Opinion: Euro 2012 gets its best game?? and pain

By JOHN LEICESTER

AP Sports Columnist

Associated Press Sports

updated 7:27 p.m. ET June 24, 2012

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -In world football, there surely is no greater anguish than a penalty shoot-out involving England.

It's agony to watch because you know in advance how it will end - with England players, proud men like Steven Gerrard, walking like the dead off the pitch, alone in a world of torment, regret and what-ifs after falling short once again in the toughest, cruelest test this sport, any sport, has devised for players' minds.

This time, against Italy in the most enthralling of the four Euro 2012 quarterfinals, the names that got added to England's hall of penalty infamy were both Ashleys, Young and Cole.

The winger and the left back swelled the sorry group of England players who cracked while faced with just an opposing goalkeeper and their own fear of failure. Their predecessors included the likes of David Beckham and Gareth Southgate, who managed to turn the shame of his missed penalty at Euro '96 into a joke, appearing in a pizza commercial with his head hidden in a paper bag.

And Cole and Young won't be the last. Because England's record of failure in shootouts is now so consistently awful that it has become a running sore on the national psyche.

The loss to Italy took England's record in seven World Cup and European Championship shootouts to: Rest of the world 6, England 1.

One.

Uno.

Ein.

No matter the language, that is the astounding number.

Luck is part of it. So is preparation. But mostly, penalty shootouts are won between the ears. They are about confidence, belief and being able to shut out that inner voice whispering, "You are going to miss this." The goal looks smaller than it is, the 'keeper looms like a giant.

Gerrard, who slotted home England's first penalty early Monday morning after 120 minutes of football ended 0-0, has described England's penalty curse as a "mental block." In his biography, he suggested England must start practicing shootouts at the end of friendly matches, while the stadium is still full.

"It's the only realistic way of practicing penalties. That draining walk from the halfway line. The tension. That feeling that everyone is watching, jeering or cheering," the England and Liverpool captain wrote.

So that's an idea for the future. But, in Kiev's Olympic Stadium, it was just pain.

"We have done the country proud but again we go home with heartbreak and it's difficult to take," said Gerrard.

This was the 8th time that Italy has faced a shootout in World Cups and the Euros. It has now won three.

FIFA boss Sepp Blatter isn't a fan of shootouts, saying this May that "when football goes to penalty kicks, it loses its essence as a team sport."

He has asked German great Franz Beckenbauer to see if an alternative is possible.

But shootouts are unbeatable drama. This one was no exception.

Like gladiators about to face the lions together, the two 'keepers, Joe Hart and Italy's Gianluigi Buffon, shared a hand-slap of mutual respect before the shooting began.

England assistant coach Gary Neville threw a pen in anger into the turf - as if he knew that this would end in English tears again.

"Send us victorious, happy and glorious" the England fans sang. Two physios pounded and massaged Gerrard's legs like pizza dough, readying the England captain's tired muscles for the torture ahead.

Italy's Riccardo Montolivo was the first to crack, firing his penalty wide of Hart's right-hand post. He buried his head in his hands. Perhaps, just perhaps, this might be England's night after all.

But no.

Young shot high, his penalty slamming off Buffon's crossbar. England manager Roy Hodgson chewed his lip.

Next up for England was Cole. The Chelsea player nervously licked his lips on the long walk from the center of the pitch to the penalty spot. He placed the ball on the turf, took seven steps back and stood hands on hips.

Uh-oh, clearly, he was thinking about it too much. Sure enough, his run-up was slow and his shot to Buffon's left was tame. The Italian guessed correctly, making the block.

Alessandro Diamanti then finished the job, ramming the dagger through English hearts by shooting cleanly past Hart.

Cue Italian delirium.

Buffon puffed out his cheeks in relief.

Neutrals would say that justice was done. Italy was the better team.

But that will be of no consolation to the English.

"Penalties has become an obsession for us in English football and in training they have done extremely well," Hodgson said. "But you can't reproduce the tired legs. You can't reproduce the pressure. You can't reproduce the nervous tension."

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Pirlo's peerless performance

PST: Italy's Andrea Pirlo was positively magnificent in Sunday's quarterfinal win over England. But don't take our word for it alone.

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Ann Curry: On The Way Out of Today?

It's looking more and more likely as if Ann Curry is on her way out of Today.

According to The New York Times, the co-host - who took over for Meredith Viera about a year ago - would essentially be the scapegoat for the long-running NBC program, which was topped in the ratings by ABC's Good Morning America for the first time in years this spring.

It's unclear if Curry would be removed completely from the show or moved to a different role, but newspaper sources say discussions are ongoing and a decision is expected to be reached prior to NBC’s coverage of the Summer Olympics in late July.

If the ax does come down on Curry, Savannah Guthrie is expected to replace her.

Matt Lauer, meanwhile, recently renewed his contract and won't be going anywhere for awhile.

[Photo: WENN.com]

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Med Student Rescues Body Part From Airport Security

No, said airline security, you can't take this bottle onboard. It exceeds the 100 milliliter limit; it's forbidden.

We have just 16 hours to get it into her body.

But wait, said professor Martin Birchall of Bristol University. This is a medical container. Inside is a trachea, a carefully constructed human windpipe, seeded with 60 million stem cells from a very sick woman in Barcelona. We have just 16 hours to get it into her body. We pre-arranged this.

We have no record of your request, said the airline.

You do have a record, said the professor. There's a woman in Barcelona right now who needs this, and we are running out of time. It took us five months to create this organ. It is the first of its kind. We must board this plane.

Sometimes, leaps in medical science require an agreeable security guard, and on this day in 2008, he wasn't playing. The guard, then his supervisors, said no. Being larger than 100 milliliters, the bottle was categorically dangerous material. If Birchall insisted on boarding the plane, he would be arrested. Birchall had no Plan B. What was he to do? This is a true story.

Hospital Clinic of Barcelona/AP

Claudia Castillo was 30 when she received a transplanted trachea infused with her own cells.

?

Claudia Castillo Had A Problem

It begins when Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old Colombian mother living in Barcelona, developed a cough. She went to her doctor, but the diagnosis took a while, and soon she was coughing constantly, short of breath; couldn't work, clean, shop or cook. It was getting harder to look after her two children. She was hospitalized and told she had tuberculosis.

The doctors gave her two options. She could have her left lung removed, or she could try a transplant. But this transplant, they told her, had never been done before. She would be a pioneer.

The tuberculosis had damaged her trachea, a tube about 4 to 6 inches long that lets air flow from the larynx to the lungs. Normally, people who need new tracheas get them from donors, usually dead ones. There is a waiting list. Because the organ used to belong to someone else, once it is placed in a new body, native cells sense foreigners in their midst and attack. People who receive donor organs have to take immunosuppressant drugs for years, though it makes them vulnerable to all kinds of diseases.

Doing It Differently

Claudia's doctor, Paolo Macchiarini, had decided to try a radical alternative.

Working with a team in Sweden, he got a trachea for Claudia, as usual, from a donor. But this time they washed it clean of all surface cells, leaving only the skeleton structure underneath. Then, they surgically removed some stem cells from Claudia's bone marrow and shipped them to Bristol University in Britain, where Birchall got them to multiply by the millions and fed them a broth designed to turn them into tracheal cells.

Enlarge Harvard Bioscience

The section of trachea with two days of cell growth, immediately before Castillo's implant surgery.

Harvard Bioscience

The section of trachea with two days of cell growth, immediately before Castillo's implant surgery.

Now comes the We've Never Done This Before part: The trachea was then "dipped" into a bath of Claudia's cells, to see if they would attach.

A company in America, Harvard Bioscience Inc., of Holliston, Mass., makes a shoebox-sized "bioreactor" for just this purpose. It looks like a rotisserie for barbecuing chickens.

Birchall and his team took the new trachea, mounted it onto a rotating drum, and then dropped it into a nutrient medium so Claudia's cells would grow and spread, then lifted it out, so the cells could get oxygen, then dumped it back in again. In, out, in out, until ... the underlying Y-shaped scaffold was covered with Claudia's cells. This trachea now was Totally Claudia on the outside.

That done, Birchall's team booked the only direct flight from Bristol to Barcelona, operated by an airline called easyJet. Birchall insists he had "several conversations" with the airline to make sure everything would go smoothly. The trachea had 16 hours to get into Claudia. That's when easyJet said no.

You Never Asked, Says The Airline

EasyJet spokesman Andrew McConnell later told the BBC, "We do not have any record of the passenger's request to carry medical materials onboard the flight." The request, he said, should have been to the easyJet call center in Poland. Birchall told reporters he had gone to the Bristol Airport ahead of time and was given specific packaging instructions, which he carefully followed. The airline spokesman said a check of company files found no such request. Birchall says the records should be there. The airline told reporters it would "rule out" the possibility the airline misplaced a file.

At the gate, discussions grew more and more heated. Birchall says he got "furious" and was almost arrested. If we fail to deliver the cells, he said, years of work would be wasted and scientists will miss a "major breakthrough for surgery and science."

Young Med Student To The Rescue

Ayodhya Ouditt/NPR

At this point, the medical student who was going to take the organ to Barcelona, Philipp Jungerbluth, told Birchall that he had a pilot friend in Germany with a small jet who could come immediately to Bristol, take the container and fly it straight to Spain. Calls were made, the friend agreed to do it for "cost" ? 14,000 pounds (about $21,000) and Birchell paid on the spot. (He was later reimbursed by his university.)

We have no record of your request, said the airline.

Philipp, instead of flying on easyJet, took the trachea to Barcelona with his pilot friend and later told science writer Mark Stevenson that easyJet "wouldn't even refund the 70 pounds for the original ticket."

The trachea did make it to Barcelona, and then into Claudia Castillo. Ten days after her operation, Castillo was discharged from the hospital. Within weeks, her lung function rebounded. Tests showed she was back to normal for her age, and doctors found no antibodies that would indicate her body was rejecting the transplant. The Guardian reports that later she called up her doctor to tell him she'd been dancing that night in a club in Ibiza.

guardian.co.uk

A frame from 'A revolution in surgery.'

Since then, there have been seven more such operations, where donated organs were stripped, then swabbed with stem cells, then placed in patients. And more recently, Macchiarini has gone the final step.

Amazingly, he doesn't do transplants anymore. Tracheas, he has decided, can be regenerated from scratch, using stem cells.

No Organ Donors Necessary: We Build 'Em From Scratch

Last year, he had a patient, a 36-year-old student in Iceland who was suffering from an advanced case of tracheal cancer. Tumors were closing in on the windpipe, threatening strangulation. Doctors took 3-D pictures of the man's trachea, then constructed a facsimile in glass, surrounded the glass frame with a porous plastic called polyethylene glycol and infused that with the patient's stem cells. The cells, fed a soup that would induce them to become trachea cells, did what they were told, and after a week, the man had a new, totally artificial trachea made from his own cells. He hasn't needed anti-rejection drugs since. He is now cancer-free.

Then, a few months ago, Macchiarini did it again, this time for a 30-year-old Baltimore man, Christopher Lyles. Lyles' new trachea seemed to be working fine, but a few months ago, he died.

What Will They Do Next?

Enlarge Ayodhya Ouditt/NPR

Starfish have remarkable regenerative powers.

Ayodhya Ouditt/NPR

Starfish have remarkable regenerative powers.

Clearly this is a new frontier. There will be wins, losses, but it feels as if we have crossed a line. For years I have marveled at the lucky animals who oh-so-casually regenerate body parts. Worms do it. So do newts and salamanders, and damaged starfish practically reclone themselves.

With these new stem-cell therapies, we can, in a modest way, begin to do it too. We are learning how to regenerate parts of ourselves, by ourselves.

What Macchiarini did with the trachea is now being tried for blood vessels, urethras and bladders ? all simple organs, basically tubes, or in the bladder's case, a sphere.

Can I Print You A Human Kidney?

The organs we really need, the ones in short supply ? hearts, livers, kidneys ? are much harder to regenerate because those organs open, close, pull, push and are thick with blood vessels, which makes them much more complicated. But when you see what's being imagined, when you see the TED talk where Dr. Anthony Atala uses a printer ? an inkjet printer! ? to create what will one day, maybe, be a human kidney ? he's got this fleshy, wet prototype sitting floppily in his hands, and the audience, enthralled, gives him a standing ovation ? you have to think miracles are about to happen.

Here's one I can imagine, and mind you I'm making this up: I'm thinking of an airport security guard, one of those really zealous ones, who knows the rules and knows they Must Be Obeyed. With his permission, I extract a small sample of stem cells, drop them in a Wisdom Broth where they grow and multiply, are mounted onto an artificial scaffold and inserted deep in his frontal cortex. A day later, our guard leaves the hospital, returns to work and, astonishingly, allows scientists to carry important medical packages onboard, even though they are bathed in more than 100 milliliters of liquid!

Crazy, you say? Impossible? Just wait. Wonderful things are about to happen.

---

If you'd like to see Claudia Castillo and her doctor, here's a short video from The Guardian.

Dr. Paolo Macchiarini's paper describing the operation can be found here. The Los Angeles Times had a good analysis here, and blogger Ed Yong, as always, got there ahead of everybody else.

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Facebook App Center launches tonight on Android and iOS with access to over 600 apps

The next big thing for Facebook? Apparently, acting as a guide to which apps users may want to check out on their Android or iOS devices. Its App Center is launching tonight with a listing of over 600 curated apps and just as the leaks indicated, puts your friends recommendations of what to use front and center. The app center itself is available on the mobile device's Facebook apps or the desktop website, where users can send apps to their phone and then get redirected to the App Store / Google Play to download it if necessary. Facebook also has guidelines for developers on how they can get their software in front of a few more eyeballs (we haven't read them, but we're guessing a tie-in with the Book of Face won't be frowned upon).

While Google has gotten a bit of a head start on this functionality by showing what people in your circles have +'d on Google Play, the crossplatform nature of the Center and Facebook's massive reach make this a pretty easy fit. Of course, with rumors of deeper integration between Facebook and iOS 6, it will be interesting to see if today's developments are referenced at WWDC next week. Check after the break for a couple more pictures and a press release, or the source links for info from Facebook's PR and developer blog.

Update: Now the App Center page is live as shown above, check it out now to see how many of your friends have been ignoring your requests in Draw Something.

Continue reading Facebook App Center launches tonight on Android and iOS with access to over 600 apps

Facebook App Center launches tonight on Android and iOS with access to over 600 apps originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jun 2012 19:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Plants may be able to 'hear' others

THEY can "smell" chemicals and respond to light, but can plants hear sounds? It seems chilli seeds can sense neighbouring plants even if those neighbours are sealed in a box, suggesting plants have a hitherto-unrecognised sense.

Plants are known to have many of the senses we do: they can sense changes in light level, "smell" chemicals in the air and "taste" them in the soil (New Scientist, 26 September 1998, p 24). They even have a sense of touch that detects buffeting from strong winds.

The most controversial claim is that plants can hear, an idea that dates back to the 19th century. Since then a few studies have suggested that plants respond to sound, prompting somewhat spurious suggestions that talking to plants can help them grow.

A team led by Monica Gagliano at the University of Western Australia in Crawley placed the seeds of chilli peppers (Capsicum annuum) into eight Petri dishes arranged in a circle around a potted sweet fennel plant (Foeniculum vulgare).

Sweet fennel releases chemicals into the air and soil that slow other plants' growth. In some set-ups the fennel was enclosed in a box, blocking its chemicals from reaching the seeds. Other experiments had the box, but no fennel plant inside. In each case, the entire set-up was sealed in a soundproof box to prevent outside signals from interfering.

As expected, chilli seeds exposed to the fennel germinated more slowly than when there was no fennel. The surprise came when the fennel was present but sealed away: those seeds sprouted fastest of all.

Gagliano repeated the experiment with 2400 chilli seeds in 15 boxes and consistently got the same result, suggesting the seeds were responding to a signal of some sort (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037382). She believes this signal makes the chilli seeds anticipate the arrival of chemicals that slow their growth. In preparation, they undergo a growth spurt. The box surrounding the fennel would have blocked chemical signals, and Gagliano suggests sound may be involved.

In a separate experiment, chilli seeds growing next to a sealed-off chilli plant also consistently grew differently to seeds growing on their own, suggesting some form of signalling between the two.

Though the research is at an early stage, the results are worth pursuing, says Richard Karban of the University of California-Davis. They do suggest that plants have an as-yet-unidentified means of communication, he says, though it is not clear what that might be.

The key question is whether the boxes around the fennel plants really block all known signals, says Susan Dudley of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She concedes that plants make faint noises when water columns in their stems are disrupted, and that hearing functions in much the same way as the sense of touch - which plants have - but wants to see the results replicated before she is convinced that plants can hear. The study, she says, comes as a challenge to botanists to either refute or confirm.

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U.N. monitors try to verify new Syria massacre

BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.N. monitors tried on Thursday to check reports of a massacre of at least 78 villagers by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad - killings that prompted another U.S. demand for the Syrian leader to cede power and leave the country.

Opposition activists said up to 40 women and children were among the dead in Mazraat al-Qubeir, near Hama, on Wednesday, posting film on the Internet of bloodied or charred bodies.

Confirmation will pile pressure on world powers to act, but they have been paralyzed by rifts pitting Western and most Arab states against Assad's defenders in Russia, China and Iran.

Syria's pro-government Addounia TV said U.N. observers had arrived in Mazraat al-Qubeir. The chief of the U.N. mission said earlier that Syrian troops and civilians had barred them.

"They are being stopped at Syrian army checkpoints and in some cases turned back," General Robert Mood, the head of the U.N. observer mission, said in a statement. "Some of our patrols are being stopped by civilians in the area."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the latest reported massacre, which follows one in which 108 people were slain in the Syrian town of Houla on May 25, as unconscionable.

"We are disgusted by what we are seeing (in Syria)," she told a news conference during a visit to Istanbul.

YEMEN-STYLE TRANSITION?

Clinton said the United States was willing to work with all U.N. Security Council members, which include Russia, on a conference on Syria's political future. But it would have to start with the premise that Assad and his government give way to a democratic government, she said.

Kofi Annan, the U.N.-Arab League envoy for Syria, was due to brief the U.N. Security Council in New York later on Thursday.

A senior Russian diplomat said Moscow would accept a Yemen-style power transition in Syria if were decided by the people, referring to a deal under which Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in February after a year of unrest.

"The Yemen scenario was discussed by the Yemenis themselves. If this scenario is discussed by Syrians themselves and is adopted by them, we are not against it," Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

A Syrian official in Hama denied reports from Mazraat al-Qubeir, telling the state news agency that residents had asked security forces for help after a "terrorist group committed ... a monstrous crime", killing nine women and children.

U.N. observers sent to Syria to verify what has proved to be a non-existent truce brokered by Annan investigated the Houla massacre, which the chief U.N. peacekeeper said was probably the work of Syrian troops and "shabbiha" militia.

Activists say pro-Assad gunmen also perpetrated the killings in Mazraat al-Qubeir, moving in to shoot, club and stab their victims, backed by army tanks that shelled the village earlier.

Syrian authorities have also denied responsibility for the Houla killings, blaming foreign-backed Islamist militants.

Footage purportedly from Mazraat al-Qubeir showed the bodies of at least a dozen women and children wrapped in blankets or white shrouds, as well as the remains of burned corpses.

"These are the children of the Mazraat al-Qubeir massacre ... Look, you Arabs and Muslims, is this a terrorist?" asks the cameraman, focusing on a dead infant's face. "This woman was a shepherd, and this was a schoolgirl."

BURNED BEYOND RECOGNITION

A Hama-based activist using the name Abu Ghazi listed more than 50 names of victims, many from the al-Yateem family, but said some burned bodies could not be identified. The bodies of between 25 and 30 men were taken away by the killers, he said.

Shabbiha, drawn mostly from Assad's minority Alawite sect that is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, have been blamed for the killings of civilians from the Sunni Muslim majority. That has raised fears of an Iraq-style sectarian bloodbath and worsened tensions between Shi'ite Iran and mainly Sunni-led Arab states.

Events in Syria's 15-month-old uprising are difficult to verify due to tight state curbs on international media access.

U.N. diplomats said they expected Annan to present the Security Council with a new proposal to rescue his failing peace plan - a "contact group" of world powers and regional ones like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Iran, which is an ally of Syria.

Rebel groups in Syria say they are no longer bound by Annan's truce plan and want foreign weapons and other support.

Western leaders, wary of new military engagements in the Muslim world, have offered sympathy but shown no appetite for taking on Assad's military, supplied by Russia and Iran.

Annan sees his proposed forum as a way to break a deadlock among the five permanent members of the Security Council, where Russia and China have twice vetoed resolutions critical of Syria that were backed by the United States, Britain and France.

It would seek to map out a political transition under which Assad would leave office ahead of free elections, envoys said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday proposed an international meeting on Syria that would include the prime candidates for Annan's proposed contact group, including Iran.

Clinton, however, reacted coolly to that idea, accusing Iran of "stage-managing" Syria's repression of its opponents in which the United Nations says over 10,000 people have been killed.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said it was important to involve Russia in peace efforts on Syria, saying the conflict there could ignite a regional conflagration.

"Assad's regime must know there is no protective hand over these atrocities," he said in Istanbul.

Leaders of a bloc grouping China, Russia and Central Asian states called on Thursday for dialogue to resolve the Syria conflict, rather than any firmer action by the Security Council.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation rejected military interference, "enforced handover of power" and unilateral sanctions, favoring a "broad nationwide dialogue, based on independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Syria."

France said it would host a conference of the "Friends of Syria" - countries hostile to Assad - on July 6.

(Additional reporting by Dominic Evans in Beirut, Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman, Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations, Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Arshad Mohammed in Istanbul and Balazs Koranyi, Gleb Bryanski and Chris Buckley; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

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