NEW YORK (AP) ? Lil Wayne says he's an epileptic and has had seizures for years.
In an interview with Los Angeles-based radio station Power 106 on Thursday, the 30-year-old rapper said epilepsy caused his most recent health scare earlier this month when he was rushed to a hospital. Wayne said he had three back-to-back seizures.
The Grammy winner says: "I've had a bunch of seizures, y'all just never hear about them."
Wayne says he "could've died" and that the recent seizures were a result of "just plain stress, no rest, overworking myself."
He released his 10th album, "I Am Not a Human Being II," this week. He'll embark on a 40-city tour in July with rappers T.I. and Future.
The New Orleans native, whose given name is Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., is one of the biggest stars not only of his genre but in all music.
"Come See Our New Home on Android," the invitation sent to members of the press on Thursday declared. Does this mean the long-rumored Facebook phone is about to become official? What is the social network's next move? And does it stand a chance?
Facebook is intending to introduce a modified version of Google's Android operating system, according to sourcing from TechCrunch's Josh Constine, the New York Times' Nick Bilton and Brian X. Chen, and the Wall Street Journal's Evelyn M. Rusli and Amir Efrati. This version of Android will put Facebook front and center and "will debut on a handset made by HTC, according to a Facebook employee and another person who were briefed on the announcement," Chen and Bilton explain.
"Imagine Facebook?s integration with iOS 6, but on steroids, and built by Facebook itself," Constine adds. "It could have a heavy reliance on Facebook?s native apps like Messenger, easy social sharing from anywhere on the phone, and more."
?It?s putting Facebook first,? a person familiar with the matter emphasized to Wall Street Journal reporters. But unlike competitors such as Amazon and Google, it is not putting Facebook itself into the hardware game.
"With Amazon, it's pretty clear," mobile industry consultant Chetan Sharma told NBC News. "They want to sell their content and services. They're building their own devices, which is different from what Facebook is doing."
However, the idea of a modified version of Android may be viewed as an act of hostility directed at Facebook's frenemy, Google.
"The reaction from Google will be interesting to see," Sharma pointed out. "There's obviously overlap ... It seems to Google that it's underpinning their Google+ efforts. Longer term, I don't see them letting it go and letting other people do their work."
But even if Google lets Facebook's plans fly, there are other issues to consider, Sharma says. "If it's just a phone that's going to be pushed by HTC, its chances are going to be limited," he explains. "[HTC] doesn't have the marketing powers." To truly stand a shot, Facebook needs to join hands with carriers.
Of course, some might wonder whether any carriers would be game. After all, Facebook's VoIP efforts and its baked-in Messenger service might conflict with carriers' business agendas, right?
Not necessarily so, says Sharma. "In certain markets [VoIP and Messenger] would be challenging," he elaborates. "In markets where unlimited voice and messaging is already bundled in ? in those scenarios operators have less resistance to the idea. They already make money on voice and messaging and they'll also make money on the data used by Facebook."
Initial whispers don't suggest that "Facebook Home," as the social network's device/software combo is expected to be named, is going to be pitched by any carriers, so we'll have to see how things fare with merely HTC. (Of course, that's assuming all these rumors and reports pan out.)
Things will be official on Thursday, April 4, and we'll be in Menlo Park, Calif., to report live.
Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? North Korea warned Seoul on Saturday that the Korean Peninsula had entered "a state of war" and threatened to shut down a border factory complex that's the last major symbol of inter-Korean cooperation.
Analysts say a full-scale conflict is extremely unlikely, noting that the Korean Peninsula has remained in a technical state of war for 60 years. But the North's continued threats toward Seoul and Washington, including a vow to launch a nuclear strike, have raised worries that a misjudgment between the sides could lead to a clash.
North Korea's threats are seen as efforts to provoke the new government in Seoul, led by President Park Geun-hye, to change its policies toward Pyongyang, and to win diplomatic talks with Washington that could get it more aid. North Korea's moves are also seen as ways to build domestic unity as young leader Kim Jong Un strengthens his military credentials.
On Thursday, U.S. military officials revealed that two B-2 stealth bombers dropped dummy munitions on an uninhabited South Korean island as part of annual defense drills that Pyongyang sees as rehearsals for invasion. Hours later, Kim ordered his generals to put rockets on standby and threatened to strike American targets if provoked.
North Korea said in a statement Saturday that it would deal with South Korea according to "wartime regulations" and would retaliate against any provocations by the United States and South Korea without notice.
"Now that the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK have entered into an actual military action, the inter-Korean relations have naturally entered the state of war," said the statement, which was carried by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency, referring to the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Provocations "will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war," the statement said.
Hours after the statement, Pyongyang threatened to shut down the jointly run Kaesong industrial park, expressing anger over media reports suggesting the complex remained open because it was a source of hard currency for the impoverished North.
"If the puppet group seeks to tarnish the image of the DPRK even a bit, while speaking of the zone whose operation has been barely maintained, we will shut down the zone without mercy," an identified spokesman for the North's office controlling Kaesong said in comments carried by KCNA.
South Korea's Unification Ministry responded by calling the North Korean threat "unhelpful" to the countries' already frayed relations and vowed to ensure the safety of hundreds of South Korean managers who cross the border to their jobs in Kaesong. It did not elaborate.
South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said the country's military remains mindful of the possibility that increasing North Korean drills near the border could lead to an actual provocation.
"The series of North Korean threats ? announcing all-out war, scrapping the cease-fire agreement and the non-aggression agreement between the South and the North, cutting the military hotline, entering into combat posture No. 1 and entering a 'state of war' ? are unacceptable and harm the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula," Kim said.
"We are maintaining full military readiness in order to protect our people's lives and security," he told reporters Saturday.
The two Koreas remain technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. Naval skirmishes in the disputed waters off the Korean coast have led to bloody battles several times over the years.
But on the streets of Seoul on Saturday, South Koreans said they were not worried about an attack from North Korea.
"From other countries' point of view, it may seem like an extremely urgent situation," said Kang Tae-hwan, a private tutor. "But South Koreans don't seem to be that nervous because we've heard these threats from the North before."
The Kaesong industrial park, which is run with North Korean labor and South Korean know-how, has been operating normally, despite Pyongyang shutting down a communications channel typically used to coordinate travel by South Korean workers to and from the park just across the border in North Korea. The rivals are now coordinating the travel indirectly, through an office at Kaesong that has outside lines to South Korea.
North Korea has previously made such threats about Kaesong without acting on them, and recent weeks have seen a torrent of bellicose rhetoric from Pyongyang. North Korea is angry about the South Korea-U.S. military drills and new U.N. sanctions over its nuclear test last month.
Dozens of South Korean firms run factories in the border town of Kaesong. Using North Korea's cheap, efficient labor, the Kaesong complex produced $470 million worth of goods last year.
Emily Hilliard will cook a festive brunch with friends on Easter Sunday. But none in her Washington, D.C., social circle of foodies, folklorists and fiddlers will go to church that day.
In Denver, Ambra Vibran will enjoy an Italian feast with cousins that Sunday. But, she says, "my spiritual life is in hiking, skiing, kayaking and enjoying God?s creation."
Eleanor Drey plans a Jewish traditional meal where family and friends will talk about freedom. But it wasn?t on Passover. Folks are tied up with their kids? spring vacations. They?ll gather at Drey?s San Francisco home in April instead.
This time of year, most Americans are celebrating essential stories of Christianity and Judaism: God freeing the enslaved is a key Passover theme. Easter?s core is Jesus? resurrection, offering a doorway to salvation.
But many celebrate with a twist.
While 73 percent of Americans call themselves Christian, just 41 percent say they plan to attend Easter worship services, according to a March 13 survey of 1,060 U.S. adults by LifeWay Research, a Nashville, Tenn.-based Christian research agency. Passover is a home-centered celebration, but it?s not known how many Jews plan to recite the prayers and serve symbolic foods at their Seder meal.
In the gap between faith and practice are millions of people who delight in Easter and Passover as "holidays," not "holy days."
They?re just as Christian, just as Jewish, in their own eyes as people who follow traditional scripts ?? church on Sunday before carving the ham or the Seder rituals before slurping the matzo ball soup. They?ve simply redefined their spirituality to center on the people at the table ? shared time, shared values with their nearest and dearest.
"Relationships have replaced religion for many Millennials," says Esther Fleece, who spent three years specializing in outreach to young adult Christians for the evangelical group Focus on the Family.
Fleece, now a literary agent in Orange, Calif., is a devoted churchgoer herself. This year, as always, she says, "I?ll invite my Creaster [Christmas and Easter] friends to come with me Easter Sunday."
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Still, Fleece says, many won?t come. They don?t think they need it.
"Religion gives people a basis for morality, for hope and a greater purpose," Fleece says. "Millennials form their friendship groups around similar interests. They reinforce and encourage each other."
Fleece?s friend Vibran, 30, takes the view that "religion has evolved over the years. I feel like it?s whatever you want it to be. I believe the Catholic moral values, but I don?t feel I have to go to church to consider myself a believer in that."
Hilliard, 29, might find herself singing old-time hymns on Easter. However, the singing is not about theology. Hymns offer "a connection to tradition and history and to feeling part of something larger than yourself," says Hilliard, who plays the fiddle.
The meal that Hilliard?s friends will cook together reflects their support for food from local growers and sustainable farm culture. At the table, "You are beholden to each other. You do talk about values and ways of living."
Unlike earlier generations, "Millennials prioritize relationships, especially family, over religion," explains Jess Rainer, who co-wrote a book drawn from the survey, The Millennials: Connecting to America?s Largest Generation.
This cultural religion view is not confined to the young. When Gallup tracked people?s happiness every day for a year in 2008, the peak of the first five months was Easter Sunday, when people logged the most hours with those who make them happy.
Since tension is not conducive to happiness, many cut one flash point ? God ? out of the holiday conversation. Easter becomes less about resurrection and salvation from sin, more about a universal longing for rebirth and the joy of spring. Passover shifts from liberation at God?s hand to human responsibility toward one another.
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While the media continues to debate the severity of the denial-of-service attacks taking place across the web this month, they appear to have claimed another victim: payments startup Dwolla announced today that it, too, is now?experiencing?a distributed denial-of-service event (DDoS attack). The attack, which is still underway, began yesterday, resulting in either limited or no availability to the company's website, Dwolla.com.
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Mar. 28, 2013 ? A new study conducted by The Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, N.M., shows that neuroimaging data can predict the likelihood of whether a criminal will reoffend following release from prison.
The paper, which is to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, studied impulsive and antisocial behavior and centered on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that deals with regulating behavior and impulsivity.
The study demonstrated that inmates with relatively low anterior cingulate activity were twice as likely to reoffend than inmates with high-brain activity in this region.
"These findings have incredibly significant ramifications for the future of how our society deals with criminal justice and offenders," said Dr. Kent A. Kiehl, who was senior author on the study and is director of mobile imaging at MRN and an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. "Not only does this study give us a tool to predict which criminals may reoffend and which ones will not reoffend, it also provides a path forward for steering offenders into more effective targeted therapies to reduce the risk of future criminal activity."
The study looked at 96 adult male criminal offenders aged 20-52 who volunteered to participate in research studies. This study population was followed over a period of up to four years after inmates were released from prison.
"These results point the way toward a promising method of neuroprediction with great practical potential in the legal system," said Dr. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Philosophy Department and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, who collaborated on the study. "Much more work needs to be done, but this line of research could help to make our criminal justice system more effective."
The study used the Mind Research Network's Mobile Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) System to collect neuroimaging data as the inmate volunteers completed a series of mental tests.
"People who reoffended were much more likely to have lower activity in the anterior cingulate cortices than those who had higher functioning ACCs," Kiehl said. "This means we can see on an MRI a part of the brain that might not be working correctly -- giving us a look into who is more likely to demonstrate impulsive and anti-social behavior that leads to re-arrest."
The anterior cingulate cortex of the brain is "associated with error processing, conflict monitoring, response selection, and avoidance learning," according to the paper. People who have this area of the brain damaged have been "shown to produce changes in disinhibition, apathy, and aggressiveness. Indeed, ACC-damaged patients have been classed in the 'acquired psychopathic personality' genre."
Kiehl says he is working on developing treatments that increase activity within the ACC to attempt to treat the high-risk offenders.
The four-year study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and pilot funds by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project. The study was conducted in collaboration with the New Mexico Corrections Department.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Duke University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
E. Aharoni, G. M. Vincent, C. L. Harenski, V. D. Calhoun, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, M. S. Gazzaniga, K. A. Kiehl. Neuroprediction of future rearrest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1219302110
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.
As part of the government?s initiative to institute Common Core standards for education, so comes a system that would mine information about students to establish best practices for effective teaching. But some think the technology that would conduct the mining crosses a line.
Glenn Beck spoke of the ?indoctrination? of the Common Core and data mining that goes along with it on his Wednesday evening show on TheBlaze TV. A look into the technology that would mine this personal information ? like MRI scans and other sensors ? and how it might be used has him and others concerned.
Cameras on computers could track students? facial expressions. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)
Beck?s response to it all? ?Are you out of your mind?? he said of some of the proposed sensors on Thursday?s morning radio program.
Watch the clip from Wednesday?s show:
In the draft ?Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century? report released in February by the Department of Education is a section detailing how to measure such qualities in a student through Behavioral Task Performance.
?Behavioral task performance measures are the broad set of methods used to capture behaviors consistent with perseverance or lack thereof?and in many cases, associated emotional experiences, physical movements or facial expressions, physiological responses, and thoughts? that students do in response to a particular challenge,? the report states.
It goes on to say that laboratory experiments have long been useful in gaining information about behavioral task performance, but ?new technological opportunities offer potential for new methods and approaches.? This includes data collected about students using online learning systems but also ?affective computing? methods, which is defined as ?the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate aspects of human affect.?
Understanding the emotions or physiological state of a student while they?re presented with a challenge, the report said, can be measured through ?analysis of facial expressions, EEG brain wave patterns, skin conductance, heart rate variability, posture and eye- tracking.?
The report presents this figure showing a variety of sensors that could be used to determine the emotional state of a student while performing a certain task:
Figure from the draft ?Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance? report (Image: ed.gov)
?Sensors provide constant, parallel streams of data and are used with data mining techniques and self-report measures to examine frustration, motivation/flow, confidence, boredom and fatigue,? the report states.
It presents MIT?s Mood Meter ? a device that captures facial expression through a camera on a laptop while software analyses the mood ? as an example of technology that can conduct these measurements. The Mood Meter was deployed on MIT?s campus to get a sense of the general?mood during the Festival of Art, Science and Technology in 2011. By tracking smiles as a metric of happiness, the Mood Meter would provide real-time information that could ?help with answers to questions such as ?Do midterms lower the mood??, ?Does warmer weather lead to happiness??, and ?Are people from one department happier than others???
Watch this video to see the Mood Meter in action:
You can see how such technology could be used to answer questions about a student?s behavior to certain situations or topics in the classroom.
?While this type of tool may not be necessary in a small class of students, it could be useful for examining emotional responses in informal learning environments for large groups, like museums,? the report says of the use of technology like the Mood Meter.
A study in 1999 published by MIT researchers delved into the use of a posture-sensing chair to evaluate a student. The experiment using a chair with pressure sensors on the seat and back evaluated student interest in order to better learn how to improve the experience for students in a computer-learning situation.
But a camera, chair, mouse and wristband equipped with sensors to track different metrics isn?t not all. The report also highlights the value of FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagery), which would reveal different areas of activity in the brain through scans.
The report notes that use of such a machine is impractical in the school setting ? equipment is large and expensive to use ? but includes the following idea:
Ed Dieterle and Ash Vasudeva of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation point out that researchers such as Jon Gabrieli and Richard Davidson are beginning to use multiple methods to explore how specific brain activity is correlated with other cognitive and affective indicators that are practical to measure in school settings.
Some technology to track students in some ways is already being implemented in schools. A student in a Texas school has fought against the school?s requirement of an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag in her student I.D. With the RFID enabled tags in the I.D.?s schools would be able to track where students were on campus ? not off ? but the student viewed it as an invasion of privacy and ?the mark of the beast.?
The report goes on to acknowledge the drawbacks of using some data mining technologies, which includes being intrusive or simply impractical for use in a traditional classroom setting.
?[...] many of these types of measures are dependent on the use of highly constrained tasks in digital learning environments, which may be difficult to translate into use in the classroom or informal learning environment.?
And what of privacy (emphasis added)?
Of course, privacy is always a concern, especially when leveraging data available in the ?cloud? that users may or may not be aware is being mined. However, another emergent concern is the consequences of using new types of personal data in new ways. Learners and educators have the potential to get forms of feedback about their behaviors, emotions, physiological responses, and cognitive processes that have never been available before. Measurement developers must carefully consider the impacts of releasing such data, sometimes of a sensitive nature, and incorporate feedback mechanisms that are valuable, respectful, and serve to support productive mindsets.
To Beck, all this adds up to the government ?using your kids as a guinea pig.?
?This is a progressive takeover of America?s entire school system,? Beck said in Wednesday?s show. ?The event horizon on this is so short because they are so far ahead if you don?t gather now as a public and act now in your local and state-wide educational systems, you will not be able to stop this.
?This is a progressive bonanza. If it?s allowed to be in our schools in any form and become the common core of America?s next generation it will destroy America and the system of freedom as we know it,? Beck said.
NOvA neutrino detector records first 3-D particle tracksPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Andre Salles media@fnal.gov 630-840-6733 DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
What will soon be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States has recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles.
Using the first completed section of the NOvA neutrino detector, scientists have begun collecting data from cosmic raysparticles produced by a constant rain of atomic nuclei falling on the Earth's atmosphere from space.
"It's taken years of hard work and close collaboration among universities, national laboratories and private companies to get to this point," said Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab manages the project to construct the detector.
The active section of the detector, under construction in Ash River, Minn., is about 12 feet long, 15 feet wide and 20 feet tall. The full detector will measure more than 200 feet long, 50 feet wide and 50 feet tall.
Scientists' goal for the completed detector is to use it to discover properties of mysterious fundamental particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are as abundant as cosmic rays in the atmosphere, but they have barely any mass and interact much more rarely with other matter. Many of the neutrinos around today are thought to have originated in the big bang.
"The more we know about neutrinos, the more we know about the early universe and about how our world works at its most basic level," said NOvA co-spokesperson Gary Feldman of Harvard University.
Later this year, Fermilab, outside of Chicago, will start sending a beam of neutrinos 500 miles through the earth to the NOvA detector near the Canadian border. When a neutrino interacts in the NOvA detector, the particles it produces leave trails of light in their wake. The detector records these streams of light, enabling physicists to identify the original neutrino and measure the amount of energy it had.
When cosmic rays pass through the NOvA detector, they leave straight tracks and deposit well-known amounts of energy. They are great for calibration, said Mat Muether, a Fermilab post-doctoral researcher who has been working on the detector.
"Everybody loves cosmic rays for this reason," Muether said. "They are simple and abundant and a perfect tool for tuning up a new detector."
The detector at its current size catches more than 1,000 cosmic rays per second. Naturally occurring neutrinos from cosmic rays, supernovae and the sun stream through the detector at the same time. But the flood of more visible cosmic-ray data makes it difficult to pick them out.
Once the upgraded Fermilab neutrino beam starts, the NOvA detector will take data every 1.3 seconds to synchronize with the Fermilab accelerator. Inside this short time window, the burst of neutrinos from Fermilab will be much easier to spot.
The NOvA detector will be operated by the University of Minnesota under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
The NOvA experiment is a collaboration of 180 scientists, technicians and students from 20 universities and laboratories in the U.S and another 14 institutions around the world. The scientists are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and funding agencies in the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.
###
Fermilab is America's premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab's website at http://www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday.
The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit 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.
NOvA neutrino detector records first 3-D particle tracksPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Andre Salles media@fnal.gov 630-840-6733 DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
What will soon be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States has recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles.
Using the first completed section of the NOvA neutrino detector, scientists have begun collecting data from cosmic raysparticles produced by a constant rain of atomic nuclei falling on the Earth's atmosphere from space.
"It's taken years of hard work and close collaboration among universities, national laboratories and private companies to get to this point," said Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab manages the project to construct the detector.
The active section of the detector, under construction in Ash River, Minn., is about 12 feet long, 15 feet wide and 20 feet tall. The full detector will measure more than 200 feet long, 50 feet wide and 50 feet tall.
Scientists' goal for the completed detector is to use it to discover properties of mysterious fundamental particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are as abundant as cosmic rays in the atmosphere, but they have barely any mass and interact much more rarely with other matter. Many of the neutrinos around today are thought to have originated in the big bang.
"The more we know about neutrinos, the more we know about the early universe and about how our world works at its most basic level," said NOvA co-spokesperson Gary Feldman of Harvard University.
Later this year, Fermilab, outside of Chicago, will start sending a beam of neutrinos 500 miles through the earth to the NOvA detector near the Canadian border. When a neutrino interacts in the NOvA detector, the particles it produces leave trails of light in their wake. The detector records these streams of light, enabling physicists to identify the original neutrino and measure the amount of energy it had.
When cosmic rays pass through the NOvA detector, they leave straight tracks and deposit well-known amounts of energy. They are great for calibration, said Mat Muether, a Fermilab post-doctoral researcher who has been working on the detector.
"Everybody loves cosmic rays for this reason," Muether said. "They are simple and abundant and a perfect tool for tuning up a new detector."
The detector at its current size catches more than 1,000 cosmic rays per second. Naturally occurring neutrinos from cosmic rays, supernovae and the sun stream through the detector at the same time. But the flood of more visible cosmic-ray data makes it difficult to pick them out.
Once the upgraded Fermilab neutrino beam starts, the NOvA detector will take data every 1.3 seconds to synchronize with the Fermilab accelerator. Inside this short time window, the burst of neutrinos from Fermilab will be much easier to spot.
The NOvA detector will be operated by the University of Minnesota under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
The NOvA experiment is a collaboration of 180 scientists, technicians and students from 20 universities and laboratories in the U.S and another 14 institutions around the world. The scientists are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and funding agencies in the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.
###
Fermilab is America's premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab's website at http://www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday.
The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit 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.
The venerable Ultima franchise is coming to Android this spring by way of a lightweight role-playing game called Ultima Forever: Quest of the Avatar. We got to play around a bit with it at GDC 2013, and it really does promise to bring the classic hardcore MMO model to a more casual audience. Players party up in groups of four to delve into dungeon romps that last five minutes and up, depending on how much time you and your buddies have.
Quick View (free) for Andorid is the mobile companion to DigitalQuick, a service that allows you to easily encrypt files on your computer and on the file-syncing service Dropbox. DigitalQuick also allows you to control what other people can do with your secure documents, such as edit, copy, and print.
Though still in beta, DigitalQuick and Quick View offer a solution for individuals and businesses who want to take advantage of Dropbox's low cost and utility without compromising security. However, Digital Quick is quirky and the mobile app is no different. In my testing, Quick View lived up to its name: With it, you can quickly view secure files on the go?and little else.
Finding Files Getting files into Digital Quick is a bit of a Byzantine process, requiring you to encrypt files on your computer and then move them on to your Android device via USB. Then, you fire up a file manager on your Android device (I use the Astro File Manager) and move the files into the My Documents directory inside the Quick View folder.
Did you have Quick View running while you did this? Well, you'll have to wait a full ten minutes before the app will sync with the DigitalQuick servers and update the permissions for the files you've moved. Until then, you'll see confusing error messages. There's no way to force the app to refresh, so you'll have restart the app, or move files into the Quick View directory before launching the app.
The Fassoo.com team has told me that future versions will include real-time permissions updating.
DigitalQuick's selling point is its support for Dropbox, and accessing your secure files from that service is straightforward with Quick View. Just tap the large Dropbox icon on the app's homescreen, tap allow on the next screen, and your DigitalQuick files (along with everything else in your Dropbox account) is available.
The process for linking Dropbox to DigitalQuick and adding encrypted files is covered in our review of the Web service.
Working With Quick View Once you have access to your files, Quick View lets you view the contents without decrypting the files. Unfortunately, the built-in document viewer will not let you copy, edit, save, or really do anything with your documents.
You can decrypt files, removing all permissions and encryption, to share with users who aren't DigitalQuick users. Doing so, of course, defeats the purpose of using a document security system. You can also view the permissions assigned to a document, such as limitations on editing and printing. Unfortunately, you cannot change the permissions from the app?to do so, you'll have to login to the DigitalQuick website.
Quick View lets you share DigitalQuick documents via email, which is useful if your files are stored locally. Dropbox has more robust sharing options, though, which don't appear to affect the encryption or permissions of DigitalQuick documents. So you may be better off just sharing your documents through Dropbox directly.
Prior to publishing this review, DigitalQuick's developers informed us that an update allows users to import files directly from Dropbox without decrypting them and for users to access their local encrypted files without an Internet connection. These are welcome additions, but did not affect the score of the review.
Not for the Faint of Heart If you're an avid DigitalQuick user already familiar with its quirks, using Quick View is a no brainer?despite all its drawbacks. If you're not a Digital Quick user, the app serves no purpose.
Because the service is still in beta, I don't want to be overly harsh, but users should be aware that Quick View is far from a finished product. The utility of being able to view and decrypt files is overshadowed by the difficulty in opening them, and the app lacks critical features like a built-in file manager and document editor. Though the app looks well-made it badly needs an improved user interface as the current version is difficult to use and completely un-intuitive. The included documentation did little to relieve my confusion.
The time has come for a service like DigitalQuick, but it and Quick View need to mature before they'll be ready to fill that niche.
The Egyptian coastguard has apprehended three scuba divers in the act of attempting to cut a major underwater telecommunications cable off the coast of Alexandria.
"Marine forces today successfully foiled an attempt by three divers while they were cutting a submarine cable for internet connection belonging to Egypt Telecom," coastguard spokesman Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement quoted by news website Al Arabiya.
The attempted act of sabotage is a sign that criminals or even terrorists are becoming all too aware of the economic damage they can do by attacking the world's subsea cables.
The alleged cable cutters were caught on a speeding fishing boat just off the port city of Alexandria. While their motives - and indeed their degree of cable-cutting success - are unclear, local subsea cable operator Seacom has been reporting cable breaks and internet service outages in the last week, affecting trans-Mediterranean lines from Europe to Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
The news highlights issues raised in a 2010 report by the IEEE, which suggested that urgent international action was needed to rid the global submarine cable network of its many vulnerable "choke points". It said that diversifying the deep-sea cable routes on which the internet and telephony depends would bolster the network's chances of surviving attacks by saboteurs, pirates and cable thieves.
The major choke points - where cables come together after traversing oceans - are in the Strait of Malacca near Singapore, the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines, and the Suez Canal. Even optical fibres have valuable metal shielding, making cables a target for cable thieves, just as copper cables are on land. Ships' anchors and fishing nets drag cables up and snap them, too, and this was responsible for most of Asia's internet outages between 2000 and 2009, the IEEE report said.
A fresh concern is that the highly specialised cable ships used to lay cables and fix broken ones could also be hijacked by pirates off places like Somalia - seriously delaying attempts to fix severed lines. And with new subsea cables recently laid into East Africa, that could have a damaging effect on the continent's adoption of wired technologies.
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) ? Anxious Cypriots patiently waited in long lines to get at their accounts on Thursday after banks opened for the first time in nearly two weeks, following an international bailout to save the country's financial system.
Fearing a run on its banks, the tiny Mediterranean country has imposed daily withdrawal limits of 300 euros ($384) for individuals and 5,000 euros for businesses ? the first so-called capital controls that any country has applied in the eurozone's 14-year history.
Financial strains are building on families and businesses, and the recession in Cyprus is likely to deepen. The mood outside banks was calmer than feared. Many people said the withdrawal limits were probably necessary to keep a bad situation from spiraling out of control.
Flower shop owner Christos Papamichael was among some 30 people waiting patiently for bank doors to open at noon Thursday. "Everything has been paralyzed ... No one thinks of buying flowers," he said.
Banks had been shut in Cyprus since March 16 to prevent people from draining their accounts as politicians scrambled to save the country's stricken financial sector. ATM machines were working, but with a limit on daily withdrawals.
An initial plan to seize up to 10 percent of all Cypriot deposits caused an international uproar and was scrapped. But in order to secure 10 billion euros ($12.9 billion) in loans from other euro countries and the International Monetary Fund, Cyprus agreed Monday to wind down its second-largest bank and seize billions from accounts holding more than the insured limit of 100,000 euros.
European financial markets, which have been on edge for weeks, rose slightly on Thursday. The FTSE 100 index of leading British shares rose 0.4 percent, while Germany's DAX index rose 0.1 percent.
Government and bank officials had feared that up to 10 percent of the country's deposits could be siphoned off when banks opened Thursday ? but that did not appear to happen. Guards from private security firms reinforced police outside some ATMs and banks in the capital, Nicosia. No problems controlling crowds were reported.
The limits on withdrawals and other capital controls are expected to be relaxed gradually. Analysts say it's anyone's guess how people and businesses will react once that happens.
Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides said that, according to central bank estimates, the controls would be fully lifted in a month. Some analysts say it could last longer.
President Nicos Anastasiades expressed in a statement his "warm gratitude and deep appreciation towards the Cypriot people for the maturity and spirit of responsibility they have shown at a critical time for the stability of the Cypriot economy."
However, many Cypriots were left frustrated and confused by the closures and controls and concerned about the effect on their businesses and livelihoods.
"No matter how much information there was, things were changing all the time," said Costas Kyprianides, a grocery supplier in Nicosia.
For years, the banking sector has been the lifeblood of the Cypriot economy, attracting money from across Europe ? and especially Russia ? thanks to high interest rates and loose regulation. The country's deposits ballooned to more than seven times its economic output. But Cypriot banks ran into trouble after taking massive losses on Greek government bonds.
Now, the country's second-largest bank, Laiki, is to be split up, with its healthy assets being absorbed into the Bank of Cyprus. Savers with more 100,000 euros ($129,000) in either Bank of Cyprus and Laiki will face big losses. At Laiki, those could reach as much as 80 percent of amounts above the 100,000 insured limit; those at Bank of Cyprus are expected to be much lower.
As part of the country's capital controls, no checks can be cashed, although they can be deposited. Anyone leaving the country, whether Cypriot or a visitor, can only take up to 1,000 euros ($1,290) with them in cash.
The country's general accounting office said pensions and other social security payments, together with salaries for government employees, will be in bank accounts next Tuesday and Wednesday.
Many Cypriots struggled Thursday to understand what exactly they could and couldn't do with their money. Television talk shows addressed viewers' queries, which ranged from how they would pay college tuition for children studying abroad to how to handle check payments.
People also wondered whether they would be able to access their salaries, many of which were due this week.
Some analysts are concerned that, if kept in place long, Cyprus's measures will go against the fundamental principle of the single currency: Free and easy movement of money around the euro's 17 members.
In a statement Thursday, The European Commission said "the free movement of capital should be reinstated as soon as possible".
Not every account in Laiki and Bank of Cyprus will be hit with big losses. Deposits held by the central government, local authorities such as municipalities, universities and development projects being co-funded by the European Union will not face a so-called haircut.
Government welfare and pension fund accounts in Laiki will be treated in the same way as those in the Bank of Cyprus, "thereby ensuring most of the deposits," said Constantinos Petrides, undersecretary to the president.
Some individuals and businesses had moved their money out of Cyprus well before the banks closed their doors last week.
According to ECB figures, deposits in Cyprus' banks slipped 2.2 percent last month, to 46.36 billion euros ($59.36 billion), the lowest figure since May 2010 and down from a peak of 50.5 billion euros ($64.67 billion) in May 2012. The figure excludes deposits from other banks and the central government.
"I anticipated, not this to happen, but I anticipated issues last year, when Greece had a question of whether it will remain in euro and the consequences of that," said Athos Angelides, who runs a business importing and distributing hair salon products. "So luckily we transferred money in the middle of last year over to the UK."
The stock market, which has been closed since March 15, stayed shut. It will remain closed on Friday and Monday, when most of Europe is closed for the Easter celebrations. Cyprus follows the Orthodox calendar and does not celebrate Easter until May this year.
____
Elena Becatoros in Nicosia and David McHugh in Frankfurt contributed.
FROM MTV NEWS The nominee list alone assures that some of Hollywood's biggest stars will take the stage on April 14 at the 2013 MTV Movie Awards, but a new announcement has confirmed which musical star will be entertaining all of us on that special night. "Spring Breakers" star Selena Gomez will make her triumphant [...]
Pratibha Gai takes multimillion pound electron microscopes and drills tiny holes in them to make atomic movie cameras. She tells Celeste Biever about her quest to understand the secret life of atoms, which helped her to scoop a L'Or?al-UNESCO For Women In Science award on 28 March.
Electron microscopes can take images of single atoms. What more did you want to see? Conventional electron microscopes operate only in a vacuum and often only at room temperature. But many chemical reactions happen at elevated temperatures, and in a gas, so we really cannot use the microscopes to get inside the reaction as it is taking place. To understand these processes, we need to be able to watch them directly.
So what did you decide to do? It suddenly occurred to me, why not drill a hole through the imaging lens, and put gas through there, where the sample is? That way I wouldn't have to take the machine apart, and everything would be integrated. But it's very challenging ? the gas pressure is a billion times greater in this 5-millimetre hole than in the rest of the experiment.
How much did the machine you were planning to drill into cost? More than $1 million.
Were you nervous? That's why I made a mock up ? it had to be done on a model first. When that was successful, I tried the real thing. Everybody had gone up to a meeting. I put the gas in, I heated it and turned the beam on.
I held my breath and I looked up at the monitor ? it's real time ? and I saw, for the first time in the world, atoms working in chemical reactions, changing their atomic structure. That was a wow moment. It was absolutely thrilling.
You first did this in 1993. How are these insights changing the world now? We are using it to help convert plants into biofuels, especially biodiesel. Using the microscope, we saw that tiny defects on the surface of the catalyst were very beneficial to the reaction. This allowed us to improve the performance to give us more product. We have also been working on antibiotic nanoparticles to control infections in medical implants. When we simulate the wound environment, we see that they are incredibly potent.
So if you understand how atoms work, you can make reactions more efficient? It is more economical if we can train atoms to do the reaction we want rather than let them do their own thing. You can see the power. Instead of using tons of material, we could just use a few thousand or million atoms to do the same work. It would save a lot of money in terms of materials.
Have you patented your hacked microscope? I am a scientist ? I believe in scientific research. I did it to study chemical reactions. After I published it, I wanted it to be available to other researchers. If you patent it you can't publish all the details. By publishing, I could help other people and it was good also for us to get grants, research funding.
Some people think chemistry is boring? Oh no, it is exciting.
But even you didn't start out as a chemist? When I left school in India, I went to Cambridge to do physics. At that time, outside microscopy, I wasn't interested in chemistry. But then I went to work with a chemistry professor in Oxford, who was really pretty instrumental in enthusing me about chemical synthesis. And then I realised I could use my electron microscopy knowledge from Cambridge to understand what I made. It was a tremendous combination. I went to a meeting and I said nobody has done this before. And unless you do something new ? totally insane ? nobody is going to take any notice. Especially for women.
There couldn't have been many women in your field back then? At Cambridge, I was the only woman in my group. It was a bit discouraging because I think at least in those days ? 3 decades ago ? physical science was still a male preserve.
How did you cope? They accepted me as a scientist but I think in the workplace you had to work harder than a man to get recognition. There were no role models in those days. I realised that that one thing that is nice thing about science is that if you have an idea, get some results, you can actually publish it and they need not know you're a woman.
Did you learn anything from these challenges? I learned that I had to be pretty good to compete, and therefore I had to work harder. And what I did was I found my own niche. As a leader in a field, the focus is on what you are achieving rather than your gender. So it is important to go for something new ? if there are already other people in a field, you are not going to be very successful unless you are brilliant.
Profile
Pratibha Gai is a professor of electron microscopy at the University of York, UK. This week she was presented with a L'Or?al-UNESCO For Women In Science award
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