Category Archives: Viva!

‘Who’s next?’: A fight to stem the rising Indigenous suicide rate

An Indigenous police officer who contemplated killing himself during the “roughest” years of his life joins a project to help other Aboriginal people find mental health services and combat high suicide rates.

Vivaldi getting closer to 1.0. Beta 3 is here with New session load/save, tab zoom and a lot of new options!

Dear Friends,

Spring is just around the corner so is Vivaldi 1.0. While we are waiting for it, we thought we would share the latest update with you.

Since the Beta 2, our primary focus for this release has been on improving performance and stability, as well as polishing the design throughout Vivaldi UI. This includes adding a lot of new settings as always 🙂 and we have also added a few new features.

Download here!

 

Here are some of the highlights for the new features and changes in this Beta 3 release:

A sessions save/load

This is our first implementation of the session manager. In this implementation, you can save all of your currently open tabs as a session so that you can go back and open them all at once. So for example, you can have a work session different from a private session. That way, you can very quickly switch between completely different set of tabs for work, and for your private research or what not.

To save a session, go to File menu and click “Save Open Tabs as Session”.

 

And to open a session, Go to Open a session under the File menu and choose from the saved sessions. 

Tab specific zoom allows you to set zoom level for each tab, rather than for each website domain. It avoids having all the tabs zoomed when visiting the same website in different tabs and allows you to keep one zoom level while browsing in a tab.

 

New Tab Hibernation Options

This new option gives you more control on your resources. If you are like us and want to have many tabs open, simply right click on the active tab and choose ‘Hibernation Background tabs’. This will immediately free up more resources as your tabs are ‘put to sleep’. Switching over to any of them will bring them back to life.

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New options and defaults for tab opening and closing behaviour

Another improvement from Beta 2 based on user feedback is tab opening/closing behaviour. When you open new tabs from a link in your current tab, they share a relationship. For example, say you perform a search in your current tab and Ctrl+Click the first search result, it will then open next to its “parent”. If you Ctrl+Click a second result, the new tab will place itself immediately after its “sibling”.

New tabs that you open via Ctrl+T or by clicking on “+” have no relationships and will therefore open on next to the “+” button, just like before.

Opening behaviour goes hand in hand with closing behaviour, so we have also made a change here as well. With the new default, when a focused tab is closed, Vivaldi will switch to its right-most (or bottom-most) “relative”. In cases where there are no relationships between tabs, Vivaldi will switch to the last activated tab (our old behavior). This combination of tab relationships and activation order, should result in a best of both worlds default and an improvement over what the other browsers are doing.

The new default works especially well when opening lots of links from one site and then closing them down one by one to return to whatever you were working on before.

But of course, all of this can be customized as you like from Tabs menu in the Settings.

 

A suggestion for our regular snapshot users, if you’ve downloaded our recent snapshot, a new installation is not required as this includes the same fixes that you received in the last snapshot.

Thank you always to all of you for supporting us and active contributor to our development as well as being strong advocate for Vivaldi. Enjoy the new beta!

 

 

O’odham Cut Border Fence Restricting Traditional Route

Photos copyright O’odham in Mexico

Do not repost without permission

O’odham in Mexico cut the fence on the border today, which restricted their traditional route. The fence went up at 10 a.m. yesterday and restricted O’odham access to health care and stores on the northern side of O’odham lands.

Check back here for story.
By Ofelia Rivas
Censored News
Copyright Ofelia Rivas

Cell Stem Cell: Zika Virus Infects Human Cortical Neural Progenitors

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Although we’ve a compelling spatial-temporal link between Zika virus outbreaks and increases in microcephaly in Brazil (and to a lesser extent in French Polynesia), we still lack proof of causation. 

One of the many barriers to proving causation is finding a plausible mechanism by which the Zika virus could produce the kind of profound fetal brain anomalies that have been reported.

Today, in a brief report published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, researchers working with lab-grown human stem cells have shown the Zika virus selectively infects the type of cells that form the brain’s cortex, and importantly, infection `increases cell death and dysregulates cell-cycle progression, resulting in attenuated hNPC growth.’

The full report can be accessed at the link below.  Below that you’ll find a link and some excerpts from a press release.

Highlights

  • Zika virus (ZIKV) infects human embryonic cortical neural progenitor cells (hNPCs)
  • ZIKV-infected hNPCs produce infectious ZIKV particles
  • ZIKV infection leads to increased cell death of hNPCs
  • ZIKV infection dysregulates cell cycle and transcription in hNPCs

Summary

The suspected link between infection by Zika virus (ZIKV), a re-emerging flavivirus, and microcephaly is an urgent global health concern. The direct target cells of ZIKV in the developing human fetus are not clear. Here we show that a strain of the ZIKV, MR766, serially passaged in monkey and mosquito cells efficiently infects human neural progenitor cells (hNPCs) derived from induced pluripotent stem cells.

 Infected hNPCs further release infectious ZIKV particles. Importantly, ZIKV infection increases cell death and dysregulates cell-cycle progression, resulting in attenuated hNPC growth. Global gene expression analysis of infected hNPCs reveals transcriptional dysregulation, notably of cell-cycle-related pathways. Our results identify hNPCs as a direct ZIKV target. 

In addition, we establish a tractable experimental model system to investigate the impact and mechanism of ZIKV on human brain development and provide a platform to screen therapeutic compounds.

Zika virus infects human neural stem cells

Cell Press 

The Zika virus infects a type of neural stem cell that gives rise to the brain’s cerebral cortex, Johns Hopkins and Florida State researchers report March 4 in Cell Stem Cell. On laboratory dishes, these stem cells were found to be havens for viral reproduction, resulting in cell death and/or disruption of cell growth.
While this study does not prove the direct link between Zika and microcephaly, it does pinpoint where the virus may be doing the most damage.

 The researchers, led by Guo-li Ming and Hongjun Song of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Hengli Tang of Florida State University, with collaborators at the Emory University School of Medicine, worked around the clock for a month to conduct the study, which provides a new platform to learn about the Zika virus using neuronal cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. In the near future, the researchers hope to grow mini-brains from the stem cells to observe the long-term effects of Zika infection on neural tissue and to screen for potential therapeutics. 

(Continue . . . )

### This study was supported by The Florida State University, the National Institutes of Health, and the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund.