A surprise interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve may have rescued the stock market from a steep decline on Tuesday, but it was no help for Apple shareholders. Apple shares plunged in late trading Tuesday after the company issued a much weaker than expected outlook for the current quarter. Apple posted 35% December quarter sales growth to $9.6 billion, along with earnings of $1.58 billion, or $1.76 a share. Both numbers were much better than expected, and Mac and iPhone shipments were solid. But iPod sales of 22 million were below forecasts, and the company's current quarter outlook %26#151; $6.8 billion sales and 94-cent earnings %26#151; was well below estimates, sending shares skidding. For the rest of the market, the day turned out much better than it could have. Following a global sell-off on Monday, U.S. stock futures were headed sharply lower Tuesday morning when the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by three-quarters of a point. It was the first emergency Fed funds cut since September 17, 2001, and the Fed's largest rate cut since October 1984. The news did much to ease fears that the Fed was unresponsive to a market and economic freefall, but stocks still ended the day down more than 1%, adding to the market's worst-ever start to a year. Yahoo lost 4% on reports that it is considering cutting hundreds of jobs, while eBay fell 4% on reports that CEO Meg Whitman could retire. Motorola shed 7% ahead of its quarterly results, and Alcatel Lucent lost 12% on a Goldman Sachs downgrade. Oracle was another big decliner, down 6%, and Microsoft, Cisco, Dell and Sun were off more than 3% each. The Nasdaq lost 47 to 2292, the S%26amp;P fell 14 to 1310, and the Dow lost 128 to 11,971. Volume rose to 6.51 billion shares on the NYSE, and 3.16 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 19-13 margin on the NYSE, and 20-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 55% on the NYSE, and 79% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 32-1,098 on the NYSE, and 36-982 on the Nasdaq.

The PC chip industry continued seeing strong sales and held prices relatively flat over 2007, according to a new report from market researcher IDC. For the full year, total worldwide PC processor shipments grew 12.6 percent over 2006 while revenues were nearly flat, up only 1.7 to $30.55 billion. This reflects the price erosion that occurred for most of the year, where vendors were lucky to keep average selling prices (ASPs) flat instead of declining as they did in other sectors, like memory. During fourth quarter alone, microprocessor shipments grew 8.5 percent sequentially from third quarter. Revenue grew 9.6 percent sequentially to $8.7 billion, according to IDC. By and large, the two major competitors in the field -- Intel and AMD -- held their respective market shares. For the entire year, Intel held 77.4 percent of the market to AMD's 22.2 percent, with the rest going to VIA Technology, IBM, Freescale and Transmeta. This represents virtually no change from the 3Q07, but a slight decrease for AMD from the fourth quarter of 2006 -- before the company began suffering from a number of problems. In that quarter, AMD held 25.3 percent of the market to Intel's 74.5 percent. What a difference a quarter can make. Barcelona delays and other production problems hurt AMD terribly, and its market share plummeted to 18.6 percent in the first quarter of 2007, just one quarter later. Since then, AMD has clawed back to 23.1 percent market share in Q407. Shane Rau, director of Semiconductors: Personal Computing research at IDC, told InternetNews.com that despite the woes surrounding AMD, it wasn't a yearlong bloodbath. "There's some common wisdom to dispel that every quarter Intel is cleaning AMD's clock," he said. "It was the first quarter where AMD had its problem with supply chain and pricing. Since then it's been going toe to toe with Intel." What AMD needs now is to get high end products out the door because that's where the profits lie. "Until they get Barcelona and Phenom quad%26#91;-core%26#93; out in volume, that means they are not playing at the top of the stack where the best ASPs are," he said. "If you don't have products there, the rest of your products are still moving downward in price. If you don't have anything to replace them at the top end, your ASPs are sinking." Compared to other markets, PC server chips had the best quarter, growing 17.0 percent sequentially while laptop chips grew 10.3 percent and desktop processors were up 6.5 percent. In all three categories, IDC reported that sales in the middle and high end outpaced the low end. Rau attributed this primarily to Intel's Caneland platform, and a little to AMD's success in finally shipping Barcelona. For the year, desktop processors grew by 2 percent, servers were up 5.6 percent, and mobile processors grew a whopping 34.3 percent. IDC's PC researchers estimate that in 2010, laptop system sales will finally surpass desktop sales -- one year earlier than it had previously projected. Rau said he expects an even earlier transition for CPUs, with laptop chip sales surpassing desktop models in late 2009. IDC expects mobile sales to remain strong in 2008, but a weakening of the U.S. economy may impact the rest of the market. Both Intel and AMD noted in their recent quarterly announcements that they do about three-quarters of their business outside of the country, so impact of a U.S. slowdown might be mitigated. Rau agrees, to a point. "For an American-based company, having a lot of worldwide business does help them hedge their bets, especially as it goes along with a weak American dollar," he said. "That's an effective price cut for emerging markets that are very price-conscious. The danger is when the U.S. economy spills over into the worldwide economy."

For Zend Technologies, PHP is a lot more than just an open source programming language. Zend, the lead commercial backer behind PHP, is pushing its vision of PHP as a prominent platform for development and deployment of mission-critical applications with a pair of new products. Zend Studio for Eclipse is Zend's new PHP IDE(define), and Zend Platform 3.6 is the latest release of the company's enterprise-deployment platform for PHP. The new releases are part of the PHP vendor's strategy to move from point products to a complete suite for the application life cycle, as PHP continues to makes inroads against both Java and .NET. "When our customers build mission applications they take the whole Zend solution, since we deal with the whole life cycle from development to staging to production," Andi Gutmans, Zend's CTO, told InternetNews.com. "So they use Zend Core for their certified PHP, they use Zend Platform for getting performance, scalability and reliability for their production servers and then they use Zend Framework across the board to get the right methodology and best practices," Gutmans added. The Zend Platform got under way in 2005 with the last major release version 3.0 in February 2007. In the new version, 3.6, Zend has focused on further improving the performance of PHP deployments. "Performance management starts when a user clicks on a URL and until they get what they're looking for," Gutmans noted. "So we mapped that whole process and looked at where we could improve." One of the key improvements in Platform 3.6 is the ability to cache model view controller%26#150;based applications, which are increasingly popular in framework deployments. Gutmans explained that with the new MVC caching capabilities, instead of caching on a file basis Zend Platform can now cache on a URL basis. Additionally, Zend Platform allowed for high-performance sites to cache in shared memory, which further improves PHP delivery performance. While Zend Platform is available for both Linux and Windows Servers, Gutmans commented that the 3.6 release is geared toward Linux. "We're now working with Microsoft toward Windows Server 2008 and working on a road map for how to work with it," Gutmans said. Zend and Microsoft have a working partnership to make PHP run well on Windows platforms. On the development side, Zend's IDE version of Zend Studio has long been primarily used on Windows, and that's not expected to change with the new release of Zend Studio for Eclipse. The new Zend Studio for Eclipse is the first official release from Zend of its IDE based on the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PHT) project. Gutmans noted that Zend had more than 15,000 beta testers for Zend Studio for Eclipse, and the feedback received helped to make the final release a more stable product. Because the new Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, developers can now leverage the full Eclipse ecosystem of plug-ins to further expand the capabilities of the IDE. While Zend is pushing its new Eclipse-based IDE, it's not abandoning its non-Eclipse Zend Studio 5.5 customers. Zend has not officially set an end-of-life date yet for the non-Eclipse Zend Studio and has pledged to keep it current for minor fixes in a maintenance mode. "I think right now we have a very solid story for business-critical applications," Gutmans said. "What we're seeing today at Zend is that it's changing the way we work with customers," he added. According to Gutmans, the company set out on this path two years when it began working with Eclipse and Framework. "It's a strategy we've been seeing the benefit of," Gutmans noted. That's not to say there still isn't work for Zend to do to further improve PHP development and deployment. "I'm the CTO, so I always think there should be more that we should be doing," Gutmans said. "I want to do more around RIA (Rich internet applications), methodologies and more around business critical deployments. There is always a lot of work for Zend."

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- HP and Intel are promoting energy efficiency programs and new products that reflect those initiatives. At an event here Wednesday, HP announced new versions of two low-power desktops, one with a 16GB solid state drive (SSD), ie. flash memory drive. The new systems are the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC with SSD and the HP Compaq dc5800 Business PC will meet Energy Star efficiency and use all the latest techniques for power efficiency, such as a low wattage CPU and the power management from Intel vPro. The dc7800 can actually attach to the back of an LCD monitor for a small, albeit less than elegant footprint. Its SSD drive will consume just two watts of power instead of 10 to 12, according to Kirk Godkin, senior product manager for business PCs. Between the SSD drive, Intel's Core 2 processor and vPro management, HP claimed it can cost as little as $10 per year to operate, at least in terms of raw power. However, the SSD drive comes with just 16GB of capacity, making the dc7800 the computing equivalent of an iPod Touch. Godkin acknowledged that this system is not for everyone, or even many businesses, due to its low capacity. It's aimed at customers where the PC would be used in a single-use environment, like a kiosk. The 16GB drive runs around $300, vs. $120 for a 80GB standard hard disk. Godkin said in the future, as prices come down, there could be 32GB and 64GB versions as well. The HP Compaq dc7800 is available today in North America at a starting list price of $1,258, while the HP Compaq dc5800 is expected to be available on February 11, starting as low as $579. The PCs reflect the latest efforts of both companies to reduce harmful materials in computers and recycle as much as possible from old systems. Until recently, old PCs usually ended up in a landfill. Not any more. HP recycled 185 million pounds of PCs in 2006, according to Carl Eckersley, manager in the personal systems group supply chain operations at HP. That includes old servers, even from a competitor. "If you're buying HP stuff, we'll take %26#91;the old equipment%26#93;," he said. "We grind up the metal and plastics, recover the precious metals and reuse as much as we can." HP recently passed the one billion pounds recycled mark and hopes to recycle another billion pounds by 2010, he added. In addition to its low power push, Intel's contribution to the environment has been to make cleaner chips. The newly-launched Penryn line is free of lead and halogens, which will make them less polluting and easier to recycle. Intel is also working on recycling efforts, although it generally leaves system recycling to the OEMs, according to Todd Brady, corporate environmental manager for Intel. But Intel does have its own project to recycle its own waste in the works. "It's been a multi-year effort, both in the U.S. and overseas," he said. Intel manufactures chips in places like Costa Rica, Malaysia, Israel and Ireland. If the local pollution control standards aren't particularly strong, Intel still brings back the waste to properly dispose of it. This includes chemicals like acids and salts used to etch the silicon wafers and the metals in the wafers. "We recycle about 80 percent of the chemical waste and minimize the amount that ends up in a landfill. Last year, about six percent of our total waste ended up in a landfill. Our ultimate goal is to get that to zero."

The drive toward openness and interoperability in Web services is gathering steam. Yahoo today announced that it is supporting the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework, giving a ringing endorsement to the effort to build a universal login standard -- which has been dismissed by some skeptics as a dreamer's fantasy. The addition of Yahoo, which counts 248 million registered users globally, will triple the number of OpenID accounts on the Web to 368 million, the company reported. "Yahoo's commitment to an open Web is a significant validation of the OpenID movement," said Scott Kveton, chairman of the OpenID Foundation, in a statement. The OpenID Foundation formed in June 2007 to promote the standard. The brainchild of LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick, who is now with Google, OpenID is designed to provide Web users with a universal identifier so they can sign into social networks, blogs and other Web sites with a single login. When Yahoo launches its OpenID service in public beta form on Jan. 30, anyone with an OpenID identifier will be able to log into Yahoo's Web sites. On non-Yahoo sites, Yahoo users will be able to type "www.yahoo.com" into the login prompt of a site that uses OpenID. The company Yahoo said that it is also working with several OpenID partners to include a "Sign in with Your Yahoo ID" button on their sites to further streamline the process. Prior to Yahoo's announcement, AOL had been the biggest name behind OpenID. Other backers include Plaxo, the online address service, and blogging sites Technorati and WordPress.com. Still, OpenID has remained at the fringes of the Web, hindered by security concerns and a tepid embrace beyond its early adopters. It is also part of the larger push toward cross-platform interoperability that some Web properties have resisted. OpenID is one of the initiatives supported by the DataPortability Workgroup, a broad-based coalition devoted to creating open standards and protocols to level the barriers between Web sites. Last week, the group announced that representatives from Google and Facebook had joined the effort. Both companies, which each offer a third-party developer platform for applications to run across various social networks, were two of the last major holdouts to the coalition. In addition to OpenID, the DataPortability Workgroup supports data-integration standards such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) and others.

While "CSI" is well known in popular culture thanks to the "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" TV shows, the former head of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is pushing a different use of the acronym. Stuart Cohen's CSI is the Collaborative Software Initiative, an organization he started after the Linux Foundation absorbed the OSDL a year ago. "I wanted to focus on broadening the scope of the organization," Cohen told InternetNews.com. "They chose to focus on the operating system only." Cohen's CSI is all about applying the open source model to software development in general and not just Linux. It's an idea that originated with the OSDL Customer Advisory Council, whose members had been bombarded with various government regulations and were looking for a way to develop an open source project around compliance and regulatory issues. A year ago after the OSDL became part of The Linux Foundation, Cohen left and set up shop as CSI. The goal of CSI is to help companies and organizations develop software using open source. In return, the companies save time and money on their projects. The first project for CSI was an effort for the Financial Services Roundtable's BITS working group, whose members includes the largest financial services companies in the United States. Cohen explained that a U.S. government regulation requires banks to assess, score and certify that vendors they use for outsourcing and which have access to confidential information are secure. For the most part, he noted that the banks were using Excel spreadsheets for the initial part of the assessment. The spreadsheets could have thousands of cells in them to address all the questions the financial services firms need to answer. The inherent problem with a spreadsheet approach is that it is difficult to manage and offers limited multiuser capabilities. "So what we are working on with them is an open source project called RegQ, which stands for regulatory questionnaire," Cohen said. RegQ is an XML schema developed using an open source stack that provides the banks with a machine-readable substitute for tracking compliance using a spreadsheet. The RegQ project is only part of a larger equation, though, for financial institutions as well as other software developers. Cohen explained that RegQ fits into a bigger operational risk-management system that banks may be using. "Ours is just the front-end, data-gathering tool to get information into the databases," Cohen said. Cohen estimated that a typical operational risk-management system will cost $3 million to $4 million, including implementation. For the front end CSI is building, a software vendor could charge $800,000 or so to develop it. According to Cohen, because a group of companies are coming together to build and fund the application in an open source approach, the cost could be limited to $100,000 to $200,000. He said IBM, HP, Novell and Intel, all members of the CSI advisory council, are interested in working with the group on commodity or industry standardization. This collaboration could create a software platform for customization, he added. While CSI's first effort is in the financial services sector, Cohen sees a broad appeal for his approach. He said he expects CSI's second project, which will be announced in the coming weeks, to show just how broad the applicability of the approach can be. Cohen did not elaborate on the particulars of the second effort. "Compliance and regulatory issues are a real focus area, but it's truly a diagonal that goes across industries," he said.

By Gisela Telis
ScienceNOW Daily News
17 January 2008 A gigantic, suicidal palm tree has been discovered in Madagascar, researchers announced today. The palm represents a genus seen nowhere else in the world--and a unique conservation challenge for a nation with a poor environmental track record.

"This palm really is an amazing discovery," says palm biologist Scott Zona of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida. "It adds a completely new branch to the palm family tree, something that happens very rarely." It's a spectacular find, adds research botanist James Miller of the New York Botanical Garden in New York City. "It makes you wonder how much we've already lost."

Xavier Metz, the French manager of a cashew plantation in remote northwestern Madagascar, found the flowering palm while picnicking with his family 2 years ago. His photos of it eventually made their way to John Dransfield, a palm expert at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Richmond, U.K. Dransfield was astonished by the palm's appearance, but he was even more surprised by a study of its DNA: Lab tests showed that the palm was a previously unknown genus and species within a family of palms found primarily in Afghanistan, Thailand, and southern China.

The palm bears only a meager resemblance to other members of its family. It is more than 18 meters tall, has fanlike leaves 5 meters across, and, when in bloom, has hundreds of flowers towering above its crown. Its Chinese cousin, by comparison, is chest-high and shrubby. The palm's life cycle is also unusual. Based on an analysis of the trunk, the palm appears to grow for decades before exploding with nectar-rich blossoms that develop into fruit, deplete the plant's nutrients, and cause it to collapse. According to Dransfield, only a handful of palm species flower themselves to death. It's still unclear how long these palms live before their dramatic demise, or how the genus arrived on the island in the first place.

In a study published in the January 2008 issue of Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, Dransfield officially names the palm Tahina spectabilis. "Tahina," the name of one of Metz's daughters, is Malagasy for "blessed" or "to be protected"--an appropriate name, given the opportunity that preserving it presents. That's because Madagascar, long known as an "ecological hot spot," is a conservation disaster, according to some environmentalists. Illegal logging and slash-and-burn practices to clear land for farming--two major sources of income for impoverished Malagasy--have destroyed most of the country's native vegetation, including 90%26#37; of its original forests.

Since the discovery, researchers have found 91 other Tahina palms, along with 50 seedlings, all within a quarter-kilometer stretch of the island. That offers Malagasy villagers a chance to reclaim some of what's lost, Dransfield says. He, the Metzes, and local villagers have set up a committee to protect the palm and have plans to cultivate and sell seedlings to botanical gardens and growers worldwide. Proceeds from the sales would come back to the villagers and help fund rural development and education efforts--in hopes, says Dransfield, that the Malagasy people might finally reap some benefit from preserving the environmental resources that remain.

Related sites

The International Palm Society

More about Madagascar

By Adrian Cho and Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 January 2008 These have been trying times for Raymond Orbach, the undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)--and for the U.S. physical scientists who depend on funding from his department.

Two weeks ago, Congress slashed $400 million in proposed increases for the 2008 budget of DOE's Office of Science, the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States (ScienceNOW, 18 December 2007). The cuts wreaked havoc on DOE's programs in fusion and particle physics and took a big bite out of its efforts in "basic energy sciences" such as chemistry and materials sciences. Funding was zeroed for the U.S. contribution this year to the multibillion-dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) (ScienceNOW, 21 December 2007), and U.S. participation in the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC) particle physics experiment was also effectively stopped, jeopardizing the project's existence. The rollbacks are also forcing hundreds of layoffs at two of the Office of Science's national labs (Science, 11 January, p. 142) and have led to deep cuts in running time at x-ray sources and other user facilities at the other eight.

As DOE officials were sorting through the wreckage, Orbach sat down with Science's Adrian Cho and Eli Kintisch last week to discuss the state of U.S. physical science in the wake of the 2008 budget. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

ITER

Science: Let's begin with the question many people are asking: Will DOE meet the U.S.'s commitment to ITER in 2008?

R.O.: Obviously we can't. Look, can I give you a bigger picture rather than deal with one item at a time? The '08 budget is the '08 budget. ... And my position on it is that it's the will of Congress and the people, and the president has signed it. We're going to do the very best we can to follow congressional direction. Obviously, it's going to be very difficult for us. It represents a substantial departure from the president's request. It also took place 3 months into the fiscal year, ... so we were spending at the level of '07. Where you see a cut from '07 in the '08 budget, we've got a real problem, because we just don't have the money. Some of the actions that we've had to take, we would not have had to take had we had the budget on October 1. ?

What we're doing is following the will of the Congress while, at the same time, maintaining, from our perspective, U.S. leadership in science as best we can. Now, I can't tell you, obviously, the details of the president's budget for '09, but I can tell you that it will be a wonderful budget request. And because '08 has been difficult for us, the gap between '08 and '09 will be large.

Science: Some researchers have suggested that DOE might go to Congress and ask to reprogram money from outside the fusion energy science program. Will DOE be asking to reprogram some money for ITER?

R.O.: ... I honestly don't know the answer. We've looked around the Office of Science at where we might reprogram [money], and we're hurting in almost every area. And remember that a reprogramming requires approval from both the subcommittees on appropriations and the authorization committees. And I meant what I said when we started--namely, Congress has spoken. They've told us where they want us to spend the money, and it would be very difficult to have a reprogramming of any kind of magnitude at all to change the directions that Congress has given us. So I don't think reprogramming--one can put much hope in that.

Science: Then will DOE ask Congress for a supplemental budget?

R.O.: I don't know the answer to that, either. ... We're not the only program in the complexity of the federal budget that feels that it has problems, ... and my assumption is that the last thing that Congress or the president wants is a decorated supplemental. Because, you come in for the Office of Science, and there will be somebody else coming in, and before you know it, the thing will be enormous. ... My guess is that it would be very hard to single out a particular program for a supplemental.

Science: Assuming that things don't change and there is no U.S. funding for ITER this year, is the U.S. effectively pulling out of the project?

R.O.: No. And I can say that unequivocally. ... Our position will be that we will go into the arrears, but we will not drop our membership in ITER. ... What we're going to do is to keep the ITER project office [at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee] alive as best we can between now and the '09 appropriation and to do the best we can to maintain our position within the international organization. We will have problems because we have six other parties who are beginning to invest in ITER construction, and we will not have those funds. But we will be there at the table, and we will do the best we can under the circumstances.

Science: The U.S. has been in and out of ITER before and now faces a year where it's not going to be making its contribution. Given the uncertainties in the budget every year, can the U.S. participate meaningfully in these huge international collaborations?

R.O.: I believe so. In the middle of the ITER negotiations this was brought up and thrown in our faces a number of times. ... But you notice Congress did not say "Pull out of ITER." What they simply said was that we will not provide funding in FY '08, and that's why FY '09 is so important. My belief is that we are good partners. We're a little strange in the way we appropriate funds. But we will do our part. When you're in the arrears, you've got to pay the price. Our cost will go up because construction is delayed. But I hope our presence at the table and our keeping the project office alive will be evidence that we fully intend to meet our commitments.

Trouble in High-Energy Physics

Science: The ILC is effectively stalled because researchers have no money to spend the rest of the year. Is DOE still committed to trying to build the ILC in the U.S.?

R.O.: We are committed to high-energy physics. ... We have no intention of moving away from the basic R%26D in the ILC, but it will have to be delayed. ...

Science: In the fall, you went to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory [Fermilab] in Batavia, Illinois, and made a point of telling researchers that the ILC had not yet reached CD0 [the first of five "critical decision" reviews that any major DOE project must pass and the one that determines whether the project is necessary for DOE's mission]. Congress cited that fact when they cut ILC's funding for R%26D from $60 million to $15 million this year, and a number of physicists believe that it may have been one of the key factors that caused the British to pull out of the ILC (Science, 21 December 2007, p. 1851). What did you intend when you made the statement that the ILC had not reached CD0, and has it been misinterpreted?

R.O.: Well, I can't speak for those who interpreted it. I can tell you precisely what I said. And that was that we have to bring the ILC into [DOE Order] 413.3, which is the way we construct major projects within the Department of Energy. And that means that you have to have a CD0, [which shows] mission need, and then CD1, CD2, CD3, and so on. It's time to start thinking about bringing the ILC into this framework. ... There was never--never--a suggestion in my comments or my actions that we were somehow moving away from the ILC. In fact, just the opposite. I was trying to include it under the rubric that we [use for] all of our construction projects.

Science: Fermilab was looking at getting a bigger-than-inflation bump and ended up taking an absolute cut of about 17%26#37; from the '08 request and about 10%26#37; from the '07 budget. The lab is now preparing to lay off 200 of its 1900 employees. What would you say to the people who will lose their jobs about the effectiveness of the Office of Science in stewarding their lab?

R.O.: I'm not sure you can blame that entirely on the stewardship of the Office of Science. I think you can say to them, first of all, that we preserved the Tevatron [collider] run. And in order to do that, the B-factory [collider] had to be shut down early at SLAC [Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California]. That said something about planning for the future and our desire to use the Tevatron, in which we have made a very heavy investment, to hopefully discover new physics that will change the way we look at nature. ... In terms of the [zeroing of funds for the] NOvA [neutrino experiment] and the reduction in the ILC--that's what I meant by priorities.

I think now the high-energy physics community understands how Congress feels and has a job on its hands to explain why it should be supported at the level of the president's request. You don't have to convince me. You don't have to convince the president. It's there. Now we're talking about the American people. And so that's their job and my job, too. And we'll make every effort to do it. ?

Science: One leading particle physicist has said that Fermilab is in "deep, deep, deep" trouble. Do you agree with that?

R.O.: No. ... I think the high-energy physics community needs to help us in determining a set of priorities within reasonable budgetary limits. ... There will be a charge to HEPAP [High Energy Physics Advisory Panel] to and to P5 [Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel] to examine the priorities for high-energy physics [as a field] within different budget outlines. ... It will be up to the community to decide what the priorities are. In terms of Fermilab itself, there is no issue. Fermilab is the high-physics experimental laboratory for the United States. There's never been any move away from that, either by Congress or by us. ... What we need now is for the high-energy physics community to give us its recommendations. We'll make the decisions, but we need their recommendations for different budget projections as to what they would do and what they wouldn't do. ...

Overall funding for basic and applied research

Science: For two straight years now, the funding subcommittees have given you guys just what you've asked for, and more, for the basic research [which is supported by the Office of Science] and applied research [which is funded through other parts of DOE]. And in the end game, the Office of Science has not done as well as other areas of DOE. What confidence can the community have that this year is going to be any different?

R.O.: ... I believe that Congress represents the views of the American public. And I believe that the numbers that we received are telling us something. Therefore, if we are to actually achieve ... an appropriation of the magnitude of the president's request, we've got to make our case to the American public. So I will be attending each of the [six] advisory committee's meetings in the coming year and urging them to recognize that Congress has taken these actions, [that] they represent the public, ... and [that] it's up to the community to make its case as to why the science and long-term investment in basic research is of sufficient priority that the president's request be honored by Congress.

Science: Do you think the physics community got somewhat cocky or overconfident, given all the positive developments on the authorization side [such as the America COMPETES act passed in August, which calls for increased funding for the Office of Science (ScienceNOW, 3 August 2007)?

R.O.: I think that's a little unfair. I think if you looked at the trajectory, it looked like the Office of Science was just fine. That was true in '07 as well. I think people worked very hard, and I think what we have to do is work harder. ... I believe we have a very strong case. [The] Rising Above the Gathering Storm report [and] the America COMPETES bill [that] was signed by the president this past August indicated support for investment in long-term basic research. But in the end of a budget cycle, you have a number of competing forces, and it's a question of priorities. I would hope that the communities that are involved in science would make the case that would bring the priority of investment in basic research to a successful conclusion.

Science: Regarding making the case for investment in basic research to the American people, what efforts have you made personally to introduce the Office of Science to the new Democratic lawmakers who are now in control of the budget?

R.O.: Well, first of all, I have never regarded this as a partisan operation. I have talked to both sides of the House since the day I got here. And the Democratic leadership that is in control now is the same Democratic leadership that I've talked to for the last 5 1/2 years. ... So I don't think it's an issue of Democrat versus Republican.

Science: When you were named undersecretary for science a year and a half ago, you spoke of the importance of having crosscutting research and discussion [between the Office of Science and other parts of DOE.] Do we see the fruits of that?

R.O.: I was sworn in on 1 June [2006], and the [2008] budget was essentially final then. ... But now I have had a year. I can't tell you the details, because obviously it's part of the president's budget [request]. But you will see. ... I think the integration of basic and applied [research], with all of the difficulties of crosscutting of stovepiped programs, has actually happened. I have another year as undersecretary. I'm very much hoping to make that an integral part of the functions of the of department so that we are working very closely between basic and applied, each doing what we do well. ... I'm actually very, very pleased. I hope the community will be, too.

Related sites

DOE home page

ITER

ILC

Call it a photo finish. A split decision. Too close to call: The leading online tracking firms are split over which Web property garners the most traffic. According to comScore, Yahoo -- perennially ranked as the most visited destination on the Web -- held onto its lead in December, staving off surging Google for at least another month. Yahoo sites pulled in 136.6 million unique visitors in December, beating out Google, whose Web properties came up just shy of 133 million unique, comScore reported. But look at the figures from Nielsen Online, and it's a different story. Google tops Nielsen's lists of the top 10 Web sites both by parent company and by brand. Nielsen defines a parent company as the consolidation of Web sites owned by a single company. By this measure, Google's sites drew the most traffic in December, with 124.6 million unique visitors. Microsoft then followed with 123 million, wile Yahoo came in third with 114 million. By brand, which Nielsen defines as all Web properties bearing consistently branded content, Google was still the top destination, but Yahoo ranked second, followed by Microsoft. comScore's top 10 Web properties during December
(Includes home, work and university users)

1. Yahoo sites (136.6 million uniques)
2. Google sites (133 million)
3. Microsoft sites (120 million)
4. Time Warner Network (119.5 million)
5. Fox Interactive (82 million)
6. eBay (80 million)
7. Amazon sites (65 million)
8. Wikipedia sites (52 million)
9. Ask Network (49.5 million)
10. Apple Inc. (47.7 million)

The disparity likely resulted from Nielsen ranking Microsoft and MSN/Windows Live as separate entities in its list of branded sites. Nielsen Analyst Suzy Bausch told InternetNews.com that Google has topped the traffic rankings by brand since March 2007. Allowing for nuanced differences in methodologies, the two research firms are measuring the same thing. Their leaderboards might look a little different, and Nielsen's numbers trend a little lower than comScore's, but both firms' analyses highlight Google's success in expanding itself into a portal. Though industry commentators and analysts frequently take shots at Yahoo for falling behind Google in search, innovation, market capitalization and other barometers of the companies' vitality, Yahoo has always been able to counter that it's still the most popular site on the Web. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang certainly took that approach last week at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. During his keynote address, he trumpeted Yahoo's unmatched popularity as a portal while repeatedly articulating his vision for the company as the premier jump-off point for the Internet. Nielsen's top 10 Web properties during December, by parent
(Includes home and work users)

1. Google sites (117.7 million)
2. Microsoft sites (123 million)
3. Yahoo sites (114 million)
4. Time Warner (106 million)
5. News Corp. Online (76.3 million)
6. eBay (67.4 million)
7. Amazon (65.4 million)
8. InterActiveCorp (64 million)
9. Apple Computer (50.7 million)
10. Wikimedia Foundation (50.5 million)

But the recent batch of tracking data suggests that the distance separating Yahoo from Google is narrowing -- or widening, depending on whose numbers you're looking at. By comScore's numbers, which paint the more optimistic picture of Yahoo's market share as a portal, the gap between the two Web titans tightened considerably in the last year. In December 2006, comScore tracked 18.6 million more visitors to Yahoo sites than to Google's Web properties. Last month, Yahoo bested Google by just 3.7 million visitors. One is only left to wonder what story the numbers will tell a year from now.

Customer feedback over its inaugural storage device has spurred Data Robotics Inc. to craft a NAS-in-a-box that lets its Drobo users share files over a LAN and gain greater storage capabilities. DroboShare, which will retail for about $200, is nearly a maternal twin to Drobo and boasts some neat features, including self-monitoring and a clear visual status and alert panel, similar to its sibling. In a statement, the San Francisco startup says DroboShare "significantly increases the value and functionality that Drobo brings by providing home or business users with a simple way to share data without the complexity normally associated with NAS or RAID storage systems." "This is the perfect file sharing device for the small team, whether they%26#146;re a group team in a big organization or a small workgroup in a SMB environment," Jillian Mansolf, SVP of sales and marketing, told InternetNews.com. DroboShare%26#146;s back panel offers up two USB ports, which lets users connect two Drobos to the network%26#151;a combined storage tank of 8TB that can potentially scale to 32TB once larger drives are on the market. There%26#146;s also a gigabit Ethernet port, and, like the Drobo, the two-pound NAS works on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. New users are already spouting off about DroboShare and sharing user experiences at theDroboShare Community.

IBM and the Mayo Clinic on Wednesday announced the opening of a new collaborative research facility designed to speed the processing of compute-intensive algorithms used to deliver medical images from patients' MRI and CT scans. The Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) is the latest product of a four-year partnership between IBM and the Mayo Clinic, giving radiologists and physicians access to IBM's latest blade hardware and Cell microprocessor architecture %26#151; first used in Sony's PlayStation 3 %26#151; to render 3-D medical images that used to take hours in a matter of minutes. "There have been algorithms out there for years that can take two-dimensional images and process them into 3-D but they take a lot of processing power and can take hours to run," Bill Rapp, IBM distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for IBM%26#146;s Healthcare and Life Sciences team, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. "But radiologists often don't use them because they only have five to 10 minutes to do a reading. By putting all this computing power together, these images can be registered 50 times faster and improve the quality of radiology reading and productivity," he added. Rapp said IBM and the Mayo Clinic are sharing the costs of staffing the six-person MI3C staff while IBM provided "hundreds of thousands of dollars" worth of hardware. For this investment, IBM gets the opportunity to see what features and applications have the greatest commercial promise for future product releases and medical researchers get access to the technology and the ability to showcase to garner more federal research grants. In practice, the high-speed computations allow radiologists to fill in the imaging gaps and blurs created when patients breath or make slight movements during examinations. If multiple scans of a particular organ or limb are slightly different%26#151;say the head is tilted a bit to the right or the left in each scan%26#151;the algorithm adjusts to provide a consistent image. The MI3C is located on the Mayo Clinic's campus in Rochester, Minn. and is open to third-party researchers and medical professionals.

Apple added two powerful systems to its lineup Tuesday ahead of the Macworld Expo conference set for next week in San Francisco where new Apple hardware is typically unveiled. Rumors have circulated for weeks that Apple is planning to debut an ultraportable computer at the show, so perhaps Tuesday's news is meant to save the spotlight for that and other announcements. In any case, the new systems are significant additions to the Mac line. Fastest Mac Ever The Mac Pro got a major performance boost in its latest incarnation. Apple is billing the new Mac Pro as the fastest Mac it's ever made thanks to the inclusion of two Intel Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz. A standard 8-core configuration is priced starting at $2,799. Other standard features include an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256 MB of memory and a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot the company said delivers up to twice the bandwidth of its previous generation. Support is also included for the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA such as the GeForce 8800 with 512MB of video memory. With support for up to four graphic cards the Mac Pro can drive up to eight 30-inch displays at once. While the typical office user won't need all those displays, Apple mentioned advanced visualization and large display walls as potential applications. The Mac Pro comes with Leopard, the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system. The latest Mac Pro is also the most expandable one Apple's offered, with four internal hard drive bays with direct-attach, cable-free installation of up to four 1 Terabyte Serial ATA hard drives. Users have the option to connect external devices to the front or back of the system which includes five USB 2.0, two FireWire 400, two FireWire 800, optical and analog audio in and out and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as a headphone jack. Apple also offers a number of build-to-order options for more memory, storage and peripherals like the Apple wireless Aluminum keyboard. Serving up Quad Core The other new hardware is Apple's latest Xserve, which the company said can run as much as twice as fast as its predecessor. The 1U rack-optimized server has up to two Quad Core 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors for 8 core's of performance and includes an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server Leopard. Priced at $2,999, Xserve also sports faster front side buses, faster memory, up to 3 Terabytes of internal storage and two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots. Specifically, the server's new high-bandwidth architecture includes two 1600 MHz front side buses and up to 32GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory for up to a 64 percent increase in memory throughput. The standard configuration, starting at $2,999, includes a single 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon, with 12 MB of L2 cache and a 1600 front side bus. Apple marketing executive Philip Schiller said the Xserve's power, storage and server software "make it ideal for supporting Mac clients and mixed platform workgroups."

During his final keynote at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on Sunday night, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates highlighted what he proudly pointed to as the commercial success of Windows Vista. "I'm pleased to say that we've got over 100 million people using Vista now, and that's a very significant milestone," Gates told the audience. What he didn't say was why there aren't more units of Vista in use. After all, Vista was for sale to consumers for 11 of the past year's 12 months. Additionally, in early December, researcher IDC forecast that nearly 270 million PCs would be sold worldwide during calendar 2007. While some of those PCs were sold either without an operating system pre-installed or with a version of Linux onboard, the vast majority shipped with Windows %26#150; either Vista or Windows XP. Since only 100 million units of Vista are out and in use, that strongly implies that more new PCs shipped with Microsoft's aging XP than Vista over the past year, which is somewhat of a shock for such a "bet the farm" product as Vista. Of course, Microsoft's numbers likely lag the actual market, given that the crucially important Christmas selling season is barely past and may not be reflected in Gates' figures. Officials also have repeatedly pointed out that it's difficult to know how many units of Vista are in use in large corporations since the licenses they buy allow them to deploy either Vista or XP. So significantly more copies of Vista may now be in use than when Microsoft's speech writers had to finalize Gates' speech. That said, however, the simple math makes it seem virtually impossible that Vista could have outsold XP on new PCs in 2007. Many analysts agree that sales of Vista have been slower than expected in its first year on the market, but point out that 100 million copies is not small change. Additionally, the arrival of Vista's Service Pack 1 (SP1) later this quarter promises to finally get many IT shops off the fence and onto the Vista deployment bandwagon. While Microsoft officials have repeatedly said Vista sales are on target, Microsoft has already had to extend the amount of time that PC vendors will be allowed to continue shipping XP on new machines by five months -- until June 30, 2008, the end of Microsoft's fiscal year. What's the hold up? Some of the reluctance to move to Vista on the part of consumers may have to do with the expense of buying new PCs with the high-end graphics capabilities and extra memory needed to run Vista's flashy Aero Glass user interface. It is perhaps the most noticeable of all the new features that arrived with Vista. "Vista has received a lukewarm response %26#91;partly because%26#93; Microsoft hasn't made a good case for upgrading," Richard Shim, research manager at analysis firm IDC, told InternetNews.com. For one thing, many PC gamers found that XP rendered a faster playing experience than Vista, which some reviewers have criticized as sluggish. Another point: A year after it shipped, very few applications actually take advantage of Vista's unique new capabilities, partly because some key features of Vista, such as the Windows Presentation Foundation, have been back-ported to XP. "%26#91;Even%26#93; Office 2007 only takes marginal advantage of Vista," Michael Cherry, lead analyst for operating systems at researcher Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. Asked whether all of the shortcomings may derail Microsoft's plans to make Vista dominant, however, both analysts scoffed. "The impact of Vista is still alive," Shim said. "It's not as influential as it was, but I wouldn't call it a failure," he added.

LAS VEGAS -- The world's major technology companies are trying to convince consumers they need an expensive, digitally connected home with the latest high-tech gadgets. But there's a problem: An increasing number of consumers are having trouble just paying for the roof over the heads, much less a 150-inch television. Few company executives at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week can avoid questions about the state of the economy, and the combination of a surge in the U.S. jobless rate, oil around $100 and a worsening credit and housing crisis has many on edge. "The fourth quarter is full of strange, unanswerable situations related to unemployment, related to GDP, related to everything else," Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer said on Monday after a briefing at the show. "So it's too soon for us to be pessimistic, but I read the papers." Electronics retailer Circuit City on Monday became the latest company to undermine the view of some analysts going into the holiday season that U.S. consumers would keep spending on computers, TVs, digital cameras and music players even as the value of their homes declined and foreclosures mounted. Circuit City, hurt by a costly restructuring, said December sales at stores open at least a year fell more than 11 percent, and it expects to post a fourth-quarter loss. More critical may be the report of December sales coming Friday from Best Buy, the leading U.S. electronics retailer. It is expected to have done significantly better than its rival. Executives at the show and analysts watching the industry's largest U.S. gathering said they feel confident about the current state of the industry. But they're uncertain about the rest of the year, when some economists expect the United States to slip into recession as the housing crisis worsens. "We watch very carefully these kinds of general economy issues, and we do feel more and more concerned about the subprime issue and the impact on consumer spending and corporate spending," Jonney Shih, chief executive of Taiwan's Asustek Computer, the largest maker of personal computer motherboards, said in an interview. "Consumers are under intense pressure," added David Daoud, a personal-computer analyst at market researcher IDC. "With the price of energy continuing to increase and a lot of people seeing the value of their houses dwindle, it will certainly lead to an amount of tension among consumers," he said. "The question now is, are manufacturers responding to that?"
Slowing sales growth An estimated 140,000 people are expected to descend on Las Vegas this week to check out the latest in consumer electronics. These include wireless Internet devices, a 150-inch plasma TV said to be the world's largest, leather-bound laptop computers and even a robot that cleans gutters. Before the holidays, technology had been viewed as a safe haven for investors fleeing housing, banking and consumer-discretionary stocks. The Standard %26 Poor's information-technology index has added 5.6 percent in the past 12 months, beating the S%26P 500's 0.5 percent decline and the Dow Jones Industrial's 2.6 percent gain. But investor sentiment has changed in the past week, after British retailer DSG International sent European retail stocks diving when it warned that full-year pretax profit would miss analysts' estimates because of falling desktop computer sales and weaker-than-expected laptop PC demand. "The market dynamics will definitely change," Oh Dong-jin, president of South Korea's Samsung Electronics, told Reuters in an interview on Monday. A series of recent analyst downgrades of technology stocks including No. 1 semiconductor maker Intel contributed to declining confidence in the sector. The S%26P technology index is down 7.7 percent in the past five trading days, making it the S%26P's worst performing sector. While many products at the Las Vegas show may never reach store shelves, collectively they serve to generate consumer enthusiasm for an industry that the show's organizer, the Consumer Electronics Association, expects will generate $171 billion in sales this year. The amount is a 6.1 percent increase from 2007's total but less than last year's 8.2 percent surge, the group said on Monday. Besides the technology, "the other overriding issue of focus is the state of the global economy, as CES serves as a crossroads for large companies from multiple geographies," Bear Stearns analyst Andrew Neff wrote in a note to investors. "Visibility remains limited." Fears of a deteriorating U.S. economy and falling DVD sales helped drive Warner Bros.' decision on Friday to exclusively back Sony's Blu-ray next-generation DVD format, in a blow to Toshiba's rival HD DVD format, a top studio executive told Reuters on Monday. "We've typically been recession-proof," Warner Bros Entertainment Group President Kevin Tsujihara said at the Las Vegas show. "But the thing we saw in the fourth quarter ... was gas prices beginning to affect sales. And since we're considered an impulse purchase, it's beginning to impact us."

Viacom's MTV Networks Group has signed deals to make videos available on five online video services and Comcast's broadband site, as the company aims to increase its presence on the Web. Dailymotion, GoFish, iMeem, MeeVee and Veoh Networks entered agreements, MTV Networks said on Tuesday at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The show where the industry trots out its newest gadgets and gizmos has been short on seismic changes this year, but Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman told Reuters in an interview that even small developments have made big differences for consumers. "We're at a phase of the development of the Internet when we are seeing the accumulation of a lot of incremental changes that makes it easier for consumers and users to navigate information and entertainment online," Dauman said. Unlike prior years when top media executives took to the CES stages, this year a handful, including Dauman and News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin, have kept low profiles. What is not certain is whether deals like the ones MTV has struck, aimed at finding consumers wherever they spend time on the Web, have generated financial returns. "We're eager to get our content out there," Greg Clayman, MTV Networks' executive vice president of digital distribution, said on the sidelines of the show. "Our fans are already there." Early results have shown that its online distribution of clips or in some cases entire episodes of some of its shows have helped boost television ratings, which rebounded in the fourth quarter. Unlike its big media peers, which mostly saw their stock fall in 2007, Viacom shares rose 7 percent.
Future of HD DVD Viacom's Paramount is one of the minority of Hollywood film studios that currently release DVDs using Toshiba Corp's HD DVD next-generation format. Toshiba suffered a blow last Friday after Time Warner's Warner Bros studios decided to release movies only on Sony Corp.'s rival format Blu-ray, which now has the backing of studios representing about 75 percent of U.S. DVD market share. "We made a good decision, which I endorse," Dauman said, responding to a question about whether Viacom would reconsider its support for HD DVD. However, he stopped short of expressing strong support for the HD DVD standard in particular. "We're focused on making sure high-definition technology succeeds," he said. "It will sort itself out."

By Devin Powell
ScienceNOW Daily News
11 January 2008 When a hungry sparrow hawk is nearby, the Siberian jay sounds an alarm. But not every call is a simple code red. New research reveals that the jays tailor their warnings to reveal whether a predator is hunting, attacking, or just hanging out. The finding, the researcher says, is the first to show such subtle distinctions among avian alarm calls.

Scientists have known for 30 years that small birds often use different calls to relay information about predators. The chickadee, for example, gets its name from the harsh "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" sound it makes when it discovers a predatory owl or hawk perched in a tree (ScienceNOW, 23 June 2005). This noise signals other birds to mob the resting raptor, and they scream and dive-bomb the predator to drive it out of their territory. But the chickadee shows more caution when it spots a flying hawk on the hunt. It uses a different call, a high-pitched "seet" sound, to signal that it's time to hide and to keep as still as possible.

Michael Griesser, a population biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, noticed similar behavior among the jays he studies. The birds call out a steady, low-pitched sound while hiding from a hunting hawk and an excited, high-pitched call to gather a mob against a perched hawk. But they also have a third call--a combination of low and high sounds--that distinguishes a hunting hawk in the sky that is looking for prey from a hawk that has spotted its next meal and has begun a downward attack dive. Instead of hiding, Griesser reports in the 8 January issue of Current Biology, the jays react to an attacking hawk by hopping to the exposed tops of trees, where they can search for the predator and prepare for a swift escape. When Griesser recorded the three alarm calls and played them back to other groups of wild jays, the birds reacted just as the ones who had seen the hawks did.

"The more I thought about this experiment," says Chris Templeton, a biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, "the more I got excited." The difference between the two behaviors of a flying hawk is quite subtle, he says, and being able to communicate that difference is an impressive accomplishment for the jays.

The paper isn't the first to show that birds can communicate about the behavior of their predators, says Erick Greene, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Montana, Missoula. "But these calls do contain a lot more information than we ever thought possible."

Related sites

Listen to the Siberian jay

More on the Siberian jay

More on birdsong

Science paper on alarm calls and evolution

IPv6 adoption (define) has a key adoption deadline looming this year, but is still facing plenty of barriers to adoption. Key among them is this: IPv6 address information is not included in most of the root DNS (define) servers that power the Internet. This makes IPv6 to IPv6 connections a difficult proposition. At a time when the current IPv4 protocol is running out of address spaces for Web sites, the barriers to IPv6 adoption need to be addressed, experts say. Starting on February 4th, at least one of those adoption barriers will be addressed as AAAA records for IPv6 addresses are added to four of the key root DNS servers. IPv6 AAAA records are a key resource record type for storing IPv6 address information on DNS servers. The IPv6 AAAA additions were announced by ICANN at the end of December in an e-mail announcement by Barbara Roseman, general operations manager for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, an organization working under the auspices of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and which is responsible for assigning new Internet-wide IP addresses. The inclusion of the IPv6 records could make the adoption and operation of IPv6 a more viable option for network operators. For Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium and an operator of the F root DNS server and creator of the popular BIND DNS software, the ICANN/IANA move to IPv6 is a very good thing. "This is one of the roadblocks to running an Internet device IPv6-only, and we're very glad to finally see this roadblock removed," Vixie told InternetNews.com. Vixie isn't the only one that is enthusiastic about the ICANN/IANA announcement of AAAA for IPv6 on some root DNS servers. Internet service provider Verio is also keen on the move. "The ICANN/IANA announcement of AAAA for IPv6 on root DNS servers is the first step toward having a worldwide IPv6-capable DNS system," Fred Clift, manager of VPS/MPS development for Verio, told InternetNews.com. "Since the DNS system is distributed across thousands of organizations, nations, companies etc., this is the logical and much needed first step. In the future, a majority of the Internet will need to be reachable via IPv6; the ICANN/IANA announcement is part of the progression towards this." Next page: Party and Counterparty Issues With IPv6

By Govert Schilling
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 January 2008 AUSTIN, TEXAS--Looking 12 billion years back in time, astronomers have found the ancestors of spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. They liken the discovery, presented here at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, to finding key fossils in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.

The very first galaxies--formed shortly after the big bang--were small and dim. Through mergers, they grew into the large galaxies we see today. Astronomers using the biggest telescopes can see these original building blocks at very large distances, where the universe appears as it did billions of years ago (ScienceNOW, 28 November 2007). But there's a snag: Astronomers have found such a stunning variety of early galaxies that they are unclear about which of these faint objects are the precursors of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way and which are the ancestors of other types of galaxies, such as giant ellipticals like M87 (ScienceNOW, 5 November 2001).

Now, astrophysicists Eric Gawiser of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Caryl Gronwall of Pennsylvania State University in State College say they've solved the puzzle. The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope, along with other ground- and space-based scopes, to analyze lightweight collections of stars known as Lyman alpha emitters, which are 10 times smaller and 20 to 40 times less massive than the Milky Way. Gawiser, Gronwall, and their colleagues showed that the starlight emitted from these star collections, and the way they are clustered in space, indicates that they must have been the building blocks for larger galaxies such as the Milky Way.

The new results will help astronomers better understand the origin and evolution of galaxies--one of the outstanding problems in cosmology, says astronomer Sandra Faber of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's like discovering embryonic cells: It starts to become interesting when you know what they will evolve into."

But there may be more than one way to build a galaxy. Faber's Santa Cruz colleague Elizabeth McGrath said at the meeting that not all big galaxies grew from small ones. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, McGrath discovered very massive, disklike galaxies in the early universe. She says there wasn?t enough time for these behemoths to form through mergers. Instead, they were probably born in one fell swoop through the rapid collapse of a very massive cloud of gas.

Related sites

Abstract of paper by Gawiser et al., with link to full text

The MUSYC project that found the Lyman alpha emitters

A primer on the formation of galaxies

By Jennifer Couzin
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 January 2008 When a cancer spreads, or metastasizes, it often becomes incurable. Now scientists are eyeing a new factor that may prompt tumor cells to start roaming: a deficit of molecules known as microRNAs, which modulate gene expression. Building on earlier work linking microRNAs to cancer, researchers have found that a lack of certain microRNAs encourages tumors to spread. They also report that in mice, the microRNAs can be manipulated to slow metastasis.

Metastasis is thought to occur for a host of reasons. Certain genes may be turned on or off in tumors, causing cells to jump ship; and some environments in the body are more hospitable to wandering cancer cells. Recently, scientists have begun to consider the role of microRNAs, which appear to be expressed at very low levels in tumors. That's led to speculation that when turned on, microRNAs can suppress tumors.

Joan Massagu%26eacute;, a cancer biologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, cast a wide net for disappearing microRNAs in breast cancers. He and his colleagues examined microRNA expression in cell lines from patients with aggressive breast cancer that had spread to bones or the lungs. They came up with six microRNAs whose expression was vanishingly low compared to normal tissue. The researchers injected mice with metastatic cells from a patient with breast cancer. When lesions formed in the bones or lungs of the animals, the team found very low expression of three of the six microRNAs.

Massagu%26eacute; and his colleagues also studied 368 banked tumor samples from breast cancer patients and looked at expression of the genes that are suppressed by the six key microRNAs; when gene expression is high, the microRNAs aren't active, and when it's low, they are. The researchers found that patients whose tumors expressed the genes had about a 50%26#37; chance of being alive and not having metastatic cancer after 10 years. Among those patients that were negative for all six genes--in other words, those whose microRNA expression was high and damping down gene expression--the number was about 75%26#37;, the team reports in the 10 January issue of Nature.

The team also investigated the impact of restoring expression of microRNAs in cancer cells injected into mice. Boosting expression of three of the six microRNAs before injecting the cancer cells dramatically reduced lung and bone metastases, although the mice still developed them eventually. "That was a very clean experiment," says Massagu%26eacute;. But "it's a far cry" from treating patients.

Laura van 't Veer, a molecular biologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, agrees that clinical applications are far off, but she says the findings are promising. At the very least, microRNAs "may represent especially good indicators of metastasis" and could be used diagnostically, says Robert Weinberg, a cancer biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose group last year described a microRNA that plays a role in breast cancer metastasis (ScienceNOW, 26 September 2007). Massagu%26eacute; is now studying whether the microRNAs he came up with help prevent metastasis in other cancers.

Related sites

Article from Science on metastasis

More on metastasis

After a sudden and heated controversy arose last week over blocking older file formats in the latest service pack of Office 2003, Microsoft late Friday all but reversed itself. Along with apologies to both users and other software makers, Microsoft also provided automated tools for restoring access to those older files. The brouhaha began last week when a user whose online handle is time961 complained on tech gadfly site Slashdot that Office 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3) defaults to blocking the opening or saving files in many older application file formats, including Office 97 and earlier, but also files created by CorelDraw, among others. The reasoning behind blocking access to those formats, according to a Microsoft knowledge base (KB) article published in December, is security -- the older formats are "less secure," the document stated. "They may pose a risk to you." Now, Microsoft has admitted those statements were in error. Although SP3 began shipping in September, this was the first outcry over the change in Office 2003's default settings %26#150; probably because most older files are to be found in customers' archives and aren't accessed frequently. Still, that could create big problems for users who have to access those archives at a much later date %26#150; for instance, as part of a multi-year audit. "Because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives," said the Slashdot posting. The affair also prompted an outcry from Corel. "Corel is not aware of any security issue related to the CorelDraw .CDR file format," Gerard Metrallier, director of graphics product management for Corel, said in a statement e-mailed to InternetNews.com. "Corel has unsuccessfully tried to figure out the basis for categorizing .CDR files as 'less secure.'" That prompted Microsoft to scramble %26#150; apologizing profusely to vendors and users alike %26#150; and to provide tools to make it much simpler for users to access the blocked file types. "In the KB article we stated that it was the file formats that were insecure, but this is actually not correct. A file format %26#133; isn't insecure %26#150; it's the code that reads the format that's more or less secure," David LeBlanc, senior software development engineer for Microsoft Office, said in a blog post Friday. That means the insecurity is in Office itself, and not in the file formats. LeBlanc went on to say that the files aren't blocked permanently either %26#150; just by default, which can be undone. In response to complaints that procedures described in the KB article require editing the Windows registry in order to re-enable access to the files, and are both complicated and risky, LeBlanc also posted links to work arounds that do the job automatically. "You click on the link %26#91;for the file type%26#93; and it brings up a dialog box that says 'Run,' %26#133; It's very easy," a Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com. Microsoft also has an Office Online help file that describes how to re-enable those file formats in Office 2007, which has blocked those files by default since it was first released in November 2006. Unlike Office 2003, Office 2007 lets users access those files by placing them in what the company refers to as "trusted locations" %26#150; that is, by placing the files in a location that Office 2007 believes it can trust in a manner similar to Internet Explorer's "Trusted Sites" zone.