Walhberg: Boy band union is strong for summer tour

NEW YORK (AP) — For Donnie Wahlberg it’s not a matter of why now, rather “why not?”

The recording artist-turned-actor was referring to the news of a major tour with his New Kids on the Block, who’ll be joined this summer on “The Package Tour” by 98 Degrees and Boyz II Men.

“The state of the boy band union is strong,” Wahlberg joked Tuesday. “Even though technically we’re not really boy bands, but we’re OK with that, so we’ll accept it.”

The three bands sold millions of records in the 1980s and ’90s and helped usher in a wave of vocal groups that continues today.

The Boston-based NKOTB formed in 1984 and amassed ten Top 20 hits. They broke up in 1994 but got back together after a 14-year hiatus. Wahlberg said he feels the break coincided with the maturation of their fan base.

“They needed time to have families and husbands and children and get jobs and live their life,” Wahlberg said.

But now he sees his band’s music as a complement to the fans’ adult lives.

“We created an outlet for them to feel good about themselves and tap into that youthfulness that had been put to bed for a long time … you may be 40, but the euphoria of it makes you feel 14 all over again,” Wahlberg said.

The band also announced a new single, “Remix (I Like The),” which will be released Jan. 28, and a new album, “10,” which is out April 2.

That music will be a bit more mature than some of the band’s previous material, member Joey McIntyre said.

“It is about the decisions that a grown man makes and goes through, as opposed to singing songs like ‘Popsicle,’” he said.

Nathan Morris, one of the members of Boyz II Men, known since the early 1990s for such hits as “I’ll Make Love to You” and “End of the Road,” said the tour is going to be all about performing.

“If the boy band thing is attached, it’s wonderful, but for all of us in here, we’re ready to get out there and sing and perform,” he said. “That’s just what we do.”

Though 98 Degrees is the youngest group on the bill, it has been apart the longest, 12 years.

“So we’re excited to get back together and doing what we do,” member Nick Lachey said. “We feel reinvigorated by our bond and by our group, so we’re very excited by that.”

Wahlberg, who stars as Detective Danny Reagan on the CBS television series “Blue Bloods,” said the boy bands’ tour, kicking off May 31 in Uncasville, Conn., and continuing into July with more than 30 dates, is going to be “great.”

“You have three acts that have lots of records, lots of fans,” he said. “Fans that are anxious to sing those records and anxious to sing other bands’ records, too.”

___

John Carucci covers entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/jcarucci_ap

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Well: Have a Health Question? Ask Well

The Well section of The New York Times is starting a new online featured called Ask Well. If you have a question about fitness, nutrition, illness or family health, the staff of The New York Times Health section is ready to help you find the answer.

How do you solve the problem of back pain caused by sitting in an office chair all day? Do you still need the flu shot even if you’ve had the flu? What’s the best way to heal tennis elbow? Those are some of the questions we’ve already answered in Ask Well.

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Tara Parker-Pope speaks about Ask Well.

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All questions submitted to Ask Well will be reviewed by the health staff. We’ll post selected questions and let readers vote on those they would most like to see answered. You can ask a question, vote for your favorites and read answered questions on the Ask Well Questions Page.

While Ask Well is not a source for personal medical advice (only your doctor can give you that), we can offer readers health information from the experts and guide you to various resources to help you make informed decisions. So let’s get started. Tell us what’s on your mind, and Ask Well will provide the answers.

Ask Well

Your health questions answered by Times journalists and experts.

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DealBook: Allergan to Buy MAP Pharmaceuticals for $958 Million

Allergan has agreed to pay nearly $1 billion to acquire MAP Pharmaceuticals and gain full control of its experimental treatment for migraine headaches, the two companies announced Tuesday night.

The purchase price of $25 a share in cash is a 60 percent premium over MAP’s closing price on Tuesday of $15.58 a share. The deal, worth $958 million in total, suggests that Allergan has great faith that MAP’s new migraine treatment will win regulatory approval from the Food and Drug Administration by the agency’s deadline of April 15.

The two companies said the deal had been unanimously approved by the boards of both companies and was expected to close in the second quarter.

Allergan already had the rights to help market the migraine drug, known as Levadex, in the United States and Canada, but after an acquisition it would have control of all the profits and costs globally.

Allergan is most known for Botox, a form of the botulinum toxin, which is used for cosmetic purposes as well as medical ones, including to treat chronic migraines with the goal of reducing the frequency of headaches. By contrast, Levadex is meant to treat migraines after they occur, making it complementary to Botox, Allergan said.

Levadex is actually a new form of an old drug, known as dihydroergotamine, or DHE, which has been used to treat severe migraine attacks for decades. DHE is typically given by intravenous infusion, requiring patients to get to a hospital at a time when many would rather remain in a dark quiet room.

Levadex, by contrast, is breathed into the lungs using an inhaler similar to one used for asthma, allowing people to use it at home.

The Food and Drug Administration declined to approve Levadex last March, though MAP said the rejection was related to manufacturing and questions about use of the inhaler, not the safety and efficacy of the drug. It resubmitted its application, with additional data and answers to questions from the F.D.A., in October.
Levadex would be the first approved product for MAP, which is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Allergan said that if Levadex is approved by April, the transaction will be dilutive to earnings per share by about 7 cents in 2013 and become accretive in the second half of 2014.

Allergan was advised by Goldman Sachs and the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. MAP was advised by Centerview Partners and the law firm Latham & Watkins.

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Inauguration brings moment of festive unity to capital

WASHINGTON — Beyonce had belted her last note and President Obama, newly sworn in for a second term, had grabbed his last hand and given his last hug. But as he walked off the inauguration platform and through an archway to the Capitol, the president turned again to face the people who came to see him.

"I want to take a look one more time," Obama said, stopping his Secret Service detail. He smiled, eyes fixed in the distance. "I'm not going to see this again."

What Obama saw was a throng of Americans filling their capital on Monday. They were waving their country's flag, cheering their president, honoring their history and celebrating their government, adding a sheen of celebratory unity to a capital more accustomed to political division.

Hazel Carter from Springfield, Ohio, who is 90 and who attended Obama's first swearing-in, had vowed not to miss this one: "I prayed, 'God, just let me keep breathing until the inauguration.'"

Charlie and Zan Thompson, in their 60s, flew in from Phoenix, despite Charlie's bad knee. Zan pushed her husband in a wheelchair for 45 minutes to the National Mall. She could persevere, she said, just as the president had in his first term.

And Patrecia McClein, 39, was there even though she and her husband Shawn, 37, went to bed Sunday night in Rochester, N.Y., with no plans to be in Washington.

"The Lord woke us up at 1 a.m. and told us to come," she said.

Hundreds of thousands of people filled Washington's streets, far less than the estimated 1.8 million who attended Obama's first inauguration. The differences from 2009 were notable. The traditional lineup of events — the swearing-in outside the Capitol's West Front, parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and night of balls — was all less complicated without the crush of humanity drawn to the first inauguration of the first African American president.

There were other shifts in mood: expectations lowered after years of partisan gridlock, hopes tempered by disappointment. And toes warmed by noticeably higher temperatures.

Still, the attendees said they felt the weight of history.

"I always wanted to come to something like this, going back to Martin Luther King," said James Sutton, 63, a taxi driver who made the 12-hour drive from Chicago. He said he didn't expect to see another African American president. "Not in my lifetime. I just wanted to be able to say I was there."

Obama's inauguration coincided with the federal holiday celebrating King, who delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the other end of the mall in 1963. Monday's ceremony in many ways directly honored the civil rights struggle that made Obama's presidency possible.

The event began with an invocation from Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Evers-Williams paid homage to the leaders "who allowed us to move from a nation of unborn hopes and a history of disenfranchised votes to today's expression of a more perfect union."

As he took the oath, Obama placed his hand on two Bibles — one owned by King, the other used by Abraham Lincoln when he was sworn in on March 4, 1861. After Monday's ceremony, at the request of the King family, the president and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. inscribed the King family Bible.

Obama's inaugural address opened with an immediate acknowledgment of the history that had brought him to that moment. "Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free," Obama said. "We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together."

His speech was seasoned with calls for togetherness, and his schedule included opportunities to practice it — at least for a day. Per tradition, Obama invited congressional leaders to coffee at the White House, including his chief political adversary: House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

The president also attended a traditional luncheon with lawmakers, where Boehner suggested the meal was an opportunity to "renew the old appeal to better angels."

Although Obama's speech offered a liberal vision, for the most part the day was light on partisanship, heavy on pomp. From the luncheon, the president and First Lady Michelle Obama crept down Pennsylvania Avenue in the president's hulking limousine known as "the beast."

The two stepped out to stroll and wave at a crowd that greeted them with shrieks and an eclectic mix of signs.

"There has never been anything false about hope," one read.

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A 'Courage Board' for All Conditions

Rating: 9/10 Nearly flawless; buy it now

It’s easy to guess what The Hovercraft was built for just by looking at it: The short swallowtail and the big blunted nose all scream “powder hound.”

I did my first series of tests in early December up in Lake Tahoe, and there was a lot more crust, ice and grooms than powder, so I took it out without expecting much. I got waaay more than I figured I would: The board held its edge just fine in the groomers, but there was no surprise there. The shock came when I crossed over to the shaded side of the mountain, when the soft groomers turned into icy crud. I was fully expecting the Jones to sketch out and leave me butt-checking all over the place, but The Hovercraft’s edge sliced right into the ice and held it as well as it did the soft stuff. No transition, no adjustments — the board just went from soft snow to ice without skipping a beat.

It was so odd that it took me most of the morning before I really trusted it. But by lunchtime, I was flying down the mountain at speeds I wouldn’t dare with any of the other boards we tested. The board’s great bite is thanks to the Jones’ underfoot camber and so-called Magne-Traction edges, which essentially act like a serrated blade to bite into hard snow. These features combine to give the board a huge amount of precision and control in hard snow.

A few weeks later, I was finally able to take it out on Mt. Shasta’s backcountry to hit some deep stuff. It excelled there as well (entirely as expected) thanks to the rockered and blunted nose, which let the board float on top of the soft stuff, while the short, stiff tail made it easy to kick back and keep the nose up.

Bottom line: I’ve never seen a board perform so well in such a wide range of snow conditions. During my multi-mountain testing session of The Hovercraft snowboard, I let one of my friends ride it. He echoed my own thoughts with one simple statement: “This thing just does whatever you ask it to do.”

WIRED Simply some of the best all-mountain performance I’ve seen. Great float on powder, plus a locked-in grip on ice and crud. Seamlessly transitions from soft to hard snow. Shockingly lightweight construction.

TIRED Blunt nose and swallowtail design means you’re not gonna be riding a lot of switch.

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“Django Unchained” producers order end to slavery action-figures

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The producers of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” on Friday ordered a halt to the production of action figures based on the Oscar-nominated slavery movie after criticism that they were offensive to African-Americans.

The eight-inch (20-cm) dolls, which were intended for people 17 and older, included gun-slinging freed slave Django, his wife and cruel, white plantation owner Candie.

“Django Unchained” has been attacked by some African-Americans for its portrayal of slavery and its violence. Despite the controversy, the film was nominated for five Oscars, including best picture.

Civil rights leader Al Sharpton’s National Action Network was among the groups that criticized the action figures.

“Selling this doll is highly offensive to our ancestors and the African-American community,” K.W. Tulloss, president of the Los Angeles branch of National Action Network, told the New York Daily News.

“The movie is for adults, but these are action figures that appeal to children,” Tulloss told the paper. “We don’t want other individuals to utilize them for their entertainment, to make a mockery of slavery.”

The Weinstein Co, which produced “Django Unchained,” said in a statement on Friday that in light of the reaction to the dolls it had ordered production to stop.

“We have tremendous respect for the audience and it was never our intent to offend anyone,” the company said.

The action figures were sold by the National Entertainment Collectibles Association, which could not be reached for comment on Friday.

The producers noted that action figures have been produced for all of Tarantino’s past films, including his World War Two revenge fantasy “Inglourious Basterds” in 2009.

“Django Unchained” stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio and has taken in some $ 130 million at U.S. and Canadian box offices since its release on December 25.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey and Alex Dobuzinskis Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Beech)

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The Week: A Roundup of This Week’s Science News

“Science,” a colleague once said at a meeting, “is a mighty enterprise, which is really rather quite topical.” He was so right: as we continue to enhance our coverage of the scientific world, we always aim to keep the latest news front and center.

His observation seemed like a nice way to introduce this column, which will highlight the week’s developments in health and science news and glance at what’s ahead. This past week, for instance, the mighty enterprise of science addressed itself to such newsy topics as the flu (there’s still time to get vaccinated!), and mental illness and gun control.

In addition to the big-headline stories that invite wisdom from scientists, each week there is a drumbeat of purely scientific and medical news that emerges from academic journals, fieldwork and elsewhere. These developments, from the quirky to the abstruse, often make their way into the daily news cycle, depending on the strength of the research behind them. (Well, that’s how we judge them, anyway.)

Many discoveries are hard to unravel. “In a way, science is antithetical to everything that has to do with a newspaper,” the same colleague observed. “You couldn’t imagine anything less consumer-friendly.”

Let’s aim to fix that. Below, a selection of the week’s stories.

DEVELOPMENTS

Health

Strange, but Effective

People with a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile — which kills 14,000 Americans a year — have a startling cure: a transplant of someone else’s feces into their digestive system, which introduces good bacteria that the gut needs to fight off the bad. For some people, antibiotics don’t fix this problem, but an infusion of diluted stool from a healthy person seems to do the trick.

Genetics

Dig We Must

Hillery Metz and Hopi Hoekstra/Harvard University

Evolutionary biologists at Harvard took a tiny species of deer mice, known for building elaborate burrows with long tunnels, and bred it with another species of deer mice, which builds short-tunneled burrows. Comparing the DNA of the original mice with their offspring, the biologists pinpointed four regions of genetic code that help tell the mice what kind of burrow to construct.

Aerospace

Launch, Then Inflate

Uncredited/Bigelow Aerospace, via Associated Press

NASA signed a contract for an inflatable space habitat — roughly pineapple-shaped, with walls of floppy cloth — that will ideally be appended to the International Space Station in 2015. NASA aims to use the pod to test inflatable technology in space, but the company that builds these things, Bigelow Aerospace, has bigger ambitions: think of a 12-person apartment and laboratory in the sky, with two months’ rent at north of $26 million.

Biology

What’s Green and Flies?

Jodi Rowley/Australian Museum

National Geographic reported on an Australian researcher working in Vietnam who discovered a great-looking new species of flying frog. Described as having flappy forearms (the better for gliding), the three-and-a-half-inch-long frog likes to “parachute” from tree to tree, Jodi Rowley, an amphibian biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, told the magazine. She named it Helen’s Flying Frog, for her mother.

Privacy

That’s Joe’s DNA!

People who volunteer their genetic information for the betterment of science — and are assured anonymity — may find that their privacy is not a slam dunk. A researcher who set out to crack the identities of a few men whose genomes appeared in a public database was able to do so using genealogical Web sites (where people upload parts of their genomes to try to find relatives) as well as some simple search tools. He was trying to test the database’s security, but even he did not expect it to be so easy.

Genetics

An On/Off Switch for Disease

Geneticists have long puzzled over what it is that activates a disease in one person but not in another — even in identical twins. Now researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who studied people with rheumatoid arthritis have identified a pattern of chemical tags that tell genes whether to turn on or not. In rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system attacks the body, and it is thought the tags enable the attack.

Planetary Science

That Red Planet

Everybody loves Mars, and we’re all secretly hoping that NASA’s plucky little rover finds evidence of life there. Meanwhile, a separate NASA craft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been looping the planet since 2006 — took some pictures of a huge crater that looks as if it once held a lake fed by groundwater. It is too soon to say if the lake held living things, but NASA’s news release did include the happy phrase “clues to subsurface habitability.”

COMING UP

Animal Testing

Retiring Chimps

Emily Wabitsch/European Pressphoto Agency

A lot of people have strong feelings about the use of chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral experiments, and the National Institutes of Health has been listening. On Tuesday, the agency is to release its recommendations for curtailing chimp research in a big way. This will be but a single step in a long process and it will apply only to the chimps the agency owns, but it may well stir big reactions from many constituencies.

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On the Road: A Farewell to ‘Nudity’ at Airport Checkpoints

TRULY bad ideas never die, in my opinion. So I wasn’t surprised to hear that, while the Transportation Security Administration says it is removing those much-reviled backscatter body-imaging scanners from airport checkpoints, the machines will be stored “until they can be redeployed to other mission priorities.”

I say, goodbye and good riddance to the scanners, which critics have called virtual strip-search machines. The T.S.A. wasn’t being specific about where the machines might be reused, but the federal government oversees transportation security in a variety of places, including train stations.

For years, critics have insisted that the images displayed by the backscatter machines (so named because of the way their X-ray waves are reflected off a body) are unacceptably detailed and graphic. But the T.S.A. has said it was working on privacy protections for those images.

Now, under pressure from Congress, the T.S.A. says that all 174 of the machines in use at airport security checkpoints will be removed by June 1. And the reason is that the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, a division of OSI Systems Inc., would fail to meet a Congressional deadline of June 1 requiring that all airport body-imaging machines be fitted with software that “produces a generic image of the individual being screened.”

The T.S.A. sounded pretty blunt in pointing a finger at the manufacturer. “Rapiscan was unable to fulfill their end of the contract” and develop the required privacy software, the agency said.

In a statement, Deepak Chopra, the chief executive of OSI Systems, noted the company’s longstanding “close relationship with the security agency,” and added, “We look forward to continuing to provide leading-edge technologies and services to the T.S.A.”

Of course, removing all Rapiscan machines (the T.S.A. had already taken 76 out of service last year) does not mean the end of the airport body-imaging machines. Nor does it mean the end of the widely disliked checkpoint drill of divesting yourself of all possessions, even handkerchiefs, and standing at attention, arms raised like an arrested bandit, while an electronic scanner buzzes over your body and a screener surveys the image.

Including the soon-to-be-gone Rapiscan machines, there are 843 body-scanners now in use at checkpoints in about 200 airports in the United States. But the majority of those machines, made by a unit of L-3 Communications Inc., employ millimeter-wave technology, which uses radio frequency waves to inspect a body. The Rapiscan machines use low-intensity X-ray beams.

In 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the T.S.A.’s overseer, the Department of Homeland Security, calling for suspension of the use of body scanners that create “a physically invasive strip-search.” Meanwhile, criticism in Congress continued to mount.

L-3 had adopted software for its millimeter-wave machines that addressed the naked body image concerns. Rather than displaying the image of an individual’s naked body, the L-3 machines depict any foreign object on a person and display only a generic body outline, similar to the police chalk outline of a body at a homicide scene.

The imminent end of the Rapiscan backscatter machines — which cost about $180,000 each — would also seem to resolve the issue of safe levels of radiation doses that some critics raised about the technology. The T.S.A. repeated Monday that safety studies have shown those radiation concerns to be unwarranted.

The T.S.A. also stressed that the Rapiscan machines are being removed only because of the Congressional deadline on the image software and not for any safety reasons. “All equipment met its security mission,” David Castelveter, an agency spokesman, said on Monday.

The agency said that most of the backscatter units will be replaced with millimeter-wave units. The agency has about 60 millimeter-wave machines on order, which are about the same price as the Rapiscan machines, and is expected to buy more. Under the agreement, Rapiscan will bear the expense of removing its backscatter units from checkpoints and storing them until they can put to use elsewhere.

OSI said last week that it has not sold any Rapiscan machines to the T.S.A. in the 2012 and 2013 fiscal years and that it has about $5 million in orders that will now be “debooked.” But taxpayers have spent over $45 million on the Rapiscan machines now in the T.S.A.’s hands.

As to the future of those machines, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who is ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement, “I want to make clear that if these machines cannot be altered to prevent the photographing of nude images, the American public must be assured that these machines will not be used in any other public federal facility.”

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

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L.A. transit officials release analysis for closing '710 gap'

Many Pasadena residents are strongly opposed to on option in the MTA report -- extending the 710 Freeway via an underground tunnel to the 210 Freeway. (January 18, 2013)

By Daniel Siegal, Los Angeles Times

January 20, 2013, 7:21 p.m.

Los Angeles County transportation officials have released the final version of their analysis of alternatives for closing the so-called 710 gap between Alhambra and Pasadena, setting the stage for more vigorous environmental review.

The analysis by the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority focuses on five options — down from an initial 39 — for reducing traffic and providing better transportation access in the area between the end of the 710 Freeway in Alhambra and the 210 Freeway in Pasadena.

They include a "no build" option, better managing of street traffic flow, bolstering rapid bus and light rail transit, and constructing a controversial tunnel to connect the freeways.

The California Department of Transportation — which acquired about 500 homes in Pasadena, South Pasadena and Los Angeles since the 1970s with the intention of building a surface freeway to close the 710 gap — has said that once the Alternatives Analysis Report is released, it will be able to identify some surplus homes and move to sell them.

The MTA will hold three community open houses to share the report's information: from 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 23 at Maranantha High School, from 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 24 at San Marino Community Church, and from 9 to 11 a.m. Jan. 26 in the Golden Eagle Building at Cal State L.A. MTA representatives will talk about the five options that will be carried into the Draft Environmental Impact Report, which is expected to be completed by early 2014.

daniel.siegal@latimes.com

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Soap Bubble Nebula

Informally known as the "Soap Bubble Nebula", this planetary nebula (officially known as PN G75.5+1.7) was discovered by amateur astronomer Dave Jurasevich on July 6th, 2008. It was noted and reported by Keith Quattrocchi and Mel Helm on July 17th, 2008. This image was obtained with the Kitt Peak Mayall 4-meter telescope on June 19th, 2009 in the H-alpha (orange) and [OIII] (blue) narrowband filters. In this image, north is to the left and east is down.

PN G75.5+1.7 is located in the constellation of Cygnus, not far from the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888). It is embedded in a diffuse nebula which, in conjunction with its faintness, is the reason it was not discovered until recently. The spherical symmetry of the shell is remarkable, making it very similar to Abell 39.

Image: T. A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage, H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF [high-resolution] Read NOAO Conditions of Use before downloading

Caption: NOAO

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