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.