Changing View on Viruses: Not So Small After All - New York Times

Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie

Electron microscopy image of a Pandoravirus particle. The virus is 1,000 times bigger than the flu virus and has nearly 200 times as many genes.

There was a time not that long ago when it was easy to tell the difference between viruses and the rest of life. Most obviously, viruses were tiny and genetically simple. The influenza virus, for example, measures about 100 nanometers across, and has just 13 genes.

Those two standards, it's now clear, belong in the trash. Over the past decade, scientists have discovered a vast menagerie of viruses that are far bigger, and which carry enormous arsenals of genes. French researchers are now reporting the discovery of the biggest virus yet. The pandoravirus, as they've dubbed it, is 1,000 times bigger than the flu virus by volume and has nearly 200 times as many genes — 2,556 all told.

Making the discovery all the more startling is the fact that, of all the genes that pandoraviruses carry, only six percent match any gene known to science.

"We believe we're opening a Pandora's box – not so much for humanity but for dogma about viruses," said Dr. Jean-Michel Claverie of the University of Mediterranée, co-author of the paper that was published online Thursday in the journal Science. "We believe we're touching an alternative tree of life."

Giant viruses would be important enough simply for the way they have blurred the line between viruses and the rest of life. But they excite scientists for another reason. Utterly unknown a decade ago, they turn out to be everywhere, including in our own bodies. What effect they have on the world's ecosystem — or our own health — is anyone's guess right now.

It was the very giant-ness of giant viruses that allowed them to be overlooked for so long. Scientists first discovered viruses in the late 1800s when they were puzzled by a disease that beset tobacco plants. They mashed up wilted tobacco leaves with water and passed the mixture through fine porcelain filters that trapped bacteria and fungi. The clear liquid could still make healthy tobacco leaves sick. The Dutch botanist Martinus Beijerinck dubbed it "a contagious living fluid."

In the 1930s, the invention of powerful microscopes finally allowed scientists to see viruses. They found that viruses were unlike ordinary cells: they didn't generate their own fuel; they didn't grow or divide. Instead, viruses invaded cells, hijacking their biochemistry to make new copies of themselves. Being small and simple seemed like part of the viral way of life, allowing them to replicate fast.

It wasn't until 2003 that a team of French researchers discovered the first giant virus. They had been puzzling over sphere-shaped objects that were the size of bacteria but contained no bacterial DNA. Eventually they realized that they were looking at a monstrously oversized virus, containing 979 genes.

Those first giant viruses were isolated from amoebae living in water from a cooling tower. Once scientists realized that viruses could be so large, they changed their search parameters and started finding other species in all manner of places, from swamps to rivers to contact lens fluid.

And along the way the biggest viruses got bigger. In 2011, Dr. Claverie and his colleagues set a new record with megaviruses, a type of giant virus with 1,120 genes they discovered in sea water off the coast of Chile. They then dug into the sediment below that sea water and discovered pandoravirsues, with more than twice as many genes.

Dr. Claverie speculates that pandoraviruses and other giant viruses evolved from free-living microbes that branched off from other life several billion years ago. "The type of cells they may have evolved from may have disappeared," he said.

The idea that giant viruses represent separate branches on the tree of life is a controversial one that many other experts aren't ready to embrace. "They provide no evidence for that notion, so it seems a distraction to me," said T. Martin Embley, a professor of evolutionary molecular biology at Newcastle University.

Despite those reservations, Dr. Embley and other researchers hail pandoraviruses as an important discovery. "I think it's wonderful that such crazy and divergent lifeforms continue to be discovered," said Tom Williams, Dr. Embley's colleague at Newcastle University.

The new study also drives home the fact that giant viruses are far from rare. Shortly after discovering pandoraviruses in sea floor sediment, Dr. Claverie and his colleagues found them in water from a lake in Australia, 10,000 miles away. "It definitely indicates that they must not be rare at all," said Dr. Claverie.

Giant viruses may be so common, in fact, that they may be hiding inside of us, too. In a paper published online on July 2 in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, French researchers offered evidence that giant viruses dwell in healthy people. They isolated a new giant virus from blood donated by a healthy volunteer, and then found antibodies and other signs of the virus in four other donors.

Giant viruses may lurk harmlessly in our bodies, invading the amoebae we harbor. Whether they can make us sick is an open question. "I don't believe we have the proof at the moment that these viruses could infect humans," said Dr. Claverie.

"But again," he added, "never say never."

That's wise advice when it comes to giant viruses.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/science/changing-view-on-viruses-not-so-small-after-all.html

Vitamin D deficiency may lead to physical problems in older age - CBS News

Not getting enough vitamin D may lead to problems with completing everyday tasks later on in life.

A new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism revealed that older people with vitamin D deficiencies were more likely to have at least one functional problem, such as getting around the house independently, compared to people with healthy levels of the vitamin.

"Seniors who have low levels of vitamin D are more likely to have mobility limitations and to see their physical functioning decline over time," lead author Evelien Sohl, a researcher with VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, said in a press release. "Older individuals with these limitations are more likely to be admitted to nursing homes and face a higher risk of mortality."

The authors pointed out that as much a 90 percent of older individuals are vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D helps build bone and muscle, and can help prevent the effects of bone diseases like osteoporosis. The sun can help the body produce vitamin D, and it is found naturally in foods like fish-liver oils, fatty fishes, mushrooms, egg yolks, and liver. Vitamin D is often added to milk as well.

CBS medical correspondent Dr. Holly Phillips said that part of why doctors are noticing people are vitamin D deficient is because they're more aware of this health problem and are testing for it.

"One of the reasons we're so vitamin D deficient is we're avoiding the sun and wearing sun screen," Phillips added. "That's great for skin cancer prevention, not such good news for our vitamin D levels."

Researchers looked at an older group of 762 people between ages 65 to 88 and also recruited a younger group of 597 people between 55 to 65. The subjects were tracked for six years as part of the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. Participants were asked about their abilities to perform normal activities like sitting down, standing up from a chair or walking outside for five minutes without stopping. Blood tests revealed their vitamin D levels, and participants were divided into three groups in order of vitamin D levels.

For the older group, people who reported the lowest vitamin D levels were 1.7 times more likely to have limitations with one physical activity than those with the highest levels. When looking at the younger group, those with the least Vitamin D were two times more likely to have difficulty with at least one everyday task than those who were in the group with the highest levels.

Additional problems were more likely to develop after three years in the most vitamin deficient older group, and after six years in the most vitamin deficient younger group.

"The findings indicate low vitamin D levels in older individuals may contribute to the declining ability to perform daily activities and live independently," Sohl said. "Vitamin D supplementation could provide a way to prevent physical decline, but the idea needs to be explored further with additional studies."

Dr. Michael Holick, a professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at Boston University School of Medicine, said that this study showed there was a necessity to look further into whether taking supplements could help with vitamin D deficiencies. He was not involved in the study.

"It would be very nice to have a vitamin D intervention study so that you could actually demonstrate that those that were vitamin D deficient, if you made their blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D above 30 ng/mL, which is what is in fact recommended by the Endocrine Society practice guidelines, ... that you could improve neurocognitive function, as well as muscle function, and improve overall health and welfare of people as they're aging," he said to Medpage Today.

The National Institutes of Health's Office of Dietary Supplements recommends adults 51 to 70 years old get 600 IUs of vitamin D each day and those 70 and older get 800 IUs daily.

For reference, three ounces of cooked salmon contain about 450 IUs of vitamin D, milk contains between 115 and 124 IUs, and a bowl of fortified cereal contains about 40 IUs of vitamin D.

Source : http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57594393/vitamin-d-deficiency-may-lead-to-physical-problems-in-older-age/

'iKnife' device analyzes surgical smoke to ID cancers - Los Angeles Times

A new device that analyzes the smoke that arises when an electrosurgical tool slices through or cauterizes flesh may help physicians determine, during a surgery, whether tissues they're removing are cancerous or not.

Using mass spectrometry to determine the components of the aerosolized tissue, chemist Zoltan Takats and colleagues at the medical school at Imperial College London and other institutions found that they could tell if tissues were cancerous or not in a matter of seconds. Lipid components in the smoke created from different types of tissues had characteristic signatures. 

Takats and his team wrote about their intelligent knife, or "iKnife," in a study published online Wednesday by the journal Science Translational Medicine.

If the tool and technique work well in clinical trials and can get regulatory approval, Takats said, it could speed surgeries considerably.

Sometimes, during the course of surgery to remove a tumor, an operating team will have questions about whether the tissues they encounter are cancerous or normal.

Today, surgeons must take a break from the operation to send a tissue sample to a pathology lab for analysis. It can take a half an hour or more to get a read back from the lab, Takats said -- time during which the patient must remain under anesthesia while the operating team waits.

A surgeon using an intelligent knife could know what kind of tissue he or she was dealing with almost instantaneously, and make decisions about how to proceed on the spot.

"One can sample a bit of tissue and the result is displayed on the screen in a second. It allows fast analysis and more sampling points," Takats said.

Seeking to show in the current study that the intelligent-knife technology worked, the team analyzed several thousand cancerous and normal samples from 302 patients, constructing a database of tissue signatures.

Then they gave intelligent knives to surgeons, who recorded data from the smoke generated during 91 operations. Analyzing the signatures, the researchers found that they were able to tell the difference between cancerous and normal tissue, and between different types of cancers.

The samples were also analyzed using traditional pathology techniques; the iKnife findings matched those with 100% accuracy, the team reported.

"We proved that it is at least as good as the currently accepted technology," Takats said.

The intelligent knife doesn't work perfectly in all cases. For instance, Takats said, it's hard for it to analyze smoke from tissues that are harder to evaporate, including skin and bone. But when cancers originating in skin and bone spread to other parts of the body, they too can be easily identified, he said.

Dr. Joseph Kim, a cancer surgeon at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif., said he thought the study was interesting, but that he wasn't sure the new technology would be useful in his own work.

"It's forcing you to burn tissues in areas where you wouldn't burn," he said. "The type of operations I do, I'm not sure I'd want to change." 

For instance, Kim, who performs surgeries on gastrointestinal cancers, said he wouldn't use an electrosurgical tool to cut a colon in half. But he said the intelligent knife might be useful for surgeons who use the cutting-and-cauterizing equipment more, such as breast cancer surgeons.

Kim said he and his colleagues had long joked about the smoke that's created during surgeries, figuring that it's probably dangerous to inhale. 

"We've all thought of the smoke in a different way, but perhaps it has another potential use," he said.

Return to Science Now.

Source : http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-iknife-cancer-smoke-20130717,0,7398624.story

Health officials across North Texas seek source of parasite outbreak - WFAA

by JANET ST. JAMES

WFAA

Posted on July 19, 2013 at 9:47 PM

McKINNEY -- Health officials confirm even more patients have been sickened this week by the food-borne parasite cyclospora.

Counties across North Texas have confirmed there are currently 45 patients as of Friday night:

• Dallas County: 13
• Tarrant County: 11
• Collin County: 14
• Denton County: 7

Health officials from the counties are working non-stop to narrow down the source of the outbreak.

Patients who test positive for cyclospora are given a 16-page questionnaire developed by the CDC that asks about where they've eaten and where they purchased certain vegetables and fruits.

"We'll get detailed," said Peggy Wittie, an epidemiologist for Collin County. "We'll ask them what they've eaten over a prolonged period of time, what restaurants you went to. If the person only cooked their own food, 'where do you get your own food?'"

Epidemiologists in Collin, Dallas, Tarrant and Denton counties  are working together to find the common link among the North Texas cyclospora cases. Collected data is passed on to state and federal investigators with the CDC and FDA.

"If they see clear linkages or bits of clear linkages from the different health departments involved then they try to track down the sources for where they got that particular item o r items," Wittie said.

Cyclospora infections mimic more common stomach and intestinal viruses. Symptoms include watery diarrhea, fatigue and nausea. Cases that go untreated can linger for months.

Many people with food-borne illness don't report it because the symptoms go away. Health authorities urge anyone with symptoms for more than three days to see a doctor. People who are sick should not prepare food for anyone else.

Washing fresh produce before eating it can reduce the chance of getting cyclospora infection. Cooking it should also kill the parasite.

E-mail jstjames@wfaa.com

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Source : http://www.wfaa.com/news/health/Cyclospora-Search-216209721.html

Overweight? Maybe You Really Can Blame Your Genes - New York Times

Boston Children's Hospital

The mouse at left is missing a gene that controls how quickly calories are burned. The two other mice are its siblings.

The mice were eating their usual chow and exercising normally, but they were getting fat anyway. The reason: researchers had deleted a gene that acts in the brain and controls how quickly calories are burned. Even though they were consuming exactly the same number of calories as lean mice, they were gaining weight.

So far, only one person — a severely obese child — has been found to have a disabling mutation in the same gene. But the discovery of the same effect in mice and in the child — a finding published Wednesday in the journal Science — may help explain why some people put on weight easily while others eat all they want and seem never to gain an ounce. It may also offer clues to a puzzle in the field of obesity: Why do studies find that people gain different amounts of weight while overeating by the same amount?

Scientists have long thought explanations for why some people get fat might lie in their genes. They knew body weight was strongly inherited. Years ago, for example, they found that twins reared apart tended to have similar weights and adoptees tended to have weights like their biological parents, not the ones who reared them. As researchers developed tools to look for the actual genes, they found evidence that many — maybe even hundreds — of genes may be involved, stoking appetites, making people voraciously hungry.

This rare gene-disabling mutation, though, is intriguing because it seems to explain something different, a propensity to pile on pounds even while eating what should be a normal amount of food. Investigators are now searching for other mutations of the same gene in fat people that may have a similar, but less extreme effect. The hope is that in the long term, understanding how this gene affects weight gain might lead to treatments for obesity that alter the rate at which calories are burned.

"The history of obesity for many many years has been one of blaming people for lack of self control," said Dr. Joseph Majzoub, chief of endocrinology at Boston Children's Hospital and lead author of the new paper. "If some of it is due to a slow metabolism, that would completely change the perspectives of parents and patients. It really would change the way we think of the disease."

In their paper, Dr. Majzoub and his colleagues describe figuring out how the gene they deleted, known as MRAP2, acts in the brain to control weight. They discovered that it is a helper gene. It normally acts in the brain to signal another gene already known to be involved in controlling appetite. So they developed a hypothesis. If the helper gene was deleted, the brakes should come off the gene that controls appetite. Animals should eat voraciously.

The first thing they noticed was that the mice got fat, ending up weighing twice as much as their normal siblings, with most of that extra weight due to fat accumulation.

"During the mouse equivalent of childhood and adolescence they were becoming rapidly obese," Dr. Majzoub said.

The surprise came when the researchers figured out why. When the mice were young, they had normal appetites. The researchers measured what they and their normal siblings ate and determined they were eating the same amount of food. Yet the mice with the deleted gene still gained weight. The only way the obesity-prone mice could be kept slim was to be fed 10 to 15 percent less than their siblings.

But as adults, the mice with the missing gene developed monstrous appetites. Given a chance, they ate much more than their siblings, exacerbating the effects of their tendency to turn food into fat.

That led the researchers to ask if the same genetic phenomenon could be making people obese. They contacted Dr. Sadaf Farooqui of the University of Cambridge, whose group has been mapping the genes of massively obese children, and studied the data on 500 of the children, searching for mutations that disabled the same gene they had deleted in mice.

One child clearly had a gene-disabling mutation and three others had mutations that the investigators suspect might render the gene nonfunctional. None of the normal-weight children who served as controls had a mutation in the helper gene.

"From a basic science point of view, this is really interesting and exciting," said David Allison, an obesity researcher at the University of Alabama in Birmingham who was not involved in the study. Any discovery that helps fill in the details of how the brain controls eating and weight gain is important, he added.

Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, who also was not involved in the study, said, "It is another piece in a very important puzzle."

The work fascinates Claude Bouchard, a genetics researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., because it might offer insight into an intriguing finding: there are genetic controls not just of how much people want to eat but also how much of what they eat turns into fat or is burned off and not used by the body. Although the common mantra is that a calorie is a calorie and 3,500 extra calories eaten equals a pound of fat on the body, that is not what happens in real life, he found.

For example, in one of his studies, Dr. Bouchard enlisted 12 pairs of lean identical twins to live in an enclosed area for 120 days so their food and exercise could be monitored while they ate 1,000 calories a day more than needed to maintain their weight. The twins in each pair gained about the same amount of weight, but the amount gained varied threefold among the pairs. Those who gained the most put on as much as 29 pounds while those who gained the least put on 9 ½ pounds.

"It is not a freak finding," Dr. Bouchard said, adding that about 20 studies found the same threefold range in weight gain in response to excess calories. But it also is not clear why this occurs. The intriguing possibility, he said, is that the newly discovered gene might be among those involved. The level of its activity might help determine how quickly calories are burned.

Dr. Majzoub and his colleagues are now trying to determine whether additional mutations in the gene they discovered — ones that hinder its function but do not completely disable it — might explain why some people gain weight.

"All we can do is hope," Dr. Majzoub said.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/health/overweight-maybe-you-really-can-blame-your-metabolism.html?pagewanted=all

Giving McDonald's eaters calorie guides did not curb bad eating habits - CBS News

Educating people on the number of calories they should eat may not help them make better choices.

A new study published July 18 in the American Journal of Public Health showed that providing people with calorie guidelines did not help them make better food choices, even when calorie counts for each item were available on the menu.

Several states and cities in the U.S. require that chain restaurants reveal calorie information for their items. Congress has already passed legislation to develop a national calorie labeling system in order to aid health care reform.

However, previous studies have shown that listing calories hasn't exactly helped Americans trim down their waistlines. It hasn't helped that fast food and restaurant food still remain calorie-laden. A 14-year study showed that fast food restaurants have only made minimal improvements to the nutritional value of their items, and 25 percent of Americans eat fast food two or more times a week.

"The general inability of calorie labeling to result in an overall reduction in the number of calories consumed has already been pretty widely shown," study author Julie Downs, an associate research professor of social and decision sciences in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, said to HealthDay. "So that's nothing new. But in the face of that, there has been the growing thought that perhaps the problem is that people don't know how to use the information without some framework, some guidance."

To see if teaching people how many calories they should eat would help, 1,094 consumers aged 18 and older at two New York McDonald's locations were provided information on recommended calorie intake before they ordered. New York is one of the cities that requires caloric information about each item to be posted on menus.

19 Photos

BBQ calories: How to burn off that hot dog

A third of the customers were given a flyer that said women and men should limit their calorie consumption to 2,000 and 2,400 calories per day respectively; another third got a flyer saying a single meal should contain between 650 and 800 calories; and a third were not given any information at all.

After they ordered, researchers looked at the customers' food receipts and had them fill out a post-meal survey.

Women who ate lunch bought an average of 824 calories, while the men purchased a meal containing 890 calories on average. This meant that women consumed 27 percent more calories than recommended in one meal, and men ate 11 percent more than the guidelines recommended.

The researchers discovered that giving people calorie guidelines did not make a significant difference in how they read and used the calorie listings on menus. In fact, people who were given calorie guidelines ate 49 more calories on average than those who did not get guidelines at all.

Downs hypothesized that people might see an item -- like a Big Mac, which has 550 calories -- and think to themselves that it sounds reasonable and below their meal and daily calorie limit. However, they'll still order a side and a drink to go with the burger.

"And then all of a sudden they're up over 1,100 calories for the meal. Each one item may seem OK, but it adds up," she noted.

"In the end the bigger issue is that asking people to do math three times a day every day of their lives is a lot," Downs added. "Because it's not like we make a decision about what to eat just once. It's a lot of decisions. And if you add a cognitive [mental] burden on top of that it's a lot to ask."

Studies have shown that if you want to slim down, you might want to avoid restaurants entirely. A May study in JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that a single meal from an independent or small chain restaurant contained on average 66 percent of an adult's estimated daily caloric intake. Another study on sit-down restaurants in the same issue revealed that a single meal contained about 56 percent of the daily recommended calories in a single meal.

On solution may be to tell people how much they have to work out to burn off their meal. Research presented at the Experimental Biology 2013 meeting in Boston suggested that listing how much exercise time instead of calories may work better. People who saw the time it would take to get rid of the calories tended to order 100 fewer calories than those who just saw the calorie counts.

Source : http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57594536/giving-mcdonalds-eaters-calorie-guides-did-not-curb-bad-eating-habits/

Moto X: What we know so far - CNET

Google's Eric Schmidt has been seen using the Moto X.

(Credit: Getty Images)

Though we have an invitation to the official Moto X unveiling, Motorola and Google haven't revealed any official specs yet. Still, there's plenty we know about the device -- and even more that we don't. Here's a sampling of what's certain and what's still up in the air.

August 1 reveal date
Official invitations have been sent; Motorola will introduce the long-rumored handset on August 1.

In stores by October
Motorola first confirmed that the Moto X is real and that it would arrive before October.

Motorola has officially switched on a sign-up page for the Moto X, giving interested readers an opportunity to learn more about the phone as the launch approaches.

(Credit: Motorola)

It will come in black and white
The Motorola invitation shows these two hues, but there's a possibility we'll see more colors emerge.

It's curvy
The first few images of the Moto X to pop up showed a more gentle approach to Motorola's recent tough, edgy form factor. Gone are the angular shoulders and Kevlar coating, replaced with a curvy back and what looks like a plain, soft-touch finish.

The official Moto X invitation confirms that we'll see rounded edges and slight bevels.

The Moto X will be customizable
Motorola's Guy Kawasaki threw the Android faithful into a tizzy when he hinted at the possibility of customized smartphones.

It isn't clear which components exactly will be customizable: the color, the capacity, the apps, custom back plates, or the finish. But here's some of what we'd like to see.

It will be contextually aware
Various members of the Google and Motorola teams played coy over the last couple of months, alluding to features in the upcoming device. Talk centered mostly around battery life, durability, and contextually aware settings.

"Contextually aware" can mean a lot of things that involve location, sensors for light and spatial positioning, incline, and so on. If the phone senses you're outside at night, for instance, it may turn on night settings. If it detects you're traveling, the phone could line up some transportation and dining tips.

Motorola hasn't given any indications that this is what it means in terms of the Moto X, but when we think of Google Now's personal assistance capabilities, we get the sense of what a phone could do.

Read also: Smartphone innovation: Where we're going next

Google Now is always listening
A recently leaked (and subsequently pulled) YouTube video, allegedly from Canadian carrier Rogers Wireless, gave a few hints as what's in store for the phone. Among the details in the short clip were an always-listening Google Now experience that can be activated by saying "OK, Google Now." Additionally, the phone was shown to have onscreen notifications called Active Updates.

Quicker camera launching
Another feature of this YouTube video was waking up the phone into the camera app. A simple flick of the wrist may be all it takes to launch the app from your pocket.

In stores by August
Even though we know for sure we'll see the Moto X before October, a recently leaked Verizon road map points to an August 23 sales date. Considering that Google's own Eric Schmidt has been spotted out and about with a Moto X we might expect it that it's mostly retail-ready.

A few of the rumored color cases for the Moto X smartphone.

(Credit: Nowhereelse.fr)

Hardware details
We have to remain skeptical about the Moto X's leaked specifications, which seem lower than they should be for Moto's comeback hopeful.

If rumors are correct, the comparatively lackluster midrange feature set could include a 720p HD AMOLED display (we'd guess a 4.5- or 4.7-inch screen with that resolution), a 1.7GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 Pro processor, and a 10-megapixel camera.

The phone could also come with 16GB internal storage and 2GB of RAM. Motorola's Droid Razr series is completely embedded, which means there's no removable battery, but there is an expansion slot. If the Moto X is the same, users with high storage needs should be happy.

Android version
While early rumors pointed to an Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean build, recent chatter indicates that Google could have 4.3 ready to go. Google is announcing something on July 24, and we've got our money on Android 4.3. That timing would put the Moto X in line to be the first phone on the market to ship with the new OS.

Camera specifics
Whatever the megapixel and sensor size, the Moto X's camera might have its own special sauce. Rather than implementing your standard run-of-the-mill digital camera lens in the Moto X, customers could see a new sensor with technology known as Clear Pixel.

Kodak apparently uses the technology to improve the way that a sensor captures light when taking a photograph, making photos clearer and less dark. There don't seem to be any other sources to substantiate the claim, but it's an interesting idea.

Interestingly enough, Motorola recently toyed with Twitter followers on the camera front, saying "Either this kid is really fast, or today's phones are really slow."

Sales model
Rumors suggest that the Moto X will be offered through multiple carriers, not just through Verizon as with the company's Droid line of phones. Should that be the case, we may look for standard color and finishes at retails stores.

There's also been talk of Google selling the smartphone direct to consumers through the Google Play store. What remains unclear is whether customers will be able to buy the custom designs through either channel. With rumors of 16 colors (translate) and multiple finishes, either Motorola or Google could run the e-tail show from their Web sites.

Cost
Since most of today's top phones still hover at the $200 mark on contract, there's a good chance that the Moto X will slide in around that range or slightly under. At the end of the day, it'll all depend on the specs we see.

We think there could be a surcharge for custom phones, especially if they involve engravings, etchings, or harder-to-manufacture designs.

Motorola's Moto X event kicks off August 1 in New York. CNET will be there on the ground to cover the whole thing live.

Source : http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/motorola-moto-x/4505-6452_7-35823022.html

FCC Backs Plan to Update a Fund That Helps Connect Schools to the Internet - New York Times (blog)

Nathan Lambrecht/The Monitor, via Associated Press

The McAllen Independent School District in McAllen, Tex., gave a number of its students iPads and iPod Touch devices last year.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted on Friday to overhaul and possibly expand its E-Rate program, a $2.3 billion effort to provide schools and libraries with up-to-date telecommunications service and equipment, including high-speed Internet connections.

A proposal approved by the commission, which will be made available for public comment before a final version is completed, calls for funds to be moved away from outdated uses like paying for paging service and long-distance phone calls and into areas that will accelerate digital literacy, like Wi-Fi connections within a school or library.

The proposal also calls for measures that would drive down the cost of services, like adoption of purchasing consortiums, and the streamlining of administrative requirements — among them, shifting much of the required paperwork for applicants to electronic filings. "One of the biggest obstacles to seizing the opportunities of digital learning in America is inadequate bandwidth at our schools and libraries," Mignon L. Clyburn, the F.C.C. chairwoman, said before voting. "Simply put, they need faster high-capacity connections and they need them now."

Just last month in a visit to a North Carolina middle school, President Obama set a goal of connecting 99 percent of school students to the Internet through high-speed broadband and high-speed wireless within five years.

"To get there, we have to build connected classrooms that support modern teaching — investments we know our international competitors are already making," Mr. Obama said on Friday.

The E-Rate fund has financed Internet connections to more than 95 percent of American public school classrooms, while only 14 percent were connected when E-Rate was established in 1997.

In 2010, however, an F.C.C. study found that more than half of the schools and libraries reported that their Internet connections were too slow to meet their needs. For the coming school year, libraries and schools requested more than $4.9 billion to pay for connections and equipment, more than twice the size of the fund.

"We fail our students if we expect digital-age learning to take place at near dial-up speeds," said Jessica Rosenworcel, an F.C.C. commissioner. "Contrast this with efforts under way in some of our world neighbors. They are pouring resources into these subjects, into schools and connectivity."

The E-Rate program has been faulted for inadequately allocating money in the fund, which is provided through a tax on consumers' phone bills, a monthly charge between 50 cents and $1.

Commissioner Ajit Pai, the lone Republican on the five-member commission (where two seats are vacant), criticized allocations of the fund, saying an average of only $1.8 billion had been spent in each of the last 10 years, leaving more than $5 billion unused in the E-Rate account.

Mr. Pai also complained that the program placed greater emphasis on the wrong services.

"E-Rate today prioritizes long-distance telephone calls and getting phone service to a school's bus garage over wiring up a classroom," Mr. Pai said in a speech this week at the American Enterprise Institute. "How can it be that E-Rate in the last few years committed about $600 million, more than one-quarter of its annual budget, to support voice telephone services while at the same time denying eight out of 10 applicants' funding for connecting classrooms?"

At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing this week, both Republicans and Democrats spoke favorably of the fund, although some quoted Mr. Pai's observations in a warning of reckless spending.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/business/media/fcc-backs-plan-to-update-a-fund-that-helps-connect-schools-to-the-internet.html

Plex for Google TV refreshed with dynamic layout, more big screen love - Engadget

After launching a brand new Android app, Plex is now giving its Google TV app more room to roam inside your HDTV. An update allows you to dynamically switch your layout to a "TV style" to better take advantage of your flat panel's extra breadth, even if you're running it from an Android smartphone instead (which you totally can). PlexPass subscribers can sideload the app to Google TV or any other Android device via an APK now, and a new Google TV app will arrive on Play within a week. So, if you've already got the pixels but need more screen acreage, check the source.

Source : http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/19/plex-for-google-tv-refreshed-with-dynamic-layout/

Apple Buys Locationary to Help Address Maps Woes - eWeek

Apple, which has said its Maps app is "not there yet," has bought Canadian startup Locationary to change that.

Apple has purchased Locationary, a Toronto-based map-focused startup that specializes in highly specific location data and business profile information. The company collects information such as hours of operation, products, services and rich media and can overlay it on a business's location on a map.Canada's Globe and Mail reported the purchase July 19, and Apple confirmed it to AllThingsD, which linked to a Sept. 30, 2012, article that Locationary CEO Grant Ritchie wrote for TechCrunch, detailing five major mapping issues that Apple needed to solve.It seems Apple agreed—or thought Ritchie would be a great asset for helping get the job done.Apple introduced the iPhone 5 on Sept. 12, 2012, and with it iOS 6, which replaced the mapping software of Apple rival Google with Apple's own app effort, Maps. The app proved to be such a mess—bridges melted into rivers, landmarks and roads were relocated—that Apple CEO Tim Cook publically apologized for it, even as the iPhone 5 launched in 22 additional countries. Apple has since updated and improved on the application, but it has yet to give it an official reintroduction.

During a May 28 interview at an AllThingsD event, Cook described mapping as "complex" and said that Apple has an "enormous investment" in Maps."We screwed up," Cook added. "It's greatly improved but not there yet. We have more to do."Ritchie's five points of advice to Apple go a long way in explaining the complexity of the undertaking—and how Apple could have gotten it so wrong.One, he points out, aggregating location data is hard. To tackle the job, "Apple would need to bring in two or three horizontal (core) databases for each country."Two, aggregating vertical business data is even harder. It's not uncommon, wrote Ritchie, "for a large publisher or search engine to use more than 100 different data sources," such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, as well as retailer-specific data from large national chains.  Three, standardizing all the above-mentioned data is another major undertaking—consider even something as simple as how many ways there are to type in a phone number. Plus, once standardizing is accomplished, setting up the infrastructure to process all the data sources "is also a challenge," wrote Ritchie, "especially if Apple wants to do real-time updates."With all of the above in place, Apple would then need to—point No. 4—"match the [points of interest] to a canonical or reference place." Ritchie calls this a difficult and time-consuming thing to do."It requires a complex algorithm that needs profile details, crowd-sourced info and machine learning and reporting tools."Finally, tip five, Apple will need to select and merge the best information into a composite profile for each place, which is what the user will see."Data integration is a complicated but crucial process for local search, mapping and directory apps," wrote Ritchie. "It's also something that most people don't think about or notice until it goes wrong."With the next official launch of Maps, the world will be watching to see if Apple can get it right.

Source : http://www.eweek.com/mobile/apple-buys-locationary-to-help-address-maps-woes/

Hot startup Uber trying to be cool again with ice cream truck - CNET

Uber rolls out its on-demand treats service again -- and this time it's doing it globally.

July 18, 2013 10:57 AM PDT

A scene from Uber's ice cream truck promo video.

(Credit: Screenshot by Donna Tam/CNET)

It's summertime, and Uber wants its users to have on-demand ice cream. The company will bring back its ice cream truck service on Friday, letting people in 33 cities across the globe summon a truck of summer's most iconic dessert for one day only.

Uber is partnering with local trucks to deliver group offerings, so you can share, and pay for, ice cream with a group of four to six people. The flavors and costs vary with each city, but it looks like the prices range from $15 to $30 per group, and includes Uber swag. Just look for the "Ice Cream" option in your Uber app and order the trucks between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.

This is a big promo push for Uber, of course, which tested the same service last year in seven cities in North America.

Donna Tam

Donna Tam is a staff writer for CNET News and a native of San Francisco. She enjoys feasting, merrymaking, checking her Gmail, and reading on her Kindle. Before landing at CNET, she wrote for daily newspapers, including the Oakland Tribune, The Spokesman-Review, and the Eureka Times-Standard.

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Source : http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57594396-94/hot-startup-uber-trying-to-be-cool-again-with-ice-cream-truck/

The 3 Most Exciting Words in Science Right Now: 'The Pitch Dropped' - The Atlantic

Aaaaaaaaaaand ... DROP! (Trinity College/Chris Heller)

In 1944, a colleague of Ernest Walton, the first person in history to successfully smash an atom, began an experiment of a decidedly larger and lengthier variety. In a physics lab at Trinity College, Dublin, the experimenter took several lumps of tar pitch -- a hard, carbonic material thought to become viscous under certain conditions -- heated them, and placed them in a funnel. And then placed that funnel into a jar. And then placed that jar into a cupboard.

And then -- after another move of the jar, to a campus lecture hall -- left the thing alone. Not for minutes or days, but for years. And then decades.

The point of this project was to prove that pitch -- which, if you hammer it, shatters like glass -- actually has some liquid properties. It is solid stuff that is, over a looooooooong period of time, capable of flowing. The work (the experimenter who set it up has been, alas, lost to history) examined this phenomenon in a lab setting. And it wasn't the first to do this: the pitch-and-jar setup was a replication of a similar experiment being conducted at the University of Queensland in Australia -- one that, to this day, remains the longest-running laboratory experiment in the world. Both experiments were simple and, in that, wonderfully elegant: their primary component, aside from the tar and the jar, was time. They required little more than waiting and watching. 

What made them challenging, however, was this second aspect. Watching, after all, is separate from seeing. And the data the scientists were looking for, for the most part, came in the form of a momentary, yet momentous, happening: the pitch, rendered elastic, succumbing to gravity and leaking through the funnel, dropping to the bottom of the jar. The scientists were waiting-watching for a single, split-second occurrence. It came to be known as the Pitch Drop. 

Aaaaaaaaalmost there: In 1990, University of Queensland's John Mainstone posed with a kind-of-almost-ready-to-drop bit of pitch. (Wikimedia Commons)

And those drops came very, very rarely. The Queensland Pitch Drop experiment was set up in 1927; since then, the pitch it contains has dropped eight times -- so, an average rate of one drop per decade. In the world beyond the tar's sealed jar, wars have broken out; peace has been restored; the Internet has been invented and commercialized; the moon has played host to the tread of human feet. And there the pitch has remained, slow and slick and taking its sweet time.

Which has made the pitch something of a human drama as well as a scientific one. Not only was the pitch drop a literally blink-and-you-miss-it occurrence ... but the experiments seeking to see it also found themselves, in some sense, on the wrong side of technological history. Even in 1944, when the Trinity version came along, video technology was not something that could easily be put to the task of endless monitoring. The data desired -- the breakaway moment -- required human eyes, watching as patiently (and, ideally, as unblinkingly) as possible.

And human eyes, of course, are notoriously unreliable. This fantastic episode of Radiolab recounts the series of Alanis Morissette-song-worthy near-misses that prevented people from observing the Queensland pitch in the act of dropping. One time, John Mainstone -- a Queensland professor who curates the Pitch Drop experiment and has made it his mission to observe its fall -- stepped out to get tea. During the 15 minutes he was away, because of course, the pitch dropped. Another time, later on, Mainstone and his colleagues put video-monitoring technology to use to record the moment even if no humans were nearby to see it. The equipment malfunctioned. The pitch dropped, unobserved.

A DIY pitch drop experiment (Science Gone Wild)

All this has given these little lumps of resin something of a cult following -- one that has been empowered by an Internet that is always on, and always around, and always watching. The black pitch has become its own kind of white whale. And now, thanks to a livecam trained on Queensland's jar of pitch, you yourself can watch for the moment of Pitch Drop. You, yourself, can nerd out about it with friends. You, yourself, can do what nobody had done before: catch the viscous pitch, the unicorn of the scientific world, in the act of dropping.

Which brings us to today -- or, more specifically, to last Thursday. It had been about a decade since the Trinity pitch's last drop, and researchers there had seen that a drop had begun to form in the pitch. The time was nigh. So they did what anyone with the means would do: they trained their own webcam on the jar. And, on Thursday: you guys, THE PITCH DROPPED.

And this time, the equipment didn't malfunction. This time, there were people around to observe the act as it happened. This time, for the first time, the liquified solid, falling from its source, was observed by human eyes. That's the moment, at the top, GIFed for your pleasure.

So is this the most important scientific happening of the day? No, probably not. But it is, for my money, the most exciting. Science, in the public imagination, is ... scientific. It is data-driven and analytic and divorced, by design, from human emotion. But this split-second falling of a lump of liquid-y tar is a nice reminder of the excitement that can be embedded in even the dullest of experiments. The drop of pitch may simply have proved what we already knew. But it was a drop of pitch that was 69 years in the making. It was the drop of pitch we had been waiting for.

Source : http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-3-most-exciting-words-in-science-right-now-the-pitch-dropped/277919/

Rocket Engine Pulled From the Ocean Definitely Belonged to Apollo 11 - Wired

The serial number identifying the engines as coming from Apollo 11. Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center

On the eve of the 44th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, a piece of their historic legacy has been ID'ed here on Earth. Billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has confirmed that the rocket engines he picked up from the ocean floor five months ago belonged to Apollo 11.

More than a year ago, Bezos announced a mission to try and recover the mighty F-1 engines, which each delivered 1.5 million pounds of thrust to the Saturn V rocket that carried men to the lunar surface. After delivering the Apollo astronauts to space, the engines crashed back to Earth and lay dormant on the ocean floor for more than 40 years, reaching a serious state of decay. After trawling the Atlantic, Bezos' team announced that they had recovered the artifacts and returned them to land for preservation and eventual display at a museum.

But with the engines warped and covered in rust, it was impossible to say precisely which of the Apollo missions they had come from. Bezos had always been aiming to find relics from Apollo 11 because he said the mission had inspired his passion in science and engineering as a child.

During the painstaking cleaning process, a conservator at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center using black light and a special lens filter to examine the relic pieces noticed a tiny number — 2044. That figure is a Rocketdyne serial number that correlates to NASA number 6044, the serial number for F-1 Engine #5 from Apollo 11.

Bezos is thrilled with the news. On his blog, he wrote that "44 years ago tomorrow Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and now we have recovered a critical technological marvel that made it all possible."

Now that they have identified the important mission these engines came from, workers can continue their conservation efforts. In addition to getting them cleaned and ready for display, the Cosmosphere is scanning all components to build a 3-D CAD model. Once that is finished, the artifacts will be shown at museums around the U.S., though exactly which ones is yet to be determined.

The all-important 2044 serial number, which shows that this engine came from Apollo 11. Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center

Source : http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/07/bezos-apollo-11/

Red Planet Riviera: Ancient Mars Ocean Found? - Discovery News

With the help of rover Curiosity, we now know that ancient Mars had large quantities of liquid water flowing across its surface. However, evidence for large bodies of water — i.e. oceans — has been hard to come by. But using high-resolution orbital data, Caltech scientists now think they've found a long-dry river delta that once flowed into a very large body of water. Welcome to the Aeolis Riviera — the strongest evidence yet for a Martian coastline.

PHOTOS: The Psychedelic Landscape of Mars

Aeolis Dorsa is a vast plain about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) east of Gale Crater, where NASA's rover Curiosity is currently exploring. Using high-resolution observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, the Caltech team spotted what appears to be a river delta leading to a large depression, a candidate for the basin of an ancient ocean.

"Scientists have long hypothesized that the northern lowlands of Mars are a dried-up ocean bottom, but no one yet has found the smoking gun," said Mike Lamb, assistant professor of geology at Caltech and a co-investigator of this research, in a news release. The research has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

It is thought that large regions of the Red Planet's northern hemisphere was once covered in water as the majority of the landmass is at a lower elevation than the southern hemisphere. This is exactly where you'd expect to see evidence of ancient large bodies of water. But over the aeons, the evidence has weathered away, making any positive identification of such features difficult.

ANALYSIS: Blue, Not Red: Did Ancient Mars Look Like This?

While analyzing an area inside Aeolis Dorsa, however, the researchers noticed a collection of inverted channels. On Mars, these raised ridges were likely caused by the deposition of rocks and other material by the flow of water down river channels. Long after the rivers ran dry, the rocky deposits remained behind. The softer sediment surrounding the river channels eventually weathered away, blasted by the Martian wind and other erosion processes. However, the deposited rocks, once found at the bottom of the rivers, were immune to this weathering, causing them to rise out of the landscape as ridges, tracing the paths of ancient riverbeds.

Looking down from its orbit, the MRO has been able to image these veined, raised structures and found what appears to be an ancient river delta leading into the depressed portion of Aeolis Dorsa.

On Earth, river deltas form at the mouths of rivers connecting to seas and oceans. The Nile Delta is a classic example, where the water from the river flows into the Mediterranean Sea. Sediment has built up at the Nile's mouth to create fanned, multichannel features, leading to a sudden drop-off — i.e. the sea.

However, understanding which way the water would have been flowing in an ancient Mars "river delta candidate" can be challenging. Could the water actually have been flowing the other way? Perhaps this isn't a delta at all; it could be reversed — several streams and small river tributaries flowing into a larger channel.

PHOTOS: Mars Through Curiosity's Powerful MAHLI Camera

Because of HiRISE's precision, high-resolution 3D images could be created to map which direction the landscape is sloping, revealing the direction of water flow. Indeed, the water would have been flowing downhill, creating a fan-like delta and the drop-off at the end of this Mars delta could be the beginning of an ocean basin. Therefore this could be the strongest evidence yet of a Martian coastline.

"This is probably one of the most convincing pieces of evidence of a delta in an unconfined region — and a delta points to the existence of a large body of water in the northern hemisphere of Mars," said Roman DiBiase, Caltech postdoctoral scholar and lead author of the paper.

Although more work is needed, the researchers estimate that the "ocean" would have, at least, covered Aeolis Dorsa, all 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles) of it. To compare with a terrestrial mass of water, this is larger than Lake Superior (82,414 square kilometers or 31,820 square miles).

In the year since Curiosity landed inside Gale Crater, the mission has uncovered incredible insights to the water history of the Red Planet inside a comparatively small impact crater. Imagine what a long-duration rover mission to a river delta would reveal. I for one would love to see a robotic mission clawing through the exposed ridges of ancient riverbed, hunting down evidence for the past habitability of an ancient Mars coastline.

Image credit: DiBiase et al./Journal of Geophysical Research/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/NASA Landsat

Source : http://news.discovery.com/space/red-planet-riviera-ancient-mars-coastline-found-130716.htm

Griffith Observatory makes the most of photo shoot from Saturn - Los Angeles Times

About 300 visitors gathered on the lawn of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles Friday afternoon to wave at the Cassini spacecraft as it took their picture from nearly 900 million miles away.

The observatory was already abuzz with visitors when curator Laura Danly picked up a bullhorn and invited everyone to head outside for the cosmic photo shoot. Danly asked who had visited the observatory especially to greet  Cassini, and about 100 hands shot into the air.

For the next five minutes, Danly explained the drill -- Cassini would take their picture from the far side of Saturn, pointing out the planet's location on a diagram of the solar system etched into the concrete near the observatory steps.

The picture would mainly feature the ringed planet, she said, with Earth but a tiny blue speck.

Cassini was taking multiple images and stitching them together to form one large mosaic picture.  The image including Earth would take 15 minutes to acquire, but the crowd didn't have to wave that long if they didn't want to, Danly explained.

She also asked two observatory staff members to stand about 20 feet apart, where Earth and Saturn were located on a solar system diagram. Playing the role of a light wave, observatory director Edwin Krupp walked from Earth to Saturn, as Danly explained that the light waves carrying Earth's image would take 80 minutes to reach Cassini's camera. A few murmurs of "wow" and "whoa" filled the air.

Awesome images of Saturn and its rings

Then Danly pointed out Saturn's location in the southeastern horizon. Everyone's heads turned, even though there was no way to see Saturn in the bright daylight.

At precisely 2:20 p.m., Danley gave her command. "Right now!" she shouted, and hands fluttered in the air -- amid a few cheers -- for about two minutes. Then the crowd dispersed.

"It's a big deal," said Austin Alley, a tourist from Humboldt who waved to Saturn with his son, high school student and astronomy enthusiast Luke Alley, 16. Like most visitors, the two had only learned about the Saturn wave that day.

"It was a very pleasant surprise," Austin said.

Asked how she felt about getting her picture taken from hundreds of millions of miles away, 6-year-old Aubrey Johnson of Los Angeles summed up her feelings in one word: "Wow."

Her older brother, Mason Johnson, 10, widened his eyes, speechless.

Aubrey and Mason waved at Saturn with their mother, Wendy Johnson, from the observatory balcony.

"I think it's a fun idea," she said. Getting her picture taken from such a great distance made her "feel very inconsequential," she said, especially in a society where "we're so personally focused."

Saturn — views of rings, moons and more

Scientists will compare Cassini's new photo with one taken in 2006 to investigate how Saturn's rings have changed, especially the dusty E ring that measures 620,000 miles wide.

Friday's photo shoot is unusual because Cassini and the sun are on opposite sides of Saturn. That allowed the planet to be lit from behind, affording scientists a chance to study its rings more closely, Krupp said.

Most photos of Saturn feature sunlight reflecting off the rings. But the brilliant lighting obscures their details. "If nothing else, it's a beautiful picture worthy of the art galleries of the world," Krupp said. "It spotlights the human experience and gives us all a chance to be participants in a subconscious way."

After the photo session, the crowd gradually milled into the observatory for a presentation on Cassini's discoveries.

Missed the photo op? You can still peer at Saturn through the observatory  telescopes from 8:00 p.m. until closing at 10:00 p.m.

Return to Science Now.

Source : http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-wave-at-saturn-cassini-reflections-20130719,0,390399.story

Amazon scores victory against Pinterest over control of .pin - CNET

Pinterest loses its fight to keep Amazon from controlling the new top-level domain .pin.

July 18, 2013 4:55 PM PDT

Amazon.com, which earlier this week lost its bid to control the domain extension .amazon, has been handed a victory over another top-level domain: .pin.

The loser in this battle: social-networking site Pinterest, which, not surprisingly, didn't want Amazon controlling .pin. In March, Pinterest filed an objection with the World Intellectual Property Organization, arguing in part that domain names on .pin -- clothes.pin, say, or whatever Amazon has in mind -- would cause confusion around the term "pin."

But WIPO was unpersuaded, ruling that .pin is a generic term:

Pinterest has failed to prove that it owns rights in a PIN trademark; that Amazon's <.pin> gTLD creates an impermissible likelihood of confusion with any PIN mark Pinterest claims to own; that Amazon's applied-for <.pin> gTLD "unjustifiably impairs the distinctive character and reputation of" the alleged PIN mark; and that Amazon's applied-for <.pin> gTLD "takes unfair advantage of the distinctive character and reputation of" the alleged PIN mark.

Moreover, the WIPO ruling said that a number of Pinterest's trademark applications were filed after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) so-called reveal day, when it became known that Amazon was going after .pin.

A Pinterest spokesperson said that the company is evaluating its next steps.

The domain extension doesn't automatically go to Amazon. This is the biggest expansion of the domain name system ever, after all, so it's not quick.

The .pin domain extension is one of scores that Amazon has applied to control as part of the ICANN expansion of the domain name system.

The big question -- as Andrew Allemann, who writes about the topic for Domain Name Wire pointed out -- is what does Amazon really want to do with .pin anyway?

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

Source : http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57594463-93/amazon-scores-victory-against-pinterest-over-control-of-.pin-domain/

'Intelligent' knife detects cancer - BBC News

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Source : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23352171

Curiosity team: Massive collision may have killed Red Planet - Register

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Dual tests by instruments on the Curiosity rover, combined with data from the first Viking probes and Mars meteorites that have fallen to Earth, suggests that the Red Planet lost its atmosphere within the first billion years of its history, according to two papers in the latest issue of Science.

Curiosity's tunable laser spectrometer in action

Curiosity's tunable laser spectrometer and quadrupole mass spectrometer, which make up part of Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory, took separate readings of the Martian atmosphere to sort out the elements and measure the pattern of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen isotopes, the papers report.

"As atmosphere was lost, the signature of the process was embedded in the isotopic ratio," said Paul Mahaffy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the principal investigator for SAM and lead author of one of the two papers about Curiosity.

The results were compared with the very crude readings taken from the 1976 Viking probes and with analysis of the isotope variation found in meteorites that have been blasted off Mars by eruptions or impacts. The new data fits current climate models, and NASA says it's confident about the results.

"Getting the same result with two very different techniques increased our confidence that there's no unknown systematic error underlying the measurements," said Chris Webster of the lead investigator behind the tunable laser spectrometer. "The accuracy in these new measurements improves the basis for understanding the atmosphere's history."

Taken together, the data suggests that the atmosphere was lost from the top down, rather than by the interaction of the atmosphere with the Martian surface. This loss appears to have occurred before Mars made it to 10 figures-worth of birthdays, and has left it fairly barren place ever since.

The findings seem to match with data from the European Mars Express probe, suggesting Mars has had a three-stage existence. During its early Phyllocian stage, thought to have lasted for the first 500 million to a billion of Mars' existence, the planet had running water laying down clay-rich minerals and a thick atmosphere.

Around a billion years into existence the planet was hit by a billion-years period of intense geological activity dubbed the Theiikian period. Vast layers of sulfates were laid out in this period, and for the rest of the planet's existence, the Siderikan period, Mars has remained much as it is now – cold, arid except for ices at the poles, and bombarded by solar radiation.

One theory for what caused that shift from a relatively lush planet with a chance for life as we know it to develop to dustbowl is that a large object, possibly even a planetoid the size of Pluto, crashed into Mars early on in life. This disrupted the planet's magnetic field and caused the loss of atmosphere.

"The data we have doesn't prove this," Webster told ABC News. "But it does fall in line with the theory."

Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime

Source : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/19/curiosity_sampling_suggests_mars_lost_atmosphere_early_in_life/

Google Shares Drop as Shift to Mobile Curbs Ad Prices - Bloomberg

Play

Google $9.56-a-Share EPS Misses Analysts' Estimate

Google Inc. (GOOG) shares fell in extended trading after the owner of the world's most popular Internet search engine reported second-quarter sales and profit that missed estimates as mobile advertising crimped average prices.

Revenue, excluding sales passed on to partner sites, was $11.1 billion, Google said yesterday on its website. That compared with an average analyst estimate of $11.3 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Profit before certain items was $9.56 a share, less than the average projection of $10.80. The shares slid as much as 5.7 percent.

Google's average cost per click, a measure of advertising rates, fell 6 percent as more marketers aimed to reach consumers through smartphones and tablets instead of desktop personal computers. While the company has been adding tools for customers to reach mobile Web surfers, such as ads tied to searches and YouTube videos, those efforts are still gaining steam, and Google is boosting investment to help them catch on.

"The challenge is for Google to reignite revenue growth as their existing businesses start to mature," said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners LP in New York, who rates the shares hold. "The core business is slowing down."

The shares of Mountain View, California-based Google dropped as low as $858.80 in late trading after the report. They had slipped less than 1 percent to $910.68 at yesterday's close in New York. The stock has advanced 29 percent this year.

The average smartphone-based search ad costs 40 percent less than a comparable promotion on a desktop computer, according to Covario Inc., a digital-marketing agency.

Total Clicks

Second-quarter net income, which includes results from discontinued operations, increased 16 percent to $3.23 billion, or $9.54 a share, from $2.79 billion, or $8.42, a year earlier, Google said. Operating expenses amounted to 35 percent of total revenue, compared with 33 percent a year earlier, and the company's effective tax rate was 24 percent.

"We're in the midst of another round of investing in the business," said Josh Olson, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. who has a buy rating on the stock and doesn't own it. "This is not unusual for Google."

The average cost per click -- the amount that advertisers paid each time a user clicked on a promotion on Google's sites and those in its network -- decreased more than the 3 percent drop analysts had predicted, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It followed a 4 percent decline in the first three months of the year. The total number of paid clicks jumped 23 percent, after a 20 percent gain in the first quarter. Analysts were projecting a 19 percent increase in the recent period.

Generating Ideas

The company has a lot of big opportunities in the market as more users adopt mobile devices and other innovative technologies, Chief Executive Officer Larry Page said on a call with analysts.

"It's pretty easy to come up with ideas. It's pretty hard to make them real and get them to billions of people," he said. "I wish we could snap our fingers and just do a tremendous amount more instantly, but the reality is it's hard work to scale, and that's what we do."

In February, Google unveiled new mobile-advertising products that push customers to buy more marketing messages for wireless devices. The features, which had been optional, will become mandatory later this month, helping advertisers target mobile users based on location or at different times of day.

The new system is "one of the biggest changes to its ad system since company inception, and should simplify the ability for marketers to acquire customers across multiple screens," Ross Sandler, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a note earlier this month. He rates Google shares a buy.

Waze Acquisition

Google is also making moves to attract more users to its mobile services, which in turn is aimed at boosting advertising. Last month, the company announced the purchase of Waze, a mobile application that helps users find routes on interactive maps. Google paid about $1.1 billion for Waze, people with knowledge of the agreement said. That would be the fourth-largest deal for the company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Google also has been improving and expanding its Android operating system for smartphones. The software commands more than 70 percent of the market, while Apple Inc., maker of the iPhone, has less than 20 percent, according to researcher IDC.

Moto X

One Android partner is Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired last year for $12.4 billion. The business is slated to release a new phone called the Moto X this year under new Google leadership. The device will use two processors to conserve battery life and will include sensors to help it better understand what a user needs, Motorola Mobility Chief Executive Officer Dennis Woodside said in May.

Google's report came two days after Web rival Yahoo! Inc. said quarterly revenue also fell short of analysts' estimates amid weakness in advertising. Yahoo's sales of display ads decreased 12 percent, driven in part by advertisers paying lower prices per promotion.

Facebook Inc. (FB), owner of the world's largest social-networking service, reports results next week amid continued scrutiny of its efforts to make money from users who visit its website on wireless devices. In the first quarter, mobile made up about 30 percent of Facebook's advertising revenue.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

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Google Sales Miss Estimates as Mobile-Ad Prices Curb Results

Google Inc. signage is displayed outside of the company's headquarters in New York. Google is making moves to attract more users to its mobile services, which in turn is aimed at boosting advertising.

Google Inc. signage is displayed outside of the company's headquarters in New York. Google is making moves to attract more users to its mobile services, which in turn is aimed at boosting advertising. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

2:44

July 18 (Bloomberg) -- Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, comments on Google's second-quarter sales and outlook. He speaks with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West." (Source: Bloomberg)

Source : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-18/google-sales-miss-estimates-as-mobile-ad-prices-crimp-results.html

New WHI Analysis: This Time Estrogen Saves Lives - MedPage Today

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OB/Gyn

Published: Jul 18, 2013

By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

Action Points

• Thousands of postmenopausal women have died prematurely over the past decade because they avoided estrogen therapy after hysterectomy, a study found.
• Note that a subgroup analysis in 2004 showed a reduction in mortality risk among Women's Health Initiative study participants who had undergone hysterectomy and were treated with estrogen alone.

Thousands of postmenopausal women have died prematurely over the past decade because they avoided estrogen therapy after hysterectomy, a new analysis of a landmark study showed.

The most conservative estimates placed the total number of deaths at 18,601, and the toll could be as high 91,610.

The estimates came from an updated analysis of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) Estrogen Plus Progestin Trial, which ended prematurely in 2002 after an interim review showed an increased risk of adverse events associated with combined hormonal therapy.

The updated analysis was limited to younger women (50 to 59) who had undergone hysterectomy. In that subgroup of patients, unopposed estrogen significantly reduced the mortality risk, Philip Sarrel, MD, of Yale University, and co-authors reported online in the American Journal of Public Health.

"The finding is so dramatic -- reporting thousands of women dying every year -- if this gets the attention that it deserves, we hope it will change clinical practice," co-author David Katz, MD, the Yale-Griffin Research Center, said in an interview. "We hope that clinicians will start routinely talking to their patients who have had a hysterectomy and bringing up the issue that taking estrogen may save your life. We have data to show that it can save your life.

"Frankly, our paper should do that. It's not every paper that has the potential to change clinical practice. This one should. It occurs in the context of a growing awareness of the damage we have done by talking women out of all forms of hormone replacement."

In the 1990s, as many as 90% of women in their 50s took estrogen after hysterectomy, and treatment continued for an average of 4 to 5 years. Multiple studies had indicated that estrogen reduced the risk of bone and heart disease after hysterectomy.

Publication of the WHI results in July 2002 led to a rapid and precipitous decline in the use of estrogen by postmenopausal women, even though the findings included women who were taking combined estrogen and progestin rather than estrogen alone. Within 18 months, half of the women using hormonal therapy had stopped, the authors noted.

A subgroup analysis in 2004 showed a reduction in mortality risk among WHI participants who had undergone hysterectomy and were treated with estrogen alone. A follow-up analysis in 2011 confirmed a decreased mortality risk of 13 per 10,000 per year among hysterectomized women 50 to 59 treated with estrogen.

Despite the positive follow-up results from WHI, prescriptions for all types of hormonal therapy have continued to decline, the authors said. Fewer than one-third of hysterectomized women are using estrogen.

"The decline in estrogen therapy prescription and usage seems to reflect a generalized avoidance of any forms of hormone therapy not supported by the WHI data," the authors wrote. "This raises the possibility that there has been and continues to be a considerable resultant mortality toll."

To examine the issue, Sarrel and colleagues undertook a study to calculate the number of premature deaths due to estrogen avoidance by hysterectomized women 50 to 59 since the WHI ended. For a point estimate, they used the 2011 WHI publication, showing a 13/10,000/yr increased mortality in that subgroup of women assigned to placebo.

Overall mortality estimates were calculated from population estimates based on census data, age variability in hysterectomy rates, and different rates of estrogen usage prior to 2002.

Investigators used census data to determine the population of women 50 to 59 from 2002 to 2011, and they used national hospital discharge data to determine hysterectomy rates from 1997 to 2005, with and without oophorectomy. For women 50 to 59, the hysterectomy rate ranged between 33% and 40%.

An estimated 54% of women undergo oophorectomy at the same time as hysterectomy. Before 2002 post-hysterectomy estrogen usage among women without ovaries was 90% and 53% among those with ovaries. Investigators performed separate analyses of mortality associated with declining estrogen use for women with and without ovaries.

Applying the lower estimated hysterectomy rate resulted in a best point estimate over 10 years of 49,128 excess deaths and an extreme low estimate of 22,677 excess deaths. Use of the higher hysterectomy estimate resulted in a best point estimate of 59,549 excess deaths over 10 years, increasing to 91,610 for the extreme high estimate.

Finally, the authors factored in a lower mortality associated with estrogen avoidance for women with and without ovaries. Application of the lower estimated hysterectomy rate resulted in a best point estimate of 40,292 excess deaths over 10 years and a low-end estimate of 18,601 excess deaths.

Use of the higher estimated hysterectomy rate resulted in a point estimate of 48,835 excess deaths due to estrogen avoidance, and a high-end point estimate of 75,125.

"Thus, across a reasonable range of all assumptions, the excess mortality was between 18,601 and 91,610," the authors concluded. "Using the best available point-estimate values with year-by-year adjustment and adjustment for differential rates of estrogen use among women with and without retained ovaries at hysterectomy, the range was 40,292 to 48,835."

The results show that clinicians should not be reluctant to prescribe estrogen for women who have undergone hysterectomy and are estrogen deficient, said Holly Thacker, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic.

"It's not only going to improve the quality of their life but likely the longevity of their life," Thacker told MedPage Today. "It's really kind of a game changer, in that we're not just talking the use of estrogen for the lowest dose for the shortest amount of time for treatment of symptoms. We're also thinking in terms of prevention and lifespan and quality of life and work productivity.

"Women and their doctors need to stop being fearful of treating estrogen deficiency."

A founder of the North American Menopause Society said the results are part of an ongoing effort to repair damage caused by early reports from the WHI.

"This is not the first paper to demonstrate that the way the WHI interpreted their results and presented them to the media has resulted in far more death and disability than it prevented," Wulf Utian, MB BCh, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said by email.

The study was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The authors reported no relevant disclosures.

---

Primary source: American Journal of Public Health
Source reference:
Sarrel PM, et al "The mortality toll of estrogen avoidance: An analysis of excess deaths among hyserectomized women aged 50 to 59 years" Am J Pub Health 2013; DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2013.301295.

Working from Houston, home to one of the world's largest medical complexes, Charles Bankhead has more than 20 years of experience as a medical writer and editor. His career began as a science and medical writer at an academic medical center. He later spent almost a decade as a writer and editor for Medical World News, one of the leading medical trade magazines of its era. His byline has appeared in medical publications that have included Cardio, Cosmetic Surgery Times, Dermatology Times, Diagnostic Imaging, Family Practice, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Medscape, Oncology News International, Oncology Times, Ophthalmology Times, Patient Care, Renal and Urology News, The Medical Post, Urology Times, and the International Medical News Group newspapers. He has a BA in journalism and MA in mass communications, both from Texas Tech Un iversity.

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Gut microbes keep species apart - Nature.com

Closely-related organisms are often considered different species if they cannot produce viable offspring by interbreeding — and in the case of two wasp species, that barrier may lie at least in part in the gut flora.

Micrograph by Robert M. Brucker

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Mountain ranges and rivers can act as physical barriers that separate closely related species and keep them from cross-breeding. But the trillions of microbes in an animal's guts could have the same role.

Robert Brucker and Seth Bordenstein, biologists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, have found that the gut bacteria of two recently diverged wasp species act as a living barrier that stops their evolutionary paths from reuniting. The wasps have subtly different collections of gut microbes, and when they cross-breed, the hybrids develop a distorted microbiome that causes their untimely deaths.

"This is the most convincing evidence that the microbiome evolves with hosts over long time periods and might affect the speciation process," says Bordenstein. The results are published in Science¹.

Jürgen Gadau, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, says that the microbiome is just one of many factors that drive the origin of species. "The important point is that microbes can change very rapidly," he says — so they could very quickly enforce the separation of nascent species.

It's what's on the inside that counts

"The gut microbiome has been intensely studied from a health perspective, but very little has been done on its evolution," says Bordenstein. Other scientists have shown that the microbiomes of different species diverge in a way that mirrors their hosts' evolutionary relationships², but it was unclear whether the bacteria were simply reacting to the hosts' changing diets or were truly co-evolving with them.

Brucker and Bordenstein addressed this by studying Nasonia giraulti and Nasonia vitripennis, two parasitic wasps that deposit their eggs in the larvae of other insects. The two species diverged one million years ago, and can still raise their young on the same hosts. When they breed, around 90% of male offspring die as larvae. 

The researchers found that the wasps' gut microbes included a bacterium in the genus Providencia, and another species called Proteus mirabilis. The parental species had more Providencia, but P. mirabilis dominated in the hybrids. This suggests that interbreeding brings about harmful changes to the gut flora, so that the insects' microbiota helps to keep the two species separate.

To confirm that the different flora was responsible for the males' demise, the team tried 'curing' the hybrid wasps of their gut microbes. They devised a way of rearing Nasonia eggs in a nutrient broth rather than an insect host, and killed the microbes in the wasps' developing guts using antibiotics. This rescued many of the doomed hybrids: half survived to pupation. But when the team added Providencia and P. mirabilis to the rearing liquid of initially germ-free wasps, most of the hybrid larvae died as usual.  

Genes and germs

"This is an important and potentially groundbreaking study," says Jack Werren, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester in New York. "It reveals that problems in hybrids can be due not just to their genetic make-up, but to interactions between their genes and associated microbes." The next step, he says, is to "determine which genes are involved in regulating which bacteria, and how this is disrupted in hybrids".

Brucker and Bordenstein found that 40% of the wasps' immune genes were at least twice as active in the normal hybrids as in the germ-free ones. They suspect that genetic incompatibilities between the parent species disrupt the hybrids' immune systems and weaken their ability to control their gut microbes. The insects end up with an unusual microbiome, which kills them. "The closest analogy we have is that it's like an autoimmune disorder," says Brucker.

In this way, the insects' microbiota helps the two species to separate and, in time, to differentiate ever more, even if they share the same geographical range. Likewise, an earlier study³ showed that gut microbes can steer the sexual preferences of flies towards individuals with similar microbiomes, which might also help to accentuate the split between species.

"We'd never say that the microbiome is the key element in all speciation," says Brucker. Rather, he feels that biologists must consider both the genome and the microbiome to understand animal evolution. "Our classic understanding of speciation is still true but we're just adding a new arm to that," he says.

Source : http://www.nature.com/news/gut-microbes-keep-species-apart-1.13408