America's growing appetite for low-carbohydrate foods has left people like Tony Stallone struggling to keep pace with demand.A vice president at online grocer Peapod, Stallone already offers more than 300 low-carb products featured in a special "aisle" on the company's Web site. But it's not nearly enough.
"We're out there fighting for every case of low-carb yogurt and low-carb tortillas we can get," he said. "The demand has been through the roof."
Low-carb diets have been around for decades, but only in the last few years made it to the mainstream. Yet, in that time they have revolutionized dieting and challenged and changed the entire food industry.
Grocers and restaurants now signpost low-carb offerings. Sales of once forbidden foods such as bacon are booming. And low-carb versions of everything from bread to bagels and tortellini to toothpaste compete for shelf space.
"I've been watching the way people eat for the last 25 years and I'm not sure I've seen anything happen this fast for this many companies," said Harry Balzer, vice president of NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., consumer research firm.
The number of low-carb specialty products has exploded, with roughly 1,200 items on the market now, including margarita mix and tortilla chips. An average of 10 new items are added each week.
The popularity of television shows such as Bravo's "Celebrity Poker," the Travel Channel's "World Poker Tour" and ESPN's coverage of the Texas Hold 'em championships have fueled a card-playing craze on campuses.College students are perfecting their poker faces in lively games nearly everywhere -- in dorm rooms, fraternity and sorority houses, and campus tournaments. Buy-in games organized by some colleges and student groups have drawn hundreds, with prizes ranging from money to televisions.
"It is crazy on campus," said Rachel Dorfman, a University of Georgia sophomore who often plays poker for hours with her Sigma Delta Tau sisters. "It is absolutely the thing to do right now."
Search engine Google Inc. announced Wednesday it would launch a free, Web-based e-mail service to compete against popular services from rivals Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp.Google's service, called "Gmail," will include a built-in search function that will let people search every e-mail they've ever sent or received.
According to company executives, users will be able to type in keywords to sort e-mails or find old missives. And it will come with 1 gigabyte of free storage -- more than 100 times what some popular rivals offer and enough to hold 500,000 pages of e-mail.
But to finance the service, Google will display advertising links tied to the topics discussed within the e-mails. For instance, an e-mail inquiring about an upcoming concert might include an ad from a ticket agency.
... But analysts said that Google -- whose technology is behind nearly four out of every five Web searches -- could shake up the free e-mail market.
Smokers hid in toilet stalls Monday as Ireland's ban on tobacco in the workplace -- including the country’s 10,000 usually smoky pubs -- began its first divisive day.... Health Minister Micheal Martin, who pushed for three years to ban workplace smoking, celebrated with anti-smoking activists at Bewley's tea house in downtown Dublin. He predicted other European nations would soon follow Ireland's example.
Ireland's sweeping nationwide ban is the world's strictest and goes well beyond statewide measures such as those in California and Delaware, which prohibit smoking in bars and restaurants.
In the blue-collar pubs of north Dublin, Martin's crusade provoked both joy and fury.
"This is the worst idea any Irish government’s ever had," said Gerry O’Connor, 32, a prison guard sitting sullenly in a corner of John Doyle’s pub. He'd just been busted trying to sneak a smoke in the pub's lavatory.
Carnegie Mellon University scientists have performed the first comprehensive proteome analysis of protein changes that occur in a developing animal, making surprising findings that could require scientists to revise standard thinking about how proteins orchestrate critical steps in embryonic development.Their findings could one day provide a sensitive way to measure how drugs or environmental chemicals affect specific protein networks and harm development.
The research, reported online (http://dev.biologists.org/content/vol131/issue3/) and in the February 1 issue of Development, found that specific cells set to change shape during a key growth step are actually poised for their transformation far in advance and that many types of proteins are involved.
"Our findings counter long-held assumptions that a limited number of proteins are responsible for this step of development and that they become active right before the cells change shape," said Jonathan Minden, principal investigator on the study and associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.
A Japanese research team has become the first in the world to grow structurally complete capillary blood vessels from human embryonic stem cells, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Monday.The team, led by Prof. Kazuwa Nakao of Kyoto University's Graduate School of Medicine, used capillary precursor cells generated from stem cells imported from Australia in 2002 to grow capillaries in a test tube earlier this year.
Unlike other cells, embryonic stem cells have the capacity to develop into any other kind of cell, such as cells that make up entire organs, and the latest announcement signals that stem cell research has entered a new stage.
Researchers had until now only managed to regenerate nerve cells and muscle tissue, which are not sufficient to produce entire organs.Nakao's team's specific achievement has been the creation of capillaries that consist of stratified endothelial cells, which form capillaries' inner surfaces, and smooth muscle cells, which form their outer surfaces.
This is an advance on results obtained in 2002 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., who managed to form structures that resembled capillaries in terms of their shape, and that, like capillaries, also channeled blood, but differed from capillaries in terms of their cell structure, by injecting stem cells into a mouse.
Stem cells, immature cells already showing promise as tools to regenerate and replace damaged tissue, may also help target and destroy cancer, U.S. scientists said on Monday.Tests in mice showed [stem] cells could deliver powerful cancer-killing proteins, destroying tumors while leaving healthy cells untouched.
Dr. Michael Andreeff and colleagues at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston used cells taken from bone marrow. These immature cells, known as mesenchymal stem cells, usually give rise to muscle and other tissues.
The researchers genetically engineered these cells to carry interferon alpha, an immune system protein that can help kill cancer cells, or a cancer-destroying virus.
In mice these cells slowed several kinds of leukemia, attacked melanoma -- skin cancer and breast cancer cells -- that had spread to the lung, and tackled brain tumors.
The first study to look at the health effects of microscopic, manufactured "nanoparticles" on aquatic animals has found troubling evidence that the molecules -- which scientists are starting to make for research and industry -- can trigger organ damage and other toxic effects.At modest concentrations in aquarium water, the minuscule particles -- which are made of carbon atoms and are less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair -- triggered damaging biochemical reactions in the brains of fish. They also wiped out entire populations of "water fleas," tiny animals that fill an ecologically crucial niche near the bottom of the aquatic food chain.
The study, described at a scientific meeting yesterday, was small and has yet to be peer reviewed or published in a scientific journal. And although some companies anticipate making tons of the particles within the next few years, current production levels are relatively low, so the risk of exposure for humans and other animals is still quite small.
Nonetheless, the findings underscore the growing recognition that the hot new field of nanotechnology, which federal officials have said will be at the heart of America's "next industrial revolution," may bring with it a number of old-fashioned trade-offs in terms of potential environmental damage and health risks.
Parkour developed 16 years ago in the suburbs of Paris when sneaker-clad teenagers began navigating public spaces as skateboarders might, but without the skateboards. (The name comes from "parcours," French for circuit or course.) From Paris it made its way to England, and then as far as Finland and Singapore. Using moves from gymnastics and martial arts and a name, traceur, that evokes tracer bullets and radioactive isotopes, parkourists tear through urban landscapes using obstacles like walls, ledges and stairs as springboards and catapults -- rarely with any safety equipment. It might look effortless, but it takes months just to master the proper way of rolling out of a jump.The sport first crept into American homes in the past couple of years in commercials for Nike and Toyota's racy Scion. The ads featured French traceurs bounding balletically through urban landscapes and referred to the sport as freerunning, from the term adopted in England when the sport took hold there.
But the spread of parkour into the woods of Georgia and the deserts of Arizona occurred almost entirely through the boundlessness of Internet message boards, where traceurs (pronounced TRAY-sers in American English) post videos and photographs of themselves and rate local parkour sites.
An experimental X-43 pilotless plane on Saturday broke the world speed record for an atmospheric engine, briefly flying 4,780 miles an hour, seven times the speed of sound, NASA said.The hypersonic aircraft, a cross between a jet and a rocket, was dropped from the wing of a modified B-52 bomber and boosted by an auxiliary rocket to an altitude of nearly 100,000 feet . It then flew on its own for 10 seconds before plunging into the Pacific Ocean, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.
"Everything worked as planned," a NASA spokeswoman, Leslie William, said.
NASA says the prototype engine will eventually power a new generation of space shuttles.
More than 3.5 billion years after nature transformed non-living matter into living things, populating Earth with a cornucopia of animals and plants, scientists say they are finally ready to try their hand at creating life.If they succeed, humanity will enter a new age of "living technology," where harnessing the power of life to spontaneously adapt to complex situations could solve problems that now defy modern engineering.
Scientists eagerly talk of a new world of ultra-small living machines, where marvelously made-to-order cells heal the body, clean up pollutants, transform electronics and communication, and much more.
The researchers say it may be possible to make sweaters that mend themselves. Or computers that fix their own glitches.
Though some experts see this new technology as providing unlimited benefits, others worry about the moral appropriateness of human-made life and the introduction of new species with the potential to evolve into creatures that could run amok.
"It's certainly true that we are tinkering with something very powerful here," said artificial-life researcher Steen Rasmussen of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
"But there's no difference between what we do here and what humans have always done when we invented fire, transistors and ways to split the atom," he said. "The more powerful technology you unleash, the more careful you have to be."
In one of the first programs of its kind in the United States, a coalition of major Silicon Valley companies is set to announce today a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to collectively combat global warming.The companies -- Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Calpine, Lockheed, ALZA, Life Scan and PG&E -- along with the city of San Jose, NASA Ames Research Center and the Santa Clara Valley Water District, will set a goal of cutting Santa Clara County's carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2010.
If successful, such a reduction would be more than triple the goal set by the still-stalled Kyoto agreement on global warming. It would be as effective as removing 1.1 million cars from Silicon Valley roads.Carbon dioxide is formed in part by the burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline, coal and natural gas. It traps heat in the atmosphere that otherwise would radiate into space.
The television industry was shaken last October when the ratings from Nielsen Media Research showed that a huge part of a highly prized slice of the American population was watching less television. As the fall TV season began, viewership among men from 18 to 34 fell 12 percent compared with the year before, Nielsen reported. And for the youngest group of adult men, those 18 to 24, the decline was a steeper 20 percent.In a world where fortunes are made and lost over the evanescent jitterings of fractions of audience share, the Nielsen announcement was the equivalent of a nuclear strike, a smallpox outbreak and a bad hair day all rolled into one.
But those who track the uses of technology say that the underlying shift in viewership made perfect sense. The so-called missing men might be more aptly called the missing guys, and they are doing what guys do: playing games, obsessing over sports and girls, and hanging out with buddies - often online.
And the evidence is accumulating that the behavior of guys like Mr. Brandel is changing faster than once thought. The rapid expansion of high-speed Internet access lets the computer become the video jukebox that Mr. Brandel uses to watch comedy clips. The seemingly inexhaustible appetite for computer games, DVD players, music and video file-sharing - and, yes, online pornography - all contribute to the trend, these experts say. While no one activity is enough to account for the drop that Nielsen reported, all of them together create a vast cloud of diversion that has drawn men inexorably away from television.
The spread of oxygen-starved "dead zones" in the oceans, a graveyard for fish and plant life, is emerging as a threat to the health of the planet, experts say.For hundreds of millions of people who depend on seas and oceans for their livelihoods, and for many more who rely on a diet of fish and seafood to survive, the problem is acute.
Some of the oxygen-deprived zones are relatively small, less than one square kilometre (0.4 square miles) in size. Others are vast, measuring more than 70,000 square kilometres.
Pollution, particularly the overuse of nitrogen in fertilizers, is responsible for the spread of dead zones, environment ministers and experts from more than 100 countries were told.
The number of known oxygen-starved areas has doubled since 1990 to nearly 150, according to the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), holding is annual conference here.
"What is clear is that unless urgent action is taken to tackle the sources of the problem, it is likely to escalate rapidly," UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer said.
Gary Steiger, an avid traveler and admitted cheapskate, has been scanning come-ons for free airline travel for a long time, and he can't believe his eyes.Free air miles for opening a bank or brokerage account. Earn 10,000 miles to sign up with a long-distance phone company for six months. Gift cards that let homeowners earn miles on their mortgage payments.
"We're seeing more offers out there," said Steiger, a retired high school teacher in Ross, Calif., who tracks the offers for a frequent-fliers Web site. "Airlines are realizing that selling miles to businesses who resell them to their customers is one of the few profit centers airlines have."
Traditional airlines like American and Delta have a new attitude about promotional deals after losing passengers the past few years to low-fare competitors such as Southwest, JetBlue and AirTran. The big carriers now are offering free trips and sweetening the frequent-flier programs that they view as a key advantage over their low-cost rivals.
Game Girl Advance.com:
It had to happen. Now that the game industry is as big as the film industry, it looks like college graduates will be thinking about going to game school instead of film school. - n. wada
"The Wall Street Journal has this article (link via Evil Avatar) reporting that Electronic Arts is donating $8M to the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. This money will be used to create a 3-year master's degree in "videogame design," and fund an endowed faculty chair. The program is set to begin in August, accepting fewer than 15 students.
EA rarely hires more than one graduate of any school's graduating class per year, and thus probably has a vested interest generating more low-cost entry level employees who are better prepared for the sort of working environment found in the game industry. USC's proximity to the new EALA studio probably also factors in.
Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate any information on the content of the program, but I'd wager that EA would be looking to focus more on the ability to work long hours on hard deadlines for extended periods of time, and how to deal with group projects using many different skill sets, rather than ludology theory. EA's own private Digipen? My gut tells me otherwise, but we'll have to wait and see."
Forbes.com:
The video game industry is facing a hardening of the creative arteries as aging gamers' tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and games based on movies, industry participants said this week.
With more and more titles chasing the success of their predecessors and content owners digging deep into their libraries to tap older material for quick fail-proof conversion into games, the industry is faced with a question more serious than rhetorical: What's new?
"The gaming industry will shrink unless we start to see new games," said Toru Iwatani, who created Pac-Man, one of the first video games to become a worldwide hit.
One of the industry's first huge hits, published by Namco Ltd. in 1980, Pac-Man crossed gender lines and became a huge hit with women.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, a gathering of industry insiders where the talk is more about how games are made than how they are sold, the dearth of new titles and the increasing cost of developing games was a common theme at keynotes and panel discussions.
The high up-front costs of developing games is also pressuring developers to rely more on sure-fire hits and take less risks on new, innovative titles.
Electronic Arts Inc. , the gaming industry's largest publisher, has perfected the art of getting gamers hooked on yearly releases of sports games and turning out versions of movie hits such as "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" and "Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup."
EA's U.S. market share in 2004 is more than twice that of its closest competitor, and the company generates more revenue in the December quarter than its closest competitor does in an entire fiscal year, driven in large part by those repeat sports and film titles.
... Despite the proliferation of sequels and licensed games, Pac-man creator Iwatani said that he had seen this happen before during his 20 year-career, and that new and revolutionary new games appear in a two- to three-year cycle.
"It's difficult right now but I expect to see a recovery in a couple years," Iwatani said.
Honolulu Advertiser: At the wise old age of 14, Michelle Wie appears to be in the process of mastering the most difficult element of golf. It has nothing to do with devastating drives and precise putts. It has everything to do with learning how to make lemonade when your game gives you lemons.
Wie did it in front of the PGA Tour and the world in January, when she whacked the ball all over Waialae Country Club and still made history by becoming the first woman to break par (2-under 68) in a men's tour event.
She did it again yesterday in the LPGA's first major of the year. The Punahou freshman went more than an hour without hitting a fairway off the tee and still shot 3-under 69. She is tied for seventh going into today's second round of the Kraft Nabisco Championship at the Dinah Shore Tournament Course in Mission Hills Country Club.
Aree Song, the youngest member of the LPGA at 17, leads after opening with a 66. Of her six birdie putts, only one was more than six feet. Song is playing in her fifth Kraft Nabisco. In her first appearance, as 13-year-old amateur Aree Wongluekiet in 2000, she tied for 10th.
JoiIto.com
The messages on JoiIto.com indicate that China has blocked blogs, most notably any site with xxx.typepad.com or xxx.blogs.com. Apparently, this is an effort to control information about the recent Taiwan President election and 1989 Tiananmen Crisis.
This is a huge indication of the growing influence of blogs throught the world.
Online gaming on video game consoles gathered momentum in 2003, with U.S. retail sales of online games exceeding $1 billion.Market researcher NPD Group in Port Washington, N.Y., said sales of games with online features rose 167 percent from 2002. Unit sales of such games in 2003 were 23 million, up 182 percent from the previous year.
NPD said that since online game consoles hit the market in 2000 with the launch of the Microsoft Xbox and later the PlayStation 2 network adapter, 33 million online-capable games have been sold.
The numbers are misleading in one sense. Many gamers buy online-capable games such as ``Madden NFL 2004'' but often they don't bother to play them online. Rather, they just play them as normal console games. NPD said the most popular genres are sports games and shooting games.
In 2002, sport games were 69 percent of the online-capable video games market, while shooting games were 22 percent. In 2003, sports games were 51 percent, shooting games were 22 percent, racing games were 15 percent and role-playing games 4 percent.
AZF's threats, first disclosed earlier this month, appeared in at least three letters sent to the offices of President Jacques Chirac and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy on Dec. 10, Feb. 13 and Feb. 17.The letters, demanding $5.2 million, threatened railway targets.
Information from the group led to the Feb. 21 recovery of a sophisticated explosive device buried in tracks near Limoges in central France.
Tests showed that the Limoges bomb was powerful enough to rupture the track, the government said then. It was made from a mixture of diesel fuel and nitrates and had a sophisticated detonator, judicial officials said.
AZF is not the only previously unknown group issuing threats to France.
Last week, two newspapers received letters addressed to Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and signed by the "Servants of Allah the Powerful and Wise."That group also was not previously known to French intelligence officials.The letters threatened possible terror attacks against France and French interests to punish the country for banning Islamic headscarves in public schools beginning next school year.
French embassies in Muslim countries around the world received the same letters, officials said Tuesday.
The response to this threat is a new law of the sea, spurred by Admiral Loy, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush 16 months ago. A parallel global code was adopted days later under American pressure by the United Nations's International Maritime Organization.The law and the code set a July 1 deadline for all of the world's ships and ports to create counterterrorism systems -- computers, communications gear, surveillance cameras, security patrols -- to help secure America against an attack.
The cost of compliance at home and abroad will be many billions of dollars. Many American and foreign ports lack the funds to comply. But the cost of not complying could be steeper still. The law's demands create a stark confrontation between world trade and national security.
If a ship, or any one of the last 10 ports it visited, does not meet the new security standards, it can be turned away from American waters. If a port falls short, no ship leaving it can enter American harbors. That means ports, and their nations, can be barred from trading with the United States.
"We're dead serious about this," said Rear Adm. Larry L. Hereth, director of port security for the Coast Guard.
Medicare's financial condition has significantly deteriorated, partly because of exploding health costs and partly because of the new Medicare law, the government reported on Tuesday. In its annual report to Congress, the Medicare board of trustees said the program's hospital insurance trust fund could run out of money before the end of the next decade.The trustees have made such projections in the past, but this one was much bleaker than the outlook reported just last year.
By contrast, the financial outlook for Social Security, though shaky in the long run, changed little from last year.John L. Palmer, a public representative on the six-member board, who is also a former dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, said: "The magnitude of the problems is much greater in Medicare. They start sooner, get bigger and will be much more difficult to deal with. The problems of Social Security are manageable, compared with those of Medicare."
Medicare was already an issue in this year's elections, but in their report, the trustees stepped up the pressure on politicians by saying that Medicare appeared unsustainable in its current form. Democrats, while asserting that the Medicare program was not in crisis, nevertheless said President Bush had aggravated its problems.
For the first time in twenty-five years, The Hyatt Foundation has awarded a woman the highest honor in architecture. Iraqi-born, Zaha Hadid will be presented with the Pritzker Architecture Prize this May in St. Petersburg, Russia. At fifty-three years of age, she is also the youngest person ever to win the award.The Hyatt Foundation honors living architects. Hadid is responsible for having a hand in designing structures both built and unbuilt. Two finished buildings include: the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati (1998 - May 2003 Opening) and a German Fire Station (1990-94).
Such tensions have altered the marital dynamic of retirement, as millions of women continue working after their husbands retire. The challenges represent "a stage of the marriage relationship that's occurring for the first time in history," said Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota.And there is little in these couples' pasts, or in the retirement experiences of previous generations, to prepare them for the stresses they face.
Since 1935, when the passage of the Social Security Act created retirement as we know it, the issue of when to retire has largely been a male one. When male breadwinners reached a certain age or seniority they left work and tapped their pensions, and they and their wives began a new chapter in their lives.
But as more women have pursued rewarding careers, retirement has grown more complicated. Many working women are younger than their husbands; many deferred their careers to raise children or care for parents. When their husbands have completed their career arcs, or been pushed into early retirement, these women are often still on the way up or accruing seniority for a pension or retirement package. Some, too young for Medicare, need to work for the health insurance."This is the first generation that's ever had to deal with this, because in the past it was one retirement per family, and that was the husband's," said Ms. Moen, one of the few researchers to study gender and retirement. "Even if women worked, they didn't work too much."
As the 41 million women of the baby boom head toward retirement age, the new era of retirement increasingly includes two careers, diverging ambitions and very different ideas about what to do with the decades to follow.
Just when the U.S. government has declared obesity a public health crisis, insurers are growing more skeptical of drastic -- and expensive -- remedies like "stomach stapling" surgery.Demand is skyrocketing for these bariatric surgeries, which shrink the stomach to help the obese lose weight. The number of procedures performed in the United States jumped to 103,000 last year from about 16,000 in the early 1990s, according to Dr. Robert Steinbrook, a national correspondent for The New England Journal of Medicine.
"The epidemic of obesity in the United States has spawned a second epidemic -- of bariatric surgery," he wrote in the March 11 edition.
Analysts say many factors are driving the frenzy, including a rise in obesity, the advent of less-invasive surgical techniques and publicity from celebrities like NBC television personality Al Roker and singer Carnie Wilson, whose surgery was broadcast over the Internet.
But as health insurers grapple with mounting medical costs, the $30,000 procedure is coming under close scrutiny. HMOs say the complication rate is high, and some are refusing to cover it at all.
Even as the Intel Corporation and the Microsoft Corporation, whose chairman is Bill Gates, are pushing a digital future in which they hope that the personal computer will be the hub for a variety of home entertainment devices, the computer game industry is pointing to a fundamental flaw in that vision: game software has largely driven PC growth among consumers."This kind of thing drives me crazy,'' said Alex St. John, the founder of a game software publisher, WildTangent Inc. He challenged Intel at a recent industry forum on the digital home, arguing that personal computer makers are about to lose out to the video game industry, which is waiting on a new generation of game consoles that also aspire to be home digital media hubs.
"If the game console makers want to own the living room,'' Mr. St. John said in a subsequent telephone interview, "they're in a better position to own it than Intel.''
Intel executives responded at the meeting and said they felt there was a market for interactive television in the home.
Microsoft is in a different position, having hedged its bets by continuing its two-decade-old alliance with Intel in producing software and microprocessors for PC's while turning to I.B.M. to develop the chip for its next-generation Xbox game player.
Now awaiting final approval from European regulators and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pregabalin is expected to generate sales of at least $3 billion a year for New York-based Pfizer.Sales could reach $6 billion "within 10 years -- that isn't out of the question," says Heather Brilliant, a pharmaceuticals analyst at Chicago-based Morningstar Inc., a research and mutual fund rating firm. "It will definitely exceed $3 billion in the near term." A Pfizer spokeswoman declined comment while the drug is awaiting approval, which analysts say could come by fall in the U.S., perhaps earlier in Europe.
As the patent holder, Northwestern will collect 6% of revenues, of which Mr. [Richard] Silverman will get a 25% cut after deducting the university's legal costs in securing several patents to protect his discovery. In other words, he'll collect $15 million for every $1 billion in sales -- before taxes, that is.
He plans to share some of the proceeds with a postdoctoral researcher from Poland who helped with the discovery, as well as giving some to the university, family and friends.
A jury of 13 Methodist clergy members said Saturday that a fellow minister did not violate church law by being in a lesbian relationship, concluding a proceeding that put on trial the church's stance on homosexuality as much as it did the minister's relationship.The ecclesiastical trial of the minister, the Rev. Karen T. Dammann, captivated United Methodist ministers and congregants around the country. The verdict comes about a month before the church opens its quadrennial convention in Pittsburgh, and is likely to serve as a rallying cry for both church conservatives and liberals already prepared for a clash over the church's stand on homosexuality.The jury deliberated for more than 10 hours over two days in the Sunday school classroom of the Bothell United Methodist Church near Seattle. Eleven jurors voted to find Ms. Dammann not guilty. The other two were undecided.
Speaking to reporters afterward, Ms. Dammann, 47, said the verdict vindicated her painful emotional decision to come out as a lesbian but meant equally difficult times ahead for the church.
"For the church it means a beginning of another stage of struggles, and I'm mindful of that," she said. "This is going to be painful."
Researchers are also finding that plaque, and heart attack risk, can change very quickly -- "within a month, according to a recent study" -- by something as simple as intense cholesterol lowering. "The results are now snowballing," said Dr. Peter Libby of Harvard Medical School. "The disease is more mutable than we had thought."The changing picture of what works to prevent heart attacks, and why, emerged only after years of research that was initially met with disbelief.
Early attempts to show that opening a narrowed artery saves lives or prevents heart attacks were unsuccessful. The only exception was bypass surgery, which was found to extend the lives of some patients with severe illness but not to prevent heart attacks. It is unclear why those patients lived longer; some think the treatment prevented their heart rhythms from going awry, while others say that the detour created by a bypass might be giving blood an alternate route when a clot formed somewhere else in the artery.Some early studies indicated what was really happening, but were widely dismissed. As long ago as 1986, Dr. Greg Brown of the University of Washington at Seattle published a paper showing that heart attacks occurred in areas of coronary arteries where there was too little plaque to be stented or bypassed.
The world is running out of names. The roster of possible names seems almost infinite, but the demand is even greater. With the rise of instantaneous communication, business spreading across the globe and the Internet annihilating geography, conflict is rampant in this realm of language and of intellectual property. Rules are up for grabs. Laws regarding names have never been in such disarray.People war over names with the passion and righteousness seen in ancient battles for parcels of land. A select few names -- think of them as the pinnacles and hilltops -- develop a tremendous concentration of economic value. The word NIKE is thought by analysts to be worth $7 billion; COCA-COLA is valued at 10 times as much. No wonder the lawyers gird their loins.
Computer science offers a useful term of art: namespace -- a territory within which all names are distinct and unique; no fuzziness allowed. The world has long had namespaces based on geography and other namespaces based on economic niche. You could be BLOOMINGDALE'S as long as you stayed out of New York; you could be FORD as long as you weren't making cars. All the world's rock bands live in a namespace where PRETTY BOY FLOYD and PINK FLOYD and PINK and the 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS and the 99TH FLOOR ELEVATORS happily co-exist. The Screen Actors Guild manages a formal namespace of its own -- one JULIA ROBERTS per universe. But traditional namespaces are overlapping and melting together.
Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year, say scientists monitoring the sky from this 2-mile-high station atop a Hawaiian volcano.The reason for the faster buildup of the most important "greenhouse gas" will require further analysis, the U.S. government experts say.
"But the big picture is that CO2 is continuing to go up," said Russell Schnell, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate monitoring laboratory in Boulder, Colo., which operates the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii.
Carbon dioxide, mostly from burning of coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, traps heat that otherwise would radiate into space. Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century, and international panels of scientists sponsored by world governments have concluded that most of the warming probably was due to greenhouse gases.
The climatologists forecast continued temperature rises that will disrupt the climate, cause seas to rise and lead to other unpredictable consequences -- unpredictable in part because of uncertainties in computer modeling of future climate.
Honolulu Advertiser -
Students critiqued Oscar-nominated films and popular teen movies for the extent and type of tobacco use, who uses tobacco, specific brands shown, perceived messages of tobacco use, special situations of tobacco use, and anti-tobacco messages displayed.
"Thumbs Down!" was given to movies that they say include and glamorize smoking, while "Thumbs Up!" was given to movies that show no smoking, or have anti-smoking messages. Students shared the information they gathered in their classes and wrote articles in school newspapers
... Last year, two out of three films rated G, PG, and PG-13 showed smoking or tobacco products, organizers reported. In 2000, 89 percent of Hawai'i high school students and 81 percent of Hawai'i middle school students who watch TV or movies reported seeing actors using tobacco most or some of the time.
A study by Dartmouth University medical school suggests that up to 52 percent of the initiation of tobacco use among adolescents is directly attributable to tobacco use in movies. Children who had viewed the most smoking in movies were three times as likely to start smoking as those who had seen the least. Major movie characters tend to light up three times more frequently than do people in America on average, noted the study.
Back in the depths of time, athletes used ginseng, opium and steroids from sheep testicles to enhance their performance.Anabolic steroids made their debut in sports in the 1940s and 50s, and chemical agents followed.
Now the big fear is that advances in biotechnology and gene therapy could result in genetically modified athletes with the bodies of Greek gods and the prowess of Superman overwhelming ordinary mortals at future Olympics.
Gene therapy, to treat or prevent disease, has not developed with the speed scientists had initially hoped but it is moving forward and it could be just a matter of time before it infiltrates sports.
"If the science develops and the regulatory and ethical frameworks are not properly established, I think there is a danger. We've seen it with the use of drugs that were developed for therapeutic purposes," said Dick Pound, president of the Montreal-based World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
#1: Moore's LawThe first one, ironically, derives from the same technology that enabled TiVo to live in the first place: Moore's Law. As chips got powerful enough and hard drives cheap enough, the PVR was inevitable. But now the raw materials are cheap enough to put hard drive -- based video recording into just about anything.
It's not just cheap components. Television delivery has changed, too. The original TiVo was designed to suck in an analog TV signal, via either antenna or cable. It also included analog S-Video and composite ports for set-top boxes, which aside from DirecTV and Dish Network were mostly analog, too.
Fast-forward to today. Nearly half of what the industry calls multichannel homes (those with cable or satellite) receive their TV in digital form.
And that's bad news for standalone PVRs like TiVo and ReplayTV.
Reason #2: HDTV
The next fatal problem for TiVo is high-definition TV signals. 2004 will be the year America embraces HDTV. The Super Bowl looked tremendous in HD, movies are amazing, and in May, when ESPN begins broadcasting SportsCenter in HD, the contest will be over.
With the world moving to HD, here comes TiVo -- a year late -- with its own HD PVR. Scheduled to ship in March, the DirecTV combination HD receiver and PVR will cost a staggering $1,000. Cable, again, is about to trump TiVo. Motorola and Scientific Atlanta are readying their own HD set-top boxes, which will again be free to use and will cost about $10 a month to rent.
Reason #3: Rupert Murdoch
The problem is that Murdoch is a rapacious cost-cutter, squeezing margins and hunting for profits at every turn. He has already moved to consolidate the fractured DirecTV set-top market -- where more than ten consumer electronics vendors build their own branded boxes -- into one (presumably cheaper) look and feel. The next step will be for Murdoch to oust TiVo in favor of a lower-cost and less useful but cheaper PVR. And when that happens, you can kiss poor TiVo goodbye.
Just when mobile operators are finally getting their costly third-generation (3G) networks up and running, a new wireless technology pushed by the computer industry is about to mess things up.At stake are tens of billions of euros in mobile telecoms revenues, as semiconductor giant Intel is putting its formidable weight behind WiMAX, a powerful wireless technology that gives fixed-line telecoms carriers a weapon to hit back at the mobile rivals who have long been eating into their voice revenues.
WiMAX, an industry standard that travels under the alternative name "802.16," and is also backed by Finland's mobile phones and networks vendor Nokia, offers lightning fast wireless data communications over distances as far as 50 kilometers.
Compare that with the first 3G networks which, although much faster than today's mobile phone networks, are 30 times slower than WiMAX, and one 3G radio mast covers an area 10 times smaller than WiMAX.
But mobile phone companies have shelled out 100 billion euros for radio frequency licenses to run 3G networks and are currently spending tens of billions on the networks. WiMAX radio spectrum can be free, and carriers need fewer base stations to operate it.
Wall Street Journal (subscription):
With the industry facing stagnant sales growth, Nestle is looking for growth in the intersection of food and pharmaceuticals -- a niche of nutritionally enhanced products known in the business as "phood." The company is betting that health-conscious consumers will pay more for fare that provides health benefits such as lowering cholesterol or aiding digestion....
Still, phood provides a much-needed new frontier for Nestle and others in the $1.1 trillion global packaged-food industry, which has hit a wall after decades of rapid growth. During the first half of the 20th century, urbanization and technologies such as canning and drying made mass-marketed foods possible -- and turned Kraft Foods Inc. and Kellogg Co. into global companies.
...
Meanwhile, food companies are under pressure to help stanch a growing obesity epidemic world-wide. With the exception of cancer, virtually all the other major killers are diet-related diseases. By 2030, for example, 370 million people world-wide are expected to have diabetes, up from 177 million in 2000, according to the World Health Organization.
Japanese financial authorities are waging a battle against what they see as one of the biggest threats to the nation's economic recovery - a rising yen. And while the effort seems to be working so far, analysts and investors are questioning how long they can keep it up.After a year of steady gains against the dollar, the yen weakened to a five-month low, around 112 yen, this month from about 106 yen in early February. The change in direction for the Japanese currency was a relief to the country's exporters whose profits are crimped by too much yen strength.
But the cost was steep: Tokyo spent record amounts to hold its currency back by selling yen and buying dollars. Japan sold 10.5 trillion yen ($95.2 billion) in the two months ended Feb. 26, already more than half last year's 20 trillion yen, a record. Through such transactions, Japan has accumulated the largest foreign-currency reserves in the world, at $777 billion, much of it invested in United States government debt. Japanese investors accounted for about half the purchases of United States Treasury securities last year.
Despite the heavy intervention, the Japanese currency is again inching up on the dollar, rising to around 109 yen on Tuesday from around 111 on Friday...
There are some healthy benefits in the new Medicare law that could help you save money. Health Savings Accounts, or HSAs, have been in effect since Jan. 1. Like Roth IRAs, they're a tax-free way for people to set aside money to cover current and future healthcare needs. But unlike a Roth, there are no limitations, and the money is also tax-deductible."The beauty of it is the money that I don't use stays in that account and continues to earn interest year after year after year. So, for me, I consider it like a supplemental retirement account," Pam Wimibush, HSA holder, said.
Singles can put away as much as $2,600 this year, and the limit with a family policy is $5,150. If you're over 55, you can add another $500.
Spectral images from the European Space Agency's Mars Express Orbiter show there is plenty of icy water at the southern pole of Mars, French scientists said Wednesday.Weeks after NASA's Mars rovers uncovered evidence of water on the Red Planet, images from the OMEGA instrument aboard the Mars Express indicate its southern pole has three distinct areas containing water ice.
"We present the first direct identification and mapping of both carbon dioxide and water ice in the Martian high southern latitudes," Jean-Pierre Bibring of the Institut d'Astrophique Spatiale in Orsay, France, said in a report published online by the science journal Nature.
The images were taken at the end of the summer on Mars so they show that the ice is present all year. Bibring and his colleagues also observed exposed water ice in a region further from the southern cap, where a large amount of water ice is thought to be buried.
After haphazardly building an Internet sales pipeline, the lodging industry sprang a $1-billion US leak - and major hotel chains are now aggressively working to plug the hole....The hotel chains' current revenue leakage, as the industry refers to it, stems from the fragmented way in which they began doing business with third-party sites in the late 1990s.
With Marriott, Hilton Hotels Corp., Hyatt Corp. and other chains slow to establish their brands on the Internet, hotel franchisees eager to tap this new marketing channel had little choice but to rely on fast-growing travel websites. So the sites signed lucrative deals with thousands of hotel operators desperate to fill rooms during the U.S.-wide travel slump. And because the owners had little expectation of getting customers otherwise, they made their inventory available at extremely steep discounts, allowing the third parties to charge whatever they wanted.
Online shoppers snapped up bargains, property owners got some extra business and travel websites routinely pocketed 25 per cent to 40 per cent of the money collected from each sale. It was much more than the 10 per cent commission traditional travel agents received, but amid weak travel demand and the relative lack of customer traffic at the hotel chains' own websites, it seemed reasonable at the time.
"They definitely didn't have things under control a couple of years ago," said Jake Fuller, a hotel analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners in New York.
That is beginning to change, although Fuller said that in 2003, the hotel industry would have earned an extra $960 million had sales through third party websites been processed at traditional travel agency rates, and even more if customers had booked at hotel-owned websites. Smith Travel Research, which tracks hotel prices and occupancy rates, put the figure at slightly above $1 billion, or about one-sixth of the total value of hotel rooms purchased online last year.
Scientists may have discovered the solar system's most distant object, more than three times farther away from Earth than Pluto. "The sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, who helped in the discovery.The object -- about 8 billion miles (12.8 billion kilometers) from Earth -- has been given the provisional name of Sedna, after the Inuit goddess who created sea creatures of the Arctic.
Brown and his team of astronomers, using Caltech's Palomar Observatory, found Sedna in November as part of an ongoing three-year outer solar system project. Days later, the high power Spitzer Space Telescope focused on the object.
Intel's plant is the largest investment in the zone, a former patch of farmland where more than 5,000 multinationals have set up shop.But just down the road, China's own Silicon Valley is emerging. In a vast high-tech park, gleaming glass-and-concrete buildings are sprouting up along boulevards lined with freshly planted trees. China's leading domestic chip company, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., is churning out chips from its campus, where it operates bilingual schools, a shopping center, apartments and a church for employees.
SMIC and other Chinese ventures in this park are striving to someday challenge U.S. companies as tech leaders of the future.
These two zones show both the promise and the challenge that China represents for Silicon Valley. U.S. tech companies are rapidly expanding their partnerships with China. They are eyeing the nation's huge domestic market and tapping its cheap labor for skilled manufacturing, and increasingly, the brainpower for creating tech innovations. At the same time, the American tech companies are looking warily at an emerging rival.
People in China "are capable of doing any engineering job, any software job, any managerial job that people in the United States are capable of doing,'' said Craig Barrett, Intel's chief executive.
For years, doctors have been saying that to prevent heart disease, patients should pay attention to both the so-called bad cholesterol, or L.D.L., and the good cholesterol, or H.D.L. The good, they said, can counteract the bad.But now, some scientists say, new and continuing studies have called into question whether high levels of the good cholesterol are always good and, when they are beneficial, how much.
While some heart experts are not ready to change their treatment advice, others have concluded that H.D.L. should play at most a minor role in deciding whether to prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs. In the meantime, doctors are calling researchers and asking what to do about patients with high H.D.L. levels, or what to do when their own H.D.L. levels are high, and patients are left with conflicting advice.
"There is so much confusion about this that it is unbelievable," said Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
Forget genomics. Forget original drug research. Many biotech companies have. Eager for reliable revenue streams, biotechs are increasingly looking to an area that the pharmaceutical industry has long overlooked -- antibacterial drugs, better knows as antibiotics.The trend of biotechs turning to antibacterials -- once the domain of companies like Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb-- has been decades in the making. After the stunning success of such groundbreaking drugs as penicillin and amoxicillin, the pharmaceutical industry has seen little reason to bring new antibiotics to market. Also, the bigger payoffs to large drug companies come from medicines for chronic conditions such as depression and high cholesterol, not acute bacterial infections.
Yet the need for new antibiotics has only grown, as bacteria strains develop resistance to already available medications.
Since toppling Saddam Hussein last year, a number of cracks have developed in the U.S. war machine:
-- The Iraq invasion caught the Pentagon so short of military cargo planes that it had to hire Russian aircraft to ferry tanks and other materiel.-- The Army wore out some 9,000 heavy weapons and vehicles that need fixing and renovating -- "a huge task" for which "we do not have the funds," Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker recently told Congress.
-- The Navy is so short of money it's requiring pilots to fly simulators rather than real jets to practice carrier landings, according to Vice Adm. Charles Moore Jr., deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness.
-- Adjusted for inflation, the cost of military personnel, pushed by tripling health care expenses, rose 16 percent during the past decade.
-- To handle new missions, the Army is recruiting 30,000 soldiers and hiring 20,000 civilians to free up troops for combat jobs. Still, it is short of infantrymen. Specialists in high demand for the war on terrorism, infantrymen make up only 4 percent of military personnel.
Research showing that bald mice can grow hair after being implanted with a type of stem cell could lead to a cure for baldness, a group of scientists says.The project marks the first time that "blank slate" stem cells were able to induce hair growth, said Dr. George Cotsarelis, a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist and co-author of the study.
The study was released Sunday on the Web site of the journal Nature Technology in advance of its April publication date.
"We've shown for the first time these cells have the ability to generate hair when taken from one animal and put into another," Cotsarelis said in a telephone interview. "You can envision a process of isolating existing stem cells and re-implanting them in the areas where guys are bald.
Sarah Brown and Linzi Andrews are at the same university and live in the same halls of residence. But rather than leaving their rooms to talk to each other, they simply head for their computers."The computer is on all the time, and because it's there I go on the internet so much more," says Linzi. Sarah agrees: "The halls here in Durham are networked and I pay £75 a year to have a permanent internet connection. If I want to talk to Linzi I send her a message rather than leave my room."
Joanne Attridge, a medical student at Cambridge University, also admits to living her life online. "When I started I intended to socialise after lectures," she says. "But I got talking in a music chatroom and I was hooked - I have so much more in common with these people than with my classmates."
The three women are typical of a growing number of cash-poor, time-rich students, often with cheap or free internet access, who are shunning student unions to spend time in virtual communities.
Mere months after the successful containment of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the last thing the Vietnamese government wanted was another dramatic public-health crisis. Unfortunately, as the world now knows, another crisis is exactly what it got.Vietnam's struggle with H5N1 influenza, better known as bird flu, is now reaching its climax. It should become clear in the next few weeks whether H5N1 can be contained or will break out and become the next great flu pandemic, as many health authorities fear.
Of course, Vietnam is only one battlefront in the war against H5N1. But more patients have died in Vietnam so far than in any other affected country, and the difficulties faced by the Vietnamese government in containing the epidemic well illustrate the difficulties faced by other governments in the region.
With an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the most popular Internet search engine, "has a near-religious quality in the minds of many users," said Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who taught a graduate seminar on Google this semester. "A few years ago, you would have talked to a trusted friend about arthritis or where to send your kids to college or where to go on vacation. Now we turn to Google."The Web site that has become a verb is many things to many people, and to some, perhaps too much: a dictionary, a detective service, a matchmaker, a recipe generator, an ego massager, a spiffy new add-on for the brain. Behind the rainbow logo, Google is changing culture and consciousness. Or maybe not -- maybe it's the world's biggest time-waster, a vacuous rabbit hole where, in January, 60 million Americans, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, foraged for long-lost prom dates and the theme from "Doogie Howser, M.D."
2004 may be the year for open source software to catch on in a big way in government agencies. For years, federal, state, and local agencies have been using open source software - some in the open, some on the sly - but the extent of open source's proliferation in public agencies remains unknown, as few hard numbers are available....
According to Stanco and other open source advocates, this change in attitude toward open source software may be attributed to agencies -- need to reel in software spending and their IT staffs -- desire to tinker with code. With open source, agencies wouldn't be tied to the whims of one software vendor; instead, a community of developers would control an open source project.
Open source software may also attract government users because the code can be exchanged between agencies, which are all watching their budgets. Agencies, which often develop their own specialized applications, view open source not only as a means to slash development costs but also as a vehicle for sharing their projects without worrying about licensing fees.
At the recent RSA conference, user authentication was a strong theme, and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates hinted at the direction of future technology in this area, predicting the traditional password is headed for its demise.In his speech, Gates noted that people will begin to rely less and less on passwords because they cannot secure data or systems in a reliable way.
Any CIO who has walked past a row of desks knows Gates has a point: The number of Post-It notes affixed to computer monitors and emblazoned with passwords is alarming.
However, technologies like smart cards that offer a different path to user authentication have been slow to catch on in widespread fashion. With the refinement of these alternatives, that could change.
When Dr. Jeffrey Snell looks at a patient, he sees the complex network of veins and arteries as the route to clearing clogged heart arteries, preventing strokes and keeping bulging vessels from rupturing -- all without major surgery.Doctors long have used the winding maze of blood vessels in the vascular system to identify and treat blockages in the arteries that feed blood to the heart.
Now an arsenal of newly miniaturized devices and sophisticated digital imaging equipment allow doctors to treat other complicated conditions with minimally invasive procedures where only local anesthesia is needed.
The fast-growing discipline, known as endovascular therapy, could replace up to 70 percent of conventional surgeries by the end of the decade, by some estimates.
In another sign of just how far Russia has changed, Irkut, a formerly secret maker of military airplanes that had spent decades helping the Soviet Union defend itself against the capitalist West, has turned to the stock market to raise cash to buy other companies and develop new planes.With its initial public offering last week, it became the first Russian military company to sell shares on the stock market. The shares - representing 20 percent of the company, and worth about $100 million - trade in Moscow now, where they closed Wednesday at 76 United States cents each, up 17 percent from their first day of trading last Thursday. By the end of the year, the company says, it intends to tap the richer capital markets of London and New York.
For months, economists have been reassuring Americans that the employment market drought would soon end.With corporate profits surging and economic indicators improving, they said, it wouldn't be long before there was a downpour of jobs. After all, history shows that strong economic growth is quickly followed by robust job creation.
With this recovery, that still hasn't happened.
Most economists aren't quite ready to throw out the history books, but the release month after month of disappointing payroll-gains reports has intensified a debate about whether a profound change in the way the U.S. economy operates is under way or has already come about: With advances in technology, rising productivity rates and the outsourcing of work to foreign countries, more economic activity won't translate into more jobs.
"I'm growing increasingly suspicious that something more fundamental may be happening to the job market and the economy," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, a research and consulting firm in West Chester, Pa
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Scientists have discovered a new way to defy the menopause which could change women's lives, they announce today. Their research raises the prospect of extending childbearing years and offers a more natural alternative to HRT to offset ageing and maintain youthful vigour. The discovery that women may make eggs after birth, rather than be born with all the eggs they would ever have, could provide profound insights into the timing of the menopause.It is also likely to help to improve the success of grafts of ovary tissue to restore fertility in women after chemotherapy for cancer.
The study overturns a theory of female fertility that has persisted for more than half a century and discloses that ovaries may have hidden reserves, a find with "significant clinical implications".
The work, published in the journal Nature, was carried out at Massachusetts general hospital, Boston.
How's this for a salubrious daily double - a pill that helps you quit smoking and lose weight at the same time? An experimental drug shows significant promise of doing just that, according to two studies presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans.The drug, rimonabant, is being developed by a French firm, Sanofi-Synthelabo, and the human tests are being directed by the company's drug development arm in Malvern, Pa., near Philadelphia.
The company plans to seek approval next year to market the drug, according to Douglas Greene, Sanofi-Synthelabo vice president of corporate, medical and regulatory affairs.
Such a pill could target two of the nation's chief health problems. Smoking is the country's top preventable killer, accounting for 435,000 deaths in 2000. The combination of poor diet, obesity and physical inactivity is right behind, with 400,000 deaths.
In one study of rimonabant, overweight people dropped an average of 20 pounds in a year and shrank their waistlines by about 3 inches. The drug also reduced other risks for heart disease: It improved levels of good cholesterol and reduced triglycerides - fatty substances in the blood stream. In a second medical trial, rimonabant helped smokers almost double their odds of quiting.
Scientists may have solved the problem of creating artificial blood, a potential breakthrough that could relieve shortages and prevent patients from being infected by contaminated supplies.It could also stop the potential spread of the human form of BSE. A team of Scottish medical scientists last month warned that variant CJD could be transferred to patients through blood donations.
The new synthetic blood would ideally be administered to anyone without triggering rejection. Accident victims could also be given immediate transfusions without having to test their blood group.
A US company assessed the blood substitute, MP4, in a small trial involving around 20 patients. It said the results had been positive, although no details have been released.
The developer of MP4 is Sangart, a company based in San Diego.
-Tim
For computer scientists and engineers, the 1990's were close to paradise - until the technology boom collapsed. But even as business has started to pick up again, the job market they operate in has become the toughest ever.While this group represents a comparatively affluent sliver of the American work force, it illustrates the broader forces - higher productivity, cost-cutting business practices and increased global competition - that have combined to make job growth throughout the American economy so frustratingly sluggish.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that the economy added just 21,000 jobs last month, another disappointing performance, particularly when the economy has been growing strongly since the summer and corporate sales and profit are rising.
Well-educated technology workers have long been at the forefront of American economic growth and innovation, used to working in a field where rapid change is the rule. As markets shift, new technologies emerge and companies die. Yet such changes typically meant little more to these employees than moving rather easily from one well-paying opportunity to the next.
That is no longer the case.
China's top dotcoms believe multimedia messaging services (MMS) will become a gold mine sustaining their profit growth, and have earmarked large sums for aggressive development, state Chinese media said yesterday.Sohu.com Inc, one of China's three large NADAQ-listed portals, plans "huge investment" this year in a bid to outpace its two major rivals, Sina.com and Netease.com, in tapping the market, Xinhua news agency said.
"The peak season for short text messages is over," Sohu's CEO Charles Zhang said according to Xinhua. "MMS based on (2.5-generation) technology will herald explosive growth in 2004."
Unlike short messaging services (SMS), which allow transmissions of written text only, MMS enables users to send color pictures, animation, recorded sound and video.
At the end of last year, 8 million Chinese residents subscribed to MMS, and experts believe MMS for mobile subscribers will expand to an industry worth US$22 billion by 2008, according to Xinhua.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) unveiled the deepest look into the universe yet, a portrait of what could be the most distant galaxies ever seen.The new image, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), includes objects that until now have been too faint to be seen and includes ancient galaxies that emerged just 700 million years after the Big Bang theory from what astronomers call the "Dark Ages" of the universe.
"This image is the deepest view in the visible that we've ever taken, where an object about as bright as a firefly on the Moon would be visible," said Massimo Stiavelli, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and the UHDF project leader.
Americans are sitting around and eating themselves to death, with obesity closing in on tobacco as the nation's No. 1 underlying preventable killer.The government is offering constructive, even lighthearted, advice to fight what it calls an epidemic of expanding waistlines. Americans will be told in a new ad campaign they can lose midsection "love handles" and double chins one step at a time if they eat less and exercise more.
"We're just too darn fat, ladies and gentlemen, and we're going to do something about it," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said Tuesday at a news conference.
A poor diet and physical inactivity caused 400,000 deaths in 2000, a 33 percent jump over 1990, said a study released Tuesday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tobacco-related deaths in the same period climbed by less than 9 percent and the gap between the two narrowed substantially.
The report predicts obesity will surpass tobacco if current trends continue. "Our worst fears were confirmed," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, the CDC's director and an author of the study.
The cost of saving lives from heart disease just went through the roof.At a meeting of cardiologists, doctors today presented results of a giant, 2,500-person government study showing that heart failure patients implanted with pricey cardiac defibrillators were 23% less likely to die over five years than patients who got standard drug therapy. The finding doubles the potential patient population eligible for defibrillators, which cost $25,000 or more installed--to roughly 1.2 million Americans from 600,000.
Meanwhile, two separate studies found that heart patients who got the highest, most expensive doses of Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor were significantly less likely to have a heart attack or other cardiac event or die from heart disease than patients who got less expensive, standard doses of cholesterol-lowering medicines.
The unambiguous results are great news for the companies that make the new therapies, including Pfizer and defibrillator producers such as Medtronic, St. Jude Medical and Guidant.
But the results pose a budget-busting dilemma for patients, employers and other payers such as federal Medicare officials, who were hoping that medical costs might soon level off. How is the nation going to pay for all this life-saving new therapy?
"We cannot afford this" new technology," says Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Eric Topol. "In the last couple of years we have truly overridden our financial ability to deliver evidence-based medicine. We need a total makeover of our health care system to particularize the benefit -- that is, to match up those individuals who really derive benefit from expensive therapies."
The findings, cardiologists say, will greatly change how doctors treat patients with heart disease and will provide the impetus to re-evaluate how low cholesterol levels should be. The study compared high doses of one of the most powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs, Pfizer's Lipitor, to a less potent drug, Pravachol, made by Bristol-Myers Squibb, which conducted the trial.The patients taking Lipitor were significantly less likely to have heart attacks or to require bypass surgery or angioplasty, the study found. Both drugs are statins, a class of medications that block a cholesterol-synthesizing enzyme and are often prescribed for patients with heart problems.
"This is really a big deal," Dr. David Waters, a professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, said of the findings. "We have in our hands the power to reduce the risk of heart disease by a lot. It's very exciting."
For the first time in 25 years, European cars aren't as reliable as those made by U.S. automakers, Consumer Reports magazine says in its annual auto issue that hits newsstands today.Asian automakers continue to lead the industry, the magazine says, but domestics topping the Europeans is a sea change.
Especially considering the high quality of cars the Europeans have been known for, "this year they seem to have dropped considerably,'' said David Champion, senior director of Consumer Reports' auto test department and head of its 327-acre testing facility in Connecticut.
In all, only eight of 41 European cars and trucks tested by Consumer Reports' editors and evaluated by their readers earned the coveted ``recommended'' check mark.
Sen. John Vasconcellos, in an unusual and likely quixotic bid to boost participation at the polls, introduced a bill Monday to allow Californians as young as 14 to vote.The proposal, which would grant people ages 16 and 17 a half-vote and those who are 14 and 15 a quarter-vote, is the final legislative push by the termed-out San Jose Democrat, an unapologetic liberal and the father of California's self-esteem movement.
"We're just children or that's what some people think,'' said Victoria Martinez, 14, of San Jose, who supports the bill. "But we do have minds and political views.''
Flanked by about two dozen teens at a news briefing Monday, Vasconcellos dubbed his attempt to amend the California Constitution ``Training Wheels for Citizenship,'' a way to engage about 2 million young people at a time of low voter turnout.
If passed, the bill would make California the first state in the nation to lower the voting age below 18 -- something legal experts said is allowed under the federal Constitution.
"By extending the vote to those who didn't own property, then to women, and then to persons of all colors, we added to the richness of our democratic dialogue and our own nation's integrity,'' Vasconcellos said.
High doses of a popular cholesterol-lowering drug can sharply boost protection against getting or dying from a heart attack, according to new research that many experts said is likely to transform the treatment of the nation's leading killer.The results, released yesterday, provide the first direct answer to one of the most important questions being debated about heart disease: Will pushing cholesterol levels even lower than currently recommended help more people avoid getting sick and dying?
Heart patients who achieved ultra-low cholesterol levels in one study were 16 percent less likely to get sicker or to die than those who hit what are usually considered optimal levels.
The findings should prompt doctors to give much higher doses of drugs known as statins to hundreds of thousands of patients who already have severe heart problems, experts said. In addition, it will probably encourage physicians to start giving the medications to millions of healthy people who are not yet on them, and to boost dosages for some of those already taking them to lower their cholesterol even more, they said.
The research showed a benefit only for the top-selling statin, Lipitor, which was compared with the third most prescribed competitor, Pravachol.
The thinnest people eat the most carbs, a four-nation survey shows.If you've been following the latest U.S. diet fads, that isn't what you'd expect. But the data come from an intensive, four-nation study of more than 4,000 men and women age 40 to 59. The study was based on food diaries kept by people in the U.S., U.K., Japan, and China.
Study leader Linda Van Horn, PhD, of Northwestern University, presented the findings at the 44th American Heart Association Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention, held this week in San Francisco.
"Without exception, a high-complex-carbohydrate, high-vegetable-protein diet is associated with low body mass," Van Horn said in a news conference. "High-protein diets were associated with higher body weight."
Don't be misled. The high-carb diet that's keeping the pounds off is full of high-fiber vegetables, not french fries.
"The point we are trying to make is that what we consider desirable carbohydrates are complex, or high-fiber-containing carbohydrates: whole grains, fruits, and vegetables -- not doughnuts or even polished rice," Van Horn said. "We are looking at legumes and vegetables that offer fiber as well as protein. We're not talking about refined carbohydrates, commonly known as sugar."
Not surprisingly, people who exercised more also tended to be less heavy. This was true even though they tended to consume more calories.
It amounts to no less than a shift in the nation's center of gravity. Hispanics made up half of all new workers in the past decade, a trend that will lift them from roughly 12% of the workforce today to nearly 25% two generations from now. Despite low family incomes, which at $33,000 a year lag the national average of $42,000, Hispanics' soaring buying power increasingly influences the food Americans eat, the clothes they buy, and the cars they drive. Companies are scrambling to revamp products and marketing to reach the fastest-growing consumer group.Latino flavors are seeping into mainstream culture, too. With Hispanic youth a majority of the under-18 set, or close to it, in cities such as Los Angeles, Miami, and San Antonio, what's hip there is spreading into suburbia, much the way rap exploded out of black neighborhoods in the late 1980s.
Hispanic political clout is growing, too. In a Presidential race that's likely to be as tight as the last one, they could be a must-win swing bloc. Indeed, the increase in voting-age Hispanics since 2000 now outstrips the margin of victory in seven states for either President George W. Bush or former Vice-President Albert Gore, according to a new study by HispanTelligence, a Santa Barbara (Calif.) research group.
Which brings us to this item from a press release put out by Nature magazine, which some of us read avidly to elevate our metaphoria. (That word, coined just now, means ''extremely high euphoria,'' but falls well short of gigaphoria.)''Scientists have measured the shortest time interval ever,'' the magazine reported that researchers had reported. ''Ferenc Krausz and colleagues used short pulses of laser light to watch an electron moving around inside an atom, and were able to distinguish events to within 100 attoseconds -- that's a 10-million-billionth of a second.'' For those of us unable to grasp hairsplitting that thin, Nature explained: ''Imagine stretching 100 attoseconds until they lasted for one second -- on the same scale, one second would last for about 300 million years.''
Do we really need this measurement? You bet we do. ''It takes an electron about 150 attoseconds to 'orbit' around the proton at the center of a hydrogen atom,'' noted Nature. ''Opening up the attosecond timescale could therefore provide new insights into the incredibly fast processes of the atomic world.''
Some might say that the operational definition of an attosecond is the time between the light turning green and the Boston driver behind you honking his horn.
-Tim
"Cheating is definitely an issue, but it's more perception than reality,'' said Dennis Fong, better known as "Thresh,'' the Michael Jordan of video gamers. "There are cheaters online, but because there is this perception that everybody cheats, people that are good are not recognized for their skills. When I play online, I'm always accused of being a cheater. Because everyone thinks everyone else is cheating, it ruins the whole experience.''For years, analysts have expected the market for playing video games online against other people to take off. A 1997 Forrester report, for instance, predicted revenues from people who pay a monthly fee for playing an online game would hit $1.6 billion by 2001. But a just-released report from the Themis Group reveals that the total take last year was still less than $1 billion.
Cheating makes online games an unpleasant experience, especially for first-timers, says Matt Pritchard, a game developer at Ensemble Studios, a Microsoft-owned company.
Online cheaters can rig the game so they can't lose. If someone who's new to the environment can't even get started without being demolished, they're not likely to come back, Pritchard said. "Basically, they're going to conclude, `Well that wasn't very entertaining,' and never even try it again,'' he said."
Saudi Arabian officials said on Sunday that they were seeking to strengthen ties with China and Russia after allowing energy companies from those countries to be among the first foreign businesses to explore Saudi natural gas reserves in more than three decades.The Saudi contracts are with Lukoil, one of Russia's largest oil companies, and Sinopec, a large Chinese oil and gas producer. They were signed here on Sunday after protracted talks with several large American energy companies had collapsed over differences on terms and amid perceptions of a more distant relationship between Riyadh and Washington.
"There is no question cooperation in the economic field has the secondary benefit of increasing total cooperation," Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, said after signing the agreement with Lukoil. Russia is the largest producer of oil among nations that are not part of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Efforts by Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, have been exceptionally fruitful within and outside OPEC, with the price of oil climbing to more than $37 a barrel, the highest since the eve of the Iraq war.
Hundreds of thousands of chickens on two commercial farms in Maryland are being slaughtered after a case of avian influenza was found there, officials said Sunday.A total of 328,000 birds were ordered slaughtered, nearly four times the number killed when two Delaware farms were infected last month.
The cases in Delaware and Maryland are from the same virus strain, which is not harmful to humans, the authorities said Sunday.Maryland agriculture officials ordered a quarantine that covers eight farms within two miles of the infected farms. The state also began testing 79 poultry farms within six miles radius.
The infected farms, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, are about 45 miles from the nearest infected farm in Delaware. The authorities said they had not discovered a connection between the cases but did not rule one out.
Bishop Robinson is the first openly gay man to be elected a bishop in the national Episcopal Church, which is a branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion. His consecration drew protesters and led to angry responses around the world.Several Anglican bishops abroad have said they will no longer associate with the Episcopal Church U.S.A. because it approved Bishop Robinson's election.
In the United States, a dozen bishops are organizing an alternative network of dioceses and parishes that object to a gay bishop. They argue that homosexuality violates biblical laws.Most Episcopalians in New Hampshire support Bishop Robinson, but a minority continues to oppose his consecration. Two churches, Church of the Redeemer in Rochester and St. Mark's in Ashland, have voted to affiliate with the new network of conservative churches.
Bishop Robinson has lived with his partner, Mark Andrew, a state administrator, for 15 years and has two grown daughters from a previous marriage.
By the time children are referred to a program such as Kaiser's, obesity has often taken a heavy emotional toll. More failure will hurt badly. Yet to succeed, they have to dramatically change the way they live, when, as children, there is much in their lives they don't control."We need to make it easier for families to control their weight,'' said Dr. Thomas Robinson, director of the Stanford Pediatric Weight Control Program at Packard Children's Hospital. "I think the blame should be on us -- health care providers -- for not providing better programs for them.''
Most youths trying to lose weight still have to go it alone. The handful of weight management classes for children in the Bay Area have waiting lists. Many who do land a spot in a program drop out, unable to stick with the diet and exercise requirements.
"The kids who make it,'' said Dr. Ann Froderberg, medical director of Kaiser's program, "they're strong kids.''
Although some American executives have begun to express reservations about offshore outsourcing, confidence abounds here as Indian technology leaders see burgeoning demand for increasingly sophisticated services."It's unlikely that anything can go wrong for the Indian outsourcing industry," said Ravi Ramu, CFO of MphasiS BFL Group, a Bangalore software services and BPO company. "There is no competition for India at present, as countries like the Philippines and China cannot scale to offer the large number of skilled, English-speaking people that we have in India."
Indian outsourcers say they are moving up the value curve, from primarily software coding and maintenance to new areas such as IT consulting, systems integration, infrastructure management, package implementation, and product development.
More than a year ago, Volvo Car gave female employees a special project: Design the car they would like to drive.The result -- a roomy, 215-horsepower coupe -- makes a statement about what women want. Simply put, they want more.
The workers demanded everything in a car that men want in terms of performance and styling, "plus a lot more that male car buyers have never thought to ask for,'' said Hans-Olov Olsson, Volvo's president and chief executive.
"We learned that if you meet women's expectations, you exceed those for men,'' he said.
The YCC concept (Your Concept Car) was shown publicly for the first time Tuesday during media preview days at the Geneva International Motor Show. It's not just powerful and sporty, but also easy to park, maintain and keep clean.
From the outset in December 2002, when Volvo's top executives approved the project, every aspect of the car's design and production has been overseen by women, a first in the automotive industry.
The alarm over childhood obesity rang in 2002. New data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey showed that 15.5 percent of children were seriously overweight and 15 percent more were at risk of becoming so.That was triple the rate of 20 years earlier.
Looking around them, health officials could see rising numbers of overweight children developing adult disorders such as heart disease and diabetes. Some were so obese they were turning to surgery to shrink their stomachs, an extreme procedure even for adults.
Looking ahead, officials forecast a huge medical bill for the United States, as this generation joins an adult population that is increasingly overweight. The 2002 health survey found 64 percent of adults overweight or obese in 2000, compared with 56 percent six years earlier.
The teenage pregnancy rate in America, which rose sharply between 1986 and 1991 to huge public alarm, has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously recorded in the United States. And though pregnancy prevention efforts have long focused almost exclusively on girls, it is boys whose behavior shows the most startling changes.More than half of all male high school students reported in 2001 that they were virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990. Among the sexually active, condom use has soared to 65 percent, and nearly 73 percent among black male students. The trends are similar, if less pronounced, for female students, who remain slightly less likely than boys to report that they have had sex. Nowhere are the changes more surprising than in poor minority neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx, which a decade ago were seen as centers of a national epidemic of teenage pregnancy.
Researchers often sum up the findings in one tidy phrase: "less sex, more contraception." But there is nothing simple about their puzzlement over the reasons.
It begins with the SenseCam, a device Microsoft researcher Lyndsay Williams calls "a black box recorder for the human body.'' SenseCam was one of dozens of new technologies on display this week at Microsoft's TechFest, an annual event to give employees a look at the company's research around the world.Hidden inside a piece of jewelry or badge, the SenseCam records hundreds of images a day without the wearer ever pressing a button. The fish-eye lens faces forward, taking pictures of the scene in front of the person wearing it.
Fusing a digital camera with a variety of small sensors, the SenseCam's shutter is triggered by any change in motion, light or temperature. Later, Microsoft might add sensors that detect sound and heart rate.
The SenseCam captured 150 photos in less than an hour, with results that looked a bit like a home movie. It captured her footsteps past gray buildings and bright shops and into the seat of a taxi.
The gadget might have as much appeal to snoops as the absent-minded. It uses a motion sensor like ones found on outdoor lights, snapping pictures of anyone standing nearby.
Williams said no one she encountered in Cambridge asked her about the camera around her neck, even though its red light flashed with every click.
"People are so busy, nobody noticed,'' she said.Like mobile phone cameras, such technologies are changing what it means to go out in public. Not too far in the future, anonymity may be a thing of the past.
Their James Bond appeal aside, the privacy impact of cameras hidden in jewelry remains an open question. "This is a new technology and there's a question what balance people are comfortable with and what social conventions they will develop around it,'' said Andrew Herbert, managing director of the Cambridge lab.
Sounds like the ultimate tool for bloggers ...
-Tim
It was not until 1998 that online writing's popularity really skyrocketed. A modern love story entitled "First Close Touch" written by Taiwan writer Pizi Tsai got widely spread on the net. Its free writing style and modern language quickly attracted people. For most Chinese people, it was their first encounter with cyber-literature. The fever continued as the story was later published and adapted into a movie and stage drama.From then on, more and more people started posting their stories, poems, articles and other works online, sharing them on various BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) or literary websites. One of the sites that receives the most hits is rongshuxia.com, the world's largest aggregator and publisher of literature in the Chinese language. Set up seven years ago, Rongshuxia provides a platform for writers to show off their talents.
Lu Jinbo, chief editor of the website, is a famous online writer himself. He explains the development of this literary website. "In the beginning, we received two or three articles a day, but now, this number has surpassed 5,000. Over the past seven years, more than 100,000 people have had their articles published here."
Thanks to the wonders of technology, now you, too, can live like Bill Gates.No, you can't suddenly afford to build a $50 million house overlooking Lake Washington. You will not have heated floors, sidewalks and driveways. And your monthly Citibank statement certainly won't show $46 billion on deposit.
You can, however, have a big, beautiful, high-definition screen on your wall that displays rotating collections of classic paintings, just as Bill does.In fact, you may already have a high-definition TV; every month, thousands of Americans join the HDTV club. A young company called Roku has now come along with a simple question: What will appear on that $5,000 sheet of plasma when you're not watching TV?
Roku suggests a slide show of high-resolution photos, nature scenes or famous paintings. That's the point of the company's first product, a slim set-top box called the HD1000.
This machine has been around since November, selling - or, rather, not selling - for $500. Two things suddenly make it much more interesting: First, an important software upgrade, version 1.5 (a free download from rokulabs
.com) that adds essentials like the ability to play music with the slide shows.
Hawkins said Digital Chocolate will create sports games that resemble fantasy sports leagues, as well as titles for women that emphasize social networking.While he acknowledges that Digital Chocolate is late to the cell phone game, he said he believes the market will be huge. Some analysts estimate that by 2006 there will be 2 billion wireless phones capable of playing games with animation, video and sound. Whether people will actually want to play games on their phones is another matter. "It's a tough opportunity for cell phone games in the North Amercan market right now. It's a fledgling market,'' said analyst P.J. McNealy of American Technology Research.
Big game publishers like EA and THQ are pushing into wireless games, while smaller companies like Jamdat Mobile and Sorrent are generating millions of dollar in revenues from them.
To be sure, playing games on cell phones isn't the best of experiences. Networking speed is slow, and it's easy to be interrupted by phone calls. Nokia tried to revolutionize the field with its N-Gage game phone, which failed miserably after its launch in the fall.
Indiana Printing & Publishing:
Being fat may hurt your income - if you're a highly educated woman.So says research from Finland that suggests weight is a pay barrier for certain women, but not for men.
Obese women who are highly educated earn about 30 percent less - a difference of at least $5,000 a year - than normal-weight or even plump women, the study found. When analyzed by occupation, women with white-collar jobs earned less if they were obese.
Obesity had little or no effect on pay if women were poorly educated, manual workers or self-employed - and no statistically significant effect on men's pay, the study found.
"This suggests that, socio-economically, obesity is not as stigmatizing for men as it is for women," concluded the University of Helsinki researchers.
They couldn't explain why, or why there was a bigger effect on some women, except to say the pressure on women to be thin may be strongest among higher socio-economic classes.
The issue of gay marriage continued its seemingly inexorable spread beyond San Francisco on Wednesday, with ceremonies in Portland, Ore., the possibility of new benefits in San Jose and a more powerful presence in the race for the White House.Portland's move to become the second U.S. metropolis to perform same-sex marriages spurred hundreds of gay couples to line up in the pouring rain in a scene reminiscent of the historic ceremonies in San Francisco last month.
San Jose, meanwhile, is bidding to become the first large city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. City leaders will consider next week whether to recognize the unions for the purpose of expanding city-worker benefits.And, all but ensuring gay marriage will become a pivotal issue in the presidential race, it was reported that Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry told a few gay supporters in San Francisco on Friday he would give state-sanctioned gay couples the federal benefits that married heterosexual couples now receive.
The world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion (82 billion pounds) a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with $30-40 billion in claims, or the equivalent of one World Trade Centre attack annually.
"There is a danger that human intervention will accelerate and intensify natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible to adapt our socio-economic systems in time," Swiss Re said in the report.
"The human race can lead itself into this climatic catastrophe -- or it can avert it."
The report comes as a growing number of policy experts warn that the environment is emerging as the security threat of the 21st century, eclipsing terrorism.Scientists expect global warming to trigger increasingly frequent and violent storms, heat waves, flooding, tornadoes, and cyclones while other areas slip into cold or drought.
"Sea levels will continue to rise, glaciers retreat and snow cover decline," the insurer wrote.
Water percolating through the soil once created a friendly environment that would have been ideal for life to flourish on Mars, NASA scientists say.It is not known how long this environment lasted or if any organism actually developed. But scientists directing robot rovers prowling the Martian surface said yesterday the evidence now is clear that some rocks were once soaked with liquid water. "The ground would have been suitable for life,"? said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, the lead investigator for science instruments on the rover Opportunity. "That doesn't mean life was there. We don't know that."
Mars now is cold and dry and there is no apparent evidence of life on its barren surface.
But Squyres said chemical and geological clues gathered by Opportunity give dramatic proof that at some time in its past, liquid water coursed over the rocks and soils.
Such conditions on Earth, Squyres said at a news conference, "would be capable of supporting life.
"We believe that that place on Mars for some period of time was a habitable environment," he said.
Wal-Mart's relentless rollout of new stores has foundered in California like a beached whale. Two years ago, the world's biggest company announced aggressive plans to build 40 of its trademark "supercenters" in this lucrative market of 35 million consumers, the last untapped domestic prize for a global behemoth whose "always low prices" stretch from China to Brazil. But not a single supercenter has opened in California, and Wal-Mart's goal -- a new one every two months -- looks dubious. Nearly everywhere it turns, the Bentonville, Ark., retailer finds itself embroiled in lawsuits, politics and voter hostility toward its profitable blend of groceries and discount merchandise.On Tuesday, voters in Inglewood, San Marcos and here in Contra Costa County will decide whether to prohibit "big-box" stores epitomized by Wal-Mart supercenters. Los Angeles, San Diego, Salinas and other cities are mulling similar bans. Lawsuits over Wal-Mart are pending in Alameda County, Bakersfield and Turlock.
Across the USA, Wal-Mart faces backlash where it once found welcome mats — often with taxpayer-financed sweeteners to boot. From Lawrence, Kan., to Sequim, Wash.; Milford, Ohio; Manatee County, Fla.; Manor, Pa.; Stoughton, Wis.; Urbana, Ill.; and Florence, S.C., communities are questioning whether Wal-Mart's ultracompetitive business practices — critics call them cutthroat and predatory — are in their best interest.
The welcome that China is offering to multinational companies and foreign investment has left many Western business executives, so critical of a closed Japan more than a decade ago, enthusiastically embracing China, its cheap work force and its huge markets.But that same openness -- combined with China's vast population of 1.3 billion and military muscle -- makes it an even greater long-term economic challenge to the United States than Japan seemed to be in the 1980's, according to a growing number of executives, economists and officials.
While China's economy is still one-third the size of Japan's, the potential size of its market has made it very hard for companies to say no when Beijing officials demand that they build factories, transfer the latest technology or adopt Chinese technical standards.
Japan has effectively run out of low-wage workers for its industries, and quickly brought much of its economy up to and in some cases beyond Western technological standards. China still has vast reserves of cheap labor in inland areas and many backward industries that can grow swiftly as they copy Western and Japanese methods.
"China could do what Japan did, as a very fast follower, but China could do it bigger and better and for a longer period of time," said Steven Weber, an Asia scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's not necessarily as vulnerable as Japan was."
But while Japan's danger to other economies over the last decade has taken the numbing forms of economic stagnation and political lassitude, China poses the risk of fast, sharp shocks.
Near the end of six hours of interviews the other day in Houston, Smalley, a founder of Carbon Nanotechnologies and a professor at Rice University, stood before a display screen outlining potential uses of a branch of science he helped to invent. That science might, he said softly, help to solve the world's energy problems, among many other possibilities. He's working on learning to build electrical cables so efficient, for instance, that they "would easily be the replacement for every high-voltage cable in the world."People pay attention to Smalley, one of the prodigious brains of American science. He won the Nobel in 1996, along with two collaborators, for discovering a new form of carbon, difficult to make but intoxicating in its properties. In that first discovery, in the 1980s, atoms of carbon, which can form exceedingly tight bonds with one another, were linked together into structures unknown to science, forming tiny, incredibly strong balls.
The carbon balls were shaped like the famous geodesic dome of R. Buckminster Fuller, the visionary architect and scientist. Researchers named the new form of carbon buckminsterfullerene, and the balls were quickly dubbed buckyballs.
Nonetheless, Google, Yahoo, America Online, Microsoft and many smaller companies have invested in the [personalization] technology. While most will not detail how they plan to use it, they all say it could make their sites more appealing to users."The Holy Grail is understanding the user's intent,'' said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president for product management at Google. When humans converse, they trade visual and verbal clues that give words context and meaning. But search engines don't benefit from that interplay, and words such as "book'' or "cut,'' which have multiple meanings, can confound them.
So instead of providing personal results, many search engines today rank results based on popularity, or on what other searchers find useful, known as consensus ranking."You look at search engines, and what they give you is what most people think is relevant,'' said Jim Pitkow, CEO of Moreover Technologies in San Francisco. "But if you're a minority user, or have a minority interest, you won't get what you want in the first page of results.''
For the first time since World War II, a national survey has sized up the average American body, not just by weight and height or even the standard chest-waist-hip routine, but in more than 240 measurements tip to toe.The results confirm what other statistics have shown: that Americans have grown. In their sheer detail, the measurements also show just how and where -- an intimate portrait of the national body with all its Lycra-ed love handles, sucked-in stomachs and fashionably disguised spare tires.
The survey -- called SizeUSA and sponsored by clothing and textile companies, the Army, Navy and several universities -- measured more than 10,000 people in 13 cities nationwide using a light-pulsing 3-D scanner.
...
Over all, the new measurements shake up what have long been considered the average outlines of the American body. For years, an average woman was thought to be a size 8, although some circles had bumped that up to size 12 in recent years. But even the women who came in on the small side in the SizeUSA survey look more like what the longtime clothing industry standards would consider a size 14 -- the size at which "plus size" clothing begins.
Greek scientists said they have found a way to lower cancer cell resistance to medical treatment in what could be a major step in treating a disease that kills more than six million people every year.The procedure, which only recently started testing on animals, could make chemotherapy more effective at significantly reduced dosages and eliminate many of its side effects.
The key lies in 'switching off' Apolipoprotein J, also known as clusterin or Apo J for short, a protein used by healthy and diseased cells alike as a shield against attacks, Stathis Gonos, leader of the research team, told Reuters on Monday.
"Our research was looking at genetic and environmental factors related to aging, and that is how we found the function of Apo J in healthy cells is to act as a shield, or 'survival factor', against toxic factors in the environment," Gonos said.
"Our next step was to investigate whether Apo J has a similar function in cancer cells, and indeed saw that it retains the same function of defending cells, shielding them from e.g. chemotherapy prescribed by a doctor to treat cancer," he added.
Cells react to what they perceive as an assault with all the weapons they have, producing vast quantities of Apo J as a shield against the attack, be that an infection or an anti-cancer drug.
"We used a new technology called RNA Interference to silence the expression of Apo J and saw that in the case of cancer cells they became a lot more fragile and this made it a lot easier to kill them with normal chemo," Gonos said.
Biotechnology companies were once known for going boldly where the big pharmaceutical companies would not, developing genetically engineered medicines like Avastin, the Genentech drug, approved on Thursday, that attacks cancer by a new method and prolongs the lives of patients. Biotech ventures also plunged into experimental areas, like gene therapy and stem cell research, that have not yet paid off and perhaps never will.But more and more start-ups now seem focused on scrounging around for existing drugs to license, often castoffs from big pharmaceutical companies. In doing so, fledgling biotech companies avoid the toil and risk of trying to discover a new cause of disease or a new compound. Some of the newer biotech companies do not even have laboratories.
"I don't know of a venture capitalist today who is willing to put significant percentages of his fund's money into de novo discovery companies," said Roger Longman, co-publisher of the medical business magazines In Vivo and Start-Up. "Instead, the real model is, 'How can I get to a product quickly, without doing all of that early biology and chemistry?' "