Sony bills its new Xperia Tablet Z as the world?s thinnest tablet. And it?s beautiful. You can even get it wet. Unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2013, the Xperia Tablet Z is a slate you can use with confidence in the kitchen or by the pool. Those aren?t the only things Sony?s new device has going for it: A new SideView app lets you see what?s on TV and change the channel with a tap. Add in a full HD display with a wider color spectrum than the iPad and you have one of the more compelling Android tablets of the year.
MORE: See a video of Laptop's hands-on impressions of this bold new tablet.
For the Xperia Tablet Z, Sony ditched the fold design it used on its previous two Android tablets, the Sony Tablet S and the Sony Xperia Tablet S. That?s probably a good thing, for although we liked the distinctive shape of the latter, thin is in. The Tablet Z measures just 0.26 inches thick, making it the ?world?s thinnest 10-inch tablet,? according to Sony. Considering the Toshiba Excite 10 LE was 0.3 inches thick, we?re splitting hairs here, but the design is still remarkably svelte.
The Xperia Tablet Z weighs 1.09 pounds, making it lighter than competing devices such as the iPad (1.4 pounds) and the Excite 10 LE (1.13 pounds).
MORE: Top 10 tablets right now
According to Sony, the full HD (1920 x 1080) display on the Xperia Tablet Z has 20 percent great color gamut than the iPad, made possible by its Bravia engine. The 10.1-inch display has an aspect ratio of 16:10. During our hands-on time, images looked lush and vivid?even underwater.
Yes, the Tablet Z is IP57 water resistant, which means it can survive up to 30 minutes in 6 inches of water. We wouldn?t go swimming with it, but wouldn?t worry if someone accidentally spilled their Poland Spring bottle on the device, either. The screen can also be used even when covered with water, so you could use it in the shower, if you want.
Like the Xperia Tablet S, the Tablet Z has a built-in IR blaster. Used in conjunction with the Sony SideView app, which displays what programs are currently on TV, you can change to a desired show by merely flicking that program?s icon towards the top of the display. It?s a pretty neat feature, and one that Sony hopes will make its tablet more of a living-room staple.
The Tablet Z also has built-in NFC, as well as Sony?s One Touch technology. This lets you wirelessly connect to another NFC-enabled device, such as a speaker, merely by tapping it with the tablet. The onboard sound isn?t too shabby, either. Four speakers around the sides and back of the Tablet Z help ensure that sound doesn?t become muffled when the device is held or in someone?s lap.
MORE: 10 Tablets with the longest battery life
Inside the Tablet Z is a quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor. A battery stamina mode shuts down processes when the screen is off?but you can whitelist apps to remain on?so the tablet will have more than 4 times the standby time as the previous version. Sony estimates that the Tablet Z will last for about 8 hours while browsing the Web via Wi-Fi.
When it goes on sale in May, Sony will offer two versions of the Xperia Tablet Z: A 16GB model will cost $499, and a 32GB version will cost $599. The tablet will be available in white or black. Overall, the Xperia Tablet Z looks is a gorgeous and highly versatile tablet that?s tailor-made for TV fans.
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A vote on President Barack Obama's nominee to lead the Defense Department, Supreme Court arguments about the future of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and?the expected onset of automatic spending cuts known as the "sequester" mean the nation's capital is bracing for a politically consequential week ahead.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood discusses how the looming spending cuts will affect air travel and calls on Congress to act.
After a weeklong recess, Congress returns to Washington with a full agenda of business that needs handling. Topping that list is an item which lawmakers are arguably unlikely to resolve over the course of the week: the sequester, about $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to begin taking effect on Friday, the first day of March.
Lawmakers left town before the President's Day holiday no closer to resolving the sequester, the second part of the so-called "fiscal cliff," which was delayed for two months by the New Year's Day deal on taxes.
Last week's recess was more full of posturing and blame-placing by Obama and Republicans in Congress ? who each blame the other for the sequester's creation ??than any substantive progress toward a deal to address the cuts, which both sides agree would be perilous.
"So now Republicans in Congress face a simple choice: Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and health care and national security and all the jobs that depend on them?" Obama said last Tuesday at the White House. "Or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations? That's the choice."
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, responded in the pages of the 'Wall Street Journal': "The president's sequester is the wrong way to reduce the deficit, but it is here to stay until Washington Democrats get serious about cutting spending."?
The administration has been warning of the potential consequences to the spending cuts, including military readiness and even delays and inconveniences in air travel.
Related:?Why Obama has the PR upper hand in sequestration battle
"We're not making this up in order to put pain on the American people," outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We are required to cut a billion dollars and we are going to do that unless Congress gets together and works together and compromises on this."?
Former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr.; Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan; Host of NPR's Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep; CNBC's Maria Bartiromo and Jim Cramer weigh in on how the looming budget cuts could be avoided with better leadership.
With both sides still so far apart, an agreement to delay or soften the blow of the automatic cuts before Friday seems unlikely.
That legislative showdown would normally suffice to consume all the political oxygen in Washington. But this week also features several other major events worth noting.
One such item is another holdover from before recess. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on final confirmation for former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to become the next defense secretary. The vote follows tenacious efforts by some Republican senators to block their former colleague from joining the Obama administration.
Senate Democrats had hoped to formally vote to confirm Hagel before last week's recess, but Senate Republicans ??even some GOP senators who said they'll support final confirmation for Hagel ??joined together to sustain a filibuster, and delay the confirmation vote until this week. For their part, Democrats decried the filibuster as unprecedented against a Pentagon chief's nomination.
Former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr.; Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan; Host of NPR's Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep; CNBC's Maria Bartiromo and Jim Cramer discuss what happens if Washington can't agree on an alternative plan.
Still, Hagel appears to be headed toward confirmation. Some of his most vociferous critics?? Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., among them ? said they would support moving toward a final vote on confirmation, which would only require a simple majority of the Senate's support. Even still, several GOP senators have said they intend to support Hagel, which only boosts his prospects for confirmation, barring some sort of development.
Hagel isn't the only member of Obama's prospective national security team left hanging over the recess.
After facing a grilling earlier this month before the Senate Intelligence Committee, John O. Brennan's nomination to become the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency faces an uncertain future. Senators are looking for more information about the Obama administration's secretive drone strikes program ??and Brennan's role in crafting that strategy ??before moving forward with his nomination.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has threatened to filibuster Brennan's nomination before the whole Senate until he's received a satisfactory answer. The concerns about Brennan aren't isolated to Republicans, either; Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon have voiced similar misgivings about the secretive use of drone strikes to target suspected terrorists and the process behind them.
Joshua Roberts / Reuters file photo
Capitol Hill in Washington, DC
Also this week, the Supreme Court will hear potentially consequential oral arguments challenging a section of the historic Voting Right Acts. The justices will hear a challenge to a section of the law requiring nine states with a history of racial discrimination to seek Justice Department approval for any change in their voting procedures before those changes can take effect.
Obama, speaking Thursday in a radio interview, sought to calm fears that African American or other minority voters would face greater challenges to voting if the Supreme Court were to strike down that section of the law.
"I know in the past some folks have worried that if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, they're going to lose their right to vote. That?s not the case," Obama said on "The Black Eagle" radio show. "People will still have the same rights not to be discriminated against when it comes to voting, you just won't have this mechanism, this tool, that allows you to kind of stay ahead of certain practices."
There are plenty of things to consider when car shopping, but financing is probably the most important part of it. Locking up financing before heading to the dealer is a great way to save both time and money. This is especially true for members of?UMe Credit Union, which is currently offering fantastic?auto loan rates?of 2.90% APR for new auto loans.
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Justice Department has joined a lawsuit against disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong that alleges the former, seven-time Tour de France champion concealed his use of performance-enhancing drugs and defrauded his long-time sponsor, the U.S. Postal Service, Armstrong's lawyers said Friday.
The suit the Justice Department is joining was filed in 2010 by former teammate Floyd Landis, who was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title for doping.
Settlement discussions had been under way between the Justice Department and Armstrong's lawyers. A person familiar with the negotiations says the two sides are tens of millions of dollars apart on how much Armstrong should pay to settle the case. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the source was not authorized to speak on the record about the private talks.
An Armstrong lawyer, Robert Luskin, said negotiations with the government failed because "we disagree about whether the postal service was damaged."
"The postal service's own studies show that the service benefited tremendously from its sponsorship ? benefits totaling more than $100 million," said Luskin.
Luskin said, "Lance and his representatives worked constructively over these last weeks with federal lawyers to resolve this case fairly."
The Landis lawsuit was filed under seal, but it will be unsealed with the Justice Department decision to join or, in essence, take over the case.
Armstrong was the subject of a two-year federal grand jury investigation that the Justice Department dropped a year ago without an indictment.
Throughout his career, Armstrong always denied drug use, but he confessed to having done so in an interview last month.
In October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a report that included affidavits from 11 of Armstrong's former teammates. These affidavits detailed how the teammates were supplied with EPO ? a banned energy-boosting hormone that stimulates red blood cell production ? by Armstrong and saw him inject, and how they were pressured to dope and bullied by Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel, the team manager. The cycling world's governing body then stripped Armstrong of the seven Tour de France titles he won from 1999 to 2005.
Last month, the head of USADA lobbied Attorney General Eric Holder for the Justice Department to join the lawsuit against Armstrong. USADA chief executive Travis Tygart has called the doping by Armstrong and the postal service teams a "massive economic fraud."
Under the False Claims Act, citizens can act as whistle-blowers and sue to recover money they believe was obtained through fraud against the federal government. These suits remain under seal until the Justice Department decides whether it thinks there is enough merit in the case to take it over. The private whistleblower receives a percentage of any money ultimately recovered.
Armstrong and USADA officials talked on and off over a couple of months about the terms under which the cyclist might sit down for a long interview to tell all he knows about doping in cycling, but Armstrong said he would not cooperate.
A person familiar with discussions between Armstrong and USADA, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private, said among the topics was how much protection USADA could provide Armstrong in the whistle-blower case and against possible criminal action. The cyclist and his attorneys ultimately were not satisfied with USADA's offer, the person said.
In commenting Wednesday on Armstrong's refusal to talk, Tygart said that, "over the last few weeks he has led us to believe that he wanted to come in and assist USADA but was worried of potential criminal and civil liability if he did so."
If the Justice Department ends up taking the whistle-blower case all the way to trial, a key issue is likely to be whether the U.S. Postal Service ? the Armstrong team's sponsor ? suffered financial harm from the drug scandal.
The government must prove not only that the postal service was defrauded, but that it was damaged in some way.
Studies conducted for the postal service point to huge financial benefits from the sponsorship.
The government could argue that all of the recent controversy tarnishes the whole sponsorship and has damaged the postal service.
But the USPS sponsorship ended long ago and relatively few people reading stories about the current controversy are associating Armstrong with the post office. Armstrong's last sponsor for his final two Tours de France was Radio Shack, in 2009 and 2010.
The studies for the postal service state that the agency reaped at least $139 million in worldwide brand exposure in four years ? $35 million to $40 million for sponsoring the Armstrong team in 2001; $38 million to $42 million in 2002; $31 million in 2003; and $34.6 million in 2004.
Despite those numbers, Armstrong is fighting an uphill battle.
The government has a potentially strong weapon on its side: An argument could be made that until recent months there was an active, ongoing conspiracy to cover up Armstrong's alleged fraud. If the case ever goes to trial, that argument could persuade a judge to allow in a huge amount of evidence on Armstrong's use of performance-enhancing drugs dating back to the 1990s ? evidence that would be barred from the government's court case as too old if there were no extended conspiracy.
A Brentwood man faces a theft charge after the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation arrested him Thursday night, claiming he bought nine stolen iPads as part of an alleged multi-county iPad theft ring.
Ngoc Vo Ngo was charged with one count of theft between $1,000 and $10,000.
According to the TBI, the district attorney general requested that the agency investigate a suspected theft ring in which individuals shoplifted iPads from area Wal-Marts and sold them to 30-year-old Ngoc Vo Ngo.
On Thursday, TBI officials say Ngo bought the nine iPads for $2,100 from law enforcement at Jennifer Nails on Ewing Drive in Nashville. Ngo was arrested, and the investigation continues.
The Metro Nashville Police Department and Wal-Mart loss prevention department assisted in the investigation. Ngo was booked into Davidson County jail and released on bond.
(Reuters) - One FBI employee was fired for sleeping with a drug dealer and lying about it under oath, while another got the boot for bugging the boss's office.
The FBI suspended for 10 days still another employee for emailing a nude photograph of herself to her ex-boyfriend's wife - the bureau showed compassion for the woman after she sought help for depression.
Those cases over the past year were among 29 revealed by CNN on Friday after the cable news network obtained an October 2012 quarterly report the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation sent to all its employees that was meant to educate FBI staff but not to be disseminated publicly.
The so-called quarterlies summarized cases investigated by the bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility.
"We have seen a rash of sexting cases and nude photograph cases, you know, people misusing their BlackBerrys for this reason, and we hope getting the message out in the quarterlies is going to teach people you can't do this stuff," FBI assistant director Candice Will told CNN.
An employee who used a government-issued BlackBerry to send sexually explicit messages to another employee received a five-day suspension. Another who used a personal cell phone to send nude photographs to several other employees received a 10-day suspension, in part because the conduct created office gossip.
"When you're given an FBI BlackBerry, it's for official use. It's not to text the woman in another office who you found attractive a picture of yourself in a state of undress," Will said.
Many of the cases involved sex, such as that of the employee who visited a massage parlour and paid for a sexual favour from the masseuse. That resulted in a 14-day suspension instead of a more severe penalty because the employee had an exemplary work record and expressed remorse, the FBI documents said.
Others were more serious, such as the case of the employee who admitted purchasing and viewing video of naked boys. That person was summarily dismissed.
Two employees who were busted for driving under the influence of alcohol were fired because in each case it was a second offense.
Another who was cited for public intoxication while walking the street drunk and armed with a bureau-issued weapon received a seven-day suspension.
Improper handling of evidence resulted in suspensions of three and eight days. Shoplifting got a summary dismissal.
CNN posted the documents on http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2013/images/02/21/office.of.professional.review.-.cnn01302013_0000.pdf.
When Mary Lou Grier got involved with the Texas Republican Party in the late 1950s, it was so obscure that it had trouble fielding candidates. ?We just begged people to run,? friend Glenda R. Reeder said.
Grier ?was willing to run for office knowing she had no prayer of winning,? daughter-in-law Margaret Grier said. ?She ran for (Bexar County) district clerk in the early 1960s. Then in 1974, she was the first woman nominated to run for a statewide office,? though she lost her land commissioner bid.
She persisted. ?We had three objectives when we started,? friend Polly Sowell said. ?We wanted Texas to be a two-party state, we wanted to defeat communism, and we wanted to bring some fiscal sanity? to the state.
Mary Lou Grier died Feb. 15 at 87.
She knew the importance of being politically active, having been raised in the Panama Canal Zone, where her family was unable to vote. She made up for it after moving to Texas, where she was inspired to get involved by her boss at USAA.
She met her husband, a Texas native who had also spent time in Panama, and by the time they got married, he was in Honolulu working with the Army Air Corps during World War II. Grier, who had gone to the University of Missouri journalism school, got a job with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
After the war, the couple settled in San Antonio to raise their children. Grier continued her tireless political efforts, becoming vice chairwoman of the county GOP.
?She helped to elect John Tower as the first (Republican) Texas senator since Reconstruction,? said Cyndi Taylor Krier, herself a former vice chairwoman. ?In those years the chairman was a man who had a full-time job somewhere else. She ran headquarters on the day-to-day basis, planned the day-to-day activities.?
?One of the biggest impacts she had was when she was Tom Loeffler's campaign manager in 1978,? Margaret Grier said. ?It was a huge responsibility. They spent a lot of time on the road going to every single county and talking to anybody who would talk to them.?
She also worked in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Outdoor Recreation as deputy director and acting director; as deputy advocate for advisory councils in the Small Business Administration; and deputy director and acting director in the National Park Service. ?She would commute every weekend,? Margaret Grier said. ?She lived in the D.C. area, flew home on Friday evening.?
?All of us who were young and impressionable in college at that time, to see a Republican woman running for statewide office, that was terrific,? Krier said. ?That's when I first got to know her and that made me realize a woman can do this, too.?
littlesparkvt writes in with news about the possibility of a privately funded Mars mission. "Millionaire Dennis Tito became the first paying customer to make a trip to the International Space Station and now he wants to launch a privately funded mission to Mars in 2018. Dennis paid a reported 20 Million to ride aboard a Russian rocket to the International Space Station and has since stayed out of the spotlight, until now. There?s no word whether the trip will include humans, there will be more information on that fact next week. Considering there is little time to train a crew for the mission the flight in 2018 will most likely be an unmanned probe. There?s also a possibility that the first mission to Mars from this private investor will harbor supplies for future astronauts. Plants and food are a possibility as they would take much less space than a full human crew."
New Delhi: Smartphone maker BlackBerry will unveil its new line of BlackBerry 10-powered devices in the country on February 25. The launch in India follows the global launch of the new operating system and two devices -- Z10 and Q10 -- powered by the new platform on January 30.
The phones will be introduced at an event in Mumbai, the Canada-based company said in an invitation sent to media. However, the pricing details of the phone were not available.The struggling Smartphone maker has also re-christened itself as 'BlackBerry' from Research in Motion earlier as it looks to turn around its fortunes with the new launch.
The company, which pioneered email on the go, is now undertaking a "journey of transformation of business and brand". The two devices -- Z10 and Q10 -- will compete with Apple's iPhone and those based on Google's Android operating system, which have gained popularity across the world.
RIM's stocks also took a beating, declining close to 72 per cent from over USD 61 apiece in January 2010 to USD 17.54 on January 25, 2012. It had fallen to as low as USD 6.30 in September 2012.
In July-September period of 2012, Android Smartphones had a market share of 72.4 per cent, while Apple's iOS market share stood at 13.9 per cent compared to RIM's share of 5.3 per cent.
However, BlackBerry has a strong fan following in India, especially among youth. As per CyberMedia Research, RIM's market share in Indian Smartphone market stood at 12.1 per cent during January-June 2012 period.
RIM is betting big on touch screen with its new User Interface (UI) on Z10 and other features like BlackBerry Balance. BlackBerry, which faced strong criticism for lack of content on its application store, has also revamped it to take on Android's Play Store and Apple's App Store.
BlackBerry, which for long been touted as an enterprise device, has introduced 'BlackBerry Balance' that will allow users separate professional data and applications from music, photographs and other personal items. The new devices also feature enhanced camera features.
BlackBerry Z10 was first unveiled in UK, last month, followed by Canada, UAE and USA earlier this month.
Read more: 6 Biggest Expectations From BlackBerry 10
Retina iPad mini has made its first appearance in the underbelly of the Internet where mockups and fake pictures mix freely with truth and actual product specifications. CNET reports that a Chinese website has posted what it claims is a picture of Retina iPad mini.
In case you've been living a rock, it's worth reiterating that Apple introduced the iPad mini alongside the fourth generation iPad at a special event in San Jose, California on October 23rd last year. The iPad mini features a 7.9-inch display, FaceTime HD and iSight cameras, ultrafast wireless performance and 10 hours of battery life.
With the 'bigger' iPad featuring a Retina display of 2048x1536 resolution, many found iPad mini's 1024x768 display rather underwhelming. Speculation about Apple releasing a Retina iPad mini has been rampant almost since the day the iPad mini was announced. Most analysts and technical experts full expect Apple to release the Retina iPad mini, and now it has made its first alleged appearance.
The picture on the Chinese forum features an iPad mini-like device pictured from the bottom. The speaker grill can be seen, as can be the Apple branding on the back, which is, strangely, in a shade of blue. The pictured device is visibly thicker than the current iPad mini, which adds credence to the fact this could be a Retina version, since the Retina iPad was famously thicker than the iPad 2. On the other hand, that blue colour sticks out like a sore thumb, since no Apple devices feature that particular shade.
We're sure we'll see a lot more leaks between now and the actual launch. Keep your seat belts on. This could be a bumpy ride.
This week the Academy Awards were officially renamed The Oscars. The rebranding suggests that Hollywood has, finally, lost some of the crippling status anxiety suggested by the creation of the pompously named ?Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.? The Oscars are at last like a J.D. who finally stops calling himself an attorney. He?s self-assured enough to be known as a lawyer.
It?s high time. The movie business is the granddaddy of American popular entertainment: It not only has a grown son?television?inflicted with status panic, but there?s also a teenage grandson?Internet video?to play enfant terrible.
That?s why I?m drawn, this Oscar season, to Vine. Vine is Twitter?s spellbinding new video app. We have no idea if it will convulse pop culture as the daguerreotype did in 1837, or the cinematograph in the 1890s. Or YouTube in 2005. Or Twitter in 2006. But the art Vine has engendered doesn?t look like pomp or bids for authority. It looks like actual art.
At the same time, Vine is only 4 weeks old. So we don?t know anything. But if, through chance, it does turn out to be a cultural convulsant, we know exactly who will be its Lumi?re brother and it's Ashton Kutcher, the early freestyler and medium-embracer who somehow instantly knows how to make hay of a new technology.
He?s Adam Goldberg. Recognize his name? If you are one of the ragtag few who currently Vine, you do?and maybe you have even noticed the hashtag #vinelikegoldberg. Goldberg is the maestro of the six-second looping Vine video; it is Goldberg?s dexterity and arid humor and trippy frisson to which we who use Vine aspire.
As Greg Boose put it in BlackBook magazine, ?Adam Goldberg somehow already owns Vine.?
But if you are not on Vine, meaning you?re every single person reading this except maybe seven, you may not remember Goldberg. Don?t bother with Wikipedia. All you need to know is that he played?with great skill?the dude in ?Saving Private Ryan,? a different dude in ?Dazed and Confused? and still another dude in ?Entourage.?
Goldberg?s father is Jewish, and his mother is a lapsed Catholic. He doesn?t cotton to either faith, but that religious abstinence doesn?t protect him from what he told me is ?garden-variety anti-Semitism,? which haunts the popular response to his online work. He takes that, and most other things, in stride.
What Goldberg is is an artist. It?s serious. He?s normal about it and doesn?t act Austrian or entitled, but he?s not giving up, either. As an actor, he turns in well-reviewed performances in movies and TV nearly all the time, dutifully collecting a union paycheck, but on the side he spins out music, books, films, videos. He does various weird be-in projects, like someone in Berlin, or Yoko Ono.
When it comes to getting digitized, Goldberg, at 42, has an invaluable asset: a digital-native girlfriend. The highly pregnant Roxanne Daner, who appears often in Goldberg?s work, is a distinguished illustrator and keen digital designer. Like others in her adventurous, coastal cohort, Daner divides her time between apps barely out of beta and Victorian-era crafting. Her design-firm bio reads, ?I am a Waldorfian. I spend my free time felting, doing eurythmy and going to the dog park.?
Ten years younger than her boyfriend, Daner turned Goldberg on to the digital. ?My friends were curmudgeonly about the Web,? Goldberg told me. ?I was just not of the generation. It?s not as though I was the first person to jump on MySpace.?
Five years ago, Daner persuaded Goldberg to try Facebook, where he experimented in conceptual art. He put up a three-minute Warholian video of his legs on a rowing machine. All of his status updates were Dada. But he couldn?t get any traction.
?We kept trying to create this narrative,? Goldberg told me. He opened a Tumblr to this end, and it became his artist?s notebook. The narrative he and Daner were making came to involve surrealism, deadpan satire, dream sequences, groovy design, left-wing politics, and the ingenuous and quirky romance that defines Goldberg?s and Daner?s sweet interaction with each other.
Goldberg, who plays guitar and whose resonant, spiky way of talking has won him voice parts in animated movies, then put out two records. One was with a band he called The Goldberg Sisters. He used what he called ?a draggy voice? and sometimes screamed. The Goldberg Sisters were featured on ?The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson.?
This might have been a big break, except that Goldberg was told he couldn?t mention a website?his Tumblr?on the show; he could only promote movies and CDs. Goldberg resigned himself, again, to producing Tumblr art for Tumblr art?s sake.?
Tumblr eventually ?became an exercise in OCD,? said Goldberg. ?I put an imposition on myself where I had to post a photo every other day and a recording every other day. That?s how I wrote my last record.?
So that?s where Goldberg was ??toiling in the nether regions of social networking, creating all sorts of stuff that nobody paid attention to??when someone his girlfriend knew told them about Vine, the app with a cool cutting feature that lets you make six-second repeating videos and share them on Twitter.
Something in Vine?s runic brevity, its looping broken-record feature and its temptation to jump cuts and stop motion, encouraged artsy projects from the start. And you couldn?t fuss too much or get too perfectionist. The Vines are posted to Vine?and Twitter and Facebook, if you choose?almost the second they?re done. I mean, they don?t have to be and you can delete them, but the technology, like Twitter itself, biases you toward publication and discourages video-hoarding.
The performance art Goldberg and Daner had been doing?singing, playing guitar and violin, acting, taking pictures, felting?perfectly suited the Vine. The first set of videos they made shows Goldberg as a speedy, addled Goldberg, developing a Vine obsession, but also cross-dressing and ventriloquizing and freaking out, while a concerned Daner and her friend Merritt look on.
Though Goldberg has said he saw horror potential in the app from the start, his early videos had comedy in them. More recently, he?s titrated out the humor entirely and put a conceptual acid-head kaleidoscope in its place. He?s hit his stride.
?I skipped my funny phase as a filmmaker,? he told me, explaining in part why he hasn?t gone the route of the Hollywood goofballs who like to chip off chuckly videos for "Funny or Die."
With the sheepishness known to anyone between 40 and 50 who unironically admits to liking art, Goldberg sighed. ?At the end of the day the things that turn me on are kind of aural-visual dream sequences,? he said.
Goldberg pioneered for Vine what he called a ?thumb-tapping technique? that makes the video stutter, where the audio seems to have a mind of its own. He also makes Vines that use other Vines and puts glass over his iPhone?s lens, and otherwise distorts the film so much that its looping and shortness start to seem like the least weird part of it.
Now that he?s put Polaroids of things reflected in mirrors in his Vines?the ancient mirror, the 20th-century Polaroid and the weeks-old Vine?Goldberg has developed new awe about the iPhone.
?The iPhone has a lens and a recording device and an input,? he told me by phone. ?You can do anything with a lens, a recording device and an input. I can?t believe we?re talking on the same device that I used to make the Vines.?
I looked at my iPhone. I put Goldberg on speakerphone for a little bit and listened to his rapid, happy voice.
?This is where things get exciting for me,? Goldberg said. And then he went to make another Vine.
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) ? Hundreds of Palestinian protesters clashed with Israeli security forces Thursday, hurling rocks and burning tires at a West Bank demonstration to show solidarity with Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Palestinians have staged protests across the West Bank all week in solidarity with the 4,500 prisoners held by Israel. Four of the prisoners are staging a hunger strike and the worsening condition of one, Samer Issawi, sparked the latest round of unrest between the protesters and Israeli troops.
His hunger strike has drawn international attention and concerns from notables such as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Issawi is incarcerated for violating the terms of his release from a previous prison term. On Thursday, an Israeli court sentenced him for eight months from the day of his arrest on July 7, meaning he could be freed as early as next month.
But Palestinians officials said it wasn't a done deal because Issawi also faces separate charges in a military court and there were no indications that he planned to end his hunger strike.
Some 2,000 people gathered at the Beitunia military checkpoint, hoping to march to a nearby military prison, where some of the prisoners are held. When the military prevented them from proceeding, protesters began rioting by hurling stones and burning tires. The demonstrators, some masked and others draped in the green flags associated with the militant group Hamas, attempted to block a road using large stones, garbage bins and tires set ablaze. Israeli soldiers responded with rubber-coated bullets and tear gas to disperse the crowd and a bulldozer cleared debris from the road.
Palestinian Red Crescent official Mohammad Samhan said 27 people were injured in the clashes. Some 30 others were treated for tear gas inhalation.
The Israeli military said there were an estimated 300 people demonstrating and that security forces used nonlethal means to break up what it called a violent riot. It said two Israeli civilians were injured. Video shot by The Associated Press showed an Israeli TV journalist running from the unrest, his hand covering a wound on his head, his face and shirt bloodied.
The Palestinians who are protesting consider all the prisoners heroes in their struggle against Israeli occupation. But much of the attention has focused on the 35-year-old Issawi, whose health has severely deteriorated after an on-again, off-again hunger strike stretching more than 200 days.
Issawi was hospitalized over the weekend after he lost consciousness, but his lawyers said his condition improved after receiving vitamins and minerals intravenously.
Last year, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners went on a mass hunger strike to demand better conditions in jail. In a deal mediated by Egyptian officials, they were promised more family visits and limits on administrative detention.
Issawi was among those freed in a 2011 exchange that released hundreds of Palestinians, many of them militants involved in deadly attacks, in exchange for an Israeli soldier held by Hamas-backed militants. Israel says Issawi was released after serving six years of a 26-year sentence for attempted murder and weapons possession charges among others.
PUBLISHED: 00:45 EST, 17 February 2013 | UPDATED: 05:03 EST, 17 February 2013
She goes by the nickname Bad Gal Ri Ri, so let?s hope one of Britain?s most up-and-coming models doesn?t pick up any of her naughty habits.
Rihanna was spotted enjoying a night of clubbing with Cara Delevingne on Saturday following her London Fashion Week debut.
The 24-year-old emerged from trendy venue The Box in England?s capital city looking well held together in the same ensemble she donned for her catwalk presentation.
Scroll down for video
Having a laugh: Rihanna went clubbing with model Cara Delevingne on Saturday
She linked arms with famous clothes horses Melissa Forde and Cara on the end.
?
The 20-year-old sister of model Poppy Delevingne looked a little worse for wear as she appeared with dishevelled hair and giggling her way to their car.
She also seemed to be stumbling down the street but rather than perhaps going overboard with her alcohol consumption, her wobbling may have been down to her trick footwear.
Taking her through the night: Rihanna donned the same LBD she had worn earlier in the day
Take a bow: Rihanna and Cara Delevingne show how to party hard after the singer's debut show
Cara donned thigh-high boots with denim hot pants as well as a red vest and printed jacket.
The slender star also lugged a heavy bag over her shoulder as they made their way home from the party session.
They were also joined by Rihanna?s friend Melissa Forde, who revealed the party didn?t end there on her Instagram page.
Long day: Cara seemed a little worse for wear as they emerged from The Box nightclub
Flaunting her frame: Cara wore lace-up black boots with denim hot pants
Girl gang: The ladies got plenty of attention from onlookers
Feeling the pressure? Rihanna and Cara scramble past fans
She posted images of herself with Cara and model Jourdan Dunn relaxing on a sofa in a picture which she tagged them as a ?clique? and referred to it as the ?afterparty?.
Melissa also shared a snap of herself smoking a suspicious cigarette as well as a snap of Rihanna dancing in the kitchen area of their lodgings.
Sunglasses at night: Rihanna celebrates her debut show with a night out on the tiles
She's made it! Cara Delevingne parties with Made In Chelsea's Rosie Fortescue
Looking good: Rihanna of course, makes the most of London clubs after debuting her show
You could have dressed up! Louise Smith leaves the show in a rather unusual top
Nice on Jaime! Ms Winstone adds some unusual style to the event
Looking good! V V Brown and Tyson Beckford are obviously fans
The after party: Rihanna's friend shared a snap of her dancing after her catwalk show
Clique: Melissa Forde poseted a snap of her and Cara with model Jourdan Dunn
Bad influence? Melissa shared a snap of her smoking a suspicious cigarette
The Barbadian singer wowed style critics as she presented her first range for River Island on that day.
While the collection appeared to be a hit with fashionistas, Rihanna ensured she gained full marks in the sartorial stakes too, wearing a figure-hugging LBD to take to the stage at the end of the show.
Keeping it simple: Rihanna took a bow after her Rihanna for River Island Fashion show wearing a tight LBD and simple gold jewellery
Rihanna teamed the tight dress with a pair of black strappy heels and a series of simple gold jewellery pieces, opting for a simple style.
She wore her hair lose around her shoulders and she sported dark plum lipstick and a matching colour on her nails.
She was seen waving to the crowd, which included the likes of Cara Delevingne, Mollie King and Jourdan Dunn after debuting the high street collection.
Round of applause: The 24-year-old singer appeared on the stage after her show had finished and was clapped by her River Island colleagues as well as the crowd
She's a hit: Rihanna beamed as she waves to fans in the crowd show off her simple dress with a series of gold jewellery pieces
Overwhelmed: The singer seemed thrilled with the reception she received from the fashion pack
The Stay singer seemed delighted by the reception from the crowd and was seen with a broad smile plastered across her face.
MailOnline's Toni Jones labelled the much-hyped collection 'wearable and impressive'.
She said: 'While the feel of the collection was quite young, Rihanna also included some seriously elegant maxi dresses, dip-hemmed shirts and digital print separates that will find a home in the 30 something market.'
Better late than never! Rihanna made journalists and fashionistas wait more than a hour for her show in a wareouse
Over the moon! The singer later tweeted a message that seemed to suggest she was delighted with how the show played out
In with the fashion crowd: Cara Delevingne and Jourdan Dunn were among the guests at the show
? VIDEO? Rihanna on stage at launch of her range at London Fashion Week?
JAKARTA, Feb. 13 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia and Nigeria have agreed to cooperate in opening plantations for palm oil, cocoa and other commodities in the African country, an Indonesian minister said here on Wednesday.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan (R) shakes hands with Indonesian Foreign Affairs Minister Marty Matalegawa (L) next to Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (C) during a visit in Abuja on February 2, 2013. (Photo: AFP/Getty)
made the statement after he accompanied President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to visit Nigeria last week.
"Nigeria has offered land for us, no matter how large we need, because it needs to cooperate with us in the agro-base industry, such as developing palm oil, cocoa and other commodities plantations," Hidayat said at the vice president's office.
"We want to have lands there, and have processing industry there and we will import it to Indonesia as our products," he said.
Indonesia is the world's largest palm oil producer and one of the world's top cocoa producers.
Hidayat said that President Yudhoyono had demanded a team be set up to study the offer.
Zeb and Treasure are part of Best Friends Animal Society?s "Single and Loving It!" adoption promotion! Right now, when you adopt one of the dogs or cats from Best Friends, your new friend will be delivered to your hometown for free, because helping a homeless pet is priceless. See all of Best Friends? single cats and dogs looking for that special relationship right here. Adoption application must be received by Feb. 18.
ZEB
Breed: Domestic long hair
Gender: Male
Born in 2004
Independent, but still playful and curious
Loves the company of people and receiving attention
Prefers to be your one and only kitty
Zeb loves the company of people, and receiving lots of attention.
He was rescued from life as a stray when the building he called home was being demolished. Since coming to Best Friends, he has learned to be very personable. He would be a great companion for someone with a busy schedule, but he's also so playful, curious and full of life.
Zesty Zeb does need to be an only pet, but he would be such a bright and fun one. He has personality-plus, and is absolutely adoring and adorable.
TREASURE
Breed: American Staffordshire Terrier
Gender: Female
Born in 2008
Equally enjoys cuddling and a good game of fetch
Prefers to be your one and only dog
This treasure isn't hard to find. She'll come running to meet you, eager for your attention and petting, and if you have time to play ball, she'll be even more delighted! Born in 2008, Treasure is a beautiful, super-sweet, silly girl, but she's not good with other dogs or cats, so needs to find a home where she can be the only pet. She came from a Colorado shelter and is in good health.
You don't need a map to find Treasure. She's right here, waiting to meet you. Could you give this happy dog the chance to show you why a good dog is worth her weight in gold?
Best Friends adopts to all of the United States and Canada. Please contact Best Friends Animal Society right?here.??See all the animals that need homes... at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Group of 20 nations will pledge to reduce public debt but are likely to agree on concrete targets only at a leaders' summit in September, EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said.
"There is a clear commitment to credible medium-term plans of fiscal adjustment and I would expect that in the final communiqu? we will state that we will define more precisely G20 policy in the St. Petersburg summit," Rehn told Reuters.
The world's 20 biggest economies decided last year in Mexico that they would come up with credible and ambitious country-specific targets for debt-to-GDP ratios beyond 2016, and clear timetables to achieve them.
"We expect to have concrete draft proposals on the table (by April) so we can build on that and agree more clear on quantifiable targets, because it's important that you maintain the momentum of fiscal consolidation," given still high levels of public and private debt in advanced economies, Rehn said.
He pointed out that in Europe public debt was around 90 percent of gross domestic product. Japan, which wants to stimulate its stagnant economy, has a public debt of more than 200 percent of GDP.
"There is no way that we can afford to get away from the medium-term fiscal objectives," Rehn said.
European policymakers believe that once debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP it becomes a drag on economic growth, as debt servicing eats up scarce resources.
"We have a common view on the need to have a credible medium-term plans for fiscal consolidation, which is also essential so we have foundation for sustainable growth," Rehn said.
A debt-cutting pact struck in Toronto in 2010 will expire this year if leaders fail to agree to extend it at a G20 summit of leaders in St Petersburg in September.
The United States, which has a debt of 73 percent of GDP, plans to consolidate its public finances, but does not want to do it too abruptly to avoid triggering a recession.
European and other G20 countries want Washington to present a plan to reduce its debt, but only in the medium term, because a sharp drop in U.S. government spending would have a highly negative impact on world growth.
"It has been underlined in the discussion, and rightfully so, that it is of a paramount importance that the United States will be able to resolve its fiscal cliff building on the partial deal," Rehn said.
U.S. politicians were able to avoid an initial year-end deadline for spending cuts with a deal that raised taxes on the wealthiest while leaving lower rates in place for most Americans. The agreement to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff" postponed automatic cuts for two months.
"We support the United States in that endeavour, because we're all in the same boat, we're all depend on each other and it's crucial for the global economy and also for the European economy that the U.S. will be able to have a more comprehensive solution to the fiscal cliff and especially have a credible, medium-term plan of fiscal consolidation." Rehn said.
(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski, editing by Mike Peacock)
In the latest installment of China File?s Conversations series, Elizabeth Economy, Andrew J. Nathan and Orville Schell respond to Nina Hachigian?s recommendations to new U.S. secretary of state John Kerry. In a recent essay at the Center for American Progress, Hachigian looked beyond immediate issues such as the Diaoyu Islands dispute, cyber security and North Korean nuclear testing to a broader question in Sino-U.S. relations:
The United States and China have no shared vision for what their future bilateral relationship could or should look like. They have not articulated a clear understanding of how they could continue to co-exist in peace a decade or two down the road, and they need to develop a shared, tangible idea for the future of the relationship.
Hachigian suggests further integrating China into the international ?web of laws, norms, and institutions?, which it currently suspects has been spun by the West to trip it up. This approach is encapsulated in a proposed draft of Kerry?s first speech in China.
From the responses at China File:
Elizabeth Economy: I think Nina is right to identify a lack of shared vision as a serious challenge in the U.S.-China relationship. Unfortunately, I don?t think that at this point in time it is possible to have such a shared vision?beyond what we have always had, namely a stated commitment to peace and stability in the Asia Pacific and to free and open markets. I am fairly sure, for example, that part of our vision for the relationship includes a vastly reformed China (economically and politically)?probably in ways that the Chinese leadership is not interested in reforming, or at least not interested in reforming at the pace we would like. [?]
Andrew J. Nathan: [?] To be sure, it is hard for any observer ? even us, much less policy makers in Beijing ? to figure out what American strategy really is. I sometimes even wonder whether it?s possible for a country with two parties that alternate in power, three branches of government, fifteen fairly independent executive departments, and 535 entrepreneurial legislators, to have a coherent strategy. [?]
Either way, the Chinese need to know where the U.S. really stands. It?s understandable that they will test the U.S. in rhetoric and in action to find out where Washington?s bottom line lies. We American observers will find out the answer along with China.
Orville Schell: [?] Even though Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, China?s next president, has said that he would like to see U.S.-China relations have a fresh start, it is unlikely that there will be a major ?re-set? any time soon. Both Beijing and Washington seem far too root-bound by their own issues and inner- and inter-party politics to step out boldly into any kind of new mutual foreign policy framework.
Hachigian argues that the ?default prediction? in the absence of a shared vision for the future is ?inevitable violent conflict.? At The New York Times this week, on the other hand, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote?that ?I do not believe that wars for global domination are a serious prospect in what is now the Post-Hegemonic Age.?
Admittedly, the historical record is dismal. Since the onset of global politics 200 years ago, four long wars (including the Cold War) were fought over the domination of Europe, each of which could have resulted in global hegemony by a sole superpower.
Yet several developments over recent years have changed the equation. Nuclear weapons make hegemonic wars too destructive, and thus victory meaningless. One-sided national economic triumphs cannot be achieved in the increasingly interwoven global economy without precipitating calamitous consequences for everyone. Further, the populations of the world have awakened politically and are not so easily subdued, even by the most powerful. Last but not least, neither the United States nor China is driven by hostile ideologies.
Moreover, despite our very different political systems, both our societies are, in different ways, open. That, too, offsets pressure from within each respective society toward animus and hostility. More than 100,000 Chinese are students at American universities, and thousands of young Americans study and work in China or participate in special study or travel programs. Unlike in the former Soviet Union, millions of Chinese regularly travel abroad. And millions of young Chinese are in daily touch with the world through the Internet.
All this contrasts greatly with the societal self-isolation of the 19th- and 20th-century contestants for global power, which intensified grievances, escalated hostility and made it easier to demonize the one another.
Brzezinski?s prescription of ?vital and robust? institutionalized cooperation, though, is similar to Hachigian?s.
Contemplating the less arguable inevitability of ?foolish, impetuous, or incompetent leaders in one capital or the other, or maybe even both?, Stephen M. Walt suggested what aspects of this cooperation might look like. From Foreign Policy last month:
The bottom line is that Washington and Beijing have an obvious interest in taking steps now that might make their relationship easier to manage in the future. In particular, establishing rules of the road for naval activity (similar to the earlier Incidents at Sea agreement) might reduce the danger of an unintended clash on the high seas. Reaching an understanding on the use of unmanned drones or cyberattacks would help too. Military-to-military contacts and other forms of elite exchange would be a good idea as well, so that elites in both societies know the people with whom they are dealing personally and are less likely to misread or misinterpret what they may do while in official positions. None of these steps makes rivalry disappear, but together they could help keep it from boiling over.
And that just might be the greatest contribution that these two states could make to international peace and security over the next 25 years.
Efforts to establish an institutional ?web? are likely to provoke some suspicion in China. An op-ed in the overseas edition of People?s Daily last July articulated a bleaker view of developing relations between the two powers:
Over the next 5-10 years, the difference in Sino-US power will make a great leap towards transformation from a difference in quantity to a difference in quality. Authoritative international organizations have already roughly estimated that the Chinese economy will overtake the US in total size by around 2020 or so. During this period, China?s military strength and sci-tech capacities will also continue to rise. The US strategic community is currently debating three basic questions with respect to China?s rise: How to respond to the challenging resource, energy, and economic demands of a great power with 1.3 to 1.5 billion people? How to respond to the challenges posed by the political system, development model, and cultural values of a socialist great power? And how to respond to the military security challenges of a great power that has not yet settled all of its issues of sovereignty and territorial integrity?
During this period, the US is likely to use non-military methods to envelop China or seek to perturb its rise, to win strategic gains, to bring about a revival of national power, and to ensure its hegemonic status. [? T]hrough an approach premised on strengthening alliance relationships, upgrading cooperative partnerships, and by splitting apart China?s ties to North Korea, Pakistan, and Myanmar while seeking to rebuild Russo-American relations, and other steps, they will seek to put China in a passive position in its foreign affairs, complicate China?s external environment, and constrict the strategic space for China?s rise; and through the development of dialogues and commonly-accepted definitions of what the Americans call the ?global commons? of sea, air, space and cyber, they will seek to substantially weaken China?s ability to compete with or strategically challenge the United States.
The article achieved online notoriety for its suggestion that the U.S. would use groups such as rights lawyers and dissidents to undermine China?s political system.
See also coverage of Kerry?s comments on China at his Senate confirmation hearing last month, via CDT.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc's privacy practices are drawing heat after an Australian software developer said the company was providing him with personal information, including email addresses, of everyone who purchased his mobile app.
The information that Google shared, which included customers' full names, email and some postal code information, was not the result of a glitch with its software. Rather it appears to be in accordance with Google's existing policies for its app store and its Google Wallet payment service - though some privacy advocates believe Google has not been clear enough in informing consumers about the practice.
Google has "buried" the notice about how it shares users' personal information in fine print rather than obtain the express consent of users, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"Meaningful consent is about people understanding what they're getting into. It's about not tricking them," said Rotenberg. "In a situation like this, where people just don't know what information is being transferred or who it's going to or for what purpose, it seems ridiculous to say that Google has consent."
The episode represents the latest privacy flare-up for Google, the world's No.1 search engine. In August, Google agreed to pay a $22.5 million fine to settle charges that it bypassed the privacy settings of customers using Apple Inc's Safari browser. Google also settled a privacy investigation by the Federal Trade Commission 2011 related to its rollout of the now-defunct Buzz social networking service.
Other Web companies, including Facebook Inc, have also drawn scrutiny over their privacy practices and entered into settlements with regulators.
Google said in an emailed statement that "Google Wallet shares the information needed to process transactions, and this is clearly stated in the Google Wallet Privacy Notice."
EPIC's Rotenberg said he believed that Google may be violating its 2011 settlement with the FTC.
Developer Dan Nolan broke the issue online in a blog post on Tuesday: "This is a massive oversight by Google. Under no circumstances should I be able to get the information of the people who are buying my apps unless they opt into it and it's made crystal clear to them that I'm getting this information."
Nolan's app, which automatically generates insults in the style of a well-known Australian politician, has been a best-seller on Apple Inc iPhone. Nolan recently released a version of the app for smartphones that rely on Google's Android operating system.
He told Reuters that Google acts as a marketplace when an app is purchased, hence the transactions occur directly between developer and the purchaser.
"The way the system is designed, it (the information) is not what a user would expect to hand over," said Nolan. "If you buy something on the iOS app store, you purchase it off Apple, and they pass the money to the developer."
The Google Wallet privacy notice states that Google will share users' personal information with other companies "as necessary to process your transaction and maintain your account."
That's different than the way Apple's App Store works. According to an Apple spokesman, the company only shares general information about the number of downloads with third-party app developers. Apple does not pass along personal information, such as email, except with publications available through its Newsstand store, if customers agree to it.
Barry Schwartz, an app developer and editor for the online blog Marketing Land, said he was pleased with Google's policy of passing along customer information to developers, since it made it easier for developers to directly handle customer service issues, such as refunds.
"I want to be able to service my customers, and yes, they are my customers, not Google's and not Apple's customers. They download our products," Schwartz wrote.
But Joel Reidenberg, Director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University School of Law, said Google and other online and mobile services needed to be more transparent about what personal information was being shared with third-party firms.
"When you buy an app, you could have a pop-up that tells you this is the information that's going to the app developer," he said.
(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco and Michael Sin in Sydney; Editing by Andrew Hay)
Evolutionary biologists urged to adapt their research methodsPublic release date: 15-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Beverly Clark beverly.clark@emory.edu 404-712-8780 Emory Health Sciences
Genome Sequencing: Emory biologist to detail need to shift focus from present-day molecules to synthesized, ancestral ones
To truly understand the mechanisms of natural selection, evolutionary biologists need to shift their focus from present-day molecules to synthesized, ancestral ones, says Shozo Yokoyama, a biologist at Emory University.
Yokoyama will present evidence for why evolutionary biology needs to make this shift at 1:30 pm on Friday, February 15, during the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston.
"This is not just an evolutionary biology problem, it's a science problem," says Yokoyama, a leading expert in the natural selection of color vision. "If you want to understand the mechanisms of an adaptive phenotype, the function of a gene and how that function changes, you have to look back in time. That is the secret. Studying ancestral molecules will give us a better understanding of genes that could be applied to medicine and other areas of science."
For years, positive Darwinian selection has been studied almost exclusively using comparative sequence analysis of present-day molecules, Yokoyama notes. This approach has been fueled by increasingly fast and cheap genome sequencing techniques. But the faster, easier route, he says, is not necessarily the best one if you want to arrive at a true, quantitative result.
"If you only study present-day molecules, you're only getting part of the picture, and that picture is often wrong," he says.
Yokoyama has spent two decades teasing out secrets of the adaptive evolution of vision in fish and other vertebrates.
Five classes of opsin genes encode visual pigments and are responsible for dim-light and color vision. Fish provide clues for how environmental factors can lead to vision changes, since the available light at various ocean depths is well quantified. The common vertebrate ancestor, for example, possessed ultraviolet vision, which is suited to both shallow water and land.
"As the environment of a species sinks deeper in the ocean, or rises closer to the surface and moves to land, bits and pieces of the opsin genes change and vision adapts," Yokoyama says. "I'm interested in exactly how that happens at the molecular level."
Molecular biologists can take DNA from an animal, isolate and clone its opsin genes, then use in vitro assays to construct a specific visual pigment. The pigment can be manipulated by changing the positions of the amino acids, in order to study the regulation of the gene's function.
In 1990, for example, Yokoyama identified the three specific amino acid changes that switch the human red pigment into a green pigment.
A few years later, another group of researchers confirmed Yokoyama's findings, but found that the three changes only worked in one direction. In order to reverse the process, and turn the green pigment back to red, it took seven changes.
"They discovered this weird quirk that didn't make sense," Yokoyama says. "Why wouldn't it take the same number of changes to go in either direction? That question was interesting to me."
He spent 10 years researching and pondering the question before he realized the key problem: The experiments were conducted on present-day molecules.
When the earliest mammalian ancestors appeared 100 million years ago, they had only the red pigment. Around 30 million years ago, the gene for the red pigment duplicated itself in some primates. One of these duplicated red pigments then acquired sensitivity to the color green, turning into a green pigment.
"At the point that the three changes in amino acids occurred in this pigment, other mutations were happening as well," Yokoyama says. "You have to understand the original interactions of all of the amino acids in the pigment, which means you have to look at the ancestral molecules. That's the trick."
In other words, just as changes in an animal's external environment drive natural selection, so do changes in the animal's molecular environment.
Statistical analysis allows Yokoyama and his collaborators to travel back in time and estimate the sequences for ancestral molecules. "It's a lot of work," he says. "We don't have a clear picture of every intermediate species. We have to do a step-by-step retracing, screening for noise in the results at each step, before we can construct a reliable evolutionary tree."
In 2008, Yokoyama led an effort to construct the most extensive evolutionary tree for dim-light vision, including animals from eels to humans. At key branches of the tree, Yokoyama's lab engineered ancestral gene functions, in order to connect changes in the living environment to the molecular changes.
The lengthy process of synthesizing ancestral proteins and pigments and conducting experiments on them combines microbiology with painstaking techniques of theoretical computation, biophysics, quantum chemistry and genetic engineering.
This multi-dimensional approach allowed Yokoyama's lab in 2009 to identify the scabbardfish as the first fish known to have switched from ultraviolet vision to violet vision. And Yokoyama pinpointed exactly how the scabbardfish made the switch, by deleting an amino acid molecule at site 86 in the chain of amino acids in the opsin gene.
"Experimenting on ancestral molecules is the key to getting a correct answer to problems of natural selection, but there are very few examples of that being done in evolutionary biology," Yokoyama says.
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Evolutionary biologists urged to adapt their research methodsPublic release date: 15-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Beverly Clark beverly.clark@emory.edu 404-712-8780 Emory Health Sciences
Genome Sequencing: Emory biologist to detail need to shift focus from present-day molecules to synthesized, ancestral ones
To truly understand the mechanisms of natural selection, evolutionary biologists need to shift their focus from present-day molecules to synthesized, ancestral ones, says Shozo Yokoyama, a biologist at Emory University.
Yokoyama will present evidence for why evolutionary biology needs to make this shift at 1:30 pm on Friday, February 15, during the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston.
"This is not just an evolutionary biology problem, it's a science problem," says Yokoyama, a leading expert in the natural selection of color vision. "If you want to understand the mechanisms of an adaptive phenotype, the function of a gene and how that function changes, you have to look back in time. That is the secret. Studying ancestral molecules will give us a better understanding of genes that could be applied to medicine and other areas of science."
For years, positive Darwinian selection has been studied almost exclusively using comparative sequence analysis of present-day molecules, Yokoyama notes. This approach has been fueled by increasingly fast and cheap genome sequencing techniques. But the faster, easier route, he says, is not necessarily the best one if you want to arrive at a true, quantitative result.
"If you only study present-day molecules, you're only getting part of the picture, and that picture is often wrong," he says.
Yokoyama has spent two decades teasing out secrets of the adaptive evolution of vision in fish and other vertebrates.
Five classes of opsin genes encode visual pigments and are responsible for dim-light and color vision. Fish provide clues for how environmental factors can lead to vision changes, since the available light at various ocean depths is well quantified. The common vertebrate ancestor, for example, possessed ultraviolet vision, which is suited to both shallow water and land.
"As the environment of a species sinks deeper in the ocean, or rises closer to the surface and moves to land, bits and pieces of the opsin genes change and vision adapts," Yokoyama says. "I'm interested in exactly how that happens at the molecular level."
Molecular biologists can take DNA from an animal, isolate and clone its opsin genes, then use in vitro assays to construct a specific visual pigment. The pigment can be manipulated by changing the positions of the amino acids, in order to study the regulation of the gene's function.
In 1990, for example, Yokoyama identified the three specific amino acid changes that switch the human red pigment into a green pigment.
A few years later, another group of researchers confirmed Yokoyama's findings, but found that the three changes only worked in one direction. In order to reverse the process, and turn the green pigment back to red, it took seven changes.
"They discovered this weird quirk that didn't make sense," Yokoyama says. "Why wouldn't it take the same number of changes to go in either direction? That question was interesting to me."
He spent 10 years researching and pondering the question before he realized the key problem: The experiments were conducted on present-day molecules.
When the earliest mammalian ancestors appeared 100 million years ago, they had only the red pigment. Around 30 million years ago, the gene for the red pigment duplicated itself in some primates. One of these duplicated red pigments then acquired sensitivity to the color green, turning into a green pigment.
"At the point that the three changes in amino acids occurred in this pigment, other mutations were happening as well," Yokoyama says. "You have to understand the original interactions of all of the amino acids in the pigment, which means you have to look at the ancestral molecules. That's the trick."
In other words, just as changes in an animal's external environment drive natural selection, so do changes in the animal's molecular environment.
Statistical analysis allows Yokoyama and his collaborators to travel back in time and estimate the sequences for ancestral molecules. "It's a lot of work," he says. "We don't have a clear picture of every intermediate species. We have to do a step-by-step retracing, screening for noise in the results at each step, before we can construct a reliable evolutionary tree."
In 2008, Yokoyama led an effort to construct the most extensive evolutionary tree for dim-light vision, including animals from eels to humans. At key branches of the tree, Yokoyama's lab engineered ancestral gene functions, in order to connect changes in the living environment to the molecular changes.
The lengthy process of synthesizing ancestral proteins and pigments and conducting experiments on them combines microbiology with painstaking techniques of theoretical computation, biophysics, quantum chemistry and genetic engineering.
This multi-dimensional approach allowed Yokoyama's lab in 2009 to identify the scabbardfish as the first fish known to have switched from ultraviolet vision to violet vision. And Yokoyama pinpointed exactly how the scabbardfish made the switch, by deleting an amino acid molecule at site 86 in the chain of amino acids in the opsin gene.
"Experimenting on ancestral molecules is the key to getting a correct answer to problems of natural selection, but there are very few examples of that being done in evolutionary biology," Yokoyama says.
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Emory University is known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate experience, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities. Emory encompasses nine academic divisions as well as the Carlos Museum, The Carter Center, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, Georgia's largest and most comprehensive health care system.
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Public release date: 15-Feb-2013
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