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You might have heard the news out of last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, that the Hubble Space Telescope had found evidence for the most distant galaxies yet discovered. Using the newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, HST did a close-up examination of some likely candidates in the Ultra Deep Field, and found galaxies at redshifts of 7 or 8 (meaning the universe is now 8 or 9 times bigger than it was when the light was emitted). That corresponds to about 600 million years after the Big Bang, which pushes back the era of galaxy formation quite a bit.

But wait! Over at Science News, Ron Cowen points out that a team led by Rychard Bouwens and Garth Illingworth of UC Santa Cruz already has a paper on the arxiv that uses similar techniques to identify three galaxies with a redshift of 10, corresponding to only 450 million years after the Big Bang. And, as Cowen mentions in a blog post, the paper was available since last month.

Constraints on the First Galaxies: z~10 Galaxy Candidates from HST WFC3/IR
Authors: R.J. Bouwens, G.D. Illingworth, I. Labbe, P.A. Oesch, M. Carollo, M. Trenti, P.G. van Dokkum, M. Franx, M. Stiavelli, V. Gonzalez, D. Magee

Abstract: The first galaxies likely formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Until recently, it has not been possible to detect galaxies earlier than ~750 million years after the Big Bang. The new HST WFC3/IR camera changed this when the deepest-ever, near-IR image of the universe was obtained with the HUDF09 program. Here we use this image to identify three redshift z~10 galaxy candidates in the heart of the reionization epoch when the universe was just 500 million years old. These would be the highest redshift galaxies yet detected, higher than the recent detection of a GRB at z~8.2. The HUDF09 data previously revealed galaxies at z~7 and z~8… [snipped]

So why are galaxies at redshift 8 considered news, if galaxies at redshift 10 have already been discovered? As Charlie Petit talks about at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the difference seems to be that the former were announced at a press briefing, while the latter just appeared on arxiv.

For better or for worse, conventional science journalism has been cut back to the point where most reporters have no choice but to wait for press releases to appear to write a story. They don’t have the resources to scan through arxiv postings every day — and even if they did, the precious newsworthy nuggets are rather sparsely scattered through the mass of Kuhnian normal science. And let’s not even think about the idea that journalists should spend time (and money) going to lots of conferences and talks and chatting with scientists about what’s hot in their fields these days — the resources just aren’t there.

There is some room for blogs to help out here. A blog by a respectable scientist can point to interesting stories that didn’t appear in any press releases, and journalists can follow up. (I know it’s happened here before.) But the thing about blogs is that they’re remarkably non-systematic; bloggers mention things because they personally find them interesting, not because they feel a duty to the wider public. The nature of journalism is changing rapidly, and it’s not clear how things will eventually shake out. I certainly hope that we continue to enjoy the work of people like Cowen, who make the extra effort to find good science stories and spread them widely.

Agriprocessors’ Operations Manager Pleads Guilty to Document Fraud Conspiracy

Guilty Plea Follows Last Week’s Sentencing of Human Resources Manager and Assistant

A top manger at Agriprocessors who participated in a conspiracy to obtain fake documents for workers pled guilty today in federal court in Cedar Rapids.

Brent Beebe, age 52, from Postville, Iowa, was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit document fraud. Beebe had been scheduled for trial on Jan. 19, 2010.

In a plea agreement, Beebe admitted he was one of two operations managers at Agriprocessors, Inc., in Postville and oversaw the beef-side production at the facility.

The week prior to a May 12, 2008, immigration enforcement action, Beebe conspired with an Agriprocessors vice-president and others to help several employees obtain new fake identification documents.

Beebe obtained $4,500 in cash from the Agriprocessors vice-president to be loaned to approximately 19 beef production employees to pay for new fake documents.

A line supervisor used the money to obtain fake documents and then delivered the fake documents to Agriprocessors on Sunday, May 11, 2008. The documents were then used to complete new application paperwork for several employees.

Sentencing before United States District Court Chief Judge Linda R. Reade will be set after a presentence report is prepared.

Beebe remains free on bond previously set pending sentencing. Beebe faces a possible maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment, a $250,000 fine, a $100 special assessment, and three years of supervised release following any imprisonment.

On Thursday, Jan. 7, 2010, Chief Judge Reade sentenced two former Agriprocessors human resources employees.

Former Agriprocessors human resources manager Elizabeth Billmeyer was sentenced to one year and one day imprisonment to be followed by two years’ supervised release. Former Agriprocessors human resources assistant Penny Hanson was sentenced to two years’ probation.

Only two defendants in the case remain to be prosecuted—Hosam Amara and Zeev Levi, who are fugitives. The investigation began in October 2007 and has continued since the execution of search warrants at Agriprocessors on May 12, 2008. The investigation is ongoing.

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Peter Deegan, C.J. Williams, and Matthew Cole, and the investigation has been led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Prior assistance was provided by the United States Marshals Service, United States Postal Inspections Service, Iowa Department of Public Safety, Iowa Department of Transportation, Federal Protective Service, Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigations, United States Department of Labor, Public Health Service, United States Department of Agriculture, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Drug Enforcement Administration, Waterloo Police Department, and Postville Police Department.

Court file information is available at ecf.iand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl.

The case file number is 08-1324.

Square Enix has released a new international trailer for Final Fantasy XIII. This one’s got English voice acting set against that Leona Lewis song “My Hands”. Oh, and drama. Lots of drama.

This seems to be the decade of “I don’t like what you say, so instead of refuting it with evidence I’ll sue you to shut you up!” for the alt-medders.

First, it was Simon Singh being sued by the British Chiropractic Association, and now it’s Barbara Loe Fischer from the ironically named National Vaccine Information Center, who is suing writer Amy Wallace and vaccine researcher Paul Offit about an article Wallace wrote in Wired magazine. The article is one of those rare ones that actually uses facts and evidence rather than anecdotes and hearsay, so of course shines a very ill-received spotlight on the antivaxxers, showing them for what they are: a public health menace.

As usual, Orac has the details. One thing that Orac notes is that Fischer chose to file her suit in Virginia which does not have SLAPP laws, designed to prevent lawsuits intended to silence critics. So it really really looks like she is suing simply to silence critics. Others think so too.

That is enough for an interesting story all by itself, of course. But the thing about people who deny reality, though, is that eventually they find themselves having to believe seven different things before breakfast, and at some point the irony meter can get pegged as they twist and spin. In this case, Ms. Fischer blows the gauge because she is asking for a “fearless” discussion about vaccines in 2010.

Yes, you read that correctly. She wants this because open and fearless conversation is so well-supported by libel lawsuits tossed around specifically to silence your opponents.

And people wonder why I think the mouthpieces for the antivax movement are so awful.

Skeptic Rebecca Watson agrees. Here’s what she has to say about this:

You can read Ms. Fischer’s complete statements on the NVIC website, but I’d make sure you clean your computer with bleach afterwards; who knows what you might catch from going there. You might want to protect your brain, too, since she somehow manages to link vaccines with terrorism and 9/11. When it comes to terrorism, I think the antivax movement fits better than vaccines, since fear is something they use all-too-well to scare parents into not vaccinating their kids.

Of course, if they used such things as evidence and scientific research, they’d have no movement at all.

The best thing we can do is keep shining this light on the hypocrisy and distortions of the antivax movement. They will continue to push garbage like this, and we have to make sure that the public sees it. The only alternative is to wait for kids to start dying from measles, pertussis, HiB, and other preventable illnesses in greater numbers than they already are… an event which, tragically, is already underway due in part to the antivaxxers.

There’s a really funny blog named Running From Your Camera. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, we’re unabashedly stealing their idea.

The challenge: set the self-timer on your camera to 2 seconds, then get as far as you can away from it before the shot using any means you like—judging will be based as much on composition, creativity and general effect as mere distance.

The rules:

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the “challenge” part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to [email protected].
5. Include 800px image AND something wallpaper sized in email.

Send your best entries by Sunday at 6PM Eastern to [email protected] with “Running” in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs at 800 pixels wide and larger, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email. [Photo]

Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Etc., Celebrities, Humor

Bob Lutz has been an important guy in the auto industry since before most of us were born. Elon Musk is the reason your eBay transactions go so smoothly (he was the co-creator of PayPal). Together, they don’t seem to make much of a team. Well, they wouldn’t make much of a match if Musk weren’t the CEO of Tesla Motors. Elon makes electric cars. Bob wants to make electric cars. Both are (*ahem*) outspoken and give good soundbites. Upon further review, it makes perfect sense that the two men were hanging out at the Detroit Auto Show. But what were they talking about?

We have some ideas, but they probably aren’t as creative as yours. We’ll get you started with some appetizers, but we’re really just looking for you to provide the main course:

Lutz to Musk: “You think you’re nervous right now, but you really just have range anxiety”
Musk to Lutz: “We have more batteries in one car than you have in 500 Volts”
Lutz to Musk: “$500 million? $50 billion!”

Help us out with some better captions by leaving some tender verbal vittles in Comments.

Detroit 2010: Caption Contest – What the heck are Bob Lutz and Elon Musk talking about? originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft issued a single security bulletin that addressed just one vulnerability on Tuesday. However, Microsoft rated the vulnerability as critical. Meanwhile, Oracle and Adobe put out patches of their own, making it a busy week for IT administrators.

“The lone Microsoft vulnerability affects everything from Windows 2000 to Windows 7, but is only rated critical for Windows 2000,” said Ben Greenbaum, senior research manager for Symantec Security Response. “From XP SP2 onward, Microsoft hardened heap memory with heap memory protection strategies; this makes the vulnerability less of an issue for the later systems.”

A Belated Christmas Gift

With only one bulletin, Microsoft is bringing a belated Christmas present to all IT admins in the form of the lightest Patch Tuesday we’ve seen in years, said Paul Henry, Lumension security and forensic analyst.

“Let’s hope that IT admins can savor this unusually reduced patch release as they kick off the new year and use the time to prepare for the numerous updates and patches that are being released this month from other vendors, including Adobe and Oracle,” Henry said.

“We also can’t forget the patches yet to come to resolve the current SMB denial-of-service problems, the MySQL zero-day rumors, the Adobe PDF issue, and the Apple zero-day that has recently had proof-of-concept code released in to the wild. Just because these flaws aren’t being addressed with the first patch bulletin of the year doesn’t mean that IT admins should not keep a close eye out for them in the near future.”

Microsoft’s Missing Patch

This is a very light Patch Tuesday from Microsoft and IT security teams should be taking advantage of the situation to address housekeeping items, according to Andrews Storms, director of security operations at nCircle. He suggested IT admins take the time this month to find every out-of-date Microsoft system and…

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New York University has entered into an exclusive license with Proteostasis Therapeutics of Cambridge, MA, for IP related to discoveries from the laboratory of David Ron, MD, professor of medicine and Julius Raynes professor of cell biology at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine. Ron’s research focuses on the unfolded protein response (UPR), and his laboratory identifies new components of the cellular response to stress — the mechanism behind many common diseases of aging. The UPR is an important part of the proteostasis network (PN), the cellular machinery that maintains protein health. The license accelerates the company’s drug discovery efforts to identify proteostasis regulators (PRs) — small molecule drugs designed to restore protein balance.

“Our lab is focused on uncovering new components of the cellular stress response and understanding their role in the pathology of human diseases,” says Ron, who has joined the company’s Scientific Advisory Board. “The UPR pathway is implicated in a broad range of diseases, including diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and retinal degeneration. Proteostasis Therapeutics’ novel drug discovery platform, which integrates multiple PN pathways, provides an advantage in rapidly developing UPR modulators identified by our lab into potential therapeutics for these diseases.”

Source: The Medical News

Idol’s still tops on the tube. Tuesday night’s return American Idol, now in its ninth season, pulled in 29.8 million viewers between 8pm and 10pm last night, according to early estimates.

This year’s Boston auditions, which featured former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham as a guest judge, peaked with 32.32m in the half hour from 9 PM. Overall, the audience was almost in line with last year’s Jan. 13 opener, which drew 30.4 million.

The new season of FOX’s Idol will be the series’ first without veteran judge Paula Abdul and the last with acid-tongued Brit Simon Cowell. Cowell will leave the program in May to develop an American adaptation of his UK talent show, The X Factor.

A thick, gooey tide of glycerin is overwhelming the fledgling biofuels industry, but an innovation from Rice University may offer a solution. Though high-grade glycerin is used to make products like soaps, cosmetics, foods, and pharmaceuticals, vast quantities of crude glycerin are simply disposed as waste in the biofuel recovery process. Rice researchers have developed glycerin-gobbling microorganisms that are being commercialized by Houston, TX-based Glycos Biotechnologies, Inc. The hungry bugs are at the heart of an energy-efficient bioconversion process that turns waste glycerin into fuels and other products.

The big problem with crude glycerin waste is that the cost of disposal eats away at the profitability of biofuel operations. GlycosBio’s approach is to integrate bioconversion into individual refinery operations. Instead of a liability, the waste glycerin can be made into a profit center, yielding high-value chemicals that can be used to make fabrics, insulation, and food products as well as additional fuels. GlycosBio designed its operations to integrate with existing refinery processes, which makes implementation relatively easy. In addition to crude glycerin, the conversion process can work on a variety of biofuel feedstocks — perhaps including algae.

Source: CleanTechnica

Agriculture, biotech, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) research in Alberta, Canada, have been integrated through one of four new provincial corporations as part of the Alberta Innovates support structure for scientific research. Alberta Innovates officially launched January 1 as the province’s Research and Innovation Act came into force, realigning what previously were 10 provincially funded research organizations. Staff from the former Alberta Agricultural Research Institute, Alberta Forestry Research Institute, Alberta Life Sciences Institute, and Alberta Prion Research Institute now operate under the direction of single agency: Alberta Innovates-Bio Solutions.

Agriculture, forestry, and food/health come under one umbrella because they draw upon biological resources that offer untapped potential for an array of high-value products, according to a statement by Art Froehlich, partner and strategic advisor in Calgary-based ag communications and marketing agency AdFarm and chair of the biosolutions agency’s board. “Common building blocks such as cellulose and starch provide opportunities to mix and match the incredible wealth of natural resources in Alberta without taking away from traditional commodity uses for food, feed, and fuel,” Froehlich says. The province expects research bodies to work more closely together under the new structure, and collaborative relationships and programs are expected to speed the process of translating research to results and attracting innovators, scientists, and researchers from around the world. Encouraging commercialization of new technologies in this way also is expected to attract angel investors, professional VCs, foundations, corporations, and others who use private capital to promote the transition to a sustainable future.

Source: Country Guide

Netbooks are a great compromise between pecking away a smartphone keyboard or hauling a tank-size laptop around—but they aren’t without shortcomings. Make the most of your netbook with these netbook-friendly tips, tricks, and applications.

Although often derided for being under-powered and a poor substitute for a full laptop, netbooks fill a nice niche. They’re tough to beat for portable browsing, note taking, and mobile computing when a laptop is over kill, the battery life is too short, and using your phone is impractical or uncomfortable. Still, you can do a lot to make life with a netbook easier.

Accept the Hardware Limitations and Tweak When Possible

Netbooks are limited and you can’t be happy using one unless you accept that. Watching video on it won’t be like watching video on a 24″ widescreen monitor. It won’t run Crysis. You’re not going to be single-handedly solving complex protein-folding operations on it and curing cancer. Nearly every netbook has a fairly standard cookie-cutter spec sheet of a 1024×600 pixel screen, a 160GB HDD, 1GB of RAM, and a modest mobile processor.

If you already own a netbook, the best thing you can do is shell out $30-60 and upgrade the 1GB of RAM to 2GB of RAM. It’s a cheap enough upgrade and it provides a significant performance boost. If you’re shopping for a netbook, the best advice we can give is to focus on two things: battery life and the physical inputs, like the spacing of the keyboard and arrangement of secondary buttons—physical design is about the only thing distinguishing one netbook from another these days.

Strip Your Netbook of Bloat and Crapware

Computer manufacturers love to stockpile their pristine machines with all sorts of crapware. Fortunately, for the most part, netbook manufacturers aren’t too extreme with this practice. Given the already unpowered nature of the machines they sell, we’d imagine they’re paranoid about bogging it down with too much crapware. Nonetheless, it’s still worth your time to give your netbook a solid run through the decrapification-gaunlet. Photo by Fabio Bruna.

You can dig through the bloatware and delete it manually, but some bloatware—we’re looking at you Norton Anti-Virus trial!—is a huge pain to remove by hand. Fortunately applications have been created that are specifically tailored to giving bloatware the boot, like PC Decrapifier—seen in the screenshot above. PC Decrapifier is great for any new computer including netbooks and will help you get ride of applications like Norton Anti-Virus, Microsoft Office Trial Edition, and other annoyances.

One caveat regarding gutting the crapware from your new netbook: Although 90 percent of the junk that is installed is in fact junk, be careful not to delete software that actually does something useful. For example, on my Asus Eee netbook there were two very similar programs with similar Eee branded names. One was a useful aggressive battery monitoring application designed to squeeze even more life out of my 6-cell battery and the other was a fairly useless application dock only for Eee netbook apps. Had I blanket nuked all the installed apps, I’d have kicked out the useful battery tool with the rest of the junk.

Once you’ve booted the factory-fresh crapware off your netbook, it’s really important to keep things clean for optimal future performance. If a little bit of crapware and software creep slows down your beefy desktop a tiny bit, a little on your netbook will definitely gum up the works. Make sure to install an application like CCleaner—a favorite among Lifehacker readers—and run it on a schedule to keep things clean.

Learn to Love Full-Screen Mode and Keyboard Shortcuts

You might have a nice spacious monitor at home and never even think to switch to full screen mode, but on a netbook using full screen mode is an absolute must. The screenshot above shows a comparison between running Firefox in regular mode and running Firefox in fullscreen mode, displaying the Lifehacker homepage. Between the title bar, menu bar, tabbed sites, and the Windows start bar, around 40% of the screen gets chewed up. The same kind of situation exists when you load popular word processors like Microsoft Word and other office applications. Most software designers are simply not designing for small screens anymore; netbooks generally have a 1024×600 resolution, which is nearly 200 pixels shorter than the already quite small 1024×768 standard monitor size that most designers keep in mind when creating toolbar and site layouts.

Unfortunately no standard exists for which a keyboard shortcut will switch an application to full screen mode. Check the menu bar in your application or hit up Google with a “myapplication fullscreen shortcut” query to find it. The full-screen shortcuts for a few common applications are: Firefox/IE/Opera/Chrome – F11 (press again to return to normal view) and Microsoft Office – ALT+V+U (press ESC to return to normal view).

In addition to searching for individual and specific keyboard shortcuts to help with things like full-screen mode, it’s worthwhile to extend your knowledge of shortcuts even further—typing on a reduced size keyboard and mousing on a small trackpad can be rough on your hands. If you extend the range of your Google queries from just the keyboard shortcut to something like “myapplication without a mouse” or “myapplication keyboard shortcut guide” you’ll find gems like this guide to using the Opera web browser completely sans-mouse—or our own guide to mouse-less Firefox. Photo by Declan TM.

The best thing about improving your keyboard chops with the netbook is that all the new shortcuts you learn are transferable to your main workstation. For more information on handy keyboard shortcuts, application tricks involving keyboard shortcuts, and how to make them if your application lacks for them, take a stroll through the archives of the keyboard shortcuts tag here at Lifehacker.

Select Applications with a Netbook-Centric Attitude

Selecting applications for a netbook is a lot like packing for a camping trip. When you pack for a camping trip you select things for your pack that are efficient and lightweight versions of things you use every day at home, and you also pack things that are distinctly related to camping that you’d never use at home. Photo by 玩具王 the Nictoyking.

For example, you may use Firefox loaded down with 1,0001 extensions on your quad-core home computer but opt to run Firefox with only one or two critical extensions or Google Chrome on your netbook. Also, just like with camping, selecting lightweight tools that are multifunction is valuable. Why use a bloated media application when something snappy and light like open-source VLC can take care of all your movie and music needs? In the same vein, look for ways to ditch software that is known for being bloated and resource hungry, like swapping out Adobe-gonna-eat-all-y’RAMs-Reader with FoxIt Reader. If you’re unsure where to start when it comes to selecting lightweight software, you might want to check out past Lifehacker Hive Five topics. Lifehacker readers tend to gravitate towards the fastest and lightest-weight solutions even when constraints like using a netbook aren’t brought into the equation.

Aside from searching out lightweight versions of applications your normally use, the netbook also benefits from applications you’d likely never use on a desktop computer.

Netbooks, for example, make pretty handy ebooks. They’re full color, they have no annoying DRM or restrictions, and they’re lightweight with a long battery life. I’ve been experimenting with using my netbook as an ebook reader and don’t have any complaints to log. If your netbook doesn’t already support screen rotation, you can easily remedy that situation by downloading EeeRotate—in use in the screenshot above. The tiny application allows you to rotate your screen using CTRL+ALT+RIGHT (you can rotate it so that you hold the netbook with the screen on your right or left hand side) and it reverses the axis of the mouse so you can still use your mouse without hassle. Pressing CTRL+ALT+UP will return the screen to normal.

If you’re a Gmail user, you’ll definitely want to enable Offline Gmail to allow you to compose emails in Gmail when you’re between wireless hotspots and unable to access the net. If you’re not a Gmail user it’s worth downloading an full-fledged email client like Thunderbird and configuring it to use your web-based email so you can enjoy the same functionality.

Even if your keyboard chops are up to par, it’s still a pain to launch applications on a netbook. Although I’ve yet to install Launchy—as much as I love it!—on my main Windows 7 desktop, most netbooks run Windows XP and Launchy can go a long way towards making application launching pleasant on the tiny keyboard and touchpad. Check out our guide to doing more with Launchy here.

Being able to shuttle files between your main workstation and your netbook, as well as keeping them backed up, is a must. Dropbox is a valuable addition to your netbook for this task. It’s lightweight, it’s fast, and for most users the free account is more than adequate. While writing this article I used Dropbox multiple times to easily toss screenshots and installation files between my netbook and desktop and as I took notes about the netbook—on the netbook!—I saved the .TXT file to Dropbox. Check out how to use Dropbox for more than just file syncing here.

Netbooks serve as an excellent go-between tool for lightweight and portable notetaking and web browsing, especially with the proper tweaking and software selection. While our list of tweaks and software suggestions is long, it’s certainly not exhaustive. If you have a netbook of your own, it’s time to sound off in the comments with your tips, tricks, and favorite applications for maximizing your netbook’s capabilities.

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How did world-famous video game composer Nobuo Uematsu (left) get his start)? What drives him in music creation? What’s he think about games these days? These were a few of the heady topics tackled by Famitsu magazine in a three-part interview with the guy, and the results are more than worth the read.

Some of the highlights:

– Uematsu got his more-or-less official start with playing music at age 12. “My sister was learning how to play the piano, so we had some instruments laying around the fast,” he said. “That was how it began. I eventually learned that guitars have these things called chords, and as I was playing around with tablatures I realized ‘Hey, I could probably play these on a piano too!’ And I could. That was a major shock to me, and really, my piano playing hasn’t evolved any from that point.”

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