Today, FedEx announced it will begin allowing customers to pay $5 to reschedule a delivery to a new date or location, or $10 to narrow delivery down to a 2-hour window.
The options are part of the newly launched FedEx Delivery Manager, which also allows customers to put a 14-day vacation hold on deliveries or leave special instructions for the driver. To use the service, sign up for an account here. You can also access Delivery Manager from FedEx's iOS and Android apps.
All Critics (119) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (111) | Rotten (8)
The harmonies they strike in this reality-inspired charmer are sweetly sublime.
You could drive an Abrams tank through the film's plot holes, but you'll likely be too busy enjoying yourself to bother.
"The Sapphires" feels like a movie you've already seen, but it's nonetheless thoroughly enjoyable, like a pop song that's no less infectious when you know every word.
"The Sapphires" sparkles with sass and Motown soul.
Sapphires is hardly a cinematic diamond mine. But this Commitments-style mashup of music and melodrama manages to entertain without demanding too much of its audience.
You've seen this story before, but never pulled off with so much joie de vivre.
They can put a song across just like the Dreamgirls. What's not to like?
Exuberant but fairly formulaic.
Doesn't always mix its anti-prejudice message and its feel-good nostalgia with complete smoothness. But despite some ragged edges it provides a reasonably good time.
Director Wayne Blair -- another veteran of the stage show -- finds his footing during the film's many musical numbers.
Despite the prosaic plot and reserved approach taken by Blair, Briggs, and Thompson, it's tough to get cynical about such a warmhearted picture that strives to tell so uplifting a story.
A movie with enough melody and camaraderie to cover up its lack of originality.
Draining most of the blood, sweat and tears from a true story, this music-minded movie capably covers a song we've heard a hundred times before.
"Sapphires," which was inspired by a true story, is propelled by a strong sense of music's power to connect people and change lives.
Fires on all cylinders when it drops all pretense and allows its talented cast to simply belt out a series of pure, unfiltered slices of ear candy.
A rousing soundtrack helps to compensate for some of the historical embellishments in this Australian crowd-pleaser.
'Sapphires' got heart and soul
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+1 more for East London's Tech City cluster: big data company Cloudera has announced the opening of its EMEA HQ on Rivington Street, Shoreditch. In late 2010, the U.K. coalition government created the Tech City label to slap on an existing, organic startup hub -- promising equity finance for businesses with high growth potential and money for tech & innovation centres.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia warned the European Union on Monday not to lift an arms embargo that has prevented weapons supplies to Syrian rebels, despite British and French lobbying.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Sunday that EU foreign ministers, who last month rejected a Franco-British proposal to ease the ban, would in coming weeks discuss the question again.
Russia, which says it is continuing to implement weapons contracts with Syria but is no longer delivering arms that could be used in the civil conflict, has vehemently opposed any supplies of weapons to President Bashar al-Assad's opponents.
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said an embargo was unnecessary in the first place because such supplies were prohibited by international law.
If the embargo is removed, "the international obligations of the EU countries, which prohibit supplies of arms and ammunition to non-government actors, are not going anywhere", he said at a news briefing after talks with his Guinean counterpart.
Russia has used its U.N. Security Council veto power to shield Assad from Western efforts to push him from power or increase pressure upon him to end violence in a conflict that has killed more than 70,000 people since March 2011.
Moscow has for months been calling for implementation of an declaration agreed by world powers including Russia and the United States in Geneva last June that called for a transitional government. However, Washington disagrees with Moscow's assertion that the agreement requires Assad to step down.
Lavrov said he and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry would discuss ways to promote a peace process in Syria at talks on the sidelines of a NATO gathering and a Russia-NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.
"We will discuss what we, Russia and the United States, can do to convince those who ... are resisting the peace process to step onto the path of implementing the Geneva agreements," Lavrov said.
Russian and U.S. diplomats have held several meetings for that purpose since late last year, to little effect.
Lavrov said that in a telephone conversation with Kerry on Saturday, "I sensed confirmation of the intention ... to seek as swift as possible a political solution".
But he said the West had not done enough to encourage all Assad's foes to show readiness for dialogue with the government: "So far there is clearly not enough movement on this."
(Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Lost your keys? Your cat? The brain can rapidly mobilize a search partyPublic release date: 21-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Yasmin Anwar yanwar@berkeley.edu 510-643-7944 University of California - Berkeley
UC Berkeley study shows how we refocus to track down a human, animal or thing
A contact lens on the bathroom floor, an escaped hamster in the backyard, a car key in a bed of gravel: How are we able to focus so sharply to find that proverbial needle in a haystack? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that when we embark on a targeted search, various visual and non-visual regions of the brain mobilize to track down a person, animal or thing.
That means that if we're looking for a youngster lost in a crowd, the brain areas usually dedicated to recognizing other objects, or even the areas attuned to abstract thought, shift their focus and join the search party. Thus, the brain rapidly switches into a highly focused child-finder, and redirects resources it uses for other mental tasks.
"Our results show that our brains are much more dynamic than previously thought, rapidly reallocating resources based on behavioral demands, and optimizing our performance by increasing the precision with which we can perform relevant tasks," said Tolga Cukur, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study to be published Sunday, April 21, in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"As you plan your day at work, for example, more of the brain is devoted to processing time, tasks, goals and rewards, and as you search for your cat, more of the brain becomes involved in recognition of animals," he added.
The findings help explain why we find it difficult to concentrate on more than one task at a time. The results also shed light on how people are able to shift their attention to challenging tasks, and may provide greater insight into neurobehavioral and attention deficit disorders such as ADHD.
These results were obtained in studies that used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to record the brain activity of study participants as they searched for people or vehicles in movie clips. In one experiment, participants held down a button whenever a person appeared in the movie. In another, they did the same with vehicles.
The brain scans simultaneously measured neural activity via blood flow in thousands of locations across the brain. Researchers used regularized linear regression analysis, which finds correlations in data, to build models showing how each of the roughly 50,000 locations near the cortex responded to each of the 935 categories of objects and actions seen in the movie clips. Next, they compared how much of the cortex was devoted to detecting humans or vehicles depending on whether or not each of those categories was the search target.
They found that when participants searched for humans, relatively more of the cortex was devoted to humans, and when they searched for vehicles, more of the cortex was devoted to vehicles. For example, areas that were normally involved in recognizing specific visual categories such as plants or buildings switched to become tuned to humans or vehicles, vastly expanding the area of the brain engaged in the search.
"These changes occur across many brain regions, not only those devoted to vision. In fact, the largest changes are seen in the prefrontal cortex, which is usually thought to be involved in abstract thought, long-term planning and other complex mental tasks," Cukur said.
The findings build on an earlier UC Berkeley brain imaging study that showed how the brain organizes thousands of animate and inanimate objects into what researchers call a "continuous semantic space." Those findings challenged previous assumptions that every visual category is represented in a separate region of visual cortex. Instead, researchers found that categories are actually represented in highly organized, continuous maps.
The latest study goes further to show how the brain's semantic space is warped during visual search, depending on the search target. Researchers have posted their results in an interactive, online brain viewer. Other co-authors of the study are UC Berkeley neuroscientists Jack Gallant, Alexander Huth and Shinji Nishimoto.
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Lost your keys? Your cat? The brain can rapidly mobilize a search partyPublic release date: 21-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Yasmin Anwar yanwar@berkeley.edu 510-643-7944 University of California - Berkeley
UC Berkeley study shows how we refocus to track down a human, animal or thing
A contact lens on the bathroom floor, an escaped hamster in the backyard, a car key in a bed of gravel: How are we able to focus so sharply to find that proverbial needle in a haystack? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that when we embark on a targeted search, various visual and non-visual regions of the brain mobilize to track down a person, animal or thing.
That means that if we're looking for a youngster lost in a crowd, the brain areas usually dedicated to recognizing other objects, or even the areas attuned to abstract thought, shift their focus and join the search party. Thus, the brain rapidly switches into a highly focused child-finder, and redirects resources it uses for other mental tasks.
"Our results show that our brains are much more dynamic than previously thought, rapidly reallocating resources based on behavioral demands, and optimizing our performance by increasing the precision with which we can perform relevant tasks," said Tolga Cukur, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study to be published Sunday, April 21, in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"As you plan your day at work, for example, more of the brain is devoted to processing time, tasks, goals and rewards, and as you search for your cat, more of the brain becomes involved in recognition of animals," he added.
The findings help explain why we find it difficult to concentrate on more than one task at a time. The results also shed light on how people are able to shift their attention to challenging tasks, and may provide greater insight into neurobehavioral and attention deficit disorders such as ADHD.
These results were obtained in studies that used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to record the brain activity of study participants as they searched for people or vehicles in movie clips. In one experiment, participants held down a button whenever a person appeared in the movie. In another, they did the same with vehicles.
The brain scans simultaneously measured neural activity via blood flow in thousands of locations across the brain. Researchers used regularized linear regression analysis, which finds correlations in data, to build models showing how each of the roughly 50,000 locations near the cortex responded to each of the 935 categories of objects and actions seen in the movie clips. Next, they compared how much of the cortex was devoted to detecting humans or vehicles depending on whether or not each of those categories was the search target.
They found that when participants searched for humans, relatively more of the cortex was devoted to humans, and when they searched for vehicles, more of the cortex was devoted to vehicles. For example, areas that were normally involved in recognizing specific visual categories such as plants or buildings switched to become tuned to humans or vehicles, vastly expanding the area of the brain engaged in the search.
"These changes occur across many brain regions, not only those devoted to vision. In fact, the largest changes are seen in the prefrontal cortex, which is usually thought to be involved in abstract thought, long-term planning and other complex mental tasks," Cukur said.
The findings build on an earlier UC Berkeley brain imaging study that showed how the brain organizes thousands of animate and inanimate objects into what researchers call a "continuous semantic space." Those findings challenged previous assumptions that every visual category is represented in a separate region of visual cortex. Instead, researchers found that categories are actually represented in highly organized, continuous maps.
The latest study goes further to show how the brain's semantic space is warped during visual search, depending on the search target. Researchers have posted their results in an interactive, online brain viewer. Other co-authors of the study are UC Berkeley neuroscientists Jack Gallant, Alexander Huth and Shinji Nishimoto.
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Reddit's involvement - whether good or bad - in the hunt for leads in the Boston bombings case does not appear to be the reason for ongoing site outages. For those who can access the service today, a banner is informing visitors that "site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack."
Tinnitus is really a affliction during which the person percepts a ringing noise within their ear when there is not any ringing sound while in the close to environment. The ringing notion is perseverant and lingers inside of the ear of the particular person, causing countless discomforts and impairing the caliber of life of the individual in question. Tinnitus Symptome It is estimated that nearly 10% with the German inhabitants has this issue, nevertheless only 6% of these people are decided to seek clinical help. The opposite 4% are struggling and searching the world wide web for Tinnitus Ursachen, hoping this significant medium will help them obtain an answer to this enduring dilemma. The reality is that this ringing ear sensation is definitely a cry for enable, that means that our bodies are sending this seem for a strategy for alarming us that there is some underlying health-related issue that we must concentrate to. Tinnitus Ursachen - what causes tinnitus? Essentially the most frequent tinnitus Ursachen (causes of tinnitus) are ear bacterial infections, psychological overall health connected ailments, sound injury, hearing impairment and listening to decline, scuba diving injuries, vertigo (Meniere?s disease), cervical backbone problems, tooth and jaw space difficulties at the same time as worry. While you can see, none of such well being ailments must be taken flippantly, thus in case you've been suffering from inside ringing, whistling or roaring appears for your more time period of time of your time (3 months or maybe more), it is best to make an appointment with all your health care practitioner and be subjected to quantity of checkups. Nonetheless, anything you should really know is the fact normally the human ear at times tends to decide on up these noises which have been reduced frequency and so they can take place even for just a one who is in ideal health. Your situation turns into trouble the instant these noises linger inside the ear, impairing the listening to and leading to irritation towards the individual who bargains while using the challenge. Tinnitus Ursachen - the implications of tinnitus If an individual chooses to ignore the constant ear ringing sensation and doesn?t get action to ascertain the actual tinnitus ursachen, he faces a lot more challenging health and fitness prognosis in the upcoming, in particular in the event the ringing and buzzing noises are enhanced at nighttime. This typically leads to sleeplessness, judgment impairment and finally ends up with psychological well being decay due to inability from the man or woman to focus on the environmental notion. When the man or woman seeks for medical support plus the physician determines the fundamental causes of tinnitus, the focus from the treatment is going to be put on resolution in the brings about in the condition instead of the problem alone. Tinnitus Ursachen - the frequent procedures and strategies for tinnitus reduction With regards to Tinnitus Ursachen, we can't say which trigger will be the most typical, as the situation is numerous from just one affected individual to another, nonetheless we might remark the most common means of tinnitus remedy, which is the habituation treatment. The habituation treatment in its foundation is surely an adoption of your technique of finding out to live while using the internal ear ringing excitement. webpage Consequently the patient is inspired to shift the eye through the interior ear appears and be much more attentive to your environmental seems.
A man accused of being one of the "most prolific sellers" of counterfeit electronics in the UK has just been sent down for two and a half years. Over 4,000 KiRFs, mainly consisting of knock-off Sennheiser and Monster headphones, were found at Michael Reeder's address, with a value of around £250,000 ($400,000). However, Sennheiser claims this is just 1 percent of the total number of items Reeder has sold online, which is why the German manufacturer has taken a keen interest in his prosecution. Last year, Sennheiser introduced a series of authentication technologies to prevent counterfeiting that was mainly originating in China -- including QR codes on product packaging that customers can verify online. If Sennheiser's estimate of 400,000 fake items is accurate, then it makes the UK's recent Microsoft Windows scandal look almost like small fry.
Update: Apologies for the earlier stumble with missing zeroes on this post.
If you're already starting to feel that shiny 'wow' factor fade from BlackBerry 10, then you'll be glad to know about some new features that are primed to appear with the next update. Reports are now flowing in from developers that suggest an HDR camera mode, PIN-to-PIN messaging within the BlackBerry Hub and an improved text selector are all likely candidates for inclusion in BlackBerry 10.1 OS. Other smaller tweaks include the ability to paste phone numbers into the dialer, the option to disable alerts for specific applications and the ability to check for app updates more easily. These reports are based on a pre-release version of BlackBerry 10.1 OS that the company recently shared with its developers, and while the list is by no means comprehensive, it sure beats unsubstantiated rumors.
Recipe for large numbers of stem cells requires only one ingredient, says NIH/Pitt teamPublic release date: 17-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Anita Srikameswaran SrikamAV@upmc.edu 412-578-9193 University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences
Stem cells and tissue-specific cells can be grown in abundance from mature mammalian cells simply by blocking a certain membrane protein, according to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their experiments, reported today in Scientific Reports, also show that the process doesn't require other kinds of cells or agents to artificially support cell growth and doesn't activate cancer genes.
Scientists hope that lab-grown stem cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which have the ability to produce specialized cells such as neurons and cardiac cells, could one day be used to treat diseases and repair damaged tissues, said co-author Jeffrey S. Isenberg, M.D., associate professor, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Pitt School of Medicine.
"Even though stem cells are able to self-renew, they are quite challenging to grow in the lab," he said. "Often you have to use feeder cells or introduce viral vectors to artificially create the conditions needed for these cells to survive and thrive."
In 2008, prior to joining Pitt, Dr. Isenberg was working in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) lab of senior author David D. Roberts, Ph.D., using agents that block a membrane protein called CD47 to explore their effects on blood vessels. He noticed that when cells from the lining of the lungs, called endothelium, had been treated with a CD47 blocker, they stayed healthy and maintained their growth and function for months.
Dr. Roberts' NIH team continued to experiment with CD47 blockade, focusing on defining the underlying molecular mechanisms that control cell growth.
They found that endothelial cells obtained from mice lacking CD47 multiplied readily and thrived in a culture dish, unlike those from control mice. Lead author Sukhbir Kaur, Ph.D., discovered that this resulted from increased expression of four genes that are regarded to be essential for formation of iPS cells. When placed into a defined growth medium, cells lacking CD47 spontaneously formed clusters characteristic of iPS cells. By then introducing various growth factors into the culture medium, these cells could be directed to become cells of other tissue types. Despite their vigorous growth, they didn't form tumors when injected into mice, a major disadvantage when using existing iPS cells.
"Stem cells prepared by this new procedure should be much safer to use in patients," Dr. Roberts noted. "Also, the technique opens up opportunities to treat various illnesses by injecting a drug that stimulates patients to make more of their own stem cells."
According to Dr. Isenberg, "These experiments indicate that we can take a primary human or other mammalian cell, even a mature adult cell, and by targeting CD47 turn on its pluripotent capability. We can get brain cells, liver cells, muscle cells and more. In the short term, they could be a boon for a variety of research questions in the lab."
In the future, blocking CD47 might make it possible to generate large numbers of healthy cells for therapies, such as alternatives to conventional bone marrow transplantation and complex tissue and organ bioengineering, he added.
"These exciting findings provide a rationale for using CD47 blocking therapies to increase stem cell uptake and survival in transplanted organs, matrix grafts, or other applications," said Mark Gladwin, M.D., professor and chief, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Pitt School of Medicine. "This continues a strong and productive collaboration between investigators at the NCI and the University of Pittsburgh's Vascular Medicine Institute."
###
Co-authors of the paper include David R. Soto-Pantoja, Ph.D., Michael L. Pendrak, Ph.D., Alina Nicolae, M.D., Ph.D., Zuqin Nie, Ph.D., and David Levens, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Cancer Institute (NCI); Erica V. Stein, B.S., M.Ed., of NCI and George Washington University; Chengyu Liu, Ph.D., of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; Abdel G. Elkahloun, Ph.D., of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI); and Satya P. Singh, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The project was funded by the NIH, NCI and NHGRI intramural programs and grants HL108954-01, HL103455-01, 11BGIA7210001; the Institute for Transfusion Medicine, the Western Pennsylvania Hemophilia Center, and Pitt's Vascular Medicine Institute.
About the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
As one of the nation's leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top 10 recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1998. In rankings recently released by the National Science Foundation, Pitt ranked fifth among all American universities in total federal science and engineering research and development support.
Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region's economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see http://www.medschool.pitt.edu.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Recipe for large numbers of stem cells requires only one ingredient, says NIH/Pitt teamPublic release date: 17-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Anita Srikameswaran SrikamAV@upmc.edu 412-578-9193 University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences
Stem cells and tissue-specific cells can be grown in abundance from mature mammalian cells simply by blocking a certain membrane protein, according to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their experiments, reported today in Scientific Reports, also show that the process doesn't require other kinds of cells or agents to artificially support cell growth and doesn't activate cancer genes.
Scientists hope that lab-grown stem cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which have the ability to produce specialized cells such as neurons and cardiac cells, could one day be used to treat diseases and repair damaged tissues, said co-author Jeffrey S. Isenberg, M.D., associate professor, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Pitt School of Medicine.
"Even though stem cells are able to self-renew, they are quite challenging to grow in the lab," he said. "Often you have to use feeder cells or introduce viral vectors to artificially create the conditions needed for these cells to survive and thrive."
In 2008, prior to joining Pitt, Dr. Isenberg was working in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) lab of senior author David D. Roberts, Ph.D., using agents that block a membrane protein called CD47 to explore their effects on blood vessels. He noticed that when cells from the lining of the lungs, called endothelium, had been treated with a CD47 blocker, they stayed healthy and maintained their growth and function for months.
Dr. Roberts' NIH team continued to experiment with CD47 blockade, focusing on defining the underlying molecular mechanisms that control cell growth.
They found that endothelial cells obtained from mice lacking CD47 multiplied readily and thrived in a culture dish, unlike those from control mice. Lead author Sukhbir Kaur, Ph.D., discovered that this resulted from increased expression of four genes that are regarded to be essential for formation of iPS cells. When placed into a defined growth medium, cells lacking CD47 spontaneously formed clusters characteristic of iPS cells. By then introducing various growth factors into the culture medium, these cells could be directed to become cells of other tissue types. Despite their vigorous growth, they didn't form tumors when injected into mice, a major disadvantage when using existing iPS cells.
"Stem cells prepared by this new procedure should be much safer to use in patients," Dr. Roberts noted. "Also, the technique opens up opportunities to treat various illnesses by injecting a drug that stimulates patients to make more of their own stem cells."
According to Dr. Isenberg, "These experiments indicate that we can take a primary human or other mammalian cell, even a mature adult cell, and by targeting CD47 turn on its pluripotent capability. We can get brain cells, liver cells, muscle cells and more. In the short term, they could be a boon for a variety of research questions in the lab."
In the future, blocking CD47 might make it possible to generate large numbers of healthy cells for therapies, such as alternatives to conventional bone marrow transplantation and complex tissue and organ bioengineering, he added.
"These exciting findings provide a rationale for using CD47 blocking therapies to increase stem cell uptake and survival in transplanted organs, matrix grafts, or other applications," said Mark Gladwin, M.D., professor and chief, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Pitt School of Medicine. "This continues a strong and productive collaboration between investigators at the NCI and the University of Pittsburgh's Vascular Medicine Institute."
###
Co-authors of the paper include David R. Soto-Pantoja, Ph.D., Michael L. Pendrak, Ph.D., Alina Nicolae, M.D., Ph.D., Zuqin Nie, Ph.D., and David Levens, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Cancer Institute (NCI); Erica V. Stein, B.S., M.Ed., of NCI and George Washington University; Chengyu Liu, Ph.D., of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; Abdel G. Elkahloun, Ph.D., of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI); and Satya P. Singh, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The project was funded by the NIH, NCI and NHGRI intramural programs and grants HL108954-01, HL103455-01, 11BGIA7210001; the Institute for Transfusion Medicine, the Western Pennsylvania Hemophilia Center, and Pitt's Vascular Medicine Institute.
About the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
As one of the nation's leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top 10 recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1998. In rankings recently released by the National Science Foundation, Pitt ranked fifth among all American universities in total federal science and engineering research and development support.
Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region's economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see http://www.medschool.pitt.edu.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Risk assets rebounded and the yen resumed its fall on Wednesday as a sharp sell-off over the past two sessions lured bargain hunters, whose appetites were boosted by firm American corporate earnings and by data pointing to ongoing U.S. monetary stimulus.
European stock markets were seen modestly higher, with financial spreadbetters predicting London's FTSE 100, Paris's CAC-40 and Frankfurt's DAX to open up as much as 0.2 percent. U.S. stock futures were down 0.2 percent, however, suggesting a soft start at Wall Street.
While markets regained some stability after investors likely liquidated part of their excessively built-up positions in the previous session's sell-off, wariness remained.
"We're now going through an uncertain period for risk assets, really," said Stan Shamu, market strategist at IG Markets. "The market is becoming a bit choppy and just range-bound as investors become a bit uncertain which way the market wants to swing this time around."
The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.4 percent, rebounding from Tuesday's session when it fell as much as 1 percent and was close to its 2013 low.
The recovery in commodities soothed investor sentiment in resources-rich Australia, pushing its shares up 1 percent.
Shanghai shares bucked the trend and fell 0.7 percent, while South Korean shares were flat on earnings concerns after Samsung Engineering reported first-quarter losses on Tuesday, highlighting the vulnerability of firms with overseas exposure.
The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday trimmed projections for global economic growth for this year and next to take into account government spending cuts in the United States and the latest struggles of recession-stricken Europe.
GAINS BY GOLD
Gold, which earlier led the liquidation of assets across the board after weaker-than-expected Chinese and U.S. economic reports stoked growth concerns, rose 1 percent to a session high of $1,381.80. But it remain volatile, last trading at $1,373.85, up 0.4 percent, as reduced prices drew buyers of gold bars, coins and nuggets.
Crude oil futures also firmed, with U.S. crude steadying at $88.74 a barrel, crawling up from a four-month low of $86.06 hit on Tuesday. Brent rose 0.4 percent to $100.33 a barrel, after breaching below $100 for the first time in nine months on Tuesday.
Japan's Nikkei average climbed 1.2 percent as the yen weakened. The Nikkei tumbled as much as 2 percent on Tuesday when the yen's rebound took a toll on sentiment.
"After seeing a pull-back, there is an opportunity for buying on the dips," Yutaka Miura, a senior technical analyst at Mizuho Securities, said of Japanese shares.
European shares fell on Tuesday on weak ZEW German consumer confidence numbers and heightened concerns about the earnings outlook for European companies. But U.S. stocks gained more than 1 percent after strong earnings from some of America's biggest companies such as Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson.
U.S. consumer prices fell in March for the first time in four months and factory output slipped, reinforcing the view that the Federal Reserve will maintain its ultra-easy monetary policy stance to support economic growth.
"We still believe that the recent volatility in the commodity prices was mainly driven by long position liquidation, while the underlying backdrop remains risk-positive due to expanding global monetary easing," said Vassili Serebriakov, strategist at BNP Paribas.
U.S. gold futures hit a session low of $1,365 and last traded at $1,380.2, after plunging to $1,321.50 on Tuesday, their lowest level since September 2010. Spot gold shed as much as 2.3 percent to $1,321.35, the lowest level in more than two years, on Tuesday.
Holdings at SPDR Gold Trust, the world's largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, fell 0.73 percent to 1145.92 tonnes on Tuesday, while holdings of global gold ETFs were at their lowest in more than a year.
The dollar gained 0.9 percent to 98.42 yen after touching a low of 95.67 yen on Tuesday, while the euro rose 0.6 percent to 129.64 yen, well above Tuesday's low of 125 yen.
"In contrast to prior growth scares, stocks in the sweet spot of monetary policy - high quality, high dividend yield, low volatility - are supporting the broader market," said Barclays Capital in a research note. "The question remains if the market can hold up in the face of a soft global growth outlook."
(Additional reporting by Ayai Tomisawa in Tokyo, Ian Chua and Thuy Ong in Sydney; Editing by Richard Borsuk)
ALMA pinpoints early galaxies at record speedPublic release date: 17-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Richard Hook rhook@eso.org 49-893-200-6655 ESO
The most fertile bursts of star birth in the early Universe took place in distant galaxies containing lots of cosmic dust. These galaxies are of key importance to our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution over the history of the Universe, but the dust obscures them and makes them difficult to identify with visible-light telescopes. To pick them out, astronomers must use telescopes that observe light at longer wavelengths, around one millimetre, such as ALMA.
"Astronomers have waited for data like this for over a decade. ALMA is so powerful that it has revolutionised the way that we can observe these galaxies, even though the telescope was not fully completed at the time of the observations," said Jacqueline Hodge (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie, Germany), lead author of the paper presenting the ALMA observations.
The best map so far of these distant dusty galaxies was made using the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX). It surveyed a patch of the sky about the size of the full Moon [1], and detected 126 such galaxies. But, in the APEX images, each burst of star formation appeared as a relatively fuzzy blob, which may be so broad that it covered more than one galaxy in sharper images made at other wavelengths. Without knowing exactly which of the galaxies are forming the stars, astronomers were hampered in their study of star formation in the early Universe.
Pinpointing the correct galaxies requires sharper observations, and sharper observations require a bigger telescope. While APEX has a single 12-metre-diameter dish-shaped antenna, telescopes such as ALMA use multiple APEX-like dishes spread over wide distances. The signals from all the antennas are combined, and the effect is like that of a single, giant telescope as wide as the whole array of antennas.
The team used ALMA to observe the galaxies from the APEX map during ALMA's first phase of scientific observations, with the telescope still under construction. Using less than a quarter of the final complement of 66 antennas, spread over distances of up to 125 metres, ALMA needed just two minutes per galaxy to pinpoint each one within a tiny region 200 times smaller than the broad APEX blobs, and with three times the sensitivity. ALMA is so much more sensitive than other telescopes of its kind that, in just a few hours, it doubled the total number of such observations ever made.
Not only could the team unambiguously identify which galaxies had regions of active star formation, but in up to half the cases they found that multiple star-forming galaxies had been blended into a single blob in the previous observations. ALMA's sharp vision enabled them to distinguish the separate galaxies.
"We previously thought the brightest of these galaxies were forming stars a thousand times more vigorously than our own galaxy, the Milky Way, putting them at risk of blowing themselves apart. The ALMA images revealed multiple, smaller galaxies forming stars at somewhat more reasonable rates," said Alexander Karim (Durham University, United Kingdom), a member of the team and lead author of a companion paper on this work.
The results form the first statistically reliable catalogue of dusty star-forming galaxies in the early Universe, and provide a vital foundation for further investigations of these galaxies' properties at different wavelengths, without risk of misinterpretation due to the galaxies appearing blended together.
Despite ALMA's sharp vision and unrivalled sensitivity, telescopes such as APEX still have a role to play. "APEX can cover a wide area of the sky faster than ALMA, and so it's ideal for discovering these galaxies. Once we know where to look, we can use ALMA to locate them exactly," concluded Ian Smail (Durham University, United Kingdom), co-author of the new paper.
###
Notes
[1] The observations were made in a region of the sky in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace) called the Chandra Deep Field South. It has been extensively studied already by many telescopes both on the ground and in space. The new observations from ALMA extend the deep and high resolution observations of this region into the millimetre/submillimetre part of the spectrum and complement the earlier observations.
More information
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) is a collaboration between Max Planck Institut fur Radioastronomie (MPIfR) at 50%, Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) at 23% and the European Southern Observatory at 27%.
This research was presented in the paper "An ALMA Survey of Submillimeter Galaxies in the Extended Chandra Deep Field South: Source Catalog and Multiplicity", by J. Hodge et al., to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.
The companion paper, "An ALMA survey of submillimetre galaxies in the Extended Chandra Deep Field South: High resolution 870 ?m source counts", on the multiplicity of the sources by A. Karim et al., will appear in the Oxford University Press journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The team is composed of J. A. Hodge (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie Heidelberg, Germany [MPIA]), A. Karim (Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, United Kingdom), I. Smail (Durham), A. M. Swinbank (Durham), F. Walter (MPIA), A. D. Biggs (ESO), R. J. Ivison (UKATC and Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom), A. Weiss (Max-Planck Institut fur Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany), D. M. Alexander (Durham), F. Bertoldi (Argelander-Institute of Astronomy, Bonn University, Germany), W. N. Brandt (Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos & Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA), S. C. Chapman (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, United Kingdom), K. E. K. Coppin (McGill University, Montreal, Canada), P. Cox (IRAM, Saint-Martin d'Heres, France), A. L. R. Danielson (Durham), H. Dannerbauer (University of Vienna, Austria), C. De Breuck (ESO), R. Decarli (MPIA), A. C. Edge (Durham), T. R. Greve (University College London, United Kingdom), K. K. Knudsen (Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala Space Observatory, Onsala, Sweden), K. M. Menten (Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany), H.-W. Rix (MPIA), E. Schinnerer (MPIA), J. M. Simpson (Durham), J. L. Wardlow (Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, USA) and P. van der Werf (Leiden Observatory, Netherlands).
ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world's most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world's largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is the European partner of a revolutionary astronomical telescope ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. ESO is currently planning the 39-metre European Extremely Large optical/near-infrared Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become "the world's biggest eye on the sky".
Alexander Karim
Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University
Durham, United Kingdom
Tel: +49 228 733658 (Christina Stein-Schmitz)
Email: alexander.karim@durham.ac.uk
Mark Swinbank
Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University
Durham, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 191 334 3772 (Lindsay Borrero)
Email: a.m.swinbank@durham.ac.uk
Richard Hook
ESO, Public Information Officer
Garching bei Mnchen, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
ALMA pinpoints early galaxies at record speedPublic release date: 17-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Richard Hook rhook@eso.org 49-893-200-6655 ESO
The most fertile bursts of star birth in the early Universe took place in distant galaxies containing lots of cosmic dust. These galaxies are of key importance to our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution over the history of the Universe, but the dust obscures them and makes them difficult to identify with visible-light telescopes. To pick them out, astronomers must use telescopes that observe light at longer wavelengths, around one millimetre, such as ALMA.
"Astronomers have waited for data like this for over a decade. ALMA is so powerful that it has revolutionised the way that we can observe these galaxies, even though the telescope was not fully completed at the time of the observations," said Jacqueline Hodge (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie, Germany), lead author of the paper presenting the ALMA observations.
The best map so far of these distant dusty galaxies was made using the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX). It surveyed a patch of the sky about the size of the full Moon [1], and detected 126 such galaxies. But, in the APEX images, each burst of star formation appeared as a relatively fuzzy blob, which may be so broad that it covered more than one galaxy in sharper images made at other wavelengths. Without knowing exactly which of the galaxies are forming the stars, astronomers were hampered in their study of star formation in the early Universe.
Pinpointing the correct galaxies requires sharper observations, and sharper observations require a bigger telescope. While APEX has a single 12-metre-diameter dish-shaped antenna, telescopes such as ALMA use multiple APEX-like dishes spread over wide distances. The signals from all the antennas are combined, and the effect is like that of a single, giant telescope as wide as the whole array of antennas.
The team used ALMA to observe the galaxies from the APEX map during ALMA's first phase of scientific observations, with the telescope still under construction. Using less than a quarter of the final complement of 66 antennas, spread over distances of up to 125 metres, ALMA needed just two minutes per galaxy to pinpoint each one within a tiny region 200 times smaller than the broad APEX blobs, and with three times the sensitivity. ALMA is so much more sensitive than other telescopes of its kind that, in just a few hours, it doubled the total number of such observations ever made.
Not only could the team unambiguously identify which galaxies had regions of active star formation, but in up to half the cases they found that multiple star-forming galaxies had been blended into a single blob in the previous observations. ALMA's sharp vision enabled them to distinguish the separate galaxies.
"We previously thought the brightest of these galaxies were forming stars a thousand times more vigorously than our own galaxy, the Milky Way, putting them at risk of blowing themselves apart. The ALMA images revealed multiple, smaller galaxies forming stars at somewhat more reasonable rates," said Alexander Karim (Durham University, United Kingdom), a member of the team and lead author of a companion paper on this work.
The results form the first statistically reliable catalogue of dusty star-forming galaxies in the early Universe, and provide a vital foundation for further investigations of these galaxies' properties at different wavelengths, without risk of misinterpretation due to the galaxies appearing blended together.
Despite ALMA's sharp vision and unrivalled sensitivity, telescopes such as APEX still have a role to play. "APEX can cover a wide area of the sky faster than ALMA, and so it's ideal for discovering these galaxies. Once we know where to look, we can use ALMA to locate them exactly," concluded Ian Smail (Durham University, United Kingdom), co-author of the new paper.
###
Notes
[1] The observations were made in a region of the sky in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace) called the Chandra Deep Field South. It has been extensively studied already by many telescopes both on the ground and in space. The new observations from ALMA extend the deep and high resolution observations of this region into the millimetre/submillimetre part of the spectrum and complement the earlier observations.
More information
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) is a collaboration between Max Planck Institut fur Radioastronomie (MPIfR) at 50%, Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) at 23% and the European Southern Observatory at 27%.
This research was presented in the paper "An ALMA Survey of Submillimeter Galaxies in the Extended Chandra Deep Field South: Source Catalog and Multiplicity", by J. Hodge et al., to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.
The companion paper, "An ALMA survey of submillimetre galaxies in the Extended Chandra Deep Field South: High resolution 870 ?m source counts", on the multiplicity of the sources by A. Karim et al., will appear in the Oxford University Press journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The team is composed of J. A. Hodge (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie Heidelberg, Germany [MPIA]), A. Karim (Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, United Kingdom), I. Smail (Durham), A. M. Swinbank (Durham), F. Walter (MPIA), A. D. Biggs (ESO), R. J. Ivison (UKATC and Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom), A. Weiss (Max-Planck Institut fur Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany), D. M. Alexander (Durham), F. Bertoldi (Argelander-Institute of Astronomy, Bonn University, Germany), W. N. Brandt (Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos & Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA), S. C. Chapman (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, United Kingdom), K. E. K. Coppin (McGill University, Montreal, Canada), P. Cox (IRAM, Saint-Martin d'Heres, France), A. L. R. Danielson (Durham), H. Dannerbauer (University of Vienna, Austria), C. De Breuck (ESO), R. Decarli (MPIA), A. C. Edge (Durham), T. R. Greve (University College London, United Kingdom), K. K. Knudsen (Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala Space Observatory, Onsala, Sweden), K. M. Menten (Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany), H.-W. Rix (MPIA), E. Schinnerer (MPIA), J. M. Simpson (Durham), J. L. Wardlow (Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, USA) and P. van der Werf (Leiden Observatory, Netherlands).
ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world's most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world's largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is the European partner of a revolutionary astronomical telescope ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. ESO is currently planning the 39-metre European Extremely Large optical/near-infrared Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become "the world's biggest eye on the sky".
Alexander Karim
Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University
Durham, United Kingdom
Tel: +49 228 733658 (Christina Stein-Schmitz)
Email: alexander.karim@durham.ac.uk
Mark Swinbank
Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University
Durham, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 191 334 3772 (Lindsay Borrero)
Email: a.m.swinbank@durham.ac.uk
Richard Hook
ESO, Public Information Officer
Garching bei Mnchen, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
+1 more for East London's Tech City cluster: big data company Cloudera has announced the opening of its EMEA HQ on Rivington Street, Shoreditch. In late 2010, the U.K. coalition government created the Tech City label to slap on an existing, organic startup hub -- promising equity finance for businesses with high growth potential and money for tech & innovation centres.
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