By all accounts, next week?s SXSW Interactive conference should be huge for ride-sharing startup SideCar. The company will be introducing its service to a number of people who have never tried out ride sharing. But recent actions by authorities in Austin could put a damper on the company?s coming-out party.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/PxLmMbNZ3Vo/
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(Reuters) - The final installment of "The Hobbit" film trilogy will be released on December 17, 2014, five months later than planned, Warner Bros. said on Thursday. "The Hobbit: There and Back Again" had been set to debut in July 2014. It will follow "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," which came out in December 2012, and "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug," which reached theaters in December 2013. "We're excited to complete the trilogy the same way we started it, as a holiday treat for moviegoers everywhere," said Dan Fellman, president of distribution for Warner Bros. ...
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/judge-accepts-soldiers-guilty-plea-wikileaks-case-224725962--sector.html
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Thu, Feb 28, 2013 | 00:30 GMT
Assassin?s Creed 3: Liberation writer Jill Murray has downplayed Ubisoft?s decision to feature a black, female protagonist, instead calling on the rest of the industry to catch up.
Speaking to Kotaku in an interesting feature on Aveline?s creation, Murray said some of those arguing in defence of all-white, all-male casts are being creatively lazy.
?[There's a] fear that ?diverse? characters are risky and might offend or alienate players by their simple inclusion ? that including them requires a magic touch, special bravery, a trembling sensitivity, or a mandate to ignore sales,? she said.
?Creating ?diverse? characters is no different than creating any character, and I believe that those who struggle with it need to address deeper issues within their own creative process.?
Murray said writers and designers need to be able to make any kind of character relatable; that?s their job.
?I strongly believe that if an audience can?t connect to such a character, it?s not because women, brown people, old people, queer people, or any type of character at all doesn?t belong at the helm of a game; it?s because the creator didn?t dig deep enough to find a way to connect with that character,? she said.
?A good writer should be able to make you weep for, laugh with, even aspire to be an amoeba if necessary. Blaming a character for failure is like blaming a hockey stick for losing the game ? a hockey stick you made with your own hands, to use in a game of your own invention. I call shenanigans.?
Murray also expressed frustration with the idea that creators don?t need to push to create diverse characters because it will ?just happen? if the story calls for it.
?Of course it?s not going to just happen. If it did, we wouldn?t be having this discussion,? she said.
?It?s necessary to fight these assumptions, and stand up for our characters. If we believe in them, we have to rise to the occasion and show ourselves and the people we work with how to bring them to life successfully. But this does not require magic, scary effort ? it?s effort anyone can put in. It?s fun, it adds variety, and it makes a lot of players feel good. It?s more than worthwhile and we should definitely try to do more of it.?
Murray and her co-writer at Ubisoft Montreal picked up a Writers Guild of America award for the Vita-exclusive Assassin?s Creed 3: Liberation, which the writer noted is selling pretty well.
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Pay close attention to the rising waxing gibbous moon tonight (Feb. 28), and if you live anywhere in the western hemisphere, you'll be able to watch an excellent demonstration of the movement of the moon in its orbit around the Earth.?
Normally we see the moon rise in the east and then move across the sky, reaching its highest point in the south before descending down toward the western horizon. Of course, this movement is due to the west-to-east rotation of our Earth. But the moon too is also moving in a west-to-east direction in its orbit against the star background, circling Earth at roughly 2,200 miles an hour (3,500 kilometers per hour), the equivalent of its apparent diameter on the sky. Usually though, we're not aware of that movement during the course of a typical night.?
But during an eclipse, when the moon interacts with Earth's shadow, that eastward motion becomes readily apparent. The moon's eastern (left) edge first touches the shadow, and then some minutes later (depending on how deeply the moon plunges into the shadow), it leaves the shadow behind, the last vestige of it disappearing on its western (right) edge.
While it appears that the shadow was creeping over the moon, it was actually the moon moving along in its orbit crossing through the shadow. [Top 10 Cool Moon Facts]
Another way to see the moon's motion through space is to watch when it closely passes a bright star or planet. Such will be the case this evening, when the moon has a close interaction with the bluish first magnitude star, Spica, in the constellation Virgo. Spica is the 16th brightest star in the sky, and soon after the moon comes above the east-southeast horizon at around 9:30 p.m. local time, you'll also see Spica near the moon. What you'll see depends on where you live.
For the eastern United States and Canada, the moon, 87-percent illuminated, will appear above and to the right of Spica as they move up above the horizon. But by 1 a.m. EST (Friday morning, March 1), the gap between them will have narrowed considerably and the moon will now appear just below and to Spica's right; their closest approach to each other.?
If you live in the northeast United States, Spica will appear less than a moon's width from the moon's lower limb. If you live in the southeast United States, they'll appear even closer ? less than half a moon's width from the lower limb.?
You should still be able to see Spica with the naked eye, although the moon will be over 100,000 times brighter; you might want to use binoculars to see it better. The moon will then move slowly away from Spica. By 2:15 a.m. it will appear directly underneath the star as they stand almost due south, and as dawn is breaking at around 5 a.m., you'll see the moon will have shifted noticeably below and to Spica's left.?
From the western United States, Spica and the moon will appear closest together right after they've risen at around 9:30 p.m. PST. Spica will appear very close to the moon's upper left rim, and then the moon will spend the rest of the night gradually moving away to the east. The moon will appear directly below Spica at the stroke of midnight, and at the break of dawn, the moon will have moved directly off to Spica's left.
The most dramatic view will be afforded to those living along the Pacific coast of Mexico and Central America as well as a large swath of South America, where the moon will actually pass directly in front of Spica. We could call this an eclipse of a star, though it's more popularly called an occultation.?
This map of the moon-Spica occultation zone?for 356 locations is available courtesy of IOTA, the International Occultation Timing Association.
Editor's Note: If you take a great photo of the moon and Spica, or any other night sky object that?you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send photos, comments and your name and location to managing editor Tariq Malik at?spacephotos@space.com.
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The?New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.?Follow SPACE.com onTwitter?@Spacedotcom. We're also on?Facebook?&?Google+.?
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stargazers-delight-moon-gets-close-bright-star-tonight-225654857.html
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the original "Star Wars" trilogy, was briefly hospitalized due to her bipolar disorder, the actress' spokeswoman said on Tuesday after video emerged of Fisher giving an unusual stage performance. The video came from a show Fisher gave aboard a cruise ship in the Caribbean last week, according to celebrity website TMZ, which posted the clip. The clip shows Fisher, 56, singing "Skylark" and "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," at times appearing to struggle to remember the lyrics. ...
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/putin-defends-russias-rights-record-talks-france-143657657.html
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BERLIN (AP) ? An Iranian opposition group urged the U.N. refugee agency Wednesday to provide better protection for its members in Iraq following a mortar attack on their camp near Baghdad airport in which seven people were killed.
The call came during a meeting in Geneva of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a France-based Iranian opposition group. The group's leader, Maryam Rajavi, urged the U.N. to transfer about 3,100 members of its militant wing, known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, from the Baghdad facility to Camp Ashraf near Iraq's border with Iran.
Last year, the MEK abandoned Camp Ashraf, where it had been based since 1986, and moved to the former U.S. base Camp Liberty as a temporary way station while the U.N. finds host countries for the refugees. The Iraqi government considers the MEK a terrorist organization and has been pressing its members to leave ever since their patron, Saddam Hussein, was ousted in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
On Feb. 9, seven people were killed and dozens wounded in the mortar attack, which was claimed by Shiite militants.
Speaking by telephone from Geneva, Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman from Rhode Island, said he met Wednesday with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, to discuss efforts to resettle the MEK members.
Kennedy said the U.S. and the U.N. had made a commitment to the exiles when they left Camp Ashraf to consider them protected people and their resettlement "needs to be given a sense of urgency that's not in place."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iran-opposition-group-urges-more-security-iraq-163148677.html
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Though it's most often associated with disorders like diabetes, Harvard researchers have shown how the signaling pathway of insulin and insulin-like peptides plays another critical role in the body ? helping to regulate learning and memory.
In addition to showing that the insulin-like peptides play a critical role in regulating the activity of neurons involved in learning and memory, a team of researchers led by Yun Zhang, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, show that the interaction between the molecules can fine-tune how, or even if, learning takes place. Their work is described in a February 6 paper in Neuron.
"People think of insulin and diabetes, but many metabolic syndromes are associated with some types of cognitive defects and behavioral disorders, like depression or dementia," Zhang said. "That suggests that insulin and insulin-like peptides may play an important role in neural function, but it's been very difficult to nail down the underlying mechanism, because these peptides do not have to function through synapses that connect different neurons in the brain"
To get at that mechanism, Zhang and colleagues turned to an organism whose genome and nervous system are well described and highly accessible by genetics ? C. elegans.
Using genetic tools, researchers altered the small, transparent worms by removing their ability to create individual insulin-like compounds. These new "mutant" worms were then tested to see whether they would learn to avoid eating a particular type of bacteria that is known to infect the worms. Tests showed that while some worms did learn to steer clear of the bacteria, others didn't ? suggesting that removing a specific insulin-like compound halted the worms' ability to learn.
Researchers were surprised to find, however, that it wasn't just removing the molecules that could make the animals lose the ability to learn ? some peptide was found to inhibit learning.
"We hadn't predicted that we would find both positive and negative regulators from these peptides," Zhang said. "Why does the animal need this bidirectional regulation of learning? One possibility is that learning depends on context. There are certain things you want to learn ? for example, the worms in these experiments wanted to learn that they shouldn't eat this type of infectious bacteria. That's a positive regulation of the learning. But if they needed to eat, even if it is a bad food, to survive, they would need a way to suppress this type of learning."
Even more surprising for Zhang and her colleagues was evidence that the various insulin-like molecules could regulate each other.
"Many animals, including the humans, have multiple insulin-like molecules and it appears that these molecules can act like a network," she said. "Each of them may play a slightly different role in the nervous system, and they function together to coordinate the signaling related to learning and memory. By changing the way the molecules interact, the brain can fine tune learning in a host of different ways."
Going forward, Zhang said she hopes to characterize more of the insulin-like peptides as a way of better understanding how the various molecules interact, and how they act on the neural circuits for learning and memory.
Understanding how such pathways work could one day help in the development of treatment for a host of cognitive disorders, including dementia.
"The signaling pathways for insulin and insulin-like peptides are highly conserved in mammals, including the humans," Zhang said. "There is even some preliminary evidence that insulin treatment, in some cases, can improve cognitive function. That's one reason we believe that if we understand this mechanism, it will help us better understand how insulin pathways are working in the human brain."
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Harvard University: http://www.harvard.edu
Thanks to Harvard University for this article.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127040/Linking_insulin_to_learning
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