Obama hints at potential military action in Syria

President Barack Obama answers questions during his new conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 30, 2013. The president strongly suggested Tuesday he'd consider military action against Syria if it can be confirmed that President Bashar Assad's government used chemical weapons in the two-year-old civil war. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

President Barack Obama answers questions during his new conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 30, 2013. The president strongly suggested Tuesday he'd consider military action against Syria if it can be confirmed that President Bashar Assad's government used chemical weapons in the two-year-old civil war. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

President Barack Obama answers questions during his new conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 30, 2013. The president said the US doesn't know how or when chemical weapons were used in Syria or who used them. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Bashar Ja'afari, Syria's U.N. ambassador, gestures as he speaks during a news conference, Tuesday, April 30, 2013 at United Nations headquarters. Bashar Ja'afari says the use of chemical weapons is not only "a red line" but "a blood line" that cannot be tolerated and is again demanding a U.N. investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Aleppo that it blames on rebels. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

President Barack Obama arrives for a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 30, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

President Barack Obama walks to the podium to answers questions during his new conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 30, 2013. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama signaled Tuesday he would consider U.S. military action against Syria if "hard, effective evidence" is found to bolster intelligence that chemical weapons have been used in the 2-year-old civil war. Among the potential options being readied for him: weapons and ammunition for the Syrian rebels.

Despite such planning, Obama appealed for patience during a White House news conference, saying he needed more conclusive evidence about how and when chemical weapons detected by U.S. intelligence agencies were used and who deployed them. If those questions can be answered, Obama said he would consider actions the Pentagon and intelligence community have prepared for him in the event Syria has crossed his chemical weapons "red line."

"There are options that are available to me that are on the shelf right now that we have not deployed," he told reporters packed into the White House briefing room.

Beyond lethal aid to the rebels, several government agencies are also drafting plans for establishing a protective "no-fly zone" over Syria and for targeted missile strikes, according to officials familiar with the planning. However, the officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the internal deliberations, stressed that Obama had not yet decided to proceed on any of the plans.

As Obama raised the prospect of deeper U.S. involvement, Hezbollah's leader said Tuesday that his Iranian-backed militant group stood ready to aid Syrian President Bashar Assad. And new violence in Syria hit the capital of Damascus, as a powerful bomb ripped through a bustling commercial district, killing at least 14 people.

Mindful that any military intervention in the combustible Middle East would be complicated and dangerous, Obama hinted the U.S. would probably avoid taking action unilaterally. Part of the rationale for building a stronger chemical weapons case against Assad, Obama said, is to avoid being in a position "where we can't mobilize the international community to support what we do."

Obama has resisted calls to expand U.S. assistance beyond the nonlethal aid the government is providing the rebels. That has frustrated some allies as well as some U.S. lawmakers, who say the deaths of 70,000 Syrians should warrant a more robust American response.

Tuesday's wide-ranging news conference coincided with the 100-day mark of Obama's second term. It's a stretch that has been defined by the defeat of gun control legislation he supported, as well as the continuation of old disputes that marked the president's first four years in office, including the Syria conflict and the launching of his controversial health care overhaul. Asked if he still had "the juice" to get legislation approved, he smiled and paraphrased Mark Twain's famous line, saying, "Rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point."

Another issue that frustrated Obama in his first term resurfaced when he was pressed about the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, the detention center he promised to close but hasn't been able to. Obama said he would make another run at it, though he was vague about how.

"I'm going to go back at this," he said. "I've asked my team to review everything that's currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively, and I'm going to re-engage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that's in the best interest of the American people."

The president also took questions for the first time about the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings that rattled the nation two weeks ago. He defended the FBI's 2011 investigation into Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspect who was killed, a probe that resulted in the bureau finding no evidence that he was a threat to the United States.

Russia has since provided more information about Tsarnaev and his mother ? both ethnic Chechens? that could have resulted in a more rigorous FBI investigation.

Obama pointedly said that Moscow has been cooperative "since the Boston bombings." He made no reference to information being held back ahead of the attack, but he did say, "Old habits die hard. There are still suspicions sometimes between our intelligence and law enforcement agencies that date back 10, 20, 30 years, back to the Cold War."

Russia has also stymied U.S. efforts at the United Nations to mount pressure against Assad's embattled government in Syria.

Assad has refused to let a U.N. team into the areas near Damascus and Aleppo where chemical weapons are believed to have been used. The White House says the team is standing by and could deploy to Syria within 48 hours if Assad allows it in. Given the unlikelihood of Assad giving the inspectors access, the U.S. says it is also seeking answers on its own and through international partners.

Polling suggests war-weary Americans are reluctant to see the U.S. get involved in another conflict in the Middle East. A CBS News/New York Times poll out Tuesday shows 62 percent of Americans say the country does not have a responsibility to intervene in the fighting in Syria, while 24 percent say the government does have that responsibility.

While Obama insists all options are on the table when it comes to dealing with Syria, the White House has little appetite for putting American soldiers into combat there. Even Arizona's Republican Sen. John McCain, who has pressed for aggressive U.S. involvement, has said putting U.S. troops on the ground in Syria would be a mistake.

Underscoring the danger that could await, the leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group said Tuesday that Syrian rebels will not be able to defeat Assad's forces by themselves, suggesting the government's friends, including his Iranian-backed group would intervene on the government side if necessary.

Hezbollah and Iran are close allies of Assad, both accused by rebels of sending fighters to assist Syrian troops.

In Washington, Obama also took questions Tuesday about the immigration debate on Capitol Hill. Obama said that while a bill crafted by eight senators ? four Democrats and four Republicans ? was not the legislation he would have written, "I do think that it meets the basic criteria that I laid out from the start."

Obama also defended the implementation of the health care overhaul he signed in his first term, though he said there will be "glitches and bumps" as the sweeping law is fully implemented. He cited the unveiling Tuesday of simplified forms for people applying for insurance as an example of the administration trying to make the rollout of the law's final stages smoother.

___

Associated Press writers Zeina Karam in Beirut and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

___

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-04-30-US-US-Syria/id-030c6a66e3a1418fa3b5cf6eeaf9518d

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Thymus teaches immune cells to ignore vital gut bacteria

Apr. 29, 2013 ? The tiny thymus teaches the immune system to ignore the teeming, foreign bacteria in the gut that helps you digest and absorb food, researchers say.

When immune cells recognize essential gut bacteria as foreign, inflammatory bowel disease such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease can be the painful, debilitating result.

In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers show that the regulatory T cells, or Tregs, that keep this from happening in most of us come from the tiny immune organ nestled near the heart, said Dr. Leszek Ignatowicz, immunologist in the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.

In fact, mice born lacking T cells that were given a specific T cell type that causes colitis-like wasting disease, didn't get the disease if they also received thymus-derived Tregs.

"This essential gut-bacteria is one group that you don't want to mount an immune response against," said Ignatowicz, the study's corresponding author. "In fact, you need the Tregs' help in inducing tolerance to these bacteria if you want to treat Crohn's and other inflammatory bowel disease."

Knowing exactly where the Tregs come from is essential to making more of them, noted Dr. Richard A. McIndoe, the center's Associate Director and a study co-author. "The Tregs have to shut down the immune response. The question is: Do we have to expand the pre-existing Tregs that came to the gut from the thymus or teach peripheral na?ve or effector T cells to become Tregs? "

The answer was thought to be that most immune cells learn to ignore the vital bacteria after they reach the gut. However, the new study shows that only a fraction of bacteria-friendly Tregs come from there. Since T cells don't have license plates, they looked at their antigen receptors and found the Tregs in the gut had the same receptors as their precursors in the thymus. Easing the comparison was the fact that na?ve T cells, which also get their education in the thymus, have mostly different receptors than thymus-educated Tregs.

They soon realized that while conversion of na?ve cells to Tregs occurs more often in the gut than other organs, it was much less frequent than conventionally believed. Once in the gut, na?ve cells can become Tregs or effector cells; effector cells only attack unless constrained by Tregs.

"We either have to induce effector T cells to change to Tregs or boost the number of Tregs coming out of the thymus to help patients with inflammatory bowel disease," McIndoe said. Some compounds, including vitamin A and transforming growth factor beta, already are known to aid conversion.

While T-cells mostly earn their receptors in the thymus, most don't take action until they actually see their chosen antigens, a variety of substances that can provoke an immune response. Well-educated thymus-derived Tregs can recognize antigens from the body's tissue as well as foreign antigens derived from sources like gut bacteria. Interestingly most immune cells circulating in the body are na?ve T-cells that become effector cells upon their first contact with an antigen.

It was previously believed that thymus-derived Tregs primarily protect the body's own tissue but don't induce tolerance to foreign antigens like ones derived from gut's bacteria. However Ignatowicz and Dr. Rafal Pacholczyk reported in 2007 in the journal Immunity that Tregs could actually recognize both self- and non-self-antigens. The gut, which regularly deals with an onslaught of foreign substances such as food and drink, was a logical place to figure out where the accommodating Tregs originated, Ignatowicz said.

MCG scientists note that effector cells also are needed in the gut to recognize and eliminate harmful bacteria, such as campylobacter, a common cause of diarrhea, vomiting and abdominal cramping that can result from eating inadequately washed and cooked poultry.

Populating gut bacteria starts early, with mother's milk or formula, and is determined largely by diet as well as the environment so every individual's is different although bacteria tend to be compatible among the same species, McIndoe said.

Vaccines are likely the oldest example of using the body's natural defense system to protect against invaders. Conversely, select immune cell populations already are being used to help fight cancer. More sophisticated approaches are being developed to turn down the immune response, in the case of an organ transplant or an autoimmune disease such as lupus or arthritis.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Journal Reference:

1. Anna Cebula, Michal Seweryn, Grzegorz A. Rempala, Simarjot Singh Pabla, Richard A. McIndoe, Timothy L. Denning, Lynn Bry, Piotr Kraj, Pawel Kisielow, Leszek Ignatowicz. Thymus-derived regulatory T cells contribute to tolerance to commensal microbiota. Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature12079

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/TDQLYj2_2lA/130429130512.htm

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What happened to dinosaurs' predecessors after Earth's largest extinction 252 million years ago?

Apr. 29, 2013 ? Predecessors to dinosaurs missed the race to fill habitats emptied when nine out of 10 species disappeared during Earth's largest mass extinction 252 million years ago.

Or did they?

That thinking was based on fossil records from sites in South Africa and southwest Russia.

It turns out, however, that scientists may have been looking in the wrong places.

Newly discovered fossils from 10 million years after the mass extinction reveal a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs in Tanzania and Zambia.

That's still millions of years before dinosaur relatives were seen in the fossil record elsewhere on Earth.

"The fossil record from the Karoo of South Africa, for example, is a good representation of four-legged land animals across southern Pangea before the extinction," says Christian Sidor, a paleontologist at the University of Washington.

Pangea was a landmass in which all the world's continents were once joined together. Southern Pangea was made up of what is today Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India.

"After the extinction," says Sidor, "animals weren't as uniformly and widely distributed as before. We had to go looking in some fairly unorthodox places."

Sidor is the lead author of a paper reporting the findings; it appears in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The insights come from seven fossil-hunting expeditions in Tanzania, Zambia and Antarctica funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Additional work involved combing through existing fossil collections.

"These scientists have identified an outcome of mass extinctions--that species ecologically marginalized before the extinction may be 'freed up' to experience evolutionary bursts then dominate after the extinction," says H. Richard Lane, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences.

The researchers created two "snapshots" of four-legged animals about five million years before, and again about 10 million years after, the extinction 252 million years ago.

Prior to the extinction, for example, the pig-sized Dicynodon--said to resemble a fat lizard with a short tail and turtle's head--was a dominant plant-eating species across southern Pangea.

After the mass extinction, Dicynodon disappeared. Related species were so greatly decreased in number that newly emerging herbivores could then compete with them.

"Groups that did well before the extinction didn't necessarily do well afterward," Sidor says.

The snapshot of life 10 million years after the extinction reveals that, among other things, archosaurs roamed in Tanzanian and Zambian basins, but weren't distributed across southern Pangea as had been the pattern for four-legged animals before the extinction.

Archosaurs, whose living relatives are birds and crocodilians, are of interest to scientists because it's thought that they led to animals like Asilisaurus, a dinosaur-like animal, and Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a dog-sized creature with a five-foot-long tail that could be the earliest dinosaur.

"Early archosaurs being found mainly in Tanzania is an example of how fragmented animal communities became after the extinction," Sidor says.

A new framework for analyzing biogeographic patterns from species distributions, developed by paper co-author Daril Vilhena of University of Washington, provided a way to discern the complex recovery.

It revealed that before the extinction, 35 percent of four-legged species were found in two or more of the five areas studied.

Some species' ranges stretched 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers), encompassing the Tanzanian and South African basins.

Ten million years after the extinction, there was clear geographic clustering. Just seven percent of species were found in two or more regions.

The technique--a new way to statistically consider how connected or isolated species are from each other--could be useful to other paleontologists and to modern-day biogeographers, Sidor says.

Beginning in the early 2000s, he and his co-authors conducted expeditions to collect fossils from sites in Tanzania that hadn't been visited since the 1960s, and in Zambia where there had been little work since the 1980s.

Two expeditions to Antarctica provided additional finds, as did efforts to look at museum fossils that had not been fully documented or named.

The fossils turned out to hold a treasure trove of information, the scientists say, on life some 250 million years ago.

Other co-authors of the paper are Adam Huttenlocker, Brandon Peecook, Sterling Nesbitt and Linda Tsuji from University of Washington; Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; Roger Smith of the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town; and S?bastien Steyer from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

The project was also funded by the National Geographic Society, Evolving Earth Foundation, the Grainger Foundation, the Field Museum/IDP Inc. African Partners Program, and the National Research Council of South Africa.

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Journal Reference:

1. Christian A. Sidor, Daril A. Vilhena, Kenneth D. Angielczyk, Adam K. Huttenlocker, Sterling J. Nesbitt, Brandon R. Peecook, J. S?bastien Steyer, Roger M. H. Smith, and Linda A. Tsuji. Provincialization of terrestrial faunas following the end-Permian mass extinction. PNAS, April 29, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1302323110

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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/PorEKO82ZFM/130429164928.htm

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Officials: 19 killed in car bombings in south Iraq

BAGHDAD (AP) ? Three car bombs exploded Monday in public areas in two cities in Iraq's largely calm Shiite Muslim south, killing 19 civilians and wounding dozens, officials said.

The attacks come amid a week-long spike in sectarian violence following clashes at a Sunni protest camp in the north of the country.

Two parked car bombs went off simultaneously Monday morning in the city of Amarah near a gathering of construction workers and a market, killing 12 civilians and wounding 25, according to police. Amarah is located 320 kilometers (200 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Another police officer said a parked car bomb exploded near a restaurant in the city of Diwaniyah, killing seven civilians and wounding 15 others. The city is located 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Baghdad.

Two medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.

Sectarian violence has spiked since Tuesday, when security forces tried to make arrests at a Sunni Muslim protest camp in the northern city of Hawija. The move set off a clash that killed 23 people, including three soldiers.

The Hawija incident and a spate of follow-up battles between gunmen and security forces as well as other attacks, including Monday's, have left around 200 dead in the last week.

Bomb attacks are relatively rare in Iraq's relatively peaceful southern Shiite cities.

No one has claimed responsibility for Monday's attacks, but coordinated bombings in civilian areas are a favorite strategy used by al-Qaida in Iraq.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/officials-19-killed-car-bombings-south-iraq-082046457.html

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President Obama's speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner (VIDEO) (Washington Post)

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Residents concerned about health effects of hydrofracking

Apr. 28, 2013 ? s living in areas near natural gas operations, also known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, are concerned their illnesses may be a result of nearby drilling operations. Twenty-two percent of the participants in a small pilot study surmise that hydrofracking may be the cause of such health concerns as sinus problems, sleeping difficulties, and gastrointestinal problems.

The findings will be presented at the American Occupational Health Conference on April 28 in Orlando, Florida.

Scientists collected responses from 72 adults visiting a primary care physician's office in the hydrofracking-heavy area of Bradford County, Pa., who volunteered to complete an investigator-faciliated survey.

"Almost a quarter of participants consider natural gas operations to be a contributor to their health issues, indicating that there is clearly a concern among residents that should be addressed," says Poun? Saberi, MD, MPH, the study's principal investigator with the department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. She is also an investigator with the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET) at Penn.

Within these 22 percent of responders, 13 percent viewed drilling to be the cause of their current health complaints and 9 percent were concerned that future health problems can be caused by natural gas operations. The previous health complaints by participants were thought to be anecdotal in nature as they were individual cases reported publicly only by popular media.

"What is significant about this study is that the prevalence of impressions about medical symptoms attributed to natural gas operations had not been previously solicited in Pennsylvania. This survey indicates that there is a larger group of people with health concerns than originally assumed," explains Saberi.

The survey included questions about 29 health symptoms, including those previously anecdotally reported by other residents and workers in other areas where drilling occurs. Some patient medical records were also reviewed to compare reported symptoms with those that had been previously documented. "Sinus problems, sleeping difficulties, and gastrointestinal problems were the most common symptoms reported on the Bradford survey," notes Saberi. "Of the few studied charts, there were no one-to-one correlations between the participants' reported symptoms on the survey and the presenting symptom to the medical provider in the records. This raises the possibility of communication gaps between residents with concerns and the medical community and needs further exploration. An opportunity exists to educate shale region communities and workers to report, as well as health care providers to document, the attributed symptoms as precisely as possible."

The CEET team also mapped the addresses of patients who agreed to provide them in relation to drilling to determine if proximity to drilling operations may relate to health problems.

"We hope this pilot study will guide the development of future epidemiological studies to determine whether health effects in communities in which natural gas operations are occurring is associated with air, water, and food-shed exposures and will provide a basis for health care provider education," says CEET director Trevor Penning, PhD. "The goal of science should be to protect the public and the environment before harm occurs; not simply to treat it after the damage has been done."

The Bradford County health concerns pilot study is one of three hydrofracking studies currently underway at CEET, one of 20 Environmental Health Sciences Core Centers (EHSCC) in the US, funded by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

CEET is also partnering with Columbia University's EHSCC to measure water quality and billable health outcomes in areas with and without hydrofracking on the Pennsylvania-New York border. Using a new mapping tool developed by Harvard University, CEET and Harvard researchers are creating maps of drilling sites, air quality, water quality, and health effects to locate possible associations. Initial studies will focus on Pennsylvania. Results of both studies are expected in early 2014. These collaborative studies are funded by pilot project funds from the respective EHSCCs, which in turn obtain their financial support from NIEHS.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/IVvBTUbZKJQ/130428230423.htm

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Libya to help ease Egypt crisis with $1.2 billion oil deal

By Jessica Donati and Ghaith Shennib

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya will soon start shipping oil to neighboring Egypt on soft credit terms, two senior Libyan officials said, as Cairo struggles to pay for energy imports and avoid fuel shortages.

The officials told Reuters that Tripoli would supply Cairo with $1.2 billion worth of crude at world prices but on interest free credit for a year, with the first cargo expected to arrive next month.

Egypt has slid into economic crisis since president Hosni Mubarak was overthrown two years ago. Most international companies have reduced oil product supplies to the country fearing non-payments, as the government tries to curb soaring energy subsidy costs which swallow up a fifth of its budget.

Libya plans to ship one to two cargoes a month for refining in Egypt under a deal that involves 12 million barrels of crude over 12 months, the oil industry officials said.

With foreign currency reserves running low, Egypt has not bought any crude on the open market since January. In rough terms the Libyan deal would be worth slightly more than half its 2012 imports, which the central bank put at $2 billion.

"Their situation is very bad, and if necessary they can take up to a year to pay (for each delivery)," said one of the Libyan officials.

Libyan authorities themselves face a daily struggle to keep services running and take control of a country awash with weapons looted from the arsenal of Muammar Gaddafi, who was toppled in 2011.

But the official said Libya could not shy away from helping an important trading partner. "If you are a good neighbor and something is wrong with your neighbor, you will not feel comfortable with yourself. It's human nature," he said.

Cairo has so far failed to agree a $4.8 billion loan deal with the International Monetary Fund and has sought help from energy producing countries in the region and beyond.

Tripoli has already deposited $2 billion at the Egyptian central bank and Qatar has announced $8 billion in loans, grants and other deposits since Islamist President Mohamed Mursi was elected last June.

WORLD PRICES

Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) declined immediate comments on the details of the deal, although one of the oil industry officials said it would supply Sirteca, the cheapest of all the country's grades. "Shipments will be sold at world prices," said the second Libyan official.

An official at the Egyptian oil ministry confirmed some of the deal's terms. "(It will be) one million barrels a month and deferred payment for 12 months without interest starting from the first half of May, God willing," the official told Reuters.

However, the official maintained that the two sides were still discussing the kind of crude oil to be supplied and how long the shipments would last. The Libyan officials said that if the first cargo was sent next month as planned, they would last until April 2014.

The Libyan deal should ease the problems of Egypt, which owes at least $5 billion to oil companies, half of it overdue.

Cairo aims to raise prices of subsidized energy gradually, bringing them close to world levels in four years, to reduce the burden on its huge budget deficit. In the short term, it wants to avoid arousing more social unrest by ensuring energy supplies during the approaching summer when energy consumption peaks.

Libya has already shown willingness to step back into its old role as North Africa's version of a Gulf petro-state by using cash to open doors.

Libya's new rulers authorized a payment of almost $200 million to Mauritania after it extradited Gaddafi's former spy chief Abdullah al-Senussi last year, although they later denied there was a quid pro quo.

Diplomats and analysts have also suggested Libya's growing support may help persuade Egypt to hand over Gaddafi's cousin Ahmed Gaddaf Alddam, who was arrested in Cairo in March.

Egypt sent two other ex-Gaddafi officials to Libya last month but barred the extradition of Gaddaf Alddam, who is claiming Egyptian citizenship. Libya is appealing the Egyptian court ruling.

(Additional reporting by Asma Alsharif in Cairo; editing by David Stamp)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/libya-help-ease-egypt-crisis-1-2-billion-130421776.html

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Home Improvement Projects : How to Paint an Interior Concrete ...

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Wunderlist Pro goes live for iOS, Mac and web, priced at $50 per year (video)

6Wunderkinder let us know last week that it was entering the big leagues of task management with Wunderlist Pro, and today it's possible for us to follow along. The company's first premium service is now available for those running the iOS, Mac and web apps, albeit with a slightly higher than anticipated $50 yearly subscription price alongside the $5 monthly option. As a reminder, Pro users get the ability to assign tasks to others, add an unlimited number of subtasks and choose from eight more backgrounds. Both file attachments and sharing are coming soon, 6Wunderkinder adds, while Android and Windows iterations of the Pro version are also on the company's very own to-do list.

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Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

And we don't need ANY arguments about what such beings would be like in order to understand that there is nothing unique here to want. The Solar System is composed of approximately 99.95% hydrogen and helium. This is basically the same as the composition of the rest of the Universe. While some elements may be slightly more common or concentrated in slightly more convenient forms in one place than another there simply isn't anything particularly unique in one star system that isn't present in another.

Furthermore look at the energetics of interstellar space travel. "Accelerating one ton to one-tenth of the speed of light requires at least 450 PJ or 4.5 ?10^17 J or 125 billion kWh, without factoring in efficiency of the propulsion mechanism. This energy has to be either generated on-board from stored fuel, harvested from the interstellar medium, or projected over immense distances." -- Wikipedia. In 2008 the world used roughly 474?10^18 J, which means the entire power output of the human race for a year would suffice to accelerate one starship of 40 tons to 0.1C, roughly. This is about the weight of the 'J' class Apollo Lunar mission payload (LEM, CM, SM, etc). Clearly even the most limited interstellar travel would have an energy cost that is frankly hard to imagine.

So, considering the enormous cost and the high degree of technology required to traverse interstellar space, why bother? Certainly it can never be economical. The energy costs quoted above indicate that even the most expensive conceivable processes for making things would be cheaper (IE using solar power to perform nuclear reactions to transmute one element into whatever other ones you need and then make whatever you want out of it) than traveling to where you can find something.

Clearly a civilization could in principle literally consume all matter in its vicinity. It is hard to imagine how this would lead to expansion for economic reasons though, there'd never be any hope of getting a return on your investment.

Obviously someone can always invent some new hypothesis as to why, for reasons of alien psychology, aliens would want to travel, but nobody knows squat about alien psychology, so there's really no point in debating it. The very fact that such an undertaking would be VAST in scope, significant even for a Kardeshev level 2 civilization indicates it wouldn't be carried out on some whim, and it seems unlikely that a civilization which spent its energy so profligately on whims would survive long.

I know it isn't a real popular opinion to hold, but everything I see indicates that interstellar distances are pretty close to uncrossable for physical beings like humans. Frankly I think that is the plain answer to the whole Fermi Paradox that people just don't really want to come to grips with. The gulfs between the stars are so wide that nobody crosses them, EVER.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/5GlVZLBNdfk/story01.htm

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Oil slips to $93 a barrel ahead of US growth data

The price of oil slipped to near $93 a barrel Friday ahead of quarterly growth figures for the world's biggest economy.

By early afternoon in Europe, benchmark oil for June delivery was down 62 cents to $93.02 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $2.21 to close at $93.64 on Thursday after the U.S. Labor Department said the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell last week by 16,000, suggesting that layoffs have declined.

Traders turned slightly cautious ahead of first-quarter U.S. economic growth figures due later Friday. Economists expect to see a significant improvement from the anemic 0.4 percent growth rate reported for the October-December quarter.

But analysts at Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong said the result "is unlikely to allay market concerns after a recent run of disappointing data indicates some decline in growth momentum." Recent reports have suggested that manufacturing is starting to weaken. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes dipped in March.

Still, if prices hold near their current level, the Nymex contract would record its largest weekly gain in 10 months, while narrowing the gap to the Brent contract to less than $10 a barrel.

"This is somewhat surprising given that U.S. crude oil stocks continue to be at just short of a 23-year high and U.S. oil production has meanwhile achieved a 21-year high," said analysts at Commerzbank in Frankfurt. "Without new U.S. pipeline capacities ? which will not be available until the end of the year ? any further narrowing of the price spread is difficult to justify."

Brent crude, which is used to price oil from the North Sea used by many U.S. refiners, was down 54 cents to $102.87 a barrel on the ICE futures exchange in London.

In other energy futures trading on the Nymex:

? Gasoline fell 1.14 cents to $2.7992 per gallon.

? Heating oil declined 1.32 cents to $2.8666 a gallon.

? Natural gas lost 0.5 cent to $4.162 per 1,000 cubic feet.

___

Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/oil-slips-93-barrel-ahead-us-growth-data-120756333.html

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Boston bomb suspect moved to prison from hospital

By Scott Malone and Tim McLaughlin

BOSTON (Reuters) - Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been moved to a prison medical center from the hospital where he had been held since his arrest a week ago while recovering from gunshot wounds, U.S. officials said on Friday.

The 19-year-old ethnic Chechen, wounded in a night-time shootout with police on April 18 hours after authorities released pictures of him and his older brother as suspects, was formally charged on Monday and could face the death penalty if convicted. His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in the shootout.

New York City officials said on Thursday that Dzhokhar told investigators in the hospital that after the FBI released their pictures, the pair made an impromptu plan to drive to New York and set off more bombs in Times Square. New York has been on heightened alert since the September 11, 2001 hijacked plane attacks and Manhattan's Times Square was the target of an attempted car bombing by a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen in May 2010.

U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers from security officials about what they might have known about the brothers, particularly Tamerlan, before the bombing at the marathon finish line that killed three people and injured 264 others. In 2011, Russia had asked the FBI to question Tamerlan because of concerns that he may have been an Islamic militant.

"Clearly enough was not done in order to monitor the activities here, especially given the fact that it wasn't one heads-up we were given but several," U.S. Representative Ed Royce, a Republican who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CNN.

On a six-month trip to Russia last year, Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended one of the area's most radical mosques, Royce said.

"The mosque that the older brother attended in Chechnya is one of the most radicalized," Royce said. "The types of doctrine that comes out of that mosque are al Qaeda inspired."

OVERNIGHT PRISON MOVE

Overnight Thursday, authorities moved Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where some of the victims were also being treated. Devens is about 39 miles west of Boston.

The prison specializes in inmates who need long-term medical or mental health care, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website. It currently holds about 1,000 prisoners.

"The U.S. Marshals Service confirms that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been transported from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and is now confined at the Bureau of Prisons facility FMC Devens at Ft. Devens, Mass.," U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Drew Wade said on Friday.

Another well-known prisoner at Devens federal medical center is Galleon Group hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam, 55, who was convicted in May 2011 on 14 criminal charges in the U.S. government's signature case in its crackdown on insider-trading of the past five years. Rajaratnam is serving an 11-year term.

NIGHT OF TERROR

Authorities say the brothers set off a pair of homemade bombs at the marathon. Three days later, the FBI and police identified the men in photos and videos taken at the scene.

The brothers are also suspected of shooting Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 26, on April 18 and then hijacking a man in a car, which they planned to drive to New York.

Their plan was foiled when the car, a Mercedes sport-utility vehicle, ran low on fuel and they stopped to refuel, giving the man a chance to escape.

Their carjacking victim was a 26-year-old of Chinese origin who goes by the American nickname "Danny," the Boston Globe reported on Friday. The newspaper did not publish his full name at his request.

"I don't want to die," the man recalled thinking as the brothers drove him around for some 90 minutes, making banal small talk, according to an interview with the Globe. "I have a lot of dreams that haven't come true yet."

The man was put in touch with the Globe by James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, where the man was a student, Fox told Reuters. Fox writes a blog for the Boston Globe website.

Danny, who is trained as an engineer, kept the brothers calm by playing up his outsider status, although at first they were puzzled by his Chinese accent, the Globe said. After determining that the victim was Chinese, Tamerlan Tsarnaev identified himself as a Muslim, the newspaper reported.

"Chinese are very friendly to Muslims!" Danny said, according to the Globe. "We are so friendly to Muslims."

One of the three people who died in the bombing was Chinese, 23-year-old graduate student Lingzi Lu. An 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard, and 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell were also killed in the attack.

The brothers' parents, father Anzor Tsarnaev and mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told reporters on Thursday in Makhachkala, the capital of Russia's Dagestan region, that they believed their son was innocent.

The father said he planned to travel to Boston to bury Tamerlan. Officials at the Cambridge, Massachusetts mosque where Tamerlan sometimes worshipped and twice disrupted services, have they were not sure if they would offer him a funeral ceremony.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Grant McCool)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/boston-suspects-had-spontaneous-bomb-plan-york-013726316--sector.html

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Synchronized Swimming 2013 Water Show | Sherman Oaks Sports ...

http://shermanoaks.patch.com/events/synchronized-swimming-2013-water-show/media_attachments/edit?upload_started=1366908281

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Source: http://shermanoaks.patch.com/events/synchronized-swimming-2013-water-show

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IBM CEO Rometty urges employees to act faster: WSJ

(Reuters) - IBM Corp's Chief Executive Virginia Rometty told employees the company had become too sluggish and unresponsive, after it posted weak first-quarter results, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing IBM's internal video message addressed to its employees.

The technology services company posted on Thursday a rare quarterly earnings miss as a sliding yen hurt earnings from Japan and it failed to close a number of major deals, especially in Europe and the United States.

Rometty set a new rule. If a client has a request or question, IBM must respond within 24 hours, the newspaper reported she said in that call. She addressed the call to over 434,000 employees worldwide.

"Where we haven't transformed rapidly enough, we struggled," Rometty said in the video published on IBM's internal website, reviewed by the newspaper. "We have to step up with that and deal with that, and that is on all levels."

IBM was not immediately reachable for comment on the report.

IBM blamed a poor performance by its sales force for some of the shortfall for the poor quarterly results. But analysts said it was not just one quarter - the company's sales have been weakening consistently, dragging down results with or without the changes in the yen.

Rometty said IBM needs to speed its shift to new computing models to get back on track, the Journal reported citing the video. (Wall Street Journal article: http://link.reuters.com/dah67t)

IBM also reassigned one of its most senior executives, the head of its computer hardware business, following a sharp drop in first-quarter sales at the unit, the Journal reported citing a person familiar with the matter.

(Reporting by Thyagaraju Adinarayan in Bangalore; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ibm-ceo-rometty-urges-employees-act-faster-wsj-004041466--finance.html

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Mac Miller Borrows Eminem's Superman Cape For 'S.D.S' Video

Rapper also took influence from Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes for the extravagant clip.
By Rob Markman

Mac Miller in his video for "S.D.S."
Photo: Rostrum

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1706326/mac-miller-sds-music-video-inspiration-eminem.jhtml

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Piezoelectric 'taxel' arrays convert motion to electronic signals for tactile imaging

Public release date: 25-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: John Toon
jtoon@gatech.edu
404-894-6986
Georgia Institute of Technology

Using bundles of vertical zinc oxide nanowires, researchers have fabricated arrays of piezotronic transistors capable of converting mechanical motion directly into electronic controlling signals. The arrays could help give robots a more adaptive sense of touch, provide better security in handwritten signatures and offer new ways for humans to interact with electronic devices.

The arrays include more than 8,000 functioning piezotronic transistors, each of which can independently produce an electronic controlling signal when placed under mechanical strain. These touch-sensitive transistors dubbed "taxels" could provide significant improvements in resolution, sensitivity and active/adaptive operations compared to existing techniques for tactile sensing. Their sensitivity is comparable to that of a human fingertip.

The vertically-aligned taxels operate with two-terminal transistors. Instead of a third gate terminal used by conventional transistors to control the flow of current passing through them, taxels control the current with a technique called "strain-gating." Strain-gating based on the piezotronic effect uses the electrical charges generated at the Schottky contact interface by the piezoelectric effect when the nanowires are placed under strain by the application of mechanical force.

The research will be reported on April 25 in the journal Science online, at the Science Express website, and will be published in a later version of the print journal Science. The research has been sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Air Force (USAF), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"Any mechanical motion, such as the movement of arms or the fingers of a robot, could be translated to control signals," explained Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents' professor and Hightower Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This could make artificial skin smarter and more like the human skin. It would allow the skin to feel activity on the surface."

Mimicking the sense of touch electronically has been challenging, and is now done by measuring changes in resistance prompted by mechanical touch. The devices developed by the Georgia Tech researchers rely on a different physical phenomenon tiny polarization charges formed when piezoelectric materials such as zinc oxide are moved or placed under strain. In the piezotronic transistors, the piezoelectric charges control the flow of current through the wires just as gate voltages do in conventional three-terminal transistors.

The technique only works in materials that have both piezoelectric and semiconducting properties. These properties are seen in nanowires and thin films created from the wurtzite and zinc blend families of materials, which includes zinc oxide, gallium nitride and cadmium sulfide.

In their laboratory, Wang and his co-authors postdoctoral fellow Wenzhuo Wu and graduate research assistant Xiaonan Wen fabricated arrays of 92 by 92 transistors. The researchers used a chemical growth technique at approximately 85 to 90 degrees Celsius, which allowed them to fabricate arrays of strain-gated vertical piezotronic transistors on substrates that are suitable for microelectronics applications. The transistors are made up of bundles of approximately 1,500 individual nanowires, each nanowire between 500 and 600 nanometers in diameter.

In the array devices, the active strain-gated vertical piezotronic transistors are sandwiched between top and bottom electrodes made of indium tin oxide aligned in orthogonal cross-bar configurations. A thin layer of gold is deposited between the top and bottom surfaces of the zinc oxide nanowires and the top and bottom electrodes, forming Schottky contacts. A thin layer of the polymer Parylene is then coated onto the device as a moisture and corrosion barrier.

The array density is 234 pixels per inch, the resolution is better than 100 microns, and the sensors are capable of detecting pressure changes as low as 10 kilopascals resolution comparable to that of the human skin, Wang said. The Georgia Tech researchers fabricated several hundred of the arrays during a research project that lasted nearly three years.

The arrays are transparent, which could allow them to be used on touch-pads or other devices for fingerprinting. They are also flexible and foldable, expanding the range of potential uses.

Among the potential applications:

• Multidimensional signature recording, in which not only the graphics of the signature would be included, but also the pressure exerted at each location during the creation of the signature, and the speed at which the signature is created.
• Shape-adaptive sensing in which a change in the shape of the device is measured. This would be useful in applications such as artificial/prosthetic skin, smart biomedical treatments and intelligent robotics in which the arrays would sense what was in contact with them.
• Active tactile sensing in which the physiological operations of mechanoreceptors of biological entities such as hair follicles or the hairs in the cochlea are emulated.

Because the arrays would be used in real-world applications, the researchers evaluated their durability. The devices still operated after 24 hours immersed in both saline and distilled water.

Future work will include producing the taxel arrays from single nanowires instead of bundles, and integrating the arrays onto CMOS silicon devices. Using single wires could improve the sensitivity of the arrays by at least three orders of magnitude, Wang said.

"This is a fundamentally new technology that allows us to control electronic devices directly using mechanical agitation," Wang added. "This could be used in a broad range of areas, including robotics, MEMS, human-computer interfaces and other areas that involve mechanical deformation."

###

This research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant CMMI-0946418, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) under grant FA2386-10-1-4070, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences under award DE-FG02-07ER46394 and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under grant KJCX2-YW-M13. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of DARPA, the NSF, the USAF or the DOE.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 25-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: John Toon
jtoon@gatech.edu
404-894-6986
Georgia Institute of Technology

Using bundles of vertical zinc oxide nanowires, researchers have fabricated arrays of piezotronic transistors capable of converting mechanical motion directly into electronic controlling signals. The arrays could help give robots a more adaptive sense of touch, provide better security in handwritten signatures and offer new ways for humans to interact with electronic devices.

The arrays include more than 8,000 functioning piezotronic transistors, each of which can independently produce an electronic controlling signal when placed under mechanical strain. These touch-sensitive transistors dubbed "taxels" could provide significant improvements in resolution, sensitivity and active/adaptive operations compared to existing techniques for tactile sensing. Their sensitivity is comparable to that of a human fingertip.

The vertically-aligned taxels operate with two-terminal transistors. Instead of a third gate terminal used by conventional transistors to control the flow of current passing through them, taxels control the current with a technique called "strain-gating." Strain-gating based on the piezotronic effect uses the electrical charges generated at the Schottky contact interface by the piezoelectric effect when the nanowires are placed under strain by the application of mechanical force.

The research will be reported on April 25 in the journal Science online, at the Science Express website, and will be published in a later version of the print journal Science. The research has been sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Air Force (USAF), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"Any mechanical motion, such as the movement of arms or the fingers of a robot, could be translated to control signals," explained Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents' professor and Hightower Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This could make artificial skin smarter and more like the human skin. It would allow the skin to feel activity on the surface."

Mimicking the sense of touch electronically has been challenging, and is now done by measuring changes in resistance prompted by mechanical touch. The devices developed by the Georgia Tech researchers rely on a different physical phenomenon tiny polarization charges formed when piezoelectric materials such as zinc oxide are moved or placed under strain. In the piezotronic transistors, the piezoelectric charges control the flow of current through the wires just as gate voltages do in conventional three-terminal transistors.

The technique only works in materials that have both piezoelectric and semiconducting properties. These properties are seen in nanowires and thin films created from the wurtzite and zinc blend families of materials, which includes zinc oxide, gallium nitride and cadmium sulfide.

In their laboratory, Wang and his co-authors postdoctoral fellow Wenzhuo Wu and graduate research assistant Xiaonan Wen fabricated arrays of 92 by 92 transistors. The researchers used a chemical growth technique at approximately 85 to 90 degrees Celsius, which allowed them to fabricate arrays of strain-gated vertical piezotronic transistors on substrates that are suitable for microelectronics applications. The transistors are made up of bundles of approximately 1,500 individual nanowires, each nanowire between 500 and 600 nanometers in diameter.

In the array devices, the active strain-gated vertical piezotronic transistors are sandwiched between top and bottom electrodes made of indium tin oxide aligned in orthogonal cross-bar configurations. A thin layer of gold is deposited between the top and bottom surfaces of the zinc oxide nanowires and the top and bottom electrodes, forming Schottky contacts. A thin layer of the polymer Parylene is then coated onto the device as a moisture and corrosion barrier.

The array density is 234 pixels per inch, the resolution is better than 100 microns, and the sensors are capable of detecting pressure changes as low as 10 kilopascals resolution comparable to that of the human skin, Wang said. The Georgia Tech researchers fabricated several hundred of the arrays during a research project that lasted nearly three years.

The arrays are transparent, which could allow them to be used on touch-pads or other devices for fingerprinting. They are also flexible and foldable, expanding the range of potential uses.

Among the potential applications:

• Multidimensional signature recording, in which not only the graphics of the signature would be included, but also the pressure exerted at each location during the creation of the signature, and the speed at which the signature is created.
• Shape-adaptive sensing in which a change in the shape of the device is measured. This would be useful in applications such as artificial/prosthetic skin, smart biomedical treatments and intelligent robotics in which the arrays would sense what was in contact with them.
• Active tactile sensing in which the physiological operations of mechanoreceptors of biological entities such as hair follicles or the hairs in the cochlea are emulated.

Because the arrays would be used in real-world applications, the researchers evaluated their durability. The devices still operated after 24 hours immersed in both saline and distilled water.

Future work will include producing the taxel arrays from single nanowires instead of bundles, and integrating the arrays onto CMOS silicon devices. Using single wires could improve the sensitivity of the arrays by at least three orders of magnitude, Wang said.

"This is a fundamentally new technology that allows us to control electronic devices directly using mechanical agitation," Wang added. "This could be used in a broad range of areas, including robotics, MEMS, human-computer interfaces and other areas that involve mechanical deformation."

###

This research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant CMMI-0946418, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) under grant FA2386-10-1-4070, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences under award DE-FG02-07ER46394 and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under grant KJCX2-YW-M13. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of DARPA, the NSF, the USAF or the DOE.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/giot-pa041913.php

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5by5 | The News #50: Tuesday, April 23, 2013

CBS invests in streaming video company in response to Aereo threat | The Verge

CBS CEO Les Moonves has had some harsh words for streaming TV service Aereo, filing suit against it and even threatening to stop free broadcasts of its shows if the company is allowed to keep operating ? but that doesn?t mean CBS has written off streaming broadcast TV altogether. Yesterday, the US?s second-largest TV network announced that it acquired a minority stake in a company called Syncbak, which uses location-based authentication to stream broadcast TV signals to people inside certain markets.

Aereo Brings Free Over-The-Air TV And Cloud DVR To Boston May 15 | TechCrunch

Aereo has just announced its first expansion beyond New York City, and the city it?s moving to next is Boston. Bostonians will gain access to the startup?s free, over-the-air TV services and usage-based cloud DVR subscription options beginning May 15, indicating it?s full-speed ahead for the media startup despite its ongoing legal battles with networks and broadcasters.

?Thor: The Dark World? Teaser Trailer: A Star-Studded Battle Across the Nine Realms | /Film

Throw the hammer down and check out the first trailer for?Alan Taylor?s Phase Two Marvel sequel, Thor: The Dark World. Scheduled for release November 8, everyone?s favorite superhero god is back in Asgard following the events of The Avengers. Go check it out now.

U.S. trade panel says Apple did not violate Google patent | Reuters

Apple Inc scored a win on Monday when the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that it did not violate a Google patent to make the popular iPhones.Apple had initially been accused of infringing on six patents for iPhone-related technology covering everything from reducing signal noise to programming the device's touch screen so a user's head does not accidentally activate it while talking on the phone.If Apple had been found guilty of violating the patent, its devices could have been banned from being imported into the United States.

Senate votes to move forward on bill taxing Internet sales | Reuters

A measure to empower U.S. states to require out-of-state retailers to collect online sales tax cleared a legislative hurdle in the Senate on Monday, after earlier winning official backing from President Barack Obama.Seventy-four senators voted to limit debate and move forward with a final vote on the proposed legislation in the Democratic-controlled Senate, likely on Wednesday."You have businesses all around America on Main Streets and shopping malls collecting sales tax on the things that they sell, competing with Internet retailers who do not," said Democratic co-sponsor Senator Richard Durbin.

Google Glass release delayed until 2014, warns Eric Schmidt | ITProPortal.com

Early adopters may be forced to revisit this year's holiday wish list, after Google chairman Eric Schmidt?warned that Google Glass is unlikely to be released before 2014. According to Schmidt, the wearable computer is now roughly one year away from a consumer release. That means that the exclusive Explorer Edition of Google Glass is the only version of the product likely to be turning heads in 2013 - the $1,500 (?985) augmented reality headset recently began shipping to selected competition winners as well as developers.

New Microsoft Campaign Positions Company as Privacy Leader | Adweek

Microsoft is once again marketing its brand as the "good guy" privacy company. The new campaign, for Microsoft's Do Not Track browser, plugs right into consumer fears that their privacy is being compromised by companies who are tracking a consumer's every click and collecting information about them "even before birth." Control is the operative word in the campaign which began Monday and will run through the end of June on TV, in newspapers, online and out of home. Microsoft research released last January found that 45 percent of consumers said they feel they have little or no control over the personal information companies gather about them.

Shapeways, the Etsy of 3D printing, raises $30M | Cutting Edge - CNET News

The 3D printing movement is well under way -- albeit with some hype built in -- and Shapeways, a marketplace where people can design, create, and sell their own products, is leading the charge.Shapeways, sometimes known as the Etsy for 3D printing, now has 10,000 "shop owners" -- people who have designed products, from iPhone cases to jewelry and shoes, that they print out and sell via Shapeways. The New York-based company is building out its recently opened 3D printing factory in the Queens borough of New York City, where its printers are cranking out roughly 1,000 products a day. By the end of the year, co-founder and CEO Peter Weijmarshausen said that he expects to be printing products a rate of 2 million to 3 million a year

Source: http://5by5.tv/news/50

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Acer Aspire V5-571PG-9814

We've seen a lot of systems come through the PC Labs with touch screens?tablets, convertible PCs, all-in-one desktops, and touch-friendly ultrabooks?but for a lot of these systems, touch was the crowning feature, the shiny bit of flash to draw a buyer's attention. The Acer Aspire V5-571PG-9814 does things a little differently. While it does have a touch screen, the overall design is a little bland, and the design, while fairly trim, isn't supermodel thin. What should catch your attention, however, is the hardware hidden inside?a newer, faster Intel Core i7 and a discrete Nvidia GPU. The combination of speedy hardware and solid (if not flashy) design should have more than a few shoppers considering the Aspire V5-571PG over competitors like the Editors' Choice Asus VivoBook S400CA-UH51 ($699 direct, 4 stars) or the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart 15-4010nr.

Design and Features
The Aspire V5-571PG has a slim chassis and falls into that nebulous area between slim ultrabooks, thick ultrabooks with touch, and standard notebooks. While it is slim?1.0 by 13.5 by 9.6 inches (HWD)?and touch-enabled, it's no ultrabook, lacking the required solid-state drive or flash cache needed for the much touted snappy performance that Intel demands. That said, it's a fairly slim laptop, and given that it offers a capacitive touch screen with 10-digit tracking, it looks surprisingly svelte. It's also light for a 15-inch system, at 4.63 pounds.

The 15.6-inch display offers 1,366-by-768 resolution, in addition to the touch capabilities, with decent viewing angles and Acer's Active Matrix TFT Color LCD. Joining the display is Dolby Advanced Audio v2 enhancement software, producing sound that, while not spectacular, offers good volume. The sound is a bit reedy, and offers almost no bass, but it will do for regular use. The chiclet keyboard offers both a full-size keyboard and a compact numeric pad?the number keys are narrow, but still very usable?with backlight for better low-light visibility. The touchpad is comfortably large, with right- and left-buttons integrated into the clickpad surface.

You'll find the usual collection of ports on the sides of the laptop, but one may be unfamiliar?Acer's proprietary combination Ethernet and VGA, which we've seen before on the Acer Aspire V5-571-6869The slim port saves space and eliminates a second port, but requires a special (included) adapter dongle, which you'll need to remember to bring along if you want to use either connection.

The Aspire V5-571PG offers three USB ports (one 3.0 and two 2.0), HDMI output for connecting to a projector or HDTV, and a multiformat card slot. A tray-loading DVD+-RW dual-layer drive takes care of your disc-burning needs, while 802.11n Wi-Fi gets you online without hassling with the included Ethernet adapter. Inside the laptop is a generous 1TB hard drive, which should offer enough storage space for a healthy digital life, full of photos and media files.

Acer doesn't hold back on the preinstalled software, starting with several proprietary programs, like Clear.fi Photo and Media, for locally sharing media va Wi-Fi, and Acer Cloud, which lets you backup and access your files anywhere there's a web connection. But the programs don't stop there, with plenty of extras piling on?Amazon Kindle, ChaCha, eBay, Encyclopedia Britannica, Evernote, Hulu Plus, iCookbook, Netflix, newsXpresso, Skitch, Skype, SocialJogger, Spotify, StumbleUpon, TuneIn Web radio, and a handful of sample games from Wild Tangent. You'll need a good 30 minutes to clear off all the unwanted crud, but a number of those utilities may be useful enough to keep. Additionally, Acer covers the Aspire V5-571 with a one-year hardware warranty, and 90-days of free software support.

Performance
The V5-571PG-9814 is outfitted with a 2GHz Intel Core i7-3537U dual-core processor, a step up from the ultra-mobile Core i7 seen in the HP Spectre XT Touchsmart 15-4010nr. Paired with 8GB of RAM, it offered better overall performance than comparable systems, racking up 2.84 points in Cinebench, well ahead of the leading Asus VivoBook S400CA-UH51 (2.40 points), and topping the HP Spectre XT (1.97 points). The faster processor led to better performance, as seen in Handbrake, where the Acer Aspire led in both Handbrake (1 minute 13 seconds) and Photoshop (4 minutes 22 seconds).

But where the V5-571PG-9814 really takes the cake is graphics performance, thanks to a discrete Nvidia GeForce 710M graphics processor. It pounded through 3DMark 11 with leading scores?1,981 points at Entry settings and 358 at Extreme settings?and then beat out all competitors in our gaming tests. The discrete GPU won't be enough to let you play high-end games like Skyrim or Crysis 3, but for less demanding titles, like Team Fortress 2 or League of Legends, you'll be able to get in on the game.

Last but not least, the 4-cell lithium ion battery sealed into the V5-571PG-9814 lasted 3 hours 37 minutes in our rundown test?a 12-hour loop of the entire Extended Edition Lord of the Rings Trilogy?which isn't terrible, but it does come up short when compared with competitors, like the Asus VivoBook S400CA-UH51 or the Sony VAIO T15 Touch (SVT15112CXS), which both lasted 4:18 (give or take a few seconds).

While it fell short in battery life and doesn't impress with its bland looks and middling port selection, the Acer Aspire V5-571PG-9814 does offer the best all-around processing and graphics performance of any of the 14- and 15-inch touch-screen laptops we've seen in recent months. While raw performance isn't enough to take the Editors' Choice from the Asus VivoBook S400CA-UH51, it is enough to recommend it to anyone shopping for a reasonably priced touch-enabled Windows 8 laptop.

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