Wall St. rises 1 percent after Dudley comments

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose 1 percent on Thursday, rallying in a volatile session in the wake of comments from William Dudley, head of the New York Federal Reserve.

Dudley said the Fed's asset purchases would be more aggressive than the timeline Chairman Ben Bernanke outlined last week if U.S. economic growth and the labor market turn out weaker than expected.

Equities initially pared their gains after the comments before climbing again.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 157.15 points, or 1.05 percent, at 15,067.29. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 16.34 points, or 1.02 percent, at 1,619.60. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 35.84 points, or 1.06 percent, at 3,412.07.

(Reporting by Ryan Vlastelica; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stock-futures-point-third-day-gains-ahead-data-111732699.html

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Exotic alloys for potential energy applications

June 27, 2013 ? The search for thermoelectrics, exotic materials that convert heat directly into electricity, has received a boost from researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo, who have found the best way to identify them.

In the new open-access journal APL Materials, the team shows that a relatively simple technique called the "rigid band approximation" can predict a material's properties more accurately than a competing, more complicated method.

"The rigid band approach still supplies the simple, predictive engineering concepts we need for discovering fruitful thermoelectric material compositions," says G. Jeffrey Snyder, a Caltech faculty associate in materials science, who led the research.

Thermoelectrics have been used since the 1950s to power spacecraft by converting the heat from radioactive decay into electricity. Their unusual properties arise from complex interactions between the many electrons associated with the atoms in alloys of heavy metals such as lead, bismuth, tellurium and antimony.

With no moving parts, thermoelectric generators are quiet and extremely reliable, requiring minimal maintenance. However, the generators are relatively inefficient (typically less than 10 percent) and the materials needed to build them are expensive -- factors that have prevented their widespread use and limited thermoelectrics to niche applications such as spacecraft or wine refrigerators.

In recent years, however, the need for increased energy efficiency and non-carbon-based power generation has sparked renewed interest in thermoelectrics. With improvements, researchers believe the materials could generate cheap electricity from otherwise wasted heat produced by engines and factory furnaces.

"If we could double their efficiency, then thermoelectric modules incorporated into an automobile engine's exhaust system could generate enough power to replace the alternator, which would increase the car's gas mileage," said Snyder.

The challenge for scientists is to choose alloy compositions, crystal sizes and additives, (also called dopants), which would yield high thermoelectric efficiency. With an exhaustive number of possible combinations to choose from, scientists use theoretical calculations to guide their search for promising materials. The materials' extreme complexity, however, requires theorists to make various assumptions that have each led to different approaches.

The most common approach is the "rigid band" approximation, which provides a relatively simple model of a material's electronic structure, and the more complex "supercell" approach, which gives a detailed picture of its ideal atomic arrangement. Some scientists have said the rigid band approach is too simple and inaccurate to be useful.

Snyder's team reported exactly the opposite result. Their calculations showed that the rigid band approach was actually more accurate than the supercell method in predicting the observed properties of a popular thermoelectric -- lead telluride -- doped with a small amount of sodium, potassium or thallium.

"Supercell approaches are accurate for very specific dopant cases, but they do not take into account the various defects present in real materials," Snyder said. By using the simpler rigid band model, he added, scientists should be able to more quickly identify promising new and more-efficient thermoelectric compositions.

The article, "Validity of rigid band approximation of PbTe thermoelectric materials" is authored by Yoshiki Takagiwa, Yanzhong Pei, Gregory Pomrehn and G. Jeffrey Snyder. The paper is among the first to appear in the new journal APL Materials, which is produced by AIP Publishing.

Authors of this study are affiliated with the University of Tokyo, and the California Institute of Technology.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/u8eE_Vk9ZRg/130627130955.htm

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Console gaming will survive! Xbox One remembers its roots | Digital ...

I used to have this giant garbage bag filled with Atari 2600 cartridges. My dad left it behind when he moved out. The first video game I ever played -?Pole Position ? was in there, along with tons of others. My first stumbling steps toward becoming a gamer started with this bag. I played every game in there (including E.T.!), and I also swapped every one of them over time with a neighbor around the corner for games I didn?t have. It was a magical time, a period of interactive plenty.

The culture of console gaming isn?t quite ready to die. Or evolve. Or whatever the next phase is for a medium that extends back as far as the early years of Atari and its competitors. Gamers want to keep passing around or selling off their physical media, and they want to do it without the pesky eye of the Internet always watching.

I sat and watched with great interest yesterday as Microsoft pulled an about-face on the controversial Xbox One policies that were laid out in the days after the console?s announcement. It was inevitable, really. From the moment Sony?s Jack Tretton took the stage at the tail end of the company?s E3 2013 press conference and ?dropped the mic? on Sony?s rival, the decision was made. In order to keep up, in order to?compete, the Xbox One would need to stick to the old ways.

Don?t think that the route to this policy shift was quite as direct as ?consumers hate new policies, Microsoft changes tune.? If that were the case, the new arrangement would have been revealed prior to E3, when the wave of discontent first started to crash. If Sony had fallen in line behind Microsoft at the trade show ? as many expected it would, particularly in light of 2012?s rumored always-online requirements and used game blockage for the PlayStation 4 ? things would have been different. That?s not what happened though.

Maybe the rumors were a bit of corporate subterfuge, a sly attempt on Sony?s part to lure its competitor into embracing an unpopular set of policies. Or maybe the ?digital future? Microsoft had mapped out really was the plan all along. It doesn?t matter now. We live in a digital world, but console gamers still want an analog solution.

Can you blame us? We?ve grown up swapping cartridges and discs. It?s one of the advantages that console gaming has over mobile or PC: there?s a culture, a community, that?s built itself around sharing freely. The Xbox One?s now-defunct family sharing feature would have kept that alive to some extent, but people aren?t quite ready to give up the familiar act of handing off a piece of physical media to a friend. I?m certainly not, as much as I might recognize that attitude as antiquated thinking.

So we?re still chained to keeping a disc in our drive when we play, or carrying a plastic case along to a friend?s home to game there. Same as it ever was.?The challenge of ushering gaming into the digital future that Microsoft envisioned is ensuring that the heart of what makes console gaming special isn?t lost, and the company?s Xbox One policies threatened that in a couple of ways.

Online checks were the big one. Steam gets along just fine, allowing offline play for up to 30 days before requiring gamers to ?check in? using an Internet connection. If you can?t get your machine to an Internet in the space of a month then you?re playing games in the wrong generation.

Microsoft?s 24-hour requirement was needlessly restrictive, and without any demonstrable reason. The need for damage control overruled any possibility of the company extending that window instead of dropping it all together. Still, I?ll always wonder what the industry landscape would have looked like today if Microsoft had come out from moment one with a 30-day window for online checks.

The used games situation wasn?t nearly as dire. If you read through the original license transfer guidelines for Xbox One closely, they weren?t such a huge shift away from what we know. Family sharing was actually a popular feature, and one that I hope to see Microsoft implement in the future. You were still going to be able to sell off old games, or gift them to friends. Sharing discs would have been a no-no for first-party titles, but with both that and license transfers for used games, much of the power was going to be left in the hands of the third-parties.

The Activisions and Electronic Arts of the world want to make money, sure, but the people running these companies aren?t stupid. The status quo says that new games (for the most part) cost $60 and used games cost $55 or less. Retailers like GameStop earn a sizable profit off of secondhand sales ? almost double what?s typically paid out to you, the gamer ? and none of that goes back to the publishers. Those profits likely would have been cut back, at least for Xbox One re-sales, but the price tags you see on the racks wouldn?t have changed.?

The other big problem was really one of messaging. The policies originally laid out for the Xbox One are completely foreign in the console space, and the big challenge that Microsoft faced was bringing the changes across in a positive way. Facts remained unclear after the hardware reveal thanks to conflicting interview responses from company executives. Then there was the big, impersonal policy dump on Xbox.com immediately before E3. Just words on a website, with little explanation. That?s not how ?you guide a loyal customer through unfamiliar and potentially scary territory.

It would have been so easy to address the changes in a more informative way. Not just clarifying the confusing fine points but also highlighting the benefits that these changes bring to the games. Developers have an enormous amount of potential now in being able to work with Microsoft?s existing network infrastructure as a tool to power their creations. It?s the promise of the cloud that we?ve heard so much talk about.

That doesn?t go anywhere with Microsoft?s policy shift. The cloud lives on and developers can still harness it. As we move deeper into the generation, we?ll see console games that, like the PC-only?SimCity, actively require online access because crucial bits of processing are handled remotely. At that point, it?s the publisher requiring an Internet connection and the publisher that then needs to justify the reasons for that requirement. It will always come back to the games though: if the cloud improves the player?s experience, who?s going to complain?

Microsoft made a smart move here, both in stepping back from its controversial policies and in acting quickly to do so. It was the only play left, given the events of the past few weeks. That said, I sincerely hope that we do one day see a move toward the digital future envisioned for the Xbox One. If it happens, it will come with the benefit of hindsight.

No one?s going to take away your right to play games offline when Internet isn?t a requirement, certainly not in this hardware generation. Similarly, the act of passing a disc to your friend isn?t going anywhere. These are deeply ingrained ideas in the culture of console gaming. The trick then, for both Microsoft and for Sony, will be in figuring out how to evolve those ideas in a more purely digital space.

Source: http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/xbox-one-policy-shift-resuscitates-the-ailing-culture-of-console-gaming/

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Carbon nanotube harpoon catches individual brain-cell signals

June 19, 2013 ? Neuroscientists may soon be modern-day harpooners, snaring individual brain-cell signals instead of whales with tiny spears made of carbon nanotubes.

The new brain cell spear is a millimeter long, only a few nanometers wide and harnesses the superior electromechanical properties of carbon nanotubes to capture electrical signals from individual neurons.

"To our knowledge, this is the first time scientists have used carbon nanotubes to record signals from individual neurons, what we call intracellular recordings, in brain slices or intact brains of vertebrates," said Bruce Donald, a professor of computer science and biochemistry at Duke University who helped developed the probe.

He and his collaborators describe the carbon nanotube probes June 19 in PLOS ONE.

"The results are a good proof of principle that carbon nanotubes could be used for studying signals from individual nerve cells," said Duke neurobiologist Richard Mooney, a study co-author. "If the technology continues to develop, it could be quite helpful for studying the brain."

Scientists want to study signals from individual neurons and their interactions with other brain cells to better understand the computational complexity of the brain.

Currently, they use two main types of electrodes, metal and glass, to record signals from brain cells. Metal electrodes record spikes from a population of brain cells and work well in live animals. Glass electrodes also measure spikes, as well as the computations individual cells perform, but are delicate and break easily.

"The new carbon nanotubes combine the best features of both metal and glass electrodes. They record well both inside and outside brain cells, and they are quite flexible. Because they won't shatter, scientists could use them to record signals from individual brain cells of live animals," said Duke neurobiologist Michael Platt, who was not involved in the study.

In the past, other scientists have experimented with carbon nanotube probes. But the electrodes were thick, causing tissue damage, or they were short, limiting how far they could penetrate into brain tissue. They could not probe inside individual neurons.

To change this, Donald began working on a harpoon-like carbon-nanotube probe with Duke neurobiologist Richard Mooney five years ago. The two met during their first year at Yale in the 1976, kept in touch throughout graduate school and began meeting to talk about their research after they both came to Duke.

Mooney told Donald about his work recording brain signals from live zebra finches and mice. The work was challenging, he said, because the probes and machinery to do the studies were large and bulky on the small head of a mouse or bird.

With Donald's expertise in nanotechnology and robotics and Mooney's in neurobiology, the two thought they could work together to shrink the machinery and improve the probes with nano-materials.

To make the probe, graduate student Inho Yoon and Duke physicist Gleb Finkelstein used the tip of an electrochemically sharpened tungsten wire as the base and extended it with self-entangled multi-wall carbon nanotubes to create a millimeter-long rod. The scientists then sharpened the nanotubes into a tiny harpoon using a focused ion beam at North Carolina State University.

Yoon then took the nano-harpoon to Mooney's lab and jabbed it into slices of mouse brain tissue and then into the brains of anesthetized mice. The results show that the probe transmits brain signals as well as, and sometimes better than, conventional glass electrodes and is less likely to break off in the tissue. The new probe also penetrates individual neurons, recording the signals of a single cell rather than the nearest population of them.

Based on the results, the team has applied for a patent on the nano-harpoon. Platt said scientists might use the probes in a range of applications, from basic science to human brain-computer interfaces and brain prostheses.

Donald said the new probe makes advances in those directions, but the insulation layers, electrical recording abilities and geometry of the device still need improvement.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/7OztY2ISM84/130619195129.htm

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Report: Slowdown in health care costs to continue

WASHINGTON (AP) ? There's good news for most companies that provide health benefits for their employees: America's slowdown in medical costs may be turning into a trend, rather than a mere pause.

A report Tuesday from accounting and consulting giant PwC projects lower overall growth in medical costs for next year, even as the economy gains strength and millions of uninsured people receive coverage under President Barack Obama's health care law.

If the calculations are correct, cost spikes because of the new health care law should be contained within a relatively narrow market segment. That would come as a relief for Democrats in an election year during which Republicans plan to use criticism of "Obamacare" as one of their main political weapons.

"There are some underlying changes to the system that are having an impact, and we can expect lower increases as we come out of the recession," said Mike Thompson of PwC's Health Research Institute, which produced the study. Cost "is still going up, but not as much as it used to."

The report comes with a caveat that sounds counterintuitive at first: Self-employed people and others who buy coverage individually could well see an increase in premiums in 2014.

The reasons have to do with requirements in the health care law. For example, starting next year insurers must accept patients with pre-existing medical problems, who cost more to cover. Also, new policies have to provide a basic level of benefits more generous in some cases than what's currently offered to individual consumers.

About 160 million workers and family members now have job-based coverage and are less likely to be affected. The individual market is much smaller, fewer than 20 million people. Still, it's expected to grow significantly over the next few years as a result of the health care law, which will also provide tax credits to help many people afford their premiums.

The U.S. spends more than $2.7 trillion a year on health care, well above any other developed country. But quality is uneven, there's widespread waste and fraud, and the system still leaves about 45 million people uninsured.

For years U.S. health care spending has grown much faster than the overall economy and workers' wages, but since the recession those annual increases have slowed dramatically. The debate now is whether that's a continuing trend. The answer will be vitally important, not only for companies and their employees, but for taxpayers who foot the bill for government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Obama's coverage expansion.

PwC's report forecasts that direct medical care costs will increase by 6.5 percent next year, one percentage point lower than its previous projection. The cost of care is the biggest component of premiums, followed by administrative expenses and overhead.

Cost-shifting to workers and efficiency measures from employers got most of the credit for slowing growth. PwC also said the health care law's push for hospitals and doctors to be more accountable may be starting to have an impact.

Four big factors were seen as pushing costs down next year:

?Patients seeking more affordable routine services in settings like clinics springing up in retail stores, as opposed to a doctor's office or the emergency room.

?Major employers contracting directly with hospital systems that have a proven record for complicated procedures such as heart surgery and certain back operations.

?The government ramping up penalties on hospitals that have too many patients coming back with problems soon after being discharged.

?Employers' ongoing effort to shift more costs to workers through higher annual deductibles, the amount people must pay each year before insurance picks up.

By using such shifting, PwC estimates that employers may be able to drive their share of next year's cost increase even lower than 6.5 percent.

On the other hand, two big factors will push costs upward:

?The high price of new "specialty" drugs to treat serious chronic illnesses such as autoimmune diseases and some types of cancer.

?Industry consolidation, with big hospitals buying up smaller ones, as well as medical practices and rehab centers. The downside of the demand for greater efficiency by employers and government is that it may be fostering new health care monopolies.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2013-06-18-Health%20Care%20Costs/id-0f648f132b384932b48b0ef61a714013

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Cuban dissident: Repression forced family to flee

MIAMI (AP) ? One of several Cuban dissidents recently allowed to visit Europe and the U.S. after Cuba changed its travel laws said Tuesday she decided to seek refuge in Miami after facing continued repression on the island.

Rosa Maria Paya said she and her family have been the subject of threats, harassment and increased vigilance since her father's death last year and following her return to Cuba in April.

"We wanted to rest a bit from the persecution we faced in Cuba," Paya said, "and continue working on the opposition's proposals for change and transition to democracy."

Paya, 24, is the daughter of the late Oswaldo Paya, the lead organizer of the Varela Project, a signature-gathering drive regarded as the largest nonviolent campaign to change the system Fidel Castro established in 1959. The petition asked authorities for a referendum on guaranteeing rights such as freedom of speech and assembly in Cuba.

In July 2012, Paya and youth activist Harold Cepero died in a car crash in Bayamo, Cuba. The two men and another passenger were in a car driven by Spaniard Angel Carromero, who lost control and struck a tree, according to government authorities. Carromero was convicted of vehicular homicide and sent to Spain to serve a four-year sentence.

Paya's daughter, wife and others have insisted the crash was not an accident. They assert that witness accounts, text messages and statements made after the crash raise questions about the Cuban government's account. Rosa Maria Paya spoke with government officials in the U.S. and Europe to press for an international investigation.

Rosa Maria Paya was allowed to leave in April after Cuba eliminated the exit permit that had been required of islanders for five decades. She was one of several prominent Cuban dissidents to visit the U.S. and appears to be the first to have returned to Cuba and then sought status as a political refugee in the U.S.

She said that when she returned to Cuba, immigration officials at the airport told her, "Welcome."

But the threats, vigilance and oppression against her family and others involved in the movement her father started intensified, she said.

The decision of the Paya family ? six members in all ? to leave the island is likely to be seen as a black eye to the Cuban government, which has been trying to portray itself as a more open society since enacting a slate of social and economic reforms in recent years, said Jaime Suchlicki, a professor at the University of Miami.

"It makes it look like the Cuban government is oppressive, which it is," Suchlicki said. On the other hand, with one less dissident on the island, "I don't think the Cuban government is going to be too upset."

Ofelia Acevedo, Oswaldo Paya's wife and Rosa Maria's mother, said she and other family members are residing in the U.S. as political refugees, not exiles, and do not plan to ask for political asylum. Under the Cuban migratory changes enacted in January, Cubans can stay abroad for two years before forfeiting full citizenship rights.

The U.S. State Department declined to provide any specific information about the family's case.

Acevedo said her family's stay in Miami was of a "temporary nature." But she also declined to provide any specifics on when they would return.

"We will continue fighting until real change is a reality in Cuba," Acevedo said. "The amount of time it will take, we don't know. When we are going to return we don't know either."

The family vowed to continue the work of Oswaldo Paya from Miami in conjunction with activists on the island. But Suchlicki said their departure was a setback for the Christian Liberation movement Paya started.

"They're going to continue, but it's one of many groups in exile," Suchlicki said. "It's a limited impact that they will have in Miami. Internally they would have more impact."

_

Follow Christine Armario on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cearmario

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-06-18-Cuban%20Dissident's%20Daughter/id-33f8faa0e83c444387e948e86af748b0

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Nintendo 3DS update adds save backups, new StreetPass game store

If the madness of E3 (and the promise of some big titles) has recently pulled you back to Nintendo's handheld, you might be greeted with a firmware update next time you open up that well-worn 3DS. Aside from improved stability and bug fixes, there's new save data backup feature which will hold on to save files for your downloaded 3DS titles as well as Virtual Console games. Appearing already in Europe, version 6.0.0-11 also bundles in a new shop for the Mii Plaza, with StreetPass Squad, StreetPass Garden, StreetPass Battle, StreetPass Mansion all priced at 5 euros, or 15 euros for the whole set. No word on yet on when the update will arrive on the other side of the Atlantic, but given past form, we'd expect it to arrive some time this month.

Filed under: Gaming, Nintendo

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Source: Nintendo Life, VG247

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/18/nintendo-3ds-update-backup/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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