A Weekly Roundup of Small-Business News - NYTimes.com

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A weekly roundup of small-business developments.

What?s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week.

The Big Story: The President Sings

In his annual State of the Union address, President Obama cranked up the populist pitch. The G.O.P. responded. Representative Sam Graves outlined what he thought small businesses wanted to hear but small-business owners were split. A small-business owner in West Virginia was excited. One study finds small-business owners are dissatisfied with all of the presidential candidates. Joel Kotkin says ?this is America?s moment ? if Washington doesn?t blow it.? Your cellphone can now sing like the president.

Davos Update: An Intern Is Bored

As the sun bombards Earth with radiation, billionaires occupy Davos and bemoan the inequality of incomes. Their outlook is gloomy. Haley Amber Feinberg, a fictional intern, checks in: ?Attended my first panel: ?Tolerating the Unemployed.? Was really boring, played Crackgammon on my phone?s Facebook app the whole time.?

The Economy: The Baltic Dry Index

Even though chief financial officers do not plan significant expansion (pdf) in 2012, Thomas Black at Bloomberg reports that companies from General Electric to Chobani, a yogurt producer, are adding workers and leading a rebound in hiring. M.B.A. employment figures are another reason for economic optimism. Tech hiring is strong. The Federal Reserve chairman promises to keep rates low. Paul Krugman is feeling better. Durable goods orders jump, but the Baltic Dry Index records a disturbingly large drop. Travel on all roads and streets declined in November 2011, but the trucking industry posts its biggest jump in tonnage in 13 years. President Obama delays his 2013 budget. Steven Rattner says it?s dangerous when economists claim that debt doesn?t matter.

Sales and Marketing 1: A Twitter Lesson

American Express succeeds at a Facebook campaign, while McDonald?s suffers the wrath of Twitter. Flowtown creates a cool small-business social media infographic. An educational institution spends more on Google advertising than Apple, eBay, State Farm and AT&T. Retailers were the second-largest source of Google ad revenue in 2011. A study finds that while lots of small-business owners believe social media are important only a few tap its power. John Donahoe, chief executive of eBay, believes we?re going to see more change in how consumers shop and pay in the next three years than we saw in the last 20.

Sales and Marketing 2: The Power of Bieber

Lori Richardson names five attributes of top sales influencers. Devin Cole explains how to network. Google takes its daily deals to five new cities. Trendcentral discusses three new crowdfunding services. Our patience for Web ads lasts, oh, about 15 seconds. A location-based shopping app, Shopkick, has three million users. Christopher Penn shows that vintage ads can teach a lot about e-mail marketing design. Derek Johnson explains how to measure success with text-message advertising. Justin Kownacki explains how Justin Bieber ruined his life: ?Evidently, Mr. Bieber (or his handlers) saw my tweet and ? decided that I was a bloke worth following. And that one single button click momentarily ruined my life.?

Ideas: A Professional Laugher?

A new service helps people save money and resources by sharing stuff with community and friends. This is the place to go if you?re in the market for a professional laugher. Virtual internships are experiencing a rise in demand. Patrick Smith finds a few unexpected pleasures at our airports. David Bakke explains how he started his side business with Scotch tape and offers this simple advice: ?For the most part, I bought and sold products with which I was familiar.? Here are 10 reasons some companies succeed and others fail. Debbie McDonnell offers ideas for choosing a business name, including: ?Count the characters. Google AdWords permits 25 characters so a business name longer than this means having to abbreviate the name if you advertise there. Even if you don?t plan to advertise here initially, allow for it as it tends to be one of the most cost-effective ways of advertising.? Walmart offers a chance to sell ?in the big box.? This mountaintop ride seems like a bad idea.

Around the Country: Cashing In

Female business owners wave a magic wand in Portland, Ore. Houston?s businesses are hiring. A bunch of Indiana businesses plan to cash in on the Super Bowl. Maine is open for business, according to its governor. The start-ups in Brevard County, Fla., are finding that investors are still cautious. Illinois teenagers face bleak job prospects, but a marketing company gives teenagers with ideas the chance to win cash and fame. Manufacturing activity in the Chicago and central Atlantic regions advances. Steven Tyler gives an embarrassing rendition of the national anthem and a New York City school sign is embarrassingly misspelled. A coming Small Business Summit extends its ?strategy award? nomination deadline to Feb. 10. An accountant offers a small-business survival guide webinar on Tuesday. A Staples contest offers a free TV commercial as its prize.

Around the World: Press Freedom

A 375-year-old French bank forgives the debts of Paris?s poor. The United States drops 27 places on an index of press freedom. As Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament sink and the country slips into recession, Britain?s prime minister has an idea: let businesses occupy empty Government offices! Iran?s trade with China soars, and Chinese solar companies are found to be selling below cost. Wenguang Huang explains why Chinese entrepreneurs want to invest in the United States. The International Monetary Fund says Europe poses a global recession threat. Eleven years of Dubai?s growth can now be seen from space. A new satellite takes spectacular pictures of Earth.

Finances: Employee Expense Reports

As lending accelerates, Jamie Dimon discusses the state of banking. Catherine Clifford explains how community development financial institutions can help start-ups. Barry Moltz suggests where companies can find short-term cash. Accounting Today has a slide show on the most unusual items found in employee expense reports. A company offers a Weight Watchers-type service to help us ?set financial goals (and actually meet them).?

Boss of the Week

Christian Wentz?s Cambridge, Mass., start-up is developing a ?wireless router for the brain? that will make it possible to collect data from the brain: ?The data could then be wirelessly transmitted to a computer.? (On the other hand, this guy is not performing like a boss.)

Technology: Apple Is Flush

After a blow-out quarter, Apple has $97.6 billion in the bank and now we know why! Google starts tracking small businesses more closely ? here?s how to find out what the company knows about you. Twitter is going to censor posts. With new ad rollouts to come, Twitter acquires an antimalware start-up. Bill George explains how I.B.M.?s Sam Palmisano redefined the global corporation. Meanwhile, I.B.M. selects its global start-up entrepreneur finalists and is gearing up to challenge Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. A Microsoft executive says a gay marriage law in Washington State is essential to the company?s competitive edge. Craftsmen creates a garage door opener with very remote control. Almost a third of all Americans now own a tablet or digital reading device. Information Week shares nine password security policy suggestions.

The Week?s Bests

Reason my kids should go to China. Wendy Kaufman tells how a trip to China changed how she ran her business: ?A C.E.O. that I met in China explained that he so passionately believes in the importance of honoring elders that he would only marry his wife if she treated his parents as her own. In the Chinese culture, family is so valued there is always someone caring for the family member. This type of work/life balance helps improve quality of care in both business and family interactions.?

Lessons from the big guys. Phil Simon shares six things he?s learned from big companies, including, ?Be sticky?: ?Attracting customers with your great products and services is step one. But getting them to stay with you ? and only you ? is the ultimate goal. With the launch of its Kindle Fire, Amazon just got stickier by making it easier for users to shop at Amazon and consume media and entertainment at Amazon than anywhere else. How can your business lure in customers and keep them there? With amazing customer service, follow-up, regular e-mail specials or contests? With interactive features at your Web site, birthday coupons or preferred customer perks? Make it hard for your customers to want to go anywhere else.?

Ways to manage time. Michael Costigan offers great advice on time management, including, ?Find someone else to crack the whip?: ?I find that it helps to have someone hold you accountable. Whether it?s a team member or an assistant, ask them to keep on you about getting things done. Sometimes the best way to make sure you do the things you need to do is by positioning the involvement of other people. That way, you aren?t just letting yourself down if something doesn?t get completed, you?re letting them and maybe the entire team down. And depending on how critical the tasks are, that could mean meeting payroll.?

This Week?s Question: What should McDonald?s have done differently on Twitter ? or was disaster inevitable?

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.

Source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/this-week-in-small-business-a-twitter-lesson/

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Targeted DNA vaccine using an electric pulse

ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2012) ? The vaccines of the future against infections, influenza and cancer can be administered using an electrical pulse and a specially-produced DNA code from the University of Oslo. The DNA code programs the body's own cells to produce a super-fast missile defence against the disease.

Researchers at the University of Oslo,Norway have developed a new type of DNA vaccine that can be used effectively against viruses and cancer. Studies reveal that the new vaccine triggers a powerful immune response. The vaccine has been tested on mice. Now the researchers hope the vaccine can be tested clinically.

This vaccine has an additional advantage. At the moment, vaccines require the inclusion of immuno-activating substances. These substances are called adjuvants and are generally composed of oil-based mixtures or aluminium salts. Adjuvants initiate local and often painful inflammation at the injection site. This inflammation fools the immune system into reacting to the vaccine.

Without additives

The new vaccine from the University of Oslo does not need the addition of adjuvants. Instead, a completely new technology is used that applies an electrical current to the injection site immediately after injection. This electrical pulse results in a molecular reaction.

"The advantage of this type of reaction is two-fold. Firstly, one injection is enough and, secondly, the immune system reacts very quickly and effectively," points out Professor Bjarne Bogen at the Centre for Immune Regulation at the University of Oslo. Bogen has developed this new vaccine technology together with Professor Inger Sandlie, post-doctorate Agnete B. Fredriksen and a number of other co-workers.

The possibilities with this new vaccine from UiO are numerous. This new vaccine technology means it will be possible to produce vaccines quickly enough to protect against new pandemics, influenza epidemics, or hostile biological threats.

No need to cultivate viruses in eggs

It is time-consuming to make traditional vaccines. Today, in order to make influenza vaccines, viruses have to be cultivated in eggs. It can take almost a year before the vaccine is ready to use.

"The first problem: the world does not have enough eggs to produce influenza vaccine quickly enough for everybody. The second problem: certain forms of the deadly bird flu kill the eggs. Fatality can be as high as 50%. If a new influenza virus kills the eggs, it will not be possible to make a vaccine," explains Bjarne Bogen to the research-magazine Apollon.

His research team is now studying whether it is possible to use this new vaccine technology to develop a rapid and effective vaccine against influenza.

DNA is the solution

The new vaccine is composed of DNA strands. To make a new vaccine, constructing just a section of DNA is enough. Bacteria are good DNA factories. By adding a special substance, the bacteria double the number of DNA strands every 20 mins. This means an 8-fold increase in an hour. Over 24 hours, the bacteria will have produced vast quantities of DNA strands. The DNA strands then need to be cleaned free of the bacteria. This copying method is used by everybody working with DNA.

Programs the cells in the body

The researchers have called the active component in this new vaccine technology Vaccibody.

When DNA is injected together with an electric pulse, DNA is taken up in the skin cells. The cells then read-off the DNA and produce some very special proteins. It is these proteins that are called Vaccibody molecules and to which the immune system reacts so strongly.

This means: the researchers have found the DNA code that programs skin cells in the body to make Vaccibody molecules.

Made up of three parts

The Vaccibody molecules are composed of three components. Each of them has an important role in the immune system. The first component is the target guidance system which, like a pair of gripping pliers, binds to dendrite cells, a type of immune cell discovered by Ralph Steinman, who last year was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The second component of the Vaccibody molecules ensures that two identical chains are held together. Tests reveal that this special architecture is highly important if the vaccine is to work.

The third component of the Vaccibody molecule is a small piece of a virus, a bacteria or cancer cell. This small piece is called an antigen.

"The Vaccibody molecules are made so that we can insert all types of antigens. The only condition is that the antigen has a protein structure. We have inserted bits from numerous different viruses and bacteria. All have worked. We have also been able to successfully insert an antigen made up of 523 amino acids. This is an enormous molecule."

The Vaccibody molecules attach to the dendrite cells and are taken to the lymph nodes which are the headquarters of the immune system. There, the dendrite cells "display" the antigen to the most important cells in the immune system, the B cells and T cells.

Not only does this result in large-scale production of B cells, but the immune system is also stimulated to produce aggressive T cells.

"Both of these parts of the immune defence are as a rule important in our protection against viruses and bacteria, and for eliminating cancer cells. This means that Vaccibody offers double protection."

Target guiding gripping pliers

In some types of Vaccibody molecules, the gripping pliers that attach to the dendrite cells are a chemokine. Chemokines are small hormone-like substances that guide the passage of cells through the body.

"We have achieved very good results from our studies with Vaccibody molecules guided using chemokines. The chemokines can be thought of as lighthouses along the coast. They enable the immune cells to navigate correctly and have a special effect on the production of T cells, an attribute that is very important in fighting viruses and cancer," underscores Bogen.

Successful test

The Vaccibody vaccine has so far been tested on mice with cancer and influenza. Eighty percent of the vaccinated mice became resistant to cancer. 100% of those vaccinated were protected against flu. The protection was effective very quickly. Bjarne Bogen hopes that a number of major companies can test the vaccine clinically on people.

Post-doctorate Ranveig Braathen is now developing the second generation Vaccibody where, with the help of molecular cloning, she is testing new variants of the gripping pliers to optimise its efficiency.

Post-doctorate Even Fossum is looking at how Vaccibody can be used to improve the vaccine against tuberculosis. In spite of today's vaccine against tuberculosis, 1.5 million people die every year of this disease. The new vaccine will ensure a much improved immune response against this feared disease.

Post-doctorate Inger ?ynebr?ten is applying Vaccibody technology in the hope of making a vaccine against HIV. PhD students Gunnveig Gr?deland, Marta Baranowska and Ane Marie Andersson are using Vaccibody to develop new vaccines against influenza.

Post-doctorate Agnete Brunsvik and PhD student Heidi Sp?ng are using the technology to develop a cancer vaccine for patients with bone marrow cancer and melanoma.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Oslo, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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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://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120130093649.htm

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SAG Awards Predictions

In just a little over an hour the SAG Awards will begin but before the winners names are announced I figured I should really share my predictions with you. As I sit here watching E! Live From The Red Carpet, yes I want to watch it all, I am thinking about not only whom I want to win but also whom I think realistically will win. Sometimes those two things are not the same. That being said I give to you my predictions for who will go home a winter at the 2012 SAG Awards, you will find my choices in bold. FILM? Best Picture? Bridesmaids? The Artist?, even though I am secretly rooting for Bridesmaids The Descendants? The Help? Midnight in Paris Best Actor ? George Clooney ? The Descendants, it is Clooney?s year again Demian Bichir ? A Better Life? Leonardo DiCaprio ? J. Edgar? Jean Dujardin ? The Artist? Brad Pitt ? Moneyball Best Actress ? Michelle Williams ? My Week With Marilyn, she is going to clean up this awards season. Glenn Close ? Albert Nobbs? Viola Davis ? The Help? Meryl Streep ? The Iron Lady? Tilda Swinton ? We Need to Talk About Kevin [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RightCelebrity/~3/Kau9oAchmWg/

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St. Louis parade on Iraq War's end draws thousands

Participants in a parade to honor Iraq War veterans make their way along a downtown street Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012, in St. Louis. Thousands turned out to watch the first big welcome home parade in the U.S. since the last troops left Iraq in December. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Participants in a parade to honor Iraq War veterans make their way along a downtown street Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012, in St. Louis. Thousands turned out to watch the first big welcome home parade in the U.S. since the last troops left Iraq in December. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Stephanie King holds a picture of her uncle, Col. Stephen Scott who was killed in Iraq in 2008, as she prepares to participate in a parade to honor Iraq War veterans Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012, in St. Louis. Thousands turned out to watch the first big welcome home parade in the U.S. since the last troops left Iraq in December. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Marine Sgt. Alex Renner, 22, right, from Red Bud, Ill. shakes hands with well wishers during a parade to welcome home Iraq war veterans along Market Street Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012 in St. Louis.(AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Carson) EDWARDSVILLE INTELLIGENCER OUT; THE ALTON TELEGRAPH OUT

George Fernau, left, from Florissant, Mo., gives a hug to Iraq war vet Bobby Lisek, from Clever, Mo., as he marches along Market Street Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012 in St. Louis. Lisek, a former sergeant in the Army, was wounded in a IED attack in Baghdad on September 11, 2004. (AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Carson) EDWARDSVILLE INTELLIGENCER OUT; THE ALTON TELEGRAPH OUT

A parade to honor Iraq war veterans makes its way west on Market Street Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012 in St. Louis.(AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Carson) EDWARDSVILLE INTELLIGENCER OUT; THE ALTON TELEGRAPH OUT

ST. LOUIS (AP) ? Looking around at the tens of thousands of people waving American flags and cheering, Army Maj. Rich Radford was moved that so many braved a cold January wind Saturday in St. Louis to honor people like him: Iraq War veterans.

The parade, borne out of a simple conversation between two St. Louis friends a month ago, was the nation's first big welcome-home for veterans of the war since the last troops were withdrawn from Iraq in December.

"It's not necessarily overdue, it's just the right thing," said Radford, a 23-year Army veteran who walked in the parade alongside his 8-year-old daughter, Aimee, and 12-year-old son, Warren.

Radford was among about 600 veterans, many dressed in camouflage, who walked along downtown streets lined with rows of people clapping and holding signs with messages including "Welcome Home" and "Thanks to our Service Men and Women." Some of the war-tested troops wiped away tears as they acknowledged the support from a crowd that organizers estimated reached 100,000 people.

Fire trucks with aerial ladders hoisted huge American flags in three different places along the route, with politicians, marching bands ? even the Budweiser Clydesdales ? joining in. But the large crowd was clearly there to salute men and women in the military, and people cheered wildly as groups of veterans walked by.

That was the hope of organizers Craig Schneider and Tom Appelbaum. Neither man has served in the military but came up with the idea after noticing there had been little fanfare for returning Iraq War veterans aside from gatherings at airports and military bases. No ticker-tape parades or large public celebrations.

Appelbaum, an attorney, and Schneider, a school district technical coordinator, decided something needed to be done. So they sought donations, launched a Facebook page, met with the mayor and mapped a route. The grassroots effort resulted in a huge turnout despite raising only about $35,000 and limited marketing.

That marketing included using a photo of Radford being welcomed home from his second tour in Iraq by his then-6-year-old daughter. The girl had reached up, grabbed his hand and said, "I missed you, daddy." Radford's sister caught the moment with her cellphone camera, and the image graced T-shirts and posters for the parade.

Veterans came from around the country, and more than 100 entries ? including marching bands, motorcycle groups and military units ? signed up ahead of the event, Appelbaum said.

Schneider said he was amazed how everyone, from city officials to military organizations to the media, embraced the parade.

"It was an idea that nobody said no to," he said. "America was ready for this."

All that effort by her hometown was especially touching for Gayla Gibson, a 38-year-old Air Force master sergeant who said she spent four months in Iraq ? seeing "amputations, broken bones, severe burns from IEDs" ? as a medical technician in 2003.

"I think it's great when people come out to support those who gave their lives and put their lives on the line for this country," Gibson said.

With 91,000 troops still fighting in Afghanistan, many Iraq veterans could be redeployed ? suggesting to some that it's premature to celebrate their homecoming. In New York, for example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said there would be no city parade for Iraq War veterans in the foreseeable future because of objections voiced by military officials.

But in St. Louis, there was clearly a mood to thank the troops with something big, even among those opposed to the war.

"Most of us were not in favor of the war in Iraq, but the soldiers who fought did the right thing and we support them," said 72-year-old Susan Cunningham, who attended the parade with the Missouri Progressive Action Group. "I'm glad the war is over and I'm glad they're home."

Don Lange, 60, of nearby Sullivan, held his granddaughter along the parade route. His daughter was a military interrogator in Iraq.

"This is something everyplace should do," Lange said as he watched the parade.

Several veterans of the Vietnam War turned out to show support for the younger troops. Among them was Don Jackson, 63, of Edwardsville, Ill., who said he was thrilled to see the parade honoring Iraq War veterans like his son, Kevin, who joined him at the parade. The 33-year-old Air Force staff sergeant said he'd lost track of how many times he had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a flying mechanic.

"I hope this snowballs," he said of the parade. "I hope it goes all across the country. I only wish my friends who I served with were here to see this."

Looking at all the people around him in camouflage, 29-year-old veteran Matt Wood said he felt honored. He served a year in Iraq with the Illinois National Guard.

"It's extremely humbling, it's amazing, to be part of something like this with all of these people who served their country with such honor," he said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-01-29-Iraq%20War-Parade/id-155b00f1299e47098fb5ffb659ba4812

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Snoop Dogg Offers Really NSFW Advice to Kris Humphries

Snoop Dogg does not believe Kim Kardashian is the marrying type.

That's the PC, G-rated version of the following video, condensed into a single, far less funny sentence than what this rapper randomly goes off about in a new message for Kris Humphries.

"The first advice is, you dumb ass n-gga, you shouldn't have tried to wife the b-tch," Snoop says below. "She gets around, man. Did you see when Reggie took the b-tch to Africa? She was looking at the Africans cause they had bigger d-cks than his... She's cold-blooded.."

Man, Dogg. Kris could have used these words of wisdom months ago. Watch for yourselves, readers, and see what else has to say about Kim Kardashian:

Snoop Dogg Slams Kim Kardashian

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/01/snoop-dogg-offers-really-nsfw-advice-to-kris-humphries/

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Deep Life

Forget E.T. It?s time to meet the intraterrestrials.

They too are alien, appearing in bizarre forms and eluding scientists? search efforts. But instead of residing out in space, these aliens inhabit a dark subterranean realm, munching and cycling energy deep inside the Earth.

Most intraterrestrials live beneath the bottom of the ocean, in an unseen biosphere that is a melting pot of odd organisms, a sort of Deep Space Nine for microbes. Many make their homes in the tens of meters of mud just beneath the seafloor. Others slither deeper, along fractures into solid rock hundreds of meters down.

Scientists are just beginning to probe this undersea world. In the middle of the South Pacific, oceanographers have discovered how bacteria survive in nutrient-poor, suffocating sediment. Off the coast of Washington state, other researchers have watched microbes creep into and colonize a borehole 280 meters below the seafloor, flushed by water circulating through the ocean crust. And near the underwater mountain ridge that marks the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, scientists have yanked up organisms that may be unlike any known sub-seafloor residents.

Such discoveries are helping biologists piece together a picture of a deep, seething ecosystem. Knowing how this world arose, researchers say, will help them understand more about the origin of life on Earth. One day intraterrestrials could even tell scientists more about extraterrestrials, by helping sketch out the extremes under which life can not only survive but even thrive.

Oceanic desert

Considering that oceans cover most of the planet, it?s a no-brainer to try to figure out what?s living in the mud and rock beneath them. ?It?s really the most massive potential habitat on Earth,? says microbiologist Beth Orcutt of Aarhus University in Denmark.

By some estimates, as much as one-third of the planet?s biomass ? the sheer weight of all its living organisms ? is buried beneath the ocean floor. Many of these bacteria and other microbes survive on food that drifts down from above, such as the remains of plankton that once blossomed in the sunlight of the ocean?s upper reaches.

These hardy microbes manage to eke out an existence even where it shouldn?t be possible. In the middle of the South Pacific, for instance, lies an oceanic vortex where water circulates in a huge eddy, or gyre, twice the size of North America. Because the gyre is so far from any landmasses ? from which nutrients wash off and help spur plankton growth and other ocean productivity ? it is essentially a giant oceanic desert, says Steven D?Hondt of the University of Rhode Island?s oceanography school in Narragansett.

In some places in the gyre, seafloor mud builds up as slowly as eight centimeters per million years. That means if you wanted to plant a tulip bulb at the usual gardener?s depth of about 16 centimeters, D?Hondt says, you?d be digging into mud that is 2 million years old.

Such low-productivity regions in the centers of oceans are far more common than nutrient-rich coastal zones, but scientists don?t often visit the deserts because they are hard to get to. In the autumn of 2010, though, D?Hondt led a cruise to the South Pacific Gyre that drilled into the dull seafloor mud and pulled up cores. ?We wanted to see what life was like in sediment in the deadest part of the ocean,? he says.

Among other things, the scientists discovered how microbes in the mud might cope. In other areas of the ocean, where more nutrients fall to the seafloor, oxygen is found only in the uppermost centimeter or two of mud; any deeper than that and it gets eaten up. But in the South Pacific Gyre, D?Hondt?s team found that oxygen penetrates all the way through the seafloor cores, up to 80 meters of sediment. To the scientists, this finding suggests that these mud microbes breathe very slowly and so don?t use up all the available oxygen. ?That violates standard expectations,? says D?Hondt, ?but until we went out there and drilled, nobody knew.?

Another possibility is that the microbes have a separate, unusual source of energy: natural radioactivity. Radioactive decay of elements in the underlying mud and rocks bombards the water with particles that can split H2O into hydrogen and oxygen, a process known as radiolysis. Microbes can then consume those elements, sustaining themselves over time with a near-endless supply of food. ?That?s the most exotic interpretation,? D?Hondt says, ?that we have an ecosystem living off of natural radioactivity that is splitting water molecules apart.?

Easy access

Thousands of miles north and east of drilling sites in the South Pacific Gyre, other scientists are exploring a very different alien realm in the Juan de Fuca Ridge, an underwater mountain range marking the convergence of several great plates of Earth?s crust. Juan de Fuca is one of those coastal areas getting plenty of nutrients from nearby British Columbia and Washington state, and scientists can get there relatively quickly.

As a result, the Juan de Fuca area may be the world?s best-instrumented seafloor. A network of observatories sprawls across the ocean bottom; in one spot, six borehole monitoring stations lie within about 2.5 kilometers of each other. One of the stations is hooked up to the shore via underwater cables, so that scientists sitting at their desks can track the data in real time. ?We can do active experiments there that we can?t do anywhere else in the ocean,? says Andrew Fisher, a hydrogeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who helped set up much of the instrumentation.

Many of the stations are observatories known as CORKs, a tortured acronym for ?circulation obviation retrofit kit,? which essentially means a deep hole in the seafloor plugged at the top to keep seawater out. Researchers lower a string of instruments into the hole, then come back several years later to retrieve them. Data from CORKs can reveal what organisms live at what depths within the borehole, as well as how microbial populations change over time.

CORKs are technically challenging to install, but sometimes glitches can yield unexpected discoveries. At one Juan de Fuca site, researchers tucked experiments down a hole in 2004. After retrieving rock chips that had dangled in the hole for four years, the team saw twisted stalks that looked like rust coating the surfaces. It turned out that the CORK hadn?t been properly sealed, and iron-oxidizing bacteria leaked in along with seawater.

Those bacteria initially colonized the borehole and built up the stalks, thriving on the cold and oxygen-rich conditions carried in by the seawater. But over the next few years the borehole began to warm up, thanks to volcanic heat percolating from below. Water from within the surrounding ocean crust began to rise and push out the seawater, reversing the flow within the hole. The iron-loving bacteria died and other types of organisms began to appear: bacteria known as firmicutes, which are found in similarly exotic environments such as the Arctic Ocean?s bottom. ?For us that?s a really interesting finding and a kind of nice serendipitous experiment,? says Orcutt, who published the work with her colleagues last year in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal.

Research at Juan de Fuca also shows how water flushes through the ocean crust, offering clues to the best places to look for microbes. People tend to think of water sitting on top of the seafloor, says Fisher, but in fact water zips through undersea rocks ? cycling the equivalent of the ocean?s entire volume through the crust every half-million years or so.

At Juan de Fuca, Fisher and colleagues have spotted two underwater volcanoes, about 50 kilometers apart, that help explain how such high rates of flow might happen. CORK observations reveal that water flows into one of the mountains and flushes out the other. ?This is the first place anywhere on the seafloor where researchers have been able to put their finger on a map and say ?the water goes in here and out here,? ? Fisher says.

Those two volcanoes are arranged along a north-south line that tends to control much of the undersea activity at Juan de Fuca, he says. Most of the fractures in the ocean crust here run north to south, making that the probable direction in which microbes also move. The cracks serve as a sort of microbial superhighway, allowing the microbes to flow along easily, carried by water. Scientists looking for more sub-seafloor microbes might want to also focus on these areas, Fisher says: ?You?ll see very different populations along the superhighways than along the back roads.?

Pond swimmers

Far from being monolithic, the seafloor is home to a surprising range of different environments. One new target, much different from Juan de Fuca or the South Pacific Gyre, is a spot in the mid-Atlantic known as North Pond. Geologists have studied this place, at 22 degrees north of the equator, since the 1970s for what it can reveal about the processes that form young crust at mid-ocean ridges. Now microbiologists are also targeting North Pond for what it can say about deep life.

The ?pond? of North Pond is a pile of undersea mud, cradled against the side of tall jagged mountains. It lies about five kilometers from where seafloor crust is actively being born; all that violent geologic activity pushes water quickly through the mud and rocks and out into the ocean above. Compared with Juan de Fuca, the water at North Pond is much cooler ? roughly 10? Celsius, as opposed to 60? C to 70? C ? but flows much faster. ?Nature finds a balance between temperature and flow,? says Fisher.

He and his colleagues, led by Katrina Edwards of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Wolfgang Bach of the University of Bremen in Germany, spent 10 weeks at North Pond last autumn. They installed two new CORKs, up to 330 meters deep, and pulled up samples of rock and water to test for any microbes that might be living there. The scientists also tucked long dangling strings of rock chips into the holes and plan to return in the years ahead to see what organisms might appear. ?It was a great success,? says Edwards. ?We set ourselves up for a good decade?s worth of work out at North Pond.?

For now, it?s up to microbiologists back on land to make sense of what?s there. Researchers are just starting to culture the slow-growing microbes pulled up at North Pond, but already they suspect they?ll find surprises.

Overall, studies at different locales reveal that deep-sea microbes are far more diverse than scientists had thought even a decade ago, says micro?biologist Jennifer Biddle of the University of Delaware in Newark. Rather than just a couple of broad classes, researchers have found a rich diversity of bacteria along with archaea ? other single-celled organisms with an older evolutionary history ? plus fungi, viruses and more. ?We were shocked it was so complicated,? says Biddle. ?We thought there was maybe five Bunsens and 10 Beakers, and it turns out there?s the entire cast of the Muppets in there.?

By comparing microbes from different seafloor sites, Biddle has found surprisingly high amounts of archaea compared with bacteria in some places. She thinks that archaea may be thriving on organic matter in seafloor mud, so nutrient-rich coasts have more archaea than sediments in the middle of the ocean. ?The jury?s still out on that one,? she says.

A new project known as the Census of Deep Life will help Biddle and others analyze and compare more of the sub-seafloor microbes. The census could take as long as a decade; the idea is to find overarching rules ? if they exist ? that describe where and how organisms thrive in the seafloor. ?Right now you can get some idea of that by looking at the sorts of energy sources that are present in the subsurface,? says census leader Rick Colwell, a microbiologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. ?But do fractures in various subsurface environments, worldwide, contain certain types of microorganisms consistently??

Plenty of data should be forthcoming. ?We?re not suffering from a lack of things to do,? Orcutt says. Edwards and her team plan to return to North Pond in April to retrieve their first set of instruments. Fisher will go back to Juan de Fuca next summer, in what may be a final visit before turning his attention elsewhere. Next on his wish list: a site off Costa Rica where water flows through the crust some thousands of times faster than at Juan de Fuca.

One day, analyzing the deep biosphere may help NASA and other space agencies in their hunt for life elsewhere in the solar system. At North Pond, expedition scientists have tested out a new tool that, once lowered into a borehole, illuminates the hole?s walls using ultraviolet light. Because living cells turn fluorescent at specific wavelengths, the light can be used to spot films of organic matter coating the hole. This probe, or some elaboration on it, could end up flying on future space missions. And then the intraterrestrials could help scientists find extraterrestrials.

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/337918/title/Deep_Life

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Let's Play 'History As A List'

A bunch of you have sent me this list. It comes from Drew Breunig, a New Yorker who apparently works in the computer business, in advertising.

It's a short history of "Frontiers" ? territories that he says have challenged humans over the centuries, arranged in roughly chronological order. Drew calls it "Frontiers Through The Ages."

• Water, 1400
• Land, 1840
• Gold, 1850
• Wire, 1880
• Air, 1900
• Celluloid, 1920
• Plastic, 1950
• Space, 1960
• Silicon, 1980
• Networks, 1990
• Data, 2000

I know, I know, it's much too American and very arbitrary (Christopher Columbus didn't exactly "open" the oceans for exploration; Egyptian sailors, Minoans, Phoenicians did that, and much earlier), but still, Drew is playing a game here that's fun, if you keep at it.

?

Suppose I wanted to think about power, how sources of power have multiplied over time. I could write a list like this:

• gravity
• muscle
• horses
• wind
• steam
• internal combustion
• oil
• gas
• nuclear

With each new chapter, we get more power, plus more risk . Not a bad trade off, almost like a formula for what we call "progress." But not always. There are some lists I can imagine that don't flatter us at all. My friend the mathematician Steven Strogatz, a music lover, sent me this: it's a small idea, but faithfully chronological...

• vinyl
• 8-track
• cassette
• CD
• iTunes

"Pretty uneven progress there!" he says.

We could make lists that, viewed a certain way, would be very depressing. This "list," found all over the Internet and attributed to "Anonymous," says a lot about our notion of "progress:"

But the more you do this exercise, the more you will find a consistent pattern that peeps through, says Kevin Kelly, first editor of Wired Magazine. Notice, he says, in many of these lists ? including Breunig's ? "there is decreasing mass in it. It gets lighter as it goes along, from Gold to Data."

Indeed.

Here's a similar list:

• stone
• bronze
• iron
• plastic
• bits

And another:

• blood
• chromosomes
• genes
• DNA

This, said Peter Drucker, the business guru from Claremont College, is the real story of human innovation, that over the eons we seem to move from heavy to light, from thick to fine, from muscle to thought.

The first chair, he once said, was probably a tree stump, created by a guy (or gal) who had to hack and hack or push a load of lumber to the ground. The work was, he imagined, sweaty and very physical.

A modern chair, on the other hand, comes from people who sit in studios with pencils or computers, fashioning in their heads while the muscle part, the manufacture, is probably done by cleverly designed robots, using materials created in laboratories. In other words, a modern chair is mostly thought, barely muscle.

I think there's a prediction, a foretelling, in all this. In his new book of essays, the science fiction writer William Gibson considers how our new communication networks look more and more like the superfine, delicate wirings of a mind...

"...the texture of these more recent technologies, the grain of them, becomes progressively finer, progressively more divorced from Newtonian mechanics. In terms of scale, they are more akin to the workings of the brain itself...the ongoing manifestation of some very ancient and extraordinary weirdness; our gradual spinning of a sort of extended prosthetic mass nervous-system..."

Wouldn't that be nice? If we big galumphing mammals drop our axes, trade our stones and heavy tools for highways made of dancing filaments of light that connect us, move us, do our bidding, making our cities, factories, vehicles lighter and lighter and lighter? We'd work in our heads, have the rest of the day for play, and live like lords and ladies. Sounds like a dream, at least till the newest edition of Stalin or Hitler figures out how to slip into that network and turn out all those lights.

And, by the way, those bad guys? They keep showing up.

• Cain
• Caligula
• Attila the Hun
• Ghenghis Khan
• Vlad the Impaler
• Robespierre
• Stalin
• Hitler
• Pol Pot

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/01/25/145854740/lets-play-history-as-a-list?ft=1&f=1007

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Euro ministers upbeat on Greece, crisis solution (Reuters)

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) ? Euro zone finance officials voiced optimism on Friday that a deal to avert a disorderly Greek default was imminent and that key building blocks to resolve Europe's sovereign debt crisis are gradually fitting into place.

Europe's top economic official said an agreement between the Greek government and its private creditors on voluntary losses for bondholders would be complete within days and the euro zone was making progress on strengthening its financial firewalls.

"We are very close to a deal, if not today then over the weekend and preferably in January, not February. We are very close," European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The euro strengthened against the dollar and safe haven German bond futures fell back after Rehn's comments. Italy's six-month borrowing costs fell below 2 percent at an auction, their lowest since May, in another sign of easing bond market tensions.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, speaking on the same panel as Rehn, said crafting a new rescue package for Greece was not easy because of past slippage in its performance, but it would be done in the coming days.

"We don't expect a default in Greece," he said. However, he cautioned that Athens would have to meet commitments to economic and fiscal reform that it had not delivered over the past two years and warned against giving Greece the wrong incentives.

The emerging private sector bond swap deal seems set to leave a funding gap of 12-15 billion euros to bring Greece's debt down to a level of 120 percent of annual output regarded by the IMF as sustainable, EU officials say.

Rehn and Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the 17 euro area finance ministers, have both said European governments and institutions may have to increase their support for Greece to make up the difference.

Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said the European Central Bank should not have to take a writedown on its holdings of Greek government bonds, bought at a discount to calm bond markets, since that could impair its monetary policy.

The ECB's governing council is debating whether and how to contribute to a package for Greece and has not yet taken a decision. ECB sources said the bank opposes taking a haircut to avoid financing governments or setting a bad precedent, but many council members wanted to find a way to avoid making a profit on holding the bonds to maturity when others were taking losses.

MORE FIREPOWER

Rehn said leaders of the 17-nation currency area would decide in the coming weeks whether to combine a temporary rescue fund for countries in difficulty with a new permanent bailout fund to give Europe more financial firepower.

By combining the 250 billion euros left in the temporary European Financial Stability Facility, a planned 500 billion euros of the permanent European Stability Mechanism and an additional 500 billion euros sought by the International Monetary Fund, "you can calculate in which ballpark we are talking."

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, speaking to reporters in Davos, kept up pressure on the Europeans to boost their financial firewalls after making a strong plea in Berlin on Monday.

There were "big worries" around the world about what the euro zone would do going forward, she said.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner praised a series of steps the euro zone was taking to overcome the crisis but warned of the risk of austerity fuelling a recessionary spiral and said Europe needed a bigger firewall to avert future crises.

"I think the Europeans recognize that the unfinished piece in that framework is building a stronger and more effective firewall," he said at another Davos session.

The United States, China and other major non-European economies have said the euro zone should commit more of its own money to crisis management before any increase in the IMF's fire-fighting resources.

If European countries committed to a more effective firewall, Geithner said he expected other economies in the IMF to act to support those efforts. Rehn said he hoped for progress at next month's G20 finance ministers' meeting in Mexico.

European ministers praised the ECB for flooding European banks with cheap, three-year liquidity last month to avert a looming credit crunch.

ECB lending had relieved pressure on euro zone banks and governments, but there is still much to do to spur growth, they said.

"The unlimited liquidity provided by the ECB's three-year LTRO has reduced pressure on European banks and will help confidence to return ... Now we have to think together about how we can support growth," French Economy Minister Francois Baroin said.

Baroin and De Guindos both said that in the longer term, the euro zone should issue joint bonds on behalf of its governments, once fiscal discipline had been more strictly enforced and gaps in member states' economic competitiveness narrowed.

(Writing by Paul Taylor, editing by Mike Peacock and Jon Boyle)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/eurobiz/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120127/bs_nm/us_eurozone_davos

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HTC to Stop Making So Many Goddamn Phones [Htc]

HTC has a problem. It realizes it's addicted to new phones. And if HTC's execs make good on recent words, we may no longer be drowning in a torrent of the company's new models every other week. Effing finally. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/3yH1AbU2hWs/htc-to-stop-making-so-many-goddamn-phones

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Guidewire jumps 38 percent in stock market debut (AP)

SAN MATEO, Calif. ? Guidewire Software quickly found a following in its stock market debut Wednesday.

The insurance software maker's stock jumped to $18 within their first few hours of trading, a 38 percent gain from the initial public offering price of $13.

Guide Software Inc. sold 8.85 million shares in the IPO. The offering raised $115 million, before expenses.

The 11-year-old company is based in San Mateo, Calif. and employs about 200 people. It specializes in software that helps insurers analyze risks and manage claims.

After a history of early losses, Guide Software turned a profit in each of the last two fiscal years. It earned $36 million on revenue of $172 million in the year ending last July.

The stock trades under the ticker symbol GWRE.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/software/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120125/ap_on_bi_ge/us_guidewire_software_ipo

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Symantec tells customers to disable pcAnywhere (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? Symantec Corp took the rare step of advising customers to stop using one of its products, saying its pcAnywhere software for accessing remote PCs is at increased risk of getting hacked after blueprints of that software were stolen.

The announcement is the company's most direct acknowledgement to date that a 2006 theft of its source code put customers at risk of attack.

Symantec said it was only asking customers to temporarily stop using the product, until it releases an update to the software that will mitigate the risk of an attack.

It acknowledged that some customers would need to continue using the software for "business critical purposes," saying they should make sure they were using the most recent version of the product and "understand the current risks," which include the possibility that hackers could steal data or credentials.

Still, it is highly unusual for a software maker to advise customers to disable a product completely while engineers develop an update to fix bugs. Companies typically recommend mitigating factors that will reduce the risk of an attack.

"That's crazy. That's pretty much unheard of to just say 'Stop using it.' Especially a vendor as large as Symantec," said H.D. Moore, chief architect of Metasploit, a platform that security experts use to test whether computer systems are vulnerable to attack.

PcAnywhere is a software program that is also bundled with some titles in Symantec's Altiris line of software for managing corporate PCs, Symantec said in a white paper and note to customers released on its website overnight where it disclosed the warning.

Company spokesman Cris Paden said that Symantec has fewer than 50,000 customers using the stand-alone version of pcAnywhere, which was available for sale on its website for $100 and $200 as of early Wednesday afternoon.

The company last week warned customers of the 2006 theft of the source code, or blueprints, to pcAnywhere and several other titles: Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security, Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack.

It made the announcement after a hacker who goes by the name YamaTough released the source code to its Norton Utilities PC software and had threatened to publish its widely used anti-virus programs. Authorities have yet to apprehend that hacker.

At the time, Paden said that the theft of the code posed no threat as long as customers were using the most recent versions of Symantec's software, with one exception: users of pcAnywhere might face "a slightly increased security risk."

In the white paper published early on Wednesday morning, the company indicated the situation was more serious.

"At this time, Symantec recommends disabling the product until Symantec releases a final set of software updates that resolve currently known vulnerability risks," it said in the white paper. (http://bit.ly/wPzX7v)

The company also reiterated its previous guidance that users of its other software titles were not at heightened risk because of the breach in 2006.

"The code that has been exposed is so old that current out-of-the-box security settings will suffice against any possible threats that might materialize as a result of this incident," it said on its website. (http://bit.ly/wqtxTI)

(Reporting By Jim Finkle in Boston, editing by Matthew Lewis)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/software/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120125/wr_nm/us_symantec_hacking

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Lifelong brain-stimulating habits linked to lower Alzheimer's protein levels

ScienceDaily (Jan. 23, 2012) ? A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, provides even more reason for people to read a book or do a puzzle, and to make such activities a lifetime habit.

Brain scans revealed that people with no symptoms of Alzheimer's who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein that is the hallmark of the disease.

While previous research has suggested that engaging in mentally stimulating activities -- such as reading, writing and playing games -- may help stave off Alzheimer's later in life, this new study identifies the biological target at play. This discovery could guide future research into effective prevention strategies.

"These findings point to a new way of thinking about how cognitive engagement throughout life affects the brain," said study principal investigator Dr. William Jagust, a professor with joint appointments at UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, the School of Public Health and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Rather than simply providing resistance to Alzheimer's, brain-stimulating activities may affect a primary pathological process in the disease. This suggests that cognitive therapies could have significant disease-modifying treatment benefits if applied early enough, before symptoms appear."

An estimated 5.4 million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease, but the numbers are growing as baby boomers age. Between 2000 and 2008, deaths from Alzheimer's increased 66 percent, making it the sixth-leading killer in the country. There is currently no cure, but a draft of the first-ever National Alzheimer's Plan, released this week, revealed that the U.S. government is aiming for effective Alzheimer's treatments by 2025.

The new study, published Jan. 23 in the Archives of Neurology, puts the spotlight on amyloid -- protein fibers folded into tangled plaques that accumulate in the brain. Beta-amyloid is considered the top suspect in the pathology of Alzheimer's disease, so finding a way to reduce its development has become a major new direction of research.

The researchers note that the buildup of amyloid can also be influenced by genes and aging -- one-third of people age 60 and over have some amyloid deposits in their brain -- but how much reading and writing one does is under each individual's control.

"This is the first time cognitive activity level has been related to amyloid buildup in the brain," said study lead author Susan Landau, research scientist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the Berkeley Lab. "Amyloid probably starts accumulating many years before symptoms appear. So it's possible that by the time you have symptoms of Alzheimer's, like memory problems, there is little that can be done to stop disease progression. The time for intervention may be much sooner, which is why we're trying to identify whether lifestyle factors might be related to the earliest possible changes."

The researchers asked 65 healthy, cognitively normal adults aged 60 and over (average age was 76) to rate how frequently they participated in such mentally engaging activities as going to the library, reading books or newspapers, and writing letters or email. The questions focused on various points in life from age 6 to the present.

The participants took part in extensive neuropsychological testing to assess memory and other cognitive functions, and received positron emission tomography (PET) scans at the Berkeley Lab using a new tracer called Pittsburgh Compound B that was developed to visualize amyloid. The results of the brain scans of healthy older individuals with various levels of lifetime cognitive activity were compared with those of 10 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and 11 healthy people in their 20s.

The researchers found a significant association between higher levels of cognitive activity over a lifetime and lower levels of beta-amyloid in the PET scans. They analyzed the impact of other factors such as memory function, physical activity, self-rated memory ability, level of education and gender, and found that lifelong cognitive engagement was independently linked to amyloid deposition.

Notably, the researchers did not find a strong connection between amyloid deposition and levels of current cognitive activity alone.

"What our data suggests is that a whole lifetime of engaging in these activities has a bigger effect than being cognitively active just in older age," said Landau.

The researchers are careful to point out that the study does not negate the benefits of kicking up brain activity in later years.

"There is no downside to cognitive activity. It can only be beneficial, even if for reasons other than reducing amyloid in the brain, including social stimulation and empowerment," said Jagust. "And actually, cognitive activity late in life may well turn out to be beneficial for reducing amyloid. We just haven't found that connection yet."

Other study authors include researchers from UC San Francisco's Memory and Aging Center and Department of Neurology, and Rush University Medical Center's Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago.

The National Institutes of Health and the Alzheimer's Association helped support this research.

Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
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---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Berkeley. The original article was written by Sarah Yang.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Susan M. Landau; Shawn M. Marks; Elizabeth C. Mormino; Gil D. Rabinovici; Hwamee Oh; James P. O?Neil; Robert S. Wilson; William J. Jagust. Association of Lifetime Cognitive Engagement and Low ?-Amyloid Deposition. Archives of Neurology, 2012; DOI: 10.1001/archneurol.2011.2748

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/~3/6h4ypt2Ziuc/120123163348.htm

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Trash Talkin? Tuesday

Trash Talkin’ Tuesday

Things to Know About Those Born in the Year of the Dragon [The Frisky] Hilary Duff Working on New Album? [HollyWire] Kevin Federline Rushed to [...]

Trash Talkin’ Tuesday Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/stupidcelebrities/~3/10eTYI85Nl0/

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Vital Signs: Accident Risk Seen for Pedestrians Wearing Headphones

[unable to retrieve full-text content]A study suggests a possible association between listening to music through headphones and being hit by a vehicle.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6021ab6f7dae5fa26889523f534c8069

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Republican Debate: GOP Candidates Face Off Ahead Of Florida Primary (LIVE UPDATES)

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich tangled Monday night over whether the former House speaker engaged in "influence peddling," was a citizen publicly advocating for a certain position, or a "consultant" skirting lobbying disclosure rules.

Romney charged Gingrich with effectively lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac, despite not having registered. Gingrich responded with a telling admission: That he hired lobbying disclosure experts study the regulations and advise him of what he could and couldn't do in order to legally avoid registering as a lobbyist. The reason he didn't want to register, he said, was to avoid being accused later of influence peddling.

"I think it's pretty clear to say that i have never, ever gone and done any lobbying. In fact, we brought in an expert on lobbying law and trained all of our staff -- and the expert is prepared to testify that he was brought in to say, here is the bright line between what you can do as a citizen and what you do as a lobbyist. For 12 years consistently running four small businesses, we stayed away from lobbying precisely because I thought this kind of defamatory and factually false charge would be made," said Gingrich.

Gingrich had previously claimed that Freddie Mac hired him as a "historian," but he may be the first historian in history to have hired a consultant to make sure his historical work didn't accidentally drift into the legal definition of lobbying.

The Gingrich campaign quickly blasted out a release calling the candidate a "small businessman," but few small businessmen would see the need to hire such a consultant, either.

The conversation quickly moved past Gingrich's admission, however.

"What's the gross revenue of Bain in the years you were associated with it? What's the gross revenue?" Gingrich asked Romney.

"Very substantial. But I think it's irrelevant compared with the fact you were working for Freddie Mac," he said.

"Wait a minute. Very substantial? Does Bain do any work with companies that did work ... with Medicare, Medicaid?" Gingrich challenged.

Romney categorically denied it. "We didn't do any work with the government. I didn't have an office on K Street. I wasn't a lobbyist. I've never worked in Washington. We have congressman who say you lobbied them," he said.

"I didn't lobby them," Gingrich said.

"We have congressmen who say you lobbied them with regard to Medicare Part D," Romney followed up.

"Whoa, whoa. You just jumped a long way over here, friend," Gingrich said, becoming agitated that the conversation moved from Freddie Mac to Medicare. Gingrich paused for an uncomfortably long time before delivering a stemwinder.

"Let me be very clear," he said, "because I understand your technique which you used on [John] McCain, you used on [Mike] Huckabee. You have used consistently. It's unfortunate and it's not going to work well because the American people see through it. I have always publicly favored a stronger Medicare program. I wrote a book in 2002 called 'Saving Lives and Saving Money.' I publicly favored Medicare Part D for a practical reason. That reason is simple. The U.S. government was not prepared to give people anything -- insulin, for example -- but they would pay for kidney dialysis. They weren't prepared to give Lipitor, but they would pay for open heart surgery. That is a terrible way to run Medicare. I'll say this in Florida. I'm proud that I publicly advocated Medicare Part D. It saved lives. It's run on a free enterprise model, includes health savings accounts and includes Medicare alternatives which gave people choices. And I did it publically and it is not correct, Mitt. I'm saying it flatly because you have been walking around this state saying things that are untrue. It is not correct to describe public citizenship having public advocacy as lobbying. Every citizen has the right to do it."

-- Ryan Grim

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/republican-debate-gop-debate_n_1224273.html

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Roundup: Bayern falls to 'Gladbach in Bundesliga

/

updated 6:29 p.m. ET Jan. 20, 2012

BERLIN - Marco Reus scored one goal and set up another as Borussia Moenchengladbach defeated first-place Bayern Munich 3-1 Friday night when the Bundesliga resumed after its winter break.

Reus capitalized on a blunder by Manuel Neuer in the 11th minute, scoring from 30 yards following the goalkeeper's poor clearance. Patrick Herrmann made it 2-0 in the 41st and added another goal in the 71st after being set up by Reus.

Bastian Schweinsteiger, back after recovering from a broken collarbone, scored for visiting Bayern in the 76th. Bayern defender Daniel van Buyten left around the same time with a suspected broken foot.

Moenchengladbach (11-4-3), which swept both league matches from Bayern for the first time since 1995-96, has 36 points, one fewer than Bayern (12-5-1). Borussia Dortmund and Schalke would match Bayern's 37 points with victories this weekend. Schalke hosts Stuttgart on Saturday and Dortmund is at Hamburg on Sunday.

___

LE MANS, France (AP) ? Brazilian winger Nene and striker Kevin Gameiro scored two goals each as Paris Saint-Germain beat the amateur team Sable-sur-Sarthe 4-0 to reach the last 16 of the French Cup.

Sable, which plays four divisions below PSG, started brightly but struggled after Nene put PSG ahead with a penalty kick in the 36th minute.

Winger Jeremy Menez set up Gameiro for his first goal in the 65th, and Gameiro ran onto a through ball from Nene to make it 3-0 in the 73rd, his 12th goal of the season. Nene scored in injury time, but missed the chance for a hat trick in the last seconds.

PSG midfielder Javier Pastore limped off with a thigh injury in the first half.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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More newsChristian Hartmann / Reuters

Pele: Messi's not me

Pele thinks Lionel Messi still needs to improve at international level before he can be considered the greatest soccer player ever and needs to score more goals to come close to matching the Brazilian great.

Boris Streubel / Getty Images

Best of the US

Abby Wambach and Clint Dempsey are voted top players by the U.S. Soccer Federation.

Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/46076559/ns/sports-soccer/

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Greece hopes for debt relief deal `very soon' (AP)

ATHENS, Greece ? Greece is confident a debt relief deal with private creditors that is crucial to avoid default can be reached "very soon," a government spokesman said Friday.

Prime Minister Lucas Papademos met for a third day with negotiators from the Institute of International Finance, which represents the private creditors who are being asked to take a loss on their bond holdings to lighten Greece's debt load by euro100 billion ($129 billion).

"The atmosphere of the talks is good. They are continuing today and we hope they will be concluded very soon," government spokesman Pantelis Kapsis told private Radio 9. "This is very important for the sustainability of the national debt and our ability to handle the debt."

Papademos was joined by Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos at two separate meetings Friday with two top Institute of International Finance officials, Charles Dallara and Jean Lemierre.

The negotiations also were discussed via a teleconference with eurozone officials, Venizelos said.

An agreement is needed if Greece is to get the next batch of bailout cash to prevent a devastating debt default. Greece does not have enough money to cover a euro14.5 billion bond repayment in March.

The bond-swap deal is part of a second bailout agreed by eurozone countries, worth euro130 billion ($168 billion) in loans and support for banks.

Under the proposed deal, private creditors would cancel 50 percent of their Greek debt in exchange of a cash payment and new bonds with a longer maturity. But the negotiations stalled last week over a disagreement on the interest rate those new bonds would have.

The two sides are now considering a proposal to set an interest rate of below 4 percent that would gradually increase until 2020, according to European officials.

Louka Katseli, a minister in Greece's previous Socialist government, said the talks are being complicated by the involvement of a large number of parties with a stake in the debt deal.

"This does not only involve Greece and the creditors," Katseli told private Skai television.

Heavily involved behind the scenes are countries such as Germany, which is paying the bulk of Greece's rescue loans, and the IMF, which is also involved in the bailouts. In addition, there are the individual bond holders such as hedge funds which have bought Greek bonds but also hold default insurance, Katseli said.

Despite caution in European markets, shares on the Athens Stock Exchange rose 2.7 percent to 708.18 on Friday in anticipation of a deal.

"Certainly we will have an agreement, and the extent and all the details of this agreement will determine whether the markets will take this as a good signal or as a bad signal," Aggelos Tsakanikas, head of research at the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, told AP Television. "We have to reduce our debt. ... It's something that is very important for the Greek economy."

Also Friday, international debt inspectors arrived in Athens to assess whether Greece is doing enough to get more bailout cash.

Officials from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund met with Venizelos. They will scrutinize Greece's public finances to make sure it is on track with painful austerity reforms needed to keep tapping rescue loans.

Near-bankrupt Greece has been surviving on a euro110 billion ($142.02 billion) rescue loan program from European countries and the IMF since May 2010, but requires additional help to meet its funding needs.

__

AP business writer Gabriele Steinhauser in Brussels and AP Television's Nektina Efthymiou in Athens contributed.

(This version CORRECTS Corrects to 4th Ld-Writethru. Updates with creditors resuming talks, Greek stocks rising on anticipation of deal, comment from analyst. AP Video.)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/eurobiz/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120120/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_greece_financial_crisis

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LG X3 supposedly leaks, to challenge HTC Edge as first quad-core phone?

Your next tablet is going to rock a quad-core chip, so why not stuff that same silicon into your next phone too? Per PocketNow, that's apparently what LG has up its sleeve with the forthcoming X3. Evidently, the four-core Tegra 3 device will also tote a 1280 x 720 4.7-inch display, 16GB of storage, Ice Cream Sandwich and NFC all in a svelte 9mm package. The whispers didn't stop there, of course, indicating it'll also wield 21Mbps HSPA support coupled with 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0. So will the X3 be the world's first quad-core phone, much in the vein of LG's G2X that preceded it? Or will it be beaten to the punch by HTC and Samsung? Here's to hoping we'll find out at MWC.

LG X3 supposedly leaks, to challenge HTC Edge as first quad-core phone? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/20/lg-x3-supposedly-leaks-to-challenge-htc-edge-as-first-quad-core/

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