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শুক্রবার, ২২ মার্চ, ২০১৩

China's new leader visits Russia on first foreign trip

By Thomas Grove

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Chinese leader Xi Jinping sent a signal to the United States and Europe on Friday by visiting Russia on his first foreign trip as president, underlining the importance of Beijing's growing alliance with Moscow.

The world's largest energy producer, Russia, and its biggest consumer, China, want particularly to bolster their clout as a financial and geopolitical counterweight to Washington, whose "Asia pivot" regional strategy worries Beijing.

Xi and President Vladimir Putin, who meet at 3:00 p.m. (1100 GMT), may preside over deals that would make Beijing Russia's top customer for oil, although they are not expected to sign a long-sought agreement on supplies of pipeline gas to China.

Just before Xi arrived with first lady Peng Liyuan, a $2 billion deal was announced by Russian and Chinese companies to develop coal resources in eastern Siberia, which underlined the countries' intentions.

Putin has said he wants to "catch the Chinese wind in our economic sail" and that desire will grow stronger if China overtakes the United States as the world's largest economy during Xi's 10-year term.

Perhaps symbolically, Xi's visit overshadowed a meeting between leaders of the Russian government and the European Union's Commission that was also taking place in Moscow.

Putin and Xi, less than a year apart in age, echoed one another in interviews before the visit, each saying the Chinese leader's choice of Moscow as his first destination was evidence of the "strategic partnership" between the nations.

A smiling Xi, 59, recalled that he read Russian literature in his younger days. Putin, 60, said Russian-Chinese relations were at "the best in their centuries-long history".

The two U.N. Security Council members' solidarity on important global issues has strengthened in recent years.

They have joined forces three times to block Western-backed measures on the conflict in Syria despite talk of grumbling in Beijing, and Russia has followed China's lead on North Korea - two issues likely to come up in Friday's talks.

They have negotiated alongside the West on Iran's nuclear program, but have watered down past sanctions in the Security Council and opposed new punitive measures as counterproductive.

Russia has added to Japan's woes over territorial disputes with Beijing by playing up its control of an archipelago claimed by Tokyo. Beijing and Moscow have also stood side-by-side in rejecting Western criticism of their record on human rights.

But the lockstep movement on the global stage has not translated into easy agreement on bilateral energy deals, underlining the limits that persist in the relationship.

NEW PRESIDENT, NEW IMPETUS

A huge business complex on the edge of Moscow, decorated with Chinese paintings and red silk armchairs, is the kind of enterprise Xi wants to nurture in Russia.

Just off the traffic-choked highway ringing Moscow, a jumble of Chinese and Russian firms, a 400-room hotel and conference venues sprawl over the 200 square km (77 square mile), $350 million Greenwood complex, which was built by a Beijing-controlled consortium with materials shipped from China.

Xi's presidency is seen as a chance to put new impetus into such projects and into ties with Russia as a whole, although Putin said this week that bilateral trade had more than doubled in five years and reached $87.5 billion in 2012.

But the trade volume is still about five times smaller than Russia's with the European Union, and also far smaller than China's trade with the United States.

The rising influence of China, with its proximity to Russia's sparsely populated eastern parts and nearly 10 times more people, has also given rise in Russia to worries that China may one day challenge Moscow's influence on its own territory.

Russia has created a separate ministry to channel resources to its far east, which complains of neglect and underfunding more than 20 years after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Defense analysts say Russian efforts to allocate military resources, including air defenses and nuclear submarines, to its eastern coast is an effort to counter China's rising military might - even as Russia sells weapons to its neighbor.

Like their populations, their economies are uneven. China's gross domestic product grew 7.8 percent last year, while Russia's growth was about 3.5 percent and was close to stagnating in February, with 0.1 percent year-on-year growth.

Xi and Putin are expected to attend a summit next week of the BRICS group of emerging market economies, another vehicle for their efforts to counter Western clout, and the Chinese leader will visit African nations Beijing is courting.

(Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chinas-leader-meet-russias-putin-first-foreign-trip-000812374.html

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Quantum computers coming soon? Metamaterials used to observe giant photonic spin Hall effect

Mar. 21, 2013 ? Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have once again demonstrated the incredible capabilities of metamaterials -- artificial nanoconstructs whose optical properties arise from their physical structure rather than their chemical composition. Engineering a unique two-dimensional sheet of gold nanoantennas, the researchers were able to obtain the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

"With metamaterial, we were able to greatly enhance a naturally weak effect to the point where it was directly observable with simple detection techniques," said Xiang Zhang, a faculty scientist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division who led this research. "We also demonstrated that metamaterials not only allow us to control the propagation of light but also allows control of circular polarization. This could have profound consequences for information encoding and processing."

The spin Hall effect, named in honor of physicist Edwin Hall, describes the curved path that spinning electrons follow as they move through a semiconductor. The curved movement arises from the interaction between the physical motion of the electron and its spin -- a quantized angular momentum that gives rise to magnetic moment. Think of a baseball pitcher putting spin on a ball to make it curve to the left or right.

"Light moving through a metal also displays the spin Hall effect but the photonic spin Hall effect is very weak because the spin angular momentum of photons and spin-orbit interactions are very small," says Xiaobo Yin, a member of Zhang's research group and the lead author of the Science paper. "In the past, people have managed to observe the photonic spin Hall effect by generating the process over and over again to obtain an accumulative signal, or by using highly sophisticated quantum measurements. Our metamaterial makes the photonic spin Hall effect observable even with a simple camera."

Metamaterials have garnered a lot of attention in recent years because their unique structure affords electromagnetic properties unattainable in nature. For example, a metamaterial can have a negative index of refraction, the ability to bend light backwards, unlike all materials found in nature, which bend light forward. Zhang, who holds the Ernest S. Kuh Endowed Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, where he also directs the National Science Foundation's Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has been at the forefront of metamaterials research. For this study, he and his group fashioned metamaterial surfaces about 30 nanometers thick (a human hair by comparison is between 50,000 and 100,000 nanometers thick). These metasurfaces were constructed from V-shaped gold nanoantennas whose geometry could be configured by adjusting the length and orientation of the arms of the Vs.

"We chose eight different antenna configurations with optimized geometry parameters to generate a linear phase gradient along the x direction," says Yin. "This enabled us to control the propagation of the light and introduce strong photon spin-orbit interactions through rapid changes in direction. The photonic spin Hall effect depends on the curvature of the light's trajectory, so the sharper the change in propagation direction, the stronger the effect."

Since the entire metasurface sample measured only 0.3 millimeters, a 50-millimeter lens was used to project the transmission of the light through the metamaterial onto a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera for imaging. From the CCD images, the researchers determined that both the control of light propagation and the giant photonic spin Hall effect were the direct results of the designed meta-material. This finding opens up a wealth of possibilities for new technologies.

"The controllable spin-orbit interaction and momentum transfer between spin and orbital angular momentum allows us to manipulate the information encoded on the polarization of light, much like the 0 and 1 of today's electronic devices," Yin says. "But photonic devices could encode more information and provide greater information security than conventional electronic devices."

Yin says the ability to control left and right circular polarization of light in metamaterial surfaces should allow for the formation of optical elements, like highly coveted "flat lenses," or the management of light polarization without using wave plates.

"Metamaterials provide us with tremendous design freedom that will allow us to modulate the strength of the photonic spin Hall effect at different spatial locations," Yin says. "We knew the photonic spin Hall effect existed in nature but it was so hard to detect. Now, with the right metamaterials we can not only enhance this effect we can harness it for our own purposes."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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

Journal Reference:

X. Yin, Z. Ye, J. Rho, Y. Wang, X. Zhang. Photonic Spin Hall Effect at Metasurfaces. Science, 2013; 339 (6126): 1405 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231758

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.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/technology/~3/5swIk_-rtcw/130321151921.htm

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বৃহস্পতিবার, ২১ মার্চ, ২০১৩

Smartwatch Wars: Samsung Fires Shot Across Apple's Bow

Samsung has had a smartwatch in the works for a long time, according to Lee Young Hee, EVP for the company's mobile business, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. He didn't say what exactly the wearable wrist device might offer feature-wise, but the public acknowledgment suggests this could be the next highly contested arena for new gizmos.

Source: http://ectnews.com.feedsportal.com/c/34520/f/632000/s/29c807c6/l/0L0Stechnewsworld0N0Crsstory0C775770Bhtml/story01.htm

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GOP's Rand Paul, Dems' Luis Gutierrez in step on immigration reform

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) and Sen. Rand Paul (R), in separate forums Tuesday, struck common ground on some of the thorniest issues surrounding immigration reform. Is a bipartisan deal close?

By David Grant,?Staff writer / March 19, 2013

Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., speaks on Capitol Hill, last Wednesday during a mock hearing on immigration reform following a national bus tour.

Susan Walsh/AP

Enlarge

In the immigration reform debate now under way in Washington, Democrats and Republicans are taking a steady march in one direction: toward one another.

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On Tuesday morning, a leading Democratic advocate of immigration reform said his party would not require a special path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, in keeping with a key Republican demand.

At nearly the same moment some two blocks away, a 2016 Republican presidential contender and tea party favorite embraced legal status and?potential citizenship for the nation?s 12 million undocumented people, which have been Democratic desires for more than a decade.

That's not to say the immigration reform debate is over ? far from it.

But when Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) of Illinois, a Chicago progressive who got himself arrested outside the White House [last year?] protesting Arizona?s tough immigration law, and Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky, a heartthrob of the conservative activist set and heir to the Paul family libertarian fame, stake out common ground on immigration reform??That?s saying something.

Senator Paul joined a list of [a handful of? a dozen?] GOP immigration reformers who say they?re willing to provide a pathway to legal status for 12 million illegal immigrants, provided it's paired with enhanced border security and no unique path to American citizenship.

The response from Representative Gutierrez, a key House negotiator on the issue???I?m willing to take yes for an answer,? he said.

Gutierrez, who crafted ill-fated bipartisan legislation on immigration reform during the tenure of President George W. Bush, tucked into questions from reporters at a Monitor breakfast just down the street from where Senator Paul at the same time launched into the immigration reform debate during a speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Their similarities are what spoke loudest.

Paul says his plan brings the undocumented ?out of the shadows, lets them normalize their existence, it lets them become [taxpayers]."

"If they want to become citizens," he said on a conference call after his speech, "I?m open to debate as to what we do to move forward. I think the way that moves forward is they get in line like everybody else. Exactly how that works, and the logistics of all this, is still open to how we move it forward.?

What some Republicans fear is that this will be ?exactly how that works?: Democrats will lead Republicans to the edge of "amnesty" (as anti-immigration partisans call it) before opting to deep-six a compromise bill, blame the GOP for failure to produce legislation, and rally Hispanic voters, who helped to shellack Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, to their side.?

?Even if you came up with a decent immigration bill,? says former GOP Rep. Steve LaTourette of Ohio, who retired in 2010, ?my fear would be that in that instance somebody over in the Democratic caucus would try to out-Hispanic the Hispanics.?

Gutierrez, who two decades ago became the first Latino elected to Congress from Illinois, could be Suspect A in doing just that. His fiery demeanor and long attention to immigration reform have helped him to build deep ties and respect in the immigration advocacy community.

But Gutierrez said on Tuesday that?s simply not what Democrats want to happen. Democrats and Republicans are almost in synch on the first portion: Both want a pathway to legal status for as long as a decade before anyone in the US illegally would be able to become a citizen.?But he also went a step further, saying Democrats won?t insist on a "special pathway to citizenship? for the undocumented, a request that has been a rallying cry of liberal advocates.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/VLUhNFo-0T4/GOP-s-Rand-Paul-Dems-Luis-Gutierrez-in-step-on-immigration-reform

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UK: Public OK with creating babies from 3 people

LONDON (AP) ? Britain's fertility regulator says it has found broad public support for in vitro fertilization techniques that allow babies to be created with DNA from three people for couples at risk of passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases.

It also found there was no evidence to suggest the techniques were unsafe, but said further research was still necessary.

Critics, however, slammed the decision as a breach of ethics, saying there were already safe methods like egg donation to allow people to have children without mitochondria defects.

Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority began a public discussion of the topic at the government's request last year.

"Although some people have concerns about the safety of these techniques, we found that they trust the scientific experts and the regulator to know when it is appropriate to make them available to patients," Lisa Jardine, chair of the group, said in a statement Wednesday.

British law forbids altering a human egg or an embryo before transferring it into a woman, so such treatments are currently only allowed for research. The regulator will now pass its findings to the government, which would need Parliamentary permission to change the law.

Similar research is going on in the U.S., where the embryos are not being used to produce children.

About one in 200 children every year in Britain is born with a mitochondrial disorder, faults in a cell's energy source that are contained outside the nucleus in a normal female egg. Mistakes in the mitochondria's genetic code can result in serious diseases such as muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, heart problems and mental retardation.

When a method to avoid these faults was first successfully used in 2008, headlines announced that scientists had created a child with three parents ? two biological mothers and a father. But scientists said that was inaccurate, since there are only trace bits of genetic material from one woman.

There are two procedures to avoid passing on faulty mitochondria. The first involves using an egg from one woman with mitochondrial defects and the sperm of the father. Scientists then put that embryo into an emptied egg from a second woman with healthy mitochondria. The DNA from the second woman amounts to less than 1 percent of the embryo's genes.

In the second technique, scientists transfer nuclear DNA out of a day-old embryo with defective mitochondria. The DNA is implanted into another single-cell embryo with normal mitochondria. The nuclear DNA from the donor embryo is discarded, leaving the healthy mitochondria.

Experts say the new techniques would likely only be used in about a dozen U.K. women every year.

David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, called the HFEA recommendations "a travesty of basic medical ethics." His group is a secular organization that opposes many genetics and fertilization experiments.

Others, however, called it progress for those with mitochondrial diseases.

"This technique does involve a step into new scientific territory," said Marita Polschmidt, director of research at the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign. "But it is a calculated, specific step with the sole aim of preventing a potentially fatal condition from being passed down to the next generation."

____

Online:

http://www.hfea.gov.uk/141.html

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-public-ok-creating-babies-3-people-143926765.html

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বুধবার, ২০ মার্চ, ২০১৩

US Deposits In Perspective: $25 Billion In Insurance, $9,283 Billion ...

Earlier today, the American Banking Association reminded Americans that there is absolutely nothing to worry about when it comes to the sanctity of US deposits: after all there is a whopping $25 billion in the FDIC insurance fund which means "insured depositors are safe and their deposits are protected by a strong FDIC fund....The FDIC insurance fund has over $25 billion in reserves and the banking industry " Obviously supposedly "insured" depositors in Cyprus also though there was nothing to worry about, until they woke up on Saturday with a haircut between 6.75% and 9.9% on their money in the bank. Sadly, it may be the case that the ABA is being just modestly disingenuous in its statement. Why? Instead of explaining it in detail, here is a snapshot that does more than thousands of words ever could.

Chart drawn to scale.

The $25 billion in touted deposit insurance is supposed to preserve and protect (granted not in their entirety) some $9,283 billion in total US deposits. A far bigger problem, however, is when one considers the "asset" side of the US banks' ledger: remember deposits are unsecured liabilities. And for US banks, sadly, over the counter derivatives represent the vast majority of "off the books" assets. According to the latest OCC quarterly report, the total derivative notional outstanding of the Top 25 holding companies is $297,514 billion, or nearly $300 trillion. In other words there are 32 times more notional derivatives than there are total deposits, while the ratio of gross derivatives to deposit insurance is a concerning 11,900-to-1.

And with that, we hand it back to the ABA to comfort all US depositors that Cyprus could never possibly happen in the US.

Source: OCC, H.8

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Source: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-19/us-deposits-perspective-25-billion-insurance-9283-billion-deposits-297514-billion-de

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Tomatoes that mimic actions of good cholesterol created

Mar. 19, 2013 ? UCLA researchers have genetically engineered tomatoes to produce a peptide that mimics the actions of good cholesterol when consumed.

Published in the April issue of the Journal of Lipid Research and featured on the cover, their early study found that mice that were fed these tomatoes in freeze-dried, ground form had less inflammation and plaque build-up in their arteries.

"This is one of the first examples of a peptide that acts like the main protein in good cholesterol and can be delivered by simply eating the plant," said senior author Dr. Alan M. Fogelman, executive chair of the department of medicine and director of the atherosclerosis research unit at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "There was no need to isolate or purify the peptide -- it was fully active after the plant was eaten."

After the tomatoes were eaten, the peptide surprisingly was found to be active in the small intestine but not in the blood, suggesting that targeting the small intestine may be a new strategy to prevent diet-induced atherosclerosis, the plaque-based disease of the arteries that can lead to heart attacks and strokes.

Specifically for the study, the team genetically engineered tomatoes to produce 6F, a small peptide that mimics the action of apoA-1, the chief protein in high-density lipoprotein (HDL or "good" cholesterol). Scientists fed the tomatoes to mice that lacked the ability to remove low-density lipoprotein (LDL or "bad" cholesterol) from their blood and readily developed inflammation and atherosclerosis when consuming a high-fat diet.

The researchers found that mice that ate the peptide-enhanced tomatoes, which accounted for 2.2 percent of their Western-style, high-fat diet, had significantly lower levels of inflammation; higher paraoxonase activity, an antioxidant enzyme associated with good cholesterol; higher levels of good cholesterol; decreased lysophosphatidic acid, a tumor-promoter that accelerates plaque build-up in the arteries in animal models; and less atherosclerotic plaque.

Several hours after the mice finished eating, the intact peptide was found in the small intestine, but no intact peptide was found in the blood. According to researchers, this strongly suggests that the peptide acted in the small intestine and was then degraded to natural amino acids before being absorbed into the blood, as is the case with the other peptides and proteins in the tomato.

"It seems likely that the mechanism of action of the peptide-enhanced tomatoes involves altering lipid metabolism in the intestine, which positively impacts cholesterol," said the study's corresponding author, Srinavasa T. Reddy, a UCLA professor of medicine and of molecular and medical pharmacology.

Previous studies performed by Fogelman's lab and other researchers around the world in animal models of disease have suggested that a large number of conditions with an inflammatory component -- not just atherosclerosis -- might benefit from treatment with an apoA-1 mimetic peptide, including Alzheimer's disease, ovarian and colon cancer, diabetes, asthma, and other disorders.

The immune system normally triggers an inflammatory response to an acute event such as injury or infection, which is part of the natural course of healing. But with many chronic diseases, inflammation becomes an abnormal, ongoing process with long-lasting deleterious effects in the body.

If the work in animal models applies to humans, said Fogelman, who is also the Castera Professor of Medicine at UCLA, consuming forms of genetically modified foods that contain apoA-1-related peptides could potentially help improve these conditions.

The peptide would be considered a drug if given by injection or in a purified pill form, but when it is a part of the fruit of a plant, it may be no different from a safety standpoint than the food in which it is contained -- and it may be better tolerated than a drug, Fogelman said. He noted that one possibility could be the development of the peptide into a nutritional supplement.

The current study and findings resulted from years of detective work in searching for an apoA-1 peptide that could be practically produced. Peptides prior to the current 6F version have required additions that can only be made by chemical synthesis. The 6F peptide does not require these additions and can therefore be produced by genetically engineering plants.

The team chose a fruit -- the tomato -- that could be eaten without requiring cooking that might break down the peptide. The researchers were able to successfully genetically express the peptide in tomato plants, and the ripened fruit was then freeze-dried and ground into powder for use in the study.

"This is one of the first examples in translational research using an edible plant as a delivery vehicle for a new approach to cholesterol," said Judith Gasson, a professor of medicine and biological chemistry, director of UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and senior associate dean for research at the Geffen School of Medicine. "We will be closely watching this novel research to see if these early studies lead to human trials."

In addition, Gasson noted that this early finding and future studies may yield important and fundamental knowledge about the role of the intestine in diet-induced inflammation and atherosclerosis.

The study was supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service Research Grants HL-30568 and HL-34343 and by the Laubisch, Castera and M.K. Grey funds at UCLA. Studies on the determination of 6F in intestinal contents and plasma were partially funded by a Network Grant from the Leducq Foundation.