Juliette Binoche is in talks for an unspecified role in Warner Bros' Godzilla, Variety reports (via Comingsoon).
If talks went well, she'll join Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, and Bryan Cranston. The latter three won't sign until the script is finalized, so, presumably, Binoche's contract will also have to wait for the finished script as well.
Speaking of the script, Frank Darabont is putting the finishing touches on a draft previously worked on my Iron Man 3's Drew Pearce.
To be directed by Gareth Edwards, Godzilla will reportedly center on a soldier (Taylor-Johnson) and his girlfriend (Olsen). Cranston will play Taylor-Johnson's grandfather.
Besides Godzilla, there may be two other monsters in the movie.
Godzilla is set for theaters on May 16, 2014. It remains to be seen whether or not the pending lawsuit brought on by producers Dan Lin, Roy Lee, and Doug Davidson against Legendary Pictures will affect the release date.
Since silver and gold topped in 2011 investors have been struggling
with these positions hoping this cyclical bull market for metals
continues. The simple truth is no one knows for sure if prices will
continue and make new highs and those who say its a for sure thing we
all know deep down is full of bull crap.
All investments move in cycles, waves or trends which ever you want
to call it. The market has 4 simple yet distinct stages each require a
completely different skill set and trading tactics to navigate.
Stage 1 ? After a period of decline a stock consolidates at a
contracted price range as buyers step into the market and fight for
control over the exhausted sellers. Price action is neutral as sellers
exit their positions and buyers begin to accumulate the stock.
Stage 2 ? Upon gaining control of price movement, buyers
overwhelm sellers and a stock enters a period of higher highs and higher
lows. A bull market begins and the path of least resistance is higher.
Traders should aggressively trade the long side, taking advantage of any
pullback or dips in the stock?s price.
Stage 3 ? After a prolonged increase in share price the buyers
now become exhausted and the sellers again move in. This period of
consolidation and distribution produces neutral price action and
precedes a decline in the stock?s price.
Stage 4 ? When the lows of Stage 3
are breached a stock enters a decline as sellers overwhelm buyers. A
pattern of lower highs and lower lows emerges as a stock enters a bear
market. A well-positioned trader would be aggressively trading the short
side and taking advantage of the often quick declines in the stock?s
price. More times than not all of stage 2 gains are given back in a
short period of time. I do show some of my trade setups using these exact stages free here: https://stockcharts.com/public/1992897
Now that you know the stages and what it looks like its time to review the gold, silver and miners charts.
?
Gold Chart ? Weekly
Gold has been in a bull market for several years but is starting to
show its age in terms of the size of the price patterns, volume levels
and extreme bullish sentiment. Back in 2011 a week before price topped
we exited precious metals because the short term charts and volume
levels were warning of a sharp drop. Since then I have not done many
trades in either gold or silver because I do not like shorting in bull
markets. Waiting for a bullish setup/price pattern before getting
involved is my focus.
Gold has pulled back with a bullish 5 wave correction the last 5
months and at key support. While the long term charts are pointing to
higher gold prices you must be aware that if gold and silver start to
breakdown things will likely get ugly quickly. To be honest I do not
care which way it goes, I just want it to either rally from support here
and make new highs or breakdown and crash. Both will be very profitable
if traded properly.
?
Silver Chart ? Weekly
Silver has a very similar chart to that of its big sister (yellow
gold).? This shiny metal has the energy of a 3 year old making it a very
volatile investment. I have touched on the topic of gold and silver
being so called safe havens and if you have been reading my work for a
while you know that any investment that can move 18-45% in value within 1
month is NOT a safe haven.
While it has done well in the past decade and boosted a lot of
retirement accounts the day will come with these things collapse and
most people holding them will give back most if not all the gains they
had simply because people get attached to large positions and most do
not know when to just exit a position.
?
Gold Miners Chart ? Monthly
This chart gives me cold sweats because I know how many people own
gold mining stocks and I know how fast these things can move. If the
price closed below the green support line the bottom could fall out and
be very painful for those who get paralyzed by denial and do nothing but
watch their accounts lose value week after week.
?
Precious Metals Investing Conclusion:
In short, this report is to show you the very basics of how
investments move in stages. It is also to show a warning that precious
metals are technically very close to a major breakdown which the big
money players are watching closely. This thinly traded sector can move
extremely fast when everyone rushes for the door.
Do not get me wrong, I am not saying a crash is about to happen,
actually it?s the opposite. All I am doing is planning the idea in your
subconscious so that if prices continue to move lower you will remember
that these price levels and take action with your investments. Remember,
you can always buy the investment back at any time again if the outlook
changes in a week, month or year.
Get My FREE Weekly Gold, Silver and Mining Reports and Trade with the Stages: www.GoldAndOilGuy.com
A government report says a cyberattack against 23 natural gas pipeline operators stole crucial information that could compromise security. Experts strongly suspect China's military.
By Mark Clayton,?Staff writer / February 27, 2013
A yellow underground EnCana natural gas pipeline marker is seen along a road on State Forest Park Land in Kalkaska, Michigan, in 2012.
Rebecca Cook/Reuters/File
Enlarge
Cyberspies linked to China?s military targeted nearly two dozen US natural gas pipeline operators over a recent six-month period, stealing information that could be used to sabotage US gas pipelines, according to a restricted US government report and a source familiar with the government investigation.
Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition
From December 2011 through June 2012, cyberspies targeted 23 gas pipeline companies with e-mails crafted to deceive key personnel into clicking on malicious links or file attachments that let the attackers slip into company networks, says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report.
The report does not mention China, but the digital signatures of the attacks have been identified by independent cybersecurity researchers as belonging to a particular espionage group recently linked to China?s military.
The confluence of these factors ? ?along with the sensitive operational and technical details that were stolen ? make the cyberbreaches perhaps among the most serious so far, some experts say. The stolen information could give an adversary all the insider knowledge necessary to blow up not just a few compressor stations but perhaps many of them simultaneously, effectively holding the nation?s gas infrastructure hostage. Nearly 30 percent of the nation?s power grid now relies on natural gas generation.
?This theft of key information is about hearing the footsteps get closer and closer,? says William Rush, a retired scientist formerly with the Gas Technology Institute who chaired the effort to create a cybersecurity standard applicable to the gas pipeline industry.
?Anyone can blow up a gas pipeline with dynamite. But with this stolen information, if I wanted to blow up not one, but 1,000 compressor stations, I could,? he adds. ?I could put the attack vectors in place, let them sit there for years, and set them all off at the same time. I don?t have to worry about getting people physically in place to do the job, I just pull the trigger with one mouse click.?
The report comes at a time of growing US-China tensions over cyberespionage. President Obama called for tighter cybersecurity of critical US infrastructure in his State of the Union speech. This month, the White House also released an executive order that attempts to bolster cybersecurity among agencies that regulate electric utilities and other key industries. Congress, however, continues to resist legislation to mandate that such companies meet specific cybersecurity performance standards.
The attacks chronicled in the new DHS report were first reported in an exclusive Monitor article in May 2012, but the report offers confirmation, as well as further details and insights. Of the natural-gas pipeline operators targeted, 10 were infiltrated, another 10 cases are still being investigated, and three were ?near misses,? in which the companies narrowly avoided infiltration of their networks, according to the report, titled ?Active Cyber Campaigns Against the US Energy Sector? and compiled by DHS?s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT).
What was stolen
Sensitive files were stolen that could give a cyberintruder the ability to control, or alter the operation of the pipelines, including usernames, passwords, personnel lists, system manuals, and pipeline control system access credentials, the report says.
?The data exfiltrated could provide an adversary with the capability to access US [oil and natural gas industrial-control systems], including performing unauthorized operations,? the report concludes. The stolen files were part of a ?sophisticated attack shopping list.?
BOSTON (AP) ? A Vermont woman whose face was disfigured in a lye attack has received a face transplant.
Doctors at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital say 44-year-old Carmen Blandin Tarleton underwent the surgery earlier this month.
A team worked 15 hours to transplant the facial skin, including the neck, nose, lips, facial muscles, arteries and nerves.
The 44-year-old Tarleton, of Thetford, Vt., was attacked by her former husband in 2007. He doused her with industrial strength lye. She suffered chemical burns over 80 percent of her body. The mother of two wrote a book about her experience that describes her recovery.
It was the fifth face transplant at the Boston hospital.
Physicians are planning to discuss the case Wednesday at the hospital.
Contact: Maria-Jose Vinas maria-jose.vinasgarcia@nasa.gov 301-614-5883 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
The colorful images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater gush from the Amazon River's mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA's Aquarius instrument.
"With a bit more than a year of data, we are seeing some surprising patterns, especially in the tropics," said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef, of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. "We see features evolve rapidly over time."
Launched June 10, 2011, aboard the Argentine spacecraft Aquarius/Satlite de Aplicaciones Cientficas (SAC)-D, Aquarius is NASA's first satellite instrument specifically built to study the salt content of ocean surface waters. Salinity variations, one of the main drivers of ocean circulation, are closely connected with the cycling of freshwater around the planet and provide scientists with valuable information on how the changing global climate is altering global rainfall patterns.
The salinity sensor detects the microwave emissivity of the top 1 to 2 centimeters (about an inch) of ocean water a physical property that varies depending on temperature and saltiness. The instrument collects data in 386 kilometer-wide (240-mile) swaths in an orbit designed to obtain a complete survey of global salinity of ice-free oceans every seven days.
The Changing Ocean
The animated version of Aquarius' first year of data unveils a world of varying salinity patterns. The Arabian Sea, nestled up against the dry Middle East, appears much saltier than the neighboring Bay of Bengal, which gets showered by intense monsoon rains and receives freshwater discharges from the Ganges and other large rivers. Another mighty river, the Amazon, releases a large freshwater plume that heads east toward Africa or bends up north to the Caribbean, depending on the prevailing seasonal currents. Pools of freshwater carried by ocean currents from the central Pacific Ocean's regions of heavy rainfall pile up next to Panama's coast, while the Mediterranean Sea sticks out in the Aquarius maps as a very salty sea.
One of the features that stand out most clearly is a large patch of highly saline water across the North Atlantic. This area, the saltiest anywhere in the open ocean, is analogous to deserts on land, where little rainfall and a lot of evaporation occur. A NASA-funded expedition, the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), traveled to the North Atlantic's saltiest spot last fall to analyze the causes behind this high salt concentration and to validate Aquarius measurements.
"My conclusion after five weeks out at sea and analyzing five weekly maps of salinity from Aquarius while we were there was that indeed, the patterns of salinity variation seen from Aquarius and by the ship were similar," said Eric Lindstrom, NASA's physical oceanography program scientist, of NASA Headquarters, Washington, and a participant of the SPURS research cruise.
Future goals
"The Aquarius prime mission is scheduled to run for three years but there is no reason to think that the instrument could not be able to provide valuable data for much longer than that," said Gene Carl Feldman, Aquarius project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The instrument has been performing flawlessly and our colleagues in Argentina are doing a fantastic job running the spacecraft, providing us a nice, stable ride."
In future years, one of the main goals of the Aquarius team is to figure out ways to fine-tune the readings and retrieve data closer to the coasts and the poles. Land and ice emit very bright microwave emissions that swamp the signal read by the satellite. At the poles, there's the added complication that cold polar waters require very large changes in their salt concentration to modify their microwave signal.
Still, the Aquarius team was surprised by how close to the coast the instrument is already able to collect salinity measurements.
"The fact that we're getting areas, particularly around islands in the Pacific, that are not obviously badly contaminated is pretty remarkable. It says that our ability to screen out land contamination seems to be working quite well," Feldman said.
Another factor that affects salinity readings is intense rainfall. Heavy rain can affect salinity readings by attenuating the microwave signal Aquarius reads off the ocean surface as it travels through the soaked atmosphere. Rainfall can also create roughness and shallow pools of fresh water on the ocean surface. In the future, the Aquarius team wants to use another instrument aboard Aquarius/SAC-D, the Argentine-built Microwave Radiometer, to gauge the presence of intense rain simultaneously to salinity readings, so that scientists can flag data collected during heavy rainfall.
An ultimate goal is combining the Aquarius measurements to those of its European counterpart, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite (SMOS) to produce more accurate and finer maps of ocean salinity. In addition, the Aquarius team, in collaboration with researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is about to release its first global soil moisture dataset, which will complement SMOS' soil moisture measurements.
"The first year of the Aquarius mission has mostly been about understanding how the instruments and algorithms are performing," Feldman said. "Now that we have overcome the major hurdles, we can really begin to focus on understanding what the data are telling us about how the ocean works, how it affects weather and climate, and what new insights we can gain by having these remarkable salinity measurements."
###
Aquarius was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Goddard. JPL managed Aquarius through its commissioning phase and is archiving mission data. Goddard now manages Aquarius mission operations and processes science data. Argentina's space agency, Comisin Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), provided the SAC-D spacecraft, optical camera, thermal camera with Canada, microwave radiometer, sensors from various Argentine institutions and the mission operations center. France and Italy also contributed instruments.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Maria-Jose Vinas maria-jose.vinasgarcia@nasa.gov 301-614-5883 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
The colorful images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater gush from the Amazon River's mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA's Aquarius instrument.
"With a bit more than a year of data, we are seeing some surprising patterns, especially in the tropics," said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef, of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. "We see features evolve rapidly over time."
Launched June 10, 2011, aboard the Argentine spacecraft Aquarius/Satlite de Aplicaciones Cientficas (SAC)-D, Aquarius is NASA's first satellite instrument specifically built to study the salt content of ocean surface waters. Salinity variations, one of the main drivers of ocean circulation, are closely connected with the cycling of freshwater around the planet and provide scientists with valuable information on how the changing global climate is altering global rainfall patterns.
The salinity sensor detects the microwave emissivity of the top 1 to 2 centimeters (about an inch) of ocean water a physical property that varies depending on temperature and saltiness. The instrument collects data in 386 kilometer-wide (240-mile) swaths in an orbit designed to obtain a complete survey of global salinity of ice-free oceans every seven days.
The Changing Ocean
The animated version of Aquarius' first year of data unveils a world of varying salinity patterns. The Arabian Sea, nestled up against the dry Middle East, appears much saltier than the neighboring Bay of Bengal, which gets showered by intense monsoon rains and receives freshwater discharges from the Ganges and other large rivers. Another mighty river, the Amazon, releases a large freshwater plume that heads east toward Africa or bends up north to the Caribbean, depending on the prevailing seasonal currents. Pools of freshwater carried by ocean currents from the central Pacific Ocean's regions of heavy rainfall pile up next to Panama's coast, while the Mediterranean Sea sticks out in the Aquarius maps as a very salty sea.
One of the features that stand out most clearly is a large patch of highly saline water across the North Atlantic. This area, the saltiest anywhere in the open ocean, is analogous to deserts on land, where little rainfall and a lot of evaporation occur. A NASA-funded expedition, the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), traveled to the North Atlantic's saltiest spot last fall to analyze the causes behind this high salt concentration and to validate Aquarius measurements.
"My conclusion after five weeks out at sea and analyzing five weekly maps of salinity from Aquarius while we were there was that indeed, the patterns of salinity variation seen from Aquarius and by the ship were similar," said Eric Lindstrom, NASA's physical oceanography program scientist, of NASA Headquarters, Washington, and a participant of the SPURS research cruise.
Future goals
"The Aquarius prime mission is scheduled to run for three years but there is no reason to think that the instrument could not be able to provide valuable data for much longer than that," said Gene Carl Feldman, Aquarius project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The instrument has been performing flawlessly and our colleagues in Argentina are doing a fantastic job running the spacecraft, providing us a nice, stable ride."
In future years, one of the main goals of the Aquarius team is to figure out ways to fine-tune the readings and retrieve data closer to the coasts and the poles. Land and ice emit very bright microwave emissions that swamp the signal read by the satellite. At the poles, there's the added complication that cold polar waters require very large changes in their salt concentration to modify their microwave signal.
Still, the Aquarius team was surprised by how close to the coast the instrument is already able to collect salinity measurements.
"The fact that we're getting areas, particularly around islands in the Pacific, that are not obviously badly contaminated is pretty remarkable. It says that our ability to screen out land contamination seems to be working quite well," Feldman said.
Another factor that affects salinity readings is intense rainfall. Heavy rain can affect salinity readings by attenuating the microwave signal Aquarius reads off the ocean surface as it travels through the soaked atmosphere. Rainfall can also create roughness and shallow pools of fresh water on the ocean surface. In the future, the Aquarius team wants to use another instrument aboard Aquarius/SAC-D, the Argentine-built Microwave Radiometer, to gauge the presence of intense rain simultaneously to salinity readings, so that scientists can flag data collected during heavy rainfall.
An ultimate goal is combining the Aquarius measurements to those of its European counterpart, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite (SMOS) to produce more accurate and finer maps of ocean salinity. In addition, the Aquarius team, in collaboration with researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is about to release its first global soil moisture dataset, which will complement SMOS' soil moisture measurements.
"The first year of the Aquarius mission has mostly been about understanding how the instruments and algorithms are performing," Feldman said. "Now that we have overcome the major hurdles, we can really begin to focus on understanding what the data are telling us about how the ocean works, how it affects weather and climate, and what new insights we can gain by having these remarkable salinity measurements."
###
Aquarius was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Goddard. JPL managed Aquarius through its commissioning phase and is archiving mission data. Goddard now manages Aquarius mission operations and processes science data. Argentina's space agency, Comisin Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), provided the SAC-D spacecraft, optical camera, thermal camera with Canada, microwave radiometer, sensors from various Argentine institutions and the mission operations center. France and Italy also contributed instruments.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Nokia just launched the stylish Lumia 720 and Lumia 520 Windows Phones plus a pair of affordable candy bar handsets (Nokia 301 and 105) here at MWC 2013. We spent a few brief minutes with CEO Stephen Elop to discuss the announcement -- chatting about the common design language and the incredible price points for these devices (€15 / $20 for the Nokia 105 and €139 / $184 for the Lumia 520). I also quizzed Mr. Elop about the Lumia 920's ongoing camera woes and what's being done to address them we discussed the company's recent focus on entry-level smartphones like the delightful Lumia 620 and what it means in terms of strategy. Hit the break to watch our video interview.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Internet users who illegally share music, movies or television shows online could soon receive warning notices from the nation's five major Internet service providers.
The Copyright Alert System, organized by the recording and film industry, is being activated this week to target consumers using peer-to-peer software.
Under the new system, complaints will prompt an Internet service provider ? such as Verizon or AT&T ? to notify a customer whose Internet address has been detected sharing files illegally. A person will be given up to six opportunities to stop before the Internet provider will take more drastic steps, such as temporarily slowing their connection, or redirecting Internet traffic until they acknowledge they received a notice or review educational materials about copyright law.
Consumers who maintain they have been wrongly accused would be forced to pay $35 to appeal the decision. The fee would be reimbursed if they prevail.
Proponents say the focus is on deterring the average consumer rather than chronic violators. The director of the organization behind the system, Jill Lesser of the Center for Copyright Infringement, said in a blog post Monday that the program is "meant to educate rather than punish, and direct (users) to legal alternatives."
Each Internet provider is expected to implement their own system. The program gives each customer five or six "strikes" after a music or film company has detected illegal file-sharing and lodged a complaint. The first alerts are expected to be educational, while the third and fourth would require the customer to acknowledge that they have received the warnings and understand their behavior is illegal. The final warnings are expected to lead to "mitigation measures," such as slowing a person's Internet connection speeds.
Officials involved in the effort acknowledge it's unlikely to stop the biggest violators. There are ways to disguise an IP address or use a neighbor's connection that is unlocked. Public wireless connections, such as those offered at coffee shops, also won't be monitored.
It began as a seemingly awkward Jack Nicholson introduction of the very long list on nominees, but the Best Picture denouement?at a very long Oscars ceremony on Sunday turned into a surprise appearance by Michelle Obama, via satellite from the Governors' Ball in Washington, D.C.?where earlier she had sat next to Chris Christie?to introduce and announce the winner,?Argo.?
According to a Samsung representative, Samsung will hold a Galaxy S IV inspired event March 14 in New York city. This will be the first Galaxy S event in the U.S. since the first round of Galaxy S phones were announced at CTIA in 2010, and Samsung mobile division chief JK Shin says the venue was moved because they were "bombarded with requests" from US carriers to hold the show in their own country.
Nobody knows exactly what to expect from Samsung's latest, but we are sure it will give us plenty to talk about. Expected with everything stronger, faster, and higher resolution that the current Galaxy S3, the handset is sure to be a hit amongst consumers.
All the details aren't known just yet, but you'll be able to count on Android Central to deliver you all the news about Samsung's next.
KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) ? Nepalese mountaineer Chhurim entered the record book by scaling Mount Everest twice in the same climbing season. In fact, she did so a week apart.
Guinness World Records said she is the first woman to climb the world's highest mountain twice in the same season ? the brief window of good weather each year that allows climbers to reach the summit.
Nepal's Tourism Minister Posta Bahadur Bogati handed over the Guinness World Records certificate issued to 29-year-old Chhurim on Monday.
She scaled the 8,850-meter (29,035-foot) summit on May 12, 2012, descended to the base camp for a couple of days' rest and then scaled the peak again a week later on May 19.
Chhurim, who uses only one name like most Sherpas, said she is not ready to quit.
"Everest is the first of the highest mountains that I have climbed, but I will continue mountaineering and hope to scale more peaks," she said.
Chhurim said there are not many women mountaineers and only a few of them have records.
"The male mountaineers have set many records but women have fallen behind. It can be difficult for women because they are considered not as strong as men and face many problems like finding toilets," she said.
The Nepal Mountaineering Association said Everest has been climbed by nearly 4,000 people since New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal did so in 1953. Women are a small number of them.
The extremely harsh weather conditions that batter the highest Himalayan peaks limit the climbing season to just a few weeks every year. Spring is the most popular season on Everest when hundreds of mountaineers attempt every year. The climbers generally reach the mountain in March or April, acclimatize to the higher elevation and low oxygen and train for climbing the snowy trail to the peak. The weather usually improves for a few days in May when they line up to the summit.
It's been over a year since Megaupload was ripped from the fabric of the Internet, and its successor has already risen to fill the hole. But Megaupload was a truly gargantuan site. So much so that it's still getting millions of visitors per month, even though there's nothing there. More »
Feb. 24, 2013 ? The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image showing an object known as HH 151, a bright jet of glowing material trailed by an intricate, orange-hued plume of gas and dust.
It is located some 460 light-years away in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull), near to the young, tumultuous star HL Tau.
In the first few hundred thousand years of life, new stars like HL Tau pull in material that falls towards them from the surrounding space. This material forms a hot disc that swirls around the coalescing body, launching narrow streams of material from its poles. These jets are shot out at speeds of several hundred kilometers (or miles) per second and collide violently with nearby clumps of dust and gas, creating wispy, billowing structures known as Herbig-Haro objects -- like HH 151 seen in the image.
Such objects are very common in star-forming regions. They are short-lived, and their motion and evolution can actually be seen over very short timescales, on the order of years. They quickly race away from the newly-forming star that emitted them, colliding with new clumps of material and glowing brightly before fading away.
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LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's finance minister insisted on Saturday he would not change course after the loss of the country's 'AAA' credit rating but George Osborne is facing pressure to do just that as his bet on austerity falters ahead of the 2015 election.
Moody's dealt Britain its first sovereign rating downgrade on Friday, saying the $2.5 trillion economy faced years more sluggish growth and debt would continue to rise until 2016.
Economically the one-notch cut will have limited importance -- most of Europe, Japan and the United States have already suffered the same fate and Britain continues to borrow at historically low rates.
But politically it is toxic for Osborne who has repeatedly vowed to protect the top credit rating since the 2010 election campaign. The downgrade exposes him to opponents who say his failure to deliver economic growth is driving Prime Minister David Cameron towards electoral defeat.
Osborne said on Saturday the move by Moody's showed he was right to focus on restoring Britain to fiscal health, arguing that only by doing that will the conditions for growth be restored.
"I am absolutely determined to make sure we deal with our problems, to make sure that Britain stays the course, to make sure that it doesn't take from this credit rating the wrong message which is we should go and borrow a lot more," the 41-year-old Chancellor of the Exchequer said.
"I'm absolutely clear we're not going to do that."
For investors, the downgrade underscores Britain's predicament: a debt-ridden, stagnating economy which has kept bond yields low in large part thanks to the Bank of England becoming the world's biggest investor in UK government debt by buying it with newly printed money.
"Osborne no longer has any place to hide or anyone to blame," said David Blanchflower, who served on the Bank of England's interest rate setting committee from 2006 to 2009.
He said the minister should "stand up, be a man and accept responsibility for the worst recovery in 100 years" and, in a message on Twitter, suggested a swift cut to value-added tax, a labor tax holiday for workers under 25 and incentives for investment and hiring to kick start growth.
Osborne can take comfort from Moody's confidence that his austerity plan would eventually "reverse the UK's debt trajectory".
A Treasury official noted Moody's had given the UK's credit rating a stable outlook, meaning little chance of a further downgrade in the next 12-18 months. When the United States and France were downgraded, their outlooks remained negative.
But whether growth will return forcefully long enough before the 2015 election to allow voters to appreciate it is now highly uncertain.
Sterling fell by almost a cent to around $1.5160 after the downgrade, just off Thursday's fresh 2-1/2-year low. Analysts said they expected it to fall further on Monday.
Some of the Conservatives' Liberal Democrat coalition partners questioned the political judgment of attaching so much importance to Britain's AAA rating.
"This is a self-inflicted injury for George Osborne," said Matthew Oakeshott, a former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman. "To be fair, he was very green in 2009 ... He foolishly erected triple-A status as a virility symbol."
"BLEEDING THE PATIENT"
Cameron, who led his Conservative Party back to office as part of a coalition government after 13 years out of power, risks another year of stagnation and giving his opponents and open goal to aim at.
The Labor Party - which left the biggest peacetime deficit when it lost the 2010 election - called for Osborne's head.
"The medicine is not working so the Chancellor says increase the dose - that's crazy economics. It is like an 18th-century doctor bleeding a patient as they get sicker and sicker," said Ed Balls, the party's main spokesman on finance issues.
But people close to Britain's most powerful two politicians say they are completely aligned. Osborne led Cameron's bid for leadership of the Conservatives and ran the 2010 election campaign. There is little or no chance of him being sacrificed or being forced into a humiliating policy U-turn which would wreck his career.
"Osborne has lots of critics, both inside and outside the party, who are now going to be emboldened by this, but there is no coherent alternative," said Tim Montgomerie, editor of the influential ConservativeHome website.
Though Labor is about 10 percentage points ahead of Conservative Party in polls, surveys show voters trust Cameron and Osborne more than Labor's leader Ed Miliband.
TIME FOR A TWEAK?
Osborne originally gambled that by slashing spending, growth rates of between 2 and 3 percent would kick in from 2013.
But with Britain's banks still recovering from the financial crisis and many of its main trading partners in Europe stuck in recession, his debt targets will be missed. His room for more spending is limited as he tries to avoid pushing up yields on Britain's 1.29 trillion pounds ($1.97 trillion) of debt.
With government spending so restricted, many investors' hopes lie with the Bank of England. Its governor, Mervyn King, this month voted to restart government-bond buying. Although in the minority, his change of heart suggested the bank may be closer than expected to pursuing more stimulus.
If Osborne slows his debt reduction plans, he could upset bond investors and throw his deficit targets further off course.
"We should stick to the plan," said Kwasi Kwarteng, a Conservative lawmaker. "The prime minister would not want to be seen to be panicking, and he's committed to keeping George Osborne where he is."
"But we do also need to look at growth," said Kwarteng, who suggested cutting corporation tax and red tape.
Business lobby the Confederation of British Industry has called for more investment on infrastructure and housing to be funded by more cuts in day-to-day spending. It also expects the government to guarantee more private-sector projects.
Osborne has a chance in his annual budget next month to deliver such tweaks to policy. ($1 = 0.6551 British pounds)
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Abbas and William Schomberg. Editing by Mike Peacock)
ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Urijah Faber and Court McGee got back on the winning track at UFC 157 on Saturday.
Faber got a first-round submission win over Ivan Menjivar. Faber and Menjivar started the fight with a rolling takedown and Faber ended up on top. He worked the top position until Menjivar got back to his feet. Faber held on, and while attached to Menjivar's back, Faber swung around and sunk in a rear naked choke. Menjivar tapped at 4:34 in the first round. The Anaheim crowd erupted for "The California Kid."
It was an important win for Faber after he lost a title fight to Renan Barao in July. The win puts him at 27-6, with five of his losses coming in title fights.
In earlier action, Court McGee punched his way to a decision win over Josh Neer. McGee used an effective strategy early on of working Josh Neer's body. Throughout the first round, Neer was hobbled by McGee's body punches. But in the second, McGee worked more on headshots. Though it wasn't as effective, McGee outstruck Neer. In the final round, McGee worked the ground game and controlled Neer while still leading on strikes. All three judges saw it 30-27 for McGee.
It was McGee's first fight at welterweight.
?I felt great at 170 lbs. This was a great move for me. I felt stronger, faster and had a lot more gas. I was told by FightMetric that I broke the record for most significant strikes ever in a welterweight fight and feel great. I could have stopped it, maybe, early with body shots but I was glad I put on a good performance.?
After the win, McGee's record is 15-3. Though he won "The Ultimate Fighter," he also lost two fights in 2012.
California's struggling homeowners are on track to get at least $20 billion in mortgage reductions and other relief under a multistate settlement five major banks agreed to a year ago, according to a report Thursday.
A total of 175,000 California borrowers were helped last year, and nearly 72,000 of those had their mortgages reduced or forgiven, according to Katherine Porter, the state appointee monitoring the banks' compliance. Another 20,000 are in trial mortgage reductions under the agreement, which settled charges of improper foreclosures across 49 states.
"California is faring very well under this deal," Porter said.
She'll get no argument from Marona Nazlou, who operates a sandwich shop in Santa Clara.
"God bless," said Nazlou, who had a second mortgage forgiven by Bank of America last fall.
The second was for about $490,000, according to his broker, Myron Von Raesfeld.
"When he opened up the letter, I said you just got a half-million-dollar gift from Bank of America," Von Raesfeld said.
Nazlou said he fell behind on his mortgage payments as the economy soured and his house lost much of its value.
"We work very hard, but my situation got much worse," he explained. Now he is in the three-month trial period of a modification on his first mortgage.
Bank of America has focused on forgiving second mortgages, Porter said, adding that people are contacting her office after getting letters from the
bank telling them their second mortgage has been eliminated. "They say, 'Is this a scam?' It isn't."
BofA has erased $3.8 billion in 37,000 second mortgages so far, she said.
"They don't reduce it, they eliminate it. You get a letter in the mail, and 30 days later they release your second mortgage and report it to the credit bureau 'paid in full.'"
California was the hardest hit by reckless subprime lending that ended with massive numbers of foreclosed homes across the state. Particularly hard hit were the Central Valley and Inland Empire, which are among the areas the state is targeting for the most relief.
About 59,000 short sales totaling $8.8 billion have been done under the agreement in California, according to the California monitor's office. Under a short sale, the home is sold for less than the value of its mortgage; banks must agree to such a sale and then absorb the loss.
But some people want fewer short sales, which cost people their homes.
"The hope of folks regarding the agreement was that it would keep people in their homes through first lien principal reductions," said Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition.
Nationally, the banks have extended $45.8 billion in all forms of relief to 550,000 borrowers, the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight reported Thursday. California has received about $18 billion so far, about 40 percent of the total.
Under the national settlement, announced last February, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Ally/GMAC and Bank of America agreed to extend $25 billion in relief of various kinds to borrowers in 49 states. A scoring system gives less than a dollar's credit for a dollar's worth of some types of relief, so the total settlement has much more than $25 billion in relief flowing to consumers.
Under a special "California commitment" arranged by Attorney General Kamala Harris, three banks that do the most mortgage lending in California -- Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo -- agreed to provide $12 billion in mortgage relief under a system that rewarded speedy principal reductions on first mortgages and forgiveness of second mortgages. Extra credit was given for relief in the counties hit hardest by foreclosures.
Independently, Ally/GMAC has extended $71.4 million to 679 California borrowers, and Citi has helped 9,466 borrowers with $813 million in relief.
Although the agreement runs for three years from its signing last February, Wells Fargo, BofA and Chase have already exceeded their commitments by $3.9 billion and are likely to finish early, Porter said.
Contact Pete Carey at 408-920-5419. Follow him on Twitter.com/petecarey.
Sebastian 'The Bash' Taylor Thomaz is bound to be a stylish baby, so MTV News found some of Hollywood's most chic baby products. By Christina Garibaldi
Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose Photo: Jason Merritt/ Getty Images
Adele arrives at the 55th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Adele arrives at the 55th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
A seating placard of actor Hugh Jackman for 85th Academy Awards are seen inside the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013. The Academy Awards will be held Sunday, Feb. 24, 2013. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP)
Actor Hugh Jackman arrives for the screening of the film Le Miserables at the 63rd edition of the Berlinale, International Film Festival in Berlin, Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013. (Photo by Joel Ryan/Invision/ AP)
From left, actors Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and Eddie Redmayne pose during the photo call of the film Les Miserables at the 63rd edition of the Berlinale, International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany, Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013. (AP Photo/Gero Breloer)
Actors Hugh Jackman, left, and Anne Hathaway pose during the photo call of the film Les Miserables at the 63rd edition of the Berlinale, International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany, Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013. (AP Photo/Gero Breloer)
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? It was an extra starry, musical day at the Dolby Theatre.
Adele took the stage first Friday, followed by the cast of "Les Miserables," singing together of the first time.
Oscar nominees Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, along with co-stars Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Helena Bonham-Carter, Sasha Baron-Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Aaron Tveit and Samantha Barks rehearsed their performances on the Oscar stage. They were backed by members of the musical's stage productions from London and Broadway.
"Les Miserables" director Tom Hooper sat in the front row of the theater as his cast sang.
Moments earlier, Adele dazzled the tiny audience of show workers with her performance of the James Bond theme "Skyfall."
"I need a lot more reverb on me," she said after her first run. "You might need to get a new reverb machine."
The 24-year-old multiple Grammy winner arrived wearing a black tunic, black leggings and flats, with no makeup and her hair in a ponytail.
"I'm going to have very high heels on the night, guys," she announced from the microphone, sipping tea between verses.
"Do you need the dresses?" she asked, and a team of stylists brought out the gowns Adele is considering for her Oscar performance.
The dress producers favored? "It's very heavy ? I mean I struggle to stand in it," Adele said. "Come and feel how heavy it is, so you don't think I'm a wimp!"
She performed her Oscar-nominated song five times before leaving the theater. "It's been good, yeah?" she asked producer Neil Meron, who nodded in approval.
Just after Adele wrapped, the star-studded "Les Miserables" cast took the stage. Hathaway chatted with Bonham-Carter as Jackman sang a capella. Then Hathaway checked her microphone with a quick verse.
"Ooh, that was flat," she said.
The entire cast assembled for a final run-through when Jackman spontaneously began singing "My Bonny Lies over the Ocean."
"My bonny lies over my daddy," the ensemble responded, breaking into laughter.
Other stars rehearsing Friday included Jennifer Hudson, who is set to perform a song from "Dreamgirls" at Sunday's ceremony.
___
AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/APSandy .
Feb. 21, 2013 ? Voracious absences at the center of galaxies, black holes shape the growth and death of the stars around them through their powerful gravitational pull and explosive ejections of energy.
"Over its lifetime, a black hole can release more energy than all the stars in a galaxy combined," said Roger Blandford, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science. "Black holes have a major impact on the formation of galaxies and the environmental growth and evolution of those galaxies."
Gravitational forces grow so strong close to a black hole that even light cannot escape from within, hence the difficulty in observing them directly. Scientists infer facts about black holes by their influence on the astronomical objects around them: the orbit of stars and clumps of detectable energy. With this information in hand, scientists create computer models to understand the data and to make predictions about the physics of distant regions of space. However, models are only as good as their assumptions.
"All tests of general relativity in the weak gravity field limit, like in our solar system, fall directly along the lines of what Einstein predicted," explained Jonathan McKinney, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park. "But there is another regime -- which has yet to be tested, and which is the hardest to test -- that represents the strong gravitational field limit. And according to Einstein, gravity is strongest near black holes."
This makes black holes the ultimate experimental testing grounds for Einstein's theory of general relativity.
While black holes cannot be observed, they are typically accompanied by other objects with distinctive features that can be seen, including accretion disks, which are circling disks of superhot matter on our side of the black hole's "event horizon"; and relativistic jets, high-powered streams of ionized gases that shoot hundreds of thousands of light years across the sky.
In a paper published in Science in January 2013, McKinney, Tchekhovskoy and Blandford predicted the formation of accretion disks and relativistic jets that warp and bend more than previously thought, shaped both by the extreme gravity of the black hole and by powerful magnetic forces generated by its spin. Their highly detailed models of the black hole environment contribute new knowledge to the field.
For decades, a simplistic view of the accretion disks and polar jets reigned. It was widely believed that accretion disks sat like flat plates along the outer edges of black holes and that jets shot straight out perpendicularly. However, new 3D simulations performed on the powerful supercomputers of the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and NASA overturned this oversimplified view of jets and disks.
The simulations show that the jet is aligned with the black hole's spin near the black hole but that it gradually gets pushed by the disk material and becomes parallel to (but offset from) the disk's rotational axis at large distances. The interaction between the jet and disk leaves a warp in the accretion disk density.
"An important aspect that determines jet properties is the strength of the magnetic field threading the black hole," said Alexander Tchekhovskoy, a post-doctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. "While in previous works it was a free parameter, in our series of works the field is maximum: it is as strong as a black hole's gravity pull on the disk."
In the simulations, the twisting energy grows so strong that it actually powers the jet. In fact, the jet can reorient the accretion disk, rather than the other way around, as was thought previously.
"People had thought that the disk was the dominant aspect," McKinney said. "It was the dog and the jet was the wagging tail. But we found that the magnetic field builds up to become stronger than gravity, and then the jet becomes the dog and the disk becomes the wagging tail. Or, one can say the dog is chasing its own tail, because the disk and jet are quite balanced, with the disk following the jet -- it's the inverse situation to what people thought."
What does this have to do with Einstein and his theory of general relativity?
Astronomers are closer than ever to being able to see the details of the jets and accretion disks around black holes. In a September 2012 paper in Science, Sheperd Doeleman of MIT reported the first images of the jet-launching structure near the supermassive black hole, M87, at the center of a neighboring galaxy, captured using the Event Horizon Telescope, a very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) array composed of four telescopes at three geographical locations. It constituted a small sliver of a vast skyscape, yet the results give astronomers like McKinney, Tchekhovskoy and Blandford the hope that they will get their first comprehensive glimpse into the black hole's neighborhood in the next three to five years.
"We'll see the gases swirl around the black hole and other optical effects that will be signatures of a black holes in spacetime that one can look out for," said Blandford.
The observations will either match models like theirs, or they will be different. Both outcomes will tell researchers a lot.
"If you don't have an accurate model and anything can happen as far as you understand, then you're not going to be able to make any constraints and prove one way or another whether Einstein was right," McKinney explained. "But if you have an accurate model using Einstein's equations, and you observe a black hole that is very different from what you expected, then you can begin to say that he may be wrong."
The model Blandford and others generated using supercomputing simulations will help serve that comparative role. But they need to add one crucial element to make the simulations meaningful: a way of translating the physics of the black hole system into a visual signal as it would be seen from the vantage point of our telescopes, billions of light years away.
"We're in the process of making our simulations shine, so they can be compared with observations," McKinney said, "not only to test our ideas of how these disks and jets work, but ultimately to test general relativity."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center.
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Journal Reference:
J. C. McKinney, A. Tchekhovskoy, R. D. Blandford. Alignment of Magnetized Accretion Disks and Relativistic Jets with Spinning Black Holes. Science, 2012; 339 (6115): 49 DOI: 10.1126/science.1230811
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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Beating Missouri could be a NCAA Tournament resume-building win for Kentucky Saturday. However, Missouri coach Frank Haith says UK?is not the only team battling to try and get into the tourney.
?I think we need the same thing, too. I think we?re all trying to improve our resume,? said Haith Thursday. ?I?m not looking at it in terms of what we need to do to build our resume, but we?ve got to try to continue to fight like we?re not in, either, and we need a great quality road win, and we haven?t had that yet. We?re right in the same boat with those guys, too.?
Missouri is coming off a signature win over Florida, but still is 19-7 overall and 8-5 in Southeastern Conference play ? or one game behind UK?in the conference. The Tigers have lost at Mississippi, Florida, LSU, Texas A&M and Arkansas in conference play.
?I think most teams do play better at home. LSU, Texas A&M and Arkansas we could easily have won, and didn?t. Hopefully we will get some road wins,? Haith said. ?We are more aggressive at home and need to be the same way on the road.?
Haith said he is ?hopeful? that momentum from the win over Florida, which beat Missouri by 31 points on Jan. 19, will carry over to Saturday?s ESPN GameDay contest.
?It?s great that we won that game, because we?ve been playing pretty good. We just want to stay humble and stay hungry,? Haith said.
Haith admitted he has not really looked at how Kentucky was playing before center Nerlens Noel went down with a season-ending knee injury. Instead, he?s concentrating on what UK did at Tennessee and then in Wednesday?s win over Vanderbilt.
?I?ve just focused on the last two in terms of executing the things they?ve done earlier. They look different in their lineup in terms of how they play, and I?ve just focused on that a little bit,??Haith said. ?They?re really athletic.
?(Julius) Mays and (Kyle) Wiltjer can shoot the ball, but they?re going to put the ball on us, they?re going to get out in transition, and we?ve go to get back and set our defense. Especially in that building, they?re going to run the ball. Our transition defense hasn?t been great (and) that?s been my biggest concern, is our ability to get back and set our defense.?
Missouri?s balanced offense has six players averaging in double figures ? the Tigers average 76 points per game. Guard Jabari Brown, who hit a key 3-pointer late in the win over Florida, is a 37 percent shooter from 3-point range. Forward Laurence Bowers seems back at full strength after missing five games with an injury. He?s second on the team with 23 blocked shots.
?Bowers back just adds an additional challenge,? LSU coach Johnny Jones said. ?He is just a force. He is obviously very physical and is capable of playing inside and outside. He gives them a different dimension and obviously is one of their leaders. They are a totally different team with him.?
Haith said Bowers is still not playing as well as he was before he was injured and the Tigers need him to focus on more than scoring.
?Be a good passer, defender and rebounder. Scoring will take care of itself,? Haith said.
Center Alex Oriakhi, a transfer from Connecticut who considered coming to UK, is a 58.2 percent shooter from the field and has a team-high 41 blocked shots. He also leads the Tigers in rebounding.
?He has been great. He did not get enough touches in some games,??Haith said.
The Missouri coach also said Oriakhi has been in foul trouble, especially on the road, and that has limited his aggressiveness.
?But he has been terrific. He?s become a more consistent scorer, rebounds at a high level. We can throw to him in the paint and positive things happen,? Haith said.
Haith?s major issue Thursday was dealing with the snow storm hitting the area. He had his director of basketball operations out picking up players for practice and hoped to have most of the players in the gym. He was also still hopeful the team could fly to Lexington Friday.
?We?re looking forward to another great opportunity for our young men. I?ve got a lot of respect for coach Cal and what he?s accomplished and who he is as a coach,? Haith said.
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Public release date: 27-Feb-2013
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ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Urijah Faber and Court McGee got back on the winning track at UFC 157 on Saturday.