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.