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Friday, March 29, 2013

Snotty sea hares clog up nostrils of lobster predators

Genevieve Anderson

A sea hare releases ink in response to a threat.

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

Spiny lobsters have hard shells and strong jaws easily capable of turning the soft-bodied, sluglike sea hare into an easy meal. But new research finds that sea hares have a snotty solution: Clog up potential lobster predators' nostrils.

When threatened, the sea hares excrete a white, sticky substance called opaline that stuffs up the lobsters' sensory organs. While the lobster struggles to deal with this sudden lack of smell, the sea hare can often escape its clutches.

Sea hares (Aplysia) are marine mollusks that get their name from two long, earlike projections on their heads. The largest species can grow up to 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms).?

Chemical protection
Size offers some protection from potential predators, but sea hares' main defenses are chemical. Like squid, they release purplish ink when threatened, but also excrete opaline. [See Video of Snotty Sea Hare in Action]

Georgia State University researchers knew that these chemicals could save sea hares from becoming a meal to spiny lobsters, but it wasn't clear whether the substances simply blocked the lobster sensory organs (which are on its antennae) or whether they actually induced chemical signals that prevented the crustaceans from smelling food.

To find out, the researchers used Caribbean spiny lobsters (Panulirus argus) and sea hares (Aplysia californica). They extracted the water-soluble part of the sea hares' opaline, which left them with all of the stickiness but none of the amino acids and other chemicals that might have affected the lobsters' chemosensory receptors. They painted the opaline abstract on the lobsters' antennae and then exposed the crustaceans to "shrimp juice," which was made by soaking shredded shrimp in water for an hour.

The researchers repeated the same experiment with three other substances: carboxymethylcellulose, which is sticky but lacks opaline's amino acids; a mixture of only the amino acids found in opaline, without the stickiness; and a combination of carboxymethylcellulose and the opaline amino acids. A final group of lobsters got to smell the shrimp juice with nothing blocking their antennae.

As the lobsters responded to the shrimp juice in each condition, the researchers measured the activity of their chemosensory neurons.?

Sticky defense
The results revealed that even without neuron-affecting chemicals, opaline's stickiness alone is enough to save sea hares from spiny lobsters. The amino acid-free carboxymethylcellulose had the same effect as opaline, the researchers report March 27 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The opaline amino acids alone, however, did not stop the lobster neurons from responding to smells, perhaps in part because they were easily washed away by sea water.

Paul M. Johnson

A sea hare inks to escape the clutches of a spiny lobster.

Spiny lobsters have chemical sensory organs all over their head and legs, and the researchers suspect sea hares can clog them all.

"Typically, a sea hare is in the grasp of a spiny lobster before the sea hare inks," they wrote. "Our observations are that the ink sticks to all of the sensory appendages in the anterior end, including the antennules, mouthparts and anterior legs. We would expect an effect on these other chemoreceptors similar to that we have demonstrated for antennular chemoreceptors."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter?and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook?& Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/2a120afe/l/0Lscience0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A30C270C174916650Esnotty0Esea0Ehares0Eclog0Eup0Enostrils0Eof0Elobster0Epredators0Dlite/story01.htm

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Making People Paranoid Prank By Jack Vale (VIDEO)

Prankster Jack Vale knows how to get under people's skin... let's just hope the guy with the photo of a gun on his t-shirt has a sense of humor. Watch Vale make everyone around him paranoid simply by talking on the phone.

Via Tastefully Offensive

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/making-people-paranoid-prank_n_2962307.html

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Thursday, March 28, 2013

Young, hot and blue

Thursday, March 28, 2013

The Universe is an old neighbourhood -- roughly 13.8 billion years old. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is also ancient -- some of its stars are more than 13 billion years old (eso0425). Nevertheless, there is still a lot of action: new objects form and others are destroyed. In this image, you can see some of the newcomers, the young stars forming the cluster NGC 2547.

But, how young are these cosmic youngsters really? Although their exact ages remain uncertain, astronomers estimate that NGC 2547's stars range from 20 to 35 million years old. That doesn't sound all that young, after all. However, our Sun is 4600 million years old and has not yet reached middle age. That means that if you imagine that the Sun as a 40 year-old person, the bright stars in the picture are three-month-old babies.

Most stars do not form in isolation, but in rich clusters with sizes ranging from several tens to several thousands of stars. While NGC 2547 contains many hot stars that glow bright blue, a telltale sign of their youth, you can also find one or two yellow or red stars which have already evolved to become red giants. Open star clusters like this usually only have comparatively short lives, of the order of several hundred million years, before they disintegrate as their component stars drift apart.

Clusters are key objects for astronomers studying how stars evolve through their lives. The members of a cluster were all born from the same material at about the same time, making it easier to determine the effects of other stellar properties.

The star cluster NGC 2547 lies in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail), about 1500 light-years from Earth, and is bright enough to be easily seen using binoculars. It was discovered in 1751 by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille during an astronomical expedition to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, using a tiny telescope of less than two centimetres aperture.

Between the bright stars in this picture you can see plenty of other objects, especially when zooming in. Many are fainter or more distant stars in the Milky Way, but some, appearing as fuzzy extended objects, are galaxies, located millions of light-years beyond the stars in the field of view.

###

ESO: http://www.eso.org

Thanks to ESO 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/127497/Young__hot_and_blue

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Man pleads not guilty to extorting A&M professor

HOUSTON (AP) ? James Arnt Aune was regarded as a fine scholar, mentor and friend by students and his fellow professors at Texas A&M University, where he headed the school's Department of Communication.

But Aune, who jumped to his death from the roof of a campus parking garage in January, battled depression in recent years. He struggled with the administrative duties of being a department head, and he was badly shaken by his 2007 battle with prostate cancer, which he survived but which forced him to face his own mortality, his widow said.

"He never really came all the way back," Miriam Aune said of his surviving cancer.

He began drinking heavily, and in December he started a sexually explicit online relationship with what he thought was an underage girl, according to prosecutors. He was soon contacted by a man purporting to be her outraged father, who threatened to expose Aune unless he paid him $5,000.

Aune paid the man $1,500, but he didn't know if he could come up with the rest, authorities say. He confessed to his wife, who pledged to stand by him, but about a week later, the 59-year-old Aune jumped to his death after sending a final text: "Killing myself now. And u will be prosecuted for black mail."

The man who got that text, according to prosecutors, pleaded not guilty Tuesday in a Houston federal courtroom to an extortion charge. The 37-year-old Metairie, La., resident was ordered to remain in jail without bail, and his trial is scheduled for May 28. If convicted, he faces up to two years in jail. His court-appointed attorney, Marjorie Meyers, declined to comment about the case.

Authorities allege that Aune was one of many victims of a scheme in which the man used his daughter to lure men into sexually explicit online relationships and later blackmailed them. The Associated Press isn't naming the man to protect the identity of his daughter.

In the criminal complaint, prosecutors contend that the man's daughter told authorities in Louisiana in 2011 that her father took naked photos and videos of her and used them "to scam men" through MocoSpace, a social networking website mainly for mobile devices.

On the site, "she would meet men, get their phone numbers and send them pictures and videos then (her father) would call them and say how she was his daughter and how she would need counseling and they had to pay for it."

At the time of that 2011 interview, her father was facing two counts of oral sexual battery and two counts of aggravated incest. The charges were dropped in February 2012 due to a lack of corroborating evidence, said Rachael Domiano, a spokeswoman for the 21st Judicial District Attorney's Office in Louisiana.

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday declined to comment about certain details of the alleged scheme, and it wasn't clear from the criminal complaint if prosecutors believe the defendant's daughter actually interacted with Aune, or if her image was used to allegedly dupe him.

Miriam Aune, 56, told The Associated Press that investigators told her that the defendant was the person who communicated with her husband and other men, pretending to be his daughter. She said her husband told her he began the online chats sometime in December and that by the third or fourth day after the chats began, the defendant reached out to him asking for money.

According to court records, undated texts show Aune scrambling to put money on prepaid credit cards for the defendant and asking for his forgiveness, saying "I am very sorry. It was a weak moment."

A week before his suicide, James Aune confessed to his wife. Miriam Aune said her husband never told her why he did it.

She pledged her support for him, but said he became despondent after his confession.

"I was just telling him there was nothing that we couldn't get through. We have two autistic children we have raised to adulthood. We've been through rough stuff. I thought we could get through this," Miriam Aune said.

According to a criminal complaint, the defendant continued bombarding Aune with profanity laced emails, texts and voicemails, including a Jan. 7 email in which he warned Aune that he had until noon the next day to pay or else "the police, your place of employment, students, ALL OVER THE INTERNET ...ALL OF THEM will be able to see your conversations, texts, pictures you sent ...."

On Jan. 8 at 9:21 a.m., the defendant texted, "3 more hours. If i don't hear from you the calls start," according the criminal complaint by FBI agent Nikki Allen.

At 10:29 a.m., Aune replied, "Killing myself now And u will be prosecuted for black mail."

He jumped from the parking garage roof about a minute later, shocking the A&M campus, which is about 100 miles northwest of Houston.

Miriam Aune doesn't excuse her husband's actions. She said it was his decision to go online and begin the conversations.

"It just shows you anybody can slip off the path. I know a lot of people are very surprised by this. He was very human with flaws, just like all of us," she said.

But she said it saddens her to know that some people will only remember her husband for what happened at the end of his life.

"To him, being a professor, it was a sacred duty to him. And he cared so much about his students," she said as she cried. "The people who know him, who loved him, they are not going to feel any differently about him."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/man-pleads-not-guilty-extorting-m-professor-004902354.html

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Computer chips: Building upward safely

Mar. 27, 2013 ? A computer model provides important clues for the production of tightly packed electronic components.

Greater numbers of ever-smaller components are required to fit on computer chips to meet the ongoing demands of miniaturizing electronic devices. Consequently, computer chips are becoming increasingly crowded. Designers of electronic architectures have therefore followed the lead of urban planners and started to build upward. In so-called 'three-dimensional (3D) packages', for example, several flat, two-dimensional chips can be stacked on top of each other using vertical joints.

Controlling the properties of these complex structures is no easy task, as many factors come into play during production. Faxing Che and Hongyu Li and co-workers from the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics, Singapore, have now developed a powerful modeling method that allows large-scale simulations -- and optimization -- of the fabrication process, which provides welcome assistance to designers.

Among the challenges of producing tightly packed computer chips is the need to prevent warpage of the underlying silicon wafer as electronics components are stacked on it. Warpage leads to a number of unwanted effects. "Strong warpage can cause wafer breakage, it makes tight packing more difficult and some processing machines cannot handle high-warpage wafers," explains Li. The degree of warpage depends on many design and process parameters, and optimizing the procedure experimentally is time-consuming and costly.

Using their computer model, Che and Li studied a wide range of parameters that influence the warpage of an 8-inch diameter silicon wafer. They focused, in particular, on how a silicon substrate responds to the deposition of layers of copper -- through which electrical currents eventually flow. "This is the first time that a model has been able to predict warpage [at] the level of the entire wafer," says Li. Moreover, the stress on the wafer can be determined accurately. The calculated values agreed well with experimental data. Importantly, with the computer simulations, the researchers could explore regimes that cannot be easily studied experimentally, such as how the depth of the connections between layers influences wafer warpage.

The next goal is to simulate even larger wafers with variable connection sizes, explains Li. "Today, there are two industry standards for 3D packaging applications, 8-inch and 12-inch wafers, but the latter are becoming increasingly important," she says. The team's model is applicable to these larger wafers, too, but it requires optimization. Currently, Che, Li and their co-workers are collecting warpage and stress data for 12-inch wafers. They will use these data for developing their model further, according to Li.

The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this research are from the Institute of Microelectronics

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

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

Journal Reference:

Faxing Che, Hongyu Y. Li, Xiaowu Zhang, Shan Gao, Kenghwa H. Teo. Development of Wafer-Level Warpage and Stress Modeling Methodology and Its Application in Process Optimization for TSV Wafers. IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology, 2012; 2 (6): 944 DOI: 10.1109/TCPMT.2012.2192732

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/gt35Y3moD-8/130327162352.htm

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US futures down as jitters about Europe continue

NEW YORK (AP) ? Concern about Cyprus and other nations in the Eurozone is weighing down U.S. stock market futures.

Cyprus is formulating details for reopening its banks after a nearly two-week shutdown, following an international bailout agreement that calls for large deposits to be taxed heavily to help pay for the rescue.

Dow Jones industrial average futures are sliding 69 points to 14,409. Nasdaq 100 futures are down 13 to 2,786.80. S&P 500 futures are off 7.75 to 1,549.50.

Investors are waiting for data on pending U.S. home sales for February, set for release at 10 a.m. Eastern.

In Europe, major indexes fell amid worries that the "bail-in" that taps deposits in Cyprus could be considered a model should other countries falter. Asian stocks rose, following Tuesday's rally in U.S. markets.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-futures-down-jitters-europe-continue-122552133--finance.html

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Bieber can't keep his clothes on at Polish airport

By Dagmara Leszkowicz, Reuters

WARSAW -- Teenage pop star Justin Bieber paraded through a Polish airport shirtless before flying out of the country, adding to a string of peculiar incidents that have plagued his European tour.

Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

Shirtless and barely holding onto his pants, Justin Bieber goes through Wladyslaw Reymont Airport in Lodz, Poland, following a concert on Monday, March 25.

The Canadian singer had previously been spotted wearing a bizarre gas mask on a night out in London, where he turned up late for one concert and collapsed on stage with shortness of breath during another.

After a sold out concert in Lodz, central Poland, the 19-year-old took off his shirt in a car as it drove up to the airport late in the night on Monday.

He then walked topless to the airport building -- in temperatures of about -10C (14F) -- and then on to his gate, only to get dressed again before boarding a private jet.

"He wasn't told to take off his clothes. He had no metal objects on him." a spokeswoman for Lodz Airport told Reuters. "He's quite skinny so I assume he was probably freezing."

The concert's organizers put the incident down to a Bieber eccentricity.

Grzegorz Michalowski / EPA

Justin Bieber performs -- with more clothes on -- during his concert in Lodz, Poland.

The show in Lodz was the 19th European concert of Bieber's "Believe" tour. The next one is due to take place in Munich, Germany, on March 28.

Discovered on YouTube in 2008, Bieber is one of the pop world's biggest stars and has built up an online following of tens of millions of fans.

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