Facebook Home hands-on (video)

We've taken a closer look at the HTC First hardware, so let's dig into the firmware side -- namely, the Facebook Home user interface featured on the First. As we heard prior to the event, Home is essentially a skinned version of Android OS that unsurprisingly offers a deeper amount of integration with the social network. As the name of the phone implies, this isn't going to be the same one-and-done deal that we've seen on other devices bearing the unofficial title of "Facebook Phone"; Home is likely here for the foreseeable future, so we'll go more in-depth on the UI and our first impressions.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/V2V_b5cxa6I/

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Aid groups: US should send cash, not food, abroad

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, former President Bill Clinton apologized for long championing food aid policies that helped Arkansas rice growers but made it harder for the impoverished country to grow its own crop.

Floods of imports of U.S. rice had put many of the country's growers out of business, and Clinton called his policies a "mistake."

Three years later, aid groups are pushing President Barack Obama to make the kind of change Clinton argued was needed and send cash in lieu of crops.

The White House won't say whether Obama's budget proposal, scheduled to come out next week, will suggest changing the way foreign food aid is distributed. But food aid groups, farm groups and their allies in Congress are preparing for the possibility Obama will tackle the issue in his second term.

At issue is whether the government should ship U.S.-grown food overseas to aid developing countries and starving people or simply help those countries with cash to buy food. Currently, the United States is shipping food abroad under the "Food for Peace" program started almost six decades ago by President Dwight Eisenhower to help farmers get rid of food surpluses and boost the country's image during the Cold War.

This approach has long been a profitable enterprise for American farmers and shippers, and those groups are strongly opposing any changes to the program.

But several food aid groups say times have changed and argue that shipping bulk food abroad is inefficient and expensive when government budgets are tight and developing countries need every dollar. Particularly controversial is the process of what is called "monetization," or selling the food once it arrives overseas to finance development projects. A 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office found monetization cost the U.S. an extra $219 million over a three years, money that could have been used for other development projects.

Aid groups are split on the point, since some finance their activities through monetization. But major aid groups like Oxfam and CARE say the process can destroy local agriculture by dumping cheap crops on the market at a price too low for local farmers to compete.

The food aid groups are pushing Obama to shift all or part of the average $1.8 billion spent on the program annually to other cash development accounts. If the administration does propose change, it could be in for a tough political battle.

Worried that an overhaul of the Food for Peace program could come in Obama's budget, a bipartisan group of 21 senators wrote a letter to the president in February asking him not to make changes.

"American agriculture is one of the few U.S. business sectors to produce a trade surplus, exporting $108 billion in farm goods in 2010," the senators wrote. "During this time of economic distress, we should maintain support for the areas of our economy that are growing."

The letter was signed by Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, the Democratic chairman of the Senate subcommittee that controls agriculture spending. The top Republicans on both of those panels signed the letter as well, as did Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski of Maryland.

Farm groups say the program is also a public relations tool for the United States.

"Bags of U.S.-grown food bearing the U.S. flag and stamped as "From the American People" serve as ambassadors of our nation's goodwill, which can help to address the root causes of instability," several farm and shipping groups wrote in a February letter to Obama.

"These are the kinds of things you don't want to make dramatic quick changes to," says Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, one of the groups that signed the letter.

But aid groups say change is a long time coming. Gawain Kripke of Oxfam says his group estimates that by spending the same amount of money, the United States could provide assistance for 17 million more poor people by changing the way the aid is distributed.

Blake Selzer of CARE says he is encouraged that food aid is being discussed.

"A lot of people don't understand our food aid program," he says. "The more daylight this is given the more people will say to themselves, is this the best way to use our tax dollars?"

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/aid-groups-us-send-cash-195948893.html

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A New Microchip for Early Cancer Detection

Using a plastic chip, doctors may soon be able to detect a much wider range of cancer cells in their patients' blood, according to a study published yesterday in Science Transitional Medicine. Their work focuses on a new version of the CTC-Chip, a technology first developed in 2007 to detect circulating tumor cells, the cells that leave a tumor and travel through the bloodstream to metastasize in other parts of the body.

The original lab-on-a-chip, no bigger than a microscope slide, works by passing blood samples through a set of nearly 80,000 posts, each barely the size of a human hair and coated with antibodies that attract circulating tumor cells, or CTCs. Once the sample has passed through, researchers can examine the chip and count CTCs to see how far the cancer has progressed. The problem until now has been that chips rely on the presence of the cell-surface protein EpCAM to capture CTCs. But some cancer cells?including those found in melanoma and certain types of breast cancer?have a reduced number of EpCAMs or lack them completely, making them hard to catch.

The new device, made of multiple chips, gets around this problem by targeting the blood cells in a patient's sample rather than the cancer cells. The first chip in the system skims off the tiny red blood cells and platelets so that only the CTCs and white blood cells flow into the second. This second chip draws the remaining cells into a single-file line, where tiny magnetic beads, each about the size of a bacterium, grab surface proteins specific to white blood cells. Finally, a magnetic field attracts the pairs of white blood cells and magnetic beads, leaving just the CTCs to be collected.

Mehmet Toner, a biomedical engineer and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School who worked on both models of the chip, says the new generation makes three major improvements.

First, he tells PM, the chip has a much higher throughput. For early cancer detection, when cancer cells are scarce, a chip needs to be able to process about 10 to 20 milliliters of blood. The first chip could process only 1 to 2 milliliters per hour, meaning hours of processing for a single test. The new chip can process 10 milliliters of blood per hour.

The new chip can also find CTCs that lack the EpCAM protein, which escaped the earlier model. "Our original vision was that most cancers are epithelial and had EpCAMs," Toner says, "but it turns out that you need different flavors of antibody for different stages of cancer?cells can change their phenotype," or composition, "with time and treatment. So looking for a specific antibody on the surface of the cancer cell was a little bit na?ve." Now the antigen-independent chip can detect cells from virtually any kind of cancer.

Finally, the new chip preserves CTCs in an "unaltered and pristine state" instead of letting them get stuck to tiny posts on the microchip. With these cells, Toner says, doctors can do precise pathological and genetic studies, telling them much more about the progression of their patients' cancers. These three improvements, Toner says, could make the chips much better at detecting cancer early.

"AIDS is a good analogy for cancer treatment," Toner says. "In this country, it's a chronic disease. We have a test, we can diagnosis it and treat it and monitor the patient. You have a very individual level of monitoring and diagnosis. We can't do this with cancer. In underdeveloped countries, they detect AIDS too late and bombard the patient with toxic drugs, and still barely anyone survives. We are treating cancer in the West like they treat AIDS in Third World countries. We wait too long to find it, and treatment is expensive, and survival rates are low."

Toner also hopes the chip's relative ease of production?it is plastic instead of glass and uses commercially available magnetic beads?will make its transition to the mass market a quick one. The developers are working with Johnson & Johnson to distribute the product, which will soon undergo clinical trials. "We are hopeful and excited," he says, "that this will become a reality in the very-near term."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/breakthroughs/a-new-microchip-for-early-cancer-detection-15306261?src=rss

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How Chess Got Its Timeless Style

You know a chess piece when you see one. They might be the most recognizable objects in gaming. But they didn't always look that way. In fact, for the longest time they didn't even look a way. The Smithsonian Magazine dug into the roots of that iconic design and it's not as old as you might think. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/eN7ks8a3rp4/how-chess-got-its-timeless-style

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Court moves on gay marriage could create a legal mess

Maira Garcia (R) and Maria Vargas wait to get married at the Brooklyn City Clerk's office on July 24, 2011 in New??

If, as many legal experts predict, the Defense of Marriage Act is struck down by the Supreme Court, advocates behind the decadeslong movement for gay rights will have won a major victory. But the decision could also create a dense legal maze for gay and lesbian married couples, one that would surely lead to more lawsuits that could make their way back to the Supreme Court.

And striking down DOMA would not just affect same-sex couples, but their employers. Basically, said Jonathan Zasloff, a professor at UCLA School of Law, the result could be a ?mess.?

The problem resides in conflicting state gay marriage laws and how the federal government would interpret them. Last week, the court heard arguments about whether Section 3 of DOMA?which prevents the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages?is unconstitutional. Justice Anthony Kennedy, generally the court?s swing vote, seemed inclined to strike down the statute on the grounds that it interferes with states' rights to define marriage, raising hopes among gay rights groups that thousands of married same-sex couples will be able to access the federal benefits of marriage for the first time.

If DOMA is struck down, then same-sex couples residing in states that allow gay marriage will suddenly be included in the more than 1,100 federal laws that give benefits to married couples. Gay couples, for instance, could file jointly on their tax returns, apply for Social Security survivor benefits if their spouse dies, and take up to 12 weeks off to care for a sick family member without fear of losing their job under the Family and Medical Leave Act.

But what about a gay couple that gets married in New York and then moves back to North Carolina, or any other of the 38 states that have explicitly banned gay marriage?

At first glance, it appears they would have no access to these rights, and that their marriage would not be recognized either by their state or the federal government. During oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito asked attorney Roberta Kaplan, who was arguing against DOMA, this very question. Alito asked whether a New York gay couple who moved to North Carolina could qualify for the same federal estate tax breaks that heterosexual married couples enjoy if one spouse dies.

"Our position is only with respect to the nine states ... that recognize these marriages," Kaplan responded.

In Kaplan's version of events, the Supreme Court could strike down DOMA and essentially create two different worlds for gay married couples in the country. In a handful of states, gay couples would enjoy all the benefits of heterosexual couples, but if they moved to the majority of the states in the union, their marriage would effectively disappear?for both federal and state purposes.

But Zasloff doesn?t think that will pass muster. He predicts same-sex couples would sue the government, arguing that this policy violates their constitutional right to travel. (In the past, the Supreme Court has struck down states? waiting periods for new residents to enroll in welfare programs, holding that they violated the right of interstate travel.) Same-sex couples could also make a broader legal argument that the federal government should define ?marriage? based on where a couple got married, not where they currently live.

The Supreme Court could sidestep this inevitable legal battle by explicitly noting whether the federal government should recognize same-sex marriages if the couples are no longer living in states that issued their license. But some experts say don?t count on it.

Andrew Koppelman, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, says he would be "astonished" if the Supreme Court clarified the issue in its opinion. Zasloff agrees, noting that Kennedy, who will most likely write the DOMA opinion if it is struck down, is known for his sphinxlike unwillingness to expound upon the details in his opinions.

That would leave broad discretion to the Obama administration to define the issue administratively, Koppelman says. The White House could direct federal agencies like the IRS to accept marriages based on where a couple got married, not where they live.

Should the Supreme Court justices spell out that same-sex marriages are not valid in states that don't recognize them, the legal differences between married same-sex couples in different parts of the country would be stark.

Under that scenario, Todd Solomon, a partner at the Chicago law firm McDermott Will & Emery, who focuses on employee benefits issues, predicts a gay-couple migration to the nine states (and the District of Columbia) that allow the unions, since Social Security, tax and other federal benefits are at stake.

Cathy Stamm, a consultant at Mercer, a human resources firm, said employers are also anxious to see what the Supreme Court will decide. She's advising firms to comb through their benefit plans that involve employees' spouses?anything from health insurance to pension plans to employee discounts?to figure out whether state or federal law will require them to cover same-sex spouses if DOMA is struck down. Solomon predicts that employees in same-sex marriages may sue employers if they deny certain benefits to their spouses if this happens.

Employers might face a particularly tricky situation if they?re based in an area that allows same-sex marriage but their employees commute in from a state that does not. So, for example, would an employee with a same-sex spouse be eligible to take 12 weeks of family leave if he or she lives in Virginia but works in D.C.? Even though Virginia doesn't allow same-sex marriage, most labor laws are based on where the place of work is, so there's no simple answer. Stamm says employers hope the Supreme Court will help them avoid this legal thicket.

"There's a lot of confusion about what employers need to do," Stamm said. "I think employers would welcome some guidance from the court when they provide their ruling."

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/gay-couples-employers-could-face-legal-maze-supreme-094406233--politics.html

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Feeling hungry may protect the brain against Alzheimer's disease

Apr. 2, 2013 ? The feeling of hunger itself may protect against Alzheimer's disease, according to study published today in the journal PLOS ONE. Interestingly, the results of this study in mice suggest that mild hunger pangs, and related hormonal pathways, may be as important to the much-discussed value of "caloric restriction" as actually eating less.

Caloric restriction is a regimen where an individual consumes fewer calories than average, but not so few that they become malnourished. Studies in many species have suggested that it could protect against neurodegenerative disorders and extend lifespans, but the effect has not been confirmed in human randomized clinical trials.

Efforts to understand how cutting calories may protect the brain have grown increasingly important with news that American Alzheimer's deaths are increasing, and because the best available treatments only delay onset in a subset of patients.

Study authors argue that hormonal signals are the middlemen between an empty gut and the perception of hunger in the brain, and that manipulating them may effectively counter age-related cognitive decline in the same way as caloric restriction.

"This is the first paper, as far as we are aware, to show that the sensation of hunger can reduce Alzheimer's disease pathology in a mouse model of the disease," said Inga Kadish, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology (CDIB) within the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "If the mechanisms are confirmed, hormonal hunger signaling may represent a new way to combat Alzheimer's disease, either by itself or combined with caloric restriction."

The team theorizes that feeling hungry creates mild stress. That, in turn, fires up metabolic signaling pathways that counter plaque deposits known to destroy nerve cells in Alzheimer's patients. The idea is an example of hormesis theory, where damaging stressors like starvation are thought to be good for you when experienced to a lesser degree.

To study the sensation of hunger, the research team analyzed the effects of the hormone ghrelin, which is known to make us feel hungry. They used a synthetic form of ghrelin in pill form, which let them control dosage such that the ghrelin-treated mice felt steadily, mildly hungry.

If it could be developed, a treatment that affected biochemical pathways downstream of hunger signals might help delay cognitive decline without consigning people to a life of feeling hungry. Straight caloric restriction would not be tolerable for many persons over the long-run, but manipulating post-hunger signaling might.

This line of thinking becomes important because any protective benefit brought about by drugs or diets that mildly adjust post-hunger signals might be most useful if started in those at risk as early in life as possible. Attempts to treat the disease years later -- when nerve networks are damaged enough for neurological symptoms to appear -- may be too late. In the current study, it was long-term treatment with a ghrelin agonist that improved cognitive performance in mice tested when they had reached an advanced age.

Study details The study looked at whether or not the feeling of hunger, in the absence of caloric restriction, could counter Alzheimer's pathology in mice genetically engineered to have three genetic mutations known to cause the disease in humans.

Study mice were divided into three groups: one that received the 'synthetic ghrelin' (ghrelin agonist), a second that underwent caloric restriction (20 percent less food) and a third group that was fed normally. Study measures looked at each group's ability to remember, their degree of Alzheimer's pathology and their level of related, potentially harmful immune cell activation.

Results of such studies are most appropriately presented in terms of general trends in the data and statistical assessments of their likelihood if only chance factors were in play, a trait captured in each result's P value (the smaller the better). Thus, the first formal result of the study are that, in mice with the human Alzheimer's mutations, both the group treated with the ghrelin agonist LY444711 and the group that underwent caloric restriction performed significantly better in the a water maze than did than mice fed normally (p=0.023).

The water maze is the standard test used to measure mouse memory. Researchers put mice in a pool with an invisible platform on which they could rest, and measured how quickly the mice found the platform in a series of tests. Mice with normal memory will remember where the platform is, and find it more quickly each time they are placed in the pool. Ghrelin agonist-treated mice found the hidden platform 26 percent faster than control mice, with caloric restricted mice doing so 23 percent faster than control mice.

The second result was a measure of the buildup of a cholesterol-related protein called amyloid beta in the forebrain, an early step in the destruction of nerve cells that accompanies Alzheimer's disease. The formal amyloid beta results show that mice either treated with the ghrelin agonist or calorically restricted had significantly less buildup of amyloid beta in the dentate gyrus, the part of the brain that controls memory function, than mice fed normally (i.e., control, 3.95?0.83; LY, 2.05?0.26 and CR, 1.28?0.17%, respectively; Wilcoxon p=0.04).

The above results translate roughly into a 67 percent reduction of this pathology in caloric-restricted mice as compared to control mice, and a 48 percent reduction of amyloid beta deposits when comparing the ghrelin-treated mice with the control group. These percentages are neither final nor translatable to humans, but are simply meant to convey the idea of "better."

Finally, the team examined the difference in immune responses related to Alzheimer's pathology in each of the three groups. Microglia are the immune cells of the brain, engulfing and removing invading pathogens and dead tissue. They have also been implicated in several diseases when their misplaced activation damages tissues. The team found that mice receiving the ghrelin agonist treatment had both reduced levels of microglial activation compared to the control group, similar to the effect of caloric restriction.

The ghrelin agonist used in the study does not lend itself to clinical use and will not play a role in the future prevention of Alzheimer's disease, said Kadish. It was meant instead to prove a principle that hormonal hunger signaling itself can counter Alzheimer's pathology in a mammal. The next step is to understand exactly how it achieved this as a prerequisite to future treatment design.

Ghrelin is known to create hunger signals by interacting with the arcuate nucleus in the part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which then sends out signaling neuropeptides that help the body sense and respond to energy needs. Studies already underway in Kadish's lab seek to determine the potential role of these pathways and related genes in countering disease.

"Our group in the School of Public Health was studying whether or not a ghrelin agonist could make mice hungry as we sought to unravel mechanisms contributing to the life-prolonging effects of caloric restriction," said David Allison, Ph.D., associate dean for Science in the UAB School of Public Health and the project's initiator.

"Because of the interdisciplinary nature of UAB, our work with Dr. Allison led to an amazing conversation with Dr. Kadish about how we might combine our research with her longtime expertise in neurology because caloric restriction had been shown in early studies to counter Alzheimer's disease," said Emily Dhurandhar, Ph.D., a trainee in the UAB Nutrition Obesity Research Center and first study author. "The current study is the result."

About the research team Along with Kadish, Allison, and Dhurandhar, Thomas van Groen, Ph.D., associate professor in UAB's CDIB co-authored the paper.

Eli Lilly donated of the ghrelin agonist used in the study. This work was also supported by Alzheimer's of Central Alabama, the National Institutes of Health Obesity Training Grant (T32DK062710), and the National Institutes of Health Behavioral Assessment Core of UAB (P30 NS47466). Allison disclosed consulting relationships with industry, the details of which are included in the PLOS ONE article.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Alabama at Birmingham. The original article was written by Greg Williams.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Emily J. Dhurandhar, David B. Allison, Thomas van Groen, Inga Kadish. Hunger in the Absence of Caloric Restriction Improves Cognition and Attenuates Alzheimer's Disease Pathology in a Mouse Model. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e60437 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060437

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/DkDJdyQL3gE/130402182457.htm

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Level of Commitment in Network Marketing

Not having success in your business? Most likely you need to make a commitment to your network marketing business to see things change.

Make a Commitment to Network Marketing

When you are truly making a commitment to change, you will realize that is the solution to your lack of success.

Are you a new marketer that is overwhelmed by all the information that gets thrown at you? You know what I?m talking about. You get emails from MLM leaders about new webinars, new products, and new ideas.

The next thing you know, you have no idea what to focus on next. You can?t follow through on commitments if you don?t know what they are!

This month you learned about blogging so you start that. Next month you attend a Facebook marketing webinar so you focus on that and so on. All this training and bouncing around does not work if you want to make a commitment to your network marketing business. It will just scatter you all over the place.

Be Committed to Your Marketing Strategy

The solution to your problem is to be committed and focus. As marketers, we are in the business of attracting people. If you overwhelm yourself with all training, you really have no level of commitment to your goal.

All this training and switching to new methods that are thrown at you is overwhelming. You end up doing lots of stuff but not making any money.

When I first got started, I was not generating any leads! I was trying this marketing strategy and that. I decide to focus on a single marketing method which is blogging. I went from zero leads a day to up to nine leads a day in just a few short weeks.

Level of Commitment Matters

Make a commitment to your vision. What do you see yourself earning? What does your new lifestyle look like at that income level?

The solution is focus and level of commitment. As marketers we are in the biz of attracting people. So if you are overwhelmed, you may be spinning your wheels and spending too much on training.

Which commitments matter the most?

Be committed to your vision. What do you see yourself earning? What does your lifestyle look like at that income level?

Be committed

How committed are you to your goal income level? If you do not know your goal income level, how can you be committed to it ? you don?t even know what it is. It?s like getting in the car for a road trip without a map or destination in mind.

If you have not considered what income level you are targeting, there is little chance you will hit it. What are you targeting, $5000 per month, $15,000 or $30,000? How does it feel at that income level?

Maybe you have financial problems now that stress you out. Think about what life will be like at your new income level. If your goal income solves your problems and changes how you feel about yourself and your life, you will be able to summon the motivation and focus you need to get there.

It?s very emotional. You must make a commitment to your vision for your life. Your level of commitment goes beyond desire. Be committed to do what takes to make it happen. It?s a decision you make.

It?s not: I?d like to make some extra income.

It is: I see myself earning $10,000 a month and will do what it takes to make it happen.

Make a commitment to your network marketing business! That is the only way you will ever be one of the top income earners.

Make a decision about the game plan you will use to earn that money. Craft a game plan that is actionable and realistic and be committed to it.

For example, you need to generate leads by driving traffic via one of several methods like:

Most leaders in this business are focused on one of these three strategies.

Also make a commitment to what you are promoting. Don?t be wishy-washy about the system or your marketing strategy. If you do not believe in what you are doing, no one else will either.

How bad do you want this? Do you wonder why people are so successful? They make a firm commitment to turn things around. If you only make a commitment to continuous improvement, it?s simply not enough. You need a tangible goal to reach.

Too many people just watch webinar after webinar and do not implement. Make a decision. Are you a spectator or a player? If you are a spectator, nothing will change for you in your life.

Be ruthlessly focused on implementing and make a commitment. Leave a comment about your experience!

Check these out!

Source: http://wealthmissionpossible.com/commitment-network-marketing/

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