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Monday, February 4, 2013

Three bodies found at Mexico oil blast site, toll reaches 36

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican rescue workers found three more bodies over the weekend amid the rubble of a deadly blast that tore through state oil firm Pemex's main office complex, the government said, as search efforts appeared to near a close.

The death toll from Thursday's explosion stands at 36, Pemex said via Twitter. Rescue workers had been digging through the last sections of the building's basement and could soon call off their search. One person was reported still missing.

Attorney General Jesus Murillo said on Friday that it was too early to say if the explosion was due to an attack, an accident or negligence, but he promised results of an investigation in the coming days.

Murillo toured the site on Sunday, but did not publicly comment on the progress of the investigation. Officials have communicated details through social media about the disaster, which struck just before a long holiday weekend.

The investigation will test confidence in President Enrique Pena Nieto, whose Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled Mexico for most of the last century but lost power in 2000, when it was accused of fostering widespread corruption.

Local media reported the three bodies were maintenance workers. A woman who worked as a secretary was still missing, but she was unlikely to be found so deep in the wreckage.

The blast occurred two months into Pena Nieto's presidency, just as Congress was preparing to discuss his plans to open up the state-run energy industry to more private investment.

Hobbled by heavy state taxation, Pemex saw production slump in the last decade and its safety record has been stained by a series of deadly accidents, including an explosion that killed about 30 at a gas facility last year.

(Reporting by Michael O'Boyle and Adriana Barrera; Editing by Simon Gardner and Stacey Joyce)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/three-bodies-found-mexico-pemex-blast-toll-reaches-043451028--finance.html

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Sunday, February 3, 2013

Japan boosts defense as some in China and Taiwan agree on disputed islets

Mainland Chinese will support the Taiwanese 'because the Diaoyu Dao are part of China, whether that?s Beijing or Taipei,' says a member of Beijing's federation of activists who oppose Japan?s claim.

By Ralph Jennings,?Correspondent / February 1, 2013

Chinese surveillance ship Haijian No. 51 (l.) and a Japan Coast Guard vessel sail near disputed islands called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, seen in the background, in the East China Sea, in Sept. 2012.

Kyodo News/AP/File

Enlarge

High-risk friction in the East China Sea between Asia?s top economic powers is scaling up in the new year, killing hopes of an early solution, as Beijing sends planes, Japan raises its defense budget, and Taiwan tests the waters again.

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Tokyo recently approved a once-off 40 billion yen ($436 million) boost in military spending and plans to form a special military unit with 10 patrol ships and two destroyers to defend a group of islets at the core of the dispute.?

In January, Japanese fighters confronted planes from China on approach to an air defense identification zone near the islets. Later, three Chinese maritime surveillance vessels approached the islets, and Taiwan?s coast guard escorted a small "fishing boat" with 10 activists reportedly on board to the same place. Japan sent all the vessels away.?

China, Japan, and Taiwan claim sovereignty over the islets, called the Senkakus in Tokyo, the Diaoyu by Beijing, and Tiaoyutai by Taipei. Japan controls the eight uninhabited islands, giving it a massive swathe of territorial water rich in fisheries and possible undersea natural gas reserves.?

?At this particular time, all sides will just take things as is, including the US, which will try to calm everybody down,? says Shane Lee, a political scientist at Chang Jung Christian University in Taiwan. The dispute, he says, ?could take decades to solve.?

Few predict a war, but analysts say leaders in each claimant government stand to gain from fueling the dispute.

China has sent vessels toward the islets 24 times since the dispute escalated in mid-2012 following Japan?s purchase of the islets from a private owner, Japanese media say. New Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping wants to show strength in his early days of consecrating leadership, analysts say.

China and Japan already disagree on a series of issues stemming from World War II.

Japan wants a working relationship with the world's No. 2 economy, China. but also needs to stand up to Beijing for the home audience.

?What they do has to strike a difficult balance between calming Beijing and standing up to Beijing,? says Scott Harold, associate political scientist at the RAND Corp., an American think tank.

Taiwan, though ever overshadowed for lack of diplomatic clout, is also becoming harder to ignore.?

Popular support?

On Jan. 24, the Japanese coast guard turned water cannons on the Taiwanese fishing boat with the 10 activists, sending them back to Taipei some 222 kilometers (138 miles) away. The incident earned the crew popular support in mainland China.

?When I got back a lot of people came up to me and told me that they thought Japan?s act was too extreme,? says Huang Hsi-lin, crew member and chairman of a Taiwan-based alliance to claim the islets. ?We plan to make another move.?

Activists in China laud Taiwanese crews that approach the islets.

?The mainland Chinese masses will support those Taiwanese because the Diaoyu Dao are part of China, whether that?s Beijing or Taipei,? says Zhang Likun, member of Beijing's federation of activists who oppose Japan?s claim.

Most Chinese in the mainland are passionate about the East China Sea dispute, Mr. Zhang adds. Taiwanese are generally more indifferent.

Some suspect that it is not only activists from China and Taiwan who are working against Japan. As the once bitter political rivals have shelved differences since 2008, Beijing and Taipei may be cooperating behind closed doors, some analysts believe.

Taiwan says it?s not working with China. But cooperation might help staunchly self-ruled Taiwan defer political talks with Beijing, which is keen to reunify.

?Tacit cooperation with Beijing on [the] maritime island dispute is viewed by some in Taiwan as a way to say to mainland [China] ?we?re showing good faith so don?t pressure us move ahead on steps toward reunification right now,?? Mr. Harold says.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/lXcp-Br_3T8/Japan-boosts-defense-as-some-in-China-and-Taiwan-agree-on-disputed-islets

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Maximize Your Happiness By Following These Self Help Principles ...

Self improvement is an area in which there is much to learn. Collecting this knowledge will help you improve yourself. If you want to grow and be a better person, start with learning and applying that knowledge to your life as often as possible.

Can?t find a date? Think about searching online. There have been quite a few couples these days that have met on the web. Yours could be out there searching for you. There are pros and cons with both of them.

Attaining well-being begins with supporting your body?s needs. Listen to your body?s cues. If it tells you that it needs food, water or rest, LISTEN. You need a healthy body to serve you for years to come. If you choose to ignore it, however, it may choose to ignore you at some point.

TIP! During the day, try to find ways to push yourself to the limit. Trying new things makes doors open up for you.

Be sure to read positive books on the subject of self improvement. Having a good personal development book can give you insight and advice that will make a difference in your life forever. It is important, however, that you choose a book that has received good reviews. There is no policing on the writers of self improvement books, and some of them are sorely lacking in credibility.

Pinpoint what is getting in the way of your success. This is hard to do for a lot of people. You might not be able to find your weakness, but you can find the way to change them. When you are able to get rid of obstacles, then your path to a successful future becomes easier to navigate.

Unless you take care of yourself, you won?t be able to care for anyone else. It doesn?t matter if you are succeeding or failing in your path. You should always find time to rest your body so that you can renew yourself.

TIP! Whereas trying to fix your problems yourself is always a great idea, sometimes you might have to seek out professional help. There is only so much that can be done with self-help books; sometimes what is required is the expertise and personal attention that only a therapist can give.

When you are working on your self improvement, you should realize you deserve to be the best you can be. Know that you owe it to yourself to do your best. In the end, you will know that you did all that you can and you will not have any regrets.

Do you drink too often? Are you addicted to smoking cigarettes, or partake in other activities that can hurt your body? The body is considered a temple, and it needs to be treated with care and respect. Kicking your worst habits is a large part of becoming a happier and more healthy individual. Look at some of the habits you have and evaluate if there is anything you can change for the better.

Instead of talking about your accomplishments, ask some other people about some of the things they have accomplished and what they are most proud of. You will then find out things that others have done to accomplish their goals, and you will get some insight.

TIP! Talking to a professional counselor or a pastor can be an extremely rewarding experience. These people have lots of training and experience with this sort of thing.

The first step in changing is making a decision to change. If you want to become a better person, you have to take concrete steps to make it happen.

Direct your self improvement efforts toward the values that are important to you. By concentrating your emotional energy on the positive aspects of everyday life and shutting out the negative, you will be on the road to inner peace.

Set goals as to how you want your life to be and make them happen. If you do nothing but sit around dreaming of how you want your life, you?ll never get it. You need to do everything in your power to make your dreams come true.

Go to the movies with a friend. You will be thrust into a busy setting and out of your comfort zone, but you will not have to excessively socialize with others. In addition, this can give you the opportunity to become comfortable in crowded rooms.

Try to find a book or article that encourages or uplifts you. Such texts might include religious scripture, inspirational books, poetry and other forms of writing. If you have something specific that you can go read when you need to ground yourself, you have a ready-to-use method to always put yourself at ease.

A positive attitude can be a powerful way to grow your spiritual nature. When you carry a poor attitude, it will directly affect your mood and develop a negative aura. Instead, stay positive and tell yourself that having a good attitude will help you achieve your goals.

TIP! Declaring lowliness is a crucial step in advancing in personal development. When you accept that you are but a tiny speck in the scope of our universe, you can begin to realize that there is much to learn if you hope to advance.

Remember to practice humility. Everyone is only a small part of the universe. Everyone has a lot to learn from everyone else. Understand this and open yourself up to new opportunities. You will be able to learn amazing things from each person you encounter if you encounter them in an open-minded fashion.

Find your personal values so you can create your personal development strategy. Focus on those areas first to make the positive changes that are most important to your happiness. Focus on what makes you a happier person and what needs to be improved. By doing this, changes that you choose to make will be much easier to adhere to.

TIP! Treat everyone, regardless of status, with a high level of respect. Your treatment of others is a direct reflection of you character.

If you apply all of the things you read here today, you have a lot of great places to start towards your next steps in personal development. Add the new information you gain to your personal development plan.

Blue widgets are a tough topic that many people find intimidating. Though some information is conflicting, there is a lot to learn from. The article you just read should have given you a good idea of how to approach the subject of Goal Setting in an efficient way. Go over this article again, and use these tips as a guide while you do more research on Goal Setting.

Source: http://www.projectpb.net/blog/index.php/personal_development/maximize-your-happiness-by-following-these-self-help-principles-3/

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Twitter says hackers compromise 250K accounts

FILE - In this Sept. 14, 2010 file photo, Twitter CEO Evan Williams makes a presentation about changes to the social network at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, In the latest online attack, Twitter says hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users, Friday, Feb. 1, 2013. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Twitter confirmed Friday that it had become the latest victim in a number of high-profile cyber-attacks against media companies, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users.

The social media giant said in a blog posting that earlier this week it detected attempts to gain access to its user data. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected.

But it discovered that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users. Twitter reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising affected users.

The online attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both American newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.

China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks.

"Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage Internet security," the Chinese Defense Ministry recently said. "The Chinese military has never supported any hacking activities."

Although Twitter said in its blog that the attack "was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident."

"The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked," the blog said. "For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users."

One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee's home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.

Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers "a toehold" in Twitter's internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company's system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users' passwords.

In a telephone interview Friday, Soltani said that the relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren't on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company's servers.

Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.

That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist's movements.

"More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service," Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist's emails.

___

AP reporters Raphael Satter in London and Didi Tang in Beijing contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-02-01-Twitter%20Hack/id-2fa6a0f79fe048f1a97e8f070cba5414

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Friday, February 1, 2013

Pfizer's animal health unit, Zoetis, soars in IPO

Shares of Pfizer's animal health business, Zoetis, surged in their trading debut after the company's IPO raised $2.2 billion ? the largest IPO by a U.S. company since Facebook Inc. raised $16 billion last May.

Pfizer Inc., the world's largest drugmaker, is keeping an ownership stake of at least 80 percent in Zoetis Inc. after the initial public offering of stock. The drugmaker is very likely to cut its stake in its spinoff with more stock sales down the road, said Scott Sweet, senior managing partner at IPOBoutique.com, which invests in IPOs and advises other investors on the deals.

The shares rose 18 percent, or $4.79, to $30.79 in midmorning trading Friday. The stock trades under the "ZTS" ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.

The New York company sold 86.1 million shares for $26 apiece, $1 above the top end of the range it estimated. That had suggested healthy demand for Zoetis from investors.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pfizers-animal-health-unit-zoetis-soars-ipo-152856633--finance.html

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Nanoparticles that look and act like cells

Jan. 31, 2013 ? By cloaking nanoparticles in the membranes of white blood cells, scientists at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute may have found a way to prevent the body from recognizing and destroying them before they deliver their drug payloads. The group describes its "LeukoLike Vectors," or LLVs, in a recent issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

"Our goal was to make a particle that is camouflaged within our bodies and escapes the surveillance of the immune system to reach its target undiscovered," Tasciotti said. "We accomplished this with the lipids and proteins present on the membrane of the very same cells of the immune system. We transferred the cell membranes to the surfaces of the particles and the result is that the body now recognizes these particles as its own and does not readily remove them."

Nanoparticles can deliver different types of drugs to specific cell types, for example, chemotherapy to cancer cells. But for all the benefits they offer and to get to where they need to go and deliver the needed drug, nanoparticles must somehow evade the body's immune system that recognizes them as intruders. The ability of the body's defenses to destroy nanoparticles is a major barrier to the use of nanotechnology in medicine. Systemically administered nanoparticles are captured and removed from the body within few minutes. With the membrane coating, they can survive for hours unharmed.

"Our cloaking strategy prevents the binding of opsonins -- signaling proteins that activate the immune system," said Department of Medicine Co-Chair Ennio Tasciotti, Ph.D., the study's principal investigator. "We compared the absorption of proteins onto the surface of uncoated and coated particles to see how the particles might evade the immune system response."

Tasciotti and his group took metabolically active leukocytes (white blood cells) and developed a procedure to separate membranes from cell innards. By coating their nanoparticles with intact membranes in their native composition of lipids and proteins, the researchers created the first drug-carrying nanoparticles that look and act like cells -- leukolike vectors.

"Using the membranes of white blood cells to coat a nanoparticle has never been done before," Tasciotti said. "LLVs are half man-made -- the synthetic silicon core -- and half made of man -- the cell membrane."

Can the membrane be produced entirely via synthetic means?

"Being able to use synthetic membranes or artificially-created membrane is definitely something we are planning for the future," Tasciotti said. "But for now, using our white blood cells is the most effective approach because they provide a finished product. The proteins that give us the greatest advantages are already within the membrane and we can use it as-is."

As the technology is developed, Tasciotti said a patient's own white cells could be harvested and used to create personalized LLVs. "Cloaked by the patient's own cell membranes, the nanoparticles would be far more likely to reach their targets and avoid the activation of the immune system surveillance," he said. To test whether the LLVs would be protected from macrophage sequestration and destruction, Tasciotti's team tested LLVs coated with human membranes and found that human macrophages left the LLVs unharmed, thus confirming the preservation of the self-recognition principle.

Nanoparticle research has generally focused on getting the particles to recognize specific tissue and to release drugs there, and only there. Comparative studies of LLVs' interaction with healthy and inflamed blood vessel cells showed the LLVs selectively targeted the inflamed tumor blood vessels.

"LLVs are dotted with proteins that help the particles reach specific targets, from inflamed or damaged tissues to cancer cells recruiting blood vessels," Tasciotti said. "Over time the membrane lipids and proteins will break away, leaving the nanoparticles to degrade naturally after releasing their payload."

The research team also looked at how well the drugs traveled through the LLV membrane. They found that rather than introducing an obstacle to drug release, the membrane provides controllable release of the drug once the nanoparticles reach their target tissue.

The present study used white blood cells from cell cultures. Tasciotti said one of his group's goals is culturing enough cells from the patient to be useful in drug therapy.

"We are aware that we will not always have access to an infinite number of white blood cells," Tasciotti said. "For this reason, we are working to optimize our system by using as little material as efficiently as possible. I expect this technology to become a new player in the crowded world of drug delivery system thanks to the opportunities it offers for the personalization of drug therapies."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Methodist Hospital, Houston.

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

Journal Reference:

Alessandro Parodi, Nicoletta Quattrocchi, Anne L. van de Ven, Ciro Chiappini, Michael Evangelopoulos, Jonathan O. Martinez, Brandon S. Brown, Sm Z. Khaled, Iman K. Yazdi, Maria Vittoria Enzo, Lucas Isenhart, Mauro Ferrari, Ennio Tasciotti. Synthetic nanoparticles functionalized with biomimetic leukocyte membranes possess cell-like functions. Nature Nanotechnology, 2012; 8 (1): 61 DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2012.212

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

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

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/PAAVP74IQbo/130131144114.htm

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Intergalactic Crash Scene Among Universe's Largest Things

A glowing cosmic structure millions of light-years long represents the aftermath of the impact of two merging galaxy clusters, researchers say.

"This is one of the biggest structures ever observed," study lead author Ettore Carretti told SPACE.com. "It is more than 100 times the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which already stretches for 100,000 light-years."

Carretti, an astrophysicist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, and his colleagues used the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales to analyze a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 3667. The cluster lies about 730 million light-years from Earth. (A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 5.9 trillion miles, or 9.5 trillion kilometers.)

"Clusters of galaxies are made of thousands of galaxies and are among the largest gravitationally bound structures," Carretti noted.

The researchers detected a diffuse radio glow in the gas and dust connecting the cluster's periphery to its core. The structure is about 13 million light-years long. [Biggest Structure in the Universe Explained (Infographic)]

Carretti said: "This is the first clear imaging of a huge impact between two merging clusters of galaxies. The overall structure we observe, part of which was already known, is a monster shock wave and its trailing wake caused by the cluster impact. The wake is the leftover after the passage of the shock, which leaves behind a turbulent 'shaken' medium."

The shock wave is expanding at a speed of about 2.6 million miles per hour (4.3 million kilometers per hour).

"This means that the overall structure we observe has taken some 2 billion years to form," Carretti said. "This is a long time, even compared to the age of the universe, which is 13.7 billion years. So what we observe has taken 15 percent of the age of the universe to form. These are huge structures and take cosmological times to form, and it is still expanding and evolving."

It remains uncertain how the merging clusters produced this glow. The researchers suggest the turbulence from the collision sent electrons zipping at near-light speeds, making them shine with radio waves in the process.

This kind of structure was predicted by cosmological simulations of galaxy cluster formation "but was never clearly pictured before," Carretti said. "Our results seem to confirm what was predicted by the simulations and will help understand how galaxy clusters formed and evolve."

The researchers want to check other galaxy clusters for similar structures. "We want to understand how common such very large-scale structures are and what would be the implications in understanding the formation and the evolution of the galaxy clusters," Carretti said.

The scientists will detail their findings in an upcoming issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter?@Spacedotcom. We're also on?Facebook?&?Google+.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/intergalactic-crash-scene-among-universes-largest-things-123346303.html

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