Video games take off as a spectator sport

Editorial: "Give video games a sporting chance"

EVERY sport has its idols and superstars. Now video gaming is getting them too. Professional gaming, or e-sports, exploded in popularity in the US and Europe last year.

The scene has been big in Asia - particularly South Korea - for about a decade, with top players such as Lim Yo-Hwan earning six-figure salaries and competing for rock-star glory in Starcraft tournaments that attract audiences in the hundreds of thousands.

The phenomenon is taking off in the West partly because of improved video-streaming technology and large financial rewards. Video games are becoming a spectator sport, with certain players and commentators drawing massive online audiences.

And where people go, money follows. The second world championship of League of Legends - a team-based game in which players defend respective corners of a fantasy-themed battle arena - was held in Los Angeles in October. The tournament had a prize pool of $5 million for the season, with $1 million going to winning team Taipei Assassins, the largest cash prize in the history of e-sports.

League of Legends has also set records for spectator numbers. More than 8 million people watched the championship finals either online or on TV - a figure that dwarfs audience numbers for broadcasts of many traditional sports fixtures.

But gamers don't need to compete at the international level to earn money. Video-streaming software like Twitch makes it easy for players to send live footage to a website, where the more popular ones can attract upwards of 10,000 viewers - enough for some to make a living by having adverts in their video streams. Gamers can go pro without leaving their homes.

Currently, e-sports productions are handled by gaming leagues - but that could soon change. Last November saw two moves that will make it even easier to reach a global online audience. First, Twitch announced it would be integrating with Electronic Arts's Origin service, a widely used gaming platform. This would let gamers stream their play at the click of a button, making it easy for people around the world to watch.

Also in November came the latest release from one of gaming's biggest franchises, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which has the ability to live-stream via YouTube built into the game itself. Another feature allows the broadcast of in-game commentary for multiplayer matches.

"I think we will reach a point, maybe within five years, where spectator features are a necessity for all big game releases," says Corin Cole of e-sports publishing company Heaven Media in Huntingdon, UK.

David Ting founded the California-based IGN Pro League (IPL), which hosts professional tournaments. He puts the popularity of e-sports down to the demand for new forms of online entertainment. "After 18 months, IPL's viewer numbers are already comparable to college sports in the US when there's a live event," he says. "The traffic is doubling every six months."

Ting sees motion detection, virtual reality and mobile gaming coming together to make physical exertion a more common aspect of video games, blurring the line between traditional sport and e-sports. "Angry Birds could be this century's bowling," says Ting.

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M'sian police to investigate rally participants' violation of terms

KUALA LUMPUR: Police will carry out investigations on participants who violated the three conditions agreed to by the rally organiser, Dang Wangi police chief ACP Zainuddin Ahmad said.

The three conditions prohibit the participants from bringing children below the age of 15 and waving placards and banners with seditious words; and compel the organiser to ensure that no more than 30,000 people were participating in the rally.

Zainuddin said the conditions were among the 27 police conditions agreed to by the organiser in accordance with Malaysia's Peaceful Assembly Act.

He said no arrests were made and no unwanted incidents occurred during the rally.

"Only two minor incidents occurred as the participants rushed to enter the stadium where the gathering was officially held, causing two senior citizens to pass out and be taken to hospital," he told reporters after the rally in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.

Zainuddin said several opposition leaders had also commended the service and cooperation given by the police throughout the rally.

He said the number of participants attending the rally was estimated at 45,000.

He also refuted the allegation that a bomb was found at Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre area.

- Bernama/xq

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ZTE readies itself for U.S. expansion in 2013

Lixin Cheng, the CEO of ZTE USA, at CES 2013.

(Credit:
Lynn La/CNET)

LAS VEGAS--Lixin Cheng and the rest of his division are determined to make it in America.

Cheng is the CEO of ZTE's U.S. division, and in addition to strengthening the company's carrier relationships, Cheng also has big plans in the near future to increase ZTE's presence in the U.S.

"There are a lot of things already in the pipeline," he said, referring to the devices planned through U.S. carriers.

But other than just spending money on developing handsets (though Cheng does refer to it as ZTE's "bread and butter"), the company also plans on using the $30 million that it recently announced to expanding its U.S. infrastructure, warehousing, and local research and development.

Of course, there are serious obstacles to face. Last fall, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee held a hearing expressing security concerns over alleged ties Huawei and ZTE had with the Chinese government.

Though both companies tried to reassure the lawmakers and the American public that there was nothing to worry about, a veil of suspicion from U.S. consumers remains.

For Cheng, the entire issue was troubling, but there were a few silver linings. First, it helped ZTE increase its transparency with the FCC. Secondly, as the old saying goes - any press is good press.

"From a branding point of view, it increased out brand awareness and a lot of people know ZTE more," he said. "I can't believe there is a positive side, but that's one, I think."

And as for concerns about competing with the tech giants already dominating the U.S. market, Cheng said there isn't any really.

He continued, saying he has full respect for Samsung and Apple, but because ZTE provides such a wide range of inexpensive and prepaid handsets, the company fulfills a niche role in the market that the other two do not satisfy.

"Honestly, I'm not focused on competitors," he said. "That's just our strategy. We're focused on our customers."

For now, what's important are the things that have a more immediate impact, like bringing the ZTE Grand S, the company's new flagship handset, to the U.S. after its initial Chinese launch.

The ZTE Grand S.

(Credit:
Lynn La/CNET)

Cheng is determined to have it available on our shores because it would mark a notable departure from ZTE's usual line of mid-range handsets in the U.S. With this smartphone, along with carrier branding, the Grand S could the company be the boost it needs to make a more positive name for itself.

Especially when considering the money that's at stake. Even though ZTE increased its U.S. market share five to six percent in the last two years, the financial gains from last year weren't so high. Cheng, however, remains steadfast.

"Last year was a very challenging year for us," he said. "But despite that, ZTE is committed to the U.S. market."

For more of CNET's CES 2013 coverage, click here.

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Pictures: Civil War Shipwreck Revealed by Sonar

Photograph by Jesse Cancelmo

A fishing net, likely only decades old, drapes over machinery that once connected the Hatteras' pistons to its paddle wheels, said Delgado.

From archived documents, the NOAA archaeologist learned that Blake, the ship's commander, surrendered as his ship was sinking. "It was listing to port, [or the left]," Delgado said. The Alabama took the wounded and the rest of the crew and put them in irons.

The officers were allowed to keep their swords and wander the deck as long as they promised not to lead an uprising against the Alabama's crew, he added.

From there, the Alabama dropped off their captives in Jamaica, leaving them to make their own way back to the U.S.

Delgado wants to dig even further into the crew of the Hatteras. He'd like see if members of the public recognize any of the names on his list of crew members and can give him background on the men.

"That's why I do archaeology," he said.

(Read about other Civil War battlefields in National Geographic magazine.)

Published January 11, 2013

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Poisoned Lottery Winner's Kin Were Suspicious

Urooj Khan had just brought home his $425,000 lottery check when he unexpectedly died the following day. Now, certain members of Khan's family are speaking publicly about the mystery -- and his nephew told ABC News they knew something was not right.

"He was a healthy guy, you know?" said the nephew, Minhaj Khan said. "He worked so hard. He was always going about his business and, the thing is: After he won the lottery and the next day later he passes away -- it's awkward. It raises some eyebrows."

The medical examiner initially ruled Urooj Khan, 46, an immigrant from India who owned dry-cleaning businesses in Chicago, died July 20, 2012, of natural causes. But after a family member demanded more tests, authorities in November found a lethal amount of cyanide in his blood, turning the case into a homicide investigation.

"When we found out there was cyanide in his blood after the extensive toxicology reports, we had to believe that ... somebody had to kill him," Minhaj Khan said. "It had to happen, because where can you get cyanide?"

In Photos: Biggest Lotto Jackpot Winners

Authorities could be one step closer to learning what happened to Urooj Khan. A judge Friday approved an order to exhume his body at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago as early as Thursday to perform further tests.

Lottery Winner Murdered: Widow Questioned By Police Watch Video

Moments after the court hearing, Urooj Khan's sister, Meraj Khan, remembered her brother as the kind of person who would've shared his jackpot with anyone. Speaking at the Cook County Courthouse, she hoped the exhumation would help the investigation.

"It's very hard because I wanted my brother to rest in peace, but then we have to have justice served," she said, according to ABC News station WLS in Chicago. "So if that's what it takes for him to bring justice and peace, then that's what needs to be done."

Khan reportedly did not have a will. With the investigation moving forward, his family is waging a legal fight against his widow, Shabana Ansari, 32, over more than $1 million, including Urooj Khan's lottery winnings, as well as his business and real estate holdings.

Khan's brother filed a petition Wednesday to a judge asking Citibank to release information about Khan's assets to "ultimately ensure" that [Khan's] minor daughter from a prior marriage "receives her proper share."

Ansari may have tried to cash the jackpot check after Khan's death, according to court documents, which also showed Urooj Khan's family is questioning if the couple was ever even legally married.

Ansari, Urooj Khan's second wife, who still works at the couple's dry cleaning business, has insisted they were married legally.

She has told reporters the night before her husband died, she cooked a traditional Indian meal for him and their family, including Khan's daughter and Ansari's father. Not feeling well, Khan retired early, Ansari told the Chicago Sun-Times, falling asleep in a chair, waking up in agony, then collapsing in the middle of the night. She said she called 911.

"It has been an incredibly hard time," she told ABC News earlier this week. "We went from being the happiest the day we got the check. It was the best sleep I've had. And then the next day, everything was gone.

"I am cooperating with the investigation," Ansari told ABC News. "I want the truth to come out."

Ansari has not been named a suspect, but her attorney, Steven Kozicki, said investigators did question her for more than four hours.

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Life will find a way, even in the midst of a hurricane

LIFE ahoy! Every hurricane that sweeps through the Gulf of Mexico carries a unique mix of bacteria in its clouds.

Much of our precipitation is likely caused by microbes in clouds. Their surfaces act as "seeds" to attract water and form ice crystals that fall through the cloud as rain or snow. To find out the nature of the bacteria, in 2010 researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta flew a jetliner through hurricanes Earl and Karl, 10 kilometres above the Earth's surface.

Twenty per cent of the small particles they collected turned out to be bacteria that could grow in the lab. Many were genetically similar to bacteria the researchers had earlier found in clouds over the US land mass and along the California coast. The similar bacteria could withstand UV radiation at high altitude, and use simple carbon compounds as their sole energy source, suggesting that they had adapted to survive in clouds.

But the bacterial communities in the two hurricanes were very different from one another - probably because the hurricanes began in different places. The team believe that the storms swept up species from the soil and ocean as they moved inland. This mix of bacteria could have increased the amount of rain from the hurricane by providing better "seeds" for the water to form around. The group presented their work at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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"Tsunami" of property cooling measures, say analysts

SINGAPORE: Property analysts have described the latest set of government measures as the "tsunami" of property cooling measures, as it affects public and private housing, executive condominiums, and industrial properties.

Some say, the additional stamp duty will hit investors wanting to own a second or subsequent property.

Mr Mohamed Ismail, CEO of PropNex, said: "Such a drastic move will have a downward spiral effect, loss of confidence in the market... will the current property prices go under such that people who bought in recent times... will their property be a negative asset moving forward?

"More pertinent, as far as public housing here, is the restrictions on PR (Permanent Resident). I think there has been a lot of concerns and people have raised about PR being able to benefit while holding on to public housing and investing. These measures will increase the supply of public housing, and overall, this will help the public housing to be further moderated."

Meanwhile, some analysts say the new measures on industrial properties did not come as a surprise.

Mr Donald Han, Managing Director of HSR Property Consultants, said: "The measures are quite timely and could have come earlier because if you notice, industrial prices have actually increased by about average 25 per cent per annum since 2010, and if you look at last year, the full year price estimate capital values have increased by more than 30 per cent.

"So all in, all the government could have actually reacted earlier on, perhaps 12 months early rather than now. But it's never too late. I think that will have a huge impact on the pace of price movement, moving forward. I expect industrial price movement this year to be a bit more moderated to a single-digit increase, if any."

- CNA/de

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Firefox 19 betas: built-in PDF viewing, broader Android reach

Adobe Systems' Flash Player plug-in has been under attack in Web development circles for years, but now Adobe's Reader software is becoming more of a target in the war against plug-ins.

Mozilla released the with its own built-in PDF reader, called PDF.js, which uses the browser's own JavaScript engine to decode the Adobe-created but industry-standard document format.

The Portable Document Format for years was an awkward part of the Web, often ambushing the unwary with long page-load times as the Adobe Reader plug-in loaded. But PDFs have become more common, exposed in Google search results and used for everything from bank statements to tax forms. In
Safari, Apple bypassed Adobe's software with its own PDF-reading plug-in, but Google went a step farther by building PDF rendering directly into Chrome.

Mozilla launched its PDF.js project in 2011, taking advantage of newer browser abilities such as Canvas to display more complicated documents.

Mozilla also released a new Firefox beta for Android that it says reaches about 15 million more phones. Previously, the browser required an 800MHz ARMv6 processor or faster, but Mozilla lowered the requirement to 600MHz, along with 512MB of memory, and HVGA (480x320 pixels) screen resolution.

"This includes popular phones like LG Optimus One, T-Mobile myTouch 3G slide, HTC Wildfire S, and ZTE R750," Mozilla said in a blog post.

The new
Android beta also adds themes so people can customize the browser's look, handles CSS' formatting set using viewport percentages, and can be localized into traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese languages.

The
Firefox beta for PCs gets the CSS feature, too, along with faster startup and a feature that offers to reset the search engine setting for the awesomebar (aka Web address or location bar) if third-party software changes it.

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Teen to Hero Teacher: 'I Don't Want to Shoot You'

A California teacher'sbrave conversation with a 16-year-old gunman who had opened fire on his classroom bullies allowed 28 other students to quickly escape what could have been a massacre.

Science teacher Ryan Heber calmly confronted the teenager after he shot and critically wounded a classmate, whom authorities say had bullied the boy for more than year at Taft Union High School.

"I don't want to shoot you," the teen gunman told Heber, who convinced the teen gunman to drop his weapon, a high power shotgun.

Responding to calls of shots fired, campus supervisor Kim Lee Fields arrived at the classroom and helped Heber talk the boy into giving up the weapon.

"This teacher and this counselor stood there face-to-face not knowing if he was going to shoot them," said Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood. "They probably expected the worst and hoped for the best, but they gave the students a chance to escape."

One student, who police say the shooter had targeted, was shot. He was airlifted to a hospital and remains in critical, but stable condition, Youngblood said. He is expected to undergo surgery today.

Two other students received minor injuries. One suffered hearing loss and another fell over a table while evacuating. Heber received a wound to his head from a stray pellet, police said.

Taft Midway Driller/Doug Keeler/AP Photo

Tennessee Teen Arrested Over School Shooting Threat Watch Video

Tragedy at Sandy Hook: The Search for Solutions Watch Video

Police said the teen, whose name has not been made public because he is a minor, began plotting on Wednesday night to kill two students he felt had bullied him.

Authorities believe the suspect found his older brother's gun and brought it into the just before 9 a.m. on Thursday and went to Heber's second-floor classroom where a first period science class with 20 students was taking place.

"He planned the event," Youngblood said. "Certainly he believed that the two people he targeted had bullied him, in his mind. Whether that occurred or not we don't know yet."

The gunman entered the classroom and shot one of his classmates. Heber immediately began trying to talk him into handing over the gun, and evacuating the other students through the classroom's backdoor.

"The heroics of these two people goes without saying. ... They could have just as easily ... tried to get out of the classroom and left students, and they didn't," the sheriff said. "They knew not to let him leave the classroom with that shotgun."

The gunman was found with several rounds of additional ammunition in his pockets.

Within one minute of the shooting, a 911 call was placed and police arrived on the scene. An announcement was made placing the school on lockdown and warning teachers and students that the precautions were "not a drill."

The school had recently announced new safety procedures following last month's deadly shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in which 20 young children were killed. Six school staffers, including the principal, were killed as they tried to protect the children from gunman Adam Lanza.

The school employs an armed security guard, but he was not on campus Thursday morning.

Youngblood said the student would be charged with attempted murder, but the district attorney would decide if he was to be tried as an adult.

Some 900 students attend Taft Union High School, located in Taft, Calif., a rural community in southern California.

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A climate of cautious prediction

ABOUT 12,000 years ago, as the world warmed after the last ice age, temperatures in the far north plummeted. This was probably caused by a huge injection of fresh water from melting ice sheets.

Could something similar happen over the next century? Most climate scientists would say no, because they expect it to take centuries for the great ice sheets to begin melting in earnest.

But renowned climate scientist James Hansen thinks that with the planet warming more rapidly than ever before, the ice sheets will melt faster, leading to rapid sea level rise. His work suggests that the average surface temperature of the entire planet will temporarily fall as a result, leading to even more climate chaos (see "Sea level rise could lead to cooler, stormier planet").

Is Hansen being alarmist about sea level rise? It will be decades before we know. But a recent study looking at how the climatic changes seen so far compare with predictions concluded that most scientists "err on the side of least drama" (Global Environmental Change, doi.org/jv9). So the next time you see a climate scientist being accused of alarmism, bear in mind that, so far, more extreme projections are tending to be more accurate.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

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"Lincoln", "Life of Pi" lead Oscar nominations

 

LOS ANGELES: Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" earned the most Oscar nominations with 12, ahead of Lee Ang's "Life of Pi," with 11 nods, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Thursday.

Both movies are nominated for the coveted best film prize, along with "Silver Linings Playbook" and "Les Miserables," which each earned eight nominations, and Ben Affleck's political thriller "Argo" with seven.

Beyond best film, "Lincoln" earned nods for best director for Spielberg, best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis for his portrayal of the American president and best supporting actor for Tommy Lee Jones as abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.

The other movies nominated for best film are "Beasts of the Southern Wild," "Zero Dark Thirty," "Amour" and "Django Unchained."

Other nominees for best actor besides Day-Lewis are Hugh Jackman in "Les Miserables," Bradley Cooper in "Silver Linings Playbook," Joaquin Phoenix in "The Master" and Denzel Washington for "Flight."

Best actress nominees are Jessica Chastain in "Zero Dark Thirty," Jennifer Lawrence for "Silver Linings Playbook," 85-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Riva in "Amour," Naomi Watts in "The Impossible" and nine-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis for "Beasts of the Southern Wild."

Best picture:
"Amour," "Argo," "Beasts of the Southern Wild," "Django Unchained," "Les Miserables," "Life of Pi," "Lincoln," "Silver Linings Playbook," "Zero Dark Thirty."

Best director:
Michael Haneke for "Amour," Benh Zeitlin for "Beasts of the Southern Wild," Lee Ang for "Life of Pi," Steven Spielberg for "Lincoln," and David O. Russell for "Silver Linings Playbook."

Best leading actor:
Bradley Cooper for "Silver Linings Playbook," Daniel Day-Lewis for "Lincoln," Hugh Jackman for "Les Miserables," Joaquin Phoenix for "The Master," and Denzel Washington for "Flight."

Best leading actress:
Jessica Chastain for "Zero Dark Thirty," Jennifer Lawrence for "Silver Linings Playbook," Emmanuelle Riva for "Amour," Quvenzhane Wallis for "Beasts of the Southern Wild," and Naomi Watts for "The Impossible."

Best supporting actor:
Alan Arkin for "Argo," Robert De Niro for "Silver Linings Playbook," Philip Seymour Hoffman for "The Master," Tommy Lee Jones for "Lincoln," and Christoph Waltz for "Django Unchained."

Best supporting actress:
Amy Adams for "The Master," Sally Field for "Lincoln," Anne Hathaway for "Les Miserables," Helen Hunt for "The Sessions," and Jacki Weaver for "Silver Linings Playbook."

Best foreign language film:
"Amour" (Austria), "Kon-Tiki" (Norway), "No" (Chile), "A Royal Affair" (Denmark) and "War Witch" (Canada).

Best animated feature:
"Brave," "Frankenweenie," "ParaNorman," "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" and "Wreck-It Ralph."

- AFP/fa

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Nexus 7 dock to go on sale this month for $39.99

Nexus 7 owners will finally be able to pick up a dock for their tablet made by Asus.

Citing a "reliable source," The Verge says that Asus will offer the dock in the U.S. within the next two weeks at a price tag of $39.99.

Backing up on that claim is a product page for the dock from Manhattan retailer B&H. The page shows the price of the dock and gives an expected delivery date of January 16. Fellow retailer Adorama also lists the dock and its price but says the product is currently backordered.

The dock comes with a mini-Google
Nexus 7 (32GB, Wi-Fi only)USB port for charging the Nexus 7 and a 3.5mm audio jack for playing music through external speakers. Other Nexus 7 docks have been released by third-party vendors and at cheaper prices, but this is the first one made directly by Asus.

Though the Nexus 7 is branded and sold under Google's name, Asus is the actual manufacturer. Asus has been busy demoing the new dock at
CES this week.

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Embryonic Sharks Freeze to Avoid Detection

Jane J. Lee

Although shark pups are born with all the equipment they'll ever need to defend themselves and hunt down food, developing embryos still stuck in their egg cases are vulnerable to predators. But a new study finds that even these baby sharks can detect a potential predator, and play possum to avoid being eaten.

Every living thing gives off a weak electrical field. Sharks can sense this with a series of pores—called the ampullae of Lorenzini—on their heads and around their eyes, and some species rely on this electrosensory ability to find food buried in the seafloor. (See pictures of electroreceptive fish.)

Two previous studies on the spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula) and the clearnose skate (Raja eglanteria)—a relative of sharks—found similar freezing behavior in their young. But new research by shark biologist and doctoral student Ryan Kempster at the University of Western Australia has given scientists a more thorough understanding of this behavior.

It all started because Kempster wanted to build a better shark repellent. Since he needed to know how sharks respond to electrical fields, Kempster decided to use embryos. "It's very hard to test this in the field because you need to get repeated responses," he said. And you can't always get the same shark to cooperate multiple times. "But we could use embryos because they're contained within an egg case."

Cloaking Themselves

So Kempster got his hands on 11 brownbanded bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium punctatum) embryos and tested their reactions to the simulated weak electrical field of a predator. (Popular pictures: Bamboo shark swallowed whole—by another shark.)

In a study published today in the journal PLoS One, Kempster and his colleagues report that all of the embryonic bamboo sharks, once they reached later stages of development, reacted to the electrical field by ceasing gill movements (essentially, holding their breath), curling their tails around their bodies, and freezing.

A bamboo shark embryo normally beats its tail to move fresh seawater in and out of its egg case. But that generates odor cues and small water currents that can give away its position. The beating of its gills as it breathes also generates an electrical field that predators can use to find it.

"So it cloaks itself," said neuroecologist Joseph Sisneros, at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the study. "[The embryo] shuts down any odor cues, water movement, and its own electrical signal."

Sisneros, who conducted the previous clearnose skate work, is delighted to see that this shark species also reacts to external electrical fields and said it would be great to see whether this is something all shark, skate, and ray embryos do.

Marine biologist Stephen Kajiura, at Florida Atlantic University, is curious to know how well the simulated electrical fields compare to the bamboo shark's natural predators—the experimental field was on the higher end of the range normally given off.

"[But] they did a good job with [the study]," Kajiura said. "They certainly did a more thorough study than anyone else has done."

Electrifying Protection?

In addition to the freezing behavior he recorded in the bamboo shark embryos, Kempster found that the shark pups remembered the electrical field signal when it was presented again within 40 minutes and that they wouldn't respond as strongly to subsequent exposures as they did initially.

This is important for developing shark repellents, he said, since some of them use electrical fields to ward off the animals. "So if you were using a shark repellent, you would need to change the current over a 20- to 30-minute period so the shark doesn't get used to that field."

Kempster envisions using electrical fields to not only keep humans safe but to protect sharks as well. Shark populations have been on the decline for decades, due partly to ending up as bycatch, or accidental catches, in the nets and on the longlines of fishers targeting other animals.

A 2006 study estimated that as much as 70 percent of landings, by weight, in the Spanish surface longline fleet were sharks, while a 2007 report found that eight million sharks are hooked each year off the coast of southern Africa. (Read about the global fisheries crisis in National Geographic magazine.)

"If we can produce something effective, it could be used in the fishing industry to reduce shark bycatch," Kempster said. "In [America] at the moment, they're doing quite a lot of work trying to produce electromagnetic fish hooks." The eventual hope is that if these hooks repel the sharks, they won't accidentally end up on longlines.

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Oscar Nominations 2013: Full List

"Lincoln" is leading the way to the 2013 Oscars. This morning, the bio pic about the 16th president picked up 12 Academy Award nominations, including best director for Steven Spielberg and best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis.

Ang Lee's "Life of Pi" followed close behind with 11 nominations. "Les Miserables" and "Silver Linings Playbook" tied for third place, with eight nominations each.

The Academy also named its eldest and youngest best actress nominees ever. "Beasts of the Southern Wild" star Quvenzhané Wallis, 9, is up for best actress along with "Amour" lead Emmanuelle Riva, 85.

See who made the cut below, and weigh in on who you want to win with Oscar.com's My Picks, an interactive and social Oscar ballot that allows you to pick who you think will win in each category. You can compete with your Facebook friends when the Academy Awards air on Feb. 24.

FULL COVERAGE: The 85th Annual Academy Awards

Best Picture:

"Beasts of the Southern Wild"

"Silver Linings Playbook"

"Zero Dark Thirty"

"Lincoln"

"Les Miserables"

"Life of Pi"

"Amour"

"Django Unchained"

"Argo"

My Picks: Create an Oscar Ballot and Play With Friends

Best Supporting Actor:

Christoph Waltz, "Django Unchained"

Philip Seymour Hoffman, "The Master"

Robert De Niro, "Silver Linings Playbook"

Alan Arkin, "Argo"

Tommy Lee Jones, "Lincoln"

Best Supporting Actress:

Sally Field, "Lincoln"

Anne Hathaway, "Les Miserables"

Jacki Weaver, "Silver Linings Playbook"

David James/Dreamworks/AP

Helen Hunt, "The Sessions"

Amy Adams, "The Master"

Best Director:

David O. Russell, "Silver Linings Playbook"

Ang Lee, "Life of Pi"

Steven Spielberg, "Lincoln"

Michael Haneke, "Amour"

Benh Zeitlin, "Beasts of the Southern Wild"

Best Actor:

Daniel Day Lewis, "Lincoln"

Denzel Washington, "Flight"

Hugh Jackman, "Les Miserables"

Bradley Cooper, "Silver Linings Playbook"

Joaquin Phoenix, "The Master"

Best Actress:

Naomi Watts, "The Impossible"

Jessica Chastain, "Zero Dark Thirty"

Jennifer Lawrence, "Silver Linings Playbook"

Emmanuelle Riva, "Amour"

Quvenzhané Wallis, "Beasts of the Southern Wild"

Best Original Screenplay:

"Zero Dark Thirty"

"Django Unchained"

"Moonrise Kingdom"

"Amour"

"Flight"

Best Adapted Screenplay:

"Lincoln"

"Silver Linings Playbook"

"Argo"

"Life of Pi"

"Beasts of the Southern Wild"

Best Animated Feature:

"Frankenweenie"

"The Pirates! Band of Misfits"

"Wreck-It Ralph"

"Paranorman"

"Brave"

Best Foreign Feature:

"Amour"

"A Royal Affair"

"Kon-Tiki"

"No"

"War Witch"

Best Visual Effects:

"Life of Pi"

"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"

"The Avengers"

"Prometheus"

"Snow White and the Huntsman"

Best Cinematography:

"Skyfall"

"Anna Karenina"

"Django Unchained"

"Life of Pi"

"Lincoln"

Best Costume Design:

"Anna Karenina"

"Les Miserables"

"Lincoln"

"Mirror Mirror"

"Snow White and the Huntsman"

Best Documentary Feature:

"Searching for Sugar Man"

"How to Survive a Plague"

"The Gatekeepers"

"5 Broken Cameras"

"The Invisible War"

Best Documentary Short:

"Open Heart"

"Inocente"

"Redemption"

"Kings Point"

"Mondays at Racine"

"Snow White and the Huntsman"

Best Film Editing:

"Lincoln"

"Silver Linings Playbook"

"Life of Pi"

"Argo"

"Zero Dark Thirty"

Best Makeup and Hairstyling:

"Hitchcock"

"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"

"Les Miserables"

Best Music (Original Score):

"Anna Karenina"

"Argo"

"Life of Pi"

"Lincoln"

"Skyfall"

Best Music (Original Song):

"Before My Time" from "Chasing Ice"

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The science of Sherlock Holmes

Jonathon Keats, contributor

(Image: Everett Collection/Rex)

The ace detective continues to enthrall us, as two new books, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes by James O'Brien and Mastermind by Maria Konnikova, show

THE death of Sherlock Holmes, as related in the December 1893 issue of The Strand Magazine, was met with sadness and fury. Fans wore black armbands to mourn their favourite detective, thrown from a cliff in mortal combat. They also sent scathing letters to Arthur Conan Doyle, who had written off Holmes to concentrate on more "serious" fiction.

A decade of literary failure persuaded the author to admit his error, averring that Holmes had actually survived. He would appear in 33 more stories by the time Conan Doyle died in 1930, but even that misfortune didn't mean the end for Holmes. Most recently he has been the subject of two TV series set in the present day: Sherlock, from the BBC, and Elementary, produced by CBS.

Two new books also capitalise on his undying fame, and suggest reasons for his appeal across genres and generations. In The Scientific Sherlock Holmes, chemist James O'Brien presents him as a pioneering forensic scientist. In Mastermind, psychologist Maria Konnikova poses him as a master of mindfulness. While each book has serious flaws, together they offer some valuable insights into the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon, and how it relates to the rise of popular science.

In Conan Doyle's opinion, science was what set Holmes apart from other fictional detectives, who typically solved crimes by chance. The author, who had trained as a physician, boasted of giving Holmes "an immense fund of exact knowledge". The majority of O'Brien's book is an assessment of whether this knowledge really was immense and exact, and how much of it is still accurate.

Holmes fares better here than in past appraisals, notably Isaac Asimov's 1980 claim that he was a "blundering chemist". O'Brien shows that he had a surprisingly advanced understanding of certain chemicals, such as barium bisulphate, which many turn-of-the-century chemists didn't believe existed, and that his famous test for blood, by detecting haemoglobin, was perfectly viable.

He also shows that Holmes was on the cutting edge of forensic techniques, from fingerprinting to tracking criminals with dogs. The first Holmes story involving fingerprints dates to 1903, two years before they were first successfully used by the police. His first story to employ a tracking dog dates to 1890, 13 years before they became popular with real-life investigators.

All of this would be little more than literary trivia were it not for another observation made by O'Brien. Conan Doyle's interest in science waned with age, as he embraced spiritualism. While he never imposed these beliefs on Holmes, the later stories contain far less science than the earlier ones. O'Brien finds that 60 per cent of the forensic science takes place in the first half of the Holmes canon, and that every story in which he performs chemical experiments predates 1904. He overlays this with reader polls that have overwhelmingly favoured the earlier stories, and concludes that the correlation between scientific content and reader interest is "surely no coincidence".

Though his certainty seems overstated, O'Brien is persuasive when he says that science gives the stories a sense of plausibility and an authenticity that prior detective fiction lacked. Conan Doyle's fiction appropriates the authority of Victorian science; Holmes's forensic investigations allow readers to vicariously experience his scientific achievements in a setting more thrilling than a university laboratory. He is the Ernest Rutherford of crime, pursuing murderers instead of protons.

Of course forensic techniques are only part of the equation. Holmes applies the scientific method to everything he encounters, surmising where people have been and what they have done by logical deduction. His astonishing insights, and how he achieves them, are the subject of Mastermind.

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic," Holmes tells Watson in the very first story, "and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose." This quaint analogy "may not be far from the truth", Konnikova says. By her 21st-century interpretation, the hippocampus is the entryway, where information is initially placed, and long-term storage is achieved by the process of consolidation. Part of what makes Holmes so good at what he does is that he is scrupulous about what he lets into his attic and how he organises it. His talent for deduction derives from keen observation combined with a memory primed to associate fresh input with prior knowledge.

Half of Konnikova's task is to describe his thought processes in terms of present-day psychology. The other half is a primer on how to employ Holmes's techniques yourself. To attain his power of observation, for instance, requires the sort of focus you can practise through meditation. To reason as effectively as he does requires that you be aware of your biases.

If all of this sounds vague, it's because Konnikova is seldom specific. Whereas O'Brien tends to get lost in details and to run off on tangents, Konnikova offers only the quickest gloss on complex issues in neuroscience, and dishes out advice that hardly depends on psychology or Holmes. She does make an interesting point when she claims that Holmes is perennially popular because "he makes the most rigorous approach to scientific thinking seem attainable". The very existence of her book shows his appeal as a self-help guru. But surely he also engages us as a man in need of help himself.

That's the line taken in both recent TV programmes. CBS presents Holmes as a recovering drug addict; the BBC as an autistic savant. While each show departs significantly from Conan Doyle's Victorian milieu, they are true to Holmes's "dual nature" (as Watson dubs it): the hyperintelligence and morphine dependence that together make for such a vivid character.

Sherlock Holmes is a work in progress. We may be fascinated by the forensics and impressed with his deductive reasoning, but it's the detective's vulnerability that moves each generation to cast him in their own image.

Jonathon Keats's new book Forged: Why fakes are the great art of our age will be released this month

Book information:
The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the case with science and forensics by James O'Brien
Oxford University Press
£18.99/$29.95

Book information:
Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova
Canongate/Viking
£16.99/$26.95

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Malaysian opposition to rally for poll reforms

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia's opposition on Wednesday received rare permission to hold a weekend political rally in a historic stadium, ahead of hotly anticipated elections due within months.

Opposition organisers say the gathering on Saturday at the 30,000-seater Stadium Merdeka (Independence Stadium), in the capital Kuala Lumpur, will focus on continued widespread criticism of a voting system seen as skewed in favour of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition.

Senior opposition politician, Hatta Ramli, from the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party said: "Not giving access to the stadium would have looked very bad for the government... They are doing the right thing and now we have a proper venue for the gathering. We want to make people aware of our demands for free and fair elections."

A rally for clean elections in April drew tens of thousands to the streets but degenerated into clashes between demonstrators and police, who were criticised for a response widely seen as heavy-handed.

The ruling coalition has controlled Malaysia since independence in 1957 but political observers say it faces its stiffest test yet in the coming polls against a formidable opposition and amid rising voter impatience with its rule.

Prime Minister Najib Razak must face elections no later than late June, but speculation of early polls is rife.

Najib's ethnic Malay-dominated ruling bloc faces an alliance comprising opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim's multi-ethnic party, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party and a third party dominated by ethnic Chinese.

Malays make up more than 60 per cent of Malaysia's 28 million people.

The trust that owns the stadium, where independence was declared 56 years ago, said in a statement it would allow Saturday's rally but that crowds must not exceed the venue's capacity.

The opposition often complains of hurdles in gaining permission for rallies, blaming ruling-party meddling, and had said in recent days that the stadium trust appeared to be snubbing its request, before approval came through.

Activists and the opposition say Malaysia's electoral roll is marred with irregularities, and complain that election officials and mainstream media are biased in favour of the ruling coalition.

The government set up a parliamentary panel to examine the complaints but critics said not enough concrete action has been taken.

The last elections in 2008 saw Barisan Nasional's worst showing ever, losing its traditional two-thirds parliamentary majority to the opposition.

- AFP/xq

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LinkedIn reaches 200 million members

LinkedIn has reached an important milestone.

The professional social network today announced that it now has over 200 million members across more than 200 countries and territories around the world. Those members are speaking 19 languages.

"I'd like to thank each of you for helping build the LinkedIn network into what it is today," LinkedIn senior vice president of products and user experience, Deep Nishar, wrote today in a blog post. "It's been amazing to see how our members have been able to transform their professional lives through LinkedIn. You truly grasp the power of LinkedIn when you start to focus on these individual success stories."

LinkedIn has been growing quite rapidly. The company announced in March 2011 that it had hit 100 million users -- eight years after its founding in 2003. In November, the company announced that its membership had risen to 187 million users.

A key component in LinkedIn's growth has been international expansion. The company reported today that Turkey, Colombia, and Indonesia are its fastest-growing markets. On the mobile side, China, Brazil, and Portugal are leading the way. All told, over 64 percent of LinkedIn members are currently living outside the U.S.

Still, the U.S. is central to LinkedIn's success. According to the company, 74 million members are in the U.S., easily dwarfing the second-place country, India, which has 18 million members. The U.K. and Brazil both tied for third place with 11 million members.

One other interesting tidbit: 4 million of LinkedIn's members identify themselves as working in the IT sector. Financial services and higher education take the next spots with 2 million and 1.95 million members, respectively.

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Hospitals Flooded With Flu Patients

U.S. emergency rooms have been overwhelmed with flu patients, turning away some of them and others with non-life-threatening conditions for lack of space.

Forty-one states are battling widespread influenza outbreaks, including Illinois, where six people -- all older than 50 -- have died, according to the state's Department of Public Health.

At least 18 children in the country have died during this flu season, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The proportion of people seeing their doctor for flu-like symptoms jumped to 5.6 percent from 2.8 percent in the past month, according to the CDC.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago reported a 20 percent increase in flu patients every day. Northwestern Memorial was one of eight hospitals on bypass Monday and Tuesday, meaning it asked ambulances to take patients elsewhere if they could do so safely.

Dr. Besser's Tips to Protect Yourself From the Flu

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Flu Season Hits Country Hard, 18 States Reach Epidemic Levels Watch Video

Most of the hospitals have resumed normal operations, but could return to the bypass status if the influx of patients becomes too great.

"Northwestern Memorial Hospital is an extraordinarily busy hospital, and oftentimes during our busier months, in the summer, we will sometimes have to go on bypass," Northwestern Memorial's Dr. David Zich said. "We don't like it, the community doesn't like it, but sometimes it is necessary."

A tent outside Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township, Pa., was set up to tend to the overflowing number of flu cases.

A hospital in Ohio is requiring patients with the flu to wear masks to protect those who are not infected.

State health officials in Indiana have reported seven deaths. Five of the deaths occurred in people older than 65 and two younger than 18. The state will release another report later today.

Doctors are especially concerned about the elderly and children, where the flu can be deadly.

"Our office in the last two weeks has exploded with children," Dr. Gayle Smith, a pediatrician in Richmond, Va., said

It is the earliest flu season in a decade and, ABC News Chief Medical Editor Dr. Besser says, it's not too late to protect yourself from the outbreak.

"You have to think about an anti-viral, especially if you're elderly, a young child, a pregnant woman," Besser said.

"They're the people that are going to die from this. Tens of thousands of people die in a bad flu season. We're not taking it serious enough."

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'Exocomets' abound in alien solar systems

Exoplanets are used to the limelight – exocomets less so. Now, a fresh crop of comets found around alien stars suggests that these icy dirt-balls stalk solar systems across the Milky Way.

Discs of debris swirling around young stars clump up to form planets. Asteroids and comets are the leftovers. But until now, astronomers had not seen many examples of these intermediate clumps.

"We have evidence of the final state, which is planets," says Barry Welsh at the University of California, Berkeley. "We have evidence of the initial state, which is discs. But what about the missing link, the stuff in between?"

Speaking on 7 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Long Beach, California, Welsh said that excitement over comet-hunting may soon surpass that for exoplanets, of which there are now hundreds of confirmed finds and thousands of candidates.

"Exoplanets are just so last year," said Welsh. "2013, whether you know it or not, is going to be the year of the comet."

Bright tails

The first star found to host comets was Beta Pictoris in 1987. Three more stars with comets turned up before 1998. But in the 1990s the first confirmed exoplanets were spotted, so astronomers switched their focus to planet-hunting.

Welsh and colleagues have now picked up the cometary trail, discovering seven more stars with comets. The individual comets around alien suns are too small to see directly, so Welsh's team looked for the chemical signatures of their tails as they are heated by their host stars.

They used the McDonald Observatory in Texas to observe about 30 young stars between May 2010 and November 2012. They found that chemical signatures in some of the stars' light varied from night to night – a likely sign of gases being emitted by comets. Some of these comets survived the stellar encounter, while others likely disintegrated near the star.

Billions of worlds

Our solar system is thought to have gone through a phase about a billion years after it formed during which incoming asteroids and comets pummelled the innermost planets. Some think that this period of heavy bombardment may have brought water and the carbon-based building blocks of life to the early Earth.

That makes the presence of comets around young stars an exciting prospect, says Russel White of Georgia State University, who was not involved in the new work. If these systems have Earth-like worlds, they could be going through their own versions of heavy bombardment, he says. "It offers some confirmation that these solar systems are rich environments, with comets and asteroids and things like that – maybe even richer than our own solar system."

For now, Beta Pictoris is the only comet-bearing star also known to have a planet, a gas giant about ten times larger than Jupiter. Longer observing times with more sensitive instruments, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, might yield comets around "adult" stars, which are known to be rich in planets.

Also at the AAS meeting, Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported that 17 per cent of stars host a planet about the size of the Earth, amounting to 17 billion in the Milky Way alone. These aren't true Earth twins, though, as they orbit their stars closer than the planet Mercury orbits our sun.

The research also showed that 90 per cent of sun-like stars probably have planets of any size. "If you shoot a spaceship at a sun-like star, you're 90 per cent likely to hit a planet," Fressin says. "That's pretty huge."

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India says two soldiers killed in clash with Pakistan troops

SRINAGAR, India: Pakistani troops killed two Indian soldiers on Tuesday near the tense disputed border between the nuclear-armed neighbours in Kashmir and one of the bodies was badly mutilated, the Indian army said.

The firefight broke out at about noon on Tuesday (0630 GMT) after an Indian patrol discovered Pakistani troops about half a kilometre (1,600 feet) inside Indian territory, an army spokesman told AFP.

A ceasefire has been in place along the Line of Control that divides the countries since 2003, but it is periodically violated by both sides and Pakistan said Indian troops killed a Pakistani soldier on Sunday.

Relations had been slowly improving over the last few years following a rupture in their slow-moving peace process after the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, which were blamed by India on Pakistan-based militants.

"There was a firefight with Pakistani troops," army spokesman Rajesh Kalia told AFP from the mountainous Himalayan region.

"We lost two soldiers and one of them has been badly mutilated," he added, declining to give more details on the injuries.

"The intruders were regular (Pakistani) soldiers and they were 400-500 metres (1,300-1,600 feet) inside our territory," he said of the clash in Mendhar sector, 173 kilometres (107 miles) west by road from the city of Jammu.

In Islamabad, a Pakistan military spokesman denied what he called an "Indian allegation of unprovoked firing". He declined to elaborate.

On Sunday, Pakistan said Indian troops had crossed the Line of Control and stormed a military post. It said one Pakistani soldier was killed and another injured.

It lodged a formal protest with India on Monday over what it called an unprovoked attack.

India denied crossing the line, saying it had retaliated with small arms fire after Pakistani mortars hit a village home.

A foreign ministry spokesman said Indian troops had undertaken "controlled retaliation" on Sunday after "unprovoked firing" which damaged a civilian home.

The deaths are set to undermine recent efforts to improve relations, such as opening up trade and offering more lenient visa regimes which have been a feature of talks between senior political leaders from both sides.

Muslim-majority Kashmir is a Himalayan region which India and Pakistan both claim in full but rule in part. It was the cause of two of three wars between the neighbours since independence from Britain in 1947.

- AFP/fa

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Tablet shipments to outshine notebooks this year, says report

Tablets will edge out notebooks in global shipments this year, according to a report out yesterday from NPD DisplaySearch.

Tablet shipments are expected to surpass 240 million, while notebooks shipments will reach around 207 million. For the first time ever,
tablets will grab more than 50 percent of the annual market share this year, up from around 38 percent last year and 26 percent in 2011.

Growth in tablet shipments will rise 64 percent this year from 2012, driven not necessarily by the
iPad but by a variety of other choices, the report said. Demand for tablets around the world has opened up the market for a range of players, both large and small.

Tablets with 7 inch and 8 inch screens will grab 45 percent of the market, accounting for shipments of 108 million units, NPD DisplaySearch said. In contrast, 9.7-inch tablets like the traditional iPad will eke out a share of 17 percent, triggered by shipments of around 41 million.

"The tablet PC market saw increasing investments in North America in the second half of 2012, from major brands that tested not only new screen sizes and price points, but also unconventional business models to support their efforts," NPD DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim said in a statement. "In 2013, further investments are expected worldwide, stoking demand to the point that tablet PC shipments will exceed those of notebook PCs."

North America will remain the biggest tablet customer, grabbing around 85 million units and a 35 percent share this year. But emerging markets will also play a huge role in tablet adoption.

Driven by local manufacturers, China will account for 65 million units and a 27 percent slice of the market. Last year, tablet shipments in both North America and China had already surpassed those of notebooks.

Shipments of notebooks have been hurt by sluggish demand worldwide, even in emerging markets, the report noted. But the notebook industry may recover some of that demand in the second half of the year. Manufacturers are expected to increasingly add more tablet features to their notebooks, such as instant-on, all-day battery life, and sleeker form factors.

Of course, the definition of a tablet versus that of a notebook is getting fuzzier.

More manufacturers are releasing hybrid devices that double as tablet and laptop. Consumers who want the best of both worlds will find a greater array of choices. That evolution may make it more difficult to decipher market share but should benefit the industry overall.

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Primitive and Peculiar Mammal May Be Hiding Out in Australia

It’d be hard to think of a mammal that’s weirder than the long-beaked, egg-laying echidna. Or harder to find.

Scientists long thought the animal, which has a spine-covered body, a four-headed penis, and a single hole for reproducing, laying eggs, and excreting waste, lived only in New Guinea. The population of about 10,000 is critically endangered. Now there is tantalizing evidence that the echidna, thought to have gone extinct in Australia some 10,000 years ago, lived and reproduced there as recently as the early 1900s and may still be alive on Aussie soil.

The new echidna information comes from zoologist Kristofer Helgen, a National Geographic emerging explorer and curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. Helgen has published a key finding in ZooKeys confirming that a skin and skull collected in 1901 by naturalist John T. Tunney in Australia is in fact the western long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus bruijnii. The specimen, found in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, was misidentified for many years.

(More about echidnas: Get to know this living link between mammals and reptiles.)

Helgen has long been fascinated by echidnas. He has seen only three in the wild. “Long-beaked echidnas are hard to get your hands on, period,” he said. “They are shy and secretive by nature. You’re lucky if you can find one. And if you do, it will be by chance.” Indeed, chance played a role in his identification of the Australian specimen. In 2009, he visited the Natural History Museum of London, where he wanted to see all of the echidnas he could. He took a good look in the bottom drawer of the echidna cabinet, where the specimens with less identifying information are often stored. From among about a dozen specimens squeezed into the drawer, he grabbed the one at the very bottom.

(Related from National Geographic magazine: “Discovery in the Foja Mountains.”)

“As I pulled it out, I saw a tag that I had seen before,” Helgen said. “I was immediately excited about this label. As a zoologist working in museums you get used to certain tags: It’s a collector’s calling card. I instantly recognized John Tunney’s tag and his handwriting.”

John Tunney was a well-known naturalist in the early 20th century who went on collecting expeditions for museums. During an Australian expedition in 1901 for Lord L. Walter Rothschild’s private museum collection, he found the long-beaked echidna specimen. Though he reported the locality on his tag as “Mt Anderson (W Kimberley)” and marked it as “Rare,” Tunney left the species identification field blank. When he returned home, the specimen was sent to the museum in Perth for identification. It came back to Rothschild’s museum identified as a short-beaked echidna.

With the specimen’s long snout, large size, and three-clawed feet, Helgen knew that it must be a long-beaked echidna. The short-beaked echidna, still alive and thriving in Australia today, has five claws, a smaller beak, and is half the size of the long-beaked echidna, which can weigh up to 36 pounds (16 kilograms).

As Helgen began tracing the history and journey of the specimen over the last century, he crossed the path of another fascinating mind who had also encountered the specimen. Oldfield Thomas was arguably the most brilliant mammalogical taxonomist ever. He named approximately one out of every six mammals known today.

Thomas was working at the Natural History Museum in London when the Tunney echidna specimen arrived, still misidentified as a short-beaked echidna. Thomas realized the specimen was actually a long-beaked echidna and removed the skull and some of the leg bones from the skin to prove that it was an Australian record of a long-beaked echidna, something just as unexpected then as it is now.

No one knows why Thomas did not publish that information. And the echidna went back into the drawer until Helgen came along 80 years later.

As Helgen became convinced that Tunney’s long-beaked echidna specimen indeed came from Australia, he confided in fellow scientist Mark Eldridge of the Australian Museum about the possibility. Eldridge replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that there might be long-beaked echidnas in the Kimberley.” (That’s the Kimberley region of northern Australia.) Scientist James Kohen, a co-author on Helgen’s ZooKeys paper, had been conducting fieldwork in the area in 2001 and spoke to an Aboriginal woman who told him how “her grandmothers used to hunt” large echidnas.

This is “the first evidence of the survival into modern times of any long-beaked echidna in Australia,” said Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This is a truly significant finding that should spark a re-evaluation of echidna identifications from across northern Australia.”

Helgen has “a small optimism” about finding a long-beaked echidna in the wild in Australia and hopes to undertake an expedition and to interview Aboriginal communities, with their intimate knowledge of the Australian bush.

Though the chances may be small, Helgen says, finding one in the wild “would be the beautiful end to the story.”

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Giffords, Kelly Say 'Enough' to Gun Violence

After she was gravely wounded by gunfire two years ago in Tucson, Ariz., former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, imagined a life out of the public eye, where she would continue therapy surrounded by the friends, family and the Arizona desert she loves so much.

Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly Speak Exclusively to Diane Sawyer

But after the slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month, Giffords and Kelly knew they couldn't stay silent.

"Enough," Giffords said.

The couple marked the second anniversary of the Tucson shooting by sitting down with Diane Sawyer to discuss their recent visit to Newtown and their new initiative to curb gun violence, "Americans for Responsible Solutions."

"After the shooting in Tucson, there was talk about addressing some of these issues, [and] again after [a movie theater massacre in] Aurora," Colo., Kelly said. "I'm hopeful that this time is different, and I think it is. Twenty first-graders' being murdered in their classrooms is a very personal thing for everybody."

Rep. Gabby Giffords on Meeting Newtown, Conn. Shooting Victims Watch Video

Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly Speak Exclusively to Diane Sawyer Watch Video

Gabrielle Giffords: Pledge of Allegiance at DNC Watch Video

Full Coverage: Gabrielle Giffords

During their trip to Newtown, Giffords and Kelly met with families directly affected by the tragedy.

"[The] first couple that we spoke to, the dad took out his cell phone and showed us a picture of his daughter and I just about lost it, just by looking at the picture," Kelly said. "It was just very tough and it brought back a lot of memories about what that was like for us some two years ago."

Full Coverage: Tragedy in Newtown

"Strength," Giffords said she told the families in Newtown.

"Gabby often told them, 'You got to have strength. You got to fight for something,'" Kelly said.

The innocent faces of the children whose lives were abruptly taken reminded the couple, they said, of 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, the youngest victim to die in the Tucson shooting at a Giffords constituent event.

"I think we all need to try to do something about [gun violence]," Kelly said. "It's obvious to everybody we have a problem. And problems can be solved."

Giffords, Kelly Call for 'Common Sense' Solutions

Giffords, 42, and Kelly, 48, are both gun owners and supporters of the 2nd Amendment, but Kelly had strong words for the National Rifle Association after the group suggested the only way to stop gun violence is to have a "good guy with a gun."

There was a good guy with a gun, Kelly said, the day Jared Loughner shot Giffords and 18 other people, six fatally, at her "Congress on Your Corner" event.

"[A man came out] of the store next door and nearly shot the man who took down Jared Loughner," Kelly said. "The one who eventually wrestled [Loughner] to the ground was almost killed himself by a good guy with a gun, so I don't really buy that argument."

Instead, Giffords and Kelly are proposing "common sense" changes through "Americans for Responsible Solutions."

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Boom expected in mobile app industry

SINGAPORE: The rising use of mobile applications has been a boon for the industry.

The mobile appplication industry recorded a 68 per cent rise in global sales last year, from US$8.5 billion to US$14.3 billion.

With the growing shipment of tablets and smartphones, experts say sales growth may increase by almost four times by 2017.

Cooliris, a photo sharing and browsing application, has become the top-ranked iPad app in 75 countries.

The application has been installed two million times and there have been 300 million photo views in the past five months.

It has also distinguished itself from over 700,000 applications available in app stores across the iPhone and Android operating system.

For the company that develops Cooliris, the installations have translated to growing revenue, and it expects this growth to continue into 2013.

Meanwhile, its downloads increased by 30 times since it launched a localised version of the app in China through an integration with China's social networking platform Renren last month.

With Asia constituting 30 per cent of Cooliris' downloads, the app developer has plans to grow its presence in markets like China and Japan.

"We do see a better trend in Asia compared to Europe, in terms of engagement and consumers using the application. The affinity for consumers in Asia towards photos has always been higher and we see that translated in the engagements with the app," said Soujanya Bhumkar, CEO of Cooliris.

"The consumers are much more open when it comes to trying new things and in terms of partnership, companies understand the velocity and momentum of a Silicon Valley based startup."

Experts say Asia is fast becoming an important market for mobile application developers.

"China makes up 50 per cent of all installed base of users in Asia when we look at the smartphone market. It's really Asia where the high growth of devices and the access to app stores and apps is coming from. Also currently, Asia is where people do have money to spend," said Rachel Lashford, managing director at Canalys.

The number of smartphone users in China is growing to over 300 million.

This growth momentum has prompted more industry players to focus on Asia to expand.

Jake Saunders from ABI Research said: "We see the Asia Pacific market being the fastest growing and this is just simply due to adoption rates of people adopting and upgrading their smartphones, growth in population so for total application downloads, we're looking at from 9 billion to 70 billion downloads in 2017."

Looking ahead, experts say start-up developers will find it harder to survive in the industry.

They will have to look for more creative ways to monetise their products and beat the growing competition from free downloads.

- CNA/xq

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Dropbox rolls out Windows 8 app

Dropbox for Windows 8.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)

Dropbox users running Windows 8 or Windows RT can now access their online files right from the Start screen.

The new and free Dropbox app for
Windows 8 displays tiles for all of the folders and files stored in your online account. The app offers the usual touch-friendly approach, so you can swipe and tap your way around the screen to view your files.

Using the Search charm, you can search for specific files by name or extension. You can right-click a file, open the Share charm, and share the file via e-mail or a social network. And you can open, edit, and save
Microsoft Office documents and other types of editable files stored on Dropbox.

But that's about it.

You can't view your locally synced files or upload new files to Dropbox from your PC or
tablet. For those options, you'll still need to install the standard Dropbox desktop application, which provides the full array of features.

Dropbox for Windows 8 is a decent first step, but the app needs a few tweaks to make it worth using over its desktop counterpart.

Read More..

Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

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• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











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  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

');

---

 $'+ doc.ngstore_price_t +'';
html += ' $'+ doc.ngstore_saleprice_t +'';
} else {
html += ' $'+ doc.ngstore_price_t +'';
}
html += '

';

$("#ecom_43331 ul.ecommerce_all_img").append(html);




o.totItems++;

}// end for loop
} // end if data.response.numFound != 0

if(o.totItems != o.maxItems){
if(o.defaultItems.length > 0){
o.getItemByID(o.defaultItems.shift());
} else if(o.isSearchPage && !o.searchComplete){
o.doSearchPage();
} else if(!o.searchComplete) {
o.byID = false;
o.doSearch();
}
}// end if
}// end parseResults function

o.trim = function(str) {
return str.replace(/^\s\s*/, '').replace(/\s\s*$/, '');
}

o.doSearchPage = function(){
o.byID = false;

var tempSearch = window.location.search;
var searchTerms ="default";
var temp;

if( tempSearch.substr(0,7) == "?search"){
temp = tempSearch.substr(7).split("&");
searchTerms = temp[0];
} else {
temp = tempSearch.split("&");
for(var j=0;j 0){
o.getItemByID(o.defaultItems.shift());
} else if(o.isSearchPage){
o.doSearchPage();
} else {
o.doSearch();
}

}// end init function

}// end ecommerce object

var store_43331 = new ecommerce_43331();





store_43331.init();

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