MUNICH, April 23 (Reuters) - Barcelona centre half Gerard Pique acknowledged his team were thoroughly second best as Bayern Munich romped to a 4-0 win in their Champions League semi-final first leg at the Allianz Arena on Tuesday. "They gave us a thrashing," he said. "We will try to turn it around in the return leg (on May 1) and put in a good performance for the fans. "They were better and faster than us. There is no point talking about the referee, there is no excuse." Arjen Robben, who sparkled on the wing for Bayern and scored one of the goals, hailed his team's spectacular performance. ...
Stepping into a carrier's store can be like a visit to the candy shop for the gadget junkie, but once playtime is over and it's time to choose just one, the decision can get a bit overwhelming. You'll find Android phones that range in size from tiny to massive, Windows Phone handsets that cover the rainbow in colors and, of course, the ubiquitous iPhone, which has a price point to suit every need. There's also the latest BlackBerry, which melds a familiar name with a brand-new operating system.
Naturally, it's no easy task to sort through the wide number of options on the market today, and it's even more difficult to find the best of the best. That's where Engadget's smartphone buyer's guide comes in handy. Here, you'll find a very exclusive list of the smartphones that we confidently use and achingly desire. Regardless of your financial situation or platform preference, you're bound to find a stellar choice that's a great fit for your needs. So read on as we round up the very best smartphones of the season.
JERUSALEM (AP) ? The Israeli military says it has shot down an unmanned aircraft sent by the Hezbollah group into Israeli skies.
Military officials said the aircraft was downed Thursday off the Israeli coast in Israeli airspace near the northern city of Haifa.
It is the second known instance in which the Lebanese militant group, a bitter Israeli enemy, has sent a drone into Israeli airspace. Last October, the Israeli air force shot down an unmanned aircraft in a similar incident.
Israel and Hezbollah fought a monthlong war in 2006 that ended in a stalemate.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has recently warned that Hezbollah might try to take advantage of the instability in neighboring Syria to obtain what he calls game-changing weapons.
In both my personal and professional life I have collected stacks of business cards. When I was offered the opportunity to review the Worldcard Link Pro?business card scanner and software from Penpower,?I jumped at the opportunity. ?Let’s see how it works. Worldcard Link (WCL) is designed for use with 4th and 5th generation iPhones and [...]
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists probing the nature of antimatter have found a bit more evidence to explain why the universe is not an empty husk, although not enough to account for the billions of galaxies strewn across the cosmos.
Physicists believe that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang at the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. Within one second, however, the antimatter had all but disappeared.
That vanishing act - leaving us in a universe with a surplus of matter forming the stars, the Earth and all known life - must be due to a subtle difference between matter and antimatter.
Researchers said on Wednesday they had found tiny variations in the way a type of particle decayed into matter and antimatter during collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant particle-smasher buried 100 metres (330 feet) underground at the foot of the Jura mountains outside Geneva.
The latest findings are the first to show that a particle known as a Bs meson has a slight preference for decaying into matter and are consistent with earlier experiments on other particles. Unfortunately, the differences are still far too small to explain the great abundance of matter around us.
"The difference that we see in the behaviour of antimatter and matter only adds up to about a galaxy's worth, not half a universe," Tara Shears of the University of Liverpool, one of the physicists working on the experiment, said in an interview.
The results, which have been submitted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, fit with the three-decade old Standard Model, which aims to describe everything known about how fundamental particles behave.
"Everything seems to add up, it is just that it doesn't come to anything near the amount of difference we need to explain the evolution of the universe," Shears said.
The CERN scientists made their new discovery after analysing data from 70 trillion collisions between protons in one of four main experiments at the LHC.
They still have another particle to study in this experiment, but they are also ready to cast their net wider to explain the puzzling predominance of matter over antimatter.
"By studying these ... effects, we are looking for the missing pieces of the puzzle," said Pierluigi Campana, another scientist on the collaboration.
Matter and antimatter are almost identical, with the same mass but opposite electrical charges. They can form separate parts of some elementary particles but if they are mixed together both are destroyed instantaneously.
The first observation that particles can decay unevenly into matter and antimatter won two scientists at Brookhaven Laboratory in New York a Nobel Prize in 1980.
After discovering a long-sought elementary particle called the Higgs boson last summer, the giant collider run by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, is currently being upgraded to nearly double its power by 2015.
Scientists hope the extra power will open up an entirely new realm of physics to help explain the antimatter conundrum, as well as other mysteries such as dark matter, the unseen stuff that helps to glue galaxies together.
Source identification of H7N9 influenza virus causing human infectionsPublic release date: 25-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: YAN Bei yanbei@scichina.org 86-106-400-8316 Science China Press
In March 2013, a novel H7N9 influenza virus was identified in China as the etiological agent of a flu-like disease in humans, resulting in some deaths. A group of scientists, led by Professor Chen Hualan (National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Veterinary Biotechnology, Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences) have investigated the origins of this novel H7N9 influenza virus (Shi et al., 2013). Following analysis of H7N9 influenza viruses collected from live poultry markets, it was found that these viruses circulating among birds were responsible for human infections. These novel H7N9 viruses are reassortants in which the six internal genes were derived from avian H9N2 viruses; however the origins of their hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) genes were unclear.
A total of 970 samples were collected from live poultry markets and poultry farms located in Shanghai and Anhui Province. Samples analyzed included drinking water, feces, contaminated soil, and cloacal and tracheal swabs. Of these samples, 20 were positive for the presence of H7N9 influenza viruses. All of the positive samples originated from live poultry markets in Shanghai. Of these 20 positive samples, 10 were isolated from chickens, 3 from pigeons, and 7 were from environmental samples.
The complete genome of three H7N9 isolates, from a chicken, pigeon, and environmental sample, was sequenced and deposited into the GISAID database. Genetic analysis of these isolates revealed high homology across all eight gene segments. Phylogenetic analysis of these novel H7N9 influenza virus isolates showed that that the six internal genes were derived from avian H9N2 viruses, but the ancestor of their HA and NA genes is unknown. According to the GenBank database, the HA genes of the novel isolated viruses were most similar to those from duck H7N3 influenza viruses, sharing 95.2?.8% homology at the nucleotide level. The NA gene of the novel H7N9 virus isolates shared highest homology (97.3?.9%) with NA genes from H4N9 or H11N9 influenza viruses isolated from ducks, and environmental samples from duck farms, located in the Dongting Lake region. It is clear that the novel H7N9 viruses are the product of gene reassortment, with the internal genes from one donor, and HA and NA genes from one or several other donors.
HA receptor-binding specificity is a major molecular determinant for the host range of influenza viruses. Amino acids at positions 226 and 228 of HA are critical for specificity of receptor-binding in influenza viruses. Within the HA protein of novel H7N9 viruses, there was a leucine residue at position 226, which is characteristic of the HA gene in human influenza viruses. This finding implies that H7N9 viruses have partially acquired human receptor-binding specificity. All of the H7N9 human isolates examined contained a lysine residue at position 627 in the PB2 protein. It is well known that this lysine residue contributes to the replication and transmission of avian influenza viruses in mammalian hosts. It is likely that the acquisition of this lysine in H7N9 viruses during their replication in human hosts has significantly contributed to their virulence and lethality in humans.
Tracing the source of these novel H7N9 influenza viruses, and their subsequent characterization, was a collaborative effort involving researchers from the National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, and Shanghai Animal Disease Control Center. This research project was partially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2011CB505000), the China Agriculture Research System (CARS-42-G08), and the National Science and Technology Major Project (2012ZX10004214). We suggest that strong measures, such as continued surveillance of avian and human hosts, control of animal movement, shutdown of live poultry markets, and culling of poultry in affected areas, should be taken during this initial stage of virus prevalence to prevent a possible pandemic. Additionally, it is also imperative to evaluate the pathogenicity and transmissibility of these H7N9 viruses, and to develop effective vaccines and antiviral drugs against so as to reduce their adverse effects upon human health.
###
corresponding author:
CHEN HuaLan
hlchen1@yahoo.com
Reference:
Shi J Z, Deng G H, Liu P H, et al. Isolation and characterization of H7N9 viruses from live poultry marketsImplication of the source of current H7N9 infection in humans. Chin Sci Bull, 2013, 58, doi:10.1007/s11434-013-5873-4.
Science China Press Co., Ltd. (SCP) is a scientific journal publishing company of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). For 50 years, SCP takes its mission to present to the world the best achievements by Chinese scientists on various fields of natural sciences researches.
[ | 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.
Source identification of H7N9 influenza virus causing human infectionsPublic release date: 25-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: YAN Bei yanbei@scichina.org 86-106-400-8316 Science China Press
In March 2013, a novel H7N9 influenza virus was identified in China as the etiological agent of a flu-like disease in humans, resulting in some deaths. A group of scientists, led by Professor Chen Hualan (National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Veterinary Biotechnology, Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences) have investigated the origins of this novel H7N9 influenza virus (Shi et al., 2013). Following analysis of H7N9 influenza viruses collected from live poultry markets, it was found that these viruses circulating among birds were responsible for human infections. These novel H7N9 viruses are reassortants in which the six internal genes were derived from avian H9N2 viruses; however the origins of their hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) genes were unclear.
A total of 970 samples were collected from live poultry markets and poultry farms located in Shanghai and Anhui Province. Samples analyzed included drinking water, feces, contaminated soil, and cloacal and tracheal swabs. Of these samples, 20 were positive for the presence of H7N9 influenza viruses. All of the positive samples originated from live poultry markets in Shanghai. Of these 20 positive samples, 10 were isolated from chickens, 3 from pigeons, and 7 were from environmental samples.
The complete genome of three H7N9 isolates, from a chicken, pigeon, and environmental sample, was sequenced and deposited into the GISAID database. Genetic analysis of these isolates revealed high homology across all eight gene segments. Phylogenetic analysis of these novel H7N9 influenza virus isolates showed that that the six internal genes were derived from avian H9N2 viruses, but the ancestor of their HA and NA genes is unknown. According to the GenBank database, the HA genes of the novel isolated viruses were most similar to those from duck H7N3 influenza viruses, sharing 95.2?.8% homology at the nucleotide level. The NA gene of the novel H7N9 virus isolates shared highest homology (97.3?.9%) with NA genes from H4N9 or H11N9 influenza viruses isolated from ducks, and environmental samples from duck farms, located in the Dongting Lake region. It is clear that the novel H7N9 viruses are the product of gene reassortment, with the internal genes from one donor, and HA and NA genes from one or several other donors.
HA receptor-binding specificity is a major molecular determinant for the host range of influenza viruses. Amino acids at positions 226 and 228 of HA are critical for specificity of receptor-binding in influenza viruses. Within the HA protein of novel H7N9 viruses, there was a leucine residue at position 226, which is characteristic of the HA gene in human influenza viruses. This finding implies that H7N9 viruses have partially acquired human receptor-binding specificity. All of the H7N9 human isolates examined contained a lysine residue at position 627 in the PB2 protein. It is well known that this lysine residue contributes to the replication and transmission of avian influenza viruses in mammalian hosts. It is likely that the acquisition of this lysine in H7N9 viruses during their replication in human hosts has significantly contributed to their virulence and lethality in humans.
Tracing the source of these novel H7N9 influenza viruses, and their subsequent characterization, was a collaborative effort involving researchers from the National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, and Shanghai Animal Disease Control Center. This research project was partially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2011CB505000), the China Agriculture Research System (CARS-42-G08), and the National Science and Technology Major Project (2012ZX10004214). We suggest that strong measures, such as continued surveillance of avian and human hosts, control of animal movement, shutdown of live poultry markets, and culling of poultry in affected areas, should be taken during this initial stage of virus prevalence to prevent a possible pandemic. Additionally, it is also imperative to evaluate the pathogenicity and transmissibility of these H7N9 viruses, and to develop effective vaccines and antiviral drugs against so as to reduce their adverse effects upon human health.
###
corresponding author:
CHEN HuaLan
hlchen1@yahoo.com
Reference:
Shi J Z, Deng G H, Liu P H, et al. Isolation and characterization of H7N9 viruses from live poultry marketsImplication of the source of current H7N9 infection in humans. Chin Sci Bull, 2013, 58, doi:10.1007/s11434-013-5873-4.
Science China Press Co., Ltd. (SCP) is a scientific journal publishing company of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). For 50 years, SCP takes its mission to present to the world the best achievements by Chinese scientists on various fields of natural sciences researches.
[ | 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.
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Public release date: 25-Apr-2013
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