I'm having that problem right now because one of my roommates was mean to me tonight. I think I'm owed an apology, but I know I won't be getting one. I can't talk to her. I know if I do I'll just feel worse and we won't get anywhere. I can't even concentrate on writing my paper because I'm so ticked off!

Is it normal to get this mad? How can I control my anger better? Taking a deep breath and counting to 10 just makes me feel angrier. I'd feel better if I punched the wall, but the last time I did that I bruised my fist. Do you have any guidelines? -- CONSUMED BY ANGER IN HERNDON, VA.

DEAR CONSUMED BY ANGER: Anger is a normal emotion. Everybody has experienced it at one time or another. Most people have been trained to suppress anger from early childhood. But it's even more important to learn to express anger in ways that are constructive rather than destructive. Punching a wall falls into the latter category and can result in injury to you and possibly the wall, as you found out.

If it is channeled in the right direction, anger can be a positive emotion. Uncontrolled, or suppressed, it can be extremely harmful and even a killer. The challenge that everyone faces is how not to deny the feeling but to express the anger -- or diffuse it -- in ways that are productive.

In a situation like yours, saying out loud in a controlled manner that something has made you angry can be like releasing steam from a pressure cooker. It's certainly more productive than making a bullying gesture; hitting a wall with your fist implies that the next punch might land on the person who pushed your buttons. In my booklet "The Anger in All of Us and How to Deal With It," I offer many suggestions that can help you manage your emotions in a more constructive way. It can be ordered by sending your name and mailing address, plus a check or money order for $7 (U.S. funds), to Dear Abby -- Anger Booklet, P.O. Box 447, Mount Morris, IL 61054-0447. Shipping and handling are included in the price. Please understand how important it is that you learn to manage and channel your emotions more constructively than you currently do.

Step one in managing your anger is to recognize that the emotion is building before you lose control or become so angry that you can't concentrate on what is most important right now -- and that is your academic studies. I know that if you learn to manage and control your anger, you will benefit greatly as you move forward in life. I have faith in you!

DEAR ABBY: If a couple has been dating for a long time and are sexually active, do you think he has a right to have sex with her while she's sleeping? My sister and I disagree about this. I feel it's abuse. My sister isn't quite sure what to think. -- CATHY IN KINGSTON, N.Y.

DEAR CATHY: If someone has sex with you without your consent, it isn't abuse. It is rape.

P.S. If the boyfriend in question is so inept at lovemaking that his partner snores right through it, then it seems to me that only the boyfriend is sexually "active."

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Write Dear Abby ator P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.

That email led Deadspin.com assignment editor Timothy Burke on the hunt of a story that exposed the heart-wrenching tale of standout Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend as a fabrication, Burke said on CNN on Thursday.

Te'o sprang to national prominence last fall when the senior co-captain was seen heroically leading the Fighting Irish to an underdog victory against the Michigan State Spartans within days of learning his grandmother had died. Moreover, it was widely reported, Te'o's girlfriend had died of leukemia just hours after his grandmother's death.

From that point, Te'o's narrative was a prominent feature in coverage of the team, which has a dedicated following and whose games are televised nationally each week.

Notre Dame went on to an undefeated regular season, culminating in a berth in the national championship game, which the Fighting Irish lost to the Alabama Crimson Tide on January 7.

"We got an email last week at Deadspin.com that said 'Hey, there's something real weird about Lennay Kekua, Manti Te'o's allegedly dead girlfriend. You guys should check it out,'" Burke said.

The email prompted Burke and co-author Jack Dickey to begin searching online for background on Kekua. "So we start Googling the name Lennay Kekua. We can't find any evidence of this person that wasn't attached to stories about her being Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend."

Their investigation led about a week later to a 4,000-word expose, published Wednesday under the headline "Blarney," that painstakingly debunked the story of Kekua's existence. The story went viral online.

Within hours of its publication, officials at Notre Dame, one of the most powerful institutions in college football and U.S. collegiate athletics overall, held a hastily organized press conference to assert that Te'o had been duped in a hoax perpetrated by a friend of his.

The girlfriend, who called herself Kekua and claimed to be a Stanford University graduate, was merely an online persona who "ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia," university spokesman Dennis Brown said in a statement.

Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said the university learned of the hoax from Te'o on December 26. Te'o answered questions forthrightly and private investigators uncovered several things that pointed to Te'o being a victim in the case, Swarbrick said.

Deadspin's Burke said he remains skeptical of this being a hoax perpetrated on Te'o rather than by Te'o.

"Ask yourself why and what incentive a person would have to execute such a lengthy, time-consuming and expensive con that would involve multiple people and essentially consume his entire life just to screw around with a guy that he knows?" Burke said on CNN.

Deadspin.com said the woman whose photograph was frequently shown on TV and in news reports about Kekua was actually a young California woman who had never met or communicated with Te'o. The website declined to identify her by name.

On Thursday, TV newsmagazine "Inside Edition" said the woman in the photograph was a 23-year-old marketing professional in Los Angeles named Diane O'Meara. Inside Edition, which is syndicated by CBS Television Distribution, said O'Meara was a former classmate of one of Te'o's friends. It Aredid not give the friend's name.

In the expose published Wednesday, Deadspin.com said a friend of Te'o's named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was "the man behind" the hoax.

Outside Tuiasosopo's home in Palmdale, California on Thursday, a member of his family who did not identify himself told reporters, "Please, we have no comment. Please respect that."

The Te'o hoax is the latest black eye Notre Dame's legendary football program has suffered in recent years.

In 2011, the school was fined $42,000 by an Indiana agency over the death of football videographer Declan Sullivan, 20, who died in October 2010 after a hydraulic lift he was using to record practice toppled over in high winds.

In 2010, Elizabeth "Lizzy" Seeberg, a freshman at nearby St. Mary's College, killed herself ten days after accusing a Notre Dame football player of sexual battery. Her family began questioning the campus police department's reluctance to gather evidence and a 15-day delay in interviewing the accused.

After a federal investigation into the matter, the school agreed to revise its policies on sexual misconduct.

(Additional reporting by Dan Burns, Dana Feldman, David Bailey and Mary Wisniewski.; Editing by Vicki Allen, Greg McCune and Andrew Hay)

A biomedical engineer with a fascination for problem solving, he has developed the so-called "nanopatch" to try to transform delivery of life-saving vaccines against potential killers like flu and the HPV virus that causes cervical cancer.

After 160 years of using needles and syringes for immunization, he says, at-risk people - especially those living in poorer, tropical, remote countries - need something simpler, stabler and easier to use. And he thinks he has the answer.

"Most current vaccines are delivered via the needle and syringe system that was developed in 1853," the scientist said in an interview from his laboratory in Australia. "It's effective on many levels but it also has many downsides."

Kendall's nanopatch has yet to prove itself in human clinical trials, but has had impressive results in animal tests.

Those have been enough to persuade U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck, maker of many of the world's top-selling vaccines, to give Kendall a three-year research grant to take the device into human trials.

NO COLD CHAIN

The nanopatch is designed to place a tiny amount of vaccine just under the skin without the need for a needle jab. Because it delivers the active ingredient right to where it is needed, tests have shown it can generate same immune response with only a fraction of the dose needed in a conventional vaccine.

And because it uses the vaccine in dried form, it does not need cold-chain refrigeration or trained staff to deliver it.

Kendall says one key limitation of needle and syringe vaccines, beside needing expensive cold-chains and specialist staff to deliver them, is that the needle puts the vaccine into muscle, which has relatively few immune cells.

In the last 30 years or so, immunologists have discovered that skin, unlike muscle, is rammed full of immune cells, making it a far more effective place to apply vaccines. "You could argue the skin is our immune sweet spot," Kendall said.

So far, Kendall's research team at the University of Queensland's Institute for Biotechnology and Nanotechnology have tested the nanopatch on mice using various inoculations - including against flu, the human papillomavirus (HPV) that causes cervical cancer, and even with a potential new vaccine against mosquito-borne viral disease chikungunya.

"We demonstrated that you need only a tiny fraction of the dose, perhaps a hundredfold less" to get the same immune response, Kendall said.

Among other potential advantages of the nanopatch are that it is pain free, low cost - it could be made for under $1 a dose compared with more than $50 for many current vaccines - and easily transportable. Kendall even ponders whether it might be mailed to remote places for people to administer it themselves.

PATCHY HISTORY

But he also recognizes there is a long way to go to bring what is still an experimental device to market - and he is aware of previous attempts at vaccine patches that had little success.

The Austrian biotech firm Intercell, now owned by France's Vivalis, saw its share price slump in 2010 after its experimental vaccine enhancement patch (VEP) system against pandemic flu failed in a mid-stage trial.

Kendall says, however, that Intercell's VEP system had a very different mode of action. The patch was applied after a needle vaccination and designed to boost the jab's effect by putting an adjuvant, or booster, into the skin.

His nanopatch applies the vaccine direct, with no adjuvant. "We apply the patch against the skin with an applicator ... and we have a high level of control of the antigen delivered."

Kendall is keen to ensure that if his patch does make it to market, it will not follow the pattern of many previous vaccine developments, which have seen life-saving shots go first to people in the wealthy world and only after several years start to reach those who need them in poorer countries.

There are still 17 million deaths a year from infectious diseases, mostly in poor countries that often cannot afford the pricey vaccines that could prevent them.

Kendall has just returned from a feasibility study using prototypes of the nanopatch in Papua New Guinea, which has one of the world's highest rates of infection with HPV - a virus that can lead to cervical cancer, the biggest cause of death in young women in developing countries.

He travelled in daytime temperatures of 30 to 40 degrees Celsius and up to 100 percent humidity "and when we got back and tested the patches we found there had been no loss in activity".

This success means Kendall now wants to push on to full clinical trials on humans, starting this year in Australia and followed swiftly with parallel trials in Papua New Guinea. An enterprise award of $100,000 from the luxury watchmaker Rolex is helping him along that path.

"This could potentially change the world of vaccinations. But we still have a very long way to go," he says.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- California has transformed into a major player in stem cell research, but the taxpayer-funded institute responsible has "significant deficiencies" in how research dollars are distributed, experts said Thursday.

A report by the Institute of Medicine found too many members on the board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine represented schools that won funding and recommended a restructuring to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

California voters in 2004 approved Proposition 71, a state ballot initiative that created CIRM, at a time when there were federal restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research and such work was opposed by some on religious and moral grounds because embryos have to be destroyed to harvest the cells.

The agency was given broad power to distribute $3 billion in bond proceeds to promising research. So far, it has distributed more than $1 billion to some five dozen universities that went mostly toward investments in new buildings and basic research.

The team of 13 experts that reviewed the stem-cell agency's operations did not judge the merits of individual studies because that was outside the scope of the report and it would have been too time-consuming and costly. But they raised serious questions about how grants were allotted.

The approval process "has some significant deficiencies which need to be improved upon in order to improve CIRM's credibility and transparency," said Harold Shapiro, an emeritus professor at Princeton University who chaired the report.

In a few short years, CIRM got off the ground and funneled research money with an eye toward stem cell therapies, turning the state into "an international hub of research and development in stem cell biology," the report said.

While the panel did not find any specific cases of conflict, it noted that the potential exists because of how the board is made up.

CIRM is composed of 29 members, mostly from academia. They have the dual role of providing oversight and day-to-day management. While the structure may have worked when CIRM was first launched and shielded it from political meddling, change is needed going forward, experts said.

"They're not broken but they're bent," said Sharon Terry, president of the nonprofit Genetic Alliance who was part of the panel. "They need some correction."

Among the recommendations: The board should remain at arm's length from the management team, focus on providing better oversight and should not decide what projects to fund. It also needs to be more diverse and include more representatives from industry and members with no stake in the grant-awarding process. Experts also favored the creation of an outside scientific group to give advice and expertise.

Some of the suggested changes would require legislative approval, but the panel felt they were needed to erase concerns about possible conflicts of interest.

In a statement, CIRM board chairman Jonathan Thomas said the agency has not had a chance to digest the report. Once board members talk it over with the panel next week, they will decide "on how best to proceed so that we can respond in as thoughtful a manner to the recommendations" as the panel did, Thomas said.

The latest report echoed several others in the past by other groups, which also called for a new governance structure.

"CIRM has not responded in a meaningful way to many previous public interest suggestions or to independent reviews," Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society said in a statement. "We hope the agency will not continue that pattern."

Since cutting the first check in 2006, CIRM now finds itself at a crossroads. The federal research limits that existed when it was created have been relaxed and it recently shifted focus from basic research to funding projects that can swiftly begin human trials. Experts felt this goal was unrealistic and urged the agency to have a more balanced approach.

At its current funding pace, CIRM is expected to earmark the last grants around 2017, but since most are multi-year awards, it will stay in business until around 2021. It's currently deciding its future for when the money runs out.

The $700,000 report was sponsored by CIRM a customary practice for organizations seeking a review. The Institute of Medicine said sponsors have no influence on the fact-gathering process and are barred from reviewing drafts or weighing in on the report before publication.

___

Follow Alicia Chang at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia

"I'm super excited, actually," Trevin toldAccessHollywood.com's. "I feel like a weight has been lifted off of me and I get a chance to just relax and soak in that I made it to the top four. So, I'm definitely excited about that."

Trevin entered the competition as a young man who went out on a limb after being told he would never make it. He leaves the show, brimming with confidence.

"I'm so super excited to start my life as an artist," he said. "I'm just ready to make feel good music and I just want America to see me as an artist now. [I'm] definitely happy and excited about that."

VIEW THE PHOTOS: NBCs The Voice Coaches: Then & Now

While Christina Aguilera previously suggested she would help the singer out after he left the show - possibly taking him on tour -- Trevin is sticking with his coach, Cee Lo Green, for now.

"I'm going to have to stay true to Cee Lo. But I'm open to any opportunity that will allow people to [see] my talent and allow people to see who I am as a person," he said. "So, I'm just excited. I can't complain and I don't want people to feel sorry for me. So I'm thankful."

While Trevin will be back performing next week, just like many other contestants from this season of "The Voice," he is looking forward to a short break in his future and going home.

VIEW THE PHOTOS: From Dirrty To Beautiful: Hot Shots Of Songstress Christina Aguilera

"The first thing that I'm going to do when I do get a chance to go home is eat," he said. "I'm going to sit down and I'm going to put on the TV and I'm going to sit back and eat -- all the types of food that I can eat and just chill."

--

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Keepin It Real With TVs Hottest Reality Stars!

Copyright 2012 by . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It began so optimistically.

On November 16, after their first "fiscal cliff" session with President Barack Obama, the four leaders of Congress had stood in the driveway of the White House shoulder-to-shoulder for what is a rare photo these days, Republicans and Democrats together, smiling.

There they were at the microphone, talking about a "framework" for tax reform and deficit reduction.

In hindsight, the shot of House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell - the Republicans - with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi - the Democrats - seems like an old family photo, before things went bad.

From that day on the driveway, things went downhill, rather quickly.

There was a feeling on both sides that the other was not acting seriously to avert the "fiscal cliff" of tax hikes and spending cuts that were set to occur at the beginning of this month. That was inflamed by public comments from ranking Republicans and Democrats, poisoning the atmosphere.

Many lawmakers and their aides fear that things may get more toxic through a series of bitter struggles expected in the next few months over the nation's debt and deficit burdens - fights not just between the parties but within them, and between the White House, the Senate and the House.

At stake is not only the U.S. government's ability to get its finances under control but whether it might default on its debts, and suffer further downgrades in the nation's credit rating.

While Obama is perceived the victor in the fiscal deal passed by Congress earlier this week, he did not come close to getting the one thing he demanded that could have headed off the next potential crisis: Freedom from a fight over the federal government's debt ceiling, which is likely to occur in February when the Treasury Department must ask Congress to increase the government's borrowing limit beyond the current $16.4 trillion.

Any positive vibes started fading a few days after the photo. On November 20, at a meeting between Republican staffers and Rob Nabors, the White House director of legislative affairs. Nabors announced that he had a White House offer in hand but "didn't want to be laughed out of the room and implied he would skip it because it was a waste of time," according to one Republican source. The White House declined to comment.

What the White House was offering was Obama's budget proposal from earlier in the year, long ago rejected by Republicans.

A Democratic source familiar with the negotiations said it was merely an opening bid that should have come as no surprise, but Republicans saw it as a red flag, particularly after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner touted it again nine days later.

Things didn't get better in the final weeks of the year.

At a December 13 meeting between Obama, Boehner and their aides at the White House, Obama spoke for almost the entire 50-minute session, according to Republican sources. They said he warned that if he did not get an agreement to his liking, he would spend the next four years "campaigning against House Republicans," starting with his second-term inauguration speech on January 21.

As far as the Republicans were concerned, Obama had effectively remained in campaign mode after his November 6 re-election, going on the attack in his "fiscal cliff" speeches.

One of the clearest examples of this, occurred at a delicate point in negotiations on Monday, with a looming deadline and the risk growing that the Republican-controlled House would blow up any deal pulled together by the Senate. At a campaign-style event with "middle class" Americans in the background, Obama accused Republicans of trying to "shove spending cuts at us that will hurt seniors, or hurt students or hurt middle-class families."

The move angered House Republicans who were already divided on how to proceed, leading to more bad blood. Republican Senator John McCain responded in the Senate, wondering "whether the president really wants this issue resolved." The people Obama was talking to, McCain said, "were laughing and cheering and applauding as we are on the brink of this collapse."

By that time, Boehner had ceased to be a force in the negotiations, thanks to his own miscalculation on December 20. That's when he brought his own "Plan B" to the House - a bill to avoid the "fiscal cliff" with minimal tax hikes on the wealthy - and then had to pull the bill when he couldn't get enough Republicans to support it.

The defeat humiliated Boehner and, by depriving him of the ability to deliver on any commitments he might make, sidelined him in the final stages of the negotiations.

ACCUSATIONS FLY

In the final days of the year, Republicans routinely accused the president of bad faith, saying he preferred to go over the 'cliff,' triggering the tax hikes and rattling the markets, because it would increase his ability to pressure them.

The same was said of Boehner by Democrats, including Reid.

"He's waiting until January 3 to get re-elected as speaker before he gets serious with negotiations because he has so many people over there that won't follow what he wants. That's obvious from the debacle that took place last week," Reid said in the Senate, referring to Boehner's failed effort to get his own caucus in line on December 20.

He was operating the House as a "dictatorship," Reid added in his December 27 speech, by refusing to allow a vote on a Senate bill to avoid the automatic tax hikes and spending cuts. Boehner was reelected as speaker on Thursday.

After that goading, Boehner let loose the next time he saw Reid.

The occasion was the final White House meeting of the standoff, on Friday, December 28, as Obama and the congressional leaders were trying to figure out how to proceed.

Reid said Boehner was just mouthing "talking points," according to a senior Democratic aide.

"The other folks at the table were engaged in a meaningful discussion. Every time the conversation got back to Boehner, he'd say 'The House has acted; the Senate needs to act.' It was like he arrived with a very short leash," the aide said.

"They were walking out of the meeting," the aide said, when Boehner turned to Reid and said, "'Go fuck yourself.'"

"'What?'" Reid asked, according to the aide, who said Boehner then uttered the profanity again.

'DISHEARTENING' FOR SOME DEMOCRATS

Obama used the December 28 meeting to ask McConnell and Reid to work up a bipartisan bill in the Senate that might win approval in the House, and they agreed. McConnell made an offer to Reid, but grew impatient waiting for a response, according to a Republican aide.

The Senate Republican left a message at 1:20 p.m. EST (1820 GMT) on Sunday, December 30 for Vice President Joe Biden: "Please call."

"Does anybody down there know how to do a deal?," McConnell told Biden, a former colleague of McConnell's in the Senate.

"There doesn't appear to be the level of understanding that you have about these negotiations" elsewhere in the administration, McConnell told Biden.

"It's a lack of experience. Smart people but they don't have a good sense of the trip wires," he added.

Despite Reid's 25 years in the Senate, he was out of the picture.

After the November 6 election, Reid had wondered whether Obama would cave or use his re-election as a hammer.

"We thought that it was a unique moment in time where we had enormous leverage over Republicans," a senior Democratic Senate aide said, "and we were ready to play hardball."

"This was our best opportunity to get something that's acceptable at your point of maximum leverage in probably the eight years of his administration," this official said.

The aide added that Wall Street experts were making a "strong case" that even if January 1 came and went without a deal, as long as negotiations were continuing, the stock market would hold fairly steady for a week or so into 2013.

The week after the election, Reid had traveled to the White House to try to determine whether Obama had the "spine" to stick to his guns in the negotiations, according to the aide. Reid then assured his fellow Democrats that the president, buoyed by his election win, would stand firm.

But by late December, Senate Democrats watched in amazement as Obama offered a higher, $400,000 income threshold for those who would see their taxes rise under his proposal compared to his original $250,000 figure, a willingness to cut cost-of-living benefits for retirees and a temporary instead of permanent increase in the debt limit.

"It was disheartening to supporters. He just telegraphed to Republicans a willingness to move higher at the drop of a hat," the aide said. "We got nickeled and dimed on everything," he said.

'OLD BULLS' GET DEAL DONE

Once Biden and McConnell cut their deal in the waning hours of 2012 - the one that kept lower taxes for everyone but those with high incomes - the White House leaked to reporters that Reid had signed off on the pact.

According to the senior Senate Democratic aide, Reid had not given his backing yet. He simply told the White House that Biden was welcome to come to the Senate, meet with Democratic senators "and try and sell the deal."

Reid promised that if the caucus was convinced by Biden, Reid would do everything he could to deliver a strong vote. But now he was out of the loop too.

Why could McConnell and Biden bring off the deal when others couldn't?

"They're experienced hands," said Trent Lott, a former Republican senator from Mississippi who was majority leader from June 1996 to January 2001.

"They have respect for each others' abilities and truthfulness," he said in an interview with Reuters. ".... They're old bulls. They know how to get the deal done."

Lott, who was a member of Congress for more than three decades, said it was "revisionist history" to see his era as some golden age of comity in Washington.

But "clearly the atmosphere has changed over the years. I don't know when it started drifting to the point where it is," he said.

Lott said he was struck by the fact that an agreement of such magnitude was ultimately the work not of the president or the House speaker, but of the Senate minority leader and the vice president.

"A lot of people in Washington ought to be embarrassed," Lott said.

(Additional reporting by Fred Barbash; Editing by Fred Barbash; Martin Howell and Paul Simao)

Corbett is scheduled to hold a news conference early on Wednesday at the Nittany Lion Inn on the Penn State campus to reveal the details of the lawsuit against the governing body of U.S. collegiate sports, his office said.

In July, the NCAA fined Penn State University $60 million and voided its football victories for the past 14 seasons in an unprecedented rebuke for the school's failure to stop assistant coach Sandusky's sexual abuse of children.

The university recently made the first payment of $12 million, destined for a national fund to support the victims of child abuse. Other sanctions included a ban on the Penn State football team from appearing in bowl games for four years.

The NCAA could not be reached on Tuesday for comment on the anticipated law suit.

The Sandusky scandal was revealed by a state grand jury convened in 2009 by Corbett, then Pennsylvania's attorney general. Sandusky is now serving 30 to 60 years in prison on 48 charges that he sexually abused 10 youths over more than a decade.

Attorney General-elect Kathleen Kane has vowed to probe Corbett's handling of the Penn State case. She has told reporters that she believes that by convening a grand jury in the case that he failed to protect children by delaying prosecution for more than two years.

Corbett, a Republican, has said he welcomes an investigation into how he handled the case.

(Editing by Tim Gaynor, desking by G Crosse)

But they were far from 22 and their complexions had long lost the glow of youth. And, most assuredly, they were not in a bar.

They were two basketball fans, both past the age of Medicare eligibility, and they took their game seriously. They also happened to be patients in a dialysis clinic in Georgetown, Ky.

According to authorities, the confrontation came five days before Kentucky played Louisville in the NCAA semifinals. Wildcats vs. Cardinals can make for dicey conversation and the men began exchanging words.

Dialysis assists kidney function, keeping the body chemically balanced by removing salt, waste and excess water. In this case, however, not much was done to contain the buildup of bile.

The 68-year-old Kentucky fan receiving treatment extended a finger to the Louisville fan, and it was not to signify that the Wildcats were No. 1. The 71-year-old Louisville fan responded by punching him in the face.

Police were summoned to the clinic. The Kentucky fan chose to not press charges.

His pain and blood pressure perhaps eased by the weekend: Kentucky beat Louisville 69-61 and went on to win the national title.

Dialysis units were not the only odd spots where sports traveled in 2012: Two sumo wrestlers - one 6-foot-8 and 625 pounds - were cast in a Canadian opera production of ''Semele''; Cowboys Stadium outside Dallas became home to a Victoria's Secret outlet; Lance Armstrong was stripped not only his seven Tour de France titles but of his 2006 honorary degree from Tufts University; and one-time NFL star Chad Ochocinco and House Speaker John Boehner wound up Twitter buddies.

Great heft was not limited to opera. At the London Olympics, judo fighter Ricardo Blas entered the 220-pound-and-over division at 480 pounds, nearly double that of most competitors. It was noted that Blas - the heaviest man at these Olympics - weighed more than the entire Japanese women's gymnastics team.

The London Games also brought an outpouring of joy from the mother of Thailand's Pimsiri Sirikaew, a weightlifting silver medalist. A bacchanalian romp, however, was not in Amornat Sirikaew's plans. She told Thai media she would mark her daughter's triumph by joining a monastery.

Looking to get in on the Olympic fun was a New Zealand farm group that wants sheep shearing as an Olympic sport. It was not immediately clear if winners would forgo gold medals for cashmere sweaters.

Other countries, with seemingly more urgent needs, went in strange directions. Haiti, the Palestinian territories, Togo and Eritrea joined the International Ski Federation, a step that did not exactly strike fear into the Swiss and Austrians. Turkmenistan, where scorching heat can reach 120 degrees, was ordered by presidential decree to create an ice hockey league.

Politics and sports invariably find themselves as tag-team partners, and this year was no different.

Ochocinco, getting ready for the Super Bowl with the New England Patriots, was watching the state of the union address on TV. He was puzzled by the frowning man seated behind the president. When told it was the speaker of the House, Ochocinco (who has since reverted to his original name of Chad Johnson) consoled Boehner on Twitter: ''If all else seems bad in life, just remember I love you kind sir.''

Kindness was surely not on the mind of Donald Trump when he took on all of Scotland. The real estate magnate turned presidential candidate was incensed that a ''horrendous'' wind farm is to be built off the Scottish coast by his luxury golf resort. In a seething letter, in which he invoked his Scottish-reared mother, Trump wrote to First Minister Alex Salmond: ''With the reckless installation of these monsters, you will single-handedly have done more damage to Scotland than any event in Scottish history.''

After Germany's loss in the semifinals of soccer's European Championship, one of its lawmakers rebuked the players for not singing the national anthem with proper gusto, a performance he deemed ''shameful.''

Like politics, religion crossed paths with sports inn 2012.

Manchester City, preparing for its Premier League title defense, headed to a village in the Austrian countryside for rest and training. But one thing Man City did not count on - bells from a medieval church that rattled the players from sleep at 7 a.m. Egon Pfeifer, the priest at St. Oswald Church, held his almighty ground. He said the bells would keep ringing ''even if the queen of England wants them to stop.''

A divinely named baseball team in Minnesota shed its ecclesiastical ties for one night. Two atheists groups were in town for a conference and sponsoring a minor league game. So the St. Paul Saints rebranded themselves for one night as ''Mr. Paul Aints.''

This was also a year of odds-defying moments.

Caleb Lloyd was sitting in the left field seats at a Cincinnati Reds game one spring night when he caught a home run ball hit by Reds pitcher Mike Leake. The next batter, Zack Cozart, also homered to left. And there, as if out of the mist of ''Field of Dreams,'' was Lloyd yet again - ready to stab it, with one hand.

''I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, that's just crazy,''' he said.

As was the case Down Under: two amateur golfers in Sydney making consecutive holes-in-one. The odds of two golfers from the same foursome acing the same hole? The National Hole in One Registry website says it's 17 million to 1.

Chris Davis of the Baltimore Orioles also made a stop in the Twilight Zone. He went 0 for 8 and struck out five times as a designated hitter in a 17-inning victory over Boston. But with the bullpen depleted, he wound up being called to the mound, the first time he pitched in the pros. He threw two scoreless innings and got the win.

''I was like, 'Sweet!' I get to try something different today,'' he said. ''Because hitting ain't working.''

Lots of things weren't working for one team at a girls' high school basketball game in Indiana - Arlington lost to Bloomington South 107-2. Bloomington South coach Larry Winters said he wasn't trying to humiliate an opponent. He told the Indianapolis Star he didn't want his players to stop shooting because that ''would have been more embarrassing.''

But for real embarrassment - some might say perseverance beyond all dignity and reason - check in with Russ Berkman. He's from the Seattle area and he won a lottery for passes to a practice round the day before the Masters. His dog had other ideas. Sierra took to the four tickets like a shank of veal and ate them.

What to do? Berkman told KJR radio his girlfriend insisted there was but one course of action. So he got Sierra to cough it all up, and Berkman then began the unsavory task of piecing together 20 shreds of tickets coated with dog vomit.

He reassembled almost three-quarters of them, photographed his handiwork and explained what happened to Augusta National. The club reprinted his tickets, and the Masters was on.

A happy ending for Berkman, although Sierra may have seen it differently.

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Associated Press writers Bruce Schreiner in Louisvillle, Ky., Dan Sewell in Cincinnati and freelancer Ben McConville in Edinburgh, Scotland, contributed to this report.

More than 400 Sandy Hook Elementary School students in kindergarten through grade 4 will return to classes on Thursday for the first time since the December 14 attack. On Wednesday afternoon those children and parents who hadn't yet visited the school were invited to walk through their new location, in neighboring Monroe.

The former Chalk Hill Middle School has been renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School and has been transformed into a "cheerful, nurturing" environment, Newtown School Superintendent Janet Robinson said at a press conference held by Newtown and Monroe officials at a town park near the school.

Officials have gone to great lengths to help the returning students recover from the nightmarish memory of the attack by Adam Lanza, which left 20 of their schoolmates, all first graders, and six staff members dead in the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

"This does not look like the other elementary school," Robinson said emphatically.

When the students return, they will find all of the belongings they left behind when teachers and police evacuated them from Sandy Hook nearly three weeks ago. They will also find the classrooms and hallways decorated with paper snowflakes made by other students from across the globe.

"There are snowflakes from around the world there. There are many snowflakes, and they are beautiful," Robinson said.

So many, in fact, that organizers have asked that no more be submitted.

"At this time, we have enough beautiful snowflakes to blanket the community of Newtown," the Connecticut PTSA said in a message to prospective decoration contributors.

ATTACK MOTIVE STILL UNKNOWN

Meanwhile, no new details have emerged in recent days to explain why the 20-year-old Lanza, armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, two other firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, targeted the grade schoolers and their teachers.

Described by family friends as having Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their home about five miles from the school before driving to Sandy Hook and embarking on the massacre, police said. He then took his own life as police were arriving at the school, which had an enrollment of 456 students ages 5 to 10 before the attack.

Police have offered no firm motive for the attack, and state police investigators have said it could be months before they are in a position to offer a report on it.

The massacre in Newtown, a rural New England town of 27,000 residents about 70 miles northeast of New York City, stunned the nation, prompting President Barack Obama to call it the worst day of his presidency and reigniting an extensive debate on gun control. In response to the attack, the National Rifle Association called for armed guards to patrol every public school in the country.

Armed officers from the Monroe Police Department will be on hand when the pupils arrive on Thursday morning around 9 a.m. at their new school, about 7 miles south of Sandy Hook, which remains an active crime scene and is closed to anyone but police.

The new Sandy Hook school has also been equipped with a new security system, although officials declined to offer details.

"I think right now we have to make this the safest school in America," Monroe Police Lieutenant Keith White said.

A comparable system will also be installed in each of Newtown's other schools shortly, Robinson said in an email to district parents.

"As we enter 2013, we begin the year knowing that we are forever changed," Robinson wrote. "We have an altered sense of security and will continue to grieve for the senseless loss of such precious little ones and their teachers, but we will join together in a new appreciation of what we have and will make something positive emerge from this."

Students will also be introduced to a new principal, Donna Page, because Sandy Hook Principal Dawn Hochsprung was among the six adults killed in Lanza's attack. Page is a former administrator in Newtown schools who has agreed to serve as interim principal while a permanent successor is sought.

(Writing by Dan Burns; Editing by M.D. Golan and Steve Orlofsky)

Tens of thousands of years of lava flow from the , a volcanic region near Mumbai in present-day India, may have spewed poisonous levels of sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and caused the mass extinction through the resulting global warming and ocean acidification, the research suggests.

The findings, presented Wednesday (Dec. 5) here at the , are the latest volley in an ongoing debate over whether an asteroid or volcanism killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago in the mass die-off known as the K-T extinction.

"Our new information calls for a reassessment of what really caused the K-T mass extinction," said Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton University who conducted the study.

For several years, Keller has argued that volcanic activity killed the dinosaurs.

But proponents of the Alvarez hypothesis argue that a giant meteorite impact at Chicxulub, Mexico, around 65 million years ago released toxic amounts of dust and gas into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun to cause widespread cooling, choking the dinosaurs and poisoning sea life. The meteorite may impact may also have set off volcanic activity, earthquakes and tsunamis. []

The new research "really demonstrates that we have Deccan Traps just before the mass extinction, and that may contribute partially or totally to the mass extinction," said Eric Font, a geologist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, who was not involved in the research.

Sea cockroach

In 2009, oil companies drilling off the Eastern coast of India uncovered eons-old lava-filled sediments buried nearly 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) below the ocean surface.

Keller and her team got permission to analyze the sediments, finding they contained plentiful fossils from around the boundary between the Cretaceous-Tertiary periods, or K-T Boundary, when dinosaurs vanished.

The sediments bore layers of lava that had traveled nearly 1,000 miles (1,603 km) from the Deccan Traps. Today, the volcanic region spans an area as big as France, but was nearly the area of Europe when it was active during the late , said Adatte Thierry, a geologist from the University of Lausanne in France who collaborated with Keller on the research.

Within the fossil record, plankton species got fewer, smaller and maintained less elaborate shells immediately after lava layers, which would indicate it happened in years after the eruptions. Most species gradually died off. In their wake, a hardy plankton genus with a small, nondescript exoskeleton, called Guembilitria, exploded within the fossil record. Keller's team found similar trends in their analysis of marine sediments from Egypt, Israel, Spain, Italy and Texas. While Guembilitria species represented between 80 percent and 98 percent of the fossils, other species disappeared.

"We call it a disaster opportunist," Keller told LiveScience. "It's like a cockroach whenever things go bad, it will be the one that survives and thrives."

Guembilitria may have come to dominance worldwide when the huge amounts of sulfur (in the form of ) released by the Deccan Traps fell into the oceans. There, it would've chemically binded with calcium, making that calcium unavailable to sea creatures that needed the element to build their shells and skeletons.

Around the same time in India, fossil evidence of land animals and plants vanished, suggesting the volcanoes caused mass extinctions on both land and in the sea there.

Global impact

In past work, the team has also found evidence at Chicxulub that casts doubt on the notion of a .

Sediments containing iridium, the chemical signature of an , show up after the extinction occurred, contradicting the notion that it could have caused a sudden die-off, Keller said.

A meteorite impact also would not have produced enough toxic sulfur and carbon dioxide to match the levels seen in the rocks, so it may have worsened the mass extinction, but couldn't have caused it, she said.

"The meteorite is just too small to cause the extinction."

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