LONDON (AFP) - British scientists say they are studying the flight of bees to see whether a tiny plane could be built with flappable wings for military or industrial spying."Researchers here are quite confident that they can solve the aerodynamics problems," said Tony Trueman, a spokesman for Bath University, in south-west England, adding that spy cameras and computers small enough to equip an insect were already within reach.
The university has received a 650,000-pound (910,000 euros, 1.15 million dollars) grant from BAE Systems, the British government and the US Air Force, and "in around the next 18 months the project will be finished," Trueman said.
He said the military could use insect-sized drones for "the sensing of chemical and biological weapons, but they are not likely to be used directly as weapons," because they would be too small to carry a bomb.
They could, however, "land on the roof of enemy vehicles and mark them for future attack."
Civil authorities might use them for "traffic monitoring, border surveillance, fire and rescue operation, wildlife survey, substance detection like in a sort of nuclear accident," he said, adding: "You can send these into the building."
Today's oil industry reminds Amory B. Lovins of the whaling industry of the 19th century."When oil was discovered, the whalers ran out of markets before they ran out of whales," Mr. Lovins said. These days, opportunities to improve energy efficiency and meet increased needs profitably with other sources, he argues, are accumulating so rapidly that demand for oil is likely to tumble more rapidly than the industry has projected.
"When you add up all the alternatives,'' Mr. Lovins said, "the game is moving away from oil much faster than people think."
Who would pay Mr. Lovins, 57, for such unconventional opinions in an era when a former oilman is in the White House, the government routinely opposes proposals to raise mileage requirements or other energy standards and many industry officials fret about whether Saudi Arabia can pump enough oil to avoid global shortages.
Try Shell Oil, which has turned to Mr. Lovins to help figure out how the oil industry can profit from leading the transition away from today's main uses of its core product. Major companies like Shell, Coca-Cola and Texas Instruments do not always agree with Mr. Lovins, but they value his iconoclastic views enough to pay the Rocky Mountain Institute, the nonprofit consulting and research group he leads, up to $20,000 a day for his consulting services.
Mr. Lovins is hoping his scrutiny of the oil industry, which will be published as a book this summer, could provide a jolt to debate about the world's energy future. By most accounts, he remains the best-known freethinker in the energy and environmental policy world and he routinely weighs in on important issues, like the role of hydrogen in the world's energy future. But it has been a while since any of his insights have made headlines.
"Hunter once remarked that I have a good idea every five years," Mr. Lovins said, referring to his former wife, L. Hunter Lovins. "I'm due and there are several cooking."
In the past year, the world of philanthropic foundations has faced intense scrutiny from the media and Congress.News stories across the nation have spotlighted instances of questionable spending practices and conflicts of interest. Congress considered a proposal that would have forbidden administrative costs from being counted as part of foundations' required annual payout of 5 percent of assets.
Now, a new report reflects increasing interest among foundation leaders themselves in tightening internal standards -- something that was not being discussed until recently.
"It's possible to argue that things have changed pretty dramatically in the last year,'' said Phil Buchanan, executive director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy (www.effectivephilanthropy.com).
The Cambridge, Mass., organization recently published "Foundation Governance: The CEO Viewpoint.'' Nearly three-quarters of the 129 organizations surveyed said they are considering changes to their operations, while a third have already instituted new procedures.
Many changes considered
Foundation leaders are looking at changing committee structures or adding audit committees; requiring board review or chief executive and chief financial officer sign-offs of tax returns; and adopting conflict of interest policies.
A growing number of foundations want to be "out in front of this issue rather than be in a reactive mode,'' Buchanan said. They want to establish standards that go beyond minimum requirements, he said.
As toy retailers struggle with weak sales and aggressive price cuts, the baby segment -- which includes not just toys but strollers, car seats and cribs -- appears to be booming.Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, is rolling out a Web site (http://wwwbabyconnection.com) for new parents with news articles, product reviews, a baby registry, and a plethora of products for infants.
Educational toy maker LeapFrog Enterprises Inc. is introducing a line of infant items like a baby seat and activity center this year, and even Walt Disney Co. is capitalizing on the baby craze with its Baby Einstein line of toys, DVDs and learning aids.
Gap Inc.'s babyGap unit is consistently a top performer among the other Gap chains, which many say is due to fewer markdowns than in adult clothing stores.
"Parents are spending more on babies than ever before. The average age when people have their first child is much older than 20 years ago," said Jim Silver, publisher of Toy Wishes magazine. "When you have your first child at an older age, you have a lot more discretionary income.
The Genentech drug Avastin, which validated a decades-old theory about a new way to attack cancer while spurring investor enthusiasm for the biotechnology industry, won approval yesterday from the Food and Drug Administration.The drug, approved for patients with colorectal cancer that has spread to other organs, is far from a cure. But in a clinical trial in which it was used with chemotherapy, people who received the drug lived a median of 20.3 months, almost five months longer than those who received only chemotherapy.
Many analysts characterize the drug as the most significant to come from the biotechnology industry in years, with sales expected to eventually reach $2 billion a year or more. Those estimates might grow because the approval by the F.D.A. was worded in a way that might allow doctors to use the drug more liberally than expected.
Avastin is the first drug to be approved that works by choking off the blood vessels that provide a tumor with oxygen and nutrients. That idea for fighting cancer, first proposed by Dr. Judah Folkman of Harvard and Children's Hospital Boston more than 30 years ago, has been difficult to get to work in practice.
Technology companies are seeing a rebound in business, but top executives this week said any jobs added to meet growing demand will likely be in countries where labor is cheaper than the United States.Executives speaking at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit in New York said they see increased hiring in countries like India and China, but few jobs will be added in the United States.
Michael Jordan, chief executive of technology services provider Electronic Data Systems Corp. said EDS's number of employees in low-cost locations like India will rise to 20,000 from 9,000, by 2006.
Bruce Claflin, chief executive of network products maker 3Com Corp. said the company's joint-venture with Huawei Technologies of China will add 1,000 engineers, all supplied by Huawei.
In the future, customers "won't know where the technology comes from," Claflin said.
China on Monday launched a major crackdown on one of the most vibrant parts of the Internet, the news discussion groups that have pushed the boundary of free speech.The new rules ban independent reporting that has not been approved by the government, discussing sensitive issues such as economic failures and posting anything that challenges the Communist Party.
Officials at the Information Office of the State Council, which regulates online media, were not immediately available for comment.
But according to documents made available to the Los Angeles Times, Information Office gatekeepers outlined the strict guidelines to senior managers from China's largest Internet portals in a meeting this week.
"The reason why they did this is very obvious,'' said Li Fang, chief editor of Netease Review. "The Communist Party thinks the Internet news comments are putting them under too much pressure from public opinion.''
While the government has gone after individual columns and news discussion sites in the past, insiders say this is the first time it has adopted such a systematic approach to the genre. People who work in this area said they were afraid of getting fired, or persecuted politically, as a result of the new campaign.
The latest upturn in Japan's economic fortunes is once more export led, despite a currency that is 10% stronger today than it was a year ago. However, the primary driver behind today's soaring demand for Japanese goods is not the United States, as it was then. This time the stimulus is much closer to home. This time Japan's principal ally in economic recovery is mainland neighbour and old enemy, China.There was a time, during Japan's last boom, when China's economic advance was viewed with deep suspicion by government strategists in Tokyo. There were grim predictions of the hollowing out of Japan's manufacturing super-structure as lower-cost Chinese producers followed the lead of South Korea and Taiwan and knocked Japan off its perch.
However, despite old enmities and a Chinese currency, the renminbi, which remains pegged to the US dollar and is just as big a barrier to trade as the greenback itself, surging demand for Japanese goods from China has completely changed the terms of debate and buried, for now, those old fears. As the pace of Chinese development continues at break-neck speed, demand for Japanese raw materials like steel, commodities like memory chips, and for capital goods, in sectors from construction to process engineering, is soaring.
Chinese experts have completed the genetic map of the killer H5N1 bird flu virus and their next step will be looking at how the virus mutates.The mapping result was achieved by an avian disease research lab at the South China Agricultural University, which is in Guangzhou, the capital of South China's Guangdong Province, according to Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily.
The breakthrough will help scientist understand how the virus evolves, the paper quoted Xin Chao'an, a leading professor at the lab as well as a member of the national avian flu team of experts, as saying....
In another development, a South Korean expert has developed a vaccine for the virus, according to a Xinhua News Agency report.
When visitors tour the headquarters of Saudi Arabia's oil empire -- a sleek glass building rising from the desert in Dhahran near the Persian Gulf -- they are reminded of its mission in a film projected on a giant screen. "We supply what the world demands every day," it declares.For decades, that has largely been true. Ever since its rich reserves were discovered more than a half-century ago, Saudi Arabia has pumped the oil needed to keep pace with rising needs, becoming the mainstay of the global energy markets.
But the country's oil fields now are in decline, prompting industry and government officials to raise serious questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the world's thirst for oil in coming years.
Energy forecasts call for Saudi Arabia to almost double its output in the next decade and after. Oil executives and government officials in the United States and Saudi Arabia, however, say capacity will probably stall near current levels, potentially creating a significant gap in the global energy supply.
"The Zippies Are Here," declared the Indian weekly magazine Outlook. Zippies are this huge cohort of Indian youth who are the first to come of age since India shifted away from socialism and dived headfirst into global trade, the information revolution and turning itself into the world's service center. Outlook calls India's zippies "Liberalization's Children," and defines one as "a young city or suburban resident, between 15 and 25 years of age, with a zip in the stride. Belongs to generation Z. Can be male or female, studying or working. Oozes attitude, ambition and aspiration. Cool, confident and creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks and shuns fears." Indian zippies carry no guilt about making money or spending it. They are, says one Indian analyst quoted by Outlook, destination driven, not destiny driven; outward, not inward, looking; upwardly mobile, not stuck-in-my-station-in-life.With 54 percent of India under the age of 25 -- that's 555 million people -- six out of 10 Indian households have at least one zippie, Outlook says. And a growing slice of them (most Indians are still poor village-dwellers) will be able to do your white-collar job as well as you for a fraction of the pay. Indian zippies are one reason outsourcing is becoming the hot issue in this year's U.S. presidential campaign.
Blogs, for instance, have been closely identified with the Dean campaign from the start. These are personal, frequently updated Web pages that typically contain short essays on sundry topics. The early Dean blogs, created by backers of the former Vermont governor, had an earnest charm to them. They were fully supportive of the candidate, of course, but had a quirky and independent cast, on account of being free of the spin of the official campaign.Now, not only does every major candidate have a blog, but new political blogs are being added daily. These blogs look like America: bitterly divided between pro-Red State and pro-Blue State.
These blogs are becoming an alternative-news universe, giving everyone with a PC and a Web connection access to the sorts of gossip that was once available only to reporters on the press bus. At a site like Feedster, which is to blogs what Google is to Web sites, you can track the rumor du jour. And what Napster did for MP3s, blogs are doing for news -- or, at least for rumors. They are eliminating the gatekeepers and all barriers to entry.
Nokia Corp., in a move that could loosen cellphone operators' grip on the wireless market, plans to unveil Monday its first handset capable of surfing the Internet using short-range wireless technology known as Wi-Fi.Nokia's Communicator 9500 will be able to bypass conventional cellphone networks, but still access the Web and even make phone calls using a Wi-Fi network. Key to its operation are "hot spots" springing up in offices, homes, coffee shops, hotels and other areas within 300 feet of a Wi-Fi base station connected to the Internet via a fixed line. Consumers now need a specially equipped laptop or personal organizer to use these hot spots.
The arrival of handsets with built-in Wi-Fi chips could be a threat to cellphone operators, such as Vodafone Group PLC, NTT DoCoMo Inc. and Cingular Wireless, that have been trying to develop new revenue sources by selling wireless data services, such as Web browsing and e-mail.
Nokia and other cellphone makers also hope phones with Wi-Fi connections will spur consumers to replace their handsets, increasing sales in the same way camera phones gave the cellphone industry a much-needed boost last year.
She charges that his group is like the Taliban. He claims that her group's dangerous message has "spread like a virus across North America, Europe and elsewhere."The issue inspiring such invectives? Not religion, but diets.
The latest spat is between Veronica Atkins, widow of Robert Atkins, the doctor who promoted a low-carbohydrate diet, heavy on the meats, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group that advocates vegetarianism.
After Dr. Atkins died last April, the vegetarian group obtained his medical records and gave them to The Wall Street Journal, which reported this month that he weighed 258 pounds and had signs of congestive heart failure. (Mrs. Atkins has said her husband's high weight was the result of fluid buildup from the accidental fall that killed him.)
The vegetarians had already formed their conclusions. "Many health authorities have been shocked and greatly troubled by the spread of the Atkins phenomenon," the group proclaimed on its Web site.
Obesity researchers say they know the phenomenon all too well. Weight loss can be like a religious epiphany. Someone loses weight on a diet. They are ecstatic and want to share the good news. "These people are believers," says Dr. Gary D. Foster, director of the weight and eating disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania. Diet books are written in the same spirit. "Evangelism creeps in,'' he said. "It's a way of marketing why this diet is different."
A new type of cancer drug stopped tumor growth in an early animal study, boosting hopes that the approach may prove promising in humans, according to data released on Sunday.The treatment, called VX-680 and being developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., represents the first drug to stop tumors by targeting enzymes called Aurora kinases.
Research has showed that Aurora kinases play an important role in mitosis, or the process of cell division, which is out of control in cancer patients. Aurora kinases have been identified as overly abundant in certain types of cancer, such as leukemia, colon cancer and breast cancer.
The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues. Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data deficit. But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda" -- a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild. Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks -- he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from -- at least in public.
The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies.
Day by day, the nation's capital is becoming a fortress, turning a city known for graceful beauty into a virtual armed camp. In response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal security agents along with their counterparts in the Washington, Maryland and Virginia governments began a huge effort to build permanent safeguards for the capital area's most important buildings and monuments.The effort that built slowly after the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City intensified after one jetliner slammed into the Pentagon and another jet crashed in Pennsylvania, presumably on its way to a target in Washington.
But more recently, security efforts have gained a new urgency as officials seek ways to stop truck bombs and other terrorist tactics that have been used in other countries, like suicide bombers.
Some of the biggest projects are under way at the most visible symbols of American democracy and might -- the White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument and the Pentagon.
A result has been a surge of security construction at a cost, still being calculated, that is expected to reach several hundred million dollars within five or six years.
Feel overwhelmed by the deluge of information flooding the world today? No wonder. Researchers say that the amount of new words, sounds, pictures and numbers produced and stored on paper, film or computer disks has almost doubled in three years.The supply of new material saved in a single year, 2002, would fill half a million libraries the size of the Library of Congress -- the world's largest collection of books and papers -- if it were all converted to print, according to a study by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, political scientists at the University of California-Berkeley.
"Our intent was to quantify people's feeling of being overwhelmed by information and to look at trends,'' Lyman said in a telephone interview.
"People had no sense of why this was happening or where the growth was.''
The recent explosion of recorded data, after centuries of steady but much slower growth, can be traced in large part to two factors:- The computer revolution, which has made it possible to save vast quantities of information in ones and zeroes, the binary alphabet of the digital age.
- The growth of "Big Science'' in astronomy, nuclear physics and biology, such as the Human Genome Project. Experts figure that in recent decades the number of scientific papers published has been doubling every three years.
The information glut may be making it harder to find useful, dependable material in the tidal wave of material bombarding people's senses, Lyman fears. In addition, more sensitive personal data -- medical, financial, even day-to-day activities -- are being captured and stored by the government and private companies.
"The problem is not so much the mass of information as the possible misuse of it,'' Lyman said. "There's no more privacy."
In recent years, especially since Japan and South Korea were co-hosts of the World Cup in 2002, the exchange in popular culture has risen sharply. Although the legacies of Japan's brutal colonial rule here remain close to the surface, the cultural interchange signifies a profound change in the relations between the countries since Japanese troops withdrew at the end of World War II.Last month, South Korea lifted almost all restrictions on the import of Japanese culture after tentatively opening its market in 1998. For the first time, South Koreans can legally buy CD's of Japanese singers and rent Japanese movies at the local video store. Japanese can now be heard on cable television, which until recently would have been greeted with the same kind of outraged reaction from some listeners as playing Wagner does in Israel.
In Japan, many people who had never thought about the Korean peninsula are watching South Korean television dramas and studying the language. Kimchi -- the spicy pickled vegetable that is Korea's national dish -- would have been dismissed a generation ago, but it is now becoming a favorite in Japan.
When the Web was in its infancy, Internet utopians envisioned a political revolution, predicting that the new medium would engage and empower voters as never before. Much of what they envisioned has come to pass, with the Internet facilitating vigorous debate this year, most dramatically, giving Howard Dean's campaign the ability to raise millions.But part of the Web's appeal has been its unbridled nature, and it is showing that it can act as a back alley -- where punches can be thrown and things can be said that might be deemed out of place, even if just at a particular moment, in the full light of the mainstream media.
The principals themselves feel like they can act out there in a way that they wouldn't dare to do in the mainstream media, said Jonathan Zittrain, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
If it's not alive, but not dead, what is it?That's the riddle posed by the new field of "partial life'' technologies, to be explored today in a symposium sponsored by San Francisco's Exploratorium. An international panel of researchers, artists and entrepreneurs will present provocative -- and perhaps useful -- new projects that blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial.
Take, for example, the DNA molecule built in the lab of Stanford University chemistry Professor Eric T. Kool.
It is larger than life, wider than any found in nature. Besides being more heat-resistant than natural DNA, the new version glows in the dark. While it can't reproduce like natural DNA, it shares some of DNA's traits.
"We've designed a genetic system that's completely new and unlike any living system on Earth,'' said Kool. He calls it "expanded DNA,'' or xDNA.
Russia is developing a new generation of warheads that can elude any kind of missile defense, though a Russian general stressed Thursday that the technology was not aimed at thwarting U.S. deployment of a new missile defense system.Missiles equipped with the new warheads would be able to evade sophisticated defense systems by changing trajectory to avoid the range of interceptor missiles, said Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, first deputy chief of the Russian armed forces' General Staff.
A prototype was tested during military exercises this week, Russia's biggest since the Soviet era. Baluyevsky said the warhead technology would be ready for deployment no later than 2010.
Baluyevsky's remarks shed light on cryptic comments made by Russian President Vladimir Putin Wednesday, after he observed a second day of exercises aimed at testing Russia's strategic missile capabilities. Submarine-launched missile failures Tuesday and Wednesday marred the exercises.
Putin mentioned Russia's development of new strategic weapon technology, but he did not say what that technology was, in what way it was advanced or when it might be deployed.
Experts say demand by women -- both heterosexual and lesbian -- is driving the growth of all sorts of sex-related ventures, from stores, catalogs and sex toy companies to adult Web sites, pornographic films and cable television shows. At the same time, many women, they say, see the sex industry as a legitimate place to make a living."Women have a voice now -- `This is what I want and this is how I want it,' " said Ms. Ross.
Samantha Lewis, president of Digital Playground, a DVD company in California that produces pornographic films for women and couples, estimated that women account for 40 percent of retail sales of Digital's movies, double what it was just two years ago. At trade shows, she said, half the fans are women, compared to maybe 10 percent five years ago. "Women are fueling the growth," Ms. Lewis, 42, said.
While women have long been involved in the sex industry as providers and consumers, their participation now has become more of an economic phenomenon, largely because of the Internet. In fact, experts say, the Internet has been a major factor in unleashing women's interest in all things sexual. Surveys by Nielsen/NetRatings, which measures Internet audiences, have found that women account for more than a quarter of all visitors to sites with adult content, with more than 10 million women logging on to such sites in December alone.
A dark, unseen energy permeating space is pushing the universe apart just as Einstein predicted it could in 1917, according to striking new measurements of distant exploding stars by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.The energy, whose source remains unknown, was named the cosmological constant by Einstein. In a prediction he later called "my greatest blunder," but which received its most stringent test ever with the new measurements, Einstein posited a kind of antigravity force pushing galaxies apart with a strength that did not change over billions of years of cosmic history.
Theorists seeking to explain the mysterious force have suggested that it could, in fact, become stronger or weaker over time -- either finally tearing the universe apart in a violent event called "the big rip" or shutting down in the distant future. If the force somehow shut down, gravity would again predominate in the cosmos and the universe would collapse on itself. That version of oblivion is sometimes called "the big crunch."
The new observations, which were led by Dr. Adam Riess at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, made the tightest measurements ever on the strength of the antigravity force over time.
Life in the Age of Old, Old Age
In the annals of human longevity, the Blaylock sisters represent a happy aberration, an anomaly so rare that they have donated blood for the sake of genetic research. They have all sailed past the current life expectancy of 79 for women in the United States, showing little serious wear along the way. The three sisters over 85 have beaten the unnervingly high odds of developing Alzheimer's (50-50 for people that age and older), and all four have survived bouts with at least one of the most common causes of death for women -- heart disease, cancer and stroke. It's tempting to say that the sisters look young for their ages, but in Audry's case, at least, there isn't much basis for comparison: there are fewer than 70,000 centenarians in the United States.Over the coming decades, though, researchers expect that figure to jump. Even conservative demographers predict that there will be 10 times the current number of centenarians in 2050, when what remains of the boomers -- the generation born between 1946 and 1964, a group representing one-third of the U.S. population -- hits old, old age. According to United Nations population projections, close to 1 in 20 American boomers are expected to live to 100, thanks to breakthroughs in treatments for heart disease and cancer, lives relatively free of hard labor and longstanding memberships at the gym. Those centenarians may not even be the most senior members of society, either -- the National Institute on Aging predicts that the boomers will be playing bridge with a growing number of people 110 and older, or supercentenarians. Demography, of course, is a game of interpretation. (Some contrarian experts predict that life expectancy will decline if obesity rates keep escalating.) But if American demographers have made one mistake consistently over the past two centuries, it's underestimating the rate at which life expectancy has grown.
The quickening pace of biotechnology might also add to the longevity boom. Some of the country's top cellular biologists will sit in their offices at Harvard and M.I.T. and announce, their faces alternately grave and gleeful, that within the next 10 to 30 years a drug will appear on the market that will slow down the process of aging. They point to recent examples of yeast cells and worms and lab mice whose life spans they have extended as much as five times as long with feats of genetic manipulation, and they suggest that they will be able to achieve more modest results in humans. They don't talk about immortality, but they do talk about healthy centenarians.
A leading British scientist today hailed pioneering new research into lung cancer as "promising and exciting."Dr Richard Sullivan, Head of Clinical Programmes for UK Cancer Research said an experimental vaccine that wiped out lung cancer in some patients in the US was "encouraging."
The three-year experiment was carried out on 43 lung cancer sufferers by researchers at Baylor University Medical Centre, Dallas.
Each patient had cells from their tumours injected into their arm and leg every two weeks for three months during the experiment.
A gene called CM-CSF was placed into the cancer cells to change the surface of the cells to help the body identify them as cancerous.
The body's immune cells soon began to recognise, attack and destroy the cancer cells in the lung.
The cancer disappeared in three of the 33 advanced stage patients, while in the rest, the disease remained stable.
For the 10 patients who were in the early stages of their cancer, the vaccine did not make much difference against the cancer.
Dr Sullivan said the vaccine was a breakthrough in the treatment of lung cancer which can be very difficult to treat.
Marc and Connie Foreman are not on the Atkins, South Beach, Zone, Lindora or any other low-carbohydrate diet.Yet here they were, waiting for a table at T.G.I. Friday's, a restaurant they have only driven past for 25 years, because Mr. Foreman had seen a commercial earlier in the day advertising one of its Atkins-approved menu items, a New York strip steak with blue cheese (broccoli, no fries).
"I won't cut out carbs completely," said Ms. Foreman, a teacher, "but when you think about your diet -- the bread, the potatoes, the pasta -- it makes sense to cut out that stuff."
Low-carb mania has spread beyond the millions of low-carb dieters. Food industry analysts say a far greater number of people are now "carb aware," even carb-phobic, cutting out those foods not as a way to lose weight, but because of a general sense that they are unhealthy. That is prompting changes in the way food is made, packaged and sold like nothing since the early 1990's, when even nondieters began loading their carts with low-fat yogurts and snacks.
"A year ago, if you asked consumers what they watch, 11 percent would have said carbs," said Michael Polk, chief operating officer at Unilever-Best Foods, which recently introduced 18 low-carbohydrate versions of items like Skippy peanut butter and Ragu tomato sauce. "Today if you ask, 40 percent of consumers say they are watching carbs. In our opinion, this has evolved into a major shift in consumer behavior."
The growth has even outpaced the government's ability to regulate the products and their labeling. Since 1999, 728 products that claim to be low in carbohydrates have been introduced, according to the Global New Products Database of Mintel International Group, a market research company.
The Japanese economy grew at a robust 7 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter of 2003, the Cabinet Office reported. After weakness early in the year, the strong showing last quarter by Japan, the world's second-largest economy, brought growth for all of 2003 to 2.7 percent.True to form, exports were the engine behind the growth, pulling Japan well out of recession. But this time, the crucial demand for Japanese goods came not from the United States, but from China.
"We reckon that 80 percent of the growth in exports in the last 12 months is due to Chinese demand," said Jesper Koll, chief Japan economist for Merrill Lynch. "There is absolutely no question that here in Japan, all eyes are on China. If China slows down, Japan will crash."
Unlike past recoveries, which tended to be narrowly dependent on increased exports of cars to North America, current growth is more widely based as Chinese demand puts idle capacity in Japanese steel mills and semiconductor plants back to work.
Sales of construction and mining equipment to China by Komatsu jumped 47 percent last quarter, to $150 million. In 2005, the company said, it expects to sell $1 billion to China, more than double the 2002 level.
Imagine swarms of tiny sensors sitting in your office, seeing, listening and maybe even smelling everything that goes on around you.Such "smart dust'' sensors are under development by start-ups like Dust of Berkeley, to be used in everything from heightening security in offices to observing enemy troop movements. Dust plans to announce today that the CIA's venture branch, In-Q-Tel, and two other investors have invested $7 million to help it in its quest.
Dust is one of the leading makers of "smart dust,'' or miniature sensors that measure heat and vibration, analyze chemical compounds and observe surrounding movement. "Smart dust'' is a niche in the hot "radio frequency identification'' industry, where a slew of companies are racing to develop versions of a technology that uses wireless sensing to track movements and products.
Dust, which employs 27 people, is battling stiff competition from an emerging group of start-ups focused on the smart-dust market.
With smart dust, sensors are packed in a tiny box together with a small chip, a battery and a radio -- and use these components to pass along data to other boxes that lie nearby in a so-called "mesh network.''
A judge ruled that evidence police gathered using electronic devices to track Scott Peterson after his pregnant wife disappeared can be used in his murder trial, despite defense objections that the technology is unreliable. Because global positioning system technology has yet to be tested in state criminal court, prosecutors had to establish its reliability and demonstrate the technology was used correctly.Judge Alfred A. Delucchi decided Tuesday they had met those legal tests.
Peterson's lawyer, Mark Geragos, tried to convince the judge that temporary glitches rendered unreliable the devices that Modesto police secretly attached to vehicles Peterson drove before his April 2003 arrest.Hugh Roddis, president of the company that sold Modesto police the three devices, said that covertly placed global positioning devices are a "good investigative tool."The satellite-based radio navigation system can pinpoint locations within feet and is in common use, including in commercial aircraft.
Called "emerging" or "postmodern" churches, they are diverse in theology and method, linked loosely by Internet sites, Web logs, conferences and a growing stack of hip-looking paperbacks. Some religious historians believe the churches represent the next wave of evangelical worship, after the boom in megachurches in the 1980's and 1990's.The label "emerging church" refers to the emergence of a generation with little or no formal attachment to church. The congregations vary in denomination, but most are from the evangelical side of Protestantism and some are sponsored by traditional churches. Brian McLaren, 48, pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Md., and one of the architects of the fledgling movement, compared the churches to foreign missions, using the local language and culture, only directed at the vast unchurched population of young America.
The ministries are diverse in their practices. At Ecclesia in Houston and Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, Calif., artists in the congregation paint during services, in part to bring mystical or nonrational elements to worship, said Chris Seay, 32, pastor of the four-year-old Ecclesia, which draws 400 to 500 people on most Sundays.
In an advance that could inexpensively speed up corporate data centres and eventually personal computers, researchers used everyday silicon to build a device that converts data into light beams.Light-based communications has until now largely been the realm of large telecom companies and long-haul fibre-optic networks because of the expense of the exotic materials required to harness photons, the basic building block of light.
Now, researchers at Intel Corp. say their results with silicon promise to reduce the cost of photonics by introducing a well-known substance that's more readily available.
In the study, published recently in the journal Nature, the Intel researchers reported encoding one billion bits of data per second, 50 times faster than previous silicon experiments. They said they could achieve rates of up to 10 billion bits per second within months.
"This is a significant step toward building optical devices that move data around inside a computer at the speed of light," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer.
Intel believes the finding could have profound implications for the links between servers in corporate data centres. Eventually, the technology could find its way into personal computers and even consumer electronics.
"It is the kind of breakthrough that ripples across an industry over time, enabling other new devices and applications," Gelsinger said. "It could help make the Internet run faster, build much faster high-performance computers and enable high bandwidth applications like ultra-high-definition displays or vision recognition systems."
A new form of mad cow disease has been found in Italy, according to a study released yesterday, and scientists believe that it may be the cause of some cases of human brain-wasting disease.While the strain has been found in only two Italian cows, both apparently healthy, scientists in Europe and the United States said it should provide new impetus in Washington for the Department of Agriculture to adopt the more sensitive rapid tests used in Europe because it may not show up in those used in the United States.
Along with the Italian study, there have been recent reports of unusual types of mad cow disease in France and Japan, and scientists say the discovery of new forms suggests that many cases of "sporadic" human disease -- by far the most common kind, responsible for about 300 deaths a year in the United States -- are not spontaneous at all, but come from eating animals.
The brain-destroying diseases involve prions -- misfolded proteins that are believed somehow to induce other proteins to fold incorrectly, leaving patches of useless debris and holes that turn brains to sponge.
The study, by a team from universities in Turin, Verona, Brescia and Milan, was edited by Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner, who won a 1997 Nobel Prize for his prion work. It appears this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Can small businesses be persuaded to pay for online advertising even if they do not sell their products or services on the Web?That is a big question for Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, as well as Yellow Pages publishers like Verizon and SBC, which are stepping up their efforts to sell online ads to plumbers, dry cleaners and other small businesses, most of which do not have Web sites.
A survey released last week suggests that small businesses may not be able to ignore online advertising for long, because potential customers are looking for them on the Internet.
The Kelsey Group, a research and advisory firm, and BizRate.com, a shopping comparison service, queried more than 5,500 online shoppers and found that 25 percent of their searches were for merchants located near their homes or workplaces. The figure, more than twice what the Kelsey Group had estimated last year, is particularly striking because search engines and Yellow Pages Web sites have done little until recently to give Internet users easy ways to find local businesses.
WSJ.com (registration required):
Pressures building within China's hard-charging economy are driving Beijing to re-examine the Chinese currency's iron-like tether to the U.S. dollar, with a loosening looking more and more like a matter of when, not if. The U.S., the European Union and other trading partners have urged China to let the yuan float, contending that the currency is undervalued and fueling a predatory export boom.But it is internal economic concerns -- not outside political pressures -- that are occupying Chinese leaders' minds. The financial system is awash with money. The amount of cash and private deposits surged 20% last year, twice the rate of the torrid economy. With so much money around, banks are lending at a similarly brisk pace. Inflation, dormant for most of last year, has picked up, and in December it rose 6% over the previous month.
These days, when Alex wants to go to a friend's house or to play video games, he'll go to his computer and shoot me a quick instant message. It's easier -- and far safer -- than bursting into my home office uninvited. This type of parent-child communication isn't all that unusual (parental anger-management issues aside). Instant messaging is quickly replacing the phone as the preferred communication tool for kids ages 12 to 17.Remember the old days, when we would spend hours talking on the phone to the same school friends we had just ridden home with on the bus? That's so last century.
Kids such as Kasey Lee, a 13-year-old middle-school student in Irvine, can't imagine being restricted to one conversation at a time. She prefers the party line quality of instant messages, which allow her to gab with many as 10 friends simultaneously.
The conversations haven't changed much since the dark ages, when I was a teen. Kasey deconstructs the day's events at school, makes weekend plans or discusses ``girl stuff'' -- boys -- in her typed computer exchanges. It's part of her regular after-school routine: snack, homework, IM.
Wall Street Journal (registraton required):
The dire state of Russia's public-health system has helped create what President Vladimir Putin calls a national emergency: Every year nearly a million more Russians die than are born. Even with surging immigration, mostly from former Soviet republics, Russia's population has dropped from 147 million in 1989 to 145 million last year. Life expectancy among men -- who have been hit especially hard by alcoholism and heart disease -- has dropped by five years in that period to 58.5, the lowest level in the developed world. If current trends continue, many demographers predict Russia's population could fall to as low as 100 million by 2050.These statistics have inescapable economic consequences. Economists say declining health will shrink the nation's labor pool and reduce its productivity, potentially complicating Mr. Putin's stated aim of doubling Russia's gross domestic product over the next 10 years.
The over-50 crowd never has been a priority for most marketers. But the new wave of active, affluent baby boomers like Dickerson that's swelling the ranks of that age group is making them harder to ignore.Americans age 50 and above control $7 trillion, or 70 percent, of all U.S. wealth, bring in $2 trillion in annual income and accounting for 50 percent of all discretionary spending. Yet they are the target of only about 5 percent of advertising dollars, according to gerontologist Ken Dychtwald, president of the Age Wave think tank in San Francisco.
Dychtwald thinks marketers should be pitching more concepts like home remodeling, anti-aging medicines and sports cars to 50-and-ups, instead of old-age products for "mature" consumers. But the first step is to focus on them at all.
"Most companies are not paying any attention whatsoever to people over 50," he said. "It's absolutely unbelievable."
The number of 18-to-34 year-olds shrank by 9 million between 1990 and 2000, he noted, while the 50-plus group rose by 12 million as the first boomers -- born from 1946-64 -- surpassed the half-century mark.
For many business travelers planning a trip still means reaching for a telephone instead of keyboarding onto the Internet.But that is changing, according to a new report, which suggests that online travel booking is capturing an increasing share of the corporate travel dollar.
Companies trying to save money and cut the best travel deals are increasingly shifting responsibility for travel arrangements onto their employees through on-line systems, according to Susan Steinbrink, who wrote the report for PhoCusWright Inc. The company supplies the travel and tourism industry with research and forecasts.
Steinbrink's report estimates that about 23 percent of U.S. corporate travel bookings are now made online. That means about $18.8 billion worth of air, car rental and hotel industry revenue came from bookings made via on-line sites operated by the suppliers themselves or on sites such as those run by Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity and other travel bookers.
The study estimates that such online corporate bookings will grow to 38.5 percent of total sales in 2006, when they are expected to reach $36.5 billion.
It's too early to guess the outcome of the hostile takeover bid for the House of Mouse.Comcast, a company feared and loathed in this market and others as the industry Bigfoot, wants to merge with Disney, the best-known brand in global entertainment. The $54 billion question won't be decided quickly.
It represents a huge leap in the power of cable, once the stepchild of the broadcast industry. And it comes at a time when the public is feeling uneasy about the media monoliths already in place.
Putting aside the financials, the legalities and the management crises that make Disney vulnerable, what's intriguing from the couch-potato perspective is Comcast's focus on a long-awaited technology: video on demand.
"The way people use TV is going to change," Comcast chief Brian Roberts said last week in announcing his intention to form the world's biggest media company. "Consumers want to control what they get, how they get it and when they get it."
Comcast has a gargantuan delivery system, with wires into 21.5 million households. It needs entertainment product to send down those wires.
After a year of explosive growth in China, the world's number two personal computer maker Dell Inc. said Friday it hoped to triple its overall growth rate this year.The company may even be able to push its overall market share --- which research firm Gartner pegged at 6.8 percent last year -- into the double-digit range, Bill Amelio, president of Dell's Asia Pacific region, said.
"That's our stretch goal," he said.
Dell's sales in China soared to about 60 percent last year, making the country Dell's fourth-largest market behind the United States, Britain and Japan.
At the company's current growth rate, China would take the number three spot from Japan in about three years.
PC sales in China rose 10.4 percent last year to 13.3 million units, accounting for nearly half of all computers sold in the Asia Pacific region, Gartner has said.
In a discovery that offers a rare glimpse back to when the universe was just 750 million years old, astrophysicists have detected a tiny galaxy that is the farthest known object from Earth."We are confident it is the most distant known object," California Institute of Technology astronomer Richard Ellis said of the galaxy, which lies roughly 13 billion light-years from Earth.
The team uncovered the faint galaxy using two of the most powerful telescopes - one in space, the other in Hawaii - aided by the natural magnification provided by a massive cluster of galaxies. The gravitational tug of the cluster, called Abell 2218, deflects the light of the distant galaxy and magnifies it many times over.
The magnification process, first proposed by Albert Einstein and known as "gravitational lensing," produces double images of the galaxy.
"Without the magnification of 25 afforded by the foreground cluster, this early object could simply not have been identified or studied in any detail with presently available telescopes," said astronomer Jean-Paul Kneib, of Caltech and the Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees in France.
The insurance industry argues that rates are set to cover the cost of doing business. And in the case of nursing homes, the industry says that cost is increasing because of a rising number of lawsuits.Frank O'Neil, vice president of corporate communications for malpractice insurer ProAssurance, said the company has made it a policy to stop insuring doctors whose main business is nursing home care.
The lawsuit climate in nursing homes, O'Neil said, is worse than any other area of malpractice law, "bar none.''
Another problem, he said, is "increasingly, that nursing homes are not carrying enough insurance, so we become the deep pockets'' that plaintiffs and their attorneys go after.
In Norman's case, though, that risk seems low, considering he's been named in just two malpractice lawsuits and subsequently dropped from both.
And Nemer has been named in just one malpractice suit, which also was dismissed.
"I have no history of cases, and my premiums still went up more than 300 percent,'' Nemer said, explaining that his rates rose from $6,000 in 2002 to $21,000 in 2003.
When Nemer asked his insurer why he was being forbidden to treat nursing home patients, he was told that they present a high risk of lawsuits.
"The government controls what we charge,'' Nemer said. "Why can't they have some control over the insurance companies? These guys have absolutely no controls. They can do whatever they want. They can charge whatever they want. They can drop a doctor for no reason at all.''
A San Francisco judge Friday refused to stop the city's unprecedented gay marriage spree, prompting elated officials to declare they will keep City Hall open through the three-day weekend so more same-sex couples can tie the knot.Superior Court Judge James L. Warren made his decision on procedural grounds, turning down a request by opponents of gay marriage to consider the matter on an emergency basis. The city, which had married at least 500 same-sex couples since Thursday, will be back in court Tuesday for a hearing on the merits of two lawsuits against its go-it-alone approach.
Taking advantage of the window of opportunity, dozens of couples streamed in from as far away as Southern California to be married under the ornate rotunda -- even as state officials said Friday they would refuse to record the marriages. The weddings, combined with the recent pro-gay court ruling in Massachusetts, set gay marriage up as a possible hot-button issue in the November elections.
The online auction house once thought of as the fastest way to dump garage sale castoffs is now the place to buy and sell Jimmy Choo shoes, Salvatore Ferragamo alligator handbags and Etro coats. And this season, eBay is taking its fashion credentials further -- it will auction garments straight off the New York runways from hot young design team Proenza Schouler, six months before they hit the stores.It all points to eBay's growing role behind the runways in the glitzy world of fashion, as a marketplace and as a no-longer-unlikely source of inspiration for some designers. With sales of $1.8 billion last year in clothes, shoes and accessories, the auction site is already all the buzz in fashion circles, and the idea of online trunk shows has some fashionistas salivating.
"I think it's genius because you can have the clothing before it arrives in all the stores. If you're a fashionista, you want things before anyone else,'' said Rosemary Ponzo, 42, a film and TV stylist who was decked out in silver Tiffany cuffs and a magenta Escada fur hat at the Catherine Malandrino show this week in New York. ``I have a lot of friends that are selling their vintage clothes, like Gaultier from the 80s and pre-owned furs.''
A small San Jose-based software company Friday emerged as a focus of the investigation into how parts of the secretive, underlying software code for Microsoft Windows were leaked and circulated on the Internet.The theft of Microsoft's closely guarded source code -- which provide blueprints that make the ubiquitous Windows operating system work -- raised computer security concerns to a new unsettling level, security experts said.
References to Mainsoft, a software company that has worked closely with Microsoft since 1994, appeared within the leaked code and an e-mail address for a Mainsoft employee is listed in an accompanying file, according to security experts who have seen the stolen code.
But those experts stressed that it was unclear what role Mainsoft may have played or who might have stolen and distributed parts of the code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0. The code has been posted on peer-to-peer file sharing sites used by the tech savvy.
Mainsoft, which has a source code licensing agreement with Microsoft, Friday acknowledged its connection to the incident. ``Mainsoft takes Microsoft's and all our customers' security matters seriously, and we recognize the gravity of the situation,'' Mainsoft Chairman Mike Gullard said in a statement.
U.S. anti-doping officials are prepared to ban athletes involved in the Balco drug scandal from competing in this summer's Olympic Games if evidence shows they used performance-enhancing drugs. As four Bay Area men were arraigned Friday in San Francisco federal court, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency began combing through documents released as part of the 42-count indictment alleging a conspiracy to give athletes illegal steroids and prescription drugs."We fully expect that developments in the U.S. Attorney's proceedings and our ongoing investigation will lead to the initiation of more doping cases against athletes and others,'' said Terry Madden, the anti-doping agency chief. He made the comments Thursday after the indictment of Balco's owner, Victor Conte Jr.; Balco's vice president, James Valente; Barry Bonds' personal trainer, Greg Anderson; and track coach Remi Korchemny.
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency can sanction athletes even though they did not fail drug tests. Athletes' names were not revealed in the court documents that alleged the Bay Area men conspired to help elite athletes circumvent drug tests.
Much of the speculation involving athletes in the case has focused on Bonds, baseball's single-season home run record holder. But with the Athens Games six months away, the impact of the case could be greatest on the U.S
It is a startling and wonderful result," said Sidney Nagel, a physicist at the University of Chicago. "One doesn't normally stop to think about this. If you did, you might have guessed what would happen, but you'd have guessed wrongly."The issue of how particles pack together has intrigued scientists for centuries and has implications for fields such as the design of high-density ceramic materials for use in aerospace or other industries.
Chaikin and his colleague, chemist Salvatore Torquato, used the candies to investigate the physical and mathematical principles involved when particles are poured randomly into a vessel.
Writing in Friday's issue of the journal Science, they said they found that oblate spheroids -- such as plain M&Ms -- pack surprisingly more densely than regular spheres when poured randomly and shaken.
When poured in, they said, spheres occupy about 64 percent of the space in a container. M&Ms manage to pack in at a density of about 68 percent.
"We just stretched a sphere and suddenly things changed dramatically," said Torquato. "To me, it's remarkable that you can take this simple system with common candies and probe one of the deepest problems in condensed matter physics."
Racing to beat a conservative legal challenge, San Francisco officials Thursday married 80 same-sex couples Thursday in a series of jubilant ceremonies that marked the nation's first government-approved gay marriages.
In a breakthrough outlined in the Feb. 13 issue of Science, they've discovered an efficient way to capture hydrogen from ethanol, produced in great quantities in Minnesota and other Corn Belt states. Not only does it promise to boost the state's ethanol industry, but it also could spark efforts to create a "hydrogen economy" that's less dependent on imported fuels such as gasoline and natural gas.The most immediate applications, they said, are in places where cheap power often isn't available: Isolated homes or air-conditioning units of diesel trucks. But eventually, they said, communities could build their own power plants, and not have to rely on huge power producers located hundreds of miles away.
"Every county or town could build its own local power system rather than having to have a megaplant," said Lanny Schmidt, the project leader and a Regents professor of chemical engineering.But how soon and where the technology would be applied, he and others say, depend on a variety of factors, including public interest, the price of the energy and existing regulatory obstacles.
Homes could start being connected to the Internet through electrical outlets, and consumers and business may find it easier to make cheaper telephone calls online under new rules that the Federal Communications Commission began preparing on Thursday.Taken together, the new rules could profoundly affect the architecture of the Internet and the services it provides. They also have enormous implications for consumers, the telephone and energy industries, and equipment manufacturers.
Michael K. Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, and his two Republican colleagues on the five-member commission said the twin moves, and a separate 4-to-1 vote Thursday to allow a small company providing computer-to-computer phone connections to operate under different rules from ordinary phone companies, would ultimately transform the telecommunications industry and the Internet."This is a reflection of the commission's commitment to bring tomorrow's technology to consumers today," Mr. Powell said. He added that the rules governing the new phone services sought to make them as widely available as e-mail, and possibly much less expensive than traditional phones, given their lower regulatory costs.
Barry Bonds's personal trainer, a prominent track coach and two executives of a nutritional supplements laboratory were charged yesterday with illegally distributing steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs to dozens of professional athletes in football, baseball and track and field. The indictments were the first to result from an investigation that began in August 2002 when federal agents began looking into the activities at the supplements laboratory, known as the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, or Balco.The allegation that the illicit drugs were sold to dozens of athletes seemed to indicate that their use was more widespread than has previously been reported. Nine athletes have been identified in news reports as failing tests for the steroid known as THG, which has been linked to Balco. More than a dozen athletes testified before the grand jury investigating the company.
The four men indicted yesterday were accused of conspiracy to distribute steroids, possession of human growth hormone and money laundering, according to the 42-count indictment handed down by a federal grand jury in San Francisco and announced in Washington by Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Anabolic steroids are a controlled substance, and under federal law it is illegal to distribute them without a prescription.
World Health Organization officials said Thursday they were investigating an outbreak of a Nipah-like virus in Bangladesh that has led to 14 deaths.Nipah virus, first identified in Malaysia in 1999, is thought to be carried by an animal, perhaps bats, cats, dogs and pigs.
WHO said from Jan. 4 to Feb. 8 at least 42 cases and 14 deaths in the Manikganj and Rajbari provinces of Bangladesh have been attributed to a virus that appears to be similar to the Nipah pathogen. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has confirmed a Nipah-like virus in nine of the cases.
Three years later, Mr. [Bram] Cohen, 28, has emerged as the face of the next wave of Internet file sharing. If Napster started the first generation of file-sharing, and services like Kazaa represented the second, then the system developed by Mr. Cohen, known as BitTorrent, may well be leading the third. Firm numbers are difficult to come by, but it appears that the BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 10 million times.And just as earlier forms of file-sharing seem to be waning in popularity under legal pressure from the music industry, new technologies like BitTorrent are making it easier than ever to share and distribute the huge files used for video. One site alone, suprnova.org, routinely offers hundreds of television programs, recent movies and copyrighted software programs. The movie industry, among others, has taken notice.
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It is difficult to measure BitTorrent's overall use. But Steven C. Corbato, director of backbone network infrastructure for Internet2, the high-speed network consortium, said he took notice in May. "We started seeing BitTorrent traffic increase right around May 15, 2003, and by October it was above 10 percent of the traffic," he said.
Researchers in South Korea have become the first to successfully clone a human embryo, and then cull from it master stem cells that many doctors consider key to one day creating customized cures for diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases.This is not cloning to make babies, but to create medicine.
It's sure to revive international controversy over whether to ban all human cloning, as the Bush administration wants, or to allow this "therapeutic cloning" that might eventually let patients grow their own replacement tissue.
Embryonic stem cells are the body's building blocks, cells from which all other tissue types spring. They're present in an embryo only days after conception and are ethically sensitive because culling stem cells destroys the embryo.
Scientists have used therapeutic cloning to partially cure laboratory mice with an immune system disease. And they know how to cull stem cells from human embryos left over in fertility clinics.
But attempts to clone human embryos-- so the resulting stem cells would be genetically identical to the patient who needs them -- have failed until now.
Scientists from Seoul National University say they succeeded largely because of using extremely fresh eggs donated by South Korean volunteers and gentler handling of the genetic material inside them.
But the recent evidence compiled by Mr. Triplett and Mr. Bosworth shows that information technology may just be the cure for Baumol's disease.They found that from 1995 to 2001, labor productivity in services grew at a 2.6 percent rate, outpacing the 2.3 percent rate for goods-producing sectors. Furthermore, this phenomenon was widespread: 24 out of the 29 service industries they studied exhibited growth in labor productivity after 1995, and 17 experienced accelerated growth.
Interestingly enough, the service industries where overall productivity did not grow were hotels, health, education and entertainment. These are all examples where customers tend to perceive that more labor is associated with higher quality, as Mr. Baumol had originally suggested.
Robert Gordon of Northwestern University and others have pointed out that information-technology-producing industries have had a big effect on aggregate productivity growth since they have themselves been extraordinarily productive. Indeed, semiconductor manufacture and the computer and electronics industry lead the pack among manufacturing industries with respect to productivity.
Scientists in South Korea report that they have created human embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem cells, the universal cells that hold great promise for medical research.Their goal, the scientists say, is not to clone humans but to advance understanding of the causes and treatment of disease.
But the work makes the birth of a cloned baby suddenly more feasible. For that reason, it is likely to reignite the fierce debate over the ethics of human cloning.
The work was led by Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University and will be published tomorrow in the journal Science. The paper provides a detailed description of how to create human embryos by cloning. Experts in the field not involved with the work said they found the paper persuasive."You now have the cookbook, you have a methodology that's publicly available," said Dr. Robert Lanza, medical director of a company, Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., that had tried without success to do what the South Koreans did.
Although the paper, written in dense jargon and summarizing its findings by saying, "We report the derivation of a pluripotent embryonic stem cell line (SCNT-hES-1) from a cloned human blastocyst," its import was immediately clear to researchers.
Officials responded to a new discovery of bird flu Tuesday by ordering a quarantine of 80 farms and the slaughter of 72,000 more chickens. The swift action was aimed at averting more bans on U.S. exports.The second case of disease was found in a commercial flock of roaster-type chickens in northern Sussex County, at least five miles away from the farm where the first flock tested positive last week.
The chickens at the second farm, operated by Perdue Farms, were killed Tuesday afternoon, said Delaware Secretary of Agriculture Michael Scuse. "This now is a very, very serious matter. We have a multibillion-dollar industry at stake,'' he said.
Scuse said it was unclear how the second farm was infected. "At this time, we cannot explain how the virus appeared so far outside our original containment zone,'' he said.
An overwhelming majority of France's National Assembly voted Tuesday to ban religious emblems in state schools, a measure Paris wants to keep tensions between Muslim and Jewish minorities out of public classrooms.Deputies voted 494 to 36 to ban Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses from state schools and threaten pupils who insisted on wearing them with expulsion.
The government insists the ban does not single out any religion, but cabinet ministers admit its main targets are the Islamic headscarves and anti-Semitic remarks from Muslim pupils that teachers say have become more frequent in recent years.
"What is at issue here is the clear affirmation that public school is a place for learning and not for militant activity or proselytism,'' Assembly Speaker Jean-Louis Debre said.
But [Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's former campaign manager,] was right about plenty of things last year. He bet that savvy use of the Internet, plus unprecedented reliance on and trust in people at the edges of networks, could help turn a "who's he?" candidate into a genuine contender for the nomination.The forces the campaign unleashed -- and the people who discovered they had a chance to change things -- aren't going to be rebottled anytime soon. Those forces have big implications for businesses, not just politicians. For example, a genuine conversation with customers and suppliers, whether through Weblogs or other means, can soften the cold exterior most companies expose to the world. Asking for ideas from the edge of the customer and supplier network can bring better ideas into an organization.
The broadcast style has failed the American people, Trippi says, because it crowds out serious debate about serious issues, focusing instead on entertainment.
Nokia will become majority owner of Symbian as Psion becomes the second co-founder to cash out of the mobile device software consortium only months after boosting its investment by acquiring part of Motorola's stake. The purchase of Psion's 31 percent stake in Symbian, an operating system for "smart" cell phones and handheld devices, will nearly double Nokia's interest to 63.3 percent.The divestitures by Motorola in summer 2003 and now Psion come as industry players position themselves for an expected explosion of demand for cell phones that double as personal organizers, wireless Internet connections, video and music players, digital cameras and game consoles.
University of Texa Southwestern Press Release:
Increasing leptin, a protein involved in regulating body weight, in laboratory animals transforms fat-storing cells into unique fat-burning cells, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas report. They speculate that these findings could provide "a quick and safe solution" to the obesity problem in humans.Dr. Roger Unger, director of the Touchstone Center for Diabetes Research at UT Southwestern, has found that increasing leptin in laboratory animals converts fat-storing cells into fat-burning cells.
Researchers attribute the change in the cell's structure and function in rats - from fat storing to fat-burning - to a massive increase in the action of mitochondria, the principal energy source of the cell. The increase in mitochondria, which also led to substantial weight loss in the rats, was found two weeks after researchers injected the leptin gene.
Findings from the study will appear in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and are currently available online.
"This is the first careful examination of the fat cells after leptin therapy," said Dr. Roger Unger, director of the Touchstone Center for Diabetes Research at UT Southwestern, a physician at the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the study's senior author. "The structure of the cells changed from the normal appearance of a fat cell to a very novel cell that's really never been seen before. There's no precedent for a cell that appears like this.
"The ability to convert fat cells into fat-burning cells may suggest novel therapeutic strategies for obesity.
The VCR and the DVD player have changed where and how Americans watch movies, and now home theaters are further transforming the experience. As setups like the Slotkys' become commonplace, TV watching is becoming more of a communal ritual, shared with family and friends."People really congregate around it. It's what people do now," said Mike Orio, who designs and installs home theater systems in the New York area and is the host of frequent movie gatherings at his Brooklyn home. "It's an American temple and the screen is the altar."
Some home-theater owners find that their living room has become a gathering place for neighbors to watch big games and other special events. Others prefer more intimate movie viewings with a few friends.
"Everybody's doing it, said David Bruce Mann, an architect in Manhattan. "Every apartment I'm doing right now, whether it's high end or just regular people with regular budgets, involves surround sound."
According to the Consumer Electronics Association, some 3.1 million prepackaged systems - five speakers, a subwoofer and an audio-video receiver - were sold last year, nearly triple the number sold in 2000.
The rise of the home theater appears to be having an effect on the movie industry: the number of tickets sold last year dropped to 1.5 billion, from 1.6 billion in 2002. Anthony Kusich, an analyst with ReelSource, a box-office tracking firm in Los Angeles, attributed the decline in part to home theaters. "Particularly older people who don't want to deal with a theater don't mind waiting for the DVD," he said.
The idea behind "social networking" Web sites like Friendster, Tribe.net and LinkedIn is almost the opposite of the old Groucho Marx joke: they attract people who want to join a club eager to have them.But as the popularity of such sites has taken off, the big question for investors in new technologies is whether social networking sites can ever make a lot of money by connecting friends of friends in mini-networks of trust, whether for dating, business or maintaining acquaintances. For many, the buzz over social networking sounds a lot like vintage Internet hyperbole from the late 1990's.
"I'm having a real problem finding a business model here," said Nate Elliott, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "It feels like the early days of the Internet, with sites like Globe.com saying they'll aggregate tens of millions of users, then find a way to monetize them. That's not the way to run a business."
The creators of such services strenuously disagree, arguing that in contrast to the hundreds of dot-coms that bombed, they have clear plans for generating revenue. But those plans could be short-circuited by Internet giants like Yahoo and Google, as well as by established players in the online jobs and dating categories, whose turf most social networking sites seek to occupy.
In the stratified world of high school, where cliques often form along racial lines, Carolyn Abbott's biotechnology students recently made a startling discovery: More than half of the class at San Jose's Piedmont Hills High School, students from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, are linked in their DNA to the same ancestor, born more than 100,000 years ago in central China or Taiwan."That's crazy," said junior Christina Romero, as she scanned the wide array of facial features, hair colors and skin tones among 17 teenagers who were suddenly related.
"I finally have an excuse to be in the Chinese Club,'' said sophomore Beth Gomes, a white student among the consanguineous classmates.
It was a highly technical genetics experiment involving polymerase chain reactions and gel electrophoresis. But it yielded deep revelations that forced the identity-conscious teens to re-evaluate their differences. And it prompted students to ponder a perplexing question: Does race exist?
With the recent mapping of the human genome and the intricate picture now available of humans on a molecular level, scientists know that traditional notions of race no longer hold up.
Decode Genetics, the Icelandic company that discovered genes for schizophrenia and osteoporosis, has found a variant gene that doubles the risk of heart attack and stroke among Icelanders who carry it, the company's researchers are reporting today.The company says it is starting advanced clinical trials of a drug intended to counteract the variant gene's effects. The company's chief executive, Dr. Kari Stefansson, says the drug may help more patients beyond those who carry the variant gene. Last year, more than a million people in the United States died of heart disease and stroke.
But several experts on the genetics of heart disease said they were not fully persuaded by the company's evidence linking the variant gene to heart attacks.
Decode Genetics is a leader in the difficult art of identifying the genes involved in complex diseases, the name for the common diseases to which several variant genes contribute. The company uses DNA analysis and statistical genetics to find disease-causing genes in Icelanders, and has shown that many of its findings apply to other populations, too.
The reason for the masterly inactivity has nothing to do with the increased strength of the financial markets vis-àvis central banks since the mid-1980s, and everything to do with the changing balance of power within the G7. A couple of decades ago, America was weak and needed the help of Germany and Japan. Now that the US is the global hegemon, it goes its own way. To the extent that the weakness of the dollar is hurting the European economy, the view from Washington is that the Euro-'ECB's benign-neglect communications style appears to invite another one-way bet for the europeans should remedy the problem by boosting growth at home.The Bush administration cares far more about China, which it sees as a potential longterm threat to American supremacy, than it does about Europe, which it sees as a waning force. As far as the Americans are concerned, east Asia is the future, Europe the past. If this analysis is correct, it would represent a seismic shift in global economics and politics, so it is worth studying in some depth.
Dressed in the unisex blue Mao tunic, Chinese women hold aloft half the sky. That myth flies out of the window the moment you step into mainland China. The normally tedious wait through immigration seems all too short as one after the other, Chinese women, dressed in the latest styles, catch your eye. The new urban Chinese woman is not just self-confident; she is totally attuned to the latest in inter national fashion trends, and what’s more, can afford to follow them.Unlike in India, where western fashions are associated with only the upper middle class, in China, the "opening up' process has been so sweeping in certain regions, that even those who neither care for fashion, nor have the time to follow it, end up being dressed a la mode. The construction worker wears jeans as does the university student, and the domestic cleaner's jacket is as chic as the secretarial assistant's. For the last 20 years, the world's leading brands have been getting their outfits manufactured in China.
But what about traditional Chinese values, you wonder, as yet another "blond," spaghetti-strapped, mini-skirted young thing in stiletto boots crosses the road. As the famous Red Flag is waved while Miss World 2003 contestants flash plastic smiles and strut their stuff in an auditorium specially constructed for the event, you wonder whether nothing's left of chairman Mao's dream of women's equality.
Restaurants everywhere are racing to put low-carb foods on their menus, as Americans turn en masse to the high-protein, low-carb lifestyle. Cheeseburgers and bunless burgers are rampant, as are buffalo wings and sour cream.But there are casualities, too - bakeries and pasta shops.
One group considering a new approach is America's pizza makers. About 3 billion pizzas are consumed in the nation each year, according to the National Association of Pizzeria Operators. To keep up with the low-carb craze, pizza makers are considering a low-carb dough for pizzas.
Dinkar Marla is just thirtysomething but he already has everything his father still dreams about: a house of his own, a snazzy car and a state-of-the art laptop.Though part of a very small slice of India, the upwardly mobile chartered accountant leads a charmed life: he travels a lot and spends his weekends clubbing or at the movies in one of the spanking new malls that have sprung up near Delhi.
"Today, people have a lot more cash at a much younger age and they're willing to spend it to make a statement," laughs Marla.
"The whole economy has grown substantially and has become more receptive to a consumerist culture with mobile phones and cars."
Marla is a part of India's growing middle class that has shed the Gandhian frugality of previous generations and begun chanting a brand-new mantra: spend, spend, spend.The signs of change are everywhere: walk into any of the glitzy shopping malls that have mushroomed in Bombay or Delhi and India's middle class is snapping up everything from mobile phones and home theatre systems to French perfume and diamond jewelry.
Doctors have found a new use for Botox, the wrinkle-smoothing botulism toxin: It seems to curb excessive sweating.People with a condition called hyperhidrosis produce four or five times the amount of sweat as is normal. There are various treatments, including powerful antiperspirants, drugs to prevent sweat gland stimulation, even surgery on those glands.
Botox, a weakened form of the food-poisoning toxin botulism, already is widely used to treat wrinkles. It is being tried to treat excessive sweating because it seems to temporarily paralyze a nerve that stimulates sweat glands.
Nielsen Media Research, the company that measures television viewership, signed an agreement Thursday with TiVo to provide information on digital video recorder usage.Television networks, concerned about declining ratings, have complained that Nielsen's measurements don't reflect the growing use of DVRs.
After many years of slow acceptance by consumers, DVR sales picked up last year and are expected to increase even more as cable companies build the product into their receivers. Forrester Research estimates there are 3 million DVRs in use, up from 1.7 million in 2002.
"We saw companies finally needing to increase the number of hours worked after cutting hours and workers through the prior three years," said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Banc of America Investment Services in St. Louis. "This is a trend we will likely see followed in 2004. Companies will need to ramp up hiring."And a Federal Reserve governor, Ben S. Bernanke, said in a speech yesterday that economic growth of more than 4 percent this year "is not at all unreasonable." Productivity gains, Mr. Bernanke said, would restrain inflation and provide room for interest-rate setters to "be patient" in the next six months.
Even at a slowed pace last quarter, the rise in productivity was enough to cause unit labor costs, or the amount paid for each unit of production, to fall 1.3 percent annually.
For all of last year, productivity rose 4.2 percent after a 4.9 percent increase in 2002. The two-year average was the largest since 1950-51.
Corning Inc. is making a $600 million investment in its liquid crystal display glass substrate manufacturing process to take advantage of the boom in flat-panel computer monitors and television sets.The company said the investment will be in stages over the next 24 months at its plants in Taiwan and Japan. In a statement, the firm said: "Corning continues to believe that the annual market volume growth for LCD glass could be in the 30 percent to 50 percent range over the next several years. . . . LCD television sales reached 3 percent of the worldwide TV market in 2003, more than tripling the 2002 rate. Corning now believes that LCD-TVs may be up to 16 percent market penetration as early as 2006."
For years it was an article of faith for many Christians that the most powerful vehicle for bringing nonbelievers to Jesus was a Billy Graham crusade.Now, they expect it will be a Mel Gibson movie.
Three weeks before the release of "The Passion of the Christ," a graphic portrayal of the torture and crucifixion of Jesus, Christians nationwide are busy preparing to use it in an immense grass-roots evangelistic campaign.
Mr. Gibson, who produced, directed and largely financed the film, has tried to stoke their enthusiasm by screening it the past two months for at least 10,000 pastors and leaders of Christian ministries and media. Many emerged proclaiming it a searing, life-changing experience.
Now those leaders are buying blocks of tickets, encouraging church members to invite their "unsaved" friends and co-workers and producing television commercials that start with scenes from the movie and finish with a pitch for their churches.
"I don't know of anything since the Billy Graham crusades that has had the potential of touching so many lives," said Morris H. Chapman, president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination. "It's like the Lord somehow laid in our lap something that could be a great catalyst for spiritual awakening in this nation."
The death toll from the bird flu epidemic sweeping across Asia rose to 16 on Thursday after a 16-year-old girl in Vietnam died from the disease, making it the country's 11th fatality from the outbreak.Vietnamese health officials said the girl was from the southern province of Soc Trang in the Mekong Delta, one of the provinces hit hardest by the outbreak. The girl died at Ho Chi Minh City's Hospital for Tropical Disease on Tuesday, said Tran Tinh Hien, the centre's deputy director, but her death was only disclosed on Thursday.
The latest death came as China and Thailand again asserted that the epidemic was under control in their countries, despite the emergence of new cases of avian flu in both humans and poultry.
While only about 3.5 percent of Americans, or about 10 million people, are following a low-carb diet, about four times that many people have tried such diets within the last year, according to the NPD Group, a market research company in Port Washington, N.Y. The food industry acknowledges that the trend has exhibited significant staying power. But good news for companies that market foods with relatively low carbohydrate content is a call to action for industries that grow or market foods that are irreversibly high in carbohydrates....
After discovering last month that concerns about carbohydrates had cut orange juice consumption by 5 percent over the last two years, the Florida Department of Citrus decided to introduce a $1.8 million advertising and marketing campaign to promote the benefits of oranges. The agency plans to position orange juice as a "smart" carbohydrate, playing up the health benefits associated with oranges.
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In April, when the United States Potato Board, a trade group, saw the latest figures on annual potato consumption - down 4.7 percent from the year before - the group's leaders left their potato farms and flew to Denver for an emergency meeting. A survey by the board found that consumers thought potatoes had no nutritional value. One survey question asked consumers to indicate which foods they thought were rich in vitamin C. Only 6 percent of the respondents chose potatoes, although a medium-size one has about 45 percent of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C.
A flash of singer Janet Jackson's right breast during a halftime Super Bowl performance has become the most-searched image in Internet history, online companies said on Wednesday.Jackson's unscripted flash of flesh during Sunday's Super Bowl halftime send Internet surfers seeking pictures of the snafu in greater numbers over a 24 hour period than searches for "September 11" or Madonna's kiss with Britney Spears.
Jackson's Web popularity rocketed to the top of the charts on Web portals owned by Terra Lycos and Yahoo Inc. moments after the shocking finale to the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday.
"The now infamous 'wardrobe malfunction' ... has proved to be the most-searched event in the history of the Internet," said Aaron Schatz, who compiles a daily list of top search phrases for Lycos.
Singer Justin Timberlake, at the end of a duet with Jackson, tore off part of her black leather bustier, exposing one bare breast. The incident prompted a federal probe into indecency on television.
On Monday, Jackson received 60 times as many searches than perennial chart topper, the "Paris Hilton sex tape," and 80 times as many as singer Britney Spears.
Ohio Legislature Votes to Ban Same-Sex Unions
The Ohio Legislature gave final approval on Tuesday to one of the most sweeping bans on same-sex unions in the country, galvanized by court rulings in Canada and Massachusetts that have declared gay marriage to be legal.The Ohio measure, which also would bar state agencies from giving benefits to both gay and heterosexual domestic partners, would make Ohio the 38th state to prohibit the recognition of same-sex unions. Gov. Bob Taft, a Republican, planned to sign it in the coming week, his office said. In approving the measure, the Republican-controlled Legislature rejected concerns raised by some of the state's largest corporations and colleges, including Ohio State University, that the ban would hurt the state's business image and undermine their ability to recruit skilled workers. Supporters of the bill, which passed overwhelmingly in the House but on a closer vote in the Senate, argued that the measure was not meant to be discriminatory, but reflected their conviction; borne out by some polls; that most people wanted marriage defined in the traditional sense: as between a man and a woman. That desire has intensified, they said, in the months since courts in Massachusetts and Canada ruled that gays should be allowed to marry.
The highest court in Massachusetts declared today that only marriage between gay couples; not just civil unions; would comply with the state's constitution, clearing the way for the marriages to take place by mid-May.It would make Massachusetts the first state in the United States to uphold same-sex marriages.
The court's ruling was issued in response to a state Senate question about whether civil unions of the kind permitted in Vermont would meet the constitutional requirements of a 4-to-3 ruling by the Massachusetts court last November that gay couples had the right to marry.
Referring to legislation being considered by the Senate, Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the state's Supreme Judicial Court, said, "The bill's absolute prohibition of the word `marriage' by `spouses' who are the same sex is more than semantic.
"The dissimilitude between the terms `civil marriage' and `civil union' is not innocuous; it is a considered choice of language that reflects a demonstrable assigning of same-sex, largely homosexual, couples to second-class status."
The opinion added: "For no rational reason the marriage laws of the Commonwealth discriminate against a defined class; no amount of tinkering with language will eradicate that stain."
It's not so much the gaping $521 billion federal budget deficit forecast for 2004 by the Bush administration Monday that's got economists fretting about the nation's fiscal future. Nor is it the $2.4 trillion shortfall projected by the Congressional Budget Office over the next 10 years.What really makes budget experts break out in a cold sweat is the vision of what happens 10, 15 and more years from now. That's when an unimaginably large tide of red ink could wash over the economy as the federal government pays the retirement and medical costs of Baby Boomers.
"Any observer looking at the deficits the CBO projects would probably be alarmed, but they are nothing compared to what occurs after," said UC Berkeley economist Janet Yellen, a former Federal Reserve governor. "We have a huge long-term problem."
Not the typical path for fashions from a hot young design team. But within days of its runway show during Fashion Week in New York next week, Proenza Schouler plans to auction some of the newly modeled clothes and shoes on eBay. The lot will include more than four dozen pairs of shoes, designed in league with Manolo Blahnik, and 50 garments, like a black silk charmeuse bustier dress with black patent leather sequins, and a pair of khaki and Nantucket-red suede shorts.The goods, from next week's show as well as two Proenza Schouler shows last year, will carry minimum bids at deep discounts to retail prices. Bidding will open at $624, for example, for the buffalo-hide trench coat, which sells for $2,400 in stores. Proenza Schouler clothes are normally found only at Barneys, Neiman Marcus and other luxury chains, and are priced at $50 to more than $10,000.
The 10-day auction, planned for Feb. 26 to March 7, will not be the first on eBay by a fashion designer. Narciso Rodriquez crossed that threshold last September. But in that case only two items, a nude-tone sequin dress and a similar colored suit, were direct from the runway.
The coming Proenza Schouler auction, by contrast, will be "virtually an online trunk show - the first of its kind,'' said Constance White, the style director at eBay. The Web site is intent on expanding its clothing offerings and special promotions. "The potential is vast," Ms. White said.
EBay had $1.8 billion last year in sales of clothing and accessories - the fifth-biggest category for the company, which said it sold $28.4 billion in goods in 2003, led by $7.5 billion worth of automobiles and $2.6 billion in consumer electronics.
In 2004, the U.S. federal budget deficit will likely be the biggest in history, with more big deficits in store for years to come. But should we care?Some economists say we shouldn't, that they've never hurt the economy before and that they'll help the economy grow faster, paying for themselves in the long run.
Many more economists, however, say deficits eventually could threaten the economy by driving up interest rates and cutting into household income -- though that probably wouldn't happen right away.
On Monday, President Bush unveiled a $2.4 trillion budget proposal for the fiscal year 2005, a budget that includes expected deficits of about $521 billion in 2004 and about $363 billion in 2005.
Pizza might be hailed as the food of the gods, one of America's best-loved meals, a hearty delectable dish that fills the stomach and seems to soothe the soul.But to low-carb dieters, it's just a gut-busting disk of dough.
And that has caused pizza makers around the nation to wonder if the low-carb craze will force changes in one of America's best-loved foods.
They're saying, "Hey, we've got a problem here. Pizza's built on bread. It's the No. 1 enemy of the Atkinites," said Tom Boyles, senior editor of PMQ Magazine, a publication that follows the pizza industry.
Boyles has a word for those who want to avoid carbohydrates: "carbavoids."
Although industry sales haven't taken a hit yet, some pizza operators are considering offering customers low-carb pizzas.
"Pizza operators are asking themselves, 'Do I want to do this?' and they're bouncing the idea back and forth," Boyles said. "It's at that point where they're going, 'Just how far is this going to go?"'
According to the National Association of Pizzeria Operators, about 3 billion pizzas are sold each year in the United States by about 40,000 shops.
At the same time, low-carb diets like the Atkins, South Beach and Zone have gained wider popularity. A Harris Interactive poll done last summer for Novartis Consumer Health Inc. estimated that 32 million Americans were on some kind of high-protein, low-carb diet.
Jill Doimer's mother died in 2002 from ovarian cancer, detected too late to be effectively treated.So Ms. Doimer is eagerly awaiting the introduction of a new test that holds the promise of detecting early-stage ovarian cancer far more accurately than any test available now, using only blood from a finger prick.
Not only does she plan to be tested, but an advocacy group she helped found, Ovarian Awareness of Kentucky, also intends to spread the word to women and doctors.
"If it's going to happen to me or anyone I know, I want it to be caught at an early stage," said Ms. Doimer, who lives in Louisville.
The new test, expected to be available in the next few months, could have a big effect on public health if it works as advertised. That is because when ovarian cancer is caught early, when it is treatable by surgery, more than 90 percent of women live five years or longer. But right now, about three-quarters of cases are detected after the cancer has advanced, and then only 35 percent of women survive five years.
The test is also the first to use a new technology that some believers say could revolutionize diagnostics. It looks not for a single telltale protein --like the prostate-specific antigen, or P.S.A., used to diagnose prostate cancer -- but rather for a complex fingerprint formed by all the proteins in the blood. Similar tests are being developed for prostate, pancreatic, breast and other cancers. The technique may work for other diseases as well.
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The test, called OvaCheck, was developed by Correlogic Systems Inc., of Bethesda, Md., with scientists from the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration.
Traditionally, adults wrap money in red envelopes - called hongbao in Chinese - on the eve of the lunar New Year, which they give to their kids. The century-old tradition is still followed in most local households, as more than 90 percent of locals said they send hongbaos every year and consider it an important holiday symbol.Most of them prepare hongbaos for children who are too young to have had the chance to work and earn money by themselves. Some parents even continue to offer gifts until their children enter college, survey results show.
However, a noticeable change is taking place. Young adults are able more quickly than in the past to earn a decent living, thus enabling them to repay their parents' kindness, said Qian Qin, an analyst at Market-expert. "I always received a large sum of money from my loving parents and grandparents in the past. It is now time for me to do something for them," said Chen Jia, a local office worker who started working last summer.
Chen sent out six hongbaos, totalling 2,000 yuan (US$240) to her parents and grandparents. "My parents and grandparents spent much effort raising me. Now I should express my thanks to them by sending gift money," said Chen.
More than one-third of Iran's Parliament resigned Sunday to protest a sweeping ban on candidates running in the parliamentary election later this month. The defiant move threatened to plunge Iran's political system into chaos.One by one, angry lawmakers who have held a three-week sit-in at the huge Parliament building, marched up to the podium and handed their resignations to the speaker. In an emotional statement read aloud during the session of Parliament on Sunday and broadcast live across the nation on Iranian radio, the members who resigned accused powerful conservatives of seeking to impose a religious dictatorship like that of the Taliban, who were overthrown by American-led forces in Afghanistan.
"We cannot continue to be present in a Parliament that is not capable of defending the rights of the people and that is unable to prevent elections in which the people cannot choose their representatives," the statement said.
There has been continual tension in Iran between reformers -- the president and much of the Parliament -- who are pressing for greater religious and cultural freedom, and religious conservatives, who control the judiciary and security services.
The World Health Organization (WHO), which is taking part in the Rome meeting, has called for strong collaborative efforts to control the virus, which has hit poultry flocks in 10 Asian countries."Things are still in the box. It has not come out. If we sit on the lid it will stay there and we still have that window of opportunity open," said Klaus Stoehr, head of the WHO's global influenza programme.
Also taking part in the meeting, which is closed to the media, are the World Animal Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control and veterinary experts from affected countries.
The WHO has said it cannot rule out one case of human to human transmission in Vietnam, but there was no firm evidence of it.
Health experts are worried that if the virus mixes with a regular human influenza strain, it might create a mutant form that was able to pass between humans, triggering a human flu pandemic.
NEW YORK - Although privacy worries led several states to pull out of a federally funded crime and terrorism database project, others are actively considering joining and sharing information on their residents, the Associated Press has learned.Mark Zadra, chief investigator for Florida state police, which runs the Matrix project, said organizers have given presentations to more than 10 Northeastern and Midwestern states in recent weeks, arguing at each stop that the database is an invaluable law enforcement tool.
Officials in Iowa and North Carolina said Friday that they are exploring the system. And documents obtained through a public-records request in Florida indicate Arizona and Arkansas also may have interest in the quick-access information repository, which combines state records with 20 billion pieces of data held by a private company.
For now, Matrix -- short for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange -- involves Florida, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and Michigan.Another state once involved, Georgia, said Friday it is dropping out completely -- after the Associated Press confronted officials with documents indicating the state was continuing to participate despite a public proclamation to the contrary in October from Gov. Sonny Perdue.
A team of Russian and American scientists are reporting today that they have created two new chemical elements, called superheavies because of their enormous atomic mass. The discoveries fill a gap at the furthest edge of the periodic table and hint strongly at a weird landscape of undiscovered elements beyond.The team, made up of scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, is disclosing its findings in a paper being published today in Physical Review C, a leading chemistry journal. The paper was reviewed by scientific peers outside the research group before publication."Two new elements have been produced," said Dr. Walt Loveland, a nuclear chemist at Oregon State University who is familiar with the research. "It's just incredibly exciting. It seems to open up the possibility of synthesizing more elements beyond this."
The periodic table is the oddly shaped checkerboard; with an H for hydrogen, the lightest element, in the upper-left-hand corner; that hangs in chemistry classrooms the world over. Each element has a different number of protons, particles with a positive electrical charge, in the dense central kernel called the nucleus.
They conjure up thoughts of America and mum's home-cooking. Now the humble blueberry, an unfamiliar sight on our market stalls, is making its mark in Britain as the new taste sensation.And Norfolk has the perfect opportunity to play a dominant role in growing what is also one of the world's healthiest soft fruits.
The county has ideal soils around Thetford Forest and along the North Norfolk coast.
Experts say the acid, sandy soils of Breckland have the potential to produce thousands of tonnes of fresh-picked blueberries within six to seven years.
The blueberry is enjoying the fastest rate of sales growth in the world, according to Paul Taylor, of south Lincolnshire-based specialist producer, Hargreaves.
Health-conscious consumers view the fruit as "life-preserving" because it contains very high levels of antioxidants - a vital tool for the body to fight cancer and ageing.
"This could be the perfect opportunity for Britain to catch up the rest of the world," said Mr Taylor.
"Blueberries are the fastest-selling berry fruit in the world. Sales are increasing at about 40pc a year."
