NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks were mostly higher Thursday as investors got back to focusing on corporate earnings and economic data.
It's a change of pace for Wall Street, which had been completely absorbed in Washington's political drama over the last month. Now that the U.S. has avoided the possibility of default, at least for a few months, traders are returning to a state of normalcy.
"I don't think we can completely close the door on the debt ceiling chapter just yet, but we can get back to the stuff that really matters," said Jonathan Corpina, who manages trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for Meridian Equity Partners.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index was up five points, or 0.3 percent, to 1,726 at 2 p.m. Eastern. If it closes at that level it would edge out its all-time high of 1,725 set on Sept. 18.
The Nasdaq composite added nine points, or 0.2 percent, to 3,848.
The two indexes were faring far better than the Dow Jones industrial average, which has just 30 stocks. The Dow was down 53 points, or 0.4 percent, at 15,321.
The Dow was dragged lower by shares of IBM. The technology giant said Wednesday that its third-quarter net income rose 6 percent, but revenue fell and missed Wall Street's forecast by more than $1 billion. IBM fell $12.10, or 7 percent, to $174.50
Goldman Sachs also weighed down the index. The investment bank's revenue fell sharply as trading in bonds and other securities slowed. Goldman fell $4.28, or 3 percent, $157.90.
Now that there was no longer an immediate fear that the United States could default on its debt and the government was reopening, Wall Street was surveying the damage.
Market analysts expect the 16-day partial shutdown of the government caused billions of dollars of damage to the U.S. economy through furloughed government employees, delayed government contracts, and declines in tourism at national parks. Analysts at Wells Fargo said the shutdown likely cut 0.5 percentage points off of U.S. economic growth.
And there remain broader concerns the two parties won't be able to reach a longer-term budget agreement. The deal approved late Wednesday only permits the Treasury Department to borrow through Feb. 7 and fund the government through Jan. 15.
"The agreement represents another temporary fix that pushes fiscal uncertainty into the early months of next year," Wells Fargo analysts said.
Despite worries about the damage the debt ceiling and government shutdown did to the economy, there were signs that normalcy was returning to financial markets.
Stresses in the bond market were easing. The one-month Treasury bill was back to trading at a yield of 0.01 percent, about where it was a month ago, and down sharply from 0.35 percent on Tuesday.
Usually a staid, conservative security, the one-month T-bill was subjected to a wave of selling at the beginning of the month. Investors feared the T-bill would be the first piece of government debt to be affected by a U.S. default if the debt ceiling was breached and the federal government could no longer pay its obligations.
The yield on the more closely-watched 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.60 percent from 2.67 percent Wednesday.
Corporate earnings are expected to continue to dominate trading for the next couple weeks. So far, only 79 companies in the S&P 500 have reported third-quarter results, according to S&P Capital IQ. Analysts expect earnings at those companies to increase 3.3 percent over the same period a year ago.
In other corporate news:
— Verizon, one of the stocks in the Dow average, rose $1.63, or 3 percent, to $48.87. The telecommunications company said it earned an adjusted 77 cents per share for the recent quarter. Analysts polled by FactSet expected earnings of 74 cents per share.
— UnitedHealth Group was down $3.67, or 5 percent, to $71.52. The health insurance giant narrowed its 2013 profit forecast, instead of raising it, giving some analysts pause.
With 'Layouts for Living', SwiftKey Liberates Your Android Typing Experience
New custom keyboard layouts adapt to any situation
San Francisco, CA, October 17, 2013 - SwiftKey, the leading Android keyboard app, today announced public beta access to its latest version, dubbed 'Layouts for Living'. The SwiftKey 4.3 update provides users with new keyboard layouts that can be resized and moved anywhere on a device, empowering people to type however they want to, regardless of screen size.
Through extensive user experience (UX) testing and feedback, SwiftKey recognized that an increasing lack of distinction between the phone and tablet form factor means users are demanding more flexibility when they type. For example, commuters in cramped trains may want to type one-handed with their left thumb, while a professional writing a document on a tablet may want to type with both thumbs. SwiftKey's latest update aims to adapt to everyday situations such as these as well as any number of others - it's up to each user. With Layouts for Living, SwiftKey liberates users with a huge variety of layouts.
"Allowing people to manipulate the location, size and layout of the keyboard not only makes it easier to type – it gives our users a more personalized way to interact with their technology and each other," said co-founder and CTO Ben Medlock. "We are committed to creating world-class user experiences that marry our powerful language technology with interfaces that learn and adapt to each user's needs."
In addition to being able to size and place the keyboard anywhere on the device, version 4.3 of SwiftKey also includes three preset keyboard modes:
Compact: On many larger phones it can be difficult to enter text and hold the phone with just one hand. This new feature minimizes the width of the keyboard and allows for easier typing with one-hand or gesture typing using SwiftKey Flow. It also frees up more of the screen estate on tablets. Full: Users with large screens can now opt for a full-width keyboard with left-right cursor control keys and a backspace key above the "Enter" key. By placing the keys closer together, this new layout mimics the experience of two-handed typing on a physical keyboard. Thumb: For people typing on tablets in landscape and with wide phones in portrait the keyboard can be split into two sections, enabling fast, comfortable typing with both thumbs.
Consistent Experience As devices of varying sizes continue to enter the market and the line between tablets and phones blur, a consistent SwiftKey experience is an ongoing priority for our fans. Listening to fan feedback, SwiftKey has merged the phone and tablet apps to eliminate guesswork as to which version of the app a user should purchase.
With SwiftKey Layouts for Living, current and future customers can use one unified SwiftKey app across all Android devices. Leveraging SwiftKey Cloud, which was introduced in SwiftKey 4.2, the app also creates a cloud-based hub for each user's personal language profile to be shared with any phone or device. SwiftKey Layouts for Living offers a beautiful user experience for all users, across all of their devices no matter the screen size.
The SwiftKey Layouts for Living beta is available to the public now and can be downloaded at http://beta.swiftkey.net.
LOON, Philippines (Reuters) - The death toll from an earthquake in the Philippines rose to 144 on Wednesday as rescuers dug through the rubble of collapsed buildings including an old church and a hospital.
Nearly 3 million people were affected by the 7.2 magnitude quake on Tuesday, which caused landslides and widespread damage to infrastructure in the tourist destinations of Bohol island and the nearby Cebu islands.
The number of injured rose towards 300, with at least 23 people missing.
The national disaster agency said at least 134 of the dead were on Bohol island, which took the brunt of the quake. The island is located 630 km (390 miles) south of the capital, Manila.
Officials feared the toll would rise as communications with remote areas were re-established.
"I think this is a growing number," Loon mayor Lloyd Lopez told Philippine radio. "Yesterday, we had a partial communications block-out."
"We have not reached all barangays, many are cut off, the roads are blocked by big boulders," Lopez said, referring to villages.
Mobile phone links from the country's main provider had been restored but a rival provider still had to fix some of its damaged equipment, a state telecommunications official said.
Many of the millions hit by the quake spent the night outdoors, including patients at some hospitals, because of aftershocks. More than 840 aftershocks have been recorded, with one of magnitude 5.1, the volcanology agency said.
"There are so many aftershocks, we are afraid," Elena Manuel, a 64-year-old grandmother, told Reuters after her family and neighbors spent the night in the grounds of a centuries-old church that collapsed in Loon, a town of about 43,000 people.
"We don't have any more food and water because stores are closed, and the bridge ... is damaged. After the quake, water and mud came out of cracks on the ground in our backyard."
WARNING TO PROFITEERS
Officials said most of 23 damaged bridges in Bohol were impassable and five roads were closed. Seventeen churches suffered irreparable damage to their old coral-stone structures.
"The church here is now only powder," said Benjamin Aggenstein, a 30-year-old German businessman based in Bohol, adding that most residents of Loon did not want to return to their damaged homes and had been staying outdoors.
Ferry and airline services have resumed despite damage to ports and airports in Bohol and Cebu.
The air force was flying 11 tons of relief supplies to Bohol, a military spokesman said.
President Benigno Aquino, who made an inspection by air of quake-hit areas, warned of stiff penalties for profiteers exploiting the disaster.
The government has declared a state of calamity in both Bohol and Cebu, triggering a freeze on prices there.
Tourism has also been hurt.
Some visitors to Bohol have cancelled reservations, but the damage to tourism was likely to be short-lived, John Patrick Chan, corporate general manager of the Bellevue Hotel group, said in a television interview.
"We expect things to go back to normal soon. We're lucky the earthquake hasn't damaged much, much more," Chan said.
The country's tourism office said it had seen about 1,000 cancellations to Bohol and Cebu by tourists from South Korea.
The last time a quake of similar magnitude hit Bohol was in 1602, said Trixie Angeles, a consultant at the National Commission on Culture and the Arts.
(This story is refiled to correct grammar in fourth paragraph)
(Additional reporting by Rosemarie Francisco in MANILA; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Robert Birsel)
Tristram Stuart, founder of Feeding the 5000, is helping to organize several disco soup events across Europe for World Food Day. Stuart is shown here in New York, where he attended the first U.S.-based disco soup event in September.
Courtesy of Feeding the 5000
Tristram Stuart, founder of Feeding the 5000, is helping to organize several disco soup events across Europe for World Food Day. Stuart is shown here in New York, where he attended the first U.S.-based disco soup event in September.
Courtesy of Feeding the 5000
Wednesday is World Food Day, an occasion food activists like to use to call attention to world hunger. With 842 million chronically undernourished people on Earth, it's a problem that hasn't gone away.
This year, activists are trying to make the day a little spicier with pots full of disco soup to highlight the absurd amount of food thrown away that could feed people: one-third of all the food produced every year.
What is disco soup, you ask? It's the tasty outcome of a party designed to bring strangers together to cook food that would otherwise end up in the trash. Oftentimes, the soup is donated to the hungry. Oh, and as the name suggests, there's music involved, too.
The first disco soup party was held in Germany in early 2012 by some folks affiliated with the Slow Food Youth Network Deutschland. The organizers collected discarded fruits and vegetables from a market, blasted some disco music and made a huge pot of soup.
Two months later, a group in France threw a disco soup party, and attracted 100 people. More parties followed, in Australia, South Korea, Ireland and beyond. You can check out an earnest little video of another French disco food event here:
The idea eventually caught the attention of Tristram Stuart, a British food waste activist and writer who started Feeding the 5000, a campaign named for an event held in London in 2009 and 2011, where 5,000 members of the public were given a free lunch made with perfectly edible ingredients bound for the rubbish bin.
Stuart is adamant that consumers and businesses in the developed world have a moral obligation to reverse "the global scandal" of food waste. In addition to throwing events to cook up blemished but edible produce, his campaign is also working to change European Union legislation on feeding food waste to pigs through the Pig Idea project.
For World Food Day, Feeding the 5000 is hosting a "flagship" disco soup party in Brussels. And the group says more pots full of disco soup will be bubbling away today in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Greece and Macedonia. The event hub is the Disco Anti Food Waste Day Facebook page.
And what if you don't like disco? Can you still have a disco soup event?
"We play anything that gets people dancing as they peel and chop the vegetables and fruit," Dominika Jarosz, event coordinator for Feeding the 5000, tells The Salt in an email.
While there are no disco soup events scheduled for Oct. 16 in the U.S., Feeding the 5000 says disco soup is starting to get traction here. The first U.S. disco soup event was held on Sept. 20 in New York, with the support of Slow Food NYC, the Natural Gourmet Institute, chef Paul Gerard of the East Village restaurant Exchange Alley and the United Nations Environment Program.
In advance of the soup blitz, Stuart visited local farms in New York and New Jersey and gleaned blemished tomatoes, over-sized watermelons, squash, eggplants and other fresh produce that the farmers were unable to sell. A rotating crew of DJs provided a soundtrack at the soup-making party at the Chelsea Super Pier, and most of the food was donated to the Bowery Mission. Such events, he says, help raise awareness among food donors like grocery stores and farmers and help them forge long-term relationships with organizations that feed the hungry.
Americans may be getting more motivated to address food waste, but we have to hand it to the Europeans, who do seem to be out in front on the issue. It was a group of Austrians, after all, who started a reality cooking show centered around Dumpster diving.
Food waste was also a talking point for world leaders who spoke up on World Food Day. "Reducing food waste is not, in fact, only a strategy for times of crisis, but a way of life we should adopt if we want a sustainable future for our planet," Nunzia De Girolamo, Italy's minister for agriculture, food and forestry policy, said at a ceremony Wednesday at the Food and Agriculture Organization's headquarters in Rome.
Tristram Stuart, founder of Feeding the 5000, is helping to organize several disco soup events across Europe for World Food Day. Stuart is shown here in New York, where he attended the first U.S.-based disco soup event in September.
Courtesy of Feeding the 5000
Tristram Stuart, founder of Feeding the 5000, is helping to organize several disco soup events across Europe for World Food Day. Stuart is shown here in New York, where he attended the first U.S.-based disco soup event in September.
Courtesy of Feeding the 5000
Wednesday is World Food Day, an occasion food activists like to use to call attention to world hunger. With 842 million chronically undernourished people on Earth, it's a problem that hasn't gone away.
This year, activists are trying to make the day a little spicier with pots full of disco soup to highlight the absurd amount of food thrown away that could feed people: one-third of all the food produced every year.
What is disco soup, you ask? It's the tasty outcome of a party designed to bring strangers together to cook food that would otherwise end up in the trash. Oftentimes, the soup is donated to the hungry. Oh, and as the name suggests, there's music involved, too.
The first disco soup party was held in Germany in early 2012 by some folks affiliated with the Slow Food Youth Network Deutschland. The organizers collected discarded fruits and vegetables from a market, blasted some disco music and made a huge pot of soup.
Two months later, a group in France threw a disco soup party, and attracted 100 people. More parties followed, in Australia, South Korea, Ireland and beyond. You can check out an earnest little video of another French disco food event here:
The idea eventually caught the attention of Tristram Stuart, a British food waste activist and writer who started Feeding the 5000, a campaign named for an event held in London in 2009 and 2011, where 5,000 members of the public were given a free lunch made with perfectly edible ingredients bound for the rubbish bin.
Stuart is adamant that consumers and businesses in the developed world have a moral obligation to reverse "the global scandal" of food waste. In addition to throwing events to cook up blemished but edible produce, his campaign is also working to change European Union legislation on feeding food waste to pigs through the Pig Idea project.
For World Food Day, Feeding the 5000 is hosting a "flagship" disco soup party in Brussels. And the group says more pots full of disco soup will be bubbling away today in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Greece and Macedonia. The event hub is the Disco Anti Food Waste Day Facebook page.
And what if you don't like disco? Can you still have a disco soup event?
"We play anything that gets people dancing as they peel and chop the vegetables and fruit," Dominika Jarosz, event coordinator for Feeding the 5000, tells The Salt in an email.
While there are no disco soup events scheduled for Oct. 16 in the U.S., Feeding the 5000 says disco soup is starting to get traction here. The first U.S. disco soup event was held on Sept. 20 in New York, with the support of Slow Food NYC, the Natural Gourmet Institute, chef Paul Gerard of the East Village restaurant Exchange Alley and the United Nations Environment Program.
In advance of the soup blitz, Stuart visited local farms in New York and New Jersey and gleaned blemished tomatoes, over-sized watermelons, squash, eggplants and other fresh produce that the farmers were unable to sell. A rotating crew of DJs provided a soundtrack at the soup-making party at the Chelsea Super Pier, and most of the food was donated to the Bowery Mission. Such events, he says, help raise awareness among food donors like grocery stores and farmers and help them forge long-term relationships with organizations that feed the hungry.
Americans may be getting more motivated to address food waste, but we have to hand it to the Europeans, who do seem to be out in front on the issue. It was a group of Austrians, after all, who started a reality cooking show centered around Dumpster diving.
Food waste was also a talking point for world leaders who spoke up on World Food Day. "Reducing food waste is not, in fact, only a strategy for times of crisis, but a way of life we should adopt if we want a sustainable future for our planet," Nunzia De Girolamo, Italy's minister for agriculture, food and forestry policy, said at a ceremony Wednesday at the Food and Agriculture Organization's headquarters in Rome.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell arrives at the Capitol on Wednesday. The Kentucky Republican helped forge a late-hour deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to sidestep financial chaos.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell arrives at the Capitol on Wednesday. The Kentucky Republican helped forge a late-hour deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to sidestep financial chaos.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The White House is insisting, publicly at least, that nobody emerged victorious from the government shutdown/debt crisis debacle.
"There are no winners here," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday after Senate leaders announced they had a deal to end the budget impasse.
"And nobody's who's sent here to Washington by the American people can call themselves a winner," Carney said, "if the American people have paid a price for what's happened."
Well, yes and no.
As the curtain comes down on the latest, but certainly not the last, partisan convulsion, there's no question that the shutdown and debt crisis will affect the political calculus in Washington.
Here's our list of winners and losers. Let us know if you have suggestions of your own.
Winners
Kentucky's Senators
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the state's wily senior senator, and his junior GOP colleague, Sen. Rand Paul, both emerged from their party's awful interlude with reputations intact, if not enhanced. McConnell employed his sharp political instincts and once again forged a late-hour deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to sidestep financial chaos. And Paul astutely tended to his 2016 presidential ambitions by largely steering clear of the doomed defund-Obamacare-or-else strategy embraced by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
GOP Sen. Ted Cruz
The Texas senator held a fake filibuster, persuaded like-minded House members to jump off the shutdown/debt crisis ledge, harvested Tea Party cash and gathered names for fundraising lists. Wednesday's Pew Research Center poll results show his popularity among Tea Party Republicans soaring — and he's solidified his role as the undisputed face of the Obamacare resistance and the voice of a motivated and aggravated slice of the party's base.
GOP Speaker John Boehner
In allowing his more conservative members to drive a losing battle, the Ohio Republican has enhanced his standing with that faction and solidified his hold on the GOP conference. Boehner on Tuesday looked every inch the blundering loser; by Wednesday, his speakership remained secure, and he was basking in the praise of some of the hard-liners who have been making his life so difficult.
GOP Rep. Tom Graves
Graves, a conservative from north Georgia, emerged from national obscurity to win notice as a leader of the defund-Obamacare movement in the House. He leveraged the crisis to go from "Representative Who?" status — he was first elected in a 2010 special election — to a seat at television talk show tables and a reputation as a leading Tea Party voice.
GOP Rep. Devin Nunes
The California Republican won national attention for his now famous characterization of fellow party members willing to shut down government over Obamacare as "lemmings with suicide vests." After that memorable description, Nunes became a go-to Republican for the media because of his willingness to criticize his party's positions while remaining loyal to leadership.
Obamacare
How could we list the Affordable Care Act as a winner, when its rollout has been beset by such enormous problems? It's simple: Think of all the "president's health care launch is an unmitigated fiasco" stories that weren't written, or received minor play, because the program start coincided with the government shutdown. Thus the administration has had cover while it hustles to fix the worst of the problems.
Senate Women
GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona was among those who gave props to his female colleagues for their role in leading a bipartisan group of 14 senators (it included six women) to help provide Reid and McConnell a framework for their deal to end the government shutdown. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine won particular notice. "Leadership, I must fully admit," McCain said, "was provided primarily by women in the Senate."
Wall Street, Eventually
A late Wednesday headline on CNN said it all: "Debt Ceiling Deal Sends Stocks Soaring."
Senate Chaplain Barry Black
In Senate floor prayers during the crisis, the 64-year-old former Navy chaplain drew national attention — and inspired a Saturday Night Live skit — with his ardent pleas for reason and faith. "Save us from the madness," he prayed one day, "and deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable."
Robert Costa
No one covered the crisis with more consistency and insight than The National Review's Washington editor, Robert Costa. He used his must-read Twitter feed to break news, and provided deep, dispassionate insight into Republican strategy for his conservative publication. Costa, 28, was one of five conservative journalists whom Obama invited to the White House for a private briefing.
Losers
(In addition to the American people, federal and government contract employees, tourists and those with businesses reliant on visitors to the nation's national parks.)
GOP Sen. Ted Cruz
Yes, the Texas senator was both a winner and a loser. He's been excoriated by members of his own party over his approach, and Wednesday's Pew Research Center poll results show his popularity dropping among those not aligned with the GOP Tea Party wing. While he has established himself as a Tea Party force, Cruz lost the immediate battle and may have fatally damaged his general election brand.
GOP Speaker John Boehner
Bad boy political columnist Roger Simon, in a widely read piece this week, took aim at Cruz and Boehner for allowing — if not orchestrating — the shutdown and leading the nation to the brink of financial calamity. Boehner, he wrote, "does not bend to the will of his Kamikaze Caucus because he is an evil man. He does so because he is a weak man. To borrow a line from Theodore Roosevelt, I could carve a better man out of a banana." In allowing his more conservative members to drive a losing battle, Boehner looked weak, blundering and barely in control of his conference. And in the end, he opened the door to a deal that will very likely require a majority of Democrats to get passed.
House GOP Hard-Liners
It took The Wall Street Journal to lay it out succinctly: "They picked a goal they couldn't achieve in trying to defund Obamacare from one House of Congress," it editorialized Wednesday, "and then they picked a means they couldn't sustain politically by pursuing a long government shutdown and threatening to blow through the debt limit."
The Tea Party Brand
Pew Research Center poll results released Wednesday showed that unfavorable views of the Tea Party have nearly doubled since 2010. Negative opinions have accelerated in recent months, particularly among moderate and liberal Republicans, and now nearly half of the American public has an unfavorable view of the Tea Party.
Immigration Overhaul
Remember that? President Obama says he does, and this he week told Univision's Los Angeles affiliate that he's going to push for House Speaker Boehner to take up the Senate-approved immigration overhaul bill. But here's how one conservative House Republican framed the upcoming debate on Wednesday: "If the president is going to show the same kind of good-faith efforts that he has shown in the last couple of weeks, I think it would be crazy for the House Republican leadership to enter into negotiations with him on immigration," said Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho. "He has tried to destroy the Republican Party and I think that anything that we do right now with this president on immigration will be with that same goal in mind, which is to destroy the Republican Party and not to get good policies."
Ken Cuccinelli
Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, was in a pretty close race with Democrat Terry McAuliffe before the Oct. 1 shutdown and impending debt crisis. But polls show that support for the social conservative has eroded in the past two weeks, driven in part by antipathy of many of the huge swath of federal workers living in the purple state Obama won twice.
Vice President Biden
The garrulous vice president was a key player in brokering a bipartisan deal to avoid the nation's last almost-default two years ago. This time, he's been nowhere to be seen — except during a shopping trip Tuesday to the local Brooks Brothers. The White House insists he is in the loop and attended meetings with members of Congress. But it's been reported that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats weren't so crazy about Biden's last deal and preferred to go it alone.
Michelle Obama's Garden
The nation's most famous vegetable plot has gone to seed, literally, during the shutdown. With no groundskeepers or gardeners working to keep up the garden and White House grounds, vegetables on the 1,500-square-foot plot are rotting, weeds are taking over, and critters are having a ball, reports the blog Obama Foodorama.
The discovery of a fossilized brain in the preserved remains of an extinct "mega-clawed" creature has revealed an ancient nervous system that is remarkably similar to that of modern-day spiders and scorpions, according to a new study.
The fossilized Alalcomenaeus is a type of arthropod known as a megacheiran (Greek for "large claws") that lived approximately 520 million years ago, during a period known as the Lower Cambrian. The creature was unearthed in the fossil-rich Chengjiang formation in southwest China.
Researchers studied the fossilized brain, the earliest known complete nervous system, and found similarities between the extinct creature's nervous system and the nervous systems of several modern arthropods, which suggest they may be ancestrally related. [Photos of Clawed Arthropod & Other Strange Cambrian Creatures]
The arthropod family
Living arthropods are commonly separated into two major groups: chelicerates, which include spiders, horseshoe crabs and scorpions, and a group that includes insects, crustaceans and millipedes. The new findings shed light on the evolutionary processes that may have given rise to modern arthropods, and also provide clues about where these extinct mega-clawed creatures fit in the tree of life.
"We now know that the megacheirans had central nervous systems very similar to today's horseshoe crabs and scorpions," senior author Nicholas Strausfeld, a professor in the department of neuroscience at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a statement. "This means the ancestors of spiders and their kin lived side by side with the ancestors of crustaceans in the Lower Cambrian."
The newly identified creature measures a little over an inch long (3 centimeters), and has a segmented body with about a dozen pairs of attached limbs that enabled it to swim or crawl.
"Up front, it has a long pair of appendages that have scissorlike components — basically an elbow with scissors on the end," Strausfeld told LiveScience. "These are really weird appendages, and there has been a long debate about what they are and what they correspond to in modern animals."
Previously, researchers suggested megacheirans were related to chelicerates, since the extinct creature's scissorlike claws and the fangs of spiders and scorpions have similar structures, said Greg Edgecombe, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, England.
"They both have an 'elbow joint' in the same place, and they both have a similar arrangement of a fixed and movable finger at the tip," Edgecombe told LiveScience. "Because of these similarities, one of the main theories for what 'great appendage arthropods' are is that they were related to chelicerates. Thus, our findings from the nervous system gave an injection of new data to support an existing theory."
Fossilized brain images
The researchers used CT scans to make 3D reconstructions of features of the fossilized nervous system. The scientists also used laser-scanning technology to map the distribution of chemical elements, such as iron and copper, in the specimen in order to outline different neural structures.
Though finding a well-preserved ancient nervous system is rare, the new study highlights the potential for similar discoveries, the researchers said.
"Finding ancient preservation of neural tissue allows us to analyze extinct animals using the same tools we use for living animals," Edgecombe said. "It suggests there should be more examples out there."
About a year ago, Edgecombe and his colleagues found a different fossilized brain that revealed unexpected similarity to the brains of modern crustaceans.
"Our new find is exciting because it shows that mandibulates (to which crustaceans belong) and chelicerates were already present as two distinct evolutionary trajectories 520 million years ago, which means their common ancestor must have existed much deeper in time," Strausfeld said in a statement. "We expect to find fossils of animals that have persisted from more ancient times, and I'm hopeful we will one day find the ancestral type of both the mandibulate and chelicerate nervous system ground patterns. They had to come from somewhere. Now the search is on."
The detailed findings of the study were published online today (Oct. 16) in the journal Nature.
Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Ghrelin, a stress-induced hormone, primes the brain for PTSD
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
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Contact: Andrew Carleen acarleen@mit.edu 617-253-1682 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT study finds that ghrelin, produced during stressful situations, primes the brain for post-traumatic stress disorder
CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- About a dozen years ago, scientists discovered that a hormone called ghrelin enhances appetite. Dubbed the "hunger hormone," ghrelin was quickly targeted by drug companies seeking treatments for obesity none of which have yet panned out.
MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that ghrelin's role goes far beyond controlling hunger. The researchers found that ghrelin released during chronic stress makes the brain more vulnerable to traumatic events, suggesting that it may predispose people to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Drugs that reduce ghrelin levels, originally developed to try to combat obesity, could help protect people who are at high risk for PTSD, such as soldiers serving in war, says Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Oct. 15 online edition of Molecular Psychiatry.
"Perhaps we could give people who are going to be deployed into an active combat zone a ghrelin vaccine before they go, so they will have a lower incidence of PTSD. That's exciting because right now there's nothing given to people to prevent PTSD," says Goosens, who is also a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Lead author of the paper is Retsina Meyer, a recent MIT PhD recipient. Other authors are McGovern postdoc Anthony Burgos-Robles, graduate student Elizabeth Liu, and McGovern research scientist Susana Correia.
Stress and fear
Stress is a useful response to dangerous situations because it provokes action to escape or fight back. However, when stress is chronic, it can produce anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses.
At MIT, Goosens discovered that one brain structure that is especially critical for generating fear, the amygdala, has a special response to chronic stress. The amygdala produces large amounts of growth hormone during stress, a change that seems not to occur in other brain regions.
In the new paper, Goosens and her colleagues found that the release of the growth hormone in the amygdala is controlled by ghrelin, which is produced primarily in the stomach and travels throughout the body, including the brain.
Ghrelin levels are elevated by chronic stress. In humans, this might be produced by factors such as unemployment, bullying, or loss of a family member. Ghrelin stimulates the secretion of growth hormone from the brain; the effects of growth hormone from the pituitary gland in organs such as the liver and bones have been extensively studied. However, the role of growth hormone in the brain, particularly the amygdala, is not well known.
The researchers found that when rats were given either a drug to stimulate the ghrelin receptor or gene therapy to overexpress growth hormone over a prolonged period, they became much more susceptible to fear than normal rats. Fear was measured by training all of the rats to fear an innocuous, novel tone. While all rats learned to fear the tone, the rats with prolonged increased activity of the ghrelin receptor or overexpression of growth hormone were the most fearful, assessed by how long they froze after hearing the tone. Blocking the cell receptors that interact with ghrelin or growth hormone reduced fear to normal levels in chronically stressed rats.
When rats were exposed to chronic stress over a prolonged period, their circulating ghrelin and amygdalar growth hormone levels also went up, and fearful memories were encoded more strongly. This is similar to what the researchers believe happens in people who suffer from PTSD.
"When you have people with a history of stress who encounter a traumatic event, they are more likely to develop PTSD because that history of stress has altered something about their biology. They have an excessively strong memory of the traumatic event, and that is one of the things that drives their PTSD symptoms," Goosens says.
New drugs, new targets
Over the last century, scientists have described the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which produces adrenaline, cortisol (corticosterone in rats), and other hormones that stimulate "fight or flight" behavior. Since then, stress research has focused almost exclusively on the HPA axis.
After discovering ghrelin's role in stress, the MIT researchers suspected that ghrelin was also linked to the HPA axis. However, they were surprised to find that when the rats' adrenal glands the source of corticosterone, adrenaline, and noradrenaline were removed, the animals still became overly fearful when chronically stressed. The authors also showed that repeated ghrelin-receptor stimulation did not trigger release of HPA hormones, and that blockade of the ghrelin receptor did not blunt release of HPA stress hormones. Therefore, the ghrelin-initiated stress pathway appears to act independently of the HPA axis. "That's important because it gives us a whole new target for stress therapies," Goosens says.
Pharmaceutical companies have developed at least a dozen possible drug compounds that interfere with ghrelin. Many of these drugs have been found safe for humans, but have not been shown to help people lose weight. The researchers believe these drugs could offer a way to vaccinate people entering stressful situations, or even to treat people who already suffer from PTSD, because ghrelin levels remain high long after the chronic stress ends.
PTSD affects about 7.7 million American adults, including soldiers and victims of crimes, accidents, or natural disasters. About 40 to 50 percent of patients recover within five years, Meyer says, but the rest never get better.
The researchers hypothesize that the persistent elevation of ghrelin following trauma exposure could be one of the factors that maintain PTSD. "So, could you immediately reverse PTSD? Maybe not, but maybe the ghrelin could get damped down and these people could go through cognitive behavioral therapy, and over time, maybe we can reverse it," Meyer says.
Working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Goosens' lab is now planning to study ghrelin levels in human patients suffering from anxiety and fear disorders. They are also planning a clinical trial of a drug that blocks ghrelin to see if it can prevent relapse of depression.
###
The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
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Ghrelin, a stress-induced hormone, primes the brain for PTSD
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
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Contact: Andrew Carleen acarleen@mit.edu 617-253-1682 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT study finds that ghrelin, produced during stressful situations, primes the brain for post-traumatic stress disorder
CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- About a dozen years ago, scientists discovered that a hormone called ghrelin enhances appetite. Dubbed the "hunger hormone," ghrelin was quickly targeted by drug companies seeking treatments for obesity none of which have yet panned out.
MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that ghrelin's role goes far beyond controlling hunger. The researchers found that ghrelin released during chronic stress makes the brain more vulnerable to traumatic events, suggesting that it may predispose people to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Drugs that reduce ghrelin levels, originally developed to try to combat obesity, could help protect people who are at high risk for PTSD, such as soldiers serving in war, says Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Oct. 15 online edition of Molecular Psychiatry.
"Perhaps we could give people who are going to be deployed into an active combat zone a ghrelin vaccine before they go, so they will have a lower incidence of PTSD. That's exciting because right now there's nothing given to people to prevent PTSD," says Goosens, who is also a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Lead author of the paper is Retsina Meyer, a recent MIT PhD recipient. Other authors are McGovern postdoc Anthony Burgos-Robles, graduate student Elizabeth Liu, and McGovern research scientist Susana Correia.
Stress and fear
Stress is a useful response to dangerous situations because it provokes action to escape or fight back. However, when stress is chronic, it can produce anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses.
At MIT, Goosens discovered that one brain structure that is especially critical for generating fear, the amygdala, has a special response to chronic stress. The amygdala produces large amounts of growth hormone during stress, a change that seems not to occur in other brain regions.
In the new paper, Goosens and her colleagues found that the release of the growth hormone in the amygdala is controlled by ghrelin, which is produced primarily in the stomach and travels throughout the body, including the brain.
Ghrelin levels are elevated by chronic stress. In humans, this might be produced by factors such as unemployment, bullying, or loss of a family member. Ghrelin stimulates the secretion of growth hormone from the brain; the effects of growth hormone from the pituitary gland in organs such as the liver and bones have been extensively studied. However, the role of growth hormone in the brain, particularly the amygdala, is not well known.
The researchers found that when rats were given either a drug to stimulate the ghrelin receptor or gene therapy to overexpress growth hormone over a prolonged period, they became much more susceptible to fear than normal rats. Fear was measured by training all of the rats to fear an innocuous, novel tone. While all rats learned to fear the tone, the rats with prolonged increased activity of the ghrelin receptor or overexpression of growth hormone were the most fearful, assessed by how long they froze after hearing the tone. Blocking the cell receptors that interact with ghrelin or growth hormone reduced fear to normal levels in chronically stressed rats.
When rats were exposed to chronic stress over a prolonged period, their circulating ghrelin and amygdalar growth hormone levels also went up, and fearful memories were encoded more strongly. This is similar to what the researchers believe happens in people who suffer from PTSD.
"When you have people with a history of stress who encounter a traumatic event, they are more likely to develop PTSD because that history of stress has altered something about their biology. They have an excessively strong memory of the traumatic event, and that is one of the things that drives their PTSD symptoms," Goosens says.
New drugs, new targets
Over the last century, scientists have described the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which produces adrenaline, cortisol (corticosterone in rats), and other hormones that stimulate "fight or flight" behavior. Since then, stress research has focused almost exclusively on the HPA axis.
After discovering ghrelin's role in stress, the MIT researchers suspected that ghrelin was also linked to the HPA axis. However, they were surprised to find that when the rats' adrenal glands the source of corticosterone, adrenaline, and noradrenaline were removed, the animals still became overly fearful when chronically stressed. The authors also showed that repeated ghrelin-receptor stimulation did not trigger release of HPA hormones, and that blockade of the ghrelin receptor did not blunt release of HPA stress hormones. Therefore, the ghrelin-initiated stress pathway appears to act independently of the HPA axis. "That's important because it gives us a whole new target for stress therapies," Goosens says.
Pharmaceutical companies have developed at least a dozen possible drug compounds that interfere with ghrelin. Many of these drugs have been found safe for humans, but have not been shown to help people lose weight. The researchers believe these drugs could offer a way to vaccinate people entering stressful situations, or even to treat people who already suffer from PTSD, because ghrelin levels remain high long after the chronic stress ends.
PTSD affects about 7.7 million American adults, including soldiers and victims of crimes, accidents, or natural disasters. About 40 to 50 percent of patients recover within five years, Meyer says, but the rest never get better.
The researchers hypothesize that the persistent elevation of ghrelin following trauma exposure could be one of the factors that maintain PTSD. "So, could you immediately reverse PTSD? Maybe not, but maybe the ghrelin could get damped down and these people could go through cognitive behavioral therapy, and over time, maybe we can reverse it," Meyer says.
Working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Goosens' lab is now planning to study ghrelin levels in human patients suffering from anxiety and fear disorders. They are also planning a clinical trial of a drug that blocks ghrelin to see if it can prevent relapse of depression.
###
The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
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.
Two recent operations in Libya and Somalia offer a vivid example of how members of U.S. Special Operations are being deployed around the world to go after terrorists. Renee Montagne talks to author Jeremy Scahill about his newest book, Dirty Wars, which is about the rise of special forces.
FILE - In this Sept. 10, 2013 file photo, Polk County Sheriff personnel investigate the death of 12-year-old girl, Rebecca Ann Sedwick, at an old cement plant in Lakeland, Fla. Two girls have been arrested in her death. Officials say she committed suicide after being bullied online for nearly a year. On Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013 Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd will announce charges against the girls, age 12 and 14, in a press conference. (AP Photo/The Lakeland Ledger, Ernst Peters, File)
FILE - In this Sept. 10, 2013 file photo, Polk County Sheriff personnel investigate the death of 12-year-old girl, Rebecca Ann Sedwick, at an old cement plant in Lakeland, Fla. Two girls have been arrested in her death. Officials say she committed suicide after being bullied online for nearly a year. On Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013 Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd will announce charges against the girls, age 12 and 14, in a press conference. (AP Photo/The Lakeland Ledger, Ernst Peters, File)
WINTER HAVEN, Fla. (AP) — A central Florida man says allegations that his 14-year-old daughter bullied a 12-year-old girl who killed herself are not true.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Tuesday authorities arrested the 14-year-old girl after she admitted online over the weekend that she had harassed Rebecca Sedwick.
A man who answered the phone at the 14-year-old's Lakeland home identified himself as her father. He told The Associated Press that his daughter was "a good girl" and he was "100 percent sure that whatever they're saying about my daughter is not true."
A 12-year-old girl was also arrested in the case. A message left at her Lakeland home was not immediately returned.
Rebecca climbed at tower at an abandoned concrete plant Sept. 9 and hurled herself to her death.
AP generally doesn't identify juveniles charged with crimes.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
Two girls were arrested in a Florida bullying case after one of them admitted online over the weekend that she harassed a 12-year-old girl killed herself last month, a sheriff said Tuesday.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said they arrested a 14-year-old girl because they were worried she would continue cyberbullying other girls. The girl is accused of bullying 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick, who climbed at tower at an abandoned concrete plant Sept. 9 and hurled herself to her death.
Judd said arrested the 14-year-old girl after she posted online Saturday that she bullied Rebecca and she didn't care.
"We decided that we can't leave her out there. Who else is she going to torment, who else is she going to harass?" Judd said.
Police also arrested a 12-year-old girl who is accused of bullying Rebecca. Both have been charged with felony aggravated stalking.
The sheriff's office identified the two girls, but The Associated Press generally does not name juveniles charged with crimes.
Judd said the bullying began after the 14-year-old girl started dating a boy that Rebecca had been seeing.
She "didn't like that and began to harass and ultimately torment Rebecca," Judd said.
The 12-year-old girl was Rebecca's former best friend, but Judd said the 14-year-old girl turned her against Rebecca. Other girls also stopped being friends with her in fear of being bullied, the sheriff said.
Authorities have said Rebecca was "terrorized" by as many as 15 girls who ganged up on her and picked on her for months through online message boards and texts.
Witnesses told investigators the 14-year-old girl told Rebecca "to drink bleach and die" and said she should kill herself.
Judd said neither girl's parents wanted to bring their daughters to the sheriff's office, so detectives went to their homes and arrested them.
Judd said the 14-year-old was "very cold, had no emotion at all upon her arrest."
Washington (AFP) - Washington's risky game of political brinkmanship neared crisis point Tuesday, with no deal yet nailed down to avoid a catastrophic US debt default, just 36 hours before a crucial deadline.
Despite global fears that the US government could run out of money to pay its bills on Thursday, the rift cleaving US politics and a fight for the soul of the Republican Party thwarted compromise.
Hopes a nascent deal between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate would open the way to resolve a fight over raising the US borrowing limit and reopening government proved over optimistic.
House Republican leaders, seeking to appease the conservative Tea Party faction, decided to try to pass their own bill, seeking to impose constraints on President Barack Obama's health care law.
The White House immediately struck back, rejecting the gambit as tantamount to demanding a "ransom" and renewed Obama's demand that the $16.7 trillion debt cap be raised without conditions.
The maneuvering left the way out of the deepest political crisis of the Obama era murky at best.
If no deal is reached by midnight on Wednesday, the US Treasury will find itself unable to borrow more money, and since its obligations will outweigh tax revenue, could begin to default on its obligations.
This would send economic shockwaves around the world.
Major powers like China and Japan are already alarmed at the implications if US Treasuries -- seen as the safest bedrock investment in the world -- lose their luster.
The House Republican plan is similar to a Senate escape bill in that it would fund government through January 15 while extending the debt ceiling to February 7, according to Congressman Darrell Issa.
But the House will include provisions to delay medical device tax that helps fund Obamacare and would remove health care subsidies for congressional aides and politicians.
"We're talking to our members on both sides of the aisle to try to find a way to move forward today," Republican House Speaker John Boehner said.
But the White House rejected the House move, signaling that if it comes to a vote minority Democrats would vote against, leaving Boehner with the long-shot task of uniting almost his entire caucus -- including the restive Tea Party -- behind the plan.
Democrats are likely banking on a plan with fewer conditions being passed by the Senate ahead of the debt default deadline before climbing on board a compromise.
"The President has said repeatedly that Members of Congress don’t get to demand ransom for fulfilling their basic responsibilities to pass a budget and pay the nation’s bills," said Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman.
"Unfortunately, the latest proposal from House Republicans does just that in a partisan attempt to appease a small group of Tea Party Republicans who forced the government shutdown in the first place."
Senate Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid vented fury at the latest House maneuver, saying they undermined the Senate compromise bid.
"Let's be clear: the House legislation will not pass the Senate," Reid said.
And, in an unusually public attack on Boehner, he accused the House speaker of appeasing a small fringe of radical conservatives at the expense of America's interests, and all just to keep his job.
"I am very disappointed with John Boehner who would once again try to preserve his role at the expense of the country," he said.
Senate Republicans were to convene to review a compromise plan being hammered out between Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Investors endured a roller coaster day on the markets due to the fast moving political developments.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly 100 points at one point, but recouped its losses by mid-morning trade, only to head on a downward track again.
China and Japan -- which between them hold more than $2.4 trillion of US debt -- have urged Washington to get its house in order.
Japan's Finance Minister Taro Aso said many US politicians "don't seem to understand well the magnitude of the international impact this problem could have".
"We demand," said China's Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao in Beijing, "that the US side, as the issuing country of the major reserve currency and the largest economy in the world . . . should undertake its due responsibility. That is to uphold and develop the stability of international financial markets."
China and Japan between them hold more than $2.4 trillion in US debt.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — When the old Sandy Hook Elementary School is demolished, building materials will be pulverized on site and metal will be taken away and melted down in an effort to eliminate nearly every trace of the building where a gunman killed 26 people last December.
Contractors also will be required to sign confidentiality agreements and workers will guard the property's perimeter to prevent onlookers from taking photographs or videos.
The goal is to prevent exploitation of any remnants of the building, Newtown First Selectman E. Patricia Llodra said Tuesday.
"We want to be absolutely certain to do everything we can to protect the privacy of the families and the Sandy Hook community," she said. "We're going to every possible length to eliminate any possibility that any artifacts from the building would be taken from the campus and ... end up on eBay."
Demolition is set to begin next week and be finished before the Dec. 14 anniversary of the shootings. Town voters last month accepted a state grant of $49.3 million to raze the building and build a new school, which is expected to open by December 2016.
The contractors' confidentiality agreements, which were first reported Monday by The News-Times of Danbury, forbid public discussion of the site as well as photographs or disclosure of any information about the building.
Llodra, the superintendent of schools and other town officials have been discussing how to handle the demolition for weeks. Llodra said they want to shield the victims' families and the community from more trauma, and don't want any part of the school used for personal gain.
Most of the building will be completely crushed and hauled away to an undisclosed location. Some of the demolition dust may be used in the foundation and driveway of the new school, Llodra said. The town also is requiring documentation that metal and other materials that can't be crushed and are hauled off-site are destroyed, she said.
In addition to the demolition crew confidentiality agreements, the project management company, Consigli Construction, also may do background checks on the workers.
"It's a very sensitive topic," Selectman Will Rodgers told The News-Times. "We want it to be handled in a respectful way."
Adam Lanza, 20, killed 20 first-grade children and six women inside the school before committing suicide. Authorities have not disclosed a possible motive for the massacre.
Sandy Hook students have been attending classes at a former school in neighboring Monroe that was renovated specially for them.
Harare (AFP) - Zimbabwean wildlife authorities said Tuesday they had discovered another 10 elephant carcasses, bringing the number of the animals poisoned by cyanide for their ivory to over 100 in the past month.
"Ten elephant carcasses were recovered in Hwange (national park) the day before yesterday (Sunday), two suspects were arrested and 14 pieces of ivory recovered," said Caroline Washaya-Moyo, spokesperson for the parks and wildlife authority.
In mid-September the park reported 81 elephants had been killed, and Washaya-Moyo said the discovery of the latest carcasses, and several others in between, brought the figure to over 100.
Twelve people have been arrested in recent weeks in connection with the killings, three of whom were sentenced in September to at least 15 years in prison each.
The magistrate also ordered them to pay $600,000 (440,000 euro) to the Zimbabwe Wildlife and Parks Authority for killing the animals by the end of the year.
Authorities have given villagers living around the park until the end of October to hand over any cyanide they might have or risk arrest.
Traditional leaders in Tsholotsho, a village bordering the park, pleaded with the authorities to pardon the villagers saying they were driven by poverty to kill the elephants and not by greed.
Just 50 rangers patrol the 14,650-square kilometre (5,660-square mile) park, and wildlife authorities say 10 times that number are needed.
There are more than 120,000 elephants roaming Zimbabwe's national parks.
Elephant tusks and other body parts are prized in Asia and the Middle East for ornaments, as talismans, and for use in traditional medicine.
The international trade in ivory, with rare exceptions, has been outlawed since 1989 after the population of African elephants dropped from millions in the mid-20th century to just 600,000 by the end of the 1980s.
Wildlife expert estimate that the illegal international ivory trade is worth up to $10 billion a year.
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011, AT 3:07 PM Obama Gets Firsthand Look at a Tornado Damage
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
Broadway, as seen from Houston Street in New York City in 1860. The classic case of artist-led gentrification is SoHo.
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building/Photography Collection/New York Public Library
Wander through New York’s Chelsea art district right now, and it might not be one of the shows at the neighborhood’s increasingly overweening megagalleries that stand out. It’ll be the sheep. The gas pumps at the Getty station on 24th and 10th are half-buried in what appears to be a rolling green pasture, neatly fenced in. Clustered on the incongruous green field is a flock of loveable, sculptural sheep. It’s a bit of soft surrealism, perfect for bemused Instagramming, and could easily be mistaken for some whimsical public art installation.
Except that’s not what it is, not exactly. It's true that the sheep are by the late French sculptor Francois-Xavier Lalanne, and “Sheep Station,” as the pop-up installation is called, was executed with the help of Lalanne’s dealer, Paul Kasmin, from up the street. But the spectacle was the brainchild of Michael Shvo, once dubbed the Big Apple’s “most successful” and “most loathed” real estate broker by New York magazine. Many of these fluffy sculptures hail from his personal collection—his wife has some public Instagrams of herself reclining sexily with Lalanne sheep—as a kind of PR stunt to boost the luxury residence he plans to build on the gas station site.
If you didn’t already associate art with real-estate speculation, it’s the kind of thing that’s likely to cement the idea in your mind. Right now, three conflicting crosscurrents are coming together to make this a hot topic for art-watchers and urban policy types. One is the gusto that developers like Shvo have for promoting new luxury housing via an association with art. Another is the fact that art’s role as a motor of economic vitality has become a preferred talking point for government agencies and arts nonprofits looking to justify money for culture in such challenging times. And the third factor is the angst experienced by artists themselves when they are implicated in the process of pushing out disadvantaged communities—before being priced out themselves—in places like New York’s ultra-hip Bushwick neighborhood (or, in London, Peckham, where a recent Guardian headline bluntly demanded, “Is Art to Blame for Gentrification?”).
The current narrative—in newsrooms, in think tanks, in studios and galleries—has art at the bleeding edge of urban transformation. But this narrative is wrong—or at least it keeps getting told in the wrong way.
The classic case of artist-led gentrification is SoHo. In the ’60s, shortly after the term gentrification was coined by British sociologist Ruth Glass, experimental art guru George Maciunus took a lead in converting the deindustrializing neighborhood’s large spaces, which had been a hub of light manufacturing for a largely Puerto Rican and African-American workforce, into artist cooperatives and live-work spaces, touching off its ultimate conversion into the gleaming nexus of air-brushed boutiques and tony restaurants that it is today. City leaders were so impressed that they wanted to do it again, and ever since the magical power of art to make over cities has been a key talking point.
The SoHo case seems clear cut. But is it? Last year, the NEA and Brookings Institution published a book called Creative Communities: Art Works in Economic Development, which includes a thought-provoking essay on the subject. Urban policy analyst Jenny Schuetz notes that even the most detailed accounts of gentrification in SoHo don’t prove that redevelopment wouldn’t have happened some other way had there been no assist from the art community. To try to answer the question of whether gallery clusters actually jumpstart transformation, Schuetz looks at every city block in Manhattan to see if there is evidence of accelerated development in the years after an art gallery moved into a neighborhood. She found that the difference was minimal. This isn’t to say that development doesn’t happen. Just that galleries are not really the major “causal agent” they get made out to be; they tend to arrive in neighborhoods already marked out for change. “These results,” she concludes, “suggest that galleries might not be the most effective or efficient target for economic development.”
Are funky bohemians the engine of development or do cities with lots of money floating around simply tend to have funky bohemian scenes?
Schuetz does leave open the possibility that other kinds of art amenities, like museums or performing arts venues, might be better candidates to boost development. As the story often gets told, it’s not the galleries, but the young (mainly white) “creatives” who first move into an “abandoned” neighborhood (which usually just means a neighborhood where poor and minority communities live or work) and lure the more affluent behind them with their vegan restaurants and glamorously eclectic outfits. Artists—glamorous but poor, open to unconventional living conditions but also in need of copious space for studios—are viewed as some kind of natural middle-term residents between the disenfranchised and a more moneyed set. For a decade, urbanist Richard Florida has been preaching the gospel that if cities can lure the “Creative Class,” then prosperity will follow.
Yet here again, causality is hotly debated—are funky bohemians the engine of development, or do cities with lots of money floating around simply tend to have funky bohemian scenes? And again, the special emphasis placed on art as a cause is misleading: Florida defined his creative class so broadly that it embraces 30 percent of the working population, including finance types and lawyers. His juicy “super-creative core,” whose proclivities were said to play the lead role in “reshaping our geography, spearheading the movement back from outlying areas to urban centers and close-in walkable suburbs,” embraced a more modest 12 percent of workers, but still included folks like scientists and techies—not exactly people living on the margins of respectable society.
The familiar examples of artist-led gentrification—in New York, the East Village, or Williamsburg—are so often cited that one almost forgets the great number of Gotham neighborhoods have gentrified without an artistic assist. At the moment, Crown Heights is experiencing a wave of transformation, and bohemians are not particularly in evidence; just garden-variety, mainly white professionals. Ditto in Harlem, which is experiencing breakneck gentrification, without any particular new artistic influx. Heck, even Flushing, Queens, is gentrifying. There, Jefferson Mao argues in his wonderfully titled essay, “On Gentrification in an Unhip Place,” it is wealthy Asian immigrants doing the gentrifying.
In the often-bitter narrative of neighborhood “revitalization,” much more depends on huge forces like average area incomes, social stratification, real-estate speculation, and rent policy than on the magic of art. (Even in artist-led gentrification’s relatively raw form in SoHo there were bigger city planning forces in play, including the Rockefellers’ concurrent push to renew Lower Manhattan.) That’s why the recent vogue for ham-handedly trying to rebrand declining cities as “vibrant” cultural destinations as a way of hotwiring economic development doesn’t typically work out. Since the financial crisis, Florida’s new line of thinking has been “ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and… we would be foolish to try.” That’s left unhip burgs like Elmira, N.Y. ,and Roanoke, Va., which attempted to save themselves by adding artistic resources, feeling more than a bit disoriented. Florida, meanwhile, has publicly disassociated himself from initiatives directly inspired by his theory, like Michigan’s “Cool Cities” project. Without the larger pressure of economic development behind art, cities are left pushing rope.
The flip side is that in places like New York, with its turbo-charged real-estate market, artists aren’t really in the driver’s seat. Even in my neighborhood, Brooklyn’s increasingly uncool and preppy Williamsburg, the spectacular transformation of the last decade has not been just some natural process of rising cachet thanks to the art scene. It’s a function of very conscious and hotly contested zoning decisions, including a far-reaching and disgraceful failure by both the city and private developers to follow through on even modest and symbolic commitments to affordable housing. “To be honest, artists are the least of our worries,” says Miguel Robles-Duran, the director of the graduate program in urban ecologies at the New School who has studied Bushwick in particular. Developers certainly seize on the presence of artists as a marketing tool, but mainly to do what they are doing anyway, which is developing. “The current system is designed to make this happen,” Robles-Duran says.
And finally, it is also possible for artists to move into a neighborhood and not completely uproot the existing community. “I repudiate the notion that artists are the shock troops of gentrification,” researcher Anne Gadwa Nicodemus wrote recently; among other things, she points to her study of artist communities in St. Paul, Minn. The neighborhood, she claims, “is more racially and ethnically diverse than before the artist spaces, and, for better or worse, still has quite high poverty levels.” In Bushwick, Robles-Duran and his collaborators plan to put out a bilingual Spanish-English gazette to publicize their research on the area’s housing problems and to try to draw together the community to save the neighborhood from rapacious redevelopment—though, with even the artists now being pressured out, the hour seems late.
Artists are a particularly self-conscious, sometimes self-indulgent, and always exhibitionistic community—they exist to call attention to themselves—so it makes perfect sense that they draw disproportionate notice in the gentrification debate. Some emphasis on their role probably reflects a healthy political self-awareness; but we need to break out of the conversation about the role of art to look at the problem constructively. Until there’s some understanding that gentrification isn’t just about people’s individual lifestyle choices—of artists, or preppies—but a symptom of dysfunctional urban policy, everyone is going to continue to get herded in front of rising rents every few years. Like sheep.
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