MOSCOW (AP) ? A Russian booster rocket carrying three satellites crashed at a Russia-leased cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday shortly after the launch.
The Proton-M booster unexpectedly shut down the engine 17 seconds into the flight and crashed some 2 kilometers (over a mile) away from the Baikonur launch pad, the Russian Space Agency said in a statement.
Russian officials said there were no casualties or damage immediately reported. Meanwhile, the Interfax news agency quoted Kazakh Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Bozhkov as saying that the burning rocket fuel has blanketed the launch pad with a toxic cloud. But he said authorities have yet to determine its potential danger to the environment.
Another Proton-M booster crashed in Baikonur in August 2012 when it failed to place two satellites into orbit. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev chided officials after that incident, saying that Russia had lost ten satellites in seven failed launches in just over a year.
Russian space officials have blamed the failures on manufacturing flaws and engineering mistakes. But observers say that the problem is rooted in a post-Soviet industrial meltdown that has stalled the modernization of the space industry.
The Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History will finally have a Tyrannosaurus rex to call its own, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers.?
By Eoin O'Carroll,?Staff / July 1, 2013
A bronze cast of the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as the Wankel T.rex, stands in front of the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University in Bozeman, Mont., in 2001. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History is acquiring its first full Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton for display in a new dinosaur hall.
Museum of the Rockies/AP
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The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., easily ranks among the most celebrated collections of interesting stuff.?The world's most-visited museum of its kind, it is home to more than 126 million specimens of plants, animals, rocks, and human cultural artifacts.
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But amid all the museum's curios ? the meteorites, the butterflies, the mummies, the tarantulas, and that huge whale suspended from the ceiling ? there is one glaring omission: No Tyrannosaurus rex.
This is about to change. In October, a 66 million-year-old, 38-foot-long, 7-ton, 85-percent-complete skeleton of the Cretaceous period's apex predator is set to arrive at the nation's capital.?
Unearthed in 1988 in a wildlife refuge by Montana rancher Kathy Wankel, the so-called "Wankel T. Rex," was at the time of its discovery the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex?skeleton ever found.
The Wankel T. Rex was discovered on federal land, so it is property of the Army Corps of Engineers. Since 1990, it has been on display at the Museum of the Rockies, which now has a second T. rex skeleton that is set to go on display next year. The Corps of Engineers is lending the Wankel T. Rex to the Smithsonian for 50 years.
The Wankel T. Rex is scheduled to go on temporary display?on October 16 ? National Fossil Day. After that, the museum's dinosaur hall will close for a major renovation. When it reopens in 2019, the skeleton will be the hall's centerpiece.
?If you've ever stood next to a real T. rex skull, you'll realize what a breathtaking thing it is: four feet long, with teeth the size of bananas,? Kirk Johnson, the museum's director and a paleontologist told Smithsonian Magazine. ?It is the most terrifying carnivore that's ever lived on the planet. And it really makes you ponder what life would have been like with these things prowling the North American landscape.?
Spice up your videos with space debris, dinosaurs, falling pianos and more with this easy to use app
The video camera on your Android phone just became a lot more fun to use thanks to FxGuru. If you ever wanted to have a T-Rex crash your brother's Little League game, or drop a piano on your mother-in-law, or just weasel out of cutting the grass because a part of Skylab fell in the yard, now you can! OK, not really but it can look like it happened, and that's more fun than cleaning up after a T-Rex.
The app is easy to use. You pick the effect you want, hit the OK button, and start recording. There's an overlay on your screen of where the magic will happen so you know just how to keep things lined up. When you're done, you can select a filter and boost the audio, and it saved to an mp4 video right on your phone.
There are seven free effects included -- Breaking News, Birthday Bot, Dancing Droid, Piano Drop,Satellite Crash, UFO Shuttle and TNT Barrel -- and you can download plenty of others for 99-cents each or $4.69 for six in a pack. The free effects are limited to 480p recording, but the paid ones will allow HD recording.
I'm having entirely too much fun with this one. Hit the Google Play link above and check it out -- you will, too. Hit the break for an example (you knew we had to) and an assortment of screen shots.
July 2, 2013 ? Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge and peak in adolescence.
"Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.
The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that teens' sensitivity to social evaluation might be explained by shifts in physiological and brain function during adolescence, in addition to the numerous sociocultural changes that take place during the teen years.
Somerville and colleagues wanted to investigate whether just being looked at -- a minimal social-evaluation situation -- might register with greater importance, arousal, and intensity for adolescents than for either children or adults. The researchers hypothesized that late-developing regions of the brain, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), could play a unique role in the way teens monitor these types of social evaluative contexts.
The researchers had 69 participants, ranging in age from 8 to almost 23 years old, come to the lab and complete measures that gauged emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.
They told the participants that they would be testing a new video camera embedded in the head coil of a functional MRI scanner. The participants watched a screen indicating whether the camera was "off," "warming up," or "on," and were told that a same-sex peer of about the same age would be watching the video feed and would be able to see them when the camera was on. In reality, there was no camera in the MRI machine.
The consistency and strength of the resulting data took the researchers by surprise: "We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," says Somerville. "Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement."
Specifically, participants' self-reported embarrassment, physiological arousal, and MPFC activation showed reactivity to social evaluation that seemed to converge and peak during adolescence.
Adolescent participants also showed increased functional connectivity between the MPFC and striatum, an area of the brain that mediates motivated behaviors and actions. Somerville and colleagues speculate that the MPFC-striatum pathway may be a route by which social evaluative contexts influence behavior. The link may provide an initial clue as to why teens often engage in riskier behaviors when they're with their peers.
SANFORD, Fla. (AP) ? A prosecutor in George Zimmerman's murder trial on Tuesday tried to pick apart the statements of a Sanford Police detective who had been called as a prosecution witness a day before but gave testimony that seemed to benefit the defense.
Prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda began by asking the judge to strike from the record a statement Detective Chris Serino made Monday in which he said he found credible Zimmerman's account of how he got into a fight with Trayvon Martin. De la Rionda argued the statement was improper because one witness isn't allowed to give an opinion on the credibility of another witness. Defense attorney Mark O'Mara argued it was proper because Serino was vetting Zimmerman's veracity in his probe.
Judge Debra Nelson told jurors to disregard the statement.
"This is an improper comment," the judge said.
De la Rionda then questioned Serino about his opinion given Monday that he didn't believe Zimmerman displayed any ill will or spite to Martin. Prosecutors must prove there was ill will, spite or a depraved mind by the defendant to get a second-degree murder conviction.
De la Rionda played back a police call Zimmerman had made to report Martin in the neighborhood: Zimmerman uses an expletive and "punks" and then says, "These a-------. They always get away." The prosecutor asked the investigator if those words showed some spite, and Serino said "a little."
Next, de la Rionda challenged Serino's contention that he found Zimmerman's story without major inconsistencies. The prosecutor played back Zimmerman's police interview in which investigators question Zimmerman about small differences in the neighborhood volunteer's story. The prosecutor also pointed out Zimmerman claimed that after he shot Martin, he spread out the teen's arms. But a photo taken immediately after the shooting shows Martin's arms under his body.
"Is that inconsistent with the defendant's statement he spread the arms out?" de la Rionda asked.
"That position, yes it is," Serino said.
It was Serino's second day on the witness stand. He and another investigator, Doris Singleton, testified Monday about their investigation as jurors heard a series of police interviews in which the detectives grew more pointed in their questioning.
In an early interview, just hours after the Feb. 26, 2012, shooting, Singleton recounted that Zimmerman noticed a cross she was wearing and said: "In Catholic religion, it's always wrong to kill someone."
Singleton said she responded, "If what you're telling me is true, I don't think that what God meant was that you couldn't save your own life."
But in an interview days later, Singleton and Serino suggest that Zimmerman was running after Martin before the confrontation. They also ask Zimmerman why he didn't explain to Martin why he was following him. The officers insinuate that Martin may have been "creeped out" by being followed.
"Do you think he was scared?" Singleton asked Zimmerman in one video interview.
Under cross-examination, though, Serino said Zimmerman seemed straightforward in his answers and didn't show any anger when talking about Martin. Serino said the increasingly pointed questioning is a tactic known as a "challenge interview," where detectives try to break someone's story to make sure they're telling the truth.
Zimmerman has said he fatally shot the unarmed black teen in self-defense in February, 2012, because he says Martin was banging his head into a concrete sidewalk behind townhomes in a gated community. Zimmerman, 29, could get life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder.
The state argued during its opening statement that Zimmerman profiled and followed Martin in his truck and called a police dispatch number before he and the teenager got into a fight. Zimmerman has denied the confrontation had anything to do with race, as Martin's family and their supporters have claimed. A 44-day delay in Zimmerman's arrest led to protests around the nation; he was ultimately charged by a Florida special prosecutor. Zimmerman's father is white and his mother is Hispanic.
In his first interview at the police station, Zimmerman said he saw Martin walking through his neighborhood on a dark, rainy night while Zimmerman was driving to the grocery store. He told Singleton that he didn't recognize Martin and that there had been recent break-ins at his townhome complex.
Zimmerman told the police officer that he lost track of Martin and got out of his truck to look for a street name he could relay to a police dispatcher. When the dispatcher suggested Zimmerman didn't need to follow Martin, Zimmerman started to head back to his vehicle. At that point, Zimmerman alleged, Martin jumped out of some bushes, punched him and he fell to the ground.
Zimmerman said Martin began hitting his head against the sidewalk as Zimmerman yelled for help and that Martin told him, "You're going to die tonight."
With Zimmerman's shirt and jacket pushed up during the struggle and his holstered gun now visible, he thought Martin was reaching for his firearm holstered around his waist. Zimmerman told the officer that he shot Martin and the teen said, "You got me."
___
Follow Kyle Hightower on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/khightower.
Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP.
Placental cells may prevent viruses from passing from mother to baby, says Pitt/MWRI teamPublic release date: 1-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Anita Srikameswaran SrikamAV@upmc.edu 412-578-9193 University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences
PITTSBURGH, July 1, 2013 Cells of the placenta may have a unique ability to prevent viruses from crossing from an expectant mother to her growing baby and can transfer that trait to other kinds of cells, according to researchers at Magee-Womens Research Institute (MWRI) and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings, published in the early online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shed new light on the workings of the placenta and could point to new approaches to combat viral infections during pregnancy.
It is imperative that the fetus be protected from infections of its mother in order to develop properly, said co-senior investigator Yoel Sadovsky, M.D., Elsie Hilliard Hillman Chair of Women's Health Research, professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive medicine, Pitt School of Medicine, and MWRI director. But how the placenta, long thought to be just a passive barrier between mother and child, accomplishes this feat has not been clear.
"Our findings reveal some of the complex and elegant mechanisms human placental cells, called trophoblasts, have evolved to keep viruses from infecting cells," Dr. Sadovsky said. "We hope that we can learn from this to devise new therapies against viral infections."
Led by Dr. Sadovsky and co-senior investigator Carolyn Coyne, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Pitt and MWRI member, the research team studied human trophoblast cells in the lab, exposing them to a panel of viruses. Unlike non-placental cells, trophoblasts were resistant to viral infection, but that trait was not a result of an inability of viruses to bind or enter the cells.
The researchers noted that when the medium, or fluid environment, in which the trophoblasts were cultured was transferred to non-placental cells, such as those that line blood vessels, they became resistant to viral infection, too.
The team noted that when the medium was exposed to sonication, which involves exposure to sound waves, viral resistance was no longer transferred to non-placental cells. This finding led them to take a closer look at exosomes, which are tiny spheres called nanovesicles that are secreted by trophoblasts and are sensitive to sonication. They found that fragments of genetic material called microRNAs contained within the exosomes, as well as lab-synthesized mimics of them, were able to induce autophagy, a mechanism of prolonged cellular recycling and survival. Blocking autophagy at least partially restored the cells' vulnerability to viral infections.
"Our results suggest this pathway could be a powerful evolutionary adaptation to protect the fetus and mother from viral invaders," Dr. Coyne said. "We might be able to use these microRNAs to reduce the risk of viral infection in other cells outside of pregnancy, or perhaps to treat diseases where enhancing autophagy would be beneficial."
###
Co-authors include other researchers from Pitt's MWRI, the departments of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, Cell Biology and Physiology, and Surgery, and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
The project was funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health Research, the National Institutes of Health grants HD065893, HD071707, AI081759, and HD075665, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
About the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
As one of the nation's leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top 10 recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1998. In rankings recently released by the National Science Foundation, Pitt ranked fifth among all American universities in total federal science and engineering research and development support.
Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region's economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see http://www.medschool.pitt.edu.
About Magee-Womens Research Institute & Foundation
Established in 1992, MWRI is an independent research institute and one of the largest institutes in the nation that focuses on reproductive biology, women's health, and infants' health. MWRI's researchers use a variety of basic, translational, and clinical investigative tools that support their central mission to: advance scientific knowledge in the fields of reproductive biology and medicine; translate this knowledge into improved health care for women and infants; train current and future scholars of reproductive medicine; and foster community investment and involvement in women's health.
http://www.upmc.com/media
Courtney McCrimmon
Phone: 412-586-9773
E-mail: McCrimmonCP@upmc.edu
[ | 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.
Placental cells may prevent viruses from passing from mother to baby, says Pitt/MWRI teamPublic release date: 1-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Anita Srikameswaran SrikamAV@upmc.edu 412-578-9193 University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences
PITTSBURGH, July 1, 2013 Cells of the placenta may have a unique ability to prevent viruses from crossing from an expectant mother to her growing baby and can transfer that trait to other kinds of cells, according to researchers at Magee-Womens Research Institute (MWRI) and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings, published in the early online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shed new light on the workings of the placenta and could point to new approaches to combat viral infections during pregnancy.
It is imperative that the fetus be protected from infections of its mother in order to develop properly, said co-senior investigator Yoel Sadovsky, M.D., Elsie Hilliard Hillman Chair of Women's Health Research, professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive medicine, Pitt School of Medicine, and MWRI director. But how the placenta, long thought to be just a passive barrier between mother and child, accomplishes this feat has not been clear.
"Our findings reveal some of the complex and elegant mechanisms human placental cells, called trophoblasts, have evolved to keep viruses from infecting cells," Dr. Sadovsky said. "We hope that we can learn from this to devise new therapies against viral infections."
Led by Dr. Sadovsky and co-senior investigator Carolyn Coyne, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Pitt and MWRI member, the research team studied human trophoblast cells in the lab, exposing them to a panel of viruses. Unlike non-placental cells, trophoblasts were resistant to viral infection, but that trait was not a result of an inability of viruses to bind or enter the cells.
The researchers noted that when the medium, or fluid environment, in which the trophoblasts were cultured was transferred to non-placental cells, such as those that line blood vessels, they became resistant to viral infection, too.
The team noted that when the medium was exposed to sonication, which involves exposure to sound waves, viral resistance was no longer transferred to non-placental cells. This finding led them to take a closer look at exosomes, which are tiny spheres called nanovesicles that are secreted by trophoblasts and are sensitive to sonication. They found that fragments of genetic material called microRNAs contained within the exosomes, as well as lab-synthesized mimics of them, were able to induce autophagy, a mechanism of prolonged cellular recycling and survival. Blocking autophagy at least partially restored the cells' vulnerability to viral infections.
"Our results suggest this pathway could be a powerful evolutionary adaptation to protect the fetus and mother from viral invaders," Dr. Coyne said. "We might be able to use these microRNAs to reduce the risk of viral infection in other cells outside of pregnancy, or perhaps to treat diseases where enhancing autophagy would be beneficial."
###
Co-authors include other researchers from Pitt's MWRI, the departments of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, Cell Biology and Physiology, and Surgery, and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
The project was funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health Research, the National Institutes of Health grants HD065893, HD071707, AI081759, and HD075665, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
About the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
As one of the nation's leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top 10 recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1998. In rankings recently released by the National Science Foundation, Pitt ranked fifth among all American universities in total federal science and engineering research and development support.
Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region's economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see http://www.medschool.pitt.edu.
About Magee-Womens Research Institute & Foundation
Established in 1992, MWRI is an independent research institute and one of the largest institutes in the nation that focuses on reproductive biology, women's health, and infants' health. MWRI's researchers use a variety of basic, translational, and clinical investigative tools that support their central mission to: advance scientific knowledge in the fields of reproductive biology and medicine; translate this knowledge into improved health care for women and infants; train current and future scholars of reproductive medicine; and foster community investment and involvement in women's health.
http://www.upmc.com/media
Courtney McCrimmon
Phone: 412-586-9773
E-mail: McCrimmonCP@upmc.edu
[ | 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.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - About 550,000 people in Oregon do not have health insurance, and Aaron Karjala is confident the state's new online insurance exchange will be able to accommodate them when enrollment under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform begins on October 1.
What Karjala, the chief information officer at "Cover Oregon," does worry about, however, is what will happen if the entire population of Oregon - 3.9 million - logs on that day "just to check it out," he said. Or if millions of curious souls elsewhere, wondering if Oregon's insurance offerings are better than their states', log on, causing Cover Oregon to crash in a blur of spinning hourglasses and color wheels and an epidemic of frozen screens.
Multiply that by another 49 states and the District of Columbia, all of which will open health insurance exchanges under "Obamacare" that same day, and you get some idea of what could go publicly and disastrously wrong.
Obamacare, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), could fail for many reasons, including participation by too few of the uninsured and a shortage of doctors to treat those who do sign up. But because its core is government-run marketplaces selling health insurance online, the likeliest reason for failure at the opening bell is information technology snafus, say experts who are helping with the rollout.
Although IT is the single most expensive ingredient of the exchanges, with eight-figure contracts to build them, experts expect bugs, errors and crashes. In April, Obama himself predicted "glitches and bumps" when the exchanges open for business.
"This is a 1.0 implementation," said Dan Maynard, chief executive of Connecture, a software developer that is providing the shopping and enrollment functions for several states' insurance exchanges. "From an IT perspective, 1.0's come out with a lot of defects. Everyone is waiting for something to go wrong."
Two states that intended to build their own exchanges, Idaho and New Mexico, announced this spring that because of the tight timeline and daunting challenges they would have the federal government operate their IT systems.
"Nothing like this in IT has ever been done to this complexity or scale, and with a timeline that put it behind schedule almost before the ink was dry," said Rick Howard, research director at the technology advisory firm Gartner.
WHAT COLOR WAS YOUR VOLVO?
The potential for problems will begin as soon as would-be buyers log onto their state exchange. They'll enter their name, birth date, address and other identifying information. Then comes the first IT handoff: Is this person who she says she is?
To check that, credit bureau Experian will check the answers against its voluminous external databases, which include information from utility companies and banks on people's spending and other history, and generate questions. The customer will be asked which of several addresses he previously lived at, for example, whether his car has one of several proffered license plate numbers, and what color his old Volvo was.
It's similar to the system that verifies identity for accessing personal Social Security information. If someone gets a question wrong, he will be referred to Experian's help desk, and if that fails may be asked to submit documentation to prove he is who he claims to be.
The next step is determining if the customer is eligible for federal subsidies to pay for insurance. She is if she is a citizen and her income, which she will enter, is less than four times the federal poverty level. To verify this, the exchange pings the "federal data services hub," which is being built by Quality Software Services Inc under a $58 million contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The query arrives at the hub, which does not actually store information, and is routed to online servers at the Internal Revenue Service for income verification and at the Department of Homeland Security for a citizenship check.
The answers must be returned in real time, before the would-be buyer loses patience and logs off. If the reported income doesn't match the IRS's records, the applicant may have to submit pay stubs.
These federal computer systems have never been connected before, so it's anyone's guess how well they'll communicate.
"The challenge for states," said Jinnifer Wattum, director of Eligibility and Exchange Solutions at Xerox's government healthcare unit, is that they have to build "the interfaces needed with the federal data services hub without knowing what this system will look like." That makes the task akin to making a key for a lock that doesn't exist yet.
CMS's contractors are working to finish the hub, but "much remains to be accomplished within a relatively short amount of time," concluded a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, in June. CMS spokesman Brian Cook said the hub would be ready by September, and that the beta version had been tested for its ability to interact with the exchanges Oregon and Maryland are building.
The federal hub has to verify even more arcane data, such as whether the insurance offered to a buyer through his job is unaffordable, in which case he may qualify for federal subsidies, and whether the buyer is in prison, in which case she is exempt from the mandate to purchase insurance.
If someone's income qualifies him for Medicaid, or his children for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), software has to divert him from the ACA exchange and into those systems. Many of the computers handling Medicaid and CHIP enrollment are, as IT people diplomatically put it, "legacy systems," meaning old, even decades old.
Many are mainframes, lacking the connectivity of cloud computing. They typically process eligibility requests in days, not seconds.
The legacy systems "rely on daily or weekly batch files to pass information back and forth," and often require follow-up phone calls, said Wattum of Xerox, which is working to configure Nevada's exchange so it can interface with the federal hub.
'NO WRONG DOOR'
A "we'll call you" message is unacceptable under Obamacare, which has a "no wrong door" goal: A buyer must never come to a dead end. If she is diverted to Medicaid, for instance, she must not be required to resubmit information, let alone wait a week for an answer about whether she's now enrolled.
State IT systems must therefore "be interoperable and integrated with an exchange, Medicaid, and CHIP to allow consumers to easily switch from private insurance to Medicaid and CHIP," said an April report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress.
To make all those systems communicate, the state exchanges must either develop entirely new systems or use application programming interfaces (APIs) that work with the legacy systems to exchange data in real time. APIs are programming instructions for accessing Web-based software applications.
GAO's Stan Czerwinski compares the necessary connectivity to adapters that let American electronics work with European outlets.
State officials told the GAO that verifying eligibility, enrolling buyers and interfacing with legacy systems are the most "onerous" aspects of developing their exchanges, "given the age and limited functionality of current state systems."
A key goal for exchange officials is keeping would-be buyers in the portal so they don't give up and use a state's ACA call center, which could quickly be swamped.
To avoid this, Oregon brought in potential users to test design prototypes, recorded what people did and where they had trouble, and tweaked the consumer interface to make it as user-friendly as possible, said Karjala.
"Even with that, if you have a family of four and you're eligible for a tax credit to offset your premium," he said, "you could be sitting at the computer for a long time."
What everyone hopes to avoid is a repeat of the early days of the Medicare prescription-drug program in 2006. Some seniors who tried to sign up for a plan were mistakenly enrolled in several, while others had the wrong premium amounts deducted from their Social Security checks.
Another challenge is capacity. Websites regularly crash when too many people try to access them.
"I had no choice but to be extremely conservative" in estimates of how many simultaneous users Cover Oregon has to be prepared for, Karjala said. "Building capacity is the only way to avoid the spinning hourglass or the site freezing, so in our performance testing we're seeing what happens if the whole U.S. population came to Cover Oregon to check it out."
This summer, state exchanges will test their ability to communicate with the federal data hub, whose security frameworks and connectivity protocols are still works in progress. But whether Obamacare 1.0 flies won't be known until the new health plans take effect on January 1. Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc, a consulting firm, said he wouldn't be surprised if some patients showing up at doctors' offices next year with Obamacare policies are told their insurers never heard of them.
(Additional reporting by Caroline Humer; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Prudence Crowther)
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