Oh, how I miss the arcade. One of my personal favorite games was always skee ball -- there was just some sort of weird joy about trying to beat the previous high score, and then seeing the tickets spew out at the end was always great. Fortunately those memories can be relived while on the go with Roller Ball, an Android game that puts the skee ball table on your device.
Gameplay is quite simple, line up the ball, flick your finger and then tilt the device to add spin if you wish, the more points you score the more tickets you will win. With six machine types, and tons of prizes who wouldn't want to sit down for a couple of minutes to rekindle some of their youth. The game play is a bit on the easy side which does allow kids to also take part, so whether looking for something for yourself or a young one to do, be sure to hit the break and pick up this free game.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. | Thu Jan 19, 2012 8:31pm EST
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - An unmanned heavy-lift Delta 4 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday to put a high-speed broadband communications satellite into orbit for the U.S. military.
The 217-foot(66-metre)-long rocket, manufactured by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin partnership United Launch Alliance, lifted off at 7:38 p.m. EST (0038 GMT Friday).
It was the first of 12 launches planned from Cape Canaveral this year.
Perched atop the Delta 4 booster was a $464-million spacecraft, built by Boeing, called the Wideband Global SATCOM 4. It is designed to relay high-resolution video, imagery, communications and other data at significantly faster rates than predecessor spacecraft.
In addition to linking ground troops and command stations, the satellite will be used to route tracking and data streams from unmanned aerial drones.
"This launch will be another important step in advancing communications capabilities for U.S. warfighters and allies around the world," Boeing Vice President Craig Cooning said in a statement before launch.
The 6.5-tonne satellite is expected to be put into service next year supporting troops in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. It joins three other wideband global spacecraft already in orbit.
There are few good reasons to be at Newark airport at 4AM on a Thursday morning. One of those good reasons: flying out to the Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off in earnest this week. The MTV Movies team is on the ground in Park City, Utah, to talk to your favorite stars and get [...]
PYONGYANG, North Korea ? A senior North Korean official dismissed concerns about Kim Jong Un's readiness to lead, saying he spent years working closely with his late father and helping him make key policy decisions on economic and military affairs.
In the first interview with foreign journalists by a high-level North Korean official since Kim Jong Il's Dec. 17 death, Politburo member and Kim family confidante Yang Hyong Sop told The Associated Press that North Koreans were in good hands with their young new leader. He emphasized an unbroken continuity from father to son that suggests a continuation of Kim Jong Il's key policies.
"We suffered the greatest loss in the history of our nation as a result of the sudden, unexpected and tragic loss of the great leader Kim Jong Il," he said in the interview Monday at Mansudae Assembly Hall, seat of the North Korean legislative body.
"But still, we are not worried a bit," he added, "because we know that we are being led by comrade Kim Jong Un, who is fully prepared to carry on the heritage created by the great Gen. Kim Jong Il."
Despite Yang's assertion of a lengthy behind-the-scenes role for Kim Jong Un, the world was introduced to the heir only in September 2010, prior to which he had been kept out of the public eye for most of his life. Though still in his 20s, he was quickly promoted to four-star general and named a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea.
The new ruler's youth and quick ascension to power have raised questions in foreign capitals about how ready he is to rule over this nation of 24 million with a nuclear program as well as chronic trouble feeding all its people.
Yang said he had no concerns about Kim's ability to lead.
"The respected comrade Kim Jong Un had long assisted the great Gen. Kim Jong Il," he told AP. "It's not a secret that he has helped the great general in many different aspects ? not only in military affairs but also the economy and other areas as well."
Daily life in this cold, somber capital has begun to return to normal one month after Kim's death, reportedly from a heart attack while riding on his private train.
The white mourning bouquets and massive portraits of the departed leader have been cleared from Pyongyang's main buildings and monuments. People are busy getting back to daily life, with children whizzing down icy slopes on wooden sleds and workers running to catch morning buses and trams as the Kim Jong Un ode "Footsteps" blares over loudspeakers.
Vast Kim Il Sung Square, where a sea of mourners converged after Kim's death, was ghostly quiet except for a few people who scurried quickly across the frigid plaza.
In recent weeks, as North Koreans filled the capital's streets with their emotive mourning and the government staged elaborate funeral proceedings, party and military officials moved quickly to install Kim's son as "supreme leader" of the people, party and military.
A soft-spoken octogenarian who is vice president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly and a standing member of the powerful Political Bureau of the Communist party's Central Committee, Yang has long-standing ties with the Kim family that stretch back to his close alliance with the nation's founder, Kim Il Sung.
During a 2010 interview with Associated Press Television News in Pyongyang, he provided the first confirmation by a government official that Kim Jong Un would eventually become the nation's next leader.
"He knows what the exact intention of the great Gen. Kim Jong Il was," he said Monday.
His comments this week indicated there would be little change to major policies laid out by Kim Jong Un's father in the three years before his death. Yang said the new leader was focused on a "knowledge-based" economy and looking at economic reforms enacted by other nations, including China.
The North has increasingly looked to China for guidance on how to revitalize its moribund economy, particularly as South Korea, Japan and other nations have frozen trade and aid to the North amid concerns about its nuclear ambitions.
Little is known about Kim Jong Un's background and experience, though North Koreans have been told he studied at Kim Il Sung Military University and was involved in military operations such as the November 2010 artillery attack on a South Korean island that killed four South Koreans.
Earlier this month, North Korea's state-run broadcaster aired a documentary about the new leader that began filling in some blanks from before his public debut.
The footage shows him observing the April 2009 launch of a long-range rocket and quotes him threatening to wage war against any nation attempting to intercept the rocket, which North Korea claimed was carrying a communications satellite but the United States, South Korea and Japan say was really a test of its long-range missile technology.
It was the first indication of his involvement in that controversial launch.
Yet if Kim Jong Un was playing a prominent behind-the-scenes role prior to 2010, his training period would have been much shorter than that of his Kim Jong Il, who spent 20 years working under his own father, Kim Il Sung. Even after his father's death, Kim Jong Il observed a three-year mourning period before formally assuming leadership.
___
Follow AP's Korea Bureau Chief Jean H. Lee at twitter.com/newsjean and Chief Asia Photographer David Guttenfelder at twitter.com/dguttenfelder.
>>>paula deen
's confession that she has type two diabetes has reignited the debate over diet and the potentially disease. deen is known for her down home southern cooking, lots of butter. he fired back at critics who say you are what you eat.
>>always eat in moderation. you know people see me on tv two and three times day, and they see me cooking all these wonderfully, southern, fattening dishes. that's only
30 days
out of 365, and it's for entertainment.
>>dr. gain s a kribtser. peop thank you. she is putting in the butter and giving the audience the southern cooking that is dangerous.
>>definitely. she is
still standing
by her cooking but saying in moderation. everyone can't eat that way. it's interesting because not only diabetes, that's what we're talking about today, but with that much better, with that much salt, you have to worry about strokes and heart attacks. it's opening the door to health problems.
>>you can still have some good buttery
macaroni and cheese
in moderation, doesn't fly. it's probably something you should skip on.
>>obviously, everything in moderatimo moderation is preferred, but there's some people with diabetes who can't eat it at all. if you have a choice, the low-fat option would be better.
>>she's a had her critics. he said she was the worst, most dangerous person in the america. she should
think twice
before telling an already obese nation that it's okay to eat food that is killing us. you're a doctor. you see people every day that get the news that they have type two diabetes. many of these are african-americans,
american indians
, his pan pipanics, how do you convince people?
>>like you said, aside from the genetic aspect which is family history, that you can't really change and ethnicity, the one thing you can change is your diet and your
weight control
. some people say i'm going to
die happy
eating my whatever it is i love to eat. what i do say to them is death is not the only option. you can live a long time.
>>you can live miserably.
>>exactly.
>>she was diagnosed three years ago.
al roker
asked her why did she wait and she said she wanted to bring something forward. she's teamed up with this drug maker.
b.b. king
has promoted something and
patti labelle
. if this is made more complicated by diet, doesn't this make your job difficult when people say i can get a drug for this.
>>i hope people take away the fact you still have to work on
weight loss
and change your lifestyle and don't think, i can still throw three sticks of butter in it and if i take my pill, i'll be okay. it's not as simple as that.
>>her sons were with us on the
today show
. they made a
low fat
lasagna. it was delicious. she and her sons say that's her focus. hopefully that's the case. thank you.
University of Minnesota biologists replicate key evolutionary stepPublic release date: 17-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jeff Falk jfalk@umn.edu 612-626-1720 University of Minnesota
More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on the Earth's surface began forming multicellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. Just how that happened is a question that has eluded evolutionary biologists.
But scientists in the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences have replicated that key step in the laboratory using natural selection and common brewer's yeast, which are single-celled organisms. The yeast "evolved" into multicellular clusters that work together cooperatively, reproduce and adapt to their environment in essence, precursors to life on Earth as it is today.
Their achievement is published in the January 16 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It all started about two years ago with a casual comment over coffee that bridging the famous multi-cellularity gap would be "just about the coolest thing we could do," recall postdoctoral researcher Will Ratcliff and associate professor Michael Travisano, both from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior.
So they decided to give it a try. Then came the big surprise. It wasn't actually that difficult. Using yeast cells, culture media and a centrifuge, it only took them one experiment conducted over about 60 days, says Travisano, who is senior author on the PNAS paper.
"I don't think anyone had ever tried it before," says lead author Ratcliff. "There aren't many scientists doing experimental evolution, and they're trying to answer questions about evolution, not recreate it."
Despite their modesty, the achievement has earned praise and admiration from evolutionary biologists around the world.
"To understand why the world is full of plants and animals, including humans, we need to know how one-celled organisms made the switch to living as a group, as multicelled organisms," said Sam Scheiner, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Environmental Biology. "This study is the first to experimentally observe that transition, providing a look at an event that took place hundreds of millions of years ago."
Funding for the research was obtained in February 2011, with coauthors R. Ford Denison and Mark Borrello, adjunct and associate professors, respectively, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior.
Ratcliff and Travisano gave the scientific community a glimpse of their discovery at a conference last summer and have subsequently been invited to talk about it at other meetings. The PNAS article represents the first time full details about the research have been disclosed. "The article provides us with the first opportunity to show the breadth of evolutionary change that we've observed," Travisano says.
In essence, here's how the experiments worked. The two chose brewer's yeast or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a species of yeast used since ancient times to make bread and beer, because it is abundant in nature and grows easily. They added it to a nutrient-rich culture media and allowed the cells to grow for a day in test tubes. Then they used a centrifuge to stratify the contents by weight. As the mixture settled, cell clusters landed on the bottom of the tubes faster because they are heavier. They removed the clusters, transferred them to fresh media, and grew them up again. Sixty cycles later, the clusters now hundreds of cells looked roughly like spherical snowflakes.
Analysis showed that the clusters were not just groups of random cells that adhered to each other, but related cells that remained attached following cell division. That was significant because it meant they were genetically similar, which promotes cooperation. When the clusters reached a critical size, some cells essentially committed suicide (apoptosis) to allow offspring to separate. The offspring reproduced only after they attained the size of their parents.
"A cluster alone isn't multiellular," Ratcliff said. "But when cells in a cluster cooperate, make sacrifices for the common good, and adapt to change, that's an evolutionary transition to multicellularity."
In order for multicellular organisms to form, most cells need to sacrifice their ability to reproduce, an altruistic action that favors the whole but not the individual, Ratcliff said. For example, all cells in the human body are essentially a support system that allows sperm and eggs to pass DNA along to the next generation. Thus, multicellularity is by its nature extremely cooperative. "Some of the best competitors in nature are those that engage in cooperation, and our experiment bears that out," said Travisano.
Evolutionary biologists have estimated that multicellularity evolved independently in about 25 groups. Travisano and Ratcliff wonder why it didn't evolve more often in nature, since it's not that difficult to recreate it in a lab. Considering that trillions of one-celled organisms lived on the Earth for millions of years, it seems as if it should have, Ratcliff said.
Maybe that's a question they will answer in the future, using the fossil record for thousands of generations of their multicellular clusters, which is stored in a freezer in Travisano's lab. Since the frozen samples contain multiple lines that independently became multicellular, they can compare them to learn if similar or different mechanisms and genes were responsible in each case, Travisano said.
The research duo's next steps will be to look at the role of multicellularity in cancer, aging and other critical areas of biology.
"Our multicellular yeast are a valuable resource for investigating a wide variety of medically and biologically important topics," Travisano said. "Cancer was recently described as a fossil from the origin of multicellularity, which can be directly investigated with the yeast system. Similarly the origins of aging, development, and the evolution of complex morphologies are open to direct experimental investigation that would otherwise be difficult or impossible."
###
Travisano joined the College of Biological Sciences faculty in 2007. The multicellularity discovery adds to his record of "firsts" in experimental evolution over the past 25 years. Before joining the Travisano lab group, Ratcliff earned his Ph.D. at the College of Biological Sciences, with Denison as his adviser. Ratcliff has become something of a rock star on the academic conference circuit, and he won the W.D. Hamilton Award for best student presentation at Evolution 2011, the premier conference for evolutionary biologists.
[ | 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.
University of Minnesota biologists replicate key evolutionary stepPublic release date: 17-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jeff Falk jfalk@umn.edu 612-626-1720 University of Minnesota
More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on the Earth's surface began forming multicellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. Just how that happened is a question that has eluded evolutionary biologists.
But scientists in the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences have replicated that key step in the laboratory using natural selection and common brewer's yeast, which are single-celled organisms. The yeast "evolved" into multicellular clusters that work together cooperatively, reproduce and adapt to their environment in essence, precursors to life on Earth as it is today.
Their achievement is published in the January 16 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It all started about two years ago with a casual comment over coffee that bridging the famous multi-cellularity gap would be "just about the coolest thing we could do," recall postdoctoral researcher Will Ratcliff and associate professor Michael Travisano, both from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior.
So they decided to give it a try. Then came the big surprise. It wasn't actually that difficult. Using yeast cells, culture media and a centrifuge, it only took them one experiment conducted over about 60 days, says Travisano, who is senior author on the PNAS paper.
"I don't think anyone had ever tried it before," says lead author Ratcliff. "There aren't many scientists doing experimental evolution, and they're trying to answer questions about evolution, not recreate it."
Despite their modesty, the achievement has earned praise and admiration from evolutionary biologists around the world.
"To understand why the world is full of plants and animals, including humans, we need to know how one-celled organisms made the switch to living as a group, as multicelled organisms," said Sam Scheiner, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Environmental Biology. "This study is the first to experimentally observe that transition, providing a look at an event that took place hundreds of millions of years ago."
Funding for the research was obtained in February 2011, with coauthors R. Ford Denison and Mark Borrello, adjunct and associate professors, respectively, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior.
Ratcliff and Travisano gave the scientific community a glimpse of their discovery at a conference last summer and have subsequently been invited to talk about it at other meetings. The PNAS article represents the first time full details about the research have been disclosed. "The article provides us with the first opportunity to show the breadth of evolutionary change that we've observed," Travisano says.
In essence, here's how the experiments worked. The two chose brewer's yeast or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a species of yeast used since ancient times to make bread and beer, because it is abundant in nature and grows easily. They added it to a nutrient-rich culture media and allowed the cells to grow for a day in test tubes. Then they used a centrifuge to stratify the contents by weight. As the mixture settled, cell clusters landed on the bottom of the tubes faster because they are heavier. They removed the clusters, transferred them to fresh media, and grew them up again. Sixty cycles later, the clusters now hundreds of cells looked roughly like spherical snowflakes.
Analysis showed that the clusters were not just groups of random cells that adhered to each other, but related cells that remained attached following cell division. That was significant because it meant they were genetically similar, which promotes cooperation. When the clusters reached a critical size, some cells essentially committed suicide (apoptosis) to allow offspring to separate. The offspring reproduced only after they attained the size of their parents.
"A cluster alone isn't multiellular," Ratcliff said. "But when cells in a cluster cooperate, make sacrifices for the common good, and adapt to change, that's an evolutionary transition to multicellularity."
In order for multicellular organisms to form, most cells need to sacrifice their ability to reproduce, an altruistic action that favors the whole but not the individual, Ratcliff said. For example, all cells in the human body are essentially a support system that allows sperm and eggs to pass DNA along to the next generation. Thus, multicellularity is by its nature extremely cooperative. "Some of the best competitors in nature are those that engage in cooperation, and our experiment bears that out," said Travisano.
Evolutionary biologists have estimated that multicellularity evolved independently in about 25 groups. Travisano and Ratcliff wonder why it didn't evolve more often in nature, since it's not that difficult to recreate it in a lab. Considering that trillions of one-celled organisms lived on the Earth for millions of years, it seems as if it should have, Ratcliff said.
Maybe that's a question they will answer in the future, using the fossil record for thousands of generations of their multicellular clusters, which is stored in a freezer in Travisano's lab. Since the frozen samples contain multiple lines that independently became multicellular, they can compare them to learn if similar or different mechanisms and genes were responsible in each case, Travisano said.
The research duo's next steps will be to look at the role of multicellularity in cancer, aging and other critical areas of biology.
"Our multicellular yeast are a valuable resource for investigating a wide variety of medically and biologically important topics," Travisano said. "Cancer was recently described as a fossil from the origin of multicellularity, which can be directly investigated with the yeast system. Similarly the origins of aging, development, and the evolution of complex morphologies are open to direct experimental investigation that would otherwise be difficult or impossible."
###
Travisano joined the College of Biological Sciences faculty in 2007. The multicellularity discovery adds to his record of "firsts" in experimental evolution over the past 25 years. Before joining the Travisano lab group, Ratcliff earned his Ph.D. at the College of Biological Sciences, with Denison as his adviser. Ratcliff has become something of a rock star on the academic conference circuit, and he won the W.D. Hamilton Award for best student presentation at Evolution 2011, the premier conference for evolutionary biologists.
[ | 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.
The rotation of the Earth has defined time for as long as time has been kept, but keeping up with all of Earth's little quirks by adding and subtracting an occasional leap second is getting tiring. Timekeepers could vote Thursday to rely solely on atomic clocks.?
After millenniums as humanity's timekeeper, Earth may be about to get a pink slip.
Skip to next paragraph
Delegates to the International Telecommunication Union's Radiocommunication Assembly are slated to vote as early as Thursday on a proposal to scrap the leap second ? an occasional tweak to atomic clocks designed to sync them with time defined by Earth's rotation.
A "yes" vote, which many expect, would leave atomic clocks as the sole international standard for determining the length of a second, and by extension, a day. For the first time in human history, the length of a day would be uncoupled from Earth's day-night cycle.
The leap second has been used since 1972 to adjust for a long-term slowdown in Earth's rotation. The slowdown is inevitable, but the pace is irregular.
Advocates for the change argue that leap seconds require fiddling with atomic clocks at these irregular intervals, raising the prospect that human error could crash large-scale computer networks, cell-phone systems, and other vital pieces of today's high-tech infrastructure. They rely on highly precise timing to operate.
Critics counter that the leap-second system has worked well since 1972, when the parallel timekeeping process was adopted internationally. Moreover, they say, killing off the leap second merely kicks the need to adjust the clocks down the road, when the gap between the two approaches would be even wider.
Whatever the merits of the case, researchers trace the two-track timing system to its underlying problem: Until the advent of atomic clocks, "the length of a second was not well defined," says John Lowe, group leader for the time and frequency services division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo.
At least in the US, all time was local until the late 1800s. People checked their watches against the time on Town Hall's clock, itself calibrated against local solar time with some tweaking to account for Earth's slightly elliptical orbit around the sun.
With transcontinental railroads came the concept of standard time and time zones. Yet that required a standard unit of time that would allow far-flung stations and conductors to synchronize clocks. That assignment was given to the second, which was defined as 1/86,400 of an average solar day.
As timekeeping grew more precise, however, it became clear that Earth's rotation wasn't constant, as previously assumed. Not only did it vary, but it was slowing.
By international agreement in 1972, solar time and atomic time have coexisted, with the periodic leap second added to atomic clocks to keep the two approaches in sync.
For astronomers, navigators, or those who map or study features of the Earth's crust, solar time as a recognized standard works well, says Geoff Chester, spokesman for the US Naval Observatory in Washington.
For these groups, "ideally you would like to keep leap seconds," he says. Losing the leap second "wouldn't shut them down, it would just make more work for them" as they corrected their timekeeping against an exclusively atomic-clock standard.
Meanwhile, losing the leap second would streamline work and could reduce the risk of outages for the telecommunications business or people who operate large-scale computer networks, which require precise timing to function, Mr. Chester adds.
Unlike the need for a leap day, which comes predictably every four years, the need to add or subtract a leap second comes randomly, with at most six months' warning.
This irregular pattern means humans must intervene to make the change.
"You risk breaking critical infrastructure every time you do a leap second," Chester says.
The swap of who tweaks their time and who doesn't isn't lost on Ken Seidelmann, former director of astrometry at the US Naval Observatory and now a professor at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
"Leap seconds are an inconvenience to the telecommunications people, but there are many other users of time who should be considered," he told the Associated Press.
In some ways, the break with the sun has been occurring for some time, adds NIST's Mr. Lowe. He notes that because of the development of time zones and daylight saving time, noon local time as the clock ticks rarely coincides with the sun reaching its highest point in the sky that day.
"We don't observe high noon as noon anymore anyway," he acknowledges.
Which probably would have suited Gary Cooper just fine.
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Public release date: 17-Jan-2012
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