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Pictures: Fungi Get Into the Holiday Spirit
Label: Health
Photograph courtesy Stephanie Mounaud, J. Craig Venter Institute
Mounaud combined different fungi to create a Santa hat and spell out a holiday message.
Different fungal grow at different rates, so Mounaud's artwork rarely lasts for long. There's only a short window of time when they actually look like what they're suppose to.
"You do have to keep that in perspective when you're making these creations," she said.
For example, the A. flavus fungi that she used to write this message from Santa grows very quickly. "The next day, after looking at this plate, it didn't say 'Ho Ho Ho.' It said 'blah blah blah,'" Mounaud said.
The message also eventually turned green, which was the color she was initially after. "It was a really nice green, which is what I was hoping for. But yellow will do," she said.
The hat was particularly challenging. The fungus used to create it "was troubling because at different temperatures it grows differently. The pigment in this one forms at room temperature but this type of growth needed higher temperatures," Mounaud said.
Not all fungus will grow nicely together. For example, in the hat, "N. fischeri [the brim and ball] did not want to play nice with the P. marneffei [red part of hat] ... so they remained slightly separated."
Published December 21, 2012
Obama, Congress Waving Bye-Bye Lower Taxes?
Label: Business
The first family arrived in the president's idyllic home state of Hawaii early today to celebrate the holidays, but President Obama, who along with Michelle will pay tribute Sunday to the late Sen. Daniel Inouye at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, could be returning home to Washington sooner than he expected.
That's because the President didn't get his Christmas wish: a deal with Congress on the looming fiscal cliff.
Members of Congress streamed out of the Capitol Friday night with no agreement to avert the fiscal cliff -- a massive package of mandatory tax increases and federal spending cuts triggered if no deal is worked out to cut the deficit. Congress is expected to be back in session by Thursday.
It's unclear when President Obama may return from Hawaii. His limited vacation time will not be without updates on continuing talks. Staff members for both sides are expected to exchange emails and phone calls over the next couple of days.
Meanwhile, Speaker of the House John Boehner is home in Ohio. He recorded the weekly GOP address before leaving Washington, stressing the president's role in the failure to reach an agreement on the cliff.
"What the president has offered so far simply won't do anything to solve our spending problem and begin to address our nation's crippling debt," he said in the recorded address, "The House has done its part to avert this entire fiscal cliff. ... The events of the past week make it clearer than ever that these measures reflect the will of the House."
Fiscal Cliff Negotiations Halted for Christmas Watch Video
Cliffhanger: Congress Heads Home after 'Plan B' Vote Pulled from House Floor Watch Video
Fiscal Cliff: Boehner Doesn't Have Votes for Plan B Watch Video
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed the sentiment while lamenting the failure to reach a compromise.
"I'm stuck here in Washington trying to prevent my fellow Kentuckians having to shell out more money to Uncle Sam next year," he said.
McConnell is also traveling to Hawaii to attend the Inouye service Sunday.
If the White House and Congress cannot reach a deficit-cutting budget agreement by year's end, by law the across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts -- the so called fiscal cliff -- will go into effect. Many economists say that will likely send the economy into a new recession.
Reports today shed light on how negotiations fell apart behind closed doors. The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported that when Boehner expressed his opposition to tax rate increases, the president allegedly responded, "You are asking me to accept Mitt Romney's tax plan. Why would I do that?"
The icy exchange continued when, in reference to Boehner's offer to secure $800 billion in revenue by limiting deductions, the speaker reportedly implored the president, "What do I get?"
The president's alleged response: "You get nothing. I get that for free."
The account is perhaps the most thorough and hostile released about the series of unsuccessful talks Obama and Boehner have had in an effort to reach an agreement about the cliff.
Unable to agree to a "big deal" on taxes and entitlements, the president is now reportedly hoping to reach a "small deal" with Republicans to avoid the fiscal cliff.
Such a deal would extend unemployment benefits and set the tone for a bigger deal with Republicans down the line.
In his own weekly address, Obama called this smaller deal "an achievable goal ... that can get done in 10 days."
But though there is no definitive way to say one way or the other whether it really is an achievable goal, one thing is for certain: Republican leadership does not agree with the president on this question.
Of reaching an agreement on the fiscal cliff by the deadline, Boehner said, "How we get there, God only knows."
Today on New Scientist: 21 December 2012
Label: WorldCadaver stem cells offer new hope of life after death
Stem cells can be extracted from bone marrow five days after death to be used in life-saving treatments
Apple's patents under fire at US patent office
The tech firm is skating on thin ice with some of the patents that won it a $1 billion settlement against Samsung
Himalayan dam-building threatens endemic species
The world's highest mountains look set to become home to a huge number of dams - good news for clean energy but bad news for biodiversity
Astrophile: Black hole exposed as a dwarf in disguise
A white dwarf star caught mimicking a black hole's X-ray flashes may be the first in a new class of binary star systems
Blind juggling robot keeps a ball in the air for hours
The robot, which has no visual sensors, can juggle a ball flawlessly by analysing its trajectory
Studio sessions show how Bengalese finch stays in tune
This songbird doesn't need technological aids to stay in tune - and it's smart enough to not worry when it hears notes that are too far off to be true
Giant tooth hints at truly monumental dinosaur
A lone tooth found in Argentina may have belonged to a dinosaur even larger than those we know of, but what to call it?
Avian flu virus learns to fly without wings
A strain of bird flu that hit the Netherlands in 2003 travelled by air, a hitherto suspected by unproven route of transmission
Feedback: Are wind turbines really fans?
A tale of "disease-spreading" wind farms, the trouble with quantifying "don't know", the death of parody in the UK, and more
The link between devaluing animals and discrimination
Our feelings about other animals have important consequences for how we treat humans, say prejudice researchers Gordon Hodson and Kimberly Costello
Best videos of 2012: First motion MRI of unborn twins
Watch twins fight for space in the womb, as we reach number 6 in our countdown of the top videos of the year
2012 Flash Fiction winner: Sleep by Richard Clarke
Congratulations to Richard Clarke, who won the 2012 New Scientist Flash Fiction competition with a clever work of satire
Urban Byzantine monks gave in to temptation
They were supposed to live on an ascetic diet of mainly bread and water, but the monks in 6th-century Jerusalem were tucking into animal products
The pregnant promise of fetal medicine
As prenatal diagnosis and treatment advance, we are entering difficult ethical territory
2013 Smart Guide: Searching for human origins in Asia
Africa is where humanity began, where we took our first steps, but those interested in the latest cool stuff on our origins should now look to Asia instead
The end of the world is an opportunity, not a threat
Don't waste time bemoaning the demise of the old order; get on with building the new one
Victorian counting device gets speedy quantum makeover
A photon-based version of a 19th-century mechanical device could bring quantum computers a step closer
Did learning to fly give bats super-immunity?
When bats first took to the air, something changed in their DNA which may have triggered their incredible immunity to viruses
Van-sized space rock is a cosmic oddball
Fragments from a meteor that exploded over California in April are unusually low in amino acids, putting a twist on one theory of how life on Earth began
US gun lobby urges armed police in every school
Label: Technology
WASHINGTON: The US' most powerful pro-gun lobbying group is suggesting that armed police be deployed to every school in the country following a mass shooting that left 20 young children dead.
The National Rifle Association, which supports a broad interpretation of US citizens' constitutional right to bear arms, had been under pressure to respond in the wake of last week's massacre in a Connecticut elementary school.
Even as the NRA leaders made their combative and determined appearance, another four people died in Pennsylvania in America's latest shooting spree, including the alleged shooter.
And a string of celebrities including Jeremy Renner, Gwyneth Paltrow and Beyonce launched a video to back a campaign to clamp down on gun sales following the Newtown school massacre.
But the pro-gun lobbyists ceded no ground to those calling for tougher gun laws.
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," declared NRA vice-president Wayne LaPierre Friday, in his first public comments since the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
"I call on Congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation," he said, in a lengthy statement. He took no questions from reporters.
LaPierre said the NRA was ready to help train security teams for schools and work with teachers and parents to improve security measures, and accused the media and the political class of demonising gun owners.
Last Friday, a troubled 20-year-old man burst into the Sandy Hook school and gunned down 20 six- and seven-year-old children and six staff members trying to protect them, before taking his own life. He also fatally shot his mother.
As LaPierre and his allies were on stage in Washington on Feiday, police in Pennsylvania shot dead a man who had killed three people and wounded "several" others, state troopers.
These deaths were the latest in a series of mass shootings in the United States this year, and prompted President Barack Obama to throw his weight behind plans to revive a ban on assault weapons.
America has suffered an epidemic of gun violence over the last three decades including 62 mass shooting incidents since 1982. The vast majority of weapons used have been semi-automatic weapons obtained legally by the killers.
There were an estimated 310 million non-military firearms in the United States in 2009, roughly one per citizen, and people in America are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than someone in another developed country.
But LaPierre insisted gun ownership is not the problem.
"You know, five years ago after the Virginia Tech tragedy when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy," he said, referring to a 2007 campus shooting that left 32 people dead.
"But what if, what if when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he'd been confronted by qualified armed security?" he demanded.
"Will you at least admit it's possible... that 26 innocent lives might have been spared that day? Is it so abhorrent to you that you'd rather continue to risk the alternative?"
The statement immediately drew criticism from supporters of tougher gun control, who are pushing to ban semi-automatic assault weapons like the .223 Bushmaster rifle that Lanza used in Friday's shooting.
"The NRA leadership's drive to fill our schools with more deadly guns and ammo is wildly out of touch with responsible gun owners and the American public," New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg said.
The New York Times, in an editorial Saturday, did not mince words, calling LaPierre's remarks a "mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant".
One of the protesters, who attempted to drown out LaPierre's statement, bore a banner reading "NRA kills our kids" the other "NRA has blood on its hands". They were led away by security.
Hollywood stars including Julianne Moore, Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm meanwhile recorded a video backing a campaign calling notably for a ban on assault weapons, as well as criminal background checks for every gun sold.
"Columbine. Virginia Tech. Tucson. Aurora. Fort Hood. Oak Creek. Newtown. Newtown. Newtown," they intoned in the black-and-white video, taking turns to list the names of America's worst gun massacres of recent years.
"How many more? How many more colleges? How many more classes? How many more movie theatres? How many more houses of faith? How many more shopping malls?" they added in the video on the "Demand a Plan" campaign website.
- AFP/al
Why does my external hard drive only show 2.2TB?
Label: LifestyleExternal hard drives are exceptionally useful for expanding storage capabilities for both backups and data management. While external hard drives are often sold in preconfigured packages by manufacturers, another popular option is to purchase an external hard-drive enclosure and then use any drive of your choice in it. This is beneficial because as your demands for storage increase, you can replace the enclosure's drive with a larger one.
These days, the availability of hard drives with 4TB of storage are enticing for people to swap into their existing enclosures; however, when doing so they may find that the system will only recognize 2.2TB of the drive, regardless of how they partition or format the device.
While modern file-system formats such as HFS+, NTFS, and ExFAT ought to handle volume sizes of between hundreds of gigabytes to zettabytes, and though operating systems like OS X have increased the maximum volume size from 2TB to 8EB (exabytes) over the years, there are hardware limitations that may limit the size of the volume that can be used. If you are using an older drive enclosure for your large hard drive, then the controllers on it may not be capable of handling over 2.2TB, regardless of the software environment being used around it.
This problem happens because of the use of LBA (logical block addressing) in modern hard-drive controllers coupled with a hardware-based limit of how many blocks can be included in the LBA scheme. Early LBA controllers used 32-bit (or lower) addressing coupled with a maximum supported block size of 512 bytes. This means they support up to 2^32 or 4,294,967,296 blocks for a device, and with each block being 512 bytes, this translates to a maximum of 2,199,023,255,552 bytes, or 2.199TB.
Unfortunately in many cases these limits are hard-coded in enclosure's firmware, so even though modern drives use 4,096-byte sectors, the system will still only address these sectors as 512 bytes in size, resulting in both a waste of space and degraded performance.
The only way around this problem is to replace your drive enclosure with a new one that has proper support for both 48-bit (or greater) LBA and 4,096-byte sectors in hard drives. Luckily most enclosures on the market today do support this, so if you run into this problem, you should be up and running in no time.
Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or !
Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.
Pictures: Fungi Get Into the Holiday Spirit
Label: Health
Photograph courtesy Stephanie Mounaud, J. Craig Venter Institute
Mounaud combined different fungi to create a Santa hat and spell out a holiday message.
Different fungal grow at different rates, so Mounaud's artwork rarely lasts for long. There's only a short window of time when they actually look like what they're suppose to.
"You do have to keep that in perspective when you're making these creations," she said.
For example, the A. flavus fungi that she used to write this message from Santa grows very quickly. "The next day, after looking at this plate, it didn't say 'Ho Ho Ho.' It said 'blah blah blah,'" Mounaud said.
The message also eventually turned green, which was the color she was initially after. "It was a really nice green, which is what I was hoping for. But yellow will do," she said.
The hat was particularly challenging. The fungus used to create it "was troubling because at different temperatures it grows differently. The pigment in this one forms at room temperature but this type of growth needed higher temperatures," Mounaud said.
Not all fungus will grow nicely together. For example, in the hat, "N. fischeri [the brim and ball] did not want to play nice with the P. marneffei [red part of hat] ... so they remained slightly separated."
Published December 21, 2012
Obama Still an 'Optimist' on Cliff Deal
Label: Business
Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
WASHINGTON D.C. – Ten days remain before the mandatory spending cuts and tax increases known as the “fiscal cliff” take effect, but President Obama said he is still a “hopeless optimist” that a federal budget deal can be reached before the year-end deadline that economists agree might plunge the country back into recession.
“Even though Democrats and Republicans are arguing about whether those rates should go up for the wealthiest individuals, all of us – every single one of us -agrees that tax rates shouldn’t go up for the other 98 percent of Americans, which includes 97 percent of small businesses,” he said.
He added that there was “no reason” not to move forward on that aspect, and that it was “within our capacity” to resolve.
The question of whether to raise taxes on incomes over $250,000 remains at an impasse, but is only one element of nuanced legislative wrangling that has left the parties at odds.
For ABC News’ breakdown of the rhetoric versus the reality, click here.
At the White House news conference this evening, the president confirmed he had spoken today to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, although no details of the conversations were disclosed.
The talks came the same day Speaker Boehner admitted “God only knows” the solution to the gridlock, and a day after mounting pressure from within his own Republican Party forced him to pull his alternative proposal from a prospective House vote. That proposal, ”Plan B,” called for extending current tax rates for Americans making up to $1 million a year, a far wealthier threshold than Democrats have advocated.
Boehner acknowledged that even the conservative-leaning “Plan B” did not have the support necessary to pass in the Republican-dominated House, leaving a resolution to the fiscal cliff in doubt.
“In the next few days, I’ve asked leaders of Congress to work towards a package that prevents a tax hike on middle-class Americans, protects unemployment insurance for 2 million Americans, and lays the groundwork for further work on both growth and deficit reduction,” Obama said. ”That’s an achievable goal. That can get done in 10 days.”
Complicating matters: The halls of Congress are silent tonight. The House of Representatives began its holiday recess Thursday and Senate followed this evening.
Meanwhile, the president has his own vacation to contend with. Tonight, he was embarking for Hawaii and what is typically several weeks of Christmas vacation.
However, during the press conference the president said he would see his congressional colleagues “next week” to continue negotiations, leaving uncertain how long Obama plans to remain in the Aloha State.
The president said he hoped the time off would give leaders “some perspective.”
“Everybody can cool off; everybody can drink some eggnog, have some Christmas cookies, sing some Christmas carols, enjoy the company of loved ones,” he said. “And then I’d ask every member of Congress, while they’re back home, to think about that. Think about the obligations we have to the people who sent us here.
“This is not simply a contest between parties in terms of who looks good and who doesn’t,” he added later. “There are real-world consequences to what we do here.”
Obama concluded by reiterating that neither side could walk away with “100 percent” of its demands, and that it negotiations couldn’t remain “a contest between parties in terms of who looks good and who doesn’t.”
Boehner’s office reacted quickly to the remarks, continuing recent Republican statements that presidential leadership was at fault for the ongoing gridlock.
“Though the president has failed to offer any solution that passes the test of balance, we remain hopeful he is finally ready to get serious about averting the fiscal cliff,” Boehner said. “The House has already acted to stop all of the looming tax hikes and replace the automatic defense cuts. It is time for the Democratic-run Senate to act, and that is what the speaker told the president tonight.”
The speaker’s office said Boehner “will return to Washington following the holiday, ready to find a solution that can pass both houses of Congress.”
Van-sized space rock is a cosmic oddball
Label: WorldThe shattered remains of a high-profile space rock are oddly low in organic materials, the raw ingredients for life. The discovery adds a slight wrinkle to the theory that early Earth was seeded with organics by meteorite impacts.
In April a van-sized meteor was seen streaking over northern California and Nevada in broad daylight. The fireball exploded with a sonic boom and sprayed the region with fragments. Videos, photographs and weather radar data allowed the meteor's trajectory to be reconstructed, and teams quickly mobilised to search for pieces in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in northern California.
Researchers readily identified the meteorites as rare CM chondrites, thought to be one of the oldest types of rock in the universe. "Because the meteorites were discovered so freshly, for the first time we had a chance to study this type of meteorite in a pristine form," says Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who led the search effort and the subsequent study of the space rocks.
Jenniskens personally found a fragment in a parking lot, where it remained relatively free of soil contaminants. "That's the best you could hope for, other than landing in a freezer," says Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Battered past
CM chondrites make up only about 1 per cent of known meteorites. Most of them contain plenty of organic materials, including amino acids, the building blocks of life on Earth.
Jenniskens and colleagues found that the California fragments also have amino acids, including some not found naturally on Earth. But in three rocks collected before a heavy rainstorm, which bathed the other pieces in earthly contaminants, organics are less abundant by a factor of 1000 than in previously studied CM chondrites.
These three rocks could not have lost organics due to space "weathering": analysis of the meteorites' exposure to cosmic rays suggests the original meteor was flying through space for only about 50,000 years before hitting Earth.
Based on its trajectory and its relatively short flight time, Jenniskens thinks the meteor can be traced back to a family of asteroids dominated by 495 Eulalia, a group known as a possible source of CM chondrites. It is probably a piece that broke off during an impact, revealing the relatively pristine material inside.
So what happened to its organics? Jenniskens' team found that the meteorites are breccia – smaller rocks cemented together – which suggests that the asteroid from which they came took a series of beatings. Those impacts, or possibly other processes inside the asteroid, could have heated it enough to destroy most organic material.
Limited delivery
The result might have implications for the organics delivery theory, says Bill Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
"It shows that not all asteroids can deliver sufficient quantities. One of the disappointments is that, from a prebiotic organic chemistry perspective, it was very limited," says Bottke. "But this is an unusual case. Most [CM chondrites] are loaded with organic compounds."
Still, studying the space rocks will help us prepare future missions to asteroids such as OSIRIS-Rex, scheduled to take off for asteroid 1999 RQ36 in 2016 and bring a sample back in 2023.
"In some ways, we've had a sample, a very fresh one, come to us," says Bottke. "This is a test bed for the techniques we'll use in that mission."
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1227163
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Britain's Akram Khan's dance of creative destruction
Label: Technology
PARIS: A year ago, Akram Khan was told his dance career was over. Now, with the Olympics ceremony under his belt, two films on the boil and three shows on tour, Britain's best-known choreographer could hardly be busier if he tried.
The 38-year-old ball of energy is in Paris this month with his most personal work to date, DESH, a full-length solo exploring his family roots in Bangladesh, through his signature fusion of contemporary dance with north Indian Kathak.
Khan's schedule for the coming months sounds like a plate-spinning act, but when he ripped his Achilles tendon during a rehearsal last January, doctors feared he would never dance again.
"It was very traumatic," he told AFP, "Ballet dancers don't come back after an Achilles tendon rupture. It's very rarely possible."
Shows were cancelled, plans cut short as Khan -- unable to walk for two months -- headed into a "humiliating" round of surgery and physiotherapy.
"I'm a dancer, so it's ego you know, somebody's telling you how to do a simple walk. I wanted to shoot them!"
"But from that it went into running, jogging, then jumping, then a little bit of confidence comes back.
"And then suddenly you're in the Olympics!" joked Khan, who choreographed and performed in a segment of the August opening ceremony.
In his solo DESH, a chameleonic Khan gives life to a dense cast of characters as the action shifts, dreamlike, from his south London birthplace to the grimy, noisy streets of Bangladesh over 80 visually-sumptuous minutes.
While he has recovered mobility, Khan has yet to get his full strength back, and had to make changes to perform the show, on world tour after premiering in London to rapturous reviews last year.
"You find other ways, and that was very valuable," he said, "I'm stronger in other ways."
Right now Khan is preparing a duet with the Flamenco dancer Izrael Galvan, in between touring with two more of his shows -- Gnosis and Sacred Monsters.
Come May he will premiere a creation called iTMOi inspired by Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" in the French city of Grenoble, before taking that show on the road as well.
Recent sideline projects have included teaming up with the artist Anish Kapoor to shoot a spoof "Gangnam Style" video in support of Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei.
As if that wasn't enough, he is choreographing a film called "Desert Dancer", based on the true story of a young Iranian man persecuted for his love of dance, and is hoping to direct a film based on DESH.
In terms of juggling projects, Khan says he is busier than ever before. And in March he will become a father for the first time, when his Japanese dancer wife gives birth to a baby girl.
The story of Khan's injury and recovery loops back to an earlier one of how, as a little boy, he liked to break things to see what was inside.
"I was destructive as a child, I was fascinated to see things broken and put back together again," he told AFP, "I was very physical, I couldn't keep my hands still."
That was how Khan's mother started teaching her three-year-old son the folk dance Kathak, today the backbone of his art. To tire him out, like others might send a child to kick a ball around the yard.
Formal lessons followed aged seven, but it was long a battle of wills with a mother determined to share -- "impose", he jokes -- her culture with him.
"It was traumatic," said Khan, who talks with disarming candour, and wry humour, of his upbringing, "My mother used to bribe me, with toys, each performance I would get a little matchbox car."
While he jokes about his strong-willed mother, Khan is clear the "challenging relationship" in his life is with his father, bent on rooting out the Westerner in his son and making a true Bengali of him.
"DESH is very much about my father," he says of the piece, which opens with a scene showing him burying his father before pounding violently at the earth, as if to root out the story of their shared past.
Like a grown-up version of the creative destruction he displayed as a child.
Co-created with the poet Karthika Nair, the visual designer Tim Yip and the composer Jocelyn Pook, the work has a political dimension too, reflecting his sense that "everything is political" in Bangladesh, starting with the drinking water polluted by Western waste dumping.
"This is my story. It's part true, part lie," he says, "It needed to be epic, because it was very personal."
But for now, Khan jokes, he is done digging for his family roots: "I think I need to move on -- I need to get a life!"
-AFP/fl
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