Slumping sales of current iPhone touch panel supplier could point to new in-cell panels for iPhone 5

A new analyst report has revealed that Wintek, the current supply chain partner for Apple?s touch panels is experiencing a steep decline in sales. The report states that Wintek has experienced one of its steepest declines on record. The report also states that the decline is certainly not down to poor demand for Apple products but more likely a sign that Apple has changed technology for its panels.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/cBFJAxdL3UY/story01.htm

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Eureka! Physicists celebrate evidence of particle

GENEVA (AP) ? Scientists at the world's biggest atom smasher hailed the discovery of "the missing cornerstone of physics" Wednesday, cheering the apparent end of a decades-long quest for a new subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, or "God particle," which could help explain why all matter has mass and crack open a new realm of subatomic science.

First proposed as a theory in the 1960s, the maddeningly elusive Higgs had been hunted by at least two generations of physicists who believed it would help shape our understanding of how the universe began and how its most elemental pieces fit together.

As the highly technical findings were announced by two independent teams involving more than 5,000 researchers, the usually sedate corridors of the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, erupted in frequent applause and standing ovations. Physicists who spent their careers in pursuit of the particle shed tears.

The new particle appears to share many of the same qualities as the one predicted by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs and others and is perhaps the biggest accomplishment at CERN since its founding in 1954 outside Geneva along the Swiss-French border.

Rolf Heuer, director of CERN, said the newly discovered particle is a boson, but he stopped just shy of claiming outright that it is the Higgs boson itself ? an extremely fine distinction.

"As a layman, I think we did it," he told the elated crowd. "We have a discovery. We have observed a new particle that is consistent with a Higgs boson."

The Higgs, which until now had been purely theoretical, is regarded as key to understanding why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give all objects weight.

The idea is much like gravity and Isaac Newton's early theories. Gravity was there all the time before Newton explained it. The Higgs boson was believed to be there, too. And now that scientists have actually seen something much like it, they can put that knowledge to further use.

The center's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, sends protons whizzing around a circular 27-kilometer (17-mile) underground tunnel at nearly the speed of light to create high-energy collisions. The aftermath of those impacts can offer clues about dark matter, antimatter and the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

Most of the particles that result from the collisions exist for only the smallest fractions of a second. But finding a Higgs-like boson was one of the biggest challenges in physics: Out of some 500 trillion collisions, just several dozen produced "events" with significant data, said Joe Incandela of the University of California at Santa Barbara, leader of the team known as CMS, with 2,100 scientists.

Each of the teams confirmed Wednesday that they had "observed" a new subatomic particle ? a boson. Heuer said the discovery was "most probably a Higgs boson, but we have to find out what kind of Higgs boson it is." He referred to the discovery as a missing cornerstone of science.

As the leaders of the two teams presented their evidence, applause punctuated their talks.

"Thanks, nature!" joked Fabiola Gianotti, the Italian physicist who heads the team called ATLAS, with 3,000 scientists, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Later, she told reporters that the standard model of physics is still incomplete because "the dream is to find an ultimate theory that explains everything. We are far from that."

Incandela said it was too soon to say definitively whether the particle was exactly the same as envisioned by Higgs and others, who proposed the existence of an energy field where all particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.

Higgs, who was invited to be in the audience, said Wednesday's discovery appears to be close to what he predicted.

"It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime," he said, calling the discovery a huge achievement for the proton-smashing collider.

Outside CERN, the announcement seemed to ricochet around the world with some of the speed and energy of the particle itself.

In an interview with the BBC, the world's most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, said Higgs deserved the Nobel Prize. Hawking said he had placed a wager with another scientist that the Higgs boson would never be found.

"It seems I have just lost $100," he said.

Marc Sher, a professor of physics at William & Mary College, said most observers concluded in December that the Higgs boson would soon be discovered, but he was "still somewhat stunned by the results."

The phrase "God particle" was coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, but it's used mostly by laymen as an easier way of explaining the theory.

Wednesday's celebration was mainly for researchers who explore the deepest, most esoteric levels of particle science. But the particle-hunting effort has paid off in other ways for non-scientists, including contributing to the development of the World Wide Web.

CERN scientists used the early Web to exchange information, and the vast computing power needed to crunch all of the data produced by the atom smasher also boosted development of cloud computing, which is now making its way into mainstream services.

Advances in solar energy, medical imaging and proton therapy used in the fight against cancer have also resulted from the work of particle physicists at CERN and elsewhere.

The last undiscovered piece of the standard model of physics could be a variant of the Higgs that was predicted or something else that entirely changes the way scientists think about how matter is formed, Incandela said.

"This boson is a very profound thing we have found," he said. "We're reaching into the fabric of the universe in a way we never have done before. We've kind of completed one particle's story. ... Now we're way out on the edge of exploration."

The discovery is so fundamental to the laws of nature, Incandela said, that it could spawn a new era of technology and development in the same way that Newton's laws of gravity led to basic equations of mechanics that made the industrial revolution possible.

"This is so far out on a limb, I have no idea where it will be applied," he added. "We're talking about something we have no idea what the implications are and may not be directly applied for centuries."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/eureka-physicists-celebrate-evidence-particle-100214540.html

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Natural plant protein converted into drug-delivery vehicles

ScienceDaily (July 3, 2012) ? Finding biocompatible carriers that can get drugs to their targets in the body involves significant challenges. Beyond practical concerns of manufacturing and loading these vehicles, the carriers must work effectively with the drug and be safe to consume. Vesicles, hollow capsules shaped like double-walled bubbles, are ideal candidates, as the body naturally produces similar structures to move chemicals from one place to another. Finding the right molecules to assemble into capsules, however, remains difficult.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have now shown a new approach for making vesicles and fine-tuning their shapes. By starting with a protein that is found in sunflower seeds, they used genetic engineering to make a variety of protein molecules that assemble into vesicles and other useful structures.

Daniel A. Hammer, Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor of Bioengineering, graduate student Kevin Vargo and research scientist Ranganath Parthasarathy of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science conducted the research.

Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"To our knowledge, this is the first time a vesicle has been made from a recombinant protein," Hammer said.

Recombinant proteins are the products of a well-established technique that involves introducing a designed gene sequence into a host organism -- in most cases, the bacterium E. coli -- in order to get that organism to make a protein it would not normally produce.

Hammer's group worked for nearly a decade to find a protein that was biocompatible, could be produced through recombinant methods and, most important, could be induced to form vesicles.

"The molecule we identified is called oleosin," Hammer said. "It's a surfactant protein found in sunflower and sesame seeds."

Surfactants are soap-like chemicals that have two distinct sides; one side is attracted to water and the other is repelled by it. They can make many structures in solution but making vesicles is rare. Most often, surfactants make micelles, in which a single layer of molecules aggregates with the water-loving part on the outside and the water-hating part on the inside. Micelles have a limited ability to carry drugs. Vesicles, in contrast, have two walls aligned so the two water-hating sides face each other. The water-loving interior cavity allows the transport of a large payload of water-soluble molecules that are suspended in water. Since many drugs are water soluble, vesicles offer significant advantages for drug delivery.

The team systematically modified oleosin to find variants of the molecule that could form vesicles. Getting oleosin to take this complex shape meant selectively removing and changing parts of oleosin's gene sequence so that the corresponding protein would fold the way the researchers wanted after it was produced by the E.coli.

"We started by truncating the sequence that codes for the hydrophobic part, shortening the protein itself," Hammer said. "We did more complex truncations at the ends for separation and to control the shape of the assembly."

"There are simple ways to correlate the gene sequence to the geometry you get in the protein," Vargo said. "For example, getting the right amount of curvature to make a spherical vesicle means the chains should be sufficiently large that they do not pack tightly."

In the process of finding the right protein for this task, the researchers came up with several other useful protein variants that form different shapes, including sheets and fibers, when grown in the appropriate salt solutions.

Materials made by recombinant methods offer an additional advantage in that the precise sequence of amino acids can be controlled for targeting to specific receptors and other biological targets. For proteins of this size, this level of control is not attainable by any other method.

"Other groups have synthesized polypeptide vesicles, but they have a hard time controlling the sequences in individual sections of their molecules," Vargo said. "We can go in a change a single amino acid in the protein by modifying the corresponding part of the gene."

"Recombinant methods mean we can make polymers that are all of a defined length and dictate the chemical composition at each location along that length," Hammer said. "You get the exact length and sequence every time."

According to Hammer's team, the hardest part of the research was confirming that these sequences did indeed fold into vesicles. This was only possible with specialized equipment available to the researchers through their association with Penn's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and made possible by a grant written by professor Karen Winey from Materials Science and Engineering.

"The vast majority of our time in this project was doing the imaging; making the protein was relatively easy," Hammer said.

The imaging technique used is known as cyro-transmission electron microscopy, or cryoTEM

"With cryoTEM," Vargo said, "we create a thin layer of solution, then plunge it into ethane, freezing it fast enough that the water doesn't crystallize. Ice crystals would also destroy the vesicles, so this technique leaves you with your particles and structures intact."

As their protein is already routinely eaten, the researchers are confident that their oleosin vesicles will be of great interest in drug-delivery applications, particularly oral-drug delivery. Future work will entail adding genes for functional groups to allow the vesicles to target certain tissues, as well as determining whether the proteins can be induced to change shape once they reach their targets.

"This research opens up the possibility of using switchable motifs to allow us to release high concentrations of drugs on different cues, such as a change in acidity," Hammer said. "Tumor microenvironments and the interior of tumors are known to be acidic, so a vesicle that falls apart in acidic environments would be extremely valuable."

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation through the Penn MRSEC and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania.

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


Journal Reference:

  1. K. B. Vargo, R. Parthasarathy, D. A. Hammer. Self-assembly of tunable protein suprastructures from recombinant oleosin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1205426109

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120703200546.htm

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'Pacific Rim' Image Introduces Charlie Hunnam And Rinko Kikuchi

Thank you Entertainment Weekly for getting us even more hyped for Comic-Con than we already were. In addition to the awesome "The Hobbit" images we saw earlier, this week's issue of the magazine also includes a new look at Guillermo del Toro's upcoming film "Pacific Rim." The first image from the movie introduced us to [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2012/07/03/pacific-rim-charlie-hunnam-rinko-kikuchi/

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Paterno family: Release all emails and records

(AP) ? Joe Paterno's family is calling on the Pennsylvania attorney general and former FBI Director Louis Freeh to release all emails and records related to their investigations into the Penn State child sex abuse scandal.

Family lawyer Wick Sollers' statement Monday comes after reports of leaked emails between administrators about a graduate assistant's account in 2001 of an encounter between former defensive coordinator Sandusky and a boy in the showers.

CNN reported one email outlined a change in plans among administrators after Athletic Director Tim Curley spoke to Paterno.

Sollers represents the family of former coach Paterno, who was fired and died in January. Sollers says it's clear someone in authority was not interested in a thorough investigation, given the leaks of selective emails.

Freeh is leading the school's internal investigation.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-07-02-Penn%20State-Abuse/id-8f9d61231c6c46e9a7f401b64961759c

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Apple says disagrees with Italy antitrust complaint

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/apple-says-disagrees-italy-antitrust-complaint-155542519--finance.html

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War-related climate change would substantially reduce crop yields

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Though worries about "nuclear winter" have faded since the end of the Cold War, existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons still hold the potential for devastating global impacts.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin?Madison and Rutgers University have found that the climate effects of a hypothetical nuclear war between India and Pakistan would greatly reduce yields of staple crops, even in distant countries.

The work, by Mutlu Ozdogan and Chris Kucharik of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW?Madison and Alan Robock of Rutgers' Center for Environmental Prediction, will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Climatic Change.

Robock used global climate models to calculate the climate impacts of a conflict between India and Pakistan, each using 50 nuclear weapons.

"This is essentially a climate change experiment, but instead of running a climate change model under a global CO2 scenario, you run it under a soot scenario, where the soot comes from fires from cities and industrial areas burning as a result of the war," explains Ozdogan, a UW?Madison professor of forest and wildlife ecology.

The soot and smoke can travel around the world in the atmosphere and block some of the sunlight that would normally reach the Earth. That leads to cooler temperatures, altered weather and precipitation patterns, and shorter growing seasons.

"We were surprised that there was such a large climate change ? climate change unprecedented in recorded human history ? even from a war with 50 small nuclear weapons per side, much, much less than one percent of the current nuclear arsenal," says Robock. He adds that the changes also lasted a full decade, much longer than he expected. "The question is, what impact does that have on things that matter to humans, and the most important is our food supply."

The researchers used the climate changes predicted for the Midwest to calculate potential effects on corn and soy production in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Missouri. Using climate-based agricultural output models, they compared yields under modern weather patterns and under the war scenario.

They found that the climate effects of nuclear war led to decreases in corn yields of 10 to 40 percent and soy yields of 2 to 20 percent, with the reductions gradually declining over the course of the decade following the war.

"Those changes ? in any year ? are much larger than the natural variation we might see" due to weather fluctuations alone, Ozdogan says. And unlike gradual environmental changes associated with greenhouse gas accumulation, the rapid onset of a war would not permit farmers or the global economy any time to adapt.

A companion study by Robock and Lili Xia of Rutgers University, also published in Climatic Change, calculated that the same scenario would dramatically reduce rice production in China: an average decrease of 21 percent during each of the first four years after the war and 10 percent less for the next six years.

Such losses add up to a huge impact on regional food supplies that could escalate into wider food shortages and trade breakdowns with dire economic and political consequences, Robock says.

The take-home message, Ozdogan says, is that localized events can have disproportionately large global impacts.

"Hopefully this will never happen," he says, "but if it happens, if the prospect is there, these are some of the results that people could expect."

###

University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://www.wisc.edu

Thanks to University of Wisconsin-Madison 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/121425/War_related_climate_change_would_substantially_reduce_crop_yields

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Twitter sees new record during Euro 2012 final

Spain's Fernando Torres holds his son Leo after an award ceremony as Spain won the Euro 2012 soccer championship final between Spain and Italy in Kiev, Ukraine, early Monday, July 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Spain's Fernando Torres holds his son Leo after an award ceremony as Spain won the Euro 2012 soccer championship final between Spain and Italy in Kiev, Ukraine, early Monday, July 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

(AP) ? Twitter says its users fired off more than 15,000 Tweets per second when Spain made its fourth goal in Sunday's European Championship final, setting a new sports-related record on the social networking site.

The surge in tweets came just weeks before the Olympics Games in London are expected to bring another unprecedented surge of activity by sports fans on social networking sites.

Twitter says total global traffic on its platform peaked at 15,358 tweets per second during the fourth goal Sunday in Kiev, where Spain defeated Italy 4-0. Twitter also registered a total of 16.5 million tweets worldwide during the match.

Among those who tweeted was Pele, the retired Brazilian star. He congratulated Spain and said he was looking forward to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2012-07-02-Euro%202012-Twitter%20Record/id-bc4c78b3a34c4e8fb45e23acb7da959d

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Kauffman Stadium transforming into All-Star venue

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) ? On a piece of metal scaffolding beyond the left-field wall at Kauffman Stadium, construction workers bolted together a table under a sweltering midday sun, the temperature tickling triple digits and sweat pouring off their brows.

Along the baselines, groundskeepers laid stencils and began to paint All-Star game logos, while other workers hurriedly connected miles of cable, built camera platforms, hung banners and spruced up every corner of the Kansas City Royals' home for its night in the national spotlight.

The anticipation is almost over: The All-Star game is merely a week away.

"People haven't been here in a long time, because no postseason games have been played here since 1985," Royals vice president Mike Swanson said Tuesday. "We want people to say, 'Wow, they did a heck of a job and we want to go back.' That's what we want."

That's what the staff of the Royals ? along with untold numbers of construction workers ? has been doing since the club left town for an extended road trip last week.

There are entire sets to build for Fox, which has television rights for Monday night's Home Run Derby and Tuesday night's All-Star game. There are bleachers to build for overflow press, and air conditioning to run to a giant, walk-in soda can in right field, where sponsor Pepsi is giving some fortunate fans an opportunity to see the festivities from a most unique vantage point.

Extra photo bays are being constructed for the roughly 75 still photographers documenting every aspect of the game. Electrical and internet cables are being run for some 500 reporters who will be covering the All-Star game on deadline for electronic and print publications.

All told, there will be 2,556 credentials issued to reporters, technicians, officials and others associated with the event, second only to the 2008 All-Star game at the old Yankee Stadium.

"When we got the game, we thought this would be one of the least-covered All-Star games," said Swanson, pointing out that the economy was in the doldrums just a few years ago, and the Olympics and November elections will financially strap many news organizations this year.

"That has turned out to be about as far from the truth as you can get."

This is the third time Kansas City has rolled out the red carpet for baseball's elite.

The city hosted the game at the old Municipal Stadium in 1960, back when the Athletics were in town. The A's moved to Oakland in 1968, and the Royals came into being the following year, and new owner Ewing Kauffman ? the namesake of the stadium ? was rewarded for his desire to keep the game in Kansas City by hosting the 1973 All-Star game at his newly constructed ballpark.

Kauffman Stadium recently underwent a $250 million renovation in part to lure the All-Star game back to Kansas City, and commissioner Bud Selig officially awarded the game on June 16, 2010.

Two years of whirlwind preparations are about to come to fruition.

"I'm looking forward to next week, the All-Star game and all the events we have," Selig said during a conference call Monday. "We're having a remarkable year on the field, and frankly off the field, as we're going over 37 million in attendance."

There will be no shortage of fans in the seats for the All-Star game, either. There were only a few tickets still available early this week for All-Star Sunday, which includes the Futures Game and the Legends and Celebrity Softball Game. The Home Run Derby and All-Star game are sold out.

How hot are tickets? Entire strips in the Diamond Club section behind home plate could be had through secondary markets on Tuesday afternoon for nearly $3,500 each.

The city and Major League Baseball are providing plenty of avenues for fans to get involved with the game, though, even if they don't want to mortgage their house for tickets.

The festivities begin in earnest on Friday, when the MLB All-Star FanFest opens at Bartle Hall in downtown Kansas City, Mo. Fans will be able to get autographs from former players, participate in interactive exhibits and check out memorabilia and other baseball-themed attractions.

Hunt Auctions will be running a live auction and appraisal fair, and some of the highlights include a home run ball hit by Lou Gehrig during the 1928 World Series, and a circa-1920s bat used by Ty Cobb, both of which are expected to bring more than $100,000.

"Both the Lou Gehrig World Series Ball and the Ty Cobb bat have incredible significance with equally impressive provenance, two of the more amazing pieces I have seen in my 20 years working with vintage baseball items," said Hunt Auctions president David Hunt.

Numerous charitable events also are planned over the weekend, including a build project with Habitat for Humanity, the renovation of youth baseball fields around Kansas City, and the MLB All-Star game Charity 5K and Fun Run through the Power and Light District.

Of course, many of those events are planned for places around the city, allowing work to finish up at Kauffman Stadium. Swanson expects the ballpark to be ready on Friday.

"I think the hardest part of hosting it, and I've been involved in baseball for 34 years, is you really have to put your baseball season on hold for 10 days," said Swanson, who has worked for the Rockies, Padres and Diamondbacks, but left each stop before they hosted the All-Star game.

"It's been a pretty intense week," he said, "but everything has really gone pretty smoothly."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kauffman-stadium-transforming-star-venue-220214075--mlb.html

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