Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/p5yW0kBCGTA/130704095044.htm
Nick Foles Auguste Rodin Breaking Amish Indianapolis explosion mike brown bcs rankings jay cutler
Friday, July 5, 2013
Study of mitochondrial DNA ties ancient remains to living descendants
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Researchers report that they have found a direct genetic link between the remains of Native Americans who lived thousands of years ago and their living descendants. The team used mitochondrial DNA, which children inherit only from their mothers, to track three maternal lineages from ancient times to the present.
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Carcassonne updated with new tally displays and detailed play by play summaries
Carcassonne, a port of the popular German boardgame, has been updated with some new features that make keeping track of gameplay easier including new scoring visualizations that will give you the ability to review every detail of a game once it's completed.
The new update also brings with it a new tally display which serves to show score details during actual game play. Carcassonne first brought the classic game to iPhone and iPad about four years ago. For hardcore fans of the traditional game, it's nice to see it's still getting updated and receiving the support it deserves. From the developers and the community.
You can grab the update via the link below. If you don't already have Carcassonne, the $9.99 purchase covers both the iPhone and iPad version.
- $9.99 - Download Now
     |
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/PQW1YwDDjJ8/story01.htm
Daily Show provisional ballot rush limbaugh rush limbaugh karl rove Election 2012 Results polling place
Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange back in action
As promised, Mt. Gox has reenabled cash withdrawals after taking its system offline to iron out the kinks. The Bitcoin exchange says it's successfully processed over $1,000,000 worth of transactions during these past two weeks of testing, which has given it the confidence to resume business -- despite a backlog on some transactions. Mt. Gox is also announcing that it's signed more banking partnerships "in Japan and around the world," though no specific companies were named. If you want to get into this whole Bitcoin thing, but don't know where to start, we got you covered.
Via: The Next Web
Source: Mt. Gox
high school shooting ohio school shooting sean young arrested matt kenseth bridge to nowhere primary results dale earnhardt jr
The Epic 'Lone Ranger' Train Sequence: How'd They Do That?
Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer and Gore Verbinski take MTV News inside the 'massive puzzle' of the 'Lone Ranger' climax.
By Josh Wigler
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1709993/lone-ranger-johnny-depp-armie-hammer-train-sequence.jhtml
Bill Hader tim mcgraw WWE Extreme Rules 2013 powerball winner powerball winner Eurovision Ken Venturi
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Vatican scandal: Two high-profile resignations follow arrest of monsignor
Vatican scandal: The?Vatican bank director and his deputy resigned Monday afternoon amid a growing financial scandal that has already landed a Vatican monsignor in prison.
Ernst von Freyberg, president of the Vatican Bank I.O.R. (Istituto per le Opere Religiose), talks with the Associated Press at his office in Vatican City, June 10. Mr. von Freyberg has been appointed the acting director of the I.O.R. The I.O.R.'s previous director and deputy director resigned Monday, just days after Francis announced a commission of inquiry into the bank and shortly after the arrest of a Vatican accountant, Monsignor Nunzio Scarano.
Domenico Stinellis/AP
EnlargeThe director of the embattled Vatican bank and his deputy resigned Monday, the latest heads to roll in a broadening finance scandal that has already landed one Vatican monsignor in prison and added urgency to Pope Francis' reform efforts.
Skip to next paragraph' +
google_ads[0].line2 + '
' +
google_ads[0].line3 + '
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
The Vatican said in a statement that Paolo Cipriani and his deputy, Massimo Tulli, stepped down "in the best interest of the institute and the Holy See." The speed with which they resigned, however, indicated that the decision was not entirely theirs.
Cipriani, along with the bank's then-president, was placed under investigation by Rome prosecutors in 2010 for alleged violations of Italy's anti-money-laundering norms after financial police seized 23 million euro ($30 million) from a Vatican account at a Rome bank. Neither has been charged and the money was eventually ordered released.
But the bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, has remained under the glare of prosecutors and now Francis amid fresh concerns it has been used as an offshore tax haven.
It was the latest turmoil to hit the IOR, which has long been the source of scandal for the Holy See. Last year, the bank's board ousted its then-president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, for incompetence and erratic behavior.
The resignations Monday and nominations of interim administrators represented a final overthrow of the bank's old guard management and coincided with its efforts to comply with international norms to fight money-laundering and terror financing.
The resignations came just days after Francis announced a commission of inquiry into the bank and followed the arrest of a Vatican accountant caught up in a criminal investigation into the IOR. Monsignor Nunzio Scarano is accused by Rome prosecutors of corruption and slander in connection with a plot to smuggle 20 million euro ($26 million) into Italy from Switzerland without reporting it to customs officials.
Scarano, dubbed "Don 500" by the Italian media because of his purported favorite euro banknote, acknowledged under questioning Monday that his behavior was wrong but that he was only trying to help out friends, his attorney Silverio Sica told The Associated Press.
According to wiretapped phone conversations, Scarano was in touch regularly with both Cipriani and Tulli to get the required bank approval to move large amounts of cash into and out of his IOR accounts. Scarano had two such accounts: a personal one and one called "Fondo Anziani" to receive charitable donations for projects to help the elderly, prosecutors say.
In addition to his Rome arrest, Scarano is also under investigation in the southern city of Salerno for alleged money-laundering stemming from a 560,000 euro cash withdrawal he made from his IOR charity account in 2009. Sica, the attorney, has said Scarano arranged complicated transactions with dozens of other people and eventually used the money to pay off a mortgage.
The group of five cardinals who oversee the IOR accepted the resignations of Cipriani and Tulli and tapped the IOR's current president, German financier and aristocrat Ernst von Freyberg, to serve as interim director, a Vatican statement said.
Von Freyberg, who was named IOR president in February, thanked Cipriani and Tulli for their years of work and said much progress has been made in recent years to bring greater transparency to the Vatican's finances.
"While we are grateful for what has been achieved, it is clear today that we need new leadership to increase the pace of this transformation process," von Freyberg said in a statement.
The IOR has in the past three years undergone tumultuous changes as it tries to adhere to international norms to fight money laundering and terror financing ? changes that apparently didn't always sit well with the old guard, who had long-standing relations with their clients.
Italian banker Rolando Marranci was named as acting deputy and another banking expert, Antonio Montaresi, was brought into a new position as chief risk officer to help ensure the IOR complies with anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism norms. Both belong to the Promontory Group, an expert in the field of anti-money laundering which has been retained by the IOR to help it comply with international norms.
The IOR's board has begun the process of finding a permanent director and deputy director, the statement said.
It wasn't immediately clear how von Freyberg would handle his new role essentially running the IOR's day-to-day operations as director, while also retaining his oversight role as president and member of the bank's board. It also wasn't clear how the new management team of Promontory executives would be able to act independently from the other more senior Promontory officials who remain as advisers to the IOR.
The Vatican bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to manage assets destined for religious or charitable works. Located in a tower just inside the gates of Vatican City, it isn't open to the public ? only to Vatican employees, religious orders and diplomats accredited to the Holy See.
Last week, Francis announced a commission of inquiry into the bank's activities and legal status to ensure it is in "harmony" with the Catholic Church's mission. It's part of his overall effort to reform the Vatican bureaucracy, mandated by the cardinals who elected him pope in March.
The reason for concern about the IOR is well-founded: The bank has long been the source of some of the greatest scandals of the Holy See, famously implicated in a scandal over the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in the 1980s, in one of Italy's largest fraud cases.
Roberto Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 in circumstances that still remain mysterious.
Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had made to several dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.
While denying any wrongdoing, the Vatican bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors.
The late Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, an American prelate who headed the Vatican bank at the time, was charged as an accessory to fraudulent bankruptcy in the scandal, but Italy's Constitutional Court eventually backed the Vatican in ruling that under Vatican-Italian treaties Marcinkus had immunity from Italian prosecution. Marcinkus long asserted his innocence and died in 2006.
superman man of steel amy adams kanye west tracy mcgrady tracy mcgrady Yeezus leak Derecho
Teens' self-consciousness linked with specific brain, physiological responses
July 2, 2013 ? Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge and peak in adolescence.
"Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.
The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that teens' sensitivity to social evaluation might be explained by shifts in physiological and brain function during adolescence, in addition to the numerous sociocultural changes that take place during the teen years.
Somerville and colleagues wanted to investigate whether just being looked at -- a minimal social-evaluation situation -- might register with greater importance, arousal, and intensity for adolescents than for either children or adults. The researchers hypothesized that late-developing regions of the brain, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), could play a unique role in the way teens monitor these types of social evaluative contexts.
The researchers had 69 participants, ranging in age from 8 to almost 23 years old, come to the lab and complete measures that gauged emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.
They told the participants that they would be testing a new video camera embedded in the head coil of a functional MRI scanner. The participants watched a screen indicating whether the camera was "off," "warming up," or "on," and were told that a same-sex peer of about the same age would be watching the video feed and would be able to see them when the camera was on. In reality, there was no camera in the MRI machine.
The consistency and strength of the resulting data took the researchers by surprise: "We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," says Somerville. "Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement."
Specifically, participants' self-reported embarrassment, physiological arousal, and MPFC activation showed reactivity to social evaluation that seemed to converge and peak during adolescence.
Adolescent participants also showed increased functional connectivity between the MPFC and striatum, an area of the brain that mediates motivated behaviors and actions. Somerville and colleagues speculate that the MPFC-striatum pathway may be a route by which social evaluative contexts influence behavior. The link may provide an initial clue as to why teens often engage in riskier behaviors when they're with their peers.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/Gktsz7CfouA/130702100956.htm
gabrielle union Andrea Bargnani Bart Strike 2013 ciara jessica simpson despicable me Ray Donovan
NYT: The Government Is Tracking All Your Snail Mail Too
Your email and phone call metadata certainly isn't private, but maybe you were holding out hope that good old fashioned snail mail somehow avoided big brother's living gaze. The Smoking Gun broke the bad news a month ago, and now the New York Times is confirming that nope, that's all being tracked too. Surprise surprise.
It's by no means a new development; it's been going on for years. But now the details of the whole system are coming to light. Fortunately, the sanctity of your mail's contents is only defilable if there's a warrant involved. There's none needed to track all the sweet, sweet metadata, though.
At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.
The surveillance system is known as the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, and was instated in 2001 after the mail-borne anthrax attacks that killed five people. Since then, the program's been responsible for photographing each and every piece of mail the Postal Service handles. There were over 160 billion pieces last year.
All this is only possible with a little help from the Postal Service itself, of course. Again, from the Times:
For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests. The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days.
Surveillance like this can be initiated either for reasons of national security, or suspicion of more vanilla criminal activity. And though everyone involved is supposed to stay quiet about the numbers, anonymous sources told the Times there are about 15,000-20,000 criminal activity tracking requests per year. National security requests? Who knows.
It's a cold comfort that no one is reading your mail (or email, or transcripts of your phone calls) considering how revealing your metadata can be. For most of us, snail mail isn't much more than a vehicle for junk mail and the occasional package anyway, but it's still disquieting to find out about. Maybe if they just started throwing away the trash for us, it'd be a little less offensive. [The New York Times]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/nyt-the-government-is-tracking-all-your-snail-mail-too-659103174
Psy Cat Zingano DMX spartacus spartacus Jonathan Winters Justin Bieber Anne Frank
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)