রবিবার, ৩০ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২

China leaders stage show of unity after expelling Bo

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's leaders put on a show of unity on Saturday after their damning accusations against disgraced politician Bo Xilai, whose expulsion from the Communist Party drew an outcry from leftist supporters in a sign of the rifts his prosecution could inflame.

Once a charismatic yet divisive star who stood out on China's stolid political stage, Bo is almost sure to face trial and jail after the ruling Communist Party announced his expulsion on Friday and issued a list of allegations: bending the law to hush up a murder, taking huge bribes and engaging in "improper sexual relations with multiple women".

The party buried Bo under the accusations at the same time that it announced a November 8 date for a congress that will anoint a new generation of top leaders - a lineup that Bo held barely disguised ambitions to join.

On Saturday evening, top leaders gathered in the cavernous national parliament building for a National Day reception, their first public appearance since the revelation of the accusations against Bo.

Premier Wen Jiabao did not mention Bo or any other controversies in his remarks to hundreds of diplomats, officials and other guests.

"Looking ahead, we are full of confidence," Wen told them, adding that "no hardship will prevent us from forging ahead".

The eight other members of the Politburo Standing Committee - the party's innermost core of power - also attended.

Bo's downfall has unsettled their preparations for the leadership succession, and exposed high-level abuse of power after his former police chief briefly took refuge in a U.S. consulate and revealed that Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, had murdered a British businessman.

State media tried to draw a clear line between Bo and the party elite he once belonged to, casting his fall as a victory for the party's determination to fight corruption.

"No matter how high a position, no matter how influential, anyone who violates party discipline and state law will be sternly pursued and punished," the official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary on the case.

"As a senior party official, Bo Xilai should have been a model of obedience to party discipline," the news agency said in the commentary, widely distributed by state media websites. "But instead he monopolized power and behaved recklessly, doing as he pleased and gravely violating discipline."

"His misdeeds deserve their punishment."

Earlier on Saturday, the party-run parliament confirmed that Bo had been removed as a delegate, following his expulsion from the party and its governing councils, Xinhua news agency reported.

DEMONISATION AND DISILLUSIONMENT

The party could face trouble, however, convincing skeptics that it has only recently awoken to Bo's crimes, which it traced back to his years as a city official in northeast China. Bo's leftist supporters have already revived charges that Bo is the victim of a plot to eradicate him and his populist policies.

"Last night, one of the core members of the ruling party's leadership was suddenly turned into a demon," said one commentary on "Red China", a far-left Chinese-language website that has issued a stream of commentary defending Bo.

"Unlike other ousted senior officials, Bo Xilai's downfall has triggered two diametrically opposed reactions in society - one of elation and relief, and the other of outrage and regret."

The "Red China" site has been blocked to the many Chinese users who do not know how to get past censorship barriers. But China's version of Twitter, "Weibo", has also echoed with debate about Bo's dramatic downfall.

Public support for Bo is unlikely to creep into the heavily regimented party congress, but the effort to disgrace him could foster deeper public disillusionment with the party by showing that one of its formerly favored officials was steeped in corruption. Bo, 63, is the "princeling" son of a Communist Party official who served alongside Mao Zedong.

"He won support from the underdogs of society and the radical intellectuals, and maybe even some within the party and the military," said Lai Hongyi, who teaches about contemporary China at the University of Nottingham in Britain. "That's probably quite polarizing because you are not talking about just a few people but a segment of the whole of Chinese society and the establishment."

After arriving in Chongqing in 2007, Bo turned it into a showcase for pro-growth economics, and ran a campaign against organized crime, policies welcomed by many of the city's 30 million residents, though his brash self-promotion irked some leaders in Beijing.

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, and his former police chief, Wang Lijun, have already been jailed over the scandal stemming from the murder in November of British businessman Neil Heywood.

The official statement carried by Xinhua said that in the murder scandal, Bo "abused his powers of office, committed serious errors and bears a major responsibility". That charge appears to reflect accusations from Wang's trial that suggested Bo tried to stymie the murder investigation.

The government also accused Bo of taking huge bribes and other unspecified crimes. Before Bo is charged and tried, investigators must first complete an inquiry and indict him, but China's prosecutors and courts come under party control and are most unlikely to challenge the accusations. (Additional reporting by John Ruwitch in Shanghai; Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Robert Birsel)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-seeks-discredit-bo-supporters-cry-foul-050857985.html

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Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite is the new king of e-readers

3 hrs.

Until now, I was convinced the e-reader was a goner. After all, that black-on-gray "e-ink" display technology has peaked and cheap tablets are eating up what's left of buyer interest. Then I fell in love with Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite. It solves two of e-ink's biggest problems ? lousy contrast and lack of integrated lighting ??while preserving the e-reader's core advantages: readability, affordability and insanely long battery life.

E-ink is opaque ??unlike see-through?LCD ? and because of that, it's a lot harder to light it.?There's no way to "back light" the thing;?you have to light it from the side. When Sony tried to do this in 2008, it destroyed the value of the e-ink screen with oppressive glare, even when the light was off. Nobody bought that product, and Sony doesn't sell a light-up e-reader now. This past April, Barnes & Noble introduced its Nook SimpleTouch with GlowLight, and while that reader does a far better job of preserving the e-ink's readability, the lighting looks uneven.

Amazon stayed away from e-ink?lighting tricks until this fall, and the wait has paid off. The technology used to light-up the new Kindle is more advanced than anything I've seen previously: Despite the limitation of an LED array ? in this case, four tiny?lights?buried at the bottom of the screen ? the entire screen glows with near-perfect evenness, no matter how bright or dim you set it.

What surprised me about the Paperwhite wasn't that Amazon finally cracked the lighting problem. It's that the lighting actually solves the other big e-ink?problem: contrast. E-readers have long suffered the criticism that their pictures aren't really black-on-white, but black-on-gray. The reading experience falls short of greatness, no matter how "easy on the eyes" the technology is supposed to be.

By some color-temperature trickery, the Paperwhite's light system turns gray into white. Not only do you leave the light on all the time, but it is ideally kept?at its brightest in all but direct sunlight (where you can't see the lighting). And speaking of direct sunlight, let me assure you that the Paperwhite retains the?outdoor virtue of e-ink?despite the lighting system and the capacitive touch sensor layer.

The other thing e-readers will continue to lord over tablets is battery life. Amazon says the Paperwhite gets up to eight weeks on a single charge, but that's only under certain conditions: that the wireless is turned off, the light intensity is set to 10 (max is 24) and you read just half an hour each day. Odds are, your habits won't align with this perfectly, so you may have to charge it more than every two months. But I will say that since I do most of my leisure reading at night after we turn the lights out, I have had the lighting set near the bottom.?

So, do I have any gripes? Sure. On the technical side, it's a little annoying that there's no ambient light sensor ? you have to mess with the lighting yourself every time you change environments. But it's easy to do it, so that's not a true concern.

In the box you find a USB cable but no charger, nothing you can plug in the wall. Chances are, you already have something like this from a phone, iPad or previous Kindle, but if you need one, it's $10 extra. Alternatively, you can just charge it every so often by plugging it into your computer.

Previous Kindles have had speakers, and advanced functions like MP3 playback and text-to-speech narration ? this Kindle is more streamlined, though it does have the "experimental browser" that we've seen on Kindles from the start.?

A much more serious nuisance is that, for the starting price of $119, you have to put up with ads on the lock screen and at the bottom of the home screen. Even when you pay the $20 bounty to opt out of Amazon's "special offers," you still get a stream of recommended titles on your home screen, and those never go away. (Seriously, Amazon, how is that not an ad?)

Barnes & Noble has retaliated, dropping the price of its ad-free (and incredibly long-named) Nook SimpleTouch with GlowLight from $139 to $119. And Barnes & Noble wants to ensure that shoppers know that the Nook does in fact come with a wall charger. If all things were equal, this would be a compelling proposal, but things are not equal. If you don't live inside a Barnes & Noble, the Nook's advantages fall short of the Paperwhite's superior technology.?

If you are a frequent Amazon shopper with a $79-per-year Prime membership, then a Kindle gets you one additional benefit: One free "lending library" book per month, including the Harry Potter series, "Hunger Games" and a ton of other bestsellers.

So if you don't care about ads, then the Paperwhite's $119 starting price is a bargain. Eliminate the ads and buy a charger and you get to about $150, still not bad. If you don't have Wi-Fi, you'll have to get the 3G version, which is $179 with ads, $199 without ? a bit more steep, perhaps, but not a terrible one-time payment, especially for someone who doesn't have home broadband.

Amazon's growing less abashed about trying to get you to spend more money ? and I think there'll be a point where it backfires. But for now, the Paperwhite's virtues outweigh any of the tacky marketing, and it can be declared hands down the best e-reader yet, without any need for qualifiers.

Wilson Rothman is the Technology & Science?editor at NBC News Digital. Catch up with him on Twitter at @wjrothman, and join our conversation on Facebook.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/gadgetbox/amazons-kindle-paperwhite-new-king-e-readers-6191170

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AP VIDEO: Syrian refugees discuss their pain, fear

As war rages in Syria, the stream of refugees into other countries shows no sign of stopping. More than 100,000 people fled Syria in August alone ? about 40 percent of all who had left since the uprising against President Bashar Assad began last March.

The United Nations refugee agency said Thursday that the number of people escaping Syria could reach 700,000 by the end of the year.

And in each case, lives are uprooted and changed forever.

In the following videos, people who fled the conflict tell their stories.

See the videos here: http://hosted.ap.org/interactives/2012/syria/

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ap-video-syrian-refugees-discuss-pain-fear-215329869.html

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Youths serving life without parole get second chance in California

SACRAMENTO (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on Sunday a measure that grants juvenile offenders sentenced to life in prison without parole the chance to petition for their release after serving 25 years.

Roughly 300 inmates in California's prison system have been sentenced to a lifetime behind bars for offenses committed as teenagers, according to the bill's sponsor, state Senator Leland Yee, a Democrat from San Francisco.

Those inmates will now be eligible for parole after serving at least 25 years in prison.

The courts can review their cases after 15 years in prison and lower their sentence to 25 years to life if the juvenile offenders demonstrate remorse and work towards rehabilitation.

"The governor's signature ... is emotional for both the supporters and the opposition, but I am proud that today California said we believe all kids, even those we had given up on in the past, are deserving of a second chance," Yee said in a statement.

Supporters of the bill, including dozens of civil rights organizations, said the United States is the only country in the world where people who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crime serve sentences of life without parole.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that juvenile murderers cannot be given mandatory sentences of life in prison without parole, saying mitigating factors - such as the circumstances surrounding the crime and family background - must be weighed before imposing a sentence.

"There's no question that we can keep the public safe without locking youth up forever for crimes committed when they were still considered too young to have the judgment to vote or drive," Elizabeth Calvin, children's rights advocate at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

The California District Attorney's Association opposed the bill, saying it applies almost exclusively to 16 or 17-year-olds convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances, and that life without the possibility of parole is an appropriate sentence for them.

Forty-five percent of California's juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole for involvement in a murder did not actually kill the victim, according to Human Rights Watch.

Many of the youths were acting as lookouts or were caught up in a robbery gone wrong, the group said, leading to a conviction of felony murder or aiding in and abetting a murder.

Brown also signed into law a bill that will slightly increase the number of inmates eligible for compassionate release and medical parole from county jails.

The laws will take effect on January 1.

(Reporting by Mary Slosson; editing by Christopher Wilson)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/youths-serving-life-without-parole-second-chance-california-213222276.html

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শনিবার, ২৯ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২

No tax, no blessing: German church insists on levy

BERLIN (AP) ? The road to heaven is paved with more than good intentions for Germany's 24 million Catholics. If they don't pay their religious taxes, they will be denied sacraments, including weddings, baptisms and funerals.

A decree issued last week by the country's bishops cast a spotlight on the longstanding practice in Germany and a handful of other European countries in which governments tax registered believers and then hand over the money to the religious institutions.

In Germany, the surcharge for Catholics, Protestants and Jews is a surcharge of up to nine percent on their income tax bills ? or about ?56 ($72) a month for a single person earning a pre-tax monthly salary of about ?3,500 ($4,500).

For religious institutions, struggling to maintain their congregations in a secular society where the Protestant Reformation began 500 years ago, the tax revenues are vital.

The Catholic Church in Germany receives about ?5 billion ($6.5 billion) annually from the surcharge. For Protestants, the total is just above ?4 billion ($5.2 billion). Donations, in turn, represent a far smaller share of the churches' income than in the United States.

With rising prices and economic uncertainty, however, more and more Catholics and Protestants are opting to save their money and declare to tax authorities they are no longer church members, even if they still consider themselves believers.

"I quit the church already in 2007," Manfred Gonschor, a Munich-based IT-consultant, said. "It was when I got a bonus payment and realized that I could have paid myself a nice holiday alone on the amount of church tax that I was paying on it."

Gonschor added he was also "really fed up with the institution and its failures."

Such defections have hit the Catholic Church especially hard ? it has lost about 181,000 tax-paying members in 2010 and 126,000 a year later, according to official figures. Protestants, who number about 24 million nationwide, lost 145,000 registered members in Germany in 2010, the most recent year from which figures are available.

But the figures include some people who still want to baptize their children, take communion on major religious holidays, marry in a religious ceremony and receive Christian burials.

The group We are Church, which claims to represent tens of thousands of grassroots Catholics, said many Germans stop paying the tax because they disagree with the church's policies or simply want to save money ? not because they have lost their faith.

"I haven't quit because I still think that I might want to get married in a church one day, even though I know that's absurd," said Anna Ainsley, a 31-old-year banker and a Protestant from Frankfurt. "But when I see my tax declaration, then I think every year that I should finally quit."

Those are the people that Germany's Catholic bishops had in mind when they decreed on Sept. 20 that stopping the payment of religious taxes was "a serious lapse" and those who did so would then be excluded from a range of church activities.

"This decree makes clear that one cannot partly leave the Church," the bishops said in a statement. "It is not possible to separate the spiritual community of the Church from the institutional Church."

Wavering Catholics will now be sent letters reminding them of the consequences of avoiding the church tax, including losing access to all sacraments.

"Maybe you haven't considered the consequences of your decision and would like to reverse this step," a draft of the letter states.

Protestants have taken a less stern position, saying non-taxpayers are still welcome to attend services and take communion. But becoming a godparent, getting married in a church or taking a job in church-affiliated institutions such as hospitals or kindergartens are off-limits to those who stop paying their taxes.

Switzerland and Austria also tax Catholic and Protestant church members. In Denmark, the State Lutheran church collects a tax from its members. Members of Sweden's Lutheran Church pay around 1 percent of their income, collected by the national tax authorities, just as in Finland.

In Italy, tax-payers have the choice of diverting a small part of their income taxes to religious institutions, including the Catholic Church and the country's Jewish community, but the contribution is voluntary.

In none of those countries have been the churches take such a firm stand against dropouts.

So far German courts have stood by the bishops' decision. This week the country's top administrative court threw out a lawsuit against the archdiocese of Freiburg by retired theologian Hartmut Zapp, who has spent years fighting the Catholic church over the tax.

Zapp argued that a Catholic should be free to stop paying but remain a member of the spiritual community and that his religious beliefs could not possibly be tied to a tax payment.

The archdiocese responded in a statement that "those who lack solidarity bid farewell to the community of believers."

The tax issue presents moral and ethical dilemmas to millions of German believers, even dividing couples.

Sonja Trott, a 34-year-old teacher from Munich, said she quit the Catholic Church 15 years ago because she no longer believed in its teachings.

"Now I'd like to convince my husband that he also should quit, that would save us a lot of money," she said.

But her husband Christoph, a sales executive, says he cannot imagine refusing to pay on moral grounds because it would seem like a betrayal of his faith. "I don't like paying it, but I do because I fear the step of quitting the church."

He would prefer to donate part of the money to charities "but well, in Germany the payment determines whether I'm allowed to consider myself a Catholic or not."

For other Germans, it's unethical to stop paying the tax but continue to use the church when it suits them.

Christine Solf, a Munich-based consultant, says she doesn't attend services regularly but appreciates the church's charitable work. For her, church membership is also a family tradition.

"I know people who quit for financial reasons but then still want their children to be baptized. That's not OK in my opinion," she said.

___

Juergen Baetz can be reached on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jbaetz

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/no-tax-no-blessing-german-church-insists-levy-152534553.html

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Online Internet Marketing Business For Beginners | Marketing Now

Today, many people from all over the planet are now considering starting an online business. Whether you are a high school graduate or a professional, anyone can start various kinds of businesses online.

Most online businesses are not successful but with some also do succeed and become profitable. This is because of internet marketing.

Internet marketing is one of the most popular methods used by online businesses to optimize their web site. This is by promoting their websites so that it will gain rank from major search engine, where many internet users use to find websites that offer the products and service they need.

Internet marketing may sound easy. It can be difficult if you are a beginner. Therefore, here are some tips for making your internet marketing strategy a success.

Writing Articles

Writing and submitting articles is one of the effective forms of marketing your online business in the internet. What you do is write about your online business and advertise your services at the ending of your article. After finishing your article, present your finished article to websites that publishes articles.

Join Forums

Joining forums is also one of the best ways to market your online business in the internet. Join groups who are discussing topics related to your online business. There is a chance that many people have questions about a certain product and answering them may not only make you look good but people who takes a look at the discussion might get interested and possibly visit your website. Just do not forget to put your name and website after each post.

Advertise on Other Websites

Marketing your online business on other websites is also a very effective internet marketing strategy. The downside is most websites that offers advertising in their site charges an advertising fee. So be sure to find a good website to advertise on. A good website should have many visitors to ensure you that many people will actually see your advertising. Also, find websites related to your online business. Advertising on a website is usually in the form of banners and text links.

Email List

This type of internet marketing method is a good way to reach out personally to many internet users. The only disadvantage to this method is that most of the popular email service providers such as Yahoo! Mail, Google, Gmail and MSN emails have features that can mark your email message as spam. Most users delete the contents of their spam folder even before they look inside.

There are online businesses that offer internet-marketing services. For varying fees, they will take care of the internet marketing for your online business. All you have to do is give them some details about your online business and specify what kind of internet marketing strategy you prefer.

These are just some of the ways to market your online business in the internet. There are many varieties of different internet marketing methods.

With more and more people starting their own online business everyday, you should carefully choose what type of internet marketing that is suitable for your business, and in the process, doing them correctly.

Of course, there will be some disappointments in the early stages of your online business but with a little patience and effort; you can be on your way on making money.

Republished by Marketing Now

Source: http://marketingnow.biz/marketing/online-internet-marketing-business-for-beginners.html

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Engadget Podcast 311 - 09.28.2012

It's been a long time, and we shouldn't have left you without a dope 'cast to Jam to, but we're back, inmates-running-the-asylum style, reporting on the bleeding edge of the future of the #3 mobile phone dominator position. In this rap-rock edition of the Engadget podcast we'll also tackle the age-old question: are magazines dead, or just in sleep mode?

Hosts: Brian Heater
Guest: Terrence O'Brien, Dana Wollman
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Orbital - Never

02:08 - Engadget Live: Join us at 4AM ET for an 'ask me anything' Q&A with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop!
02:50 - From the lab: Lumia 920 low-light shootout with Nokia 808, iPhone 5, HTC One X and Galaxy S III
12:10 - Live from Blackberry Jam Americas 2012!
13:18 - RIM reveals more details about Blackberry 10
13:53 - RIM pledges ongoing support for BlackBerry devs by serenading them (video)
15:00 - RIM puts BlackBerry 10 on display: new alarm, Peek gesture and more
16:00 - BlackBerry's new Dev Alpha B handset runs BB10, we go hands-on
30:45 - RIM shows off native Facebook and Foursquare apps for BlackBerry 10, confirms Twitter and LinkedIn for launch
31:07 - RIM: BlackBerry 10 carrier testing starts in October, OS remains on schedule
31:23 - BlackBerry App World to sell music and movies, open to BB 10 app submissions on October 10th
32:45 - Barnes & Noble launching Nook Video this fall with a little help from HBO, Sony, Disney, Viacom, more
33:07 - Barnes & Noble's Nook HD 7-inch Android tablet, hands-on (video)
34:04 - Barnes & Noble announces Nook HD+ 9-inch tablet, we go hands-on (video)
47:25 - Hands-on with Wikipad, the $500 Android gaming tablet (video)
50:35 - Lytro light-field camera hitting Amazon, Target and Best Buy sites next month


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Engadget Podcast 311 - 09.28.2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[WATCH]: Get Fit: Cardio Kickbox Burn Workout - Health & Fitness

Rating: 4

Burn fat and lose weight with this 12 minute cardio kickboxing workout. This exercise video will tone your butt, legs and abs while burning mega calories! Get fit with Denise Austin?s Cardio Kickbox Burn workout on YouTube! This workout is from Denise Austin?s DVD ?Get Fit: Daily Dozen?. For full selection of great workouts like this one, go to the BeFit Channel on YouTube at: www.youtube.com Check us out on Facebook at: www.facebook.com Follow us on Twitter at: www.twitter.com

Source: http://aerobic-fitness.vrg-healthfitness.com/2012/09/27/watch-get-fit-cardio-kickbox-burn-workout-4/

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Nevada Licenses Three More Gambling Operators - Casino Online ...

The Nevada Gaming Commission approved three more gambling operators to provide their services in the state?s newly regulated gambling industry. The three groups are American Casino and Entertainment Properties LLC, PokerTrip Enterprises and WMS Industries.

American Casino and Entertainment Properties LLC (ACEP) was granted an interactive gambling operator?s license by the Nevada Gaming Commission. The group owns the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and is keen to combine its terrestrial operations with online gambling services to its customers.

According to ACEP, it plans to run free-to-play online poker games for the duration of this year, but by next year it will switch to real money online poker.

Following the approval of its license applicaiton, ACEP and Bally Technologies issued a joint statement, saying that Bally would provide an iGaming platform to ACEP and its properties, including the Stratosphere, as well as its two Arizona Charlies properties.

The Vice President of Business Development for Bally Technologies, John Connelly said after the signing of the agreement: ?We are excited about the opportunity to partner with a premier gaming operation and a globally recognized brand like the Stratosphere. What makes this even more significant is the fact that ACEP is located in Nevada, one of the only approved and regulated markets within the United States.?

?We are pleased to be involved in the leading edge of this emerging segment in the U.S.,? said American Casino and Entertainment Properties? CEO, Frank Riolo. ?This partnership with Bally will allow us to establish a play-for-free poker site by the end of the year, which we plan to use to further enhance our brands and enable us to be poised to launch a real money poker site at such a time as permitted.?

PokerTrip Enterprises, a group based in Las Vegas, was awarded an online poker marketer license, while the Illinois based WMS Industries Inc. was granted a license as a service provider and interactive gaming system manufacturer.

Related Posts

Article source: http://www.compatiblepoker.com/poker-rumors/nevada-licenses-three-more-gambling-operators/6503

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Source: http://casinoonlinemarketing.com/nevada-licenses-three-more-gambling-operators/

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শুক্রবার, ২৮ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২

Alanis Morissette Slows Down "Basket Case," Shows Love for Billie Joe Armstrong

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/09/alanis-morissette-slows-down-basket-case-shows-love-for-billie-j/

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Bioengineers introduce 'Bi-Fi' -- The biological 'Internet'

ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2012) ? If you were a bacterium, the virus M13 might seem innocuous enough. It insinuates more than it invades, setting up shop like a freeloading houseguest, not a killer. Once inside it makes itself at home, eating your food, texting indiscriminately. Recently, however, bioengineers at Stanford University have given M13 a bit of a makeover.

The researchers, Monica Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, and Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering, have parasitized the parasite and harnessed M13's key attributes -- its non-lethality and its ability to package and broadcast arbitrary DNA strands -- to create what might be termed the biological Internet, or "Bi-Fi." Their findings were published online Sept. 7 in the Journal of Biological Engineering.

Using the virus, Ortiz and Endy have created a biological mechanism to send genetic messages from cell to cell. The system greatly increases the complexity and amount of data that can be communicated between cells and could lead to greater control of biological functions within cell communities. The advance could prove a boon to bioengineers looking to create complex, multicellular communities that work in concert to accomplish important biological functions.

Medium and message

M13 is a packager of genetic messages. It reproduces within its host, taking strands of DNA -- strands that engineers can control -- wrapping them up one by one and sending them out encapsulated within proteins produced by M13 that can infect other cells. Once inside the new hosts, they release the packaged DNA message.

The M13-based system is essentially a communication channel. It acts like a wireless Internet connection that enables cells to send or receive messages, but it does not care what secrets the transmitted messages contain.

"Effectively, we've separated the message from the channel. We can now send any DNA message we want to specific cells within a complex microbial community," said Ortiz, the first author of the study.

It is well-known that cells naturally use various mechanisms, including chemicals, to communicate, but such messaging can be extremely limited in both complexity and bandwidth. Simple chemical signals are typically both message and messenger -- two functions that cannot be separated.

"If your network connection is based on sugar then your messages are limited to 'more sugar,' 'less sugar,' or 'no sugar'" explained Endy.

Cells engineered with M13 can be programmed to communicate in much more complex, powerful ways than ever before. The possible messages are limited only by what can be encoded in DNA and thus can include any sort of genetic instruction: start growing, stop growing, come closer, swim away, produce insulin and so forth.

Rates and ranges

In harnessing DNA for cell-cell messaging the researchers have also greatly increased the amount of data they can transmit at any one time. In digital terms, they have increased the bit rate of their system. The largest DNA strand M13 is known to have packaged includes more than 40,000 base pairs. Base pairs, like 1s and 0s in digital encoding, are the basic building blocks of genetic data. Most genetic messages of interest in bioengineering range from several hundred to many thousand base pairs.

Ortiz was even able to broadcast her genetic messages between cells separated by a gelatinous medium at a distance of greater than 7 centimeters.

"That's very long-range communication, cellularly speaking," she said.

Down the road, the biological Internet could lead to biosynthetic factories in which huge masses of microbes collaborate to make more complicated fuels, pharmaceuticals and other useful chemicals. With improvements, the engineers say, their cell-cell communication platform might someday allow more complex three-dimensional programming of cellular systems, including the regeneration of tissue or organs.

"The ability to communicate 'arbitrary' messages is a fundamental leap -- from just a signal-and-response relationship to a true language of interaction," said Radhika Nagpal, professor of computer science at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, who was not involved in the research. "Orchestrating the cooperation of cells to form artificial tissues, or even artificial organisms is just one possibility. This opens a door to new biological systems and solving problems that have no direct analog in nature."

Ortiz added: "The biological Internet is in its very earliest stages. When the information Internet was first introduced in the 1970s, it would have been hard to imagine the myriad uses it sees today, so there's no telling all the places this new work might lead."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford University Medical Center. The original article was written by Andrew Myers.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Monica E Ortiz, Drew Endy. Engineered cell-cell communication via DNA messaging. Journal of Biological Engineering, 2012; 6 (1): 16 DOI: 10.1186/1754-1611-6-16

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/U83jqgGqS48/120928103802.htm

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Regular refs back; Goodell apologizes to fans

FILE - In this Aug. 9, 2012, file photo, officials walk towards the field for an NFL football game between the Buffalo Bills and the Washington Redskins in Orchard Park, N.Y. The NFL and referees' union reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday, Sept. 26, to end a three-month lockout that triggered a wave of frustration and anger over replacement officials and threatened to disrupt the rest of the season. (AP Photo/Bill Wippert, File)

FILE - In this Aug. 9, 2012, file photo, officials walk towards the field for an NFL football game between the Buffalo Bills and the Washington Redskins in Orchard Park, N.Y. The NFL and referees' union reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday, Sept. 26, to end a three-month lockout that triggered a wave of frustration and anger over replacement officials and threatened to disrupt the rest of the season. (AP Photo/Bill Wippert, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 4, 2011, file photo, officials confer in the fourth quarter of an NFL football game between the Atlanta Falcons and Houston Texans in Houston. The NFL and referees' union reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2012, to end a three-month lockout that triggered a wave of frustration and anger over replacement officials and threatened to disrupt the rest of the season. (AP Photo/Dave Einsel, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 25, 2011, file photo, officials confer in the third quarter of an NFL football game between the Denver Broncos and the Tennessee Titans in Nashville, Tenn. The NFL and referees' union reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2012, to end a three-month lockout that triggered a wave of frustration and anger over replacement officials and threatened to disrupt the rest of the season. (AP Photo/Wade Payne, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 24, 2011, file photo, referee Ed Hochuli (85) signals during the second quarter of an NFL football game between the Detroit Lions and the San Diego Chargers in Detroit. The NFL and referees' union reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2012, to end a three-month lockout that triggered a wave of frustration and anger over replacement officials and threatened to disrupt the rest of the season. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 5, 2012, file photo, Commissioner Roger Goodell gestures to fans before an NFL football game between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys in East Rutherford, N.J. The NFL and referees' union reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday, Sept. 26, to end a three-month lockout that triggered a wave of frustration and anger over replacement officials and threatened to disrupt the rest of the season. (AP Photo/Bill Kostroun, File)

(AP) ? The replacement officials are gone and the NFL is sorry it took so long. Now fans can go back to complaining about the calls made by the regular refs.

The sport's experiment with replacements ends Thursday night when a veteran crew works the Browns-Ravens game. Referee Gene Steratore, a 10-year veteran, strolled onto the field at M&T Bank Stadium with little fanfare about 2? hours before kickoff, still wearing a coat and tie as he paced along the sidelines. Among his other routine tasks was a brief talk to a stadium official about the wireless on-field microphone the referee wears.

"Show me how this one works," Steratore said as he examined the unit.

Commissioner Roger Goodell apologized to fans for the anxiety of the last three weeks while denying that using replacement officials increased the chances of flagrant mistakes.

After two days of marathon negotiations ? and mounting frustration across the league ? the NFL and the officials' union announced at midnight Wednesday that a tentative eight-year agreement had been reached to end a lockout that began in June.

The return of the regulars couldn't come soon enough for many players, coaches and fans.

"Those guys might mess up every now and then, but we can live with that happening with professional guys out there," Detroit Lions receiver Calvin Johnson said.

Goodell insisted the timing of the deal was not a reaction to the outcry over Monday night's game, when a missed call cost Green Bay a win against the Seattle Seahawks. The two sides had been in "intensive negotiations" the last two weeks, he said, although he acknowledged it "may have pushed the parties further along."

For the Packers, Redskins, Lions and other teams who voiced their displeasure with calls that might have swayed games, the agreement doesn't change their records.

"Obviously when you go through something like this, it is painful for everybody," Goodell said. "Most importantly, it is painful for our fans. We are sorry to have to put our fans through that, but it is something that in the short term you sometimes have to do to make sure you get the right kind of deal for the long term and make sure you continue to grow the game."

The commissioner was watching at home Monday night.

"You never want to see a game end like that," he said.

But Goodell repeatedly reminded reporters that the regular officials have botched plenty of calls over the years.

The players don't necessarily disagree on that point.

"Everything is fine until there is a call that decides a game and then people ? players, fans, reporters ? are going to be complaining again," Lions receiver Nate Burleson said. "If you thought there was a microscope on the replacement refs, just wait until people start expecting the regular refs to be perfect."

The new agreement will indeed improve officiating in the future, Goodell asserted, reducing mistakes like those made Monday and making the strains of the last three weeks worthwhile.

Goodell acknowledged "you're always worried" about the perception of the league.

"Obviously, this has gotten a lot of attention," he said. "It hasn't been positive, and it's something that you have to fight through and get to the long term. ... We always are going to have to work harder to make sure we get people's trust and confidence in us."

The agreement hinged on working out pension and retirement benefits for the officials, who are part-time employees of the league. Goodell said the NFL's offer to increase the deal's length from five to eight years spurred some concessions from the officials.

The tentative pact calls for their salaries to increase from an average of $149,000 a year in 2011 to $173,000 in 2013, rising to $205,000 by 2019. The current defined benefit pension plan will remain in place for current officials through the 2016 season or until the official earns 20 years' service.

The defined benefit plan will then be frozen. Retirement benefits will be provided for new hires, and for all officials beginning in 2017, through a defined contribution arrangement.

Beginning with the 2013 season, the NFL will have the option to hire a number of officials on a full-time basis to work year round, including on the field. The NFL also will be able to retain additional officials for training and development and can assign those officials to work games. The number of additional officials will be determined by the league.

The tentative deal must be ratified by 51 percent of the union's 121 members. They plan to vote Friday and Saturday in Dallas.

Coaches and players began griping about the replacement officials in the preseason, but the tension seemed to boil over this past weekend. Scuffles after the whistle were frequent with players appearing to test the limits of the new officials, and coaches were fined for berating them.

"Guys are going to have to play with a lot of technique now," said Bengals cornerback Adam "Pacman" Jones. "You're not going to get away with the touching down the field."

The football world fretted that a mistake by the replacements would decide a game, and that fear was realized on the prominent stage of "Monday Night Football," with the ensuing uproar reaching all the way to the White House.

The Seahawks won 14-12 on a desperation pass into the end zone on the final play after Golden Tate got away with offensive pass interference. Packers safety M.D. Jennings had both hands on the ball for what would have been a victory-clinching interception, but the officials on the field ruled he and Tate had simultaneous possession.

That call was confirmed by instant replay, and the NFL supported that decision the next day ? while acknowledging Tate should have been penalized, which would've handed the win to Green Bay.

Unlike the replacement officials used for one game in 2001, who generally came from the highest levels of college football, this year's group was from lower college divisions or other leagues such as Arena Football.

No longer, at least, will critics say the officials on the field aren't accustomed to the speed of the game.

The longest contract with on-field officials in NFL history was reached with the assistance of two federal mediators. Referee Ed Hochuli told The Associated Press that he had yet to see full details of the deal, "but we're excited to be back."

"And ready," he said. "And I think that's the most important message ? that we're ready."

The NFL players' union, which had protested that using replacements jeopardized health and safety, heartily welcomed back the regular officials.

"Our workplace is safer with the return of our professional referees," its statement said.

Goodell disputed that players' health and safety were ever compromised. He said he never heard any objections from sponsors pressuring the league to resolve the impasse.

The commissioner even tried to put a positive spin on the fact that the furor over Monday's calls was so widespread it drew opinionated tweets from athletes in other sports, Hollywood stars and President Barack Obama.

"Not much surprises me about what happens in the NFL and the influence and attention that it gets," he said. "That is a reaction not only of our passionate fan base, but this moved quickly into mainstream media. That is a signal of the influence of the game in today's society."

___

AP Sports Writer Joseph White in Baltimore, AP Pro Football Writer Barry Wilner in New York and AP Sports Writers Larry Lage in Allen Park, Mich., Joe Kay in Cincinnati and Tim Reynolds in Miami contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-09-27-Refs%20Return/id-670bca0e63ae41eab006c882488d5f0b

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Response to ?Adopt a Kid, Not a Cause? ? Together for Adoption

by Dennae Pierre Published Sep 28, 2012

As a foster and adoptive mother, I am always happy to come across articles on adoption. Megan Hill?s thoughts on whether or not adoption should be considered a cause communicated to me her ?desire for her children to know that they are loved and wanted by her. I can say a hearty ?amen? as an adoptive mother who never wants my children to think of themselves as a cause. There is much to agree with Megan, so?throughout this article I desire not to pit her ideas about adoption against ours, but rather show how her viewpoint scratches the surface and why Together for Adoption feels it is necessary to go deeper.

The Desire to Have Children

We have children because we want them. That is an easy way to describe the prospect by which people begin to have a family, but is it enough to stop there? As thoughtful Christians, we must ask ourselves, why do we want children?

The first few pages of the Bible show us that procreation is very much a part of God?s mission. God entrusted Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth with image-bearers. These image-bearers were to spread the image of God all over the face of this earth. Why? Not to meet the instinctual need of Eve to nurture a child, although that was a result. It was not to secure Adam?s family line, although that happened as well. The primary reason was to spread God?s name throughout the earth.

From the beginning, there has always been something very missional about having children. We certainly don?t think God called our first parents to ?be fruitful and multiply? so they could ?rescue? a few children. This mission was broader, wider, and deeper.? Our children, biological or not, are part of the mission God entrusted to us.

What?s in a Name (?Adoption?)?

This is a piece of the backdrop that hangs behind the word ?Adoption? for us. When Together for Adoption speaks of ?Adoption? we are talking about something specific and distinct. We are not talking about adopting orphans. We do not believe that adoption is about embracing a diverse kingdom or fulfilling our duty to the needy. The word ?Adoption? in our name refers to the doctrine of adoption. We believe adoption is all about salvation. Adoption is a wonderful way to describe the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Dan Cruver, the founder of Together for Adoption, says it wonderfully, ?I don?t know if you have ever thought about it like this, but God is an adoptive Father. Jesus, our Elder Brother, is God the Father?s eternal, only-begotten, natural Son. We believers are His sons through adoption. This identity is fundamental to who we are. As adopted sons, we enjoy all the rights and privileges of the relationship that God the Father enjoys with his eternal Son. To be God?s sons through adoption means that we are co-heirs with Jesus. This is an amazing reality and an eternal privilege! We will forever be God?s sons through the miracle of adoption.?

All of this, I am sure we agree on, but let me explain why this matters when it comes to orphan care. Of course families who adopt must want and love children, but much more is needed if we are to, on a macro level, meet the needs of the hundreds of millions of orphaned children and on a micro level, unselfishly love and care for the children in our individual homes in a way that provides answers and healing to their painful losses.

On a macro level, our message is not just for people who are currently involved in orphan care. It is necessary to remind the church of the doctrine of their adoption precisely to awaken their minds to the idea of loving some of the most vulnerable children in our world. We believe our message is necessary because the global orphan crisis is massive and unacceptable. 130+ million orphans will never get their physical and emotional needs met without the Church taking extreme action. What should motivate the Church to social action? Every single time, it needs to be the gospel. If we remove the gospel as the main motivation for the church to take action, we are left with individuals being motivated out of works righteousness.

What the Crisis Needs

The worldwide orphan crisis cannot be solved by Americans adopting children. Together for Adoption has not suggested that every Christian needs to ?adopt? children or even that every orphaned or vulnerable child needs to be adopted. Roughly 130,000 children?are adopted in the United States each year. That is a miniscule drop in the bucket of the 130 plus million children orphaned or at risk of being orphaned. Families ?wanting children? is necessary, but not enough to solve the world orphan crisis. We need a movement of believers who will not rest until the suffering cry of orphans is answered. If we want that type of movement to happen within the worldwide Church and to happen in a way that brings great glory to God, then it must be motivated out of the good and wonderful work Christ did for us, not from our own desires.

We need Christians in impoverished nations to care for orphans. We host our conferences in places like Haiti and Nicaragua because the only way many orphans will ever get their needs met is through an indigenous foster care and adoption movement. What will call, empower, and sustain a family already living in poverty to welcome that nephew or niece to their table? Only the gospel message of Jesus Christ.

We need Christians to work to prevent orphans. Systemic changes in the foster care system, addressing poverty, HIV/AIDS, and malaria, and finding creative ways to come around a single mom to truly be her family are a few of many the ways orphan prevention can happen. This can only happen in a way that brings glory to God and truly meets the needs of these individuals through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We need churches full of people who understand what it means to have been adopted into the family of God so that they support, encourage, and walk with families who adopt children. Adoptive moms often say that they do not feel understood or loved by their church members? callous or heartless comments in relation to their adopted children. The theology of adoption rightly taught and applied will create a Christian culture where that does not happen.

Those are just a few of the countless examples of why, on a macro level, our message is necessary. However, on a micro level, there are innumerable examples as well. As Megan Hill wrote in her blog post the adoption-blogging world well documents that adoption is not an easy task. It is well known that there are difficulties and pain involved. It should never be romanticized. I became involved with Together for Adoption after speaking to multiple couples who had decided to disrupt their foster care placements. Since then, I have spoken with families who have dissolved their adoptions. Many of the women I speak with are depressed and crushed under the weight of their children?s extreme needs.

Dissolution of adoption should never happen. Christians need to be equipped to endure with joy the suffering involved with a difficult foster care placement until that child can be reunited with their biological family or placed with a forever family. The theology of adoption can equip Christians to have a persevering love with difficult children who resist our love.

There is a great need for children to be adopted that are older or who have special needs. Many of us may be called to welcome in a teenager??at the cost of our own desires for healthy babies. The gospel, in particular the doctrine of adoption, equips Christians to make self-denying choices like these. It equips us to make these choices not as a part of a personal crusade to save the world one child at a time, but as a part of God?s mission to display his love and glory to everyone, especially the most vulnerable.

We must have a love that is so unique, so counter-cultural that we are able to love children that the world does not want, the kind of children that the world would deem undesirable and unlovable. This unique love can only come after drinking from the well of God?s love for his Son, which, by the wonderful grace of adoption, has been poured out to us.

Infertility and Adoption

Lastly, I would like to briefly speak to the infertility issue. Infertility is a great loss and terrible suffering for so many.? Anyone who has walked the painful road of infertility will tell you that adoption cannot solve that problem. Being able to adopt a child into your family is a blessing in and of itself. I have heard countless women express to me how thankful they are for their adoptive children and how they hope their child never thinks that they adopted them because they were infertile. As Megan Hill rightly says, we adopt our children because we want them, because we loved them. But it goes beyond that. We adopt them because they needed us and not because we need them.

Parenting never goes well with biological or adoptive children when we seek our children to meet a need within us. Rather, we make the sacrifices we do, joyfully, to raise our children out of an overflow of what God has done for us. Of course, we can agree that our children bless us. Children are a sanctifying grace from the Lord. Our children are a wonderful gift, but that gift must always remain in the place God intended it to be. A gift that points us to the wonderful gift giver who meets all our wants and desires with himself, our Father God.

Adopting simply to meet our own desire for a child also minimizes the pain and loss that child experiences. The loss of their biological family is a loss that happened only as a result of our broken and sinful world. How thankful I am to be my children?s mother. And yet, I weep every time I pray for their biological mother who is unable to be their mama. I adopted my children to meet their deep, desperate need for a mother, which means they experienced a deep and painful loss. As their mother, I wish I could protect them from the pain of the loss of their biological family. I wish when we had our ?why?? discussions I could make it as simple as ?because I wanted children.? But that would not answer the hurting cry of their heart that knows this is not the way it was meant to be.

Instead, I give my children a larger story in which they can live in as I paint a picture for them of our God who deeply understands their loss. I show them our God who experienced even greater loss; the loss of his only begotten Son and that terrible and horrific loss was the greatest act of love this universe has ever known. It is the very loss that restored me into a relationship with God. The God who adopted me into his family through the sweet blood of Jesus is the same God that has filled me with a deep love for them.

?

Source: http://www.togetherforadoption.org/?p=15396

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Here Are The 23 Nintendo Wii U Launch Titles

nintendo-wii-u-gamepad (1)The Nintendo Wii U launches on November 18 with the support of 23 games. Nintendo stated previously that there would be 50 available before March 31, so, relatively so, the Wii U is launching with a strong amount of games including New Super Mario Bros U, Call of Duty: Black Ops II and, yes, Nintendo Land, the game Nintendo hopes will be the Wii Sports of its new console (it won't).

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/hBopbRt0MZ0/

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বৃহস্পতিবার, ২৭ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২

Electronic Arts Buys Online Gaming Development Studio ESN ...

http://techme101.com/2012/09/26/electronic-arts-buys-online-gaming-development-studio-esn/

Electronic Arts continues to beef up its cloud-based gaming offerings. Today it was announced that it is buying ESN, developers of the Planet web-based games framework, for an undisclosed sum. The two companies had already been working together, namely on Battlelog, an online social-web component for EA?s Battlefield 3.

Source: http://techme101.com/2012/09/26/electronic-arts-buys-online-gaming-development-studio-esn/

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U.S. FDA approves relaxed aflatoxin handling rules for Indiana

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a request from Indiana to let grain handlers in the No. 5 corn state blend corn contaminated with aflatoxin, a naturally occurring toxic substance, with other grain to make animal feed.

The Indiana State Department of Agriculture announced the approval on Thursday, saying the move would give farmers more flexibility in feeding livestock at a time of limited feed supplies.

Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska, the top three U.S. corn states, have already received similar authority from the FDA to blend off corn with aflatoxin.

Aflatoxin is the byproduct of a corn mold that tends to spread in drought years. Following the worst drought in the Corn Belt in half a century, the grain sector has been bracing for outbreaks of the substance, which can cause liver disease and is considered carcinogenic.

Human exposure to high amounts of aflatoxin is rare. But aflatoxin contamination prompted a series of U.S. pet food and livestock food recalls last December.

The FDA generally forbids grain handlers from mixing corn containing aflatoxin with "clean" grain, but it has relaxed this policy during years of widespread aflatoxin problems upon the request of state officials.

Following FDA approval, grain handlers who want to blend corn contaminated with aflatoxin must agree to comply with several provisions, including labeling the blended grain.

Under FDA guidelines, certain types of animal feed can contain an aflatoxin concentration of up to 300 parts per billion (ppb). Human foods must contain less than 20 ppb, while the threshold for milk is even lower at 0.5 ppb.

Last month, Iowa began requiring the state's dairy processors to test all milk received in the state for aflatoxin.

Indiana's State Board of Animal Health advised Indiana dairy plants to test incoming milk for aflatoxin starting September 1, but the testing is not mandatory.

(Reporting by Julie Ingwersen; editing by Jim Marshall)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-fda-approves-relaxed-aflatoxin-handling-rules-indiana-221508983.html

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Simulations uncover 'flashy' secrets of merging black holes

Simulations uncover 'flashy' secrets of merging black holes [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 27-Sep-2012
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Francis Reddy
Francis.j.reddy@nasa.gov
301-286-4453
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

According to Einstein, whenever massive objects interact, they produce gravitational waves -- distortions in the very fabric of space and time -- that ripple outward across the universe at the speed of light. While astronomers have found indirect evidence of these disturbances, the waves have so far eluded direct detection. Ground-based observatories designed to find them are on the verge of achieving greater sensitivities, and many scientists think that this discovery is just a few years away.

Catching gravitational waves from some of the strongest sources -- colliding black holes with millions of times the sun's mass -- will take a little longer. These waves undulate so slowly that they won't be detectable by ground-based facilities. Instead, scientists will need much larger space-based instruments, such as the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which was endorsed as a high-priority future project by the astronomical community.

A team that includes astrophysicists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is looking forward to that day by using computational models to explore the mergers of supersized black holes. Their most recent work investigates what kind of "flash" might be seen by telescopes when astronomers ultimately find gravitational signals from such an event.

Studying gravitational waves will give astrophysicists an unprecedented opportunity to witness the universe's most extreme phenomena, leading to new insights into the fundamental laws of physics, the death of stars, the birth of black holes and, perhaps, the earliest moments of the universe.

A black hole is an object so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational grip. Most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, contain a central black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass, and when two galaxies collide, their monster black holes settle into a close binary system.

"The black holes orbit each other and lose orbital energy by emitting strong gravitational waves, and this causes their orbits to shrink. The black holes spiral toward each other and eventually merge," said Goddard astrophysicist John Baker.

Close to these titanic, rapidly moving masses, space and time become repeatedly flexed and warped. Just as a disturbance forms ripples on the surface of a pond, drives seismic waves through Earth, or puts the jiggle in a bowl of Jell-O, the cyclic flexing of space-time near binary black holes produces waves of distortion that race across the universe.

While gravitational waves promise to tell astronomers many things about the bodies that created them, they cannot provide one crucial piece of information -- the precise position of the source. So to really understand a merger event, researchers need an accompanying electromagnetic signal -- a flash of light, ranging from radio waves to X-rays -- that will allow telescopes to pinpoint the merger's host galaxy.

Understanding the electromagnetic counterparts that may accompany a merger involves the daunting task of tracking the complex interactions between the black holes, which can be moving at more than half the speed of light in the last few orbits, and the disks of hot, magnetized gas that surround them. Since 2010, numerous studies using simplifying assumptions have found that mergers could produce a burst of light, but no one knew how commonly this occurred or whether the emission would be strong enough to be detectable from Earth.

To explore the problem in greater detail, a team led by Bruno Giacomazzo at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and including Baker developed computer simulations that for the first time show what happens in the magnetized gas (also called a plasma) in the last stages of a black hole merger. Their study was published in the June 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The simulations follow the complex electrical and magnetic interactions in the ionized gas -- known as magnetohydrodynamics -- within the extreme gravitational environment determined by the equations of Einstein's general relativity, a task requiring the use of advanced numerical codes and fast supercomputers.

Both of the simulations reported in the study were run on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. They follow the black holes over their last three orbits and subsequent merger using models both with and without a magnetic field in the gas disk.

Additional simulations were run on the Ranger and Discover supercomputers, respectively located at the University of Texas, Austin, and the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard, in order to investigate the effects of different initial conditions, fewer orbits and other variations.

"What's striking in the magnetic simulation is that the disk's initial magnetic field is rapidly intensified by about 100 times, and the merged black hole is surrounded by a hotter, denser, thinner accretion disk than in the unmagnetized case," Giacomazzo explained.

In the turbulent environment near the merging black holes, the magnetic field intensifies as it becomes twisted and compressed. The team suggests that running the simulation for additional orbits would result in even greater amplification.

The most interesting outcome of the magnetic simulation is the development of a funnel-like structure -- a cleared-out zone that extends up out of the accretion disk near the merged black hole. "This is exactly the type of structure needed to drive the particle jets we see from the centers of black-hole-powered active galaxies," Giacomazzo said.

The most important aspect of the study is the brightness of the merger's flash. The team finds that the magnetic model produces beamed emission that is some 10,000 times brighter than those seen in previous studies, which took the simplifying step of ignoring plasma effects in the merging disks.

"We need gravitational waves to confirm that a black hole merger has occurred, but if we can understand the electromagnetic signatures from mergers well enough, perhaps we can search for candidate events even before we have a space-based gravitational wave observatory," Baker said.

###


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Simulations uncover 'flashy' secrets of merging black holes [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 27-Sep-2012
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Francis Reddy
Francis.j.reddy@nasa.gov
301-286-4453
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

According to Einstein, whenever massive objects interact, they produce gravitational waves -- distortions in the very fabric of space and time -- that ripple outward across the universe at the speed of light. While astronomers have found indirect evidence of these disturbances, the waves have so far eluded direct detection. Ground-based observatories designed to find them are on the verge of achieving greater sensitivities, and many scientists think that this discovery is just a few years away.

Catching gravitational waves from some of the strongest sources -- colliding black holes with millions of times the sun's mass -- will take a little longer. These waves undulate so slowly that they won't be detectable by ground-based facilities. Instead, scientists will need much larger space-based instruments, such as the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which was endorsed as a high-priority future project by the astronomical community.

A team that includes astrophysicists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is looking forward to that day by using computational models to explore the mergers of supersized black holes. Their most recent work investigates what kind of "flash" might be seen by telescopes when astronomers ultimately find gravitational signals from such an event.

Studying gravitational waves will give astrophysicists an unprecedented opportunity to witness the universe's most extreme phenomena, leading to new insights into the fundamental laws of physics, the death of stars, the birth of black holes and, perhaps, the earliest moments of the universe.

A black hole is an object so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational grip. Most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, contain a central black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass, and when two galaxies collide, their monster black holes settle into a close binary system.

"The black holes orbit each other and lose orbital energy by emitting strong gravitational waves, and this causes their orbits to shrink. The black holes spiral toward each other and eventually merge," said Goddard astrophysicist John Baker.

Close to these titanic, rapidly moving masses, space and time become repeatedly flexed and warped. Just as a disturbance forms ripples on the surface of a pond, drives seismic waves through Earth, or puts the jiggle in a bowl of Jell-O, the cyclic flexing of space-time near binary black holes produces waves of distortion that race across the universe.

While gravitational waves promise to tell astronomers many things about the bodies that created them, they cannot provide one crucial piece of information -- the precise position of the source. So to really understand a merger event, researchers need an accompanying electromagnetic signal -- a flash of light, ranging from radio waves to X-rays -- that will allow telescopes to pinpoint the merger's host galaxy.

Understanding the electromagnetic counterparts that may accompany a merger involves the daunting task of tracking the complex interactions between the black holes, which can be moving at more than half the speed of light in the last few orbits, and the disks of hot, magnetized gas that surround them. Since 2010, numerous studies using simplifying assumptions have found that mergers could produce a burst of light, but no one knew how commonly this occurred or whether the emission would be strong enough to be detectable from Earth.

To explore the problem in greater detail, a team led by Bruno Giacomazzo at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and including Baker developed computer simulations that for the first time show what happens in the magnetized gas (also called a plasma) in the last stages of a black hole merger. Their study was published in the June 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The simulations follow the complex electrical and magnetic interactions in the ionized gas -- known as magnetohydrodynamics -- within the extreme gravitational environment determined by the equations of Einstein's general relativity, a task requiring the use of advanced numerical codes and fast supercomputers.

Both of the simulations reported in the study were run on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. They follow the black holes over their last three orbits and subsequent merger using models both with and without a magnetic field in the gas disk.

Additional simulations were run on the Ranger and Discover supercomputers, respectively located at the University of Texas, Austin, and the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard, in order to investigate the effects of different initial conditions, fewer orbits and other variations.

"What's striking in the magnetic simulation is that the disk's initial magnetic field is rapidly intensified by about 100 times, and the merged black hole is surrounded by a hotter, denser, thinner accretion disk than in the unmagnetized case," Giacomazzo explained.

In the turbulent environment near the merging black holes, the magnetic field intensifies as it becomes twisted and compressed. The team suggests that running the simulation for additional orbits would result in even greater amplification.

The most interesting outcome of the magnetic simulation is the development of a funnel-like structure -- a cleared-out zone that extends up out of the accretion disk near the merged black hole. "This is exactly the type of structure needed to drive the particle jets we see from the centers of black-hole-powered active galaxies," Giacomazzo said.

The most important aspect of the study is the brightness of the merger's flash. The team finds that the magnetic model produces beamed emission that is some 10,000 times brighter than those seen in previous studies, which took the simplifying step of ignoring plasma effects in the merging disks.

"We need gravitational waves to confirm that a black hole merger has occurred, but if we can understand the electromagnetic signatures from mergers well enough, perhaps we can search for candidate events even before we have a space-based gravitational wave observatory," Baker said.

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Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-09/nsfc-su092712.php

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