False memories prime immune system for future attacks

IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.

When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.

Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.

The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.

The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."

So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.

To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).

The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.

"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"

This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"

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US cruise ship passengers' parting gift: bathrobes

WASHINGTON: The 4,000-plus exhausted passengers who lived a hellish four-day ordeal aboard the powerless and drifting Carnival Triumph cruise ship won't be left completely empty handed.

The cruise company is making a gift to the travelers of the bathrobes they were using on the ship, the company announced Friday.

"Of course the bathrobes for the Carnival Triumph are complimentary," it said in a tweet on the official @carnivalcruise account.

But the announcement has been received with less than full-throated cheers.

"Who wants a stinky robe?!" tweeted a reporter in North Carolina, Astrid Martinez, while another user of the social media site, Natalie Eshaya, enthused sarcastically, "Oh how generous."

Another skeptic, Paul Nather, wondered "What do you think the going rate for a Carnival cruise bathrobe will be on eBay tomorrow?"

The white bathrobe has become an unlikely symbol of the nightmare of the cruise-goers, who donned them to attract attention as they stood on the drifting ship.

Others used the white terrycloth as a canvas to write messages, with one passenger proclaiming, "I survived Carnival's triumph redbags" -- a reference to the bags that substituted for toilets.

The Triumph docked Friday morning in the port of Mobile, Alabama. It had originally been scheduled to return to port early Monday after a weekend stop in Cozumel in Mexico, before an engine room blaze left the massive vessel without electricity to power the kitchens, toilets, and other necessities.

- AFP/ck

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Sen. Rubio drowning in 'water-gate'

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Facebook says it was hacked last month

Social media company Facebook announced Friday that it was hacked last month, which has led to an ongoing investigation.

Below is a statement issued by Facebook:

Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. This attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised. The compromised website hosted an exploit which then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops. The laptops were fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software. As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day. We have no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised in this attack.

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This article originally appeared on CNET.

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Carnival Cruise Ship Hit With First Lawsuit

The first lawsuit against Carnival Cruise Lines has been filed and it is expected to be the beginning of a wave of lawsuits against the ship's owners.

Cassie Terry, 25, of Brazoria County, Texas, filed a lawsuit today in Miami federal court, calling the disabled Triumph cruise ship "a floating hell."

"Plaintiff was forced to endure unbearable and horrendous odors on the filthy and disabled vessel, and wade through human feces in order to reach food lines where the wait was counted in hours, only to receive rations of spoiled food," according to the lawsuit, obtained by ABCNews.com. "Plaintiff was forced to subsist for days in a floating toilet, a floating Petri dish, a floating hell."

Click Here for Photos of the Stranded Ship at Sea

The filing also said that during the "horrifying and excruciating tow back to the United States," the ship tilted several times "causing human waste to spill out of non-functioning toilets, flood across the vessel's floors and halls, and drip down the vessel's walls."

Terry's attorney Brent Allison told ABCNews.com that Terry knew she wanted to sue before she even got off the boat. When she was able to reach her husband, she told her husband and he contacted the attorneys.

Allison said Terry is thankful to be home with her husband, but is not feeling well and is going to a doctor.

Carnival's Triumph Passengers: 'We Were Homeless' Watch Video

Girl Disembarks Cruise Ship, Kisses the Ground Watch Video

Carnival Cruise Ship Passengers Line Up for Food Watch Video

"She's nauseated and actually has a fever," Allison said.

Terry is suing for breach of maritime contract, negligence, negligent misrepresentation and fraud as a result of the "unseaworthy, unsafe, unsanitary, and generally despicable conditions" on the crippled cruise ship.

"Plaintiff feared for her life and safety, under constant threat of contracting serious illness by the raw sewage filling the vessel, and suffering actual or some bodily injury," the lawsuit says.

Despite having their feet back on solid ground and making their way home, many passengers from the cruise ship are still fuming over their five days of squalor on the stricken ship and the cruise ship company is likely to be hit with a wave of lawsuits.

"I think people are going to file suits and rightly so," maritime trial attorney John Hickey told ABCNews.com. "I think, frankly, that the conduct of Carnival has been outrageous from the get-go."

Hickey, a Miami-based attorney, said his firm has already received "quite a few" inquiries from passengers who just got off the ship early this morning.

"What you have here is a) negligence on the part of Carnival and b) you have them, the passengers, being exposed to the risk of actual physical injury," Hickey said.

The attorney said that whether passengers can recover monetary compensation will depend on maritime law and the 15-pages of legal "gobbledygook," as Hickey described it, that passengers signed before boarding, but "nobody really agrees to."

One of the ticket conditions is that class action lawsuits are not allowed, but Hickey said there is a possibility that could be voided when all the conditions of the situation are taken into account.

One of the passengers already thinking about legal action is Tammy Hilley, a mother of two, who was on a girl's getaway with her two friends when a fire in the ship's engine room disabled the vessel's propulsion system and knocked out most of its power.

"I think that's a direction that our families will talk about, consider and see what's right for us," Hilley told "Good Morning America" when asked if she would be seeking legal action.

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Sand-grain-sized drum extends reach of quantum theory

The banging of a tiny drum heralds the intrusion of the weird world of quantum mechanics into our everyday experience. Though no bigger than a grain of sand, the drum is the largest object ever to have been caught obeying the uncertainty principle, a central idea in quantum theory.

As well as extending the observed reach of quantum theory, the finding could complicate the hunt for elusive gravitational waves : it suggests that the infinitesimal motion caused by these still-hypothetical ripples in spacetime could be overwhelmed by quantum effects.

The uncertainty principle says that you cannot simultaneously determine both a particle's exact position and momentum. For example, bouncing a photon off an electron will tell you where it is, but it will also change the electron's motion, creating fresh uncertainty in its speed.

This idea limits our ability to measure the properties of very small objects, such as electrons and atoms. The principle should also apply to everyday, macroscopic objects, but this has not been tested – for larger objects, the principle's effects tend to be swamped by other uncertainties in measurement, due to random noise, say.

Quantum drum

To extend the known reach of the uncertainty principle, Tom Purdy and colleagues of the University of Colorado, Boulder, created a drum by tightly stretching a 40-nanometre-thick sheet of silicon nitride over a square frame with sides of half a millimetre – about the width of a grain of sand. They placed the drum inside a vacuum chamber cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, minimising any interference by random noise.

By continuously firing a stream of photons at the drum they were able to get increasingly precise measurements of the position of the skin at any moment. However, this also caused the skin to vibrate at an unknown speed. When they attempted to determine its momentum, the error in their measurement had increased – just as the uncertainty principle predicts.

"You don't usually have to think about quantum mechanics for objects you can hold in your hand," says Purdy.

That the uncertainty principle holds sway at such a large scale could affect the hunt for gravitational waves, which are predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity but have never been detected.

Mitigation strategy

Gravitational wave detectors look for very slight changes in the distance between two test masses caused by passing spacetime ripples. Purdy says his team's experiment confirms long-held suspicions that quantum uncertainty could overwhelm these very small changes.

Now he and others can use the drum to explore more advanced measurement techniques to mitigate the effects. For example, uncertainty in an object's momentum could lead to future uncertainty in its position and there should be ways to minimise such knock-on effects. "You can't avoid the uncertainty principle, but you can in some clever ways make it [such that] increasing the momentum doesn't add back to the uncertainty in position at a later time," says Purdy.

His experiment is a neat demonstration of the breakdown of the traditional notion that the atomic world is quantum while the macroscopic world is classic, says Gerard Milburn of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved in the work. Previous, attempts to blur the quantum-classical divide have involved entangling diamonds and demonstrating quantum superposition in a strip of metal.

Despite these feats, Milburn doesn't rule out the prospect of a breakdown on really large scales. "Of course maybe one day we will see quantum mechanics fail at some scale. Testing it to destruction is a good motivation for going down this path," he says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1231282

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China's North Korea dilemma grows worse: experts

BEIJING: North Korea's third nuclear test presents China under its new leader Xi Jinping with an unwelcome choice -- confront its defiant ally or accept having an uncontrollable atomic state on its border.

Beijing is the North's most important backer, providing its neighbour with trade and aid that have enabled the regime to survive since the 1950-53 Korean War, which historians estimate killed as many as 400,000 Chinese troops.

In China's strategic thinking, North Korea is a "buffer zone" that prevents the 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea encroaching on its own border.

But with Kim Jong-Un's government again the subject of international fury, the relationship risks increasingly becoming an irritant for Beijing, analysts say.

"More and more people realise that North Korea is more like a security liability than a security asset to China," said Jia Qingguo, an expert on China's foreign relations at Peking University.

"China treasures stability in the Korean peninsula. But the problem is, North Korea's action is very destabilising."

He added that Beijing's thinking on the North would not "change overnight" and that Xi's ascent -- he now heads the Communist Party, and is due to become state president next month -- was unlikely to drive a new approach in itself.

Many social media users in China want a tougher line against North Korea. One this week likened Pyongyang to a "crazy dog" that had humiliated Beijing.

But while expressing "firm opposition" to Tuesday's blast, China's foreign ministry reiterated calls for calm and restraint and did not mention potential reprisals, echoing its statements after the North's tests in 2006 and 2009.

As then, it stated its support for denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula and backed a six-party dialogue that groups China, the United States, both Koreas, Japan and Russia. However, the forum has been moribund since 2009.

Meanwhile the official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary that the latest blast was an attempt by a "desperate DPRK" (North Korea) to keep a perceived external threat at bay, stressing its "strong sense of insecurity".

"I think China probably needs to act somehow, at least do something to show that this time China is serious," said Jing-Dong Yuan, an Asia security expert at the University of Sydney.

"There also needs to be serious discussion within Chinese leadership" about the strategic value of their wayward neighbour, he added.

Relations with the North are largely the preserve of the Communist Party's international liaison department and the People's Liberation Army. Both are believed to back the longstanding policy of support, despite the strains.

As Pyongyang's primary energy supplier, any move by Beijing to turn off the taps, even partially and temporarily, would have immediate impact.

But China fears that a crisis in North Korea would bring refugees flooding across the border, a US-backed escalation in the region, or even ultimately a unified Korea with a US military presence on its doorstep.

Authorities might only feel compelled to act if tensions escalated dramatically, for example, if Japan and South Korea began to consider their own nuclear options, Yuan said.

Yet seeking to wind down the situation at such a late stage might prove too little too late, he continued, and in the meantime Beijing was effectively giving Pyongyang a green light on its nuclear ambitions.

"It has issued strong statements but it has not really seriously followed up with specific actions," he said.

"North Korea knows pretty well that China is concerned about instability and uncertainty, so they basically continue with their own policy, disregarding Chinese pleas or whatever internal message they send to the North Korean leaders."

Beijing voted for a resolution last month by the UN Security Council, where it has a veto, expanding sanctions against Pyongyang for a rocket launch in December, but only after lengthy negotiations to soften the punishment.

Jia said support in China for a tougher line on North Korea was growing, and he expected Beijing to show more backing for international measures against Pyongyang, but it would still look to balance that with stability.

"The international community should not expect too much from China," he said.

-AFP/gn

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Mom of boy held in bunker is worried

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Phil McGraw speaks with mother of former Alabama child hostage


• She tells him she worried about trying to put him back on a school bus


• Ethan told her the Army killed the 'bad man'


• The 6-year-old tells his mom that 'My bus driver is dead'

(CNN) -- Jennifer Kirkland says she caught her 6-year-old son Ethan just staring at a school bus the other day.

He was mesmerized, his eyes locked on the yellow vehicle. He didn't say a thing, and she didn't know what to say to him.

The last time he was on a bus, he was sitting just behind the driver -- as he always did -- waiting for his stop so he could go home.

But the "bad man" got on, and killed the driver, his buddy Mr. Poland.

Appearing on the "Dr. Phil" show, Kirkland told Phil McGraw she was worried how her little boy was going to react the next time she tried to put him on the bus to school.

After being kidnapped, the recovery ahead

Photos: Alabama bunker standoff

HIDE CAPTION

Ethan has been having a hard time sleeping, she told the psychologist turned syndicated daytime talk show host.

He thrashes his arms, tosses and turns and sometimes he calls out.

It has only been almost 10 days since the FBI sent a rescue team into the bunker in Midland City, Alabama, where Ethan was held hostage for nearly a week by Jimmy Lee Dykes.

His mother hasn't asked Ethan what happened when he was there.

"I have not talked to Ethan about it," she said in an interview aired Wednesday. "I don't know how to. As a mother I want him to know that I'm there if he needs to talk. I don't know how to respond because I have never been through this."

Inside the bunker: From storm shelter to boy's prison

Ethan has seen two people shot to death. Dykes shot bus driver Charles Poland several times before he carried Ethan, who had fainted, off the bus and into an underground bunker Dykes had built on his property.

Then the FBI killed Dykes when negotiations broke down and authorities felt they had to rescue the boy before Dykes, who had a handgun, did something rash.

"The Army came in and shot the bad man," Kirkland said Ethan told her.

Kirkland said she had hoped Dykes wouldn't be harmed.

"From the very beginning, I had already forgiven Mr. Dykes even though he had my child," she said. "I could not be angry through this. My job was to be the mother."

She thinks Dykes had a soft spot for Ethan because he has disabilities. Dykes took care of her boy as best he could, she said.

He even fried chicken for the boy.

Still, as the crisis continued, she worried that Dykes might be spooked by something her child did -- or that he had enough supplies to stay down there for months. She worried her boy would think she had abandoned him.

She asked authorities to let her speak to Dykes.

"That's my baby. He's my world. He's my everything," she said. "Everything I do I do for him. And I was afraid I wasn't going to get him back."

When she did get him back, he was in the hospital, putting stickers on everyone in sight.

"Hey, bug, I sure have missed you," she recounted.

"I missed you, too," he answered.

FBI: Bombs found in Alabama kidnapper's bunker

Now she worries that even though he seems like the same playful little boy, there is an emotional storm ahead.

McGraw told her to talk to Ethan about his feelings, not what happened to him in the bunker.

"Let that decay in his young mind," he said.

McGraw asked Ethan a few questions, but as 6-year-olds are apt to do, he answered most with a "Yes" or a "No."

But when the doctor asked him how he got to school, Ethan said, "On my bus, but my ..."

Then he walked over to his mother and as if telling a secret, whispered in her ear, "But my bus driver is dead."

Kirkland told McGraw that it was Poland who helped Ethan conquer his fear of descending the steep school bus steps. Poland would cheer Ethan on and one day when the child hesitated and the mother went to help, the driver said, "Let him do it."

Since then, Ethan has had no problem.

But now his cheerleader won't be there, and Kirkland is anguished about her boy.

"Mr. Poland put him behind him so he could keep a good eye on him," she said.

Ethan hasn't been back to school yet. He's been busy opening birthday presents and playing with his favorite toys. On Wednesday, he made a new friend in Gov. Robert Bentley.

There's a picture from the event where little Ethan is sitting underneath the governor's desk. The child is beaming.

"Ethan is a loving, forgiving child," Kirkland said. "He is easy to go up to a perfect stranger and say, 'Can I have a hug?'"

That was the boy who went into that bunker. She is concerned it's not the child who came out.

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Body in burned cabin ID'd as Christopher Dorner

(CBS News) BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. - Remains of a man who was in a burned California cabin on Tuesday have been positively identified as belonging to that of Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD officer who was suspected of killing four people and was the subject of an intense manhunt, officials confirmed.

The San Bernardino County Coroner's office said the positive identification was made through dental records.

The final hours of the manhunt for Christopher Dorner began when Jim and Karen Reynolds opened the door of one of their rental condos.

Police fill in the blanks on Dorner's last day
Carjacking victim: Christopher Dorner told me "I don't want to hurt you"
Deputy slain in ex-cop shootout was new father

"We had come into the living room and he opened the door and came out at us," said Karen.

"He had the gun drawn," added Jim.

A man believed to be Dorner tied them up.

"He talked to us, trying to calm us down," said Karen, "and saying very frequently he would not kill us."

He then took their car. "We listened for probably a minute or two, wanted to make sure he was gone," said Jim, "sounded quiet. And then we started struggling trying to get loose."

They called 911, triggering a chain of events that ended with Tuesday's shootout in which two sheriffs deputies were shot. Thirty-five-year-old Jeremiah MacKay died from his wounds.

The firefight that we witnessed was intense and we were forced to take cover - however, we left his cell phone on. Early in the standoff you could hear officers suggesting burning the suspect out.

One officer can be heard saying, "Burn that ------ out , burn it down, ------ burn this mother-----"

Four more hours would pass before police used high-powered tear gas. The canisters are known to be a fire hazard.

"We did not intentionally burn down that cabin to get Mr. Dorner out," San Bernandino Sheriff John McMahon had said.

Dorner's body was found in the ashes. It's unclear if the cause of death was from the fire -- or a single shot we heard moments after the cabin ignited.

Meanwhile, investigators looking through a trash bin in Irvine, California, where the first two victims were killed, recovered Dorner's badge, a police uniform, and a high-capacity ammo magazine.

CBS News asked San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department about the audio we recorded, and they declined to comment.

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Pistorius' Girlfriend Saw Self as 'Brainy Bombshell'

Reeva Steenkamp hit the headlines in America today as the alleged murder victim of her boyfriend, Olympic and Paralympic athlete Oscar "Blade Runner" Pistorius -- but in her homeland of South Africa, she already was known as a top model, a men's magazine cover girl and a budding reality show star.

Asked to describe herself in three words, Steenkamp chose, "brainy, blonde, bombshell," according to the website of "Tropika Island of Treasure 5," the reality show on which she was going to be featured starting Saturday.

"She was definitely destined for success," her publicist, Sarit Tomlinson of Capacity Relations, told the BBC. "She was a gorgeous girl both inside and out, and also had a brain. ... She had an incredible entrepreneurial spirit.

"She was an absolute angel -- the sweetest, sweetest human being, kind human being," she told the BBC. "It's very, very sad."

READ: Pistorius Kept Guns in Bedroom for Security: Journalist

PHOTOS: Paralympic Champion Charged with Murder

Ice Model Management/AP Photo

Runner Oscar Pistorius Arrested in Girlfriend's Killing Watch Video

The Kansas City Chiefs' Jovan Belcher Kills Girlfriend Then Himself Watch Video

Steenkamp, who police said was 30 but was listed in profiles as 29, burned up social media, describing herself on Instagram as a "cover girl, law graduate, Instagram fanatic," and on Twitter as a "child of God."

"What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow??? #getexcited #ValentinesDay," she tweeted Wednesday, perhaps referring to her boyfriend, Pistorius -- though maybe not.

She had plans to celebrate Valentine's Day this morning by giving a motivational speech to high schoolers in Johannesburg about love, valueing themselves and following their dreams, according to reports.

"I've realized that although Valentine's Day can be a cheesy, money-making stint to most people, it's a day of expressing love across the world," she told the South African celebrity site ZAlebs Wednesday, purportedly just hours before her death. "It doesn't have to only be between lovers, but by telling a friend that you care, or even an old person that they are still appreciated."

Browse through her Instagram account and you'll discover a trove of snapshots documenting vivid moments in the life of a young woman who brought smiles to the faces of those around her.

She was an advocate against violence against women, posting an image of a woman with a hand over her face and the caption, "I woke up in a happy safe home this morning. Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals in SA. RIP Anene Booysen. #rape #crime #sayNO."

Steenkamp encouraged her thousands of followers on Twitter to fight against sexual abuse, re-tweeting the day before she died, "WEAR BLACK THIS FRIDAY IN SUPPORT AGAINST #RAPE AND WOMAN ABUSE #BLACKFRIDAY."

She showed her religious side by offering this poem on Instagram on Jan. 29:

     "Dear God,

     "I need you. Everyday,
     "Every moment, Every second
     "that I breathe, I need you.

     "I am not strong enough on my own.

     Amen."

"He is listening," read one of the dozen responses to the post - mostly from today. "RIP dear."

Steenkamp was pronounced dead this morning in Pistorius' gated, luxury home in Pretoria, South Africa, with four gunshot wounds to her head and upper body. Pistorius, 26, has been charged with murder.

"I must just say that her future has been cut short," Mike Steenkamp, Reeva Steencamp's uncle, told the Associated Press. "The family at the moment, Barry and June, are devastated."

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