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Original Source: Bloomberg

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May 26 (Bloomberg) -- Currencies in Europe will benefit from record oil prices because of the region's energy efficiency, exports to oil-producing nations and vigilance against inflation, according to Barclays Capital. The euro, the British pound, the Swiss franc, the Swedish krona and the Norwegian krone should perform "relatively well" as oil prices rise, wrote David Woo, global head of foreign exchange strategy in London at the bank, the third-biggest currency trader. The U.S. dollar ranks bottom in terms of potential performance as energy prices climb, it said. "Europe is well positioned in the new paradigm, the U.S. is not," Woo wrote in a research note dated May 23.

The dollar slid as much as 8.9 percent to a record low against the euro this year as losses from the subprime mortgage collapse threatened to send the U.S. economy into a recession. At the same time, oil futures have soared to a record as a crude producers sought higher dollar prices to compensate for lower import revenues, according to Barclays Capital. This has created a "vicious circle'' where high energy prices increase the U.S. trade deficit and make other central banks reluctant to lower interest rates, leading to further dollar declines, Barclays Capital said. The euro bought $1.5757 at 5:23 p.m. in Tokyo, little changed from late in New York on May 23. It rose to $1.6019 on April 22, the highest since the common European currency's introduction in January 1999.

The U.S., Canadian, New Zealand and Australian score poorly in terms of their intensity of energy use because of their dispersed populations and focus on manufacturing or commodity industries, Barclays said. European economies are more densely populated, service-orientated and energy efficient, it said. Oil consumption accounts for less than 2 percent of nominal gross domestic product in Norway, Switzerland, the U.K. and Sweden in 2006, compared with more than 3.5 percent in the U.S. and Canada, the report showed. "The U.S. is the world's third-largest oil producer but because of the high energy intensity of its economy, its petroleum trade deficit is not much smaller than the eurozone, which produces no oil," Woo wrote. Japan and Switzerland may also suffer deteriorating trade balances as oil prices rise, the report said. Crude oil for July delivery rose by 96 cents to $133.15 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It reached $135.09 on May 22, the highest since trading began in 1983.

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Next month marks the tenth anniversary of the European Central Bank, guardian of the euro, which itself will turn ten thereafter.

Images courtesy of AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari and AFP

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Climate models predicted it wouldn't happen until the end of the century. So Seattle researchers were stunned to discover that vast swaths of acidified sea water are already showing up along the Pacific Coast as carbon dioxide from power plants, cars and factories mixes into the ocean. In some places, including Northern California, the acidified water was as little as four miles from shore.

"What we found ... was truly astonishing," said oceanographer Richard Feely, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. "This means ocean acidification may be seriously impacting marine life on the continental shelf right now." The phenomenon is an aspect of global warming scientists are just beginning to understand.

Acidified ocean water can be fatal to some fish eggs and larvae. It also interferes with the formation of shells and skeletons, harming corals, clams, oysters, mussels and the tiny plankton that are the basis of the marine food web. "Their shells dissolve faster than they are able to rebuild them," said Debby Ianson, an oceanographer at Fisheries and Oceans Canada and a co-author of the study published today in the online journal Science Express.

Since the Industrial Revolution, when humans began pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the oceans have absorbed 525 billion tons of the greenhouse gas, Feely estimates. That's about a third of the man-made emissions during that time. By reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the oceans have blunted the temperature rise due to global warming. But they've suffered for that service, with a more than 30 percent increase in acidity.

"This is another example where what's happening in the natural world seems to be happening much faster than what our climate models predict," said Carnegie Institution climate scientist Ken Caldeira, whose work suggested it would be nearly 100 years before acidified water was common along the West Coast. And there's worse to come, the scientists warn. The acidified water upwelling along the coast today was last exposed to the atmosphere about 50 years ago, when carbon-dioxide levels were much lower than they are now. That means the water that will rise from the depths over the coming decades will have absorbed more carbon dioxide, and will be even more acidic. "We've got 50 years' worth of water that's already left the station and is on our way to us," study co-author Hales said. "Each one of those years is going to be a little bit more corrosive."

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Images courtesy of Dana Greeley & Simone Alin, PMEL, and Daily Mail

Original Source: Seattle Times

Original Source: BBC News

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The Phoenix lander is due to touch down on Monday in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 423-million-mile journey from Earth. The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water ice thought to be buried beneath the surface. Scientists say the mission should give the clearest indication yet of whether Mars could once have harbored life.

The final seven minutes of the probe's ten-month journey is regarded as the riskiest part of the mission. After it enters the top of the Martian atmosphere at nearly 5.7km/s (13,000 mph), the probe must perform a series of maneuvers to come safely to rest. It will release a parachute, use pulsed thrusters to slow to a fast walking speed, then come to a halt on three legs. If all goes to plan, the Phoenix lander will reach the surface of Mars at 0053 BST (1953 EDT) on May 26. Nasa controllers will know in about 15 minutes whether the attempt has been successful.

Landing on Mars is a notoriously tricky business. Of the 11 missions that have tried to land probes on Mars since 1971 - only five have succeeded. Phoenix is an apt name for the current mission, as it rose from the ashes of two previous failures. In September 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft crashed into the Red Planet following a navigation error caused when technicians mixed up "English" (imperial) and metric units. A few months later, another Nasa spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander (MPL), was lost near the planet's South Pole. Phoenix uses hardware from an identical twin of MPL, the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander, which was cancelled following the two consecutive failures. The probe was launched on 4 August 2007 on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

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Original Source: New York Times

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IT’S O.K. to liken Shigeru Miyamoto to Walt Disney. When Disney died in 1966, Mr. Miyamoto was a 14-year-old schoolteacher’s son living near Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital. An aspiring cartoonist, he adored the classic Disney characters. When he wasn’t drawing, he made his own toys, carving wooden puppets with his grandfathers’ tools or devising a car race from a spare motor, string and tin cans. Even as he has become the world’s most famous and influential video-game designer — the father of Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda and, most recently, the Wii — Mr. Miyamoto still approaches his work like a humble craftsman, not as the celebrity he is to gamers around the world.

Perched on the end of a chair in a hotel suite a few dozen stories above Midtown Manhattan, the preternaturally cherubic 55-year-old Mr. Miyamoto radiated the contentment of someone who has always wanted to make fun. And he has. As the creative mastermind at Nintendo for almost three decades, Mr. Miyamoto has unleashed mass entertainment with a global breadth, cultural endurance and financial success unsurpassed since Disney’s fabled career.

Mario, the mustached Italian plumber he created almost 30 years ago, has become by some measures the planet’s most recognized fictional character, rivaled only by Mickey Mouse. As the creator of the Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda series (which have collectively sold more than 350 million copies) and the person who ultimately oversees every Nintendo game, Mr. Miyamoto may be personally responsible for the consumption of more billions of hours of human time than anyone around. In the Time 100 online poll conducted this spring, Mr. Miyamoto was voted the most influential person in the world.

But it isn’t just traditional gamers who are flocking to Mr. Miyamoto’s latest creation, the Wii. Eighteen months ago, just when video games were in danger of disappearing into the niche world of fetishists, Mr. Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s chief executive, practically reinvented the industry. (Mr. Miyamoto’s full title is senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo’s entertainment analysis and development division.) Their idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: rather than create a new generation of games that would titillate hard-core players, they developed the Wii as an easy-to-use, inexpensive diversion for families (with a particular appeal to women, an audience generally immune to the pull of traditional video games). So far the Wii has sold more than 25 million units, besting the competition from Sony and Microsoft.

Last week Nintendo released its new Wii Fit system in North America, a device that hopes to make doing yoga in front of a television screen almost as much fun as driving, throwing, jumping or shooting in a traditional game. Though there were no hard sales figures available as of Tuesday, there were reports of stores across the country selling out of Wii Fit.

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Original Source: Reuters

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The same team of experts who found that obesity may be socially contagious said they found similar patterns among smokers, with people clearly influencing others in their social and family networks. In fact, the most isolated people are now those who remain the most addicted as their personal networks get pushed to the fringes, they wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School in Boston and Dr. James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, studied 12,067 people who have been taking part in the Framingham study -- a study of the health and habits of nearly an entire town in Massachusetts -- for the past 32 years. "We've found that when you analyze large social networks, entire pockets of people who might not know each other all quit smoking at once," Christakis said in a statement. "What appears to happen is that people quit in droves."

Smoking is becoming increasingly less common in the United States. In 1965, 42 percent of the population smoked, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number has fallen to around 20 percent. When the Framingham study started, around 37 percent of adults smoked. Spouses had strong effects -- when someone quit, his or her spouse was 67 percent less likely to continue smoking. Quitters influenced their brothers or sisters -- siblings were 25 percent less likely to smoke if one of them quit, while the friend of someone who kicked the habit was 36 percent less likely to smoke. Even co-workers are influential -- in small firms, a quitter could decrease smoking among peers by 34 percent.

Richard Suzman, who directs behavioral studies at the National Institute of Aging, said the research could influence policy. "The results suggest new and probably more powerful approaches to changing health behaviors, such as smoking, by careful targeting of small peer groups as well as single individuals," he said.

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Images courtesy of Reuters and iStockPhoto

Original Source: Spaceflight Now

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PRINCETON, NJ -- When she peered into the screen of her computer one day in January, Alicia Soderberg was supposed to see a small, dull glowing smudge in one corner, the evidence of a month-old supernova that would help her better understand the mystery of these huge exploding stars. What the Princeton University astronomer saw instead was anything but dull. As Soderberg and Edo Berger, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton, studied the X-ray emissions conveyed from space by NASA's Swift satellite, they saw an extremely bright light that seemed to jump out of the sky. They didn't know it, but they had just become the first astronomers to have caught a star in the act of exploding. The once-in-a-lifetime event, described in a paper published in the May 22 issue of Nature, has transfixed the worldwide astronomical community.

Soderberg and Berger wanted to observe a supernova known as SN 2007uy in the spiral galaxy NGC 2770, located 90 million light years from Earth in the constellation Lynx. They could plan to do that because they are able to view images captured by the telescope a few hours after the observation merely by downloading the data from the Swift website. The sudden appearance nearby of the X-ray burst of the newer supernova, easily captured by the NASA satellite with multiple instruments that can detect gamma rays, X-rays and ultraviolet light, has set scientists on a new path. "This phenomenon had been predicted more than 30 years ago, but is now observed for the first time," said Roger Chevalier, the W.H. Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. "These are the earliest observations of light from a supernova after the central collapse that initiated the explosion."

In the Nature paper, Soderberg and 38 colleagues show that the energy and pattern of the X-ray outburst is consistent with what scientists would have expected to see in the birth of a neutron star -- a shock wave blasting through the surface of the original massive star. Until now, astronomers have only been able to observe supernovae brightening days or weeks after the event, when the expanding shell of debris is energized by the decay of radioactive elements forged in the explosion.

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Photos Courtesy of AFP and NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler

Original Source: Associated Press

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — After four consecutive male winners on "Dancing With the Stars," it was finally ladies' night. Kristi Yamaguchi was named the new "Dancing" champ on the show's season finale, becoming the first woman to win the ABC dance-off since its inaugural season. The figure skater came into the final contest Tuesday with a perfect score and bested fan favorites Jason Taylor and Cristian de la Fuente to claim the mirrorball trophy. "This is definitely for all those women out there to continue to be strong," she said after the show, hoisting the prize above her head.

The Olympic gold medalist was clearly the most talented dancer on this season's competition, regularly landing atop the judges' scoreboard. But viewer votes count just as much, and with the audience 75 percent female, men have had the edge. Last season ended with a shocker when race-car driver Helio Castroneves upset Spice Girl Melanie Brown.

Taylor, the massive but graceful pro football star, called Yamaguchi "just perfect," adding that he "grew up watching her compete for our country." De la Fuente, who was eliminated early in the two-hour season finale, said "it was impossible to beat her." His professional partner, Cheryl Burke, agreed. "Kristi deserved it more than any other woman in any other season," she said. "It's about time that a woman wins."

Winning the "Dancing" crown doesn't quite compare to winning an Olympic gold medal, Yamaguchi said, but it's still "a fun, amazing experience." "It's not just this (trophy) but what it represents," she said. "It's all the hard work and the time spent together and the friendships made, challenging yourself and learning something new."

Though Taylor and de la Fuente didn't win, each was victorious in his own way. Besides forming a close friendship with each other, Taylor, an aspiring actor, has taken meetings with Hollywood heavyweights, and de la Fuente learned an important life lesson. The actor ruptured a tendon in his biceps while dancing on April 28, but delayed the surgery necessary to repair it so he could continue in the contest.

"It's about wanting something in life and going for it," he said. "In this case it was a dance show, but it can be anything that you're afraid of. Go for it. Do it. The reward that you get when you put your heart, your soul, everything you've got in something, it's priceless."

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Photos Courtesy of ABC