(Reuters) ? Many Americans are satisfied with how often they are screened for cancer but some say they are not screened often enough, while a growing body of evidence suggests too much screening for certain types of cancer may do more harm than good, a Gallup poll showed.
According to the poll released on Wednesday, 58 percent of 1,012 adults surveyed thought standard cancer screenings, such as Pap smears, mammograms or blood tests to detect prostate cancer, were performed often enough.
Thirty-one percent said such cancer screenings were not done often enough, and 7 percent said they were done too often.
"Americans for many years have heard the traditional admonition that 'early detection' of cancer is always beneficial for the patient, and the results of the current question suggest that this belief still holds in the minds of most," Gallup pollsters said in their report.
There is a debate over the value of frequent screening, set off by recommendations that widespread cancer screening for breast and prostate cancer be scaled back.
In October, the government-backed U.S. Preventive Services Task Force triggered an uproar among cancer specialists when it issued a draft recommendation that healthy men not get a common blood test for prostate cancer called the PSA test. The task force is collecting public comment on the draft recommendation against the PSA test until December 13.
The same panel caused a media storm in 2009 after it recommended that doctors scale back routine mammograms for women in their 40s and 50s.
Just over half the respondents in the Gallup poll, conducted between November 3 and 6, were men. The maximum margin of sampling error was 5 percentage points for men and 6 percentage points for women.
If you?ve ever asked yourself the question above, then this small business roundup is for you. You?ve got a great product or service in place, but how do you get customers to learn more about it and about you and your company? Marketing may not be as hard as you think and there are plenty of tools and a lot of advice to help you along the way.
Social Media
Survey says: Small business finally using social media. A recent study shows a significant shift in the use of social media as a marketing tool for small business. Check out some of the interesting numbers as small business seems to be finally adapting to the social Web in a big way. MarketWatch
Facebook remains the platform of choice. Small businesses still swear by Facebook as their main social media marketing outlet saying it is still more effective than all other alternatives. You can check out a graph showing the breakdown of social media channels as well. eMarketer
More Data
Series of surveys show increased acceptance/effectiveness of social media. Paul Gillin has this roundup of surveys all showing that the time has come for social media marketing in general. Though the Constant Contact survey is the one most sited in connection with SMBs, there is some other data here to confirm the trend. Business2Community
Check out the full Constant Contact survey here. Check out the rest of the data in this survey released in time for this past Small Business Saturday. The Fall 2011 Attitudes and Outlooks Survey has plenty of insight of interest to your small business. Constant Contact
Email
Is email really dead? Though it may be the last tool you think about in your marketing tool box, e-mail should not be counted out. Check out the infographic below and follow our link for a version you can share. VisibleGains
Book Shelf
Google + for Dummies. Susan Payton takes us on a guided tour of?the newest social media frontier with a review of this new guide to Google +. If you?ve been slow to get started, join the club, but understand the value for your business. Small Business Trends
Mobile
SMBs prepare to invest in mobile. Though a survey may show small business still lags behind in the use of mobile marketing, other data points to the fact that mobile marketing may soon be on the increase among small businesses. ZDNet
Why mobile could be key to last minute sales. Not only can mobile marketing provide a compliment to your social media campaign, it can also provide important boosts where needed to generate sales on Holidays and at other special times. Venture Beat
Advice
Tips when designing your marketing plan. When coming up with a marketing plan for your small business?in the new?year, don?t forget these five important points. Your marketing plan should be the key to?bringing in more clients and customers. Be sure you get your?it right.?SFGate
Other Tools
Project Rev 2012 offers marketing advice/tools. A?new project focuses on?delivering marketing?advice and tools to 10 specially selected small business owners?and entrepreneurs in an effort to help them find more customers. Business Wire
All NASA spacecraft sent to other planets must undergo meticulous procedures to make sure they don't carry biological contamination from Earth to their destinations.
However, a step in these planetary protection measures wasn't adhered to for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, now en route to the Red Planet, SPACE.com has learned.
The incident has become a lessons-learned example of miscommunication in assuring that planetary protection procedures are strictly adhered to.
The issue involves a set of drill bits carried by the Curiosity rover, which launched Nov. 26 to Mars. When project developers made an internal decision not to send the equipment through a final ultra-cleanliness step, it marked a deviation from the planetary protection plans scripted for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. [Photos: Watching the Mars Rover Curiosity Blast Off?]
That judgment, however, didn't reach NASA's chief protector of the planets until "very late in the game," said Catharine "Cassie" Conley, NASA's planetary protection officer. "They didn't submit the request for the deviation not to comply with their planetary protection plan until several months ago," she emphasized.
Conley told SPACE.com that the initial plan called for placing all three of the drill bits inside a sterile box. Then, after Curiosity landed, the box would be opened for access to the sterilized bits via the rover's robot arm, extracted one by one and fit onto a drill head as the mission progressed.
But in readying the rover for departure to Mars, the box was opened, with one drill bit affixed to the drill head, Conley said. Also, all of the bits were tested pre-launch to assess their level of organic contamination. While done within a very clean environment, that work strayed from earlier agreed-to protocols, she said.
"That's where the miscommunication happened," Conley said. "I will certainly expect to have a lessons-learned report that will indicate how future projects will not have this same process issue. I'm sure that the Mars exploration program doesn't want to have a similar process issue in the future. We need to make sure we do it right."
Equatorial target
Conley said the deviation from protocol was reinforced by science and project officials concluding that Curiosity's target landing spot, Gale Crater, is free of potentially life-harboring ice ? at least at depths that the drill bits would penetrate.
"That reinforced the reasonableness of not having the drill bits sterilized, because there's unlikely to be 'special regions' in the Gale Crater landing site," Conley said.
The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission was designed to comply with a requirement to avoid going to any site on the Red Planet known to have water or water-ice within 3.3 feet (1 meter) of the surface.
Adhering to cleanliness standards is a way to make sure the mission does not transport Earth life to Mars. Doing so preserves the ability to study that world in its natural state and also avoids contamination that would obscure an ability to find native life on that planet, if it exists.
Conley emphasized that the Curiosity assembly team and technicians did an excellent job of keeping Curiosity cleaner than any robot that NASA' s sent to Mars since the Viking lander in the 1970s.
Still, the decision to not keep the drill bits ultra-clean shows the process needs to be fixed, Conley said.
"It would have been better for them to check with me before they opened the box of bits to confirm that it was okay ? rather than trying to ask for it afterwards," she said. "In this case it was fine. But for future missions we want to make sure that they ask beforehand."
Habitable environments
The Mars Science Laboratory is not a life-detection mission. Rather, it will study whether the Gale Crater area of Mars has evidence of past and present habitable environments.
"Direct life detection is inherently difficult, some would argue currently impossible, because there is no uniform agreement on life," said Scott Hubbard, the former "Mars Czar" for NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Hubbard is now a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., and author of the new book "Exploring Mars ? Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery," published by the University of Arizona Press.
"There is no mathematical expression for life as there is gravity ? only a series of attributes such as complexity, reproduction, metabolism, responsiveness and so on," Hubbard told SPACE.com. "We don't have a 'Star Trek' tricorder that says 'It's alive, Jim'."
Mars sample return
On-the-spot detection of life is difficult, underscoring the need to return to Earth well-selected samples from the Red Planet for analysis in a lab, Hubbard noted.
There are three reasons for pushing forward on a Mars return sample effort, he said: The best laboratory equipment can be employed, much of which cannot be reduced to spacecraft size; many labs and many scientists can be utilized to cross-check each other with alternate techniques; and discoveries can be followed and rechecked years later with new tools and techniques and hypotheses.
"The treaty-type agreements on planetary protection specify very rigorous levels of cleanliness to prevent forward and backward contamination," Hubbard said. "Spacecraft going to potential habitable zones on Mars must be cleaned to an amazing degree, even sterilized. Samples returned to Earth will be treated as if they were highly infectious until demonstrated otherwise."
Price tag estimates for a "Sample Receiving Facility" here on Earth have ranged as high as $300 million, Hubbard said. "Nevertheless, I think it is all worth it to find out 'Are we alone?'? 'Did life ever arise on Mars?'" he said.
Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of this year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.
NASA's Swift finds a gamma-ray burst with a dual personalityPublic release date: 30-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Francis Reddy francis.j.reddy@nasa.gov 301-286-4453 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
A peculiar cosmic explosion first detected by NASA's Swift observatory on Christmas Day 2010 was caused either by a novel type of supernova located billions of light-years away or an unusual collision much closer to home, within our own galaxy. Papers describing both interpretations appear in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Nature.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the universe's most luminous explosions, emitting more energy in a few seconds than our sun will during its entire energy-producing lifetime. What astronomers are calling the "Christmas burst" is so unusual that it can be modeled in such radically different ways.
"What the Christmas burst seems to be telling us is that the family of gamma-ray bursts is more diverse than we fully appreciate," said Christina Thoene, the supernova study's lead author, at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain. It's only by rapidly detecting hundreds of them, as Swift is doing, that we can catch some of the more eccentric siblings."
Common to both scenarios is the presence of a neutron star, the crushed core that forms when a star many times the sun's mass explodes. When the star's fuel is exhausted, it collapses under its own weight, compressing its core so much that about a half-million times Earth's mass is squeezed into a sphere no larger than a city.
The Christmas burst, also known as GRB 101225A, was discovered in the constellation Andromeda by Swift's Burst Alert Telescope at 1:38 p.m. EST on Dec. 25, 2010. The gamma-ray emission lasted at least 28 minutes, which is unusually long. Follow-up observations of the burst's afterglow by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories were unable to determine the object's distance.
Thoene's team proposes that the burst occurred in an exotic binary system where a neutron star orbited a normal star that had just entered its red giant phase, enormously expanding its outer atmosphere. This expansion engulfed the neutron star, resulting in both the ejection of the giant's atmosphere and rapid tightening of the neutron star's orbit.
Once the two stars became wrapped in a common envelope of gas, the neutron star may have merged with the giant's core after just five orbits, or about 18 months. The end result of the merger was the birth of a black hole and the production of oppositely directed jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light, followed by a weak supernova.
The particle jets produced gamma rays. Jet interactions with gas ejected before the merger explain many of the burst's signature oddities. Based on this interpretation, the event took place about 5.5 billion light-years away, and the team has detected what may be a faint galaxy at the right location.
"Deep exposures using Hubble may settle the nature of this object," said Sergio Campana, who led the collision study at Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy.
If it is indeed a galaxy, that would be evidence for the binary model. On the other hand, if NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory finds an X-ray point source or if radio telescopes detect a pulsar, that goes against it.
Campana's team supports an alternative model that involves the tidal disruption of a large comet-like object and the ensuing crash of debris onto a neutron star located only about 10,000 light-years away. The scenario requires the break-up of an object with about half the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres. While rare in the asteroid belt, such objects are thought to be common in the icy Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. Similar objects located far away from the neutron star may have survived the supernova that formed it.
Gamma-ray emission occurred when debris fell onto the neutron star. Clumps of cometary material likely made a few orbits, with different clumps following different paths before settling into a disk around the neutron star. X-ray variations detected by Swift's X-Ray Telescope that lasted several hours may have resulted from late-arriving clumps that struck the neutron star as the disk formed.
In the early years of studying GRBs, astronomers had very few events to study in detail and dozens of theories to explain them. In the Swift era, astronomers have settled into two basic scenarios, either the collapse of a massive star or the merger of a compact binary system.
"The beauty of the Christmas burst is that we must invoke two exotic scenarios to explain it, but such rare oddballs will help us advance the field," said Chryssa Kouveliotou, a co-author of the supernova study at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
NASA's Swift was launched in November 2004 and is managed by Goddard. It is operated in collaboration with several U.S. institutions and partners in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Japan.
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NASA's Swift finds a gamma-ray burst with a dual personalityPublic release date: 30-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Francis Reddy francis.j.reddy@nasa.gov 301-286-4453 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
A peculiar cosmic explosion first detected by NASA's Swift observatory on Christmas Day 2010 was caused either by a novel type of supernova located billions of light-years away or an unusual collision much closer to home, within our own galaxy. Papers describing both interpretations appear in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Nature.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the universe's most luminous explosions, emitting more energy in a few seconds than our sun will during its entire energy-producing lifetime. What astronomers are calling the "Christmas burst" is so unusual that it can be modeled in such radically different ways.
"What the Christmas burst seems to be telling us is that the family of gamma-ray bursts is more diverse than we fully appreciate," said Christina Thoene, the supernova study's lead author, at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain. It's only by rapidly detecting hundreds of them, as Swift is doing, that we can catch some of the more eccentric siblings."
Common to both scenarios is the presence of a neutron star, the crushed core that forms when a star many times the sun's mass explodes. When the star's fuel is exhausted, it collapses under its own weight, compressing its core so much that about a half-million times Earth's mass is squeezed into a sphere no larger than a city.
The Christmas burst, also known as GRB 101225A, was discovered in the constellation Andromeda by Swift's Burst Alert Telescope at 1:38 p.m. EST on Dec. 25, 2010. The gamma-ray emission lasted at least 28 minutes, which is unusually long. Follow-up observations of the burst's afterglow by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories were unable to determine the object's distance.
Thoene's team proposes that the burst occurred in an exotic binary system where a neutron star orbited a normal star that had just entered its red giant phase, enormously expanding its outer atmosphere. This expansion engulfed the neutron star, resulting in both the ejection of the giant's atmosphere and rapid tightening of the neutron star's orbit.
Once the two stars became wrapped in a common envelope of gas, the neutron star may have merged with the giant's core after just five orbits, or about 18 months. The end result of the merger was the birth of a black hole and the production of oppositely directed jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light, followed by a weak supernova.
The particle jets produced gamma rays. Jet interactions with gas ejected before the merger explain many of the burst's signature oddities. Based on this interpretation, the event took place about 5.5 billion light-years away, and the team has detected what may be a faint galaxy at the right location.
"Deep exposures using Hubble may settle the nature of this object," said Sergio Campana, who led the collision study at Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy.
If it is indeed a galaxy, that would be evidence for the binary model. On the other hand, if NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory finds an X-ray point source or if radio telescopes detect a pulsar, that goes against it.
Campana's team supports an alternative model that involves the tidal disruption of a large comet-like object and the ensuing crash of debris onto a neutron star located only about 10,000 light-years away. The scenario requires the break-up of an object with about half the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres. While rare in the asteroid belt, such objects are thought to be common in the icy Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. Similar objects located far away from the neutron star may have survived the supernova that formed it.
Gamma-ray emission occurred when debris fell onto the neutron star. Clumps of cometary material likely made a few orbits, with different clumps following different paths before settling into a disk around the neutron star. X-ray variations detected by Swift's X-Ray Telescope that lasted several hours may have resulted from late-arriving clumps that struck the neutron star as the disk formed.
In the early years of studying GRBs, astronomers had very few events to study in detail and dozens of theories to explain them. In the Swift era, astronomers have settled into two basic scenarios, either the collapse of a massive star or the merger of a compact binary system.
"The beauty of the Christmas burst is that we must invoke two exotic scenarios to explain it, but such rare oddballs will help us advance the field," said Chryssa Kouveliotou, a co-author of the supernova study at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
NASA's Swift was launched in November 2004 and is managed by Goddard. It is operated in collaboration with several U.S. institutions and partners in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Japan.
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
JERUSALEM ? Rockets fired from Lebanon struck northern Israel early Tuesday for the first time in more than two years, drawing a burst of Israeli artillery fire across the tense border, the Israeli military said.
No casualties or major damage were reported on either side, and no one claimed responsibility for the attack. The military said at least two of the rockets landed on Israeli soil, and that Israeli guns shelled the area where the fire had originated.
The U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, said it had deployed additional troops and stepped up patrols in the area to prevent any further violence.
UNIFIL's commander, Maj. Gen. Alberto Asarta Cuevas, said in a statement that he was in close contact with Israeli and Lebanese officials. "There is a need to act with restraint and the parties have reassured me of the continued commitment to maintain the cessation of hostilities," he said.
UNIFIL has policed southern Lebanon to enforce a cease-fire that ended a bloody, monthlong war between Israel and the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Israeli officials said they did not believe Hezbollah was involved in Tuesday's attack.
The flare-up comes at a time when the entire region is engulfed in violence and upheaval, with thousands killed in the regime's crackdown on protesters in Syria and after popular uprisings ousted longtime rulers in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen.
The Israeli military said it did not expect Tuesday's incident to touch off a wider conflict with Lebanon. In a statement, however, it said it regarded the attack as "severe" and held the Lebanese government and army responsible for preventing rocket fire at Israel.
A Lebanese security official told The Associated Press that one rocket was fired from Lebanon and that Israel hit back with six rockets, which landed in an empty area. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Israel's Army Radio station said it was the eighth rocket attack since the 2006 war. Hezbollah has not claimed responsibility for any of the attacks, but smaller militant organizations, some Palestinian and some linked to al-Qaida, have launched rockets on several occasions.
None of the rocket attacks has caused serious casualties. But in August 2010, two Lebanese soldiers, a Lebanese journalist and an Israeli soldier were killed in a brief border clash touched off by Lebanese army fire toward an Israeli military base.
Overall, however, the border has been largely quiet but tense since the 2006 war, which was sparked by a deadly cross-border attack by Hezbollah on an Israeli military patrol.
During that fighting, Israel bombed Hezbollah's strongholds and Hezbollah barraged northern Israel with nearly 4,000 rockets.
About 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis were killed in the conflict, which ended with the U.N.-brokered truce that sent thousands of Lebanese troops and international peacekeepers to south Lebanon.
Although the cease-fire agreement forbade Hezbollah to rearm, Israel contends the group has since replenished its arsenal with even more powerful weapons.
_____
Associated Press writer Elizabeth A. Kennedy contributed to this report from Beirut.
SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) ? A Texas man who prosecutors said wanted to "gain status" with the white supremacist gang The Aryan Brotherhood was sentenced to more than 37 years in prison on Wednesday for fire bombing an African American church in an admitted attempt to murder a parishioner.
Steven Scott Cantrell, 26, a resident of the tiny west Texas town of Crane, pleaded guilty in federal court in Midland, Texas, to charges of damaging religious property, arson, and interfering with housing, all prosecuted with a bias crime enhancement.
"When hatred and bigotry are expressed through acts of violence and destruction, this office will use every resource available to ensure that those responsible are found, prosecuted and punished," said Robert Pitman, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas.
"There is simply no room in a civilized society for the kind of conduct Cantrell engaged in," he added.
Cantrell admitted that he set fire to the historic Faith in Christ Church in Crane after he saw an African American man passing by the church in a wheelchair.
Pitman says before setting fire to the four-building complex, Cantrell ransacked the sanctuary and scrawled "racist and threatening graffiti" on the walls.
Cantrell admitted before his sentencing that he was hoping to kill the man, whom he believed lived in a shelter at the church. The man was not hurt.
One week after torching the church, officials say Cantrell wrote a letter to the pastor apologizing for his actions.
Pitman says the church arson was the culmination of a series of racially motivated crimes that Cantrell committed in the small town on December 28, 2010, all in an attempt to "gain status" in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.
Cantrell also set fire to the home of a man he believed to be Jewish. Cantrell told U.S. District Judge Robert Junell on Wednesday he also set a fire at a Crane gym which Cantrell said served Latino and African American customers and is owned by a Caucasian man married to a Mexican-American woman, telling Junell that he felt "disrespected" by their marriage.
"I believed the white race needed to be kept pure," Cantrell told the judge.
In addition to the sentence of 450 months in federal prison, Junell ordered Cantrell to pay more than a half million dollars in restitution to his victims.
"Today's sentence reflects the vile nature of this defendant's actions," said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. "The department will continue to vigorously prosecute those that commit heinous acts like this one."
WASHINGTON ? NPR Executive Editor Dick Meyer is leaving the public radio network to lead BBC News America.
Meyer's appointment at BBC was announced Wednesday. Since 2009, he has been NPR's executive editor, managing all news operations. His resignation follows the departure of NPR's top news executive Ellen Weiss in January. She left following an internal investigation on how the firing of commentator Juan Williams was handled.
NPR's search for a news leader has been on hold until new CEO Gary Knell starts work on Thursday. NPR's board pushed for the resignation of former CEO Vivian Schiller in March in an effort to limit damage after hidden camera video footage showed a fellow executive deriding the tea party movement as "racist."
Meyer's last day at NPR will be Dec. 9, spokeswoman Anna Christopher said. Margaret Low Smith continues to serve as senior vice president of news until a replacement is hired. NPR will wait until its top news post is filled before deciding how to fill the executive editor role, Christopher said.
Before public radio, Meyer was editorial director of CBSNews.com and was a producer for "The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather."
Beginning in February 2012, Meyer will lead the BBC's U.S. newscast "BBC World News America" and its American website. In a statement, he says the BBC has "real opportunity for growth" in the U.S. as American news organizations struggle.
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