Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2013/02/06/young-han-solo/
শুক্রবার, ৮ ফেব্রুয়ারি, ২০১৩
Check Out The Young Han Solo That Almost Was
Talk of a spin-off isn't the first time the concept of a young Han Solo has been floated. He was originally scheduled for an appearance in "Revenge of the Sith," but was eventually (thankfully) cut. However, there is some concept art for the character, which you can check out below. Also, find out what would [...]
বৃহস্পতিবার, ৭ ফেব্রুয়ারি, ২০১৩
NHN Japan spins off its Line messaging business to focus on its ...
Demonstrating the strength of its massively popular Line messaging apps and services, NHN Japan ? the?Japanese arm of Korean search giant Naver ? announced today it is to split gaming and Internet services businesses, spinning off its messaging, search and Web portals into a new company.
NHN Japan says that smartphone and PC game development will now be handled by Hangame Corporation, which will continue to build on its Line Game brand, strengthening its position as one of Japan?s top online gaming businesses.
The newly created Line Corporation will now be tasked with the development of the Line messaging service, Naver Web portals, and operation of the Japanese ISP?Livedoor. Line Corp. is tasked with becoming the number one domestic media company.
NHN also has eyes on expanding its overseas business,?announcing?that it establish a joint-venture named Line Plus Corporation in Japan. Here?s where it gets confusing: Line Corp. will hold a 60 percent share of Line Plus Corp., while NHN?s Korean parent will hold a 40 percent share.
Mobile messaging has become a huge business in Asia, proved by the fact that?Naver?s Line app?hit 100 million downloads, just 18 months after launching. The company runs its own virtual currency, and expanded it to its global userbase in August 2012.
The dominance of Naver?s online services in Asia is the primary reason?Yahoo decided to close its Korean business. But that hasn?t stopped Yahoo teaming up with Kakao, the Korean maker of mobile focused WhatsApp-like VoIP app Kakao Talk, to take on Line.
The two companies will work together to promote and market the service, which has over 65 million global users in Japan.
With Line, Naver and Livedoor now free from NHN?s gaming business, its parent hopes that it will make it more flexible, increasing its?competitiveness?both locally and in global markets.
H/T: Serkan Toto
How new corals species form in the ocean
Feb. 6, 2013 ? Since the observations made by English naturalist Charles Darwin on the Galapagos Islands, researchers have been interested in how physical barriers, such as isolation on a particular island, can lead to the formation of new species through the process of natural selection. Natural selection is a process whereby heritable traits that enhance survival become more common in successive generations, while unfavorable heritable traits become less common. Over time, animals and plants that have morphologies or other attributes that enhance their suitability to a particular environment become more common and more adapted to that specific environment.
Researchers today are intimately familiar with how physical barriers and reproduction isolation can lead to the formation of new species on land, especially among plants and animals with short generation times such as insects and annual plants. Michael E. Hellberg, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at LSU, however, is interested in a more obscure form of speciation: the speciation of animals in the ocean.
"Marine plants and animals can drift around in the ocean extremely long distances," Hellberg said. "So how do they specialize?"
In a recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, Hellberg and his graduate student Carlos Prada investigate how corals specialize to particular environments in the ocean. Corals, animals that form coral reefs and some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, start their lifecycle with a free floating larval stage. Coral larvae can disperse vast distances in open water. Different coral species share similar geographical locations, with different species often existing only yards apart. As Prada and Hellberg propose in their recent publication, the large dispersal potential of coral larvae in open water and the proximity of different species on the ocean floor creates a mystery for researchers who study speciation. Hellberg and Prada ask, "How can new marine species emerge without obvious geographic isolation?"
When it comes to corals within the relatively small confines of the Caribbean, which spans approximately 3 million square kilometers, the key to the puzzle appears to be habitat depth in the ocean. In others words, natural selection has led to the formation of different coral species according to how deep in the ocean these different corals grow.
Prada and Hellberg study candelabrum corals of the genus Eunicea, generally known as "sea fans," for which sister species have been shown to be segregated by ocean depth. One sister species survives better in shallow waters, while the other is better adapted to deep waters. These corals, like other corals, are very slow-growing animals. In fact, sea fan corals don't reach reproduction age until they are 15-30 years old, and can continue reproducing until they are 60 or more years old. So while candelabrum coral larvae can disperse large distances from their parents, landing and beginning to grow in either shallow or deep water habitats, small differences in survival rates at different depths between the two species and long generation times can combine to produce segregation.
"When these coral larvae first settle out after dispersal, they are all mixed up," Hellberg said. "But long larvae-to-reproduction times can compound small differences in survival at different depths. By the time these corals get to reproduction age, a lot has changed."
The shallow water sea fan coral even has a different morphology than its deep water sister. The shallow water coral fans out into a wide network of branches, while the deep water coral grows tall and spindly. According to Hellberg, these differences in morphology might well be genetic, with the different corals having different protein structures and levels of expression that are better adapted to their specific water depth environment. Hellberg hopes in future research to investigate the genetic basis of these different morphologies
In other interesting results, Prada explained how transplanting the shallow coral species to deep water environments, and vice versa, can cause the coral to take on a morphology more like that of its sister species.
"Their morphologies are not super fixed," Prada said. "But they can't change all the way to a different morphology."
Prada observed that while shallow water sea fans can become taller and more spindly when transplanted in deep water environments, they don't seem to be able to make a complete transition to the morphology of the deep water sea fan. This suggests that the two corals, while they likely had a common ancestor, have adapted genetically and biochemically to their respective water depths.
Prada did ocean dives in the Bahamas, Panama, Puerto Rico and Cura?ao to sample candelabrum coral colonies. Back in the lab, he performed tests on the coral samples' genes to determine how shallow and deep corals become genetically different.
"Normally, organisms are differentiated by geography," Prada said. "But these corals are differentiated by depth." Prada and Hellberg's research provides new insights into how new species form in the ocean, a topic of relatively limited research as opposed to speciation of terrestrial organisms.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Louisiana State University.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- C. Prada, M. E. Hellberg. Long prereproductive selection and divergence by depth in a Caribbean candelabrum coral. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1208931110
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/6-Tc45gPI8Y/130206162325.htm
বুধবার, ৬ ফেব্রুয়ারি, ২০১৩
Will Scientists Ever Be Able to Piece Together Humanity's Early Origins? (preview)
See Inside New fossil discoveries complicate the already devilish task of identifying our most ancient progenitors
In Brief
- Paleoanthropologists have long thought that humans descended from a chimpanzeelike ancestor and that early human fossils belonged to a single evolving lineage. According to this view, only later did our predecessors diversify into multiple overlapping branches of humans, of which our species is the sole survivor.
- Recent fossil discoveries have upended that scenario, however, providing intriguing evidence that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees may not have looked particularly chimplike and that our early forebearers were not alone in Africa.
- The findings are forcing researchers to reconsider what traits indicate that a species belongs on the line leading to us?and to question whether it will ever be possible to identify our last common ancestor.
From a distance, you probably would have assumed her to be human. Although she stood only about a meter tall, with long arms and a small head, she walked, if perhaps slightly inelegantly, upright on two legs, as we, alone among living mammals, do. This familiar yet strange individual is Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, who lived some 3.2 million years ago. She is one of the oldest creatures presumed to have strode on the evolutionary path leading to our species, Homo sapiens.
When Lucy was uncovered in 1974, evidence of bipedal locomotion virtually guaranteed her kind a spot in the human family tree. And although scientists had an inkling that other branches of humans coexisted more recently alongside our own, early human evolution appeared to be a simple affair, with Lucy and the other ancient bipeds that eventually came to light belonging to the same lone lineage. Thus, the discoveries seemed to uphold the notion of human evolution as a unilinear ?march of progress? from a knuckle-walking chimplike ape to our striding, upright form?a schema that has dominated paleoanthropology for the past century. Yet as researchers dig back further in time, our origins are turning out to be a lot more complicated than that iconic image would suggest.
This article was originally published with the title Shattered Ancestry.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=3fabfbff34ffe8392e317679d1b460aa
মঙ্গলবার, ৫ ফেব্রুয়ারি, ২০১৩
Obama presses his gun proposals in Minnesota
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) ? With his gun proposals dividing Congress, President Barack Obama conceded Monday the challenges he faces in winning support for measures ranging from criminal checks on gun buyers to an assault weapons ban. But, he declared: "We don't have to agree on everything to agree it's time to do something."
Obama argued that there's bipartisan support for universal background checks and for gun trafficking laws. But, acknowledging the political challenges he faces, he would say only that the assault weapons ban deserves a vote in Congress.
"Changing the status quo is never easy," Obama said. "This will be no exception. The only way we can reduce gun violence in this county is if the American people decide it's important, if you decide it's important ? parents and teachers, police officers and pastors, hunters and sportsmen, Americans of every background stand up and say, 'This time, it's got to be different.'"
Before his remarks, Obama held a roundtable discussion at the Minneapolis Police Department Special Operations Center, speaking with law enforcement and community leaders.
Obama made his pitch in Minnesota, a Democratic-leaning state where officials have been studying ways to reduce gun-related attacks and accidents for several years. It was the first he has campaigned on his proposals outside of Washington.
Ahead of the trip, the White House released a photo of the president skeet shooting at Camp David, the presidential retreat. Obama cited skeet shooting when asked in a recent interview whether he had ever shot a gun.
The president unveiled his sweeping package of proposals for curbing gun violence last month after the mass shootings at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school. But many of the proposals face tough opposition from some in Congress and from the National Rifle Association.
Reinstatement of the assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004, is expected to be the steepest climb for Obama. Universal background checks for gun purchasers may have an easier time passing Congress, though the NRA also opposes that measure.
White House press secretary Jay Carney, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, said Obama remained committed to the assault weapons ban and it was too early to write off prospects for any part of the package.
"We all recognize that all the components of this are difficult and face challenges, some perhaps even more than others," Carney said. "But the president's support is firm and clear."
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has said he hopes his panel can write gun legislation this month, though it's unclear what it will contain.
The White House picked Minneapolis as the backdrop for Obama's remarks in part because of recent steps the city has taken to tackle gun violence, including a push for stricter background checks.
After a spike in violent crimes, the city launched a program in 2008 aimed at providing more resources for at-risk youth and helping rehabilitate young people who have already perpetrated crimes. In January, Minneapolis also hosted a regional summit on gun violence for elected officials from around the Midwest.
Minneapolis Police Chief Janee Harteau and Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek are also among the officials Obama has consulted as he pursues his anti-gun violence measures.
Stanek has also been leading a group of Minnesota sheriffs pushing for stronger background checks for people trying to buy guns.
The ban on assault weapons faces more obstacles in Congress, where Republicans and some Democrats are aligned against it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that he's willing to take a look at legislation that would ban certain semi-automatic weapons, but he also noted that he voted against a ban on such weapons in 1994 because it "didn't make sense."
Among those participating in the round table discussion Monday with Obama was Minneapolis's Democratic mayor, R.T. Rybak, who said he supports Obama's proposed bans on assault weapons and high capacity magazine, as well as universal background checks.
Earlier in the day, Rybak criticized Reid for his stand. "He's dancing around this issue and people are dying in this country," Rybak said on MSNBC.
___
Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-presses-gun-proposals-minnesota-202135794--politics.html
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