SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Computer-maker Lenovo has hired tech-savvy actor Ashton Kutcher to help design and pitch its latest line of tablets, dubbing the Hollywood star a "product engineer" who can bring his ideas along with his image.
It's the latest tech foray for the "Two and a Half Men" performer who recently starred in a biopic about innovative giant Steve Jobs and has invested venture capital in more than a dozen Silicon Valley startups.
The deal was announced Tuesday at a Lenovo live-streamed event in Los Angeles. Lenovo's first video advertisements for the new Yoga Tablet feature Kutcher acting as a product tester in his boxers, a spacesuit and aboard an airplane.
The company said Kutcher will do more than just advertise.
"This partnership goes beyond traditional bounds by deeply integrating him into our organization as a product engineer as we look at developing the next wave of products," said Lenovo spokesman David Roman.
Kutcher — who in recent years has appeared in ads for snack chips and cameras — said of Lenovo, "Entrepreneurship is part of their DNA, and I couldn't ask for a better fit."
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Lenovo, with headquarters in Beijing and in Research Triangle Park, N.C., acquired IBM's computer business in 2005 and became the world's top PC-maker ahead of HP in the third quarter. But, like other manufacturers, it has struggled with waning consumer demand for desktop and laptop models.
It's one of several Asian tech companies seeking to loosen Apple's grip on China's tablet market with less expensive Android models.
Vice President Joe Biden swears in Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) as his mother, Carolyn, holds a Bible on Thursday.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Vice President Joe Biden swears in Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) as his mother, Carolyn, holds a Bible on Thursday.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Cory Booker is a Yale-educated lawyer and erstwhile tweeter who, as mayor of Newark, N.J., displayed a knack for grabbing headlines while building a mixed legacy as the troubled city's leader.
He's also black, and Thursday at noon the 44-year-old Democrat was sworn in as a U.S. senator, making Congress's upper chamber just a tiny bit more diverse in more ways than one.
Booker, who on Oct. 16 was elected as New Jersey's first black senator, will join Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina as the chamber's only black senators.
Scott, a former congressman, was appointed to temporarily fill retired Sen. Jim DeMint's unexpired term and is running in 2014 for the right to serve out the term's final two years.
The last elected black senator? That would be Barack Obama of Illinois, back in 2004. Obama and Booker form half of an elite group: Only four African-Americans have ever been elected to the U.S. Senate and served. Five, including Scott, were appointed.
As Booker starts his Senate career we thought we'd take a quick dive into the demographics of our Congress. We have drawn on the detailed work the Congressional Research Service does profiling each successive Congress — including the current 113th.
Booker Will Help Lower Average Age
In her analysis of the 113th, Jennifer Manning of the CRS reported that the average age of members "is among the highest of any Congress in recent U.S. history."
That means Booker, born in 1969, will bring a dash of youthful diversity to the Senate, where the average age is 62. He replaces the man who had been the oldest serving senator — New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg, who died in June at 89.
But the average age is going down. Manning reports that the average for senators elected in 2012 was 53, down from 57.1 in 2008.
The U.S. House is younger, but not by much: The average current age is 57; the average age of those elected last year was 49.2 years.
Lautenberg Was Old, But Not Oldest Ever
The oldest senator in U.S. history was Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who was 99 years old when he stepped down in January 2003. Thurmond, who died six months later at age 100, was also the longest-serving senator, chalking up nearly a half century.
The distinction of being the dean of senators, age-wise, now goes to Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, who is 80. The youngest? Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., who was born in 1973.
The oldest House member is Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, who was born in 1933; the youngest is Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Fla., who was born 50 years later.
Booker Makes History, But Ethnic Diversity Is House Story
With Booker sworn in, joining fellow New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the Garden State becomes the first in the nation to have an African-American and Hispanic serving in the U.S. Senate at the same time.
A milestone, to be sure.
Booker also joins Obama, and former senators Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois Democrat, and Edward William Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, as the nation's only elected black senators.
But Senate diversity remains more a tale of women than ethnicity. There are 20 female senators, 16 Democrats and four Republicans.
The real diversity story is playing out on the Democratic side of the aisle in the U.S. House. There, Manning of the CRS reports, women and minority representatives are a caucus majority.
Eighty-two women serve in the House, 62 of them Democrats, and 20 Republicans. CRS reports that there are 43 black House members, including two delegates, all Democrats; and 34 Hispanic/Latino members, including a delegate and Puerto Rican resident commissioner, of which 27 are Democrats. Twelve House Democrats are Asian or Pacific Islanders.
Women, Predominantly Democrats, Set Record
Jeanette Rankin of Montana was the first woman elected to the U.S House, back in 1917. It's worth noting that it wasn't until 1920 that the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote — and that was a year after Rankin's term ended, reports R. Eric Peterson, a specialist in American government at CRS.
Over on the Senate side, the first woman to serve was Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia, appointed in 1922 after the death of her senator husband.
The House, Peterson reports, was 95 percent male until the 102nd Congress of 1991-1992. In the succeeding decade, the percentage of women in both the House and the Senate grew at its historically highest rate, he says.
Booker's Law Background: Not So Groundbreaking
In his analysis of congresses dating back to 1945, Peterson found that law was consistently the most commonly reported occupation or professional background of U.S. senators.
"Lawyers have occupied between one-third and half of Senate seats in each Congress studied since 1945," he reported, with the peak in 1971-1973 of more than half.
Business and banking were reported as the second most common occupations among senators since 1945.
House members reported much more diverse occupational backgrounds, though law was the most commonly cited over time, Peterson found.
Booker worked as a staff attorney for the Urban Justice Center in Newark, but quickly jumped into his political career, winning a seat on the city council in 1998.
Not all cameras have an aperture-priority mode. If yours has one, you should use it. All the time. It'll give you more control over the look of your photos without having to dive into the complexities of full-manual exposure controls. ...
New York City (AFP) - Fannie Mae Thursday sued nine giant banks plus the British Bankers Association over some $800 million in losses due to alleged rate-rigging manipulation in the latest fallout from the Libor scandal.
Fannie Mae, citing recent settlements involving four of the banks, said it lost $332 million in interest-rate swaps with the defendant banks, with the other losses in trades with other counterparties.
Ingress is finally available to the public. Since its release it has required invites from friends; that restriction has now been lifted. It is good timing as Niantic recently announced a worldwide tour for devoted Ingress fans and players.
If you have been waiting patiently for an invite or just haven't checked it out yet, now is your chance. You will have to choose whether to join the Resistance or the Enlightened. Once you choose, get ready for an amazingly intense, fun and time consuming experience. Ingress has been quite the hit and removing the invite restriction will surely draw many more players in. Click the link if you want to check out Ingress.
We're used to thinking of the moon as a cold and unassuming lump of rock—but new research suggests that it could have been made of a strange magma mush for hundreds of millions of years before it solidified into the object we now see every night.
Nike Snowboarding made this little edit of legendary skateboarder and artist Natas Kaupas. He talks about creativity, passion, enjoyment, all leading towards his delivery as art director for Nike's recent video release, Never Not.
Be sure to check out Never Not Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't already.
Contact: Carol Thorbes cthorbes@sfu.ca 778-782-3035 Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University molecular biologist Lynne Quarmby's adventures in pond scum have led her and four student researchers to discover a mutation that can make cilia, the microscopic antennae on our cells, grow too long. When the antennae aren't the right size, the signals captured by them get misinterpreted. The result can be fatal.
In a newly published paper in the science journal Current Biology, the researchers discovered that the regulatory gene CNK2 is present in cilia and controls the length of these hair-like projections.
This discovery is important because cilia, or flagella, dangle from all of our cells. Their ability to propel some cells, such as sperm, and allow molecular communication in others, for example cellular responses to hormones, determines how we develop from embryos and how our bodies function in adulthood.
When cilia are too short or too long they cause various human hereditary diseases and deformities, such as too many fingers or toes, blindness and Polycystic Kidney Disease, which affects one in 600 people.
Quarmby and her doctoral student Laura Hiltonsenior and lead authors, respectively, on this paperare among the few scientists globally who study cilia-disassembly as opposed to -assembly.
A crucial part of all cells' lifecycle is their cilia's disassembly before cell division and assembly after it. The gene LF4 is a known assembly regulator, and, prior to this study, scientists thought that assembly speed controlled cilia's ultimate length or shrinkage. But Quarmby and Hilton have discovered that disassembly speed is also important, and that the regulatory gene CNK2 plays a key role in controlling it.
Similar to how a balance between water pressure and gravity determines the height of a fountain's stream, a balance of assembly and disassembly speed determines cilia's length. When growing and shrinking happen simultaneously cilia length remains constant.
Pond scum's algae make good lab models for analyzing this because they reproduce quickly, and they have cellular structure and cilia that closely parallel ours. Quarmby and Hilton have been mucking about with pond scum for years and recently started studying algae cilia with defective CNK2 and LF4 genes.
After discovering that cilia with either defective gene are abnormally long, they created an algae cell with four cilia, instead of the normal two, with two of the four engineered to glow green.
Along with two SFU undergrad students and a University of Toronto undergrad, Quarmby and Hilton watched as the fluorescent green tag began to appear at the tip of the untagged pair of cilia.
"We were able to deduce how the mutations affected the cilia's assembly and disassembly by measuring how much and how quickly green fluorescence appeared at the tip of the untagged cilia," explains Quarmby.
"We knew that we had something important when we saw that cells bearing mutations in both CNK2 and LF4 had the most extraordinarily long cilia. They were unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
"My student Laura ran this experiment and oversaw our undergrad researchers. It gave us unique insights into the potentially key role disassembling cilia have in deciding the tails' length. Further investigation will help us understand how ciliary malfunction causes a progression of diseases."
The SFU undergrads working with Quarmby and Hilton were Kavisha Gunawardane and Marianne Schwarz. The UofT student was Joo Wan (James) Kim.
###
Simon Fraser University is Canada's top-ranked comprehensive university and one of the top 50 universities in the world under 50 years old. With campuses in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, B.C., SFU engages actively with the community in its research and teaching, delivers almost 150 programs to more than 30,000 students, and has more than 120,000 alumni in 130 countries.
Simon Fraser University: Engaging Students. Engaging Research. Engaging Communities.
Simon Fraser University
Public Affairs/Media Relations (PAMR)
778.782.3210 http://www.sfu.ca/pamr
Contact:
Lynne Quarmby (West Van. resident), 778.782.4474, quarmby@sfu.ca
Laura Hilton (North Van. resident), 778.782.4598, lkh@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Photos: http://at.sfu.ca/UzEqCZ
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Cellular tail length tells disease tale
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
[
| E-mail
]
Share
Contact: Carol Thorbes cthorbes@sfu.ca 778-782-3035 Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University molecular biologist Lynne Quarmby's adventures in pond scum have led her and four student researchers to discover a mutation that can make cilia, the microscopic antennae on our cells, grow too long. When the antennae aren't the right size, the signals captured by them get misinterpreted. The result can be fatal.
In a newly published paper in the science journal Current Biology, the researchers discovered that the regulatory gene CNK2 is present in cilia and controls the length of these hair-like projections.
This discovery is important because cilia, or flagella, dangle from all of our cells. Their ability to propel some cells, such as sperm, and allow molecular communication in others, for example cellular responses to hormones, determines how we develop from embryos and how our bodies function in adulthood.
When cilia are too short or too long they cause various human hereditary diseases and deformities, such as too many fingers or toes, blindness and Polycystic Kidney Disease, which affects one in 600 people.
Quarmby and her doctoral student Laura Hiltonsenior and lead authors, respectively, on this paperare among the few scientists globally who study cilia-disassembly as opposed to -assembly.
A crucial part of all cells' lifecycle is their cilia's disassembly before cell division and assembly after it. The gene LF4 is a known assembly regulator, and, prior to this study, scientists thought that assembly speed controlled cilia's ultimate length or shrinkage. But Quarmby and Hilton have discovered that disassembly speed is also important, and that the regulatory gene CNK2 plays a key role in controlling it.
Similar to how a balance between water pressure and gravity determines the height of a fountain's stream, a balance of assembly and disassembly speed determines cilia's length. When growing and shrinking happen simultaneously cilia length remains constant.
Pond scum's algae make good lab models for analyzing this because they reproduce quickly, and they have cellular structure and cilia that closely parallel ours. Quarmby and Hilton have been mucking about with pond scum for years and recently started studying algae cilia with defective CNK2 and LF4 genes.
After discovering that cilia with either defective gene are abnormally long, they created an algae cell with four cilia, instead of the normal two, with two of the four engineered to glow green.
Along with two SFU undergrad students and a University of Toronto undergrad, Quarmby and Hilton watched as the fluorescent green tag began to appear at the tip of the untagged pair of cilia.
"We were able to deduce how the mutations affected the cilia's assembly and disassembly by measuring how much and how quickly green fluorescence appeared at the tip of the untagged cilia," explains Quarmby.
"We knew that we had something important when we saw that cells bearing mutations in both CNK2 and LF4 had the most extraordinarily long cilia. They were unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
"My student Laura ran this experiment and oversaw our undergrad researchers. It gave us unique insights into the potentially key role disassembling cilia have in deciding the tails' length. Further investigation will help us understand how ciliary malfunction causes a progression of diseases."
The SFU undergrads working with Quarmby and Hilton were Kavisha Gunawardane and Marianne Schwarz. The UofT student was Joo Wan (James) Kim.
###
Simon Fraser University is Canada's top-ranked comprehensive university and one of the top 50 universities in the world under 50 years old. With campuses in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, B.C., SFU engages actively with the community in its research and teaching, delivers almost 150 programs to more than 30,000 students, and has more than 120,000 alumni in 130 countries.
Simon Fraser University: Engaging Students. Engaging Research. Engaging Communities.
Simon Fraser University
Public Affairs/Media Relations (PAMR)
778.782.3210 http://www.sfu.ca/pamr
Contact:
Lynne Quarmby (West Van. resident), 778.782.4474, quarmby@sfu.ca
Laura Hilton (North Van. resident), 778.782.4598, lkh@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Photos: http://at.sfu.ca/UzEqCZ
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
How old is social media? Maybe we can date it from the birth of Facebook in February 2004. Or perhaps we can go back to 2002, to when Friendster was founded. Or even way, way, way back to digital antiquity – back to 1997, when Reid Hoffman founded the first social media website, SocialNet.
No, social media is actually older, 2,000 years older, than Facebook, Friendster or SocialNet. That’s the view at least of Tom Standage, the digital editor of the Economist, whose new book Writing In The Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years makes the intriguing argument that social media has actually been around since the Romans. It’s the industrial top-down media of the last 150 years, Standage told me, that is the historical anomaly. Social media, he explains, “scratches a prehistorical itch” for personalized news, opinion and gossip. So rather than a waste of time or a distraction, he insists, Facebook and Twitter are actually something that satisfies us as human-beings.
Standage is too good a historian to argue that nothing about social media is new. He acknowledges, for example, that the globalized, instantaneous and searchable nature of social networks are truly new. Yet Standage’s comparisons of contemporary social media with Roman papyrus letters or hand-printed tracts of the Reformation really do suggest that social media goes a lot further back than 1997. “The only surprising things about social media,” Standage dryly concludes, “is that we are surprised by it.”
Just five days after UFC president Dana White announced a light heavyweight bout between Antonio Rogerio Nogueira and Alexander Gustafsson for the promotion's return to London, England on March 8, the UFC has been forced to change its plans.
"Minotouro" has withdrawn from the fight due to a lingering back injury, sources close to the situation confirmed with MMAFighting.com before White also confirmed the news with Ariel Helwani.
White added that there are no plans for Gustafsson's next fight yet. Gustafsson's team also said it heard the news but didn't know who the Swedish fighter will draw next.
Nogueira, who is expected to be ready to fight again in May, hasn't fought since his unanimous decision victory over Rashad Evans at UFC 156 in February. During his UFC career, the Brazilian light heavyweight has pulled out of multiple bouts due to injury, cancelling matches against Rich Franklin, Mauricio Rua,as well as Gustafsson back in April 2012. The same back injury forced him out of his UFC 161 rematch against Rua.
Gustafsson vs. Nogueira was scheduled to headline the first of six events in Europe next year. The card will take place at the O2 Arena in London.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., with House GOP leaders, speaks with reporters following a Republican strategy session, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013. At left is Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio. House GOP leaders Tuesday floated a plan to fellow Republicans to counter an emerging Senate deal to reopen the government and forestall an economy-rattling default on U.S. obligations. But the plan got mixed reviews from the rank and file and it was not clear whether it could pass the chamber. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Imagine that someone asked you to name the one group of people who've earned the right to spend less time at the office next year. To just relax. Because, darn it, they've really busted their humps in 2013, and everyone is extremely pleased with the job they're doing.
We're guessing "United States Congress" wouldn't be at the top of your list.
Well, guess what? Congress, the group of esteemed lawmakers who brought you the government shutdown of 2013, has announced that they plan to be in session for fewer days next year.
The news came from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who announced the schedule on Twitter.
Follow the links and you'll get to this handy-dandy schedule (PDF) that lists the days when Congress will be in session. The grand total for 2014: 113 scheduled days. In 2013, the expected total was 126 days.
To be fair, members of Congress spend a considerable amount of time in their districts. As RollCall puts it, "the work doesn't end when lawmakers leave Washington."
Still, the shorter session begs the question: Why? Not to mention that the shorter session has the potential to be more bad PR for a group in the single-digit job-approval ratings and, as of early October, less popular than cockroaches.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., with House GOP leaders, speaks with reporters following a Republican strategy session, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013. At left is Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio. House GOP leaders Tuesday floated a plan to fellow Republicans to counter an emerging Senate deal to reopen the government and forestall an economy-rattling default on U.S. obligations. But the plan got mixed reviews from the rank and file and it was not clear whether it could pass the chamber. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Imagine that someone asked you to name the one group of people who've earned the right to spend less time at the office next year. To just relax. Because, darn it, they've really busted their humps in 2013, and everyone is extremely pleased with the job they're doing.
We're guessing "United States Congress" wouldn't be at the top of your list.
Well, guess what? Congress, the group of esteemed lawmakers who brought you the government shutdown of 2013, has announced that they plan to be in session for fewer days next year.
The news came from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who announced the schedule on Twitter.
Follow the links and you'll get to this handy-dandy schedule (PDF) that lists the days when Congress will be in session. The grand total for 2014: 113 scheduled days. In 2013, the expected total was 126 days.
To be fair, members of Congress spend a considerable amount of time in their districts. As RollCall puts it, "the work doesn't end when lawmakers leave Washington."
Still, the shorter session begs the question: Why? Not to mention that the shorter session has the potential to be more bad PR for a group in the single-digit job-approval ratings and, as of early October, less popular than cockroaches.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Share