Ron Blackwell of the AFL-CIO says housing prices falling faster than during Great Depression.
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Federal government nationalizes troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac becoming one of the biggest players in the US Mortgage Market. Many private analysts worry that it may not be enough to stabilise the slumping housing market, given the glut of vacant homes for sale
A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.
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It’s not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.
Szostak’s protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn’t anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.
While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn’t wholly autonomous, so it’s not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.
“We’ve made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide,” Szostak said in a phone interview. “What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple [genetic] sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful.”
By doing “something useful” for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know.
“Once we can get a replicating environment, we’re hoping to experimentally determine what can evolve under those conditions,” said Sheref Mansy, a former member of Szostak’s lab and now a chemist at Denver University.
Protocellular work is even more radical than the other field trying to create artifical life: synthetic biology. Even J. Craig Venter’s work to build an artificial bacterium with the smallest number of genes necessary to live takes current life forms as a template. Protocell researchers are trying to design a completely novel form of life that humans have never seen and that may never have existed.
Over the summer, Szostak’s team published major papers in the journals Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that go a long way towards showing that this isn’t just an idea and that his lab will be the first to create artificial life — and that it will happen soon.
“His hope is that he’ll have a complete self-replicating system in his lab in the near future,” said Jeffrey Bada, a University of California San Diego chemist who helped organize the Origin of Life conference.
Modern life is far more complex than the simple systems that Szostak and others are working on, so the protocells don’t look anything like the cells that we have in our bodies or Venter’s genetically-modified E. coli.
“What we’re looking at is the origin of life in one aspect, and the other aspect is life as a small nanomachine on a single cell level,” said Hans Ziock, a protocellular researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Life’s function, as a simple nanomachine, is just to use energy to marshal chemicals into making more copies of itself.
“You need to organize yourself in a specific way to be useful,” Ziock said. “You take energy from one place and move it to a place where it usually doesn’t want to go, so you can actually organize things.”
Modern cells accomplish this feat with an immense amount of molecular machinery. In fact, some of the chemical syntheses that simple plants and algae can accomplish far outstrip human technologies. Even the most primitive forms of life possess protein machines that allow them to import nutrients across their complex cell membranes and build the molecules that then carry out the cell’s bidding.
Those specialized components would have taken many, many generations to evolve, said Ziock, so the first life would have been much simpler.
What form that simplicity would have taken has been a subject of intense debate among origin of life scientists stretching back to the pioneering work of David Deamer, a professor emeritus at UC-Santa Cruz.
What most researchers agree on is that the very first functioning life would have had three basic components: a container, a way to harvest energy and an information carrier like RNA or another nucleic acid.
Szostak’s earlier work has shown that the container probably took the form of a layer of fatty acids that could self-assemble based on their reaction to water (see video). One tip of the acid is hydrophilic, meaning it’s attracted to water, while the other tip is hydrophobic. When researchers put a lot of these molecules together, they circle the wagons against the water and create a closed loop.
These membranes, with the right mix of chemicals, can allow nucleic acids in under some conditions and keep them trapped inside in others.
That opens the possibility that one day, in the distant past, an RNA-like molecule wandered into a fatty acid and started replicating. That random event, through billions of evolutionary iterations, researchers believe, created life as we know it.
In a paper released this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mansy and Szostak showed that the special membranes, fat bubbles essentially, were stable under a variety of temperatures and could have manipulated molecules like DNA through simple thermal cycling, just like scientists do in PCR machines.
The entire line of research, though, begs the question: where would DNA, or any other material carrying instructions for replication, have come from?
Many researchers have tried to tackle this problem of how RNA- or DNA-like molecules could have developed from the amino acids present on the early Earth. John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Manchester, published a paper last year demonstrating one plausible way that RNA could have spontaneously been created in the prebiotic world.
Once such molecules existed, Szostak’s lab’s demonstrated in a Nature paper earlier this summer that nucleic acids could replicate inside a protocell (pdf).
But while many scientists agree the protocell work is impressive, not every scientist is convinced that it contributes to a reasonable explanation for the origin of life.
“Their work is wonderful inasmuch as what they are doing can be,” said Mike Russell, a geochemist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “It’s just that I’m uneasy about the significance of it to the origin of life.”
Russell argues that the very first life-like molecules on Earth would have been based on inorganic compounds. Instead of a fatty acid membrane, Russell argues that iron sulfide could have provided the necessary container for early cells.
But UCSD’s Bada pointed out that it as unlikely we will ever know how life actually began.
“[Szostak’s] point, and how we all view it, is that it’s a nice model, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it happened that way,” he said.
Szostak suggested that even if life could theoretically or did begin some other way, his lab’s hypothesis was (at least) experimentally plausible.
“We’re now pretty much convinced that growth and division could occur under perfectly reasonable prebiotic conditions in a way that is not some artificial laboratory construction,” he said.
And actually, the most intriguing possibility of all may be that the protocells in Szostak’s lab do not closely model earthly life’s origins. If that’s true, human beings, ourselves the product of evolution from the most primitive organisms, would have created an alternative path to imbuing matter with the properties of life.
“What we have in biology is just one of many, many possibilities,” Szostack said. “One of the things that always comes up when people talk about life and universal qualities is water. But is water really necessary? What if we could design a system that works in something else?”
[tags]biologists new lifeform, new life scientist,molecular biologist Harvard Medical School[/tags]
Source: Wired.com
Today in San Francisco, reporters and analysts gathered at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event eager to hear Steve Jobs talk about the improvements to his line of iPods.
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For starters today Apple is releasing a new version of iTunes. The new iTunes will have a few new features including grid browsing and the Genius function. Genius is an all new way to automatically create play lists from your library based on songs that go well together. This works with music and movies. iTunes will upload a list of your music and movies to the internet to be added to a database. This database will gather and compare information from all Genius users to develop a smart play list. The more people using Genius the smarter it will be. Kind of takes the fun out of the mix tape, but still a really cool feature. The new iTunes can be downloaded for free.
The classic iPod is being upgraded to a thinner 120GB ($249) version and the 160GB is being discontinued.
Next was the big announcement. New second gen nano iPods. The new nano’s will sport a whole new look. The nano is going back to a more vertical design like the long forgotten iPod mini. Much like the macbook air they have a new curved aluminum design with a curved glass cover for the screen. This new design will make it the thinnest iPod ever. Apple has taken the accelerometer from the touch and iPhone and it does some great things. The nano now has cover flow so you can browse your music by album cover. One of the coolest things about cover flow on the nano is you to simply shake your nano to scroll through. The integration of the accelerometer also means a larger display for watching video. Some of the other nano improvements include use of Genius play list building without iTunes, built in mic, 24 hour battery life (music playback), environmentally friendly (toxics free), and they come in a wide variety of colors. My favorite is the silver with black click wheel. The new nanos will come in 8GB ($149) and 16GB ($199) models.
The rest of the updates were nowhere near as exciting. Steve announced a new set of ear buds that have both a woofer and tweeter, on cable controls, and a built in mic. You can get a pair of these for the steep price of $79.
The iPod touch also saw a few cool updates. The new touch will be thinner even though they are cramming in more features. Taking up space on the inside of the new touch is a built-in speaker, Nike + and volume controls on the side. Steve also showed a tv spot which basically promotes the touch as a hand held gaming device. With about 700 games on the App Store, Steve boasts that the touch is the “best portable device for playing games.” Look out Nintendo… Some of the highlighted games are Need for Speed, Real Soccer 2009, and they even managed to get a version of the new hit game Spore for the iPod touch. The touch screen D-pad and A/B buttons that some of the games has as well as motion senor controlling makes the touch a pretty diverse gaming device. The new iPod touch will come in 8GB ($229), 16GB ($299), and a 32GB ($399) models.
The last updates of the event came for the iPhone. No new hardware, but there is a 2.1 firmware update that fixes a lot of bugs. “Fewer dropped calls, big battery life improvements. No crashes with Apps. Backing up is faster.” This update is free for all iPhone owners.
With the whole arsenal of iPods improved, its time to start your Christmas shopping. Oh and F.Y.I. Jobs also mentioned that 90% of US cars offer iPod integration. So if your in the market for a new mp3 player and a new car, you can truly combine them.
Source:Engadget.com
[tags]new ipod redesign, new ipod touch, ipod nano, ipod nano redesign[/tags]
We knew the Apple iPhone would allow for some really great automotive applications. Our pal Marty Padgett at The Car Connection even rounded up the best of the apps a few weeks ago, which we republished here . But what we were hoping for was something that completely leveraged the iPhone’s accelerometers to effectively create a VBox , just cheaper and smaller.
Once again I am forced to express my jealous admiration for the new breed of magic, eco-friendly car. Oops, did I say magic? I meant magnet: this car overcomes the force of gravity through the strategic use of an electric engine…and magnets. Winner of the unseen technology award at the Interior
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motives design awards 2007, the MAG magnetic vehicle concept (designed by Matúš Procháczka) finds an unusual solution to the problem of, expending fuel to get somewhere. Rather than finding a different fuel source, or building a smaller car, Procháczka ingeniously reduces the weight of the car by using an electric engine with magnets the same polarity as the roads. The resulting upward force lightens the vehicle’s weight by 50%.
References to information at Wikipedia have shown up in various inappropriate places, from homework assignments to college term papers. But there’s one place that it seems everyone can agree that it doesn’t belong: the US court system. The US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, ruling in an immigration case, has agreed with the Board of Immigration Appeals in finding that a reliance on information in Wikipedia is insufficient grounds for a ruling. Nevertheless, it sent the case back to the Board, requesting that it clarify its decision.
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The decision, filed late last week, stems from a case where an individual entered the country using a forged passport, and then applied for asylum based on the threat of torture if she were returned to her place of origin. Her application for asylum, and the processing of her case by the immigration courts, hinge on a personal identification document called a laissez-passer issued by the Ethiopian government.
The Department of Homeland Security, wishing to deny the asylum claim, argued that the laissez-passer was insufficient as a form of identification. Excerpts from Wikipedia apparently provided at least some of the information used by the DHS position to support its position. An immigration judge ruled in favor of the DHS, finding that the individual, Lamilem Badasa, had not established her identity, and could not be granted asylum.
[tags]wikipedia judge, judge wikipedia decision, wikipedia court, judge uses wikipedia[/tags]
Are Internet Explorer and Firefox ready to do battle with Chrome?
Google announced Monday that it has been hard at work on an open-source browser known as Chrome, a beta version of which will be released in 100 countries on Tuesday.
New features will included “isolated” tabs designed to prevent browser crashes and a more powerful JavaScript engine.
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“Why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web,” Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, Google engineering director, wrote in a blog post.
Google was apparently looking to keep news of Chrome under wraps until after the holiday weekend. A 38-page, online comic book that provided details about Chrome hit the blogosphere Monday morning, but Pichai and Upson said in their blog post that Google had “hit ‘send’ a bit early” on the web comic.
The comic depicts various Google engineers describing Chrome’s features, including the isolated tab idea.
“By keeping each tab in an isolated ‘sandbox’, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites,” Pichai and Upson wrote.
Having a number of tabs open in a single browser eats up memory. If a browser is running slow, a user’s natural inclination is to close a few tabs? In some cases, however, little bits of the closed tabs remain, which eats up space and requires the operating system to grow the browser’s address space, according to Google. With Chrome, there will be a different tab for each process, including plug-ins.
“When a tab is closed in Google Chrome, you’re ending the whole process,” according to the comic. “You can look under the hood with Google Chrome’s task mananger to see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your CPU” so you can place “blame where blame belongs.”
Google also promised “improved speed and responsiveness across the board.”
“We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers,” Pichai and Upson wrote.
Like OpenSocial and Android, Chrome will be an open source initiative.
“We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path,” they wrote. “We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.”
The team selected Webkit because it uses memory efficiently, was easily adapated to embedded devices, and it was easy for new browser developers to learn to make the code base work, according to the web comic. “Webkit keeps it simple.”
Google recently extended its financial deal with Mozilla until 2011, according to a blog post from Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
Tuesday’s beta release will be available for Windows users. “We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust,” Pichai and Upson wrote.
“This is just the beginning — Google Chrome is far from done,” they wrote. “Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.”
Last week, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, which includes improved security and new browsing aids.
Earlier this summer, Mozilla released Firefox 3, which garnered 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
[tags]google web browser, google chrome browser, google web information, google releases browser[/tags]
The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.
Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin’s five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
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Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.
“We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us,” the Palins’ statement said.
“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support,” the Palins said.
The Palins asked the news media to respect the young couple’s privacy.
“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media, respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates,” the statement concluded.
MCCAIN KNEW
Senior McCain campaign officials said McCain knew of the daughter’s pregnancy when he selected Palin last week as his vice presidential running mate, deciding that it did not disqualify the 44-year-old governor in any way.
In the short period since she was announced last Friday, Palin has helped to energize the Republican Party’s conservative base, giving the McCain camp fresh energy going into the campaign for the November 4 election against Democrat Barack Obama.
McCain officials said the news of the daughter’s pregnancy was being released to rebut what one aide called “mud-slinging and lies” circulating on liberal blog sites.
According to these rumors, Sarah Palin had faked a pregnancy and pretended to have given birth in May to her fifth child, a son named Trig who has Down syndrome. The rumor was that Trig was actually Bristol Palin’s child and that Sarah Palin was the grandmother.
A senior McCain campaign official said the McCain camp was appalled that these rumors had not only been spread around liberal blog sites and partisan Democrats, but also were the subject of heightened interest from mainstream news media.
“The despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs, some even with Barack Obama’s name in them, is a real anchor around the Democratic ticket, pulling them down in the mud in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their ‘campaign of change,'” a senior aide said.
[tags]sarah palins daughter pregnant, palin child pregnant, sarah palin daughter now pregnant[/tags]
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, while Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned residents that the state “could see flooding worse than Hurricane Katrina,” as Gustav approached the Gulf Coast.
The story, marked “Hold for release – Do not use”, was sent in error to the news service’s thousands of corporate clients.
The stock obituary was published “momentarily” after a routine update by a reporter, and was “immediately deleted”, Bloomberg said.