Microsoft to sell phone on Verizon by summer-source

NEW YORK Thu March 4, 2010 6:25pm EST

A man looks at his phone as he walks past a Verizon wireless store in New York, Jul 30, 2009 record photo.

Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is aiming to launch dual phones that will be sole by tip U.S. mobile user Verizon Wireless in late open or early summer, a chairman briefed on the make a difference pronounced on Thursday.

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The phones would be targeted at complicated users of amicable network sites, according to the chairman who asked not to be identified as the inclination have not nonetheless been announced.

The phones are being grown by Microsoft underneath the formula name Project Pink, the chairman said. Representatives for Microsoft and Verizon Wireless declined comment.

Microsoft essentially competes in the wireless industry by offered the Windows mobile program to mixed handset makers, but it has been losing marketplace share to Apple Inc, Google Inc and others.

The program association additionally sells the Sidekick phone, that is made by Sharp Corp. The Sidekick came from the merger of start-up Danger Inc.

Microsoft has prolonged denied rumors that it is building new cellphones over the Sidekick, but speak about Project Pink has persisted.

Technology blog Gizmodo on Thursday posted photographs of a black phone with dull edges that slides open and includes a mini-keyboard. (link.reuters.com/pes33j)

Gizmodo pronounced the photographs, that show Microsoft branding and the Verizon Wireless logo, were piece of selling materials that a tipster had sent to the blog.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew and Bill Rigby, modifying by Tiffany Wu, Gary Hill)

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Robert Fisks World The loyal utterance of letters from the frontRobert Fiskators

How come old soldiers dont write in clich�s? We reporters fill the dispatches with clich�s about "gathering fight clouds" and guns "falling silent" review any (and I repeat, any) newspaper, and you"ll see what I mean. Is it their simple amiability or savagery, or fright that mostly spares genuine soldiers from the clich�s of broadcasting and the ungrammatical shorthand of the email?

Take Hal Crookall, whom readers last met in this mainstay as he tramped with his crew over the silt dunes of Dunkirk, the initial greeting of his soldiers on saying the thousands of soldiers on the beaches matching to that of the British sergeant in the movie Atonement. Fuck me! they roared. Well, Hal has forsaken me an additional note and be warned, Reader, this is clever stuff, not for the breakfast list after celebration of the mass an essay by me on the Menin Gate at Ypres, that bears the names of some-more than 56,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never found after the First World War.

Hals memories were of that same Menin Gate during the Second World War. Retreating with the BEF rearguard in 1940, he found himself fortifying Ypres, the unequivocally same Belgian city still undergoing reformation from the hull of the 1914-1918 war. And irony of ironies he was systematic to take up on all sides subsequent to Lutyens" murky monument. I saw the Menin Gate for the initial time, vacant at the series of names on it, with the pale thought that might be the names would shortly be combined to them.

The theatre is set. I was a unequivocally immature second lieutenant, and I was sent with my crew to take up a on all sides to the left of the Menin Gate on what seemed to be a waterway bank. There were German snipers on the conflicting side ... I got a summary from the CO to stick on him underneath the Menin Gate, for instructions. Second Lieutenant Crookall was roughly killed by a German trebuchet explosve when he arrived and was told that a Royal Engineers section was fixation an bomb assign underneath the overpass at the behind of the Menin Gate. Hals pursuit was to take a crew to the alternative side of the overpass and hold off Hitlers legions. He ran to the second building of a house, anticipating a window that faced up the travel with a raise of balderdash underneath the window lonesome with a tarpaulin.

I dived on tip of it, poked a Bren gun by the window and proposed firing... I shortly became wakeful that there was a majority awful smell in the room. As shortly as I was able, I folded behind the tarpaulin... I was to have nightmares for majority years after what followed. I realised that I was lying on tip of a raise of passed bodies. Immediately confronting me, inches away, was what was left of an old mans face, lonesome in crawling white maggots. Then Hal ran behind to the good gate, seeing a pretentious Alsatian dog in a pathway with half the nose blown off, and an additional human physique being eaten by an animal imitative a polecat.

The explosives went off, floating up the overpass and deleterious the Menin Gate and though Hal might not know it, the shrapnel outlines of that explosion are essentially still on the embankment prior to streamer for the Channel coast. So you see, Robert, your accounts about Ypres can additionally trigger some-more new memories than the First World War! So it would seem. A soldier"s-eye perspective of risk and abhorrence and history. And by possibility when I got Hals letter, I was celebration of the mass Arthur Stockwins lovely, deeply unhappy book about an event of letters in in between the woman who would turn his mother, Edith Ainscow of Birmingham, and her infantryman swain of the Great War, Second Lieutenant Geoff Boothby. He was a tunneller close to Ypres, digging thirty feet in to the blue clay of Flanders to conflict the German lines from underneath the ground. She was 18, he 21. Edith had well known Geoff for usually 4 days and their letters are a relocating down payment in in between them. Geoff tries to gangling his immature woman the dark of the trenches nonetheless he speaks of the genocide of a immature officer, the cold, the slightly wet this is Ypres in the early open of 1916: I"ve had a stale night of it, falling a missile underneath the majority perplexing conditions of wet, cold bad luck... Huns reported operative dual yards from my gallery, that meant yours indeed lying on his stomach in humid clay for half an hour and conference nothing... Yesterday 3 crumps (shells) done themselves extremely de trop by alighting 10 yards from the dugout, one outstanding the entrance. But we"re removing used to such couple of things as shells. Edith pleads for a design of Geoff in is uniform. Geoff Dearest, I"ve got your print usually right away and I can frequency take my eyes off it even to write to you. I didnt know anything could have anybody so happy.

But by twenty March, Geoff was writing: Nearly all my friends in the Staffords have been killed in the fighting turn Ypres a couple of weeks ago. Its a hideous unhappy thing how majority friendships have been done damaged by this war... But it does have one feel unequivocally unapproachable to be an Englishman, when one knows how unselfishly ones friends go west. Ouch. Just dual months later, Geoff was killed by a German subterraneous explosion, failing instantly, thirty feet down in the Flanders sand usually a mile or so from where roughly a entertain of a century after Hal himself would be fighting for his hold up opposite the Germans. Geoffs physique was not recovered but his name is remembered on the relic at Bellewaerde Wood.

When Geoffs officer, Major J M Bliss, writes to his mom Alice, he starts with harmful eloquence. I am some-more contemptible than I can demonstrate to have to send you a little unequivocally bad news, in actuality the worst, of your son Lieut Boothby...

In Alices papers, Arthur Stockwin found a handwritten note from Alice, dedicated to her passed son.

Will you come behind when

The Tide Turns?

After majority days?

My heart yearns to know.

And so I seem

To have you still the same

In one universe with me

As if it were piece and parcel,

One shadow, and we need not

dissemble

Our darkness: do you understand?

For I have told you solid how it is.

I shall regularly consternation over you, and

look for you

And you will regularly be with me.

I think even Hal will be lost for difference at that.

More from Robert Fisk

Researchers find elemental step in immune-system development

Our work demonstrates that the defence complement uses both certain and disastrous preference processes to emanate an in effect race of B cells, pronounced Dr. Pelanda, Associate Professor in the Integrated Department of Immunology at National Jewish Health and the University of Colorado Denver. A forsake in possibly preference routine could lead to autoimmunity or defence deficiency.

Humans have millions of B cells each day, each one versed with the own singular B-cell receptor. Each receptor recognizes a specific protein fragment. Once the receptor recognizes that fragment, the B cell becomes activated and releases antibodies that conflict the protein or the cell it is on.

B-cell receptors initial crop up on building B cells in the bone marrow. Some of those receptors connect to proteins that are a normal piece of the body, and could trigger an autoimmune attack. Other receptors can be non-functional. The preference routine weeds out these dangerous and non-functional B cells to furnish a race that can commend a far-reaching accumulation of foreign, potentially damaging invaders, but endure proteins that are a normal piece of the organism.

Negative preference occurs in the bone pith when potentially autoimmune B cells are detected, deserted and educated to furnish a opposite receptor.

The subsequent step has been unclear. Do B cells that tarry disastrous preference leave the bone pith on their own? Or do they need a vigilance that tells them to leave the pith and quit to the spleen?

Dr. Pelanda and her colleagues knew that B-cell receptors broach a constant, or "tonic," signal, even when they are not activated. They thought that tonic vigilance competence approach suitable B cells to leave the bone marrow, quit to the spleen and mature.

Using a singular rodent indication and an in vitro complement written privately for B cells, Dr. Pelanda found that mice who have fewer B-cell receptors have fewer grown up B cells in their spleens. The B cells could have left the bone pith but died since they did not have a B-cell receptor, well known to be required for survival. If that were the case, afterwards a pro-survival factor, bcl-2, should have discovered grown up B cells and increasing their population. It did not. Thus, it became transparent that juvenile B cells contingency embrace a vigilance from the B-cell receptor that allows them to shun the bone marrow, quit and mature.

It is a really critical checkpoint, pronounced Dr. Pelanda. Without it, B cells are stranded in the bone marrow, incompetent to circulate, grown up and minister to defence defense.

Dr. Pelanda and her colleagues afterwards activated the protein Erk by branch on the Ras gene, and saw that some-more B cells transient the bone pith to mature. Conversely, when they shut off activation of Erk in normal B cells, couple of were means to mature. Thus, Erk helps broach the positive-selection vigilance that allows B cells to mature.

Naval investigate laboratory takes a close see at singular diamonds



The aria says that "diamonds are a girl"s majority appropriate friend," but scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory are anticipating that diamonds are a researcher"s majority appropriate crony too. NRL, that has been concerned in pioneering work involving containing alkali fog deposition of solid and the make use of of solid materials in modernized technologies applicable to the Department of Defense given 1987, has not long ago undertaken a little new projects in solid research. In partnership with the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History, NRL researchers have started investigate singular and ancestral healthy colored diamonds to assimilate and impersonate the defects/impurities, that means the color. Many of the properties of solid required for record are impacted by defects and impurities benefaction in the lattice. NRL has been complementing the studies of these defects and impurities in containing alkali fog deposition solid materials with the studies of healthy diamonds at the Smithsonian.

Since late 2005, a group of NRL researchers led by Dr. James Butler of the Chemistry Division, has been examining surprising healthy colored diamonds accessible to the Smithsonian. These enclosed majority of the diamonds in the Smithsonian Collection, such at the "Hope" and the "Blue Heart," as well as a pick up of 240 whim colored diamonds in the Aurora Butterfly pick up on loan to the Smithsonian.

During 2005, NRL researchers James Butler, Sally Magana (NRC), Jaime Freitas and Paul Klein worked with the Smithsonian, Penn State University, and Ocean Optics to investigate the visual glimmer properties of the Hope Diamond. This work, "Using Phosphorescence as a Fingerprint for the Hope and Other Blue Diamonds", was published in Geology, 36, 83-86 (2008). Most recently, in 2010, NRL has been operative with the Smithsonian and the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) to investigate an additional important blue diamond, the Wittelsbach-Graff diamond. Both the Hope and the Wittelsbach-Graff diamonds are believed to have originated from the same segment in India in the 17th century, have matching blue color and scarcely matching red/orange brightness when vehement by ultra-violet light. Hence, it has been speculated that they competence have originated from the same stone. The Wittelsbach-Graff solid was last seen in open in 1958; afterwards in 2008 Laurence Graff, a solid dealer, paid for it at auction for 16.4 million GBP. Graff had the mill cut and repolished, shortening it from a 35.5 carat mill to a 31 carat stone, compared to the Hope solid that is 45.52 carats.

The investigate group investigate the Wittelsbach-Graff solid used a accumulation of spectroscopic and little analyzes to establish the impassioned likeness of the gems, but additionally noticed graphic differences in the dislocation and aria microstructure that suggests that the gems probably did not issue from the same severe stone.

The Wittelsbach-Graff is on agreement at the Museum of Natural History from Feb to Aug 2010 along with the Hope Diamond. This work continues the ongoing partnership in between NRL scientists and the Museum of Natural History on the Hope solid and alternative blue diamonds at the Smithsonian that has carefully thought about the brightness (due to donor-acceptor recombination), the boron thoroughness utilizing delegate ion mass spectroscopy, and shortly to be published work on the spectroscopic and constructional properties of a pick up of pinkish diamonds.

Another aspect of NRL"s solid investigate partnership with the Smithsonian involves an interdisciplinary bid to investigate singular pinkish diamonds. Many healthy pinkish diamonds get their color from colored bands or lamellae in an differently drab diamond. Led by Jeff Post, Eloïse Gaillou, and Tim Rose of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History; NRL researchers James Butler (Chemistry Division), Rhonda Stroud and Nabil Bassim (Materials Science and Technology Division); along with Alexander Zaitsev, CUNY; and Marc Fries, JPL/Cal Tech complicated a apartment of healthy pinkish diamonds. The investigate group used a accumulation of spectroscopic and microanalytical collection to investigate the structure, defects, and impurities in and around the colored lamellae.

Pink diamonds are intensely rare, on a standard with blue diamonds in monument and value. But distinct majority blue diamonds where the color is caused by an foreign matter atom, boron, pinkish diamonds appear to get their color from structural, or a multiple of constructional and foreign matter associated defects.

While the investigate group has not identified the expect make up of the defects causing the pinkish color, they have dynamic that it is contained in slight colored lamellae in an differently pure pattern of diamond. Using a focused ion lamp microscope, NRL researchers extracted cross-sections of the pinkish lamella for minute hearing in a delivery nucleus microscope (TEM). TEM hearing of the hideaway structure, total with spectroscopic analysis, indicate that the lamellae are the outcome of cosmetic deformation, that occurred whilst the solid was still in the earth"s layer and prior to it was ecstatic to the aspect in very old volcanic eruptions. They will go on their studies to impersonate a apartment of singular pinkish diamonds to see if they can entirely brand the inlet and means of the defects that means the pinkish color. "The pinkish lamella are matching tiwn domains, with atoms organised to counterpart roughly just those of the surrounding pure diamond. The genuine subject is, what pointed change in the atomic agreement creates the twins pinkish but leaves the scarcely matching kin colorless? The sub-angstrom imaging capabilities of the ultimate era of nucleus microscopes should discuss it us the answer," says Stroud.

"Understanding these singular colored healthy diamonds provides believe utilitarian to both technologists and gemologists," Butler explains. "A improved bargain of these defects and impurities (dopants) concede us to tailor the materials properties of solid materials: from electrically insulating to semiconducting; from optically pure to a accumulation of colors; or to yield the removed quantum states for quantum cryptography or quantum computing."

&

http://www.nrl.navy.mil

Bit Defender

Win one of 3 copies of A Serious Man on Blu-ray

Win one of three copies of A Serious Man on Blu-ray It"s not funny A SERIOUS MAN TRAILER - ON DVD AND BLU-RAY MARCH 15by grapevine_digital Embed

A SERIOUS MAN TRAILER - ON DVD AND BLU-RAY MARCH 15
by grapevine_digital

5 March 2010 16:26 GMT

To celebrate the release of A Serious Man on the 15 March Pocket-lint is giving away 3 copies of the film on Blu-Ray.

The film follows Physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg who, unhappy with his life, sets out to make sense of it all. Joel and Ethan Coen return to their comedy roots with this original and darkly humorous story about one ordinary mans quest to become a serious man.

So, for a chance to win, simply click through on this link that"ll whisk you away to the competition page. The competition will run for 2 weeks, finishing on the 19 March 2010.

Film 2009 Focus Features LLC. All Rights Reserved. Packaging Design 2010 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved. ACADEMY AWARD is the registered trademark and service mark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science.

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Putin says Russia could pointer up to Iran sanctions: RIA

MOSCOW Fri Mar 19, 2010 2:43pm EDT Related News Russia-U.S. arms pact possible in April-Putin aideFri, Mar 19 2010

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday that Russia could sign up to a sanctions resolution on Iran, Russian news agencies quoted a senior Putin aide as saying.

World

Putin"s deputy chief of staff, Yuri Ushakov, was quoted as saying that Putin had affirmed that a sanctions resolution "was possible," Itar-Tass news agency reported.

"Vladimir Vladimirovich gave his appraisal of the situation in Iran and underlined that such a situation (involving Russian support of a sanctions resolution) was possible," RIA state news agency quoted Ushakov as saying.

But Putin also cautioned Clinton that sanctions "do not always help to resolve such an issue and that sometimes they can have a counterproductive impact," Ushakov was quoted as saying by RIA.

(Writing by Guy Faulconbridge, editing by Steve Gutterman)

World

Scientists find hulk cosmetic balderdash vegetable patch in North Atlantic

A giant rubbish tip made up of thousands of pieces of plastic has been found floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

The large dump is north of the Caribbean and is a similar in volume to the "great Pacific garbage patch" that lies between Hawaii and California.

Discarded plastic is known to harm seabirds and marine life, but Karen Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association said the problem in the Atlantic ocean had been "largely ignored."

Just some of the rubbish picked up during a sweep in the North Atlantic. Most pieces are only 1cm wide and can be swallowed by fish and birds

As the debris is so small it mingles in with the seaweed. Sea birds mistake the discarded plastic for food

The revelations come after the results of a 22-year study were unveiled at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, U.S.

During the study, the longest and most extensive record of plastic marine debris in any ocean basin, SEA undergraduates collected more than 64,000 tiny bits of plastic.

More...New homes to be built from 18 tonnes of recycled plasticMet Office to re-examine 150 years of temperature data in the wake of the Climategate scandalVBS video report on the "Pacific garbage patch"

Scientists and students carried out 6,100 sweeps of the North Atlantic towing fine mesh nets behind a research vessel.

More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface.

This image shows the remains of albatross chicks mingled with the plastic junk they were fed by their parents. Thinking it was food, the adults picked it up from the vast rubbish patch in the Pacific and then brought it back to the nest

Researchers believe these fish died after swallowing bits of plastic found floating in the Atlantic Ocean

The researchers described the sheer diversity of what they had found in this synthetic soup in a voyage blog.

They wrote: "We saw embedded in each patch a disturbing mosaic of plastic junk.

"We grabbedour nets and began fishing furiously, amassing a pile of bottle caps,shotgun shells, crates, toothbrushes, a boxers mouthpiece, and myriadunidentifiable chunks floated by, gently pulsating with the oceanscurrents."

Dr Lavender Law said that most of the pieces of plastic weregenerally very small - about one centimetre across, and wereaccumulating fairly far north in the Atlantic.

The maximum "plastic density" was 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre. It is impossible to measure the exact size of the patch as much of it floats beneath the surface.

"That"s a maximum that is comparable with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," said Dr Lavender Law.

Plastic patch: The yellow line traces the area the scientists are planning to trawl for debris this year

The full impact on the marine environment of the plastics if not yet known, she said.

"But we know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular."

When plastic is in the sea for a longtime it photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces until it is smallenough to be ingested by organisms near the surface - thus entering thefood chain. Some plastic leaches potentially toxic chemicals such asbisphenol A.

Fish captured off the Azores have been sent to a lab inCalifornia for stomach analysis. More than one third of fish collected from the North Pacific patch were found to have ingested plastic fragments.

Both the Pacific and North Atlantic patches are called gyres, which are areas with few ocean currents surrounded by strong ocean currents.

They create spinning vortexes and once plastic floats into the area it cannot escape and so accumulates over time.

The Pacific Gyre was discovered in 1997 by Captain Charles Moore and was the first to be documented.

There are now thought to be five major oceanic gyres and all are likely to form large plastic patches.

Enlarge

The five areas or "gyres" where plastic is believed to be collecting in large synthetic soups

The researchers wrote on their voyage blog: "There is no doubt in our minds that the Pacific plastic plague is not anisolated phenomenon, but an International problem.

"Weve seen plastictrash covering beaches in Bermuda, carried from the mainland by theGulf Stream. Weve seen broken down fragments in our trawls aftersieving the oceans surface.

"And weve now seen mini islands of plastic trash entangled in Sargassum (seaweed)."

For more information visit the website 5gyres.org