Sci-Tech Today

WorldWide Telescope Brings Universe to the Desktop

Wed, 14 May 2008 13:06:07 -0500

Where is Saturn in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy? Microsoft has some answers.

Indeed, Microsoft likes to think the final frontier got a little closer this week with its public beta launch of the WorldWide Telescope software.

WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together images from ground- and space-based observatories across the world to allow people to explore the night sky through their computers.

"The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said. "By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and experience the wonders of space."

Navigating the Galaxies

Microsoft Research blended software and Web 2.0 services to create the high-performance Microsoft Visual Experience Engine. This engine allows users to pan and zoom around the heavens. WorldWide Telescope stitches together terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that relates to their position in the sky.

The service goes beyond simple browsing of images. Users can choose which telescope they want to look through, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space Telescope, or others. They can view the locations of planets in the night sky -- in the past, present or future. They can view the universe through different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of the science of astronomy.

Users have two options. They can freely browse through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take a guided...

Sprint CEO Calls for Shareholders' Patience in Turnaround

Thu, 15 May 2008 07:10:56 -0500

Dan Hesse, chief executive officer at Sprint Nextel Corp. for less than five months, faced tough questions Tuesday about the company's continued trouble keeping wireless subscribers.

Overland Park, Kan.-based Sprint, the nation's third-largest wireless provider, lost about a million customers in 2007 and reported Monday that it lost 1.07 million more in the first quarter of 2008 alone.

"Over the last year, AT&T and Verizon have really been eating our lunch, particularly in terms of high-value customers," investor Carlos Roberts of McLean, Va., told Hesse at the company's annual shareholder meeting. Roberts asked Hesse what he was doing about that problem.

Hesse, hired in December after the company's board ousted former CEO Gary Forsee, told Roberts and other shareholders that Sprint Nextel is taking the appropriate steps to regain momentum on subscriber numbers.

But he cautioned that shareholders shouldn't expect significant improvement in the company's finances until the end of 2008.

"Improving our performance will take time," he said.

Chairman James Hance Jr. placed the blame where many already have -- on Sprint's struggle to integrate Nextel Communications Inc.'s network and corporate culture with its own after it bought Nextel in 2005.

"Over the course of merging Sprint and Nextel, we lost our focus on how we attract, serve and retain our customers," Hance said. "As a result, we lost ground to our competitors. Too many good customers have walked out the door unhappy with us."

Hesse said the company will focus on retaining high-quality customers through improved customer service and special offers for existing customers. For example, it plans to roll out a device like Apple Inc.'s iPhone, called the Instinct, in June and sell it initially only to existing customers.

Sprint also continues to weed out subscribers who have trouble paying their bills and don't spend much on lucrative data services such as Internet surfing or video.

"In...

Wireless Patient Devices at Risk from Internet Use

Thu, 15 May 2008 07:11:48 -0500

Losing the audio feed during "Monday Night Football" may seem like a crisis for some sports fan, but it's nothing compared to losing the signal that monitors a critically ill hospital patient.

The technical glitches share a potential source: the proposed use of unoccupied TV airwaves for high-speed Internet service across the country.

While television networks and wireless microphone users have been fighting the idea, the medical community is also sounding the alarm over possible interference from unlicensed portable gizmos operating in a nearby spectrum. The spectrum's valuable wireless real estate has attracted technology companies and consumer advocates who say it shouldn't remain vacant.

Hospitals and medical device makers say using empty channels for unlicensed uses is a matter of life and death, not just a source of static for entertainment outlets. It could disrupt the monitoring of patients' heart rates, blood oxygen levels and other vital signs at medical facilities.

"If they stop functioning for a period of time, you don't know the patient's physiological condition. This is patient care at its most basic level," says Dale Woodin, executive director of the American Society of Healthcare Engineering, an arm of the American Hospital Association.

Medical device maker GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Co., has also weighed in, asking the Federal Communications Commission to proceed carefully in its decision to permit broadband use through those idle channels, commonly known as "white spaces."

In an FCC filing last week, the company requested stricter standards to protect wireless patient-monitoring equipment, such as heart, blood pressure and respiration devices, from being overwhelmed by other equipment operating in nearby channels.

The FCC is conducting tests to find an efficient and interference-free way to use the spectrum for broadband, but several trial devices have either broken down or failed. A spokesman said some additional lab tests may be needed, but...

Genetically Modified Human Embryo Stirs Criticism

Thu, 15 May 2008 07:12:53 -0500

News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it's a step toward creating "designer babies."

But an author of the study says the work was focused on stem cells. He notes that the researchers used an abnormal embryo that could never have developed into a baby anyway.

"None of us wants to make designer babies," said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

The idea of designer babies is that someday, scientists may insert particular genes into embryos to produce babies with desired traits like intelligence or athletic ability. Some people find that notion repugnant, saying it turns children into designed objects, and would create an unequal society where some people are genetically enriched while others would be considered inferior.

The study appears to be the first report of genetically modifying a human embryo. It was presented last fall at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, but didn't draw widespread public attention then. The result was reported over the weekend by The Sunday Times of London, which said British authorities highlighted the work in a recent report.

Rosenwaks and colleagues did the work with an embryo that had extra chromosomes, making it nonviable. Following a standard procedure used in animals, they inserted a gene that acts as a marker that can be easily followed over time. The embryo cells took up the gene, he said.

The goal was to see if a gene introduced into an abnormal embryo could be traced in stem cells that are harvested from the embryo, he said. Such work could help shed light on why abnormal embryos fail to develop, he said.

No stem cells were recovered from the human embryo, said Rosenwaks, noting...

Aid Worker Enters 'Unrecognizable' Myanmar Delta

Thu, 15 May 2008 07:21:35 -0500

The first international aid official allowed into the cyclone-devastated Irrawaddy delta by Myanmar's military leaders described towns rendered unrecognizable, thousands of survivors without shelter in heavy rains and local volunteers saving lives.

Soldiers have barred foreign aid workers from reaching cyclone survivors in the areas hardest hit by Cyclone Nargis, but gave access to an International Red Cross representative who returned to Yangon on Tuesday.

"People who have come here having lost their homes in rural areas have volunteered to work as first aiders. They are humanitarian heroes," said Bridget Gardner, the agency's country head.

The ruling junta has been blasted by aid agencies for refusing to allow most foreign experts into the delta and not responding adequately to what they say is a spiraling crisis.

Relief workers also reported some storm survivors were being given spoiled or poor-quality food rather than nutrition-rich biscuits sent by international donors, adding to fears that the ruling military junta in the Southeast Asian country could be misappropriating assistance.

U.N. officials warned that the threat was escalating for the 2 million people facing disease and hunger in low-lying areas battered by the storm unless relief efforts increased dramatically.

Ten days after the tempest, reaching the worst-affected areas was getting more and more difficult.

Checkpoints manned by armed police were set up Tuesday on roads leading to the Irrawaddy River delta and all international aid workers and journalists were turned back by officers who took down their names and passport numbers. Drivers were interrogated.

"No foreigners allowed," one policeman said after waving a car back.

However, Gardner, the Red Cross expert, and her assessment team were able to visit five locations in the Irrawaddy delta. In one of them, 10,000 people are living without shelter as rain continued to tumble from the sky.

"The town of Labutta is unrecognizable. I have been here before and...

Craigslist Countersues eBay for Trademark Violations

Thu, 15 May 2008 07:22:33 -0500

Online classifieds giant Craigslist countersued its minority owner, eBay Inc., alleging the online auctioneer is violating federal and state antitrust laws.

The legal spat, which began last month, pits two of the Internet's most popular Web sites against one another.

It lays bare eBay's long-standing desire for a majority stake in Craigslist and Craigslist's continued resistance to eBay's advances.

Craigslist claims eBay attempted to quash competition by using privileges and information gleaned from its 28 percent stake in Craigslist to benefit its own classifieds site Kijiji, which launched last year in the U.S.

According to Craigslist's complaint, filed Tuesday in state Superior Court in San Francisco, eBay internally calls Kijiji the "Craigslist killer."

San Jose, California-based eBay said the allegations are unfounded and unsubstantiated. It claims Craigslist is trying to divert attention from eBay's lawsuit, filed in April, which alleges that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster engaged in a series of "clandestine transactions" intended to dilute eBay's stake unfairly.

EBay is the sixth most popular Web site in the U.S., according to comScore Inc.'s count of unique visitors, while Craigslist ranks 25th.

The latest complaint outlines a fractious four years since eBay purchased its stake in Craigslist from an unnamed former shareholder who solicited outside bids. The terms of the deal were never disclosed.

At the time, the companies agreed that if eBay tried to compete against Craigslist, eBay would lose rights to Craigslist's management and information. Craigslist says eBay triggered that provision when it launched Kijiji.

And when eBay named a representative to Craigslist's board who was a Kijiji insider, that violated the federal Clayton Antitrust Act and California law prohibiting participation on the board of a competitor, Craigslist claims.

EBay also asked for confidential Craigslist information -- such as launch dates for new sites and site traffic statistics -- as it planned to launch...

China Quake Toll Hits 15K; 26K Believed Buried

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:54:40 -0500

Military helicopters dropped food and medicine to Chinese earthquake survivors who remained cut off Wednesday in remote mountain villages behind roads clogged by landslides. The official death toll rose to nearly 15,000, and tens of thousands more were feared buried or missing.

As help began to arrive in some of the hardest-to-reach areas, some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and refugee centers were springing up over the disaster area the size of Maryland.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted government officials as saying rescuers who hiked Wednesday into the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county -- the epicenter of Monday's magnitude 7.9 quake -- found it "much worse than expected."

The official death toll rose Wednesday to 14,866, Xinhua said, but it was not immediately clear if that number included the 7,700 reported dead in Yingxiu. In Sichuan province alone, another 25,788 people were buried and 14,051 missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to Xinhua.

The toll was expected to rise further once rescuers reach other towns in Wenchuan that remain cut off from the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu more than two days after the quake. Roads leading to Wenchuan from all directions were still being cleared of debris, Feng Zhenglin, deputy minister of railway and transportation, said in Beijing.

The death toll for Mianyang city was also confirmed at 5,430, up from 3,629, on Wednesday, Xinhua said, with more than 18,000 people there still thought to be buried under crushed buildings.

At a middle school Sichuan province's Qingchuan county where students were taking a noon nap when the quake demolished a three-story building, 178 children were confirmed dead in the rubble and another 23...

Three in 10 People Get All or Most Calls on Cell Phones

Thu, 15 May 2008 07:23:56 -0500

For nearly three in 10 households, don't even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.

The federal figures, released Wednesday, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.

The number of wireless-only households grew by 2 percent since the first half of last year. Underscoring the rapid growth, in early 2004 just 5 percent had only cell phones.

Households with cell phones who rarely if ever use their landlines grew by 1 percent since the first half of last year.

Such families often either have their landline hooked exclusively to a computer or rely so heavily on their cells that they ignore landline calls because they are probably from telephone solicitors, said Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the report.

The trends have an important impact on polling organizations, which rely chiefly on calls to random landline phone numbers. Calling cell phone users can be more costly for pollsters, in part because federal law forbids unsolicited calls to cell phones made by computerized dialing systems used heavily by pollsters.

Studies have shown that so far, people who have only cell phones don't give significantly different answers to questions than those who use landlines. Pollsters, though, are under growing pressure to survey the growing number of cell phone users and some already do so.

Also affected are the telephone industry and emergency service providers, who can find it harder to locate people calling from a cell phone.

The survey also found...

Dennis Quaid Testifies on Babies' Drug Mix-Up Nightmare

Thu, 15 May 2008 07:24:51 -0500

Actor Dennis Quaid told the U.S. Congress on Wednesday of a harrowing, near-fatal drug mixup in which his newborn twins were administered 1,000 times the normal dose of a blood thinner.

The actor said his family's brush with tragedy underscores the need to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable through lawsuits, a remedy that is becoming increasingly problematic for injured consumers.

Some 7,000 Americans die every year from medication errors.

At issue before the House Reform and Government Oversight Committee is a move by regulators at the Food and Drug Administration to step into lawsuits on the side of defendant drug companies.

In court, the drug companies argue that federal regulation should pre-empt the filing of lawsuits under state law, a matter that will come before the Supreme Court later this year in a case from the state of Vermont.

The Quaid family is suing drug maker Baxter Healthcare Corp., which is seeking dismissal of the lawsuit on federal pre-emption grounds that the government's Food and Drug Administration approved the labeling.

"Like many Americans, I believed that a big problem in our country was frivolous lawsuits," Quaid testified. "But now I know that the courts are often the only path to justice."

The committee's ranking Republican, Rep. Tom Davis, sympathized with Quaid, saying that if this had happened to the Davis family, "I'd be suing everybody in sight." Apart from Quaid's case, Davis called for balance between total pre-emption and unrestrained litigation.

Quaid told the committee his family's life-altering story began in November 2007 when twins Thomas and Zoe, at the time 12 days old, developed a staph infection and had to be hospitalized.

The children were mistakenly administered the wrong version of the drug heparin, due to two concentrations of the drug being bottled with similar labels and size. When rotated slightly as they often are when stored, the light...

NATO Allies To Sign Deal on Cyber Defense Center

Wed, 14 May 2008 07:23:33 -0500

Estonia and six NATO allies sign a deal this week to provide staff and funds for a new research center designed to boost the alliance's defenses against cyber terrorism.

The agreement to be signed in Brussels on Wednesday comes a year after the small Baltic nation was exposed to an unprecedented wave of cyber attacks that crippled government and corporate computer networks.

The attacks lasted three weeks and followed deadly riots sparked by the relocation of a Soviet war memorial. Many Estonians suspect the Kremlin was behind the virtual strikes but Moscow has denied involvement.

The attacks showed how vulnerable individual countries are to cyber warfare and underscored the need for a joint NATO response, said Estonian Maj. Raul Rikk, who heads the center.

"The attacks against Estonia last year were cyber terrorism to say the least," Rikk told The Associated Press in a tour of the facility in Tallinn. "The job of the center is to create new capabilities to fight against new threats."

Despite tight security, the low-key appearance of the center makes it look like the offices of an IT company rather than a site where cyber war games are simulated. Rows of computers are lined up in classroom-like offices separated by a long corridor.

The defense ministers of NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Italy, Spain and Slovakia are to sign Wednesday's agreement that will ensure funds and staff for the center's operations. The United States will join the project as an observer, Rikk said.

The center will be operational in August, although the formal opening is planned for 2009. A staff of 30 specialists will conduct research and training on cyber warfare. They will also be ready to help NATO members respond to any future attacks against computer networks.

Rikk said the experts will be recruited from various NATO member states and fields...