30-03-2013, 01:46 PM
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For most automakers, baby boomers are the proverbial 800-pound gorilla that still drives the industry, the biggest buying group in terms of raw vehicle sales and, in particular, the generation spending the most for each of the cars they buy.
But manufacturers are preparing for the arrival of a new group that could soon not only outnumber the boomers but also demand some big changes in the type and size of vehicles the industry produces. Generation Y, also known as the millennials, offer both tantalizing opportunities and major challenges, according to executives at this year?s New York International Auto Show.
Slideshow: The 2013 New York Auto Show
Millennials are becoming ?the new face? of American auto buyers, asserted Jim Farley, Ford Motor Co.?s global sales and marketing chief, during his keynote speech at the auto show. ?And we?ll be surprised,? he added, ?by what they choose.?
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, there are more than 80 million American consumers approaching age 30, which means that each year millions more are moving into the new vehicle buying demographic. Indeed, according to the recent ?Gen Y in the Driver?s Seat? study by consulting firm Deloitte, they already represent about 40 percent of the nation?s potential car buying population ? though they are still well outnumbered by boomers when it comes to the number of new vehicles sold each year.
Chevy Rolls Out New 2014 Camaro
In fact, that ?potential? doesn?t necessarily translate into the same mindset toward buying and owning cars that was seen when boomers came of age. Nearly a third of American 19-year-olds haven?t bothered to get a driver?s license, according to a new study, continuing a downward trend that finds fewer and fewer millennials plugging into the American car culture.
?Virtual contact reduces the need for actual contact,? suggested Michael Sivak, co-author of the study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. ?We found that the percentage of young drivers was inversely related to the availability of the Internet.?
In 1983, well before the advent of texting, e-mail and online gaming, 83 percent of American 19-year-olds were licensed. By 2010, found UMTRI, that was down to around 70 percent.
Another study, jointly carried out by General Motors and Viacom?s MTV Scratch unit, found just 32 percent of 3,000 American millennials surveyed saying they were interested in cars ? though it also showed 69 percnet viewing the purchase of a car a ?milestone? in becoming an adult.
Which brand millennials turn to is also up in the air. Auto data-tracking service Edmunds.com finds that Japanese makers have steadily lost ground with millennials at the expense of Detroit and Korean makers ? a sharp reversal of the trend when baby boomers were first entering the new car market.
?Don?t think we have the millennials figured out," Ford senior marketing executive Amy Marentec recently said, but she added that domestic automakers are beginning to show signs of ?cracking the code.?
The market data suggest that younger buyers are generally more interested in green technology than their parents? generation, something that could drive demand for hybrids, plug-ins and battery vehicles. On the other hand, the higher cost for such technologies is so far restricting sales.
Millennials are downsizing, several executives said. That?s one of the reasons why Audi has such big hopes for the next-generation A3 sedan it showed reporters during a sneak peek in New York. It will become ?the third leg? for the brand, said Audi of America chief Scott Keogh, and should drive other makers to rethink the future of their bigger products.
Booming Sales Put Volkswagen of America Back in the Black
Keogh also emphasized that the new generation of buyers ?isn?t willing to compromise,? even though they?re on a tighter budget than boomers. They expect that even entry-level products have a much higher level of refinement ? and advanced features like infotainment systems capable of accessing social media services.
The new generation has ?an incredible taste for luxury,? echoed Ford?s Farley, adding that millennials now expect to get more for less, no longer expecting that they have to pay a substantial premium for high-line brands. ?And as the price of luxury cars drops,? he said, ?don?t be surprised if they make luxury cars their first (new vehicle) purchase.?
For the industry, delivering on those expectations could be challenging. It could strain resources in the short-term, but those brands which can meet the demand could come to dominate the new generation much as marques like Toyota, Nissan and Honda were the favorites of the boomers.
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By Kathleen Doheny
HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, March 29 (HealthDay News) ? Women who take hormone therapy that includes estrogen and progestin are at increased risk of developing breast cancer and dying from it, especially if they start taking the therapy just as menopause begins, a new analysis confirms.
Researchers followed nearly 42,000 women, all of whom were past menopause, for an average of more than 11 years. Of those, more than 25,000 did not use hormone therapy and more than 16,000 took estrogen and progestin, also called combined hormone therapy. For this analysis, the researchers did not include estrogen-only therapy, used by women who have had a hysterectomy.
At the end of the follow-up period, more than 2,200 of the women were found to have breast cancer. Compared to non-users, those who took combined therapy were more likely to have breast cancer, said Dr. Rowan Chlebowski, a medical oncologist at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. Chlebowski led the study, which was published in the March 29 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The link has been found in other studies, but Chlebowski also found the risk was greatest among those who took the hormones closest to menopause. ?Women starting within months of menopause had about a threefold greater risk than women starting 10 years after menopause,? Chlebowski said.
For the new analysis, Chlebowksi looked at results from the Women?s Health Initiative observational study. He compared the findings with those from the Women?s Health Initiative randomized clinical trial, in which women were assigned to different treatments.
The Women?s Health Initiative included four clinical trials and an observational study. Women were all past menopause and were aged 50 to 79.
Chlebowski said he did the new analysis to resolve what he saw as unanswered questions. In the trial, only about one-third, or 5,000, of the women were in their 50s when they started the study. As that is the typical age for menopause to start, about two-thirds of the women in the trial were in their 60s or beyond, so began to take hormones several years after menopause.
Chlebowski set out to see if the link between breast cancer risk and combined hormone therapy use was influenced by earlier use of hormones.
?We had a substantial number closer to menopause than the clinical trial of [the Women's Health Initiative],? he said.
He found, however, that not only was the risk of breast cancer still increased, but it also increased even more if the women were closer to menopause when they began to take the hormones.
He speculated that women who start the hormone therapy close to menopause still have circulating levels of estrogen high enough to make them exceed some threshold, beyond which it may become hazardous.
Progestin is thought to play a role, too, he added.
Although others have thought that the breast cancers linked with combined hormone therapy are often ones with a somewhat better outlook ? another question Chlebowski thought needed more study ? he did not find that in his new analysis.
The new analysis reinforces the finding that combination hormone therapy is linked with higher breast cancer risk, said Dr. Joanne Mortimer, director of Women?s Cancer Programs at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif.
Although previous research has found some good effects of hormone therapy on the heart, she and Chlebowski said that has to be weighed against the breast cancer risk found in much other research.
The new analysis also suggests that ?the time of starting hormone therapy really matters,? Mortimer said. Although the analysis found an association between the two, it did not prove a cause-and-effect link.
Mortimer and Chlebowski agreed that women need to discuss the pros and cons of hormone therapy during menopause with their doctors.
Women should seriously consider whether their symptoms, such as hot flashes and night sweats, are limiting enough to warrant taking hormones, Chlebowski said. Although some women are severely bothered by symptoms, he said, others may be less bothered and can avoid hormone therapy.
More information
To learn more about hormone therapy after menopause, visit the American Cancer Society.
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University students punch the air as they march through Kim Il Sung Square in downtown Pyongyang, North Korea, Friday, March 29, 2013. Tens of thousands of North Koreans turned out for the mass rally at the main square in Pyongyang in support of their leader Kim Jong Un's call to arms. Placards read: ?Let?s crush the puppet traitor group? and ?Let?s rip the puppet traitors to death!? (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin)
University students punch the air as they march through Kim Il Sung Square in downtown Pyongyang, North Korea, Friday, March 29, 2013. Tens of thousands of North Koreans turned out for the mass rally at the main square in Pyongyang in support of their leader Kim Jong Un's call to arms. Placards read: ?Let?s crush the puppet traitor group? and ?Let?s rip the puppet traitors to death!? (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin)
North Koreans punch the air during a rally at Kim Il Sung Square in downtown Pyongyang, North Korea, Friday, March 28, 2013. Tens of thousands of North Koreans turned out for the mass rally at the main square in Pyongyang in support of their leader Kim Jong Un's call to arms. The placard reads: "U.S. forces, get out!" (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin)
North Korean army officers punch the air as they chant slogans during a rally at Kim Il Sung Square in downtown Pyongyang, North Korea, Friday, March 28, 2013. Thousands of North Koreans turned out for the mass rally at the main square in Pyongyang in support of their leader Kim Jong Un's call to arms. (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin)
North Koreans gather during a rally at Kim Il Sung Square in downtown Pyongyang, North Korea, Friday, March 28, 2013. Tens of thousands of North Koreans turned out for the mass rally at the main square in Pyongyang in support of their leader Kim Jong Un's call to arms. (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? Across North Korea, soldiers are gearing up for battle and shrouding their jeeps and vans with camouflage netting. Newly painted signboards and posters call for "death to the U.S. imperialists" and urge the people to fight with "arms, not words."
But even as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is issuing midnight battle cries to his generals to ready their rockets, he and his million-man army know full well that a successful missile strike on U.S. targets would be suicide for the outnumbered, out-powered North Korean regime.
Despite the hastening drumbeat of warfare, none of the key players in the region wants or expects another Korean War ? not even the North Koreans.
But by seemingly bringing the region to the very brink of conflict with threats and provocations, Pyongyang is aiming to draw attention to the tenuousness of the armistice designed to maintain peace on the Korean Peninsula, a truce North Korea recently announced it would no longer honor as it warned that war could break out at any time.
It's all part of a plan to force Washington to the negotiating table, pressure the new president in Seoul to change policy on North Korea, and build unity at home ? without triggering a full-blown war if all goes well.
In July, it will be 60 years since North Korea and China signed an armistice with the U.S. and the United Nations to bring an end to three years of fighting that cost millions of lives. The designated Demilitarized Zone has evolved into the most heavily guarded border in the world.
It was never intended to be a permanent border. But six decades later, North and South remain divided, with Pyongyang feeling abandoned by the South Koreans in the quest for reunification and threatened by the Americans.
In that time, South Korea has blossomed from a poor, agrarian nation of peasants into the world's 15th largest economy while North Korea is struggling to find a way out of a Cold War chasm that has left it with a per capita income on par with sub-Saharan Africa.
The Chinese troops who fought alongside the North Koreans have long since left. But 28,500 American troops are still stationed in South Korea and 50,000 more are in nearby Japan. For weeks, the U.S. and South Korea have been showing off their military might with a series of joint exercises that Pyongyang sees a rehearsal for invasion.
On Thursday, the U.S. military confirmed that those drills included two nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers that can unload the U.S. Air Force's largest conventional bomb ? a 30,000-pound super bunker buster ? powerful enough to destroy North Korea's web of underground military tunnels.
It was a flexing of military muscle by Washington, perhaps aimed not only at Pyongyang but at Beijing as well.
In Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un reacted swiftly, calling an emergency meeting of army generals and ordering them to be prepared to strike if the U.S. actions continue. A photo distributed by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency showed Kim in a military operations room with maps detailing a "strike plan" behind him in a very public show of supposedly sensitive military strategy.
North Korea cites the U.S. military threat as a key reason behind its need to build nuclear weapons, and has poured a huge chunk of its small national budget into defense, science and technology. In December, scientists launched a satellite into space on the back of a long-range rocket using technology that could easily be converted for missiles; in February, they tested an underground nuclear device as part of a mission to build a bomb they can load on a missile capable of reaching the U.S.
However, what North Korea really wants is legitimacy in the eyes of the U.S. ? and a peace treaty. Pyongyang wants U.S. troops off Korean soil, and the bombs and rockets are more of an expensive, dangerous safety blanket than real firepower. They are the only real playing card North Korea has left, and the bait they hope will bring the Americans to the negotiating table.
Narushige Michishita, director of the Security and International Studies Program at Japan's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, isn't convinced North Korea is capable of attacking Guam, Hawaii or the U.S. mainland. He says Pyongyang hasn't successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile.
But its medium-range Rodong missiles, with a range of about 800 miles (1,300 kilometers), are "operational and credible" and could reach U.S. bases in Japan, he says.
More likely than such a strike, however, is a smaller-scale incident, perhaps off the Koreas' western coast, that would not provoke the Americans to unleash their considerable firepower. For years, the waters off the west coast have been a battleground for naval skirmishes between the two Koreas because the North has never recognized the maritime border drawn unilaterally by the U.N.
As threatening as Kim's call to arms may sound, its main target audience may be the masses at home in North Korea.
For months, the masterminds of North Korean propaganda have pinpointed this year's milestone Korean War anniversary as a prime time to play up Kim's military credibility as well as to push for a peace treaty. By creating the impression that a U.S. attack is imminent, the regime can foster a sense of national unity and encourage the people to rally around their new leader.
Inside Pyongyang, much of the military rhetoric feels like theatrics. It's not unusual to see people toting rifles in North Korea, where soldiers and checkpoints are a fixture in the heavily militarized society. But more often than not in downtown Pyongyang, the rifle stashed in a rucksack is a prop and the "soldier" is a dancer, one of the many performers rehearsing for a Korean War-themed extravaganza set to debut later this year.
More than 100,000 soldiers, students and ordinary workers were summoned Friday to Kim Il Sung Square in downtown Pyongyang to pump their fists in support of North Korea's commander in chief. But elsewhere, it was business as usual at restaurants and shops, and farms and factories, where the workers have heard it all before.
"Tensions rise almost every year around the time the U.S.-South Korean drills take place, but as soon as those drills end, things go back to normal and people put those tensions behind them quite quickly," said Sung Hyun-sang, the South Korean president of a clothing maker operating in the North Korean border town of Kaesong. "I think and hope that this time won't be different."
And in a telling sign that even the North Koreans don't expect war, the national airline, Air Koryo, is adding flights to its spring lineup and preparing to host the scores of tourists they expect to flock to Pyongyang despite the threats issuing forth from the Supreme Command.
War or no war, it seems Pyongyang remains open for business.
___
Lee is chief of AP's bureaus in Pyongyang, North Korea, and Seoul, South Korea. She can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/newsjean. Eric Talmadge in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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Mar. 28, 2013 ? Chemists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory believe they can now explain one of the remaining mysteries of photosynthesis, the chemical process by which plants convert sunlight into usable energy and generate the oxygen that we breathe. The finding suggests a new way of approaching the design of catalysts that drive the water-splitting reactions of artificial photosynthesis.
"If we want to make systems that can do artificial photosynthesis, it's important that we understand how the system found in nature functions," says Theodor Agapie, an assistant professor of chemistry at Caltech and principal investigator on a paper in the journal Nature Chemistry that describes the new results.
One of the key pieces of biological machinery that enables photosynthesis is a conglomeration of proteins and pigments known as photosystem II. Within that system lies a small cluster of atoms, called the oxygen-evolving complex, where water molecules are split and molecular oxygen is made. Although this oxygen-producing process has been studied extensively, the role that various parts of the cluster play has remained unclear.
The oxygen-evolving complex performs a reaction that requires the transfer of electrons, making it an example of what is known as a redox, or oxidation-reduction, reaction. The cluster can be described as a "mixed-metal cluster" because in addition to oxygen, it includes two types of metals -- one that is redox active, or capable of participating in the transfer of electrons (in this case, manganese), and one that is redox inactive (calcium).
"Since calcium is redox inactive, people have long wondered what role it might play in this cluster," Agapie says.
It has been difficult to solve that mystery in large part because the oxygen-evolving complex is just a cog in the much larger machine that is photosystem II; it is hard to study the smaller piece because there is so much going on with the whole. To get around this, Agapie's graduate student Emily Tsui prepared a series of compounds that are structurally related to the oxygen-evolving complex. She built upon an organic scaffold in a stepwise fashion, first adding three manganese centers and then attaching a fourth metal. By varying that fourth metal to be calcium and then different redox-inactive metals, such as strontium, sodium, yttrium, and zinc, Tsui was able to compare the effects of the metals on the chemical properties of the compound.
"When making mixed-metal clusters, researchers usually mix simple chemical precursors and hope the metals will self-assemble in desired structures," Tsui says. "That makes it hard to control the product. By preparing these clusters in a much more methodical way, we've been able to get just the right structures."
It turns out that the redox-inactive metals affect the way electrons are transferred in such systems. To make molecular oxygen, the manganese atoms must activate the oxygen atoms connected to the metals in the complex. In order to do that, the manganese atoms must first transfer away several electrons. Redox-inactive metals that tug more strongly on the electrons of the oxygen atoms make it more difficult for manganese to do this. But calcium does not draw electrons strongly toward itself. Therefore, it allows the manganese atoms to transfer away electrons and activate the oxygen atoms that go on to make molecular oxygen.
A number of the catalysts that are currently being developed to drive artificial photosynthesis are mixed-metal oxide catalysts. It has again been unclear what role the redox-inactive metals in these mixed catalysts play. The new findings suggest that the redox-inactive metals affect the way the electrons are transferred. "If you pick the right redox-inactive metal, you can tune the reduction potential to bring the reaction to the range where it is favorable," Agapie says. "That means we now have a more rational way of thinking about how to design these sorts of catalysts because we know how much the redox-inactive metal affects the redox chemistry."
The paper in Nature Chemistry is titled "Redox-inactive metals modulate the reduction potential in heterometallic manganese-oxido clusters." Along with Agapie and Tsui, Rosalie Tran and Junko Yano of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are also coauthors. The work was supported by the Searle Scholars Program, an NSF CAREER award, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. X-ray spectroscopy work was supported by the NIH and the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Synchrotron facilities were provided by the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, operated by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by California Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Kimm Fesenmaier.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/zABlV4-Gj0A/130329125305.htm
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Klout, the service for measuring online influence, is boosting its integration with both Bing and Instagram today.
On the Bing side, the news follows last fall?s announcement of a strategic investment from and partnership with Microsoft. That announcement included the unveiling of a feature in Bing that would show Klout scores for select people. (And Bing continues to surface more data on that front.)
Now Klout users can add Bing to their Klout accounts. It sounds like that won?t have an immediate effect on their Klout scores, but according to the company blog post, ?Bing search data will start becoming integrated into Klout?s algorithm? and ?search results will eventually factor into each user?s Klout Score.?
I was a little confused about the timing of events here (perhaps because I?ve only bothered to add Twitter and Facebook to my Klout profile), but a spokesperson explained that this sort of staggered integration is normal: ?Before we are able to incorporate any data into a person?s score, we need users to connect the network to Klout so we can begin to process the influence data. So, with Bing, we are now asking people to connect it to their accounts, and eventually search data will actually factor into their score.?
The spokesperson also confirmed that this is the first time Klout has integrated with a search engine.
Speaking of that staggered integration process, starting in 2011, Klout allowed users to add Instagram to their accounts, and now it?s ready to take the next step, incorporating Instagram activity into your score. So talented photographers whose photos get a big response on Instagram should see their Klout go up.
Klout measures influence based on the ability to drive action across the social web. Any person can connect their social network accounts and Klout will generate a score on a scale of 1-100 that represents their ability to engage other people and inspire social actions. Klout enables everyone to gain insights that help them better understand how they influence others. Klout also provides people with opportunities to shape and be recognized for their influence.
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Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
? Learn moreSource: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/28/klout-instagram-bing/
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Lasers, particularly those that set boats ablaze and incinerate incoming missiles, have long been on the Navy's mind. Today, the Office of Naval Research revealed its latest energy weapon craving: vehicle-mounted lasers that shoot down drones. Dubbed Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-The-Move, the project is offering private outfits up to $400,000 each to develop such a system that blasts at full power for 120 seconds and juices back up to 80 percent after a 20 minute charge. The beam is required to pack a punch of at least 25 kilowatts, while the ability to ratchet up to 50 kilowatts is optional. Given that kind of power, Wired points out that making such a solution fit in a Humvee is going to be a feat -- especially when the Navy says it can't weigh more than 2,000 pounds and must fit entirely within a vehicle's cargo area. Have blueprints for a jeep-mountable laser squirreled away in your basement hobby shop? You'll have to send your application in by 2 PM on April 26th to qualify for the federal cash.
[Image credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery, Flickr]
Filed under: Transportation, Science
Via: Wired
Source: Federal Business Opportunities
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In an interview with Los Angeles-based radio station Power 106 on Thursday, the 30-year-old rapper said epilepsy caused his most recent health scare earlier this month when he was rushed to a hospital. Wayne said he had three back-to-back seizures.
The Grammy winner says: ?I?ve had a bunch of seizures, y?all just never hear about them.?
Wayne says he ?could?ve died? and that the recent seizures were a result of ?just plain stress, no rest, overworking myself.?
He released his 10th album, ?I Am Not a Human Being II,? this week. He?ll embark on a 40-city tour in July with rappers T.I. and Future.
The New Orleans native, whose given name is Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., is one of the biggest stars not only of his genre but in all music.
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One of my favorite mobile game publishers, Chillingo, was at GDC 2013 and we got to catch up with them and hear about all of the awesome titles that are coming to Android. Some are already out, like Parking Mania and Contre Jour, but others like He-Man, Puzzle Craft, and Endless Road are on the way, and others still like Catapult King just came out. We only got to try out a few of these, but Chillingo's catalog is really impressive, and it will be great to see more of their stuff hitting Google Play this year.
What are your favorite Chillingo games? Any other publisher that you have a particular fondness for?
 |  |
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/1m8GBb5lg1A/story01.htm
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By Maria Golovnina
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain opens a judicial inquiry into the death of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky on Thursday to establish how he died in the locked bathroom of his vast mansion near London.
Berezovsky, who survived years of intrigue, power struggles and assassination attempts in Russia, was found dead on Saturday in his home in Ascot, a town close to Queen Elizabeth's Windsor Castle.
Police said there was no sign of a struggle and the 67-year-old's death was "consistent with hanging", suggesting he might have killed himself.
Berezovsky was the king-maker behind Vladimir Putin's ascent to power in Russia but later became his number-one enemy and fled to Britain in 2000.
Berezovsky's associates have hinted he was depressed after losing a $6 billion (3.9 billion pounds) court case against another tycoon, Roman Abramovich, last year, when a judge humiliated him publicly by saying he was an unimpressive and unreliable witness.
Other people close to him have said they were not convinced by the official account.
"If he really hanged himself why was that not known from the very beginning?" said Andrei Sidelnikov, an opposition figure who knew Berezovsky. "I don't believe it was a suicide."
In Russia, state media quoted Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Zvyagintsev as saying the government would continue efforts to "bring back assets that Berezovsky and his accomplices acquired criminally and legalised abroad".
Mass-circulation tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, which supports the Kremlin, ran a front page headline on Wednesday that read: "Did Berezovsky hang himself or did he have help?"
The inquest will open in the town of Windsor on Thursday.
MANIPULATOR
A master of political manipulation, Berezovsky had been known as the "godfather of the Kremlin" and wielded immense influence during a decade that followed the Soviet collapse.
Once a mathematician with Nobel Prize aspirations, he built a massive business empire under former President Boris Yeltsin and was the first of Russia's so-called oligarchs.
He then became one of the first victims of a ruthless political crackdown of the early Putin era after falling out with his prot?g?.
Once in exile, Berezovsky often said he feared for his life, particularly after the fatal poisoning of his friend and former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with a dose of the radioactive isotope polonium-210 in London in 2006.
Another friend and business partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili, also died in unclear circumstances two years later.
For many, Berezovsky personified the decade of wild capitalism, chaos and violence that followed the Soviet fall. He left a trail of enemies in Russia and beyond, and no doubt once featured on many a hit list.
Berezovsky survived an assassination attempt in 1994 when a bomb exploded in his car, decapitating his driver.
In his final months he led a much less extravagant life, apparently bitter and broken and rarely seen in public.
He suffered another blow in 2011 when he was forced to pay one of Britain's biggest divorce settlements to his former wife Galina. Media reported the settlement topped $100 million.
"My father was not the typical parent, nothing about him was ordinary," said his daughter Anastasia in a tribute. "He has coloured my life in infinite ways, and I know that what he concerned himself most with was making all his children proud."
(Additional reporting by Steve Gutterman in Moscow; Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/britain-opens-inquest-berezovskys-unexplained-death-231602692.html
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By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 14:50 EDT
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The biggest-ever trawl of the human genome for cancer-causing DNA errors has netted more than 80 tiny mutations, a finding that could help people at high risk, researchers said Wednesday.
The results, which double the number of known genetic alterations linked to breast, ovarian and prostate cancer, were unveiled in a dozen scientific papers published in journals in Europe and the United States.
The three hormone-related cancers are diagnosed in over 2.5 million people every year and kill one in three patients, said a Nature press statement.
Teams from more than 100 research institutes in Europe, Asia, Australia and the United States said the work should in the future help doctors to calculate an individual?s cancer risk long before any symptoms emerge.
People with high-susceptibility mutations could be counselled against lifestyle choices that further increase their risk, given regular screening and drug treatment, or even preventative surgery.
?We have examined 200,000 areas of the genome in 250,000 individuals. There is no (other) study of cancer of this size,? Per Hall, coordinator of the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS), told AFP of the research.
The studies compared the DNA of more than 100,000 patients with breast, ovarian and prostate cancer to that of an equal number of healthy individuals. Most were of European ancestry.
DNA, the blueprint for life, comprises four basic chemicals called A (adenine) C (cytosine), T (thymine) and G (guanine) strung together in different combinations along a double helix.
Researchers noted where the A, C, T, G combinations of cancer patients differed significantly from those of healthy people.
They were looking for a tiny ?spelling mistake? in the code, called a single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP that can cause problems in gene function.
For breast cancer, the researchers found 49 SNPs, ?which is more than double the number previously found?, said Sweden?s Karolinska Institutet, which took part in the giant study.
?In the case of prostate cancer, researchers have discovered another 26 deviations, which means that a total number of 78 SNPs may be linked to the disease.?
For ovarian cancer, eight new SNPs were found.
Everyone has inherited alterations in their DNA, but whether these mutations are dangerous or not is determined by where on the code they lie.
And carrying a mutation does not necessarily mean a person will develop cancer, a disease that may have multiple causes.
The researchers said further study is needed to allow scientists to translate these DNA telltales into tests for predicting cancer risk. A more distant goal is using the knowledge for better treatments.
?Since there are many other factors that influence the risk of these cancers (mainly lifestyle factors), future tests have to take more risk factors than just genes into consideration,? said Hall.
?It will take a couple of years before we have the necessary models enabling us, with high accuracy, to predict the individual risk of these cancers.?
The findings were published in Nature Genetics and Nature Communications, PLOS Genetics, the American Journal of Human Genetics and Human Molecular Genetics.
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Source: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/27/scientists-find-cancer-causing-dna-mutations/
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LONDON (AP) ? A record-breaking cyberattack targeting an anti-spam watchdog group has sent ripples of disruption coursing across the Web, experts said Wednesday.
Spamhaus, a site responsible for keeping ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills out of the world's inboxes, said it had been buffeted by the monster denial-of-service attack since mid-March, apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Swiss-British group.
"It is a small miracle that we're still online," Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said.
Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic ? like hundreds of letters being jammed through a mail slot at the same time. Security experts measure those attacks in bits of data per second. Recent cyberattacks ? like the ones that caused persistent outages at U.S. banking sites late last year ? have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second.
But the furious assault on Spamhaus has shattered the charts, clocking in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus has enlisted to help it weather the attack.
"It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can't keep up," CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince wrote in an email.
Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies said that was no understatement.
"This attack is the largest that has been publicly disclosed ? ever ? in the history of the Internet," he said.
It's unclear who exactly was behind the attack, although a man who identified himself as Sven Olaf Kamphuis said he was in touch with the attackers and described them as mainly consisting of disgruntled Russian Internet service providers who had found themselves on Spamhaus' blacklists. There was no immediate way to verify his claim.
He accused the watchdog of arbitrarily blocking content that it did not like. Spamhaus has widely used and constantly updated blacklists of sites that send spam.
"They abuse their position not to stop spam but to exercise censorship without a court order," Kamphuis said.
Gilmore and Prince said the attack's perpetrators had taken advantage of weaknesses in the Internet's infrastructure to trick thousands of servers into routing a torrent of junk traffic to Spamhaus every second.
The trick, called "DNS reflection," works a little bit like mailing requests for information to thousands of different organizations with a target's return address written across the back of the envelopes. When all the organizations reply at once, they send a landslide of useless data to the unwitting addressee.
Both experts said the attack's sheer size has sent ripples of disruptions across the Internet as servers moved mountains of junk traffic back and forth across the Web.
"At a minimum there would have been slowness," Prince said, adding in a blog post that "if the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why."
At the London Internet Exchange, where service providers exchange traffic across the globe, spokesman Malcolm Hutty said his organization had seen "a minor degree of congestion in a small portion of the network."
But he said it was unlikely that any ordinary users had been affected by the attack.
Hanna said his site had so far managed to stay online, but warned that being knocked off the Internet could give spammers an opening to step up their mailings ? which may mean more fake lottery announcements and pitches for penny stocks heading to people's inboxes.
Hanna denied claims that his organization had behaved arbitrarily, noting that his group would lose its credibility if it started flagging benign content as spam.
"We have 1.7 billion people who watch over our shoulder," he said. "If we start blocking emails that they want, they will obviously stop using us."
Gilmore of Akamai was also dismissive of the claim that Spamhaus was biased.
"Spamhaus' reputation is sterling," he said.
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Even the appeal of piloting a remote control toy ball around your carpet tends to wear off after a while. As such, Orbotix has been pushing the augmented reality aspect of its Sphero hardware pretty hard for the past several months. Now the company is announcing the availability of a new AR SDK through Github, as well as a Unity-based plug-in that lets developers build games around existing 3D models. The latter was created for iOS, with an Android version coming shortly. The company's also announcing an "App Bounty" program, promising the gift of funds to developers who build genre apps that hit on "pre-determined requirements" from the company. Roll on past the break for more info on all of the above.
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/nO9Qe3a3BCc/
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? Insurance companies will have to pay out an average of 32 percent more for medical claims on individual health policies under President Barack Obama's overhaul, the nation's leading group of financial risk analysts has estimated.
That's likely to increase premiums for at least some Americans buying individual plans.
The report by the Society of Actuaries could turn into a big headache for the Obama administration at a time when many parts of the country remain skeptical about the Affordable Care Act.
While some states will see medical claims costs per person decline, the report concluded the overwhelming majority will see double-digit increases in their individual health insurance markets, where people purchase coverage directly from insurers.
The disparities are striking. By 2017, the estimated increase would be 62 percent for California, about 80 percent for Ohio, more than 20 percent for Florida and 67 percent for Maryland. Much of the reason for the higher claims costs is that sicker people are expected to join the pool, the report said.
The report did not make similar estimates for employer plans, the mainstay for workers and their families. That's because the primary impact of Obama's law is on people who don't have coverage through their jobs.
The administration questions the design of the study, saying it focused only on one piece of the puzzle and ignored cost relief strategies in the law such as tax credits to help people afford premiums and special payments to insurers who attract an outsize share of the sick. The study also doesn't take into account the potential price-cutting effect of competition in new state insurance markets that will go live on Oct. 1, administration officials said.
At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said some of what passes for health insurance today is so skimpy it can't be compared to the comprehensive coverage available under the law. "Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don't pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus," she said. "They're really mortgage protection, not health insurance."
A prominent national expert, recently retired Medicare chief actuary Rick Foster, said the report does "a credible job" of estimating potential enrollment and costs under the law, "without trying to tilt the answers in any particular direction."
"Having said that," Foster added, "actuaries tend to be financially conservative, so the various assumptions might be more inclined to consider what might go wrong than to anticipate that everything will work beautifully." Actuaries use statistics and economic theory to make long-range cost projections for insurance and pension programs sponsored by businesses and government. The society is headquartered near Chicago.
Kristi Bohn, an actuary who worked on the study, acknowledged it did not attempt to estimate the effect of subsidies, insurer competition and other factors that could mitigate cost increases. She said the goal was to look at the underlying cost of medical care.
"Claims cost is the most important driver of health care premiums," she said.
"We don't see ourselves as a political organization," Bohn added. "We are trying to figure out what the situation at hand is."
On the plus side, the report found the law will cover more than 32 million currently uninsured Americans when fully phased in. And some states ? including New York and Massachusetts ? will see double-digit declines in costs for claims in the individual market.
Uncertainty over costs has been a major issue since the law passed three years ago, and remains so just months before a big push to cover the uninsured gets rolling Oct. 1. Middle-class households will be able to purchase subsidized private insurance in new marketplaces, while low-income people will be steered to Medicaid and other safety net programs. States are free to accept or reject a Medicaid expansion also offered under the law.
Obama has promised that the new law will bring costs down. That seems a stretch now. While the nation has been enjoying a lull in health care inflation the past few years, even some former administration advisers say a new round of cost-curbing legislation will be needed.
Bohn said the study overall presents a mixed picture.
Millions of now-uninsured people will be covered as the market for directly purchased insurance more than doubles with the help of government subsidies. The study found that market will grow to more than 25 million people. But costs will rise because spending on sicker people and other high-cost groups will overwhelm an influx of younger, healthier people into the program.
Some of the higher-cost cases will come from existing state high-risk insurance pools. Those people will now be able to get coverage in the individual insurance market, since insurance companies will no longer be able to turn them down. Other people will end up buying their own plans because their employers cancel coverage. While some of these individuals might save money for themselves, they will end up raising costs for others.
Part the reason for the wide disparities in the study is that states have different populations and insurance rules. In the relatively small number of states where insurers were already restricted from charging higher rates to older, sicker people, the cost impact is less.
"States are starting from different starting points, and they are all getting closer to one another," said Bohn.
The study also did not model the likely patchwork results from some states accepting the law's Medicaid expansion while others reject it. It presented estimates for two hypothetical scenarios in which all states either accept or reject the expansion.
Larry Levitt, an insurance expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, reviewed the report and said the actuaries need to answer more questions.
"I'd generally characterize it as providing useful background information, but I don't think it's complete enough to be treated as a projection," Levitt said. The conclusion that employers with sicker workers would drop coverage is "speculative," he said.
Another caveat: The Society of Actuaries contracted Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, to do the number-crunching that drives the report. United also owns the nation's largest health insurance company. Bohn said the study reflects the professional conclusions of the society, not Optum or its parent company.
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AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this report.
Online:
Society of Actuaries __ http://www.soa.org/NewlyInsured/
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/study-health-overhaul-raise-claims-cost-32-pct-173335479--politics.html
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? Federal regulators are pressing the Supreme Court to stop big pharmaceutical corporations from paying generic drug competitors to delay releasing their cheaper versions of brand-name drugs. They argue these deals deny American consumers, usually for years, steep price declines that can top 90 percent.
The Obama administration, backed by consumer groups and the American Medical Association, says these so-called "pay for delay" deals profit the drug companies but harm consumers by adding 3.5 billion annually to their drug bills.
But the pharmaceutical companies counter that they need to preserve longer the billions of dollars in revenue from their patented products in order to recover the billions they spend developing new drugs. And both the large companies and the generic makers say the marketing of generics often is hastened by these deals.
The justices will hear the argument Monday.
Such pay-for-delay deals arise when generic companies file a challenge at the Food and Drug Administration to the patents that give brand-name drugs a 20-year monopoly. The generic drugmakers aim to prove the patent is flawed or otherwise invalid, so they can launch a generic version well before the patent ends.
Brand-name drugmakers then usually sue the generic companies, which sets up what could be years of expensive litigation. When the two sides aren't certain who will win, they often reach a compromise deal that allows the generic company to sell its cheaper copycat drug in a few years ? but years before the drug's patent would expire. Often, that settlement comes with a sizable payment from the brand-name company to the generic drugmaker.
Numerous brand-name and generic drugmakers and their respective trade groups say the settlements protect their interests but also benefit consumers by bringing inexpensive copycat medicines to market years earlier than they would arrive in any case generic drugmakers took to trial and lost. But federal officials counter that such deals add billions to the drug bills of American patients and taxpayers, compared with what would happen if the generic companies won the lawsuits and could begin marketing right away.
A study by RBC Capital Markets Corp. of 371 cases during 2000-09 found brand-name companies won 89 at trial compared to 82 won by generic drugmakers. Another 175 ended in settlement deals, and 25 were dropped.
Generic drugs account for about 80 percent of all American prescriptions for medicines and vaccines, but a far smaller percentage of the $325 billion spent by U.S. consumers on drugs each year. Generics saved American patients, taxpayers and the healthcare system an estimated $193 billion in 2011 alone, according to health data firm IMS Health.
But government officials believe the number of potentially anticompetitive patent settlements is increasing. Pay-for-delay deals increased from 28 to 40 in just the last two fiscal years and the deals in fiscal 2012 covered 31 brand-name pharmaceuticals, Federal Trade Commission officials said. Those had combined annual U.S. sales of more than $8.3 billion.
The Obama administration argues the agreements are illegal if they're based solely on keeping the generic drug off the market. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, speaking at Georgetown Law School recently, noted that once a generic drug gets on the market and competes with a brand-name drug, "the price drops 85 percent." That quickly decimates sales of the brand-name medicine.
"These agreements should actually be considered presumptively unlawful because of the potential effects on consumers," Verrilli said.
In the case before the court, Brussels, Belgium-based Solvay ? now part of a new company called AbbVie Inc. ? reached a deal with generic drugmaker Watson Pharmaceuticals allowing it to launch a cheaper version of Solvay's male hormone drug AndroGel in August 2015. Solvay agreed to pay Watson, now called Actavis Inc., an estimated $19 million-$30 million annually, government officials said. The patent runs until August 2020. Watson agreed to also help sell the brand-name version, AndroGel.
Actavis spokesman David Belian disputed the government's characterization of the agreement with Solvay. Belian said that in addition to licensing agreement over Solvay's Androgel patents, Watson was being compensated for using its sales force to promote AndroGel to doctors.
AndroGel, which brought in $1.2 billion last year for AbbVie, is a gel applied to the skin daily to treat low testosterone in men. Low testosterone can affect sex drive, energy level, mood, muscle mass and bone strength.
The FTC called the deal anticompetitive and sued Actavis.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta rejected the government's objections, and the FTC appealed to the Supreme Court.
The federal district and appellate courts both ruled against the government, AbbVie, which is based in North Chicago, Ill., said. "We are confident that these decisions will be upheld by the Supreme Court."
The Generic Pharmaceutical Association's head, Ralph Neas, said the settlements are "pro-consumer, pro-competition and transparent." He said every patent settlement to date has brought a generic drug to market before the relevant patent ended, with two-thirds of the new generic drugs launched in 2010 and 2011 hitting the market early due to a settlement.
"By doing what the FTC wants, you're going to hurt consumers rather than help them," said Paul Bisaro, CEO of Actavis of Parsippany, N.J.
Bisaro said consumers will save an estimated $50 billion just from patent settlements involving Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering drug made by Pfizer Inc. of New York that reigned for nearly a decade as the world's top-selling drug.
Lipitor's patent ran until 2017, but multiple generic companies challenged it. Pfizer reached a settlement that enabled Actavis and a second company to sell slightly cheaper generic versions starting Nov. 30, 2011, and several other generic drugmakers to begin selling generic Lipitor six months later. The price then plummeted from Pfizer's $375 to $530 for a three-month supply, depending on dosage, to $20 to $40 for generic versions.
Because generic companies tend to challenge patents of every successful drug, the FTC's position would impose onerous legal costs on brand-name drugmakers and limit their ability to fund expensive research to create new drugs, said the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which represents brand-name drugmakers.
According to the 2010 RBC Capital Markets study, when trial victories, settlements between drugmakers and dropped cases are combined, generic companies were able to bring their product to market before the brand-name drug's patent expired in 76 percent of the 371 drug patent suits decided from 2000 through 2009.
Consumer, doctor and drugstore groups have lined up to support the Obama administration in this case.
"AARP believes it is in the interest of those fifty and older, and indeed the public at large, to hasten the entry of generic prescription drugs to the marketplace," said Ken Zeller, senior attorney with the AARP Foundation Litigation. "Pay-for-delay agreements such as those at issue in this case frustrate that public interest."
The American Medical Association, the giant doctors' group, believes pay-for-delay agreements undermine the balance between spurring innovation through patents and fostering competition through generics, AMA President Dr. Jeremy A. Lazarus said. "Pay for delay must stop to ensure the most cost-effective treatment options are available to patients."
Drugstores also believe pay-for-delay deals "pose considerable harm to patients because they postpone the availability of generic drugs which limits patient access to generic medications," said Chrissy Kopple of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores.
Eight justices will decide this case later this year. Justice Samuel Alito did not take part in considering whether to take this case and is not expected to take part in arguments.
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The case is Federal Trade Commission vs. Actavis, Inc., 12-416.
AP Business Writer Linda A. Johnson in Trenton, N.J., contributed to this report.
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Follow Jesse J. Holland on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/jessejholland
Follow Linda A. Johnson on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/high-court-weighs-drug-companies-generics-policy-070931180--finance.html
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