Apple quietly updated its iMac options to include versions with a built-in VESA mount adapter today, available on both 21.5-inch and 27-inch models for a $40 additional fee. The option will come as a relief to users who were saddened by the lack of any VESA-mounting option on the new iMac design.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kqCKNfe0ieE/
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White smoke emerges from the chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Wednesday, March 13, 2013. The white smoke indicates that the new pope has been elected. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
White smoke emerges from the chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Wednesday, March 13, 2013. The white smoke indicates that the new pope has been elected. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
Crowds cheer after white smoke billowed from the chimney on the Sistine Chapel indicating that a new pope has been elected in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Wednesday, March 13, 2013.(AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)
Crowds cheer after white smoke billowed from the chimney on the Sistine Chapel indicating that a new pope has been elected in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Wednesday, March 13, 2013.(AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)
VATICAN CITY (AP) ? Cardinals elected a new pope to lead the world's 1.2 billion Catholics on Wednesday, overcoming deep divisions to select the 266th pontiff in a remarkably fast conclave.
Tens of thousands of people who braved cold rain to watch the smokestack atop the Sistine Chapel jumped in joy when white smoke poured out a few minutes past 7 p.m., many shouting "Habemus Papam!" or "We have a pope!" ? as the bells of St. Peter's Basilica and churches across Rome pealed.
The pope, whose identity isn't yet known, is due to emerge from the loggia overlooking St. Peter's Square to deliver his first words as the bishop of Rome. The lag time was giving Romans plenty of time to get to St. Peter's, and a steady stream of pilgrims and tourists were making their way.
Chants of "Long live the pope!" arose from the throngs of faithful, many with tears in their eyes. Crowds went wild as the Vatican and Italian military bands marched through the square and up the steps of the basilica, followed by Swiss Guards in silver helmets and full regalia.
They played the introduction to the Vatican and Italian anthems and the crowd, which numbered at least 50,000, joined in, waving flags from countries around the world.
"I can't explain how happy I am right down," said Ben Canete, a 32-year-old Filipino, jumping up and down in excitement.
Elected on the fifth ballot, the pope was chosen in one of the fastest conclaves in years, remarkable given there was no clear front-runner going into the vote and that the church had been in turmoil following the upheaval unleashed by Pope Benedict XVI's surprise resignation.
A winner must receive 77 votes, or two-thirds of the 115, to be named pope.
For comparison's sake, Benedict was elected on the fourth ballot in 2005 ? but he was the clear front-runner going into the vote. Pope John Paul II was elected on the eighth ballot in 1978 to become the first non-Italian pope in 455 years.
Patrizia Rizzo ran down the main boulevard to the piazza with her two children as soon as she heard the news on the car radio. "I parked the car ... and dashed to the square, she said. "It's so exciting, as Romans we had to come."
The conclave played out against the backdrop of the first papal resignation in 600 years and revelations of mismanagement, petty bickering, infighting and corruption in the Holy See bureaucracy. Those revelations, exposed by the leaks of papal documents last year, had divided the College of Cardinals into camps seeking a radical reform of the Holy See's governance and those defending the status quo.
The names mentioned most often as "papabile" ? a cardinal who has the stuff of a pope ? included Cardinal Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan, an intellect in the vein of Benedict but with a more outgoing personality, and Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Canadian head of the Vatican's important bishops' office who is also scholarly but reserved like Benedict.
Brazilian Cardinal Odilo Scherer is liked by the Vatican bureaucracy but not by all of his countrymen. And Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungary has the backing of European cardinals who have twice elected him as head of the European bishops' conference.
On the more pastoral side is Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston, the favorite of the Italian press, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the back-slapping, outgoing archbishop of New York who has admitted himself that his Italian is pretty bad ? a drawback for a job that is conducted almost exclusively in the language.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi said it was a "good hypothesis" that the pope would be installed next Tuesday, on the feast of St. Joseph, patron saint of the universal church. The installation Mass is attended by heads of state from around the world, requiring at least a few days' notice.
Benedict would not attend, he said.
Thousands of people braved a chilly rain on Wednesday morning to watch the 6-foot- (2-meter-) high copper chimney on the chapel roof for the smoke signals telling them whether the cardinals had settled on a choice. Nuns recited the rosary, while children splashed in puddles.
Unlike the confusion that reigned during the 2005 conclave, the smoke this time around was clear: black during the first two sets of smoke signals, and then clearly white on Wednesday night ? thanks to special smoke flares akin to those used in soccer matches or protests that were lit in the chapel ovens to accompany the smoke from the burned ballot papers.
The Vatican on Wednesday divulged the secret recipe used: potassium perchlorate, anthracene, which is a derivative of coal tar, and sulfur for the black smoke; potassium chlorate, lactose and a pine resin for the white smoke.
The chemicals were contained in five units of a cartridge that is placed inside the stove of the Sistine Chapel. When activated, the five blocks ignite one after another for about a minute apiece, creating the steady stream of smoke that accompanies the natural smoke from the burned ballot papers.
Despite the great plumes of smoke that poured out of the chimney, neither the Sistine frescoes nor the cardinals inside the chapel suffered any smoke damage, Lombardi said.
___
Reporters Karl Ritter and Daniela Petroff contributed.
___
Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield
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A Lun-class ekranoplan, one of the Soviet aircraft that inspired Rutan's project.
Renowned aircraft engineer and designer Burt Rutan, who officially retired in April 2011, reveals exclusively to Popular Mechanics today that he has devised "a new concept for a seaplane that may allow for operation from any surface: water, snow, grass, and hard surface."
Reports proliferated in late 2011 that the 69-year-old founder of the innovative aerospace research firm Scaled Composites was working on a seaplane that he could use to go lake-hopping near his new home in Coeur d?Alene, Idaho. Rutan said at the time that his design was inspired by Cold War?era Russian craft like the MD-160 Lun-class ekranoplan. "It is a combination wing ship and seaplane," he said at a meeting of the Experimental Aviation Association.
But Rutan tells PM he has abandoned his initial concept and design and is now working on an entirely new type of aircraft. For now, he declined to provide details of the design and says he won?t be satisfied that he has broken new ground until the new craft is operational. "I will call it a ?real breakthrough? only if it flies like I think it might," he says.
Rutan received the Popular Mechanics Leadership Award at the magazine?s 2006 Breakthrough Awards for his extraordinary achievements as an aircraft designer. That includes SpaceShipOne, the craft that won the $10 million 2004 Ansari X Prize by carrying three people more than 62 miles above the earth?s surface twice within two weeks. At the time, SpaceShipOne was the most significant development in the space tourism industry.
Backed by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, and Richard Branson, the founder and chairman of Virgin Group, Rutan and Scaled Composites went on to design SpaceShipTwo, the suborbital craft that completed a successful "drop test" on Oct. 10, 2010, gliding gracefully to a landing in Mojave, Calif., after being released from its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo. Virgin Galactic has announced that the first suborbital flight of SpaceShipTwo would take place in 2013, but the company has not specified a date for the maiden voyage.
Rutan has settled into a somewhat less hectic life than he led during the frenzied runup to the SpaceShipTwo test flights. Never one to stop innovating, Rutan?s final design for the company he founded in 1982 was the Model 367 BiPod, a roadable aircraft (aka flying car) with a wingspan of nearly 32 feet. In runway testing during the past two years, it has achieved 80 mph and taken flight in brief, short hops.
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The newest addition to WWE?s pay-per-view calendar, WWE Payback, makes its world premiere Sunday, June 16, at Chicago?s Allstate Arena.
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Starting at $25, tickets for WWE Payback go on sale Saturday, March 23, at 12 p.m. CT. Tickets will be available at the Allstate Arena box office, all Ticketmaster outlets and www.ticketmaster.com, or you can charge by phone by calling 1-800-745-3000.
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View CommentsSource: http://www.wwe.com/inside/wwe-payback-tickets-on-sale
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A man wears a brain-machine interface, equipped with electroencephalography Photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images
Behind a locked door in a white-walled basement in a research building in Tempe, Ariz., a monkey sits stone-still in a chair, eyes locked on a computer screen. From his head protrudes a bundle of wires; from his mouth, a plastic tube. As he stares, a picture of a green cursor on the black screen floats toward the corner of a cube. The monkey is moving it with his mind.
The monkey, a rhesus macaque named Oscar, has electrodes implanted in his motor cortex, detecting electrical impulses that indicate mental activity and translating them to the movement of the ball on the screen. The computer isn?t reading his mind, exactly?Oscar?s own brain is doing a lot of the lifting, adapting itself by trial and error to the delicate task of accurately communicating its intentions to the machine. (When Oscar succeeds in controlling the ball as instructed, the tube in his mouth rewards him with a sip of his favorite beverage, Crystal Light.) It?s not technically telekinesis, either, since that would imply that there?s something paranormal about the process. It?s called a ?brain-computer interface.? And it just might represent the future of the relationship between human and machine.
Stephen Helms Tillery?s laboratory at Arizona State University is one of a growing number where researchers are racing to explore the breathtaking potential of BCIs and a related technology, neuroprosthetics. The promise is irresistible: from restoring sight to the blind, to helping the paralyzed walk again, to allowing people suffering from locked-in syndrome to communicate with the outside world. In the past few years, the pace of progress has been accelerating, delivering dazzling headlines seemingly by the week.
At Duke University in 2008, a monkey named Idoya walked on a treadmill, causing a robot in Japan to do the same. Then Miguel Nicolelis stopped the monkey?s treadmill?and the robotic legs kept walking, controlled by Idoya?s brain. At Andrew Schwartz?s lab at the University of Pittsburgh in December 2012, a quadriplegic woman named Jan Scheuermann learned to feed herself chocolate by mentally manipulating a robotic arm. Just last month, Nicolelis? lab set up what it billed as the first brain-to-brain interface, allowing a rat in North Carolina to make a decision based on sensory data beamed via Internet from the brain of a rat in Brazil.
So far the focus has been on medical applications?restoring standard-issue human functions to people with disabilities. But it?s not hard to imagine the same technologies someday augmenting capacities. If you can make robotic legs walk with your mind, there?s no reason you can?t also make them run faster than any sprinter. If you can control a robotic arm, you can control a robotic crane. If you can play a computer game with your mind, you can, theoretically at least, fly a drone with your mind.
It?s tempting and a bit frightening to imagine that all of this is right around the corner, given how far the field has already come in a short time. Indeed, Nicolelis?the media-savvy scientist behind the ?rat telepathy? experiment?is aiming to build a robotic bodysuit that would allow a paralyzed teen to take the first kick of the 2014 World Cup. Yet the same factor that has made the explosion of progress in neuroprosthetics possible could also make future advances harder to come by: the almost unfathomable complexity of the human brain.
From I, Robot to Skynet, we?ve tended to assume that the machines of the future would be guided by artificial intelligence?that our robots would have minds of their own. Over the decades, researchers have made enormous leaps in AI, and we may be entering an age of ?smart objects? that can learn, adapt to, and even shape our habits and preferences. We have planes that fly themselves, and we?ll soon have cars that do the same. Google has some of the world?s top AI minds working on making our smartphones even smarter, to the point that they can anticipate our needs. But ?smart? is not the same ?sentient.? We can train devices to learn specific behaviors, and even out-think humans in certain constrained settings, like a game of Jeopardy. But we?re still nowhere close to building a machine that can pass the Turing test, the benchmark for human-like intelligence. Some experts doubt we ever will: Nicolelis, for one, argues Ray Kurzweil?s Singularity is impossible because the human mind is not computable.
Philosophy aside, for the time being the smartest machines of all are those that humans can control. The challenge lies in how best to control them. From vacuum tubes to the DOS command line to the Mac to the iPhone, the history of computing has been a progression from lower to higher levels of abstraction. In other words, we?ve been moving from machines that require us to understand and directly manipulate their inner workings to machines that understand how we work and respond readily to our commands. The next step after smartphones may be voice-controlled smart glasses, which can intuit our intentions all the more readily because they see what we see and hear what we hear.
The logical endpoint of this progression would be computers that read our minds, computers we can control without any physical action on our part at all. That sounds impossible. After all, if the human brain is so hard to compute, how can a computer understand what?s going on inside it?
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=2ae0b3735d795fdc4cb1fc0b6ecb36cd
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Mar. 11, 2013 ? The heart failure drug digoxin, used less and less since it "failed" in its 1997 clinical trial, may do something no drug has achieved since: reduce by 34 percent the chances that heart failure patients will be admitted to the hospital within 30 days of first taking it, according to an analysis highlighted today at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session and published online simultaneously in The American Journal of Medicine.
Preventing frequent admissions became a national priority last year as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) penalized thousands of hospitals an estimated total of $300 million for having above average 30-day readmission rates in patients with pneumonia, heart attack or heart failure.
CMS leveled the penalties as part of federal healthcare reform and with the rationale that many admissions and readmissions are preventable if care is handled properly. While that is a matter of debate, one in five Medicare recipients is readmitted within 30 days at an annual cost of $17 billion, with heart failure the most common culprit. Digoxin is known to reduce acute heart failure symptoms like shortness of breath, the kind of frightening experience that sends people racing to emergency rooms.
"This is the first study to suggest that any drug, old or new, can dramatically reduce the risk of 30-day, all-cause hospital admission among older heart failure patients," said Ali Ahmed, M.D., M.P.H., professor in the divisions of Gerontology, Geriatrics, & Palliative Care and Cardiovascular Disease within the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Ahmed today presented the work by researchers from UAB and Birmingham Veterans Affairs Medical Center as part of the ACC's Late Breaking Clinical Trials session.
Obsessed with reducing mortality
The current study is a re-analysis of data from the original Digitalis Investigation Group (DIG) trial, which was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies program. DIG was a randomized, controlled clinical trial conducted in the early 1990s in which digoxin failed to lower the risk of death (all-cause mortality) in patients with chronic heart failure. The treatment did, however, reduce the risk for hospitalization due to worsening heart failure by 28 percent when patients were followed for three years.
After it failed to reduce mortality, digoxin went from one of the most prescribed heart failure drugs to an afterthought, despite its being approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as an oral treatment for "mild to moderate heart failure." In the meantime, newer drug classes like beta blockers and aldosterone antagonists came into vogue after successfully reducing both mortality and hospitalization in pivotal trials.
Interestingly, while these drug classes reduced hospital admission over the long term, their effect on all-cause 30-day readmission was never studied. The DIG study looked at patients with systolic heart failure, where the heart's blood-pumping capability deteriorates, in some cases after a heart attack, or for reasons not completely understood. Because of the reduced pumping strength, the field once thought of heart failure as a mechanical pump failure.
Accordingly, researchers first tried drugs like milrinone and vesnarione, positive inotropes that increase the strength of the heart's contractions. While the drugs increased pumping strength and made patients feel better, they also increased mortality and failed to address underlying disease processes.
Researchers then came to understand that heart failure worsens because of the body's response to it. As the heart weakens, the body's organs, starved of oxygen and energy, trigger the same systems that make the heart pump harder when we are scared (sympathetic nervous system, adrenaline), along with those they interact with (renin-angiotensin). Neurohormonal and neurohumoral are umbrella terms for these systems and, initially, they change (remodel) the structure of heart chambers such that they work more efficiently.
As heart failure progresses, however, neurohormonal signals continue to remodel the heart's ventricles until the heart pumps blood with less efficiency. Drugs such as angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, aldosterone antagonists and beta blockers interfere with neurohormones to improve outcomes. The medications keep the weakened heart from working too hard, which prevents processes that thin out heart chamber walls. Unlike digoxin, these drugs reduced both death and hospitalization in key clinical trials, and became first-line treatments for heart failure.
"In our obsession to a make a dent in the intractable, high death rates seen with chronic heart failure, we almost forgot that most heart failure patients are older adults, and that this disease is the leading cause of hospital admission and readmission for these patients," said Ahmed, also professor in the Department of Epidemiology within the UAB School of Public Health and director of the Advanced Illness, Multimorbidity and Heart Failure (AIM-HF) program in the UAB Center for Aging. "In the process, we ignored a drug in digoxin with proven ability to reduce the risk of hospitalization due to worsening heart failure."
After digoxin failed to reduce mortality in the DIG trial, its prescription rate dropped from two thirds of patients in the 1990s to perhaps one third today, said Ahmed. Evidence has emerged since then that a low dose of digoxin not only reduces the risk of hospitalization, but may also reduce the risk of death.
"Digoxin is the only inotrope that does not increase mortality at the traditional inotrope dose," said Robert Bourge, M.D., professor in the division of Cardiovascular Disease and vice-chair for Clinical Affairs and Development in the Department of Medicine within the UAB School of Medicine. "Furthermore, research has shown that in low doses, digoxin may also block neurohormone systems like beta blockers or ACE inhibitors. Add that to its ability to reduce 30-day, all-cause hospital admission, and the field may need to rethink its use of digoxin," said Bourge, also first author of the study.
He added that William Withering, the English physician who discovered digoxin more than 200 years ago, predicted that "? in spite of opinion, prejudice or error, time will fix the real value upon this discovery."
Despite the attention received by the new analysis of the digoxin data, the authors emphasized that the findings will not change practice unless the findings are replicated in studies that show digoxin also reduces 30-day, all-cause hospital readmission in older patients discharged from hospitals after acute heart failure. The current analysis used the rate of first-time hospital admission among outpatients within 30 days as a model for what would happen when typically sicker hospitalized patients are discharged from the hospital but return within a month.
One sign that the observed outpatient benefit may extend to those hospitalized: the reanalysis showed a greater benefit the more severe a patient's heart failure.
"Heart failure is a major public health issue with our growing aging population, and no medications have yet been shown to reduce the high 30-day hospital readmission rates for patients recently discharged from an acute heart failure hospitalization," said Jerome Fleg, M.D., medical officer at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and coauthor on the study.
"Should future studies prove that digoxin is equally effective in sicker heart failure patients discharged from the hospital and at higher risk of returning soon, it would mean that an extremely inexpensive drug may solve a costly problem for nation's hospitals and improve outcomes of older heart failure patients in the process," said Ahmed.
About the research team
Along with the Ahmed and Bourge, UAB authors of the paper included Kanan Patel, MBBS, MPH, Inmaculada Aban, Ph.D., Connie White-Williams, RN, Ph.D., and Richard Allman, M.D., director of the UAB Center for Aging, who is also faculty at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Birmingham. Authors making important contributions from other institutions were Jerome Fleg, M.D., of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), Gregg Fonarow, M.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles, John Cleland, M.D., of Hull York Medical School, Kingston-Upon-Hull in the United Kingdom, John McMurray, M.D, of the University of Glasgow, Dirk van Veldhuisen, M.D., Ph.D., of the University Medical Centre of Groningen in the Netherlands, Mihai Gheorghiade, M.D., of Northwestern University, Michel White, M.D., of the Montreal Heart Institute, Gerasimos Filippatos, M.D., Ph.D., of Attikon University Hospital in Athens, Greece, and Stefan Anker, M.D., Ph.D., of the Center for Clinical and Basic Research, IRCCS, San Raffaele, in Rome. Drs. Fonarow and Gheorghiade disclosed consulting relationships with industry, with details included in the related journal article
The original DIG study was supported by the NHLBI. The current manuscript was prepared using a limited access dataset obtained from the NHLBI and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of the DIG study or the NHLBI.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Alabama at Birmingham. The original article was written by Greg Williams.
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