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Frederick A. Murphy / CDC handout via EPA file

A new virus that appears similar to rabies, but has the symptoms and lethality of Ebola, shown here, has been dubbed the Bas-Congo virus. It killed two teenagers in the Congo in 2009.

By Maggie Fox, NBC News

A virus that killed two teenagers in Congo in 2009 is a completely new type, related to rabies but causing the bleeding and rapid death that makes Ebola infection so terrifying, scientists reported on Thursday. Theyre searching for the source of the virus, which may be transmitted by insects or bats.

The new virus is being named Bas-Congo virus, for the area where it was found. Researchers are finding more and more of these new viruses, in part because new tests make it possible, but also in the hope of better understanding them so they can prevent pandemics of deadly disease.

The virus infected a 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl in the same village in Congo in 2009. They didnt stand a chance, says Joseph Fair of Metabiota, a company that investigates pathogens. Fair is in the Democratic Republic of Congo now, under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak.

They expired within three days, Fair said in a telephone interview. It was a very rapid killer.

A few days later a male nurse who cared for the two teenagers developed the same symptoms and survived. Samples from the lucky nurse have been tested and it turned out a completely new virus had infected him, Fair and other researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS pathogens.

The genetic sequences went to Dr. Charles Chiu, of the University of California, San Francisco.

We were astounded that this patient had sequences in his blood from a completely unknown and unidentified virus, Chiu said. They werent expecting that.

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New virus in Africa looks like rabies, acts like Ebola

Frederick A. Murphy / CDC handout via EPA file

A new virus that appears similar to rabies, but has the symptoms and lethality of Ebola, shown here, has been dubbed the Bas-Congo virus. It killed two teenagers in the Congo in 2009.

By Maggie Fox, NBC News

A virus that killed two teenagers in Congo in 2009 is a completely new type, related to rabies but causing the bleeding and rapid death that makes Ebola infection so terrifying, scientists reported on Thursday. Theyre searching for the source of the virus, which may be transmitted by insects or bats.

The new virus is being named Bas-Congo virus, for the area where it was found. Researchers are finding more and more of these new viruses, in part because new tests make it possible, but also in the hope of better understanding them so they can prevent pandemics of deadly disease.

The virus infected a 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl in the same village in Congo in 2009. They didnt stand a chance, says Joseph Fair of Metabiota, a company that investigates pathogens. Fair is in the Democratic Republic of Congo now, under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak.

They expired within three days, Fair said in a telephone interview. It was a very rapid killer.

A few days later a male nurse who cared for the two teenagers developed the same symptoms and survived. Samples from the lucky nurse have been tested and it turned out a completely new virus had infected him, Fair and other researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS pathogens.

The genetic sequences went to Dr. Charles Chiu, of the University of California, San Francisco.

We were astounded that this patient had sequences in his blood from a completely unknown and unidentified virus, Chiu said. They werent expecting that.

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Dangerous new virus in Africa

Joomla, the open-source-based content management system that competes against WordPress, Drupal and others in the world of blog, website and intranet creation, has today taken a step up in the world of converged media. The opensource community, which says its platform powers 3% of all the websites in the world, has released version 3.0 of its CMS, which automatically optimizes content created on the platform for the mobile web. Joomla says that its mobile implementation is the first to be built on Twitter Bootstrap, the mobile-friendly toolkit developed by Twitter and released on Github in August 2011 that is a collection ofbase CSS styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, alerts and more that are already widely used in the development of websites and apps.

Also among the 15 or so new features in version 3.0 are aPostgreSQL driver, a new user interface for administrators and a new front-end template. Other features have been introduced incrementally since the sitess last version (2.5, out in January) and include the ability tocopy a template, the option to disable the ability to change the Username in Profile and the installation of language packages directly from the extension manager.

The decision to go with Twitter Bootstrap for Joomlas responsive-design mobile implementation, the company says, was made in part because the framework is already popular with developers. Its one example where Twitter has for now continued to work harmoniously with the developer community, at a time when relationships have become somewhat more strained when it comes to third parties working with its own APIs to create Twitter clients.

Meanwhile, the inclusion of the PostgreSQL driver, Joomla notes, will mean it it supports the main repositories for databases (the other two already supported are MySQL and SQL Server).

While sites like WordPress are widely cited as the worlds biggest website-creation platforms, Joomla has also been a significant, if slightly less consumer-focused player in this space. Sites forCitibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonalds and Sony have been built on the platform, along with those of smaller blogs and intranets.

Joomla says thatthere are more than half a million active contributors to its open source CMS, and that its software has been downloaded more than 30 million times to date. WordPress, Drupal and Joomla have come to dominate the market for CMS-based websites (as opposed to those that are built from the ground up in custom designs): together, they account for some 75% of the top-1 million CMS-based sites worldwide, according to an estimate from BuiltWith.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news. The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitters website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS) + Application Framework, which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

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Website Creation Platform Joomla Debuts Version 3.0, Mobile And Tablet Optimized Thanks To Twitter Bootstrap

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Sep 27, 2012) - Joomla, one of the world's most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.0. Along with new features such as a PostgreSQL driver, a new user interface for administratorsand a new front-end template, the Joomla CMS can now display content on mobile devices as clearly and distinctly as it does on a personal computer or Mac.This innovation makes Joomla the first major CMS that includes the Twitter Bootstrap framework that enables it to be 100 percent mobile-friendly by default. Over time, a native mobile optimization option becomes increasingly important for a Web presence as global information technology consulting firm IDC predicts that by 2015 mobile Internet will overtake desktop usage.

"As accessing the Internet via a mobile device is becoming more common than accessing it via a desktop computer, the mobile version of a company's website will soon be more important than the desktop version," said Paul Orwig, president of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. "With every version of Joomla, we use feedback from our community of more than a half a million contributors to add new features that will keep those who use our CMS ahead of what trends will impact the way their content is experienced.By optimizing Joomla 3.0 for mobile devices, there is absolutely no doubt as to whether what was designed for the desktop will transfer seamlessly to a phone or tablet."

In this release, the goal was to make Joomla 3.0 completely mobile-friendly while still remaining recognizably Joomla. To accomplish this, Twitter Bootstrap was utilized. Bootstrap is an extensive front-end toolkit for developing websites and applications. Using Bootstrap allows Joomla to create a mobile-ready experience based on a popular framework that many other developers and designers already know and work with on a regular basis.

In total, there are more than 15 new features to Joomla 3.0. Other key features include the ability to copy a template, the option to disable the ability to change the Username in Profile and the installation of language packages directly from the extension manager, which makes it easier to manage other languages.Many of these new features have been introduced incrementally since the launch of Joomla 2.5 in January.

One of the brand new features with Joomla 3.0 is the addition of the PostgreSQL driver. This addition means that the CMS is truly database independent, as it already is integrated with MySQL and SQL Server.

Joomla 3.0 is truly a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than 2.6 million Joomla forum posts, nearly 580,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 9,900 Joomla extensions.To download Joomla 3.0, go to http://www.joomla.org/download.html.

About Joomla! Joomla is one of the world's most popular software packages used to build, organize, manage and publish content for websites, blogs, Intranets, and mobile applications. With about 3 percent of the web running on Joomla, the free open source Content Management System (CMS) powers the web presence of hundreds of thousands of small businesses, governments, non-profits and large organizations worldwide like Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald's and Sony. The award-winning CMS is led by an international community of more than a half million active contributors, helping the most inexperienced user to seasoned web developer make their digital visions a reality. Joomla's power and extensibility has resulted in its software being downloaded more than 30 million times.

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Joomla! 3.0 Released; Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Newly Optimized for Mobile Devices

Its time for the Associated Press and the New York Times to join the rest of us

The Online News Association met this past week. As you might expect, they tweeted a lot. When Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Jose Vargas was at the podium Sept. 21 giving the keynote speech, a veritable social media storm erupted.

Its time we retire the word and the term illegal immigrant in referring to people. It is not only an inhumane term it is a political term, it is an unfair term, it is an inaccurate term, said Vargas. Himself an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines, Vargas called particularly on the New York Times and the Associated Press to change their stylebooks to a less politicized term.

The majority of responses from journalists we tracked on Twitter, responded to Vargas challenge cautiously, or refuted contention that undocumented was a less politically charged term.

Robert McMillan, a journalist from New Jersey who writes for Reuters, tweeted: I always thought undocumented was equally politicized. But maybe Im wrong.

Mike Roe, a journalist from L.A., tweeted: Agreed on it being an equally if not more politicized term at this point.

Vargas comments, and the hubbub surrounding it, prompted a restatement of the New York Times editorial stance by Phil Corbett, associate managing editor for standards, in an interview with Poynter. We do think the phrases 'illegal immigrants' and 'illegal immigration' are accurate, factual and as neutral as we can manage under the circumstances, Corbett said.

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times Public Editor wrote a blog post about it Sept. 24, and issued an invitation for the public to comment about it.

It is interesting, if infuriating, to see this conversation so delayed in the New York Times. We, along with our fellow members of the Latino press, have long urged the Associated Press and all mainstream media to join with the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in changing their stylebooks and dropping the i-word. Neither media bellwether has seen fit to do so.

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Dropping the i-word