Obama urges action on debt ceiling

HONOLULU (AP) -- President Barack Obama is hailing a last-minute deal that avoids the so-called fiscal cliff but says it's just one step in a broader effort to boost the economy and shrink federal deficits.

Obama said in his radio and Internet address Saturday that the new law ? approved by Congress on New Year's Day and signed Thursday ? raises taxes on the wealthiest Americans while preventing a middle-class tax hike that could have thrown the economy back into recession.

With the "fiscal cliff" crisis barely over, Obama faces new battles in Congress over raising the country's $16.4 trillion borrowing limit, as well as more than $100 billion in automatic spending cuts for the military and domestic programs which were delayed by two months under the compromise.

Lawmakers promise to replace those across-the-board cuts with more targeted steps that could take longer to implement.

Obama ? speaking from Hawaii, where he is on vacation with his family ? said he is willing to consider more spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the deficit.

But he said he "will not compromise" over his insistence that Congress lift the federal debt ceiling. The nation's credit rating was downgraded the last time lawmakers threatened inaction on the debt ceiling, in 2011.

"Our families and our businesses cannot afford that dangerous game again," Obama said.

If elected officials from both parties "focus on the interests of our country above the interests of party, I'm convinced we can cut spending and raise revenue in a manner that reduces our deficit and protects the middle class," Obama said.

In the Republican address, Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan said that as attention again turns to the debt limit, "we must identify responsible ways to tackle Washington's wasteful spending."

Americans know that "when you have no more money in your account and your credit cards are maxed out, then the spending must stop," Camp said.

___

Online:

Obama address: www.whitehouse.gov

GOP address: www.youtube.com/HouseConference

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-urges-action-debt-ceiling-110229324.html

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Rare Water-Rich Mars Meteorite Discovered

1. How do we know that a rock is from Mars, especially when its composition is different from what we've found on Mars to date.

Isotope ratios and certain element ratios. These depend on the history of a planetary body, and you can rule out every planet / asteroid but Mars. I always liked the conclusion in this paper [sciencedirect.com]:

There seems little likelihood that the SNCs are not from Mars. If they were from another planetary body, it would have to be substantially identical to Mars

Of course, there is no such other Mars in the solar system.

The existence and composition of little atmospheric inclusions (i.e., tiny little bits of Martian air trapped in the rock) were another convincing piece of evidence for the Mars meteorites, as was the evidence of alteration by water.

2. How do rocks leave Mars' gravity well in the first place? Are they shrapnel from Mars being hit by big meteorites?

In a way. Suppose you have a big meteor hit (the size of the one that formed the Baringer Meteor Crater, or bigger). The meteor drills into the body and goes beneath the surface. At some point, it is stopped, and it dumps its kinetic energy into the body of the planet (i.e., for big impacts the meteorite explodes at depth). The shock wave is roughly spherical, and so the part directed upwards lifts up the surface above where the meteorite hit. Most of this material is lifted not much more than the depth of the explosion, forming the characteristic lip of the crater, and typically turning the layers in the rock upside down at the lip. Some of this material can be accelerated to much higher velocities, however, forming (for example) the rays of the new craters on the Moon. If the meteorite is really big, some of the surface material is accelerated to escape velocity and away it goes. After a little while (a few dozen to no more than a million years), some material will hit another planet. Mars and Earth have been trading material like this for the life of the solar system.

The really amazing thing is that some of the material ejected is not treated too roughly. Spores and seeds etc. could definitely survive the trip.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/oTUELNKKjAc/story01.htm

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Pebble smartwatch to be officially unveiled at CES, ready to be shown off to the world

Kickstarter has spawned some pretty interesting products over the past 12 months, one of which is the Pebble smartwatch. It's some time now since Pebble first hit Kickstarter with a $100,000 goal that eventually became $10million. Having originally been slated to ship in September, this was missed, with seemingly no end to the wait in sight. 

Press invites have started to roll out to a Pebble event on Jan. 9 at CES in Las Vegas, where we're promised that the company CEO, Eric Migicovsky, will not only unveil the much anticipated product, but will also offer a full walkthrough of the finished article. 

The Pebble smartwatch is an intriguing device. Featuring an electronic paper display allowing for great viewing outdoors, the watch will pair to your Android device via a downloadable application. The app will allow you to choose a watch face to match your tastes, and will also push notifications to the watch for email, phone calls, Facebook notifications, calendar events, Twitter, weather and alarms. Additionally Pebble will have the ability to receive text messages from your phone. The watch itself will also be able to run specially designed applications, opening up a whole world of possibilities. 

The event goes down at 09:00 PST on Jan. 9, and Android Central will be on the ground to bring you all the news. The event will also be live-streamed over on the Pebble website.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/4XwRQNzvtek/story01.htm

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'Zero Dark Thirty' features stunning final hour

By Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, NBC News

REVIEW: The best hour of filmmaking you'll see all year is the final hour of Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," which has to be considered a favorite to take home this year's best picture Oscar.

It's easy to find reasons not to go to the film, which is hardly a light night out at the movies or an ideal date flick. It's long -- pushing two hours, forty minutes. The film's controversial torture scenes have been widely discussed, and they are indeed difficult to watch -- detainees are waterboarded, strapped into dog collars, shoved into tiny boxes. And even before those scenes, the film reminds us what started it all by playing gut-wrenching phone?calls from people trapped in the World Trade Center after it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. "I'm going to die, aren't I?" one woman asks a helpless 911 operator.

Heavy stuff. Heavy, heartbreaking stuff. And not a movie for everyone. But "Zero Dark Thirty" is a majestic piece of filmmaking and like Bigelow's earlier Oscar-winner "The Hurt Locker," delves into a world that few Americans can even imagine. For most of us, the hunt for Osama bin Laden seemed for years like a fruitless quest, painful and frustrating when we thought about it, but not something that was constantly top of mind. But to the CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain (named Maya in the film), bin Laden was all she thought about, all the time.

Wrote critic Roger Ebert of the film, "?There isn't a whole lot of plot -- basically, just that Maya thinks she is right, and she is." She is indeed, and the film manages to build on her slow gathering of evidence into a Jenga-like pile of information, with missteps along the way. Even though you know bin Laden was at the Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound, even though you know he was killed there by Navy SEALs in 2011, it's to the film's credit that events feel like they hang in doubt even once that dramatic final hour begins.

Chastain makes Maya feel like a real person, faults and all. She's not your typical suave James Bond-like spy. You're not sure you'd like her if you knew her, an opinion that's backed up by a great Washington Post piece about the real agent. (?Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks?? the paper quotes a source as saying. ?If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.?) She has a theory to which she is devoted, but always she carries with her the knowledge that she has seen friends die for similar devotion.?

Maya's challenges, though, only make the build towards the inevitable raid on the Abbottabad compound all the more dramatic. There's a trip to Area 51 (really!) to examine the special helicopters that'll be used, which allows Maya to meet the SEALs who'll be risking their lives because of her beliefs. ("I wanted to drop a bomb," she tells them sourly.)

Once the SEALs, and the Belgian Malinois dog they take along, climb into those two helicopters, it's impossible to take your eyes off the screen, or even breathe. Maya can only watch from the base, knowing their lives are in danger whether she's right or wrong, and that failure will be devastating. The attack itself may not be what you expected. The compound is cramped and dangerous, with threats around every corner and terrified women and children caught up in the raid. One of the helicopters crashes and must be destroyed, bin Laden's computer hard drives and journals must be shoved into bags, and the Pakistanis have scrambled their F-16s to investigate what the heck is going on. In the middle of the mayhem, a SEAL appears dazed, and when asked what's wrong, simply says, "I just shot the guy on the third floor." And all that's come before, the 9/11 phone calls, the torture, the deaths in the pursuit of other theories, all come down to the guy on the third floor.

In addition to Chastain, Bigelow gets marvelous performances from Jason Clark, whose fabulous performance in Showtime's "Brotherhood" is often overlooked; James Gandolfini, as likable and terrifying as Tony Soprano was; and Kyle Chandler, always so good whenever he's onscreen. At one point, Chandler's character tells Maya, "I don't (expletive) care about bin Laden! Protect the homeland!" Which is, of course, precisely what she thought she was doing.

"Zero Dark Thirty" opened in New York and Los Angeles in December to qualify for the Academy Awards, adds more cities on Jan. 4, and opens in still more locations on Jan. 11.

Related content:

Source: http://entertainment.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/02/16303987-zero-dark-thirty-features-stunning-final-hour?lite

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Al Jazeera buys Gore's Current TV, terms undisclosed

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Al Jazeera said on Wednesday it will buy Current TV, the struggling cable channel founded by Al Gore and partners, in a move that will boost the Qatar-based broadcaster's footprint in the United States.

Terms were undisclosed, but analysts estimated the deal could be worth as much as $500 million.

Al Jazeera said it would start a new U.S.-based news channel with the acquisition, which will make it available in more than 40 million U.S. households, up from 4.7 million prior to the deal.

The deal brings Al Jazeera, which operates under the patronage of the emir of Qatar and his family, into closer competition with American news channels like CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

But the award-winning channel that is seen in more than 260 million homes in 130 countries faces hurdles with U.S. distributors and viewers, television industry analysts said.

Current, a liberal channel which has battled low viewership, had been distributed in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service.

One of its distributors, Time Warner Cable, which accounted for about 12 million of those homes, announced late Wednesday it was terminating its carriage deal.

"Our agreement with Current has been terminated and we will no longer be carrying the service. We are removing the service as quickly as possible," Time Warner Cable said in a statement.

Reuters reported in April Time Warner Cable was considering dropping Current if it did not reach certain ratings thresholds.

A spokesperson would not elaborate. Current is also distributed by Comcast Corp and DirecTV, with 22.4 million and 19.8 million subscribers, respectively.

Comcast or DirecTV were either unavailable or declined comment. Dish Network Corp also declined comment.

Both Comcast and DirecTV also hold equity stakes of more than 5 percent in Current, according to public filings.

Current said Gore, its chairman, and co-founder Joel Hyatt, the chief executive officer, will remain on the advisory board.

PARANOIA ABOUT AL JAZEERA

Analysts said Al Jazeera would have to overcome a significant image problem in the United States, where many viewers remember its stridently anti-war reporting of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Al Jazeera has deeper pockets. The downside is the politics. People in America associate Al Jazeera with the Muslim world or the Arab world or the Islam world and they have problems with that," said Jimmy Schaeffler, pay TV consultant at The Carmel Group.

"They have psychological, political and emotional concerns and that will work against them."

"There's a fair amount of paranoia when it comes to Al Jazeera," said Robert Thompson, professor of TV and popular culture at Syracuse University.

Al Jazeera has only been shown in a handful of cities. It said its new U.S.-based news channel would be separate from Al Jazeera English, and would provide both domestic and international news for American audiences.

The new channel would air in 2013 and would be headquartered in New York City. In addition to existing bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago, Al Jazeera would open more bureaus and would double its U.S.-based staff to more than 300 employees.

Current was co-founded in 2005 but never caught on. It shifted to a more liberal format from 2011, but ratings continued to disappoint, said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media, who pegged its average daily audience under 50,000 viewers and the value of a deal at $400 million to $500 million.

In late October, Current confirmed it was considering selling itself and had hired JP Morgan and the Raine Group to assess options.

Thompson said the deal came at a challenging time for the cable industry.

"Launching a cable network in the U.S. in the second decade of the 21st century is not an easy thing to do. Even Oprah Winfrey has struggled in significant ways," he said.

Disputes between pay TV distributors and cable networks have risen lately. Time Warner Cable also dropped arts-focused cable channel Ovation over its low ratings and the high costs of carrying the network.

(Reporting By Susan Zeidler; Editing by Gary Hill and Stephen Coates)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/al-jazeera-buys-current-tv-terms-undisclosed-002643807--finance.html

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Chinese medicine yields secrets to scientists

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

The mysterious inner workings of Chang Shan?a Chinese herbal medicine used for thousands of years to treat fevers associated with malaria?have been uncovered thanks to a high-resolution structure solved at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI).

Described in the journal Nature this week, the structure shows in atomic detail how a two-headed compound derived from the active ingredient in Chang Shan works. Scientists have known that this compound, called halofuginone (a derivative of the febrifugine), can suppress parts of the immune system?but nobody knew exactly how.

The new structure shows that, like a wrench in the works, halofuginone jams the gears of a molecular machine that carries out "aminoacylation," a crucial biological process that allows organisms to synthesize the proteins they need to live. Chang Shan, also known as Dichroa febrifuga Lour, probably helps with malarial fevers because traces of a halofuginone-like chemical in the herb interfere with this same process in malaria parasites, killing them in an infected person's bloodstream.

"Our new results solved a mystery that has puzzled people about the mechanism of action of a medicine that has been used to treat fever from a malaria infection going back probably 2,000 years or more," said Paul Schimmel, PhD, the Ernest and Jean Hahn Professor and Chair of Molecular Biology and Chemistry and member of The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at TSRI. Schimmel led the research with TSRI postdoctoral fellow Huihao Zhou, PhD.

Halofuginone has been in clinical trials for cancer, but the high-resolution picture of the molecule suggests it has a modularity that would make it useful as a template to create new drugs for numerous other diseases.

The Process of Aminoacylation and its Importance to Life

Aminoacylation is a crucial step in the synthesis of proteins, the end products of gene expression. When genes are expressed, their DNA sequence is first read and transcribed into RNA, a similar molecule. The RNA is then translated into proteins, which are chemically very different from DNA and RNA but are composed of chains of amino acid molecules strung together in the order called for in the DNA.

Necessary for this translation process are a set of molecules known as transfer RNAs (tRNAs), which shuttle amino acids to the growing protein chain where they are added like pearls on a string. But before the tRNAs can move the pearls in place, they must first grab hold of them.

Aminoacylation is the biological process whereby the amino acid's pearls are attached to these tRNA shuttles. A class of enzymes known as aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases is responsible for attaching the amino acids to the tRNAs, and Schimmel and his colleagues have been examining the molecular details of this process for years. Their work has given scientists insight into everything from early evolution to possible targets for future drug development.

Over time what has emerged as the picture of this process basically involves three molecular players: a tRNA, an amino acid and the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase enzyme that brings them together. A fourth molecule called ATP is a microscopic form of fuel that gets consumed in the process.

The new work shows that halofuginone gets its potency by interfering with the tRNA synthetase enzyme that attaches the amino acid proline to the appropriate tRNA. It does this by blocking the active site of the enzyme where both the tRNA and the amino acid come together, with each half of the halofuginone blocking one side or the other.

Interestingly, said Schimmel, ATP is also needed for the halofuginone to bind. Nothing like that has ever been seen in biochemistry before.

"This is a remarkable example where a substrate of an enzyme (ATP) captures an inhibitor of the same enzyme, so that you have an enzyme-substrate-inhibitor complex," said Schimmel.

###

Scripps Research Institute: http://www.scripps.edu

Thanks to Scripps Research Institute for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/126078/Chinese_medicine_yields_secrets_to_scientists

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