Everybody wants to be fit, but let?s face it; making a commitment to an exercise program can be a mega?time-zapper. The good news is, if you learn to exercise smarter you can still get amazing results in a very short amount of time. If you commit to a well-designed circuit-style workout that overloads all of your major muscles, works large muscle groups with compound movements and keeps your heart rate elevated the entire time then you can get fit, lean and strong exercising just 30 minutes, three days a week.
If weight loss is a concern, as long as you keep moving quickly from one exercise to the next to keep?your heart rate elevated you don?t need to run a single lap or put in any extra cardio time either.?That?s because hormonal changes occur with circuit-style resistance exercises that create a fat-burning environment (1). For the best weight loss results you will of course also need to watch what you eat. A ?clean cuisine? style diet is your best bet for healthy, long-term weight loss.
As for picking the best exercises, I prefer a ?full fitness fusion? approach that fuses a variety of exercise disciplines and focuses on full body moves rather than isolation exercises. If you want to get fit fast you will get much better quicker results doing compound exercises like push-ups as opposed to an isolation exercise like biceps curls. As with anything, the smarter you work the less time you need to spend and the better your results will be.
Author Ivy Larson?is a nutrition, fitness and wellness expert. She is the founder of the Clean Cuisine product line, author of?Clean Cuisine: An 8-Week Anti-Inflammatory Nutrition Program that Will Change the Way You Age, Look & Feel?and the creator of?Full Fitness Fusion: The 30 Minute Solution?workout DVD. Find her at?Cleancuisineandmore.com?and on Twitter?@clean_cuisine.
Also Read:
The Most Important Anti-Inflammatory Diet You Can Start Today?
Reducing Inflammation for Heart Health?
The Benefits of Omega-6 and Omega-3 Fatty Acids?
source: 1.?Adipose Tissue Lipolysis Is Unregulated in Lean and Obese Men During Acute Resistance,? Diabetes Care 31, no. 7 (2008): 1397-99
Author: Mishel Roserberg | Total views: 102 Comments: 0 Word Count: 850 Date:
With the right amount of knowledge, you will be able to efficiently increase web traffic through optimization of your website. Read on for more useful SEO tips.
Strive to design each page of your website in a way that makes it stand out from every other. Pay particular attention to the titles you use. These are extremely important for search engine optimization purposes. Including your keyword or phrase in the titles on your pages is important towards ranking highly on search engines.
If you have a site that is written in a non-english language, use the language meta tag. That's because search engines will rank you higher when people do a search for your content in that language.
Research any outside SEO company before signing over the work to them. Lots of SEO companies will charge too much for sub-standard work. Read online reviews and testimonials from previous companies to make sure that the company you're looking to hire is the real deal. Your wallet will thank you later.
Once you have discovered the right key phrases for your website, you should put that key phrase in your title. The first impression of your site is generated by the title, so choose it with care. This way, your site will be clicked because it most fits the search results the user typed in.
Ask yourself the question "how would somebody find my site if they were searching for it?" Then ensure that you have multiple uses of these keywords scattered through your site. Include your keywords in the titles of your pages and throughout your content, but don't overuse them. Stuffing your pages full of keywords will cause the search engines to lower your search ranking.
An important SEO tip is to keep an eye on your search rankings. It is crucial that you track your results to understand how your SEO is doing. One easy way to track your progress is by using the Google Analytics tool.
Retaining the visitors you get from search engines will not only increase your profits, but also your search engine rank. It is proven that spending more time working on a site increases the page rank. This trend has been established through metrics like Quantcast scores. When customers can chat, discuss, and interact with each other on your site, they are more likely to stay longer.
Keywords will help you improve the visibility of your sites. Coordinate your keywords with your article topics. This makes it easier for search engines to index your work. Therefore, it's easier for readers who may be trying to locate your articles. The keyword you want to focus on should appear several times in your article's text, as well as in its title and summary.
There are several options you can use to get inbound links to your website. Article writing, message forums, press releases, directory submissions and blogs can all provide your site with traffic. A great way to improve your SEO is to use good outbound links.
This will help increase your search engine rankings. The meta description appears right under the website link in many search engines, so use this text to grab a potential customer's attention. If you are using a popular CMS, you might be able to edit meta descriptions directly from the control panel.
The most important thing that you can do for your site is to make sure that you always keep the content on the site fresh and unique. People won't want to visit your website if you simply present the same old information indefinitely.
If you want to have successful SEO results, you need a site map. This will make it easier for spiders to crawl on your site. If your site is particularly large, you may need multiple maps. In general, try not to have more than 100 links on each map.
These descriptions will let your web site show up higher in search ratings. The meta description refers to the short description that appears in search results. Use important keywords and encourage your readers to take action and visit your site. Check to see if your content management software makes it easy for you to write a meta description on the same page you create your content on.
Meta tags should be as clear and descriptive as possible. Add a concise description to every meta tag on your site. This will increase click through rates.
Keyword density is vital when you optimize a web page for search engines. Focus on keeping each page's keyword content well under 20 percent.
You should now know that SEO is a very important part of internet marketing. By abiding by the advice in this article, you will be able to optimize your website. As long as your website is of high-quality, you will be more likely to receive a lot of traffic, which will lead to more profits.
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Related to: internet marketing - business - online business - affiliate marketing - article marketing - video marketing - SEO - search engine - social media - google
1: Understanding Online Business Success
Starting a home based business to earn income online takes a significant amount of time and energy upfront to get things going. Not seeing results immediately can be discouraging and cause people to give up too early. In this article, we look at the process of starting a home based business and working through the frustrations to be there when the sales come flowing in.
2: Why You Need To Build Multiple Streams of Income For Yourself
Being an entrepreneur and earning multiple streams of income is a dream that many have, but in reality it does take some initial hard work to achieve this. Earning multiple streams of income is the wave of the future, and here are some tips and advice for you when you are looking for ways in which to do this for yourself.
3: Article Marketing Strategy: Putting Together a "Class Schedule" For Your Article Topics
Businesses go to so much trouble when there is one sure-fire, simple, very inexpensive way to attract new clients to a business: Teach a free class. That is what article marketing is like. Your articles are just like free classes. You teach your target readers something helpful in your article. Your resource box then says, "If you enjoyed this article you can visit my website and apply what you have learned."
4: What is Cyber Marketing And Why It Is So Important For The Success Of Your Website
Cyber marketing has now become an indispensable segment of e-commerce as well as the internet and World Wide Web related topics. Cyber marketing simply refers to a technique of attracting potential customers by advertising your products or services through such means as websites, emails, and banners.
5: The Best Way To Optimise Your Website SEO For Google Panda
If you want your SEO to work you now need to concentrate on appeasing Google Panda, and to do this you need to know what Google Panda's spiders/bots will be looking for. Find out here how to search engine optimise your website for the latest Google Panda algorithm, and achieve the success you deserve.
Mar. 29, 2013 ? While pearl millet is a major food staple in some of the fastest growing regions on Earth, relatively little is known about the drought-hardy grain.
Recently, plant geneticists at the University of Georgia successfully isolated the gene that creates dwarfed varieties of pearl millet. It is the first time a gene controlling an important agronomic trait has been isolated in the pearl millet genome. Their work appeared in the March edition of the journal G3: Genes, Genomics, Genetics.
The dwarf varieties are economically important in the U.S., India and Africa, in particular.
The researchers, led by UGA's Katrien Devos, also were able to trace the dwarf gene to plants bred 50 years ago by Glenn Burton, a UGA plant breeder who worked on the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences' Tifton campus.
Knowing which gene controls the dwarfing trait will help plant breeders create more efficient, sustainable varieties of millet that have the short stature some farmers and ranchers want.
"Knowing the actual gene that reduces plant height has allowed us to develop markers that can be used by breeders to screen for the presence of the gene long before the effects of the gene can be visually observed," said Devos, a professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences' Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics, housed in the department of crop and soil sciences, and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences' department of plant biology.
"In the longer term, the knowledge gained in pearl millet will help to develop semi-dwarf lines with high agronomic performance in other cereal crops," she said.
Rajiv K. Parvathaneni, a doctoral student working in Devos' lab, was in charge of tracking down the gene, which works by controlling the flow of the growth hormone auxin through the plant.
He also wanted to understand the mechanism by which the gene controls auxin and to develop plant-breeder-friendly markers that would allow breeders to screen for the dwarfing gene before their plants matured.
The gene that Parvathaneni found affects the downward transport of auxin, which is made in the top part of the plant. If this gene is on, the auxin flows freely, and millet will grow to its full height, about 10 feet. If it is off, the millet plant may only grow to be 3 to 5 feet in height.
Parvathaneni and Devos' team first found which region of the pearl millet's genome contributed to growth and then compared that section to a similar section of DNA from sorghum. Sorghum is a grain related to pearl millet, and a complete map of its genome recently was released by Devos' UGA colleague Andy Patterson.
The comparison revealed that ABCB1, a gene controlling auxin transport and causing reduced plant height in sorghum, was the prime gene candidate controlling pearl millet dwarf stature, Devos said.
Comparative genome analysis, a process in which an unmapped genome is compared to the genome of a similar and more thoroughly described plant genome, is a common method to help identify the functions of specific genes, especially in crops for which little genetic resources are available.
The next step for Devos' team is to work with researchers in other states to understand more fully how auxin transport differs in tall and dwarf millet plants and to verify that ABCB1 is in fact the gene that controls dwarfism.
After Devos and Parvathaneni located the dwarfing gene, they tested pearl millet dwarfs from around the world. All dwarfs caused by a nonfunctional ABCB1 gene have the same mutation as the dwarfs that were first bred by Burton in the 1960s.
Dwarf varieties of pearl millet are not ideal for every planting situation. In Africa, many farmers prefer taller varieties because they use the long stalks for roofing thatch and other applications.
However, where millet is intensively cultivated, dwarf millet allows farmers to harvest the grain with mechanical threshers. Ranchers like dwarf millet as a forage plant because it has a high leaf-to-stem ratio, Devos said.
Knowing more about the plant in general is key to broadening production of the very drought-resistant, hardy grain.
"The crop itself has a future, a bright one-especially in regions where climate change may lead to more erratic rainfall patterns as pearl millet is highly drought tolerant. It already is a popular food crop in semi-arid regions of India and Africa and will likely gain interest from drought-prone regions of the developed world as an alternative to corn in animal feed," Parvathaneni said.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Georgia. The original article was written by J. Merritt Melancon.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
R. K. Parvathaneni, V. Jakkula, F. K. Padi, S. Faure, N. Nagarajappa, A. C. Pontaroli, X. Wu, J. L. Bennetzen, K. M. Devos. Fine-Mapping and Identification of a Candidate Gene Underlying the d2 Dwarfing Phenotype in Pearl Millet, Cenchrus americanus (L.) Morrone. G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, 2013; 3 (3): 563 DOI: 10.1534/g3.113.005587
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.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg marked the tenth anniversary on Wednesday of his ban on smoking in bars and restaurants with a report saying the ban and subsequent anti-smoking measures had prevented 10,000 premature deaths.
"Ten years ago when New York City prohibited smoking in restaurants and bars, many predicted the end of the hospitality, restaurant and tourism industries," Bloomberg said in a statement.
"Yet ten years later, fewer New Yorkers are smoking, we are living longer, our industries are thriving and nobody longs for a return to smoke-filled bars and restaurants."
Critics of the move feared banning smoking would hurt the restaurant and bar business, but the Health Department report said there are now some 6,000 more restaurants and bars in the city than there were a decade ago.
The city's Smoke-Free Air Act came into effect a little over a year into Bloomberg's first term as mayor in 2003 and prohibited smoking inside bars, restaurants and most workplaces.
The following year, the city began providing free nicotine replacement therapy to smokers trying to quit and in 2011 expanded the smoking ban to the city's parks and beaches.
According to the report released on Wednesday, the proportion of adult smokers dropped by about a third to 15 percent in 2011 from 21.5 percent in 2002. The report, released by the city's Health Department, also said the proportion of youths under age 18 who smoke dropped by about half to 8.5 percent.
Bloomberg's tenure, which will end this year, has been marked by his efforts to improve New Yorkers' health by trying to induce them to eat less salt, trans fats and calories in general, among other measures.
Bloomberg has been criticized by some as paternalistic but his efforts have coincided with an increase in New Yorkers' life expectancy, including a decline in tobacco-related deaths.
Bloomberg's attempt to limit the size of sugary drinks sold in the city was derailed this month only hours before the new rules were to take effect when a judge ruled that they were "arbitrary and capricious". The city is appealing that decision.
A week later, Bloomberg announced his plan to require shops to hide cigarettes and tobacco products from public view, arguing that would shield young people from marketing efforts.
Some shop owners and cigarette manufacturers have criticized the plan as unnecessary extra regulation that would infringe the free speech provision of the U.S. Constitution.
Bloomberg also proposed a minimum price of $10.50 for a pack of cigarettes, in the hope that some smokers would find the habit too expensive to maintain. The two bills are now before the city council.
Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of premature death in the city, according to the Health Department.
Ronald Bayer, a professor of public health at Columbia University, called Bloomberg's health initiatives a "major achievement" and said his efforts to make smoking less socially acceptable were an effective and legitimate use of his office.
He said it remains an open question how much further government could go to discourage smokers to quit.
(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst)
(In next-to-last paragraph, this story corrects spelling of professor's name to Bayer, not Beyer)
Freshman Stephanie Lande has never spent Passover away from her family. However, since she?s from New York, Lande wasn?t able to return home to celebrate with her family this year.
?It?s a little hard because I?m not with family but at the same time it?s a new experience,? the occupational therapy major said.
Lande didn?t allow her distance from home stop her from celebrating Passover, a Jewish holiday composed of two dinners known as Seders during which members of the Jewish faith remember their ancestors? escape from Egypt.
?It?s a holiday in which you spend time with family and it?s hard not eating by their side but at the same time like you?re remembering what your ancestors and everyone else went through to get you the freedom that you currently have,? Lande said.
For first-time college students, observing Passover away from their families may seem intimidating, but Lande said this year she was able to celebrate with friends, friends whom she calls her ?second family.?
During the first Seder Monday, March 25, Lande went home with her friend, freshman Maggy Kay.
?It was good because it was a new experience and I felt very welcome, very comfortable there,? Lande said. ?Even though I wasn?t with my family, I felt personally welcome with her family.?
Kay, an elementary and special education major, said that she considers Passover a home-oriented holiday and welcomed Lande to her home.
?It is really a family holiday,? she said. ?You don?t really go to services.?
Though she went home for the first night of Seder, Kay said it would be too difficult to work around classes to go home on both nights.
?I think it will be different but I think it will be interesting to see how other people experience Seder,? Kay said.
Both Kay and Lande participated in Hillel?s observation of second Seder. They said that they feel Hillel, a college-campus- based Jewish organization, has become a support group for them.
About 10 percent of Towson?s student population is Jewish, according to Towson Hillel?s website, and Lande said new students should not be afraid to find friends with whom they can share events like Passover.
?If you want to join a group such as Shabbat or Hillel, you should because they?ll be your second family and they?ll always be there for you no matter what,? she said.
27 March 2013Last updated at 07:45 ETBy Jason PalmerScience and technology reporter, BBC News
Scientists say wastewater injection from hydraulic fracturing was linked to a magnitude-5.7 earthquake that struck the US state of Oklahoma in 2011.
Fracking, as it is known, injects water and chemicals into petroleum wells in a bid to extract trapped natural gas.
Opponents of the practice say that it risks causing seismic events and contaminating groundwater.
The study in Geology shows that "induced seismicity" can occur years after wastewater injection begins.
Most seismic events linked to fracking have been markedly of smaller magnitudes, and have tended to occur in the first weeks or months of injection.
By contrast, fracking wastewater was first injected into Oklahoma's Wilzetta oilfields, near the town of Prague, some 18 years prior to the November 2011 series of quakes that included three of magnitude 5 or greater.
The new study adds to an increasing body of evidence that the injection of wastewater from fracking - rather than the wellhead injection that extracts gas or oil - is correlated to an increase in seismic events.
A comprehensive review in 2012 by the US' National Academy of Sciences found that "the process of hydraulic fracturing a well as presently implemented for shale gas recovery does not pose a high risk for inducing felt seismic events", but that "injection for disposal of waste water derived from energy technologies into the subsurface does pose some risk for induced seismicity".
However, the report said the number of such documented events over several decades was small compared to the overall number of operations carried out.
In April 2012, a study by scientists at the US Geological Survey of the interior of the US found that events of magnitude 3 or greater had "abruptly increased in 2009" from 1.2 per year in the previous 50 years to more than 25 per year - although a number of gas and oil extraction methods may be implicated in the rise.
'Unexpectedly large'
But the authors of the new study focus on the significantly larger and delayed events in Prague, which they wrote "necessitate reconsideration of the maximum possible size of injection-induced earthquakes, and of the time scale considered diagnostic of induced seismicity".
Study co-author Geoffrey Abers of Columbia University said that "there's something important about getting unexpectedly large earthquakes out of small systems that we have discovered here, " adding that "the risk of humans inducing large earthquakes from even small injection activities is probably higher" than had been believed.
But seismologist Austin Holland of the Oklahoma Geological Survey said while the study showed a potential link between the earthquake and fracking, "it is still the opinion of those at the Oklahoma Geological Survey that these earthquakes could be naturally occurring".
"There remain many open questions, and more scientific investigations are underway on this sequence of earthquakes and many others within the state of Oklahoma," he said.
The topic remains hotly debated in the scientific literature, and between lobbyists and policy-makers, particularly in the UK.
Links between fracking in Blackpool and tremors in the region led to a government ban on the practice, which was lifted at the end of December 2012.
The Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics, located nearly a mile below the surface of the Gran Sasso mountain about 60 miles outside of Rome, detects tiny particles called neutrinos.
By Tia Ghose LiveScience
Physicists at an underground laboratory have caught an ultra-rare particle in the act of reappearing.
For only the third time, scientists have detected elementary particles called neutrinos in the act of changing from one type, called muon, to another, called tau, on the several-hundred-mile trip between two laboratories.?
"It proves that the muon neutrinos are some kind of Superman-type particle: They get into a phone booth somewhere in between and change into something else," said Pauline Gagnon, a particle physicist at Indiana University, who was not involved in the experiment.
The new discovery bolsters the theory that the sneaky neutrinos oscillate from one type to another, which is why physicists detect fewer coming from the sun than predicted. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles In Nature]
Sun particles The nuclear reaction that powers the sun also produces massive numbers of solar neutrinos, tiny, uncharged particles that reach Earth and pass virtually undetected through ordinary matter, said researcher Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and a member of the team that conducted the experiment, called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus).
"Each square centimeter of your body is touched every second by 60 billion neutrinos from the sun," Ereditato told LiveScience.
But for the last two decades, scientists have detected fewer neutrinos from the sun than they expected.
The dominant explanation for this neutrino shortage, proposed in 1957 by Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, argued that neutrinos oscillate between three flavors, or types: electron, muon and tau.
As a result, neutrinos seem to disappear, because detectors try to measure them in one flavor when they have oscillated to another one.
Scientists have caught many neutrinos in the act of disappearing. But catching neutrinos as they appear has been far more elusive ? since 2010, only two other tau neutrinos have been discovered.
Reappearing particles To find these rare events, physicists with the OPERA project shot a beam of muon neutrinos from the physics lab CERN in Switzerland 454 miles (730 kilometers) through the Earth's crust to Gran Sasso Laboratory, buried underneath a mountain in Italy. ?
During the travel, a very small fraction of the neutrinos naturally changed flavor, and when they reached the laboratory some tiny fraction of them were detected by a 4,000-ton "camera," transforming into a similar flavored particle and then decaying after a short distance. These fleeting events produce a faint blip of light recorded by one of 9 million photographic plates, Gagnon told LiveScience.
Because neutrinos have no charge, they only interact with matter through the weak force, which doesn't happen very often, Gagnon said.
Tau neutrinos morph into tau particles that travel for?just a few millimeters before decaying into hadrons, so they are even harder to detect.
The newly discovered tau neutrino bolsters the notion that the discovery of two others, in 2010 and 2012, were real.
This detection is statistically quite strong: The chance that the researchers are mistaken is about one in a million, Ereditato said.
The findings could provide other insights into tau neutrinos.
"Neutrinos have a mass and measuring this mass is quite difficult, because it's extremely small," Gagnon said.
But because neutrinos' mass determines how quickly they oscillate, and in turn how frequently they should be detected, finding tau neutrinos could help physicists nail down these elusive particles' mass, she said.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose.?Follow?LiveScience @livescience, Facebook? andGoogle+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Stocks closed up on Wall Street Tuesday?after another strong report on housing encouraged investors to buy stocks.?The S&P 500 index closed within a point of its all-time high.
By Matthew Craft,?AP Business Writer / March 26, 2013
Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday. A gain in the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home prices index pushed stocks higher Tuesday.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Enlarge
The Standard & Poor's 500 index closed within a short reach of its all-time high on Tuesday. Rising home prices and orders for manufactured goods drove stocks up from the opening bell.
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The S&P 500 index rose 12.08 points, or 0.8 percent, to close at 1,563.77. That's less than two points from the peak it reached on Oct. 9, 2007, before a recession and ensuing financial crisis battered markets.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 111.90 points, also 0.8 percent, to 14,559.65.
"Unless something major comes along to derail this rally, it just seems like the market is going to keep climbing higher," said Marty LeClerc, the managing partner of Barrack Yard Advisors, an investment firm in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
Factory orders surged in February, helped by stronger demand for commercial aircraft. Overall orders for durable goods, a catchall term for products ranging from refrigerators to jumbo jets, jumped 5.7 percent from the previous month, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. It was the biggest increase in five months.
The stock market's gains were widely shared. All 10 industry groups in the S&P 500 rose, with health care and energy companies leading the way.
Smaller companies lagged behind the biggest ones Tuesday. The Nasdaq composite rose 17.18 points, or 0.5 percent, to 3,252.48.
And the Russell 2000 rose 3.97 points, or 0.4 percent, to 949.82. That's roughly half of the S&P 500's gain.
Big company stocks and small-company stocks often part ways, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank in Chicago. Big corporations generally have stronger ties to Europe, and their stocks wavered over the past week as traders kept an eye on negotiations to rescue Cyprus.
By contrast, smaller companies are less exposed to the rest of the world. "That's part of the reason small-caps have outpaced the market this year," Ablin said.
The S&P 500, used by investors as a proxy for the overall market, is up 9.6 percent so far this year. The Russell 2000 has fared better, rising 11.8 percent.
European markets rose modestly as investors gained confidence in the new bailout plan arranged for Cyprus and its banking system. The island country decided to keep its banks closed for another two days in an attempt to ward off panicked withdrawals.
Netflix surged 5 percent, leading the S&P 500, after an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities said the stock will likely climb as the company adds subscribers. Netflix's database of its members' viewing habits should give it an edge in creating new shows and draw more people to sign up for the video-streaming service, the analyst said. Netflix rose $9.82 to $190.61.
Housing prices rose in January at the fastest pace since the summer of 2006, before the housing bubble popped. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-city price index climbed 8.1 percent in the 12 months to January. That compares with a 6.8 percent increase the previous month. Prices rose in all 20 cities, led by Phoenix.
The economic reports out Tuesday added to evidence that the economy is slowly improving, and that's exactly what many investors want right now, LeClerc said. Slow growth means it will take a while before the Federal Reserve starts unraveling its bond-buying program and raising interest rates.
In the market for U.S. government bonds, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note slipped to 1.91 percent from 1.92 percent late Monday.
Among stocks making big moves:
? Drive-in restaurant chain Sonic jumped 10 percent after reporting that its quarterly earnings more than doubled. Sales were flat but Sonic said its expects them to improve in the year ahead. Its stock rose $1.14 to $12.87.
? Supervalu rose after announcing plans to lay off more than 1,000 people, roughly 3 percent of its workforce. The supermarket operator said its recent sale of five grocery chains means it needs fewer workers. Supervalu's stock gained 7 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $5.12.
? Children's Place Retail Stores sank 3 percent after the company reported weaker quarterly earnings. The retailer also said bad weather would crimp its sales. The company's stock lost $1.48 to $44.51.
The GameStick is the second of two Kickstarter-backed Android-powered game consoles announced in the past 12 months, and its arguably the less visible of the two (the other being OUYA, of course). It's a bit different than the OUYA as well, in terms of both form factor and specs: the GameStick is roughly the size of a USB thumb drive and runs a dual-core Amlogic processor, rather than the Tegra 3 found in the OUYA. Similar to the OUYA, the GameStick also comes with a proprietary wireless controller -- the standard four button layout, two analog sticks, two shoulder buttons, and a d-pad make up its inputs -- though the GameStick's controller is actually the bulk of the hardware. The GameStick itself actually nestles into the back of the controller, making the whole bundle rather portable.
But perhaps you already know all of this? We have been hearing about the GameStick for some time now. Should that be the case, you'll wanna know how the thing actually feels, and we can deliver that just beyond the break, as we've just put GameStick and its controller through the paces.
Mar. 24, 2013 ? In a collaborative study published online in Nature Genetics, researchers from Cardiff University, BGI, International Wildlife Consultants, Ltd., and Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital, have completed the genome sequencing and analysis of two iconic falcons, the peregrine (Falco peregrinus) and saker (Falco cherrug). The work provides an invaluable resource for the deep understanding of the adaptive evolution in raptors and the genetic basis of their wide distribution.
Peregrine and saker falcons are widespread, and their unique morphological, physiological and behavioral adaptations make them successful hunters. The peregrine is renowned as the world's fastest animal, and the falcon is the national emblem of United Arab Emirate. In recent decades, peregrine and saker falcons have been listed as endangered due to rapid population declines caused by a wide range of factors including environmental change, overharvesting for falconry, habitat loss and bioaccumulation of pesticides (e.g. DDT, PCBs).
In this study, researchers focused on the evolutionary basis of predatory adaptations underlying peregrine and saker. They conducted whole genome sequencing and assembled the high quality ~1.2 Gb reference genomes for each falcon species. Phylogenic analysis suggested that the two falcon species might diverged 2.1 million years ago.
Comparing with chicken and zebra finch, researchers found the transposable element composition of falcons was most similar to that of zebra finch. Large segmental duplications in falcons are less frequent than that in chicken and zebra finch, and comprise less than 1% of both falcon genomes. They also found that a gene expansion in the olfactory receptor ?-c clade in chicken and zebra finch is not present in falcons, possibly reflecting their reliance on vision for locating prey.
Observing genome-wide rapid evolution for both falcons, chicken, zebra finch and turkey, researchers found that the nervous system, olfaction and sodium ion trans-port have evolved rapidly in falcons, and also the evolutionary novelties in beak development related genes of falcons and saker-unique arid-adaptation related genes.
Shengkai Pan, bioinformatics expert from BGI, said, "The two falcon genomes are the first predatory bird genome published. The data presented in this study will advance our understanding of the adaptive evolution of raptors as well as aid the conservation of endangered falcon species."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by BGI Shenzhen.
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Journal Reference:
Xiangjiang Zhan, Shengkai Pan, Junyi Wang, Andrew Dixon, Jing He, Margit G Muller, Peixiang Ni, Li Hu, Yuan Liu, Haolong Hou, Yuanping Chen, Jinquan Xia, Qiong Luo, Pengwei Xu, Ying Chen, Shengguang Liao, Changchang Cao, Shukun Gao, Zhaobao Wang, Zhen Yue, Guoqing Li, Ye Yin, Nick C Fox, Jun Wang, Michael W Bruford. Peregrine and saker falcon genome sequences provide insights into evolution of a predatory lifestyle. Nature Genetics, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/ng.2588
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A new stable release of Chrome is out today, bringing improved spell-checking to Google's browser. Mountain View announced the update on the Chrome Blog, explaining that it refreshed the dictionaries for all supported languages -- and adding support for Albanian, Korean and Tamil. Additionally, the "Ask Google for suggestions" feature now includes grammar checking and context-sensitive spell-checking in English, so you can expect the search giant to set you straight on the difference between "affect" and "effect." If you've added custom words to your dictionary, you'll now be able to sync them across all your devices running Chrome. Look for the browser update to roll out to Windows, Linux and Chrome OS users in the coming weeks -- Mac support is still in the works.
Sen. Claire McCaskill. (AP Photo Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
Add Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill to the growing list of politicians who have evolved on the issue of same-sex marriage.
?I have come to the conclusion that our government should not limit the right to marry based on who you love,? the moderate Democrat wrote on her Tumblr Sunday night. ?While churches should never be required to conduct marriages outside of their religious beliefs, neither should the government tell people who they have a right to marry.?
As public opinion on gay marriage continues to shift toward record acceptance rates, more politicians have come out in support of it. In the last few weeks alone, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton made public statements in support of repealing the federal rule that prevents gay marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). President Clinton signed the DOMA into law in 1996. Some Republicans, too, have broken with their party position this year by supporting gay marriage, including Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. Dozens of Republicans signed a legal brief last month in support of gay marriage, including several ex-members of the George W. Bush administration.
McCaskill?s support arrives the same week that the Supreme Court will hear challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act and California?s Proposition 8.
The senator admits that her views on the subject ?have changed over time,? and says she can no longer stay silent on the issue: ?[A]s many of my gay and lesbian friends, colleagues and staff embrace long term committed relationships, I find myself unable to look them in the eye without honestly confronting this uncomfortable inequality. Supporting marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples is simply the right thing to do for our country, a country founded on the principals of liberty and equality.?
In 2009, she came under fire after suggesting that a vote for a proposed gun provision would be like voting in favor of same-sex marriage, and last May, after President Obama came out in support of legalizing same-sex marriage, McCaskill refused to clearly state her own position. As noted by the?Springfield News-Leader, McCaskill has a history of walking a fine line when it came to supporting marriage equality for the LGBT community:
McCaskill, D-Mo., has stated her opposition to gay marriage in the past, but she?s walked a bit of a tightrope on the question. She has expressed support for civil unions, which grant gay couples some ? but not all ? of the legal rights that married couples enjoy. She also opposed Missouri?s 2004 constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, arguing that it was unnecessary because existing state law already prohibited gay marriage.
McCaskill defended her Senate seat in November against Tea Party backed Rep. Todd Akin after a contentious election battle. Akin?s comments on ?legitimate rape? and abortion became an oft-repeated soundbite against him last year.
SAN FRANCISCO - Hispanic-Americans are leading the way in growing coffee consumption in the United States, while the number of adults under 40 who enjoy the popular drink on a daily basis has dropped, according to an industry study released on Friday.
Of the Hispanic-Americans who participated in the National Coffee Association's National Coffee Drinking Trends 2013 market study, 76 percent said they had drunk coffee the previous day. That is up by 13 percentage points from last year.
This compares with 47 percent of African-Americans and 64 percent of Caucasian-Americans who said they had consumed coffee the day before.
This was the second year that the study included ethnicity.
The survey showed that overall coffee consumption jumped by 5 percentage points this year, with 83 percent of the U.S. adult population now drinking coffee within the past year. Daily consumption was flat at 63 percent.
Overall daily coffee consumption by adults aged 18 to 39, however, has dropped. Some 16 percent of the people in this age group who participated in the online survey said they had drunk an espresso-based coffee in the past day. That compared with 6 percent of those aged 60 and over. But younger consumers have cut their daily consumption of the brew overall.
"In traditional coffee, we did see a decline," said Mark DiDomenico, of market research firm Datassential, as he presented the study's findings at the National Coffee Association USA convention in San Francisco on Friday.
Among those aged 18 to 24, only 41 percent said they drank coffee daily, down sharply from 50 percent in 2012. Those aged 60 and above have upped their daily intake, with 76 percent of the respondents saying they drank coffee every day, versus 71 percent a year ago.
Young adults between 18 and 24 greatly reduced their daily intake of non-gourmet traditional coffee, dropping to 17 percent from 27 percent last year, the study showed.
The single-serve format, which involves machines designed to brew one cup at a time with what are called individual "pods" of coffee, continued to grow. The study showed that 13 percent of the U.S. population drank coffee made in a single-cup brewer the previous day, up from 10 percent in 2012.
"Drip coffee maker use seems to be slowly falling," DiDomenico said.
At the same time, perceptions of quality of single-cup systems remains low, though it has improved year-over-year. In 2013, 21 percent said they perceived the quality of the system to be excellent, up from 25 percent in 2012 and 15 percent in 2011, DiDomenico said.
The NCA has been conducting this study annually since 1950. This year, the online study involved 2,840 adults who were selected from an online panel with ethnicities aligned proportionately with the U.S. population's makeup. Data was collected in both English and Spanish between mid-January and mid-February 2013.
In his new cover story for New York magazine, Joe Hagan offers the most in-depth look at the Today?show ratings?disaster that has created Matt Lauer's weeks-long attempt at image rehabilitation, and it's now clear that the defining moment that brought the morning show crashing own to Earth ? the exit of Ann Curry ? was something of a cross between the fourth circle of Hell and?and running with the Heathers?in high school: Curry got pranked, she got her clothes made fun of, she was prevented from reaching out to Robin Roberts, and her legacy lives on as a ...
