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WHO warns against use of electronic cigarettes

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  • The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Friday against using
    electronic cigarettes, saying there was no evidence to prove they were safe
    or helped smokers break the habit.

  • First made in China and sold mainly over the Internet in countries
    including Brazil, Britain, Canada and Israel, they have grown in popularity
    despite a lack of regulatory approval, it said.

  • A typical electronic cigarette is made of metal tube with a chamber
    which holds liquid nicotine in a rechargeable cartridge. Users puff on it
    but do not light it, leading some to use it to evade smoking bans in public
    places, according to the WHO.

    However, they inhale a fine mist of nicotine into their lungs, "plus potentially many other toxic compounds which we are not sure of", said Douglas Bettcher, acting director of the WHO's Tobacco Free Initiative.

    "The World Health Organization knows of absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever that would confirm that the electronic cigarette is a safe and effective smoking cessation device," Bettcher told a news briefing.

    "Toxicological tests and clinical trials have not been performed on this
    product," he said.


  • The electronic cigarette has yet to be shown to be a legitimate therapy like nicotine gum, patches or lozenges that help wean smokers from nicotine addiction, the U.N. agency said.

    "If the manufacturers and marketers of the electronic cigarette want to help smokers to quit, then they should operate within proper regulatory frameworks, Bettcher said. This meant rigorous clinical and toxicological studies must be carried out
    .

  • The WHO was greatly concerned that some manufacturers had used the WHO name or logo on their package or website, falsely implying endorsement, Bettcher said, declining to take names.

  • The agency was contacting health authorities in its 193 member states to alert them of "these bogus, untested false claims". Turkey had already banned sales, he said.

    The WHO agency had become aware only this year of the spreading use of electronic cigarettes worldwide.

    "It has really taken countries and the WHO by surprise. It has been a product that appeared very suddenly on the market in a short period of time," Bettcher said.


  • In 2003 WHO members clinched a treaty calling for stronger warnings on
    cigarette packages and limits on advertising and sponsorship. Some 160
    countries have ratified the landmark pact.

    Tobacco use is the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide, contributing to 5.4 million deaths from heart disease, stroke and other diseases annually, the WHO says.

Obesity may diminish a man's fertility

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  • Being obese may dim a man's chances of becoming a father, even if he is otherwise healthy, a new study suggests.

  • Researchers found that among 87 healthy men ages 19 to 48, those who were obese were less likely to have ever fathered a child. More importantly, they showed hormonal differences that point to a reduced reproductive capacity, the researchers report in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

  • Compared with their thinner counterparts, obese men had lower levels of
    testosterone in their blood, as well as lower levels of luteinizing hormone (LH)
    and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) -- both essential to reproduction.

  • According to the researchers, these relatively low levels of LH and FSH are suggestive of a "partial" hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. This is a condition in which the testes do not function properly due to signaling problems in the hypothalamus or pituitary gland, two brain structures involved in hormone secretion.

  • The findings suggest that obesity alone is an "infertility factor" in otherwise healthy men, write Dr. Eric M. Pauli and his colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey.

    Of the 87 men in the study, 68 percent had had a child. Pauli's team found that the average body mass index, or BMI, was lower among these men compared with those who'd never fathered a child; in the former group, the average BMI was 28, which falls into the range for "overweight," while the average BMI for childless men was nearly 32, which falls into the "obese" range.

  • When the researchers assessed the men for several reproductive hormones, they found that the more obese a man was, the lower was his LH and FSH levels. On the other hand, increasing obesity correlated with increasing estrogen levels.

    Excess body fat, Pauli's team explains, may increase the conversion of testosterone to estrogen in a man's blood. Such hormone alterations could, in turn, signal the brain to suppress FSH and LH production.

    Past studies have linked obesity with a dampened libido and increased risk of erectile dysfunction, the researchers note. Those effects, they say, along with the hormonal alterations seen in this study, could act together to decrease an obese man's fertility.

Stressed plants release aspirin-like chemical

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WASHINGTON, Sep 19 - Plants stressed by drought or unseasonable temperatures squirt out an aspirin-like chemical, researchers reported on Thursday in a finding that may some day help farmers watch for trouble.

The chemical, methyl salicylate, may help plants resist the damage and may help them signal danger to one another, the team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado said.

"Unlike humans, who are advised to take aspirin as a fever suppressant, plants have the ability to produce their own mix of aspirin-like chemicals, triggering the formation of proteins that boost their biochemical defenses and reduce injury," Thomas Karl, who led the study, said in a statement.

"Our measurements show that significant amounts of the chemical can be detected in the atmosphere as plants respond to drought, unseasonable temperatures, or other stresses."

Acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin, was originally derived from tree bark, so scientists knew it was a compound made by plants. But it was never seen to be emitted as a gas.

Writing in the journal Biogeosciences, the researchers said they accidentally found the chemical when they set up instruments last year in a California walnut grove to monitor plant emissions of volatile organic compounds.

Such compounds can combine with industrial emissions to affect pollution and they can influence local climate.

The trees were already stressed by drought, and levels of methyl salicylate rose with unseasonably cool night-time temperatures -- especially when it quickly warmed up the next day.

Plants are known to emit chemicals to signal one another when they are close together, for instance, when being chomped on by insects.

"These findings show tangible proof that plant-to-plant communication occurs on the ecosystem level," scientist Alex Guenther said. "It appears that plants have the ability to communicate through the atmosphere."

Farmers and forest managers may be able to monitor for methyl salicylate to watch for early signs of disease, insect infestation, or other types of stress long before leaves begin to wither and drop off.

"If you have a sensitive warning signal that you can measure in the air, you can take action much sooner, such as applying pesticides. The earlier you detect that something's going on, the more you can benefit in terms of using fewer pesticides and managing crops better," Karl said.

Glitch shuts 'Big Bang' Collider for two months

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  • Geneva,Sep 21,- A technical glitch has forced scientists to shut down the
    huge particle-smashing machine built to simulate the conditions of the "Big
    Bang" for at least two months, they said on Saturday.

  • The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said there had
    been a major helium leak on Friday into the tunnel housing the biggest and
    most complex machine ever made.


  • Just 10 days ago, scientists had celebrated the successful start of the
    Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under the Swiss-French border, hoping it would
    revamp modern physics and unlock secrets about the universe and its origins.

    In order to fix the problem, the machine will have to be warmed up from its
    operating temperature of minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, spokesman James Gillies
    said.

    "Because the LHC is a superconducting machine that works at very low
    temperatures, in order to get in and fix it we've got to warm it up, then we
    go and fix it, and then we cool it down again, and that's a process that's
    likely to take two months," he said.


    The organisation said strict safety regulations had ensured there was no risk
    to people from the malfunction.

  • The project has had to work hard to dismiss suggestions by some critics
    that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that
    could suck in the whole planet.


    Since the machine started up earlier this month, scientists have successfully
    sent particle beams around the accelerator.

    The next step will be to smash the beams into each other to trigger tiny
    collisions at nearly the speed of light.

  • This will be an attempt to recreate on a miniature scale the heat and
    energy of the Big Bang, the explosion generally believed by cosmologists to be
    at the origin of our expanding universe.

    CERN said it thought the leak was prompted by a faulty electrical connection
    between two magnets, which probably melted at high current, leading to
    mechanical failure.

    When the LHC starts up at full speed, it will be able to engineer 600 million
    collisions every second between protons travelling around its 27-km
    underground chamber at 99.99 percent of the speed of light.

  • CERN officials said minor glitches were to be expected, given the
    intricacy of the $9 billion machine.

    "It's a very complicated machine, we've always known that there's the
    possibility of this sort of incident in the start-up phase and if it happens,
    then it's a two-month off time," said Gillies.

Stardust evidence points to planet collision

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  • Stardust evidence points to planet collision

    WASHINGTON, Sep 21, Masses of dust floating around a binary star system
    suggest that two Earth-like planets obliterated each other in a violent
    collision, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.

    "It's as if Earth and Venus collided with each other," Benjamin
    Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California Los Angeles, who
    worked on the study, said in a statement.


    "Astronomers have never seen anything like this before; apparently major,
    catastrophic, collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system."


    Writing in the Astrophysical Journal, the team at UCLA, Tennessee State
    University and the California Institute of Technology said it spotted the dust
    orbiting a star known as BD +20 307, 300 light-years from Earth in the
    constellation Aries.


    A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion
    miles. So the observations are, in essence, looking back in time 300 years.

    "If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision would have
    wiped out everything in a matter of minutes: the ultimate extinction event,"
    said Gregory Henry of Tennessee State University.

    BD +20 307 appears to be composed of two stars, both very similar in mass,
    temperature and size to the Earth's sun. They spin about their common center
    of mass every 3 1/2 days or so.

    "The planetary collision in BD +20 307 was not observed directly but, rather,
    was inferred from the extraordinary quantity of dust particles that orbit the
    binary pair at about the same distance as Earth and Venus are from our sun,"
    Henry said.

    "If this dust does indeed point to the presence of terrestrial planets,
    then this represents the first known example of planets of any mass in orbit
    around a close binary star."


    In July 2005, the team reported it had spotted the system, then believed to
    consist of a single star. It was surrounded by more warm orbiting dust than
    any other sun-like star known to astronomers.

    "This poses two very interesting questions," said Tennessee State's
    Francis Fekel. "How do planetary orbits become destabilized in such an old,
    mature system? Could such a collision happen in our own solar system?"

Common plastics chemical linked to heart problems

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Common plastics chemical linked to heart problems:


Rockville, Maryland,Sep 17, A major study links a chemical widely used in plastic products, including baby bottles, to health problems in humans like heart disease and diabetes, but US regulators said on Tuesday they still believe it is safe.

The chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, is commonly used in plastic food and beverage containers and in the coating of food cans.

Until now, environmental and consumer activists who have questioned the safety of BPA have relied on animal studies.

But the study by British researchers in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that among 1,455 US adults, those with the highest levels of BPA were more likely to have heart disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities than those with the lowest levels.

US Food and Drug Administration officials said they would review the new findings, which were not yet published when the agency issued a draft conclusion in August that BPA is safe at current exposure levels.

"We have confidence in the data that we've looked at and the data that we're relying on to say that the margin of safety is adequate," FDA official Laura Tarantino said at a meeting of experts advising the agency on whether it made the right call.

"There are things you can do if you choose to reduce your level of bisphenol A," Tarantino said. "But we have not recommended that anyone change their habits or change their use of any of these products because right now we don't have the evidence in front of us to suggest that people need to."

Panel chairman Martin Philbert declined to say what the committee's next move would be.

BPA is used to make polycarbonate plastic, a clear shatter-resistant material in products ranging from baby bottles to medical devices.

BPA can mimic the hormone estrogen in the body.

LEACHING INTO LIQUIDS

People can consume BPA when it leaches out of the plastic into baby formula, water or food inside a container. Some retailers and manufacturers are moving away from products with BPA. Canadian officials have concluded BPA was harmful.

Steven Hentges of the American Chemistry Council, an industry group, said the study's design did not allow for anyone to conclude BPA causes heart disease and diabetes.

"On the other hand, though, bisphenol A has been very intensively studied in a very large number of laboratory animal studies. And the weight of evidence from those studies . continues to support the safe use of products containing bisphenol A," he said in a telephone interview.

The British researchers, who acknowledged their findings are not proof that the chemical is causing the harm, analyzed urine samples from a US government health survey of adults ages 18-74 representative of the US population.

The 25 percent of people with the highest levels of bisphenol A in their bodies were more than twice as likely to have heart disease, including heart attacks or type 2 diabetes, compared to the 25 percent with the lowest levels.

At the FDA panel meeting, several scientists and activists said the FDA ignored animal studies finding health concerns and some called for the chemical to be banned in food containers.

Democratic US Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, who heads the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said the FDA has "focused myopically on industry-funded research."

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Committee on Finance, released a letter he wrote to FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach asking why the agency has not appointed a safety panel to review BPA.

Tarantino said nothing was ignored but industry-funded studies finding no harm were important in the conclusions. The panel is expected to present its advice to the FDA next month.

Tarantino, head of the FDA's office of food additive safety, said there is talk of government scientists doing their own BPA safety studies, but that could take years to conduct.

Exercise may help pregnant women stop smoking

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LONDON, Sep 23, Physical exertion may help pregnant women stop smoking, researchers said on Tuesday, after two small studies showed a quarter of women who exercised regularly while expecting a babyquit smoking.

The British scientists said the quitting rate was about the same as for people who use nicotine replacement.


"Our findings suggest that a physical activity intervention is feasible and acceptable as an aid to smoking cessation during pregnancy," Michael Ussher and colleagues from St. George's University of London, wrote in the journal BMC Health.


  • Nicotine -- one of the most addictive substances known -- can lead to lower birth weight, higher infant mortality and is linked to learning difficulties and health problems in childhood.

    An estimated 17 percent of British women and 20 percent of women in the United
    States say they smoke during pregnancy, the researchers said.

    Nicotine patches are one way to help smokers give up, but there are worries
    they may harm the fetus, leaving exercise as a healthy alternative for
    pregnant women, the researchers said.

    The two pilot studies included women over 18 who smoked at least one cigarette
    a day and were 12 to 20 weeks into their pregnancy.

    In one trial, women exercised under supervision once a week for six weeks
    while in the other they worked out twice a week for the same length of time
    and then once weekly for three weeks. All received counseling and help to stop
    smoking.

    The women exercised at a moderate pace and the main activity was walking, the
    researchers said. A quarter of the 32 women gave up smoking before giving
    birth, the studies found.

    The researchers, who are now conducting a larger trial of more than 850
    women, did not say why exercise appears to make a difference but previous
    research has linked physical activity to reduced cravings during pregnancy.

Scientists get images of planet with sun-like star

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Washington,Sep 16 - Scientists have snapped the first images of a planet outside our solar system that is orbiting a star very much like the sun.

Nearly all of the roughly 300 so-called extrasolar planets discovered to date have been detected using indirect methods such as changes observed in a star when a planet orbits directly in front of it from the perspective of Earth.

But in findings announced on Monday, University of Toronto scientists said they used the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take direct pictures of the planet, which is about the size of Jupiter but with eight times the mass.

It is also much hotter than Jupiter, they said.

This planet and the star it seems to orbit are located in our Milky Way galaxy about 500 light years from Earth, the scientists said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, or the distance light travels in a year.

"It's always been a goal to take a picture of a planet around another star. The challenge, of course, is that planets are much, much fainter than stars," Ray Jayawardhana, one of the scientists, said in a telephone interview.

Of all known extrasolar planets, this one is orbiting the furthest from its star. It is located roughly 11 times further from its star than Neptune -the outermost planet in our solar system -- is located from the sun, the scientists said.

They said they are working to confirm that the planet is indeed orbiting this star as it appears, but it may take up to two years to get that data.

"The star is very typical. It's like the sun, just younger. But the planet is quite unusual. It's on the high end of the mass of the extrasolar planets found so far. And it's also very far away from its star," Jayawardhana added.

Before this, the only planets or similar objects that have been directly imaged outside of the solar system were either free-floating in space and not orbiting a star, or orbiting a brown dwarf, a failed star that did not reach the mass necessary to spark the nuclear fusion typical of a star.

The scientists said they benefited from technology that reduces distortions from turbulence in Earth's atmosphere.

Jayawardhana said the scientists have evidence of water and carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere. The planet is not thought to be a good candidate for extraterrestrial life because it appears to be a gas giant, a type of planet inhospitable to life, and because it is too young.

The star is considered a newborn, forming an estimated 5 million years ago. The sun is about 4-1/2 billion years old.

The brains behind a blade runner

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The brains behind a blade runner

REYKJAVIK, Sep 29, If it sounds far-fetched for a man without lower legs to become one of the fastest runners on the planet, how about typing by just thinking the words or staying sporty well into old age?

Such prospects motivate work at Ossur, the Icelandic group behind the prosthetics that vaulted double-amputee Oscar Pistorius into the limelight with his bid to compete in the Beijing Olympics.

Besides producing carefully adapted artificial limbs to change the lives of disabled people, the world's only major listed prosthetics maker is also looking ahead to the day when robotics and neuroscience can change those of many more.

"What we should do is compare to the real body," Ossur's Chief Executive Jon Sigurdsson told Reuters. "And then we see that there is a long way to go. It is a very humbling experience to try to imitate God."

With market capitalization of about $431 million, the company is small in the field of medical equipment, but positioned for growth.

Hilmar Janusson, its head of technology, envisions a day when prostheses can be controlled by our nerves rather than by systems such as the computer keyboard.

What is needed -- Janusson almost makes it sound easy -- is a grasp of the signals running through our nervous system. "As soon as we start to understand, and basically de-code it into something, then things will happen very, very quickly," he said.

It's a goal to date pursued in the academic world. In May, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine reported how a monkey wired up with microelectrodes could use brainpower to direct a robotic arm to pluck a marshmallow from a skewer and stuff it into its mouth.

In the meantime, Ossur is gaining plenty of attention from its work with Pistorius.

THE FIRST BIG STEP :

The South African, dubbed the Blade Runner because of the pair of carbon-fibre blades on which he sprints, won three gold medals in the Paralympics after failing to achieve the qualifying time for the main games.

Born without a fibula in either leg, he has become a symbol of perseverance, while the Cheetah Flex-Foot product he runs on sparked a debate about what constitutes an unfair edge in sport.

Janusson said the Flex-Foot may look nothing like human anatomy, but from a biomechanical perspective it is actually similar. The big difference: human feet are more efficient.

"We now know that the whole body is a spring that is loaded and you don't waste a joule of energy," he said.

Ossur did not invent the Flex-Foot. That was an American man named Van Phillips, himself an amputee. Ossur bought his firm in 2000 and has since fine-tuned the product.

The company knows the world it supplies. Sigurdsson says of the 220 or so staff in Reykjavik, half a dozen are amputees. Its founder, Ossur Kristinsson, was born without a foot and wears a prosthesis.

Janusson said remarkable progress has been made toward helping someone who has lost a limb lead a more normal life.

"For below-knee, we're probably replacing up to 50-60 percent," he said. "We're pretty good below-knee. And there is no reason for below-knee amputees not to participate fully. Above-knee, we're down to 20-30 percent."

Arms are tougher. "Maybe 3-4 percent," he said.

To achieve that remaining 96 to 97 percent will require progress on many fronts, including a better understanding of the nervous system and advances in tissue engineering, where scientists work with cells to replace biological functions.

The big breakthrough may not be all that far off, according to Yoky Matsuoka, a specialist in robotics and neuroscience at the University of Washington, who is working to control arms and hands by nerve signals.

"I think we are already witnessing the beginning of the big step," she said of the prospect of de-coding the nervous system. "Of course, a complete decoding and perfectly natural control may not happen in our lifetime."

Matsuoka expects scientists will certainly get to the point where a person could manipulate an object by thinking. "Spinning a pen or crumpling a paper at human speed may be a bit harder. Having enough sensory feedback to replace a surgeon's hand may take even longer," she said in an email interview.

ONE OF A KIND

Ossur -- whose main competitor in the prosthetics field is unlisted Otto Bock of Germany -- has generated investor interest in its niche, as well as in its more esoteric ideas.

"The only problem is it's the only listed company in its field," said Haraldur Yngvi Petersson, an analyst at Icelandic bank Kaupthing.

Petersson is one of just four analysts who cover the company, but he notes that unlike most Icelandic groups, Ossur has some foreign investors, including fund manager Fidelity.

The analyst is enthusiastic about products such as Rheo knee and Proprio foot which, aided by computer technology, adapt to the way a person walks and moves.

"I would say that we are just now starting to see real revenue potential," Petersson said of them.

Shares in Ossur, are down a little more than 25 percent from a lifetime high in 2006. But they are still double what they were worth in 2004.

The company does not pay dividends, preferring to pour money into research and development. Sales reached $93 million in the latest quarter, more than 40 percent from prosthetics, when the company reported net income of nearly $4 million. Bracing and support products make up the biggest share of revenues.

But Janusson, the technology chief, is also energized by simpler issues. He talks about a day, for example, when people wounded by landmines can get state-of-the-art prostheses at little cost.

He points to the switch to digital watches from wind-ups in the 1970s. Initially, the digital ones were expensive but as technology progressed, they became the stuff of dollar stores.

He believes prostheses one day could be used to help a much broader portion of the population. Allowing the elderly to stay active, for instance, could extend life itself.

"Everyone in the profession would agree with me, that the level of activity makes a difference in how long you live," Janusson said.

Yahoo begins radical home page overhaul

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Yahoo begins radical home page overhaul :
SUNNYVALE, California, Sep 18- Yahoo Inc is moving ahead on Thursday with a radical redesign of its home page -- the most heavily trafficked site on the Web -making changes that give users a personalized view of the wider Web.

T
he Internet media giant is under the gun to deliver on year-old promises to transform Yahoo from a network of more or less insular properties into "starting points" that help consumers quickly navigate their way to the rest of the Web.

"We are going to put what matters to you most at your fingertips," said Tapan Bhat, the senior vice president in charge of "front doors" -the main destinations at Yahoo, including Yahoo.com, MyYahoo and the Yahoo toolbar.

The new Yahoo home page features a tab on the left hand column of the page with sophisticated links to the user's 10 or 20 favorite sites. It functions as an alternative to navigation methods like bookmarks, link bars or browser tabs, he said.

In its simplest sense, Yahoo is blending the broadcast, editorially-controlled view that Yahoo.com has long offered with the personalized, self-selected view of information that the company's MyYahoo service has long offered. It mixes things users know they want, with the serendipitous or unexpected.

"For the first time, we are going to marrying those two to take the best of both," Bhat promised.

The changes, which Yahoo is testing on only a small group of users initially, will lead to a full-scale overhaul later. Two years ago, the last such redesign of Yahoo.com took up to six months to fully implement, the Yahoo executive said.

The makeover of Yahoo.com marks the company's 14-year evolution from the Web's pioneering directory of sites to an index of links to a search navigation tool to a complex media destination site.

A spokeswoman said Yahoo planned to invite a random sample of its users amounting to less than 1 percent of audience. The tests will be conducted in Britain, France, India and the United States, Bhat said.

The new home page relies on slick personalization technology that allows users who have signed into their Yahoo account to see when new information arrives not just on Yahoo sites, like e-mail or news, but off-Yahoo on sites such as eBay Inc auctions or Google Inc's Gmail service. Instead of whisking people to these sites, users can see a preview of the information while staying on the home page, which allows them to quickly navigate across a range of their favorite sites. The Yahoo home page attracts around 100 million U.S. users a month and 300 million worldwide, Bhat said.

Yahoo is relying on new technology it calls the Content Optimization Knowledge Engine to help its computers determine what the most engaging content may be to a specific user, then serve it up based on their prior surfing habits. Relevant ads tied to users' particular interests are delivered as well.

SLOWLY MOVING THE MOUNTAIN

Yahoo is moving carefully with this personalized approach in the knowledge that less than 15 percent of its user base subscribe to its existing MyYahoo personalization service.

"It is a leaner look, it is more user friendly," said Caroline Dangson, an analyst with market research firm IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts, who was briefed on the changes.

But Dangson said the collective judgment of IDC researchers is that Yahoo has made a series of very exciting announcements over the past year, but has been slow to deliver on any of its promises to open up and transform how its sites function.

The more than 500 million or so monthly users of Yahoo properties have little if nothing to see of these ambitious plans to date. "These are announcements. But when does this really roll out?" Dangson asks of the new home page design.

And while Yahoo moves carefully so as not to anger its base of hundreds of millions of visitors, many of its biggest rivals have made sweeping changes in their own sites, Dangson said.

These include Microsoft Corp's MSN, Time Warner Inc's AOL, Facebook and News Corp MySpace, everyone it seems, except Google, Dangson said.

Some of those makeovers have frustrated users who prefer "classic" versions of their favorite sites, she said, adding to the caution of Yahoo, which attracts some of the biggest audiences on the Web to Yahoo.com, Yahoo News and Yahoo Mail.

The real test of the success or failure of the Yahoo home page redesign will only come when the company opens up Yahoo.com to let independent developers create their own applications to work on Yahoo.com, Dangson said. That where Google, Facebook and MySpace all are further along, she said.

Separately, in a bid to shore up morale within a company that has been besieged by competition, a tough advertising market and the so far unwonted takeover gestures of Microsoft, Yahoo has introduced a campaign to encourage employees to dress in purple -- the company's primary color -at work.

Wall St. havoc deals blow to mobile phone makers

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HELSINKI, Sep 18- Mobile phone makers and operators risk losing thousands of their most profitable customers as financial havoc whacks the global banking industry.

Analysts said the success of Blackberry-maker RIM (RIM.TO: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) (RIMM.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) is the most dependent on Wall Street's future.

In worst case scenario 40,000 workers may lose their jobs in finance following Lehman's (LEH.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) collapse and problems at other big financial firms, New York Governor David Paterson said earlier this week.

"RIM probably looks most exposed to any downside risk in this segment," said analyst Neil Mawston from research firm Strategy Analytics, adding that also Palm (PALM.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), HTC (2498.TW: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and HP (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) could feel the pinch.


Handset makers already face an increasingly fierce battle for market share as demand slows in the United States and Europe, where economies are under pressure from the global credit crunch.

  • Operators have started to answer thegrowing problem by shifting their subsidy dollars to more expensive phonemodels -- hoping to attract clients who spend more money by surfing on theInternet and checking their e-mail.

  • "In North America they have been targeting especially higher-data devices," said Carolina Milanesi, analystat research firm Gartner.

  • The global mobile phone market is expected to grow around 10 percent this year, boosted by the continuing surge in demand for cheap phones in emerging markets like India.

  • At the same time, mature handset markets in the developed world have grown marginally at best. In Western Europe handset sales fell sharply in the first half of 2008, Gartner says.

    Operator subsidies -- key for phone sales in most mature markets -- in Western Europe show a moderate decline, while subsidies in North America are slowly rising, Credit Suisse said in a research note.

    "However a substantial reallocation is underway in that 45 percent of subsidies in these markets now go towards smartphones, some 20 percentage-points higher than 18 months ago -- a trend which we believe will continue," Credit Suisse said, adding this was likely to hurt sales volumes of cheaper phones.

  • RIM, which sold 5.6 million Blackberries last quarter, has been able to successfully expand its customer base beyond Wall Street bankers in the last few years, but 40 percent of its new subscribers were still from large corporations in the last fiscal quarter.

    "No matter how much economic challenge there is, how many people do you know that have given up their mobile?" RIM's co-chief executive Jim Balsille said on Thursday in Mumbai at the launch of the BlackBerry Bold smartphone in India.

    "But there's clearly got to be a point where there is an impact.
    Macroeconomic factors have gotten all the more turbulent in the last week,
    and maybe it will come to that tipping point," he said, declining to say if
    the company stood by its guidance for the second quarter and for the rest of
    the year.


    Among the large mobile phone makers Nokia (NOK1V.HE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) has been pushing for bigger share of the mobile e-mail market for years, but sold just 2 million E-series business phones in the second quarter, less than 2 percent of its total volumes.

    "Nokia's E-series handsets have been struggling to gain traction over the past year, so the current financial-industry wobbles may not help them,"
    said Strategy Analytics' Mawston.

Nokia to unveil touch screen phone Oct 2

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Nokia to unveil touch screen phone Oct 2

HELSINKI, Fri Sep 26, The world's top cellphone maker Nokia will unveil its long-awaited first touch screen phone at a media and analyst event in London next week, two industry
sources told Reuters on Friday.
Both sources said Nokia was set to unveil the phone, codenamed "Tube", on Oct 2.

A Nokia spokeswoman declined to comment.

  • Smaller handset vendors -- LG Electronics, Apple and Samsung Electronics -have rolled out numerous popular touch screen phones over the last two years.

    Nokia said in July it would introduce its first touch screen phone, priced cheaper for the higher-volume market than rival touch screen models, this year.

Distinguish between Indifferece curve and Iso-quant

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Indifference Curve



ISO – QUANT

1. Indifference
curve is a locus of points, which represents various combinations of two
gods and has same utility on satisfaction in every combination.


2. Indifference curve emphasizes on consume satisfaction.


3. There are no physical units in which satisfaction can be measured. We label indifference
curves as I, II, III etc. showing that higher indifference curve provides a greater level of satisfaction, but we cannot say how much greater.


1. ISO0QUANT is a locus of some points which represents different compination of two factions of production and has same production in every points.


2. ISO – QUANT emphasizes on total output or production.


3. We can label SO-QUANT in the physical units of the output produced with out any difficulty. It is possible to say by how much production is greater or less
on ISO-QUANT than on another.

Distinguiush between MRS and MRTS

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MRS



MRTS

1. The elaboration of MRS in marginal rate of substitution.


2. By MRS we mean at rate one product is substituted by another product.


3. The idea of MRS
is derived from the indifference curve analysis.


1. The elaboration of MRTS is marginal rate of technical substitution.


2. By MRTS we mean at what rate one factor of production is substituted by an other factor of
productions.


3. The idea of MRTS
is derived from the ISO – QUANT curve analysis.

Marginal rate of technical substitution

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MRTS

The elaboration of MRTS is Marginal rate of technical substitution. MRTS can be defined as at what rate one factor of production can be substituted by another factor of production.

MRTS can be explained by the following schedule:













Factor Combination



Factor (y)



Factor (X)



MRTS



A



B



C



D



E



12



8



5



3



2



1



2



3



4



5



-



4:1



3:1



2:1



1:1


Graphical presentation: -


Fig: MRTS is given by the slope of the ISO –QUANT


Each of the input combinations A, B, C, D and E gives the same level of output. From combination A to combination B units of Y are replaced by 1 unit of X in the production
process without any change in the level of output. Therefore the MRTS is 4:1 atthis stage. Again from combination B to combination C 3 units of Y are replaced by 1 unit of X. Thus the marginal rate of technical substitution is now 3;1. Likewise, marginal rate of technical substitution between factor combination C and D is 2:1 and between factor combination D and E is 1:1.

The marginal rate of technical substitution at a point on the equal product curve can be known fromthe slope of the equal product curve at that point.

MRTS = Slope = Change in factor y/ change in factor x

= 4y/4x

LAC in constant cost curve

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LAC in constant cost curve :

If the production function is linear and homogenous (that is homogenous of the first degree) and also the prices of inputs remain constant, then the long run average cost will remain constant at all levels of output.

Google rolls out rival to iPhone

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NEW YORK, Sep 24 - T-Mobile has rolled out Google's answer to the iPhone as the Web search giant makes its biggest stab yet at leaping from consumers' computers into their pockets with a device cheaper than rival Apple offers.

The widely-anticipated G1 phone, introduced on Tuesday made by HTC Corp, has a touch-sensitive screen, a computer-like keyboard, Wi-Fi connections and uses Google's new Android operating system. Available in three colors -- black, white and brown -- it includes familiar Google services, such as Google Maps, Gmail and YouTube. Like the iPhone and other "smartphones" the device is meant to broaden the appeal of Web surfing on the go.

"If we see more mobile Web usage we'll be happy," Google co-founder Sergey Brin told Reuters after arriving at the launch on roller-blades.

His company, a powerhouse in Web advertising, would benefit if Android led more cell users to spend time on the Web, no matter which phone they are using.

Google is well ahead of rivals Yahoo Inc and Microsoft Corp in Web search on computers, but it wants to use Android to ensure this dominance carries over to the phone when mobile Web surfing becomes more popular.

But while no clear mobile Web winner has emerged so far, Google faces stiff competition from longer established phone players such as Nokia, Research In Motion Ltd's BlackBerry and Microsoft, as well as Apple.

Analysts saw the device as a "good first step" rather than an iPhone killer, but some expect as many as 400,000 to be sold in the United States by year-end. A T-Mobile executive said the estimate was "not incredible."

When it becomes available to U.S. consumers on October 22, the G1 will sell for about $179 -- slightly cheaper than the entry-level price of $199 for Apple Inc's iPhone -- with a two-year contract.

The G1 will be launched by T-Mobile's UK unit in November and other European countries such as Germany, Netherlands and the Czech Republic in the first quarter of 2009.

"The G1 doesn't threaten Apple now, but Android has raised the bar for competing mobile platforms. The bigger concern here is for Microsoft and Nokia if Google can win over the hearts and minds of operators and developers," said Geoff Blaber, an analyst with British firm CCS Insight.

NEXT GOOGLE PHONE MAY CHANGE

Both Google and Apple are wooing developers to create applications for their devices, but unlike Apple, which keeps a tight grip on the iPhone's hardware and operating software, Google's Android is open to be changed by outside developers.

Asked if the user interface of future Google phones would look anything like the first one, Andy Rubin, who developed Android for Google, said: "Its completely replaceable."

For example, Leslie Grandy, T-Mobile USA's product development vice president sees the carrier selling a range of Google-powered phones in future, including more basic ones without a touch-screen or full keyboards.

The new phone features Android Market, where customers can find and download free applications to expand and personalize their phones. T-Mobile's Grandy said the marketplace would eventually include applications that are sold for a fee.

"Because the platform is open, we think Android is somewhat future proof," Rubin, Google director of mobile platforms, told the audience at the launch.

A similar strategy helped increase the buzz around Apple's second-generation iPhone, which can support more than 3,000 applications available online.

Amazon.com's digital music store will be loaded on the G1, allowing users to search, download, buy and play more than six million songs, pitting it against iPhone's music player.

Android also competes with Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, which has been solidly gaining ground. HTC Chief Executive Peter Chou told Reuters his company, which has concentrated on Windows phones so far, is already planning more Android and Windows devices.

Between the United States and the United Kingdom, Chou said he expects to have sold more than 400,000 G1 by the year end.

Android's biggest competitor is Symbian software, which represents 60 percent of the smartphone market and which Nokia plans to buy out and open to other developers.

Nokia, which has about 40 percent of the mobile phone market, has also branched into mobile Web services such as mapping that compete directly with Google. Speaking at a conference in Chicago on Tuesday, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said he was not worried by new competition.

"The entry of Apple and Google -- in fact today in a very concrete way -- in mobile communications is the best possible illustration of the fact that there's a lot of possibility here," he said.

Hadron Collider forced to halt

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Hadron Collider forced to halt
London, Sep 20 (BBC Online) - Plans to begin smashing particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be delayed after a magnet failure forced engineers to halt work.

The failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100C. The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.

The LHC beam will remain turned off over the weekend while engineers investigate the severity of the fault.

A spokesman for Cern told the BBC it was not yet clear how soon progress could resume at the £3.6bn ($6.6bn) particle accelerator.

While the failure was "not good news", he said glitches of this kind were not unexpected during testing.

Delays

The first beams were fired successfully around the accelerator's 27km (16.7 miles) underground ring over a week ago.

The crucial next step is to collide those beams head on. However, the fault appears to have ruled out any chance of these experiments taking place for the next week at least.

The quench occurred during final testing of the last of the LHC's electrical circuits to be commissioned.

At 1127 (0927 GMT) on Friday, the LHC's online logbook recorded a quench in sector 3-4 of the accelerator, which lies between the Alice and CMS detectors.

The entry stated that helium had been lost to the tunnel and that vacuum conditions had also been lost.
It added that the Cern fire brigade had been called to the scene.

The superconducting magnets in the LHC must be supercooled to 1.9 kelvin above absolute zero, to allow them to steer particle beams around the circuit.

As a result of the quench, the temperature of about 100 of the magnets in the machine's final sector rose by around 100C.

A spokesman for Cern confirmed that it would now be difficult, if not impossible, to stage the first trial collisions next week.

Further delays could follow once the damage has been fully assessed over the weekend.

The setback comes just a day after the LHC's beam was restored after engineers replaced a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week.

Scientists find sun less blustery than before

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Scientists find sun less blustery than before

LOS ANGELES, Sept 24- The sun's winds are less blustery than they used to be, NASA said on Tuesday, revealing data from a solar probe that promises new insights about Earth's local star but poses few if any consequences for humans -- unless you're an astronaut.

The data show the solar wind, a steady stream of charged sub-atomic particles emitted by the sun and blowing at 1 million mph (1.6 million kph), has dwindled to its lowest level in at least 50 years, reducing its strength as a shield against potentially harmful galactic cosmic radiation.

The solar wind inflates a massive protective bubble, called the heliosphere, around the solar system. But measurements from the spacecraft Ulysses show the wind's pressure has dropped 20 percent since the mid-1990s. At the same time, the electron temperature of the solar wind has declined 13 percent.

As the solar wind weakens, the heliosphere is expected to dwindle in size and strength as well, allowing more cosmic radiation -- super high-energy electrons and protons zipping through interstellar space -- to reach the inner solar system.

Scientists studying the phenomenon insist Earth's inhabitants have nothing to fear. Humans remain protected from cosmic rays by virtue of the magnetic field that surrounds Earth, acting as an inner barrier to our exposure.

A diminished solar wind and corresponding rise in cosmic rays are of concern, however, to astronauts who venture beyond Earth orbit to the moon, Mars or beyond, and to engineers who design trans-orbital spacecraft.

The biggest implications, however, are scientific ones.

Researchers say the findings open the door to a greater understanding of the sun and heliosphere by altering solar conditions in a way that allows scientists to conduct new comparative studies.

"The heliosphere is our laboratory," said Nancy Crooker, a research professor at Boston University, in a conference call with reporters. "We know the sun has been this cool, this inactive before, but that was prior to the space age. So we didn't have actual physical measurements until now of such periods."

Ed Smith, NASA's project scientist for Ulysses, said, "It's an opportunity for us to study changes in the sun which will give us newer insights into the origin of the solar wind and its relation to the solar magnetic field."

The weakening solar wind differs from the 11-year cycles of solar activity associated with such phenomena as sun spots and solar flares that can cause disruptions of electric power grids and radio transmissions on Earth, as well as auroral displays.

However, Dave McComas, a principal Ulysses investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said continued diminishment of solar winds could dampen the impact of the next peak in other solar disturbances.

Ulysses, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency, was launched from the space shuttle Discovery in 1990 and became the first probe to fly around the sun's poles.

After more than 17 years, the spacecraft named for the hero of "The Odyssey" has exceeded its original mission lifetime nearly fourfold but is expected to finally wind down in a month or two, scientists said.

Nintendo to launch camera, music-capabl

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TOKYO, Sun Sep 28, Japanese video game maker Nintendo Co Ltd plans to launch a new model of its DS handheld machine that can take pictures and play music by the end of the year, the Nikkei business daily said on Sunday.

The move would pit the top-selling portable game gear with Apple Inc iPod and camera-embedded cellphones in general.

The price for the new machine, which will also be equipped with advanced wireless communications functions, is expected to be below 20,000 yen ($189) in Japan, compared with 16,800 yen for the current model, the Nikkei said.

The Wii game console and DS have been Nintendo's twin growth engines, helping its share price to grow more than three-fold over the past three years.

The DS far outsells Sony Corp's rival machine, PlayStation Portable (PSP), globally.

But in Japan, the PSP's unit sales exceeded the DS's in five consecutive months through July, according to game magazine publisher Enterbrain, in a potential sign of slowing momentum for the current DS model.

Scientists have discovered the crucial ovulation-triggering role played by a small protein molecule in the brain

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Scientists have discovered the crucial ovulation-triggeringrole played by a small protein molecule in the brain, a finding that could holdthe key to new therapies for infertility.

Professor Allan Herbison form the University of Otago with collaboration of Cambridge University researchers, has published the first evidence that kisspeptin signaling in the brain is also essential for ovulation to occur in adults.

Studying female mice, the researchers found that signaling between kisspeptin and its cell receptor GPR54 was essential to activate Gonadotrophin releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons, the nerve cells known to initiate ovulation.

The research appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

"This is an exciting finding, as people have been trying to find out precisely how the brain controls ovulation for more than 30 years. This work now reveals a crucial link in the brain circuitry responsible," Herbison said in a statement.

The study indicates that disorders affecting the signaling between kisspeptin and the GPR54 receptors will result in women being unable to ovulate.

As an approach to treating infertility in some women, it could allow for ovulation to be induced in a more natural way than current therapies, the research added.


Herbison says his research group is now investigating what role kisspeptin-GPR54 signaling might play in the male reproductive system.

As for the protein's name "kisspeptin," the researcherssay it is completely unrelated to its association with reproduction.

Electronic Arts

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Electronic Arts

  • Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), headquartered in Redwood City, California, is
    the world's leading interactive entertainment software company. Founded in
    1982, the company develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software
    worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, cellular handsets and
    the Internet. Electronic Arts markets its products under four brand names: EA
    SPORTS(TM), EA(TM), EA SPORTS Freestyle(TM) and POGO (TM). In fiscal 2008, EA
    posted GAAP net revenue of $3.67 billion and had 27 titles that sold more than
    one million copies. EA's homepage and online game site is www.ea.com. More
    information about EA's products and full text of press releases can be found
    on the Internet at www.info.ea.com.

  • EA, EA SPORTS, EA SPORTS Freestyle, EA Mobile POGO, Need for Speed,
    Spore, Lemonade Tycoon, SimCity and The Sims are trademarks or registered
    trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Tetris
    is a registered trademark of Tetris Holding, LLC. Bejeweled is a registered
    trademark of PopCap Games, Inc. John Madden, NFL, FIFA, Tiger Woods, PGA TOUR
    and NASCAR are the property of their respective owners and used with
    permission. MONOPOLY, YAHTZEE, and SCRABBLE (in the U.S. and Canada) are
    trademarks of Hasbro and are used with permission. iPhone, iPod, iTunes and
    Mac are trademarks or registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Nintendo
    DS is a trademark of Nintendo, All other trademarks are the property of their
    respective owners.

Organization Work setting

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Organization work setting:

The organization work setting is the large orgazaniazaiton frameork that modeled in influencing organization members and job behaviors that determine organizational performance and individual development.

The totality of how an organization system proceeds

So, organization work setting is the design for managing the organization i.e. organization arrangements social factor, physical setting and technology.

Organzaion change occurs when individual change their behavioral and these behavioral change occur when elements of the work setting have been modified.

Such as, termination of a project manager in the mid level of a project will affect the total project work in short total work
setting.