Corrections

Photo by Gabriela Insuratelu

In an April 11 ?Bad Astronomy? blog post, Phil Plait wrote that money for NASA's asteroid mission was being taken from planetary research. The asteroid mission would be funded with new money added to the budget.

In an April 11 ?Future Tense? blog post, Torie Bosch misspelled physicist Brian Greene?s last name.

In an April 10 ?Brow Beat? blog post, Aisha Harris misspelled the name of video creators Slacktory.

In an April 10 ?DoubleX,? Emily Bazelon misidentified Leah Parsons, mother of a Canadian teen who committed suicide, as Linda Parsons.

In an April 9 ?Technology,? Farhad Manjoo originally misstated the value of 24,000 bitcoins. At press time, they would?ve been worth approximately $5.6 million.

In an April 9 ?Vault? blog post, Rebecca Onion misspelled Lynyrd Skynyrd.

In an April 9 "XX Factor" blog post, Amanda Hess misspelled the last name of Sen. Michael Bennet.

In an April 8 Mad Men ?TV Club,? Seth Stevenson misidentified Betty's husband. His name is Henry Francis, not Dick Francis.

In an April 8 ?Weigel,? David Weigel misspelled Roger Ebert?s first name.

In an April 8 ?Weigel,? David Weigel misquoted Margaret Thatcher as saying, ?You would rather have the poor poorer.? The correct quote is, ?They would rather have the poor poorer.?

In an April 4 ?Culturebox,? J. Bryan Lowder misidentified the extremely serious, sombrero-wearing, gloved gentleman in an early shot from the telecast of the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony as a ?farmer pouring from an oilcan into a doghouse.??He is, more likely and with equal absurdity, a beekeeper pouring smoke into a beehive, which we?re told calms the beasts therein.

In an April 4 "War Stories," Fred Kaplan said that the most recent conflict between North and South Korea was the sinking of the Cheonan in November 2010. Actually, the Cheonan sank in March 2010. In November 2010, the North Koreans fired on South Korean forces at Yeonpyeong Island.

Slate?strives to correct all errors of fact. If you've seen an error in our pages, let us know at?corrections@slate.com. General comments should be?posted?in our Comments sections at the bottom of each article.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=eb6d4e2ab5e066f25ab38854e7566dab

hoekstra best superbowl commercials 2012 best super bowl ads chrysler super bowl commercial madonna half time show fiat 500 abarth madonna halftime

Will Chavez's unfulfilled promises affect Sunday's election?

Worsening power outages, crumbling infrastructure, and other unfulfilled promises could impact Sunday's election to replace socialist President Hugo Chavez, who died last month.

By Frank Bajak,?Associated Press / April 11, 2013

A poster of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez hangs on an iron fence next to a government housing construction project in Valencia, Venezuela. About 2 million of Venezuela's 30 million people lack permanent homes. The government says it has built 370,500 homes and apartments over the past two years, and more than 3 million people applied for them.

Ramon Espinosa / AP

Enlarge

It's just after nightfall and the power is out again in untold hundreds of thousands ? probably millions ? of Venezuelan homes. If the government knows how many, it's not saying. It hasn't issued reports on problems in the public power grid since 2010.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

In Venezuela's third-largest city, Pedro Martinez dons a shirt for visitors drawn by the flicker of candles inside his one-story, cement-block house in a middle-class district. The Caribbean heat is sticky thick inside. A mesh hammock hangs by the front door.

"This happens nearly every day," Martinez says of the blackout, holding a candle close so a reporter can take notes. It's the day's second outage. The first struck just after noon.

It's been like this for five years, pretty much everywhere but Caracas, the capital. Worsening power outages, crumbling infrastructure and other unfulfilled promises witnessed this week in a trip through the country's industrial heartland could be an important factor in Sunday's election to replace socialist President Hugo Chavez, who died last month after a long battle with cancer.

His political heir, Nicolas Maduro, is favored to win, largely on the strength of Chavez's generous anti-poverty programs, which the late president emphasized over public works with one big exception: housing.

But polls show that support may be eroding and the outages are a testament to the neglect many Venezuelans consider inexcusable in this major oil-producing state. Violent crime, double-digit inflation, official corruption and persistent food shortages are other factors.

Some of the rolling, intermittent blackouts are still scheduled. But most are no longer announced. They generally last three to four hours a day on average, said Miguel Lara, who ran the power grid until Chavez forced him out in 2004 for being "a political risk."

Jose Aguilar, a U.S.-based consultant with extensive and more recent experience in Venezuela's electrical industry, says it is suffering "a downward spiral of deterioration." Insufficient transmission lines are running so hot that 20,000 distribution transformers burned out last year, he said. "They run them cherry red."

Electrical substations are in a precarious state, Aguilar and Lara said. If one goes offline, others fail. Employees don't even have fuses, said Lara. "They have to cobble together their own to keep things running."

"There's no money to buy parts for something that breaks," said Giovanni Rinaldi, a 15-year employee at a hydroelectric plant in the eastern city of Ciudad Guayana, which he said is plagued by four or five power outages a week despite being in the region that generates more than 70 percent of Venezuela's electricity.

He was fired this week, he said, after posting photos on Twitter of a state utility company vehicle that was used to distribute Maduro campaign posters and other material around town.

"We had put our own money into keeping those vehicles running because the company didn't," Rinaldi, a 40-year-old father of two, said by phone. "It's not right."

The government hasn't adequately spent to expand and strengthen the power grid, critics say.

They also blame problems on Cuban, Iranian, and Uruguayan technicians brought in to run by Chavez to run the system. Accidents are up tenfold, and there are places in remote states that suffer outages for as long as three to five days, says Lara.

Maduro, who was sworn in as interim president the day of Chavez's funeral, said Thursday that the state power utility would be completely restructured, and blamed a recent surge in outages on sabotage by sympathizers of his challenger Sunday, opposition leader Henrique Capriles.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/ecuGw--wBCY/Will-Chavez-s-unfulfilled-promises-affect-Sunday-s-election

Tippi Hedren Big Tex Sweetest Day optimal Samantha Steele Espn goog Sylvia Kristel

High levels of lead detected in rice imported from certain countries

Apr. 10, 2013 ? Rice imported from certain countries contains high levels of lead that could pose health risks, particularly for infants and children, who are especially sensitive to lead's effects, and adults of Asian heritage who consume large amounts of rice, scientists said in New Orleans on April 10. Their research, which found some of the highest lead levels in baby food, was among almost 12,000 reports scheduled for the 245^th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

Tsanangurayi Tongesayi, Ph.D., who headed the analysis of rice imported from Asia, Europe and South America, pointed out that imports account for only 7 percent of the rice consumed in the United States. With vast rice fields in Louisiana, California, Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi, the U.S. is a major producer and exporter of the grain. However, imports of rice and rice flour are increasing ? by more than 200 percent since 1999 ? and rice is the staple food for 3 billion people worldwide, he added.

"Such findings present a situation that is particularly worrisome given that infants and children are especially vulnerable to the effects of lead poisoning," Tongesayi said. "For infants and children, the daily exposure levels from eating the rice products analyzed in this study would be 30-60 times higher than the FDA's provisional total tolerable intake (PTTI) levels. Asians consume more rice, and for these infants and children, exposures would be 60-120 times higher. For adults, the daily exposure levels were 20-40 times higher than the PTTI levels."

The research was part of a symposium titled "Food and Its Environment: What Is In What We Eat?"

Tongesayi's team, which is with Monmouth University in N.J., found that levels of lead in rice imported into the United States ranged from 6 to 12 milligrams/kilogram. From those numbers, they calculated the daily exposure levels for various populations and then made comparisons with the FDA's PTTI levels for lead. They detected the highest amounts of lead in rice from Taiwan and China. Samples from the Czech Republic, Bhutan, Italy, India and Thailand had significantly high levels of lead as well. Analysis of rice samples from Pakistan, Brazil and other countries were still underway.

Because of the increase in rice imports into the United States, Tongesayi said that rice from other nations has made its way into a wide variety of grocery stores, large supermarket chains and restaurants, as well as ethnic specialty markets and restaurants.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Chemical Society.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/qPiHCEdUtMc/130410201824.htm

masters par 3 gwen stefani overeem laron landry mary j blige burger king islands 2013 nissan altima

Oldest Dinosaur Embryo Fossils Discovered in China

Bones from Lufengosaurus embryos (like this femur shown in cross-section) have yielded new information about dinosaur development. Image: A. LeBlanc

From Nature magazine

Palaeontologists working in China have unearthed the earliest collection of fossilized dinosaur embryos to date. The trove includes remains from many individuals at different developmental stages, providing a unique opportunity to investigate the embryonic development of a prehistoric species.

Robert Reisz, a palaeontologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Canada, and his colleagues discovered the sauropodomorph fossils in a bone bed in Lufeng County that dates to the Early Jurassic period, 197 million to 190 million years ago. The site contained eggshells and more than 200 disarticulated bones ? the oldest known traces of budding dinosaurs, the researchers report online today in Nature.

?Most of our record of dinosaur embryos is concentrated in the Late Cretaceous period,? says David Evans, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. ?This [study] takes a detailed record of dinosaur embryology and pushes it back over 100 million years.?

But it is not just the age of the fossils that is notable, the researchers say. Spectroscopic analysis of bone-tissue samples from the Chinese nesting site revealed the oldest organic material ever seen in a terrestrial vertebrate. That was surprising because the fossilized femur bones were delicate and porous, which made them vulnerable to the corrosive effects of weathering and groundwater,?says Reisz.

?That suggests to us that other dinosaur fossils might have organic remains,? he says. ?We just haven?t looked at them in the right ways.?

Protein pointers
Reisz thinks that the complex proteins his team detected in that organic material are preserved collagen. Because collagen composition varies across species, further analyses could help researchers to compare the sauropodomorph fossils with those of other creatures. They include the mighty sauropods, close relatives ? and perhaps descendants ? of early sauropodomorphs that weighed in at about 100,000 kilograms each, making them the largest animals ever to roam Earth.

The researchers think that the Lufeng dinosaurs are sauropodomorphs because they are similar in many ways to intact embryonic skeletons of Massospondylus, a sauropodomorph that Reisz unearthed in South Africa in 2005. But their analysis does identify key differences between the two fossil finds. The Lufeng embryos were less developmentally advanced than the Massospondylus embryos, and they seem to be examples of a different genus, Lufengosaurus.

The embryos also yielded information that could help researchers to understand how these adult sauropodomorphs ? bipedal dinosaurs with long necks ? were able to grow to be 9 metres long, larger than any other terrestrial animal alive during their heyday. When the scientists compared two dozen Lufengosaurus femur bones of different sizes and in various stages of development, they found evidence of rapid, sustained embryonic growth and short incubation times.

Reisz says that the dinosaurs probably maintained this extreme rate of growth after hatching in an effort to evade predation by outgrowing their predators. ?This may be a model to explain gigantism in this group,? he says.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on April 10, 2013.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=282ffe09b447ae57a181a1067765019a

joe arpaio cat in the hat green eggs and ham wiz khalifa and amber rose oh the places you ll go blunt amendment justin bieber birthday

Discovery of a blue supergiant star born in the wild

Apr. 10, 2013 ? A duo of astronomers, Dr. Youichi Ohyama (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica or ASIAA, Taiwan) and Dr. Ananda Hota (UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in the Basic Sciences or CBS, India), has discovered a blue supergiant star located far beyond our Milky Way Galaxy in the constellation Virgo.

Over 55 million years ago, the star emerged in an extremely wild environment, surrounded by intensely hot plasma (a million degrees centigrade) and amidst raging cyclone winds blowing at four million kilometers per hour. Research using the Subaru Telescope, the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope (CFHT) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) revealed unprecedented views of the star formation process in this intergalactic context and showed the promise of future investigations of a possibly new mode of star formation, unlike that within our Milky Way.

About one thousand galaxies reside in a cluster filled with million-degree hot plasma and dark matter. The Virgo cluster, the nearest cluster of galaxies located about 55 million light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, is an ideal laboratory to study the fate of gas stripped from the main body of galaxies falling into the intra-cluster medium. Does star formation take place in the clouds of stripped gas? If so, how? Dr. Ohyama and Dr. Hota focused on the trail of IC 3418 to explore a potentially new mode of star formation. Dr. Hota has been collecting data from multiple telescopes since 2006 to understand this galaxy, which he first spotted in the GALEX data during his Ph.D. research.

IC 3418 is a small galaxy falling into the Virgo cluster of galaxies at such a high speed (a thousand kilometers per second) that its blanket of cool gas strips off. As it passed through the cluster, its stripped-off cool gas formed a 55,500 light-years-long trail that looks very much like the water vapour condensation trail from a supersonic jet's path. Hot plasma surrounds the trail of IC 3418, and it has not been clear whether the clouds of cool gas would vaporize like water sprinkled on a hot frying pan or condense further to form new young massive stars. The GALEX ultraviolet image shows that new massive stars do form in the trail. How did the stripped gas condense to form new stars without getting vaporized by the hot plasma? This process does not conform to star formation in our Milky Way Galaxy where massive stars develop in groups inside of stellar nurseries sheltered within giant cold molecular gas clouds.

Dr. Ohyama suspected that a tiny dot of light emission in the trail of IC 3418 might be different from other blobs of ultraviolet light emissions in the trail. Spectroscopy of the little dot from Subaru Telescope's Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS) revealed something stunning. Dr. Ohyama recalls, "When I first saw the spectrum, I was so puzzled, since it did not look like anything I had known of in extra-galactic astronomy." Unlike typical star-forming regions, the telltale signs of stellar nurseries were missing.

Intense UV-radiation usually ionizes/heats-up the surrounding gas when a star is born. Instead of any sign of heated gas, the observation showed fast winds blowing out of the stellar atmosphere at a speed of about 160 kilometers per second. Comparison with emissions from nearby stars made it clear that this massive, hot (O-type) star had passed its youth and was now aging; it was at a stage known as Blue Supergiant star and would soon face its explosive death as a supernova.

Dr. Ohyama commented on the significance of the research: "If our interpretations are correct, this is probably the farthest star ever discovered with spectroscopic observation. Since we only observed for a fraction of the night with the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope, there is huge potential for stellar spectroscopy with extremely large telescopes, e.g., the Thirty Meter Telescope, being planned for the future. We look forward to that exciting time."

Dr. Hota emphasized how important it is for astronomers to pay attention to this exotic system: "Precisely because the thermal and dynamic contrast of star formation that our research shows cannot be observed within our Milky Way, the details revealed by the Subaru Telescope's spectroscopy and the deep, sharp imaging of CFHT are opening up a new avenue for investigating the baffling fundamentals of star formation." Future in-depth investigations of this cocktail of hot plasma and turbulent, cold gas may reveal very different characteristics of stars, which may remain wild, exotic objects, challenging current theories of star formation.

This research was partially supported by the following:

• National Science Council of Taiwan (grant to Dr. Ohyama)
• National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR) and Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), both in India (for Visiting Astronomer position to Dr. Hota).

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Youichi Ohyama, Ananda Hota. Discovery of a Possibly Single Blue Supergiant Star in the Intra-cluster Region of Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The Astrophysical Journal, 2013; 767 (2): L29 DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/767/2/L29

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/top_news/top_science/~3/3UKjZOosQyI/130410194227.htm

rick santorum ozzie guillen castro comments phish gluten free diet barry zito mac virus santorum drops out

Boxee Cloud DVR Is Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

The set-top box market is more crowded than ever and getting even more so as everyone from Rdio to Intel launches services and devices to cash in on the cord-cutting TV trend. To even have a chance in this $4.6 ...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/7MH5JiFvSTM/

chimpanzee chimpanzee the lucky one pittsburgh pirates mariners mets shades of grey

Google target of Microsoft-led antitrust complaint

BRUSSELS (AP) ? A group of companies led by Microsoft have called on European authorities to launch an antitrust investigation into Google and its hold over mobile internet usage on smartphones.

The "FairSearch" initiative of 17 companies ? which includes Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle ?claims Google is acting unfairly by giving away its Android operating system to mobile device companies on the condition that the U.S. online giant's own software applications like YouTube and Google Maps are installed and prominently displayed.

"Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a Trojan horse to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data," said Thomas Vinje, the group's Brussels-based lawyer.

Android operating systems have the largest share of the smartphone market worldwide, followed by Apple's iOS platform with systems from Blackberry, Microsoft and others far behind.

"Google's predatory distribution of Android at below-cost makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google's dominant mobile platform," FairSearch said in a statement.

The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc's executive arm and antitrust authority, is not obliged to take any action other than reply to the group's complaint.

Google Inc. did not address the complaint's charges in detail. "We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission," said Google spokesman Al Verney.

The U.S. company is already under investigation by Brussels for practices related to its dominance of online search and advertising markets.

That complaint, launched in 2010, alleges Google unfairly favors its own services in its Internet search results, which enjoy a near-monopoly in Europe. Google has proposed a list of remedies to address the Commission's concerns to achieve a settlement. The Commission is currently examining the proposed changes.

In China, Google has already come under official scrutiny because of Android's dominance of the mobile smartphone market there.

Several European data privacy regulators have also launched an investigation into Google's practices, alleging the company is creating a data goldmine at the expense of unwitting users.

Last year, the company merged 60 separate privacy policies from around the world into one universal procedure. The European authorities complain that the new policy doesn't allow users to figure out which information is kept, how it is combined by Google services or how long the company retains it.

The policy allows Google to combine data collected from one person as they use Google's services, from Gmail to YouTube, giving it a powerful tool for targeting users with advertising based on their interests and search history. Advertising is the main way the company makes its money.

___

Toby Sterling in Amsterdam contributed reporting.

___

Follow Juergen Baetz on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/jbaetz

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/google-target-microsoft-led-antitrust-complaint-080949532--finance.html

The Lumineers grammys miguel frank ocean Justin Timberlake Grammys adam levine mumford and sons