Day of confusion leaves gay couples in limbo after 9th Circuit, Supreme Court rulings
Day of confusion leaves gay couples in limbo after 9th Circuit, Supreme Court rulings
LAS VEGAS — Confusion and uncertainty over gay marriage spread Wednesday as couples in Las Vegas wondered whether they’d be allowed to wed, and partners in Idaho dealt with disappointment after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling blocked them moments before they would have picked up marriage licenses.
Officials and judges in a handful of other states weighed in, meanwhile, in the latest flurry of legal wrangling over an issue that has sparked a series of rulings this week that have left couples in limbo.
“I think I have whiplash,” said Mary Baranovich who was a plaintiff in the Nevada case with Beverly Sevcik, her partner of 43 years.
In the city that bills itself as the marriage capital of the world, wedding chapels and city officials prepared for a wave of gay couples after a morning of back and forth rulings that stemmed from the Supreme Court decision Monday that effectively made gay marriage legal in about 30 states.
The ruling did not, however, decide the matter for the rest of the nation, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles much of the Western U.S., issued a decision Tuesday that appeared to overturn gay marriage bans in cases from Nevada and Idaho, clearing the way for same-sex unions in those states.
3 win Nobel in chemistry for making super-zoom microscopes
STOCKHOLM — Three researchers won a Nobel Prize on Wednesday for giving microscopes much sharper vision than was thought possible, letting scientists peer into living cells with unprecedented detail to seek the roots of disease.
The chemistry prize was awarded to U.S. researchers Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell. They found ways to use molecules that glow on demand to overcome what was considered a fundamental limitation for optical microscopes.
Betzig, 54, works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia. Hell, 51, is director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany, and also works at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Moerner, 61, is a professor at Stanford University in California.
Their work, done independently and extending back to the 1980s, led to two techniques that were first demonstrated in 2000 and 2006.
Previously, a calculation published in 1873 was thought to define the limit of how tiny a detail could be revealed by optical microscopes.
Wiring nerves to prosthetic recreates sense of touch
WASHINGTON — Scientists are moving closer to an artificial hand that can feel: Implanted electrodes allowed some amputees to tell by touch how gently to grasp, letting them pluck fruit without crushing it.
The two men told researchers at Case Western Reserve University that wiring some of their remaining nerves to a robotic arm — albeit only during visits to a lab — felt more like grasping objects with their own hand than with a tool.
“This feels like normal sensation,” one of the men, Igor Spetic of Madison, Ohio, said in an interview.
When researchers touched different spots on his artificial hand, “sometimes it felt like a cotton ball,” he said. “Sometimes like sandpaper.”
An unexpected benefit: The phantom pain both men have felt since losing their limbs in industrial accidents has nearly disappeared since they began the experiment, the researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
By wire sources