WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama is wishing a joyful Easter to those who celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama says the Easter and Passover holidays give millions of Christians, Jews and people of other faiths a chance to slow down and recommit themselves to loving their neighbors and seeing everyone as a child of God.
Jews celebrated Passover at sundown on Monday. Easter is Sunday.
In the Republican address, Rep. Terry Lee of Nebraska called for approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to bring oil from Canada's tar sands to Texas Gulf Coast refineries. Lee says the project would help create tens of thousands of jobs.
The Obama administration is considering whether to approve the project, which would run through Lee's home state.
I love my tiny little Mazda, but I'll be honest -- I still don't completely understand how it works. That's never really bothered me before (I'd much rather geek out over a phone or something) but a Kickstarter project from a small team in Boston has me itching to pay more attention to what's really going on under the hood. Long story short, Dash combines a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled dongle that plugs into your car's on-board diagnostics port with a smartphone app that gives you up-to-date information how on your car is holding up.
Mar. 29, 2013 ? Radar systems today depend increasingly on phased-array antennas, an advanced design in which extensive grids of solid state components direct signal beams electronically. Phased array technology is replacing traditional electro-mechanical radar antennas -- the familiar rotating dish that goes back many decades -- because stationary solid state electronics are faster, more precise and more reliable than moving mechanical parts.
Yet phased array antennas, which require bulky supporting electronics, can be as large as older systems. To address this issue, a research team from the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a novel device -- the ultra-compact passive true time delay. This component could help reduce the size, complexity, power requirements and cost of phased array designs, and may have applications in other defense and communication areas as well.
The patent-pending ultra-compact device takes advantage of the difference in speed between light and sound, explained Ryan Westafer, a Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) research engineer who is leading the effort. The ultra-compact device uses acoustic technology to produce a type of signal delay that's essential to phased-array performance; existing phased-array antennas use cumbersome electrical technology to create this type of signal delay.
"Most true time delay equipment currently uses long, meandering electromagnetic delay lines -- comparable to coaxial cable -- that take up a lot of space," Westafer said. "In addition, there are some time delay designs that utilize photonic technology, but they currently have size and functionality drawbacks as well."
The ultra-compact delay device uses acoustic delay lines that are embedded entirely within thin film materials. The component can be made thousands of times smaller than an electrical delay-line design, Westafer said, and it can be readily integrated on top of semiconductor substrates commonly used in radar systems.
A Critical Delay
In a phased array radar system, true time delays are necessary to assure proper performance of the many signal beam producing elements that make up the array. As the elements scan back and forth electronically at extremely high speeds, their timing requires extremely fine coordination.
"The individual antenna elements of a phased array appear to scan together, but in fact each element's signal has to leave up to a few nanoseconds later than its neighbor or the steered beam will be spoiled," explained Kyle Davis, a GTRI research engineer who is a team member. "These delays need to march down each element in the array in succession for a steered beam to be produced. Without correct time delays, the signals will be degraded by a periodic interference pattern and the location of the target will be unclear."
Traditional phased array systems use one foot of electrical delay line for each nanosecond of delay. By contrast, the Georgia Tech team's time-delay design consists of a thin-film acoustic component that's a mere 40 microns square. The tiny device can be readily integrated into the silicon substrate of a radar component, yet it provides the same delay as many feet of cable.
This size reduction is possible because of a simple fact of physics -- sound traveling through the air moves about 100,000 times more slowly than light. As a result, when an electromagnetic wave such as a radar signal becomes an acoustic wave, it slows down dramatically. In the case of the ultra-compact passive true time delay component, the acoustic area of the component furnishes a multi-nanosecond delay in the space of a few microns.
"Microwave acoustic delay lines actually date back to 1959, but our ultra-compact delay's small size represents a significant advance that should allow microwave acoustic delay lines to be manufactured and integrated much more readily," explained William Hunt, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "And it's worth noting that this innovative work took place as the result of both strong student participation and very effective collaboration across several Georgia Tech units."
Acoustic Wave Conversion
A phased array radar using the Georgia Tech time delay component could operate like this: An electromagnetic wave is transmitted through an electrical line to the compact time delay device. Then, within the delay device, a piezoelectric transducer converts electromagnetic waves to acoustic waves, and over the distance of a few microns the waves are slowed by several orders of magnitude.
Once the required delay is achieved, the acoustic waves are transduced back to electromagnetic waves, delivered into another electrical line and transmitted by an antenna. A similar but reverse sequence takes place when the radar beam bounces back from its target and is received by the antenna.
In addition to Westafer, Davis and Hunt, the Georgia Tech development team includes GTRI principal research engineers Jeff Hallman and Jim Maloney; GTRI research engineer Brent Tillery and GTRI research associate Chris Ward; School of Electrical and Computer Engineering student Stephen Mihalko, and GTRI student assistant Jonathan Perez.
To date, the Georgia Tech team has successfully demonstrated that the current version of the ultra-compact passive true time delay can handle radar signals at 100 percent bandwidth while delivering a 10 nanosecond delay. The team is presently addressing technical issues such as signal loss, and near-term plans call for the demonstration of an improved device design and the delivery of initial packaged devices to customers.
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Making do with more: Joint BioEnergy Institute researchers engineer plant cell walls to boost sugar yields for biofuelsPublic release date: 29-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Lynn Yarris lcyarris@lbl.gov 510-486-5375 DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
When blessed with a resource in overwhelming abundance it's generally a good idea to make valuable use of that resource. Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant organic material on Earth. For thousands of years it has been used as animal feed, and for the past two centuries has been a staple of the paper industry. This abundant resource, however, could also supply the sugars needed to produce advanced biofuels that can supplement or replace fossil fuels, providing several key technical challenges are met. One of these challenges is finding ways to more cost-effectively extract those sugars. Major steps towards achieving this breakthrough are being taken by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).
"Through the tools of synthetic biology, we have engineered healthy plants whose lignocellulosic biomass can more easily be broken down into simple sugars for biofuels," says Dominique Loque, who directs the cell wall engineering program for JBEI's Feedstocks Division. "Working with the model plant, Arabidopsis, as a demonstration tool, we have genetically manipulated secondary cell walls to reduce the production of lignin while increasing the yield of fuel sugars."
JBEI is a scientific partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) whose mission is to advance the development of next generation biofuels that can provide the nation with clean, green and renewable transportation energy that will create jobs and boost the economy. Loque and his research group have focused on reducing the natural recalcitrance of plant cell walls to give up their sugars. Unlike the simple starch-based sugars in corn and other grains, the complex polysaccharide sugars in plant cell walls are locked within a robust aromatic polymer called lignin. Setting these sugars free from their lignin cage has required the use of expensive and environmentally harsh chemicals at high temperatures, a process that helps drive production costs of advance biofuels prohibitively high.
"By embedding polysaccharide polymers and reducing their extractability and accessibility to hydrolytic enzymes, lignin is the major contributor to cell wall recalcitrance," Loque says. "Unfortunately, most efforts to reduce lignin content during plant development have resulted in severe biomass yield reduction and a loss of integrity in vessels, a key tissue responsible for water and nutrient distribution from roots to the above-ground organs."
Lignin has also long posed problems for pulping and animal feed. To overcome the lignin problem, Loque and his colleagues rewired the regulation of lignin biosynthesis and created an artificial positive feedback loop (APFL) to enhance secondary cell wall biosynthesis in specific tissue. The idea was to reduce cell wall recalcitrance and boost polysaccharide content without impacting plant development.
"When we applied our APFL to Arabidopsis plants engineered so that lignin biosynthesis is disconnected from the fiber secondary cell wall regulatory network, we maintained the integrity of the vessels and were able to produce healthy plants with reduced lignin and enhanced polysaccharide deposition in the cell walls," Loque says. "After various pretreatments, these engineered plants exhibited improved sugar releases from enzymatic hydrolysis as compared to wild type plants. In other words we accumulated the good stuff polysaccharides - without spoiling it with lignin."
Loque and his colleagues believe that the APFL strategy they used to enhance polysaccharide deposition in the fibers of their Arabidopsis plants could be rapidly implemented into other vascular plant species as well. This could increase cell wall content to the benefit of the pulping industry and forage production as well as for bioenergy applications. It could also be used to increase the strength of cereal straws, reducing crop lodging and seed losses. Since regulatory networks and other components of secondary cell wall biosynthesis have been highly conserved by evolution, the researchers feel their lignin rewiring strategy should also be readily transferrable to other plant species. They are currently developing new and even better versions of these strategies.
"We now know that we can significantly re-engineer plant cell walls as long as we maintain the integrity of vessels and other key tissues," Loque says.
###
A paper describing this research in detail has been published in Plant Biotechnology Journal. The paper is titled "Engineering secondary cell wall deposition in plants." Loque is the corresponding author. Co-authors are Fan Yang, Prajakta Mitra, Ling Zhang, Lina Prak, Yves Verhertbruggen, Jin-Sun Kim, Lan Sun, Kejian Zheng, Kexuan Tang, Manfred Auer and Henrik Scheller.
This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.
JBEI is one of three Bioenergy Research Centers established by the DOE's Office of Science in 2007. It is a scientific partnership led by Berkeley Lab and includes the Sandia National Laboratories, the University of California campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. DOE's Bioenergy Research Centers support multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research teams pursuing the fundamental scientific breakthroughs needed to make production of cellulosic biofuels, or biofuels from nonfood plant fiber, cost-effective on a national scale.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. For more, visit http://www.lbl.gov.
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the Unites States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit the Office of Science website at science.energy.gov.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Making do with more: Joint BioEnergy Institute researchers engineer plant cell walls to boost sugar yields for biofuelsPublic release date: 29-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Lynn Yarris lcyarris@lbl.gov 510-486-5375 DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
When blessed with a resource in overwhelming abundance it's generally a good idea to make valuable use of that resource. Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant organic material on Earth. For thousands of years it has been used as animal feed, and for the past two centuries has been a staple of the paper industry. This abundant resource, however, could also supply the sugars needed to produce advanced biofuels that can supplement or replace fossil fuels, providing several key technical challenges are met. One of these challenges is finding ways to more cost-effectively extract those sugars. Major steps towards achieving this breakthrough are being taken by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).
"Through the tools of synthetic biology, we have engineered healthy plants whose lignocellulosic biomass can more easily be broken down into simple sugars for biofuels," says Dominique Loque, who directs the cell wall engineering program for JBEI's Feedstocks Division. "Working with the model plant, Arabidopsis, as a demonstration tool, we have genetically manipulated secondary cell walls to reduce the production of lignin while increasing the yield of fuel sugars."
JBEI is a scientific partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) whose mission is to advance the development of next generation biofuels that can provide the nation with clean, green and renewable transportation energy that will create jobs and boost the economy. Loque and his research group have focused on reducing the natural recalcitrance of plant cell walls to give up their sugars. Unlike the simple starch-based sugars in corn and other grains, the complex polysaccharide sugars in plant cell walls are locked within a robust aromatic polymer called lignin. Setting these sugars free from their lignin cage has required the use of expensive and environmentally harsh chemicals at high temperatures, a process that helps drive production costs of advance biofuels prohibitively high.
"By embedding polysaccharide polymers and reducing their extractability and accessibility to hydrolytic enzymes, lignin is the major contributor to cell wall recalcitrance," Loque says. "Unfortunately, most efforts to reduce lignin content during plant development have resulted in severe biomass yield reduction and a loss of integrity in vessels, a key tissue responsible for water and nutrient distribution from roots to the above-ground organs."
Lignin has also long posed problems for pulping and animal feed. To overcome the lignin problem, Loque and his colleagues rewired the regulation of lignin biosynthesis and created an artificial positive feedback loop (APFL) to enhance secondary cell wall biosynthesis in specific tissue. The idea was to reduce cell wall recalcitrance and boost polysaccharide content without impacting plant development.
"When we applied our APFL to Arabidopsis plants engineered so that lignin biosynthesis is disconnected from the fiber secondary cell wall regulatory network, we maintained the integrity of the vessels and were able to produce healthy plants with reduced lignin and enhanced polysaccharide deposition in the cell walls," Loque says. "After various pretreatments, these engineered plants exhibited improved sugar releases from enzymatic hydrolysis as compared to wild type plants. In other words we accumulated the good stuff polysaccharides - without spoiling it with lignin."
Loque and his colleagues believe that the APFL strategy they used to enhance polysaccharide deposition in the fibers of their Arabidopsis plants could be rapidly implemented into other vascular plant species as well. This could increase cell wall content to the benefit of the pulping industry and forage production as well as for bioenergy applications. It could also be used to increase the strength of cereal straws, reducing crop lodging and seed losses. Since regulatory networks and other components of secondary cell wall biosynthesis have been highly conserved by evolution, the researchers feel their lignin rewiring strategy should also be readily transferrable to other plant species. They are currently developing new and even better versions of these strategies.
"We now know that we can significantly re-engineer plant cell walls as long as we maintain the integrity of vessels and other key tissues," Loque says.
###
A paper describing this research in detail has been published in Plant Biotechnology Journal. The paper is titled "Engineering secondary cell wall deposition in plants." Loque is the corresponding author. Co-authors are Fan Yang, Prajakta Mitra, Ling Zhang, Lina Prak, Yves Verhertbruggen, Jin-Sun Kim, Lan Sun, Kejian Zheng, Kexuan Tang, Manfred Auer and Henrik Scheller.
This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.
JBEI is one of three Bioenergy Research Centers established by the DOE's Office of Science in 2007. It is a scientific partnership led by Berkeley Lab and includes the Sandia National Laboratories, the University of California campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. DOE's Bioenergy Research Centers support multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research teams pursuing the fundamental scientific breakthroughs needed to make production of cellulosic biofuels, or biofuels from nonfood plant fiber, cost-effective on a national scale.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. For more, visit http://www.lbl.gov.
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the Unites States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit the Office of Science website at science.energy.gov.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Lion kills heron: A video of four lions setting upon a blue heron at a Dutch zoo serves as a reminder of the King of the Jungle's wild instincts.
By Mai Ng?c Ch?u,?Contributor / March 28, 2013
A group of four lions, like the one pictured at left, and a heron, like the one at right, had an encounter at an Amsterdam zoo that did not turn out well for the heron.
Lion: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP/File; Heron: Robert Harbison / The Christian Science Monitor
Enlarge
A video of four lions preying upon a heron at a Dutch zoo, shot last year and reposted on YouTube Wednesday, reminds us that you can take the lion out of the wild, but you can't take the wild out of the lion.?
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This Dutch family was visiting the zoo on a quiet Sunday afternoon when things got a bit more exciting than seeing bored animals lying around their enclosures. A lion spots a heron near the water. Following her instincts she sneaks up on it and manages to grab it. The whole family wants in on the prize, but a sneaky cub gets away with it.
In the video, a blue heron?at the Artis Royal Zoo wandered into a small pool while a group of four lions were basking in the sun, about 25 yards away. ?
As the the bird came into view of a lioness, instinct kicked in.?The lioness darted toward the bird, which desperately attempted to take flight but was pulled from the air with a leaping snatch.?The rest of her pride joined in to finish off the heron. ?
The footage of the killing has drawn thousands of views, because it's not often to see animals prey on one another at zoos. Experts said that, though the kings of the jungle are kept in captivity, cared and fed by humans, their original wildness remains untamed.?
Earlier this month, an African lion broke out of its pen and killed a 24-year-old intern at the Cat Haven sanctuary in California who was cleaning the main enclosure. According to CNN, the?5-year-old, 350-pound?killer was one of the victim's favorites.
Captive lions tend to act on their wild instincts whenever potential prey catches their eyes. A pair of videos titled "lion tries to eat baby" have attracted in total more than 7.6 millions views on YouTube since they were uploaded last April. The clips show an Oregon Zoo lioness snarling and baring her fangs in vain at a happily oblivious toddler protected by reinforced glass.
"Most of the time they seem relaxed and cuddly?so it's easy to forget that they react to meat with the reflexive instincts of a shark." Professor Craig Packer, a leading big cat expert at the University of Minnesota, noted in a recent interview with National Geographic News.?"Ten years ago Roy Horne (of Siegfried ?and Roy) was attacked by a tiger that they had handled for years?these attacks happen when people forget about the shark inside."
Early this month, The Monitor's Gloria Goodale interviewed Zara McDonald, executive director of the Bay Area Felidae?Conservation Fund?regarding the death of the Seattle woman.?
?Cats are predators,? said McDonald.?"I don?t care how tame anyone thinks one might be, they are always a wild animal with the ability to hurt humans.?
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
CHARLEROI, Belgium (Reuters) - Just a day after giving birth, Belgian entrepreneur Esmeralda Desart was back at work running her export business, putting in the kind of 16-hour day that has become the norm since she started up a company selling printer parts in 2007.
Refused bank loans, looking after a baby was just one more concern as Desart confronted the problems of red tape and rising costs that entrepreneurs say are making her homeland at the heart of the euro zone a bad place for business.
Her struggle to set up a company is emblematic of the wider frustration among entrepreneurs, who say Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo's boast to global business leaders at Davos that "Belgium is back" as a centre for innovation has a hollow ring.
"They don't make it easy," Desart, 44, said at her prefabricated orange office near Charleroi airport, south of Brussels. "And I only employ 15 staff. If Europe is going to create jobs, they need thousands of people like me."
Desart left a steady job with little more than her savings and her enthusiasm to set up an Internet-based business set to generate 15 million euros ($19 million) in sales this year.
A small regional grant she obtained requires her to run operations from a drab industrial park near Charleroi, away from her family in Brussels.
Trying to emerge from three years of crisis, the European Union has mandated deep reforms to help revive the continent's weakened economy, but Belgium, home to the EU's headquarters, has enacted very few of those changes.
Italy, Spain and Portugal have been forced to confront bloated public finances and fading business dynamism. But entrepreneurs in wealthier northern nations like Belgium say their governments feel no such urgency to cut regulatory red tape, confront powerful trade unions and modernize.
Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have been struggling with stagnation since 2011 and are neither keeping up with Germany nor reforming like southern Europe.
That could potentially shrink the euro zone's core, and cast more doubt on the bloc's credibility with investors.
SLIPPING
Belgium is struggling to remain a dynamic, hi-tech economy with the world's 12th highest per capita income at the centre of the 17-nation currency area.
The country fell eight places in the World Bank's ranking on the ease of starting a company this year compared to 2012, to 44th place out of 185 economies. When it comes to the ease of doing business, it slipped two spots to 33th place.
"Belgium must decide whether it is part of northern or southern Europe," said Jo Libeer, the head of the business chamber in Flanders, the country's wealthy northern region that has an ageing population and a growing mismatch between workers' skills and the jobs on offer.
Take the "Uplace" shopping centre planned for Mechelen, just north of Brussels, a development that would revive an abandoned area next to a former Renault car factory, to create 3,000 jobs.
Its backers hoped the luxury mall and offices would open last year, having secured the site in 2007. But a long list of permits - including one needing the approval of 14 government agencies - has meant it will now not open until 2016.
In Brussels, telephone company Belgacom has been blocked from installing a new, high-speed "4G" mobile network already used in Germany and the United States because of the city's strict radiation regulations.
"People need 4G, and what does Brussels say to them? Fuck you," Didier Bellens, Belgacom's head, told reporters.
Bureaucracy is swollen by Belgium's division into three regions and three partially overlapping linguistic communities, plus cities and local councils. In total, the country of 11 million people has six parliaments.
Such obstacles might be overlooked in boom times, but the economies of Belgium and the Netherlands will shrink for the second straight year in 2013, after a recession in 2009, while Germany is likely to see its output rise slightly.
With their trade-friendly location between Germany's industrial belt and the North Sea, Belgium and the Netherlands traditionally tracked or outperformed their biggest trading partner. But since 2010, Germany has been pulling ahead.
Belgium is the worst performer. Compared to regional peers, salary costs are more than 10 percent higher than the average in Germany, France and the Netherlands. What is more, the gap is widening, according to the Federal Planning Bureau, the agency on whose data the government bases its budgets.
One reason is that Belgium and Luxembourg are the last countries in Europe to keep automatic wage indexation, meaning wages go up in line with inflation regardless of productivity and the wider economy.
Administrative charges on companies rose 7 percent from 2008 to 2010, reversing a previous fall, the Federal Planning Bureau said, because Belgium has been slower than other countries to move services online.
WAGE COSTS
According to data collected by retailers' lobby Comeos, Belgian firms pay as much as 25 percent more to employ someone than neighboring countries.
"The hourly cost of wages is the highest in the whole euro zone," central bank governor Luc Coene told Le Soir newspaper. "The first thing to do is to reduce the charges on employment."
That is a result of trade union power in Belgium, where unionization is second only to Nordic countries in Europe.
Major decisions must be agreed with the unions, causing deadlock on many issues relating to labor reform and wages. One large Belgian retailer spent 10 years negotiating with unions before it could open 30 minutes earlier on Saturdays.
"We have this tradition of discussion and agreement, but now we've gone too far," said Dominique Michel, the head of Comeos. "We start negotiating and it takes forever, and that's a very bad system."
REFORM FOR ALL
With youth joblessness as high as 40 percent in some parts of Brussels, and national unemployment at a 15-year high, Belgium is nearing a critical point.
Ford Motor Co closed its car plant in the eastern city of Genk last year, moving the production of its Mondeo mid-size cars and Galaxy minivans to Spain in search of cheaper labor.
Caterpillar, the world's largest maker of construction equipment, plans to cut 1,400 jobs at a plant near Charleroi due to the high costs of operating in the country.
"Factories are being moved from the north to the south as we speak," Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutchman who chairs meetings of euro zone finance ministers, told the European Parliament in March. "Reform isn't just an issue for the south. It is basically an issue for all countries."
Prime Minister Di Rupo says Belgium is one of the world's most open economies and he promised in Davos his government would do "our utmost to make sure that our economy will be one of the most creative in the world".
But the country's leading politicians have declined to take on the unions, leaving companies increasingly reliant on temporary contract workers who go from job to job.
Di Rupo's message also jars with the experience of entrepreneurs such as Desart, at a time when Europe's future rests on the shoulders of people like her.
"We don't have a God-given right to prosperity," she said. "Northern Europe's future lies in services and innovation, not in big factories, but we need governments and banks behind us. If we can't reform, why should our businesses even exist?"
(Reporting by Robin Emmott and Ben Deighton; Editing by Paul Taylor)
Boxee's second box is getting a fresh round of updates, as GigaOm points out software version 2.1.0.7781 has been detailed and is rolling out. It includes features that appeal to classic Boxee fans like support for DLNA rendering that lets it browse and play files from PCs or other devices on the same network and DMR that lets users push media to it from apps like Skifta. For more traditional viewers, the update also brings a standard TV guide users can pull up by selecting "TV" on the home screen, the ability to schedule and manage DVR recordings from antenna on the box itself (previously only possible via webpage for the still-in-beta feature), notifications for upcoming recordings and even 3D support in the Vudu app. Boxee co-founder Idan Cohen joined us at Expand and mentioned some of the other updates the team is working on, we'll see if oft-requested features like the ability to pause live TV are added any time soon. Hit the source link for the full list of changes, current owners should see the new software arrive over the next few days.
Mar. 26, 2013 ? A psychological experiment known as "the marshmallow test" has captured the public's imagination as a marker of self control and even as a predictor of future success. This test shows how well children can delay gratification, a trait that has been shown to be as important to scholastic performance as traditional IQ.
New research from University of Pennsylvania psychologists suggests, however, that changing one's mind about delaying gratification can be a rational decision in situations when the timing of the payoff is uncertain.
The research was conducted by assistant professor Joseph Kable and postdoctoral researcher Joseph McGuire, both of the Department of Psychology in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences.
The study was published in the journal Psychological Review.
In the classic marshmallow test, researchers give children a choice between one marshmallow and two. After the children enthusiastically choose two, the experimenter says that they need to leave for "a few minutes" or "a little while." The children are also told that, if they can hold off eating the one marshmallow until the researcher returns, they can have the two marshmallows they prefer. With the children left alone in the room, hidden cameras track how long they resist temptation. Most try to wait but end up caving within a few minutes.
"The kids' responses seem illogical -- if you decided to wait in the first place, why wouldn't you wait the whole way through?" Kable said.
This behavior was an intriguing puzzle for Kable; he studies how people make value-based decisions, especially when they require comparing the value of something in the present with something else in the future. But, in conducting his own variants of the marshmallow test, he found that a key fact had been glossed over in both popular and academic discussions: the children don't know how long they will have to wait.
"I didn't even know that there was uncertainty in the marshmallow test until we started trying to do that type of experiment ourselves on adults and weren't getting any interesting behavior," Kable said. "That the kids don't know how long it's going to be until the researcher returns changes the entire decision problem!"
This confusion may stem from the explanations provided for children's decisions in the marshmallow test. Some of the researchers who have employed the marshmallow test and its variants have hypothesized that participants' decision to eat the marshmallow could be attributed to a strong impulse overriding the original decision to wait, or that the ability to wait was drawing on a reserve of self control that is depleted over time. Since these hypotheses make the same predictions even when there is no uncertainty, the uncertainty was often downplayed.
Kable and McGuire's analysis of data from earlier marshmallow-test studies showed problems for these hypotheses, however. If reversing the decision to wait was a function of the wearing down of self control, the time at which children eat the first marshmallow should be clustered in the middle or towards the end of the waiting period. Instead, children who gave up waiting tended to do so within the first few minutes.
After this analysis, Kable and McGuire did their own survey-based research to see how people estimate the lengths of waiting times in different situations.
The researchers asked participants to imagine themselves in a variety of scenarios, such as watching a movie, practicing the piano or trying to lose weight. Participants were told the amount of time they had been at the activity and were asked to respond how long they thought it would be until they reached their goal or the end.
The results showed a marked difference between the scenario with a relatively well-defined length and those that were more ambiguous.
"Our intuition is that when we are waiting for something, the longer we wait the closer and closer we get to that thing, which is what we see when we ask people about familiar things, like how long a movie will last," Kable says. "But what we've found is that, if you don't know anything about when the outcome will occur, the longer you wait the more you think you're getting farther and farther away from that outcome."
While the marshmallow test remains a good predictor of who is better or worse at delaying gratification, Kable's research suggests the mechanism behind that ability needs to be reinterpreted. It may also suggest some tools and techniques people can use to improve self control, or at least become aware of situations where delaying gratification will be particularly challenging.
"This is exciting to us because it suggests a way to get people to persist to the end," Kable said. "Your previous experience and your expectations can change your behavior, so you need to give them experiences that provide them with the right kinds of expectations."
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania.
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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.
From Yahoo! Sports Review by Timothy Allen in SRM 334 (section 3)
Hayden Dyer and I selected the Qatar bid for the 2022 world cup as our current event presentation for many reasons. Both of us are interested in the sport, and we found it unique that a country such as Qatar would be able to host one of the biggest events in the world of sport.
Qatar is a small country in the Middle East, bordered only by Saudi Arabia (although in close proximity of Bahrain and United Arab Emirates). The economy of Qatar is essentially run by oil, and many surrounding countries have had much prosperity because of this product. The city of Dubai in UAE has expanded to one of the largest cities in the world, and is growing exponentially. Some of the projects that are happening there are remarkable and they have high hopes that they will be one of the most visited cities in the world in the next few years.
Qatar itself has made a lot of promises up to this point. They have planned on building 8 (almost brand new) stadiums to attract attention and a World Cup bid. These stadiums offer built in air conditioning to keep players and fans cool in the 100+ degree conditions during the summer. This will be the most expensive World Cup in history by a long shot. The selection process for Qatar to get this world cup was a long and arduous one; they had to produce a bid evaluation report which covers hotel accommodations to transportation for players and fans. The struggle to get this attention was hard as well, 2002 was the first time a world cup wasn?t held in the Americas or Europe, and 2010 was the first time the world cup was held in Africa. FIFA President Sepp Blatter said it was his goal to bring the World Cup to countries that would never have a chance to see it years ago, but that leaves a lot of pressure for these countries to prepare for it.
Although Qatar is a safe country itself, it?s hard to ignore the safety concerns in hosting such a large event in the Middle East, and being a Muslim country there is still much hostility towards other nationalities and religions. For example, Qatar is a dry country, meaning alcohol is forbidden and against the law to possess, but for the World Cup, alcohol will be permitted and there will be designated alcohol zones where it can be purchased and consumed. Another difficulty in Qatar?s bid was Israel, although they aren?t a powerhouse in the sport, there is a strong possibility they will be included in the tournament, and although Qatar doesn?t recognize Israel as a country, they will still be able to compete.
Overall, Qatar is drawn out to be a success on paper. They have a lot of time to prepare for the tournament and unlike South Africa they plan on being done with stadium renovations years before the tournament will take place. There is a lot that can go wrong in the next 10 years, but with careful preparation I can see this World Cup being a success for the Middle East?s exposure and for other hopeful countries to come.
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Review by Hayden Dyer in SRM 334 (section 3)
For our current event presentation, we decided on the topic of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and the controversies, bid campaign, and media involvement that come along with it. Qatar was selected to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, in a bid campaign that also included countries such as, USA, Japan, and Australian, to name a few. One of the major controversies surrounding FIFA?s choice to pick Qatar was how hot it gets during the summers. Temperatures can reach up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, making medical personnel worried about the player?s safety of playing in these temperatures. One suggestion was to schedule the event during Qatar?s winter months, where the temperature would be much lower. Many people wondered knowing that it would be so hot why would FIFA choose Qatar to host such a big event. It all starts with the bid campaign where the country proposes to FIFA on why they should host the World Cup. Using media such as websites and videos, Qatar began to spread the word to gain supporters for their proposal. They aired videos showing how not only their country, but also the world would come together and enjoy such an event. They also put out videos of architectural designs of what the stadiums would look like, if they were chosen, and to silence critics about it being too hot, they said that each stadium would have an air conditioning unit that would make the stadium about 30 degrees cooler than it was outside. Seeing these proposals FIFA chose Qatar to be in the final voting with USA, who Qatar beat to host this event. Using media such as websites, and airing commercials to get their name out there Qatar grabbed the attention of many people, and impressed the FIFA committee with their state of the art facility plans, enough so to host an event as big as the FIFA World Cup.
From Sarajevo to Chicago, Aleksandar Hemon tells the engaging story of his many lives.
By Lisa Weidenfeld / March 25, 2013
The Book of My Lives
By Aleksandar Hemon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
224 pp.
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Aleksandar Hemon?s The Book of My Lives is a series of mostly chronological autobiographical essays, beginning with his youth in Sarajevo and moving on through his life as an adult in Chicago.
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Hemon, a ?New Yorker? contributor who has primarily written fiction outside the magazine, casts an amusingly jaundiced eye back at his younger self. It?s somewhat unexpected, given the still-vivid memories of the violence that took place in Sarajevo, but it turns out that, even in the face of political and social catastrophe, a country can still be filled with feckless youths who believe that every action they take is the most radical and exciting action ever.
In these essays, Hemon manages to write about his own younger days in a way that makes them both uniquely his own, but also universal.
Not everyone has a themed anti-fascism or maybe accidentally pro-fascism birthday party, as a friend of his does, but almost everyone can remember being just as opinionated when they were young. In the US, of course, many of us may recover from an embarrassing party in the wake of a few goofy Facebook photos.That Hemon's fascism party ends with the state police questioning him about his commitment to the country is the particularly Bosnian wrinkle to the story.
The essays, written for a series of different publications, can sometimes shift tonally. Early essays about Hemon's gang of childhood friends are so lighthearted as to be almost a little frivolous. Hemon?s amusement at his own childhood might be a little greater than the reader?s. Fans of Hemon familiar with past work like the heartbreaking ?The Lazarus Project? might be a little surprised to see how much of a teddy bear the author appears to be in real life.
This isn?t to say he skirts serious topics. An essay about his love of and lack of skill in chess touches on fatherhood, both in his relationship with his own father and through the story of one of his chess companions, whose son was shot in the street during the Islamic Revolution in Tehran. Yet overall the tone of the book is not one of pessimism or despair. Despite a life that has seen his family displaced and his childhood home ravaged nearly beyond repair, Hemon seems to remain mostly good-humored.
The final essay proves the exception. It depicts an event of such epically tragic proportions that to describe much of it here would take away from the experience of reading it. Suffice to say, the fact that Hemon continues to write with any humor at all is nothing short of miraculous.
One of the cheerier aspects of the book is Hemon?s long blossoming romance with the city of Chicago. It?s the kind of love letter more often associated with New York. Hemon is an inveterate walker from his days of being a young writer in Sarajevo, and he walks all over Chicago to get a feel for it once he?s unintentionally emigrated there because of the violence back home.
Hemon's initial plan to visit the country for a short stay unexpectedly coincides with the worsening of tensions in his own country, and he finds himself applying for refugee status. Forced to learn to love a new home, Hemon finds himself enchanted with the lake, the neighborhoods, the people, the food. One of the essays is simply a list of reasons he loves it there. The poetry in that list evokes a magical city of random gorgeous images and events.
Visitors to Chicago may complain about the cold, but Hemon finds beauty in the way that very same cold makes people huddle together under the heat lamps on the elevated train tracks, ?an image of human solidarity enforced by the cruelty of nature, the story of Chicago and of civilization.? It takes a special love for the city to stand under those warming lights in the frigid cold and think about anything besides when the next train will be coming. That this essay turned out to be one he wrote for a compilation his future wife was editing only adds to the overall sense that the relationship between Hemon and his adopted home is a romance.
?The Book of My Lives? may not turn out to be the most substantial work in Hemon?s oeuvre. ?The Lazarus Project,? despite being a work of fiction, more powerfully describes the pain of diaspora common to people forced to leave their home country. Nonetheless, Hemon is engaging and interesting company, and the story of his life ? or lives ? is one worth telling.
One of the great features of Android is the ability to change launchers, and within that category the ability to go completely off the rails with customization -- Lightning Launcher is one of those options. It's going to take some work, but the incredible set of controls and changes you can make with this launcher may be worth it if you're motivated. Best of all, it's free as well.
Stick around with us after the break and see how far the customization can go with Lightning Launcher -- users looking for a basic launcher with a few extra perks need not apply.
Mar. 25, 2013 ? Longhorn cattle have a hybrid global ancestry, according to a study by University of Texas at Austin researchers published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study of the genome of the Longhorn and related breeds tells a fascinating global history of human and cattle migration. It traces back through Christopher Columbus' second voyage to the New World, the Moorish invasion of Spain and the ancient domestication of the aurochs in the Middle East and India.
"It's a real Texas story, an American story," said Emily Jane McTavish, a doctoral student in the lab of biology professor David Hillis. "For a long time people thought these New World cattle were domesticated from a pure European lineage. But it turns out they have a more complex, more hybrid, more global ancestry, and there's evidence that this genetic diversity is partially responsible for their greater resilience to harsh climatic conditions."
To reconstruct the genetic history of Texas Longhorns, McTavish, Hillis and colleagues from the University of Missouri-Columbia analyzed almost 50,000 genetic markers from 58 cattle breeds. The most comprehensive such analysis to date, it was funded in part by the Cattlemen's Texas Longhorn Conservancy, which helped the scientists get access to samples used by ranchers.
Among the findings was that the Texas Longhorn breed are direct descendants of the first cattle in the New World. The ancestral cattle were brought over by Columbus in 1493 to the island of Hispaniola. They traveled the rest of the way to the continent in 1521 on the ships of later Spanish colonists.
Over the next two centuries the Spanish moved the cattle north, arriving in the area that would become Texas near the end of the 17th century. The cattle escaped or were turned loose on the open range, where they remained mostly wild for the next two centuries
"It was known on some level that Longhorns are descendants from cattle brought over by early Spanish settlers," said Hillis, the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor in the College of Natural Sciences, "but they look so different from the cattle you see in Spain and Portugal today. So there was speculation that there had been interbreeding with later imports from Europe. But their genetic signature is co mpletely consistent with being direct descendants of the cattle Columbus brought over."
The study reveals that being a "pure" descendant of cattle from the Iberian peninsula indicates a more complicated ancestry than was understood. Approximately 85 percent of the Longhorn genome is "taurine," descended from the ancient domestication of the wild aurochs that occurred in the Middle East 8,000-10,000 years ago. As a result, Longhorns look similar to purer taurine breeds such as Holstein, Hereford and Angus, which came to Europe from the Middle East.
The other 15 percent of the genome is "indicine," from the other ancient domestication of the aurochs, in India. These indicine cattle, which often have a characteristic hump at the back of the neck, spread into Africa and from there up to the Iberian peninsula
"It's consistent with the Moorish invasions from the 8th to the 13th centuries," said Hillis. "The Moors brought cattle with them, and brought these African genes, and of course the European cattle were there as well. All those influences come together in the cattle of the Iberian peninsula, which were used to stock the Canary Islands, which is where Columbus stopped and picked up cattle on his second voyage and brought them to the New World."
Once in the New World, most of the cattle eventually went feral. Under the pressures of natural selection they were able to re-evolve ancient survival traits that had been artificially bred out of their European ancestors. Selection for longer horns allowed them to defend against wild predators. They became leaner and more able to survive heat and drought.
"The Longhorns that were in the area when Anglo settlers arrived almost looked more like the ancestral aurochsen than like modern cattle breeds," said McTavish. "Living wild on the range, they had to become very self sufficient. Having that genetic reservoir from those wild ancestors made it possible for a lot of those traits to be selected for once again."
McTavish said it's possible the indicine heritage in particular helped, because the climate in India and Africa tended to be hotter and drier than in Europe.
The Longhorns remained wild on the range, or very loosely managed, until after the Civil War, when Texans rounded up the wild herds and began supplying beef to the rest of the country. Since then the fortunes of the Longhorns have waxed and waned depending on how their unique genetic profile intersects with the changing needs of American consumers.
"The Longhorns almost went extinct starting in the late 19th century," said Hillis. "A lot of the value of cattle at that time had to do with the fat they had, because the primary lighting source people had was candles, made of tallow, and Texas Longhorns have very low fat content. Ranchers began fencing off the range and importing breeds from Europe that had higher fat content. That's when Americans began developing their taste for fatty beef, so then the other cattle became valuable in that respect as well. The only reason the Longhorns didn't go extinct was because half a dozen or so ranchers kept herds going even though they knew that these other breeds were more valuable in some sense. They appreciated that the Longhorns were hardier, more self-sufficient."
Hillis, who raises Longhorns of his own out at the Double Helix Ranch, said that the winds of history now seem to be blowing in the Longhorns' direction. They can survive in hotter, drier climates, which will become increasingly important as the world warms. They provide lean and grass-fed beef, which is seen as healthier by many consumers. And their genes may prove valuable to ranchers, who can use the increasingly sophisticated genetic information to selectively breed the Longhorns' toughness into other breeds of cattle.
"It's another chapter in the story of a breed that is part of the history of Texas," he said.
History video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=G7-BlxmKuFM
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin. The original article was written by Daniel Oppenheimer.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Emily Jane McTavish, Jared E. Decker, Robert D. Schnabel, Jeremy F. Taylor, and David M. Hillis. New World cattle show ancestry from multiple independent domestication events. PNAS, March 25, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1303367110
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Adam Levine loves to take his shirt off. Like, we're talking L-O-V-E type of love here. The man is seen shirtless about as much as he's not (only a slight exaggeration) and frequently flaunts his toned physique in his music videos, his magazine appearances, and even on TV.
(Reuters) - Dell Inc said it received alternative proposals from Blackstone Group LP and Carl Icahn that could be superior to the $24.4 billion offer from founder Michael Dell and private equity fund Silver Lake Partners last month.
Michael Dell is willing to explore the possibility of working with third parties regarding alternative offers, the company said on Monday.
However, Dell said the special board committee considering a sale continues to support the company's pending sale to Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners.
The committee was evaluating the new takeover proposals to decide whether either or both offers are likely to trump the existing take-private deal, Reuters reported on Sunday, quoting a source familiar with the discussions.
Icahn has offered $15 per share for 58 percent of Dell, while Blackstone has proposed paying more than $14.25 per share. The Silver Lake group had agreed to buy all of Dell for $13.65 per share.
Dell's shares were up 4 percent at $14.67 in heavy premarket trading on Monday.
Icahn Enterprises raised the prospect of working with Blackstone, saying the two groups had held preliminary talks.
"We plan to review the Blackstone proposal in greater detail," Icahn Enterprises said on Monday, adding that the Michael Dell-Silver Lake proposal "significantly undervalues Dell."
One issue for the special committee is how to compare the three proposals. Both Blackstone's and Icahn's proposals envision that a portion of Dell's stock will remain publicly traded.
Silver Lake was not reachable for comment outside normal business hours in the United States.
"We continue to believe a higher bid than the current $13.65 per share offer will likely be offered but, based on our assumptions, a $15 per share bid may be a threshold," Wells Fargo Securities Maynard Um said in a note.
"We believe a higher Silver Lake/Dell bid might still be a more attractive and strategic option, assuming information regarding the public stub and financial services sale is accurate," he said.
The rival bids for Dell throw the future of the PC-maker into question. A "go-shop" period - during which the target company actively looks for rival offers - for a deal of this size rarely yields competing offers. The bids now could potentially turn the sale of Dell into a three-horse race, which could drag out for months.
It also could threaten the future of Michael Dell, who founded the technology giant at the age of 19 with just $1,000. Under the Silver Lake plan, he planned to contribute his roughly 16 percent share of Dell's equity to the deal, along with cash from his investment firm MSD Capital, and to remain CEO of the company. Silver Lake is putting up $1.4 billion in the deal.
The Silver Lake group has no plans to increase or amend its offer until Dell's special committee comes out with a ruling on the rival proposals, two sources close to the matter said late on Sunday. They said for now the buyout firm and Michael Dell planned to move forward with their current deal.
But the current plan to take the company private has come under attack from several high-profile Dell shareholders such as Southeastern Asset Management and T. Rowe Price.
The shareholders have said that his offer undervalues the company and pledged to vote against the deal, which requires a majority of shareholders, excluding the founder, to pass.
Brian Marshall, an analyst at ISI Group said in a report on Sunday that he did not expect the Silver Lake group to raise its offer meaningfully above the rival bids, "given significant challenges facing the PC business and a long transformation ahead."
RIVAL BIDS
Under Icahn's proposal, Dell shareholders will have a choice of electing cash or stock, but there would be a cap on the amount of cash they could get, the source said.
In other words, if all Dell shareholders chose to cash out, they could only sell 58 percent of their stock, retaining the other 42 percent that will remain publicly traded.
Icahn is being advised by investment bank Jefferies Group Inc. He plans to fund his bid with his own money, Dell's cash as well as new debt.
The activist investor, who has taken a stake in Dell, earlier this month demanded Dell pay out $15.7 billion in special dividends. He is no longer asking for that, the source said.
Jefferies declined to comment on Sunday.
Blackstone recently hired Dell's former vice president of corporate strategy, David Johnson.
Under Blackstone's proposal, Dell also would have a certain amount of stock publicly traded. But unlike the Icahn proposal, Blackstone has proposed buying out any shareholder that wants to cash out of Dell.
Blackstone is being advised by Morgan Stanley, which has also given it a highly confident letter of financing, the source said.
Morgan Stanley declined to comment on Sunday.
There have also been some conversations about the Blackstone group selling Dell's financial services business, but that is not part of the current proposal, the source said.
NEXT STEPS
Dell was regarded as a model of innovation as recently as the early 2000s, pioneering online ordering of custom-configured PCs and working closely with Asian component suppliers and manufacturers to assure rock-bottom production costs.
But as of 2012's fourth quarter, Dell's share of the global PC market had slipped to just above 10 percent from 12.5 percent a year earlier as its shipments tumbled 20 percent, according to research house IDC.
Michael Dell returned to the company as CEO in 2007 after a brief hiatus, but has been unable to engineer a turnaround thus far. Dell's focus on corporate computing in recent years has yet to yield results, critics note.
Competing successfully against incumbents, including IBM and Hewlett-Packard, will not be easy no matter what the corporate structure.
A source earlier said that Dell had slashed its internal forecast for fiscal 2013 operating profit to about $3 billion - down sharply from the $3.7 billion it had predicted previously. The source added that more details will be revealed in a proxy filing which is expected by the end of this week.
Meanwhile, if the special committee of the board decides that either - or both - of the rival bids for Dell are reasonably likely to lead to superior offers, Icahn and Blackstone will have to present firm bids for Dell. The negotiations are likely to take weeks, the source said.
At that point, the special committee will again need to decide whether the firm bids from Icahn and Blackstone, which include features such as committed financing, were superior to the Silver Lake-Michael Dell agreement.
If they are superior, Silver Lake and Michael Dell will get one shot at revising their original bid. Unlike most other go-shop processes, where the original bidders get several chances to match rival bids, Dell has given its founder and Silver Lake the right to do so only once.
(Additional reporting by Nadia Damouni and Greg Roumeliotis in New York and Sayantani Ghosh in Bangalore; Editing by Theodore d'Afflisio, Stephen Coates and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
I love my tiny little Mazda, but I'll be honest -- I still don't completely understand how it works. That's never really bothered me before (I'd much rather geek out over a phone or something) but a ![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 29-Mar-2013
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