Testing will be done in Switzerland, France and Russia, officials said, with the results expected in a few months.

No autopsy was done at the time of Arafat's death, at the request of his wife, Suha. But she later filed a lawsuit, spurring a French investigation. French medical teams ruled out poisoning, and an eight-year Palestinian investigation found no conclusive evidence of foul play.

Many here have already made up their minds.

"Regardless of the results of the tests, whether they will be positive or negative, we are convinced and have all the evidence to prove that Israel has assassinated him," Tawfik Tirawi, head of the Palestinian committee investigating Arafat's death, said at the news conference Saturday in the Ramallah offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

But Mahdi Abdul Hadi, an analyst with the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, said Palestinians were more concerned about the possibility that collaborators helped Israel kill Arafat.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said the Palestinians were free to take all the samples they wanted.

"We have nothing to fear," he said. "All the accusations against Israel are completely ridiculous and not based on the slightest bit of evidence."

Amir Rapaport, publisher and editor of Israel Defense magazine, said it was possible but unlikely that Israel had a role. Although Israel's prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, expressed "satisfaction" on learning of Arafat's death, Rapaport said he had been privy to the debate among top Israeli government and military leaders, and this idea wasn't part of the discussion.

Furthermore, he said, the way Arafat died — an initial deterioration, temporary improvement, then a final collapse — bears none of the hallmarks of Israeli assassinations, which tend to be quick and decisive. "It's too complicated," he said.

Conspiracy theories are rife in countries around Israel's periphery, said Boaz Ganor, executive director of Israel's International Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

"The fact that most Palestinians believe Israel was responsible, I'm not surprised," Ganor said. "They probably believe Israel is responsible for global warming as well."

The French team recently has sought to question Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said Palestinian officials, who requested anonymity, but they were rejected.

"We will not allow any action that would infringe on our sovereignty," Tirawi said, an apparent reference to the French request. Tirawi said reports that Arafat's corpse had been damaged by tons of concrete poured over the grave site at the 2004 burial were false.

mark.magnier@latimes.com

Times staff writer Magnier reported from Jerusalem and special correspondent Abukhater from Ramallah.

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