Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2013/07/26/the-wolverine-review/
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Friday, July 26, 2013
Five Reason To See 'The Wolverine'
This might come as a surprise to you, but "The Wolverine" is actually pretty good. If you've been paying attention the "X-Men" franchise for the last decade, here's how things looked before the new standalone film: 1) "X-Men: Last Stand" capped off the original trilogy by essentially spitting in the face of the comic book [...]
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Microsoft confirms hackers infiltrated computers in attack mirroring recent Facebook break-in
REDMOND, Wash. ? Microsoft has joined the list of prominent technology companies confirming they have been hit by a recent computer hacking attack.
In a blog posting Friday, Microsoft said it had found no evidence that any customer data had been heisted.
Microsoft Corp. gave few other details about the break-in, except to say that was it similar to a hacking attack that online social networking leader Facebook Inc. disclosed last week. Facebook had said its investigation had discovered other companies had been hacked, but didn?t identify the other victims.
Like Facebook, Microsoft says it is still investigating how malicious software was planted on what it said were a small number of its computers.
Online messaging service Twitter also recently disclosed that hackers may have stolen information about 250,000 of its users.
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Pluto moon vote helps the case for Vulcan
M. Showalter / NASA / ESA
An image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, surrounded by four smaller moons. P4 and P5 will be getting new names. One of them might be called Vulcan.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
The organizer of a contest to name Pluto's two tiniest moons can't guarantee that either one of them will be called "Vulcan" ??but if the name nominated by the original captain on the "Star Trek" TV show retains its lead in the voting, planetary scientist Mark Showalter promises to argue the best case he can.
"My starting position is that we should work with the names that received the most votes," Showalter told NBC News on Friday.
The "Pluto Rocks" voting is due to conclude at noon ET Monday, to be followed by a 1 p.m. Google+ Hangout sponsored by the SETI Institute, the place where Showalter works. Right now, Vulcan holds a commanding lead with about 140,000 of the 370,000 votes cast. But even if Vulcan holds onto that edge, don't expect Showalter to declare immediately that Vulcan is the choice.
"There will not be an announcement on Monday," he said.
For one thing, it's not totally up to Showalter to make the nomination. He's just one of the leading scientists on the discovery teams for P4 and P5, the two moons that were found in 2011 and 2012. All the members from each of the teams will have to agree on the names to be submitted to the International Astronomical Union for approval. Even then, the IAU could voice concerns about the names they submit, leading to alternate suggestions. Showalter said he's actually seen that happen in the case of the Uranian moon that ended up being called Cupid.
Kirk ... takes ... command
Vulcan wasn't on Showalter's initial list of prospects, but he added it to the ballot at the urging of William Shatner, the actor who played Captain James T. Kirk on the original "Star Trek" series in the late 1960s. Shatner favored the name because it was the fictional home planet of Kirk's pointy-eared science officer, Mr. Spock. "Let's hope the IAU thinks Vulcan is a good name," Shatner wrote in a tweet to his 1.35 million Twitter followers.
Showalter said Shatner's endorsement definitely skewed the results. "Early on, it's pretty clear there were some Trek fans who seem to have resorted to augmented voting technologies," Showalter said. But he's convinced that the groundswell of support for Vulcan is genuine, and he said he's "come up with a pretty good case" for using the name.
"I want people to feel that their vote counted," Showalter said.
The IAU's guidelines for Pluto's moons stipulate that they should be named after Greek or Roman gods who have some connection to the mythological underworld. Those guidelines worked for Pluto's three other moons, Charon (ferryman of the dead), Nix (goddess of darkness) and Hydra (a many-headed monster).
Vulcan has a family relationship to the underworld, in that he was Pluto's nephew. And in his capacity as the god of fire, Vulcan tended to hang out in the depths beneath Mount Etna and other volcanoes, rather than on the heights of Mount Olympus. That may not be Hell, exactly, but it's certainly the underworld.
Showalter admitted that it might be tricky to have the god of fire associated with one of the coldest places in the solar system. "It may well be there's a consensus that it's a great name, but not a great name for a moon of Pluto," he said. Also, the name Vulcan has been associated with a hypothetical planet that was thought to circle the sun within Mercury's orbit. The 19th-century French astronomer who discovered Neptune, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, spent fruitless years looking for it. Pluto's moon is in an entirely different place, but Showalter sees that as a potential plus.
"Maybe we'd be doing Le Verrier a favor by saying that when he was looking for the ninth planet inside Mercury's orbit, he was looking in the wrong direction," Showalter joked.
Some have said the name Vulcan should be reserved for a planet beyond our own solar system. In response, Showalter points out that there's no IAU procedure for giving names to extrasolar planets (beyond generic designations such as?Kepler-37b or Gliese 163c). That situation may change if planet-naming ventures such as Uwingu take hold. But in the meantime, Showalter feels that Vulcan should at least be given a fair shot at solar system fame.
Another moon to name
So it's virtually a sure thing that Showalter will try making the case for Vulcan. But what about the other Plutonian moon?
Right now, Cerberus is hanging onto the No. 2 spot in the voting, and unless Styx or some other name comes from behind in the next few days, Showalter will argue the case for Cerberus as well. That name fits perfectly with the mythological underworld theme, because Cerberus was the three-headed hound that guarded the gates of the underworld.
One drawback is that there's already an asteroid named Cerberus, and the IAU doesn't want newly named celestial bodies to be confused with previously named objects. Showalter said there are at least two ways around that issue: One is to argue that the asteroid and the moon wouldn't be confused. The precedent for this is Io, a mythological name that refers to a Jovian moon as well as an asteroid. Another way out is to change the spelling slightly ? say, to the Greek name Kerberos. One precedent for this is the Plutonian moon Nix, which uses an alternate spelling to avoid confusion with the asteroid Nyx. (By the way, there's already an asteroid named Vulcano, but that name is considered different enough from Vulcan,)
Opening the moon-naming process up to a vote has been a lot of work, even if it's a non-binding vote, and Showalter said he doubts that he'll do it again. But he's gratified by the response: The contest?attracted hundreds of thousands of votes from scores of countries around the world, generated more than 30,000 write-in suggestions for names, and gave Pluto fans and "Star Trek" fans lots to think about.
What would Spock think about all this? Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played the alien on the original "Star Trek" show, said via Twitter that "'Vulcan' is the logical choice."?I can imagine Spock saying that, but I can also imagine him uttering just one word. ...
Spock said, "Fascinating," a lot! Here are the times he said it. Enjoy!
More about Pluto and its moons:
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?and adding the?Cosmic Log page?to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Low-pitched song indicates fairy-wren size
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Public release date: 20-Feb-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Rebecca Scott
rebeccas@unimelb.edu.au
61-383-440-181
University of Melbourne
A male fairy-wren's low pitch song indicates body size, a new international study has shown.
The study led by University of Melbourne researcher Dr Michelle Hall, is the first to show that the larger the male fairy wren, the lower the pitch of his song.
"This is the first time we have been able to show that song pitch indicates body size in song birds," said Dr Hall from the University's Department of Zoology.
The study, which began when Dr Hall was at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, has been published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Reliable communication about body size between animals is particularly important when communicating with mates or rivals. For example the bigger the rival is, the more likely it is to win in a fight so a song pitch indicating a large size may deter rivals.
"Surprisingly, there is very little evidence that the pitch of calls indicates body size differences within species, except in frogs," she said.
"In birds in particular, there has been no evidence that the pitch of songs indicated the size of the singer until now."
The study involved measuring the leg length (a good indicator of overall body size) of 45 adult male purple-crowned fairy-wrens. It found there was a correlation between the lowest song pitches and male size.
"We found the bigger males sang certain song types at a lower pitch than smaller males," she said.
Purple-crowned fairy-wrens are creek-dwelling birds from northern Australia and, like their close relatives the blue wrens, males sing trill songs after the calls of certain predators, a context that seems to attract the attention of females.
Males have a repertoire of trill song variants, and it is the low-pitched variants that indicate the size of the singer.
Dr Hall showed that it may be the complexity of birdsong that has obscured the relationship between body size and song frequency in the past.
"Birds can have large repertoires of song types spanning a wide frequency range, and some birds even shift the pitch of their songs down in aggressive contexts," she said.
"Focusing on the lowest pitches that males were able to sing was the key to finding the correlation with body size."
###
The study was conducted at Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary in collaboration with Dr Anne Peters (Monash University) and Dr Sjouke Kingma (University of East Anglia, UK), and funded by the German Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 20-Feb-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Rebecca Scott
rebeccas@unimelb.edu.au
61-383-440-181
University of Melbourne
A male fairy-wren's low pitch song indicates body size, a new international study has shown.
The study led by University of Melbourne researcher Dr Michelle Hall, is the first to show that the larger the male fairy wren, the lower the pitch of his song.
"This is the first time we have been able to show that song pitch indicates body size in song birds," said Dr Hall from the University's Department of Zoology.
The study, which began when Dr Hall was at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, has been published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Reliable communication about body size between animals is particularly important when communicating with mates or rivals. For example the bigger the rival is, the more likely it is to win in a fight so a song pitch indicating a large size may deter rivals.
"Surprisingly, there is very little evidence that the pitch of calls indicates body size differences within species, except in frogs," she said.
"In birds in particular, there has been no evidence that the pitch of songs indicated the size of the singer until now."
The study involved measuring the leg length (a good indicator of overall body size) of 45 adult male purple-crowned fairy-wrens. It found there was a correlation between the lowest song pitches and male size.
"We found the bigger males sang certain song types at a lower pitch than smaller males," she said.
Purple-crowned fairy-wrens are creek-dwelling birds from northern Australia and, like their close relatives the blue wrens, males sing trill songs after the calls of certain predators, a context that seems to attract the attention of females.
Males have a repertoire of trill song variants, and it is the low-pitched variants that indicate the size of the singer.
Dr Hall showed that it may be the complexity of birdsong that has obscured the relationship between body size and song frequency in the past.
"Birds can have large repertoires of song types spanning a wide frequency range, and some birds even shift the pitch of their songs down in aggressive contexts," she said.
"Focusing on the lowest pitches that males were able to sing was the key to finding the correlation with body size."
###
The study was conducted at Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary in collaboration with Dr Anne Peters (Monash University) and Dr Sjouke Kingma (University of East Anglia, UK), and funded by the German Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-02/uom-lps022013.php
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Thursday, February 14, 2013
Texas middle school teacher lassos student in class
www.khou.com
A school district spokesman blamed the boy's injuries on the teacher's bad judgment rather than any malice.?
Yippee-ki-yay, school instructor.
A history teacher in North Texas reportedly lassoed a seventh-grade student and bruised his neck in class Monday, alarming parents, disappointing school officials and confusing everyone else.
The unidentified man - who gives new meaning to rope-a-dope - brought the long lasso to Schrade Middle School in Rowlett for an unorthodox lesson. He was attempting to share his knowledge of lasso techniques for cattle drives with the children.
RELATED: DISABLED STUDENTS, LEFT OUT IN THE COLD
"He was visiting with the students, telling the students about how cowboys would corral maverick steers back into the herd," Chris Moore, a school district spokesman, told Dallas/Fort Worth-based station WFAA.
The cowboy wannabe asked several students to run around as if they were rowdy animals - the sort of fun game that comes naturally to children a few years younger. But when he tried to rope them in, the fun and games took a serious turn.
"This is not something that we feel was malicious -- it was not intent," said Moore. "Extremely unfortunate, and extremely poor judgment."
RELATED: SEE IT, COLORADO RANGER RESCUES DEER STUCK ON FROZEN LAKE WITH LASSO
A 13-year-old student emerged from the half-baked history lesson with neck marks, which only worsened the next day. His parents were shocked that a teacher would lasso a child in the classroom.
The teacher was trying to bring history to life for students; instead, he brought disciplinary action to life against himself.
The Garland Independent School District suspended the teacher and started investigating the incident. School officials said the teacher feels remorse and promised to never lasso a child again.
The Rowlett Police Department is considering criminal charges for injury to a child.
mwalsh@nydailynews.com
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nydnrss/news/~3/OWuTLkE1PNM/story01.htm
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Happily married couples consider themselves healthier, expert says
Feb. 13, 2013 ? Research shows that married people have better mental and physical health than their unmarried peers and are less likely to develop chronic conditions than their widowed or divorced counterparts. A University of Missouri expert says that people who have happy marriages are more likely to rate their health as better as they age; aging adults whose physical health is declining could especially benefit from improving their marriages.
Christine Proulx, an assistant professor in the MU Department of Human Development and Family Studies, examined the long-term relationship between self-rated health and marital quality. She found that, in all stages of marriage, positive or negative relationships affect the individuals' health. Spouses should be aware that how they treat each other and how happy they are in their marriages affect both partners' health, and they should think more about their personal relationships when thinking holistically about their health, she said.
"We often think about the aging process as something we can treat medically with a pill or more exercise, but working on your marriage also might benefit your health as you age," Proulx said. "Engaging with your spouse is not going to cure cancer, but building stronger relationships can improve both people's spirits and well-being and lower their stress."
Proulx suggests that health professionals consider patients' personal relationships when designing health promotion programs or treatment plans.
"Physicians should recognize that the strength of patients' marriages might affect their health," she said. "I suspect we'd have higher rates of adherence to treatment plans for chronic illnesses if medical professionals placed more of an emphasis on incorporating families and spouses in patients' care. If spouses understand their partners' disease and how to treat it at home, and the couple has a strong marriage, both people's health could improve."
Proulx analyzed data from 707 continuously married adults who participated in the Marital Instability Over the Life Course panel study, a 20-year, nationwide research project started in 1980 with funding from the Social Security Administration's Office of Research and Statistics and the National Institute on Aging.
Most study participants were Caucasian, had more than high school educations, and earned more than $55,000 in annual family income in 2000. Because of these characteristics, Proulx says the participants probably had some protection against marital and health challenges more commonly faced by people of different ethnicities or with less education or income.
The study, "The Longitudinal Associations between Marital Happiness, Problems, and Self-Rated Health," will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. Proulx co-authored the study with Linley Snyder-Rivas, an alumna of the Department of Human Development and Family Studies in the MU College of Human Environmental Sciences.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia.
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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/Rvz4dYNbxwM/130213152410.htm
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'A drop of ink on the luminous sky:' Wide Field Imager snaps cosmic gecko
Feb. 11, 2013 ? This part of the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer) is one of the richest star fields in the whole sky -- the Large Sagittarius Star Cloud. The huge number of stars that light up this region dramatically emphasise the blackness of dark clouds like Barnard 86, which appears at the centre of this new picture from the Wide Field Imager, an instrument mounted on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.
This object, a small, isolated dark nebula known as a Bok globule [1], was described as "a drop of ink on the luminous sky" by its discoverer Edward Emerson Barnard [2], an American astronomer who discovered and photographed numerous comets, dark nebulae, one of Jupiter's moons, and made many other contributions. An exceptional visual observer and keen astrophotographer, Barnard was the first to use long-exposure photography to explore dark nebulae.
Through a small telescope Barnard 86 looks like a dearth of stars, or a window onto a patch of distant, clearer sky. However, this object is actually in the foreground of the star field -- a cold, dark, dense cloud made up of small dust grains that block starlight and make the region appear opaque. It is thought to have formed from the remnants of a molecular cloud that collapsed to form the nearby star cluster NGC 6520, seen just to the left of Barnard 86 in this image.
NGC 6520 is an open star cluster that contains many hot stars that glow bright blue-white, a telltale sign of their youth. Open clusters usually contain a few thousand stars that all formed at the same time, giving them all the same age. Such clusters usually only live comparatively short lives, on the order of several hundred million years, before drifting apart.
The incredible number of stars in this area of the sky muddles observations of this cluster, making it difficult to learn much about it. NGC 6520's age is thought to be around 150 million years, and both this star cluster and its dusty neighbour are thought to lie at a distance of around 6000 light-years from our Sun.
The stars that appear to be within Barnard 86 in the image above are in fact in front of it, lying between us and the dark cloud. Although it is not certain whether this is still happening within Barnard 86, many dark nebulae are known to have new stars forming in their centres -- as seen in the famous Horsehead Nebula, the striking object Lupus 3 (eso1303) and to a lesser extent in another of Barnard's discoveries, the Pipe Nebula. However, the light from the youngest stars is blocked by the surrounding dusty regions, and they can only be seen in infrared or longer-wavelength light.
[1] Bok globules were first observed in the 1940s by astronomer Bart Bok. They are very cold, dark clouds of gas and dust that often have new stars forming at their centres. These globules are rich in dust that scatters and absorbs background light, so they are almost opaque to visible light.
[2] This quotation comes from E. E. Barnard, Dark Regions in the Sky Suggesting an Obscuration of Light, Yerkes Observatory, Nov 15 1913.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/astronomy/~3/FBUs8Ko5NX0/130213082424.htm
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