Global crisis can be overcome in 18 months: APEC

Pacific Rim nations assured the world that the global financial crisis can be quelled in 18 months, but provided few details of how they expect that to happen - or how their governments can help.The 21 economies, which represent more than half of the world's productive power, also pledged during a two-day summit not to erect new protectionist barriers for the next year, and to jump-start stalled World Trade Organization talks.The main accomplishment of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum was a widening of support for the Washington Declaration made last weekend by major economies that pledged to maintain free trade despite pressures to protect domestic industries.

The leaders voiced confidence that the crisis could be resolved by mid-2010, though they did not go much beyond the steps outlined in the Group of 20 summit in Washington.

"We are convinced that we can overcome this crisis in a period of 18 months," the leaders said in a statement. "We have already taken urgent and extraordinary steps to stabilize our financial sectors and strengthen economic growth."The reassuring words were added early Sunday to a declaration the leaders had signed off on the previous day. Delegates from several countries said the changes were made overnight at the request of the summit's host, Peruvian President Alan Garcia."We have agreed that this meeting produce a clear and firm statement that breaks the vicious cycle of anguish and uncertainty," Garcia said Sunday. "We - united as the world's peoples, governments and businesses - are going to beat the crisis."

The 18-month timeline fits with a calculation by the International Monetary Fund, which forecast developed economies would grow barely 0.1 per cent in 2009, and that the world would emerge from the crisis the following year.

But some delegates and analysts were skeptical that the timetable was much more than wishful thinking, and some leaders distanced themselves from the language. Mexican President Felipe Calderon described the date as more of an estimate than a prediction.Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper went a step further."I think it would be speculative to commit to that kind of timeline," he said.And Dan Price, an aide to George W. Bush, said the US president thinks the global economy can be fixed even faster.

"That particular sentence was added by the president of Peru as the chair," Price said aboard Air Force One. "Certainly, some in the region may think that recovery may take 18 months. President Bush...

Ramsey Cascades

Ramsey Cascades is the tallest waterfall in the park and one of the most spectacular. Water drops 100 feet over rock outcroppings and collects in a small pool where numerous well-camouflaged salamanders can be found.

The trail to the waterfall gains over 2,000' in elevation over its 4 mile course and the 8-mile roundtrip hike is considered strenuous in difficulty. It follows rushing rivers and streams for much of its length. The last 2 miles pass through old-growth cove hardwood forest with large tuliptrees, basswoods, silverbells, and yellow birches.Do not attempt to climb to the top of the falls. Several people have been killed trying to do so.

Access Trail: Ramsey Cascades Trail (Tennessee)Trailhead: Drive six miles east of Gatlinburg on Highway 321 and turn at the Greenbrier entrance to the park. Follow the signs 4.7 miles to the trailhead.

Ulcerative Colitis

Also called: Colitis, Distal colitis, Pancolitis, Ulcerative proctitis
Ulcerative colitis is a disease that causes ulcers in the lining of the rectum and colon. It is one of a group of diseases called inflammatory bowel disease. Ulcers form where inflammation has killed the cells that usually line the colon.

Ulcerative colitis can happen at any age, but it usually starts between the ages of 15 and 30. It tends to run in families. The most common symptoms are pain in the abdomen and bloody diarrhea. Other symptoms may include anemia, severe tiredness, weight loss, loss of appetite, bleeding from the rectum, sores on the skin and joint pain. Children with the disease may have growth problems.

About half of people with ulcerative colitis have mild symptoms. Several types of drugs can help control ulcerative colitis. Some people have long periods of remission, when they are free of symptoms. In severe cases, doctors must remove the colon.

Ficus

Ficus is a genus of about 850 species of woody trees, shrubs, vines, epiphytes, and hemi epiphytes in the family Moraceae. Collectively known as fig trees or figs, they are native throughout the tropics with a few species extending into the semi-warm temperate zone. The so-called Common Fig (F. carica) is a temperate species from the Middle East and eastern Europe (mostly Ukraine), which has been widely cultivated from ancient times for its fruit, also referred to as figs.Figs occupy a wide variety of ecological niches. Take, for example, the Common Fig, a small temperate deciduous tree whose fingered fig leaf is well-known in art and iconography; or the Weeping Fig (F. benjamina) a hemi-epiphyte with thin tough leaves on pendulous stalks adapted to its rain forest habitat; or the rough-leaved sandpaper figs from Australia; or the Creeping Fig (F. pumila), a vine whose small, hard leaves form a dense carpet of foliage over rocks or garden walls. Moreover, figs with different plant habits have undergone adaptive radiation in different biogeographic regions, often leading to very high levels of alpha diversity. In the tropics, it is quite common to find that Ficus is the most species-rich plant genus in a particular forest. In Asia as many as 70 or more species can co-exist.

A fig "fruit" is derived from a specially adapted type of inflorescence (an arrangement of multiple flowers). In this case, it is an involuted, nearly closed receptacle with many small flowers arranged on the inner surface. Thus the actual flowers of the fig are unseen unless the fig is cut open.In Bengali, where the Common Fig is called dumur, it is referenced in a proverb: tumi jeno dumurer phool hoe gele ("You have become [invisible like] the dumur flower").

The syconium often has a bulbous shape with a small opening (the ostiole) at the outward end that allows access to pollinators. The flowers are pollinated by very small wasps that crawl through the opening in search of a suitable place to lay eggs. Without this pollinator service fig trees cannot reproduce by seed. In turn, the flowers provide a safe haven and nourishment for the next generation of wasps. This accounts for the frequent presence of wasp larvae in the fruit. Technically, a fig fruit proper would be one of the many tiny mature, seed-bearing flowers found inside one fig - if you cut open a fresh fig, the flowers will appear as fleshy "threads", each bearing a single seed inside.

The fig plants can be monoecious (hermaphrodite) or dioecious (hermaphrodite and female).

'Hamilton has just got to use his brain'

The Formula One world championship is poised for a thrilling climax with three drivers in with a chance of winning with two races to go.

Lewis Hamilton of McLaren heads into Sunday's race in China with a five-point championship lead over Ferrari's Felipe Massa, with BMW Sauber's Robert Kubica a further seven adrift.

On paper, Hamilton should be a strong favourite, and Kubica - whose car is off the pace of the Ferrari and McLaren - should have no chance.

But the Englishman's position is not as strong as it might at first appear.

And after a season of topsy-turvy results and high-profile errors, it is clear anything could happen - especially when Hamilton appears to have more enemies out on the track than he does in the title battle.

We assess the positions of each of the three contenders.

Houston

Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States of America and the largest city within the state of Texas. As of the 2006 U.S. Census estimate, the city has a population of 2.2 million within an area of 600 square miles (1,600 km²). Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of the Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown metropolitan area—the sixth-largest metropolitan area in the U.S. with a population of around 5.6 million.

Houston was founded on August 30, 1836 by brothers Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen on land near the banks of Buffalo Bayou. The city was incorporated on June 5, 1837 and named after then-President of the Republic of Texas—former General Sam Houston—who had commanded at the Battle of San Jacinto, which took place 25 miles (40 km) east of where the city was established. The burgeoning port and railroad industry, combined with oil discovery in 1901, has induced continual surges in the city's population. In the mid-twentieth century, Houston became the home of the Texas Medical Center—the world's largest concentration of healthcare and research institutions—and NASA's Johnson Space Center, where the Mission Control Center is located.

Houston's economy has a broad industrial base in the energy, manufacturing, aeronautics, transportation, and health care sectors; only New York City is home to more Fortune 500 headquarters in the city limits. Commercially, Houston is ranked as a gamma world city, and the area is a leading center for building oilfield equipment. The Port of Houston ranks first in the United States in international waterborne tonnage handled and second in total cargo tonnage handled. The city has a multicultural population with a large and growing international community. It is home to many cultural institutions and exhibits—attracting more than 7 million visitors a year to the Houston Museum District. Houston has an active visual and performing arts scene in the Theater District and is one of few U.S. cities that offer year-round resident companies in all major performing arts

Indian National Bird

The Indian peacock, Pavo cristatus, the national bird of India, is a colourful, swan-sized bird, with a fan-shaped crest of feathers, a white patch under the eye and a long, slender neck. The male of the species is more colourful than the female, with a glistening blue breast and neck and a spectacular bronze-green train of around 200 elongated feathers. The female is brownish, slightly smaller than the male and lacks the train. The elaborate courtship dance of the male, fanning out the tail and preening its feathers is a gorgeous sight.

Our Oceans Are In Trouble:

What is the state of the ocean today?

It's actually very bad. It's probably worse in many ways than the state of conservation on land, but we don't think about it because we don't live in it.

Basically it comes down to what we put into the atmosphere and ocean and what we take out of the ocean. What we put into the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which makes the ocean hotter. And when it dissolves in the oceans themselves, it makes them more acidic. From the land, you're getting all this runoff into the oceans—vast amounts of nutrients associated with excess fertilizer, pesticides, industrial waste, waste from cars and city streets. There's a lot of stuff that fertilizes the ocean and causes bacteria and other slimy stuff to proliferate, plus things that actually poison the ocean.

We also have the massive scale of fisheries. We're pulling out the tops of the food chain. Most of the big fish in the ocean are already gone. We've also strip-mined the bottom of the sea floor with trawls.We've basically created a massive disturbance to the ocean, which is resulting in collapsing ecosystems, failing fisheries, toxic blooms.

When did scientists realize the damage we're causing the ocean?

In the last 50 years, things have really deteriorated. People have had some impact for a long time, but the ocean can suffer a certain amount of assault from human activity and not have a major problem with it. Now everything is increasing. Carbon dioxide is increasing dramatically. Industrial fisheries, since about the 1950s, have increased dramatically.

BBC plans to double its output made in Wales

THE BBC last night announced ambitious plans to double the proportion of network productions made in Wales, with Crimewatch coming to Cardiff in 2011 and Casualty likely to follow a year later.Coming just a week after ITV’s decision to slash programme making in Wales, the news is a welcome boost for the broadcasting industry.

In a speech to the Royal Television Society last night, BBC executive Jana Bennett also announced that, for the very first time, a network commissioning executive will be based in Cardiff to help build on the success of the independent production sector.The shifting of resources to Wales ties in with the BBC’s commitment to better reflect the diversity of creative talent around the UK.

In 2006 and 2007 the proportion of spend outside London increased by 15%. Last year the BBC, affectionately known as Auntie, spent £300m outside London.Ms Bennett’s announcement was said to represent the corporation’s determination to build a large-scale, sustainable production centre in Wales, focused on drama, factual and music content.It would enable BBC Wales and its partners in the independent sector to build on the success of existing network programmes such as Doctor Who and Torchwood.

NASA Space Probe to Fly Over Mercury, Closest Planet to Sun:


A U.S. spacecraft will fly over Mercury next week to photograph the planet closest to the sun, in the second of three passes, NASA said.

The Messenger probe will take more than 1,200 pictures and collect data from the smallest planet in the solar system when it swings 125 miles (200 kilometers) above Mercury's cratered surface on Oct. 6, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said a statement on its Web site yesterday.

The 2,442-pound (1,107 kilogram) probe is due to pass the planet three times before settling into orbit in March 2011, NASA said. Messenger was launched in August 2004 at a cost of $286 million. It first flew past in January and will make its final pass in September 2009.

``The results from Messenger's first flyby of Mercury resolved debates that are more than 30 years old,'' Sean Solomon, the mission's principle investigator from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said in the statement. ``The second encounter will uncover even more information about the planet.''

The spacecraft is more than halfway through a 4.9 billion- mile journey that includes more than 15 trips around the sun before entering orbit around Mercury, NASA said. The probe is designed to improve scientists' understanding of how Earth, Venus and Mars were formed, and their interactions with the sun.

The January flyby showed that volcanic eruptions produced many of Mercury's plains and that its magnetic field appears to be generated in a molten iron core, according to the space agency.

The second flyby may bring more information about the particles located around the planet's magnetic field, according to NASA, which said the probe will also chart Mercury's topography.

has a diameter of about 3,000 miles, less than half the diameter of Earth and is 36 million miles from the sun.

Before Messenger, the only other craft to visit Mercury was Mariner 10, which passed the planet three times in 1974 and 1975.

Cash drive launched so delicate mummy can finally see the light

A public appeal is to be launched in March so that Hull's Egyptian mummy, which recently starred in a TV programme, can come out from the dark. The 2,700 year old mummy belonging to Hull Museums is so fragile that it cannot be put on display and has been kept in storage for 60 years.

But because of the huge interest shown in Channel 5's programme entitled 'The True Curse of the Mummy', museum officials want Hull people to have a chance to come face to face with the preserved remains, now thought to be the inspiration behind a whole genre of horror stories.

But they need people to dig into their pockets. Money is needed to pay for cleaning and conserving the mummy and another one in Hull's collection, so they can be exhibited without causing their condition to deteriorate further.

Anaerobic biodegradation of pollutants

Anaerobic microbial mineralization of recalcitrant organic pollutants is of great environmental significance and involves intriguing novel biochemical reactions. In particular, hydrocarbons and halogenated compounds have long been doubted to be degradable in the absence of oxygen, but the isolation of hitherto unknown anaerobic hydrocarbon-degrading and reductively dehalogenating bacteria during the last decades provided ultimate proof for these processes in nature. Many novel biochemical reactions were discovered enabling the respective metabolic pathways, but progress in the molecular understanding of these bacteria was rather slow, since genetic systems are not readily applicable for most of them. However, with the increasing application of genomics in the field of environmental microbiology, a new and promising perspective is now at hand to obtain molecular insights into these new metabolic properties. Several complete genome sequences were determined during the last few years from bacteria capable of anaerobic organic pollutant degradation. The ~4.7 Mb genome of the facultative denitrifying Aromatoleum aromaticum strain EbN1 was the first to be determined for an anaerobic hydrocarbon degrader (using toluene or ethylbenzene as substrates). The genome sequence revealed about two dozen gene clusters (including several paralogs) coding for a complex catabolic network for anaerobic and aerobic degradation of aromatic compounds.

Nootropic
Nootropics, popularly referred to as "smart drugs", "smart nutrients", "cognitive enhancers" and "brain enhancers", are a class of drugs that improve impaired human cognitive abilities (the functions and capacities of the brain). The term covers a broad range of substances including drugs, nutrients and herbs that have purported cognitive enhancing effects.

The word nootropic was coined in 1964 by the Romanian Dr. Corneliu E. Giurgea, derived from the Greek words noos, or "mind," and tropein meaning "to bend/turn". Typically, nootropics are alleged to work by altering the availability of the brain's supply of neurochemicals (neurotransmitters, enzymes, and hormones), by improving the brain's oxygen supply, or by stimulating nerve growth. However the efficacy of alleged nootropic substances in most cases has not been conclusively determined. This is complicated by the difficulty of defining and quantifying cognition and intelligence.

Biotechnology

Biotechnology is technology based on biology, especially when used in agriculture, food science, and medicine. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity defines biotechnology as:
Any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use.

Biotechnology is often used to refer to genetic engineering technology of the 21st century, however the term encompasses a wider range and history of procedures for modifying biological organisms according to the needs of humanity, going back to the initial modifications of native plants into improved food crops through artificial selection and hybridization. Bioengineering is the science upon which all biotechnological applications are based. With the development of new approaches and modern techniques, traditional biotechnology industries are also acquiring new horizons enabling them to improve the quality of their products and increase the productivity of their systems.

Strapdown systems

Lightweight digital computers permit the system to eliminate the gimbals, creating "strapdown" systems, so called because their sensors are simply strapped to the vehicle. This reduces the cost, eliminates gimbal lock, removes the need for some calibrations, and increases the reliability by eliminating some of the moving parts. Angular rate sensors called "rate gyros" measure how the angular velocity of the vehicle changes.

A strapdown system has a dynamic measurement range several hundred times that required by a gimbaled system. That is, it must integrate the vehicle's attitude changes in pitch, roll and yaw, as well as gross movements. Gimballed systems could usually do well with update rates of 50 to 60 updates per second. However, strapdown systems normally update about 2000 times per second. The higher rate is needed to keep the maximum angular measurement within a practical range for real rate gyros: about 4 milliradians. Most rate gyros are now laser interferometers.

The data updating algorithms ("direction cosines" or "quaternions") involved are too complex to be accurately performed except by digital electronics. However, digital computers are now so inexpensive and fast that rate gyro systems can now be practically used and mass-produced. The Apollo lunar module used a strapdown system in its backup Abort Guidance System (AGS).

Strapdown systems are nowadays commonly used in commercial and tactical applications (arcraft, missiles, etc). However they are still not widespread in applications where superb accuracy is required (like submarine navigation or strategic ICBM guidance).

Implicit Web

The Implicit Web is a concept coined in 2007 to denote web sites which specialize in the synthesis of personal information gleaned from the Internet into a single, coherent picture of user behavior. Implicit data may include clickstream information, media consumption habits, location tracking or any data generated without "explicit" input from a user. Presumed advantages of implicit data include accuracy, ease of input and comprehensiveness.

The term Implicit Web was popularized by the technology investors Josh Kopelman, Fred Wilson, and Brad Feld.

Google Earth Plus

Google Earth can be upgraded to a Plus edition for a $20 annual subscription fee. Google Earth Plus is an individual-oriented paid subscription upgrade to Google Earth and adds the following features:

* GPS integration: read tracks and waypoints from a GPS device. A variety of third party applications have been created which provide this functionality using the basic version of Google Earth by generating KML or KMZ files based on user-specified or user-recorded waypoints. However, Google Earth Plus provides direct support for the Magellan and Garmin product lines, which together hold a large share of the GPS market. The Linux version of the Google Earth Plus application does not include any GPS functionality.
* Higher resolution printing.
* Customer support via email.
* Data importer: read address points from CSV files; limited to 100 points/addresses. A feature allowing path and polygon annotations, which can be exported to KML, was formerly only available to Plus users, but was made free in version 4.0.2416.
* Higher data download speeds

Network telescope

A network telescope (also known as a darknet, internet motion sensor or black hole) is an internet system that allows one to observe different large-scale events taking place on the Internet. The basic idea is to observe traffic targeting the dark (unused) address-space of the network. Since all traffic to these addresses is suspicious, one can gain information about possible network attacks (random scanning worms, and DDoS backscatter) as well as other misconfigurations by observing it.

The resolution of the Internet telescope is dependent on the number of dark addresses it monitors. For example, a large Internet telescope that monitors traffic to 16,777,216 addresses (a /8 Internet telescope in IPv4), has a higher probability of observing a relatively small event than a smaller telescope that monitors 65,536 addresses (a /16 Internet telescope).

A variant of a network telescope is a sparse darknet, or greynet, consisting of a region of IP address space that is sparsely populated with 'darknet' addresses interspersed with active (or 'lit') IP addresses.

Object-relational database

An object-relational database (ORD) or object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) is a database management system (DBMS) similar to a relational database, but with an object-oriented database model: objects, classes and inheritance are directly supported in database schemas and in the query language. In addition, it supports extension of the data model with custom data-types and methods.

One aim for this type of system is to bridge the gap between conceptual data modeling techniques such as Entity-relationship diagram (ERD) and object-relational mapping (ORM), which often use classes and inheritance, and relational databases, which do not directly support them.

Another, related, aim is to bridge the gap between relational databases and the object-oriented modeling techniques used in programming languages such as Java (programming language), C++ or C#. However, a more popular alternative for achieving such a bridge is to use a standard relational database systems with some form of ORM software.

Software transactional memory
In computer science, software transactional memory (STM) is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It functions as an alternative to lock-based synchronization, and is typically implemented in a lock-free way. A transaction in this context is a piece of code that executes a series of reads and writes to shared memory. These reads and writes logically occur at a single instant in time; intermediate states are not visible to other (successful) transactions. The idea of providing hardware support for transactions originated in a 1986 paper and patent by Tom Knight. The idea was popularized by Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss. In 1995 Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou extended this idea to software-only transactional memory (STM). STM has recently been the focus of intense research and support for practical implementations is growing.