Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/05/happy-birthday-the-rock/
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Friday, May 3, 2013
Asia stocks rise on US jobs data
BANGKOK (AP) ? Asian stock markets rose Friday, finding renewed strength from a fall in U.S. jobless benefit claims and an interest rate cut by the European Central Bank intended to boost the region's ebbing economy.
Investors jittery over the state of the U.S. economy took heart from a U.S. Labor Department report that said applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level in more than four years. That calmed fears that intensified Wednesday following the release of reports showing lackluster hiring and factory output.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.7 percent to 22,823.70. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 added 0.1 percent to 5,134.60. South Korea's Kospi rose 0.2 percent to 1,960.80. Benchmarks in the Philippines and Thailand rose while those in New Zealand and Singapore fell.
"The market is basically riding on the U.S. market's rise today," said Francis Lun, chief economist at GE Oriental Financial Group in Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese stocks posted sharp gains, but that was mostly due to bargain-hunting after a sharp fall, Lun said.
Markets in Japan were closed for a public holiday.
An interest rate cut by the European Central Bank gave markets in Europe a small lift Thursday. The central bank, which sets interest rates for the 17 European Union countries that use the euro, cut the rate by a quarter of a percentage point to a record low of 0.5 percent.
The decision was widely anticipated following a grim run of economic data for the eurozone, which is expected to stay in recession when first-quarter figures are released later this month.
"Importantly, core countries have been increasingly affected by weakening growth prospects and it remains to be seen whether the German economy can rebound strongly any time soon," said analysts at Credit Agricole CIB in a market commentary.
Among individual stocks, Hong Kong-listed property and consumer shares posted solid gains. Evergrande Real Estate Group rose 4.1 percent. Instant noodle maker Tingyi Holding Corp. rose 3.2 percent.
The Labor Department report and higher profits from CBS, Facebook and other companies sent Wall Street higher Thursday. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.9 percent to 14,831.58. The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 0.9 percent to 1,597.59. The Nasdaq composite index climbed 1.3 percent to 3,340.62.
On Friday, the U.S. government's closely watched monthly employment report will be released.
Benchmark oil for June delivery was down 19 cents to $93.80 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $2.96, or 3.3 percent, to finish at $93.99 a barrel on the Nymex on Thursday, the biggest one-day gain for crude since November.
In currencies, the euro rose to $1.3076 from $1.3058 late Thursday in New York. The dollar rose slightly to 98 yen from 97.96 yen.
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Thursday, May 2, 2013
Was Africa the motherland of dinosaur predecessors?
The ancestors of dinosaurs might have established themselves in present-day Tanzania and Zambia, suggest newly discovered fossils.
People stand near an 26-foot replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex standing between the 9th green and the 10th tee at the Sunshine Coast resort course in south Queensland, Australia, in 2012.
Dennis Passa/AP/File
EnlargeNewly discovered fossils from 10 million years after the world's largest known extinction indicate that dinosaurs' ancestors might have taken hold in present-day Tanzania and Zambia, millions of years before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and much earlier than dinosaur relatives are seen in the fossil record elsewhere.?
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Earlier studies, mostly based on fossil records from Russia and South Africa, led scientists to think that dinosaur predecessors failed to survive after a mass extinction some some?252 million years ago,?which killed off 90 percent of Earth's species.?
"The fossil record from the Karoo of South Africa, for example, is a good representation of four-legged land animals across southern Pangea before the extinction," said Christian Sidor, a paleontologist at the University of Washington, in a press release. "But after the event, animals weren?t as uniformly and widely distributed as before. We had to go looking in some fairly unorthodox places.?
Sidor authored a recent study on dinosaurs' origins, published in?the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Drawing upon fossils unearthed from Tanzania, Zambia, and Antarctica since 2003, and current fossil records, Sidor and his colleagues generated two profiles of animals living about five million years before and 10 million years after the mass extinction.
For example, Dicynodon, a four-legged creature with a body resembling that of a fat lizard and a head resembling a turtle's, dominated the southern region of supercontinent Pangea before the extinction event, an area that comprises present-day Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, and India.
After the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, populations of Dicynodon, along with many other herbivores, decreased dramatically.
The changing climate allowed new creatures to emerge and thrive. Archosaurs were a?group of plant-eating reptiles whose living relatives are birds and crocodilians. In its news release, the National Science Foundation, one of the study's two sponsors, said scientists are interested in archosaurs?because they were believed to be the predecessors of dinosaur-related animals such as Asilisaurus, a dinosaur-like animal, and Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a dog-sized creature with a five-foot tail that may be the earliest dinosaur.
"Early archosaurs being found mainly in Tanzania is an example of how fragmented communities became after the extinction event,? Sidor said in the University of Washington press release.
These findings, according to the co-authors, suggested that "archosaur diversification was more intimately related to recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction than previously suspected.?
In an interview with?Discovery News,?co-author and geologist Sterling Nesbitt of the Field Museum of Natural History said "true dinosaurs first show up about 230 million years ago, from what is now Argentina. We think that dinosaurs first evolved in Gondwanaland ? including Africa, South America, India, Madagascar, Australia, Antarctica." ?
The study also revealed that before the extinction, 35 percent of four-legged species were found in two or more of the five areas studied, with some species' habitats stretching 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers), encompassing the Tanzanian and South African basins.
Ten million years after the extinction, just seven percent of four-legged species were found in two or more regions, suggesting that?there was a geographical clustering of the animals.
"The expeditions by this team of researchers to little-explored Permian and Triassic aged depositional basins in Africa and Antarctica, which form part of the supercontinent Gondwana, has greatly enhanced our understanding of the distribution of land-living vertebrates that lived more than 200 million years ago,"?Bruce Rubidge, a dinosaur specialist at the University of Witwatersrand, told Discovery News.
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Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Did someone fire missiles at a Russian jetliner flying over Syria?
A Russian airliner with 160 passengers on board reportedly had to take evasive action after being fired upon by two anti-aircraft missiles over Syria Monday, prompting Russian aviation authorities to advise all Russian planes to avoid airspace over combat zones.
Some aviation experts say they are puzzled by the report that a Russian Airbus 320 jetliner, flying at 9,800 meters (about 6 miles) altitude, was attacked and managed to maneuver to avoid the two missiles, both of which exploded within a few hundred meters of the plane.
"We're hearing about this civil plane being attacked in Syrian airspace, but there's not enough information to figure out what happened," says Oleg Panteleyev, chief analyst with Aviaport.ru, an online aviation news agency.
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"A modern civil airliner has minimal capacity for maneuver, it's simply not built to evade ground fire. The main issue, which needs to be sorted out right now, is whether there are some groupings in Syria who are armed with these weapons and want to shoot down passenger planes. Meanwhile, it's absolutely correct to recommend that planes divert around Syria. It just costs a few minutes, and it's no big problem," he adds.
Rosaviatsia, the Russian version of the US Federal Aviation Administration, said it was investigating claims by the crew of the NordWind Airlines charter, which was on a night flight from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to the Russian Volga city of Kazan. The crew said they "spotted signs of combat activities which, they believed, could pose a threat to the safety of the plane."
According to Russian press reports, the plane's pilot noticed "flashes on the ground" and reacted by gaining altitude. Two missiles subsequently exploded just a few hundred meters beneath the plane, and the pilot quickly changed course to avoid being hit by fragments.
The usually reliable Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified official Russian source as saying that "the Syrian side" confirms that "unidentified people" had fired two surface-to-air missiles at the plane, though it was unclear whether they knew it was a Russian aircraft.
Russia's foreign ministry said in a statement that it will "take the necessary emergency measures to clear up the details of the story and work in cooperation with the Syrian authorities."
But some aviation experts say they are skeptical that anything of the kind could have happened, and suspect the event may have been "staged," perhaps for political reasons.
"This is a fairy tale. Nothing like that could have happened, it's just been staged," says Magomed Tolboyev, one of Russia's most famous test pilots. "It's too silly to discuss."
But others say it could have happened and, if so, it's a very serious warning for civilian aircraft to avoid flying over Syria.
"A passenger plane has no means of preventing a missile attack, but it does have a system that warns of approaching objects and automatically makes the plane go up or down in response," says Valery Entanaltsev, executive director of the Fund for Developing Aviation Infrastructure, an industry-supported public organization.
"It's not clear who was behind this shooting, but it needs to be thoroughly investigated. Maybe it was a provocation. It's a very worrisome development," he says.
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/did-someone-fire-missiles-russian-jetliner-flying-over-152400310.html
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Cern closes in on antigravity answer
30 April 2013
Last updated at 13:38 ET
Researchers at Cern in Switzerland have proved the merits of a way to test antimatter as a source of the long-postulated "anti-gravity".
Antimatter particles are the "mirror image" of normal matter, but with opposite electric charge.
How antimatter responds to gravity remains a mystery, however; it may "fall up" rather than down.
Now researchers reporting in Nature Communications have made strides toward finally resolving that notion.
Antimatter presents one of the biggest mysteries in physics, in that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created at the Universe's beginning.
Continue reading the main story?Start Quote
End Quote Jeffrey Hangst Alpha experiment spokespersonIt's the first time that anyone has even been able to talk about doing this?
Yet when the two meet, they destroy each other in what is called annihilation, turning into pure light.
Why the Universe we see today is made overwhelmingly of matter, with only tiny amounts of antimatter, has prompted a number of studies to try to find some difference between the two.
Tests at Cern's LHCb experiment and elsewhere, for example, have been looking for evidence that exotic particles decay more often into matter than antimatter.
Last week, the LHCb team reported a slight difference in the decay of particles called Bs mesons - but still not nearly enough to explain the matter mystery.
One significant difference between the two may be the way they interact with gravity - antimatter may be repelled by matter, rather than attracted to it.
But it is a difference that no one has been able to test - until the advent of Cern's Alpha experiment.
Getting annihilatedAlpha is an acronym for Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus - an experiment designed to build and trap antimatter "atoms".
Just as hydrogen is made of a proton and an electron, antihydrogen is an atom made of their antimatter counterparts antiprotons and positrons.
The trick is not just in making it, but in making it hang around long enough to study it - before it bumps into any matter and annihilates.
In 2010 the Alpha team did just that, and in 2011 they showed they could keep antihydrogen atoms trapped for 1,000 seconds.
The team has now gone back to their existing data on 434 antihydrogen atoms, with the antigravity question in mind.
"In the course of all the experiments, we release (the antihydrogen atoms) and look for their annihilation," said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the experiment.
"We've gone through those data to see if we can see any influence of gravity on the positions at which they annihilate - looking for atoms to fall for the short amount of time they exist before they hit the wall," he told BBC News.
The team has made a statistical study of which antihydrogen atoms went where - up or down - and they are able to put a first set of constraints on how the anti-atoms respond to gravity.
The best limits they can suggest is that they are less than 110 times more susceptible to gravity than normal atoms, and less than 65 times that strength, but in the opposite direction: antigravity. In short, the question remains unanswered - so far.
"It's not a very interesting band yet but it's the first time that anyone has even been able to talk about doing this," said Prof Hangst.
"We actually have a machine that can address this question, that's what's exciting for us here, and we know how to get from here to the interesting regime."
The Alpha experiment's main task is to study the energy levels within antihydrogen, to spot any differences between it and the hydrogen that physicists know to extraordinary precision.
Prof Hangst said the antigravity measurement was just an "interesting sideshow" for the experiment.
"We have a lot of options for studying antimatter and this is a new one that has a future."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22355187#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Saturday, April 27, 2013
NY City sues BP over Deepwater Horizon spill: Comptroller
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City said on Friday it sued BP Plc for more than $39 million of losses it claims beneficiaries of the city's pension funds sustained due to BP's "misconduct and fraudulent behavior" linked to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
"BP failed to disclose to shareowners the serious risks involved in its offshore drilling operation," Comptroller John Liu said. "After the spill began, it misleadingly attempted to minimize the extent of the damage and the cost to shareowners."
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges BP failed to disclose facts about the dangers involved in offshore drilling operations, the extent of the leak and the estimated cost of the cleanup costs.
BP declined to comment on New York's lawsuit.
"The estimated transactional investment losses to City pension beneficiaries caused by BP's misconduct and fraudulent behavior exceed $39 million," the Comptroller's office said in the news release.
BP's New York-traded stock was down 0.1 percent at $42.2 after the news, about in line with the overall market. The broad based S&P 500 was down 0.2 percent.
The 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 rig workers and spilled 4 million barrels of oil in the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.
BP has estimated it could spend more than $42 billion to cover clean-up, fines and other liabilities. It has been selling a variety of assets to help cover its costs.
A trial for direct damages related to the spill got underway in February. The trial is being held with no jury before Judge Carl Barbier at federal court in New Orleans.
A U.S. civil trial has already been set for August 2014, regarding accusations that BP committed fraud by misleading shareholders before and after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill about its ability to respond to the accident.
(Reporting by Edward Krudy and Hilary Russ; Editing by Vicki Allen, Andre Grenon and Bob burgdorfer)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/york-city-sues-bp-over-deepwater-horizon-spill-163656872.html
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Global Health: In Central Africa, Bitter Cassava Is Linked to Mental Deficits
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Children who do not show physical symptoms of konzo, a crippling disease caused by the cyanide in improperly prepared cassava, may still have mental impairments.
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