NEW ORLEANS -- Terell Floyd returned an interception 38 yards for a touchdown on the first play, Teddy Bridgewater directed three more scoring drives and No. 22 Louisville jumped to a 24-10 halftime lead over heavily favored No. 4 Florida in the Sugar Bowl on Wednesday night.
Shaking off an early hit that flattened him and knocked off his helmet, Bridgewater was 12 of 17 passing for 180 yards, including a pinpoint timing toss that DeVante Parker acrobatically grabbed as he touched one foot down in the corner of the end zone.
Jeremy Wright added short touchdown run for Louisville and John Wallace connected on a 27-yard field goal. Quite a start for the two-touchdown underdogs.
Florida had not trailed by more than 10 points in a game all season. It did not get on the board until Caleb Sturgis's 33-yard field goal early in the second quarter, which made it 14-3.
The Gators finally got in the end zone with a trick play in the closing second of the half. They changed personnel as if to kick a field goal on fourth-and-goal from the 1, but lined up in a bizarre combination of swinging-gate and shotgun formations and handed off to Matt Jones.
Jones met only minimal resistance as he crashed into the end zone to cap an 11-play, 74-yard drive that included four straight completions and four straight runs by Florida quarterback Jeff Driskel.
After Louisville native Muhammad Ali was on the field for the coin toss, the Cardinals quickly stung the Gators. Floyd, one of nearly three dozen Louisville players from the state of Florida, made the play.
Driskel was 7 of 12 for 77 yards. His interception was only his fourth all year. He was looking for seldom-targeted receiver Andre Debose, who had only two catches all season coming in. The throw was a bit behind Debose and the receiver tipped it, making for an easy catch and score for Floyd.
Oddly, Louisville had only 10 defenders on the field until only moments before the snap, when safety Jermaine Reve darted out from the sideline and immediately found a Florida receiver to cover.
When Louisville's offense got the ball later in the quarter, the Florida defense, ranked among the best in the nation this season, sought to intimidate the Cardinals with one heavy hit after another. Then again, Cardinals coach Charlie Strong was plenty familiar with many of these Gators - he was their defensive coordinator before moving to Louisville after the 2009 season.
One blow by Jon Bostic knocked Bridgewater's helmet off moments after he'd floated an incomplete pass down the right sideline. Bostic was called for a personal foul, however, which seemed to get the Cardinals drive rolling. Later, Wright lost his helmet during a 3-yard gain and took another heavy hit before he went down.
Louisville kept coming, though.
B.J. Butler turned a short catch into a 23-yard gain down to the Florida 1. Then Wright punched it in to give the Cardinals an early two-TD lead over a Southeastern Conference opponent that lost only one this season and finished third in the BCS standings, one spot too low to play for a national title in Miami.
Louisville won the Big East berth to this game. They beat Rutgers in late November to virtually lock up the conference title, sealing that win on a late interception by Floyd.
UPDATE: Echo Lake has also brought over Graciella Sanchez to work with Brittany Kahan on starting the talent component of the management company. Aside from the Fanning sisters, the other actors coming aboard are: Jonathan Jackson (Nashville), Gregory Smith and Travis Milne (Rookie Blue), Ivana Milicevic (Banshee), Jordan Gavaris (Orphan Black), Jacob Wysocki (Terri) and Marguerite Moreau.
EXCLUSIVE: As we kick off 2013, here?s a reminder that it?s a hard business. Dakota and Elle Fanning have left One Talent Management, where JJ Harris repped the actresses practically since they were babies. What happened is that the thesps were handled day to day at One Talent by Brittany Kahan, who is leaving them to start a talent management division at the production company Echo Lake, which previously repped filmmakers. She?s taking the Fannings with her. Dakota, coming to the end of the Twilight Saga films, just finished the Naomi Foner-directed Very Good Girls and the Richard Laxton-directed Effie, while Elle just finished Maleficent with Angelina Jolie and is attached to star in Olive?s Ocean. The actresses are agented by WME.
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LOS ANGELES (AP) ? With its purchase of left-leaning Current TV, the Pan-Arab news channel Al-Jazeera has fulfilled a long-held quest to reach tens of millions of U.S. homes. But its new audience immediately got a little smaller.
The nation's second-largest TV operator, Time Warner Cable Inc., dropped Current after the deal was confirmed Wednesday, a sign that the channel will have an uphill climb to expand its reach.
"Our agreement with Current has been terminated and we will no longer be carrying the service. We are removing the service as quickly as possible," the company said in a statement.
Still, the acquisition of Current, the news network that cofounded by former Vice President Al Gore, boosts Al-Jazeera's reach in the U.S. beyond a few large U.S. metropolitan areas including New York and Washington nearly ninefold to about 40 million homes.
Gore confirmed the sale Wednesday, saying in a statement that Al-Jazeera shares Current TV's mission "to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling."
Al-Jazeera, owned by the government of Qatar, plans to gradually transform Current into a network called Al-Jazeera America by adding five to 10 new U.S. bureaus beyond the five it has now and hiring more journalists. More than half of the content will be U.S. news and the network will have its headquarters in New York, spokesman Stan Collender said.
Collender said there are no rules against foreign ownership of a cable channel ? unlike the strict rules limiting foreign ownership of free-to-air TV stations. He said the move is based on demand, adding that 40 percent of viewing traffic on Al-Jazeera English's website is from the U.S.
"This is a pure business decision based on recognized demand," Collender said. "When people watch Al-Jazeera, they tend to like it a great deal."
Previous to Al-Jazeera's purchase, Current TV was in 60 million homes. It is carried by Comcast Corp., which owned less than a 10 percent stake in Current TV, as well as DirecTV. Neither company announced plans to drop the channel.
In 2010, Al-Jazeera English's managing director, Tony Burman, blamed a "very aggressive hostility" from the Bush administration for reluctance among cable and satellite companies to show the network.
Even so, Al-Jazeera has garnered respect for its ability to build a serious news product in a short time. In a statement announcing the deal, it touted numerous U.S. journalism awards it received in 2012, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize and the Scripps Howard Award for Television/Cable In-Depth Reporting.
But there may be a culture clash at the network. Dave Marash, a former "Nightline" reporter who worked for Al-Jazeera in Washington, said he left the network in 2008 in part because he sensed an anti-American bias there.
Al-Jazeera English went on the air in November 2006. It moved quickly to establish a strong presence on the Internet, launching web streaming services and embracing new social media services such as Twitter in part to compensate for its lack of a presence on U.S. airwaves.
The English news network has a different news staff and a separate budget from the Arabic network, which launched in 1996. They and the company's growing stable of other Al-Jazeera branded channels are overseen by Sheik Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, a member of Qatar's royal family.
Sheik Ahmed took over last year following the abrupt resignation of the company's longtime Palestinian head, Wadah Khanfar, who was widely credited with helping build Al-Jazeera into an influential global brand. In his departure note to staff, he said he was leaving behind "a mature organization" that "will continue to maintain its trailblazing path."
Both the English and the Arabic channels actively covered the protests, violence and political upheaval that have become known as the Arab Spring.
Current, meanwhile, began as a groundbreaking effort to promote user-generated content. But it has settled into a more conventional format of political talk television with a liberal bent. Gore worked on-air as an analyst during its recent election night coverage.
Its leading personalities are former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Cenk Uygur, a former political commentator on MSNBC who hosts the show called "The Young Turks." Current signed Keith Olbermann to be its top host in 2011 but his tenure lasted less than a year before it ended in bad blood on both sides.
Current has largely been outflanked by MSNBC in its effort be a liberal alternative to the leading cable news network, Fox News Channel.
Current hired former CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrman in 2011 to be its president. Bohrman pushed the network to innovate technologically, with election night coverage that emphasized a conversation over social media.
Current TV, founded in 2005 by former vice president Gore and Joel Hyatt, is expected to post $114 million in revenue in 2013, according to research firm SNL Kagan. The firm pegged the network's cash flow at nearly $24 million a year.
___
AP Television Writer David Bauder in New York and AP writer Adam Schreck in Baghdad contributed to this report.
Electric stimulation of brain releases powerful, opiate-like painkillerPublic release date: 2-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Laura Bailey baileylm@umich.edu 734-647-1848 University of Michigan
ANN ARBORResearchers used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain to release an opiate-like substance that's considered one of the body's most powerful painkillers.
The findings expand on previous work done at the University of Michigan, Harvard University and the City University of New York where researchers delivered electricity through sensors on the skulls of chronic migraine patients, and found a decrease in the intensity and pain of their headache attacks. However, the researchers then couldn't completely explain how or why.
The current findings help explain what happens in the brain that decreases pain during the brief sessions of electricity, says Alexandre DaSilva, assistant professor of biologic and materials sciences at the U-M School of Dentistry and director of the school's Headache & Orofacial Pain Effort Lab.
In their current study, DaSilva and colleagues intravenously administered a radiotracer that reached important brain areas in a patient with trigeminal neuropathic pain (TNP), a type of chronic, severe facial pain. They applied the electrodes and electrically stimulated the skull right above the motor cortex of the patient for 20 minutes during a PET scan (positron emission tomography). The stimulation is called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).
The radiotracer was specifically designed to measure, indirectly, the local brain release of mu-opioid, a natural substance that alters pain perception. In order for opiate to function, it needs to bind to the mu-opioid receptor (the study assessed levels of this receptor).
"This is arguably the main resource in the brain to reduce pain," DaSilva said. "We're stimulating the release of our (body's) own resources to provide analgesia. Instead of giving more pharmaceutical opiates, we are directly targeting and activating the same areas in the brain on which they work. (Therefore), we can increase the power of this pain-killing effect and even decrease the use of opiates in general, and consequently avoid their side effects, including addiction."
Most pharmaceutical opiates, especially morphine, target the mu-opioid receptors in the brain, DaSilva says.
The dose of electricity is very small, he says. Consider that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which is used to treat depression and other psychiatric conditions, uses amperage in the brain ranging from 200 to 1600 milliamperes (mA). The tDCS protocol used in DaSilva's study delivered 2 mA, considerably lower than ECT.
Just one session immediately improved the patient's threshold for cold pain by 36 percent, but not the patient's clinical, TNP/facial pain. This suggests that repetitive electrical stimulation over several sessions are required to have a lasting effect on clinical pain as shown in their previous migraine study, DaSilva says.
The manuscript appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. The group just completed another study with more subjects, and the initial results seem to confirm the findings above, but further analysis is necessary.
Next, researchers will investigate long-term effects of electric stimulation on the brain and find specific targets in the brain that may be more effective depending on the pain condition and patients' status. For example, the frontal areas may be more helpful for chronic pain patients with depression symptoms.
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.
Electric stimulation of brain releases powerful, opiate-like painkillerPublic release date: 2-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Laura Bailey baileylm@umich.edu 734-647-1848 University of Michigan
ANN ARBORResearchers used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain to release an opiate-like substance that's considered one of the body's most powerful painkillers.
The findings expand on previous work done at the University of Michigan, Harvard University and the City University of New York where researchers delivered electricity through sensors on the skulls of chronic migraine patients, and found a decrease in the intensity and pain of their headache attacks. However, the researchers then couldn't completely explain how or why.
The current findings help explain what happens in the brain that decreases pain during the brief sessions of electricity, says Alexandre DaSilva, assistant professor of biologic and materials sciences at the U-M School of Dentistry and director of the school's Headache & Orofacial Pain Effort Lab.
In their current study, DaSilva and colleagues intravenously administered a radiotracer that reached important brain areas in a patient with trigeminal neuropathic pain (TNP), a type of chronic, severe facial pain. They applied the electrodes and electrically stimulated the skull right above the motor cortex of the patient for 20 minutes during a PET scan (positron emission tomography). The stimulation is called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).
The radiotracer was specifically designed to measure, indirectly, the local brain release of mu-opioid, a natural substance that alters pain perception. In order for opiate to function, it needs to bind to the mu-opioid receptor (the study assessed levels of this receptor).
"This is arguably the main resource in the brain to reduce pain," DaSilva said. "We're stimulating the release of our (body's) own resources to provide analgesia. Instead of giving more pharmaceutical opiates, we are directly targeting and activating the same areas in the brain on which they work. (Therefore), we can increase the power of this pain-killing effect and even decrease the use of opiates in general, and consequently avoid their side effects, including addiction."
Most pharmaceutical opiates, especially morphine, target the mu-opioid receptors in the brain, DaSilva says.
The dose of electricity is very small, he says. Consider that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which is used to treat depression and other psychiatric conditions, uses amperage in the brain ranging from 200 to 1600 milliamperes (mA). The tDCS protocol used in DaSilva's study delivered 2 mA, considerably lower than ECT.
Just one session immediately improved the patient's threshold for cold pain by 36 percent, but not the patient's clinical, TNP/facial pain. This suggests that repetitive electrical stimulation over several sessions are required to have a lasting effect on clinical pain as shown in their previous migraine study, DaSilva says.
The manuscript appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. The group just completed another study with more subjects, and the initial results seem to confirm the findings above, but further analysis is necessary.
Next, researchers will investigate long-term effects of electric stimulation on the brain and find specific targets in the brain that may be more effective depending on the pain condition and patients' status. For example, the frontal areas may be more helpful for chronic pain patients with depression symptoms.
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.
Jan. 2, 2013 ? With its 2160 litres of liquid helium about to run out, the Herschel Space Observatory will, by the end of March, become just another piece of space junk.
In January's Physics World, Steve Eales, a University of Cardiff astronomer who leads one of the telescope's largest surveys, explains how this space facility has advanced our understanding of star and galaxy formation.
Sub-millimetre wavelength astronomy -- the kind of astronomy that the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory has been undertaking since blast off in May 2009 -- lets us observe fundamental astronomical events, reaching parts of the universe that optical light cannot.
As Eales writes, "In peering into the big clouds of gas and dust that are the "maternity wards" of stars and then detecting the sub-millimetre light emitted from the dust around the newly formed stars, Herschel is doing much to study star formation, which is one of astronomy's 'big questions'."
Held in place by the gravitational forces between Earth and the Sun, at some 1.6 million kilometres from us, Herschel has been able to detect faint sub-millimetre radiation from 10 billion years back in time.
Eales remarks on the pace at which our understanding of the universe is advancing thanks to the observatory, which was named after the German-born astronomer William Herschel, who discovered infrared radiation and the planet Uranus, with help from his sister Caroline.
Recalling whole nights spent looking for one new galaxy with its sub-millimetre predecessor -- the James Maxwell Space Telescope -- Eales describes how he recently turned up 7000 new galaxies in barely 16 hours using Herschel data.
The 2160 litres of helium that Herschel blasted off with has kept the observatory cold enough to ensure that the heat given off by its own machinery doesn't confuse its readings.
This March, however, the helium will run out and Herschel will be defunct. But, as Eales writes, "the treasure trove of Herschel data will be picked through by astronomers for years to come."
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Public release date: 2-Jan-2013
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