sports

Djokovic, Kvitova named ITF World Champions

2011-12-13T07:02:00.001-08:00

Novak Djokovic of Serbia and Petra Kvitova of the Czech Republic have been named ITF World Champions for 2011. Djokovic won the Australian Open, Wimbledon and US Open in a stellar year in which took over as the top-ranked men`s player, finishing with a 70-6 overall record Djokovic, the first man other than Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal to be given the award since 2003, says "starting with victory in last year`s Davis Cup final, this has been an almost perfect 12 months for me." The 21-year-old Kvitova won Wimbledon and led the Czech Republic to victory in Fed Cup, ending a breakthrough year as the second-ranked player in the world.

Indonesia activist dies after setting himself ablaze

2011-12-12T04:41:00.001-08:00

An Indonesian student activist has died after setting himself on fire in front of the presidential palace, police said Sunday. Sondang Hutagalung, 22, set himself ablaze across from the palace in downtown Jakarta. Police Col. Angesta Romano Yoyol said that the man died late Saturday at the hospital where he was being treated for burns over 98 percent of his body. Hutagalung, a law student, was a well-known rights advocate. However, it was still unclear what he was protesting with his self-immolation on Wednesday. Yoyol said a police are investigating. The activist was last seen joining a Sept. 7 protest demanding justice for Munir Thalib, a prominent activist who died in 2004 of arsenic poisoning during a flight with national carrier Garuda.

Nations agree on landmark deal to fight climate change, aid poor countries

2011-12-12T04:40:00.001-08:00

A U.N. climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement early Sunday on a complex and far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change for the coming decades. The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would put all countries under the same legal regime enforcing commitments to control greenhouse gases. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest. The deal also set up the bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year to poor countries to help them adapt to changing climate conditions and to move toward low-carbon economic growth. Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Those commitments expire next year, but they will be extended for another five years under the accord adopted Sunday. The breakthrough capped 13 days of hectic negotiations that ran a day and a half over schedule, including two round-the-clock days that left negotiators bleary-eyed and stumbling with words. Delegates were seen nodding off in the final plenary session, despite the high drama, barely constrained emotions and uncertainty whether the talks would end in triumph or total collapse. The nearly fatal issue involved the legal nature of the accord that will govern carbon emissions by the turn of the next decade. A plan put forward by the European Union sought strong language that would bind all countries equally to carry out their emissions commitments. India led the objectors, saying it wanted a less rigorous option. Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan argued that the EU proposal undermined the 20-year-old principle that developing countries have less responsibility than the industrial nations that caused the global warming problem through 200 years of pollution. "The equity of burden-sharing cannot be shifted," she said in angry tones. The debate ran past midnight and grew increasingly tense as speakers lined up almost evenly on one side or the other. Conference president Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who is South Africa's foreign minister, called a recess and told the EU and Indian delegates to put their heads together and come up with a compromise formula. Coming after weeks of unsuccessful effort to resolve the issue, Nkoana-Mashabane gave Natarajan and European Commissioner Connie Hedegaard 10 minutes to find a solution, with hundreds of delegates milling around them.

New pain sensors explain why snake bites hurt

2011-11-17T18:13:00.001-08:00

The Texas coral snake may seem benign enough, with crayon-colored rings adorning its body, but this serpent packs a mighty punch in its toxin-laden venom. And new research finds these toxins trigger a previously unknown pain mechanism in humans. There are many different types of pain, said study researcher David Julius, of the University of California, San Francisco. Some respond to changes in heat or pressure; for example, if you burn your finger or get punched. Others respond to different chemicals, such as acids. Your body senses the painful trigger with a receptor on a pain-sensing nerve in your skin. That nerve signals the brain, which then tells the body that the pot is hot or the acid is burning you. It seems the coral snake triggers a novel pain receptor on nerves. The finding could help researchers develop drugs to treat snakebites or other painful phenomena in a targeted fashion without having to use opiates. [ 5 Facts About Pain ] "We find natural products from animals or plants that generate pain sensations and find out what they target on the cells," Julius told Live-science. "In the future, these kinds of toxins will help us understand how these [pain-sensing] molecules are activated… that sort of information is important for producing drugs to reverse the action." Painful toxin Julius and his colleagues screened a wide variety of snake venom s, looking specifically at their ability to activate certain pain-relaying nerve cells in rats. The Texas coral venom activated some of these nerve cells, a type of chemical-based pain-sensing cell that communicates the conditions of the body to the brain. In that venom, the researchers found a toxin they named Mitt x, which opens a channel on the outside of the skin's nerve cells, sending a signal up to the brain. Oddly, even though Mitt x isn't acidic, it turned on a channel related to those that usually respond to acids. The channels' acid-sensing relatives produce pain when tissues are deprived of blood and oxygen, but MitTx is specific for a channel that hasn't been implicated in pain sensation before. The one [pain pathway] that we've identified with this toxin isn't the one that people have paid the most attention to," Julius said. "This is an important site of action, and we should look at it more closely in how it produces pain." Snake venom The Texas coral snake (Micrurus tener tener) is about 2 feet long and is usually shy and secretive, as well as nocturnal, so it's not often you run across one. They don't usually bite humans unless provoked, but their venom is a powerful neurotoxin and without treatment the bites are fatal about 10 percent of the time. Luckily, no deaths from coral snake bites, the Texas variety or others, have been reported in the United States since coral snake anti-venom has been available to hospitals. Even when not fatal, however, the venom of the Texas coral snake causes extreme pain that can last for hours. Because this pain is mediated through this newly discovered pathway, it's possible that traditional pain relievers such as aspirin, which work through different receptors, wouldn't help the pain. The bites, if painful enough, are usually treated with opiate pain relievers, like morphine, but a more targeted and less addictive reliever would be beneficial, according to the researchers. "Different types of injuries mediate pain through different types of mechanisms," Julius said. "That's the secret — figuring out what the mechanism is for different types of pain, so you can eventually target the right kinds of therapeutics for that."

The first teeth grew on the outside of body

2011-11-17T18:02:00.001-08:00

The fictional Cheshire cat's smile seemed to have a life of its own, outside of the cat's body, and now new research suggests the world's first teeth grew outside of the mouth before later moving into the oral cavity. The study, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, supports what is known as the "outside-in" hypothesis of tooth evolution. The first teeth and smile, however, did not belong to a cat, but likely were flashed by small and spiny sharklike fish. That initial smile would have looked rather sinister. "The first smile would probably have been a prickly one, with many tiny teeth that looked like pointy cheek scales, and other small toothlike scales wrapping around the lips onto the outside of the head," co-author Mark Wilson told Discovery News. For the study, Wilson, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, and his colleagues studied animals called ischnacanthid acanthodians, an extinct group of fish that resembled sharks. They lived during the Early Devonian period, which lasted from 416 to 397 million years ago. The researchers determined that head scales from these fish were in transition, evolving from scales to teeth. The pointy structures were identified on the lips of the fish. This discovery helps to negate the “inside out” theory of tooth evolution, which holds that the first teeth emerged from structures in the pharynx progressing into the mouth. Project leader Stephanie Blais, a University of Alberta researcher, told Discovery News that "our findings support the idea that teeth evolved from modified pointed scales on the mouth margins (lips) as we see in Obtusacanthus," one of the prehistoric fish included in the study. All of the analyzed fish specimens were excavated at the Man on the Hill site in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada. As to why teeth first evolved, Blais said they "would have conferred a major advantage in terms of food acquisition. Pointed scales near the margins of their mouths would have helped them grasp prey and hang on to it until they could swallow it whole." Such prey consisted of "probably whatever they could swallow," co-author Lindsay MacKenzie of the University of Montana’s Department of Geosciences told Discovery News. Based on fossilized stomach contents and other evidence, their primary prey probably consisted of arthropods, including crustaceans, as well as a variety of soft-bodied creatures and fish. Blais said jaws, which must have evolved earlier, and the toothlike formations "allowed fishes to change from a filter-feeding or mud-grubbing more passive lifestyle to one of active predation." The world's first aggressive conflicts also may have arisen at this point, since the move from passive feeding to hunting led to what Blais termed "the very first evolutionary arms race" among vertebrates, with some becoming predators and others becoming prey. The first teeth also probably first arose in sets, and not just as a single tooth here and there. MacKenzie explained that "scales and teeth exist in developmental fields in which similar developmental processes generate many similar tooth or scale elements." Since the first teeth likely arose from these scales, they then to some extent mirrored the prior scale groupings, emerging as sets of teeth. There is a connection between human teeth and these first fish teeth. "Because teeth would have allowed vertebrates to become more efficient predators, and eventually more efficient herbivores, they were retained and passed down through generations in most groups," Blais said. While humans and other animals with teeth share this initial fish connection, a lot of evolution, as well as inter-species battles, occurred over the millions of years. "Interactions between predators and prey through time only increased their (teeth's) importance, leading to highly specialized teeth, such as those in mammals," Blais said.

Asian Carp tacos? Illinois launches anti-hunger program

2011-09-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

Minced Asian carp tacos? How about spaghetti with carp sauce? Illinois officials hope serving the invasive species on a plate is the creative solution to two big problems: controlling the plankton-gobbling carp from entering the Great Lakes and record numbers of people facing hunger. But the idea has major obstacles, mainly overcoming people's nose-crinkling response to eating a fish that grows to 100 pounds and is able to sail out of the water — a trait spotlighted in YouTube videos. "We are in uncharted water here," said Illinois Department of Natural Resources spokesman Chris McCloud. "Why remove them and put them into a landfill when you can take them and use them for good? If we can get past the name 'carp' and the perception ... we can prove this is going to be a highly nutritious, cheap meal." Starting Thursday, the department launches a campaign to change the fish's image and demonstrate how to work with the ultra-bony meat. Officials have enlisted Louisiana chef Philippe Parola, who's become a national advocate for the fish he calls silverfin. He plans to fry up the fish that tastes something like mahi mahi, so audience members can taste samples. Getting carp to soup kitchens and food pantries is months off, said Tracy Smith, a director for Feeding Illinois, which supplies food banks and is helping on the project. The idea is modeled after a state program that lets hunters donate deer meat to be ground and distributed to food pantries. But there's no system in place for netting Asian carp in large amounts and cleaning and distributing the fish. And state officials don't know the most feasible way to dole out the carp: minced or as boneless fillets, for example. The yuck factor While eating Asian carp isn't new — it's consumed in China and high-end restaurants, among other places — the first step to get it to the American masses is countering the yuck factor. Illinois officials appear to have their work cut out for them; recent visitors to Our Lady of Grace Food Pantry in Chicago were skeptical. The pantry puts canned goods, meat and bread in the plastic food bags it gives out. If carp were to make its way there, workers would include it with the meat, leaving people to figure out how to cook the fish on their own. "I wouldn't eat it," Vincent Williams, 49, an unemployed former bank worker, said with a look of disgust on his face. "Ugh, I don't know. I might," said Christopher Cain, 25, a former moving company worker. Asian carp were imported from China and escaped into the Mississippi River in the 1970s. They've spread across dozens of waterways, with bighead carp in dozens of states and silver carp — the other Asian species near the Great Lakes — in more than a dozen. The bighead reaches up to 4 feet long and 100 pounds, while silver carp are famous for leaping from the water when startled, at times slamming into boaters with bone-shattering force. If Asian carp ever reached the Great Lakes — breaching electric fish barriers near Chicago — they could decimate food supplies and starve out native species, disrupting a $7 billion fishing industry. Officials say carp are caught near the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a man-made link between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River system, as part of a plan to control population, along with other precautions. Health benefits touted Nutritionists and food scientists tout Asian carp as low in mercury because they don't eat other fish and are high in Omega-3 fatty acids. Illinois has been sending some of its carp to China, where the demand is high. This week, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, who is in China, sampled carp, reportedly saying it tasted like tilapia. Anti-hunger advocates in Illinois are praising the idea of serving the carp, especially with increasing demand for food stamps. An average of 1.8 million people rely on the state's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program each month, according to figures from earlier this year. That's up from 1.2 million people monthly in 2006. "It's a crisis" Smith with Feeding Illinois said. "Creative partnerships are going to be critical to getting through this." Chef Phillip Foss was among the first to serve it in a Chicago high-end establishment. Recipes on his blog, thepickeledtongue.com, include one for "Carp-accio," which calls for cucumber and watermelon. He said it's not easy to fillet because of the bones, but everyday cooks could use its minced form as a beef substitute. "Make a seafood bolognaise sauce that everyone will love. Then surprise them, that they actually just ate Asian carp," Foss said. He and others point out that another now popular fish, the Chilean Sea Bass, was rebranded from its original name, Patagonian toothfish. Turning a nuisance into a good dinner Illinois officials aren't the first to float a humanitarian approach with carp. Late last year, Louisiana State University officials partnered with a nonprofit to make canned carp to send to Haiti, where the diet is already fish-rich and protein is scarce. They came up with a product in a spicy tomato sauce with the consistency of canned salmon. The test batches in Haiti were a hit, said Julie Anderson, a professor with the university's agriculture center. The project is stalled, because of funding and other reasons, but Anderson hopes it's revived. She said there were rave reviews after the canned carp was served on crackers at an office Christmas party. "You hear about it so much on the news as a nuisance, a problem," Anderson said. "People don't associate nuisances with a good dinner."

Scientists discover 12 new frog species in India

2011-09-17T19:10:00.000-07:00

Years of combing tropical mountain forests, shining flashlights under rocks and listening for croaks in the night have paid off for a team of Indian scientists which has discovered 12 new frog species plus three others thought to have been extinct.
It's a discovery the team hopes will bring attention to India's amphibians and their role in gauging the health of the environment.
Worldwide, 32 percent of the world's known amphibian species are threatened with extinction, largely because of habitat loss or pollution, according to the group Global Wildlife Conservation.
"Frogs are extremely important indicators not just of climate change, but also pollutants in the environment," said the project's lead scientist, biologist Sathyabhama Das Biju of the University of Delhi.
Many of the newly found frogs in India are rare and are living in just a single area, so they will need rigorous habitat protection, Biju told The Associated Press on Saturday. "Unfortunately in India, conservation has basically focused on the two most charismatic animals — the elephant and the tiger. For amphibians there is little interest, little funding, and frog research is not easy."
Night frogs are extremely hard to find, coming out only at dark and during the monsoon season, living either in fast-flowing streams or on moist forest ground.
Biju said he and his student researchers had to sit in dark, damp forests listening for frog sounds and shining flashlights under rocks and across riverbeds. They confirmed the new species by description as well as genetics.
The 12 new species include the meowing night frog, whose croak sounds more like a cat's call, the jog night frog, unique in that both the males and females watch over the eggs, and the Wayanad night frog, which grows to about the size of a baseball or cricket ball. "It's almost like a monster in the forest floor, a huge animal for a frog, leaping from one rock to another," Biju said.
Three other species were rediscovered, including the Coorg night frog described 91 years ago, after scientists "had completely ignored these animals, thinking they were lost."
The discoveries — published in the latest issue of international taxonomy journal Zootaxa — bring the known number of frogs in India to 336. Biju estimated this was only around half of what is in the wild, and said none of India's amphibians are yet being studied for biological compounds that could be of further use in science.
"We first have to find the species, know them and protect them, so that we can study them for their clinical importance," he said.
Biju is credited with discovering dozens of new Indian frog species during his 35-year career.

FSU president confirms Pitt, Syracuse applications

2011-09-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic Coast Conference has received application letters from Pittsburgh and Syracuse to join the league, a move that would leave the Big East scrambling to replace two of its longest tenured members.
Florida State President Eric Barron told The Associated Press on Saturday before the Seminoles played No. 1 Oklahoma that the ACC was excited about adding to its "northern tier."
"Pittsburgh and Syracuse, who have applied, these are solid academic schools, and the ACC is a truly academic conference," Barron said. "Certainly great basketball teams, a good history of football.
"I'm sure consideration will be very fast. I'll be surprised if it's not tomorrow (Sunday)."
He confirmed that 11 of 12 ACC presidents attended a meeting in Greensboro, N.C., on Tuesday — the other participated by phone — and unanimously approved raising the exit fee to $20 million — up from $12 million to $14 million — for any member leaving the conference.
"The great thing is that the conference is strong and committed to a unanimous commitment to staying together," North Carolina State Chancellor Randy Woodson said. "And to the extent that this is kind of a dramatic shift in conferences, we're trying to be proactive and stay strong."
The Big East's exit fee is $5 million, though schools wanting to leave must provide 27 months' notice.
A jump by Pittsburgh and Syracuse could lead to another dramatic shuffle in college athletics. Texas A&M already has announced its intention to join the Southeastern Conference, leaving the future of the Big 12 in doubt. The board of regents at Oklahoma and Texas are meeting Monday to discuss the possibility of the universities leaving that conference.
Big East spokesman John Paquette declined to comment on the possible defections. Pittsburgh spokesman E.J. Borghetti said athletic director Steve Pederson also wouldn't comment. Syracuse AD Daryl Gross also declined comment.
If the move goes forward, Pittsburgh and Syracuse would become the fourth and fifth schools to leave the Big East for the ACC in the past decade. Virginia Tech and Miami joined in 2004, and Boston College followed a year later as the ACC's 12th member.
Syracuse is a founding member of the Big East, and Pittsburgh joined the league in 1982.
News of a possible Big East upheaval came on the heels of the death of its founder, Dave Gavitt, who died Friday night after a long illness.
North Carolina athletic director Dick Baddour said the ACC created a committee last year of athletic directors, university presidents and faculty athletic representatives to examine possible scenarios of both expansion and defections. Baddour, one of the four athletic directors on the committee, wouldn't reveal specifics of those discussions nor comment specifically on Syracuse and Pittsburgh.
"If you think about this nationally, it's obvious that the world is turning upside down and you want the ACC ... to be in a position where we are strong in all areas, that all of our sports are strong, that our television packages are strong as well," Baddour said shortly before kickoff of the Virginia-North Carolina game.
Speaking on a pregame radio show, Virginia Tech athletic director Jim Weaver said: "We want to move forward and be the best we can be, and that's what we're going to do."
The New York Times first reported news of the talks involving the ACC on Friday, and CBSSports.com first reported Saturday the schools had filed applications with the ACC.
Until now, the focus of this most recent round of conference realignment had been on the Big 12, with the board of regents at Oklahoma and Texas meeting Monday to discuss their conference futures. Oklahoma could be heading to the Pac-12 and taking Oklahoma State with it. Texas has stated its desire to keep the Big 12 together, but the Pac-12 could be an option as well as football independence, a la Notre Dame, which competes in the Big East in all other sports.
Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott attended 23rd-ranked Texas' meeting with UCLA at the Rose Bowl on Saturday, but said he had no plans to meet with Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds or President Bill Powers.
Scott talked with Texas, Oklahoma and several other Big 12 teams last year while his conference added Utah and Colorado, signing a massive television contract along the way.
Scott reiterated the Pac-12's stance on expansion: The conference is "not being proactive," but has been approached by universities and is willing to consider growing again. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State have been linked with a Pac-12 move for several weeks, and Scott has confirmed several unidentified schools recently approached him for preliminary discussions.
"I'm surprised there's been so much activity so quickly," Scott said, alluding to the upheaval in conference alignment talks the past few weeks. "There's been a lot of transition in a short time."
Scott said no school has applied for admission to the Pac-12, but also said the conference has no formal application policy.
There also have been reports linking Texas to the ACC, a move that likely would include Texas Tech.
When the Big Ten was looking to expand last summer, there was plenty of speculation about Big East schools on the Big Ten's target list.
But the Big Ten added only Nebraska (from the Big 12). A few months later the Big East announced TCU from the Mountain West Conference was joining the league in 2012 as its ninth football member and 17th overall.
"Nothing ... surprises me because it's been happening, the rumors have been going on for weeks now of who's going to where," TCU AD Chris Del Conte said.
The Big East was close to signing a contract extension for its television rights with ESPN this year, walking away from a nine-year deal that reportedly was worth about $1 billion.
Big East Commissioner John Marinatto said in August that the Big East felt it was in a position of strength as the last major football conference to negotiate a deal because there would be more bidders on the market with NBC expanding its cable presence and Fox becoming more involved in college football.
The Big East's situation is tricky because of seven nonfootball members — such as Georgetown and Villanova — that help make it one of the nation's strongest basketball conferences. The basketball schools and football schools often have different agendas. But losing Pitt and Syracuse would be a huge blow to Big East basketball as well as football.
The other football-playing members of the Big East are Rutgers, Connecticut, Louisville, South Florida and Cincinnati.
There already has been speculation that West Virginia would be a target for the SEC to balance out that conference and grow to 14 members if and when Texas A&M finally joins.
The ACC would end up with 14 members if it adds Syracuse and Pitt, but 16 might make more sense. Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany has said his league is set with 12, but could reconsider if other conferences make additions.
It seems likely that the latest news about conference realignment won't be the last.
"I think some things will take shape in the near future," Weaver said.

Social Media Stars: Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, Starbucks and Family Guy

2011-09-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

Famecount.com, the social media statistics service, has revealed that the reformed rapped Eminem is quickly gaining popularity on Facebook. With 28,883,000 'likes' on the social networking site, Eminem overtook Lady Gaga with 28,872,000 to be termed the most 'Liked' living artist.

However, Eminem, whose real name is Marshal Marthers, has a long way to go before he beats the pop singer in totality. On Twitter for instance, Gaga leads Eminem by over 5 million followers.

Earlier this week Famecount announced that Eminem has touched the one billion views mark.

"At Famecount, we have watched Eminem's social media fame explode over the last 6 months," Daniel Dearlove, founder of Famecount, said in an statement on Eminem's YouTube milestone released on Monday, Feb. 26.

Although Eminem did reach the elite musician club in terms of social media by hitting the one billion views mark on YouTube, the rapper still trailed behind Justin Biber with 1.3 billion views and Lady Gaga with 1.189 billion views.

Social media statistics have become a crucial tool in assessing the popularity of celebs and public figures after these sites emerged as huge marketing and PR tools since 2009. On the flip side, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube among other sites have redefined the way marketing, PR campaigns, damage control work. When it comes to celebrities in particular, these platforms provide the grounds for fans to actually follow their celebrities eliminating the need to rely on reports and rumors, thus satisfying satisfy the fans, stalkers as well as news junkies.

According to the statistics collected by Famecount, Lady Gaga reigns the social media with 28,886,499 Facebook fans, 8,397,686 Twitter Followers and 1,198,712,174 YouTube Views.

President Barack Obama dominates the politicians category, Starbucks topped the Brands list while Family Guy took the TV category.

Start the slideshow to see the social media 'Allstars':

Wayward penguin 'Happy Feet' missing in action

2011-09-13T04:31:00.000-07:00

The wayward penguin known as "Happy Feet" is missing in the Southern Ocean.
Experts tell The Associated Press the most likely scenario is that the emperor penguin's satellite transmitter fell off. The small unit was attached to his feathers with super glue and was designed to fall off when he molted early next year.
But the unit stopped transmitting Friday, just five days after the penguin was released into the sea south of New Zealand.
Other possibilities are that Happy Feet was eaten by an orca or a leopard seal; that he died of natural causes; or that the transmitter malfunctioned.
The aquatic bird was discovered on a New Zealand beach in June. He became sick from eating sand which he likely mistook for snow, but was nursed back to health over two months at the Wellington Zoo. Veterinarians repeatedly flushed his stomach to remove sand and fattened him up on a diet of fish.
After he was released from the deck of a research vessel, Happy Feet's satellite tracker showed that he swam in a meandering route, ending up about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast of where he began when the last transmission was received Friday morning. Experts say his looping pattern was typical for a penguin chasing fish.
Kevin Lay, a consultant at the company Sirtrack which attached the tracking device, said staff have gone over diagnostics from the tracker and it appears it was functioning well until the last transmission.
Lay said the tracker needs to be above the water's surface to transmit. Because penguins surface regularly to breathe, that hadn't proved a problem until Friday.
"We think the most likely scenario is tag detachment," Lay said. "The intention was always that the transmitter would fall off."
That's the scenario favored by Peter Simpson, a program manager at New Zealand's department of conservation.
"Who knows? He's probably swimming along quite happily without a transmitter on his back," Simpson said.
"I'm still confident we did the right thing by releasing him back into the wild," Simpson added. "He's a marine bird and he's designed to swim and he's designed to live in the ocean."
Scientists say there's an outside possibility they may again hear from Happy Feet. The penguin also has been fitted with a transponder chip under his skin, similar to those used to identify household cats and dogs. The chip will be activated if the penguin turns up near certain monitored emperor colonies in Antarctica.
Because Happy Feet is believed to be about 3 years old, it could be a year or two before he would arrive in an Antarctic colony to breed — if he is still alive.
New Zealand penguin expert Colin Miskelly said it's time to face facts.
"It's unlikely that we will ever know what caused the transmission to cease," Miskelly wrote on his blog. "But it is time to harden up to the reality that the penguin has returned to the anonymity from which he emerged."

Allegri wants to avoid Lazio lapse against Barca

2011-09-13T04:28:00.001-07:00

AC Milan coach Massimiliano Allegri says his side cannot afford to repeat the slow start they made against Lazio when they tackle Barcelona at the Nou Camp in the Champions League on Tuesday.
Milan began their Serie A campaign with a 2-2 draw at home to Lazio on Friday where they paid for an uninspired opening by trailing 2-0 inside the first 20 minutes.
"We need to be careful and to avoid playing like we did in the first 20 minutes against Lazio," said Allegri before his team's departure from Milan on Monday.
"We need to be very careful and show great respect to Barcelona while trying to do well in both defence and attack.
"We're playing the team who at the moment play the best football but we have great players, we're Milan and in football you can't bank on anything.
"I'm not emotional, I'm just thinking about the game which is only the first in the group stages and not a final.
"I want us to tackle it with serenity and to qualify for the knock-out stages."
Allegri also revealed he will make changes to the team that played Lazio, with no space for Italy forward Antonio Cassano.
"Cassano played very well against Lazio but tomorrow (Tuesday), due to his characteristics, Pato will probably start alongside (Zlatan) Ibrahimovic in attack."
Allegri also had a kind word for his Inter Milan counterpart Gian Piero Gasperini, who began his nerazzurri reign on Sunday with a 4-3 defeat at Palermo.
"Palermo-Inter was a great game, it was intense and exciting but you can't kick out all the hard work Gasperini's been doing because of one defeat," he said.

NRC: Shutdown of Yucca Mountain nuke dump can proceed

2011-09-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

A divided Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday allowed the Obama administration to continue plans to close the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada.
The commission split, 2-2, on whether to uphold or reject a decision by an independent nuclear licensing board. The board voted last year to block the Energy Department's from withdrawing its application for Yucca Mountain, a remote site 90 miles from Las Vegas. The licensing board said the government failed to make a scientific case for why the application should be withdrawn.
Despite the split vote, the NRC said in an order Friday that the licensing board should continue steps to close out work on Yucca Mountain by the end of the month, citing "budgetary limitations."
The Energy Department has not requested additional funding for Yucca Mountain, and NRC spending on Yucca expires at the end of the month.
The NRC decision appeared to be a victory for NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who last year ordered NRC staff to halt work on the Yucca project.
Jaczko, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Yucca Mountain's leading congressional opponent, has made a series of decisions to delay or halt work on the Nevada dump since becoming chairman in 2009. His actions have infuriated congressional Republicans, who accuse Jaczko of carrying out the wishes of Reid and President Barack Obama, who appointed Jaczko as NRC chairman and promised in the 2008 campaign to kill the Yucca Mountain project.
The NRC vote may not be the final word on the issue.
A federal appeals court in Washington is considering a suit by South Carolina, Washington state and others that want to ship spent nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain.
Congress chose Yucca Mountain as the leading candidate for disposal of radioactive nuclear waste. But opponents are concerned about contamination, and the Obama administration has said it would not consider the site and would look for alternatives.
The appeals court ruled in July that it would not intervene in the case because the NRC had not made a final decision on the status of Yucca Mountain.
'Workable option'
A staff member for an NRC commissioner who supports the project said the issue is far from over.
"We don't view this order as telling DOE to close Yucca Mountain," said Ho Nieh, chief of staff to Commissioner William Ostendorff, a Republican who has clashed with Jaczko over the Yucca Mountain issue.
As a practical matter, work on Yucca Mountain will not continue in the short term, Nieh and others said, because neither the Energy Department nor the NRC has allocated money for the project.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said Yucca Mountain is not a "workable option."
Jaczko's actions on Yucca Mountain have been criticized by House Republicans, by his own scientific staff and by the NRC's Inspector General. The IG report found that Jaczko acted within his authority and broke no laws. But it also concluded that to get his way on the issue he failed to be forthcoming with other commissioners
Jaczko declined to comment Friday, and a spokesman for the NRC declined to reveal how individual commissioners voted. However it is widely believed that Jaczko and fellow Democrat William Magwood voted overturn the licensing board decision, while Republicans Ostendorff and Kristine Svinicki voted to uphold it. Nieh said Friday that Ostendorff voted to uphold the licensing board.
Commissioner George Apostolakis, a Democrat, recused himself from the vote because he has worked on Yucca-related issues in the past.

Crime lab stays on the 9/11 case

2011-09-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

Forensic scientists are continuing to identify remains from 9/11 victims, and they could still be working on the case 10 years from now. Ten years after the terror attacks, thousands of bits of bone found where the World Trade Center's twin towers fell are unidentified, and 1,124 of the 2,753 known victims have not yet been matched up with any remains.
Mark Desire, who heads up the identification effort for the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, notes that the crime lab handles about 500 homicides and 2,000 sexual-assault cases a year, and thousands of other investigations. But the 9/11 case is special.
"As a forensic scientist, you're taught not to get emotionally involved," he told me today. "But the World Trade Center ... that's the exception."
This weekend, he and his colleagues will be meeting with the families of the victims, going over everything that's been accomplished over the past year and everything they hope to do over the next year. It's what he's done on every anniversary since the attacks.
Here are the highlights from this year's report:
Five scientists in Desire's office are working full-time on World Trade Center victim identification, and the effort can draw upon the 180 other employees at the medical examiner's lab.
More than 21,000 pieces of human remains have been collected so far, with about 13,000 of those fragments matched up to DNA extracted from samples of the victims provided by loved ones. The reference samples may come from hair in combs or hairbrushes, from flecks of skin left behind in old toothbrushes, on clothes or on jewelry, from medical samples, even from baby teeth found in photo albums. "We've become really good at disposable razors — breaking them open and taking the DNA," Desire said.
About 6,000 of those remains have been analyzed more than once, sometimes five or six times, as new DNA extraction techniques become available. In the old days, the scientists used to grind bone by hand to get at the DNA. Now, the lab uses liquid-nitrogen freezing, sonication and high-tech detergents to get the DNA out of bone tissue that is typically degraded by fire, water and exposure to the elements. "We need every possible cell in what's left to have any hope of generating a profile," Desire said. In the past five years, the new techniques have sparked a new wave of victim identifications.
The scientists analyze the DNA by looking for matching sequences known as short tandem repeats, or STRs. They can also draw upon other types of DNA tests that focus on mitochondrial DNA or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, or "snips"). If there's a full-profile match, the chances of making a wrong identification are less than 1 in a trillion. In the past, the forensics team has used dental records, other medical records and even tattoos to match remains with victims — but today, DNA is the gold standard. "We would never release remains unless we were absolutely positive that this was the individual identified, and DNA allows us to do that," Desire said.
About 400 bone fragments are checked every month. If there's a DNA match, it's almost always matched to a victim who has already been associated with other remains. But every six months or so, there's a new identification. The last time that happened was in August: Ernest James, a 40-year-old New Yorker who worked at the insurance firm Marsh & McLennan in the trade center's north tower, was lost on 9/11 but was finally linked to a bit of bone, thanks to the DNA.
Desire said the thousands of yet-to-be-identified samples will continue to be stored for future analysis as new techniques are developed. He and his colleagues are already talking with the planners for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, to make sure that unidentified 9/11 remains will stay accessible even after they're interred at the memorial.
"They're stored now in a very low-humidity condition, preserved for years to come to be able to work with," Desire said. "They're going to be stored at the memorial in the same way."
Every time DNA technology improves, forensic scientists will go back to those samples and check them again, hoping to give a little more closure to the thousands of families who are still wondering about their loved ones. That means that as painful as it may be, Desire and his fellow forensic scientists will be going to the anniversary gatherings with 9/11 families for years to come.
"It is a very emotional time for all of us," Desire said. "We want to emphasize that we are there."

Spurs want to sign Beckham after LA deal ends

2011-09-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

Tottenham and Queens Park Rangers are interested in signing David Beckham when his Major League Soccer contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy expires at the end of the year.
The 36-year-old midfielder trained with Tottenham during the last MLS offseason and manager Harry Redknapp is interested in signing him in January.
"I don't think you would ever say no to David Beckham. He would bring a lot to any club," Redknapp said Friday. "He came and trained with us last year. He was fantastic to have around the place as a player and as a person.
"He was a top-class professional and he's the kind of lad you would like around the place. He is someone the young lads look up to and he is a great role model for anybody."
Although Beckham trained with Spurs in January, the club failed to agree a loan deal for the former England captain.
And talks are yet to start between Spurs and Beckham's representatives ahead of the MLS season ending in November.
"What are the chances of us signing him? I have no idea," Redknapp said. "I'll be honest. I don't have a clue. I wouldn't know the financial situation or what it would take. I have never discussed it with the chairman.
"Would I like him here? Of course I would."
QPR's interest in bringing the former Manchester United and Real Madrid player to the Premier League newcomers emerged in a tweet from owner Tony Fernandes.
"It is not a discussion chairman Tony Fernandes and I have had," QPR manager Neil Warnock said.

Medium intensity earthquake jolts Delhi, NCR

2011-09-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

After a bomb blast at the high court in Delhi on Wednesday, the national capital was rocked by a strong earthquake around 11.34 pm. The earthquake measured 4.2 on the Richter Scale.

"An earthquake of 4.2 magnitude was recorded at 23.28.18 Indian standard time. The epicenter of the quake was near New Delhi-Haryana border. It was a "slight' earthquake but was felt strongly because the epicentre was so close. The epicenter falls on 28.6 North latitude and 77.0 east longitude," a senior official at MET department told .

The tremors were felt for less than ten seconds. The quake sent shivers among citizens who ran out of the high-rise buildings. There were no immediate reports of any casualty.

The fire brigade and police said they have not received any immediate calls of casualty or damage.

Delhi is among thirty important cities in the country that fall into high risk seismic zone, while Srinagar is among places at very high risk of earthquakes, the government said on Wednesday.

While Delhi, Amritsar and Chandigarh fall under zone IV (high risk), Srinagar comes under zone V (very high risk), he said. As per seismic map of India prepared by Bureau of Indian Standards 58.6 per cent areas of the country fall into earthquake zone V (very high risk), IV (high risk) and III (moderate risk).

World environment programs may lose US aid

2011-09-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

What do flood prevention in Nepal, wildlife preservation in Namibia and reef fishing in Indonesia have to do with the U.S. budget?
Global conservation programs like these have all gotten help from the U.S. government, and they are probably prime targets of the budget-cutting congressional "super committee," since they sit at the crossroads of two things Americans don't like spending much money on: foreign aid and the environment.
As the 12 members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction work to whittle the budget by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years — if they fail to do so by Nov. 23, automatic spending cuts kick in — they may take aim at funds that pay for international conservation efforts.
That's of deep concern to the nongovernmental organizations that run these programs and see them as relative bargains that can prevent vastly more expensive relief operations or security threats caused by thinning natural resources in unstable parts of the world.
"It's important to consider what these investments are meant to support," said Reid Detchon, the nongovernmental United Nations Foundation vice president for energy and climate. "It's not all about birds and bunnies — it's investments that have a real impact on saving lives."
Most Americans don't know much about how U.S. foreign aid dollars are spent, and don't think highly of foreign aid in general, according to Karlyn Bowman, an expert on public opinion polling at the American Enterprise Institute.
'Spend money at home'
"Not only would they rather spend the money here at home, but they also don't think the money is spent well abroad." Bowman said in a telephone interview. "They certainly want to be involved in humanitarian efforts ... but things beyond that aren't a very high priority at this time."
A 2010 World Public Opinion poll showed most respondents figured the United States spends 25 percent of its budget on foreign aid, more than double the 10 percent most respondents thought should be spent.
In fact, the U.S. government spends roughly 1 percent of its total budget on foreign aid. The share of total 2010 U.S. spending on international conservation, climate and environmental programs was $1.13 billion, or about 0.03 percent.
Representative Kay Granger, a Texas Republican, told a House Appropriations panel recently that a key question in crafting a bill to fund foreign operations was what impact individual programs would have on U.S. national security. "If that question couldn't be answered, we reduced the spending, added restrictions, or canceled the program altogether."
"We are very concerned," said Todd Shelton of World Wildlife Fund, which works on conservation programs in 100 countries. "The international affairs budget and the international conservation programs that we are following also hangs in the balance."
Hedge against instability
Like others in the global environmental community, and some military experts, Shelton considers international environmental programs a relatively inexpensive hedge against geopolitical instability stemming from scarce resources.
"For a very small investment up front, now, we are confident of the positives, not only to the security of the United States and the planet, but also to the American taxpayer's pocketbook in the future," Shelton said.
A study in the journal Nature in August backed that up: researchers found that countries hit by the recurring dry heat of the El Nino global climate pattern — and the crop-killing droughts that often follow — doubled the risk of civil wars since 1950.
U.S. military experts have repeatedly told Congress that this scenario, and pressure for U.S. intervention in these conflicts, is one reason to shore up environmental programs, especially those to mitigate climate change and encourage sustainable resources.

Harang helps Padres handed Giants crucial loss

2011-09-07T18:37:00.001-07:00

Aaron Harang threw seven strong innings and Cameron Maybin had two hits and an RBI as the San Diego Padres dealt a big blow to the San Francisco Giants' fading playoff hopes with a 3-1 victory Wednesday night.
The Giants, who have 19 games left, came into the game trailing NL West-leading Arizona by six games.
San Francisco rookie Brett Pill homered for a second straight game after he hit a home run Tuesday night in his first major league at-bat.
Will Venable had a solo homer and scored twice, while Maybin doubled and tripled in a run in the ninth.
The Padres got clutch defensive plays by Venable and Maybin.
The first was by Maybin, who made a long running catch while crashing into the wall in left-center field to rob Justin Christian leading off the game. Maybin hit his forehead on the padded wall and was on the ground for about a minute before he got up and stayed in the game.
Venable threw out Pill at home in the seventh when the rookie tried to score on a medium fly ball to right by pinch-hitter Pat Burrell.
San Diego won for the second time in 13 games overall. The Padres had lost six of their previous seven home games against San Francisco.
Harang (13-5) broke a two-start losing streak by allowing one run and four hits in seven innings. Harang, who struck out three and walked three, is 2-0 with a 0.90 ERA in three starts this season against the Giants, all at Petco Park.
Heath Bell got the final four outs for his 36th save in 40 chances. Bell replaced Chad Qualls in the eighth and threw one pitch to retire Carlos Beltran on a line drive to right with a runner on first and two outs.
Matt Cain (11-10) gave up two runs and four hits over seven innings. The right-hander struck out seven and walked three.
Cain, making his 200th career start, dropped to 8-19 lifetime against San Diego.
Venable led off the Padres' first with his seventh homer to right. It also extended his season club record for leadoff homers to five.
The home run was the third allowed by Cain in his last 20 starts. Overall, Cain has given up only eight homers.
Pill tied the game with a homer leading off the fifth. Pill joined John Bowker as the only two players in franchise history to homer in their first two major league games.
Pill homered off Wade LeBlanc on Tuesday night in his first major league at-bat, a two-run shot in the second inning of the Giants' 6-4 win.
The Padres took a 2-1 lead in the sixth when Jesus Guzman singled in Maybin, who reached on a two-out double.
Notes: Cain has pitched 203 innings this season, the fifth straight season he has reached the 200-inning mark. ... Bowker homered in his major league debut on April 12, 2008, and again the next day. ... It is "improbable" that Padres INF Logan Forsythe will play again this season, according to manager Bud Black. Forsythe has not played since Friday with an inflamed patellar tendon in his right knee. But Black said Forsythe's surgically repaired left knee is bothering him and will likely end his season. ... After a day off, Giants RHP Tim Lincecum (12-12, 2.75 ERA) will attempt to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers for the first time this season in four starts (0-2, 1.86) on Friday to open a six-game homestand. LHP Clayton Kershaw (17-5, 2.45) pitches for the Dodgers. ... LHP Cory Luebke (5-8, 3.29) will start for the Padres on Thursday at Arizona, facing NL wins leader RHP Ian Kennedy (18-4, 2.96).

Giant saltwater crocodile captured alive in Philippines

2011-09-05T18:51:00.000-07:00

Villagers and veteran hunters have captured a one-ton saltwater crocodile which they plan to make the star of a planned ecotourism park in a southern Philippine town, an official said Monday.
Mayor Edwin Cox Elorde said dozens of villagers and experts ensnared the 21-foot male crocodile along a creek in Bunawan township in Agusan del Sur province after a three-week hunt. It could be one of the largest crocodiles to be captured alive in recent years, he said, quoting local crocodile experts.
Elorde said the crocodile killed a water buffalo in an attack witnessed by villagers last month and was also suspected of having attacked a fisherman who went missing in July.
Reptile destroyed four traps
He said he sought the help of experts at a crocodile farm in western Palawan province.
"We were nervous but it's our duty to deal with a threat to the villagers," Elorde told The Associated Press by telephone. "When I finally stood before it, I couldn't believe my eyes."
After initial sightings at a creek, the hunters set four traps, which the crocodile destroyed. They then used sturdier traps using steel cables, one of which finally caught the enormous reptile late Saturday, he said.
About 100 people had to pull the crocodile, which weighs about 2,370 pounds, from the creek to a clearing where a crane lifted it into a truck, he said.
Locals hope crocodile will be 'biggest star'
The crocodile was placed in a fenced cage in an area where the town plans to build an ecotourism park for species found in a vast marshland in Agusan, an impoverished region about 515 miles southeast of Manila, Elorde said.
"It will be the biggest star of the park," Elorde said, adding that villagers were happy that they would be able to turn the dangerous crocodile "from a threat into an asset."
Despite the catch, villagers remain wary because several crocodiles still roam the outskirts of the farming town of about 37,000 people.

Humans had sex with now-extinct relatives

2011-09-05T18:49:00.000-07:00

Our species may have bred with a now extinct lineage of humanity before leaving Africa, scientists say.
Although we modern humans are now the only surviving lineage of humanity, others once roamed the Earth, making their way out of Africa before our species did, including the familiar Neanderthals in West Asia and Europe and the newfound Denisovans in East Asia. Genetic analysis of fossils of these extinct lineages has revealed they once interbred with modern humans, unions that may have endowed our lineage with mutations that protected them as we began expanding across the world about 65,000 years ago.
Now researchers analyzing the human genome find evidence that our species hybridized with a hitherto unknown human lineage even before leaving Africa, with approximately 2 percent of contemporary African DNA perhaps coming from this lineage. In comparison, recent estimates suggest that Neanderthal DNA makes up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes and Denisovan DNA makes up 4 percent to 6 percent of modern Melanesian genomes.
"We need to modify the standard model of human origins in which a single population transitioned to the anatomically modern state in isolation — a garden of Eden somewhere in Africa — and replaced all other archaic forms both within Africa and outside Africa without interbreeding," researcher Michael Hammer, a population geneticist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told LiveScience. "We now need to consider models in which gene flow occurred over time."
Haplotype hints
Hammer and his colleagues gathered DNA samples from the Center for the Study of Human Polymorphisms in Paris and sequenced about 60 regions of the human genome that apparently have no function. These genes are less subject than functional DNA to change as a result of recent evolutionary pressures driving the survival of the fittest; in such a way, they can give a clearer view of how populations might have mixed or not in the past.
The investigators focused on three populations that presented a good sample of the geographic and cultural diversity of sub-Saharan Africa — Mandenka farmers in western Africa, Biaka Pygmies in west-central Africa, and San Bushmen of southern Africa — looking for unusual patterns that suggested ancient interbreeding with other lineages. This included a hunt for long haplotyes , or sets of DNA sequences, not seen in other modern human groups, the idea being that while short haplotypes could potentially be explained by a few chance mutations within these modern human populations, comparatively long haplotypes were instead likely inherited from a significantly different lineage.
"If interbreeding occurs, it's going to bring in a whole chromosome," Hammer explained. Although this genetic contribution would have dwindled over time, remnants would still exist as shorter, unusual fragments, and "by looking at how long they are, we can get an estimate of how far back the interbreeding event happened." (The longer these odd haplotypes are, the more recently they occurred, having less time to get diminished by other genetic inputs.)
The researchers discovered especially strong evidence for such genetic mixing in the Biaka and San, in the form of a trio of unusual haplotypes. By comparing these sets of genes with those from comparable modern human ones, the investigators estimated the unusual genes may have come from a lineage that first diverged from the ancestors of modern humans about 700,000 years ago. For context, the Neanderthal lineage diverged from ours within the past 500,000 years, while the first signs of anatomically modern human features appeared only about 200,000 years ago.
"The populations that interbred in Africa were on a similar scale of divergence as the expanding modern population and Neanderthals were outside of Africa," Hammer said. "They were similar enough biologically so that they were able to produce fertile offspring, thus allowing genes to flow from one population to the other."
The length of the exotic haplotypes from this extinct lineage suggests interbreeding might still have occurred until as recently as 35,000 years ago.
"We think there were probably thousands of interbreeding events," Hammer said. "It happened relatively extensively and regularly."
Homeland of extinct lineage
A broader survey of where this trio of exotic haplotypes from this extinct lineage might now be found revealed they could be seen in modern human groups across sub-Saharan Africa, but apparently just one central African population of Pygmies, the Mbuti, had all three. Since this group is relatively isolated from other modern human populations, including other Pygmies, the scientists conjecture that central Africa may have been the homeland of this extinct lineage.
In the future, Hammer's team wants to look at the entire genome sequences of several modern human groups in Africa to get a better picture of how interbreeding might have occurred.
"Did it occur in a single burst in a single locale, or was admixture an ongoing process such that genes were flowing over large geographic distances and long periods of time?" Hammer asked. "This has many implications for how modern humans acquired the features that make them unique."
The researchers also want to look for ancient DNA from this extinct lineage that might have conferred some evolutionary advantage to hybrids with modern humans. This process of modern humans interbreeding with other lineages as they expanded across the world "may have accelerated the evolutionary process by allowing genes that are beneficial in one locale to spread to a new population that has not yet had time to adapt to those new conditions," Hammer said. "This may be a major mode of acquiring novel characteristics and one of the ways that we became the species that we are today."
So far no traces of the haplotypes from this newfound lineage have been seen in modern human groups outside of Africa. However, "we can't be sure until we do a better job of searching for them," Hammer said. "Another question for the future."

Cancer can't keep Buddy Ryan from Cowboys vs. Jets

2011-09-05T18:41:00.000-07:00

Not even cancer surgery can keep former NFL coach Buddy Ryan from being in the stands when his twin sons coach against each other Sunday night in the prime-time opener between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Jets.
Cowboys defensive coordinator Rob Ryan said Monday his dad was diagnosed last week with a form of cancer "in his gland that's right through his neck." Brother Rex, the Jets coach, said through a team spokesman that it was the parotid gland, the largest of the salivary glands.
Having already beaten melanoma in 1968 and '80, and another form of the disease earlier this year, the 80-year-old Ryan said this was "less serious" except that "whenever you go under anesthesia, you never know what's going to happen." So he told doctors to postpone the operation until he returns from the Meadowlands to see Rob and the Cowboys play against Rex and the Jets. He said he'll fly to New York on Friday and will return to his home in Kentucky on Monday.
"They said to go ahead and go," Ryan said during a telephone interview. "I've got to be able to do something" while waiting for the operation.
Rob Ryan said his dad's approach to fighting the disease is typical.
"That's just the way he is," he said. "This is a big thing for him, a big thing for the Ryans. He's just about the only guy that's beaten cancer about every time. He's been through it about four or five times. I'm sure the prognosis is great for him because he always wins."
He said his father's illness will be more motivation than distraction.
"All he taught us is 'Do the job,'" Rob said. "That's the way he is, so it's not that difficult. Obviously, (we're) praying a lot for him and things have to go well because that's what it is. But he raised us to do the job. Whatever we do, we're going to be the best at it — and that's what we are."
From Jets camp, Rex added: "It's going to be great having him here. I know this is huge for him. He's looked forward to it for a long time."
Buddy Ryan was as outspoken and boisterous as his boys are, a persona he could back up with his team's success on the field.
He was defensive coordinator of two renowned Super Bowl champions, the Joe Namath-led Jets who pulled off the huge upset in 1969, and the 1985 Bears who ran his 46 defense to perfection. He is also known for throwing a punch at the offensive coordinator while he was running the Oilers' defense. Ryan also had entertaining stints as the head coach of the Eagles and the Cardinals.
Both sons were on their dad's staff with the Cardinals in 1994 and '95. They've since made a name for themselves, with Rex leading the Jets to the AFC championship game the last two years, and Rob winning two Super Bowls as an assistant coach for the Patriots' Bill Belichick. This is Rob's first season in Dallas after working as defensive coordinator of the Browns and Raiders the last four years.
The brothers have squared off before, and every time is special for the Ryan family, especially the patriarch.
"This game's important to him," Rob said. "He wants to see these two rams bat heads."
____
AP Sports Writer Dennis Waszak Jr. in Florham Park, N.J., contributed to this report.

Species count put at 8.7 million

2011-09-03T19:09:00.000-07:00

The natural world contains about 8.7 million species, according to a new estimate described by scientists as the most accurate ever.

But the vast majority have not been identified - and cataloguing them all could take more than 1,000 years.

The number comes from studying relationships between the branches and leaves of the "family tree of life".

The team warns in the journal Plos biology that many species will become extinct before they can be studied.
Although the number of species on the planet might seem an obvious figure to know, a way to calculate it with confidence has been elusive.

In a commentary also carried in PLoS Biology, former Royal Society president Lord (Robert) May observes: "It is a remarkable testament to humanity's narcissism that we know the number of books in the US Library of Congress on 1 February 2011 was 22,194,656, but cannot tell you - to within an order of magnitude - how many distinct species of plants and animals we share our world with."

Now, it appears, we can.

"We've been thinking about this for several years now - we've had a look at a number of different approaches, and didn't have any success," one of the research team, Derek Tittensor, told BBC News.

"So this was basically our last chance, the last thing we tried, and it seems to work."

Dr Tittensor, who is based at the UN Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre (Unep-WCMC) and Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, worked on the project alongside peers from Dalhousie University in Canada and the University of Hawaii.

The vast majority of the 8.7 million are animals, with progressively smaller numbers of fungi, plants, protozoa (a group of single-celled organisms) and chromists (algae and other micro-organisms).

The figure excludes bacteria and some other types of micro-organism.

Linnaean steps
About 1.2 million species have been formally described, the vast majority from the land rather than the oceans.
The trick this team used was to look at the relationship between species and the broader groupings to which they belong.

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus developed a comprehensive system of taxonomy, as the field is known, which is still - with modifications - in use today.

Groups of closely related species belong to the same genus, which in turn are clustered into families, then orders, then classes, then phyla, and finally into kingdoms (such as the animal kingdom).

The higher up this hierarchical tree of life you look, the rarer new discoveries become - hardly surprising, as a discovery of a new species will be much more common than the discovery of a totally new phylum or class.

The researchers quantified the relationship between the discovery of new species and the discovery of new higher groups such as phyla and orders, and then used it to predict how many species there are likely to be.

"We discovered that, using numbers from the higher taxonomic groups, we can predict the number of species," said Dalhousie researcher Sina Adl.

"The approach accurately predicted the number of species in several well-studied groups such as mammals, fishes and birds, providing confidence in the method."

And the number came out as 8.7 million - plus or minus about a million.

Muddied waters
If this is correct, then only 14% of the world's species have yet been identified - and only 9% of those in the oceans.
"The rest are primarily going to be smaller organisms, and a large proportion of them will be dwelling in places that are hard to reach or hard to sample, like the deep oceans," said Dr Tittensor.

"When we think of species we tend to think of mammals or birds, which are pretty well known.

"But when you go to a tropical rainforest, it's easy to find new insects, and when you go to the deep sea and pull up a trawl, 90% of what you get can be undiscovered species."

At current rates of discovery, completing the catalogue would take over 1,000 years - but new techniques such as DNA bar-coding could speed things up.

The scientists say they do not expect their calculations to mark the end of this line of inquiry, and are looking to peers to refine methods and conclusions.

One who has already looked through the paper is Professor Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation programmes at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

"I think it's definitely a creative and innovative approach, but like every other method there are potential biases and I think it's probably a conservative figure," he told BBC News.

"But it's such a high figure that it wouldn't really matter if it's out by one or two million either way.

"It is really picking up this point that we know very little about the species with which we share the planet; and we are converting the Earth's natural landscapes so quickly, with total ignorance of our impact on the life in them."

Laws of physics defied to make ... coneheads

2011-09-03T19:05:00.000-07:00

In a mind-bending, and light-bending, discovery, scientists have produced a fun-house-like warping of light that defies existing laws of physics.
For centuries, simple equations (taught every year to high school physics students) have described how light moves through different media, for example from air into glass. Now, however, researchers have found that if the boundary between media is sufficiently complex (in this case, coated with nano-sized wires), those laws no longer apply.
The discovery has prompted the physicists to rewrite the traditional equations to account for the characteristics of the boundary surface. In most cases where these tweaked equations are applied, the new laws simplify back to their traditional forms, but sometimes, they show that light can behave in incredibly strange ways.
"Using designer surfaces, we've created the effects of a fun-house mirror on a flat plane," researcher Federico Capasso of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences said in a statement. "Our discovery carries optics into new territory and opens the door to exciting developments in photonics technology."
In addition to stirring up the laws of physics, the new finding allowed the researchers to create some wacky pictures. For instance, they simulated an image of their lab group as it would appear in a mirror coated with nano-wires. The result: a portrait of conehead-looking scientists.
Light speed
While Einstein's theory of special relativity showed that the speed of light represents a universal speed limit, it doesn't mean that light can't travel at different rates in different materials. For example, when light travels through a medium such as glass or water, it travels slower than when moving through a vacuum (that's when it moves at the characteristic "speed of light" — about 671 million miles per hour.
The traditional physics laws describe how moving from one medium to another causes light to refract, or change direction. These laws ignored the boundary between the two media, because that boundary didn't seem to change how the light moved.
But in a recent experiment at Capasso's lab, the researchers showed that when the boundary contains a special pattern, in this case an array of tiny gold antennas, etched into the surface of silicon, those laws no longer apply.
The scientists found that the antennas temporarily trapped the light, holding its energy for a short time before releasing it. By patterning the boundary with different types of these antennas, the researchers could bend the light before it even entered the silicon. Depending on the pattern, the light would reflect and refract in bizarre ways.
"Ordinarily, a surface like the surface of a pond is simply a geometric boundary between two media, air and water," said study leader Nanfang Yu, a research associate in Capasso's lab. "But now, in this special case, the boundary becomes an active interface that can bend the light by itself."
Rewriting the laws
After their experiments, the physicists went back to the drawing board to reformulate the traditional light equations. They added new terms to the equations representing the effect of the boundary between two media to account for their findings.
"By incorporating a gradient of phase discontinuities across the interface, the laws of reflection and refraction become designer laws, and a panoply of new phenomena appear," said Zeno Gaburro, a visiting scholar in Capasso's lab. "The reflected beam can bounce back instead of forward. You can create negative refraction.
Ultimately, the scientists found that manipulating the boundary can change the color (frequency of light waves), brightness (amplitude) and polarization of the light to create custom-made wacky light beams. One such beam the team succeeded in making produced a corkscrew-shaped stream of light from a flat surface.
The researchers say their finding could lead to a variety of applications in making lenses and optics. They report their discovery in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Science.

In dark ocean depths, 'twilight bacteria' at work

2011-09-03T18:56:00.000-07:00

In the dark depths of the ocean, mysterious organisms have been converting carbon dioxide into a form useful for life. Now scientists have identified some suspects: "twilight" microbes from 2,625 feet below the ocean surface that are turning inorganic carbon into useable food.
The job of capturing carbon, crucial to sustaining life on Earth, is usually carried out by plants that use sunlight as energy. But light doesn't penetrate below 656 feet of ocean, so plants can't do this job.
To survive, living cells must convert carbon dioxide into molecules that can form cellular structures or be used in metabolic processes. Simple, single-celled organisms called archaea that often live in extreme conditions were thought to be responsible for much of the dark ocean's carbon fixation. But there was evidence that archaea could not account for the total amount of carbon fixation going on there.
"Our study discovered specific types of bacteria, rather than archaea, and their likely energy sources that may be responsible for this major, unaccounted component of the dark ocean carbon cycle," said Ramunas Stepanauskas, a study researcher who is director of the Bigelow Laboratory Single Cell Genomics Center.
To get a glimpse of what was going on in the dark, the researchers looked at samples from two subtropical gyres, or systems of rotating ocean currents, in the South Atlantic and North Pacific. The team isolated single cells from the samples and sequenced genomes (the complete set of inherited instructions for an organism) of 738. This allowed them to identify a variety of strains of bacteria and verify the predominant lineages capable of fixing carbon.
To carry out this process, cells need a source of energy.While it is believed that archaea use ammonia, many of the bacteria the scientists sampled contained genes suggesting they could use sulfur compounds as an energy source. Others may also use single-carbon compounds, such as methane, as energy sources, the researchers write.
These previously unrecognized types of dark ocean bacteria may play an important role in the natural cycling of nutrients from the environment to organisms and back, the researchers write in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Science.

Ford, Toyota to work together on hybrid trucks

2011-09-02T04:45:00.000-07:00

Ford and Toyota said Monday they will work together on a gas-electric hybrid engine to power pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles.
The companies signed a deal to share development costs, saying they want to make the technology more affordable for customers and bring it to market faster.
Both companies now sell hybrid cars, but trucks need a different system with power to tow and haul heavy loads.
“Our collaboration with Ford is a move to make hybrid technology more widely available in sport-utility vehicles and in trucks,” said Takeshi Uchiyamada, Toyota’s executive vice president for research and development, in a statement Monday.
“Those kinds of models are indispensable to American customers. And providing them with our hybrid technology will help conserve energy and reduce output of greenhouse gas here in the United States. That was our thinking in considering the collaboration,” he added.
Hybrid trucks would help automakers meet stricter government fuel economy and pollution standards in the U.S. and other countries. In the U.S., the fleet of new cars and trucks will have to average 56.5 miles per gallon (24 kilometers per liter) by 2025, although trucks will have lower mileage targets.
It will take a year for the companies to figure out who will do what research, Ford product development chief Derrick Kuzak said. He said it would be at least two or three years after that before a system can be developed. The companies aren't sure yet what kind of gas mileage it will get.
The system would power some of Ford's F-Series pickup trucks, the top-selling vehicle in the U.S., and it would run the Tundra, Toyota's full-sized pickup truck. It also would be used in rear-wheel-drive sport utility vehicles, the companies said.
Ford and Toyota also said they will work together to develop standards for the way electronic devices such as smartphones link to cars and trucks.
Ford said it's the first time it has worked with Toyota on any project.
"There are no future plans beyond that point," Kuzak said. He said the companies would save money on developing the system but he did not know how much. It's important, he said, to share costs to make the system affordable to customers.
Discussions between the two companies began in April.
It's not the first hybrid system for pickup trucks and SUVs. General Motors Co., Chrysler and BMW AG collaborated on a system unveiled several years ago. The system powers some GM pickups and SUVs but has not sold well.

2 tons of elephant ivory seized in Hong Kong

2011-09-02T04:41:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong customs officers have seized a large shipment of African ivory hidden in a container that arrived by sea from Malaysia.
Hong Kong government officials said Tuesday that officers found 794 pieces of ivory tusks estimated to be worth $1.6 million.
The officers found the tusks, which were hidden by stones, on Monday after deciding to examine the shipment, which the officials said was labeled "nonferrous products for factory use."
The container arrived from Malaysia, but the officials did not say where it originated from. A 66-year-old man was arrested and officials are investigating.