These assist to remove unwanted toxins from your body to help you your body organs to function better. You can buy green coffee beans from shops and physical fitness retail outlets but for anyone who is trying to avoid wasting revenue, it is actually greater which you obtain it in the web from the honest seller. You ought to think of the coffees as an investment.
Japanese American chemist Satori Kato invented the first instant coffee in 1901, freeze-dried coffee followed in 1938. Once you hit forty years of age, whether you're a man or even a woman, one's body starts aging faster than normal, in accordance with studies that centered on numerous nutrients and use. Fair trade could have helped coffee growers, yet what happens on the crops after these are harvested needs being addressed.
It tastes very smoky with a bit of spiciness. Open the lever for the top from the unit to insert a capsule, then lift the lever to eject it to the backlit container, which can hold around 15 used capsules. Green vegetable extract is popular for weight-loss management and controlling blood sugar surges that eventually use fat.
Aside from the signature Boquete coffee, the shop features a variety of teas, iced drinks and flavored concoctions. In addition, it seems that it really is coffee, rather than caffeine and other caffeinated beverages for example tea, which offers the top protection. Get back to shape by simply making the correct use of Green Coffee Bean Extract.
By the end with the study, the test subjects averaged a 10.five percent loss in body weight without a alternation in diet or exercise habits. So Green Coffee Bean Max has so many benefits what has almost impossible to ignore it. Medical doctors suggest Green Coffee Extract as an productive resolution to burn body fat rapidly.
The company, which has been within the coffee business since 1916, took its product extremely seriously, as well as their meticulous approach is readily discernable inside final product. The benefits from the delivery can make you be on time and get coffee accumulated for others. Compare that to a cup of regular coffee that has about 100 mg of caffeine.
This is because the carbon roast flavors have taken over. Green coffee bean extract. The Great Depression of 1927, America's legacy of struggle, untold love and sacrifice, whose motto was 'Always Lend a Helping Hand'. This really is following your soaked procedure hence the color from the bean is in fact white.
It has really powerful anti-oxidants which is often equivalent towards the organic anti-oxidants encountered in grape seed extract together with green leaf tea. This step can be important for the final flavor in the beans. There are many good things about grinding coffees including the idea that doing so produces fresh, great tasting coffee, the expense of doing so will be less than buying coffee grounds from your store, and coffee bean grinding offers a sense of satisfaction to prospects who enjoy doing things on their own.
About the Author: Buddies call her Gwendolyn Murillo but she doesn't like when people use her full name. Puerto Rico is the location she adores many. Her day task is a bookkeeper. Modelling trains is things she loves many.Detra is how I'm called however you can call me anything you such as.
Playing baseball is what like doing. I have actually always loved living in Kansas already I'm considering other choices. Invoicing is how I make cash.
If you want to check out more information in regards to Green coffee bean extract stop by www.youtube.com/watch
June 28, 2013 ? Tracking the growth of dinosaurs and how they changed as they grew is difficult. Using a combination of biomechanical analysis and bone histology, palaeontologists from Beijing, Bristol, and Bonn have shown how one of the best-known dinosaurs switched from four feet to two as it grew.
Psittacosaurus, the 'parrot dinosaur' is known from more than 1000 specimens from the Cretaceous, 100 million years ago, of China and other parts of east Asia. As part of his PhD thesis at the University of Bristol, Qi Zhao, now on the staff of the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing, carried out the intricate study on bones of babies, juveniles and adults.
Dr Zhao said: "Some of the bones from baby Psittacosaurus were only a few millimetres across, so I had to handle them extremely carefully to be able to make useful bone sections. I also had to be sure to cause as little damage to these valuable specimens as possible."
With special permission from the Beijing Institute, Zhao sectioned two arm and two leg bones from 16 individual dinosaurs, ranging in age from less than one year to 10 years old, or fully-grown. He did the intricate sectioning work in a special palaeohistology laboratory in Bonn, Germany,
The one-year-olds had long arms and short legs, and scuttled about on all fours soon after hatching. The bone sections showed that the arm bones were growing fastest when the animals were ages one to three years. Then, from four to six years, arm growth slowed down, and the leg bones showed a massive growth spurt, meaning they ended up twice as long as the arms, necessary for an animal that stood up on its hind legs as an adult.
Professor Xing Xu of the Beijing Institute, one of Dr Zhao's thesis supervisors, said: "This remarkable study, the first of its kind, shows how much information is locked in the bones of dinosaurs. We are delighted the study worked so well, and see many ways to use the new methods to understand even more about the astonishing lives of the dinosaurs."
Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol, Dr Zhao's other PhD supervisor, said: "These kinds of studies can also throw light on the evolution of a dinosaur like Psittacosaurus. Having four-legged babies and juveniles suggests that at some time in their ancestry, both juveniles and adults were also four-legged, and Psittacosaurus and dinosaurs in general became secondarily bipedal."
Just as the rumors foretold, Samsung has announced Korean availability of a 55-inch curved OLED HDTV. Priced at 15 million Korean won (around $13,000) Samsung claims its "Timeless Arena" design eliminates potential for defective OLED pixels. It also reiterates the claim LG made when it launched its own curved OLED model earlier this year that keeping all parts of the screen an equal distance from the viewer makes for a better viewing experience. It also supports features found in other Samsung TVs like multi-view that lets two people watch different things at the same time thanks to 3D glasses, and the Evolution Kit CPU upgrade. There's no word on US availability for its flat OLED HDTVs, but the company also launched its new 65- and 55-inch 4K TVs at the same event.
Via Mr. Charles P. Pierce, official DoD statement from Secretary Hagel:
The Department of Defense welcomes the Supreme Court?s decision today on the Defense of Marriage Act. The department will immediately begin the process of implementing the Supreme Court?s decision in consultation with the Department of Justice and other executive branch agencies. The Department of Defense intends to make the same benefits available to all military spouses ? regardless of sexual orientation ? as soon as possible. That is now the law and it is the right thing to do?
Pierce adds, ?It really matters that this Secretary Of Defense started out in the military as an infantry grunt. I truly believe that.?
*********** What?s on the agenda for the evening, as we catch our breath between bouts?
Hello, and welcome to sunny San Franciscso where Microsoft is about to kick off its annual Build developer conference. We already know today is the day Windows 8.1 becomes available as a public preview, and the execs in Redmond have hinted they have even more to share about the big OS update. But what else? Will those rumors of WebGL support for IE11 come to fruition? And how 'bout some news indie gaming developers can use? We'll be giving you the blow by blow, starting around 12PM ET today. Stay tuned!
Contact: Andy Henion henion@msu.edu 517-355-3294 Michigan State University
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Automakers and other private firms should be required by law to carry insurance policies to pay for tearing down their factories and buildings, recommends a hard-hitting study from Michigan State University's Center for Community and Economic Development.
Such a requirement would prevent commercial and industrial companies from "walking away" from shuttered facilities a problem plaguing the nation, said Rex LaMore, director of the CCED and lead author on the study.
In the automotive industry alone, there are 135 abandoned plants nationwide. That's not to mention the vacant gas stations, apartment buildings and many other decaying structures that are blighting both rural and urban communities, LaMore said.
"There needs to be a new approach for dealing with abandoned property, because local residents not only pay a price by losing jobs and the resulting ripple effects on the local economy, but the community can be left with property that is unsafe, vulnerable to crime, costly and unappealing to other potential employers," LaMore said.
Currently, facility owners can walk away without dismantling the structure and clearing the property for future use. Responsibility often falls to local municipalities to redevelop or clean up the abandoned property before they can, if ever, attract new companies.
The report calls for federal or state-by-state legislation requiring new commercial and industrial projects to carry insurance policies that secure financial assurances for any potential future dismantling, removal and restoration of abandoned properties. LaMore said the recommendation applies only to newly built -- not existing -- facilities.
The report also supports the creation of a private sector industry that develops and maintains insurance that can implement abandoned property clean-ups.
The idea is not without precedent. In various industries, including railway, companies buy an insurance policy on the land where they have business activity. Further, the practice of requiring people and businesses to buy insurance can be seen, at the federal level, for health care and properties within a floodplain, and, at the state level, for automobiles.
LaMore said the proposal is not without disadvantages. It could, for example, discourage mixed-use structures and increase construction costs.
But the potential benefits outweigh the disadvantages -- particularly by ending the pattern of abandoned buildings and the economic drag that can have on a community, he said.
Daniel P. Gilmartin agrees. Gilmartin is executive director and CEO of the Michigan Municipal League, which represents cities, villages and townships many of which are dealing with abandoned factories and buildings.
"Blighted property is a significant issue for Michigan communities that impacts safety, property values and quality of life," Gilmartin said. "It is a problem we must tackle if we're going to have vibrant places that attract talent. This proposal provides a unique new approach worthy of discussion by policymakers, and we're excited to help move that forward with Michigan State University."
###
LaMore co-authored the report with Michelle LeBlanc, a 2013 graduate from MSU's School of Planning, Design and Construction.
LaMore and LeBlanc will present the report and recommendations at the 2013 Joint Congress of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning in Dublin, Ireland July 15-19.
[ | 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.
Contact: Andy Henion henion@msu.edu 517-355-3294 Michigan State University
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Automakers and other private firms should be required by law to carry insurance policies to pay for tearing down their factories and buildings, recommends a hard-hitting study from Michigan State University's Center for Community and Economic Development.
Such a requirement would prevent commercial and industrial companies from "walking away" from shuttered facilities a problem plaguing the nation, said Rex LaMore, director of the CCED and lead author on the study.
In the automotive industry alone, there are 135 abandoned plants nationwide. That's not to mention the vacant gas stations, apartment buildings and many other decaying structures that are blighting both rural and urban communities, LaMore said.
"There needs to be a new approach for dealing with abandoned property, because local residents not only pay a price by losing jobs and the resulting ripple effects on the local economy, but the community can be left with property that is unsafe, vulnerable to crime, costly and unappealing to other potential employers," LaMore said.
Currently, facility owners can walk away without dismantling the structure and clearing the property for future use. Responsibility often falls to local municipalities to redevelop or clean up the abandoned property before they can, if ever, attract new companies.
The report calls for federal or state-by-state legislation requiring new commercial and industrial projects to carry insurance policies that secure financial assurances for any potential future dismantling, removal and restoration of abandoned properties. LaMore said the recommendation applies only to newly built -- not existing -- facilities.
The report also supports the creation of a private sector industry that develops and maintains insurance that can implement abandoned property clean-ups.
The idea is not without precedent. In various industries, including railway, companies buy an insurance policy on the land where they have business activity. Further, the practice of requiring people and businesses to buy insurance can be seen, at the federal level, for health care and properties within a floodplain, and, at the state level, for automobiles.
LaMore said the proposal is not without disadvantages. It could, for example, discourage mixed-use structures and increase construction costs.
But the potential benefits outweigh the disadvantages -- particularly by ending the pattern of abandoned buildings and the economic drag that can have on a community, he said.
Daniel P. Gilmartin agrees. Gilmartin is executive director and CEO of the Michigan Municipal League, which represents cities, villages and townships many of which are dealing with abandoned factories and buildings.
"Blighted property is a significant issue for Michigan communities that impacts safety, property values and quality of life," Gilmartin said. "It is a problem we must tackle if we're going to have vibrant places that attract talent. This proposal provides a unique new approach worthy of discussion by policymakers, and we're excited to help move that forward with Michigan State University."
###
LaMore co-authored the report with Michelle LeBlanc, a 2013 graduate from MSU's School of Planning, Design and Construction.
LaMore and LeBlanc will present the report and recommendations at the 2013 Joint Congress of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning in Dublin, Ireland July 15-19.
[ | 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.
With everything from chickens and rabbits to cashews and apricots out back, Mazen Saadeh is part restaurateur, part survivalist.
?I think the world is going very fast to hell and I want to be safe and find something to eat when the shelves will be empty,? says Mr. Saadeh, a Palestinian novelist and filmmaker who lived in Vienna, Paris, and Iowa before returning home to the West Bank several years ago. ?If any war happens between the US and any countries, or Israel and Iran, it means the price of bread [will be] minimum $100.?
Then he adds that he doesn?t like bread.
That?s a pity, because the crusty loaves that come out of his outdoor oven and are served up on the porch of his renovated 1944 farmhouse are as delicious as the sunset colors that spread out over the valley below.
Inside, blinking red Christmas lights adorn the main dining space, which is further furnished with a guitar, poster of Hugo Ch?vez, accordion, chess set, and an African drum.
RECOMMENDED: Think you know the Middle East? Take our geography quiz.
He hadn?t been planning on coming back here; he and his wife, Julia, had found an old house in Portland, Ore., and were planning on converting it into a weekend restaurant. But at the last minute he felt the pull of his native land. He told her, ?No, khalas [enough], let?s go back to Palestine.?
The mayor of Bir Zeit, a university town near Ramallah, offered him a restaurant property he couldn?t refuse. But Julia apparently didn?t feel the same draw.
?So now she is making wine in Portland and I am making wine in the West Bank,? he says matter-of-factly, fiddling with his Apple computer.
Business was so great in Bir Zeit that he decided to open a second restaurant here in Beit Jala. But the drive between the two properties, which would take 45 minutes or less if he were allowed to drive on Israeli roads, consumes two hours each way and it became untenable to manage both properties. So he shut down the Bir Zeit restaurant, his ?favorite baby,? and is now putting everything into this property, where he has established a Palestinian-style locavore restaurant. He has seven employees, all university students ? ?now there are seven families [making a] living,? he says ? and a handful of volunteers that come from as far away as Hungary.
As the last rays of sunlight grace the tops of his fruit and olive trees, he heads outside and pads down the rocky path, bending over his peas and tomatoes, and wagging a finger at the small swimming pool that he is renovating for carp ? right next to a larger one that local elders remember using as kids.
Evening prayers echo across the valley, mingling with the sound of silverware tinkling in the outdoor kitchen as the minutiae of daily life makes itself heard amid the strains of religion and politics in this storied land.
Stocks closed up on Wall Street Wednesday, despite a slowdown in the US economy.?Stocks have been unpredictable for weeks, ever since Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke started hinting that a pullback in Fed stimulus programs would start soon.
By Christina Rexrode,?AP Business Writer / June 26, 2013
Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday. Stocks were up Wednesday despite a slowdown in US economic growth.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Enlarge
The U.S. economy slowed down, but the stock market went up for a second day in a row on Wednesday.
Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition
The gains were decisive. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 149.83 points, or 1 percent, 14,910.14. All 10 sectors in the Standard & Poor's 500 index were higher.
The appraisal of the economy was just as clear, and contrary: The government reported that the economy grew at an annual rate of 1.8 percent in the first three months of the year, down significantly from the previous estimate of 2.4 percent and anemic by the standards of many economists.
It might seem counterintuitive for stocks and growth to go in opposite directions, but analysts said it made sense.
The slower growth made traders and investors less anxious that the Federal Reserve might act too soon to end measures aimed at propping up the economy and stock market. Investors also seemed to realize that they dumped too many stocks last week, when they panicked after the Fed outlined plans on how it might eventually end the measures.
"The sell-off was a little bit overdone," said David Coard, head of fixed-income sales and trading at Williams Capital Group in New York. "Sometimes you've got to take a breather."
Tuesday and Wednesday marked the stock market's first two-day gain since the Fed gave its timetable for throttling back its economic stimulus a week ago. That announcement, which followed weeks of speculation about its next move, had spooked markets, causing stocks to gyrate and bond yields to spike.
The Standard & Poor's 500 rose 15.23, or 1 percent, to 1,603.26. The Nasdaq composite index gained 28.34, or 1 percent, to 3,376.22.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell for the first time since June 14, slipping to 2.54 percent from 2.61 percent.
The price of gold plunged $45.30, or 3.6 percent, to $1,229.80 an ounce, its lowest price in three years.
The markets have been unpredictable for weeks, ever since Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke started hinting that a pullback in Fed stimulus programs would start soon. In the last 25 trading days, the Dow has ricocheted through 17 triple-digit swings, split almost evenly between ups and downs.
Pope Francis delivers his speech in St. Peter's square at the Vatican during his weekly general audience Wednesday, June 26, 2013.(AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Francis delivers his speech in St. Peter's square at the Vatican during his weekly general audience Wednesday, June 26, 2013.(AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Francis salutes a group of professional cooks as he arrives in St. Peter's square at the Vatican for his weekly general audience Wednesday, June 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
A gust of wind blows Pope Francis' mantle as he reads his speech in St. Peter's square at the Vatican after his weekly general audience Wednesday, June 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Francis kisses a baby as he arrives in St.Peter's Square at the Vatican for his weekly general audience, Wednesday, June 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
VATICAN CITY (AP) ? Pope Francis' new commission of inquiry into the troubled Vatican bank has a brand new money-laundering case to look into: How a Holy See monsignor withdrew more than a half-million euros in charitable donations from the bank without any flags being raised, walked out of Vatican City with the cash, and then used the money to pay off his personal mortgage.
The case of Monsignor Nunzio Scarano is just one example of how lax norms and incompetence, if not more serious shortcomings at the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, have sullied the Vatican's reputation in international financial circles and made it a target for Francis' clean-up and reform campaign.
Francis on Wednesday announced the creation of a commission of inquiry to look into the IOR's activities and legal status "to allow for a better harmonization with the universal mission of the Apostolic See," according to the legal document he signed creating it.
It was the second time in as many weeks that Francis has intervened to get information out of the IOR, a secretive institution best known for the scandals it has caused the Vatican. On June 15, he filled a key vacancy in the bank's governing structure, tapping a trusted prelate to be his eyes inside the bank.
Francis named five people to the commission, including two Americans: Monsignor Peter Wells, a top official in the Vatican secretariat of state, and Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor, former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See and current president of a pontifical academy.
American cardinals were among the most vocal in demanding a wholesale reform of the Vatican bureaucracy ? and the Vatican bank ? in the meetings outlining the priorities for the new pope in the run-up to the March conclave that elected Francis. The demands were raised following revelations in leaked documents last year that told of dysfunction, petty turf wars and allegations of corruption in the Holy See's governance.
Francis, who has made clear he has no patience for corruption and wants a "poor" church, has already named a separate commission of cardinals to advise him on the broader question of reforming the Vatican bureaucracy as a whole.
The Vatican bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to manage assets destined for religious or charitable works. Located in a tower just inside the gates of Vatican City, it also manages the pension system for the Vatican's thousands of employees.
The bank commission's members have authority to gather documents, data and information about the bank's legal status and activities, even overriding normal secrecy rules to do so. Members can receive information from anyone in the Vatican bureaucracy as well as people who spontaneously volunteer information, and the commission can refer to outside advisers if necessary, according to the terms.
The commission will report back to Francis ? presumably with both information and recommendations ? and then will be dissolved, the document states. No timeframe was given but the commission is to start working soon.
The bank's daily management and activities continues unchanged.
The announcement came as the Vatican faces a new embarrassment involving the bank: Prosecutors in the southern city of Salerno have placed Scarano, an accountant in one of the Vatican's key finance offices, the Administration for the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, under investigation for alleged money-laundering stemming from his IOR account.
Scarano's attorney, Silverio Sica, told The Associated Press that the investigation concerns transactions Scarano made in 2009 in which he took 560,000 euros ($729,000) in cash out of his personal IOR bank account and carried it out of the Vatican and into Italy to help pay off a mortgage on his Salerno home.
To deposit the money into an Italian bank account ? and to prevent family members from finding out he had such a large chunk of cash ? he asked 56 close friends to accept 10,000 euros apiece in cash in exchange for a check or money transfer in the same amount, Sica said in a telephone interview. Scarano was then able to deposit the amounts in his Italian account.
"The money came from the Vatican. He wanted to bring it into Italy. He was advised to do it in this way," Sica said.
The original money came into Scarano's IOR account from donors who gave it to the prelate thinking they were funding a home for the terminally ill in Salerno, Sica said. He said the donors had "enormous" wealth and could offer such donations for his charitable efforts.
He said Scarano had given the names of the donors to prosecutors and insisted the origin of the money was clean, that the transactions didn't constitute money-laundering, and that he only took the money "temporarily" for his personal use.
The home for terminally ill hasn't been built, though the property has been identified, Sica said.
"He declares himself absolutely innocent," Sica said.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed Wednesday that Scarano had been suspended temporarily from his job and that the Vatican's financial watchdog agency, known by its acronym AIF, was "aware of the case and is taking ? if and where appropriate ? the necessary measures."
Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported over the weekend that the Bank of Italy had flagged the case to the AIF, seeking information about Scarano's IOR account as part of the Salerno probe. Lombardi didn't respond when asked why the IOR itself didn't flag such unusually large cash withdrawals back in 2009.
There have long been questions about just what the IOR actually is and does ? questions which the commission presumably will try to iron out for Francis. Vatican officials have long insisted it's not even a bank, since it doesn't perform key banking activities like making loans.
It does however take deposits, transfer money and invest for its clients, who include Vatican officials, members of religious orders and diplomats accredited to the Holy See. The bank performs asset management services that in 2012 helped earn it 86.6 million euros in profit on 7.1 billion euros in total assets under management.
___
Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield
(Reuters) - Funds managed by KKR & Co LP will buy clinical research group PRA International from Genstar Capital LLC for an undisclosed amount, PRA said on Monday, underscoring growing private equity interest in the contract research industry.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a person familiar with the matter said the agreed price was around $1.3 billion, as previously reported by Reuters.
"Over the past several years, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in M&A within the pharma services industry, with 17 moderate-to-large deals occurring over the past four years," Sterne Agee analyst Greg Bolan said in a research note.
Clinical research service firms are either being snapped up by private equity firms willing to pay top dollar or are being taken public in offerings that attract strong investor demand in a bet that the pharmaceutical industry, for cost reasons, will continue to outsource the research needed to get drugs approved by regulators.
Genstar bought PRA in 2007 for $797 million and put it on the block earlier this year after failing to sell it in 2011.
The San Francisco-based private equity firm filed for an IPO for PRA in May, which given the strong equity markets helped make the sales process more competitive, said Mike Gerardi, managing director, healthcare investment banking, at Jefferies LLC, PRA's financial adviser.
The market is now more generous toward such companies. Last month, Bain Capital LLC and TPG Capital LP raised $947 million by taking public Quintiles Transnational Holdings, the world's largest provider of contract research services.
"I consider the IPO market as another bidder ... and a pretty robust one," Gerardi said.
PRA provides clinical trial services and other research for pharmaceutical companies in more than 80 countries to help them win regulatory approval for drugs.
For KKR, PRA marks its second healthcare investment over the past 12 months. In June 2012, the private equity firm announced an investment in GenesisCare, an Australia-wide network of cancer and cardiovascular care centers. Since 1995, KKR has invested more than $9 billion in healthcare globally.
Latham & Watkins was legal adviser To PRA. Credit Suisse, UBS Investment Bank and Wells Fargo were financial advisers to KKR, while Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP was legal adviser.
(Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis and Jessica Toonkel in New York and Arpita Mukherjee in Bangalore; Editing by Ted Kerr and Steve Orlofsky)
Faster than light expansion is just a mathematical oddity caused by the use of a particular coordinate system. Not that there's anything wrong with it, just that nobody ever seems to explain it properly.
Local distances and times are easy to measure objectively using clocks and measuring rods, but the definition is not so clear and unambiguous anymore when you're talking about large distances in the expanding universe. Different metrics exist, defining distances, times and speeds in a different way, yielding wildly different values while giving the same tangible results for any actual event. I will give you two ways of looking at the universe: the first conserves the speed of light but looks very weird, while the other looks more normal but does not respect Special Relativity. Under General Relativity, which allows a wider range of metrics, both models are perfectly valid and consistent. I will disregard the effects of gravity, but otherwise it should be a pretty accurate description, certainly enough to explain what "space itself" really means.
If you define distances, times and speeds using the common sense definitions from Special Relativity (using beams of light to measure distances, always assuming a constant speed of light), distant galaxies are traveling away from us at high speeds (but less than the speed of light) and therefore time passes more slowly for them. Since this has been the case ever since the big bang, they are younger than us at this point in time. They don't just look younger because we had to wait for their light to get here, but they really are younger "right now" even if we take the traveling time of light into account. If we could "look" at them directly without having to wait for the light to get here, like we could do in a mathematical model, we would "see" the universe getting younger and younger, and clocks ticking ever more slowly, the further out we "look" in our expanding universe. At a distance of c times the age of the universe, the big bang is happening "right now". This gives the universe a finite size (assuming nothing existed before the big bang) but it does contain an infinite amount of matter thanks to Lorentz contraction. Everything near the boundary is squished in the direction of the expansion so that an infinite amount of stuff fits in this finite amount of space.
This metric is a bit cumbersome because it gives us a special position at the center of the universe while in fact there's nothing special about our position at all. Some other, distant civilisation (in the distant future according to the above metric) will actually say that we don't exist yet and our galaxy is much younger than theirs, "now". (Using their definition of "now"). That's just the classic twin paradox, nothing really wrong with that, but it does make our point of view a bit subjective.
So cosmologists came up with a better metric, the cosmological model: they define time as whatever is measured by local clocks that are traveling at the same speed as the average galaxy in that area (the expansion speed vector), undoing time dilation due to the expansion and thereby making the whole universe the same age. Local distances are defined in such a way that objects look pretty much the same size everywhere (no Lorentz contraction due to expansion speed), which can be achieved by defining distances in function of a constant speed of light relative to the expanding universe. So in effect we stretched the universe and sped it up, just by using a different definition of "now" and by measuring distances differently. With this model, the universe looks nicely homogenous and truly infinite, making many calculations a lot easier. There's no longer anything special about our location.
But because we changed our definitions of space and time, some of the old assumptions from special relativity are no longer valid. Things can and do fly away from us at speeds well in excess of the speed of light simply because we are defining their speed differently. But the light from those places will ne
PARIS (Reuters) - Top bankers and policymakers from around the world will search for ways to kick-start Europe's economy and seek clarity on regulatory changes at this week's conference of the financial industry's global trade body.
More than 1,000 bankers, politicians, regulators and investors meet in Paris on Tuesday and Wednesday for a conference of the Institute of International Finance (IIF), which lobbies on behalf of banks over regulatory, financial and economic issues.
The meeting comes against a jittery backdrop after investors were rattled in the past week by concerns about how the global economy will cope with an end to massive central bank impetus measures and a slowdown in China's growth. That has halted a strong run by bank shares, and reignited discussion about how to boost growth.
Douglas Flint, chairman of both HSBC - Europe's biggest bank - and the IIF, said banks wanted to get clarity on "defining the end point" for regulatory change so they can adapt to that framework.
"Regulation is always going to be a continuum, but the scale of the change that's taking place at the moment is unprecedented and it would be extremely helpful to everyone if there was settled framework," he told Reuters on Monday in Paris.
Banks are on a firmer footing than two years ago after regulators forced them to increase their capital and liquidity strength, but there remains uncertainty about whether banks can be deemed too big, the details of a euro zone banking union and the structure to deal with banks that fail.
Euro zone ministers failed over the weekend to agree how to handle bank collapses or set a blueprint for how bondholders would share losses for bailing out banks, showing the reform program is still far from complete.
Flint said a lack of regulatory clarity for banks was holding back economic growth.
"If you want to get the economies growing again - and credit supply is part of that - then it's important the system is stable. At the moment there are still some fairly fundamental debates still going on," he said.
He said China's slowing growth needed to be closely watched, but European issues still dominated the global stage: "The eurozone is still the most immediate issue."
The IIF represents more than 450 banks and other financial firms and prides itself on getting bankers together with politicians, regulators and central bankers.
It represented creditors of Greece's debt in the biggest and most complex sovereign restructuring ever and has spent much of its recent past leading calls for better coordination of regulatory change.
Bank bosses including Flint, UBS's Axel Weber, BNP Paribas's Baudouin Prot and Societe Generale's Frederic Oudea will be joined by the European Central Bank's Jorg Asmussen, French central bank governor Christian Noyer and officials from the New York Fed, IMF and big investors such as Pimco.
Finance ministers from France and Chile are also due to attend, as well as EU competition chief Joaquin Almunia and the European Banking Authority watchdog.
There remains skepticism regarding the quality of assets in Europe's banks, where critics say banks and regulators have been too slow to recognize losses on many loans and lax in how they assess their riskiness.
The EBA wants to draw a line under those concerns with a review of the assets of euro zone banks later this year, which will lay the groundwork for another "stress test" of Europe's banks next year.
An IIF panel on Tuesday will assess how Europe's much-criticized past tests have compared to those in the United States.
(Reporting by Steve Slater; Editing by Peter Graff)
Should Apple bring iOS 7's new, clarified, deferential, depth-driven look and feel OS X? For the last few years Apple has worked diligently and deliberately to bring iOS nomenclature and metaphors back to the Mac, and create a more consistent experience between their two platforms. Right now, however, iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks couldn't look more different.
iOS 7 has an all-new physics and particle engine, making it feel like a collection of objects in space, and work more like a video game, as well as a completely new paint job with icons and interface elements the likes of which we've never seen on an Apple product before. They've both had their richly rendered textures removed, but where Mavericks lost the old leather, it didn't lose it's Aqua-era gloss, at least not entirely, and it didn't gain any of the new print-inspired look, at least not yet.
Macs are often said to enjoy a halo effect from iOS devices -- people buy iPhones and iPads and then start considering the Mac s well. For the last few years, no matter how different the two platforms, the interfaces looked familiar enough that the Mac was approachable to iOS users in a very direct and comforting way.
Likewise, Jony Ive is now vice president of all design, not just hardware, and not just iOS. It's not unreasonable to think his grand digital plans will eventually encompass future versions of OS X, as they're about to do to iOS. After all, even the best designer and design teams in the world can't do everything at once.
So here's the question -- do you think the new iOS 7 design language will be brought back to the Mac? Will the next version of OS X once again be made familiar to iPhone and iPad users? Should there once again be a single, unified look and feel to Apple's products going forward?
Vote in the poll up top and then tell me why or why not in the comments below!
Love it or hate it, Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription-based software is now the only way to get your favorite apps like Photoshop, Premiere Pro and the like. The company has just released the latest versions of most of those programs, now dubbed CC, which can be installed alongside the current apps for those afraid to change mid-project. Meanwhile, Adobe's trying to tempt previous suite or apps owners to transition to the new system for up to 60 percent off for CS6 owners during a 12-month period, or 40 percent off for those on CS3 to CS5.5. According to Photo Rumors, Adobe is also considering a new pricing structure in response to a massive online backlash against the subscription model from existing clients, who feel it's too expensive. It sent out a survey asking some of them what they thought about paying $10 per month for three years for Photoshop, or $30 for the entire suite, while being able to keep a permanent CS6 copy of either at the end. Considering the level of vehemence we saw earlier, we'll have to wait and see if that'll fly -- meanwhile, check the PR after the break to see what's new in all the apps.
Astronaut wives: The other space pioneers As the men of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs reached further to the Moon, their spouses back home faced stresses and celebrity in an orbit all their own
Source: CBSNews Posted on:
Monday, Jun 17, 2013, 8:12am Views: 10
June 17, 2013 ? Young women who have cancer treatment often lose their fertility because chemotherapy and radiation can damage or kill their immature ovarian eggs, called oocytes. Now, Northwestern Medicine? scientists have found the molecular pathway that can prevent the death of immature ovarian eggs due to chemotherapy, potentially preserving fertility and endocrine function.
Scientists achieved this in female mice by adding a currently approved chemotherapy drug, imatinib mesylate, to another chemotherapy drug cisplatin.
The results will be presented Monday, June 17, at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
"This research advances the efforts to find a medical treatment to protect the fertility and hormone health of girls and young women during cancer treatment, " said So-Youn Kim, the lead investigator and a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Teresa Woodruff, chief of fertility preservation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Adding imatinib mesylate to the drug cisplatin blocks the action of a protein that triggers a cascade of events resulting in death of the immature eggs. Kim discovered the protein that triggers the oocyte's ultimate death is Tap63.
Previous research suggested that imatinib is a fertility-protecting drug against cisplatin, but reports of the drug's effectiveness have been contradictory, Kim said. Her research confirms its effectiveness in an animal model.
She is currently testing imatinib with other chemotherapy agents to see if it also protects fertility in combination with them.
To demonstrate that imatinib protects oocytes against cisplatin, Kim and colleagues cultured ovaries (containing the immature eggs) from five-day-old mice with imatinib and cisplatin for 96 hours. The ovaries were then placed in a kidney capsule in the host mice to keep the ovaries alive. Two weeks later, the immature eggs were still alive. The imatinib did not block cisplatin-induced DNA damage, but Kim believes the eggs may recover and repair the damage over time.
"Previous reports have shown that chemotherapy and radiation-treated oocytes are able to recover from DNA damage," Kim said.
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain turned up the pressure on other rich economies to clamp down on secretive money flows at a summit next week by pressing its overseas tax havens into a transparency deal and announcing new disclosure rules for British firms.
Prime Minister David Cameron wants to make progress on closing global tax loopholes when he hosts a meeting of leaders of the Group of Eight economies in Northern Ireland on Monday and Tuesday.
"It is important we are getting our house in order," Cameron said in a speech in London on Saturday after representatives of overseas tax havens linked to Britain agreed to sign up to an international transparency protocol.
"It is a very positive step forward and it means that Britain's voice in the G8 and the campaigning on this issue around the world for proper taxes, proper companies and proper laws ... will be stronger."
Ten territories and self-governing regions will join the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Assistance in Tax Matters which has been agreed by more than 50 countries.
They also pledged to produce plans on how to provide more information on the ownership of so-called shell companies.
Those included in the agreement were Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Anguilla, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.
The convention will help developing countries trying to trace money they suspect belongs in their state coffers, to request tax information from offshore centers.
Also on Saturday, the British government said it will introduce new domestic rules to combat tax evasion and money laundering, by forcing shadowy "shell" companies to throw off their cloak of anonymity and reveal who really runs them.
Under the new British rules, companies will be required to obtain and hold information on their ownership and control which will then be held in a central registry, available to police and revenue agencies.
Chancellor George Osborne said it was essential that British law enforcement and tax authorities had access to information about the ultimate owners of companies, and it was time for others to act.
"These commitments demonstrate the concrete action we are taking ourselves but it is vital that we take collective international action through the G8 to tackle the international challenges of tax evasion, money laundering and illicit finance," Osborne said in a statement.
But aid campaigners said Britain's action will count for little if the rest of the G8 - the United States, Japan, Canada, Russia and Europe's biggest economies - does not follow suit.
"The acid test of the prime minister's efforts will be whether he delivers a G8 deal that clamps down on tax haven secrecy and phantom companies, and will help poor countries collect the money they need to end the scandal that sees one in eight people go to bed hungry," said Melanie Ward, a spokesperson for the Enough IF campaign.
It represents more than 200 anti-poverty campaign groups.
A consultation on the design of Britain's new rules, including whether the register of beneficial ownership should be publicly available, as sought by anti-corruption campaigners, will be published by the government in the coming months.
Global tax evasion could be costing more than $3 trillion a year, according to researchers from Tax Justice Network while as much as $32 trillion - twice the size of U.S. gross domestic product - could be hidden by individuals in tax havens.
(Additional reporting by Stephen Addison; Editing by William Schomberg)
Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon and John Cusack are among an array of A-list actors starring in a new video urging President Barack Obama to "set the world's course" for an end to nuclear weapons at next week's G8 Summit in Northern Ireland.
"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked," actor Robert De Niro says in the video.
"Such fatalism is a deadly adversary," Damon responds.
Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman, Naomi Watts and Christoph Waltz also appear in the two-and-a-half minute spot.
The video was produced by Global Zero, a Washington, D.C.-based grassroots organization whose mission is "to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2030."
?The message from national security experts and citizens around the world is clear: the only way to eliminate the global nuclear danger is to eliminate all nuclear weapons,? Michael Douglas says. ?It's time to set the world's course to zero.?
To do so, Global Zero said in a press release, President Obama "will have to go beyond the bilateral process President Reagan started of U.S.-Soviet/Russian arms reductions and bring the other leading nuclear powers into international arms negotiations for the first time in history."
The group also sent an open letter to Obama recalling a 2009 speech in which the president committed to their cause.
President Obama,
Four years ago in Prague, [y]ou stated clearly and with conviction your commitment to seek a world without nuclear weapons. You asked for perseverance. You dared us to overcome our differences. You challenged us to ignore the voices that tell us the world cannot change. And you told us words must mean something.
We heard you.
On June 17-18, when you meet with President Putin on the side of the G8 Summit, we urge you to negotiate further cuts to the massive U.S.-Russian Cold War stockpiles and pave the way to bringing world leaders into the first international negotiations in history for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Of course, there are other pressing issues for Obama and Putin to discuss. Namely, Syria, and its deadly civil war.
After authorizing U.S. weapons for Syrian rebels, Obama faces difficult talks with the Russian president, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's most powerful ally.
"There are no illusions that that's going to be easy," Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser, told Reuters.
?It?s in Russia?s interest to join us in applying pressure on Bashar Assad to come to the table in a way that relinquishes his power and his standing in Syria,? Rhodes told the Associated Press. ?We don?t see any scenario where he restores his legitimacy to lead the country.?
June 14, 2013 ? Social phobias affect about 15 million adults in the United States, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and surveys show that public speaking is high on the list of such phobias. For some people, these fears of social situations can be especially acute: For example, individuals with Asperger's syndrome often have difficulty making eye contact and reacting appropriately to social cues. But with appropriate training, such difficulties can often be overcome.
Now, new software developed at MIT can be used to help people practice their interpersonal skills until they feel more comfortable with situations such as a job interview or a first date. The software, called MACH (short for My Automated Conversation coacH), uses a computer-generated onscreen face, along with facial, speech, and behavior analysis and synthesis software, to simulate face-to-face conversations. It then provides users with feedback on their interactions.
The research was led by MIT Media Lab doctoral student M. Ehsan Hoque, who says the work could be helpful to a wide range of people. A paper documenting the software's development and testing has been accepted for presentation at the 2013 International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, known as UbiComp, to be held in September.
"Interpersonal skills are the key to being successful at work and at home," Hoque says. "How we appear and how we convey our feelings to others define us. But there isn't much help out there to improve on that segment of interaction."
Many people with social phobias, Hoque says, want "the possibility of having some kind of automated system so that they can practice social interactions in their own environment. ? They desire to control the pace of the interaction, practice as many times as they wish, and own their data."
The MACH software offers all those features, Hoque says. In fact, in randomized tests with 90 MIT juniors who volunteered for the research, the software showed its value.
First, the test subjects -- all of whom were native speakers of English -- were randomly divided into three groups. Each group participated in two simulated job interviews, a week apart, with MIT career counselors.
But between the two interviews, unbeknownst to the counselors, the students received help: One group watched videos of interview advice, while a second group had a practice session with the MACH simulated interviewer, but received no feedback other than a video of their own performance. Finally, a third group used MACH and then saw videos of themselves accompanied by an analysis of such measures as how much they smiled, how well they maintained eye contact, how well they modulated their voices, and how often they used filler words such as "like," "basically" and "umm."
Evaluations by another group of career counselors showed statistically significant improvement by members of the third group on measures including "appears excited about the job," "overall performance," and "would you recommend hiring this person?" In all of these categories, by comparison, there was no significant change for the other two groups.
The software behind these improvements was developed over two years as part of Hoque's doctoral thesis work with help from his advisor, professor of media arts and sciences Rosalind Picard, as well as Matthieu Courgeon and Jean-Claude Martin from LIMSI-CNRS in France, Bilge Mutlu from the University of Wisconsin, and MIT undergraduate Sumit Gogia.
Designed to run on an ordinary laptop, the system uses the computer's webcam to monitor a user's facial expressions and movements, and its microphone to capture the subject's speech. The MACH system then analyzes the user's smiles, head gestures, speech volume and speed, and use of filler words, among other things. The automated interviewer -- a life-size, three-dimensional simulated face -- can smile and nod in response to the subject's speech and motions, ask questions and give responses.
While this initial implementation was focused on helping job candidates, Hoque says training with the software could be helpful in many kinds of social interactions.
After finishing his doctorate in media arts and sciences this summer, Hoque will become an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Rochester in the fall.
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) ? Police say about 1,000 people in the Brazilian capital have protested against the Confederations Cup claiming the money spent to host the tournament would be better spent elsewhere.
The Saturday demonstration began in front of the National Stadium, where Brazil and Japan will meet in the tournament's opener, and then moved on to other parts of Brasilia.
Carlos Carone is a press spokesman for the city's public safety department. He says the demonstration lasted about three hours and there were no clashes between police and protesters.
However local media says police used tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray to disperse the crowd.
The protest came one day after police clashed with demonstrators angered by hikes in bus and subway fares in Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city.
June 13, 2013 ? Nearly 900 extrasolar planets have been confirmed to date, but now for the first time astronomers think they are seeing compelling evidence for a planet under construction in an unlikely place, at a great distance from its diminutive red dwarf star.
The keen vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a mysterious gap in a vast protoplanetary disk of gas and dust swirling around the nearby star TW Hydrae, located 176 light-years away in the constellation Hydra (the Sea Serpent). The gap's presence is best explained as due to the effects of a growing, unseen planet that is gravitationally sweeping up material and carving out a lane in the disk, like a snow plow.
Researchers, led by John Debes of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., found the gap about 7.5 billion miles from the red dwarf star. If the putative planet orbited in our solar system, it would be roughly twice Pluto's distance from the Sun.
The suspected planet's wide orbit means that it is moving slowly around its host star. Finding the suspected planet in this orbit challenges current planet formation theories. The conventional planet-making recipe proposes that planets form over tens of millions of years from the slow but persistent buildup of dust, rocks, and gas as a budding planet picks up material from the surrounding disk. TW Hydrae, however, is only 8 million years old. There has not been enough time for a planet to grow through the slow accumulation of smaller debris. In fact, a planet at 7.5 billion miles from its star would take more than 200 times longer to form than Jupiter did at its distance from the Sun because of its much slower orbital speed and a deficiency of material in the disk.
An alternative planet-formation theory suggests that a piece of the disk becomes gravitationally unstable and collapses on itself. In this scenario, a planet could form more quickly, in just a few thousand years.
"If we can actually confirm that there's a planet there, we can connect its characteristics to measurements of the gap properties," Debes says. "That might add to planet formation theories as to how you can actually form a planet very far out. There's definitely a gap structure. We think it's probably a planet given the fact that the gap is sharp and circular."
What complicates the story is that the red dwarf star is only 55 percent the mass of our Sun. "It's so intriguing to see a system like this," Debes says. "This is the lowest-mass star for which we've observed a gap so far out."
The disk also lacks large dust grains in its outer regions. Observations from ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter Array) show that millimeter-sized (tenths-of-an-inch-sized) dust, roughly the size of a grain of sand, cuts off sharply at about 5.5 billion miles from the star, just short of the gap. The disk is 41 billion miles across.
"Typically, you need pebbles before you can have a planet. So, if there is a planet and there is no dust larger than a grain of sand farther out, that would be a huge challenge to traditional planet-formation models," Debes says.
The Hubble observations reveal that the gap, which is 1.9 billion miles wide, is not completely cleared out. The team suggests that if a planet exists, it is in the process of forming and not very massive. Based on the evidence, team member Hannah Jang-Condell at the University of Wyoming in Laramie estimates that the putative planet is 6 to 28 times more massive than Earth. Within this range lies a class of planets called super-Earths and ice giants. Such a small planet mass is also a challenge to direct-collapse planet-formation theories, which predict that clumps of material one to two times more massive than Jupiter can collapse to form a planet.
TW Hydrae has been a popular target with astronomers. The system is one of the closest examples of a face-on disk, giving astronomers an overhead view of the star's environment. Debes's team used Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) to observe the star in near-infrared light. The team then re-analyzed archival Hubble data, using more NICMOS images as well as optical and spectroscopic observations from the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). Armed with these observations, they composed the most comprehensive view of the system in scattered light over many wavelengths.
When Debes accounted for the rate at which the disk dims from reflected starlight, the gap was highlighted. It was a feature that two previous Hubble studies had suspected but could not definitively confirm. These earlier observations noted an uneven brightness in the disk but did not identify it as a gap.
"When I first saw the gap structure, it just popped out like that," Debes says. "The fact that we see the gap at every wavelength tells you that it's a structural feature rather than an instrumental artifact or a feature of how the dust scatters light.
The team's paper will appear online on June 14 in The Astrophysical Journal.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uVVXP-EdfGCdYRQC_kUZ60pEZBM-gh7wY6QZFc6emYsJ8vT4lYfcXQSqqtByWEDG8d1bvxEFP1N4UhzKq2e0H5m8kEc0jgkdY-Y7Za3Zc=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 27-Jun-2013
Share ] 
