Science and Technology today

Banking stem cells could save Japan nuclear workers

2011-04-20T08:30:00.000+06:00

Health officials should collect blood from workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in case they are accidentally exposed to high levels of radiation and need a stem cell transplant, Japanese researchers said on Thursday.
They said gathering blood from the workers would give them a ready source of their own stem cells that could help rebuild their bone marrow should they become exposed to high levels of radiation.
"The danger of a future accidental radiation exposure is not passed, since there has been a series of serious aftershocks even this April," Dr Shuichi Taniguchi of Toranomon Hospital in Tokyo and Dr Tetsuya Tanimoto of the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research wrote in the Lancet medical journal.
A series of strong aftershocks this week has rattled eastern Japan, slowing the recovery effort at the Fukushima Daiichi plant due to temporary evacuations of workers and power outages.
Tokyo Electric Power Co said this week the situation at the nuclear plant, wrecked by a 15-meter (49.2-foot) tsunami on March 11, had stabilized. The crisis is now rated par with the world's worst nuclear accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, although the total release of radiation at Chernobyl was far greater.
The researchers say transplant teams are standing by in Japan and Europe to collect and store the nuclear workers' cells, but so far the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan is balking because it would cause a "physical and psychological burden for nuclear workers," the team wrote.
Collecting cells from the workers has several advantages over donated cells, which require finding a matching donor and carry the risk of rejection.
Stem cell transplants from a person's own cells would allow the workers to avoid taking drugs to suppress the immune system, helping them to better resist infections. The cells could quickly restore normal function to the body's machinery for making blood cells.
And the workers' cells could be banked and stored in case they develop leukemia, which could happen years down the road.
But the solution is not perfect, the team admits. High exposure to radiation would also attack cells in the gut, skin or lung -- problems a stem cell transplant could not fix.
Yet, with containment and clean-up efforts at the damaged plant expected to drag on for months or even years, Tanimoto and Taniguchi say taking steps to protect the workers' from future harm is paramount.
"The most important mission is to save the nuclear workers' lives and to protect the local communities," the team wrote.
"Such an approach would be the industry's best defense: if a fatal accident happened to the nuclear workers, the nuclear power industry of Japan would collapse."

Scientists find way to map brain's complexity

2011-04-20T08:29:00.000+06:00

Scientists say they have moved a step closer to developing a computer model of the brain after finding a way to map both the connections and functions of nerve cells in the brain together for the first time.
In a study in the journal Nature on Sunday, researchers from Britain's University College London (UCL) described a technique developed in mice which enabled them to combine information about the function of neurons with details of their connections.
The study is part of an emerging area of neuroscience research known as 'connectomics'. A little like genomics, which maps our genetic make-up, connectomics aims to map the brain's connections, known as synapses.
By untangling and being able to map these connections -- and deciphering how information flows through the brain's circuits -- scientists hope to understand how thoughts and perceptions are generated in the brain and how these functions go wrong in diseases such as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and stroke.
"We are beginning to untangle the complexity of the brain," said Tom Mrsic-Flogel, who led the study.
"Once we understand the function and connectivity of nerve cells spanning different layers of the brain, we can begin to develop a computer simulation of how this remarkable organ works."
But he said would take many years of work among scientists and huge computer processing power before that could be done.
In a report of his research, Mrsic-Flogel explained how mapping the brain's connections is no small feat: There are an estimated one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain, each connected to thousands of other nerve cells, he said, making an estimated 150 trillion synapses.
"How do we figure out how the brain's neural circuitry works? We first need to understand the function of each neuron and find out to which other brain cells it connects," he said.
In this study, Mrsic-Flogel's team focused on vision and looked into the visual cortex of the mouse brain, which contains thousands of neurons and millions of different connections.
Using high resolution imaging, they were able to detect which of these neurons responded to a particular stimulus.
Taking a slice of the same tissue, the scientists then applied small currents to subsets of neurons to see which other neurons responded and which of them were synaptically connected.
By repeating this technique many times, they were able to trace the function and connectivity of hundreds of nerve cells in visual cortex.
Using this method, the team hopes to begin generating a wiring diagram of a brain area with a particular function, such as the visual cortex. The technique should also help them map the wiring of regions that underpin touch, hearing and movement.
John Williams, head of neuroscience and mental health at the Wellcome Trust medical charity, which helped fund the study, said understanding the brain's inner workings was one of science's "ultimate goals."
"This important study presents neuroscientists with one of the key tools that will help them begin to navigate and survey the landscape of the brain," he said.

Scientists find superbugs in Delhi drinking water

2011-04-15T14:52:00.000+06:00

A gene that makes bugs highly resistant to almost all known antibiotics has been found in bacteria in water supplies in New Delhi used by local people for drinking, washing and cooking, scientists said on Thursday.
The NDM 1 gene, which creates what some experts describe as "super superbugs," has spread to germs that cause cholera and dysentery, and is circulating freely in other bacteria in the Indian city capital of 14 million people, the researchers said.
"The inhabitants of New Delhi are continually being exposed to multidrug-resistant and NDM 1-positive bacteria," said Mark Toleman of Britain's Cardiff University School of Medicine, who published the findings in a study on Thursday.
A "substantial number" of them are consuming such bacteria on a daily basis, he told a briefing in London. "We believe we have discovered a very significant underlying source of NDM 1 in the capital city of India," he said.
NDM 1, or New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1, makes bacteria resistant to almost all antibiotics, including the most powerful class, called carbapenems.
It first emerged in India three years ago and has now spread across the world. It has been found in a wide variety of bugs, including familiar pathogens like Escherichia coli, or E. coli.
No new drugs are on the horizon for at least 5-6 years to tackle it and experts are concerned that only a few major drug companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, still have strong antibiotic development programmes.
Toleman's study, carried out with Cardiff University's Timothy Walsh and published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, investigated how common NDM 1-producing bacteria are in community waste seepage -- such as water pools or rivulets in streets -- and tap water in urban New Delhi.
The researchers collected 171 swabs from seepage water and 50 public tap water samples from sites within a 12 kilometer radius of central New Delhi between September and October 2010.
The NDM 1 gene was found in two of the drinking-water samples and 51 of seepage samples, the researchers said, and bacteria positive for NDM 1 were grown from two drinking-water samples and 12 seepage samples.
"We would expect that perhaps as many as half a million people are carrying NDM 1-producing bacteria as normal (gut) flora in New Dehli alone," Toleman said.
Experts say the spread of superbugs threatens whole swathes of modern medicine, which cannot be practiced if doctors have no effective antibiotics to ward off infections during surgery, intensive care or cancer treatments like chemotherapy.
In a commentary about Walsh and Toleman's findings, Mohd Shahid from Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India, said global action was needed.
"The potential for wider international spread of ... NDM 1 is real and should not be ignored," he wrote.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated April 7 as World Health Day and under the slogan "No action today, no cure tomorrow" it is campaigning about the risks of life-saving antibiotics losing their healing power.
"We are at a critical point in time where antibiotic resistance is reaching unprecedented levels," said Zsuzsanna Jakab, the WHO's regional director for Europe.
"Given the growth of travel and trade in Europe and across the world, people should be aware that until all countries tackle this, no country alone can be safe."

Japan a robot power everywhere except at nuclear plant

2011-04-15T14:43:00.001+06:00

Japan may build robots to play the violin, run marathons and preside over weddings, but it has not deployed any of the machines to help repair its crippled reactors.
While robots are commonplace in the nuclear power industry, with EU engineers building one that can climb walls through radioactive fields, the electric power company running Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has not deployed any for the nuclear emergency.
Instead, its skeleton team has been given the unenviable and perhaps deadly task of cooling reactors and spent nuclear fuel on their own, only taking breaks to avoid over-exposure.
A science ministry official said a robot used to detect radiation levels is at the site of the accident in Fukushima, north of Tokyo, but nuclear safety agency official Hidehiko Nishiyama said: "We have no reports of any robots being used."
That robot would have come in handy early on Thursday when workers monitoring radiation had to back away from the plant because it was becoming too hot.
While Japan is renowned for its cutting edge technology, it also maintains an anachronistic element in its society that relies on humans for tasks that have given way to automation in many other parts of the world, such as operating elevators and warning motorists of road construction.
In one of Japan's worst nuclear accidents, two workers were killed in September 1999, when workers at a nuclear facility in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, set off an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction by using buckets to mix nuclear fuel in a lab.
Japan is a world leader in robots, using them to automate the most complicated manufacturing processes and to sift through rubble to look for victims in earthquakes.
Robots were also used after two infamous nuclear disasters -- Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and will almost certainly be used at Fukushima for work in highly radioactive areas.
Kim Seungho, a nuclear official who engineered robots for South Korea's atomic power plants, said: "You have to design emergency robots for plants when they are being built so they can navigate corridors, steps and close valves."
The Fukushima plant was built in the 1970s, well before robots were able to work on sophisticated tasks.
Robots are in place in many nuclear plants for structured situations such as monitoring pipes and simple maintenance.
Kim, a deputy director in nuclear technology for the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, said budget constraints and denial have kept emergency robots out of many plants in his country and around the world.
"Nuclear plant operators don't liked to think about serious situations that are beyond human control," he said by telephone.

2011-02-08T16:20:00.002+06:00

হ্যালো,
অনেকদিন যাবত আমি আপনাদের মাঝে অনুপস্থিত আছি। এজন্য আমি আপনাদের কাছে দুঃখ প্রকাশ করছি। আশা করি ভবিষ্যতে আপনাদের মাঝে নিয়মিত আসব।
ধন্যবাদ

Apple pitches $499 iPad, takes on Amazon

2010-02-02T08:44:00.000+06:00

Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs took the wraps off a sleek tablet that it called the iPad, pitching the new gadget at a surprisingly low price to bridge the gap between smartphones and laptops.
A buoyant Jobs took the stage at a packed theatre on Wednesday to show off the 9.7-inch touchscreen tablet, which looks like a large iPhone, and to introduce a new iBook electronic reader service that will compete with Amazon.com Inc's Kindle.
The iPad is Apple's biggest bet on a new product since the iPhone three years ago, and seeks to tap an unproven market for tablets. Analysts, while impressed by the iPad's seamless functionality, also pointed out that consumers already have smartphones and laptops for their mobile computing needs.
Jobs described the iPad as a "third category" of devices, a do-everything media gadget that can surf the Web, and play movies and video games. He also left little doubt that Apple was going after the e-book market that Amazon had popularized.
"If there's going to be a third category of device, it's going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone; otherwise it has no reason for being," said Jobs, who still appeared thin following his liver transplant last year.
"Now Amazon's done a great job of pioneering this functionality with their Kindle. And we're going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit further," he said.
Famous for his skills as a pitchman, Jobs, dressed in his trademark blue jeans and black turtleneck, created plenty of drama as he waited until late in the event to discuss the cost of the iPad, which analysts had expected to be up to $1,000.
Apple elected to price it for as little as $499 for 16 gigabytes of storage, starting in late March. An extra $130 is needed to equip the iPad with third-generation (3G) wireless capability. Higher-capacity models will sell for $599 and $699.
"Pricing is very aggressive, so it's pretty positive from a mass adoption perspective," said Brian Marshall, an analyst with Broadpoint Amtech.
Research group IDC said it expects Apple to ship 4 million iPad units in 2010, with about 2 million in the United States.
Shares of Apple rose to as high as $210.58 after the pricing news, up 5.5 percent from their session low. The stock closed up 0.94 percent at $207.88 on Nasdaq, within reach of its all-time high of $215.59 logged on Jan 5.
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The half-inch thick, 1.5-pound iPad features Apple's own processor and 10 hours of battery life. It runs a version of the iPhone's operating system and can use virtually all of the 140,000 apps currently available for the smartphone.
"What once occupied half your living room can now be dropped in a bag," said Outsell Inc analyst Ned May. "It's pulling together a variety of needs (in) a universal entertainment device."
Apple announced a data plan deal with AT&T Inc, which appeared to have beaten out Verizon Wireless. AT&T will offer two monthly data plans for the iPad, a limited one for $14.99 and an unlimited one for $29.99.
IPHONE-LIKE ANTICIPATION
Other technology companies, including Microsoft Corp and Toshiba Corp, have launched tablets that failed to take off in recent years.
But analysts said they were impressed with the technology that Apple showed off. The iPad has a near life-size touch keyboard, and comes with all the expected features, including a calendar, an address book and maps.
"One thing Apple has proven is that they can consumerist new concepts, new technologies," said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a consulting firm. "That will probably be their claim to fame again with this."
However, some also mentioned potential cannibalization of other Apple products.
"If it's doing all these things and does it better than a notebook then they'd have to tell me why I'd want a MacBook," said NPD analyst Steve Baker.
Some industry watchers said the iPad, with its multimedia bells and whistles, will be a tough competitor for Amazon's Kindle. The iBooks store will let users buy from publishers including Pearson Plc's Penguin, News Corp's HarperCollins, and Hachette Book Group.
But other analysts noted that the Kindle costs less -- $259 for the cheapest version -- and was more tailored for long-form reading, at least for now.
"This is not an e-reader -- this is a device that can be used to read books," Cowen & Co analyst James Friedland said of the iPad. "This doesn't change the game -- at the same time, Apple is a formidable competitor and our view is that over time, Apple and Amazon will emerge as the two largest players" in e-books.
Shares of Amazon took a brief hit but recovered to end 2.7 percent higher at $122.75 on Nasdaq.
In an online poll on reuters.com before Wednesday's media event, 37 percent of more than 1,000 respondents said they would pay $500-$699 for the tablet. Nearly 30 percent weren't interested, while 20 percent said they would pay $700-$899.

Scientists find way to block fearful memories

2009-12-18T22:33:00.000+07:00

US researchers have found a drug-free way to block fearful memories, opening up the possibility of new treatment approaches for problems such as post traumatic stress disorder, they reported on Wednesday.
The findings in people build on studies in rats that showed that reactivating a memory -- by showing people objects that stimulate the fearful memory -- opens up a specific time window in which the memory can be edited before it is stored again.
"Before memories are stored, there is a period where they are susceptible to being disrupted," said Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, whose study appears in the journal Nature.
Earlier studies have shown that drugs can be used to block fearful memories, but the results were not long lasting.
Phelps and colleagues based their studies on findings in rats that showed that old memories can be changed or reconsolidated, but only during a specific window time after the rat is reminded of the fearful memory.
That window of susceptibility is typically between 10 minutes after re-exposure to the object to 6 hours later, when the memory stored once again in the brain.
The researchers applied these findings to people in a lab setting. First, they created a fearful memory by showing the volunteers a blue square, and then delivering a mild shock.
Once they had created the fear memory, they simply showed a blue square, which reminded them of the fear memory.
The team waited 10 minutes and then started a training period where the volunteers were repeatedly exposed to the blue square without a shock.
Phelps said simply delaying the exposure training so that it falls within a period during which the memory is susceptible to being edited made a lasting difference in the ability to block the fear memory.
A second group that was exposed to the blue square without the 10-minute waiting period, continued to show fear when exposed to the blue square.
When they brought people back a year later, the group that got the training showed no fear response -- tracked by changes in the skin -- when exposed to the blue square, while other volunteers continued to have a fear response.
Phelps said the important aspect of the study is the time window.
"What we think is happening is because we did it at the right time, you are restoring the memory as safe as opposed to just creating a new memory that competes with the old memory," Phelps said.
She said the findings are the first of their type in humans, and she cautioned that the findings cannot be immediately applied to people with severe anxiety problems, such as post traumatic stress disorder.
"We did a blue square with a mild shock," she said. "Normal fear memories are way more complex than that."
But she said, the findings do open up the possibility of new training methods that can be studied to help people overcome difficult memories.
"It's really exciting for the potential of treating these disorders. It's just a ways away," Phelps said.
The study was supported through a grant by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health

"Big Bang" collider sets particle beam record

2009-12-01T15:46:00.000+07:00

The "Big Bang" experiment at CERN near Geneva scored a world record on Monday by accelerating beams to the highest energy ever achieved in a particle collider, the research center announced.
Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said the achievement marked a major milestone on the way to tests next year which they hope will unlock secrets of the origins and make-up of the universe.
The energy of the twin beams circulated around 27-km tunnels deep underground went, at 1.18 trillion electric volts (TeV), well past the previous highest -- just under 1 TeV -- in a collider at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The achievement in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) came 10 days after the world's largest scientific experiment was restarted following an accident soon after its launch in September 2008.
"We are still coming to terms with just how smooth the LHC commissioning is going," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer as the record was announced. "It is fantastic."
The beam energy now achieved in the LHC -- a vast complex of huge magnets, electronics and computers costing some $10 billion underground on the Franco-Swiss border -- leaves some way to go before the real "Big Bang" experiments can begin.
The object of these is to smash particles together at a force of some 7 TeV and create conditions one billionth of a second after the explosion 13.7 billion years ago that shaped the universe and everything in it.
Data gathered when those collisions occur will be recorded and analyzed by a network of 10,000 researchers not just at CERN at the foot of the French Jura mountains but also in some 30 countries around the world.
Scientists hope to learn how matter, and what is called anti-matter, was created and whether the so-called "Higgs Boson" -- which Scottish physicist Peter Higgs suggests helped matter come together -- actually exists.
But despite the rapid and seamless progress since the first beams were injected into the repaired LHC on November 20, leaders of the project remained cautious about the moment when they will start what they call "first physics."
Said Heuer: "We are continuing to take it step by step, and there is a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I'm keeping my champagne on ice until then."
Over the next few weeks, scientists will move into a commissioning phase aimed at slowly increasing the beam intensity and producing good quality collision data that the monitoring machines can test their capacities on.
The first major collisions at 7 TeV are due to take place some time in the first quarter of next year, CERN says.

Big Bang machine achieves first particle collisions

2009-11-25T17:44:00.000+07:00

Scientists have smashed together proton beams for the first time in a 27-kilometre tunnel under the French-Swiss border in an initial step toward discovering how the universe came into existence, they said on Monday.
Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hope experiments will already start giving clues about the origins of the universe in the coming months as the world's biggest particle collider starts moving to full power.
"It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer about the collision, achieved by sending two bunches of subatomic particles around the ring in opposite directions.
It is only three days since the "Big Bang Machine," or Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was switched back on after being halted by an accident 14 months ago, just 10 days after its first start-up.
Earlier, physicist Steve Myers told Reuters it could take until 2011 for beams of protons to hit top velocity in the nearly $10 billion experiment, which involves scientists from dozens of countries.
The key aim of the project at the CERN research center is to try to discover how the universe took shape, after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago spilled out matter at vast speeds and energies that eventually became suns, stars, planets and then life itself.
Experiments in a previous collider at the CERN research center near Geneva at the foot of the French Jura mountains staged particle collisions producing energy very close to that of the Big Bang.
The LHC operating at its full might should recreate conditions like those just one billionth of a second after the primeval explosion.
The scientists now plan to increase the beam intensity and accelerate the beams further so they can gather enough collision data by Christmas to help set up experiments.

New fossils reveal a world full of crocodiles

2009-11-22T23:15:00.000+07:00

New fossils unearthed in what is now the Sahara desert reveal a once-swampy world
divided up among a half-dozen species of unusual and perhaps intelligent crocodiles, researchers reported on Thursday.
They have given some of the new species snappy names -- BoarCroc, RatCroc, DogCroc, DuckCroc and PancakeCroc -- but say their findings help build an understanding of how crocodilians were and remain such a successful life form.
They lived during the Cretaceous period 145 million to 65 million years ago, when the continents were closer together and the world warmer and wetter than it is now.
"We were surprised to find so many species from the same time in the same place," said paleontologist Hans Larsson of McGill University in Montreal who worked on the study.
"Each of the crocs apparently had different diets, different behaviors. It appears they had divided up the ecosystem, each species taking advantage of it in its own way."
Larsson and Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, funded by National Geographic, studied the jaws, teeth and what few bones they had of the crocodiles. They also did CT scans, which are computer-enhanced x-rays, to see inside the skulls.
Two of the species, DogCroc and DuckCroc, had brains that looked different from those of modern crocodiles.
"They may have had slightly more sophisticated brain function than living crocs because active hunting on land usually requires more brain power than merely waiting for prey to show up," Larsson said in a statement.
RatCroc, a new species formally named Araripesuchus rattoides, was found in Morocco and would have used its buck-toothed lower jaw to grub for food.
PancakeCroc, known scientifically as Laganosuchus thaumastos, was 20 feet long with a big, flat head.
DuckCroc represents new fossils found in Niger from a previously known species called Anatosuchus minor. It would have eaten grubs and frogs with its broad snout.
The more ferocious BoarCroc was also 20 feet long but ran upright and had a jaw built for ramming, with three pairs of knife-like teeth.
Some walked upright with their legs under the body like a land mammal instead of sprawled out to the sides, bellies touching the ground.
"Their amphibious talents in the past may be the key to understanding how they flourished in, and ultimately survived, the dinosaur era," Sereno wrote in a separate article for National Geographic.

Chinese cyber-spying grows against US: report

2009-11-22T23:14:00.000+07:00

China's government appears increasingly to be piercing US government and defense industry computer networks to gather useful data for its military, a congressional advisory panel said on Thursday.
"A large body of both circumstantial and forensic evidence strongly indicates Chinese state involvement in such activities," the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its 2009 report to Congress.
The 12-member, bipartisan commission was set up in 2000 to analyze the implications of growing trade with China.
Beijing has begun to broaden its national security concerns beyond a potential clash across the Taiwan Strait and issues around its periphery, the 367-page report said.
China is the most aggressive country conducting espionage against the United States, focused on obtaining data and know-how to help military modernization and economic development, it added.
The amount of "malicious" computer activities against the United States increased in 2008 and is rising sharply this year, it said, adding, "Much of this activity appears to originate in China."
The Chinese Embassy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The commission said the Chinese government had placed many of its capabilities for computer network operations within elements of the People's Liberation Army.
"China's peacetime computer exploitation efforts are primarily focused on intelligence collection against US targets and Chinese dissident groups abroad," it said.
The report cited conclusions of Northrop Grumman Corp, one of the Pentagon's top contractors, that implicated the Chinese government in extensive cyber activities against the United States.
Omitted was any thorough description of the techniques used for forensic analysis of such suspected cyber espionage.
A Northrop Grumman study was prepared for the commission and released in October. It said Beijing appeared to be conducting "a long-term, sophisticated, computer network exploitation campaign" against the government and US defense industries.

"Big Bang" experiment advancing fast

2009-11-22T23:12:00.000+07:00

After a year's delay, scientists at the world's biggest accelerator have restarted an experiment to recreate "Big Bang" conditions that had sparked suggestions the earth would be sucked in by millions of black holes.
Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have established circulating particle beams in both directions in the underground Large Hadron Collider, a step that is already beyond where the experiment stalled during a first attempt in September 2008, CERN spokesman James Gillies said.
The high-profile experiment, through which tiny particles are smashed in a bid to learn more about the birth of the universe, failed just nine days after it was launched due to a technical problem that took longer than expected to fix.
"We are further advanced now than where we were after five days of experiment last year," said CERN's Director for Accelerators Steve Myers, saying the extra year had allowed researchers to upgrade instrumentations and computer software.
Myers added that researchers had increased the sensitivity of the protections at the 10 billion Swiss franc ($9.82 billion) collider under the French-Swiss border.
"If anything happens, we would not have the same amount of damage we had last year," he said.
CERN, a 55-year-old organization that counts 10,000 scientists and technicians worldwide working on its research projects, has vigorously rebuffed any suggestion the ground-breaking experiment would cause the world to end.
CERN's Director General Rolf Heuer said getting the experiment re-started had been an "herculean effort."
"We've still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we're well on the way," he said.
If things continue to progress at this speed, scientists may be able to accelerate particles at the highest energy level ever tested before Christmas, although high-energy collisions that may shed light on the secrets of the universe would only happen in the new year, Myers said.
The experiment will be fully under way when the particle beams will be smashed at high energy levels. This will most likely happen in January.
The next important step in the experiment will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now, CERN said.

Apple tops phone chart; Nokia, Samsung step up

2009-11-13T11:53:00.000+07:00

The world's two largest cellphone makers, Nokia and Samsung Electronics, unveiled on Tuesday their latest rivals to the iPhone as Apple became the top profit generator in the handset industry.
Apple Inc overtook Nokia in the September quarter as the cellphone maker generating the highest total operating profit in the industry, research firm Strategy Analytics said.
Nokia said on Tuesday it had started deliveries of its top- of-the-range N900, while Samsung Electronics Co Ltd announced it would launch its own open mobile platform, bada, in December as it tries to make up for a late start in the smartphone market.
Nokia and Samsung together sell around 60 percent of all cellphones globally, but they have lost some ground to Apple and Research In Motion Ltd, maker of the Blackberry.
The N900 model is the first Nokia phone to run on the Linux Maemo operating system, which analysts see as key for Nokia to regain ground in the coming years.
"The Maemo platform, which powers the N900, reflects Nokia's need to replace its legacy software platforms with something more powerful to compete with Apple and others," said Ben Wood, head of research at British consultancy CCS Insight.
"Samsung's announcement of bada shows it has also identified the same requirement. The big question is, does the mobile phone world need yet another operating system?"
While Nokia has lost ground in the smartphone business, it is still the world's largest smartphone maker by volume. Samsung's volumes are well behind Apple, RIM and HTC Corp.
But measured by profits, Nokia lost in the third quarter against Apple, which entered the cellphone market only in mid-2007.
Apple does not unveil profits per business line, but Strategy Analytics estimated Apple's operating profit for its iPhone handset unit stood at $1.6 billion in the third quarter, compared with Nokia's $1.1 billion.
"With strong volumes, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls, the PC vendor has successfully broken into the mobile phone market in just two years," said Alex Spektor, an analyst at Strategy Analytics.
Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones during the July-September quarter, generating sales of $4.5 billion. Nokia sold 108.5 million phones in total in the same quarter, generating sales of 6.9 billion euros ($10.36 billion), but its profits were hurt by the economic downturn.
WORRIES OVER SMARTPHONE BOOM
Global sales of mobile handsets will snap a four-quarter losing streak in the last three months of the year as the industry is buoyed by economic recovery, a Reuters poll of analysts showed on Tuesday.
Sales are expected to rise 3 percent in the fourth quarter as the Christmas period brings a brighter end to a year in which sales are forecast to fall 6.9 percent, the poll of 31 banks, brokerages and research firms showed.
While the broader handset industry has struggled, smartphones sales have boomed and analysts have forecast the smartphone market will grow 20 percent to 30 percent this year.
But there are signs that increased competition is starting to put pressure on margins and put some companies on the defensive.
This week, the world's No. 4 smartphone brand, HTC, said it expected fourth-quarter revenue to fall almost 15 percent from the same period a year earlier, as the intense rivalry forces prices down.
Strategy Analytics said growth in the smartphone market slowed to just 5 percent in the third quarter from 17 percent in the second quarter.
"On the supply-side, a weak lineup from Nokia, the industry giant, has helped to keep a cap on growth," said Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.
"On the demand-side, consumers have been buying huge volumes of high-end feature phones with touchscreens from Samsung and LG and many consumers seem happy for now to go without full app-store support," Mawston added.

South African find gives clue to dinosaur evolution

2009-11-13T11:52:00.001+07:00

A huge dinosaur discovered in South Africa is a previously unknown species that sheds light on the evolution of the largest creatures ever to walk the earth, a scientist said Wednesday.

Adam Yates, a paleontologist at Johannesburg's Wits University, said the seven-meter-long Aardonyx Celestae occupied a "very significant position in the family tree of dinosaurs."

"This new dinosaur is helping us complete and revise our picture of how the truly giant dinosaurs first got going," he told reporters Wednesday.

Yates said the almost complete fossil remains of the vegetarian giant that existed in the Jurassic period 195 million years ago were discovered in the town of Senekal in South Africa's Free State province by a student five years ago. However, they have just classified as a separate species.

"Aardonyx probably walked on its hind legs but could drop to all fours as well. It had flattened feet with large claws that supported its body weight on the inside of the foot and a robust thigh for supporting weight," he said.

Pentagon eyes crash analysis on 1,300 satellites

2009-11-07T23:09:00.000+07:00

The US military said on Tuesday it is now tracking 800 maneuverable satellites on a daily basis for possible collisions and expects to add 500 more non-maneuvering satellites by year's end.
The U.S. Air Force began upgrading its ability to predict possible collisions in space after a dead Russian military communications satellite and a commercial US satellite owned by Iridium collided on February 10.
General Kevin Chilton, commander of US Strategic Command, called the collision the "seminal event" in the satellite industry during the past year and said it destroyed any sense that space was so vast that collisions were highly improbable.
He said military officials had wanted to do more thorough analysis of possible collisions in space, but had lacked the resources. Before the collision, he said they were tracking less than 100 satellites a day.
"It's amazing what one collision will do to the resource spigot," he told a space conference in Omaha, Nebraska.
The crash, which was not predicted by the US military or private tracking groups, underscored the vulnerability of US satellites, which are used for a huge array of military and civilian purposes.
Chilton said the Air Force was tracking more than 20,000 satellites, spent rocket stages and other objects in space, up from just 14,000 a few years ago.
But he said that was just what US could "see" and there were estimates that the actual number was much greater, posing a potential threat to satellites on orbit.
Air Force Lieutenant General Larry James, who heads US Strategic Command's Joint Functional Component Command for Space, told reporters the Air Force met its goal for tracking possible collisions among 800 satellites that have the ability to be moved in September, ahead of an October target date.
"Our goal now is to do that conjunction assessment for all active satellites ... roughly around 1,300 satellites ... by the end of the year and provide that information to users as required," James told reporters on a teleconference during a space conference in Omaha, Nebraska.
Some of the 500 satellites still to be assessed cannot be shifted because they do not carry extra fuel that would be needed to move them once in orbit.
To increase its ability to predict possible collisions, the Air Force has been buying more computers and hiring analysts. It also works with commercial satellite operators to share data collected by their spacecraft and by US government sources.
Chilton lauded the efforts, but said the work was still too reliant on Air Force analysts and needed further improvement. "We are decades behind where we should be," he said.
Victoria Samson, with the nonprofit Center for Defense Information, said the Air Force needed more trained operators to do the analyses and the goal of adding 500 more satellites to the analysis might be "somewhat optimistic."

Scientists see furthest back in time, 13 billion years ago

2009-10-30T17:39:00.000+07:00

Astronomers have seen the furthest back in time ever, measuring light from a star that exploded 13 billion years ago, just after the dawn of the universe.
They traced a gamma-ray burst called GRB 090423 to see the light from the massive star that died 630 million years after the Big Bang that brought the universe into being, they reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Two separate teams measured the redshift of the object at about 8.2. Redshift is the distortion of light as it travels across space and time and is often likened to the sound of a train rising and falling as it approaches and passes the listener.
This extreme redshift -- the highest ever recorded -- shows the burst occurred when the universe was less than 5 percent of its current age, Nial Tanvir of Britain's University of Leicester and colleagues reported.
"The redshift measured for GRB 090423 means that the burst occurred at a time when the universe was about nine times smaller than it is today -- putting the timing of the event at about 630 million years after the Big Bang," Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada wrote in a commentary.
"Gamma ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe," he added.
"They are believed to be associated with the formation of stellar-sized black holes or rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars during cataclysmic events such as the collapse of a massive star or the coalescence of two compact stellar objects."
In this case, the star's death long ago was bright enough to outshine even galaxies and will help scientists understand what happened in the early days of the universe.

Scientists make cells that form eggs and sperm in lab

2009-10-30T17:37:00.000+07:00

US researchers have found a way to coax human embryonic stem cells to turn into the types of cells that make eggs and sperm, shedding light on a stage of early human development that has not been fully understood.
The findings could lead to new understanding of inherited diseases and transform treatments for infertility, they said.
"We are really trying to look at the origins of normal and abnormal human development by going to the source," said Dr. Renee Riejo Pera of Stanford University in California, whose study appears in the journal Nature.
"For years and years, we haven't had the ability to look at how germ cells -- the cells that give rise to eggs and sperm -- how they are made -- what genes are required, what pathways are active," Pera said in a telephone interview.
This part of the human reproductive cycle cannot be studied in animals because the genes involved are unique to humans.
"Germ cells in humans normally develop between day 12 after fertilization through the first trimester. That is a place we can't look. We can't see because obviously it is in utero," Pera said.
She said the findings will finally allow researchers to begin to study the earliest stages of human development, and gather new clues about inherited diseases and infertility.
"The potential is enormous," Darren Griffin, a professor of Genetics at the Britain's University of Kent, said in a statement.
He said the work could make it possible to study a range of genetic and environmental effects on fertility, including pollution.
GREEN LIGHT
Dr. Kehkooi Kee, a researcher in Pera's lab, devised a way to isolate the germ cells from embryonic stem cells by adding a gene that makes green glowing proteins when germ cells are active.
"A green light comes on when a germ cell has been formed. It raises its hand," Pera said.
Once they were convinced they had germ cells, they began turning on and off several genes -- called DAZ, DAZL and BOULE -- they believed were important in converting stem cells to immature germ cells.
One of these genes, DAZL, was key to transforming embryonic stem cells into germ cells. When turned off, half as many germ cells formed.
The other two genes, DAZ and BOULE, played a role in getting cells to cut the number of chromosomes in half, a process called meiosis that must take place before fertilization.
Some of the sperm cells went all the way through meiosis. "It means we really did hit the nail on the head. We got where we wanted to go if we see meiosis in the dish," Pera said.
She said these cells formed a round spermatid, an immature sperm cell that contains just one copy of the chromosomes that would be suitable for use in an in vitro fertilization clinic.
Producing too few germ cells or poor quality germ cells is a major cause of infertility in humans.
"We think if there's immature germ cells that are available in a person, we might be able to use this system to mature them and push them forward into development," she said.
Pera hopes to try the same approach with so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, which are adult cells that have been reprogrammed to behave like embryonic stem cells.
The idea is to take cells from people with infertility problems, produce germ cells and study them to see what caused the infertility.
The study was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

Sony partners with Netflix to stream movies on PS3

2009-10-27T20:25:00.000+07:00

Sony Corp said on Monday it is partnering with Netflix Inc to provide access to the online movie rental company's library through Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console.
PS3 users in the United States who are also Netflix subscribers will be able to instantly stream movies from the Netflix catalog at no extra cost.
Sony's move is just the latest salvo in its battle with Microsoft Corp and its Xbox 360 console as the two heavyweights vie to become the so-called "digital hub" of the living room. Both companies are using their consoles to provide content beyond games.
"While gaming is clearly our core DNA I think we felt very confident three years ago when we debuted PlayStation 3 that this was going to be a device that was going to mean much more than gaming," said Jack Tretton, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America.
The Xbox already offers Netflix access, but users must pay $50 a year for Xbox Live Gold membership to use it.
Although Netflix offers thousands of movies and TV episodes for instant streaming, it does not make its entire catalog available.
Netflix will be up and running on the PS3 in November, Sony said. Initially PS3 users will utilize a Blu-ray disc to access Netflix, but it will eventually be available through a software update on the PS3.
The PS3's installed base numbers close to 9 million units in the United States, and Netflix has a US subscriber base of 11.1 million.
The PS3, long the No. 3 console in the United States, is generating sales momentum following a recent price cut.
In September, the PS3 was the top-selling home console in the United States for the first time, according to industry tracker NPD, dethroning long-running champion Nintendo Co.
Tretton said the PS3's strength has continued into October. "A lot of consumers were waiting for this price point .... The numbers are extremely good."

South Korea stem cell scientist guilty of fraud

2009-10-27T20:22:00.000+07:00

A South Korean court Monday found disgraced stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk guilty of fraud and handed down a suspended sentence in a case that sent shockwaves throughout the global scientific community.
Hwang, once a scientist with rock-star like status for bringing South Korea to the forefront of stem cell studies, had faced trial on charges of fraud, misusing state funds and violating bioethics laws.
"He was guilty of fabrication," the Seoul court said in a verdict in the trial that stretched more than three years and included painstaking details about the scientific work Hwang and his team had performed at Seoul National University.
The court also said that Hwang illegally diverted a portion of the money he received for research for his personal use.
"But he has shown he has truly repented for his crime," the court said in its verdict. Hwang's supporters, who have packed the court for each hearing, broke into applause when the court sentenced Hwang to two years in jail, suspended for three years.
Prosecutors were seeking a four-year prison term, saying Hwang had set back scientific research and deeply embarrassed the country, which was at one point being groomed into a global center for stem cell studies.
Hwang and his lawyers did not speak to reporters.
Hwang's team was thought to have made two major breakthroughs by cloning stem cells and tailoring them to a specific patient, which raised hopes of generating genetically specific tissue to repair damaged organs or treat diseases such as Alzheimer's.
Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood. Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kinds of stem cells, as they have the potential to give rise to any type of tissue.
An investigation team at Seoul National University said in late 2005 that Hwang's team fabricated vital data in two papers on human embryonic stem cells. Hwang resigned his post and the government revoked his stem cell research license.
With major financial backing from his supporters, Hwang went on to form SooAm Biotech Research Foundation in 2006, which specializes in animal cloning and has produced cloned dogs.
Hwang is still regarded with scorn by many in the country but has fostered a small, devoted group of followers.
"Perhaps there is a chance that he might regain trust from people through sincere work. However, the truth has come out on his manipulated research and this has been made clear," said Park Jeong-woo, a professor of bioethics at Catholic University.

Hitachi,Toshiba optic drive ventures in global probe

2009-10-27T20:17:00.000+07:00

Japan's Hitachi Ltd and Toshiba Corp said on Tuesday that their optical disc drive operations with South Korean partners were being investigated internationally for possible anti-trust violations.
Hitachi said its joint venture with LG Electronics, Hitachi-LG Data Storage, had received a subpoena from the US Department of Justice, and that the unit was also under investigation by European Union and Singapore regulators.
Toshiba said its joint venture with Samsung Electronics, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Corp, had also received a subpoena in the United States and that it was answering queries from authorities in other regions.
Sony the previous day said that its US optical disc drive had received a subpoena in the United States, without elaborating on what products were being investigated.
Optical disc drives read or write data on media such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

Facebook sees ad potential bigger than Google search ads

2009-10-17T12:38:00.000+07:00

Facebook's chief operating officer said the social networking company was targeting a bigger ad market than the search ad market that has made Google Inc rich.
Sheryl Sandberg also told a group of high-tech specialists on Thursday that revenues were growing so fast at privately held Facebook that it turned cash positive recently, instead of in 2010 as predicted earlier this year.
A member of the board told Reuters the company was on target to bring in revenue of $500 million this year. Sandberg gave no numbers that would update that figure.
Sandberg, who has long fought the perception Facebook lacked a revenue model, laid out a gameplan to turn the company into a cash machine by describing how the company aimed to bring in revenues from novel ads aimed at its 300 million users.
She said advertising was a "funnel" that starts at the top by engaging many people and creating demand, then getting to the bottom where a select group bought a product.
Google does a better job than any other company in advertising to people who are at the bottom of the funnel and know what they want, and are searching to buy it, she said hours after Google reported third quarter net revenue of $4.38 billion, beating analysts expectations.
"If you look at global ad spend its about a $640 billion annual business ... It's 10 percent demand fulfillment," which is what Google's search ads do, she said.
"Where we are playing in the ad market is in that demand generation, which is the top 90 percent of the funnel."
Sandberg said Facebook has been shifting to an approach similar to Google's, in which the style of the ad resembled the style of its searches.
One success story she cited involved Starbucks Corp, which posted a video that created complaints. In response, Starbucks altered the video and won kudos from Facebook members. She said the message was, "Thanks so much ... isn't it great to have a company that listens."

Long-term monkey tests back Oxford's gene therapy

2009-10-17T12:35:00.000+07:00

Long-term tests on monkeys using Oxford BioMedica's gene therapy ProSavin suggest it can treat Parkinson's disease without causing the jerky, involuntary movements associated with current drugs, researchers said on Wednesday.
Parkinson's is caused by lack of the brain chemical dopamine. Standard treatment involves oral drugs that briefly raise dopamine levels -- but levels of the chemical still remain unstable, leading to a movement disorder called dyskinesias.
By contrast, tests on macaque monkeys found the gene therapy safely restored concentrations of dopamine in the brain, corrected motor deficits and prevented dyskinesias -- with no severe adverse side effects.
French researchers observed the animals for up to three and a half years in the study, after first inducing Parkinsonian syndrome by giving a neurotoxin and then treating them with gene therapy injections.
"Gene therapy-mediated dopamine replacement may be able to correct Parkinsonism in patients without the complications of dyskinesias," Bechir Jarraya and colleagues wrote in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Oxford BioMedica is currently conducting Phase I/II clinical trials with ProSavin and in July announced encouraging initial results.
ProSavin, which is administered directly to the striatum in the brain, delivers three genes required to convert cells that normally do not produce dopamine into cells that do.

Huge new ring spotted around Saturn

2009-10-12T12:21:00.000+07:00

Scientists have spotted a huge new ring around Saturn -- the largest planetary ring seen yet in the solar system.
The faint ring, made of tiny particles, partly marks the orbit of Saturn's distant moon Phoebe, Anne Verbiscer of the University of Virginia and colleagues reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Phoebe, orbits the ringed planet at a radius of about 8 million miles (13 million kilometers) and, evidently, objects colliding with Phoebe and kicking up dust keep the ring supplied with material.
"The closest analogs to the Phoebe ring are the two gossamer rings associated with Jupiter's inner satellites, Thebe and Amalthea," they wrote. These moons, too, are the source of dust kicked up by collisions.
"Similar structures should also adorn the other gas giant planets," the researchers added.
Galileo first potted Saturn's colorful rings in 1610 with his telescope, and almost any amateur planet-spotter can see the densest of the giant planet's rings.
Verbiscer's team used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to see this new one, which is very deep, lies far beyond Saturn's other rings and is tilted at a 27-degree angle to the plane of the others.
"This is one supersized ring," Verbiscer said in a statement.
Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have rings.

US spacecraft crash on moon in search for water

2009-10-12T12:19:00.000+07:00

Two US spacecraft were crashed into a lunar crater on Friday but scientists said it was too early to say whether the mission to search for supplies of water on the Moon had been a success.
NASA, which is hoping to find sufficient quantities of water to use as fuel for space exploration, said it could take two months to make a conclusive assessment of what was found.
A two-ton empty rocket stage slammed into the eternally dark Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole at 4:31 a.m. PDT (1131 GMT), intended to throw up a plume of spray from any ice that was there.
Instruments on a second craft, that flew through the plume and hit close to the same spot four minutes later, as well as a lunar orbiter and telescopes on Earth captured data that could show whether there was ice there.
Video transmitted back from the trailing craft did not show, as hoped, the eruption of debris, but infrared devices showed a hot flash that indicated a crater about 18 to 20 yards (meters) wide.
"We didn't see a big splashy plume like we wanted to see," said Michael Bicay, director of science at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center.
Scientists did not know whether there had been no plume or if it could not be seen in the Internet-quality video shown as the craft crashed.
The $79 million program, a bargain by space exploration standards, could help change views of the moon.
Recent signs of water have upended ideas of the lunar surface as barren and unchanging, and evidence of ice would also suggest new possibilities for space travel.
"Water is essentially energy," scientist Victoria Friedensen said on NASA TV. "It can be used to make fuel."
WATER AS SPACE FUEL
Three studies released last month found clear evidence of water on the moon, but the skein of water bound with dust that was disclosed then was extremely thin.
"It's not enough to be of any economic importance," said NASA Lunar Science Institute Director David Morrison.
Hidden in the Cabeus crater near the pole, out of sunlight, could be soil concentrations of 2 percent to 3 percent ice that would be usable. "You're going into a place where the sun hasn't shined for a billion years," Morrison said.
Video from the trailing spacecraft gave the sense of the fast approaching crash as craters edged with light grew larger and larger.
"I was blown away by how long this little spacecraft lasted," Tony Colaprete, the mission's principal investigator, told a news conference. He said it got good spectroscopic data which would show what elements were in the crater and how they were changed by the heat of the first impact.
"The fact that we flew in, saw the crater and it was still glowing hot means that if there was ice there or a pool of water or whatever else, it was subliming (turning to vapor)," he said. "We got the data we need."
Hundreds of space enthusiasts in parkas and sleeping bags gathered in the early morning to watch the impact on a big outdoor screen at the Ames Research Center, housed on an old dirigible field in Silicon Valley.
When the video signal abruptly stopped, the sign the trailing spacecraft had also hit the surface, cheers erupted.

T-Mobile USA kicks off corporate Wi-Fi push

2009-10-06T17:15:00.000+07:00

Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA plans on Monday to start offering a wireless service for office workers, hoping to increase its presence in the corporate market as it chases larger rivals like AT&T and Verizon.
T-Mobile USA, which focuses now on cost-conscious consumers, said its new service combines BlackBerry phones from Research In Motion with Wi-Fi -- a short-range radio technology -- and would help companies save money both on cellphone calls and calls from desktop phones.
Corporate BlackBerry users could get rid of their desktop phone as their BlackBerries will revert to the Wi-Fi network from cellular within the office -- or anywhere else they have access to a Wi-Fi network.
This means using up fewer cellular minutes and eliminating the need for wired phones, T-Mobile USA said.
Analysts said that, unlike companies such as AT&T, which has to protect its traditional telephone business, T-Mobile USA as a purely wireless operator would not have to worry about cannibalizing fixed-line revenue.
"From T-Mobile's perspective, this really launches them into the market," said Rob Arnold, enterprise communications analyst with Current Analysis.
"They don't have the disadvantage of trying to protect their revenue streams" from fixed-line networks, he said, adding that any sales through the new service would be entirely new revenue.
T-Mobile USA is the fourth-ranked player in a mature U.S. mobile market and is under-represented in the high-end corporate arena.
Analysts say it has to beef up spending considerably to catch up with markets leaders Verizon and AT&T.
The new corporate offering, similar to a residential service already in place, will charge a flat monthly fee on top of cellular rates. The fee, which depends on the number of users signed up, can include unlimited Wi-Fi calls.
T-Mobile also promised uninterrupted service: if a user moves out of a Wi-Fi zone during a conversation, the call will automatically switch to T-Mobile USA's cellular network.

Nobel prize-winning medical research long and costly

2009-10-06T17:12:00.000+07:00

The Nobel-winning medical science that points the way to a cancer cure was sparked by curiosity, not business sense, a new laureate said on Monday.
Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel prize for medicine together with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for work on the existence and nature of telomerase, an enzyme that helps prevent the fraying of chromosomes and is core to new work on aging and cancer.
Federal research grants made the work possible, and that money is becoming more important as the California public education system which nurtured the science struggles with budget cuts that will probably reduce the wages of Blackburn and her colleagues.
Now a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, Blackburn's federal grant application had proposed understanding how the ends of the chromosomes worked.
"I was just following my nose," she told a news conference after the announcement of her prize by the Nobel committee in Stockholm. "That would look pretty bad in a business plan," she said, noting that basic research is long and costly.
Blackburn's work in the field dates to the late 1970s, and about three decades later a therapy based on the enzyme is in trials by biotech firms Merck and Geron.
Now the University of California system is chopping salaries and raising the fees that have made it unusually affordable, raising questions over whether Blackburn and her colleagues will face wage cuts for future research.
"Get a Nobel prize, have a pay cut," quipped Blackburn. "It sort of breaks my heart to see it being under attack."
NO QUICK PROFIT
Blackburn's San Francisco lab on Monday was filled with fluorescent proteins, cleansing solutions and young scientists asking basic questions that may not cure anything soon, but could be the first step to a drug years away from development.
Her research has federal backing and President Barack Obama last week earmarked $5 billion from recent stimulus funding for medical research that might not "lend itself to quick profit."
So Blackburn's lab is still full of "crazy" questions, in the words of doctoral student Beth Cimini, 23, who was filling a syringe with a blue liquid. The work is part of a plan to put fluorescent "tags" on a protein and see how it reacts with telomeres, as the ends of the chromosomes are called.
"I went to Liz and said ... 'It might be wacky, but can we try it'?" said Cimini, who added that results suggest her hunch may not be "entirely crazy."
Closer ties between academia and corporations on basic research might provide a way forward in the future.
"The old paradigm needs to be revamped," said Sam Hawgood, dean of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, who says star researchers may be able to attract corporate backing even for basic science.
Blackburn may turn to a new source of funding -- herself. Her share of the prize money -- one third of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.42 million) -- may go for seed funds for new ideas too small to merit writing a grant, she said.

Scientists levitate mice to study low gravity

2009-09-13T22:51:00.000+07:00

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have succeeded in levitating mice, a feat that they say could lead to advances in treating bone loss for astronauts living for extended periods in low gravity environments.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicist Yuanming Liu said in an interview on Thursday that the mice were levitated using a device called a no gravity simulator, which is powered by a superconducting gradient magnet.
"The reason we want to levitate mice is we are aware of the situation that astronauts who stay in micro-gravity environments long enough might lose some bone mass," Liu told Reuters.
"By levitating mice we can simulate similar conditions and we can study whether bone loss will actually occur in mice, and that will help us understand more about the bone loss that might occur in astronauts," he said.
Liu said the second stage of experimentation will involve having the mice live in the levitator for a week or longer to see what physical effects result.
"We first tried a fully conscious mouse and he didn't like it very much, he started to spin and got disoriented," Liu said.
"Mice like to grab onto something and so by just floating in the air it's really different for (the mouse) to adjust to," he said.
A second experiment was conducted with a mouse that had been partially sedated by a veterinarian, and that rodent calmed down considerably as he floated in the air.
According to a paper published by Liu and his colleagues, under repeated levitation even mice that were not sedated began acting normally inside the special cage, eating and drinking while they floated off the surface.

Fixed-up Hubble telescope spots distant stardust

2009-09-11T21:20:00.000+07:00

The freshly repaired and outfitted Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a new butterfly-shaped galaxy and wisps of stardust containing the elements of life being recycled into new galaxies, NASA said on Wednesday.
The space agency released the first batch of images from the orbiting Hubble, repaired by shuttle astronauts in May, and said they show the once-doomed telescope has been reinvented yet again.
"The telescope was given an extreme makeover and now is significantly more powerful than ever, well-equipped to last into the next decade," Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said at a news conference.
The newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph got detail data on a galaxy called Markarian 817 being pulled into a supermassive black hole, and an exploded star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that are both spewing matter into space.
"We believe that most of the matter in space is actually wispy filaments between the galaxies," James Green of the University of Colorado told the news conference. Hubble is making these wisps visible for the first time.
The spectral imager detected oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. "The elements of life are being produced in stars ... but they are also being distributed through the cosmos," Green said.
Another star has jets, material being blasted out "from what probably is going to be a planetary system by the time this thing settles down," said Bob O'Connell of the University of Virginia.
In May, space shuttle astronauts repaired two shorted-out instruments and installed a new camera and the spectrograph.
"We are giddy with the quality of data that we have with this new telescope," Heidi Hammel, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told the news conference.
SEVERAL BRUSHES WITH DISASTER
Hubble has survived several brushes with disaster. Soon after it was launched in 1990, astronomers discovered to their panic that it was out of focus and shuttle astronauts had to install a fix in 1993.
Another servicing mission was scrapped after the 2003 accident that killed the entire crew of the space shuttle Columbia, and NASA considered just letting the telescope die. Astronomers protested strongly, but they are now being careful to justify Hubble's continued expense at every opportunity.
"In all humility I truly believe that Hubble has fundamentally changed the course of modern astronomy and astrophysics," said David Leckrone of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
On Tuesday, a presidential review panel said the US human spaceflight program was on an "unsustainable trajectory", spending too much money.
The Human Space Flight Review Committee suggested using NASA funds to encourage commercial companies to get into the business of launching travelers to the International Space Station.
University of Alberta history professor Robert Smith estimated that $15 billion has been spent on the Hubble telescope. "Astronomers now have to ensure that their projects are technically and scientifically feasible to get funding; they also have to assemble a political coalition to see their projects through," Smith said in a statement.

Motorola unveils Google phone to muted response

2009-09-11T21:18:00.000+07:00

Motorola unveiled on Thursday the first of many cellphones to be developed in partnership with Google, but analysts questioned if it could revive the once-dominant handset maker's fortunes.
Wall Street sees the phones as Motorola's last big hope to regain the market share lost to rivals like Apple Inc, Nokia and Samsung.
Analysts were unimpressed by the design but hoped a focus on integrating social networking sites from Facebook to Twitter might help prop up sales.
Shares of Motorola rose around 1.5 percent at $7.97, barely more than the rise in the overall market and off their earlier high of $8.15 before the phone was shown. In contrast, when Palm Inc unveiled the Pre phone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, its stock rose 35 percent.
Motorola's stock had risen over 10 percent in the past month in anticipation of the new phone.
"This is just the first salvo in the whole discussion about where they are going to place, but it sounds like they've done a good job here," said Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. "It's nothing really to write home about from a physical aspect, but they don't really need to knock it out of the park to do much better."
The phone, which uses Google's Android software, has a slide-out mini-keyboard and a five megapixel camera.
The devices will be called Cliq in the United States, where it goes on sale at Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA in the fourth quarter, and branded Dext in the rest of the world. France Telecom's Orange plans to sell the phone in Britain and France; Telefonica in Spain; and America Movil in Latin America.
The phone will hit stores ahead of Thanksgiving, the start of the crucial holiday season, with pricing not yet available. Another Android phone will be launched before the end of the year, Motorola said.
"It's not really a threat to iPhone because it doesn't look distinctive enough," said Macquarie Research's Phil Cusick. "It's pulling back here because really what they launched was essentially in-line with what we'd been expecting."
NETWORKING HARD
Motorola's last big cellphone -- the Razr -- launched nearly five years ago. Its ultra-thin design spurred copycats.
Since co-Chief Executive Sanjay Jha took the helm in August 2008, investors have hoped the doctor of engineering could turn around Motorola with his aim of scrapping existing phone roll-outs to divert resources into Google Android devices.
"We're committed to the product, but we have to make it matter in the market place. That will govern our financials," Jha told Reuters after unveiling the device. [ID:nN10360919]
Motorola is banking on the current craze for smartphones, one of the hottest segments of the tech market. Charter's Snyder expects sales of about 240 million smartphones, or about 20 percent of a 1.2 billion global phone market, in 2010.
Jha has said the new phones command higher margins as people are willing to pay more for smartphones.
"These phones will substitute for very unprofitable phones that Motorola is selling," Snyder said. "They will probably cannibalize some of Motorola's own phone sales and probably not show up as huge market share gains initially."
Some liked Motorola's efforts to simplify managing contacts and communications with online social sites.
"That's the limitation of your iPhone: you move from one page to another," said Deutsche Bank's Brian Moddoff. "This is a good starting point.
The centerpiece of the phones is MOTOBLUR software, which delivers updates from friends on multiple social sites. Contacts, messages and log-in information will be backed up on secure servers, so users can remotely erase the data -- if the phone is lost -- or use it to update a new phone.
But "it's got to do something more, because that alone is not going to make people go out and rush to buy this phone," said ABI Research's Kevin Burden.

H1N1 unlikely to mutate into 'superbug': study

2009-09-05T16:24:00.000+07:00

The new H1N1 virus appears to outcompete seasonal flu, making it less likely to mix with other circulating flu viruses into a "superbug" as some had feared, US researchers said on Tuesday.
The H1N1, or swine flu, virus also spreads more quickly and causes more severe disease in animal studies, the team said, but it shows no signs of mixing with either of the two seasonal flu viruses to form a new, so-called reassortant virus.
"The results suggest that 2009 H1N1 influenza may outcompete seasonal flu virus strains and may be more communicable as well," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.
The study, conducted in ferrets by a team at the University of Maryland, underscores the need for getting vaccinated with the new swine flu vaccine, Fauci said in a statement.
When the team infected ferrets with 2009 H1N1 virus plus either seasonal H1N1 virus or seasonal H3N2 virus, both viruses made them sick, but only the H1N1 virus spread to other ferrets, suggesting it will dominate ordinary flu.
"The H1N1 pandemic virus has a clear biological advantage over the two main seasonal flu strains and all the makings of a virus fully adapted to humans," Daniel Perez of the University of Maryland said in a statement.
"I'm not surprised to find that the pandemic virus is more infectious, simply because it's new, so hosts haven't had a chance to build immunity yet. Meanwhile, the older strains encounter resistance from hosts' immunity to them," Perez said.
The researchers also found that the pandemic virus established infections deeper in the ferrets' respiratory system, including the lungs, while the seasonal flu strains remained in the nasal passages.
That confirmed observations in people.
"The findings of this study are preliminary, but the far greater communicability of the pandemic virus is a clearly blinking warning light," he said.
HARDLY ANYONE IMMUNE
The World Health Organization predicts a third of the world's population will eventually be infected with swine flu.
Seasonal flu infects between 5 percent and 20 percent of a given population every year, but 90 percent of severe cases and deaths are among the elderly. It kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people globally.
Perez and his team used samples of the H1N1 pandemic variety from last April's initial swine flu outbreak.
They found some of the animals infected with both a seasonal flu strain and the pandemic strain developed both respiratory and intestinal illness. The team plans to study whether this combination may explain some of the deaths attributed to the new virus.
Because hardly anyone has immunity to the new H1N1 virus, experts believe it will infect far more people than usual, as much as a third of the population.
Five companies are making swine flu vaccine for the US market -- AstraZeneca's MedImmune unit, CSL Ltd, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Novartis AG and Sanofi-Aventis SA. Tests have begun to determine if people will need one or two doses to be protected.
Despite calls by scientific advisers to President Barack Obama to speed up supply, swine flu vaccines are unlikely to be ready before October, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week.

Extending space station key to Mars :NASA scientist

2009-09-05T16:18:00.000+07:00

Getting humans to Mars will require medical research on the International Space Station through at least 2020, said the program's lead scientist, presenting a time frame five years beyond NASA's current budget forecast.
Extending the life of the station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations that is nearing completion after more than a decade of construction, was a surprise finding of the presidential panel reviewing the US human space program.
The study team's report was to be delivered to the White House this week but was not expected to be publicly disclosed until mid- to late-September.
The panel also said NASA's $18 billion annual budget, about half of which is spent on human space projects, falls about $3 billion a year short for Constellation, the moon-and-beyond exploration initiative NASA plans after it retires the space shuttle and station programs.
"NASA needs the ISS," program scientist Julie Robinson said. "A six-month stay on the space station is going to be the best analog we're ever going to have for a six-month microgravity transit to Mars in the future."
Scientists looking to develop countermeasures for radiation exposure, bone loss and other effects of long-duration stays in space estimate they will need to keep the station operating until at least 2020 to ensure "that next step beyond low-Earth orbit (will be) a safe step for humankind," Robinson said.
NASA plans to spend about $2.5 billion a year for space station operations through 2015.
Ending it just five years after its completion would rankle U.S. partners Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, which have invested heavily in the program and are looking for payoffs, members of the Human Space Flight Plans Committee said during public hearings.
Subcommittee chair Sally Ride, a former astronaut, said her group found widespread support for continuing, and even enhancing, the station program into 2016 and beyond.
"We didn't start off with that perspective," Ride said. "We don't think that the deorbit of ISS in 2016 makes sense."
While the NASA and the White House begin examining the panel's recommendations, a 13-member joint station-shuttle crew will soon begin unloading more than seven tons of new laboratory equipment, supplies and spare parts.
The shuttle Discovery and seven astronauts arrived at the space station on Sunday for a nine-day stay.
On Monday, the crew planned to attach the shuttle's Italian-built cargo pod onto the station so it can be unpacked. The container is packed with two new research facilities, a freezer, a spare oxygen generator, a second treadmill and a fifth berth for the station's newly expanded six-person crew.
The last bedroom is scheduled to be flown to the outpost next year.
Discovery is due back at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sept. 10.

Meet the "Invisible Man"

2009-08-28T22:42:00.002+07:00

Now you see him, soon you won't: Chinese performance artist Liu Bolin can camouflage himself so well that he becomes practically invisible.
Beijing-based Liu, or the "Invisible Man," vanishes, chameleon-like, into walls, doors, vehicles and even people by staying perfectly still as assistants paint him in the exact colors and textures of the object he is standing infront of.
The 37-year-old contemporary artist, who deliberately wears army fatigues before every transformation, says his works manifest the increasing alienation of modern man.
"My art is cultural, it represents the diminishing humanity in today's society. I use my art as a retrospective on culture, the environment and the fast-paced economic development," Liu told Reuters.
For his latest work, Liu disappeared into an intricately carved and painted doorway of a traditional Beijing courtyard house with the help of three assistants who painted him for four hours as he stood absolutely still.
Each of Liu's transformations, which are photographed and then put on display, also carry an individual message -- the doorway performance was intended to demonstrate the importance of accepting new forms of art while preserving the old.
Liu has held exhibitions at home as well as in Britain, France and Italy.
For his next performance, Liu plans to literally vanish into thin air by camouflaging himself while flying on an airplane.

DNA to make next-gen microchips

2009-08-19T15:21:00.000+07:00

International Business Machines Corp is looking to the building blocks of our bodies -- DNA -- to be the structure of next-generation microchips.
As chipmakers compete to develop ever-smaller chips at cheaper prices, designers are struggling to cut costs.
Artificial DNA nanostructures, or "DNA origami" may provide a cheap framework on which to build tiny microchips, according to a paper published on Sunday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Microchips are used in computers, cell phones and other electronic devices.
"This is the first demonstration of using biological molecules to help with processing in the semiconductor industry," IBM research manager Spike Narayan said in an interview with Reuters.
"Basically, this is telling us that biological structures like DNA actually offer some very reproducible, repetitive kinds of patterns that we can actually leverage in semiconductor processes," he said.
The research was a joint undertaking by scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center and the California Institute of Technology.
Right now, the tinier the chip, the more expensive the equipment. Narayan said that if the DNA origami process scales to production-level, manufacturers could trade hundreds of millions of dollars in complex tools for less than a million dollars of polymers, DNA solutions, and heating implements.
"The savings across many fronts could add up significantly," he said.
But the new processes are at least 10 years out. Narayan said that while the DNA origami could allow chipmakers to build frameworks that are far smaller than possible with conventional tools, the technique still needs years of experimentation and testing.

Building block of life found on comet

2009-08-19T15:17:00.002+07:00

The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday.
Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004.
Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth two years later in a canister that detached from the spacecraft and landed by parachute in the Utah desert.
Comets like Wild 2, named for astronomer Paul Wild (pronounced Vild), are believed to contain well-preserved grains of material dating from the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago, and thus clues to the formation of the sun and planets.
The initial detection of glycine, the most common of 20 amino acids in proteins on Earth, was reported last year, but it took time for scientists to confirm that the compound in question was extraterrestrial in origin.
"We couldn't be sure it wasn't from the manufacturing or the handling of the spacecraft," said astrobiologist Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the principal author of the latest research.
She presented the findings, accepted for publication in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, to a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., this week.
"We've seen amino acids in meteorites before, but this is the first time it's been detected in a comet," she said.
Chains of amino acids are strung together to form protein molecules in everything from hair to the enzymes that regulate chemical reactions inside living organisms. But scientists have long puzzled over whether these complex organic compounds originated on Earth or in space.
The latest findings add credence to the notion that extraterrestrial objects such as meteorites and comets may have seeded ancient Earth, and other planets, with the raw materials of life that formed elsewhere in the cosmos.
"The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare," said Carl Pilcher, the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute in California, which co-funded the research.
Glycine and other amino acids have been found in a number of meteorites before, most notably one that landed near the town of Murchison, Australia in 1969, Elsila said.

NASA wants proposals for space taxis

2009-08-11T16:40:00.002+07:00

NASA plans to use $50 million of federal economic stimulus funds to seed development of commercial passenger transportation service to space, agency officials said on Monday.
Aspiring spaceship operators will have 45 days to submit proposals, which will be competitively evaluated. Awards for the Commercial Crew Development program are expected to be announced before the end of September.
The United States is retiring its fleet of space shuttles next year after seven more missions to complete construction of the $100 billion International Space Station, which orbits about 225 miles above Earth.
After that, the United States plans to buy rides for astronauts to and from the station from Russia, one of the 16 nations involved in the station program.
NASA is spending $500 million to help two U.S. firms, Space Exploration Technologies, a privately held company known as SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences Corp, develop rockets and capsules to deliver cargo to the station.
SpaceX's contract includes an option to upgrade its Dragon cargo ship for passenger service. The company has said it needs $300 million, most of which would be used to develop a launch escape system for the crew.
"It's a little disappointing that (the new program) is only $50 million," SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk told Reuters. "Fifty million is what it costs for one seat on the (Russian) Soyuz."
Nevertheless Musk hailed the move as a step in the right direction.
"The main thing that the public should be taking note of is that right now we are (solely dependent) on the Russians (for space transports) after 2010," he said.
The White House has convened a panel, headed by former Lockheed Martin chief Norm Augustine, to review NASA's human space program. The current plan is to finish the station next year, retire the shuttles and develop new vehicles that can travel to the space station as well as to the moon and other destinations in the solar system.
Funding for the follow-on program has been scaled back to $81.5 billion from $108 billion between 2010 and 2020, the year pegged for the first post-Apollo moon landing.
Members of a presidential panel reviewing the country's human space program said last week that given current budget forecasts and no changes in the program, a moon landing would not occur until the mid 2020s at the earliest.
The panel, which is scheduled to make its report by August 31, also has been mulling extending the life of the space station beyond its projected shut-down date of 2015.
In addition to scientific uses, having a station in orbit will serve as a market to stimulate commercial space development, said board member Jeff Greason, the co-founder and head of XCOR Aerospace.
NASA plans to hold a workshop in Houston on Thursday for companies interested in partnering to develop commercial passenger service to space.
Firms expressing interest in the program include Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., Airborne Systems, SpaceX, Boeing Co, Tether Applications, Retro Aerospace, Emergent Space Technologies, Davidson Technologies, and Paragon Space Development Corp.
The competition is only open to US firms.

New technique gives big picture of AIDS gene map

2009-08-06T13:08:00.001+07:00

A new technique has given researchers a "big picture" look at the genome of the AIDS virus, the first time its entire gene map has been decoded.
The technique may not only lead to new treatments against the fatal and incurable virus, but for other viruses such as influenza and the bugs that cause the common cold, they said on Wednesday.
"We are hopeful that this is going to open up many new opportunities for drug discovery," Kevin Weeks of the University of North Carolina, who led the research, said in a telephone interview. "We have a big list of things we can try."
The human immunodeficiency virus or HIV is what is known as an RNA virus. Like influenza, polio and many viruses that cause colds, it uses RNA instead of DNA as its map when carrying out functions.
DNA depends on building blocks called nucleotides to carry information on its two strands. These are the familiar A, C, T and G of the genetic code. RNA has just one strand and depends on complex folding patterns to carry information, as well as nucleotides.
"There is so much structure in the HIV RNA genome that it almost certainly plays a previously unappreciated role in the expression of the genetic code," Weeks said.
His team developed a new chemical method called SHAPE to make an image not only of the RNA's nucleotides, but of the shapes and folds of the RNA strands.
Other imaging methods such as X-ray crystallography can capture the precise position of each atom, but only one small area at a time. SHAPE gets a bigger picture, but not at the atomic level, Weeks said.
"The technique is thus akin to zooming out on a map and getting a broader view of the landscape at the expense of fine details," Hashim Al-Hashimi of the University of Michigan wrote in a commentary on the findings, published in Nature.
This, in turn, will help researchers make better drugs to treat such viruses, said Weeks. New drugs are often engineered to fit into specific structures on a virus, blocking it from attaching to a cell, for instance, or gumming up its works so it cannot replicate.
But RNA viruses are especially hard to defend against.
More than 20 drugs are now on the market for HIV, for instance, and it requires various combinations to keep it in check. Many strains of flu resist the effects of older antivirals and mutations help one strain of seasonal influenza resist Roche AG's Tamiflu.
Weeks said the new imaging technique will help researchers looking for new approaches. "In the short term it almost certainly is going to make it easier to design short, interfering RNAs," he said.
These drugs, known as siRNAs for short, stop RNA from functioning and can interfere with defective cells or bacteria and viruses.
Companies such as Merck and Co. and Silence Therapeutics Plc are working to use this approach.
"SiRNAs can be very potent," Weeks said. "They are expensive to make but they are relatively easy to design."

EU says a third of Europeans never used Internet

2009-08-05T15:16:00.000+07:00

One third of European Union citizens say they have never used the Internet, compared with 40 percent in 2007, an EU study showed on Tuesday.
In the report on the digital economy in the 27-nation EU, the European Commission also said more than one in four Europeans had never used a computer and 40 percent had no Internet access at home.
Among those not having an Internet link, more than a third said they did not see the need while roughly one in four said they could not afford it.
Older people -- above the age of 65 -- and the unemployed were the least active online.
The Commission, the EU's executive arm, said people aged 16-24 did most online. Its survey also included young children.
Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, said the focus must be on freeing up the internet highway for these super users.
She plans new rules for Internet downloads to make it easier for people to access music and films.
"To release the economic potential of these digital natives, we must make access to digital content an easy and fair game," she said in a statement.

Scientists study huge plastic patch in Pacific

2009-08-05T15:13:00.001+07:00

Marine scientists from California are venturing this week to the middle of the North Pacific for a study of plastic debris accumulating across hundreds of miles (km) of open sea dubbed the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."
A research vessel carrying a team of about 30 researchers, technicians and crew members embarked on Sunday on a three-week voyage from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, based at the University of California at San Diego.
The expedition will study how much debris -- mostly tiny plastic fragments -- is collecting in an expanse of sea known as the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, how that material is distributed and how it affects marine life.
The debris ends up concentrated by circular, clockwise ocean currents within an oblong-shaped "convergence zone" hundreds of miles (km) across from end to end near the Hawaiian Islands, about midway between Japan and the West Coast of the United States.
The focus of the study will be on plankton, other microorganisms, small fish and birds.
"The concern is what kind of impact those plastic bits are having on the small critters on the low end of the ocean food chain," Bob Knox, deputy director of research at Scripps, said on Monday after the ship had spent its first full day at sea.
The 170-foot vessel New Horizon is equipped with a laboratory for on-board research, but scientists also will bring back samples for further study.
Little is known about the exact size and scope of the vast debris field discovered some years ago by fishermen and others in the North Pacific that is widely referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."
Large items readily visible from the deck of a boat are few and far between. Most of the debris consists of small plastic particles suspended at or just below the water surface, making it impossible to detect by aircraft or satellite images.
The debris zone shifts by as much as a thousand miles north and south on a seasonal basis, and drifts even farther south during periods of warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures known as El Nino, according to information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Besides the potential harm to sea life caused by ingesting bits of plastic, the expedition team will look at whether the particles could carry other pollutants, such as pesticides, far out to sea, and whether tiny organisms attached to the debris could be transported to distant regions and thus become invasive species.

Organic food is no healthier, study finds

2009-07-30T23:46:00.000+07:00

Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.
A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.
"A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance," said Alan Dangour, one of the report's authors.
"Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."
The results of research, which was commissioned by the British government's Food Standards Agency, were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Sales of organic food have fallen in some markets, including Britain, as recession has led consumers to cut back on purchases.
The Soil Association said in April that growth in sales of organic products in Britain slowed to just 1.7 percent in 2008, well below the average annual growth rate of 26 percent over the last decade, following a plunge in demand at the end of the year.

Microsoft-Yahoo deal seen squeaking by regulators

2009-07-30T23:32:00.002+07:00

Microsoft's 10-year Internet search deal with Yahoo will get a hard look from Obama administration antitrust enforcers but will probably squeak through.
While the partnership knocks the number of competing search engines down to two, from three, antitrust experts said this might have happened anyway. The partners say they will join to create a stronger competitor to Google Inc.
"The question is: is it OK? Is two enough?" said antitrust attorney John Briggs of Axinn, Veltrop and Harkrider LLP.
"I think this deal would be really easy to get through in the Bush administration. They wouldn't even look twice at it," said Briggs. "This administration is going to look twice at it, and probably in the end let it through."
Microsoft's Bing search engine will power search queries on Yahoo's sites. The companies said they expected the deal to be "closely reviewed" by regulators, but were hopeful it would close in early 2010.
Google has 65 percent of the search market, versus Yahoo, with 29.6 percent, and Microsoft's 8.4 percent, according to comScore.
"Without this deal, I think it would be really unlikely that you'd have a market with three robust search providers in 10 years," said Beau Buffier, an attorney with Shearman & Sterling LLP.
Senator Herb Kohl, whose subcommittee oversees the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, said the panel was concerned that advertisers would face higher rates and that there might be less innovation because of the agreement.
"The deal between Yahoo and Microsoft -- industry giants and direct competitors in Internet advertising and search markets -- warrants our careful scrutiny," he said in a statement. "The implications of this proposed joint agreement will be closely reviewed by my subcommittee."
But Evan Stewart, an antitrust expert with Zuckerman Spaeder, said the deal creates a stronger competitor to Google.
"This is good for the competitive marketplace," said Stewart. "It will be easier to get access to this advertising space at presumably more competitive rates."
The length of the deal means that regulators will likely view it almost as a merger, said Richard Brosnick of law firm Butzel Long. "In Internet time, that might as well be 100 years. A 10-year exclusive license might as well be an acquisition."
Google is expected to be watching the deal closely. It dropped its own advertising deal with Yahoo last year under pressure from the Justice Department.
Microsoft and advertisers had lobbied the department hard to stop Google from gaining further market power.
Google, so far, is saying little publicly about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal.
"There has traditionally been a lot of competition online, and our experience is that competition brings about great things for users," said Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich in an emailed statement. "We're interested to learn more about the deal."
The Microsoft-Yahoo deal was inevitable following Yahoo's rejection of a Microsoft takeover, the collapse of the Google-Yahoo deal and upheaval in Yahoo's executive suites, said Stewart, the attorney with Zuckerman Spaeder.
"Now that the new management is up and running, she (Carol Bartz) is revisiting the basic strategic wisdom of entering into a strategic partnership with Microsoft," he said. "This is like the directors cut. This is a similar movie but with different scenes added or changed."

Status quo won't get NASA to Mars, new chief says

2009-07-26T16:52:00.000+07:00

NASA cannot continue on its present path, which includes staffing the International Space Station and returning astronauts to the moon by 2020, and fulfill its ultimate goal of getting people to Mars, the U.S. space agency's new chief said on Tuesday.
NASA is trying to finish construction of the $100-billion space station and retire the shuttle fleet next year. It also is developing two new rockets and a capsule-style craft that can ferry crews to the moon and other destinations in addition to the station, which orbits 225 miles above Earth.
"We cannot continue to survive on the path that we're on right now," Charlie Bolden, a retired Marine Corps general and four-time shuttle astronaut, said in a speech to NASA employees.
Bolden said he believes the space program's long-term objective is sending people to Mars.
"The challenge for us in the next few months is to figure out what the single most efficient, most cost-effective path is to get there," he said.
Bolden was appointed NASA administrator by President Barack Obama' administration in May, about five years after his predecessor, President George W. Bush, set a goal for the agency to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, resume sending humans to the moon by 2020 and then push on to Mars.
Returning astronauts to the moon was estimated in 2005 to cost about $110 billion, but that figure has since been cut by about $40 billion. NASA spends about half of its $18 billion annual budget on human spaceflight.
A presidential panel is reviewing options for the US human space program and is expected to issue its report next month. Bolden told workers the review is "nothing to be afraid of."
Concurrently, a second review that encompasses all areas of space -- military, commercial, civil and scientific -- is under way by the national security advisor, James Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, Bolden said.
"There needs to be a coherent policy and so President Obama has asked General Jones to put together a group to take a look at the national space policy," Bolden said. "That's already under way to a limited extent but we hope to be participating in that as a full member."
Bolden's address to NASA employees came seven days into space shuttle Endeavour's 16-day construction mission to the International Space Station.

Giant 'scar' on Jupiter spotted by Aussie stargazer

2009-07-26T16:50:00.000+07:00

A large comet or asteroid has slammed into the Jupiter, creating an impact site the size of Earth, pictures by an Australian amateur astronomer show.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed the discovery using its large infrared telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, said computer programmer Anthony Wesley, 44, who discovered the impact zone while stargazing at home.
News of Wesley's find on a backyard 14.5-inch (37 cm) reflecting telescope has stunned the astronomy world, with scientists saying the impact will last only days more.
Wesley said it took him 30 minutes to realise a dark spot rotating in Jupiter's clouds on July 19 was actually the first impact seen by astronomers since a comet collided with the giant planet in July 1994.
"I thought (it) likely to be just a normal dark polar storm," he said on his website www.acquerra.com.au/astro.
"However as it rotated further into view and the conditions improved I suddenly realised that it wasn't just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot," Wesley said from his home at Murrumbateman, north of Canberra.
Photographs show the impact zone, or "scar", near Jupiter's south polar region, with gases seen in infrared images.
"We are extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right hour, the right side of Jupiter to witness the event. We couldn't have planned it better," NASA JPL scientist Glenn Orton told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.
Orton confirmed the spot was an impact site and not a localised weather event in Jupiter's swirling surface, similar to the planet's famed red spot.

Yahoo outlook misses, shares drop

2009-07-23T12:46:00.000+07:00

Yahoo Inc's forecast for third-quarter fell short of Wall Street's expectations, as the Internet company announced plans to step up spending and cited continued weakness in the advertising market.
Shares of Yahoo fell 2.8 percent in after hours trade, following a 1.5 percent drop on the Nasdaq.
Yahoo forecast revenue for the current quarter of $1.45 billion to $1.55 billion, while pegging traffic acquisition costs -- the portion of revenue that Yahoo pays its partners -- at 26 percent of revenue.
That suggests net revenue of $1.07 billion to $1.15 billion, by Reuters calculations, below the $1.17 billion expected by analysts, according to Reuters Estimates.
Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz said on a conference call that the company was hiring more engineers and sales and marketing staff as it invests in new products and branding initiatives.
"We're really going to move to reposition the Yahoo brand and the Yahoo company," Bartz said.
Yahoo forecast income from operations for the current quarter of $55 million to $65 million, down from $76 million in the second quarter.
The company forecast operating cash flow of $330 million to $370 million, compared with the average analyst forecast of $413.5 million, according to Reuters Estimates.
"Looks like guidance is a little light for the third quarter," said Colin Gillis, an analyst at Brigantine Advisors. "But she (Bartz) is probably moving it to the game of 'guide light and beat.'"
Second-quarter revenue dropped 13 percent to $1.57 billion from a year ago as advertisers remained tight-fisted.
Excluding traffic acquisition costs, Yahoo booked net revenue of $1.14 billion, in line with the average of analysts' expectations, according to Reuters Estimates.
Revenue from search advertising fell 15 percent from the year-ago quarter, while display advertising revenue fell 14 percent.
"We're in challenging times in all of the sectors within advertising, including online," said Ross Sandler, an analyst at RBC Capital markets. "These guys are being disproportionately hit by overexposure to premium display, which has been an area that has been especially weak."
Yahoo posted net income of $141 million, or 10 cents a share, compared with net income of $131.2 million, or 9 cents a share, at this time last year. Analysts, on average, were looking for 8 cents a share.
Shares of Yahoo fell 47 cents, or 2.8 percent, to $16.28 from their $16.75 close on the Nasdaq.

Longest 21st century solar eclipse wows millions

2009-07-23T12:39:00.001+07:00

A total solar eclipse began its flight on Wednesday across a narrow swathe of Asia, where hundreds of millions of people watched the skies darken despite thick summer clouds.
The longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century was visible along a roughly 250 km-wide (155 miles) corridor, according to the US space agency NASA, as it traveled half the globe and passed through the world's two most populous nations, India and China.
Thousands of people snaked through the narrow lanes of the ancient Hindu holy city of Varanasi and gathered for a dip in the Ganges, an act considered as leading to salvation from the cycle of life and death.
Amid chanting of Hindu hymns, men, women and children waded into the river with folded hands and prayed to the sun as it emerged in an overcast sky.
"We have come here because our elders told us this is the best time to improve our after-life," said Bhailal Sharma, a villager from central India who came to Varanasi with a group of about 100 people.
The eclipse then swept through Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and over the crowded cities along China's Yangtze River, before heading to the Pacific.
Crowds gathered along the high dykes of Wuhan, an industrial city in central China, roared and waved goodbye as the last sliver of sun disappeared, plunging the city into darkness.
"As soon as the totality happened, the clouds closed in so we couldn't see the corona. That's a pity," said Zhen Jun, a man whose work unit had given the day off for the spectacle.
But eclipse viewers in central China was luckier than those in the coastal cities near Shanghai, where overcast skies and rain in some places blocked the view of the sun entirely.
LONGEST THIS CENTURY
Eclipses allow earth-bound scientists a rare glimpse at the sun's corona, the gases surrounding the sun.
"In the 21st century this is the longest," said Harish Bhatt, dean at the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics.
"This is indeed quite an important event for scientific experiments. Its long duration provides you an opportunity to make very complicated, complex experiments."
Scientists in China planned to snap two-dimensional images of the sun's corona -- up to 2 million degrees Celsius (3.6 million F) hot -- at roughly one image per second, Bhatt said.
The eclipse lasted up to a maximum of 6 minutes, 39 seconds over the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA.
The eclipse is seen as a mixed blessing for millions of Indians. Those who considered it auspicious bathed in holy rivers and ponds for good fortune during the solar blackout.
But astrologers predicted the eclipse spelled bad luck for others. Expectant mothers asked doctors to advance or postpone births to avoid complications or a miserable future for their children.
Parents in several schools in India's capital, New Delhi, kept their children home from classes since the eclipse coincided with breakfast. According to Hindu custom, it is inauspicious to prepare food during an eclipse.
In ancient Chinese culture, an eclipse was an omen linked to natural disasters or deaths in the imperial family. Chinese officials and state media were at pains to reassure the public that city services would run normally.
"We heard about it on television last night," said Qian Qiangguo, speaking in a thick Wuhan accent.
In modern China, people who wished to see the astronomical rarity clearly tried to escape thick pollution caused by the rapid industrial growth, avoiding cities where smog smudges the horizon, even on clear days.
"The majority of people decided to go to Tongning, in Anhui, because they're worried about the serious air pollution from industrial areas in Shanghai," said Bill Yeung, the president of the Hong Kong Astronomical Society, who organized 120 eclipse chasers from Hong Kong.
Those who chose Shanghai ended up fleeing to inland cities to escape the clouds, he added.

Shuttle Endeavour mission delayed again by weather

2009-07-16T12:54:00.000+07:00

Lightning strikes and thunderstorms near the seaside launch pad forced NASA on Monday to delay yet again the launch of shuttle Endeavour on a mission to the International Space Station.
"The weather has just bitten us again," launch director Pete Nickolenko radioed to the Endeavour crew, as the spaceship's liftoff was postponed for the fifth time in about a month.
Endeavour had been scheduled to blast off at 6:51 p.m. EDT on a mission to install a Japanese-built outdoor research platform at the space station. The launch was rescheduled for 6:03 p.m. EDT on Wednesday.
Two launch attempts last month were scuttled by hydrogen fuel leaks. A third attempt ended on Saturday when NASA ordered checks of the shuttle's electrical systems following a spate of lightning strikes and Sunday's launch was canceled due to poor weather.
NASA is trying to complete construction of the $100 billion orbital outpost, a project of 16 nations, by September 30, 2010, so it can retire the shuttle fleet and ramp up development of replacement ships that can journey to the moon and other destinations farther from Earth.
Endeavour's cargo includes the Japanese-built platform that is to be mounted to the front of the $2.4-billion Kibo lab where it will serve as an outdoor perch for science experiments that need to be exposed to the open environment of space.
Experiments on the platform can be installed and retrieved remotely with a robotic arm, eliminating the need for time-consuming and potentially risky spacewalks by station crewmembers. The first two sections of Kibo were attached to the station in 2008.
The platform is to be installed during the first of five spacewalks planned during Endeavour's 12-day stay at the station. Astronauts also are expected to replace batteries that are part of the station's solar power system and store spare parts needed to keep the outpost operational after the shuttle fleet is retired.

Google's ace in PC war with Microsoft

2009-07-12T10:23:00.000+07:00

Low-cost netbooks could provide the fertile ground Google Inc needs to make its free PC operating system a success as it prepares to take on Microsoft Corp's dominant Windows juggernaut.
Google's new Chrome Linux-based operating system will be free-of-charge, in stark contrast to Windows, which analysts say costs anywhere from $20 for the older XP system to at least $150 for the current Vista system.
That price gap could be just what Google needs to attract price-conscious consumers of netbooks, the bare-bones PCs which sell for as little as $400 each. The Internet search giant has said Chrome will initially be targeted at netbooks.
"Google's move is very timely because of all the bad press that Microsoft's been getting over its pricing for Windows 7," said Gartner analyst Lilian Tay.
"Microsoft is unwilling to cut prices, and PC brands are probably already unhappy with that because they're already trying so hard to make the extra dollar from the cheap netbooks."
The PC industry is struggling to recover from its worst downturn, hit by the global recession and as booming netbook sales cannibalize traditional laptops that cost as much as six times more.
A coming generation of "nettops," being promoted as the netbook equivalent of traditional desktop computers, could strain the industry further.
Chrome could be just the ticket for netbook makers to boost their profit margins, as the Web-centric nature of netbooks makes it a natural fit for Google, which has carved out a space for itself as a major innovator on the Internet.
Most major PC brands declined to say if they would make Chrome-based netbooks, although Google has named big tech names such as Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Lenovo as partners.
Taiwan's Asustek, which pioneered the netbook in 2006, called the Chrome operating system an interesting development.
"We're looking very closely into it, and will be seeking user feedback and seeing what the industry has to say about it before deciding whether we'll use the system in our PCs," Asustek Chief Operating Officer Tony Chen told Reuters."
TESTY RELATIONS
Microsoft, relatively late to embrace the netbook craze, had initially said it would be hard to create a new class of PCs and seemed content to watch on.
It remains a reluctant supporter even with netbooks' current rapid growth, as sales of cheaper versions of Windows used on netbooks have cannibalized more expensive, advanced versions, hurting revenues at the software maker.
Microsoft has tried to restrict how its upcoming Windows 7 version can be used in netbooks, and says it won't support certain low-cost chip-sets from UK chip designer ARM.
Google may seek to exploit some of the resulting PC maker discontent with Microsoft on the issue. Already, Google has said it will support netbooks running on ARM chipsets as the British company launches its own aggressive plan to take up to a 30 percent share of the market next year.
"Microsoft has never lost 30 percent of any PC segment in recent memory," said Vincent Chen, an analyst at Yuanta Securities. "If Google is successful in the ARM segment, that's going to give it a huge boost to expand even further."
Some analyst however remain skeptical on Chrome's long term chances, saying the system, based on the open-source Linux, is just the latest version of an unsuccessful formula.
"When you look at netbooks, all of them ran on Linux in the early days," said IDC analyst Bryan Ma. "They tried it, but users didn't want that. They wanted something familiar, and in today's world, that's Windows."

Pigs at risk from people as new flu spreads

2009-07-12T10:11:00.000+07:00

There is a growing risk that pigs will catch the new H1N1 flu strain -- commonly known as swine flu -- from humans, German researchers said on Thursday.
There have already been a handful of suspected cases of humans passing the current pandemic H1N1 virus to swine. The latest German research confirms it is infectious to pigs and can spread rapidly.
Thomas Vahlenkamp and colleagues from the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, Germany's national research center for animal health, experimentally infected five pigs with the new flu.
Four days later, the virus had spread to three uninfected pigs housed with them and all the pigs showed clinical signs of disease, they reported in the Journal of General Virology.
"With the increasing numbers of human infections, a spill-over of this human virus to pigs is becoming more likely," Vahlenkamp said.
"The prevention of human-to-pig transmissions should have a high priority in order to avoid involvement of pigs in the epidemiology of this pandemic."
Encouragingly, though, while the virus spread quickly among the pigs, it did not spread to five chickens housed with them.
The World Health Organization declared a pandemic last month following the spread of the new flu virus, which mixes swine, avian and human elements. It has killed more than 400 people globally and likely now infects millions.

Google takes aim at Microsoft with new PC platform

2009-07-09T18:24:00.000+07:00

Google Inc plans to attack Microsoft Corp's core business by taking on the software giant's globally dominant Windows operating system for personal computers.
Google, which already offers a suite of e-mail, Web and other software products that compete with Microsoft, said on Tuesday it would launch a new operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.
Microsoft shares fell 1.4 percent to $22.22 in early Nasdaq trade on Wednesday. Google shares rose 1.2 percent to $401.36.
Called the Google Chrome Operating System, the new software will be in netbooks for consumers in the second half of 2010, Google said in a blog post, adding that it was working with multiple manufacturers.
Netbooks are low-cost notebook PCs designed for Internet surfing and other Web-based applications.
"It's been part of their culture to go after and remove Microsoft as a major holder of technology, and this is part of their strategy to do it," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. "This could be very disruptive. If they can execute, Microsoft is vulnerable to an attack like this, and they know it," he said.
Google and Microsoft have locked horns over the years in a variety of markets, from Internet search to mobile software. It remains to be seen if Google can take market share away from Microsoft on its home turf, with Windows currently installed in more than 90 percent of the world's PCs.
The news comes as executives from the world's biggest technology and media companies, including Google and Microsoft, gather in Sun Valley, Idaho for an annual conference organized by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.
A spokesman for Microsoft declined to comment.
Key to success will be whether Google can lock in partnerships with PC makers, such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc, which currently offer Windows on most of their product lines.
Hewlett-Packard Co , the world's largest PC brand, declined to confirm if it would sell PCs running on the new operating system.
"We are looking into it" said HP spokeswoman Marlene Somsak, referring to the operating system. "We want to understand all the different operating systems available to customers, and will assess the impact of Chrome on the computer and communications industry."
Google's Chrome Internet browser, launched in late 2008, remains a distant fourth in the Web browser market, with a 1.2 percent share in February, according to market research firm Net Applications. Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to dominate with nearly 70 percent.
FAST AND LIGHTWEIGHT
The new Chrome OS is expected to work well with many of the company's popular software applications, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Maps.
It will be fast and less memory-intensive, enabling users to access the Web in a few seconds, Google said. The new operating system is based on open-source Linux code, which allows third-party developers to design compatible applications.
"The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web," Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, said in the blog post. The Chrome operating system is "our attempt to rethink
what operating systems should be."
Google said the operating system was a new project, separate from its Android mobile operating software found in some smartphones. Acer Inc, the world's No. 3 PC brand, has already agreed to sell netbooks that run on Android to be released this quarter.
The new system is designed to work with ARM and x86 chips, the main chip architectures in use in the market. Microsoft has previously said it would not support PCs running on ARM chips, allowing Google an opportunity to infiltrate that segment.
Charlene Li, partner at consulting company Altimeter Group, said Google's new system could initially appeal to consumers looking for a netbook-like device for Web surfing, rather than people who use desktop PCs for gaming or high-powered applications.
But eventually, the Google operating system has the potential to scale up to larger, more powerful PCs, especially if it proves to run faster than Windows, she said.
Google did not say how much it would charge for the operating system (OS), but Enderle expects Google to charge at most a nominal fee or make it free, saying the company's business model has been to earn revenue from connecting applications or advertising.
Microsoft declines to say how much it charges PC brands for Windows, but most analysts estimate about $20 for the older XP system and at least $150 for the current Vista system.
Altimeter's Li added: "A benefit to the consumer is that the cost saving is passed on, not having to pay for an OS. It's clearly positioned as a shot across the bow of Microsoft."

NASA poised for third shuttle launch try Saturday

2009-07-09T18:23:00.000+07:00

Countdown clocks resumed ticking at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday in preparation for NASA's third attempt to launch space shuttle Endeavour on a construction mission to the International Space Station.
Liftoff is scheduled for 7:39 p.m. EDT (2339 GMT) on Saturday. Two previous launch attempts in June were canceled due to potentially dangerous hydrogen fuel leaks.
"We're all eager to get Endeavour and her crew on their way to the International Space Station," said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, a shuttle launch manager. "We're ready to fly this mission."
Technicians fixed the leak and last week filled the fuel tank with 500,000 gallons (1.9 million litres) of supercold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to test if the repair was successful. The leak did not reappear, prompting managers to clear Endeavour for launch on a 16-day mission to deliver the final piece of Japan's Kibo complex to the space station.
The Endeavour crew plans to conduct five spacewalks during their stay at the station to install a porch onto Kibo for science experiments, as well as to replace batteries in a solar panel wing and perform other maintenance tasks.
The three-day launch countdown began on Wednesday. The only remaining obstacle appeared to be the weather. Meteorologists predicted only a 40 percent chance that conditions would be suitable for a launch attempt on Saturday.
"We're expecting we'll see some afternoon thunderstorms in the area around launch time," said shuttle weather officer Kathy Winter.
NASA has eight flights remaining to complete construction of the $100 billion station, a project of 16 nations. The agency plans to retire the shuttle fleet next year and develop new spaceships that can travel to the moon and other destinations as well as the space station.

More than 800 wildlife species now extinct

2009-07-07T10:55:00.001+07:00

More than 800 animal and plant species have gone extinct in the past five centuries with nearly 17,000 now threatened with extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reported on Thursday.
A detailed analysis of these numbers indicates the international community will fail to meet its 2010 goal of bolstering biodiversity -- maintaining a variety of life forms -- a commitment made by most governments in 2002.
Based on data released in 2008 in the union's Red List, the new IUCN analysis is being released now to precede the 2010 target year and to draw a connection between crises in the financial and environmental realms, said report editor Jean-Christophe Vie.
"We don't want to make a choice between nature and the economy; we just want to bring nature to the same level when you have to take a decision," Vie said by telephone from Switzerland.
"Jobs are important but not jobs to the detriment of nature," he said. "We have done that too much and look where we have arrived."
The new analysis shows 869 species became extinct or extinct in the wild since the year 1500 while 290 more species are considered critically endangered and possibly extinct.
At least 16,928 species are threatened with extinction, including nearly one-third of amphibians, more than one in eight birds and nearly a quarter of mammals.
By comparison, the 2004 Red List showed 784 extinctions since 1500.
PROSPERITY AND BIODIVERSITY
The report said this is not a comprehensive list with only 2.7 percent of the 1.8 million described species analyzed.
The number of extinctions is "a gross underestimate but it does provide a useful snapshot of what is happening to all forms of life on Earth," the study authors wrote.
"It's much more severe than the economic crisis or the bank crisis," Vie said. "You can lose a core industry but you can rebuild one. In nature, if you lose it, you lose it, and you're losing a lot of capital that cannot be replaced."
He said the notion that biodiversity is secondary to economic health is largely a view held by countries in North America, Europe and elsewhere, where the connection to natural products is less direct.
In less developed areas, there is a direct line between human prosperity and biodiversity.
In much of the world, Vie said, "The main problem every day is not to find a job, it's to find food ... and in most places this comes from biodiversity, from nature, from fish and plants."
For land-based species, the main threat is habitat destruction through farming, logging and development.
Climate change is not now the main threat to biodiversity but that could change, the report said.
In examining 17,000 species of birds, amphibians and reef-building corals, the report found a significant proportion that are not now threatened are susceptible to climate change, including 30 percent of birds, 51 percent of corals and 41 percent of amphibians that are not threatened now.

GE teams up with Geron for stem-cell research

2009-07-07T10:43:00.001+07:00

General Electric Co is teaming up with US biotech company Geron Corp to use stem cells to develop products that could give drug developers an early warning of whether new medicines are toxic.
The venture is the largest US conglomerate's most direct attempt to make a commercial products from human embryonic stem cells. Scientists say the cells hold great medical promise, but their use has been highly controversial in the United States.
Embryonic stem cells are the body's master cells and can grow into various types of human tissue, such as skin or internal organs.
GE and Geron aim to use an existing batch of stem cells to develop sample human cells that drug companies could use to test the toxicity of new drugs early in the development process, before they are ready for animal testing or human clinical trials.
The venture would not sell actual stem cells, but rather heart or liver cells derived from stem cells, said Konstantin Fiedler, general manager of cell technologies at GE Healthcare.
"This could replace, to a large extent, animal trials," Fiedler said in a telephone interview. "Once you have human cells and you can get them in a standardized way, like you get right now your lab rats in a standardized way, you can actually do those experiments on those cells."
Fiedler emphasized the products are still in an early development stage. GE estimated it would have the first commercial cells ready next year.
Geron shares surged 15 percent after the news of its deal with the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company, which has made expanding its healthcare operation a major push this year.
POTENTIAL, CONTROVERSY
Scientists say that research on embryonic stem cells, which are the most malleable, has enormous potential to develop treatments for cancer and other diseases.
But using stem cells derived from days-old human embryos has been controversial in the United States, where opponents say the destruction of any embryo is wrong. The Obama administration in March lifted a Bush-era decision that had forbidden federally funded researchers to work with the embryonic cells.
GE's stepping up its presence in stem cell research could boost the field's standing, advocates said.
"What I read this to be is validation that human embryonic stem cell research is moving through the pipeline as it should be and what once were promising theoretical ideas are now getting closer and closer to being ideas in practice," said Amy Comstock Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, a group that advocates stem-cell research.
GE will fund the research and manufacturing and sell any resulting products, while Menlo Park, California-based Geron will open up to GE its extensive database covering the growth of and differentiation of existing human embryonic stem cells.
The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the arrangement. Fiedler said it was too early to estimate the revenue the project might generate.
Needham analyst Mark Monane, who follows Geron, wrote in a note to clients that the financial terms were likely "modest," but added: "The value of the opportunity lies in the quality of the partner."
In May, GE reached a deal with Cytori Therapeutics Inc to commercialize that company's StemSource product.
GE has had since 2005 a policy to do research on stem cells, while following all US and applicable laws, but had not tried to commercialize a product from them, Fiedler said.
Geron shares rose 98 cents to close at $7.67 on the Nasdaq, while GE closed down 4 cents at $11.72 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Smaller U.S. companies including StemCells Inc and Aastrom Biosciences Inc and Osiris Therapeutics Inc have focused on stem-cell research, although the technology has also caught the attention of drug giants such as No. 1 Pfizer Inc, which last year quietly launched a stem cell initiative.

Australia discovers 3 new large dinosaurs

2009-07-04T15:18:00.002+07:00

Fossils of three new species of dinosaurs have been discovered in Australia, including a meat-eater larger than Velociraptor from the Jurassic Park movies, suggesting Australia may have a more complex prehistoric past.
The two plant-eating and one carnivore dinosaurs, the first large dinosaurs unearthed since 1981, were found in Queensland and date back 98 million years to the mid-Cretaceous period.
"It not only presents us with two new amazing long-necked giants of the ancient Australian continent, but also announces our first really big predator," paleontologist John Long, head of sciences at Museum Victoria said on Friday.
Paleontologist Ben Kear at La Trobe University in Melbourne said the discovery will pave the way for new studies on Australian dinosaurs and their environments.
"Australia is one of the great untapped resources in our current understanding of life from the Age of Dinosaurs," Kear said. "The discoveries...will definitely reinvigorate interest in the hitherto tantalizingly incomplete, but globally significant record from this continent..."
Australia's dinosaur fossil record has been extremely poor compared with North America, South America and Africa.
The new dinosaurs were unearthed during joint Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum and Queensland Museum digs at Winton in outback Queensland.
SLASHING CLAWS
The meat-eating theropod dinosaur has been called Australovenator (nicknamed Banjo after Australian bush poet Banjo Patterson) and the two plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs are Wintonotitan and Diamantinasaurus
"The cheetah of his time, Banjo was light and agile. He could run down most prey with ease over open ground," said Scott Hocknull, lead author of the dinosaur discovery, published on Friday on PLos One (www.plosone.org/home.action).
"His most distinguishing feature was three large slashing claws on each hand. Unlike some theropods that have small arms (like T Rex), Banjo was different. His arms were a primary weapon. He's Australia's answer to Velociraptor, but many times bigger and more terrifying," said Hocknull.
"Banjo" sheds light on the ancestry of the largest-ever meat-eating dinosaurs, the carcharodontosaurs, a group of dinosaurs that became gigantic, like Giganotosaurus, he said.
The two herbivore dinosaurs were different kinds of titanosaur, the largest type of dinosaur ever to have lived.
Wintonotitan was a tall animal which may have fitted into a giraffe-like niche, while the stocky Diamantinasaurus was more hippo-like, said Hocknull.
Two of the dinosaurs were found buried together in a 98-million-year-old "billabong" or waterhole.
"Billabongs are a built-in part of the Australian mind because we associate them with mystery, ghosts and monsters," said Hocknull, referring to Patterson's poem Waltzing Matilda, which tells of a "swagman" or bushman who jumps into a billabong and drowns after police try and catch him with a stolen sheep.
Hocknull said hundreds more fossils from the dig were still to be prepared and there was more material to be excavated.

NY thieves want iPhones, victims fight back

2009-07-04T15:15:00.000+07:00

Thieves are increasingly going after iPhones and other smartphones but victims now can fight back with technology.

One device allows a user to remotely activate a loud siren designed to rattle the thief. Another application, designed for iPhones, can reveal the phone's location.

Police statistics show petty crime is down in New York but anecdotal evidence and recent headlines about street muggings targeting costly and coveted devices like Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's Sidekick have disturbed smartphone users concerned about protecting access to e-mail, passwords and other data.

"When we have seen spikes in thefts, a significant portion has to do with ... highly desirable products," said police spokesman Paul Browne. "In the last couple of years it's been iPods, Sidekicks, iPhones."

He said most of these muggings involve teenagers robbing other teenagers and take place on subways in the afternoon after schools get out.

New technology helps owners of expensive gadgets to get them back after they are lost or stolen. The Find My iPhone feature from Apple, which declined to comment for this story, enables users to determine the phone's location and erase the data on it, among other things.

A Chicago blogger who tried the feature after his iPhone disappeared tracked the phone's movements from a friend's computer. According to his post here, he got his phone back -- and a handshake from the surprised culprit.

"You're lucky you didn't get shot in the face," read one comment on the blog.

MAKE A DEAL WITH PHONE THIEF

Indian company Maverick Mobile Solutions' system allows victims of theft to activate a siren and send a text message to the phone -- perhaps to offer a deal to get the phone back.

Fear of a gadget-related crime wave is not new. In 2005, as Apple's signature white earphones were becoming ubiquitous in U.S. cities, the New York Police Department reported an increase in subway crime linked to iPod thefts. Before that, victims were targeted for their expensive sneakers.

But cell phone theft is a particular concern because of the risk of identity theft, said City Councilman Peter Vallone.

"It's bad enough losing your phone and that's all it was a few years ago," Vallone said. "Nowadays, if you lose your phone, you can very quickly lose your identity."

Local media have reported spikes in iPhone-related street muggings. In May, a thief snatched actor Kevin Bacon's Blackberry on a New York City subway platform.

Many iPhone users agree that, given the amount of personal data stored on phones, losing one could be devastating.

"The damage would be extensive," said Joshua Deutch, 32, a freelance IT consultant. He said he would "not think twice" before wiping data -- including bank account numbers and multiple passwords -- if someone stole his iPhone.

But Deutch said pursuing a thief would be going too far.

"Obviously, there's some excitement with that but I have insurance," he said. After data has been wiped clean, the iPhone is "just a brick," he said.

Some thieves get caught due to missteps.

In March, a man stole a woman's iPhone on a Manhattan subway platform and then used it to snap pictures of himself. He e-mailed the pictures to his personal e-mail address, inadvertently using his victim's e-mail account, according to the New York Post newspaper.

The victim saw the photograph in her own e-mail outbox and alerted police, who checked the picture against mug shots and then identified and arrested the thief.

Still, many smartphone users say they do not worry about someone getting hold of their personal data.

"A lot of people are really uptight about anyone knowing anything about them," said Nick Divers, 23, who has not taken steps to protect the data on his iPhone. "Is that a big deal? Not to me."

Scientists kill cancer cells with "trojan horse"

2009-06-30T17:22:00.001+07:00

Australian scientists have developed a "trojan horse" therapy to combat cancer, using a bacterially-derived nano cell to penetrate and disarm the cancer cell before a second nano cell kills it with chemotherapy drugs.

The "trojan horse" therapy has the potential to directly target cancer cells with chemotherapy, rather than the current treatment that sees chemotherapy drugs injected into a cancer patient and attacking both cancer and healthy cells.

Sydney scientists Dr Jennifer MacDiarmid and Dr Himanshu Brahmbhatt, who formed EnGenelC Pty Ltd in 2001, said they had achieved 100 percent survival in mice with human cancer cells by using the "trojan horse" therapy in the past two years.

The scientists plan to start human clinical trials in the coming months. Human trials of the cell delivery system will start next week at the Peter MacCullum Cancer Center at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and The Austin at the University of Melbourne.

The therapy, published in the latest Nature Biotechnology journal, sees mini-cells called EDVs (EnGenelC Delivery Vehicle) attach and enter the cancer cell.

The first wave of mini-cells release ribonucleic acid molecules, called siRNA, which switch off the production of proteins that make the cancer cell resistant to chemotherapy.

A second wave of EDV cells is then accepted by the cancer cell and releases chemotherapy drugs, killing the cancer cell.

"The beauty is that our EDVs operate like 'Trojan Horses' They arrive at the gates of the affected cells and are always allowed in," said MacDiarmid.

"We are playing the rogue cells at their own game. They switch-on the gene to produce the protein to resist drugs, and we are switching-off the gene which, in turn, enables the drugs to enter."

DISARMING TUMOUR CELLS

RNA interference, or RNAi, is designed to silence genes responsible for producing disease-causing proteins and is one of the hottest areas of biotechnology research. RNA was the basis of the 2006 Nobel Prize in medicine.

Dozens of biotechnology companies are looking for ways to manipulate RNA to block genes that produce disease-causing proteins involved in cancer, blindness or AIDS.

Brahmbhatt said that after treatment with conventional drug therapy, a large number of cancer cells die but a small percentage of the cells can produce proteins that make cancer cells resistant to chemotherapeutic drugs.

"Consequently, follow-up drug treatments can fail. The tumors thus become untreatable and continue to flourish, ultimately killing the patient," said Brahmbhatt.

"We want to be part of moving toward a time when cancers can be managed as a chronic disease rather than being regarded as a death sentence," he said.

The Nature report said the mini-cells were "well tolerated with no adverse side effects or deaths in any of the actively treated animals, despite repeated dosing."

"Significantly, our methodology does not damage the normal cells and is applicable to a wide spectrum of solid cancer types," said MacDiarmid.

"The hope is that the benign nature of this EDV technology should enable cancer sufferers to get on with their lives and operate normally using out-patient therapy."

Health games become serious business

2009-06-30T17:18:00.000+07:00

Videogames were once blamed for rising obesity rates but are now being championed by the medical industry and for use by government departments for their health benefits.

Games like Electronic Arts' "EA Sports Active" and Nintendo's "Wii Fit" have got players of all ages moving -- and game developers and investors looking for hot new titles to cash in on this booming segment of the market.

Big John Games' upcoming "Butt Kicker" Nintendo DSi game will provide an action-based environment in which players fight against cigarettes and "Karate Bears" for Wii teaches players real karate routines using the Wii's motion-sensor controllers.

With interest in health games rising, the fifth annual Games for Health Conference in Boston expanded to 390 people this year from 100, including developers, investors and medical experts, while numbers at many other conferences are down up to 40 percent.

"Healthcare is 18 percent of the GDP of the United States and so games for health is probably the largest sector of activity in the serious games field long-term," said Ben Sawyer, co-founder of The Games for Health Project.

"If you add up the 18 month sales of "Wii Fit" and the sales of "EA Sports Active," Konami's "Dance Dance Revolution" and other healthy games, the worldwide retail numbers are over $2 billion."

Dr. Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop which fosters innovation in children's learning, has just released a report looking at how digital games can play a beneficial and educational role in health care.

"The White House should launch a national initiative to promote research and development of proven games," said Levine.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, whose mission is to improve the health and healthcare of all Americans, has also called for a public engagement campaign supported by the president, Congress and the federal agencies to teach parents, teachers and health providers about the healthy side of gaming.

"States' governors should direct their school technology officers to look at innovations like "Dance Dance Revolution" and "Wii Fit" as a way to extend the reach of physical education and comprehensive health education," said Dr. Debra Lieberman, director of Health Games Research for the foundation.

The Games for Health Conference also showcased how videogames are being used to help doctors and patients alike.

Serious games developer Virtual Heroes is working on a new first-person shooter sequel for Hope Lab's popular "Re-Mission" game, which has been distributed to cancer patients in 81 countries since 2006.

"We're taking their existing concept and trying to raise the fun bar and creating more lifelike and enjoyable environments within the human body," explained Jerry Heneghan, CEO of Virtual Heroes.

"Players will take control of Roxy, the protagonist, and have new weapons to battle cancer with thanks to input from cancer patients."

Virtual Heroes is also updating its HumanSim technology with a new human physiology engine, technology has been used by Duke Medical Center's nursing school to train nurses virtually.

Heneghan said he hopes this software will inspire gamers to turn to careers in healthcare and make people in the medical profession more proficient with more grants and funding flowing into universities for health games.

Google slammed as China, US quarrel over Internet

2009-06-27T16:18:00.000+07:00

China on Thursday stepped up accusations that Google is spreading obscene content over the Internet, a day after US officials urged Beijing to abandon plans for controversial filtering software on new computers.

The growing friction over control of online content threatens to become another irritant in ties at a time the world is looking for the United States and China to cooperate in helping to pull the global economy out of its slump.

China's Foreign Ministry on Thursday accused Google's English language search engine of spreading obscene images that violated the nation's laws, less than 24 hours after disruptions to the company's search engines and other services within China.

Spokesman Qin Gang did not directly say whether official action was behind the disruptions, but he made plain the government's anger and said "punishment measures" taken against Google were lawful.

"Google's English language search engine has spread large amounts of vulgar content that is lascivious and pornographic, seriously violating China's relevant laws and regulations," he told a regular news conference.

A spokesman for Google in China declined to comment.

Separately, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and US Trade Representative Ron Kirk on Wednesday voiced concerns over the "Green Dam" software in a letter to Chinese officials.

"China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues," Locke said in a statement.

China says the "Green Dam" filtering software is to protect children from illegal images and insists the deadline of July 1 for new computers to be sold with the software will not change.

An official at the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, which handles trade rows, said the ministry had no immediate response to the US criticism and referred questions to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which also had no comment.

Critics have said the program, sold by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co, is technically flawed and could be used to spy on users and block sites Beijing considers politically offensive.

The proposed new rules raised fundamental questions regarding the transparency of China's regulatory practices and concerns about compliance with WTO rules, the U.S. officials said.

GOOGLE DISRUPTED

The software plan coincides with criticisms of Google by China's Internet watchdog and access disruptions in China to the U.S. company's websites.

The watchdog last week ordered the world's biggest search engine to block overseas websites with "pornographic and vulgar" content from being accessed through its Chinese-language version.

Late on Wednesday evening, Internet users in China were unable to open several Google sites for around an hour, and some reported disruptions throughout Thursday.

A company spokeswoman at Google in the United States said the firm was checking reports of problems with access in China.

The disruption -- coming soon after Google was criticized by China -- "seems beyond mere coincidence," said Mark Natkin, Managing Director of Marbridge Consulting, a Beijing-based company that advises on telecommunications and IT.

Google's problems reflect the difficulties of foreign Internet firms competing in the world's biggest online market while facing controversy over censorship.

Chinese officials have said their Internet moves are driven by worries about exposing children to disturbing online images, but an official newspaper reported on Thursday that a plan to recruit volunteers to scour the Internet for banned content and report to officials also has a political element.

The Legal Daily reported that 10,000 volunteers sought by Beijing would also search for "harmful content" that includes "threats to state security," "subverting state power," and "spreading rumours and disturbing social order."

Natkin, the consultant, said the official pressure was most unlikely to deter Google and other Internet companies from continuing to operate in China.

"Google has to be looking at China as a long-term play," he said. "The allure of the Chinese market, not just for Google and not just for Internet companies, is so compelling, so alluring."

Adventurer targets first round world solar flight

2009-06-27T15:46:00.000+07:00

Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard unveiled Friday the prototype of a solar powered plane he plans to fly around the world to highlight the potential of alternative energy sources.

The prototype, HB-SIA, has the wingspan of a jumbo jet but weighs only as much as an average family car.

The propeller plane is powered by four electric motors and designed to fly day and night by saving surplus energy from its 24,000 solar cells in high-performance batteries.

"Yesterday it was a dream. Today it is a plane. Tomorrow it will be an ambassador of renewable energy," Piccard told a news conference at Duebendorf airfield near Zurich.

"If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled solely by solar energy, let no one come and claim that is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air conditioning systems and computers," Piccard said.

Piccard, who made history in 1999 by flying round the world non-stop in a hot-air balloon, hopes the prototype will make its first test flights later this year before a first complete night flight in 2010 over Switzerland.

Friday's launch came after six years' work by 50 engineers and technicians on the so-called Solar Impulse, which has a number of high profile backers including Deutsche Bank, watchmaker Omega and Swiss chemicals maker Solvay and a budget of 70 million euros ($97.53 million).

The plane combines innovative aerodynamic features, novel light-weight materials strong enough to resist pressures at high altitude and solar technology.

A planned successor, HB-SIB, will likely be even bigger, enabling Piccard and fellow pilot Andre Borschberg to fly around the world along a path similar to the one he took in his Orbiter 3 balloon a decade ago.

HB-SIB will first fly across the Atlantic and the United States and is projected to start in 2012.

The pilots will spend 36-hours in the plane's tiny one-man cockpit and fuselage in initial flights to test its ability to fly overnight.

The round-the-world attempt will be made in five stages, each lasting several days, with Piccard and Borschberg sleeping for 15 minutes every two to four hours and using resting techniques such as auto-hypnosis and meditation to stave off fatigue.

"Through this project we are proclaiming our conviction that a pioneering spirit and political vision can together change society and put an end to fossil fuel dependency," Piccard said.

The adventurer said it was important to find ways for business to make profit from sustainability to encourage investment and the development of alternative energies.

Josef Ackermann, chairman of Deutsche Bank, which manages 3 billion euros in sustainability-related investment products, told Reuters he saw big growth opportunities in renewable energy and ecologically friendly projects.

"To have branding in these projects and be a leading force is very important for us. We see tremendous business potential going forward," Ackermann told Reuters.

Europe to offer China, India help in burying CO2 emissions

2009-06-23T10:48:00.003+07:00

Europe will next week start moves to help China and India develop technology to trap and bury carbon dioxide underground in the fight against global warming, according to a draft European Commission document.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a process of burying harmful gases, is seen by some as a potential silver bullet to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants, which are multiplying rapidly worldwide and threaten to heat the atmosphere to dangerous levels.

The European Union will start a consultation process on how finance and technology should be delivered to China and later India. This could be critical in securing their commitment to a new global deal on climate change at talks in Copenhagen in December.

"China builds, every year, as much coal-fired power plant as the entire UK generating capacity," said a report prepared for consultations with industry and seen by Reuters on Friday.

"Unless a way can be found of making this climate-compatible, we can never meet our climate objectives, regardless of what action we take in Europe," it added.

While the technologies exist, utilities are reluctant to build CCS power stations without public funding because the CCS component adds over $1 billion to the cost of each plant.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

"A project of this size has never been done before," said Eric Drosin, a spokesman for ZEP, a European coalition of industry, scientists and those environmentalists that back CCS.

"Knowledge sharing is crucial to the rapid deployment of CCS in China," he added. "We are willing to share all information except that which is covered by intellectual property rights."

Many environmentalists oppose spending public money on the technology, saying it is untested and utilities already make massive profits while driving the planet towards irreversible climate damage.

"Rather than trying to persuade China to bet on a technology that might not even work...the EU should help China invest in renewables and efficiency and leapfrog the fossil fuel-based energy model of the West," said Greenpeace campaigner Frauke Thies.

The Commission's EU-China Near Zero Emissions Coal (NZEC) proposal will initially tap into about 60 million euros ($84 million) of existing EU development funding, but will also seek support from industry and taxpayers.

"It is likely that the CCS component of the Chinese NZEC demonstration project alone will cost in total around 300 million euros," said the report.

"We will seek to garner financial support from member states for this initiative, which in the first instance will affect China, then India, South Africa, OPEC and other emerging economies and developing countries," it added.

In 2050, almost 60 percent of CO2 emissions from the power sector are projected to be captured, compared to virtually none today and almost 30 percent in 2030, said the report.

"Big Bang" collider set for autumn restart:

2009-06-23T10:37:00.005+07:00

The giant sub-atomic particle collider built to reproduce "Big Bang" conditions is set to restart this autumn, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday.

Scientists believe they have figured out how to prevent a repeat of the problems that caused the 10 billion Swiss franc ($9.2 billion) Large Hadron Collider to be shut down just nine days after it was switched on last September, CERN expert Steve Myers said in a statement.

The machine -- the largest and most complex ever made -- overheated because of a faulty splice in the super-conducting cable connecting two cooling magnets, according to Myers.

There are 10,000 splices around the underground collider's 27-km (17-mile) ring, which smashes particles together at a temperature of just above absolute zero to recreate the conditions believed to have been present at the beginning of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

CERN has put back the start date several times, and most recently said the collider would restart in September.

"Many new tests have been developed," Myers said. "That has given us a wealth of information about the LHC splices, and confidence that we will be in good shape for running this year."

Among the repairs and modifications made to the collider -- which are thought to cost up to $30 million -- are a system to respond to any heating up of its core, several added pressure relief valves, improved vacuum technology, and stronger anchors connecting its magnets to the floor.

"All of this contributes to preparing the machine for a long and safe operational lifetime," CERN said.

Behind the existence of the Universe

2008-10-31T20:33:00.003+06:00

We see clear evidence that the universe we know today began as a super dense, super hot, Singularity.By timing the expansion of universe, we can now say that it came into existence no longer than 20,000 million years ago. In a monumental fire ball that provided raw materials from which galaxies, stars and planets are still formed. We see around us the effect of that violent birth. The galaxies as we know from studying energetic dense quasar like 3c273 are fleeing from us at speed up to 80 percent of the speed of light. Pick up the story from the time just after the beginning when the temperature of the fireball was a million million degrees. At such temperature, particles of matter such as protons and electrons interacted continuously with their subatomic mirror image their antiparticle equivalent and with the high temperature (That is highly energetic) radiation background in a maelstrom of reactions. All the while, as the seconds passed, radiation was being turned into matter, matter into radiation.

But what was there before the big bang? The holly Quran says about it-- Allah from His “Noor” (Original stage, from which all kinds of photons lights, rays etc. were formed) created the raw materials of super dense Singularity Lump. Infinite time ago the vacant space was full of “Noor”, when He wished to create the universe then he ordered that “Noor” to concentrate in one point. Actually that process was that concentration by centripetal gravitational force, thus when the “Lump” was ready then He triggered it probably with a so-called Higg’s Boson particle.And it was the big bang through which the whole universe came into existence.Finally it is possible that beginning can only be explained by the rediscovery of God. And what is the fate of universe? And that the end will be infinite dissipation in an infinite void.

News Desk

2008-10-29T20:35:00.003+06:00

Yahoo and Google race to rebuild sites, lure coders

It’s like watching a race between two glaciers.
Yahoo and Google are undeniably the two biggest powers on the Internet, each with a vast number of features and users. Each is trying to remake itself during a time when faster-moving start-ups show how hard it is for a massive site to transform itself.
But change is indeed in the works, and given the companies’ scale, it’s profound for both companies and for millions of people using the Internet.
On Tuesday, Yahoo in effect released version 1.0 of its Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS), providing public access to programming interfaces that will let developers build applications on top of Yahoo sites and build Yahoo information in to their own. The beleaguered Internet pioneer is betting on strategy to increase the activity of existing Yahoo users and draw new users to the site.
The same day, Google added a new option to its Gmail service that can show a user’s calendar, list the user’s online Google Docs files, and add small Web applications called gadgets. It’s a modest move, but it’s a new indicator that Google is serious about expanding beyond its core search operation into an all-purpose Internet tool.

Motorola to call on Google in cell overhaul

Motorola is expected to place a heavy bet that Android phones with Google’s mobile operating system can turn around its struggling cell phone division.
Sanjay Jha, the company’s co-chief executive and head of mobile devices, is expected to focus on Google’s operating system in an overhaul of the cell phone division that includes additional job cuts and the elimination of four platforms, according to a report Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. Jha is expected to detail his plans as early as Thursday when the company announces its earnings.
Motorola is expected to trim the number of operating systems it uses to three: Android for its midtier devices, as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and its own platform, P2K.
Business Week reported earlier this week that Motorola was prepping a social-networking smartphone based on Android that will debut in the second quarter of next year. Motorola’s Android phone, according to the report, is expected to feature a touchscreen similar to Apple’s popular iPhone, as well as a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that allows people to connect to such social-networking sites as MySpace and Facebook. It is unclear how similar it will be to T-Mobile USA’s newly released G1 phone, manufactured by HTC, which also uses Android.
Motorola tapped Jha in August to be co-chief executive and head of the mobile devices business after announcing earlier that it will separate the mobile devices from the rest of the company. Jha, 45, spent the past 14 years at cell phone chipmaker Qualcomm, where he most recently ran the company’s CDMA division.

Tyrannosaurus rex noses out dinosaur competition

Scientists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, compared the size of their olfactory bulbs—the part of the brain regulating the sense of smell—in a wide range of carnivorous dinosaurs. The researchers performed CT scans and measured fossilized skulls of meat-eating dinosaurs, known as theropods, including huge predators, smaller raptors and ostrich-like dinosaurs. They also looked at the primitive bird Archaeopteryx. Tyrannosaurus, the scourge of North America at the end of the age of dinosaurs, was the undisputed king. Its olfactory capabilities surpassed that of the other huge predators the researchers examined, including South American giant Giganotosaurus and African killer Carcharodontosaurus. ”T. rex had a very good sense of smell,” Francois Therrien of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview. “Probably that’s how they located prey and patrolled a large territory.” The researchers were not the first to describe T. rex’s strong sense of smell, but were the first to rate the beast in comparison to other meat-eating dinosaurs. Other experts have pointed to T. rex’s stellar smeller as evidence that it must have been more of a scavenger than an active hunter. Therrien disagreed. ”It has been suggested that the very good sense of smell of T. rex indicated that it was a scavenger because it would have used its sense of smell to locate putrefying carcasses on the landscape,” said Therrien, whose findings were published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. ”But when we look at modern animals, we see that’s not the case. Scavengers don’t necessarily have a better sense of smell. You have some like the turkey vultures that have a good sense of smell. But you have other scavengers like the Old World vultures that actually have a typical sense of smell because they use sight instead of smell to locate prey.” Vicious little Velociraptor and its raptor relatives also had an excellent sense of smell, the researchers said. But the ostrich-like dinosaurs like speedy Ornithomimus and the toothless Oviraptor apparently had very poor senses of smell. Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird with fossils dating to 150 million years ago, turned out to have a good sense of smell in line with that of the small meat-eating dinosaurs from which paleontologists believe birds evolved, they said.

PC Tips

2008-10-28T13:43:00.003+06:00

By editing registry increase your download connection

Click on Start Menu
Click on Run
Write Regedit & press Enter
Then Browse HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
Current version\Internet settings
Modify/Create the value Data Type(s) and Data Name(s) as detailed below
Data Type: REG_DWORD
[Dword value] //Value Name:MaxConnectionPer1_0Server
Settings for the value data :[0000000a]
Modify/Create the value Data Type(s) and Data Name(s) as detailed below
Data Type: REG_DWORD
[Dword value] //Value Name:MaxConnectionPerServer
Settings for the value data :[0000000a]
Click on exit button
Restart your PC

Enable/Disable Recycle Bin

Click on Start Menu
Click on Run
Write Regedit & press Enter
Then Browse HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
Current version\Explorer\Bit Bucker
Modify/Create the value Data Type(s) and Data Name(s) as detailed below
Data type:DWROD
Value Name:NukeOnDelete
Settings for the value data:[0=Use Recycle Bin/ 1=Permanently Delete]
Click on exit button
Restart your PC

Camera Zone

2008-10-28T13:29:00.002+06:00

Nikon—D700

Key Feature:

·Nikon's original 12.1-megapixel FX-format (23.9 x 36mm) CMOS sensor
·Broad ISO sensitivity up to 6400 and incredibly low noise
·Continuous shooting up to 5 frames per second
·Three-Inch, super-density 920,000-dot VGA color monitor
·Fast, accurate 51-point AF with 3D Focus Tracking
·Active D-Lighting with NEW Auto mode

Kodak-V1273
Key Feature:

·3 in. (7.6 cm) touch screen LCD
·Smart capture mode
·HD pictures and videos and optional KODAK EASYSHARE HDTV Dock
·12.0 MP for prints up to 30 × 40 in. (76 × 102 cm)
·Optical image stabilization
·Multimedia slide show
·Face detection technology

Olympus—E-520

Key Feature:

·Larger, 2.7" LCD display (versus 2.5")
·Contrast detect autofocus (with select lenses) and face detection with live view
·Faster continuous shooting speeds (3.5 vs 3.0 fps)
·New vertical and horizontal panning IS modes
·Shadow Adjustment Technology brightens dark areas of your photos
·Perfect Shot Preview lets you see the effects of exposure compensation and white balance settings on your subject before you take a photo
·Built-in wireless flash control

Laptop Zone

2008-10-27T12:40:00.001+06:00

DELL--Studio 17

Intel® Pentium® Dual Core T2390 (1.86GHz/533Mhz FSB/1MB cache)

Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition SP1

Glossy widescreen 17.0 inch display (1440x900)

8X Slot Load CD / DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive)

160GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)

Fujitsu--LifeBook® A1110 Notebook

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor

Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium with Service Pack 1

Crystal View WXGA display

Bluetooth communication, webcam, and faster 802.11 AGN wireless on select configurations

ASUS-LAMBORGHINI VX3

Processor :Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9300 : 2.6 GHz - 2.1 GHz, 6/3MB On-Die L2 Cache;

Operating System:Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate,

Chipset: Mobile Intel® PM965 Express Chipset +ICH8M

Hard Drive:2.5" 9.5mm SATA ,320GB,5400rpm

Mobile Corner

2008-10-27T11:54:00.000+06:00

LG--KC910
8MP Camera
100Mb Internal memory
8 Mb MicroSD (included)
WAP2.0, HTML4.0

Sony Ericsson-C905c
Screen
240x320 pixel
262,144 color TFT QVGA
Memory
- Memory Stick Micro™ (M2™) support (2GB M2 in box)
- Phone memory 160MB
Sizes
- 104.0 x 49.0 x 18.0 mm
- 4.1 x 1.9 x 0.7 inches

Samsung-G810
5 Megapixel camera with 3X optical zoom
face detection
wide dynamic range

From Album

2008-10-26T09:09:00.000+06:00

Early life and biography

Louis Jean Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in Dole in the Jura region of France and grew up in the town of Arbois. There he later had his house and laboratory, which is a Pasteur museum today. His father, Jean Pasteur, was a poorly educated tanner and a veteran of the Napoleonic wars. Louis's aptitude was recognized by his college headmaster, who recommended that the young man apply for the Ecole Normale superieure, which accepted him. After serving briefly as professor of physics at Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at Strasbourg University, where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector in 1849. They were married on May 29, 1849 and together they had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. Throughout his whole life, Louis Pasteur remained an ardent Catholic. A well-known quotation illustrating this is attributed to him: "The more I know, the more nearly is my faith that of the Breton peasant. Could I but know all I would have the faith of a Breton peasant's wife.

Work on chirality and the polarization of light

In Pasteur's early works as a chemist, he resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid (1849). A solution of this compound derived from living things (specifically, wine lees) rotated the plane of polarization of light passing through it. The mystery was that tartaric acid derived by chemical synthesis had no such effect, even though its chemical reactions were identical and its elemental composition was the same.

Upon examination of the minuscule crystals of Sodium ammonium tartrate, Pasteur noticed that the crystals came in two asymmetric forms that were mirror images of one another. Tediously sorting the crystals by hand gave two forms of the compound: solutions of one form rotated polarized light clockwise, while the other form rotated light counterclockwise. An equal mix of the two had no polarizing effect on light. Pasteur correctly deduced the molecule in question was asymmetric and could exist in two different forms that resemble one another as would left- and right-hand gloves, and that the biological source of the compound provided purely the one type.This was the first time anyone had demonstrated chiral molecules.

Pasteur's doctoral thesis on crystallography attracted the attention of M. Puillet and he helped Pasteur garner a position of professor of chemistry at the Faculté (College) of Strasbourg.

In 1854, he was named Dean of the new Faculty of Sciences in Lille. In 1856, he was made administrator and director of scientific studies of the École Normale Supérieure.

Germ theory

Louis demonstrated that the fermentation process is caused by the growth of microorganisms, and that the growth of microorganisms in nutrient broths is not due to spontaneous generation but rather to biogenesis (Omne vivum ex ovo).

He exposed boiled broths to air in vessels that contained a filter to prevent all particles from passing through to the growth medium, and even in vessels with no filter at all, with air being admitted via a long tortuous tube that would not allow dust particles to pass. Nothing grew in the broths; therefore, the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, as spores on dust, rather than spontaneously generated within the broth. This was one of the last and most important experiments disproving the theory of spontaneous generation. The experiment also supported germ theory.

While Pasteur was not the first to propose germ theory (Girolamo Fracastoro, Agostino Bassi, Friedrich Henle and others had suggested it earlier), he developed it and conducted experiments that clearly indicated its correctness and managed to convince most of Europe it was true. Today he is often regarded as the father of germ theory and bacteriology, together with Robert Koch.

Pasteur's research also showed that some microorganisms contaminated fermenting beverages. With this established, he invented a process in which liquids such as milk were heated to kill most bacteria and molds already present within them.He and Claude Bernard completed the first test on April 20, 1862. This process was soon afterwards known as pasteurisation (or "pasteurization" in America).

Beverage contamination led Pasteur to conclude that microorganisms infected animals and humans as well. He proposed preventing the entry of microorganisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery.

In 1865, two parasitic diseases called Pébrine and flacherie were killing great numbers of silkworms at Alais (now Alès). Pasteur worked several years proving it was a microbe attacking silkworm eggs which caused the disease, and that eliminating this microbe within silkworm nurseries would eradicate the disease.

Pasteur also discovered anaerobiosis, whereby some microorganisms can develop and live without air or oxygen, called the Pasteur effect.

News desk

2008-10-25T16:14:00.000+06:00

Amazon floats new cloud service

Amazon Web Services has officially released its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted computing service.
The company said today that the service would no longer be considered a beta product and would be supported by a service level agreement. The SLA will serve as a commitment from Amazon to keep the service up at rate of at least 99.95 per cent or allow customers to claim a refund on purchased service credits for the system.
EC2 allows businesses to run traditional server deployments on a hosted ‘cloud’ system. Customers pay for the service on a sliding scale according to the amount of server resources used.
In addition to the SLA, the company has unveiled the first public beta of the EC2 Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server services. Both offerings allow users to run deployments of the Microsoft server systems within the EC2 cloud computing platform.

Scientists build world’s smallest storage devic

Scientists are claiming a major breakthrough in quantum computing after managing to store information inside the nucleus of an atom.
The team from Princeton University, Oxford University and the U.S. Department of Energy used both the electron and nucleus of a phosphorous atom embedded in a silicon crystal. Both the electron and nucleus behaved as tiny quantum magnets capable of storing quantum information.
“The electron acts as a middle-man between the nucleus and the outside world, “ said John Morton, a research fellow at Oxford’s St. John’s College.
“It gives us a way to have our cake and eat it—fast processing speeds from the electron, and long memory times from the nucleus.”
While memory has been stored in a nucleus for just one tenth of a second the team managed to keep the information accessible for nearly two seconds. Researchers studying quantum computing recently calculated that if a quantum system could store information for at least one second, error correction techniques could then protect that data for an indefinite period of time

Google adds offline support to mobile Gmail

Google has introduced a new version of its Gmail client for mobile phones, making the application more responsive and providing offline support in case the user moves out of mobile coverage.
Gmail for Mobile 2.0 (available at m.google.com/mail) runs on handsets supporting Java J2ME, which includes BlackBerry devices, giving mobile access to Gmail accounts for users with a wider variety of handsets.
Google said in its mobile blog that it has improved performance by pushing all processing into the background, improving caching and addressing bottlenecks in the client code.
Basic offline support means that users can now compose and read their most recent emails even when they cannot get a mobile network signal.
Any outgoing messages are saved in the Gmail outbox on the phone and delivered when a connection is re-established, according to Google.

Camera Zone

2008-10-24T16:43:00.000+06:00

Canon Powershot SD990 IS

14.7 megapixels; 3.7x optical zoom / 4x digital zoom; Lens-shift image stabilization; JPEG file format; ISO 80-1600; Auto and manual exposure; Secure digital memory storage; 3-inch LCD display; Lithium-ion battery.

Panasonic Lumix FX150

14.7 megapixels; 4x optical zoom, 28mm ultra wide-angle lens; 720p high-definition movie mode; Lens-shift MEGA O.I.S. image stabilizaion; 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 aspect ratios; ISO 100 - 1600 (6400 high sensitivity mode); 2.7-inch LCD display; Lithium-ion battery; Secure Digital memory card storage (50MB internal).

Canon Powershot G10

14.7 megapixels; 5x

optical zoom / 4x digital zoom; Lens-shift image stabilization; Auto and manual exposure; JPEG and RAW file formats; 28-140mm wide angle lens; ISO 80-1600; Lithium-ion battery; Secure digital memory storage; 3-inch LCD display.

News desk

2008-10-23T21:41:00.000+06:00

India launches lunar satellite

India has successfully launched a lunar satellite which will conduct a two-year mission to map the Moon.

The Chandrayaan-I lifted off from the Indian spaceport in Sriharikota on a domestically produced PSLV-C11 rocket. Once in orbit it will orient itself and begin the sustained burn needed to get into lunar orbit.

"Chandrayaan-1 is India's first spacecraft mission beyond Earth's orbit. It aims to further expand our knowledge about the Moon," said the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

"With well-defined objectives, Chandrayaan-1 intends to put an unmanned spacecraft into an orbit around the Moon and to perform remote sensing of our nearest celestial neighbour for about two years using 11 scientific instruments built in India and five other countries."

India is joining the Asian space race, as the satellite will join those of China and Japan orbiting the Moon. The country has said it wants to put men on the Moon in the next decade.

Part of the Indian mission will include attempts to locate deposits of Helium 3, which is being touted as the fuel for a new generation of fusion reactors.

Comcast runs out 50Mbps service in US

Comcast is rolling out its next-generation internet services, promising speeds of up to 50Mbit/s today and up to 160Mbit/s in the future.

The new services will initially be available in parts of New England, including the Boston Metropolitan region and Southern New Hampshire, as well as areas of Philadelphia and New Jersey.

Comcast aims to have connections available in 10 major markets in the next few months.

"Wideband is a game-changer for the industry. With wideband running over our next-generation fibre-optic network, we can greatly enhance our customers' online experience immediately," said Mitch Bowling, general manager of Comcast Online Services.

"And these speeds are only a preview of what's to come; wideband will provide the capability of delivering dramatically faster speeds in excess of 160Mbit/s in the future."

BlackBerry Bold set for US release

Research in Motion is planning to debut the new BlackBerry Bold handset in the US on 4 November.

AT &T will be the first carrier to offer the handset, which will cost $299. The two companies had originally planned a summer release, but had faced delays reportedly due to problems the phone was experiencing with AT&T's 3G network.

The BlackBerry Bold has been available in the UK since August through Orange and since September through T-Mobile.

Laptop Zone

2008-10-22T19:47:00.000+06:00

Inspiron Mini 9

Introducing your new best friend. Complete with connectivity features, you have the freedom to live without ever losing touch.

* Connect with advanced wireless options

* Light and compact for an on-the-go lifestyle

* Dynamic & Customizable user interface

* 4 hours battery life & just 2.28 lbs

FUJITSU

LifeBook® S6520 Notebook

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor

Genuine Windows Vista® Business

Crystal View WXGA display

4.1 pounds

LifeBook® S7211 Notebook
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor
Genuine Windows Vista® Business
Crystal View WXGA display
5.2 pound

Mobile Corner

2008-10-21T09:56:00.000+06:00

Sony Ericsson—G705

Screen

1.320x240 pixels

2. 262.144 color TFT

Memory

1. Memory Stick Micro™ (M2™) support

2. Phone memory 120MB

Sony Ericsson—W902 walkman

Screen

- 240x320 pixel
- 262.144 color TFT

Memory

- Phone memory 25MB
- Memory Stick Micro™ (M2™) support (up to 8 GB)

LG –KS360

1. Type- QWERTY slider

2.Internal memory- 1Gb NAND Flash/ 512Mb SDRAM

3. External LCD dimension-- 240 x 320, 2.4 inch

4. 2 Mega pixel camera

From Album

2008-10-21T09:28:00.000+06:00

Albert Einstein
March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955
Physicist and Mathematician
Nobel Laureate for Physics 1921

"There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is."
- Albert Einstein –

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely considered one of the greatest physicists of all time.
While best known for the theory of relativity (and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2), he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1905 (Annus Mirabilis) explanation of the photoelectric effect and "for his services to Theoretical Physics". In popular culture, the name "Einstein" has become synonymous with great intelligence and genius. Einstein was named Time magazine's "Man of the Century."

Einstein's brain found to be anatomically distinct

We always thought something must have made Albert Einstein smarter than the rest of us. Now, scientists have found that one part of his brain was indeed physically extraordinary.
In the only study ever conducted of the overall anatomy of Einstein's brain, scientists at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, discovered that the part of the brain thought to be related to mathematical reasoning - the inferior parietal region - was 15 percent wider on both sides than normal.
Furthermore, they found that the groove that normally runs from the front of the brain to the back did not extend all the way in Einstein's case. That finding could have applications even to those with more pedestrian levels of intelligence.
"That kind of shape was not observed in any one of our brains and is not depicted in any atlas of the human brain," said Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist who led the study, published in this week's issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal.
"But it shouldn't be seen as anatomy is destiny," she added. "We also know that environment has a very important role to play in learning and brain development. But what this is telling us is that environment isn't the only factor."
The findings may point to the importance of the inferior parietal region, Witelson said.

News Desk

2008-10-21T09:10:00.000+06:00

Will Motorola Take Android Down Social Path?

Motorola is reportedly working to create its first Android-based smartphone. The first phone based on Google's open mobile operating system -- T-Mobile's G1 -- will show up Oct. 22, and Motorola will apparently be joining the party at an undisclosed later date. Still, a fashionably late entrance could be just fine

Alcatel-Lucent speeds up laptop security

Networking giant Alcatel-Lucent has revamped its OmniAccess 3500 Nonstop Laptop Guardian (NLG) adding HSPA support to the laptop management device.The NLG is a PCMCIA card with an embedded Linux operating system. It slots into a notebook and provides a range of features to help IT departments remotely secure, monitor, manage and locate mobile computers over 3G and protect the data if the device is lost or stolen.

Previously the NLG was available only on CDMA-based 3G networks, but it is now compatible with next-generation high-speed 3G GSM/HSPA networks, thereby expanding its coverage and capabilities.

In a recent study by Alcatel-Lucent, 76 per cent of respondents in the US and Germany said that it is necessary to protect a lost or stolen laptop with more than encryption, including the ability to locate the device using GPS and remotely revoke access to data.

Recomind launches new e-discovery tools

Enterprise search and legal discovery firm Recommind has launched a new electronic discovery product designed to offer highly regulated firms an effective means to locate relevant data and carry out an early risk assessment.

Recommind Insite Legal Hold features the firm's concept search technology that works alongside traditional keyword search to find only the relevant data and reduce instances of false negatives, according to the firm's vice president of marketing, Craig Carpenter.

The product will also allow practitioners to review and assess data before it is collected and processed. Built-in processing functionality, meanwhile, could save firms up to 80 per cent on the usual processing and renewing costs, claimed Carpenter.

PC tips

2008-10-19T12:55:00.000+06:00

Write your own name on title bar of Internet Explorer

Click on Start Menu

Click on Run

Write Regedit & press Enter

Then Browse HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer \main\

Modify\Create the value name [Window Title] according to the Value Data listed bellow.

Data Type: REG_SZ [string Value] //

Value name: Window Title

Value Data:[write your name]

Click Exit button

Restart your PC

Enable/Disable Automatic Update message of Media Player

Click on Start Menu

Click on Run

Write Regedit & press Enter

Then Browse HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ Microsoft \Media Player\Player upgrade Modify \Create the value name[AskMeAgain]according to the value data listed below

Data Type: REG_SZ [string Value] //

Value name: AskMeAgain

Value Data: [No=Disabled /Yes=Enabled]

Click Exit button

Restart your PC

Accelerate Your Start Menu By Registry Edit

Click on Start Menu

Click on Run

Write Regedit & press Enter

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop Modify\

Create the data value type(s) and value Name(s) as detail below.

Data Type: String Value//Value

Name : MenuShowDelay

Setting for Value Data: [Default=400/Adjust to Preference]

Click Exit button

Restart your PC

Big Question----Who is the creator of the Universe ?

2008-10-18T21:41:00.000+06:00

Watch the video and imagine who is the creator of the universe--Allah/God , Self created or Any one else?

News desk

2008-10-18T16:48:00.000+06:00

iGoogle Limbers Up With New Flexibility Features

Google has rolled out a new, bigger viewing feature to its iGoogle custom home page builder app. iGoogle basically lets users select and move little gadgets -- which are miniature, modular applications that provide news feeds, comics, Gmail access, games, weather, movie listings, etc. -- anywhere they want on their iGoogle home pages. The new feature is called "canvas view," and users to take an application from a simple list or snippet to an entire page.

Bro adcaster s Air White Space Grievances

The Federal Communications Commission continues to receive plenty of static from both sides of the television white space debate. Last month it was Google cofounder Larry Page raising allegations of rigged FCC testing of white spaces prototype devices. Now, the National Association of Broadcasters is upset that FCC chairman Kevin Martin threw his support behind such devices.

Scooping the Competition in the Digital Age

One of the books that had a big impact on me during my larval stage as a journalist was Dan Rather's "The Camera Never Blinks." The memoir was of Rather's experiences as a truly trailblazing and courageous TV reporter, not Rather the lightning-rod anchor with the southern-fried election night phraseology.

Mobile Corner

2008-10-18T06:35:00.000+06:00

N-96
Technical Specifications
16GB internal flash memory, microSD memory card slot (hot swappable) for expandability and flexibility
Up to 5 megapixel (2592 x 1944 pixels)
Focus range 10 cm to infinity
Dual-LED camera flash, video light, recording indicator, auto-focus assist light
Secondary camera :VGA (640 x 480 pixels) sensor
Video capture in MPEG-4 up to VGA at 30 fps
Digital Video Stabilization

SAMSUNG G810
Key Features
5 Megapixel Camera
Advanced Camera Technology
GPS Navigation
S60 Open OS
Enhanced Camera Usability

MOTOROKR™ U9 - Unlocked (Purple)
Price: $275.99
Availability: In Stock
Touch sensitive music keys

From Album

2008-10-17T09:49:00.000+06:00

Archimedes

Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287 BC - c. 212 BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer. Although little is known about his life, he is regarded as one of the most important scientists in classical antiquity. In addition to making important discoveries in the field of mathematics and geometry, he is credited with producing machines that were well ahead of their time.

The Ancient Roman historians showed a strong interest in Archimedes and wrote several biographies relating to his life and works, while the few copies of his treatises that survived through the Middle Ages were a major influence on scientists during the Renaissance.

Archimedes produced the first known summation of an infinite series with a method that is still used in the area of calculus today.

Archimedes was a famous mathematician whose theorems and philosophies became world known. He gained a reputation in his own time which few other mathematicians of this period achieved. He is considered by most historians of mathematics as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

Biography

Archimedes was born c. 287 BC in the seaport city of Syracuse, Sicily, which was then a colony of Magna Graecia. The date of his birth is based on an assertion by the Byzantine Greek historian John Tzetzes that he lived for seventy-five years. In The Sand Reckoner Archimedes gives his father's name as Phidias, an astronomer about whom nothing is known. Plutarch wrote that Archimedes was related to King Hieron II, the ruler of Syracuse. A biography of Archimedes was written by his friend Heracleides but this work has been lost, leaving the details of his life obscure. It is unknown, for instance, whether he ever married or had children. Archimedes is believed to have spent part of his youth being educated in Alexandria, Egypt where he was a contemporary of Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes. Some of Archimedes' mathematical works were written in the form of letters to Eratosthenes, who was the chief librarian in Alexandria.

Archimedes died c. 212 BC during the Second Punic War, when Roman forces under General Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured the city of Syracuse after a two year long siege. According to the popular account given by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives , Archimedes was contemplating a mathematical diagram when the city was captured. A Roman soldier commanded him to come and meet General Marcellus but he declined, saying that he had to finish working on the problem. The soldier was enraged by this, and killed Archimedes with his sword. Plutarch also gives a lesser-known account of the death of Archimedes which suggests that he may have been killed while attempting to surrender to a Roman soldier. According to this story, Archimedes was carrying mathematical instruments, and was killed because the soldier thought that they were valuable items. General Marcellus was reportedly angered by the death of Archimedes, as he had ordered him not to be harmed.

The last words attributed to Archimedes are "Do not disturb my circles". This quote is often given in Latin as "Noli turbare circulos meos", but there is no reliable evidence that Archimedes uttered these words, and they do not appear in the account given by Plutarch.

Archimedes' tomb had a carving of his favorite mathematical diagram, which was a sphere inside a cylinder of the same height and diameter. Archimedes had proved that the volume and surface area of the sphere would be two thirds that of the cylinder. In 75 BC, 137 years after his death, the Roman orator Cicero visited the tomb in Syracuse which had become overgrown with scrub. Cicero had the tomb cleaned up, and was able to see the carving and read some of the verses that had been added as an inscription.

The account of the siege of Syracuse given by Polybius in his Universal History was written some seventy years after the death of Archimedes, and was used as a source by Plutarch and Livy. It sheds little light on Archimedes as a person, and focuses on the war machines that he is said to have built in order to defend the city.

Discoveries and Inventions

Most of the facts about his life come from a biography about the Roman soldier Marcellus written by the Roman biographer Plutarch. According to Plutarch, Archimedes had so low an opinion of the kind of practical invention at which he excelled and to which he owed his contemporary fame that he left no written work on such subjects. While it is true that--apart from a dubious reference to a treatise, On Sphere-Making - all of his known works were of a theoretical character, nevertheless his interest in mechanics deeply influenced his mathematical thinking. Not only did he write works on theoretical mechanics and hydrostatics, but his treatise Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems shows that he used mechanical reasoning as a heuristic device for the discovery of new mathematical theorems.

He was best known for his discovery of the relation between the surface and volume of a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder, for hisformulation of a hydrostatic principle Archimedes' principle and for inventing the Archimedes screw (a device for raising water).

Archimedes Principal states: an object immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force that is equal in magnitude to the force of gravity on the displaced fluid.

He also invented things such as the hydraulic screw - for raising water from a lower to a higher level, catapult, the lever, the compound pulley and the burning mirror.

In mechanics Archimedes discovered fundamental theorems concerning the center of gravity of plane figures and solids.

Archimedes probably spent some time in Egypt early in his career, but he resided for most of his life in Syracuse, the principal city-state in Sicily, where he was on intimate terms with its king, Hieron II. Archimedes published his works in the form of correspondence with the principal mathematicians of his time, including the Alexandrian scholars Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene.

He played an important role in the defense of Syracuse against the siege laid by the Romans in 213 BC by constructing war machines so effective that they long delayed the capture of the city. But Syracuse was eventually captured by the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus in the autumn of 212 or spring of 211 BC, and Archimedes was killed in the sack of the city.

Archimedes Screw

Archimedes Screw, or Archimedean screw, or screwpump, is a machine historically used for transferring water from a low-lying body of water into irrigation ditches. It is one of several inventions and discoveries reputed to have been made by Archimedes, but as some researchers suggest, some form of this mechanism may have been used earlier by Sennacherib, King of Assyria, in the 7th century BC.

Modern screw pumps, consisting of helices rotating in open inclined troughs, are effective for pumping sewage in wastewater treatment plants. The open troughs and the design of the screws permit the passage of debris without clogging.

The Burning Mirror (Glass)

Archimedes invented many machines which were used as engines of war. These were particularly effective in the defense of Syracuse when it was attacked by the Romans under the command of Marcellus.

During the Roman siege of Syracuse, he is said to have single-handedly defended the city by constructing lenses to focus the Sun's light on Roman ships and huge cranes to turn them upside down. When the Romans finally broke the siege, Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier after snapping at him, "Don't disturb my circles,'' a reference to a geometric figure he had outlined on the sand.

While Archimedes did not invent the lever, he gave the first rigorous explanation of the principles involved, which are the transmission of force through a fulcrum and moving the effort applied through a greater distance than the object to be moved.

His Law of the Lever states: Magnitudes are in equilibrium at distances reciprocally proportional to their weights. According to Pappus of Alexandria, his work on levers caused him to remark, "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth." Plutarch describes how Archimedes designed block and tackle pulley systems, allowing sailors to use the principle of leverage to lift objects that would otherwise have been too heavy to move.

A large part of Archimedes' work in engineering arose from fulfilling the needs of his home city of Syracuse. The Greek writer Athenaeus of Naucratis describes how King Hieron II commissioned Archimedes to design a huge ship, the Syracusia, which could be used for luxury travel, carrying supplies, and as a naval warship. The Syracusia is said to have been the largest ship built in classical antiquity. According to Athenaeus, it was capable of carrying 600 people and contained garden decorations, a gymnasium and a temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite. Since a ship of this size would leak a considerable amount of water through the hull, the Archimedes' Screw was said to have been developed in order to remove the bilge water.

Archimedes had stated in a letter to King Hieron that given the force, any given weight might be moved, and even boasted, we are told, relying on the strength of demonstration, that if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this. Hiero being struck with amazement at this, and entreating him to make good this problem by actual experiment, and show some great weight moved by a small engine, he fixed accordingly upon a ship of burden out of the king's arsenal, which could not be drawn out of the dock without great labor and many men; and, loading her with many passengers and a full freight, sitting himself the while far off, with no great endeavor, but only holding the head of the pulley in his hand and drawing the cords by degrees, he drew the ship in a straight line, as smoothly and evenly as if she had been in the sea.

Mathematics

Although he is often regarded as a designer of mechanical devices, Archimedes also made important contributions to the field of mathematics. Plutarch wrote: "He placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life."

Some of his mathematical proofs involve the use of infinitesimals in a way that is similar to modern integral calculus. By assuming a proposition to be true and showing that this would lead to a contradiction, Archimedes was able to give answers to problems to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, while specifying the limits within which the answer lay.

This technique is known as the method of exhaustion, and he employed it to approximate the value of (Pi). He did this by drawing a larger polygon outside a circle, and a smaller polygon inside the circle. As the number of sides of the polygon increases, it becomes a more accurate approximation of a circle. When the polygons had 96 sides each, he calculated the lengths of their sides and showed that the value of ¼ lay between 3 + 1/7 (approximately 3.1429) and 3 + 10/71 (approximately 3.1408).

This was a remarkable achievement, since the ancient Greek number system was awkward and used letters rather than the positional notation system used today. He also proved that the area of a circle was equal to Pi multiplied by the square of the radius of the circle.

He used the method of exhaustion to show that the value of the square root of 3 lay between 265/153 (approximately 1.732) and 1351/780 (approximately 1.7320512). The modern value is around 1.7320508076, making this a very accurate estimate.

Another noted mathematical work by Archimedes is The Sand Reckoner. In this work he set out to calculate the number of grains of sand that the universe could contain. In doing so, he challenged the notion that the number of grains of sand was too large to be counted. He wrote: "There are some, King Gelon (Gelon II, son of Hieron II), who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude; and I mean by the sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily but also that which is found in every region whether inhabited or uninhabited." To solve the problem, Archimedes devised a system of counting based around the myriad. This was a word used to mean infinity, based on the Greek word for uncountable, murious. The word myriad was also used to denote the number 10,000. He proposed a number system using powers of myriad myriads.

Legends About Archimedes

Legend has it that Archimedes discovered his famous theory of buoyancy (Archimedes Principle) while taking a bath. He was so excited that he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka, eureka (I have found it)!".

Another legend describes how Archimedes uncovered a fraud against King Hieron II of Syracuse using his principle of buoyancy. The king suspected that a solid gold crown he ordered was partly made of silver. Archimedes first took two equal weights of gold and silver and compared their weights when immersed in water. Next he compared the weights of the crown and a pure silver crown of identical dimensions when each was immersed in water. The difference between these two comparisons revealed that the crown was not solid gold.

Long-term study confirms Vioxx heart risks

2008-10-14T22:33:00.000+06:00

A long-term analysis of people who took the arthritis drug Vioxx confirms it doubles the risk of strokes and heart attacks, researchers said on Monday, but this risk goes away a year after people stop taking it. And other drugs in the same class of painkillers known as Cox-2 inhibitors may cause similar harm, they said. "The good news is the data suggests that the risk doesn't persist forever. The risk goes back toward normal after a year of follow up," said Dr. Robert Bresalier of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, whose study appears in the journal Lancet. Safety data from this same study in 2004 set off alarms that Vioxx increased the risks of heart attacks and stroke, prompting drug maker Merck & Co Inc to withdraw the popular painkiller from the market. Merck last year inked a $4.85 billion deal to settle thousands of claims for heart attacks, strokes and deaths allegedly caused by the drug. The original study, funded by Merck, was meant to determine whether Vioxx could prevent polyps that raise the risk of colon cancer. A 2005 analysis by Bresalier and colleagues published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that it took 18 months for the drug to increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, a time frame that played a prominent role in Merck's legal defense of Vioxx. The journal later posted a correction on its Web site, saying the difference was not statistically significant. The new analysis, done with independent statisticians, suggests the risk occurs early and persists, Bresalier said. "This data shows you can't precisely determine the timing of the risk. It does appear to start relatively early," he said in a telephone interview. The study, dubbed Approve, looked at the effects of three years of treatment with Vioxx, or rofecoxib, in 2,587 patients. Patients were checked for side effects while on the drug and two weeks after they stopped. It includes one-year follow-up data on patients who stopped taking the drug because of heart side effects. "In essence, the relative risk remained about the same," Bresalier said.
People who took Vioxx in the study had about the double the risk of having a heart attack or stroke than those who took a dummy pill, he said. Merck said that overall findings were consistent with the original study, but noted not all patients were able to be followed after they stopped taking the drug and the analysis was not able to take into account other heart risks. The company said in a statement it believes that the research "using limited data from a prematurely terminated study needs to be interpreted very cautiously and in the context of the rest of the data from the extensive clinical development program for Vioxx." Bresalier said a number of studies since the initial safety warning on Vioxx suggest other Cox-2 inhibitors, including Pfizer Inc's Celebrex, or celecoxib, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) such as ibuprofen, also carry a higher risk of heart trouble. "I think the preponderance of data now does suggest this is a class effect," he said. Cox-2 drugs were designed to be safer replacements for NSAIDS, including aspirin and naproxen, which can cause deadly gastrointestinal bleeding.
"There seems to be an increased risk for most if not all non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. That doesn't mean these aren't good drugs. It's just there is some increased risk we need to be aware of," he said. Vioxx had generated sales of $2.5 billion a year before the arthritis and chronic pain pill was withdrawn from U.S. drugstores almost four years ago. Pfizer's Celebrex has remained on the market.

Samsung re-enters US laptop market

2008-10-14T22:32:00.001+06:00

Diversified electronics maker Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said it is re-entering the U.S. computer market with a range of branded products that build on its component supply strengths.The Korean-based company will introduce on Tuesday new ultralight notebooks designed to appeal to potential buyers of Apple Inc's ground-breaking MacBook Air and smaller "netbook" models from the likes of Asustek Computer.
Breaking into the crowded U.S. market involves taking share from more established players. The Korean electronics maker sees other Asian brand-name players as vulnerable, especially Toshiba Corp, Sony Corp and Lenovo.
Samsung is also coming out with models aimed at business professionals and the market for bulkier laptops known as "desktop replacements," a Samsung executive said.
Like Apple's Air, Samsung's X-Series premium lightweight notebooks come with options for either a hard drive or solid state memory. But Samsung's X360 is priced at $2,499 and carries 128 gigabytes of flash memory, twice the 64 gigabytes that comes with the Apple Air selling for $2,598. "These products really go after Apple and Sony. This is the MacBook Air killer," Bret Berg, the senior product manager for Samsung's U.S. computer division, said in an interview. The X360 weighs 2.8 pounds and has an ultra-thin, tapered wedge design with a magnesium allow chassis, an aluminum top and a "pebble"-style keyboard. Samsung's hard-drive version, the X460, starts at $1,899 for a 160-gigabyte hard drive, twice the capacity of Apple's existing MacBook Air model that is priced at $1,799 for an 80-gigabyte drive. The X460 weighs just under 4.2 pounds.
Its premium netbook, the NC10, in white or metallic-blue colored cases, starts at $499 with a 10.2-inch display and 160 gigabyte hard drive. Netbooks are a smaller class of PCs that are lower priced than notebooks and can sell for $300 or less. Samsung is positioning its product between lower cost EEE PCs from Asustek and the smallest full-scale notebooks. Samsung's model bears a resemblance to an 11-inch notebook Sony sold earlier this decade that was popular with mobile business professionals but cost upward of $2,000 at that time. One cost advantage is that many of the components inside Samsung machines are made by its semiconductor and other finished product businesses. This includes Samsung's SuperBrite light-emitting diode, backlit liquid crystal displays.
It estimates that 80 percent of the value of its PCs are from Samsung components -- everything but the microprocessor and graphics chips. As the world's biggest maker of memory chips, storage is Samsung's biggest weapon. The reentry into the U.S. highly competitive computer market will also be aided by Samsung's strong established ties with business resellers, distributors and consumer retailers through sales of everything from TVs to monitors to phones. In the first quarter of 2009, Samsung plans to rev up its sales distribution strategy, including corporate distributors such as CDW or Newegg and consumer retailers such as Best Buy, and regional U.S. store chains Fry's Electronics or The Wiz. Samsung's announcement, which has been in the works for more than a month, coincides with Apple's announcement later on Tuesday of upgraded notebook models. Analysts predict Apple may introduce a new line of notebooks for under $1,000.

Russian and US astronauts unite in orbit

2008-10-14T22:29:00.000+06:00

Russian cosmonaut and a US astronaut met in space on Tuesday when spaceman Sergei Volkov welcomed American Richard Garriott on board the International Space Station. Garriott, a computer game developer who paid $35 million for his trip to space, arrived with two crewmates on board a Soyuz capsule, which docked with the space station two days after blasting off from a launch-pad in Kazakhstan. After the hatches were opened between the capsule and the station at 0955 GMT, Volkov -- whose cosmonaut father was orbiting the earth when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 -- welcomed Garriott with a hug. NASA said they are first children of previous space adventurers to meet in orbit. Russian television showed Garriott smiling after taking congratulations from friends and family, including his astronaut father Owen, who joked with Alexander Volkov at mission control in Moscow. Space tourist Garriott, US astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe on Sunday. Fincke will serve as commander of the six-month Expedition 18 mission which will focus on preparing the station to house six crew members on longer-duration missions. Russian space officials brushed aside reports of problems with a toilet at the station, saying all problems had now been resolved and that there were several reserve systems. After 10 days in space Garriott will return to Earth with the ISS's outgoing crew aboard a Soyuz re-entry vehicle, a three-person capsule which has malfunctioned on its last two flights. In April, a Soyuz capsule landed 420 km (260 miles) off course after explosive bolts failed to detonate before re-entry, sending the craft into a steep descent. Last year, a Soyuz capsule carrying Malaysia's first astronaut also made a so-called "ballistic" landing, similarly blamed on faulty bolts. Russian space officials said they had done everything possible to avoid a so-called ballistic entry when Garriott returns to earth. "We can say with confidence that we have done everything that could possibly be done," Vitaly Davydov, deputy head of Russian Space Agency ROSKOSMOS, was quoted as saying by Itar-Tass news agency.
Born in Cambridge, England, and raised in Texas, Garriott says he dreamed about flying to space since childhood. He made his fortune by creating fantasy computer games such as Ultima.

Nobel prize for physics, medicine, chemistry for this year(2008)

2008-10-14T22:24:00.000+06:00

Physics
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize for physics for 2008 to two researchers from Japan and an American colleague.
Professor Gunnar Oquist, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced on October 7. Half of the award will go to Yoichiro Nambu from the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics', nobelprize.org noted."
Nambu first developed a mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics back in 1960. The theory helped give rise to the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, which unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature's four forces in one single theory. Meanwhile, Makoto Kobayashi from Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Toshihide Maskawa from Kyoto University's Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics will each receive a quarter of the total sum 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'
Medicine
The 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine has been awarded to German citizen Harald zur Hausen, French citizens Francoise Barr�-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier.
The Nobel Assembly at Sweden's prime medical university, Karolinska Institute in Stockholm awarded one half of the prize to Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of 'human papilloma viruses (HPV) causing cervical cancer. The other half of the prize was awarded jointly to Fran�oise Barr�-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of 'human immunodeficiency virus' Harald zur Hausen, born 1936, is a German citizen and Professor Emeritus at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelbelg. Francoise Barr�-Sinoussi, born in 1947 and Luc Montagnier, born in 1932 are both French. Barr�-Sinoussi is a professor and director at the Institute Pasteur in Paris. Montagnier is professor emeritus at the World Foundation for Aids Research and Prevention in Paris. According to the Nobel Assembly, zur Hausen's discovery 'has led to characterization of the natural history of HPV infection, an understanding of mechanisms of HPV-induced carcinogenesis and the development of prophylactic vaccines against HPV acquisition.' Barr�-Sinoussi and Montagnier's discovery of HIV 'was one prerequisite for the current understanding of the biology of the disease and its antiretroviral treatment.' This year's Nobel Prize awards discoveries of two viruses causing severe human diseases. Harald zur Hausen went against current dogma and postulated that oncogenic human papilloma virus (HPV) caused cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women. He realized that HPV-DNA could exist in a non-productive state in the tumours, and should be detectable by specific searches for viral DNA. He found HPV to be a heterogeneous family of viruses. Only some HPV types cause cancer. His discovery has led to characterization of the natural history of HPV infection, an understanding of mechanisms of HPV-induced carcinogenesis and the development of prophylactic vaccines against HPV acquisition. Fran�oise Barr�-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier discovered human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Virus production was identified in lymphocytes from patients with enlarged lymph nodes in early stages of acquired immunodeficiency, and in blood from patients with late stage disease. They characterized this retrovirus as the first known human lentivirus based on its morphological, biochemical and immunological properties. HIV impaired the immune system because of massive virus replication and cell damage to lymphocytes. The discovery was one prerequisite for the current understanding of the biology of the disease and its antiretroviral treatment. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded by the Nobel Assembly and Professor Lars Olson is the committee's chairman.
Chemistry
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2008 jointly to Osamu Shimomura, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA, USA and Boston University Medical School, USA, Martin Chalfie, Columbia University, USA and Roger Y. Tsien, University of California, USA for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP. Professor Gunnar Oquist, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in Stockholm on October 8, 2008. Osamu Shimomura, born in 1928, a Japanese citizen, was responsible in 1962 for isolating GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria and discovering 'that this protein glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.' The discovery of GFP has meant that 'researchers have developed ways to watch processes that were previously invisible, such as the development of nerve cells in the brain or how cancer cells spread', the academy sources said. Martin Chalfie, born in 1947 and Roger Y Tsien, born in 1952, have been rewarded for their roles in developing the scientific application of the discovery. Chalfie, a professor at New York's Columbia University, 'demonstrated the value of GFP as a luminous genetic tag for various biological phenomena'. Tsien, a professor at the University of California, 'contributed to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces. He also extended the colour palette beyond green allowing researchers to give various proteins and cells different colours.' Osamu Shimomura is Professor Emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory, Massachusetts, and Boston University Medical School. The Prize money of 10 million kronor ($1.38 million) is to be shared equally among the three Nobel Laureates.

Six Essential Apple iPhone Security Tips

2008-10-13T15:14:00.002+06:00

iPhone Security Tip 1: Enable Auto-Lock
One of the most basic iPhone security functions is the Auto-Lock feature, which locks the device's touch screen after not being used for a preset time period. Users can choose to set their iPhones to lock after not being used for one, two, three, four or five minutes. Auto-Lock can also be disabled altogether.
Auto-Lock is turned on by default, but you can change the settings by first clicking the main iPhone Settings icon, tapping the General tab and then hitting Auto-Lock. Then select the desired time period by tapping the on-screen value. Finally, exit the Auto-Lock and Settings screens by tapping the box in the display's top left corner.
Though Auto-Lock is not exactly a security function on its own, when combined with the Passcode safeguard described below, it's an essential iPhone security feature.
iPhone Security Tip 2: Enable Passcode Lock
The iPhone Auto-Lock disables the device's screen after a preset time period of non-use, but the Passcode Lock feature takes that a step further. Whenever the device's display locks, whether due to Auto-Lock or because you've hit the iPhone Sleep button--found on the top right of the device--Passcode Lock requires a four-digit code to be entered before the device can be employed again.
To turn on Passcode Lock, simply click the main iPhone Settings icon again, hit General and then tap Passcode Lock. On the Passcode Lock menu screen, enable the function by tapping Turn Passcode On. You'll then be prompted to enter in a new passcode. Good passwords are completely random and should not be chosen based on birthdays or other dates or numbers that could be uncovered by would-be hackers.
You can also specify when a passcode is required. To do so, tap Require Passcode and then choose whether or not you want to be prompted for a code immediately upon using the device, after one minute, five minutes, 15 minutes, one hour or four hours. Setting the passcode prompt to Immediately is the most secure, as users won't be able to access the iPhone at all without entering the appropriate passcode.
The Passcode Lock screen also has options to Show SMS Preview and Erase Data. When enabled, the SMS preview function allows the first sentence of new text messages to appear on-screen even when a passcode has not been entered. If you'd like the highest level of iPhone security--or just some more privacy--you probably want to disable Show SMS Preview.
The Erase Data function lets you completely wipe your iPhone after 10 failed passcode attempts. After six failed attempts, the iPhone locks out users for a minute before another passcode can be entered. And the device increases the lock-out time following each additional failed attempt--one minute, five minutes, 15 minutes, etc.--so an attempted passcode bypass could take miscreants hours.
iPhone Security Tip 3: Use Wi-Fi Safely on the iPhone
One of the iPhone's most valuable features is its Wi-Fi support, which lets you connect to high-speed wireless networks for faster Web browsing and better data coverage in spots where cellular coverage is less than stellar. However, employing Wi-Fi networks without taking the proper security precautions can leave your device--and everything on it--open to crafty hackers.
First things first, you want to make sure your own personal Wi-Fi networks is secured using Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) or another wireless security protocol. (Refer to the product literature that accompanied your wireless router for more on how to enable Wi-Fi security.) When you connect your iPhone to that network for the first time, you'll be prompted for the network's password--assuming you're using some sort of Wi-Fi security. You should also modify the name of your personal Wi-Fi network to something custom, to help reduce the chance of coming across another network with the same name.
To ensure that you don't unknowingly connect to Wi-Fi networks while on the go, you should enable the iPhone's Ask to Join Networks function. You can turn this feature on by once again tapping the main iPhone Settings tab and then choosing Wi-Fi. On the main Wi-Fi settings screen, turn the Ask to Join Networks function on by simply tapping the on/off button next to the option. After the feature is enabled, you'll never connect to an open Wi-Fi network without first being asked to confirm the connection. (The device will still automatically connect to recognized networks, or networks to which you've connected in the past.)
It's also a good idea to disable Wi-Fi whenever it's not in use. This reduces the chance of accidentally connecting to an unsecured or suspect network and saves iPhone battery life. To turn Wi-Fi off, just hit the iPhone Settings icon, tap Wi-Fi and then click the on/off button on the Wi-Fi screen.
iPhone Security Tip 4: Securely Access Corporate, Web Mail
If you're a corporate iPhone user, the most secure way for you to access your e-mail, at least your business mail, is most likely through a Microsoft Exchange Server--assuming your organization uses Exchange. Lotus Notes users can also securely receive their corporate mail via iPhone thanks to the recent introduction of Lotus iNotes ultralite. (For more on how to receive Outlook and Notes mail on the iPhone, consult your IT administrator.)
For non-business iPhone users, receiving Web mail, like Gmail, AOL and Yahoo Mail, is a breeze; however, the process is not always secure--especially if you're not aware of how to ensure that secure sockets layer (SSL) protection is enabled, where available. SSL encrypts mail that's sent and received via iPhone. If you're unable to connect to your Web mail using the iPhone and SSL, consider using another mail account that does support the safeguard--I've setup a number of Gmail accounts using SSL on the iPhone. Or, if you choose to access mail without SSL, be aware that your messages are not secured--think post card vs. sealed letter.
To ensure that you're using SSL when retrieving Web mail, click the main iPhone Settings tab, choose Mail, Contacts and Calendar and then select one of your active mail accounts. While on the mail account screen, click Advanced, scroll down to the Use SSL option and ensure that it's set to On.
iPhone users can also access Web mail via their mail provider's portals, but it pays to be security smart when using this process as well. For instance, iPhone users should ensure that the URL for the mail provider's site begins with HTTPS://WWW instead of just HTTP://WWW, which signifies that the connection is secured using SSL. A tiny lock also appears just to the right of URLs when iPhone users navigate to pages that use SSL for secure connections. In other words, be wary of logging into any Web site to check mail via iPhone that doesn't have HTTPS in its URL and a lock to the right of the Web address in your Safari browser.
iPhone Security Tip 5: Browse the Web via Safari
Just like surfing the Web via laptop or desktop computers, navigating the Internet via iPhone is rife with security risks. Proactively optimizing your iPhone browser security settings could potentially mean the difference between a fully-functioning device and an infected gadget rendered useless by malware.
The iPhone Safari browser security settings are basic--and most are turned on by default--but it doesn't hurt to ensure that your iPhone Safari security settings are in order.
First off, you'll want to ensure that pop-ups are blocked. Clicking on a malicious pop-up could expose your device to malware and lead to an infection. As mentioned above, pop-ups are blocked by default, but you can check and modify your settings by first clicking the main iPhone Settings icon and then scrolling down and tapping Safari. On the Safari settings screen, ensure that the Block Pop-ups button is switched to On.
You'll also want to check on your Safari cookies settings. Cookies are pieces of text that are distributed back and forth between Web servers and Internet clients, typically browsers, and they're used mainly for authenticating users. However, cookies can be a security/privacy risk, as information about users' devices, operating systems, browsers and, in some cases, browsing habits can be stored within cookies and could, therefore, be accessed by third-parties.
The iPhone Safari Accept Cookies function is set to From Visited by default--meaning the browser will accept cookies from sites that you navigate to--but the most security conscious iPhone owners may want to disable cookies completely. Cookies can be disabled by in the Safari settings menu by tapping the Accept Cookies tab and then selecting Never.
iPhone users can also clear their current crop of cookies by clicking the Clear Cookies button at the bottom of the Safari settings menu and then selecting Clear Cookies again on the following screen.
iPhone Security Tip 6: Set Device Usage Restrictions
Though the iPhone has made some significant gains in recent days toward become a suitable business smartphone, its target user is still the consumer. And consumers come in all shapes, sizes...and ages.
IT administrators and parents with little iPhone users have the ability to set iPhone restrictions to, say, block explicit content from being shown on the iPhone's music or video player. And they can block access to YouTube and stop third-party applications from being installed.
Restrictions options can be located via the main iPhone Settings menu, within the General tab. Once you've clicked on Restrictions on that tab, you'll see a set of potential options beneath the words Enable Restrictions . Tap Enable Restrictions , enter in a four-digit code and then select the specific constraints you wish to impose by hitting the On/Off button next to each option.
Selecting the iPod Explicit option, blocks the user's ability to sync any iTunes content that's branded "explicit" by Apple. If you disable Safari, block YouTube and iTunes, or say no to installing apps or using the gadget's camera, the phone user will not be able to access any of these functions until a passcode is reentered and the restrictions lifted.

Mobile Firefox Enters Testing Next Week

2008-10-13T15:14:00.001+06:00

By this time next week, Mozilla will have unveiled the alpha release of its mobile Firefox browser, codenamed Fennec.
But not too many people will be able to make use of it initially: the code will only be available for Nokia's N810 Internet Tablet. The alpha code is aimed at Mozilla community members, specifically to give the innovative touch user interface and the feature set a grueling workout, says Jay Sullivan, Mozilla vice president of mobile.
A release for Windows mobile is in the works, to be released "in the next few months," according to Sullivan. One possible interim option is a version to run on Windows PCs, in effect acting as an emulator.
Sullivan says there will likely be two or three additional alpha releases over the coming months before the beta version is released, presumably sometime in 2009.
Fennec is one of a growing number of full-featured Web browsers designed specifically for mobile devices.
As previously reported, the alpha Firefox for Mobile (it's official title) includes the "awesome bar" first introduced in Version 3.0 of desktop Firefox. The bar is a vastly smarter URL box that can be used to do keyword searches of your URL history and bookmarks. That's also a key innovation to make a mobile browser easier to use, by minimizing manual input.
Fennec uses the same core HTML rendering engine, Gecko, that's found in desktop Firefox, with full JavaScript capability and AJAX (a set of tools and features for building interactive Web applications). Gecko is also used in the ThunderHawk mobile browser, and the browser Nokia developed for the N810 tablet.
The alpha version will support fingertip touch interaction, with the browser designed to use the full device screen for content, with the control buttons and URL bar hidden but easily uncovered with a single swipe of your finger. The Nokia tablet supports direct touch and use of a stylus, according to Sullivan.
A major goal of the alpha release is to encourage developers to check out existing Firefox add-ons and create new ones especially for Fennec. Also new is a geo-location interface exposed via JavaScript. The intent, says Sullivan, is to make it simpler for developers to access various types of location information and incorporate that data into Fennec add-ons.
One add-on that will be introduced shortly is based on Mozilla's Weave project: the goal is to let a user seamlessly move from desktop to mobile Firefox.

Microsoft Will Soon Release 'Windows Cloud' OS

2008-10-13T15:12:00.002+06:00

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer- revealed a few details on Wednesday of a forthcoming operating system that will help developers write Internet-based applications.
Within a month, Microsoft will unveil what Ballmer called "Windows Cloud." The OS, which will likely have a different name, is intended for developers writing cloud-computing applications, said Ballmer, speaking in London to an auditorium of IT managers at a Microsoft-sponsored conference.
Cloud computing is a term often applied to programs that are presented in a Web browser, but the actual computing is performed at a distant data center.
Ballmer was short on details, saying more information would spoil the announcement. Windows Cloud is a separate project from Windows 7, the OS Microsoft is developing to succeed Windows Vista.
Companies such as Google and Salesforce.com have embraced the concept of delivering software over the Internet, as it can mean lower costs and less maintenance for those who use the applications.
Microsoft, which has built its fortunes on desktop-based software, has been anxious to show it also has plans for adapting its software for the Internet.
Ballmer was quick to point out that Microsoft doesn't envision products such as the Office productivity suite to move entirely off desktop PCs and onto the Internet.
But Microsoft is working on a service that would let people do "light editing" of Office documents at places such as a public Internet kiosk, Ballmer said.
"That's all I can say on that," Ballmer said. "Otherwise, we have no drum-roll announcement in a month."
Microsoft is developing online components for many of its products such as its SharePoint collaboration software; the Exchange e-mail server and its Dynamics Customer Relationship Management software, Ballmer said.
Microsoft calls its strategy "software plus services," where its core applications are augmented by Web-based functionality.
Microsoft has been facing increasing pressure from Google, which offers a Web-based productivity suite called Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Ballmer was dismissive of Google, saying Docs and Spreadsheets has "relatively low usage" and that users want richer features in an office software package.
"We want software more powerful than software that runs in a browser," Ballmer said.

Micron Buys Qimonda JV Stake for $400M

2008-10-13T15:12:00.001+06:00

Micron Technology will buy Qimonda's stake in DRAM manufacturing joint venture Inotera memories for US$400 million in cash, Qimonda said Monday.
Idaho-based Micron will receive Qimonda's 35.6 percent stake in Inotera, a JV with Taiwan's Nanya Technology Corp., which currently manufactures 1G-byte DDR2 and 1G-byte DDR3 DRAM. The companies did not say when they expected the deal to close, but disclosed that Qimonda will receive two payments of $200 million, the second one coming when it receives final legal and regulatory approval.
Inotera has a capacity of 120,000, 300mm wafers per month at two fabs in Taiwan. Qimonda's share of Inotera's output will be ramped down over a period of eight months after the deal closes, the company said.

US space tourist set for blast-off

2008-10-13T15:11:00.001+06:00

US video game magnate Richard Garriott will blast off into space aboard a Russian spaceship on Sunday watched by his father, a NASA astronaut who went into space at the height of the Cold War.

Garriott, who paid $35 million for a ride to the International Space Station, will lift off aboard the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft alongside US astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov at 1:03 p.m. (0503 GMT).

Russian-born Google co-founder Sergei Brin , who has put down a $5 million deposit on a seat on a private space flight, was on hand for a send-off at the Baikonur cosmodrome attended by the trio's family and friends.

Garriott has drawn parallels between his journey, which comes at a time of diplomatic tension between Russia and the United States, with the era of his father, retired NASA astronaut Owen Garriott.

Just like then, he said, exploration was not overshadowed by politics.

"This was also true 30 years ago in my father's time with NASA that Russian cosmonauts and engineers always got along wonderfully with the U.S. representatives," he said before the blast-off. His crew members agreed.

"As far as politics in space is concerned, we know there are politics on the ground but it has not affected our crew," said Fincke.

"We are a symbol of what people can be doing working together. So we say in space there is no room for politics."

Scientists sequence giant panda's genome: report

2008-10-13T15:10:00.000+06:00

Scientists have sequenced the genome of the giant panda, an achievement which may aid efforts to protect the endangered species, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

By understanding the genetic make-up of giant pandas, researchers may be able to explain their low birth rate and help them to have more cubs, Wang Jun, a scientist at the Beijing Genomics Institute, was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

"By sequencing the giant panda genome we've laid the genetic and biological foundation for us to gain a deeper understanding of the peculiar species," said Wang, whose institute played a major role in the International Giant Panda Genome Project.

Launched in March this year, the project discovered evidence to support the theory that giant pandas might be a subspecies of black bear, Xinhua said.

Wang said knowledge of the genome could also help efforts to control disease among pandas. Scientists believe fewer than 2,000 giant pandas may now live in the wild in China.

Repossession 'is mental threat'

2008-10-12T22:22:00.000+06:00

The fallout from the economic downturn could be a significant threat to mental health, according to a survey.
House repossession was rated as the event most likely to cause mental health problems, ahead of redundancy, or finding out about infertility.
Charity Rethink called for action to prevent a "mental health disaster".
The survey was published as a UN report showed England spends more of its health budget on mental health care than any other European country.
Rethink's director of public affairs Paul Corry said: "I wouldn't be surprised if we see a rise in the number of people going to their doctor because of mental health problems in the coming months.
"Even for people lucky enough to hang on to their home, the stress and worry of arrears building up can be enough to harm your mental health - this survey shows it worries millions of us."
He said that people who already had mental health problems were likely to be treated less well by their lenders, and did not have a "safety net" to protect them.
He said: "There's an urgent need to do something to prevent a mental health disaster."
Another mental health charity agrees with that assessment - Mind, which is launching its own £16m initiative to link exercise to better mental health, and to reduce stigma, released its own report earlier this year warning about the dangers of debt.

Google founder Brin visits Russian space cosmodrome

2008-10-12T22:18:00.001+06:00

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, considering going into space on a private flight, made a surprise visit to Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome on Saturday to wish good luck to a fellow space tourist.

Richard Garriott, a US computer game developer and Brin's friend, is due to blast off into orbit aboard Russia's Soyuz spaceship on Sunday at 1:03 p.m. (0503 GMT) alongside US astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov.

Brin, a native of Moscow, arrived at the sprawling Soviet-era complex along with Garriott's friends and family members to cheer for the success of his journey to the International Space Station.

The Google billionaire has put down a $5 million deposit to book a flight into space with space tourism company Space Adventures but has not said if he would definitely go.

Space Adventures, which specializes in sending super-rich adventurers on trips to the ISS, said he could go as soon as 2011 as part of its planned private Soyuz flight programme.

In jeans and a black fleece, Brin looked relaxed as he toured, along with other U.S. visitors, the world's oldest space launch facility which was originally set up in the 1950s as a clandestine missile test facility.

Garriott, who paid $35 million for his ticket to space, waved and joked as he talked with Brin and others during a private meeting from behind a glass quarantine panel designed to protect his health ahead of the blast off.

"I feel great. Thank you," he said through a microphone, smiling.

The group cheered and laughed as Brin jokingly inquired whether Garriott would have access to the Internet on the ISS. As a good-luck gift, Brin gave him a camera memory card and wished him luck.

Other visitors included Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft developer, who traveled to space in April 2007.

Baikonur is a sleepy town in the barren steppes of central Kazakhstan.

Bank turmoil fuels phishing boom

2008-10-12T22:17:00.001+06:00

Hi-tech fraudsters are taking advantage of the global financial turmoil, say governments and security experts.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a warning saying phishing gangs were using the turmoil to extract valuable information from consumers.
A UK parliamentary group said it expected a move away from ID theft towards attacks on account holders.
The news comes as a UK banking group reveals that phishing attacks were up more than 180% in a year.
Fresh targets
The FTC said the current rapid changes in the banking world, where many institutions suddenly had new owners, could only help fraudsters keen to steal login and other personal details.
"Scammers are taking advantage of upheavals in the financial marketplace to confuse consumers into parting with valuable personal information," it warned.
It said it expected fraudsters to pose as the new owners of banks or the federal agencies charged with oversight of struggling institutions.
The FTC urged consumers to be wary and not reply to e-mail messages or pop-ups that ask for personal or financial information even if they appeared to come from a bank. Consumers should also scrutinise bank and credit card statements for unauthorised withdrawals or transfers.
Secure Computing said its October spam report showed that many of the banks and other financial institutions caught up in the turmoil were topping its list of phishing targets.
Chase, Wachovia and Bank of America were among the most popular targets with scammers, it said.
The company said it expected British banks to be popular too in the coming weeks as changes and mergers are completed.
In its second annual report, the All Parliamentary Group on ID Fraud said tighter credit lending rules would lead to more attempts to get at existing bank accounts.
"There is no longer a guarantee that they will get credit by applying assuming another person's identity, so they are instead tapping into accounts which already exist," read the report.
Fraud figures released in early October by the Association of Payment Clearing Services (Apacs), which represents UK banks, show a steep rise in the number of phishing attacks even before the turmoil in the banking world began.
From January to June 2008 phishing attacks rose by 186% on the same period in 2007, it said. In total it saw more than 20,

Spam attack' halts Virgin e-mail

2008-10-12T22:16:00.001+06:00

Tens of thousands of Virgin customers have spent four days cut off from, or with little access to, their e-mail accounts after a suspected spam attack.
The problem affected a company which processes messages delivered through the Virgin.net platform.
All legitimate e-mails were held back when the "large" attack began on Tuesday evening so the spam could be removed, a Virgin Media spokesman said.
E-mails were gradually being delivered now the fault was cleared, he added.
He said these messages should now have been available but access via webmail may have been taking longer to restore.
'Nothing lost'
About 200,000 people use the Virgin.net service but well under half of these were affected by the problem, the company stated.
Error messages were displayed when they tried to log on. Virgin Media stressed that no e-mails had been lost.
"Since late Tuesday evening, some customers on our Virgin Media DSL service may have been unable to access e-mail or webmail," the spokesman said.
"This was due to a suspected spam attack suffered by our e-mail supplier which also affected a number of other ISPs. No customers on our cable service were affected.
"All customers are able to access e-mail again now, though due to a large queue of undelivered e-mail messages, there may be a short delay before some e-mails reach customers' accounts."

Tainted China water sickens 450

2008-10-12T22:14:00.000+06:00

About 450 people have fallen ill in southern China after drinking contaminated water
Four of the sick, in two villages in Guangxi province, have arsenic poisoning. Industrial waste from a metal company has been blamed.
Residents began to show symptoms of facial swelling, vomiting and blurred vision on 3 October.
Last month, tainted milk left more than 50,000 children sick.
Plant closed
Ge Xianmin, head of the Guangxi regional occupational disease prevention and control institute, told Xinhua: "The villagers were slightly poisoned. They can be cured in nine to 15 days with timely treatment."
Health officials said 23 children under the age of seven and 32 people aged over 60 had been kept in hospital for observation, while others were receiving outpatient treatment.
According to local government officials, torrential rain caused waste water containing arsenic from the Jinhai Metallurgy Chemical company to overflow and pollute nearby ponds and wells.
The company - a branch of the state-owned Liuzhou China Tin Company - was closed after the contamination was discovered.
Xinhua said the local government and the company had agreed to share the medical costs of the villagers.
Last month, four children died and more than 50,000 were sickened after they were fed on baby milk powder contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine.
The scandal resulted in a recall of many Chinese milk products.

Nature loss 'dwarfs bank crisis'

2008-10-12T22:13:00.000+06:00

The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.
It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.
The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.
The study, headed by a Deutsche Bank economist, parallels the Stern Review into the economics of climate change.
It has been discussed during many sessions here at the World Conservation Congress.
Some conservationists see it as a new way of persuading policymakers to fund nature protection rather than allowing the decline in ecosystems and species, highlighted in the release on Monday of the Red List of Threatened Species, to continue.

New method generates stem cells safely from mice

2008-10-11T22:35:00.002+06:00

WASHINGTON, - Japanese researchers who invented a way to make powerful stem cells out of ordinary cells say they have now found a safer way to do it.

Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues invented a new way to transform ordinary cells into embryonic-like stem cells called iPS cells, using a ring of genetic material called a plasmid.

Working in mice, they generated induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, and said they believe the method can work in people, too, and is an important step toward a new field called regenerative medicine.

Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood. Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kinds of stem cells, as they have the potential to give rise to any type of tissue.

But they are difficult to make, requiring the use of an embryo or cloning technology. Many people also object to their use, and several countries, including the United States, limit funding for such experiments.

In the past year, several teams of scientists have reported finding a handful of genes that can transform ordinary skin cells into iPS cells, which look and act like embryonic stem cells.

To get these genes into the cells, they have had to use retroviruses, which integrate their own genetic material into the cells they infect. This can be dangerous and can cause tumors and perhaps other effects.

Last month US researchers did the same thing using a harmless virus called an adenovirus, but the method was not efficient -- and introducing any virus into the body can pose risks.

Yamanaka's team tried several different methods but eventually looped three of the genes needed into one plasmid and the fourth into another, and transplanted these into cells from a mouse embryo.

The mouse embryonic cells reverted to a stem-like state and began behaving like embryonic stem cells.

Yamanaka's team said the method was also not as efficient as using retroviruses but said they plan to try their method using human cells.

If it works, some day doctors may be able to make tailor-made transplants to treat diseases in people by removing a few cells, transforming them in the lab and transplanting the new tissue or organs back in.

Quarter of adolescent US girls received HPV vaccine

2008-10-11T22:35:00.001+06:00

WASHINGTON, - A quarter of girls aged 13-17 in the United States received Merck & Co's Gardasil vaccine last year to protect against the human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer, the US government said on Thursday.

A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided the first look at how many adolescent girls are getting the vaccine, which won approval in June 2006 for preventing cervical cancer and genital warts in young women and girls aged 9-26.

Based on data on about 3,000 girls nationwide, the CDC said 25 percent had received at least one dose of the three-shot series in 2007, which translates to about 2.5 million girls.

Just under a third of adolescents got shots against potentially deadly meningitis, another new vaccine.

"It generally takes about seven or eight years before you can go from a new vaccine all the way to having 90 percent coverage rate, which would be the eventual target," Dr. Lance Rodewald, head of the CDC's division of immunization services, said during a conference call with reporters.

"In general, we're quite pleased with the results at 25 percent. But it points out that we've got a long ways to go."

Rodewald said the CDC did not have estimates on how many women up to age 26 were getting the vaccine.

Gardasil targets four strains of the human papillomavirus, also called HPV, a common sexually transmitted virus that causes genital warts and most cases of cervical cancer.

Merck said in a statement it is encouraged by the CDC findings "but more needs to be done to help protect the other 75 percent."

More than 18 million Gardasil doses have been distributed in the United States. Merck has said it expects the vaccine to reach between $1.4 billion and $1.6 billion in 2008 sales.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc makes a rival vaccine, Cervarix, but said in June it did not expect to win U.S. approval for it until late 2009.

Common side effects from the vaccine include those seen with other injections such as fainting and injection pain as well as headache, nausea and fever, the FDA said.

Some consumers, doctors and others have raised questions about Gardasil's safety but the FDA and CDC said the most serious adverse events did not appear linked to the vaccine.

The survey provided estimates for two other vaccines recommended at age 11 or 12 -- the tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis (whooping cough), or Tdap, vaccine, and the meningitis vaccine.

It showed that 32 percent had received Sanofi-Pasteur's MCV4 meningitis vaccine, up from 12 percent in 2006, and 30 percent received the Tdap vaccine, up from 11 percent in 2006.

Drug-resistant HIV strains turning up in China

2008-10-11T22:34:00.000+06:00

HONG KONG, - Drug-resistant HIV strains are turning up in parts of China as the virus stretches beyond high-risk groups and gains a stronger foothold in the general population, a leading Chinese AIDS researcher said.

Chen Zhiwei, director of the AIDS Institute in Hong Kong, described the trends as "alarming" and warned that Chinese AIDS patients could get in trouble because there were very few HIV drugs available in China.

"All these drug-resistant mutations are in China now, they are emerging in Chinese patients. The major worry is whether the drug-resistant virus (strains) will spread," Chen said.

"We are studying whether that is happening, but that will be the case if you don't provide proper treatment," he told Reuters.

"If drug resistant virus (strains) spread in China, we don't have enough selection of (drugs) that are made available," Chen said, adding that researchers had urged China to import more varieties of HIV drugs.

China has only seven of the more than 20 different HIV drugs available, which means patients end up with limited options once they develop resistance to certain drugs.

Although HIV infection is incurable, cocktails of the drugs can control the virus. But drug adherence is bad in China's rural regions due to poor patient knowledge, inaccessible healthcare and a lack of health workers to explain to patients the importance of keeping to drug regimens.

Chen's warning comes after he and his colleagues published an article in Nature last week, detailing how HIV infections were rising sharply among women and gay and bisexual men in China.

There were some 700,000 HIV/AIDS cases in China as of October 2007, up 8 percent from 2006. Some 38 percent of cases were attributed to heterosexual contact, more than triple the 11 percent in 2005 -- when the bulk of infections were occurring among injecting drug users and through blood transmissions.

GENERAL POPULATION AT RISK

Cases among gay and bisexual men jumped to 3.3 percent in 2007 from 0.4 percent in 2005 nationally.

In a separate study of southwestern Yunnan province -- a region notorious for HIV infections among drug users -- the scientists found that women now make up 35 percent of those infected, up from 7.1 percent before 1996.

"The virus is moving into the general population. Signs are prevalent among women and vertical transmission (from mother to fetus)," he said.

"We have to find a way to stop this or the change will be like South Africa. If there is no good prevention, transmissions will suddenly explode," said the scientist. Chen said the porous southern Chinese border was a concern. An HIV strain circulating in Yunnan is also found in Thailand and Myanmar, which could be partly explained by Chinese women working as prostitutes in Indochina, he said.

"They travel to and from Indochina. They work in Thailand, then they bring the virus back," he said.

Travelers crossing the southern border may be responsible.

"Last year, we randomly tested travelers and found 30 people from Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam who were HIV positive. We try to test the bridging population and see what's going on," Chen said.

Gecko-like glue is said to be stickiest yet

2008-10-11T22:33:00.000+06:00

CHICAGO, - A new type of dry glue designed to mimic gecko feet is 10 times stickier than the gravity-defying lizards, and three times stickier than other gecko-inspired glues, US researchers said on Thursday.

"It's the stickiest dry glue yet," said Liming Dai of the University of Dayton, who reported on the glue in the journal Science.

A 1-inch (2.5-cm) square of the adhesive can support the weight of a 220-pound (100-kg) man climbing up a vertical surface, but it can be easily lifted and reapplied, an ideal material for, say, a Spider-Man suit.

"That is not real. What we do is real," said Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, referring to the comic book superhero's wall-climbing prowess.

Aside from helping people walk up walls, the glue could be used in electrical components without the need for soldering, Wang and Dai said in a telephone interview.

And because it is dry, it could be used at very low temperatures as in space, where more conventional glues lose their grip.

Like other gecko-inspired glues, the new glue uses a carpet of carbon nanotubes, thin filaments of carbon molecules. But attached to the ends of these filaments are curly strands of carbon that expand the surface area of the glue's gripping action.

This design matches the structure of real gecko feet, which have microscopic hairs that branch off in different directions.

"Our sticky glue has a force 10 times that of gecko feet and three times more than previous sticky glues trying to mimic the gecko feet," said Dai, who also worked with teams from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory near Dayton and the University of Akron to develop the glue.

Dai said the design is meant to maximize the effect of atomic-scale attractive forces known as van der Waals forces. When the curly part of the tubes are pressed onto a surface, the tubes become aligned with the surface, forming a strong bond. But, when lifted at an angle, this bond is broken.

Wang uses the analogy of having a foot stuck in mud. If you pull straight up, the foot stays stuck, but if you slowly peel the foot away, the bond is broken.

NASA gives budget-busting Mars probe a reprieve

2008-10-11T22:31:00.000+06:00

Cape Canaveral, - NASA needs more money to resolve problems with its next Mars mission and keep it on track for launch next year, and is gambling that the US Congress will find the extra funds, officials said on Friday.

Exactly how much more cash will be needed to keep the Mars Science Laboratory on schedule, and where it will come from, officials with the US space agency would not say.

"If we're going to launch in 2009 or 2011, additional budget resources are going to be necessary," Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters, said during a conference call with reporters.

Despite the uncertainty, NASA officials said they were forging ahead with plans to launch the roving chemistry station between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15 of next year, when Earth and Mars are favorably aligned. The planets sweep into optimal position every two years.

Costs for the probe, which is about the size of a sport utility vehicle and is designed to assess Mars' suitability for life, already have swelled to $1.9 billion from $1.6 billion.

NASA has been launching probes at every opportunity in an attempt to learn if life ever took hold beyond Earth.

The Mars Science Lab is an ambitious follow-on program to the two small rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, currently exploring the equatorial regions of Mars for signs of past water.

"This is a really important scientific mission," McCuistion said. "This is truly the push into the next decade for the Mars program and for the discovery for the potential for life on other planets.

"I fully believe that Congress will support us as we go forward on this because they recognize the importance of the mission as well," he added.

In an attempt to make up time lost due to a host of technical challenges, including problems with materials and parachutes, Mars Science Lab contractors are working multiple shifts to deliver components so that testing can begin in late November or early December.

NASA plans to reassess the mission's progress in January.

If the probe has to miss its 2009 launch date, keeping the contractor and science teams employed for another two years is estimated to cost $300 million.

In addition to seeking additional funding from Congress, NASA will assess other science programs to see if any money can be reallocated to the Mars Science Lab, said Ed Weiler, NASA's lead scientist.

Mobile gaming firms eye Nokia, Apple boost in 2009

2008-10-11T22:30:00.000+06:00

HELSINKI, - Mobile gaming companies say they will book few new sales from Nokia's N-Gage phones or Apple's iPhone, but are betting on a market boost next year as more phones of these kinds are taken up by consumers.

Nokia launched its N-Gage gaming service six months ago, but it had so far gained little traction as users have to install the service to their phones themselves.

What gaming industry executives hoped for was a similar takeup, as with the App store on iPhone, which gave users easy access to buy new games or other software.

While Apple has talked about a total of 10 million phones on the market, Nokia's leading position in cellphones gave it the potential to reach an audience at least 10-times larger.

The mobile gaming market suffered an unexpected slump last year, with many game developers and analysts pointing to telecom operators' lack of investment in marketing.

"Merchandising has been a primary pain point for the mobile games industry, and the introduction of new platforms gives consumers a really simple way to discover and download games," said Greg Ballard, chief executive of Glu Mobile, one of the largest mobile gaming firms.

N-Gage was a software platform that allowed one game, without special programming, to be used across many phone models, and was one of the cornerstones of Nokia's new services strategy.

"In many ways the N-Gage design reflects an insider's view of how to solve the merchandising challenges that we have all seen in this business for so long. It was like a bunch of us had gotten together and said, 'Here, this is how it should be done,'" Ballard said.

Nokia aimed to ease the mobile gaming industry's key challenges: making them easy to find and buy. It was directly on the phone's home screen and offered free trial versions of games.

"All the right pieces are in place from our perspective. We're very excited about this platform. It is very difficult for this not to be successful," said Electronic Art's Javier Ferreira, head of mobile publishing in Europe.

Electronic Arts was the largest mobile games provider after its $680 million acquisition of Jamdat in 2006.

THE 2009 STORY

Nokia opened the new service six months ago, but has since started to ship in volumes only one model with N-Gage preinstalled. It was now ramping up production of top-end models, the N85 and N96 of which it was set to sell several millions this year. Most of new Nokia's multimedia phones would ship with pre-installed N-gage.

"That's when the platform launches," Ferreira said.

Nokia opened the service to users of five multimedia phones of which it has sold about 15 million, analysts said, but there was an open question as to how many have the application installed. Nokia declined to comment ahead of its earnings release next week.

"Volume on new platforms has been low, but that has been our expectation. We see new platforms as a 2009 story," Ballard said. EA also expects new platforms to change the industry.

Ferreira said: "A lot of new platforms are really starting to hit the market. We are all excited about the catalyst it can bring to the market in coming months."

"It's an extremely exciting time to be in this market ... We feel very bullish about this market," Ferreira said.

The third big player in the market, Gameloft, told Reuters last week it expected 2008 revenues from new platforms -- N-Gage and iPhone -- to top 2 million euros.

This compared to global market estimates for mobile gaming, which ranged from $4 billion to $8 billion.

Telecom carriers, so far the main sales channel for the games, were not likely to give up their position without a fight as games were a key driver for increasing data and service revenues from users.

"The relevancy of mobile games is increasing," said Eitan Gelbaum, VP at Amdocs, a software and services provider to telecom carriers.

Mobile games represent up to 50 percent of all downloads, while just 18 months ago, the share of mobile games was 35 percent of all downloaded content, Gelbaum said.