Saturday, April 27, 2013

Samsung Electronics profit jumps ahead of Galaxy S4 debut

SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd reported on Friday its sixth straight quarter of profit growth ahead of the debut of its latest Galaxy smartphone, the South Korean IT giant's biggest assault on rival Apple Inc yet.

By launching the Galaxy S4 in the United States on Saturday, Samsung is taking aim at Apple's home market at a time when the iPhone maker appears to have hit a snag. Earlier this week, Apple reported its first profit decline in more than a decade and indicated no major product releases until the fall.

Samsung is widely expected to resume posting record quarterly profits, after a hiatus in January-March, as the S4 is dispatched to 327 mobile carriers in 155 countries.

This week, Samsung has kicked off a massive advertising campaign for the S4 and set up mini stores at Best Buy locations to promote the smartphone. Initial orders have surprised on the upside, with the firm expecting a short-term supply crunch.

Early success of the S4 is crucial in determining the extent of the expected second-quarter record earnings for a company that gets more than 70 percent of its overall profit from mobile devices.

The new S4, which sports a host of software-enabled features, is seen as stealing a head-start on what's widely expected to be an upgraded iPhone later this year. But the Galaxy phone has drawn mixed reviews so far.

Profit from Samsung's mobile division jumped 56 percent to a record 6.51 trillion won in the first quarter, accounting for nearly three quarters of the firm's entire profit, the company said on Friday, before the stock market open.

Samsung, which doesn't provide smartphone sales figures, likely sold 68-70 million smartphones in the quarter ended March, up from 63 million in the previous quarter, according to five analysts.

By contrast, second-ranked Apple said on Tuesday it shipped 37.4 million iPhones in the March quarter, up from 35.1 million a year ago, but down sharply from 47.8 million in the previous quarter.

Samsung's first-quarter overall operating profit increased 54 percent from a year ago to 8.8 trillion won ($7.9 billion), broadly in line with its earlier estimate and almost on par with the fourth-quarter's record of 8.84 trillion won.

Shares in Samsung, valued at around $215 billion, have risen 2 percent in the past three months, beating a 21 percent decline in Apple and a 1 percent drop in the wider market.

(Reporting by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Ryan Woo)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/samsung-electronics-profit-jumps-ahead-galaxy-s4-debut-103335938--finance.html

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Friday, April 26, 2013

Boston suspect is moved; FBI searches landfill

FILE - This April 25, 2013 file photo shows the mother of the two Boston bombing suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, left, speaking at a news conference in Makhachkala, the southern Russian province of Dagestan. Two government officials tell The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies added the Boston bombing suspects' mother to a federal terrorism database about 18 months before the attack. At right is her sister-in-law Maryam. (AP Photo/Musa Sadulayev, File)

FILE - This April 25, 2013 file photo shows the mother of the two Boston bombing suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, left, speaking at a news conference in Makhachkala, the southern Russian province of Dagestan. Two government officials tell The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies added the Boston bombing suspects' mother to a federal terrorism database about 18 months before the attack. At right is her sister-in-law Maryam. (AP Photo/Musa Sadulayev, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 5, 2011 file photo, two guards are stationed outside the Devens Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Devens, Mass. The U.S. Marshals Service said Friday, April 26, 2013, that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, charged in the Boston Marathon bombing April 15, 2013, had been moved from a Boston hospital to the federal medical center at Devens, about 40 miles west of the city. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)

FILE - This combination of undated file photos shows Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, left, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. The FBI says the two brothers are the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, and are also responsible for killing an MIT police officer, critically injuring a transit officer in a firefight and throwing explosive devices at police during a getaway attempt in a long night of violence that left Tamerlan dead and Dzhokhar captured, late Friday, April 19, 2013. The ethnic Chechen brothers lived in Dagestan, which borders the Chechnya region in southern Russia. They lived near Boston and had been in the U.S. for about a decade, one of their uncles reported said. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/The Lowell Sun & Robin Young, File)

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, left, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg hold a news conference, Thursday, April, 25, 2013 in New York. The two say the Boston Marathon bombing suspects intended to blow up their remaining explosives in Times Square. They said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told Boston investigators from his hospital bed that he and his brother had discussed going to New York to detonate their remaining explosives. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

This Friday, April 26, 2013 photo shows the entrance of the Devens Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Devens, Mass. The U.S. Marshals Service said Friday that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, charged in the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, had been moved from a Boston hospital to the federal medical center at Devens, about 40 miles west of the city. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

BOSTON (AP) ? Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhohkar Tsarnaev was moved from a hospital to a federal prison medical center, while FBI agents searched for evidence Friday in a landfill near the college he was attending.

Tsarnaev, 19, was taken from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the throat and other injuries suffered during a getaway attempt, and transferred to the Federal Medical Center Devens, about 40 miles from Boston, the U.S. Marshals Service said. The facility at a former Army base treats federal prisoners.

Also, FBI agents picked through a landfill near the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where Tsarnaev was a sophomore. FBI spokesman Jim Martin would not say what investigators were looking for.

An aerial photo in Friday's Boston Globe showed a line of more than 20 investigators, all dressed in white overalls and yellow boots, picking over the garbage with shovels or rakes.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, said that the bombing suspects' mother had been added to a federal terrorism database about 18 months before the deadly attack ? a disclosure that deepens the mystery around the Tsarnaev family and marks the first time American authorities have acknowledged that Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was under investigation before the tragedy.

The news is certain to fuel questions about whether the Obama administration missed opportunities to thwart the April 15 bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 260.

Tsarnaev is charged with joining with his older brother, now dead, in setting off the shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs. The brothers are ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago with their parents. Investigators have said it appears that the brothers were angry about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Two government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation, said the CIA had Zubeidat Tsarnaeva's name added to the terror database along with that of her son Tamerlan Tsarnaev after Russia contacted the agency in 2011 with concerns that the two were religious militants.

About six months earlier, the FBI investigated mother and son, also at Russia's request, one of the officials said. The FBI found no ties to terrorism. Previously U.S. officials had said only that the FBI investigated Tamerlan.

In an interview from Russia, Tsarnaeva said Friday that she has never been linked to terrorism.

"It's all lies and hypocrisy," she told The Associated Press from Dagestan. "I'm sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person, and I've never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism."

Tsarnaeva faces shoplifting charges in the U.S. over the alleged theft of more than $1,624 worth of women's clothing from a Lord & Taylor department store in Natick, Mass., in 2012.

Earlier this week, she said she has been assured by lawyers that she would not be arrested if she traveled to the U.S., but she said she was still deciding whether to go. The suspects' father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said that he would leave Russia soon for the United States to visit one son and lay the other to rest.

A team of investigators from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has questioned both parents in Russia this week, spending many hours with the mother in particular over two days.

Meanwhile, New York's police commissioner said the FBI was too slow to inform the city that the Boston Marathon suspects had been planning to bomb Times Square days after the attack at the race.

Federal investigators learned about the short-lived scheme from a hospitalized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev during a bedside interrogation that began Sunday night and extended into Monday morning, officials said. The information didn't reach the New York Police Department until Wednesday night.

"We did express our concerns over the lag," Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the findings on Thursday.

The FBI had no comment Friday.

___

Eileen Sullivan reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Colleen Long in New York and Julie Pace in Washington contributed to this story.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-04-26-Boston%20Marathon-Explosions/id-5c91c6d0909f4d8683ce19f55c0f90e5

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Fish win fights on strength of personality

Apr. 26, 2013 ? When predicting the outcome of a fight, the big guy doesn't always win suggests new research on fish. Scientists at the University of Exeter and Texas A&M University found that when fish fight over food, it is personality, rather than size, that determines whether they will be victorious. The findings suggest that when resources are in short supply personality traits such as aggression could be more important than strength when it comes to survival.

The study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, found that small fish were able to do well in contests for food against larger fish provided they were aggressive. Regardless of their initial size, it was the fish that tended to have consistently aggressive behaviour -- or personalities -- that repeatedly won food and as a result put on weight.

Dr Alastair Wilson from Biosciences at the University of Exeter said: "We wondered if we were witnessing a form of Napoleon, or small man, syndrome. Certainly our study indicates that small fish with an aggressive personality are capable of defeating their larger, more passive counterparts when it comes to fights over food. The research suggests that personality can have far reaching implications for life and survival."

The sheepshead swordtail fish (Xiphophorus birchmanni) fish were placed in pairs in a fish tank, food was added and their behaviour was captured on film. The feeding contest trials were carried out with both male and female fish. The researchers found that while males regularly attacked their opponent to win the food, females were much less aggressive and rarely attacked.

In animals, personality is considered to be behaviour that is repeatedly observed under certain conditions. Major aspects of personality such as shyness or aggressiveness have previously been characterised and are thought to have important ecological significance. There is also evidence to suggest that certain aspects of personality can be inherited. Further work on whether winning food through aggression could ultimately improve reproductive success will shed light on the heritability of personality traits.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Exeter, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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


Journal Reference:

  1. Alastair J Wilson, Andrew Grimmer, Gil G. Rosenthal. Causes and consequences of contest outcome: aggressiveness, dominance and growth in the sheepshead swordtail, Xiphophorus birchmanni. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2013; DOI: 10.1007/s00265-013-1540-7

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/top_news/~3/yQOUDvwPT-0/130426115454.htm

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Just what makes that little old ant change a flower's nectar content?

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Ants play a variety of important roles in many ecosystems. As frequent visitors to flowers, they can benefit plants in their role as pollinators when they forage on sugar-rich nectar. However, a new study reveals that this mutualistic relationship may actually have some hidden costs. By transmitting sugar-eating yeasts to the nectar on which they feed, ants may be indirectly altering the nectar-chemistry and thus affecting subsequent pollinator visitations.

Many species of plants benefit from interacting with ants, and some even secrete special sugary substances to attract ants. Plants produce sugar, in the form of nectar, and in exchange ants provide services such as pollination or protection from herbivores.

The main components of nectar that attract pollinators include three dominant sugars?sucrose, fructose, and glucose?and amino acids (or proteins). The chemical composition of nectar differs among plant species and has been thought to be a conservative trait linked to pollinator type. For example, plants pollinated by hummingbirds tend to have nectar with high amounts of sucrose. In addition, nectar composition is thought to be regulated by the plant.

"When people think about how flowers are pollinated, they probably think about bees," notes Clara de Vega, a postdoctoral researcher at the Estaci?n Biol?gica de Do?ana, Spain. "But ants also pollinate flowers, and I am interested in the role ants play in pollination since it is still poorly understood."

De Vega joined forces with Carlos M. Herrera, an evolutionary ecologist at the Estaci?n Biol?gica de Do?ana, to investigate the relationship between ant pollinators and nectarivorous yeasts. Nectar-dwelling yeasts, which consume sugars, have recently been discovered in the flowers of many temperate and tropical plant species. De Vega and Herrera have already discovered that some ant species not only carry certain types of sugar-metabolizing yeasts on their bodies, but they also effectively transmit these yeasts to the nectar of flowers they visit.

In their most recent work, published in the American Journal of Botany, De Vega and Herrera investigated whether flowers visited by these ants differed from flowers that were not visited by ants in their sugar chemistry, and whether sugar-chemistry was correlated with the abundance of ant-transmitted yeasts found in the nectar.

By excluding ants from visiting inflorescences of a perennial, parasitic plant, Cytinus hypocistis, and comparing the nectar chemistry to inflorescences that were visited by ants, the authors tested these ideas experimentally.

When the authors compared the sugar content in the nectar of flowers visited by ants versus those enclosed in nylon mesh bags to exclude ants, they found that nectar of flowers exposed to ants had higher levels of fructose and glucose, but lower levels of sucrose compared with the ant-excluded flowers.

Interestingly, in flowers visited by ants, there was a high correlation between yeast cell density and sugar content. Nectar that had higher densities of yeast had more fructose and less sucrose, suggesting that the types of yeasts change the sugar content of the nectar. Flowers that were excluded from ants did not have any yeast in their nectar.

"Our study has revealed that ants can actually change the nectar characteristics of the flowers they are pollinating," says de Vega. "The microorganisms, specifically yeasts, that are present on the surface of ants change the composition of sugar in the flower?s nectar."

"This means that nectar composition is not completely controlled by the flower?it is something created in cooperation with the ants that visit the flower," she notes. "We also think that these ant-transported yeasts might have the potential to affect plant reproduction."

Indeed, if a plant cannot control the sugar content of its nectar, then it may lose some of its target pollinators, which would potentially affect overall seed set and plant fitness.

Moreover, if introducing these yeasts to nectar changes the chemistry of the very components that serve to attract pollinators, then perhaps ants are indirectly changing the foraging behavior of subsequent flower visitors and thereby affecting seed dispersal patterns.

This study has revealed an additional layer in the complex association between ants and flowering plants, as pollinating ants alter sugar-nectar chemistry in flowers via sugar-consuming yeasts. But the story does not end here. De Vega plans to continue researching the role that these nectarivorous yeasts play on the reproduction of plants.

"I plan to study the whole interaction of plants, yeasts, and pollinators?how are they interrelated and what mechanisms shape these relations?"

###

Article: http://www.amjbot.org/content/100/4/792.full.pdf+html

American Journal of Botany: http://www.amjbot.org/

Thanks to American Journal of Botany for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127919/Just_what_makes_that_little_old_ant_change_a_flower_s_nectar_content_

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Thursday, April 25, 2013

High performance semiconductor spray paint could be a game changer for organic electronics

Apr. 25, 2013 ? Researchers at Wake Forest University's Organic Electronics group have come up with a novel solution to one of the biggest technological barriers facing the organic semiconductor industry today. Oana Jurchescu, an assistant professor of physics, and a team of researchers developed a high performance organic semiconductor 'spray paint' that can be applied to large surface areas without losing electric conductivity. This is a potentially game changing technology for a number of reasons.

Organic thin film transistors are currently deposited by one of three methods. Drop casting and spin coating conduct electricity well but are limited to small area applications. They could not be used to make a wall-sized, flexible video screen for instance. On the other hand, organic spray-on techniques can be applied to large areas but have poor performance when compared to their small-area counterparts.

Jurchescu's work provides the best of both worlds. The spray-deposition technology developed in her lab produced the highest performance organic thin film transistors for this method to date -- (April 2, 2013) -- comparable to those of drop casting and spin coating. Unlike drop casting and spin coating, her spray-deposition technology can be applied over large surfaces to any medium-from plastic and metal to human skin.

Her team's research, High Mobility Field-Effect Transistors with Versatile Processing from a Small-Molecule Organic Semiconductor was published April 2, 2013 in the journal Advanced Materials.

Because of its superb performance and the fact it can be applied over large areas quickly (it is also inexpensive to process compared to inorganic semiconducting materials like silicon), it has the potential to be produced in commercial quantities. The technology is a big step towards realizing futuristic devices such as transparent solar cells on building windows, car roof and bus stations, electronic displays in previously inaccessible spaces and wearable electronics due to the organic plastics' thin, lightweight and conformal nature.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Wake Forest University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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


Journal Reference:

  1. Yaochuan Mei, Marsha A. Loth, Marcia Payne, Weimin Zhang, Jeremy Smith, Cynthia S. Day, Sean R. Parkin, Martin Heeney, Iain McCulloch, Thomas D. Anthopoulos, John E. Anthony, Oana D. Jurchescu. High Mobility Field-Effect Transistors with Versatile Processing from a Small-Molecule Organic Semiconductor. Advanced Materials, 2013; DOI: 10.1002/adma.201205371

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/top_news/~3/bpLB5qM1n-Q/130425103318.htm

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Boston Bomb Victims? Hidden Injury: Hearing Loss

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Hearing loss from ?acoustic trauma? can be temporary or permanent, depending on whether the harm was to the eardrum or the delicate hairs of the inner ear.
    

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/us/boston-bomb-victims-hidden-injury-hearing-loss.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Hope Solo Tweets Phone Number, Claims it Was Joke; Fans Scratch Heads

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/04/hope-solo-tweets-phone-number-claims-it-was-joke-fans-scratch-he/

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