Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that supplementing healthy mice with a natural compound called NMN can compensate for this loss of energy production, reducing typical signs of aging such as gradual weight gain, loss of insulin sensitivity and declines in physical activity.  The study appears in the October 27, 2016  issue of the journal Cell Metabolism.  “We have shown a way to slow the physiologic decline that we see in aging mice,” said Shin-ichiro Imai, MD, PhD, a professor of developmental biology and of medicine.  Imai is working with researchers conducting a clinical trial to test the safety of NMN in healthy people.  The phase 1 trial began earlier this year at Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo.  NMN can be given safely to mice and is found naturally in a number of foods, including broccoli, cabbage, cucumber, edamame and avocado.  The new study shows that when NMN is dissolved in drinking water and given to mice, it appears in the bloodstream in less than three minutes.  Importantly, the researchers also found that NMN in the blood is quickly converted to NAD in multiple tissues.  Julia Evangelou Strait  Read more at https://source.wustl.edu/2016/10/natural-compound-reduces-signs-aging-healthy-mice/

November 3, 2016  Food Fight Heats Up as America’s Test Kitchen Sues a Founder by Kim Severson  The owners of America’s Test Kitchen have filed a 39-page lawsuit against Christopher  Kimball, the bow-tied avatar of New England-flavored American cookery, along with his longtime public relations consultant, a loyal assistant and the executive producer who is also his third wife.  The complaint says they conspired to “literally and conceptually rip off” America’s Test Kitchen, the Boston-based television, radio and publishing empire that Mr. Kimball helped create, in order to start Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, their glossy new brand whose magazine debuted this month.   There are allegations of stolen customer lists and trade secrets, sneaky tactics to secure a radio deal and new office space, and a breach of fiduciary duty on the part of Mr. Kimball, who remains a limited partner in America’s Test Kitchen.  And yes, there are email servers involved.  Much of the suit is based on a forensic search of emails that it says showed Mr. Kimball’s scrambling to set up his new business before he left the old one, securing copies of his work contacts and packing up his belongings.  “Want to get ahead of the partners!” he wrote to his assistant, whose emails show that she used the America’s Test Kitchen name to search for office space for his new venture.  The suit, filed in Suffolk County (Mass.) Superior Court, contends that Mr. Kimball and his team copied the America’s Test Kitchen style and business model right down to how recipes are written, and did some of their work on Milk Street while still employed by America’s Test Kitchen.  By 2015, the board of Boston Common Press, which owns America’s Test Kitchen, had hired a new chief executive who outranked Mr. Kimball but said he wanted him to stay on in a leadership role and as the face of America’s Test Kitchen.  He could even take time to write books.  Mr. Kimball eventually stopped coming to the office, telling people there he had been fired.  The new venture is named after the street in Boston’s financial district where Mr. Kimball has rented 8,000 square feet of the ground floor of the Flour & Grain Exchange building for his offices and studio. Initially called Milk Street Kitchen, the new venture was sued last summer by the owner of nearby Milk Street Cafe, who claimed the original name had hurt his business.  Mr. Kimball won the early rounds of the trademark battle.  The lawyer for the cafe owner is now representing America’s Test Kitchen in the new suit.  Although Mr. Kimball has said all along that he has been careful to present Milk Street as a new endeavor, the suit says that it is so close to his old one that the public is confused.  Even the consumer-driven name of the Facebook fan page for America’s Test Kitchen includes Milk Street.  Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/dining/christopher-kimball-americas-test-kitchen-lawsuit.html

November 26, 2013  They parade it proudly through the campus on football Saturdays, roll it out during every halftime performance at Ross-Ade Stadium and thump it throughout each game—the giant percussion instrument that boldly proclaims, right on its face, that it is the "World's Largest Drum."  But is Purdue University's Big Bass Drum truly the biggest?  It seemed like a simple enough question, and one I got to wondering about recently while working on a feature about a Purdue research machinist who last summer spent his time repairing and remaking most of the 216 pieces of custom hardware on the 92-year-old drum.  During my interview with Michael Sherwood, I casually asked:  "How big is this thing, anyway?"   He squirmed at the question and deferred to the Purdue All-American Marching Band.  So I marched over to the Elliott Hall of Music to find the band's marketing director, Susan Xioufaridou.  She promptly spurned my query, insisting the dimensions of the drum always have been a band secret.  Now my reporter DNA was starting to boil.  Nothing makes a journalist more determined to find a fact than someone trying to keep it under wraps.  I scoured the Internet, figuring the drum's dimensions likely were buried on some obscure blog, as most pieces of trivia usually are, only to come up empty.  There were lots of estimates for the diameter, but they were decidedly less than precise, ranging from 8 feet to 10 feet.  What I did discover right away was that there's a lot of competition for the title of "World's Largest Drum," which probably explains why Purdue keeps the actual dimensions under its hat, er, shiny steel helmet.  A few drums in Asia and Europe easily tower over the Boilermakers' drum, with the Guinness World Record holder in South Korea measuring in at a diameter of 18 feet 2 inches.  The University of Texas has Big Bertha, which is 8 feet tall and 44 inches wide, and the University of Missouri boasts Big Mo, which measures in at 9 feet tall and 4 feet, 6 inches wide.  I filed a public records request with Purdue on Sept. 23, officially seeking the dimensions of the Big Bass Drum.  Usually, public records requests take weeks for a reply.  Lucia Anderson, who handles requests to Purdue under Indiana's Access to Public Records Act, answered within a day.  "I'm responding to your request for public records as it relates to the 'plans and drawings of the Purdue Bass Drum . . .  " Anderson wrote.  "To the extent that these drawings exist, this request is denied under IC 5-14-3-4(a)(4) which exempts records that are 'records containing trade secrets.' "  At this point, I was determined not to be beaten on this story.  I sought out Purdue's resident expert on calculating big things:  Steve Wereley, the mechanical engineering professor who calculated the size of the massive BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill in 2010.  Wereley, who presumably had much better things to do, was good-natured about my odd request, and accomplished the task in all of 15 minutes.  (He admits it took him a bit longer to figure out the size of the oil spill, which he accomplished with the help of an expert team and the U.S. government.)  He told me that if he could find a photo of the drum pictured next to something of known height and width, he could easily calculate it.  A technique called photogrammetry would take care of the rest.  The photo that held the key was one Purdue itself published in 2008, after a football game against the University of Oregon.  There was the drum, in all its glory, on the Ross-Ade Stadium football field during an All-American Marching Band performance.  Since the NCAA establishes uniform guidelines for the size of the markings on a football field, Wereley said the math was relatively simple.  He used the 5-yard line to calculate the diameter and the field's hash marks to figure out the width.  Wereley calculated the drum's diameter to be 7 feet 5 inches.  He estimated the width to be 3 feet 10 inches.  While he couldn't be completely sure of his accuracy, he estimated his calculations were correct within inches.  Even with a margin for error, that's smaller than the size of the University of Texas and University of Missouri drums. Purdue's claim to possess the "World's Largest Drum" was starting to look like what politicians delicately like to call a "stranger to the truth."  My epiphany came at last.  It turns out that the holy grail of my quest—the true size of Purdue's Big Bass Drum—was right under my nose the whole time.  City Editor Dave Smith had a hunch that the answer might lie in our own newspaper archives, stored on microfilm at the Tippecanoe County Public Library.  So we took a short walk over there.  Inside an aging metal cabinet on the first floor was a square paper boxed labeled "Lafayette Journal & Courier—No. 474."  We gently placed the roll of microfilm in a nearby reader.  Smith quickly scrolled through the film, slowing down when he reached the 1921 newspapers—the year the drum was built by Leedy Manufacturing Co.  We glanced through Journal & Courier issues from May, June and July before coming to Aug. 6, the day after the Big Bass Drum was unveiled.  And there were the drum's dimensions, right on the front page:  "Seven feet three inches in diameter and three feet nine inches wide."  Before Purdue decided to designate the dimensions a "trade secret," the university crowed proudly about the "mammoth instrument."  Hayleigh Colombo  http://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2013/11/24/purdues-worlds-largest-drum-claim-a-giant-exaggeration/3691109/  PUBLIC LIBRARY TO THE RESCUE!

The world's largest drum measures 5.54 m (18 ft 2 in) in diameter is 5.96 m (19 ft 6 in) tall and weighs 7 tonnes (15,432 lb 5.76 oz) and was created by Yeong Dong-Gun local government and Seuk Je Lee (all South Korea) in Simcheon-Meon, South Korea, on 6 July 2011.  The drum is a traditional Korean "CheonGo" drum.  See picture at http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-drum

During the final months and weeks leading up to the November 8, 2016 presidential election, courts across the country have ruled in numerous challenges to state election laws.  For example, there have been recent court rulings affecting the laws regulating early voting, voter photo identification (ID) requirements, registration procedures, straight-party voting, and voter rolls.  Accordingly, many such laws have been recently invalidated, enjoined, or altered.  Others continue to be subject to litigation.  In Michigan, a court preliminarily enjoined a 2016 law that ended the ability of voters to vote for a political party’s entire slate of candidates with a single notation—straight-party voting—concluding that it was likely that the challengers would succeed on the merits of their claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  In North Carolina, a court invalidated several recent changes to that state’s election laws, including a voter photo ID law, holding that the laws were enacted with a racially discriminatory intent in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the VRA.  In Ohio, a court held that a law setting forth the process for removing the names of inactive voters from the voter rolls violates the National Voter Registration Act, and in another case, upheld a law that eliminated a period of early voting and same-day registration, known as “Golden Week,” against a challenge under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause and Section 2 of the VRA.  Finally, in contrast to the North Carolina ruling, a court declined to invalidate a Texas voter photo ID law, but required it to be administered on November 8, 2016, with modifications, holding that the law has a discriminatory effect on minority voting rights in violation of Section 2 of the VRA.  Read Recent State Election Law Challenges: In Brief by L. Paige Whitaker, Congressional Research Service 7-5700 R44675 at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44675.pdf

From 12:01 a.m. ET on Monday, November 7 until 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, November 9, 2016 anyone will be able to access NYTimes.com in full, regardless of whether or not they have a subscription.  Along with all of the written coverage that will appear on the site in those 72 hours, NYT will also be streaming live on election night starting at 4:30 PM ET on its Facebook page.  Plus, the newspaper’s The Run-Up election podcast will host a call-in show on election day “in which Times politics reporters will answer questions from listeners.”

http://bgr.com/2016/11/04/new-york-times-free-2016-election/

Saturday Night Live  GO CUBS GO   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GZf0MhCYfs  2:44

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1547  November 7, 2016  On this date in 1665, The London Gazette, the oldest surviving journal, was first published.  On this date in 1786, the oldest musical organization in the United States was founded as the Stoughton Musical Society.