Last month, Ethan Hawke told a French magazine that he was developing a third Before Sunrise film with Richard Linklater and Julie Delpy, but when we caught up with him last night at the Plaza Hotel (where he was presenting a New York Stage and Film honor to Christopher Plummer) and asked him if the movie would really happen, Hawke hedged his bets a bit.
When seeds from the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana mature, their cell nuclei reduce in size and the chromatin condenses
This release is available in German.
Plant seeds represent a special biological system: They remain in a dormant state with a significantly reduced metabolism and are thus able to withstand harsh environmental conditions for extended periods. The water content of maturing seeds is lower than ten percent. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne have now discovered that the genetic material in seeds becomes more compact and the nuclei of the seed cells contract when the seeds begin to mature. The seeds probably protect their genetic material against dehydration in this way.
Plants prepare for changing environmental conditions in the best possible way by developing dormant seeds. Seeds that mature in autumn, for example, have no problem surviving the harsh conditions of winter. And when the seeds encounter more pleasant external conditions in spring, they germinate and reboot their metabolism, which has been running at a low speed. In archaeological excavations, seeds have even been found that had survived for several thousand years and were still able to germinate.
Dry seeds represent a transitional stage between embryonic and seedling stages. During developmental transitions, the genes that control the new state must be activated while the genes for the "old" stage are silenced. The genes in the cell nucleus are surrounded by proteins. This complex the chromatin can be tightly or loosely packed. The degree of compactness of the chromatin regulates the activity of the genes: the more "open" the chromatin, the better the genes can be read.
It was not known up to now whether the reduced metabolic activity or low water content of seeds was linked with changes in the chromatin. The research team working with Wim Soppe from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research has now shown in studies on the thale cress that the cell nuclei clearly contract during seed maturation and the chromatin compacts as part of this process. Both processes are reversed during germination. "The size of the nucleus is independent of the state of dormancy of Arabidopsis thaliana seeds," says Soppe. Instead, the reduction of the nucleus is an active process, the function of which is to increase resistance to dehydration. Again, the condensation of the chromatin arises independently of the changes in the nucleus.
Thanks to the discoveries of the Cologne-based researchers it may be possible to protect other organisms against dehydration, as the mechanisms that regulate the organisation of the chromatin have undergone little or no change over the course of evolution.
###
Original publication:
Martijn van Zanten, Maria A. Koini, Regina Geyer, Yongxiu Liu, Vittoria Brambilla, Dorothea Bartels, Maarten Koornneef, Paul Fransz, and Wim J. J. Soppe
Seed maturation in Arabidopsis thaliana is characterized by nuclear size reduction and increased chromatin condensation
Advance online publication 28 November 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1117726108 PNAS
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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.
Plant seeds protect their genetic material against dehydration Public release date: 2-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
When seeds from the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana mature, their cell nuclei reduce in size and the chromatin condenses
This release is available in German.
Plant seeds represent a special biological system: They remain in a dormant state with a significantly reduced metabolism and are thus able to withstand harsh environmental conditions for extended periods. The water content of maturing seeds is lower than ten percent. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne have now discovered that the genetic material in seeds becomes more compact and the nuclei of the seed cells contract when the seeds begin to mature. The seeds probably protect their genetic material against dehydration in this way.
Plants prepare for changing environmental conditions in the best possible way by developing dormant seeds. Seeds that mature in autumn, for example, have no problem surviving the harsh conditions of winter. And when the seeds encounter more pleasant external conditions in spring, they germinate and reboot their metabolism, which has been running at a low speed. In archaeological excavations, seeds have even been found that had survived for several thousand years and were still able to germinate.
Dry seeds represent a transitional stage between embryonic and seedling stages. During developmental transitions, the genes that control the new state must be activated while the genes for the "old" stage are silenced. The genes in the cell nucleus are surrounded by proteins. This complex the chromatin can be tightly or loosely packed. The degree of compactness of the chromatin regulates the activity of the genes: the more "open" the chromatin, the better the genes can be read.
It was not known up to now whether the reduced metabolic activity or low water content of seeds was linked with changes in the chromatin. The research team working with Wim Soppe from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research has now shown in studies on the thale cress that the cell nuclei clearly contract during seed maturation and the chromatin compacts as part of this process. Both processes are reversed during germination. "The size of the nucleus is independent of the state of dormancy of Arabidopsis thaliana seeds," says Soppe. Instead, the reduction of the nucleus is an active process, the function of which is to increase resistance to dehydration. Again, the condensation of the chromatin arises independently of the changes in the nucleus.
Thanks to the discoveries of the Cologne-based researchers it may be possible to protect other organisms against dehydration, as the mechanisms that regulate the organisation of the chromatin have undergone little or no change over the course of evolution.
###
Original publication:
Martijn van Zanten, Maria A. Koini, Regina Geyer, Yongxiu Liu, Vittoria Brambilla, Dorothea Bartels, Maarten Koornneef, Paul Fransz, and Wim J. J. Soppe
Seed maturation in Arabidopsis thaliana is characterized by nuclear size reduction and increased chromatin condensation
Advance online publication 28 November 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1117726108 PNAS
[ | 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.
Secretary Clinton met with Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi in a historic visit to Yangon, Myanmar. NBC?s Kristen Welker, traveling with the Secretary, reports.
The future brightened for organic chemistry when researchers at Rice University found a highly controllable way to attach organic molecules to pristine graphene, making the miracle material suitable for a range of new applications.
The Rice lab of chemist James Tour, building upon a set of previous finds in the manipulation of graphene, discovered a two-step method that turned what was a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon into a superlattice for use in organic chemistry. The work could lead to advances in graphene-based chemical sensors, thermoelectric devices and metamaterials.
The work appeared this week in the online journal Nature Communications.
Graphene alone is inert to many organic reactions and, as a semimetal, has no band gap; this limits its usefulness in electronics. But the project led by the Tour Lab's Zhengzong Sun and Rice graduate Cary Pint, now a researcher at Intel, demonstrated that graphene, the strongest material there is because of the robust nature of carbon-carbon bonds, can be made suitable for novel types of chemistry.
Until now there was no way to attach molecules to the basal plane of a sheet of graphene, said Tour, Rice's T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science. "They would mostly go to the edges, not the interior," he said. "But with this two-step technique, we can hydrogenate graphene to make a particular pattern and then attach molecules to where those hydrogens were.
"This is useful to make, for example, chemical sensors in which you want peptides, DNA nucleotides or saccharides projected upward in discrete places along a device. The reactivity at those sites is very fast relative to placing molecules just at the edges. Now we get to choose where they go."
The first step in the process involved creating a lithographic pattern to induce the attachment of hydrogen atoms to specific domains of graphene's honeycomb matrix; this restructure turned it into a two-dimensional, semiconducting superlattice called graphane. The hydrogen atoms were generated by a hot filament using an approach developed by Robert Hauge, a distinguished faculty fellow in chemistry at Rice and co-author of the paper.
The lab showed its ability to dot graphene with finely wrought graphane islands when it dropped microscopic text and an image of Rice's classic Owl mascot, about three times the width of a human hair, onto a tiny sheet and then spin-coated it with a fluorophore. Graphene naturally quenches fluorescent molecules, but graphane does not, so the Owl literally lit up when viewed with a new technique called fluorescence quenching microscopy (FQM).
FQM allowed the researchers to see patterns with a resolution as small as one micron, the limit of conventional lithography available to them. Finer patterning is possible with the right equipment, they reasoned.
In the next step, the lab exposed the material to diazonium salts that spontaneously attacked the islands' carbon-hydrogen bonds. The salts had the interesting effect of eliminating the hydrogen atoms, leaving a structure of carbon-carbon sp3 bonds that are more amenable to further functionalization with other organics.
"What we do with this paper is go from the graphene-graphane superlattice to a hybrid, a more complicated superlattice," said Sun, who recently earned his doctorate at Rice. "We want to make functional changes to materials where we can control the position, the bond types, the functional groups and the concentrations.
"In the future -- and it might be years -- you should be able to make a device with one kind of functional growth in one area and another functional growth in another area. They will work differently but still be part of one compact, cheap device," he said. "In the beginning, there was very little organic chemistry you could do with graphene. Now we can do almost all of it. This opens up a lot of possibilities."
###
Rice University: http://media.rice.edu
Thanks to Rice University for this article.
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AGU meeting: Stanford scientists subject rocks to hellish conditions to combat global warming Public release date: 1-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mark Shwartz mshwartz@stanford.edu 650-723-9296 Stanford University
A team of Earth scientists at Stanford University is subjecting chunks of rock to hellish conditions in the laboratory all in the name of curbing climate change.
By exposing a handful of rocks to high temperatures and pressures, the scientists have obtained critical new data about the large-scale underground storage of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas and leading cause of global warming.
"About 60 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from power plants, refineries and other industries," said Sally Benson, professor (research) of energy resources engineering at Stanford. "One way to significantly curb global warming is to capture carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks and store the emissions in geologic formations thousands of feet below the surface."
Benson and her colleagues have conducted numerous experiments on rock core samples and analyzed the results in microscopic detail. The goal is to predict how minute grains and pores in rock will affect the flow of vast quantities of carbon dioxide pumped deep into the ground.
"We want to see where the carbon dioxide moves, how fast, how much gets dissolved and how much gets trapped," said Benson, director of Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project.
On Dec. 6 and 7, she and members of her lab will present their findings at the 2011 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.
Experimental rocks
Over the past five years, Benson's team has collected cylinder-shaped core samples of sandstone and other rocks from various sites in North America. Each core roughly the size of a beer can is placed in a special chamber and subjected to high temperatures and pressures similar to those found a half-mile or more underground.
"We then inject carbon dioxide and water into the rock cores and take X-ray CT scan just like the CT scan you'd get if you had a back injury," Benson explained.
This technique has allowed Benson's team to generate detailed, three-dimensional maps showing the real-time movement of carbon dioxide through tiny pore spaces between individual grains of rock.
"We're making observations on a spatial scale that people have ignored in the past," Benson said. "Before, you could only estimate the average properties of a rock. Now we can tell you the precise carbon dioxide saturation and relate that to other rock properties in a quantitative way. "
Among the most important properties for large-scale carbon storage is permeability a measurement of how easily fluids flow through a porous rock formation. The higher the permeability, the more carbon dioxide can be pumped into the rock.
"We developed a new imaging technique that allows you to determine the permeability and capillary pressure down to the individual pixel," Benson said. "Nobody has done that before. Because we can observe the rocks so carefully and control the amount of CO2 in them by the experiments we do, we've been able to learn a huge amount about what happens in a real CO2 sequestration project at a much larger scale."
Leakage potential
A major focus of Benson's research is leakage potential: Will stored carbon dioxide gas eventually escape its underground prison and return to the atmosphere?
Because carbon dioxide is soluble in water, scientists worry about the consequences of water leaking from an underground reservoir. Will dissolved carbon dioxide gas be released and eventually reach the surface?
"It's like when you open a bottle of Perrier water," Benson said. "You release the pressure and little bubbles of carbon dioxide come out. But is there a big risk of that happening underground? Do we have to not only worry about carbon dioxide getting out of the reservoir, but also about water containing carbon dioxide escaping?"
To address the problem, Stanford graduate student Lin Zuo focused on a property known as relative permeability a measure of the ability of water and carbon dioxide to through the pore spaces between grains of rock. "CO2 and water basically have to compete," Benson explained. "Which one gets the big pores, and which one gets the small spaces?"
In his lab experiments, Zuo discovered that carbon dioxide has an incredibly low the relative permeability when it's released from water. "This is good news," Benson said. "It means that it's not really a problem if water with dissolved carbon dioxide gets out of the storage reservoir, because when the bubbles come out of solution, they actually plug up the rock formation."
But will the released carbon dioxide bubbles eventually escape? "Lin's study predicts that the rock formation will stay plugged up for a really, really long time. His research shows that one thing people worry about is not really a big risk after all. This kind of work helps us prepare for scale-up, so that we can accurately predict where the carbon dioxide will go when we put it underground."
Norwegian example
Despite the enormous potential of carbon capture and storage to significantly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, the technology has only been adopted by a handful of commercial operators, including the Sleipner natural gas project in Norway's North Sea.
Since 1996, nearly 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide have been captured from natural gas production at Sleipner and stored in a sandstone aquifer filled with saline water about 2,600 feet below the seabed, according to the company website. "The carbon dioxide will probably remain stored in the geological layer for thousands of years," the website predicts.
So why hasn't the Sleipner example been adopted worldwide?
"We can do it today," Benson said. "It's really just a matter of money. If we had a price on carbon that was $50 a metric ton, carbon capture and storage would take off. But with no price on carbon in sight, companies can only sustain a certain amount of investment. So really the impediment is creating the incentive where people will pay that price for capturing carbon."
The Norwegian government created an incentive 20 years ago. "To combat global warming, Norway imposed a carbon tax of $50 per metric ton for offshore carbon dioxide emissions in 1991," Benson said. "Companies were faced with a choice either pay the tax or stop emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They soon realized it would cost them a lot less to inject it under the seabed."
The biggest expense Sleipner and other companies face is separating and capturing the carbon dioxide emissions. "Separating is quite costly, $50 to $100 per metric ton," Benson said. "That's the big cost. The underground storage is less than 20 percent of the total cost."
The natural gas produced at the Sleipner site contains about 10 percent carbon dioxide, which has to be separated and removed before the company can sell the natural gas. The additional cost of storing it in the seabed is relatively nominal, Benson said. Perhaps one day the United States and other major fossil fuel consumers will follow Norway's lead, she added.
"Fundamentally, carbon capture and storage is not such a challenging thing to do," she said. "If we were really serious about dealing with climate change, we would be deploying this technology today."
###
This article was written by Mark Shwartz, communications/energy writer at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.
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.
AGU meeting: Stanford scientists subject rocks to hellish conditions to combat global warming Public release date: 1-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mark Shwartz mshwartz@stanford.edu 650-723-9296 Stanford University
A team of Earth scientists at Stanford University is subjecting chunks of rock to hellish conditions in the laboratory all in the name of curbing climate change.
By exposing a handful of rocks to high temperatures and pressures, the scientists have obtained critical new data about the large-scale underground storage of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas and leading cause of global warming.
"About 60 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from power plants, refineries and other industries," said Sally Benson, professor (research) of energy resources engineering at Stanford. "One way to significantly curb global warming is to capture carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks and store the emissions in geologic formations thousands of feet below the surface."
Benson and her colleagues have conducted numerous experiments on rock core samples and analyzed the results in microscopic detail. The goal is to predict how minute grains and pores in rock will affect the flow of vast quantities of carbon dioxide pumped deep into the ground.
"We want to see where the carbon dioxide moves, how fast, how much gets dissolved and how much gets trapped," said Benson, director of Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project.
On Dec. 6 and 7, she and members of her lab will present their findings at the 2011 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.
Experimental rocks
Over the past five years, Benson's team has collected cylinder-shaped core samples of sandstone and other rocks from various sites in North America. Each core roughly the size of a beer can is placed in a special chamber and subjected to high temperatures and pressures similar to those found a half-mile or more underground.
"We then inject carbon dioxide and water into the rock cores and take X-ray CT scan just like the CT scan you'd get if you had a back injury," Benson explained.
This technique has allowed Benson's team to generate detailed, three-dimensional maps showing the real-time movement of carbon dioxide through tiny pore spaces between individual grains of rock.
"We're making observations on a spatial scale that people have ignored in the past," Benson said. "Before, you could only estimate the average properties of a rock. Now we can tell you the precise carbon dioxide saturation and relate that to other rock properties in a quantitative way. "
Among the most important properties for large-scale carbon storage is permeability a measurement of how easily fluids flow through a porous rock formation. The higher the permeability, the more carbon dioxide can be pumped into the rock.
"We developed a new imaging technique that allows you to determine the permeability and capillary pressure down to the individual pixel," Benson said. "Nobody has done that before. Because we can observe the rocks so carefully and control the amount of CO2 in them by the experiments we do, we've been able to learn a huge amount about what happens in a real CO2 sequestration project at a much larger scale."
Leakage potential
A major focus of Benson's research is leakage potential: Will stored carbon dioxide gas eventually escape its underground prison and return to the atmosphere?
Because carbon dioxide is soluble in water, scientists worry about the consequences of water leaking from an underground reservoir. Will dissolved carbon dioxide gas be released and eventually reach the surface?
"It's like when you open a bottle of Perrier water," Benson said. "You release the pressure and little bubbles of carbon dioxide come out. But is there a big risk of that happening underground? Do we have to not only worry about carbon dioxide getting out of the reservoir, but also about water containing carbon dioxide escaping?"
To address the problem, Stanford graduate student Lin Zuo focused on a property known as relative permeability a measure of the ability of water and carbon dioxide to through the pore spaces between grains of rock. "CO2 and water basically have to compete," Benson explained. "Which one gets the big pores, and which one gets the small spaces?"
In his lab experiments, Zuo discovered that carbon dioxide has an incredibly low the relative permeability when it's released from water. "This is good news," Benson said. "It means that it's not really a problem if water with dissolved carbon dioxide gets out of the storage reservoir, because when the bubbles come out of solution, they actually plug up the rock formation."
But will the released carbon dioxide bubbles eventually escape? "Lin's study predicts that the rock formation will stay plugged up for a really, really long time. His research shows that one thing people worry about is not really a big risk after all. This kind of work helps us prepare for scale-up, so that we can accurately predict where the carbon dioxide will go when we put it underground."
Norwegian example
Despite the enormous potential of carbon capture and storage to significantly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, the technology has only been adopted by a handful of commercial operators, including the Sleipner natural gas project in Norway's North Sea.
Since 1996, nearly 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide have been captured from natural gas production at Sleipner and stored in a sandstone aquifer filled with saline water about 2,600 feet below the seabed, according to the company website. "The carbon dioxide will probably remain stored in the geological layer for thousands of years," the website predicts.
So why hasn't the Sleipner example been adopted worldwide?
"We can do it today," Benson said. "It's really just a matter of money. If we had a price on carbon that was $50 a metric ton, carbon capture and storage would take off. But with no price on carbon in sight, companies can only sustain a certain amount of investment. So really the impediment is creating the incentive where people will pay that price for capturing carbon."
The Norwegian government created an incentive 20 years ago. "To combat global warming, Norway imposed a carbon tax of $50 per metric ton for offshore carbon dioxide emissions in 1991," Benson said. "Companies were faced with a choice either pay the tax or stop emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They soon realized it would cost them a lot less to inject it under the seabed."
The biggest expense Sleipner and other companies face is separating and capturing the carbon dioxide emissions. "Separating is quite costly, $50 to $100 per metric ton," Benson said. "That's the big cost. The underground storage is less than 20 percent of the total cost."
The natural gas produced at the Sleipner site contains about 10 percent carbon dioxide, which has to be separated and removed before the company can sell the natural gas. The additional cost of storing it in the seabed is relatively nominal, Benson said. Perhaps one day the United States and other major fossil fuel consumers will follow Norway's lead, she added.
"Fundamentally, carbon capture and storage is not such a challenging thing to do," she said. "If we were really serious about dealing with climate change, we would be deploying this technology today."
###
This article was written by Mark Shwartz, communications/energy writer at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.
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.
President Barack Obama gestures as he speaks at Scranton High School in Scranton, Pa., Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Barack Obama gestures as he speaks at Scranton High School in Scranton, Pa., Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Barack Obama waves as he takes the stage prior to speaking at Scranton High School, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011, in Scranton, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Barack Obama is greeted by Scranton, Pa. Mayor Chris Doherty upon his arrival at Wilkes-Barre / Scranton International Airport in Avoca, Pa., Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011. (AP Photo/Rich Schultz)
NEW YORK (AP) ? Blending governing with re-election politics, President Barack Obama roused a cheering northeast Pennsylvania crowd Wednesday as he warned of a "massive blow to the economy" if Republicans block a payroll tax extension.
But hours later, addressing donors in New York, he toned his rhetoric down and declared progress was possible.
Obama took to the road with a dual pitch for money, campaigning for more cash in the pockets of U.S. workers ? and for his campaign treasury as well.
He pressed his case at a campaign-style rally in working-class Scranton, Pa., where he said Republicans had to choose between lower taxes for the wealthy, or a payroll tax cut that would help working Americans. Republicans say they would support extending the payroll tax cut, but reject new taxes to offset the costs.
"Are you going to cut taxes for the middle class and those who are trying to get into the middle class, or are you going to protect massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires?" he said. "Are you going to ask a few hundred thousand people who have done very, very well to do their fair share or are you going to raise taxes for hundreds of millions of people across the country?"
Later, in donor-rich New York City where he was raising money for his already flush re-election bid, he took a more conciliatory tone, acknowledging that Republicans such as House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky were also willing to extend the payroll tax, though not with a tax increase on millionaires.
"For the last couple of days Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell have both indicated that it probably does make sense not to have taxes go up for middle class families, particularly since they've all taken an oath not to raise taxes," Obama told about 50 donors at a Greenwich Village restaurant. "And so it's possible we'll see some additional progress in the next couple of weeks that can continue to help strengthen the economy."
The populist pitch in Scranton and the fundraisers in New York served as political bookends for the president and illustrated the dual policy and political demands on him as the 2012 campaign season nears.
He first rallied the type of working-class crowd that would benefit from the tax cuts and then appealed for campaign contributions from donors, many of whom would be the ones to shoulder the tax increases Obama supports.
Obama told one group of donors that he still needs to make sure that key aspects of the health care law get implemented in 2014, that banking regulations are enacted and that energy policies are updated.
"I'm going to need another term to finish the job," he said.
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Republicans said they were prepared to extend the temporary payroll tax cut, but they opposed Democrats' plan to pay for it by taxing incomes over $1 million, setting up a showdown over how to find mutually acceptable savings of over $100 billion before any extension could become law. The GOP released a plan of their own that would raise money by freezing federal workforce salaries and providing government benefits according to income.
The full payroll tax of 6.2 percent would be restored if Congress does not act by year's end, increasing taxes on 160 million Americans. Obama and the Democrats want to expand this year's 2 percentage point reduction in the payroll tax as well as extend, it while Republicans favor a straight extension.
"If Congress doesn't act to extend this tax cut then most of you ... the typical middle-class family is going to see your taxes go up by $1,000 at the worst possible time," Obama said.
Obama was welcomed warmly by a crowd of nearly 2,000 in the Scranton High School gym. At one point the president said that Republicans have sworn an oath not to raise taxes, prompting one man in the crowd to yell loudly: "Give us some names!"
In making a case for the consequences of letting the tax cut lapse, Obama offered a bleak assessment, telling his audience: "It would be tough for you. It would also be a massive blow for the economy because we're not fully out of the recession yet."
Technically, though, the recession ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the nonprofit group that determines the beginning and end of recessions. The downturn began in December 2007 and was the longest and deepest since World War II, costing the country about 7.5 million jobs.
The recovery has been unusually weak, but the economy is growing again. It expanded 2 percent in the July-September quarter.
In selecting Scranton to make his appeal, Obama ventured to the birthplace of Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bob Casey, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is the author of the payroll tax cut plan expected to come up for a vote in the Senate later this week.
Before making remarks, Obama sought to put a face on the beneficiaries of the payroll tax cut by stopping at the home of third-grade teacher Patrick Festa and his wife Donna, a graphic designer, in working-class South Scranton. The three chatted in the family's Christmas-decorated dining room, Obama inquiring about their work and their two high school-aged children.
Obama won Pennsylvania with 54 percent of the vote in 2008, but the fragile economy could put the state in play in 2012. Its proximity to Washington and its political importance have made it a favorite stopping place for Obama and Biden. The trip comes as Obama steps up his re-election campaign, rolling out two ads that call on supporters to begin to mobilize.
In New York, Obama attended three fundraisers: one at the home of businessman Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, where tickets went for at least $10,000; one at the Greenwich Village restaurant Gotham Bar and Grill at $35,800 per ticket; and a reception at the Sheraton Hotel, where tickets began at $1,000. The money will be split between the Democratic National Committee and the Obama re-election campaign.
At Rosen's Upper East Side residence, Obama expressed support for Israel, after Rosen noted "concern" about U.S.-Israeli relations among some Jewish voters, and he spoke of progress that has been made on restoring the economy.
"Bottom line is this: Over the past three years we've made progress. People aren't feeling all that progress so far because we had fallen so far. But the trajectory of the country at this point is sound," Obama said.
Obama had private time and posed for pictures with groups of Latino supporters and gay and lesbian backers before he addressed the Sheraton fundraiser, the last of the night.
"Every single thing that we care about is at stake in the next election," he told that crowd. "The very core of what this country stands for is on the line."
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? Brazilian filmmaker Oscar Maron Filho suffered a fatal heart attack while addressing a forum at a film festival in India Sunday afternoon.
After suffering cardiac arrest, Filho was rushed to a local hospital, where he died. He was 56.
Filho was at the 42nd International Film Festival of India to promote his documentary feature "Mario Filho - The Creators of Crown," which revolves around the Brazilian sports journalist of the same name.
Following the incident, red-carpet events and other activities were canceled for the rest of the day. At 8 p.m. Sunday, a moment of silence was held.
"We are deeply sad by the sudden demise of, who suffered a cardiac arrest this noon while interacting with the audience at the Open Forum," festival organizers said in a statement on the IFFI's Facebook profile.
"Despite giving him CPR by the medicos at IFFI he did not respond," the statement continued. "The Doctors at GMC Hospital declared his death. ... RIP Mr. Oscar Maron Filho."
The body of Filho will be flown back to Brazil on Wednesday, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Filho worked at Brazilian production companies Atlantida Cinematografica and Canal 100 Newsreel. He also made short films including "Pele," "Pele Gol Mil" and "Bye Bye Romario."
The IFFI is scheduled to continue through Saturday. "Mario Filho - The Creators of Crown" was screened Friday night.
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Public release date: 2-Dec-2011
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